That kind of sloppiness is rare for the BBC, but typical for US media. It's probably because so many USians don't know or care about world geography. It would sound weird/inaccurate to hear news about "San Francisco, USA" without mentioning California. But this is exactly how it sounds when US news mention a city in another country and ignore the state/province/region/department where it's located. Here's a good example of a double-whammy courtesy of CNN:
"CANCUN, Mexico (CNN) --" (Cancún is in the state of Quintana Roo)
"Mexico's Vicente Fox, a conservative in the final months of his presidency, is host to Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the Yucatan resort."
They didn't do their homework here. Yucatán is the state NW of Quintana Roo. The Yucatán Peninsula contains these two states plus Campeche:
We know a light saber is hot because Qui-Gon Jinn used his to melt through a thick blast door on board a Trade Federation ship. This was at the beginning of Episode I. Remember, the door was glowing orange and liquefied metal was sliding from it. I don't think that would have happened with a cold or room-temperature blade.
"Wouldn't your average Jedi be horribly scarred from all this."
Not necessarily, Padawan. If a Jedi cuts through a door/bulkhead/vehicle with a light saber s/he could avoid getting splashed with melted metal by applying a subtle Force push along with the slicing motion of the saber. To Saber 101 class you should return, youngling.;)
You might want to read the link you posted. The moon does not actually have a very faint atmosphere. From your link: "[the moon is] surrounded by a *very* this [sic] region of molecules which might be loosely classified as an atmosphere."
I did read it, thanks. And since you feel the article doesn't make a case for a lunar atmosphere, here's a paragraph from NASA's Moon Fact Sheet:
"Lunar Atmosphere
Diurnal temperature range: (greater than)100 K to (less than)400 K (roughly -250 F to +250 F)
Total mass of atmosphere: ~25,000 kg
Surface pressure (night): 3 x 10-15 bar (2 x 10-12 torr)
Abundance at surface: 2 x 105 particles/cm3
Estimated Composition (particles per cubic cm):
Helium 4 (4He) - 40,000 ; Neon 20 (20Ne) - 40,000 ; Hydrogen (H2) - 35,000
Argon 40 (40Ar) - 30,000 ; Neon 22 (22Ne) - 5,000 ; Argon 36 (36Ar) - 2,000
Methane - 1000 ; Ammonia - 1000 ; Carbon Dioxide (CO2) - 1000
Trace Oxygen (O+), Aluminum (Al+), Silicon (Si+)
Possible Phosphorus (P+), Sodium (Na+), Magnesium (Mg+)
Composition of the tenuous lunar atmosphere is poorly known and variable,
these are estimates of the upper limits of the nighttime ambient atmosphere
composition. Daytime levels were difficult to measure due to heating and
outgassing of Apollo surface experiments."
Yes, it's "tenuous" but if experts like NASA and Sir Arthur C. Clarke call it an atmosphere, that's good enough for me.
Re:The atmosphere is less harsh?
on
US Plans Lunar Motel
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Wow, an astonishing piece of news - there's atmosphere on the Moon!
You're right, it's not astonishing. Thanks to the Apollo missions and more recent studies it was determined that our moon and many others in the solar system actually have very faint atmospheres. Though the Moon's gravity is very low it's just enough to hold a thin concentration of gas molecules very close to the surface:
I do see your point, common sense would make it seem that it's just a vacuum. What with all the impact craters and the sky being always black over there.
This is one of the reasons I like/. somebody always gets up and says "hey their my relatives!".
Hey, they're all my relatives.:) When I said most of my ancestry was Totonac, I meant that the remainder was Spanish, most recently my great grandfather who moved to Mexico in the late 1800s. And this breakdown is true for most of Mexico's modern population. There's this cultural/historical sense that one side of the family screwed over the other side. Both included brutal invaders and innocent victims just trying to survive. I'm sure many slashdotters can relate in terms of the British/US expansion westward from the 13 colonies and the native American tribes they encountered. This story has been repeated throughout history all over the world, of course. We humans are funny that way and we haven't changed much.
All true, but the fact remains that the indigenous American civilizations went into a sharp (relatively speaking) decline 100-200 years before the Spanish got there.
Good point. One theory I've heard is based on the patterns of natural resource consumption and climate change over time. The amounts of rainfall and river flow had an immediate effect on many native American populations, and as their crops declined and or failed they sometimes had to relocate their population centers and sometimes even just disperse into smaller population groups to survive. There were also other factors like disease and war.
Going back to the Aztecs, their approach to conquest was based on defeating another tribe's army and offering to leave the ruling family in power if the Aztecs' demands were met. They specified a yearly payment in the form of harvests, raw materials, goods, and people (slaves). Failure to pay made the U.S. Internal Revenue Service look like Girl Scouts. It's been estimated that if the Spanish hadn't come when they did and defeated the Aztecs, their empire would have fallen eventually. Between an unsustainable economy and the general discontent, something would break sooner or later.
Did they? My understanding was that Hernán Cortés had the ruling family and other people with power tortured and/or killed. Of the general population, those who didn't die in the violence of the Spanish invasion were forced to flee and probably ended up mixing with other tribes.
And then there was the smallpox epidemic (and other diseases) that the Spanish brought from Europe and for which the native population had no defenses. In fact, Cuitláhuac died of smallpox and his nephew Cuauhtémoc then became the last Aztec emperor. The Spanish captured him, tortured him, kept him prisoner a few years and then hanged him.
But even though the Aztec population was significantly reduced and scattered, their descendants are still around. There's been just a bit of foreign immigration to Mexico the last 484 years, mostly from Spain. Want to guess why modern Mexicans look a bit different than Aztecs and other locals did? : ) And finally, their language (Náhuatl) is still spoken in several states in central Mexico.
Full disclosure: most of my ancestry comes from the Totonacs. This was one of many tribes enslaved by the Aztecs and all too glad to help the Spanish overthrow the evil overlords. Talk about the devil you know, huh?
That's an impressive surge in population growth in Europe, since last I heard the entire planet only had 6 billion people. (guess that makes me a demographics / statistics / math nazi?)
Just ask Britain and France! If anyone understands that national standing on the international scene, once established, is permanent... it's them!
(well put) And don't forget Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, the Mongolian Empire, Rome, Persia, Alexander's Macedonia... shall I go on?
"They claimed they had a throughput of several DVD movies per second. How is that for video on demand!"
This is nothing but an impressive statistic until ISPs provide this kind of bandwidth into homes (the infamous "last mile" connection). Not to mention that even the fastest hard drives available to consumers can't write data this fast.
Right on. Technology shouldn't be complicated just because it can be. To illustrate this point let's turn to the classic story recounted in a previous/. story:
A good example of advanced computer intelligence in a hotel (not just the rooms) is in the detective/science fiction novel "Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan:
It's set mostly in San Francisco in the 25th century, and there's a "Hendrix hotel" that's actually controlled by a self-aware AI inspired by its famous namesake. There's a very violent scene where some thugs attempt to commit a crime in the lobby. Let's just say the hotel had really good security.
It doesn't always matter. I'm hispanic from a middle-class family and worked to pay for my CS degree and for everything else I have. I've been in the professional world for several years and in all that time I've never noticed my ethnicity being an issue. I work hard, make a decent living and my white/black/asian/hispanic/indian colleagues treat me as a friend or coworker, just like I treat them.
Don't assume I'm in a part of the country where minorities are actually a majority. I understand that in my home town there's a 20% hispanic population at most. I also have to travel on business to several states in the South / Central US. Even in tiny rural towns in the midwest I've always been treated politely. I can only assume it's because I do my job, treat people respectfully and don't look for prejudice where it doesn't seem to exist. I'm sure you'll say that I'm just lucky. Maybe so, but I believe in the saying that luck is when opportunity meets preparation.
I've always thought the term "people of color" is funny/peculiar/odd/logically impossible. I mean, I've never seen a transparent or invisible human being, so I think it's fair to say we're all "of color". And I don't know where I read this saying but it's very accurate and humanistic even if it sounds a bit gory:
"We're all pink inside".
And since the other responses to this post reference Pink Floyd,
The anonymous post above already mentioned that p is for momentum and the equation is framed in a way that accounts for quantum mechanics, not just classical (Newtonian) physics. I found a good explanation here:
Scroll about halfway down to the section header "Relativistic relation among mass, energy and momentum".
By the way, IANAP (I am not a physicist) but I had fun taking physics in college as part of my computer science requirements. And by funny coincidence this post is actually related to my sig. I don't remember where I first saw that (it was in college many moons ago). I always thought it was funny and clever, a good tip of the hat to Mr. Shakespeare, and a good way to describe the universe.
A poster above mentioned the possibility of a.50 caliber rifle shooting through a wall. But brute force aside, what about the extremely long range of these sniper rifles? Even with a high-zoom camera I doubt that the robot would catch the puff of smoke from one of these monsters 2,000 meters away:
Mind you, these rifles won't just kill people at that range, but they'll punch holes through armor or engine blocks in vehicles and aircraft from that distance.
Talk about "reach out and touch someone."
There's a key difference between DIVX and this new format. As the Wikipedia article explains, back then you could pay a fee to continue viewing the disc, and by paying even more you could make it "unlimited" (limited only by the life of the company providing the service).
I haven't read TFA yet but from the summary it looks like Microsoft is going for disposable media without renewable viewing options.
This reminds me of the neverending argument between fans of iTMS and Napster/Yahoo types of service. What's better, to buy a song (movie, etc.) and keep it forever, or to pay much less but in essence only rent the product for as long as the company is there to back it up? After seeing what happened during the dot com era I favor the former.
Mexico has not enacted these same licensing restrictions, and surely allows for more doctors who can be used outside the country.
This isn't an even comparison. Health care in the US is privatized for the most part, with only a small percentage of health care facilities and professionals dedicated to socialized work for lower-income patients. In Mexico there are at least 3 large entities providing socialized medicine for various types of employees:
ISSTE - "Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado"
IMSS - "Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social"
PEMEX - "Petróleos Mexicanos"
(Sorry I didn't include URLs, kind of in a hurry as I type this. Feel free to Google the acaronyms for more details)
In addition to these large organizations there are lots of private hospitals, clinics and independent doctors. This makes for a much more diverse health care "market" (if we can call it that) in Mexico than in the US. The doctors people see will depend on the industry/company where they work, or on their income level if they can afford private care.
Mexicans are well known to send a great amount of income back home.
This may be true for Mexican workers whose families are still in Mexico, but it's somewhat of a generalization. There's a lot of Mexican immigrants in the US and other countries who don't send money "back home" because home, and their family, are now in the country where they reside.
This could mean lower medical prices in Mexico though.
Medical care in Mexico costs much less than in the US. But you have to balance that against the fact that the average income in Mexico is also much lower, taxation levels are different, and the cost of medication is also different (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) in Mexico than in the US.
You must be using a Treo 650 with PalmOS then. Nothing crashes more.
I've had one since February and it's only crashed a couple of times since then. I wonder if people reporting crashes are running strange / incompatible Palm programs?
Slashdot Mirror
That kind of sloppiness is rare for the BBC, but typical for US media. It's probably because so many USians don't know or care about world geography. It would sound weird/inaccurate to hear news about "San Francisco, USA" without mentioning California. But this is exactly how it sounds when US news mention a city in another country and ignore the state/province/region/department where it's located. Here's a good example of a double-whammy courtesy of CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/03/30/bush.cancu"CANCUN, Mexico (CNN) --" (Cancún is in the state of Quintana Roo)
"Mexico's Vicente Fox, a conservative in the final months of his presidency, is host to Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the Yucatan resort."
They didn't do their homework here. Yucatán is the state NW of Quintana Roo. The Yucatán Peninsula contains these two states plus Campeche:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/americas/mexico_poWe know a light saber is hot because Qui-Gon Jinn used his to melt through a thick blast door on board a Trade Federation ship. This was at the beginning of Episode I. Remember, the door was glowing orange and liquefied metal was sliding from it. I don't think that would have happened with a cold or room-temperature blade.
Not necessarily, Padawan. If a Jedi cuts through a door/bulkhead/vehicle with a light saber s/he could avoid getting splashed with melted metal by applying a subtle Force push along with the slicing motion of the saber. To Saber 101 class you should return, youngling. ;)
I did read it, thanks. And since you feel the article doesn't make a case for a lunar atmosphere, here's a paragraph from NASA's Moon Fact Sheet:
http://www.spds.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/moon"Lunar Atmosphere Diurnal temperature range: (greater than)100 K to (less than)400 K (roughly -250 F to +250 F) Total mass of atmosphere: ~25,000 kg Surface pressure (night): 3 x 10-15 bar (2 x 10-12 torr) Abundance at surface: 2 x 105 particles/cm3 Estimated Composition (particles per cubic cm): Helium 4 (4He) - 40,000 ; Neon 20 (20Ne) - 40,000 ; Hydrogen (H2) - 35,000 Argon 40 (40Ar) - 30,000 ; Neon 22 (22Ne) - 5,000 ; Argon 36 (36Ar) - 2,000 Methane - 1000 ; Ammonia - 1000 ; Carbon Dioxide (CO2) - 1000 Trace Oxygen (O+), Aluminum (Al+), Silicon (Si+) Possible Phosphorus (P+), Sodium (Na+), Magnesium (Mg+) Composition of the tenuous lunar atmosphere is poorly known and variable, these are estimates of the upper limits of the nighttime ambient atmosphere composition. Daytime levels were difficult to measure due to heating and outgassing of Apollo surface experiments."
Yes, it's "tenuous" but if experts like NASA and Sir Arthur C. Clarke call it an atmosphere, that's good enough for me.
P.S. That NASA web site is very slow today, try the Google cache. http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:YB5wQo57AwIJ:You're right, it's not astonishing. Thanks to the Apollo missions and more recent studies it was determined that our moon and many others in the solar system actually have very faint atmospheres. Though the Moon's gravity is very low it's just enough to hold a thin concentration of gas molecules very close to the surface:
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/moonI do see your point, common sense would make it seem that it's just a vacuum. What with all the impact craters and the sky being always black over there.
Hey, they're all my relatives. :) When I said most of my ancestry was Totonac, I meant that the remainder was Spanish, most recently my great grandfather who moved to Mexico in the late 1800s. And this breakdown is true for most of Mexico's modern population. There's this cultural/historical sense that one side of the family screwed over the other side. Both included brutal invaders and innocent victims just trying to survive. I'm sure many slashdotters can relate in terms of the British/US expansion westward from the 13 colonies and the native American tribes they encountered. This story has been repeated throughout history all over the world, of course. We humans are funny that way and we haven't changed much.
Good point. One theory I've heard is based on the patterns of natural resource consumption and climate change over time. The amounts of rainfall and river flow had an immediate effect on many native American populations, and as their crops declined and or failed they sometimes had to relocate their population centers and sometimes even just disperse into smaller population groups to survive. There were also other factors like disease and war.
Going back to the Aztecs, their approach to conquest was based on defeating another tribe's army and offering to leave the ruling family in power if the Aztecs' demands were met. They specified a yearly payment in the form of harvests, raw materials, goods, and people (slaves). Failure to pay made the U.S. Internal Revenue Service look like Girl Scouts. It's been estimated that if the Spanish hadn't come when they did and defeated the Aztecs, their empire would have fallen eventually. Between an unsustainable economy and the general discontent, something would break sooner or later.
Did they? My understanding was that Hernán Cortés had the ruling family and other people with power tortured and/or killed. Of the general population, those who didn't die in the violence of the Spanish invasion were forced to flee and probably ended up mixing with other tribes.
And then there was the smallpox epidemic (and other diseases) that the Spanish brought from Europe and for which the native population had no defenses. In fact, Cuitláhuac died of smallpox and his nephew Cuauhtémoc then became the last Aztec emperor. The Spanish captured him, tortured him, kept him prisoner a few years and then hanged him.
But even though the Aztec population was significantly reduced and scattered, their descendants are still around. There's been just a bit of foreign immigration to Mexico the last 484 years, mostly from Spain. Want to guess why modern Mexicans look a bit different than Aztecs and other locals did? : ) And finally, their language (Náhuatl) is still spoken in several states in central Mexico.
Full disclosure: most of my ancestry comes from the Totonacs. This was one of many tribes enslaved by the Aztecs and all too glad to help the Spanish overthrow the evil overlords. Talk about the devil you know, huh?
That's an impressive surge in population growth in Europe, since last I heard the entire planet only had 6 billion people. (guess that makes me a demographics / statistics / math nazi?)
(well put) And don't forget Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, the Mongolian Empire, Rome, Persia, Alexander's Macedonia... shall I go on?
Back then there was a joke that you could easily spot owners of those early Compaqs or the IBM 5155 Transportables: one arm was longer than the other.
This is nothing but an impressive statistic until ISPs provide this kind of bandwidth into homes (the infamous "last mile" connection). Not to mention that even the fastest hard drives available to consumers can't write data this fast.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=15874 7&cid=13299054
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-fo rm/102-8961702-9548145
It's set mostly in San Francisco in the 25th century, and there's a "Hendrix hotel" that's actually controlled by a self-aware AI inspired by its famous namesake. There's a very violent scene where some thugs attempt to commit a crime in the lobby. Let's just say the hotel had really good security.Not even Faraday?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farad
"There is no dark side on the Moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark."
Is that the opposite of "misunderestimation", as coined by a certain US President?
It doesn't always matter. I'm hispanic from a middle-class family and worked to pay for my CS degree and for everything else I have. I've been in the professional world for several years and in all that time I've never noticed my ethnicity being an issue. I work hard, make a decent living and my white/black/asian/hispanic/indian colleagues treat me as a friend or coworker, just like I treat them.
Don't assume I'm in a part of the country where minorities are actually a majority. I understand that in my home town there's a 20% hispanic population at most. I also have to travel on business to several states in the South / Central US. Even in tiny rural towns in the midwest I've always been treated politely. I can only assume it's because I do my job, treat people respectfully and don't look for prejudice where it doesn't seem to exist. I'm sure you'll say that I'm just lucky. Maybe so, but I believe in the saying that luck is when opportunity meets preparation.
I've always thought the term "people of color" is funny/peculiar/odd/logically impossible. I mean, I've never seen a transparent or invisible human being, so I think it's fair to say we're all "of color". And I don't know where I read this saying but it's very accurate and humanistic even if it sounds a bit gory:
"We're all pink inside".And since the other responses to this post reference Pink Floyd,
Shine on you crazy diamonds.The anonymous post above already mentioned that p is for momentum and the equation is framed in a way that accounts for quantum mechanics, not just classical (Newtonian) physics. I found a good explanation here:
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/MassScroll about halfway down to the section header "Relativistic relation among mass, energy and momentum".
By the way, IANAP (I am not a physicist) but I had fun taking physics in college as part of my computer science requirements. And by funny coincidence this post is actually related to my sig. I don't remember where I first saw that (it was in college many moons ago). I always thought it was funny and clever, a good tip of the hat to Mr. Shakespeare, and a good way to describe the universe.A poster above mentioned the possibility of a .50 caliber rifle shooting through a wall. But brute force aside, what about the extremely long range of these sniper rifles? Even with a high-zoom camera I doubt that the robot would catch the puff of smoke from one of these monsters 2,000 meters away:
http://www.barrettrifles.com/military.htmMind you, these rifles won't just kill people at that range, but they'll punch holes through armor or engine blocks in vehicles and aircraft from that distance. Talk about "reach out and touch someone."
I haven't read TFA yet but from the summary it looks like Microsoft is going for disposable media without renewable viewing options.
This reminds me of the neverending argument between fans of iTMS and Napster/Yahoo types of service. What's better, to buy a song (movie, etc.) and keep it forever, or to pay much less but in essence only rent the product for as long as the company is there to back it up? After seeing what happened during the dot com era I favor the former.
This isn't an even comparison. Health care in the US is privatized for the most part, with only a small percentage of health care facilities and professionals dedicated to socialized work for lower-income patients. In Mexico there are at least 3 large entities providing socialized medicine for various types of employees:
ISSTE - "Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado"IMSS - "Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social"
PEMEX - "Petróleos Mexicanos"
(Sorry I didn't include URLs, kind of in a hurry as I type this. Feel free to Google the acaronyms for more details)
In addition to these large organizations there are lots of private hospitals, clinics and independent doctors. This makes for a much more diverse health care "market" (if we can call it that) in Mexico than in the US. The doctors people see will depend on the industry/company where they work, or on their income level if they can afford private care.
Mexicans are well known to send a great amount of income back home.This may be true for Mexican workers whose families are still in Mexico, but it's somewhat of a generalization. There's a lot of Mexican immigrants in the US and other countries who don't send money "back home" because home, and their family, are now in the country where they reside.
This could mean lower medical prices in Mexico though.Medical care in Mexico costs much less than in the US. But you have to balance that against the fact that the average income in Mexico is also much lower, taxation levels are different, and the cost of medication is also different (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) in Mexico than in the US.
I've had one since February and it's only crashed a couple of times since then. I wonder if people reporting crashes are running strange / incompatible Palm programs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountains_of_Paradise