Child pornography and terrorism are the only two uses for Freenet so far discussed in this topic. Genuine preocupations for citizens of the democratic western world, to be sure, yet these things will happen whether Freenet exists or not. Freenet is not the problem, nor a problem per se. Any infrastructure can and will be misused so long as we attack a symptom and not the problem. Furthermore, you cannot shut down supply, no matter how hard you try. What you can attempt is to change the demands of the market, and let's be realistic, as long as there are human beings on this universe, there will always be a certain percentage of deviations from the "established norm".
Here's an example in which infrastructure is crucial - Tons of cocaine and pot make their way up the American continent on a daily basis, all the way up to Canada. If the US government decided to approach the problem from the same viewpoints I'm reading in this topic, their solution could be to try to shut down all incoming traffic into the country, or create highway checkpoints at regular intervals, soviet-bloc style, or even to shut down the highways altogether.
Which brings me to my point, shedding light on a positive aspect of Freenet, such as being a way for citizens of repressive governments to freely communicate with each other, giving them a fighting chance to organize themselves into a resistance. China comes immediately to mind, or Uzbekistan. Knowledge is power, communication its' medium, Freenet one of its' tools.
Cool! In a recently opened cultural center in my town, I was invited to take care of the movie department on a voluntary basis, and I agreed immediately. I screen a featurette and movie every Wednesday. No beer permit yet, but the place sells really good wine, espressos, prosciutto on bagel, ham and cheese crepes, simple but quality stuff. Admission is free. My little perk is that I get to eat and drink as much as I want for free:)
The food/wine bar and tables are on an incredible platform, raised about three feet above the main floor and made of twenty THOUSAND upside-down wine bottles, lit from below.
Now, there's a BIG scientific research and educational institute in my town, so I get a lot of astronomy, physics and oceanography students, and let me tell you, it's a thrill to blow their twentysomething minds with films like "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia", "THX-1138", "Koyaanisqatsi", "Fitzcarraldo" and the original french version of "Wages Of Fear". Recently, in light of all the buzz for fantasy films (LOTR and Narnia), I decided to show 1981's "Excalibur" and just about packed the place full. For the featurette, I screen stuff like Buñuel's "L'age D'or" and the occasional Monty Python TV episode.
During the break between the short and the movie, I do a random slideshow of painting, sculpture and architecture from prehistory to the present, plus anime, graffiti and various pop artifacts. All of this to the sounds of Godspeed You Black Emperor, dEUS, Zoviet France, The Clash, Arcade Fire and even some Conet Project! Man, it's like I'm living in rock 'n' roll geek heaven.
But even here, we get a few idiots who can't stop chattering during the movie. Incredible. But what I've noticed, since I monitor the crowd and ask the idiots to keep it quiet, is that they sincerely don't notice that they're bothering the rest of us, they're in their own self-centered bubble, and they shrink in shame and confusion when singled out.
My theory is that this is the result of shortened attention spans in the last two decades, courtesy of what the film and TV industry calls "whammies", or rapid-fire editing, car chases, explosions and mounting body counts. Another Hollywood trend is a pervading bland and fake sentimentality with the emotional sophistication of a Hallmark card, but that's a topic for another discussion. Anyway, this is what happens when the creative process is in the hands of a few corporate suits, as opposed to artists with conviction, and the ultimate point is, we are what we eat, and our minds are being fed with crap, with a few notable exceptions (The Sopranos comes to mind).
With this mental diet, many people can't relate to a movie being an intellectual challenge (which can be, you know, fun), instead they expect a distraction, or a continuation of their perpetual distraction, who needs to have their boat rocked, anyway. And so, whatever it is they are watching, their minds drift and thoughts of American Idol pop into their heads, and they need to tell their companions about it, right away, before this important train of thought drifts away, only to snap back to attention the moment an explosion goes off or a car chase begins.
It's all fine and well to joke about mexican food all over this thread, some of the zingers are very funny, but this gives me an idea: how about determining the incidence of prostate cancer in Mexico's population?
As an example, one of the typical "delicacies" found in the city of Guadalajara is a dish called "torta ahogada" or "drowned torta", which is pork meat stuffed in baguette-style bread, dipped in tomato sauce, then again in ultra-hot chile de arbol sauce. Garnished with pickled onions, you squeeze lemon juice, add a little rock salt and dig in. A LOT of people in Guadalajara eat this on a regular basis.
As a side note, just as in the United States some people bob for apples in a bucket full of water, there's one stand in Guadalajara that holds competitions, bobbing for tortas in a bucket full of chile de arbol sauce. The winner eats there free for a year. Strictly for masochists, if you ask me.
Anyway, if we compare the percentage of prostate cancer cases in Guadalajara as opposed to, say, Minneapolis, maybe a "real world" result will stick out plainly and clearly. Then again, maybe not, maybe a race is genetically more susceptible to contract prostate cancer, I dunno, but to dig up the data would cost next to nothing and could be worth a try.
If you take all articles in all languages, Wikipedia surpassed the magic number a long time ago, and has by now actually gone beyond 2,000,000 articles.
Hey, don't forget about the lifelong thing of getting her VCR to stop blinking 12:00, and I do mean lifelong, 'cause you and I both know she'll never get around to TiVo unless you get it for her for Christmas.
The organs that serve the species, as opposed to the individual, are the same organs that will probably get you if nothing else does first: the prostate in the male, the ovaries and mammary glands in the female. Once an individual reaches a certain advanced age, that individual might have avoided heart disease or whatever else, but cancer of the 'naughty bits' is almost guaranteed.
TFA points in an interesting direction, however, at least for the female of the species. Maybe it's not a propagate then get out of the way scenario, but a use it or lose it one. It's there to be used, not to let it atrophy.
So c'mon, people! What's good for the gander is good for the goose, let's keep using those 'naughty bits' until we're a hundred years old and beyond! Oh, and eat lots of garlic and olive oil to keep the heart pumping.
Now that the US Supreme Court is completely tilted towards corporate interests for the next decade or two, maybe you shouldn't have been modded Funny, but Scary. I wouldn't bet against these idiots machinating the kind of farcical logic you've jokingly applied.
Remember how just last week, right in the midst of the Alito rubber-stamp hearings, some justices were caught red-handed feeding from the corporate tit. All-expenses-paid trips for Scalia, a twenty thousand dollar bible for Scalia sidekick Thomas, among many other things. By the way, the retort was that the justices were not breaking the law, as the rules do not apply to justices the way they apply for congressmen.
Therefore, all the RIAA has to do is pay for Alito's golf club membership and voilá!, this lady will have to pay damages for not downloading music, therefore causing distress to the corporations by screwing with their methods for collecting revenue via litigation.
Oh (insert your favorite deity here), I need a drink...
Seriously... if this one goes the wrong way if moving to Canada.... yeah I said it.
Not good enough. Remember the Blue Jays? MLB can track you down in Canada. Here's a tip: move to Montreal, 'cuz that's probably the last place MLB will bother to look in.
It's not the sport that you should despise. It's the myopic ballclub owners and the backlash to their century-long stupidity: most of the current crop of spoiled-brat free agent superstars and their agents. That combination has just about taken all the joy out of baseball, since around or about 1994.
I am reminded of a story I read a long time ago that is analogous to this particular debate. It may seem a simple and childlish story, but it makes a very clear point, please bear with me:
In medieval times, there was a feudal lord who was kind and generous, providing good food and medical care to his serfs. One day the feudal lord started giving resources to a man who polished glass, and he was much criticised by the population and the clergy, as his perceived duty was to provide for the immediate needs of his people, not on ridiculous, alchemist follies of no apparent altruistic value. However, the lord paid no heed to these criticisms and kept on sponsoring the glass polisher.
A century or two later, the microscope was invented, and shortly thereafter the ability to detect the source of many diseases that plagued all the land. Urban sanitation became a priority, the tide of disease had turned. Much of the groundwork in optical lenses that led to the microscope was done by the glass polisher that the feudal lord had stubbornly sponsored back in the day.
More recently, many people believe that the only things that came out of the Apollo missions were moonrocks, Velcro and Tang, that the money would have been better spent on other, more altruistic and pressing issues of the day. If that wish had been heeded back in the day, many of the fruits of research and invention of new technologies that made the Apollo missions possible would not be around today, and today they are everywhere, in medicine, in computing, in communications, transportation, the list goes on and on.
When it comes to most of the gigantic problems plaguing mankind, we cannot tackle them frontally in a linear fashion. Hints and solutions come from "outside the box", which is to say the by-products of other areas of research.
So, if 'star dust' is too obscure and abstract a bounty for some people, not to worry, their payoff will come not from the actual mission itself, but from the by-products of the labs and shops that designed and built the spacecraft. These are the Menlo Parks of today. But we probably will never know that the payoff came from Stardust or Cassini or Spirit and Endeavour, as the benefits will reach us in an indirect manner, such as new components that make radiation treatment for cancer a bit more effective, for example. And of course, there are longer-term benefits that we can't begin to imagine.
Whoever modded this offtopic is obviously not a Michael Crichton fan.
Make that early Michael Crichton fan. Crichton has in recent years become something of a joke with his views on a "widespread scientific conspiracy" that's foisting the "myth" of Global Warming upon an unsuspecting public. Crichton even went so far as to testify in the United States Congress as a so-called authority on the subject. Hello, ladies and gentleman: Crichton is a writer of fiction, not a climatologist.
But I digress, so I'll get back on topic. What makes The Andromeda Strain such a gripping read is the fact that this microorganism is so shockingly deadly, and it is fascinating to read the high-tech, top-secret response to the crisis. Which is to say, Crichton would never have written a book about a harmless organism landing on Earth, as it would not have created any tension, therefore he would have had no story.
Any writer worth his/her salt knows that science fiction begins with an absurd premise and develops logically from there. In the case of Andromeda Strain, the absurd premise is a worst-case scenario, and of course it falls apart if inspected closely: the Earth has been bombarded by meteorites and small comets (as well as 'dust' that enters the atmosphere much more gently) since the dawn of time, so surely any microorganism could hitch a ride to Earth in that manner.
So yes, Stardust has landed in Utah with cometary dust. And yes, I'll be sleeping soundly tonight.
There's a classification of galaxies known as Malin-type, which refers to their being at the extreme end of low density and luminosity. Malin-types can be spiral and a thousand times larger than our own Milky Way (LOL!), yet only have a few million active stars within; little is known about these supergiants, but the fact that they do organize themselves into spiral structures and that most of their mass is spread so thinly that it has not and maybe cannot create pockets of concentration that will achieve critical mass. These are, in a way, stillborn supergiants.
Here's a nifty little mystery: Malin Spiral Giants rotate extremely slowly, and given their size, it turns out they take eons to complete a single rotation; in fact, they may have rotated only a handfull of times since their inception. Considering the relatively young age of the Universe, how did such slow-moving monsters organize themselves into such sophisticated structures as spirals in the limited timeframe?
At the other end of the scale, Malin-types can be dwarves with only a few thousand active stars. Most probably, there are also "average sized" Malins, but I've never come across any literature on that. In any case, they are incredibly difficult to detect and just as hard to study even if you know exactly where they are.
If this newly discovered galaxy is a Malin Dwarf, we have been presented with a golden opportunity to learn a ton and a half about an obscure (as in virtually unknown, so there's no pun intended) yet extremely important type of celestial structure, since Malin-types may account for a considerable percentage of MACHO (Massive Compact Halo Object) dark matter that makes up the Universe. Also, there is a lot of mass in those babies that is exactly the way it was back in the early days of the Universe.
In fact, Malin Dwarves may be the most common type of galaxy out there, think about it: what's the most common object in our fractally-scaled corner of the cosmos, the Solar System? Low mass and/or low density asteroids and comets.
This newly discovered galaxy may be considered the intergalactic equivalent of a comet.
In fact this aspect of Napster, where you could see other people's music collections, was what set it apart from other services. Its usefulness hasn't been matched since.
Some current SoulSeek clients have the same feature, such as SolarSeek for OSX.
From our point of view. do we just look 360, more stars there, less stars here, therefore we're on the rim side of the galaxy?
If it was up to visible light only, you'd be right; in fact, I believe it was William Herschel, co-discoverer of Uranus, who first attempted in the late 1700's to make a diagram of the galaxy, based exclusively on visible-light observing. As it turned out, the Milky Way seemed to have a "powder puff" shape and the sun was near the center!
However, for the better part of the last century we've been using infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, radio, etc. If you point and shoot a picture with an infrared telescope in the direction of the Saggitarius constellation, the "loudest" source of x-rays in the night sky, the image you get is that of a central galactic bulge and a symmetrical disc that cuts across the bulge and extends outwards both left and right. This image is consistent with all observations of other spiral galaxies.
Not necessarily. A city could do a great deal to minimize light pollution without sacrificing luminosity by replacing light sources from white halogen to amber, as well as concentrating that light exclusively in a downward direction with the aid of metal screens painted white on the inside; picture something like a tablelamb-style screen and you're there. This would get rid of glare while keeping the streets as well-lit as they are now.
If implemented, less wattage is needed to achieve the same level of illumination, thereby saving the city a TON of money every single night from now until kingdom come, as well as wasting less energy resources, always a good idea in an age of fossil fuels.
Hence, less resources spent - good for astronomy, good for the environment, good for the city, and so it goes. Imagine if every city in the world implemented this! The one big problem would be the cost to refurbish all those street lamps, but the investment would probably pay for itself in the short-to-medium term; after the break-even point, it's all savings.
Now c'mon, you seem to be a well-read Anonymous Coward, the least you can do is be polite towards a polite question. Basically, there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers, and a science fiction scenario is no excuse for even more doomsayer predictions.
Remember, Columbine is a town that manufactures missiles, and still everybody asked why some students in that particular town razed as many as they could before they imploded.
With your tone of writing, maybe you should consider moving into a more peacefull town, as far from your Anonymous Cowardly Town as you can, first time you get a chance? You know, there's a wide world out there who believe that the reality of war is scary, while for you, the reality of peace is scary.
Is it any coincidence that most functioning Cold War relics are in Small Town U.S.A.?
I feel for you, I can't even begin to imagine what type of education you've received. And your parents.
Believe me, there IS another way than the oppressive Christ and Nuclear Holocaust dogma that surrounds you. It's called History. Or Culture. Or Art. Or Science. Four different tickets that will take you to the same finish line: Common Sense, Enlightmentent, Adulthood (most adults are only adults in age, not in mind), call it what you will.
I've wondered about the fact that only in the past four decades we've had the ability to track storms AND measure their strength in a systematic manner, and even then there are problems, i.e. Katrina was originally thought to have struck the Gulf Coast as a Cat 4, yet about a month or two later a more detailed analysis of the data indicated that Katrina was actually a Cat 3.
Furthermore, if you look up Pacific Basin hurricanes on the NOAA page, you will find that Hurricane Linda in 1997 was the strongest ever recorded in the area, but there is an intriguing disclaimer, which goes something like this: Due to lack of consistent monitoring in the Pacific Basin, we have insufficient data for any year before 1996.
Which brings me to my question: How many tropical storms in the last century have gone unnoticed before the advent of satellites, and even if noticed by the occasional cargo boat in some remote shipping route (which is precisely where Tropical Storm Zeta is right now), have been dismissed by captain and crew as a northern gale that strayed too far south? Maybe they just passed tangentially across and thought "no big deal".
As an example, a similar argument can be made for the increase of measured cancer and heart disease related deaths, which supposedly are statistically on the increase, yet in decades past a lot of passings have been categorized as sudden death or natural causes, especially outside the larger cities. You can see it, can't you? Millions of people all over the world going about their daily business in their small towns, with undiagnosed metatastic cancer, incredibly clogged arteries, or whatever else you can think of.
My point is: In general, systematic and accurate compiling of information in some areas goes back less than half a century. Beyond the two parameters (geography and time), applied differently in each case, it's anybody's guess. Now compound this with our inevitable tendency to view things in an anthropocentric as well as cronocentric manner and yikes! How to make heads or tails of all this?
Basically, our elders, through no fault of their own, left us a mess of incomplete info. And to be fair, even if we get our act together of compiling precise data, which we seem to be nobly attempting, there will always be something we missed that'll vex our offspring in a hundred years.
Guiness, with a high concentration of both iron and iodine would be an ideal treatment for radiation poisioning.
They weren't kidding when they said 'Guiness is good for you', were they? That was the actual Guiness slogan in the UK not too long ago, maybe it still is. Pub lifeforms will thrive in a post-apocalyptic world, with Guiness and a nice hot kidney pie, yum.
I, for one, welcome our new Dublin-based stoutmeister overlords. Salud!
Hmmm...yes and no. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and her 'satellite states', the threat for MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) has virtually disappeared. I mean, twenty years ago the image of thousands of ICBMs crossing each other in opposite directions was palpable, while now it almost sounds like the hysterical folly of Cold War doomsayers. The missiles are still there, but the Politburo has gone the way of the dodo, along with the itchy-trigger-finger military antagonism it fed back and forth with Washington, and I'm sure we all hope that the missiles in the plains beyond the Urals, along with those in South Dakota, rot in their freaking silos.
The image that sounds more feasible today is the suicide backpack nuker blowing a crater in the middle of an urban area, a couple of missiles lobbied from North Korea into Tokyo, or twin nukes blowing up in Delhi and Islamabad.
By the way, does anybody know if SAC (Strategic Air Command) is still flying its' B-52 bombers in circles around the perimeter of the Artic Circle, just in case?
Absolutely. I have yet to make a single coaster with Taiyo Yuden.
One of the things about TY is that their CDs and DVDs are actually manufactured in Japan, as opposed to, say, China or Taiwan. Chalk up another one against outsourcing. Yes, you have to go to the online stores to get them, but the price for a TY spindle is about the same as with any other mainstream DVD media out there.
Not only Argentina, but all of Latin America. December 28 is known as Dia De Los Inocentes, translated literally as Day Of The Innocents, but also interpreted as Day Of The Gullible.
Slashdot Mirror
Child pornography and terrorism are the only two uses for Freenet so far discussed in this topic. Genuine preocupations for citizens of the democratic western world, to be sure, yet these things will happen whether Freenet exists or not. Freenet is not the problem, nor a problem per se. Any infrastructure can and will be misused so long as we attack a symptom and not the problem. Furthermore, you cannot shut down supply, no matter how hard you try. What you can attempt is to change the demands of the market, and let's be realistic, as long as there are human beings on this universe, there will always be a certain percentage of deviations from the "established norm".
Here's an example in which infrastructure is crucial - Tons of cocaine and pot make their way up the American continent on a daily basis, all the way up to Canada. If the US government decided to approach the problem from the same viewpoints I'm reading in this topic, their solution could be to try to shut down all incoming traffic into the country, or create highway checkpoints at regular intervals, soviet-bloc style, or even to shut down the highways altogether.
Which brings me to my point, shedding light on a positive aspect of Freenet, such as being a way for citizens of repressive governments to freely communicate with each other, giving them a fighting chance to organize themselves into a resistance. China comes immediately to mind, or Uzbekistan. Knowledge is power, communication its' medium, Freenet one of its' tools.
Cool! In a recently opened cultural center in my town, I was invited to take care of the movie department on a voluntary basis, and I agreed immediately. I screen a featurette and movie every Wednesday. No beer permit yet, but the place sells really good wine, espressos, prosciutto on bagel, ham and cheese crepes, simple but quality stuff. Admission is free. My little perk is that I get to eat and drink as much as I want for free :)
The food/wine bar and tables are on an incredible platform, raised about three feet above the main floor and made of twenty THOUSAND upside-down wine bottles, lit from below.
Now, there's a BIG scientific research and educational institute in my town, so I get a lot of astronomy, physics and oceanography students, and let me tell you, it's a thrill to blow their twentysomething minds with films like "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia", "THX-1138", "Koyaanisqatsi", "Fitzcarraldo" and the original french version of "Wages Of Fear". Recently, in light of all the buzz for fantasy films (LOTR and Narnia), I decided to show 1981's "Excalibur" and just about packed the place full. For the featurette, I screen stuff like Buñuel's "L'age D'or" and the occasional Monty Python TV episode.
During the break between the short and the movie, I do a random slideshow of painting, sculpture and architecture from prehistory to the present, plus anime, graffiti and various pop artifacts. All of this to the sounds of Godspeed You Black Emperor, dEUS, Zoviet France, The Clash, Arcade Fire and even some Conet Project! Man, it's like I'm living in rock 'n' roll geek heaven.
But even here, we get a few idiots who can't stop chattering during the movie. Incredible. But what I've noticed, since I monitor the crowd and ask the idiots to keep it quiet, is that they sincerely don't notice that they're bothering the rest of us, they're in their own self-centered bubble, and they shrink in shame and confusion when singled out.
My theory is that this is the result of shortened attention spans in the last two decades, courtesy of what the film and TV industry calls "whammies", or rapid-fire editing, car chases, explosions and mounting body counts. Another Hollywood trend is a pervading bland and fake sentimentality with the emotional sophistication of a Hallmark card, but that's a topic for another discussion. Anyway, this is what happens when the creative process is in the hands of a few corporate suits, as opposed to artists with conviction, and the ultimate point is, we are what we eat, and our minds are being fed with crap, with a few notable exceptions (The Sopranos comes to mind).
With this mental diet, many people can't relate to a movie being an intellectual challenge (which can be, you know, fun), instead they expect a distraction, or a continuation of their perpetual distraction, who needs to have their boat rocked, anyway. And so, whatever it is they are watching, their minds drift and thoughts of American Idol pop into their heads, and they need to tell their companions about it, right away, before this important train of thought drifts away, only to snap back to attention the moment an explosion goes off or a car chase begins.
Apple Music??? That should've come out Apple Records, my man, proud publishers of The Beatles, Free and the immortal Klaatu.
It's all fine and well to joke about mexican food all over this thread, some of the zingers are very funny, but this gives me an idea: how about determining the incidence of prostate cancer in Mexico's population?
As an example, one of the typical "delicacies" found in the city of Guadalajara is a dish called "torta ahogada" or "drowned torta", which is pork meat stuffed in baguette-style bread, dipped in tomato sauce, then again in ultra-hot chile de arbol sauce. Garnished with pickled onions, you squeeze lemon juice, add a little rock salt and dig in. A LOT of people in Guadalajara eat this on a regular basis.
As a side note, just as in the United States some people bob for apples in a bucket full of water, there's one stand in Guadalajara that holds competitions, bobbing for tortas in a bucket full of chile de arbol sauce. The winner eats there free for a year. Strictly for masochists, if you ask me.
Anyway, if we compare the percentage of prostate cancer cases in Guadalajara as opposed to, say, Minneapolis, maybe a "real world" result will stick out plainly and clearly. Then again, maybe not, maybe a race is genetically more susceptible to contract prostate cancer, I dunno, but to dig up the data would cost next to nothing and could be worth a try.
1,000,000 articles in English.
If you take all articles in all languages, Wikipedia surpassed the magic number a long time ago, and has by now actually gone beyond 2,000,000 articles.
I have a very large seashell collection, scattered in beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen part of it.
I also have a life-sized map of the world. The legend reads "1 Mile = 1 Mile".
Hey, don't forget about the lifelong thing of getting her VCR to stop blinking 12:00, and I do mean lifelong, 'cause you and I both know she'll never get around to TiVo unless you get it for her for Christmas.
The organs that serve the species, as opposed to the individual, are the same organs that will probably get you if nothing else does first: the prostate in the male, the ovaries and mammary glands in the female. Once an individual reaches a certain advanced age, that individual might have avoided heart disease or whatever else, but cancer of the 'naughty bits' is almost guaranteed.
TFA points in an interesting direction, however, at least for the female of the species. Maybe it's not a propagate then get out of the way scenario, but a use it or lose it one. It's there to be used, not to let it atrophy.
So c'mon, people! What's good for the gander is good for the goose, let's keep using those 'naughty bits' until we're a hundred years old and beyond! Oh, and eat lots of garlic and olive oil to keep the heart pumping.
See y'all at the 2070 Slashdot Convention!
Now that the US Supreme Court is completely tilted towards corporate interests for the next decade or two, maybe you shouldn't have been modded Funny, but Scary. I wouldn't bet against these idiots machinating the kind of farcical logic you've jokingly applied.
Remember how just last week, right in the midst of the Alito rubber-stamp hearings, some justices were caught red-handed feeding from the corporate tit. All-expenses-paid trips for Scalia, a twenty thousand dollar bible for Scalia sidekick Thomas, among many other things. By the way, the retort was that the justices were not breaking the law, as the rules do not apply to justices the way they apply for congressmen.
Therefore, all the RIAA has to do is pay for Alito's golf club membership and voilá!, this lady will have to pay damages for not downloading music, therefore causing distress to the corporations by screwing with their methods for collecting revenue via litigation.
Oh (insert your favorite deity here), I need a drink...
That's right. Hu is on first. Don Hu, a chinese gentleman. Frank Watt is on second and Pierre Iaduneau from Quebec is on third.
Seriously... if this one goes the wrong way if moving to Canada.... yeah I said it.
Not good enough. Remember the Blue Jays? MLB can track you down in Canada. Here's a tip: move to Montreal, 'cuz that's probably the last place MLB will bother to look in.
It's not the sport that you should despise. It's the myopic ballclub owners and the backlash to their century-long stupidity: most of the current crop of spoiled-brat free agent superstars and their agents. That combination has just about taken all the joy out of baseball, since around or about 1994.
More recently, many people believe that the only things that came out of the Apollo missions were moonrocks, Velcro and Tang, that the money would have been better spent on other, more altruistic and pressing issues of the day. If that wish had been heeded back in the day, many of the fruits of research and invention of new technologies that made the Apollo missions possible would not be around today, and today they are everywhere, in medicine, in computing, in communications, transportation, the list goes on and on.
When it comes to most of the gigantic problems plaguing mankind, we cannot tackle them frontally in a linear fashion. Hints and solutions come from "outside the box", which is to say the by-products of other areas of research.
So, if 'star dust' is too obscure and abstract a bounty for some people, not to worry, their payoff will come not from the actual mission itself, but from the by-products of the labs and shops that designed and built the spacecraft. These are the Menlo Parks of today. But we probably will never know that the payoff came from Stardust or Cassini or Spirit and Endeavour, as the benefits will reach us in an indirect manner, such as new components that make radiation treatment for cancer a bit more effective, for example. And of course, there are longer-term benefits that we can't begin to imagine.
Whoever modded this offtopic is obviously not a Michael Crichton fan.
Make that early Michael Crichton fan. Crichton has in recent years become something of a joke with his views on a "widespread scientific conspiracy" that's foisting the "myth" of Global Warming upon an unsuspecting public. Crichton even went so far as to testify in the United States Congress as a so-called authority on the subject. Hello, ladies and gentleman: Crichton is a writer of fiction, not a climatologist.
But I digress, so I'll get back on topic. What makes The Andromeda Strain such a gripping read is the fact that this microorganism is so shockingly deadly, and it is fascinating to read the high-tech, top-secret response to the crisis. Which is to say, Crichton would never have written a book about a harmless organism landing on Earth, as it would not have created any tension, therefore he would have had no story.
Any writer worth his/her salt knows that science fiction begins with an absurd premise and develops logically from there. In the case of Andromeda Strain, the absurd premise is a worst-case scenario, and of course it falls apart if inspected closely: the Earth has been bombarded by meteorites and small comets (as well as 'dust' that enters the atmosphere much more gently) since the dawn of time, so surely any microorganism could hitch a ride to Earth in that manner.
So yes, Stardust has landed in Utah with cometary dust. And yes, I'll be sleeping soundly tonight.
There's a classification of galaxies known as Malin-type, which refers to their being at the extreme end of low density and luminosity. Malin-types can be spiral and a thousand times larger than our own Milky Way (LOL!), yet only have a few million active stars within; little is known about these supergiants, but the fact that they do organize themselves into spiral structures and that most of their mass is spread so thinly that it has not and maybe cannot create pockets of concentration that will achieve critical mass. These are, in a way, stillborn supergiants.
Here's a nifty little mystery: Malin Spiral Giants rotate extremely slowly, and given their size, it turns out they take eons to complete a single rotation; in fact, they may have rotated only a handfull of times since their inception. Considering the relatively young age of the Universe, how did such slow-moving monsters organize themselves into such sophisticated structures as spirals in the limited timeframe?
At the other end of the scale, Malin-types can be dwarves with only a few thousand active stars. Most probably, there are also "average sized" Malins, but I've never come across any literature on that. In any case, they are incredibly difficult to detect and just as hard to study even if you know exactly where they are.
If this newly discovered galaxy is a Malin Dwarf, we have been presented with a golden opportunity to learn a ton and a half about an obscure (as in virtually unknown, so there's no pun intended) yet extremely important type of celestial structure, since Malin-types may account for a considerable percentage of MACHO (Massive Compact Halo Object) dark matter that makes up the Universe. Also, there is a lot of mass in those babies that is exactly the way it was back in the early days of the Universe.
In fact, Malin Dwarves may be the most common type of galaxy out there, think about it: what's the most common object in our fractally-scaled corner of the cosmos, the Solar System? Low mass and/or low density asteroids and comets.
This newly discovered galaxy may be considered the intergalactic equivalent of a comet.
Warning: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
In fact this aspect of Napster, where you could see other people's music collections, was what set it apart from other services. Its usefulness hasn't been matched since.
Some current SoulSeek clients have the same feature, such as SolarSeek for OSX.
From our point of view. do we just look 360, more stars there, less stars here, therefore we're on the rim side of the galaxy?
If it was up to visible light only, you'd be right; in fact, I believe it was William Herschel, co-discoverer of Uranus, who first attempted in the late 1700's to make a diagram of the galaxy, based exclusively on visible-light observing. As it turned out, the Milky Way seemed to have a "powder puff" shape and the sun was near the center!
However, for the better part of the last century we've been using infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, radio, etc. If you point and shoot a picture with an infrared telescope in the direction of the Saggitarius constellation, the "loudest" source of x-rays in the night sky, the image you get is that of a central galactic bulge and a symmetrical disc that cuts across the bulge and extends outwards both left and right. This image is consistent with all observations of other spiral galaxies.
Not necessarily. A city could do a great deal to minimize light pollution without sacrificing luminosity by replacing light sources from white halogen to amber, as well as concentrating that light exclusively in a downward direction with the aid of metal screens painted white on the inside; picture something like a tablelamb-style screen and you're there. This would get rid of glare while keeping the streets as well-lit as they are now.
If implemented, less wattage is needed to achieve the same level of illumination, thereby saving the city a TON of money every single night from now until kingdom come, as well as wasting less energy resources, always a good idea in an age of fossil fuels.
Hence, less resources spent - good for astronomy, good for the environment, good for the city, and so it goes. Imagine if every city in the world implemented this! The one big problem would be the cost to refurbish all those street lamps, but the investment would probably pay for itself in the short-to-medium term; after the break-even point, it's all savings.
Now c'mon, you seem to be a well-read Anonymous Coward, the least you can do is be polite towards a polite question. Basically, there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers, and a science fiction scenario is no excuse for even more doomsayer predictions.
Remember, Columbine is a town that manufactures missiles, and still everybody asked why some students in that particular town razed as many as they could before they imploded.
With your tone of writing, maybe you should consider moving into a more peacefull town, as far from your Anonymous Cowardly Town as you can, first time you get a chance? You know, there's a wide world out there who believe that the reality of war is scary, while for you, the reality of peace is scary.
Is it any coincidence that most functioning Cold War relics are in Small Town U.S.A.?
I feel for you, I can't even begin to imagine what type of education you've received. And your parents.
Believe me, there IS another way than the oppressive Christ and Nuclear Holocaust dogma that surrounds you. It's called History. Or Culture. Or Art. Or Science. Four different tickets that will take you to the same finish line: Common Sense, Enlightmentent, Adulthood (most adults are only adults in age, not in mind), call it what you will.
I hope to meet you here in five years.
I've wondered about the fact that only in the past four decades we've had the ability to track storms AND measure their strength in a systematic manner, and even then there are problems, i.e. Katrina was originally thought to have struck the Gulf Coast as a Cat 4, yet about a month or two later a more detailed analysis of the data indicated that Katrina was actually a Cat 3.
Furthermore, if you look up Pacific Basin hurricanes on the NOAA page, you will find that Hurricane Linda in 1997 was the strongest ever recorded in the area, but there is an intriguing disclaimer, which goes something like this: Due to lack of consistent monitoring in the Pacific Basin, we have insufficient data for any year before 1996.
Which brings me to my question: How many tropical storms in the last century have gone unnoticed before the advent of satellites, and even if noticed by the occasional cargo boat in some remote shipping route (which is precisely where Tropical Storm Zeta is right now), have been dismissed by captain and crew as a northern gale that strayed too far south? Maybe they just passed tangentially across and thought "no big deal".
As an example, a similar argument can be made for the increase of measured cancer and heart disease related deaths, which supposedly are statistically on the increase, yet in decades past a lot of passings have been categorized as sudden death or natural causes, especially outside the larger cities. You can see it, can't you? Millions of people all over the world going about their daily business in their small towns, with undiagnosed metatastic cancer, incredibly clogged arteries, or whatever else you can think of.
My point is: In general, systematic and accurate compiling of information in some areas goes back less than half a century. Beyond the two parameters (geography and time), applied differently in each case, it's anybody's guess. Now compound this with our inevitable tendency to view things in an anthropocentric as well as cronocentric manner and yikes! How to make heads or tails of all this?
Basically, our elders, through no fault of their own, left us a mess of incomplete info. And to be fair, even if we get our act together of compiling precise data, which we seem to be nobly attempting, there will always be something we missed that'll vex our offspring in a hundred years.
Guiness, with a high concentration of both iron and iodine would be an ideal treatment for radiation poisioning.
They weren't kidding when they said 'Guiness is good for you', were they? That was the actual Guiness slogan in the UK not too long ago, maybe it still is. Pub lifeforms will thrive in a post-apocalyptic world, with Guiness and a nice hot kidney pie, yum.
I, for one, welcome our new Dublin-based stoutmeister overlords. Salud!
...the nuclear threat is still there
Hmmm...yes and no. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and her 'satellite states', the threat for MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) has virtually disappeared. I mean, twenty years ago the image of thousands of ICBMs crossing each other in opposite directions was palpable, while now it almost sounds like the hysterical folly of Cold War doomsayers. The missiles are still there, but the Politburo has gone the way of the dodo, along with the itchy-trigger-finger military antagonism it fed back and forth with Washington, and I'm sure we all hope that the missiles in the plains beyond the Urals, along with those in South Dakota, rot in their freaking silos.
The image that sounds more feasible today is the suicide backpack nuker blowing a crater in the middle of an urban area, a couple of missiles lobbied from North Korea into Tokyo, or twin nukes blowing up in Delhi and Islamabad.
By the way, does anybody know if SAC (Strategic Air Command) is still flying its' B-52 bombers in circles around the perimeter of the Artic Circle, just in case?
Absolutely. I have yet to make a single coaster with Taiyo Yuden.
One of the things about TY is that their CDs and DVDs are actually manufactured in Japan, as opposed to, say, China or Taiwan. Chalk up another one against outsourcing. Yes, you have to go to the online stores to get them, but the price for a TY spindle is about the same as with any other mainstream DVD media out there.
Not only Argentina, but all of Latin America. December 28 is known as Dia De Los Inocentes, translated literally as Day Of The Innocents, but also interpreted as Day Of The Gullible.