You must've gotten on early and left. I tried to get on in the middle (just got out of class) and they had maxed out the allowed connections on the web stream. It's too bad they don't have the bandwidth or memory to handle video, because that would, at least for a short bit, be really interesting.
Holy pick-pocketing batman! Teaching kids fiscal responsibility? Don't be ridiculous.
I've never used them. How much do these messages cost if one can actually accrue an $800 bill in one month? I can't believe sending text messages would be such a severe tax on the cellular infrastructure that they would even need to be more than a small scheduled fee. Even if it's $0.25 a mesage, which is a lot more than I'd pay under normal circumstances, I could send 3200 messages each month for that cost. That's 100 messages per day. I just did a brief scan of my GAIM logs, and I doubt I come anywhere close to that on average, with 10 fingers! Don't their thumbs get sore?
The Hubble cost $1.5 billion to build and launch. The James Webb Space Telescope has been budgeted at $800 million, but won't be serviceable. I was going to say you're numbers are a little off, but I actually agree. If it costs over $500 million, it's better to abandon it, although there will be no direct replacement for many years.
While I am fascinated by and love the Hubble, I've begun to agree with many out there. Given the size of NASA's budget, the amount they want to accomplish in the next ten years, and future systems currently under development, a manned mission seems like an unnecessary expense, especially with cost estimates on the order of $1 billion.
The robotic mission will replace the old batteries and broken gyroscopes and provide a way to deorbit the telescope after it becomes unable to deorbit itself. It seems to me that the first goal of the mission should be to provide that method of deorbiting. Once the development team is confident of their ability to do that, they should begin working on replacing the batteries and gyros. That way, at the very least, NASA should be able to use Hubble until the either the last gyros fail or batteries die, which is expected to occur around 2009. That also, if I remember correctly, is when the next space telescope is scheduled to be launched. Of course, while I'm not one of the MDA or NASA engineers, I don't know of any reason why the robot itself couldn't take over the functions of the Hubble's aiming systems, so the gyro replacement and the deorbiting system may work hand-in-hand.
I had always wondered about this when looking at nebulae like Eta Carinae or the Cat's Eye Nebula (google them if you want pictures, I'm not finding a link for you). I believe both of those are actually supernova remnants, not planetary nebulae, but it still fascinated me that neither was symmetrical. For lack of any better explanation, I assumed it was largely due to differences in gravitational forces in different directions. Still, I didn't expect that alone to be sufficient to explain why Eta Carinae appears in some wavelengths as two seperate, spherical lobes. Perhaps magnetic fields contribute to these cases, as well.
I have to admit, before the concerns started coming up a couples months ago, painting an aircraft with a laser is the kind of thing I might consider trying on an impulse, but being careful not to do it while it was heading toward me so light couldn't enter the cockpit. It wouldn't take me 25 years to realize that was a little irresponsible, though. It would take about 1 night in jail. Actually, it only took me one news article. Still, some people don't learn as quickly as I do. A small fine and some community service seems like a much better punishment in this case, assuming he had no malicious intent. Remember he reported that his daughter was with him when he did this, which makes me more inclined to believe the story that he was just playing around and did something stupid.
What insightful answers did the rest of Slashdot give when they applied to work at Google?
I actually don't remember my Google interview. Perhaps they brain washed me afterwards so I couldn't tell any of their secrets. For that matter, I don't remember filling out an applications. Then again, I don't use Unix either. I guess both disqualify me from being a true slashdotter. I better go to the link and hit F5 a few times to reaffirm myself.
That's a very interesting picture. I expected a very eccentric orbit with a long period. That shows an orbit not dramatically different from the earth's, and it must have a similar period. That means it would cross our path quite a few times before that next close approach. For Venus however, I doubt they astronomers could draw that up, discuss it for however long they've been watching the rock, and still neglect to figure in close approaches to the ladies' planet.
I ran it through the calculator for a 400 meter asteroid (from the article) made of dense rock (assumed) at 17 km/s and 45 degree impact (suggested by the calculator). I also dropped it in 1000 m of water, as it has a 75% chance of landing in the oceans.
Results
Impact Energy: 1.23 x 10^19 Joules
Crater Formed in Seafloor: 2.46 km diameter
Earthquake: 6.0 on Richter Scale
Radiant Flux at 100 km: 7.68 times that of sun
Numbers should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt
The server's name is apparently Neo. Can it save us? I doubt it since it already took the red pill.
Someone will surely correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure by the name that this is the 16 foot (5 m) rock that passed inside the moons orbit last week. That's large enough, if I remember correctly, to hit the ground if it doesn't break up, but too small to do anything more than very localized damage. If someone really wants to get Karma points, they'll post a link to the asteroid simulator page so we can all go throw a 16 foot rock at the earth and find out how much the climate is affected.
Actually, isn't this the 4th or 5th time this has been mentioned on Slashdot? I seem to remember a couple articles several weeks ago when JPL first commented on it.
I agree. I am impressed with the amount and depth of content in the Wikipedia articles, and with the useful links to other articles included in the text. Because it's all contributed by people who (probably) aren't experts on the topics, I wouldn't cite it in anything I wrote, but it's a good starting point and can present a lot of interesting trivia on just about anything. Looking up trivia probably accounts for about 95% of World Book's use anyways.
A little before SS1 did it's two X-prize flights, a few quiet news articles announced that Scaled Composites was being contracted to supply the dropship for glide tests for the X37 program. Speculation is that the White Knight carrier plane is to be used for this, so although SS1 might not get flown again, White Knight probably will, and there will be some extra cash coming in from the project.
Owens said he can't afford top-of-the line equipment, like infrared sensors and electronics that would govern the motion. Instead he's using a hydraulic system to transfer the motion of his limbs to the larger structure,
It sounds like he's basically he's relying on his own sense of balance to control this thing. We do it unconsciously as adults, but it took us a long while to learn and a lot of falling down. It may be possible he's got everything figured out and the control is natural enough that he'll just climb in and start walking. Somehow, though, I imagine him lifting the first foot and getting his center of gravity outside the edges of the other foot. Then he's got to shake off the bruises, bring a crane over to lift the thing up and repeat until he gets the hang of it. That's assuming his hydraulics are fast enough and he has enough degrees of freedom to keep the thing balanced to begin with. Having a heavy legs like he mentioned will reduce, but not eliminate the danger of shifting the weight to far out.
This is way cool and it'd be awesome to see it work, but I'm officially a doubter.
I suppose I may have misinterpreted your original post then. It seemed at first like another one of those annoying posts by the wonderful Slashdot grammar trolls and those like them. My apologies.
My contribution to the discussion then: A lot of these people seem to exhibit these annoying habbits (talking in theatres, not paying an appropriate amount of attention to other drivers, etc) primarily while on their phones. For some people, it really seems to be an instant on/off brain damage switch. Push the little green button, mutate into a brain-dead super-annoyer. Push the red one, normal again.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it. ~pauljlucas (sig)
Looking at the exact literal interpretation of his post (what he explicitly wrote), you're right. The cellphone use is irrelevant and it's the person being rude. The part you missed, or are choosing to miss, is that he was referring, lightheartedly, to the fact that many people forget their manners while using their cellphone. You reply as if he were criticizing you as a cell phone user (and I admit I didn't explicity read it in your post, but I've got a gut feeling you own a cell phone). He never suggested that cellphones were inherently rude. Quit trolling.
From the blogs, it sounds to me like the php guys haven't recommended not using Apache 2, but rather have not recommended it. Although they haven't stated any harms aside from it's an unproven platform, they haven't found any benefits, either. So they said why bother.
Although on the surface that sounds pretty neutral, I can certainly understand Apache being concerned about this, considering how closely affiliated the two are (as the grandparent noted). I like analogies so imagine bringing home a couple of girlfriends over the years for Mom and Dad to meet. Then you meet an even better girl whom you invest a lot of effort into impressing and you're sure they'll love her, but instead they say, "what was wrong with your last girlfriend?" While your parents haven't said anything against your new lady friend, they've implied they're not impressed. I admit, dating is a poor analogy for some of the regulars here, but at least it was fun while lasted, right?
I agree that it sounds somewhat petty. Why not say something a little more friendly like, "We've seen great things from the Apache Foundation, and while we're not prepared to fully endorse version 2, we're anxious to see how it performs?" It's simple, generic, non-committal, open-ended, political-style BS, but it keeps people happy.
$3 billion or however much it was, 6 years of waiting and now they can't figure out what the pictures are showing. Every week they've got a new theory that doesn't offer much decent insight on what Titan's surface really looks like. With how much has been invested in this mission, I'm sure the scientists are going crazy to present the public with findings (or at least the PR people are) but I think they need to wait until the middle of next month when they've got the Hguyens images to help. Then they can compare close up, visible wavelength pictures with the IR shot's Cassini's been taking and have a real idea what the moon is made out of. Until then, quit confusing me.
For now, I just hope the ESA did a little bit better job on the Hguyens than they did on the Beagle.
As far as I can tell, the ACS is not too dissimilar from the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) online journal database. You have to be a paid member of ASME to access it and I believe some of the full-texts have an additional fee. This has been around for years, but no complaints that I know of. For that matter, my school's library has subsciptions to several online journal databases. Not only would it be silly to press forward with this suit, but based on precedence this doesn't even seem like a fatal threat to ACS's database, unless they are totally inept and can't find anything to provide that the author doesn't want freely published.
Interesting (sorry no mod points). I was wondering exactly how well they were expected to stand up to earthquakes, since the guy is from Iran and the pictures look pretty traditionally Middle Eastern. It seems every 2-3 years they have an earthquake over there that kills 25000-50000 people. Thanks for pointing that out.
Slashdot Mirror
You must've gotten on early and left. I tried to get on in the middle (just got out of class) and they had maxed out the allowed connections on the web stream. It's too bad they don't have the bandwidth or memory to handle video, because that would, at least for a short bit, be really interesting.
Holy pick-pocketing batman! Teaching kids fiscal responsibility? Don't be ridiculous.
I've never used them. How much do these messages cost if one can actually accrue an $800 bill in one month? I can't believe sending text messages would be such a severe tax on the cellular infrastructure that they would even need to be more than a small scheduled fee. Even if it's $0.25 a mesage, which is a lot more than I'd pay under normal circumstances, I could send 3200 messages each month for that cost. That's 100 messages per day. I just did a brief scan of my GAIM logs, and I doubt I come anywhere close to that on average, with 10 fingers! Don't their thumbs get sore?
The Hubble cost $1.5 billion to build and launch. The James Webb Space Telescope has been budgeted at $800 million, but won't be serviceable. I was going to say you're numbers are a little off, but I actually agree. If it costs over $500 million, it's better to abandon it, although there will be no direct replacement for many years.
While I am fascinated by and love the Hubble, I've begun to agree with many out there. Given the size of NASA's budget, the amount they want to accomplish in the next ten years, and future systems currently under development, a manned mission seems like an unnecessary expense, especially with cost estimates on the order of $1 billion.
The robotic mission will replace the old batteries and broken gyroscopes and provide a way to deorbit the telescope after it becomes unable to deorbit itself. It seems to me that the first goal of the mission should be to provide that method of deorbiting. Once the development team is confident of their ability to do that, they should begin working on replacing the batteries and gyros. That way, at the very least, NASA should be able to use Hubble until the either the last gyros fail or batteries die, which is expected to occur around 2009. That also, if I remember correctly, is when the next space telescope is scheduled to be launched. Of course, while I'm not one of the MDA or NASA engineers, I don't know of any reason why the robot itself couldn't take over the functions of the Hubble's aiming systems, so the gyro replacement and the deorbiting system may work hand-in-hand.
I had always wondered about this when looking at nebulae like Eta Carinae or the Cat's Eye Nebula (google them if you want pictures, I'm not finding a link for you). I believe both of those are actually supernova remnants, not planetary nebulae, but it still fascinated me that neither was symmetrical. For lack of any better explanation, I assumed it was largely due to differences in gravitational forces in different directions. Still, I didn't expect that alone to be sufficient to explain why Eta Carinae appears in some wavelengths as two seperate, spherical lobes. Perhaps magnetic fields contribute to these cases, as well.
I have to admit, before the concerns started coming up a couples months ago, painting an aircraft with a laser is the kind of thing I might consider trying on an impulse, but being careful not to do it while it was heading toward me so light couldn't enter the cockpit. It wouldn't take me 25 years to realize that was a little irresponsible, though. It would take about 1 night in jail. Actually, it only took me one news article. Still, some people don't learn as quickly as I do. A small fine and some community service seems like a much better punishment in this case, assuming he had no malicious intent. Remember he reported that his daughter was with him when he did this, which makes me more inclined to believe the story that he was just playing around and did something stupid.
That's a very interesting picture. I expected a very eccentric orbit with a long period. That shows an orbit not dramatically different from the earth's, and it must have a similar period. That means it would cross our path quite a few times before that next close approach. For Venus however, I doubt they astronomers could draw that up, discuss it for however long they've been watching the rock, and still neglect to figure in close approaches to the ladies' planet.
I ran it through the calculator for a 400 meter asteroid (from the article) made of dense rock (assumed) at 17 km/s and 45 degree impact (suggested by the calculator). I also dropped it in 1000 m of water, as it has a 75% chance of landing in the oceans.
Results
- Impact Energy: 1.23 x 10^19 Joules
- Crater Formed in Seafloor: 2.46 km diameter
- Earthquake: 6.0 on Richter Scale
- Radiant Flux at 100 km: 7.68 times that of sun
Numbers should, of course, be taken with a grain of saltDuh...he's going at night!
The server's name is apparently Neo. Can it save us? I doubt it since it already took the red pill.
Someone will surely correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure by the name that this is the 16 foot (5 m) rock that passed inside the moons orbit last week. That's large enough, if I remember correctly, to hit the ground if it doesn't break up, but too small to do anything more than very localized damage. If someone really wants to get Karma points, they'll post a link to the asteroid simulator page so we can all go throw a 16 foot rock at the earth and find out how much the climate is affected.
Seriously...only one stick of RAM and no AGP slot.
Actually, isn't this the 4th or 5th time this has been mentioned on Slashdot? I seem to remember a couple articles several weeks ago when JPL first commented on it.
I agree. I am impressed with the amount and depth of content in the Wikipedia articles, and with the useful links to other articles included in the text. Because it's all contributed by people who (probably) aren't experts on the topics, I wouldn't cite it in anything I wrote, but it's a good starting point and can present a lot of interesting trivia on just about anything. Looking up trivia probably accounts for about 95% of World Book's use anyways.
A little before SS1 did it's two X-prize flights, a few quiet news articles announced that Scaled Composites was being contracted to supply the dropship for glide tests for the X37 program. Speculation is that the White Knight carrier plane is to be used for this, so although SS1 might not get flown again, White Knight probably will, and there will be some extra cash coming in from the project.
This is way cool and it'd be awesome to see it work, but I'm officially a doubter.
I suppose I may have misinterpreted your original post then. It seemed at first like another one of those annoying posts by the wonderful Slashdot grammar trolls and those like them. My apologies.
My contribution to the discussion then: A lot of these people seem to exhibit these annoying habbits (talking in theatres, not paying an appropriate amount of attention to other drivers, etc) primarily while on their phones. For some people, it really seems to be an instant on/off brain damage switch. Push the little green button, mutate into a brain-dead super-annoyer. Push the red one, normal again.
From the blogs, it sounds to me like the php guys haven't recommended not using Apache 2, but rather have not recommended it. Although they haven't stated any harms aside from it's an unproven platform, they haven't found any benefits, either. So they said why bother.
Although on the surface that sounds pretty neutral, I can certainly understand Apache being concerned about this, considering how closely affiliated the two are (as the grandparent noted). I like analogies so imagine bringing home a couple of girlfriends over the years for Mom and Dad to meet. Then you meet an even better girl whom you invest a lot of effort into impressing and you're sure they'll love her, but instead they say, "what was wrong with your last girlfriend?" While your parents haven't said anything against your new lady friend, they've implied they're not impressed. I admit, dating is a poor analogy for some of the regulars here, but at least it was fun while lasted, right?
I agree that it sounds somewhat petty. Why not say something a little more friendly like, "We've seen great things from the Apache Foundation, and while we're not prepared to fully endorse version 2, we're anxious to see how it performs?" It's simple, generic, non-committal, open-ended, political-style BS, but it keeps people happy.
$3 billion or however much it was, 6 years of waiting and now they can't figure out what the pictures are showing. Every week they've got a new theory that doesn't offer much decent insight on what Titan's surface really looks like. With how much has been invested in this mission, I'm sure the scientists are going crazy to present the public with findings (or at least the PR people are) but I think they need to wait until the middle of next month when they've got the Hguyens images to help. Then they can compare close up, visible wavelength pictures with the IR shot's Cassini's been taking and have a real idea what the moon is made out of. Until then, quit confusing me.
For now, I just hope the ESA did a little bit better job on the Hguyens than they did on the Beagle.
As far as I can tell, the ACS is not too dissimilar from the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) online journal database. You have to be a paid member of ASME to access it and I believe some of the full-texts have an additional fee. This has been around for years, but no complaints that I know of. For that matter, my school's library has subsciptions to several online journal databases. Not only would it be silly to press forward with this suit, but based on precedence this doesn't even seem like a fatal threat to ACS's database, unless they are totally inept and can't find anything to provide that the author doesn't want freely published.
Interesting (sorry no mod points). I was wondering exactly how well they were expected to stand up to earthquakes, since the guy is from Iran and the pictures look pretty traditionally Middle Eastern. It seems every 2-3 years they have an earthquake over there that kills 25000-50000 people. Thanks for pointing that out.