Hubble is used by a large community of scientists whose interests are entrenched. Whether the physics is worth the continuing investment is debatable.
Entrenched? There is no trench. I don't know why people on Slashdot like to imagine some sort of secret cabal of astronomers and physicists, looking out for their own welfare.
Anybody who can succeed as an astrophysicist can leave the field at any time, and make more money doing any variety of things, from aerospace work to programming to finance. I've seen it happen consistently and frequently, even in the "bad" economy. Those who remain in the field do so because they want to advance human understanding, not to "make work" and collect a paycheck. Astronomers advocating the continued servicing of HST are doing so because it serves science, not because they are "entrenched."
Your reasoning is utterly simplistic and goes both ways. Do you fix a broken printer at more cost than buying a new one?
Huh? SM4 will cost a hell of a lot less than replacing HST. And you're forgetting that the upgrades are built, finished, paid for, and sitting uselessly on the ground. SM4 is worth it, regardless of JWST and anything else that's being built. There is more than enough science to keep them busy.
Reminds me of the "dark energy" idea: "Well, we can only find 1/3 of the matter that we know should exist, so the rest is.. well, it's just the dark energy that we can't detect!"
This statement is wrong in several ways.
First of all, "dark energy" has nothing to do with the missing mass problem. You meant to say "dark matter." Dark energy is another term for the cosmological constant, a parameter tied to the observed acceleration of the universe. There are completely independent measurements that require this parameter, including supernova acceleration studies and incredibly precise cosmic microwave background measurements.
Regarding dark matter, you seriously trivialize the situation. It's not a case of astronomers being unable to find the matter, like it's a lost set of keys. We see that galaxies and clusters of galaxies experience more gravitation attraction than they should, based on the visible mass. Hence "dark matter." But it's not just that we can't see it; big bang nucleosynthesis tells us that only a small fraction of the matter in the universe is baryonic. Baryons are the normal particles that "stuff" is made of, like you, me, stars, dust, and gas. That means that the missing mass is not simply something we're not seeing (because it doesn't glow, for example), but is something utterly different.
We're not missing mass because we're not good at finding stars, or dust, or whatever. We're missing it because it's something completely, fundamentally different from all of that stuff.
Nope, wrong. Fission and fusion have not been well understood.
Huh. Odd, then, that there are all those commercial fission power plants, and we have fusion bombs, and fusion reactions in the lab, and understand the fusion mechanism of the sun (including to former "solar neutrino problem").
Even all the elemential particles aren't known yet.
All of the particles relevant to commercial energy production by fission or fusion are known and well-understood. If you disagree, please state specifically what problems remain in our understanding, that are relevant to the practical applications you describe.
Sorry, but staring at blobs in the sky and making up theories about how they got there isn't science. The world is no better off with Hubble.
This is the most asinine statement I've seen all day. And on Slashdot, that's saying a lot. Claiming that astronomers "stare at blobs" is like claiming biologists watch bunnies hop around all day. Astrophysics and cosmology are bona fide sciences, and it's absurd that this needs to be explained to you. Conclusions arrived at by multiple, independent methods provide specific information about the universe, and testable predictions. The cosmological parameters, for example, come from cosmic microwave background studies, supernova accelleration experiments, big bang nucleosynthesis (models and measurements), and other methods, and together paint coherent and consistent, testable, picture of the universe. In turn, these parameters affect simulations of structure formation in the universe, which can then be compared to observations from deep galaxy surveys.
To presume that we're a bunch of naval-gazers making guesses about "blobs" is an incredible insult, and arises only from your inability or lack of desire to learn anything about the state of modern astrophysics.
I want to go in there and ask if they have any previous revisions of drugs.
The best part is that the big, lit -up logo on their stores looks like "CVS/pharmacy". It always reminded me of CVS/Entries, CVS/Repository, and other control files.
Supercolliders exist so we can understand fission and fusion reactions better, which provides a tangible benefit to mankind in the development of fusion/fission power. Telescopes don't provide a tangible benefit, but they provide us with pretty pictures.
No, that's not really the case. Fission and fusion reactions have been very well understood for decades. (Fusion, in part, due to astronomers. You see that big glowing fusion reactor in the sky?) Producing power by fission or fusion is an engineering, not physics, problem. It's pretty well solved in the fission case, and not well solved in the fusion case.
Modern particle physics, including supercollider experiments, is about as far removed from practical applications as astrophysics and cosmology. In fact, the fields overlap in various ways; big bang nucleosynthesis, cold dark matter, neutrino oscillations, etc.
And knock it off with the "pretty pictures" crap. The "pretty pictures" are a PR and education effort, not the scientific product. If we don't produce the pretty pictures, and popular explanations to go with them, we're attacked for living in an ivory tower, too elitist to share our results with the public. When we do attempt education and public outreach, we get your crap about "just pretty pictures." Can't win. Maybe if you'd read the articles, instead of adopting the Playboy approach, you'd learn something about the science.
Apparently, the scientific community think that the Hubble has become limited in usefulness. The new observatory observes infrared and some visible (though not optical blue.) Everything is red-shifted, they say, so visible light telescopes like Hubble serve no purpose.
Everything in the world (or orbiting it) is limited in usefulness. Things are built by imperfect humans, with finite resources and finite knowledge. Saying that the scientific community says Hubble "serves no purpose" is a gross, terrible misrepresentation of the astronomers' stance.
I am an astronomer. I do not want to see Hubble decommissioned, nor do I consider it useless. Nor does any astronomer I've talked to. Nor does the American Astronomical Society, the largest professional society of astrnomers. Your statement is simply absurd. HST time continues to be heavily oversubscribed, and numerous papers using HST data are produced daily.
Your argument seems to arise from HST having a planned succesor, JWST, which will be better in many, but not all, respects than HST. That does not make HST useless. Take a look at ground-based telescopes; despite the 10-meter Keck telescopes, the 5-meter Palomar telescope remains a very useful astronomical tool, and so does the 60-inch Palomar telescope, which was recently renovated and automated. HST would not become "useless" even if JWST existed today, and is sure as hell not "useless" with JWST years away.
Also, the last I checked Paypal does make loans in the form of the Paypal credit card.
All I can find on their site now is a PayPal debit MasterCard, not a credit card. So obviously that's not a loan.
If they do issue (or did issue) a credit card, I would expect that it would merely be "branded" PayPal, and actually be issued by a bank (like First USA, MBNA, etc.). Similarly, I might have a United Airlines credit card, but UAL isn't actually the company that's loaning me money.
So why do you want them to be classified as a bank, anyway? I thought the parent of your post made it pretty clear that such a classification wouldn't really change any aspect of how they are behaving--that they appear not to be violating any banking regulations. Do you disagree?
What would a BSD card get you that a Linux one can't?
If you're trying to fix a broken FreeBSD box, and FreeBSD is the operating system you use everyday and know well, I think you'd rather have a FreeBSD boot disk.
I once managed to produce a total of $69.69 at Wal-Mart or Target or some place like that. Unfortunately for me, the girl at the cash register didn't take numbers as seriously as your $6.66 chick.
Does the definition of "just a DoS attack" include the acknowledgement that a system with no availability is useless? Or does OpenBSD's stated designs only include the goal of no unauthorized access without any pretentions of "features", "usefulness", or "availability"?
Here, I'll give you a choice: Do you want me to crash your system, or do you want me to have root access (possibly without you ever knowing about it)?
Most people would agree that being rooted is worse than being crashed. That doesn't mean being crashed is good, or that we shouldn't try to prevent it, but in our millions of years of evolution, most of the human race has evolved the ability to classify things more finely than "good" or "bad." We can distinguish degrees of good or bad.
Everything managed by the package manager goes into/usr, and everything I bring in and compile goes to/usr/local. That makes sense to me.
So now you're mixing up programs that are part of the OS, and third-party programs that are under package management.
If you want/usr/local to be exclusively for non-package-managed software that you install yourself, then you should be putting package-managed software in a third place, like/opt, not/usr. This is trivial to do with FreeBSD's Ports Collection.
They haven't changed their standard F-mount in god only knows how long, so I can find decades old lenses that will work with my camera (just that I have to manually focus, oh no) and I don't really have to worry about lenses I get today being made obsolete for future camera purchases, including the digital SLR body I intend to get someday.
That reminds me of another nice thing about old cameras and lenses... they've done most of their depriciating already! So if you decide in a few years that you want faster lenses, or autofocus, or whatever, you won't take much of a hit selling the stuff you bought used.
It is admirable that Nikon's kept the same mount for so long. (I have heard something about new Nikon lenses not having an aperture ring on the lens, making them incompatible with old bodies, though.) As you may know, Canon completely changed its mount when it went to AF. That means I can't use the new lenses on my MF gear, but the bright side is that there's no demand for the MF lenses by the AF crowd, keeping prices lower for me. Silver linings and all that!
The entry price on an SLR film camera is a little steep, but the entry price on an SLR digital camera is leaps and bounds above that.
And the entry price on a film SLR is only steep if you're buying new. There are tons of manual-focus SLRs from the 70's and 80's on the used market for next-to-nothing.
I started in photography with my dad's Canon TLb, a matched-needle manual exposure body. It's in good working order and well-built, but I doubt I could get $50 for it. I have done, IMHO, decent work with it (with good, but also inexpensive lenses). I had the privelege of taking an intermediate photography class at a top-notch photo school, and there were people doing much better work than I was, using even older and less "capable" equipment.
I just supplemented the TLb with a Canon A-1, which I purchased for $109 from a major vendor with excellent customer service and return policies. The interior, including mirror and viewfinder, are perfectly spotless. This was Canon's most advanced camera at the time it was made.
These cameras made beautiful pictures. Great photographs made today are not "better" than great photographs made in 1975, or vice-versa. New technologies may make it easier, and improve your success rate, but until I can match the bird pictures Art Morris made with an A-1 fifteen years ago, I can't really blame the camera, can I?
Do many analog watches support syncing to atomic clocks?
I wouldn't say many. Who really needs that, anyway? Once I set my $30 analog watch, it will get me places on time. There's no need to correct it between trips to a different time zone, or DST changes. But if you're an anal-retentive geek who really needs this feature, you can get it.
Errr no, dB measure the log ratio of two intensities, the one you're interested in, and a reference. For dBA, the reference is supposed to be the threshold of human hearing. You can have sound with positive power, but quieter than the reference level, which would result in negative dBA.
0 dBA may be "perfectly silent" in the sense that you can't hear it by itself, but if you put two or more 0 dBA sources together, you will hear them. The 0 dBA sources are producing sound.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody who can succeed as an astrophysicist can leave the field at any time, and make more money doing any variety of things, from aerospace work to programming to finance. I've seen it happen consistently and frequently, even in the "bad" economy. Those who remain in the field do so because they want to advance human understanding, not to "make work" and collect a paycheck. Astronomers advocating the continued servicing of HST are doing so because it serves science, not because they are "entrenched."
First of all, "dark energy" has nothing to do with the missing mass problem. You meant to say "dark matter." Dark energy is another term for the cosmological constant, a parameter tied to the observed acceleration of the universe. There are completely independent measurements that require this parameter, including supernova acceleration studies and incredibly precise cosmic microwave background measurements.
Regarding dark matter, you seriously trivialize the situation. It's not a case of astronomers being unable to find the matter, like it's a lost set of keys. We see that galaxies and clusters of galaxies experience more gravitation attraction than they should, based on the visible mass. Hence "dark matter." But it's not just that we can't see it; big bang nucleosynthesis tells us that only a small fraction of the matter in the universe is baryonic. Baryons are the normal particles that "stuff" is made of, like you, me, stars, dust, and gas. That means that the missing mass is not simply something we're not seeing (because it doesn't glow, for example), but is something utterly different.
We're not missing mass because we're not good at finding stars, or dust, or whatever. We're missing it because it's something completely, fundamentally different from all of that stuff.
To presume that we're a bunch of naval-gazers making guesses about "blobs" is an incredible insult, and arises only from your inability or lack of desire to learn anything about the state of modern astrophysics.
Modern particle physics, including supercollider experiments, is about as far removed from practical applications as astrophysics and cosmology. In fact, the fields overlap in various ways; big bang nucleosynthesis, cold dark matter, neutrino oscillations, etc.
And knock it off with the "pretty pictures" crap. The "pretty pictures" are a PR and education effort, not the scientific product. If we don't produce the pretty pictures, and popular explanations to go with them, we're attacked for living in an ivory tower, too elitist to share our results with the public. When we do attempt education and public outreach, we get your crap about "just pretty pictures." Can't win. Maybe if you'd read the articles, instead of adopting the Playboy approach, you'd learn something about the science.
(The lameness filter is lame. Ignore this parenthetical remark.)
I am an astronomer. I do not want to see Hubble decommissioned, nor do I consider it useless. Nor does any astronomer I've talked to. Nor does the American Astronomical Society, the largest professional society of astrnomers. Your statement is simply absurd. HST time continues to be heavily oversubscribed, and numerous papers using HST data are produced daily.
Your argument seems to arise from HST having a planned succesor, JWST, which will be better in many, but not all, respects than HST. That does not make HST useless. Take a look at ground-based telescopes; despite the 10-meter Keck telescopes, the 5-meter Palomar telescope remains a very useful astronomical tool, and so does the 60-inch Palomar telescope, which was recently renovated and automated. HST would not become "useless" even if JWST existed today, and is sure as hell not "useless" with JWST years away.
If they do issue (or did issue) a credit card, I would expect that it would merely be "branded" PayPal, and actually be issued by a bank (like First USA, MBNA, etc.). Similarly, I might have a United Airlines credit card, but UAL isn't actually the company that's loaning me money.
So why do you want them to be classified as a bank, anyway? I thought the parent of your post made it pretty clear that such a classification wouldn't really change any aspect of how they are behaving--that they appear not to be violating any banking regulations. Do you disagree?
I once managed to produce a total of $69.69 at Wal-Mart or Target or some place like that. Unfortunately for me, the girl at the cash register didn't take numbers as seriously as your $6.66 chick.
Why would you throw rocks at a moment? I thought people threw them at glass houses, or maybe Israeli soldiers.
Most people would agree that being rooted is worse than being crashed. That doesn't mean being crashed is good, or that we shouldn't try to prevent it, but in our millions of years of evolution, most of the human race has evolved the ability to classify things more finely than "good" or "bad." We can distinguish degrees of good or bad.
You are welcome to join us when you catch up.
If you want /usr/local to be exclusively for non-package-managed software that you install yourself, then you should be putting package-managed software in a third place, like /opt, not /usr. This is trivial to do with FreeBSD's Ports Collection.
It is admirable that Nikon's kept the same mount for so long. (I have heard something about new Nikon lenses not having an aperture ring on the lens, making them incompatible with old bodies, though.) As you may know, Canon completely changed its mount when it went to AF. That means I can't use the new lenses on my MF gear, but the bright side is that there's no demand for the MF lenses by the AF crowd, keeping prices lower for me. Silver linings and all that!
I started in photography with my dad's Canon TLb, a matched-needle manual exposure body. It's in good working order and well-built, but I doubt I could get $50 for it. I have done, IMHO, decent work with it (with good, but also inexpensive lenses). I had the privelege of taking an intermediate photography class at a top-notch photo school, and there were people doing much better work than I was, using even older and less "capable" equipment.
I just supplemented the TLb with a Canon A-1, which I purchased for $109 from a major vendor with excellent customer service and return policies. The interior, including mirror and viewfinder, are perfectly spotless. This was Canon's most advanced camera at the time it was made.
These cameras made beautiful pictures. Great photographs made today are not "better" than great photographs made in 1975, or vice-versa. New technologies may make it easier, and improve your success rate, but until I can match the bird pictures Art Morris made with an A-1 fifteen years ago, I can't really blame the camera, can I?
0 dBA may be "perfectly silent" in the sense that you can't hear it by itself, but if you put two or more 0 dBA sources together, you will hear them. The 0 dBA sources are producing sound.