In fact on your very Wikipedia diagram I count much less fuel needed to go from Earth to Moon than from Earth to Mars (9.3 + 4.1 + 1.6 m/s, vs 9.3 + 2.5 +.7 +.6 +.9 +.2 +.3 +.9 + 4.1).
But it remains perfectly clear than it costs much more to leave Earth *via the Moon* than to leave directly (all the remainder delta-Vs from Earth C3 piling up the same, indeed you compare 9.3 + 4.1 + 1.6 [twice] +.7 m/s to 9.3 + 2.5 +.7 )
So you are still absolutely right, a stop by the Moon is a clear waste in delta-V...
Indeed by maintaining the judgement he may have neared the day of an alternative european root DNS... FYI, there is already the working ORSN servers, http://european.de.orsn.net/tech-pubdns.php
Please tell me what prevents a photon from the neighboring townlights (or a star, if you are more romantic) to be refracted by the atmosphere and enter the receiving telescope just at the same time as the Moon's one?
In spite of the precise wavelength of the laser (and of course you'll filter on wavelength as far as you can), as I said there are so much more photons coming from everywhere (as in all astrophotography) that, again, the signal you get from one single shot is below the noise. It's only by playing statistics on the return time that you can get info. Please note that one argument in TFA is, they'll be able to send more shots per second (so as to have results 'faster', and of course get better averages from more samples)
Actually the said 'single photon' that comes back from the retroreflector arrives with millions of others coming from everywhere around (from our atmosphere to the neighboring moon land), and is totally unvisible within this "noise". The issue here consists in estimating the presence of photons *below noise level*, which you only can do by statistically studying series of shots. (or, in a simplified form: by averaging hundreds of shot results, you lower the noise and end in seeing a small peak around the time where you expected the photons to come back)
Incidentally these experiments have been and are done today routinely in many observatories worldwide; the originality here may be an increase of precision but the mehod is very classical. Here in France I have a neighbor observatory which organizes visits to this setup, for instance (the last photo of http://www.bdl.fr/fr/ephemerides/astronomie/Promen ade/pages2/269.html shows a lunar shot... within an entirely french page, sorry)
OK, I know, indeed it is O. S. But it's an OS tool dedicated specifically to plug you to private info gathering companies -the (uncorrelated) fact it doesn't support Adblock now is even more funny:-)
Personally, I'm waiting O. S. versions of those 'my-preferred-space-that-gathers-all-my-photos, emails, agenda and best RSS news before trying.
THIS, would be an interesting direction for O. S., much, much better than Flock. In my opinion.
Two or three years ago, when powerpoint files were sometimes hard to decrypt on macintoshes without MS software, I tried almost everything available around, and concluded that the Thinkfree Office of that time, a downloadable, paying, set of java scripts, was the best around.
I enjoyed it for more than one year before Apple's Pages appeared and was faster and as good.
Is it still the same ThinkFree Office? They don't have a downloadable version anymore? (my old one still works well here)
fully agreed. I've been using it for more than a year now, with links to iCal, handling of various calendars and users, very sophisticated views gathering different calendars/users etc.
Well, I'm back. It seems that during the night, and in spite of a hot discussion, a total ban on DVD copying has been passed.
This allows legally forbidding one single personal DVD archival. Also, editing or distributing software that does this will drive you to three years of jail and a fine of 300 000 euros...
The only semipositive measure is, there will be an administrative committee that will refine the details (indeed it *may* allow archival copying in some cases). But an administration can change its mind from day to day, without requiring another law or vote...
BUT!... in France we still have "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" engraved on each money coin. (Please collect them now)
I confirm, including the initial draft's article about *turning* illegal DRM-remover softwares.
What most of us are unaware is the enormous complexity of these legal texts. The original text proposed, more than two years ago, is already half a dozen pages long, with a thick slice of administrative talk around it. Then, with months passing, it got *hundreds* of proposed "amendments", some half a page long, some longer than the text itself.
Those amendments, proposed by a very broad variety of deputies, rank from the best possible ideas to the worst ones, wherever you position yourself. You will find funny ones, others only intending to correct grammatical points (I swear!), other sympathetic but extremely specific ("to help the visually impaired"... "to help librarians..." each time proposing exceptions).
Of course there are ones that have been pushed by DRM-loving deputies that tend to even harden the proposed law, and others pushed by P2P-lovers (or deputies expecting they'll be elected by younger people next time) that try to soften it.
All in all, it is merely impossible to synthesize the law proposed, because *all* proposed amendments will have to be discussed and decided one after the other during various days and nights (with a varying deputy population...), and the simple presence or elimination of one of them may in fact turn everything upside down. (which is precisely what the initial "P2P legalized" amendment was about to do in december)
I personally tried to download the french text (available on the government site), print it and read it: I must say I stopped halfway --it was more than 100-pages long already last december, ie *before* all the "legal P2P" thing was added...
At least, what one can say is "deputies are now aware of the issue" (when most of them weren't initially in december), and then everything can happen, with the current right-led majority definitely not tender to P2P but on the other hand having to deal with excited students recently disappointed by other laws (relaxing their rights on first employment and lowering the age where they can be ousted out of school), so some expect a possible symbolic move...
Oh yes, and believe it or not, there indeed are a minute percentage of intelligent deputies that do believe format conversion is in the interest of the citizen. Go figure...
Nobody will pull iTMS out. Indeed, the only thing this (very long and complex) law may do, is to legally allow one person to change a document format, which for instance in the case of music would mean that when I convert an Apple's DRMed file to mp3 for personal use on my third-party mp3 reader, I would'nt do something illegal any more.
And I say *may* do. Because in the end, the law may even be amended to allow this only to institutions (libraries...) --originally in this very same law, converters themselves were explicitly illegal!
But I am still hopeful, because the story of this laws' vote has been funny enough (at one point in time, there was one article that would have legalized P2P exchanges provided one would pay an extra monthly fee!). The resulting mess (government illegally removing that already voted article, then putting it back one day at midnight in the hope that it will be legally removed later once the majority's deputies have been aligned...) is so large that almost everyone is conscious there is something bad happening for young, supposedly "mp3-lover" electors.
As a consequence, the final removal of that "P2P legalized" article may well push the positive couterpart that the article about format translation (ie, removal of DRM) be accepted, as a sort of compensation.
This, is what I hope.
And there is absolutely nothing in the law about Fnac, Apple, or anyone else, and no obligation at all to them. It's only DRM fans that say Apple may close ITMS volutarily by fear that lots of french user would de-DRM ITMS songs. Which is, of course, ridiculous.
"The heart of the new system is the NXT brick, an autonomous 32-bit LEGO microprocessor that can be programmed using a PC, or for the first time in the retail offering, a Mac."
I know a person in charge of geostationary satellite control, and she says this time adjustment will have imposed a large amount of satellite and ground station software updates. She added that because of this among many other updates, there have been a formal proposal by the US, some months ago, to change the rules and abandon any updating before there is a full day (!) of delay, but the proposal was refused.
FYI, this 1-s correction is the first in 5 years, but there were 4 others in the previous 5 years.
Waiting for one day would basically mean renouncing for some thousand years, or more probably, waiting for the next civilization to come:-)
... and you want to nail the coffin? 70 different apps means 10 times more than the number of browsers, or the number of newsreaders. (newsreaders as in "usenet newsreaders", since the term itself more and more is perceived as... "RSS aggregator" nowadays:-)
:-D in fact it means you'll shift half of the star light out of phase, so that instead of having "constructive interferometry" (ie, a dot of light at the center of the interferogram), the light from one of the arms of the interferometer cancels the other's.
This is supposed to happen *just* at the place of the star, and not at the planet location, which means the accuracy of this "cancelling" device must be indeed very great...
For information, the European Space agency has a project named Darwin that intends to cancel the light of a star by destructive interferometry, leaving the neigboring planet alone: from its specifications, I retain that in order to "see" the planet, you must damp the star from a factor 10^9 in visible light (10^6 in IR). Basically this is how the Earth looks like close to the sun: 10^9 times less brilliant.
Compared to this, the damping factor announced in the original paper (between 100 and 1000), would look, well, definitely unsufficient if it weren't for just a demo today...
I hope I wasn't too naughty, I didn't talk about the angular resolution needed.
For Cassini I don't know, but I understand Nasa and Esa will publish the first "extensive" set if results concerning Titan on dec. 8, with a press conference in Esa tomorrow Nov. 30. All will also be on the Nature website on the 8.
Contrary to what's announced in the previous post, Safari was not the first browser to be Acid2-compatible. The mac-only iCab beated it from more than three months. Now, iCab may well be the browser witht the smallest share on Earth:-) Not only is it mac-only, it is very old and was for years not compatible with CSS, a real show-stopper in spite of many other features (tab browsing, ad-filtering wellll before Adblock, site downloads, page+image saves...). The relatively recent version 3 not only is perfect with CSSs, really it rocks... including on Acid2. Now, given its 10^-12% market share, all I hope for iCab is it'll get enough shareware fees not to die:-/
A very, very long time ago, the (then single) Mindstorm brick appeared as almost a co-design between Lego, MIT*, and famous companies like e. g. Apple co-sponsored computer interface kits that were shown in Legoland (the one in Billund). That was almost 10 years ago, and Mindstorm was brilliant, technologically off-the-shelf, and very costly. Since then, Lego, a dane company that tried to keep all its production within Denmark, has lost money years after years maybe because of this (when Denmark voted about joining Euroland, I remember Lego as a key national industrial announcing in the press they *had* to join, and this announcement being given a key impact). They have lost so much, they have sold this year all their amusement parks ("Legolands", in all countries). It seems now a matter of survival.
They have lost so much, at least, that they never could *upgrade* the Mindstorms core brick.
Which is now an old, dull, and unefficient thing -let's face it.
I'd bet anyone in this discussion finding it nice must be over 40.
What else could they have done I don't know (just provide I/O interfaces for existing PDAs? miniaturize the same thing? add a touchscreen that'd have suppressed the need for a PC?), but the fact is, they did nothing at all for 10 years.
"When someone tells me they can "disprove evolution," or "disprove quantum theory," I am immediately very skeptical and would require a lot of convincing to take them seriously."
I fully second this.
When Einstein's relativity took on the classical mechanics, it didn't "disprove it", it showed it to be a peculiar case (working 99% of time) in a more general picture.
Tell me about a new theory that would *include* quantum mech. as a specific case, I'll start being interested.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact on your very Wikipedia diagram I count much less fuel needed to go from Earth to Moon than from Earth to Mars (9.3 + 4.1 + 1.6 m/s, vs 9.3 + 2.5 + .7 + .6 + .9 + .2 + .3 + .9 + 4.1).
.7 m/s to 9.3 + 2.5 + .7 )
But it remains perfectly clear than it costs much more to leave Earth *via the Moon* than to leave directly (all the remainder delta-Vs from Earth C3 piling up the same, indeed you compare 9.3 + 4.1 + 1.6 [twice] +
So you are still absolutely right, a stop by the Moon is a clear waste in delta-V...
Indeed by maintaining the judgement he may have neared the day of an alternative european root DNS...
FYI, there is already the working ORSN servers, http://european.de.orsn.net/tech-pubdns.php
Which, incidentally, is an option Apple has been offering on OSX for years...
For information, the margin of error @ 95% confidence for only 15 samples is about
:-)
0.98/SQRT(15) = 25%
ie, the detection rate lies somewhere between 70 and 100%
source: wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_Error
Now, this is still quite interesting IMHO
That's what I call an argumented comment :-D
Please tell me what prevents a photon from the neighboring townlights (or a star, if you are more romantic) to be refracted by the atmosphere and enter the receiving telescope just at the same time as the Moon's one?
In spite of the precise wavelength of the laser (and of course you'll filter on wavelength as far as you can), as I said there are so much more photons coming from everywhere (as in all astrophotography) that, again, the signal you get from one single shot is below the noise.
It's only by playing statistics on the return time that you can get info. Please note that one argument in TFA is, they'll be able to send more shots per second (so as to have results 'faster', and of course get better averages from more samples)
H.
Actually the said 'single photon' that comes back from the retroreflector arrives with millions of others coming from everywhere around (from our atmosphere to the neighboring moon land), and is totally unvisible within this "noise".
n ade/pages2/269.html shows a lunar shot... within an entirely french page, sorry)
The issue here consists in estimating the presence of photons *below noise level*, which you only can do by statistically studying series of shots. (or, in a simplified form: by averaging hundreds of shot results, you lower the noise and end in seeing a small peak around the time where you expected the photons to come back)
Incidentally these experiments have been and are done today routinely in many observatories worldwide; the originality here may be an increase of precision but the mehod is very classical. Here in France I have a neighbor observatory which organizes visits to this setup, for instance (the last photo of http://www.bdl.fr/fr/ephemerides/astronomie/Prome
OK, I know, indeed it is O. S. :-)
But it's an OS tool dedicated specifically to plug you to private info gathering companies -the (uncorrelated) fact it doesn't support Adblock now is even more funny
Personally, I'm waiting O. S. versions of those 'my-preferred-space-that-gathers-all-my-photos, emails, agenda and best RSS news before trying.
THIS, would be an interesting direction for O. S., much, much better than Flock. In my opinion.
Here in Europe such surveys just aren't available...
Two or three years ago, when powerpoint files were sometimes hard to decrypt on macintoshes without MS software, I tried almost everything available around, and concluded that the Thinkfree Office of that time, a downloadable, paying, set of java scripts, was the best around.
I enjoyed it for more than one year before Apple's Pages appeared and was faster and as good.
Is it still the same ThinkFree Office? They don't have a downloadable version anymore?
(my old one still works well here)
Hervé
fully agreed. I've been using it for more than a year now, with links to iCal, handling of various calendars and users, very sophisticated views gathering different calendars/users etc.
Well, I'm back.
... in France we still have "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" engraved on each money coin.
It seems that during the night, and in spite of a hot discussion, a total ban on DVD copying has been passed.
This allows legally forbidding one single personal DVD archival.
Also, editing or distributing software that does this will drive you to three years of jail and a fine of 300 000 euros...
The only semipositive measure is, there will be an administrative committee that will refine the details (indeed it *may* allow archival copying in some cases). But an administration can change its mind from day to day, without requiring another law or vote...
BUT!
(Please collect them now)
I confirm, including the initial draft's article about *turning* illegal DRM-remover softwares.
What most of us are unaware is the enormous complexity of these legal texts.
The original text proposed, more than two years ago, is already half a dozen pages long, with a thick slice of administrative talk around it. Then, with months passing, it got *hundreds* of proposed "amendments", some half a page long, some longer than the text itself.
Those amendments, proposed by a very broad variety of deputies, rank from the best possible ideas to the worst ones, wherever you position yourself.
You will find funny ones, others only intending to correct grammatical points (I swear!), other sympathetic but extremely specific ("to help the visually impaired"... "to help librarians..." each time proposing exceptions).
Of course there are ones that have been pushed by DRM-loving deputies that tend to even harden the proposed law, and others pushed by P2P-lovers (or deputies expecting they'll be elected by younger people next time) that try to soften it.
All in all, it is merely impossible to synthesize the law proposed, because *all* proposed amendments will have to be discussed and decided one after the other during various days and nights (with a varying deputy population...), and the simple presence or elimination of one of them may in fact turn everything upside down. (which is precisely what the initial "P2P legalized" amendment was about to do in december)
I personally tried to download the french text (available on the government site), print it and read it: I must say I stopped halfway --it was more than 100-pages long already last december, ie *before* all the "legal P2P" thing was added...
At least, what one can say is "deputies are now aware of the issue" (when most of them weren't initially in december), and then everything can happen, with the current right-led majority definitely not tender to P2P but on the other hand having to deal with excited students recently disappointed by other laws (relaxing their rights on first employment and lowering the age where they can be ousted out of school), so some expect a possible symbolic move...
Oh yes, and believe it or not, there indeed are a minute percentage of intelligent deputies that do believe format conversion is in the interest of the citizen. Go figure...
Nobody will pull iTMS out. Indeed, the only thing this (very long and complex) law may do, is to legally allow one person to change a document format, which for instance in the case of music would mean that when I convert an Apple's DRMed file to mp3 for personal use on my third-party mp3 reader, I would'nt do something illegal any more.
And I say *may* do.
Because in the end, the law may even be amended to allow this only to institutions (libraries...) --originally in this very same law, converters themselves were explicitly illegal!
But I am still hopeful, because the story of this laws' vote has been funny enough (at one point in time, there was one article that would have legalized P2P exchanges provided one would pay an extra monthly fee!).
The resulting mess (government illegally removing that already voted article, then putting it back one day at midnight in the hope that it will be legally removed later once the majority's deputies have been aligned...) is so large that almost everyone is conscious there is something bad happening for young, supposedly "mp3-lover" electors.
As a consequence, the final removal of that "P2P legalized" article may well push the positive couterpart that the article about format translation (ie, removal of DRM) be accepted, as a sort of compensation.
This, is what I hope.
And there is absolutely nothing in the law about Fnac, Apple, or anyone else, and no obligation at all to them. It's only DRM fans that say Apple may close ITMS volutarily by fear that lots of french user would de-DRM ITMS songs. Which is, of course, ridiculous.
http://www.wulffmorgenthaler.com/thestrip.asp?cDay =12&cMonth=12&cYear=2005
From the very Lego page itself:
"The heart of the new system is the NXT brick, an autonomous 32-bit LEGO microprocessor that can be programmed using a PC, or for the first time in the retail offering, a Mac."
I know a person in charge of geostationary satellite control, and she says this time adjustment will have imposed a large amount of satellite and ground station software updates.
:-)
She added that because of this among many other updates, there have been a formal proposal by the US, some months ago, to change the rules and abandon any updating before there is a full day (!) of delay, but the proposal was refused.
FYI, this 1-s correction is the first in 5 years, but there were 4 others in the previous 5 years.
Waiting for one day would basically mean renouncing for some thousand years, or more probably, waiting for the next civilization to come
Hervé
... and you want to nail the coffin? :-)
70 different apps means 10 times more than the number of browsers, or the number of newsreaders.
(newsreaders as in "usenet newsreaders", since the term itself more and more is perceived as... "RSS aggregator" nowadays
Hervé
a page where I counted them more than one year ago (indeed there are more, now):
http://sainct.ouvaton.org/uniwakka/RSSforMac/
"For example, there's a /. RSS feed, but most people read it from the front page"
/. from my RSS reader, which allows me to open a separate tab to send this comment when needed...
Do you have stats? I for one read
Hervé
:-D
in fact it means you'll shift half of the star light out of phase, so that instead of having "constructive interferometry" (ie, a dot of light at the center of the interferogram), the light from one of the arms of the interferometer cancels the other's.
This is supposed to happen *just* at the place of the star, and not at the planet location, which means the accuracy of this "cancelling" device must be indeed very great...
Hervé
For information, the European Space agency has a project named Darwin that intends to cancel the light of a star by destructive interferometry, leaving the neigboring planet alone: from its specifications, I retain that in order to "see" the planet, you must damp the star from a factor 10^9 in visible light (10^6 in IR). Basically this is how the Earth looks like close to the sun: 10^9 times less brilliant.
Compared to this, the damping factor announced in the original paper (between 100 and 1000), would look, well, definitely unsufficient if it weren't for just a demo today...
I hope I wasn't too naughty, I didn't talk about the angular resolution needed.
Hervé
For Cassini I don't know, but I understand Nasa and Esa will publish the first "extensive" set if results concerning Titan on dec. 8, with a press conference in Esa tomorrow Nov. 30. All will also be on the Nature website on the 8.
Contrary to what's announced in the previous post, Safari was not the first browser to be Acid2-compatible. The mac-only iCab beated it from more than three months. :-) :-/
Now, iCab may well be the browser witht the smallest share on Earth
Not only is it mac-only, it is very old and was for years not compatible with CSS, a real show-stopper in spite of many other features (tab browsing, ad-filtering wellll before Adblock, site downloads, page+image saves...).
The relatively recent version 3 not only is perfect with CSSs, really it rocks... including on Acid2.
Now, given its 10^-12% market share, all I hope for iCab is it'll get enough shareware fees not to die
A very, very long time ago, the (then single) Mindstorm brick appeared as almost a co-design between Lego, MIT*, and famous companies like e. g. Apple co-sponsored computer interface kits that were shown in Legoland (the one in Billund).
That was almost 10 years ago, and Mindstorm was brilliant, technologically off-the-shelf, and very costly.
Since then, Lego, a dane company that tried to keep all its production within Denmark, has lost money years after years maybe because of this (when Denmark voted about joining Euroland, I remember Lego as a key national industrial announcing in the press they *had* to join, and this announcement being given a key impact).
They have lost so much, they have sold this year all their amusement parks ("Legolands", in all countries). It seems now a matter of survival.
They have lost so much, at least, that they never could *upgrade* the Mindstorms core brick.
Which is now an old, dull, and unefficient thing -let's face it.
I'd bet anyone in this discussion finding it nice must be over 40.
What else could they have done I don't know (just provide I/O interfaces for existing PDAs? miniaturize the same thing? add a touchscreen that'd have suppressed the need for a PC?), but the fact is, they did nothing at all for 10 years.
And *that*, went wrong...
Hervé
(*) http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects/cricket/ -1997, mind you.
"When someone tells me they can "disprove evolution," or "disprove quantum theory," I am immediately very skeptical and would require a lot of convincing to take them seriously."
I fully second this.
When Einstein's relativity took on the classical mechanics, it didn't "disprove it", it showed it to be a peculiar case (working 99% of time) in a more general picture.
Tell me about a new theory that would *include* quantum mech. as a specific case, I'll start being interested.
"I guess, though, unlike most /monkeys I need an actual reason to hate a company, not just the fact that they are big..."
There is no reason to hate them, but a concern about their monopoly.
Now, contrary to e. g. Apple whose music monopoly is faded out by their "anti-monopoly" situation on MacOS, Google's is very visible...
Hervé