I am a student, and my reading list for next semester will cost me $1850 (Amazon prices). If anyone has any updates on the 'google print hack' I (and thousands of others like me) will be most appreciative!
Your legal options are as follows:
1. Buy the books from Amazon and suck up the expense.
2. Buy the books from a used bookstore and suck up a somewhat smaller expense.
3. Check them out from the university library for the semester. Of course, your books can probably be recalled, and popular books may not be available.
4. Determine which books are optional. Some professors add books to their reading list because they think it will be useful to students in the future, not because they plan to use it in the course. If that's the case, you can defer purchasing the optional books.
5. If only a few chapters in one book will be discussed in class, ask the prof to instead have the chapters photocopied for the class. This is considered "fair use" for educational purposes.
6. Personally speak to your professors of the expense of the books. In my experience, professors don't always think carefully about students' financial hardships until the issue is pointed out to them. Once they realize the issue, some professors will drop books from the required list. I know of one professor who had several copies of a required text which he would loan to students in financial hardship for the semester.
But the hour WON'T "jump forward or backward an hour". You'll either have a 23-hour or 25-hour day, plus it will only happen once every 500 years or so. When are you going to test it?
You can test the leap hour every time you flip between Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time, which is what I think the GP was discussing.
Imagine you make a very precise schedule in advance (e.g. scheduled events on a spacecraft) and then a leap second is announced and everything is then off by a second. Now you have all of these tables out there that are wrong that you have to find and then correct... a major headache when your working with something where precision in time is important (e.g. a spacecraft moving at 8 km/s).
If precision in time is mission critical, use another standard that is not sensitive to leap seconds. Astronomers use ephemeris time which is not affected by leap seconds. Of course, if you want to convert ephemeris time to Pacific Daylight Time, then you would need to worry about leap seconds.
JPL uses ephemeris time for mission critical spacecraft operations.
Re:how did we miss that before?
on
Ice Lake on Mars
·
· Score: 1
Were someone to attempt to drive down one of these false roads, perhaps into a drainage ditch that is actually there instead, and was killed, then it would be a tragedy.
Please tell me you're joking. Anyone who drives a car and drives off a road because they were following an erroneous map instead of their own eyes is asking to be Darwined.
Nope, at least not convincingly. The Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) found a dark spot near the predicted Beagle landing site, but further imaging showed that spot to be a small impact crater with wind-blown sediment on its floor, which is not consistent with an impact as recent as late 2003.
From the MSSS link: Based on the MGS MOC imaging campaign and subsequent analyses, no incontrovertible evidence of the Beagle 2 lander was found within the areas imaged by MOC.
How many kilos of waste is produced by burning gas in your car per month? How much energy is used distilling and refining crucde oil into gasoline?
Seriously. This isn't a hydrogen-is-way-better-than-gas post. Please do an actual comparison between gasoline cost and hydrogen cost?
I remember plenty of delayed shuttle launches in the 80's. I recall watching Discovery's first or second launch when it got scrubbed at T-3 seconds. That was a major letdown since the shuttle's main engines were already firing and had to be shut down.
Scrubbing shuttle launches for technical gliches is nothing new.
One of the challenges of studying Titan is that is has a *massive* atmosphere with lots of haze due to the presence of hydrocarbons. Most of the images of Titan's surface are actually in the near-infrared where the haze is less optically thick (i.e. you can see through more atmosphere), but the haze still degrades the images. A camera with higher spatial resolution would simply take higher resolution images of haze. (You can test this out yourself by taking pictures on a really foggy day with a 3 Mpixel and a 6 Mpixel camera.)
I also take issue with your claim that Cassini is carrying the wrong sets of instruments to determine whether or not this is a lake. The article concentrates on the results from the camera. However, Cassini also carries a radar imager which can determine the roughness of the surface. A large body of water with little wave action will appear as a smooth surface. If this "lake" appears smooth in radar images, then that would would lend further support to the lake hypothesis.
It's a shame the camera and radar dish face different directions on Cassini, so simultaneous observations can't be made with those instruments. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the radar was pointed at the "lake" during a future flyby.
Many of these images have been processed. In press release images, the brightnesses of pixels are frequently stretched so that the lightest shade pixels are white and the darkest shade pixels are dark (sort of like changing the brightness/contrast of an image in your favorite image viewer). This allows for details in shading and brightnesses to be more apparent to the viewer.
The parachute is probably covered by dust (and probably started accumulating dust as soon as it touched down). However, it's still likely to be a lighter shade of red than the surroundings and one of the brighter objects in the vicinity.
I think it would be cool if places like NASA let scientists pick thier projects. Or even let outsiders in, for example if you have a masters in geography and you're interested in helping map the surface of mars, that you can sign up for that work.
Well, if you're motivated, you can look at and work with data from NASA planetary missions. Data collected from the first 270 days of MER rover operations are available.
Actually, while one of the Pioneer Venus atmospheric probes did survive its impact with Venus's surface, it had no cameras. All the landing site images we've seen of Venus's surface came from Soviet Venera landers.
1. Only limited funding has been available for lunar research. In the last 10 years, there has been much more funding available for Mars-related work, so many people who would otherwise study the moon have chosen to study Mars instead.
2. New ideas can prompt scientists to look at older data in new ways.
Of course, if you wish to analyze the data yourself, they are publically available.
Think of the mars rover. That was remotely controlled (correct me if I'm wrong).
It depends what you mean by "remotely controlled." The one-way light time between Earth and Mars varies from about 5 to 20 minutes, so you can't drive the rovers with a joystick. Also complicating the issue is that rover controllers no longer work around the clock like they did during the primary mission - it's too expensive to have people to have people work like that for 6+ months. Instead, rover commands are generated during regular working hours rather than during local Mars rover time. It's probably more correct to say that the rovers are "remotely commanded."
The rovers do have some autonomous capabilities. Ground controllers can send up commands to tell the rover to drive to certain way points and avoid any obstacles along the way. (See here.) However, ground controllers still need to double-check the rovers' final position after autonomous drives. Issues like wheel slippage on slopes and sandy surfaces can mean the wheel odometry may not match the actual distance travelled. Also, the rovers don't have the capability to automatically decide what's scientifically important and what's not - people still have to make those decisions. The rovers are a considerable way from being autonomous.
Actually, it pisses me off that people who use metric will say 5000 kilometers instead of 5 megameters... effectively changing the base unit to suit their scale.
Actually, it pisses me off that people who use Imperial units will say 3000 miles instead of 190080000 inches... effectively changing the base unit to suit their scale.
If you look at it historically, you have to recognize that at the time the Bill of Rights was enacted, the people most affected by gun restrictions weren't in the population centers but on the frontier -- people facing problems with wild animals and hostile Indians.
I disagree with your statement that the second amendment was not about government tyranny.
As a practical matter, people on the frontier had little to worry in terms of government control - they would have been able to carry arms simply because there was essentially no government on the frontier to enforce any possible 18th century gun control laws.
The second amendment was written because the Framers of the Constitution remembered that the Revolution was fought by Americans who, more often than not, brought their own weapons to battle against the British government. You might recall that Minutemen (which could have been considered a "well regulated militia") supplied most of their own arms. The Framers hoped that the threat of an insurrection would keep the central government from abusing its power.
More nonsense. Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to scrub the shuttle mission for Hubble? Nope. That was O'Keefe's call.
Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to *keep* the Hubble?
I appreciate your sentiment that this is not necessarily a Rep vs Dem issue. However, the president is ultimately responsible for what the federal bureaucracy does. While scrapping the Hubble may or may not make sense, let's not forget that the president has considerable sway over the actions of federal agencies.
In the US, it's absolutely legal to carry a loaded firearm on your belt.
Actually, it's not "absolutely legal" everywhere in the US. For instance, in Arizona, it's currently not legal to carry any kind of firearm into a bar... although that might change soon.
I'm always puzzled by people who claim eBay sniping is unfair. Yeah - it's an annoyance. However, everyone has a chance to snipe, so it's still fair and sportsmanlike.
Most of the Apollo pictures of the moon were taken with *film* cameras, not digital cameras. As a general rule, properly exposed film tends to produce higher resolution images than most consumer digital cameras.
As far as the Huygens images go, those images *were* compressed before they were transmitted.
If private industry is more efficient than NASA, why haven't they already built their own launch facilities and satellite launchers?
And please don't blame it on US regulations. Little is stopping companies from making deals for building launch facilities and factories in some other country.
Actually, one of Mars Global Surveyor's solar panels actually moved past its designed stop point during the aerobraking phase of the mission. (MGS was initially in an elliptical orbit and would dip into Mars's upper atmosphere on close approaches to slow itself down to circularize the orbit.) The solution was to modify the aerobraking procedure to lower the pressure on the solar panel which did work by delayed the planned mission profile aby a year.
BULLCRAP!!!
Sorry to be so vehemously blunt, but as a space scientist who works with images, I'll say that there's a large number of us who find images to be of value for more than just the "gee-whiz" factor. Images are one of the primary ways we can learn about the geology of planetary bodies. Cassini is using its images of Saturn's rings to learn about ring dynamics. Images are helping the Mars rovers to navigate around obstacles.
Often times, we are limited in the data we can extract from a probe by weight and power constraints on the transmitter. So, engineers have to economize on data volume. As it is, DISR (the imager on Huygens) had to look through a pile of haze to image the surface as it dropped in. A high resolution imager would have simply returned high resolution images of fog rather than crisp images of the surface. (I'm guessing here - I haven't seen the data stream coming down.) High-resolution might be great at the surface, but Huygens was designed to be an atmospheric experiemnt and was never designed to soft land on a hard surface (although there were hopes that it might as it seems to have done).
Granted, I work in the planetary geology subfield, so I am biased in favor of imaging since I like to look at rocks. Particles and fields people aren't so interested in imagers. It was true that early designs for the Voyagers did not incorporate cameras. However, it was scientists who argued for the inclusion of an imager, not politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a student, and my reading list for next semester will cost me $1850 (Amazon prices). If anyone has any updates on the 'google print hack' I (and thousands of others like me) will be most appreciative!
Your legal options are as follows:
1. Buy the books from Amazon and suck up the expense.
2. Buy the books from a used bookstore and suck up a somewhat smaller expense.
3. Check them out from the university library for the semester. Of course, your books can probably be recalled, and popular books may not be available.
4. Determine which books are optional. Some professors add books to their reading list because they think it will be useful to students in the future, not because they plan to use it in the course. If that's the case, you can defer purchasing the optional books. 5. If only a few chapters in one book will be discussed in class, ask the prof to instead have the chapters photocopied for the class. This is considered "fair use" for educational purposes.
6. Personally speak to your professors of the expense of the books. In my experience, professors don't always think carefully about students' financial hardships until the issue is pointed out to them. Once they realize the issue, some professors will drop books from the required list. I know of one professor who had several copies of a required text which he would loan to students in financial hardship for the semester.
There might be other legal options open to you.
But the hour WON'T "jump forward or backward an hour". You'll either have a 23-hour or 25-hour day, plus it will only happen once every 500 years or so. When are you going to test it?
You can test the leap hour every time you flip between Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time, which is what I think the GP was discussing.
Imagine you make a very precise schedule in advance (e.g. scheduled events on a spacecraft) and then a leap second is announced and everything is then off by a second. Now you have all of these tables out there that are wrong that you have to find and then correct... a major headache when your working with something where precision in time is important (e.g. a spacecraft moving at 8 km/s).
If precision in time is mission critical, use another standard that is not sensitive to leap seconds. Astronomers use ephemeris time which is not affected by leap seconds. Of course, if you want to convert ephemeris time to Pacific Daylight Time, then you would need to worry about leap seconds.
JPL uses ephemeris time for mission critical spacecraft operations.
This feature has been imaged before.
Were someone to attempt to drive down one of these false roads, perhaps into a drainage ditch that is actually there instead, and was killed, then it would be a tragedy.
Please tell me you're joking. Anyone who drives a car and drives off a road because they were following an erroneous map instead of their own eyes is asking to be Darwined.
(and the Beagle probably has been found)
Nope, at least not convincingly. The Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) found a dark spot near the predicted Beagle landing site, but further imaging showed that spot to be a small impact crater with wind-blown sediment on its floor, which is not consistent with an impact as recent as late 2003.
From the MSSS link: Based on the MGS MOC imaging campaign and subsequent analyses, no incontrovertible evidence of the Beagle 2 lander was found within the areas imaged by MOC.
How many kilos of waste is produced by burning gas in your car per month? How much energy is used distilling and refining crucde oil into gasoline? Seriously. This isn't a hydrogen-is-way-better-than-gas post. Please do an actual comparison between gasoline cost and hydrogen cost?
I remember plenty of delayed shuttle launches in the 80's. I recall watching Discovery's first or second launch when it got scrubbed at T-3 seconds. That was a major letdown since the shuttle's main engines were already firing and had to be shut down.
Scrubbing shuttle launches for technical gliches is nothing new.
One of the challenges of studying Titan is that is has a *massive* atmosphere with lots of haze due to the presence of hydrocarbons. Most of the images of Titan's surface are actually in the near-infrared where the haze is less optically thick (i.e. you can see through more atmosphere), but the haze still degrades the images. A camera with higher spatial resolution would simply take higher resolution images of haze. (You can test this out yourself by taking pictures on a really foggy day with a 3 Mpixel and a 6 Mpixel camera.)
I also take issue with your claim that Cassini is carrying the wrong sets of instruments to determine whether or not this is a lake. The article concentrates on the results from the camera. However, Cassini also carries a radar imager which can determine the roughness of the surface. A large body of water with little wave action will appear as a smooth surface. If this "lake" appears smooth in radar images, then that would would lend further support to the lake hypothesis.
It's a shame the camera and radar dish face different directions on Cassini, so simultaneous observations can't be made with those instruments. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the radar was pointed at the "lake" during a future flyby.
Many of these images have been processed. In press release images, the brightnesses of pixels are frequently stretched so that the lightest shade pixels are white and the darkest shade pixels are dark (sort of like changing the brightness/contrast of an image in your favorite image viewer). This allows for details in shading and brightnesses to be more apparent to the viewer. The parachute is probably covered by dust (and probably started accumulating dust as soon as it touched down). However, it's still likely to be a lighter shade of red than the surroundings and one of the brighter objects in the vicinity.
I think it would be cool if places like NASA let scientists pick thier projects. Or even let outsiders in, for example if you have a masters in geography and you're interested in helping map the surface of mars, that you can sign up for that work.
Well, if you're motivated, you can look at and work with data from NASA planetary missions. Data collected from the first 270 days of MER rover operations are available.
Then lets build a space ship that can orbit Venus? Would we learn more that way than just using telescopes?
You mean like Magellan?
Actually, while one of the Pioneer Venus atmospheric probes did survive its impact with Venus's surface, it had no cameras. All the landing site images we've seen of Venus's surface came from Soviet Venera landers.
11 years for the data to be analyzed.
It happened this way for two reasons:
1. Only limited funding has been available for lunar research. In the last 10 years, there has been much more funding available for Mars-related work, so many people who would otherwise study the moon have chosen to study Mars instead.
2. New ideas can prompt scientists to look at older data in new ways.
Of course, if you wish to analyze the data yourself, they are publically available.
Think of the mars rover. That was remotely controlled (correct me if I'm wrong).
It depends what you mean by "remotely controlled." The one-way light time between Earth and Mars varies from about 5 to 20 minutes, so you can't drive the rovers with a joystick. Also complicating the issue is that rover controllers no longer work around the clock like they did during the primary mission - it's too expensive to have people to have people work like that for 6+ months. Instead, rover commands are generated during regular working hours rather than during local Mars rover time. It's probably more correct to say that the rovers are "remotely commanded."
The rovers do have some autonomous capabilities. Ground controllers can send up commands to tell the rover to drive to certain way points and avoid any obstacles along the way. (See here.) However, ground controllers still need to double-check the rovers' final position after autonomous drives. Issues like wheel slippage on slopes and sandy surfaces can mean the wheel odometry may not match the actual distance travelled. Also, the rovers don't have the capability to automatically decide what's scientifically important and what's not - people still have to make those decisions. The rovers are a considerable way from being autonomous.
Actually, it pisses me off that people who use metric will say 5000 kilometers instead of 5 megameters... effectively changing the base unit to suit their scale.
Actually, it pisses me off that people who use Imperial units will say 3000 miles instead of 190080000 inches... effectively changing the base unit to suit their scale.
If you look at it historically, you have to recognize that at the time the Bill of Rights was enacted, the people most affected by gun restrictions weren't in the population centers but on the frontier -- people facing problems with wild animals and hostile Indians.
I disagree with your statement that the second amendment was not about government tyranny.
As a practical matter, people on the frontier had little to worry in terms of government control - they would have been able to carry arms simply because there was essentially no government on the frontier to enforce any possible 18th century gun control laws.
The second amendment was written because the Framers of the Constitution remembered that the Revolution was fought by Americans who, more often than not, brought their own weapons to battle against the British government. You might recall that Minutemen (which could have been considered a "well regulated militia") supplied most of their own arms. The Framers hoped that the threat of an insurrection would keep the central government from abusing its power.
More nonsense. Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to scrub the shuttle mission for Hubble? Nope. That was O'Keefe's call.
Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to *keep* the Hubble?
I appreciate your sentiment that this is not necessarily a Rep vs Dem issue. However, the president is ultimately responsible for what the federal bureaucracy does. While scrapping the Hubble may or may not make sense, let's not forget that the president has considerable sway over the actions of federal agencies.
In the US, it's absolutely legal to carry a loaded firearm on your belt. Actually, it's not "absolutely legal" everywhere in the US. For instance, in Arizona, it's currently not legal to carry any kind of firearm into a bar... although that might change soon.
I'm always puzzled by people who claim eBay sniping is unfair. Yeah - it's an annoyance. However, everyone has a chance to snipe, so it's still fair and sportsmanlike.
Most of the Apollo pictures of the moon were taken with *film* cameras, not digital cameras. As a general rule, properly exposed film tends to produce higher resolution images than most consumer digital cameras.
As far as the Huygens images go, those images *were* compressed before they were transmitted.
If private industry is more efficient than NASA, why haven't they already built their own launch facilities and satellite launchers?
And please don't blame it on US regulations. Little is stopping companies from making deals for building launch facilities and factories in some other country.
As far as NASA planetary datasets go, try the Planetary Data System
Some of the USGS topo datasets are available from the EROS Data Center. Some free datasets are available for download.
Actually, one of Mars Global Surveyor's solar panels actually moved past its designed stop point during the aerobraking phase of the mission. (MGS was initially in an elliptical orbit and would dip into Mars's upper atmosphere on close approaches to slow itself down to circularize the orbit.) The solution was to modify the aerobraking procedure to lower the pressure on the solar panel which did work by delayed the planned mission profile aby a year.
Details here.
BULLCRAP!!! Sorry to be so vehemously blunt, but as a space scientist who works with images, I'll say that there's a large number of us who find images to be of value for more than just the "gee-whiz" factor. Images are one of the primary ways we can learn about the geology of planetary bodies. Cassini is using its images of Saturn's rings to learn about ring dynamics. Images are helping the Mars rovers to navigate around obstacles. Often times, we are limited in the data we can extract from a probe by weight and power constraints on the transmitter. So, engineers have to economize on data volume. As it is, DISR (the imager on Huygens) had to look through a pile of haze to image the surface as it dropped in. A high resolution imager would have simply returned high resolution images of fog rather than crisp images of the surface. (I'm guessing here - I haven't seen the data stream coming down.) High-resolution might be great at the surface, but Huygens was designed to be an atmospheric experiemnt and was never designed to soft land on a hard surface (although there were hopes that it might as it seems to have done). Granted, I work in the planetary geology subfield, so I am biased in favor of imaging since I like to look at rocks. Particles and fields people aren't so interested in imagers. It was true that early designs for the Voyagers did not incorporate cameras. However, it was scientists who argued for the inclusion of an imager, not politicians.