Capsaicin is sold as ground chili pepper in capsule form at health stores, and seems to work very well at stimulating cardiac functions in general, as well as unclogging arteries in the long run. Plus, considering that it's natural, with none of the weird side effects that come with most pharmaceuticals, Capsaicin pills work as a supplement to standard medical treatments.
I'm sure they'll find new properties of Capsaicin as time goes on. However, the corporate rub is that Capsaicin, like hemp, is a naturally occurring substance and therefore cannot be patented... unless (bite your tongue) they 'modify' the current laws.
The PP is right, it's tens of millions, at least according to one of Isaac Asimov's science essays I read a while back. In astronomical timescales, structures of the magnitude of Saturn's rings exist for the equivalent of an eyeblink. In fact, it's not too much of a stretch to assume that each of the gas giants have gone through more than one of these "brief" events. Humanity is quite lucky to be around during one of them.
Too bad it wasn't Jupiter with the large-scale structure this time around, though - Galileo would have had a seizure after looking through the eyepiece and seeing four moons and an epic, effing ring to boot!
I understand why "Ducky" won, but how could "The Problem with Math" win the polls? It wasn't really that good...
Because even when video/audio quality is subpar, with a grating Crystal Method style soundtrack, little kids waxing erudite about particle physics are soooo adorable. It's no contest - "Ducky" is clearly the superior work here.
There is something to be said about a painting's appeal over the ages AS it ages.
The proper term for what you're describing is patina. I'd like to add an interesting twist to it.
In the early nineties, I visited a town's monastery in central Mexico, where art students were restoring a 1820's mural by the painter Eugenio Tres Guerras (literally, Eugene Three Wars), a rendition of the Final Judgment. The lower half of the mural, within arm's reach, represented a cross-section of catacombs, painted mostly in black hues, except for a long sequence of skeletal remains.
For a century and a half, the devout had come to this monastery with knives to carve petitions in the mural, scraping flakes of black paint to reveal the white plaster underneath - "Help my sick child", "Bless our marriage", etc - think of it as catholic graffiti, much of it more than a century old.
The restoration approach really made my day: the art students were carefully painting over the carvings with slightly lighter hues, so that if one were standing several meters away, the overall scope of the artwork could be appreciated with no visual noise, but by standing very close to the walls and making a slight effort, the carved petitions could be read. The idea behind this approach is that the carvings have become an integral part of the mural itself and should not be lost.
As for the upper half of the mural, students in scaffolding were applying standard restoration techniques.
The aging of the painting adds to the significance of the work as a whole doesn't it?
Not always. Another of Da Vinci's masterworks, The Last Supper, has gone through horrific circumstances and the latest attempt to rescue it is, IMO, right on target, even as there is quite a bit of controversy around it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo)
I've taken out a bottle of Laphroaig and served it in a half highball glass.
I propose a toast. To discussions in the geek (intellectual) community, by far the most satisfying discussions out there. Geographic decentralization of ideas (and lame humor) enriches us all. I discovered your website in 2000, and immediately it became a staple of my daily web diet. Yet I can't help but think of other websites with a similar purpose that did not live, or will not live, to celebrate the ten year milestone. And that brings up another point - Slashdot (Sourceforge?) has been able to rise to the challenge of change and wild growth of the internet, broadening scope without compromising principles. For example, I've yet to have Slashdot treat my eyeballs as "captive", to hurl advertising at.
My personal favorites are any and all astronomy/cosmology/physics stories and discussions.
But more than anything else, in the last ten years, the powers-that-be have gone on an offensive campaign, and it is through Slashdot that many of us became aware of how our rights are being eroded, through Slashdot how many of us are up-to-date on the latest dispatches from the battlefront in the war of Corporation/State vs Citizen, through Slashdot that many of us (Slashdot readers) have slipped through the sticky grasp of the mainstream media. In other words, Slashdot fulfills an essential function in a society that takes pride in calling itself "democratic".
You've done a man's job, sir.
Salud, Comandante Taco. Or should that be El Taco Comandante? And BTW, would that taco be of beef, fish or carnitas? Corn or flour?
Back in the day, the wave of robberies in my hometown were precise, quick and bloodless (for the most part). These people were not desperate robbers with an itchy trigger finger, they were professionals. Because they were professionals, surely they calculated cost (time, effort and risk) and return of investment. If you're a robber and think like this, it's inevitable that you also think of "opportunity cost", which is basically "How much am I losing elsewhere by staking out this particular person?" I wasn't the only fish in the sea, you know. Not that I know if I was being watched or not, but I bet I probably was, for a while.
If I was being watched, by making their homework extremely difficult, I was probably branded as "high-effort, high-risk, not worth it", then they moved on to other candidates - clockwork, unlucky souls who made their "job" quicker and easier.
As for the "lone nut" that stalks all day, I've never even thought about it. But no professional acts alone, so it sounds as if somebody like that would be a meth or heroin addict on the comedown, and that person has no time to waste, he'll march right into the company and pull a gun on the receptionist.
A low level security guard is going to look at the schedule, and try to make it conform to his own sense of order, rounding up or down patrol times, falsifying patrols, or just plain blowing off the whole schedule entirely.
Damn right. A few years back, my hometown was in the midst of a crime wave, and at the business where I worked, a guy was hired to go and deposit money in the bank. The first thing management told him was to never, ever repeat the same route nor schedule twice in a row. At first, the guy followed this advice, but after a couple of weeks, probably without even realizing it, he fell into a mindless, hurried routine that you could set your watch by. Within a month, he was ambushed - his car was crashed into at an intersection, then when he got off to inspect the damage, a gun was pointed at his temple.
A few days later, the guy resigned and I was given bank duty for a while, and I dare you to try and discern a pattern in the way I handled this baby. Once out of the office, I had six options to choose from within a half block in either direction (east, then straight, left or right - west, then left or right). Sometimes I stalled for up to three hours before dashing off, sometimes I repeated the same route three times at different hours, just to confound whoever might be watching.
To take it up a notch from the PP, here's the twist: Management itself, for all their initial concerns, began dropping hints about other needs I wasn't taking into consideration, such as needing the money deposited within a certain hour. After the assault and robbery shake-up, the organization became open to flexibility, then soon after went back to rigid, routine expectations, downgrading safety for convenience. As an example, the financial department was screaming for regularity, to sort out money movements by X hour.
Within a few months, an armored car service opened in town, which my company hired immediately, and things went back to normal.
Now here's my point: it's not just the grunts, it's also the supervisors and management. On paper, somebody's gonna have to wrack their brain and work harder to schedule activities that follow no pattern, probably for the same amount of pay. Supervisors will constantly have to change their schedules accordingly. There will be initial grudging compliance on all levels, then resistance will manifest itself through groaning, then procrastination turning into inaction. To change organizational habits, an initial push towards implementation is not enough, somebody has to really exert pressure for a long, long time, and who's going to do it, old employees? Unlikely. New employees? A big possibility they'll be sucked into the organizational culture within a couple of unhappy months. You have to find and hire the right outside person, and that'll take a bit of luck, never mind Game Theory, an old and iffy construction that's always caused more harm than good when applied in "real life".
Going offtopic here, and as crazy as it may sound, I do miss the bank deposits, as they turned weekdays into an adventure. First of all, it was a daily shot of adrenaline. And then, there was the deposit itself, not through regular bank tellers, but within a backdoor bank vault, a security-clearance (automated door, long hallway, automated door), CC-monitored bizarro world where the same hungover guys from other companies deposited every day, and the bank employees always kept ice-cold beer for us... in the morning. To get the beer to us on the other side of the 8-inch glass, it had to go through the same time-delay security mechanisms that we placed the ingoing deposits into. It was a small space with no chairs, so we sat on the floor, drinking beer out of paper cones, a thick cloud of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, crushed butts and cones strewn on the floor. After a while, you find yourself regarding this as normal. Talk about organizational culture.
It sounds like either an equipment malfunction or something much more mundane that interfered with the measurement for that split second in time. Science is about repeatable, testable, observable results, not one-off flukes.
I find your argument intriguing, and I immediately respect a healthy dose of skepticism while wielding Occam's Razor. But flipping your argument while focusing on the hypothetical malfunction and/or interference, as well as trying to apply that other great tool, the Sherlock Holmes Principle, it goes something like this:
One incident six years ago, no further similar malfunctions nor interferences either before nor after, in this or any other similar instrument in the world. That would be either quite a malfunction (!) or a not-so-mundane interference. Furthermore, TFA states that at first the team thought it was a man-caused interference, but seem to have discarded the possibility. What I'm trying to say here is that in the context of your argument, this event also seems highly improbable from a technological standpoint. Further evidence is required to support your argument. Come to think of it, the same applies to any counterargument so far.
In any case, TFA does not tell us about any attempt to repeat any possible technical glitch. In fact, TFA was very unsatisfying and downright misleading, case in point, the ludicrous claim that the 5 millisecond spike in the readings may have been caused by "the last throes of an evaporating black hole". WTF! Nothing, I repeat, nothing with mass beyond the Chandrasekar Limit can evaporate via quantum processes in quintillions of years, let alone 10-13 billion.
Back in my college days, there was a nasty area right across the boulevard from Monterrey Tech (in Mexico) unaffectionately known as The Bronx. During weekends, it wasn't uncommon to see a molotov cocktail hurled here and there, from four or five story apartment buildings, just for the hell of it. There would be a towable hot dog stand parked on the curb, suddenly you'd hear a perpetrator from above yell "MOLOTOV!", the hot dog vendor would yell back "FUCK YOU!", then a molotov cocktail would fly in a parabola right above customers' heads and burst into flames in an empty lot across the street. Some of the customers would smile or laugh, some would groan in exasperation - but nobody was shocked.
Sanitation in the area was a disaster, there were so many cockroaches in the buildings that many students simply gave up trying to exterminate them and simply accepted them as "pets", going as far as wagering on cockroach races. I don't know if it still exists, but back in those days there was a cheap repellent stick known as Chinese Chalk that was smeared on surfaces, and while it was fresh, supposedly no cockroach would cross the boundary. Racecourses were designed with Chinese Chalk, beers were popped open, wages were placed on the floor, and the festivities began.
Years later, simply mentioning The Bronx can still make ex-alumni shudder.
Aw, what the hell, here's another good cockroach story:
One day, a friend of mine saw to his horror, three cockroaches huddling in his kitchen wall. So the guy approached nervously with a can of Raid and, involuntarily shutting his eyes, blasted 'em for about ten seconds before jumping several feet back. With morbid fascination and never taking his eyes off them, the guy slowly approached the dying, quivering roaches, still attached to the wall. He was just a couple of feet away when two of the roaches, in a final, heroic act of revenge, lunged at him. Screaming bloody murder in a high pitched tone that must've cracked a neighborhood window or two, the guy jerked violently, tripped and fell in a weird position, dislocating his shoulder. On a happy note, my friend himself tells that story, and has a good laugh while doing so.
Call the PP a Troll, Offtopic, whatever, I'm still laughing five minutes after reading it. Furthermore, I refuse to click on the link for fear of destroying the image I've already made in my mind, I wanna cling to this one.
...I believe there's a good chance that other corporations are monitoring this case very carefully, then will dispatch fleets of lobbyists in Washington to push legislation to repeal the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, with Harry Reid more than willing to comply. It cannot be understated that both major political parties in Congress have made it very clear, in the last ten years or so, that they are for the most part sympathetic towards Big Business.
Think copyright laws and the virtual demise of public domain. Think file sharing. Think internet radio.
GPP: In that regard Apple really suck and are worse than even Microsoft.
PP: Apple doesn't own the music they sell you, they license it from the music labels.
I have to agree with the second quote. Due to the current laws as well as unnegotiable terms of contract drafted by the giant labels, either Apple complies or gets locked out of the market, so in this respect Apple is a gear in a vast, putrid machine they did not create.
Remember that Napster corporate and legislative hysteria preceded the iTunes Music Store, which is important to emphasize, offered the first legitimate and user-friendly music download option. And even now, after massive and prolonged negotiations, the major labels keep on flexing muscle, so that at all times, fleets of lawyers remain deployed by all sides. And then there are countless nuances, such as Led Zep wanting customers to buy the full album, as opposed to individual songs, etc.
In this sense, the consequences of the success of the iPod has placed Apple in a tightrope, navigating between bad PR and loss of content for sale. Technological uncharted waters may be a fine thing, but legal and corporate... yuck.
BTW, I'm not trying to apologize for Apple, which pisses me off in several other respects, it's just that I see an unholy maze out there, and I have to call this one for Apple.
Actually, the article did mention probes going out to the far reaches of the Oort Cloud, implying a propulsion system that will overtake the Voyagers, rendering them pretty much to the status of monuments, zipping along at escape velocity.
Hell, I can imagine, in a really distant future, some project sent to retrieve the Voyagers for display in some museum or private collection. You could even play the gold record. Imagine what these babies would be worth on eBay!
Well, actually, the ultimate nerd would put an authentic blue and yellow eighties Cray Supercomputer Tower sofa in his/her(?) living room. And you know what? Called "retro-chic" when they went on the auction market, these things still look cool, which is to say, they're style, as opposed to fashion.
Nicely put, sir. Yet also notice how the mafiaa (canadian or otherwise) statement finds a way to insinuate the blame on consumers, potential or otherwise. To these people, we are either suckers or thieves.
Here's an analogy to His Master's Voice: A long time ago (to quote Lucas), I took my car for an oil and filter change. The shop charged me something like thirty dollars for the filter. That didn't seem right, so by the time of the next oil change, I went to look for it myself, and to my shock, it cost me something like eight dollars, same brand. Needless to say, I never went back to the place that cheated me, and started a little word-of-mouth campaign. Yet they seem to make up for it by milking quadruple the profit (or more) from every single new or unknowing customer. Now isn't that some kind of fucking business model?
However, this business model seems to have staying power, so do your homework, only the lazy get cheated twice in the same way.
Or for hours of non-stop time-listening fun, you can always take the shortwave option, at the frequencies listed on the WWV website: http://tf.nist.gov/stations/wwv.html.
Ok, there's their mistake, they didn't hire a lawyer.
You see, I've never been able to understand this, particularly in this type of civil case (the penal side of the law is another subject). Do judges scowl upon defendants but smile radiantly at lawyers? Are judges in the United States favorably impressed by the amount of lawyer-hours a defendant or plaintiff can afford? Do judges not see that many defendants are hopelessly and unfairly outgunned in the almighty fucking DOLLAR department?!!
If I get sued by a corporation, I do not have time to look through legal codes and jurisprudence tomes that state evidence and arguments in my favor. I also wouldn't know where to start looking. But does that mean that the evidence and arguments don't exist? Bullshit, and judges have got to be aware of this. Failure to produce evidence and arguments in a particular case in a court of law, because of a lack of means, should NEVER BE proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" of guilt.
Justice system? More like a bully system, in which the party with the biggest stick will always win, and overpaid lawyers (who then become judges) celebrate the scene they've created for themselves. The system has been highjacked so long ago, set up for abuse by throwing dollars at it, it's become an honorable fucking tradition. This is where the root of the problem is.
It seems that you're absolutely right. I did some further reading since I posted, and here's what I came up with:
Pioneer 11, for example, had a constant power supply of 144W upon arrival to Jupiter, but by the time it got to Saturn, that figure had decreased to 100W. By the time they lost contact with it, the figure must have been much lower, and still they lost the signal only because its' antenna's alignment with Earth had been lost. BTW, there's a typo in my original post, as last contact with Pioneer 11 was not in 2005, but in 1995. Pioneer 10, however, with the same specs as Pioneer 11, never lost telemetry, so the final verdict is that its' batteries simply petered out. Which is to say, signal strength did finally cross the threshold, due to the dying juice supply.
Compare this with the Voyagers, which upon launch generated 420W of power, and I think your point becomes apparent.
Then of course, in all four craft, some instruments were switched off after the planetary tours, to divert crucial power supply to the absolutely essential components of the following phase of the mission.
One final thought: how low does transmitter strength have to go before it fades away, from that distance? Something like one of those gizmos you hook up to an iPod so you can listen to it in your car radio?
The two Voyagers, as well the two Pioneer probes, are barely on the edge of the heliopause (around 85 AUs from the Sun). It is speculated that the Oort Cloud begins around 750 AUs from the Sun. As it's taken 30 years to travel 85 AUs, it'll be approximately 250 years before the probes enter the proposed inner boundary of the Oort Cloud. A quick footnote: Voyager 1, thanks to the particular trajectory chosen for it, is a bit further away than the other three probes, around 100 AUs away from the Sun.
Now here's the clincher: Voyagers' batteries are supposed to last another 15-20 years at most. As for the Pioneers, the last signal from Pioneer 10 was registered in 2003, from Pioneer 11 in 2005. On blueprint, they still have a bit of juice left, but their distances from Earth are so great that there's no current instrument that can pick up their incredibly weak signal.
Anyhow, by the time the Voyagers and Pioneers reach the Oort Cloud, they'll have been stone cold dead for centuries.
These spacecraft fascinate me more today than back in their prime-time heyday. Most people think that when Voyager 2 flew by Neptune, the planetary team moved out of JPL and that was that. Yet the current team moved in and the really hardcore adventure really kicked into gear. These things just kept going and sailed right off the edge!
As of 21 October 2004, LINEAR had detected 211,849 new objects of which at least 1622 were near earth asteroids and 142 were comets. All of LINEAR's discoveries were made using robotic telescopes.
What's worrisome is that the homepage http://www.ll.mit.edu/LINEAR/ is also stuck at 211,849 objects. Did they run out of funds in 2004? It sounds extremely shortsighted to stop this project.
Slashdot Mirror
Capsaicin is sold as ground chili pepper in capsule form at health stores, and seems to work very well at stimulating cardiac functions in general, as well as unclogging arteries in the long run. Plus, considering that it's natural, with none of the weird side effects that come with most pharmaceuticals, Capsaicin pills work as a supplement to standard medical treatments.
I'm sure they'll find new properties of Capsaicin as time goes on. However, the corporate rub is that Capsaicin, like hemp, is a naturally occurring substance and therefore cannot be patented... unless (bite your tongue) they 'modify' the current laws.
You mean tens of billions I assume?
The PP is right, it's tens of millions, at least according to one of Isaac Asimov's science essays I read a while back.
In astronomical timescales, structures of the magnitude of Saturn's rings exist for the equivalent of an eyeblink. In fact, it's not too much of a stretch to assume that each of the gas giants have gone through more than one of these "brief" events. Humanity is quite lucky to be around during one of them.
Too bad it wasn't Jupiter with the large-scale structure this time around, though - Galileo would have had a seizure after looking through the eyepiece and seeing four moons and an epic, effing ring to boot!
I understand why "Ducky" won, but how could "The Problem with Math" win the polls? It wasn't really that good...
Because even when video/audio quality is subpar, with a grating Crystal Method style soundtrack, little kids waxing erudite about particle physics are soooo adorable. It's no contest - "Ducky" is clearly the superior work here.
There is something to be said about a painting's appeal over the ages AS it ages.
The proper term for what you're describing is patina. I'd like to add an interesting twist to it.
In the early nineties, I visited a town's monastery in central Mexico, where art students were restoring a 1820's mural by the painter Eugenio Tres Guerras (literally, Eugene Three Wars), a rendition of the Final Judgment. The lower half of the mural, within arm's reach, represented a cross-section of catacombs, painted mostly in black hues, except for a long sequence of skeletal remains.
For a century and a half, the devout had come to this monastery with knives to carve petitions in the mural, scraping flakes of black paint to reveal the white plaster underneath - "Help my sick child", "Bless our marriage", etc - think of it as catholic graffiti, much of it more than a century old.
The restoration approach really made my day: the art students were carefully painting over the carvings with slightly lighter hues, so that if one were standing several meters away, the overall scope of the artwork could be appreciated with no visual noise, but by standing very close to the walls and making a slight effort, the carved petitions could be read. The idea behind this approach is that the carvings have become an integral part of the mural itself and should not be lost.
As for the upper half of the mural, students in scaffolding were applying standard restoration techniques.
The aging of the painting adds to the significance of the work as a whole doesn't it?
Not always. Another of Da Vinci's masterworks, The Last Supper, has gone through horrific circumstances and the latest attempt to rescue it is, IMO, right on target, even as there is quite a bit of controversy around it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo)
I am not a number, I am a human being!
Aw shit, Alzheimer's setting in. That was supposed to be:
"I am not a number, I am a FREE MAN!
I've taken out a bottle of Laphroaig and served it in a half highball glass.
I propose a toast. To discussions in the geek (intellectual) community, by far the most satisfying discussions out there. Geographic decentralization of ideas (and lame humor) enriches us all. I discovered your website in 2000, and immediately it became a staple of my daily web diet. Yet I can't help but think of other websites with a similar purpose that did not live, or will not live, to celebrate the ten year milestone. And that brings up another point - Slashdot (Sourceforge?) has been able to rise to the challenge of change and wild growth of the internet, broadening scope without compromising principles. For example, I've yet to have Slashdot treat my eyeballs as "captive", to hurl advertising at.
My personal favorites are any and all astronomy/cosmology/physics stories and discussions.
But more than anything else, in the last ten years, the powers-that-be have gone on an offensive campaign, and it is through Slashdot that many of us became aware of how our rights are being eroded, through Slashdot how many of us are up-to-date on the latest dispatches from the battlefront in the war of Corporation/State vs Citizen, through Slashdot that many of us (Slashdot readers) have slipped through the sticky grasp of the mainstream media. In other words, Slashdot fulfills an essential function in a society that takes pride in calling itself "democratic".
You've done a man's job, sir.
Salud, Comandante Taco. Or should that be El Taco Comandante?
And BTW, would that taco be of beef, fish or carnitas? Corn or flour?
No, AOL users say "Me too!". Slashdotters say "You're wrong. You forgot to consider (logic) and (example)", whatever the post.
There, fixed that for you.
I am not a number, I am a human being!
Back in the day, the wave of robberies in my hometown were precise, quick and bloodless (for the most part). These people were not desperate robbers with an itchy trigger finger, they were professionals. Because they were professionals, surely they calculated cost (time, effort and risk) and return of investment. If you're a robber and think like this, it's inevitable that you also think of "opportunity cost", which is basically "How much am I losing elsewhere by staking out this particular person?" I wasn't the only fish in the sea, you know. Not that I know if I was being watched or not, but I bet I probably was, for a while.
If I was being watched, by making their homework extremely difficult, I was probably branded as "high-effort, high-risk, not worth it", then they moved on to other candidates - clockwork, unlucky souls who made their "job" quicker and easier.
As for the "lone nut" that stalks all day, I've never even thought about it. But no professional acts alone, so it sounds as if somebody like that would be a meth or heroin addict on the comedown, and that person has no time to waste, he'll march right into the company and pull a gun on the receptionist.
A low level security guard is going to look at the schedule, and try to make it conform to his own sense of order, rounding up or down patrol times, falsifying patrols, or just plain blowing off the whole schedule entirely.
Damn right. A few years back, my hometown was in the midst of a crime wave, and at the business where I worked, a guy was hired to go and deposit money in the bank. The first thing management told him was to never, ever repeat the same route nor schedule twice in a row. At first, the guy followed this advice, but after a couple of weeks, probably without even realizing it, he fell into a mindless, hurried routine that you could set your watch by. Within a month, he was ambushed - his car was crashed into at an intersection, then when he got off to inspect the damage, a gun was pointed at his temple.
A few days later, the guy resigned and I was given bank duty for a while, and I dare you to try and discern a pattern in the way I handled this baby. Once out of the office, I had six options to choose from within a half block in either direction (east, then straight, left or right - west, then left or right). Sometimes I stalled for up to three hours before dashing off, sometimes I repeated the same route three times at different hours, just to confound whoever might be watching.
To take it up a notch from the PP, here's the twist: Management itself, for all their initial concerns, began dropping hints about other needs I wasn't taking into consideration, such as needing the money deposited within a certain hour. After the assault and robbery shake-up, the organization became open to flexibility, then soon after went back to rigid, routine expectations, downgrading safety for convenience. As an example, the financial department was screaming for regularity, to sort out money movements by X hour.
Within a few months, an armored car service opened in town, which my company hired immediately, and things went back to normal.
Now here's my point: it's not just the grunts, it's also the supervisors and management. On paper, somebody's gonna have to wrack their brain and work harder to schedule activities that follow no pattern, probably for the same amount of pay. Supervisors will constantly have to change their schedules accordingly. There will be initial grudging compliance on all levels, then resistance will manifest itself through groaning, then procrastination turning into inaction. To change organizational habits, an initial push towards implementation is not enough, somebody has to really exert pressure for a long, long time, and who's going to do it, old employees? Unlikely. New employees? A big possibility they'll be sucked into the organizational culture within a couple of unhappy months. You have to find and hire the right outside person, and that'll take a bit of luck, never mind Game Theory, an old and iffy construction that's always caused more harm than good when applied in "real life".
Going offtopic here, and as crazy as it may sound, I do miss the bank deposits, as they turned weekdays into an adventure. First of all, it was a daily shot of adrenaline. And then, there was the deposit itself, not through regular bank tellers, but within a backdoor bank vault, a security-clearance (automated door, long hallway, automated door), CC-monitored bizarro world where the same hungover guys from other companies deposited every day, and the bank employees always kept ice-cold beer for us... in the morning. To get the beer to us on the other side of the 8-inch glass, it had to go through the same time-delay security mechanisms that we placed the ingoing deposits into. It was a small space with no chairs, so we sat on the floor, drinking beer out of paper cones, a thick cloud of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, crushed butts and cones strewn on the floor. After a while, you find yourself regarding this as normal. Talk about organizational culture.
It sounds like either an equipment malfunction or something much more mundane that interfered with the measurement for that split second in time. Science is about repeatable, testable, observable results, not one-off flukes.
I find your argument intriguing, and I immediately respect a healthy dose of skepticism while wielding Occam's Razor. But flipping your argument while focusing on the hypothetical malfunction and/or interference, as well as trying to apply that other great tool, the Sherlock Holmes Principle, it goes something like this:
One incident six years ago, no further similar malfunctions nor interferences either before nor after, in this or any other similar instrument in the world. That would be either quite a malfunction (!) or a not-so-mundane interference. Furthermore, TFA states that at first the team thought it was a man-caused interference, but seem to have discarded the possibility. What I'm trying to say here is that in the context of your argument, this event also seems highly improbable from a technological standpoint.
Further evidence is required to support your argument. Come to think of it, the same applies to any counterargument so far.
In any case, TFA does not tell us about any attempt to repeat any possible technical glitch. In fact, TFA was very unsatisfying and downright misleading, case in point, the ludicrous claim that the 5 millisecond spike in the readings may have been caused by "the last throes of an evaporating black hole". WTF! Nothing, I repeat, nothing with mass beyond the Chandrasekar Limit can evaporate via quantum processes in quintillions of years, let alone 10-13 billion.
Back in my college days, there was a nasty area right across the boulevard from Monterrey Tech (in Mexico) unaffectionately known as The Bronx. During weekends, it wasn't uncommon to see a molotov cocktail hurled here and there, from four or five story apartment buildings, just for the hell of it. There would be a towable hot dog stand parked on the curb, suddenly you'd hear a perpetrator from above yell "MOLOTOV!", the hot dog vendor would yell back "FUCK YOU!", then a molotov cocktail would fly in a parabola right above customers' heads and burst into flames in an empty lot across the street. Some of the customers would smile or laugh, some would groan in exasperation - but nobody was shocked.
Sanitation in the area was a disaster, there were so many cockroaches in the buildings that many students simply gave up trying to exterminate them and simply accepted them as "pets", going as far as wagering on cockroach races. I don't know if it still exists, but back in those days there was a cheap repellent stick known as Chinese Chalk that was smeared on surfaces, and while it was fresh, supposedly no cockroach would cross the boundary. Racecourses were designed with Chinese Chalk, beers were popped open, wages were placed on the floor, and the festivities began.
Years later, simply mentioning The Bronx can still make ex-alumni shudder.
Aw, what the hell, here's another good cockroach story:
One day, a friend of mine saw to his horror, three cockroaches huddling in his kitchen wall. So the guy approached nervously with a can of Raid and, involuntarily shutting his eyes, blasted 'em for about ten seconds before jumping several feet back. With morbid fascination and never taking his eyes off them, the guy slowly approached the dying, quivering roaches, still attached to the wall. He was just a couple of feet away when two of the roaches, in a final, heroic act of revenge, lunged at him. Screaming bloody murder in a high pitched tone that must've cracked a neighborhood window or two, the guy jerked violently, tripped and fell in a weird position, dislocating his shoulder.
On a happy note, my friend himself tells that story, and has a good laugh while doing so.
Call the PP a Troll, Offtopic, whatever, I'm still laughing five minutes after reading it.
Furthermore, I refuse to click on the link for fear of destroying the image I've already made in my mind, I wanna cling to this one.
...I believe there's a good chance that other corporations are monitoring this case very carefully, then will dispatch fleets of lobbyists in Washington to push legislation to repeal the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, with Harry Reid more than willing to comply. It cannot be understated that both major political parties in Congress have made it very clear, in the last ten years or so, that they are for the most part sympathetic towards Big Business.
Think copyright laws and the virtual demise of public domain.
Think file sharing. Think internet radio.
GPP: In that regard Apple really suck and are worse than even Microsoft.
PP: Apple doesn't own the music they sell you, they license it from the music labels.
I have to agree with the second quote. Due to the current laws as well as unnegotiable terms of contract drafted by the giant labels, either Apple complies or gets locked out of the market, so in this respect Apple is a gear in a vast, putrid machine they did not create.
Remember that Napster corporate and legislative hysteria preceded the iTunes Music Store, which is important to emphasize, offered the first legitimate and user-friendly music download option. And even now, after massive and prolonged negotiations, the major labels keep on flexing muscle, so that at all times, fleets of lawyers remain deployed by all sides. And then there are countless nuances, such as Led Zep wanting customers to buy the full album, as opposed to individual songs, etc.
In this sense, the consequences of the success of the iPod has placed Apple in a tightrope, navigating between bad PR and loss of content for sale. Technological uncharted waters may be a fine thing, but legal and corporate... yuck.
BTW, I'm not trying to apologize for Apple, which pisses me off in several other respects, it's just that I see an unholy maze out there, and I have to call this one for Apple.
Actually, the article did mention probes going out to the far reaches of the Oort Cloud, implying a propulsion system that will overtake the Voyagers, rendering them pretty much to the status of monuments, zipping along at escape velocity.
Hell, I can imagine, in a really distant future, some project sent to retrieve the Voyagers for display in some museum or private collection. You could even play the gold record. Imagine what these babies would be worth on eBay!
The ultimate nerd acquisition is an "original replica" of yourself, frozen in carbonite http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/20/155624 7.
Well, actually, the ultimate nerd would put an authentic blue and yellow eighties Cray Supercomputer Tower sofa in his/her(?) living room. And you know what? Called "retro-chic" when they went on the auction market, these things still look cool, which is to say, they're style, as opposed to fashion.
Nicely put, sir. Yet also notice how the mafiaa (canadian or otherwise) statement finds a way to insinuate the blame on consumers, potential or otherwise. To these people, we are either suckers or thieves.
Here's an analogy to His Master's Voice:
A long time ago (to quote Lucas), I took my car for an oil and filter change. The shop charged me something like thirty dollars for the filter. That didn't seem right, so by the time of the next oil change, I went to look for it myself, and to my shock, it cost me something like eight dollars, same brand. Needless to say, I never went back to the place that cheated me, and started a little word-of-mouth campaign. Yet they seem to make up for it by milking quadruple the profit (or more) from every single new or unknowing customer. Now isn't that some kind of fucking business model?
However, this business model seems to have staying power, so do your homework, only the lazy get cheated twice in the same way.
Or for hours of non-stop time-listening fun, you can always take the shortwave option, at the frequencies listed on the WWV website: http://tf.nist.gov/stations/wwv.html.
Ok, there's their mistake, they didn't hire a lawyer.
You see, I've never been able to understand this, particularly in this type of civil case (the penal side of the law is another subject). Do judges scowl upon defendants but smile radiantly at lawyers? Are judges in the United States favorably impressed by the amount of lawyer-hours a defendant or plaintiff can afford? Do judges not see that many defendants are hopelessly and unfairly outgunned in the almighty fucking DOLLAR department?!!
If I get sued by a corporation, I do not have time to look through legal codes and jurisprudence tomes that state evidence and arguments in my favor. I also wouldn't know where to start looking. But does that mean that the evidence and arguments don't exist? Bullshit, and judges have got to be aware of this. Failure to produce evidence and arguments in a particular case in a court of law, because of a lack of means, should NEVER BE proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" of guilt.
Justice system? More like a bully system, in which the party with the biggest stick will always win, and overpaid lawyers (who then become judges) celebrate the scene they've created for themselves. The system has been highjacked so long ago, set up for abuse by throwing dollars at it, it's become an honorable fucking tradition. This is where the root of the problem is.
It seems that you're absolutely right. I did some further reading since I posted, and here's what I came up with:
Pioneer 11, for example, had a constant power supply of 144W upon arrival to Jupiter, but by the time it got to Saturn, that figure had decreased to 100W. By the time they lost contact with it, the figure must have been much lower, and still they lost the signal only because its' antenna's alignment with Earth had been lost. BTW, there's a typo in my original post, as last contact with Pioneer 11 was not in 2005, but in 1995.
Pioneer 10, however, with the same specs as Pioneer 11, never lost telemetry, so the final verdict is that its' batteries simply petered out. Which is to say, signal strength did finally cross the threshold, due to the dying juice supply.
Compare this with the Voyagers, which upon launch generated 420W of power, and I think your point becomes apparent.
Then of course, in all four craft, some instruments were switched off after the planetary tours, to divert crucial power supply to the absolutely essential components of the following phase of the mission.
One final thought: how low does transmitter strength have to go before it fades away, from that distance? Something like one of those gizmos you hook up to an iPod so you can listen to it in your car radio?
The two Voyagers, as well the two Pioneer probes, are barely on the edge of the heliopause (around 85 AUs from the Sun). It is speculated that the Oort Cloud begins around 750 AUs from the Sun. As it's taken 30 years to travel 85 AUs, it'll be approximately 250 years before the probes enter the proposed inner boundary of the Oort Cloud.
A quick footnote: Voyager 1, thanks to the particular trajectory chosen for it, is a bit further away than the other three probes, around 100 AUs away from the Sun.
Now here's the clincher: Voyagers' batteries are supposed to last another 15-20 years at most. As for the Pioneers, the last signal from Pioneer 10 was registered in 2003, from Pioneer 11 in 2005. On blueprint, they still have a bit of juice left, but their distances from Earth are so great that there's no current instrument that can pick up their incredibly weak signal.
Anyhow, by the time the Voyagers and Pioneers reach the Oort Cloud, they'll have been stone cold dead for centuries.
These spacecraft fascinate me more today than back in their prime-time heyday. Most people think that when Voyager 2 flew by Neptune, the planetary team moved out of JPL and that was that. Yet the current team moved in and the really hardcore adventure really kicked into gear. These things just kept going and sailed right off the edge!
That's no Slashdot! It has no CowboyNeal option on its polls!
Not to mention the usual witty commentary we've all come to know and love, time and again, but in spanish:
- Imagínate un enjambre Beowulf de estos!
- Esa no es una luna, es una estación espacial!
- En Rusia Soviética, Wikipedia te vandaliza a TI!
Meteorologists predict overnight cloud cover for September 1st, 2007, everywhere... ...with complete clearing right after dawn on the 2nd.
The LINEAR project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Near-Earth_A
From the wikipedia article:
What's worrisome is that the homepage http://www.ll.mit.edu/LINEAR/ is also stuck at 211,849 objects. Did they run out of funds in 2004? It sounds extremely shortsighted to stop this project.