The spiral arms are thicker than we've been assuming. Does that mean that there are more stars and gas/dust clouds in the greater volume? If there are more, then the mass of the galaxy is higher, and with the relativistic adjustment recently adopted, there's less need for a "dark halo", or, at least, less of one required to balance the velocity of the outer stars. OTOH, if there's the same amount, then the density is less, which throws off the very measurement technique that they're using to derive the new thickness, since the less-dense interstellar medium will have less effect on the two wavelengths (yeah, I read the article).
Anyone know of an online resource for the American Astronomical Society papers? I'd like to see what, if anything, they say about the density values for the WIM.
Cloning reproduces (more, or less, given epigenetics, and the source of the mitochondrial DNA in the egg) a copy of an adult. This technique allows the genetic equivalent of sexual reproduction from two (or three, again depending on the egg) parents. For two-genetically female couples, yes, it will allow, when reliable, replacing the trip to the sperm bank with a trip to "gene shop".
It will also allow infertile persons to have genetic children (like the planet needs more humans).
If we're going to obsolete men, let's start with the most overtly misogynistic, please. Imagine the freedom for women when they don't have to hide their bodies because most the local men are incapable of (or simply disinterested in) controlling themselves and can make their own life decisions without having to defer to some thug.
There have been several SF stories that covered this subject. Most presented an optimistic future with no men. There would certainly be no more unplanned pregnancies. Anyone who's heard about the major women's street fight in LA a couple of months back knows better, though. Without men to do most of the dying, women can be just as ruthless and brutal. I suspect being sodomized with a stick is no more pleasant that being raped by a man, although, at least, there's no risk of pregnancy.
1) almost no one knows what knowledge others in their organization lack
2) very few people really know how much they know
3) almost no one ever has the time to catalog their knowledge and write it all down (if they do, they probably aren't doing anything and don't know anything)
Pick something, for example, a set of personal wikis. Start a "test run". Every time someone is asked how to do something by someone else, they don't explain verbally, they put it in their wiki. Between the requester's follow-up questions (also through the wiki) and the answers, there will be the "oral history" captured electronically.
Management has to provide the resources, and the startup training time, as well as some sort of recognition for those who answered "in form" and for the requesters that followed through "in form".
One other thought is that "how I do X" could be captured through voice recognition. As a staff member performs a task, they could verbalize the steps to some easy-to-use voice recorder, then those recordings parsed to on-line documents. Allow the staff member first crack at editing as a courtesy (you don't know what was captured), and while they're doing it, they may also think of more input.
Don't be a grammar Nazi on the wikis (or whatever tool). Save that for the professional training manual writer(s) that end up compiling the "official" procedure manual from the raw data.
The "blindspot" effect may well occur in enclosed spaces. In the open, where there is a plethora of visual references, a human-sized or larger object non-reflective object would be readily apparent because the shape would trigger the "edge-detect" optical neurons. If you were sufficiently close to, and facing, a true-black object, such that it occupied nearly all of your visual space, you might be back to the blindspot.
and it's insulting to monkeys to suggest that he is. He is (unfortunately, IMO) a member of the species arrogant enough to call itself "homo sapiens sapiens". In math, one counter-example is enough to disprove a hypothesis. Certainly GW is enough of a counter-example to disprove the intelligence (or wisdom) of the species (which doesn't prevent some, very few, apparently, instances of the species from being intelligent).
It snows in El Paso in January/February, and in Amarillo more than that. Texas is a hell of a lot bigger than Austin, or whatever small part of it you're familiar with. Even in the winter, the road surface is usually enough warmer than the snow-covered ground to provide some useful energy.
There's another source of heat in addition to the solar input. Passing vehicles emit heat from the exhaust (including the catalytic converters) and there's heat built up from the mechanical stresses, 'specially the "big rigs".
If they use the code that runs/., and enough commodity computers, the web site wouldn't crash due to load. Can't say about it's pipes to the 'net, though.
Is it "helping" the regime there to have the corruption reported, as in providing a place for the populace to report the corruption, which allows the central government to get a bigger cut, or is it, in the long run, likely to open that government more, which autocrats tend to perceive as "not helping", but which could improve the lives of the proletariat by freeing what wealth and income they have to be spent on themselves?
Every time Microsoft decides to generate more revenue, they rob you just as if they had you at gunpoint.
Happy with 2k, which works pretty well? Sorry, we're moving everyone to XP, so we'll strong-arm the hardware vendors into XP-only drivers (which precludes the victim from buying new hardware WITHOUT buying XP), and, of course, the latest licenses for applications code will be XP-only, and, although it is quite illegal, we'll require you to use an MS-Windows OS to fetch updates, even for applications.
Happy with XP? Here comes Vista (not quite to the Vista-drivers-only stage, but it will happen).
Since "global warming" is the very loose term for EXCESS (i.e., more than we really want) energy in the atmosphere, extracting some small fraction of it with windmills, which are, after all, not very tall compared to the depth of the troposphere ( tens of m vs 10 km ) is a "good thing".
"in western nations, people actually consume more energy than the solar flux of their entire country"? I've seen estimates from several hundred to something over 1000 W/m2 solar flux for the US. The area of the United States is roughly 9.8 x 10^6 km2 (9.8 x 10^12 m2). Using 600 W/m2 and 8 hr/day, that's 4.704 x 10^16 W-H (4.7 x 10^13 KWH). The US consumes something around 3 x 10^13 KWH. So, not really.
The down sides to wind power are: bird strikes, which are bad for the windmills and VERY bad for the birds; uneven distribution, coupled with a competitive, rather than cooperative, power distribution grid; a bit of an eyesore with the current designs. Hardly reasons to abandon the concept.
I've avoided buying Seagate drives since they started botching the SCSI interface back on the 150 MEGABYTE drives. The drives would accept selection while spinning up and loading the firmware from the media, then hang the bus until power was cycled. I have SCSI adapters with jumpers labeled "Seagate" that would hold off scanning the SCSI bus for a couple of minutes to let the Seagates become ready. No problem like that with any other drive manufacturer. This problem lasted at least through the 2 GByte 3.5" Barracuda, since I've tested HBAs against them and seen it.
It doesn't surprise me at all that they still have incompetent firmware programmers.
Simple solution: stop buying Seagate products and your problems will be fewer.
Rapid energy storage, with very low effective series resistance, is perfect for regenerative braking, and for burst acceleration. If a vehicle starts with full batteries and capacitors, then uses the capacitors first in acceleration, they would be discharged when braking was required, allowing them to rapidly store the power from the motor/generators. The batteries (and fuel cell or combustion engine), then are sustained energy for overcoming losses, powering accessories, and long uphill grades.
"to the point of reasoning with them" makes the erroneous assumption that humans (other than a rare few) are consistently capable of reason. On any subject where "belief" is involved (religion, political and economic theory, child-rearing,...), reason is literally not possible by the believer. You can no more reason with an Islamic fundamentalist or George W. Bush regarding their respective delusions, than a significantly afflicted schizophrenic off his medication, and probably less.
"Peaceful relations" with Japan are a product of the advantages that they perceive and American delusions. When either of those factors changes, then the Japanese would quite willingly return to their Imperial behavior, or the US will go back to the arrogant pre-war behavior that made the war with Japan inevitable.
Schizophrenics have delusions, that, except for social acceptability, are indistinguishable in perceived reality and extreme attachment from those of the religious. Their perceptions of sound, taste, touch,... are very real to them. If the brain is capable of the those experiences, although there is no observable external stimulus, why isn't the perception of "other", in a similar absence of stimulus, considered simply another error in brain function?
The GUI of OSX is a clone of the Amiga as possible, including the "replicative fading". Sure it has a few more colors, and much newer hardware to drive it, but functionally, it's the same, but weaker.
Same:
Menus at the top of the GUI, rather than the application window. Brain-damaged limitation on the location of the window resize controls. Task bar/dock. Drive icons. Really usable command line interface. Drag'n'drop,...
Missing:
Public/shared/private screen feature.
Better:
???
BTW, anyone got a "stickies" (on-screen Post-It (tm)) equivalent for the Mac or Gnome?
Can we can keep the legislative gravy train rolling to the point that it it no longer economical to run a telemarketing operation because the profit is entirely consumed by the bribes?
Selling me a 3-core-out-of-4 honestly, 'specially if the the whole core is shut down to draw no power, is better than the scam Intel pulled with the 486SX/487 A 486 was a chip with a floating point unit sufficiently dead (this is Intel, remember) that even they disabled it on die. This was no big deal, 'cause they were a bit cheaper than a "fully-functioning" 486. The scam was the 487. Coming from a time when it was too much real estate to put the FPU on-die with the Integer core (386/387 & 68030/68882, for example), external FPUs were common. The real scam was that a 487 cost MORE than a 486, and it was exactly the same silicon as a 486, just bonded out differently. When the "487" was plugged into the MB, the 486SX was disabled and everything was run in the 487.
I never was stupid enough to buy one, but stunts like that are why nearly all of my x86 boxes are AMD (needed a couple of Intels for testing on SMP, back when).
Not the 68008, the Z8000, and volume had very little to do with it. IBM's purchasing overruled the choice because they had a commitment to leverage over their vendors (remember Micropolis?). Intel was dying because their architecture (8086) was inferior to the Z8000/68K on the higher end and 6800/6502 on the lower end, so IBM had leverage in the contract negotiations.
'Course we all ended up with the worst CPU architecture that could be coerced into running at all. Yeah, they took IBM's money and made a very nice "sow's ear purse", but the register architecture is still a sick joke.
The 68000 came into IBM with the XT/370, which used a re-microprogrammed 68000, running 370 opcodes as native instructions, as the main CPU and the 8088 as an I/O processor for the 3270 terminal, disk, and network interfaces.
It is trivial to set up a BSD, Linux (Solaris,...) box with a second NIC, and run a DHCP server on just that network. You can add a few other services, including the SAMBA suite and a DNS repeater, if you need to test against those features, but do not allow that box to route (Linux default), so no packets cross between its networks. Now you can install, patch,..., in isolation and the isolated system only knows that it cannot get a connection to M$, or wherever. If you want to spend the time, you can even allow routing of DNS, or to/from specified IP addresses.
I've always done my game machine installs and updates on the isolated LAN, because it lets me get Firefox, ZoneAlarm,... installed and set up before allowing the system to access the 'net. That's getting harder now that M$ has illegally tied fetching of patches to their own OSs, so I guess I'll have to stop PC gaming soon.
Slashdot Mirror
The spiral arms are thicker than we've been assuming. Does that mean that there are more stars and gas/dust clouds in the greater volume? If there are more, then the mass of the galaxy is higher, and with the relativistic adjustment recently adopted, there's less need for a "dark halo", or, at least, less of one required to balance the velocity of the outer stars. OTOH, if there's the same amount, then the density is less, which throws off the very measurement technique that they're using to derive the new thickness, since the less-dense interstellar medium will have less effect on the two wavelengths (yeah, I read the article).
Anyone know of an online resource for the American Astronomical Society papers? I'd like to see what, if anything, they say about the density values for the WIM.
Cloning reproduces (more, or less, given epigenetics, and the source of the mitochondrial DNA in the egg) a copy of an adult. This technique allows the genetic equivalent of sexual reproduction from two (or three, again depending on the egg) parents. For two-genetically female couples, yes, it will allow, when reliable, replacing the trip to the sperm bank with a trip to "gene shop".
It will also allow infertile persons to have genetic children (like the planet needs more humans).
If we're going to obsolete men, let's start with the most overtly misogynistic, please. Imagine the freedom for women when they don't have to hide their bodies because most the local men are incapable of (or simply disinterested in) controlling themselves and can make their own life decisions without having to defer to some thug.
There have been several SF stories that covered this subject. Most presented an optimistic future with no men. There would certainly be no more unplanned pregnancies. Anyone who's heard about the major women's street fight in LA a couple of months back knows better, though. Without men to do most of the dying, women can be just as ruthless and brutal. I suspect being sodomized with a stick is no more pleasant that being raped by a man, although, at least, there's no risk of pregnancy.
Who needs kids, or women who look like them?
Rangiku, rather than Orihime, and Yoruichi, rather than Rukia.
Dead wrong.
1) almost no one knows what knowledge others in their organization lack
2) very few people really know how much they know
3) almost no one ever has the time to catalog their knowledge and write it all down (if they do, they probably aren't doing anything and don't know anything)
Pick something, for example, a set of personal wikis. Start a "test run". Every time someone is asked how to do something by someone else, they don't explain verbally, they put it in their wiki. Between the requester's follow-up questions (also through the wiki) and the answers, there will be the "oral history" captured electronically.
Management has to provide the resources, and the startup training time, as well as some sort of recognition for those who answered "in form" and for the requesters that followed through "in form".
One other thought is that "how I do X" could be captured through voice recognition. As a staff member performs a task, they could verbalize the steps to some easy-to-use voice recorder, then those recordings parsed to on-line documents. Allow the staff member first crack at editing as a courtesy (you don't know what was captured), and while they're doing it, they may also think of more input.
Don't be a grammar Nazi on the wikis (or whatever tool). Save that for the professional training manual writer(s) that end up compiling the "official" procedure manual from the raw data.
The "blindspot" effect may well occur in enclosed spaces. In the open, where there is a plethora of visual references, a human-sized or larger object non-reflective object would be readily apparent because the shape would trigger the "edge-detect" optical neurons. If you were sufficiently close to, and facing, a true-black object, such that it occupied nearly all of your visual space, you might be back to the blindspot.
and it's insulting to monkeys to suggest that he is. He is (unfortunately, IMO) a member of the species arrogant enough to call itself "homo sapiens sapiens". In math, one counter-example is enough to disprove a hypothesis. Certainly GW is enough of a counter-example to disprove the intelligence (or wisdom) of the species (which doesn't prevent some, very few, apparently, instances of the species from being intelligent).
My wife takes medication that makes her very sensitive to heat. In her state of health, raising the temperature could kill her.
No way they'll put that in without me having a backup (as we do now).
8.5 mm is about 1/3 inch. millimeters are 1/10 of centimeters (which are 1/100 of meters)
mod parent "stupid american"
It snows in El Paso in January/February, and in Amarillo more than that. Texas is a hell of a lot bigger than Austin, or whatever small part of it you're familiar with. Even in the winter, the road surface is usually enough warmer than the snow-covered ground to provide some useful energy.
There's another source of heat in addition to the solar input. Passing vehicles emit heat from the exhaust (including the catalytic converters) and there's heat built up from the mechanical stresses, 'specially the "big rigs".
New bikes DO have catalytic converters.
Check the "ENGINE" tab here. for example:
http://www.ducati.com/od/ducatinorthamerica/en/bikes/model.jhtml?model=2390
If they use the code that runs /., and enough commodity computers, the web site wouldn't crash due to load. Can't say about it's pipes to the 'net, though.
Is it "helping" the regime there to have the corruption reported, as in providing a place for the populace to report the corruption, which allows the central government to get a bigger cut, or is it, in the long run, likely to open that government more, which autocrats tend to perceive as "not helping", but which could improve the lives of the proletariat by freeing what wealth and income they have to be spent on themselves?
Because the FORMAT of the numbers tells you. If it's in that format, it is year-month-day.
Every time Microsoft decides to generate more revenue, they rob you just as if they had you at gunpoint.
Happy with 2k, which works pretty well? Sorry, we're moving everyone to XP, so we'll strong-arm the hardware vendors into XP-only drivers (which precludes the victim from buying new hardware WITHOUT buying XP), and, of course, the latest licenses for applications code will be XP-only, and, although it is quite illegal, we'll require you to use an MS-Windows OS to fetch updates, even for applications.
Happy with XP? Here comes Vista (not quite to the Vista-drivers-only stage, but it will happen).
Since "global warming" is the very loose term for EXCESS (i.e., more than we really want) energy in the atmosphere, extracting some small fraction of it with windmills, which are, after all, not very tall compared to the depth of the troposphere ( tens of m vs 10 km ) is a "good thing".
"in western nations, people actually consume more energy than the solar flux of their entire country"? I've seen estimates from several hundred to something over 1000 W/m2 solar flux for the US. The area of the United States is roughly 9.8 x 10^6 km2 (9.8 x 10^12 m2). Using 600 W/m2 and 8 hr/day, that's 4.704 x 10^16 W-H (4.7 x 10^13 KWH). The US consumes something around 3 x 10^13 KWH. So, not really.
The down sides to wind power are: bird strikes, which are bad for the windmills and VERY bad for the birds; uneven distribution, coupled with a competitive, rather than cooperative, power distribution grid; a bit of an eyesore with the current designs. Hardly reasons to abandon the concept.
I've avoided buying Seagate drives since they started botching the SCSI interface back on the 150 MEGABYTE drives. The drives would accept selection while spinning up and loading the firmware from the media, then hang the bus until power was cycled. I have SCSI adapters with jumpers labeled "Seagate" that would hold off scanning the SCSI bus for a couple of minutes to let the Seagates become ready. No problem like that with any other drive manufacturer. This problem lasted at least through the 2 GByte 3.5" Barracuda, since I've tested HBAs against them and seen it.
It doesn't surprise me at all that they still have incompetent firmware programmers.
Simple solution: stop buying Seagate products and your problems will be fewer.
Science, some of it very, very old already did: it's called birth control. Can't get it practiced where and when it's needed most, though.
Rapid energy storage, with very low effective series resistance, is perfect for regenerative braking, and for burst acceleration. If a vehicle starts with full batteries and capacitors, then uses the capacitors first in acceleration, they would be discharged when braking was required, allowing them to rapidly store the power from the motor/generators. The batteries (and fuel cell or combustion engine), then are sustained energy for overcoming losses, powering accessories, and long uphill grades.
"to the point of reasoning with them" makes the erroneous assumption that humans (other than a rare few) are consistently capable of reason. On any subject where "belief" is involved (religion, political and economic theory, child-rearing, ...), reason is literally not possible by the believer. You can no more reason with an Islamic fundamentalist or George W. Bush regarding their respective delusions, than a significantly afflicted schizophrenic off his medication, and probably less.
"Peaceful relations" with Japan are a product of the advantages that they perceive and American delusions. When either of those factors changes, then the Japanese would quite willingly return to their Imperial behavior, or the US will go back to the arrogant pre-war behavior that made the war with Japan inevitable.
Schizophrenics have delusions, that, except for social acceptability, are indistinguishable in perceived reality and extreme attachment from those of the religious. Their perceptions of sound, taste, touch, ... are very real to them. If the brain is capable of the those experiences, although there is no observable external stimulus, why isn't the perception of "other", in a similar absence of stimulus, considered simply another error in brain function?
The GUI of OSX is a clone of the Amiga as possible, including the "replicative fading". Sure it has a few more colors, and much newer hardware to drive it, but functionally, it's the same, but weaker.
...
Same:
Menus at the top of the GUI, rather than the application window.
Brain-damaged limitation on the location of the window resize controls.
Task bar/dock.
Drive icons.
Really usable command line interface.
Drag'n'drop,
Missing:
Public/shared/private screen feature.
Better:
???
BTW, anyone got a "stickies" (on-screen Post-It (tm)) equivalent for the Mac or Gnome?
The "sound" has been explained many times: the weapons' energy is so high that your own hull produces audible responses to the EMP.
Can we can keep the legislative gravy train rolling to the point that it it no longer economical to run a telemarketing operation because the profit is entirely consumed by the bribes?
Selling me a 3-core-out-of-4 honestly, 'specially if the the whole core is shut down to draw no power, is better than the scam Intel pulled with the 486SX/487 A 486 was a chip with a floating point unit sufficiently dead (this is Intel, remember) that even they disabled it on die. This was no big deal, 'cause they were a bit cheaper than a "fully-functioning" 486. The scam was the 487. Coming from a time when it was too much real estate to put the FPU on-die with the Integer core (386/387 & 68030/68882, for example), external FPUs were common. The real scam was that a 487 cost MORE than a 486, and it was exactly the same silicon as a 486, just bonded out differently. When the "487" was plugged into the MB, the 486SX was disabled and everything was run in the 487.
I never was stupid enough to buy one, but stunts like that are why nearly all of my x86 boxes are AMD (needed a couple of Intels for testing on SMP, back when).
Not the 68008, the Z8000, and volume had very little to do with it. IBM's purchasing overruled the choice because they had a commitment to leverage over their vendors (remember Micropolis?). Intel was dying because their architecture (8086) was inferior to the Z8000/68K on the higher end and 6800/6502 on the lower end, so IBM had leverage in the contract negotiations.
'Course we all ended up with the worst CPU architecture that could be coerced into running at all. Yeah, they took IBM's money and made a very nice "sow's ear purse", but the register architecture is still a sick joke.
The 68000 came into IBM with the XT/370, which used a re-microprogrammed 68000, running 370 opcodes as native instructions, as the main CPU and the 8088 as an I/O processor for the 3270 terminal, disk, and network interfaces.
Wrong solution to you problem.
...) box with a second NIC, and run a DHCP server on just that network. You can add a few other services, including the SAMBA suite and a DNS repeater, if you need to test against those features, but do not allow that box to route (Linux default), so no packets cross between its networks. Now you can install, patch, ..., in isolation and the isolated system only knows that it cannot get a connection to M$, or wherever. If you want to spend the time, you can even allow routing of DNS, or to/from specified IP addresses.
... installed and set up before allowing the system to access the 'net. That's getting harder now that M$ has illegally tied fetching of patches to their own OSs, so I guess I'll have to stop PC gaming soon.
It is trivial to set up a BSD, Linux (Solaris,
I've always done my game machine installs and updates on the isolated LAN, because it lets me get Firefox, ZoneAlarm,