This is total bunk. That carbon dioxide would be STILL released
CO2 isn't the problem. Plants rotting underwater release more methane, and methane is by far a worse greenhouse gas than CO2. So yes, the same plants, rotted two different ways, will release greenhouse gas of different severity.
Yeah, but said caveat is hidden behind a stupid '+' widget that you see nowhere other than microsoft.com; so it's easy to miss. If you search for "caveat" on the page without the appropriate section expanded, IE doesn't find it.
Incidentally, the advisory is for IE 5.x, but if you read other fine print, the only reason IE 4.x isn't listed is that Microsoft haven't bothered to test it to see if it's affected.
Mir is easily naked-eye visible from the surface of the Earth, even against city lights. If you've never seen it, well, it's getting awfully close to your last chance. Go to the excellently interesting Heavens Above, choose a location from the database (near enough is good enough), and click on "Mir", under the 10-day predictions. If you have any passes before the 22nd, click on the date for a sky chart.
Visible passes are always in the couple of hours after sunset or before sunrise, when the sky is black but Mir is still in sunlight. Pass predictions are usually spot-on, except when the satellite in question has just changed its orbit. It sounds like Mir's orbit isn't gonna change until they go for the big burn on Thursday. When you spot it, it'll look like a red (how appropriate) star, moving though the sky. It'll cover half the sky or so in just five minutes or so.
OK, could somebody explain for the benefit of all us metric people out here in the Rest Of The World, what the crack about "5.075 feet" in the "dept." line is about?
Re:A Clean Alternative
on
Solar Sails
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· Score: 1
A solar sail powered spacecraft can't tack against the 'wind'
Sure you can. Set your sail at 45 degrees to the sun, and sunlight hits your sail and reflects off. You get thrust once as the photon hits you, and once more as the photon leaves. Setting your sail at x degrees to the sun gets you thrust at x degrees to the sun. Of course, the steeper your angle, the less sunlight you're intercepting, so the less thrust you get overall. At 90 degrees, edge-on to the sun, you get zero thrust.
It's true , however, that you can't tack in the solar wind. That's the stream of protons blowing off the sun, and those little beasties don't bounce off your sail -- they stick.
You can gain maneuverability by using a launching laser instead of (or as well as) sunlight. You can even use a launching laser at you home star to decelerate at your target star: cut part of your sail loose, and it will blow ahead of you, pushed by launching laser light. Put yourself in the reflected beam from the cut-away portion of sail, and voila, you have light hitting your sail from the opposite direction of your launching laser! (This idea isn't original with me of course; I got it from an essay by Niven or Brin or some such clever person.)
To directly correct your mis-statement, they banned semi-automatic (one bullet fired for every pull of the trigger) firearms, not fully automatic
Yeah, well, from an engineering perspective, they're pretty much the same thing. A weapon that is designed as semi-auto can often be converted to full-auto by filing a bit off, or installing a simple kit. (I understand that this dodge is used in the U.S. by people who want to buy full-auto weapons.) So in order to prevent nasty people acquiring full auto weapons, they had to ban semi-auto.
And from a practical perspective, there's little difference either. I can pump a trigger at four shots per second, easy.
Double-barreled shotguns are banned on the basis that they're sort-of semi-auto: there's two barrels and you can fire them in quick succession. This one is a quibble, I know, and there was a bunch of wrangling back and forth.
Some.22 rifles are banned because although they're low calibre, they are semi-auto (the banned ones are, anyway), and they were the Australian spree-killer's weapon-of-choice.
If I remember correctly its illegal for prople to own guns in Australia.
Oo, troll. FYI, you remember incorrectly. We outlawed automatic weapons (read: guns designed specifically for killing large numbers of people).
Australians have quite a different relationship with their government, and with guns, than do Americans. By and large, Australians trust that their government is made up of real, ordinary people. Sure, they screw up, but it's not a conspiracy against the citizens; it's just perfectly ordinary people behaving in perfectly ordinary ways.
Australians also have no problem with their government holding monopolies over things like the postal service, or power generation, or telephone service, or whatever. (OK, so we've privatised some of these things, but we didn't have a problem with it the other way; it's just that the Liberals got in to power.:-)
And as for "defending our rights" (with the implication that we should shoot everybody that is in any way connected with the Evil that is government): well, actually, we're quite happy with our current ability to vote the bastards out next time around. And the authority of the Australian Electoral Commission is hugely respected. Can't say enough good things about them.
Democracy ain't perfect, but it's the best system we've got. And contrary to many gun totin' American's opinions, countries such as Japan run just fine with no gun ownership whatsoever.
Well, 5+4 zipcodes are a bit different from Australian postcodes. Aussie postcodes are 4 digit, and in a city generally cover an area about 1.5km to 2km square. 5+4 zipcodes, on the other hand, are so hi-res that they can easily distinguish down to the level of individual houses. After all, in 9 digits there's a billion possible codes, and only about 0.25 billion Americans.
Here in Australia, one of my friends wrote another friend's email address on the outside of an envelope, and dropped it in a letterbox with appropriate postage. It got delivered.
For another of my friends, you don't need to write his street address on the envelope, as his family have moved several times within the one postcode. So on the envelope, you just write [name], [postcode], AUSTRALIA; and that's all.
The Despair asshole was in fact joking. OK, sure, he trademarked ":-(", but he did it specifically to hold current intellectual property laws up to ridicule, rather than to attempt to make pots of money. This is also why he requested seven million separate injunctions, and that people offending against his new trademark be required to write out 1000 lines.
Re:Constantly use a conversion table?
on
E=MC
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· Score: 1
E = mc^2 is true in Imperial units if you use Imperial units consistently (i.e., for E, m, and c).
Can you give an example of three Imperial units (one each for E, m, c) for which this is the case? I couldn't think of any.
For metric, it's true for the most obvious choice: m in kilograms, c in metres per second, E in joules ('cos joules are really kg.m^2.s^-2).
Re:Constantly use a conversion table?
on
E=MC
·
· Score: 1
For a start, E=mc^2 isn't true in Imperial units; you have to say E=kmc^2, where k is a constant that depends on the units you used for E, m and c.
For a second, there are so many conversion factors that just because you've seen the conversion factor once doesn't mean that you've automatically memorised it. And that's not even thinking about conversions within Imperial. Quick, off the top of your head: how many chains in a league?
Reading between the lines of the article, it looks like libraries get to choose what filtering software they want to use.
Here then is a potential work-around: write our own.
Previous discussions here on/. have established that it would be difficult to create an effective open-source block list, because of the difficulty of trusting people who submit to the list; not to mention all of the usual problems inherent in censorware: regional differences in mores, overblocking, underblocking, etc.
So we ship it with an ineffective block list, say a token list of a dozen or so sites, and give the people who operate the software (e.g. librarians)the ability to edit block list. No competing censorware companies can point out that it underblocks, because their own products are guilty of the same thing.
Cable and DSL have arrived here with a vengance! $60 a month will get you 400kbit/s DSL.
On your side of the continent, maybe. Over here in Perth, Telstra are still effectively a monopoly, and the story is different. Telstra own the only cable network, so there's no incentive for them to roll out cable modems -- no one to compete against. They have just started to roll out DSL in limited areas, priced at AU$190 to $400 for the install, plus $73 to $90 per month, plus $0.19 per MB after 250MB; and that's for 256kbit/sec. There are providers other than Telstra, but all the ones I've seen all say "coming soon".
zero g space combat where hard work and intelligence defeats athletic ability
Ah, but it does. I play ordinary gravity-bound laser tag, and one of the things you lean is that a group of people who play together as a team will beat a group of all-stars who play as individuals.
Play time in the battle area is analgous to fighter planes and space craft how?
I admit that there is much of the "flip your front hand around on the laser and spin just as your pack powers up" nature that doesn't translate, but much of the general tactics does. "It's easy to work as a team when you're not under pressure", "find the key positions and hold them", "figure out where your opponent wants to be in sixty seconds, and be there first", and so on, all translate quite well. And you need to be familiar with the people you're working with, and you need to be able to work under pressure, and the only way to learn that is to do it.
I've even unkowingly recapitulated parts of the book. Ender sees that all the commanders have their teams practice formations, and he sees this as a weakness, and beats them. In the first season of team competition in my city, I had my team practice one maneuver. For almost the whole season, we won all our games, because we were coordinated and the other teams weren't. But as Ender realised, it's a brittle kind of coordination, and once the other teams became sufficiently coordinated themselves, our one trick stopped working, and we lost in the finals.
... and also look at the last few volumes of Risks; all the ones since the US election, basically. Much detailed analysis, mostly with the conclusion that it can't be done well.
Pretty sucky symbols if you ask me. Firstly, as the original poster suggested, it's possible to translate all our own characters into a 5x7 grid. Hell, the first printer I owned, a Commodore MPS 801, used 5x7 pxels per character, and it could display all of PETSCII, upper and lower case. (It also used a unihammer print head; i.e. the print head was a single pin. But that's another story.)
Secondly, if you're gonna make up symbols, you could at least make up ones that make sense. The "1", "3" and "4" in this character set are OK; they've all got a vertical bar at the left, and then 1, 3 or 4 strokes respectively coming off that bar. Why not continue this theme through all the numbers? (OK, so there's not enough pixels to do that literally, but you get the idea.) And the idea of using a half-line shift upwards to signify exponentiation is just deeply wrong.
Did anyone else figure out the "largest prime" on their own? Is there some other clue that I missed?
It was easy for me, but I'm a human.
Some parts of it would be easy for an alien who has already figured out the base ten, positional, left-to-right stuff which the first part of the page is supposed to teach. For example, we've just been reading a list of prime numbers, and then we get to a big complicated looking number. I immediately said to myself, "This is gonna be a prime number, and a big one." I didn't immediately expect it to involve a power of two minus one, but there are a whole bunch of primes of this form. So when our alien mathematician sees:
2 [symbol] 3021377 [symbol] 1
, he/she/it can pretty quickly guess that the first symbol is "exponentiate", and the second is "subtraction".
But that isn't what we see. Instead of a symbol for exponentiation, we see a superscript. This is a big fat clue for humans like me, but completely cryptic as far as aliens are concerned. It makes it inobvious as to how the line should be read, as it breaks the left-to-right-then-down-a-line rule that we've just been trying to establish.
[region coding in DVDs] was a non-issue to 99.5% of DVD buyers.
let me guess: you're from North America, and you live in North America. Region coding may be a non-problem for people who live, and expect to continue to live, in region 1; but for people who live elsewhere, or who travel between regions, it's a big f***ing pisser.
Large numbers of DVD players here in the Rest Of The World are either sold region free, are modified after sale to be region free, or are in a region other than what you would expect them to be. (A friend in Finland has a region 1 player, and owns exclusively region 1 disks.)
Incidentally, here's a map. Why the f*** is South Africa in a different region to the rest of Africa? Why is Australia in the same region as Mexico, and Japan in the same as Europe?
you'd need to convert to DC with a rectifier circuit
What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?
LED's are, after all, diodes. If you feed one an AC voltage, all that happens is that it turns on whenever the voltage is high enough. That means it's off for a touch over 50% of it's duty cycle. But you don't actually need to do any rectification; the LED effectively does it itself.
5 V (or 12 V or whatever) circuits
Just string together more LEDs in series until you've got enough to take the voltage. Simplifying just a little, if your LEDs have a breakover of 2.2V, and you're working from 110V power, just string 50 of the wee beasties together. (I suspect that this is what is sone in LED traffic lights.)
The real reason that LEDs aren't used for lighting much yet is capital cost: particularly for high brightness, an LED array is way more expensive than an incandescent or fluorescent light.
The basic issue is the unpredictability of interaction with the atmosphere during re-entry. For a nice-shaped object, like a space shuttle or an Apollo capsule, you can be pretty certain what's gonna happen, but for a rough shaped object like a satellite, which is decidely non-aerodynamic, and which is going to break into pieces at various unpredictable times during the re-entry, it's a lot fuzzier. Add to this the fact that the atmosphere as a whole expands and contracts.
Still, I wouldn't have thought that, say, the Pacific would be that hard to hit -- especially for a satellite that's still got heaps of fuel. You could use all this fuel to bring them in on a quite steep descent; a steeper attack into the atmosphere would make things more predictable, I think.
it would have been better in every way just to expand area codes to four digits.
Can anyone think of any reason the telcos didn't take this approach?
(a) Migration. You'd have to either have a flag day on which every area code gained an extra digit, and every telco switched their machinery, and every user started dialling the extra digit, or you'd have to have a provisional dual-number system, wherein every area was, for a period of time, covered by a 3-digit and a 4-digit area code. There probably isn't enough number space left to implement such a scheme. (To give an example of how to do this, you could tack, say, a '9' on the front of existing 3 digit area codes to create the new 4-digit codes. If there were no existing area codes that started with '9', then the phone system would be able to tell whether it was looking at a 3- or a 4-. But it relies on there being no 3-digit area codes in use that start with that particular digit.)
(b) Memory space in phone machinery. Lots of telephone equipment has the ability to memorise or process phone numbers. In adding an extra digit, you're forcing the obsolescence of any equipment which can't cope with the extra digit. This would probably turn into an infrastructure nightmare.
...here in Australia. We used to have 7 digit local phone numbers, but our telecommunications oversight body saw the problem that large US cities are having, and acted to prevent it being a problem here. They converted all the exisiting numbers by slapping a digit on the front. In most places, this digit is '9', so any old phone numbers you used to have memorised, you still have memorised. All the first digits other than '9' are therefore available for future expansion.
They revamped our area codes at the same time, and they are a single digit -- that's right: ten area codes for the whole continent! My area code, 08, (all long distance numbers begin with '0') covers more than half the continent, area-wise. I'm not so sure about the wisdom of this area code scheme, but the 8-digit local numbers are pretty nifty.
Oh, and mobile phones have their own area code, 04. You Americans should do this; it is packed with much subtle goodness.
'Course, what we really need is DNS for telephones.
Interestingly enough many people whole left W.A. for careers overseas are retiring back to WA
I've noticed this as a difference between Australians and Americans. Many Australians travel to another part of the world, whether it be backpacking or working; and then return home. Many Americans, on the other hand, travel to another part of the US, discover that it's not as bad as the part they grew up in, and move there. Las Vegas, Nevada, has some ridiculously large percentage of non-natives; at the company I worked for, 2 out of about 20 people were born in Nevada.
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, the advisory is for IE 5.x, but if you read other fine print, the only reason IE 4.x isn't listed is that Microsoft haven't bothered to test it to see if it's affected.
Visible passes are always in the couple of hours after sunset or before sunrise, when the sky is black but Mir is still in sunlight. Pass predictions are usually spot-on, except when the satellite in question has just changed its orbit. It sounds like Mir's orbit isn't gonna change until they go for the big burn on Thursday. When you spot it, it'll look like a red (how appropriate) star, moving though the sky. It'll cover half the sky or so in just five minutes or so.
OK, could somebody explain for the benefit of all us metric people out here in the Rest Of The World, what the crack about "5.075 feet" in the "dept." line is about?
Sure you can. Set your sail at 45 degrees to the sun, and sunlight hits your sail and reflects off. You get thrust once as the photon hits you, and once more as the photon leaves. Setting your sail at x degrees to the sun gets you thrust at x degrees to the sun. Of course, the steeper your angle, the less sunlight you're intercepting, so the less thrust you get overall. At 90 degrees, edge-on to the sun, you get zero thrust.
It's true , however, that you can't tack in the solar wind. That's the stream of protons blowing off the sun, and those little beasties don't bounce off your sail -- they stick.
You can gain maneuverability by using a launching laser instead of (or as well as) sunlight. You can even use a launching laser at you home star to decelerate at your target star: cut part of your sail loose, and it will blow ahead of you, pushed by launching laser light. Put yourself in the reflected beam from the cut-away portion of sail, and voila, you have light hitting your sail from the opposite direction of your launching laser! (This idea isn't original with me of course; I got it from an essay by Niven or Brin or some such clever person.)
Yeah, well, from an engineering perspective, they're pretty much the same thing. A weapon that is designed as semi-auto can often be converted to full-auto by filing a bit off, or installing a simple kit. (I understand that this dodge is used in the U.S. by people who want to buy full-auto weapons.) So in order to prevent nasty people acquiring full auto weapons, they had to ban semi-auto.
And from a practical perspective, there's little difference either. I can pump a trigger at four shots per second, easy.
Double-barreled shotguns are banned on the basis that they're sort-of semi-auto: there's two barrels and you can fire them in quick succession. This one is a quibble, I know, and there was a bunch of wrangling back and forth.
Some .22 rifles are banned because although they're low calibre, they are semi-auto (the banned ones are, anyway), and they were the Australian spree-killer's weapon-of-choice.
Oo, troll. FYI, you remember incorrectly. We outlawed automatic weapons (read: guns designed specifically for killing large numbers of people).
Australians have quite a different relationship with their government, and with guns, than do Americans. By and large, Australians trust that their government is made up of real, ordinary people. Sure, they screw up, but it's not a conspiracy against the citizens; it's just perfectly ordinary people behaving in perfectly ordinary ways.
Australians also have no problem with their government holding monopolies over things like the postal service, or power generation, or telephone service, or whatever. (OK, so we've privatised some of these things, but we didn't have a problem with it the other way; it's just that the Liberals got in to power. :-)
And as for "defending our rights" (with the implication that we should shoot everybody that is in any way connected with the Evil that is government): well, actually, we're quite happy with our current ability to vote the bastards out next time around. And the authority of the Australian Electoral Commission is hugely respected. Can't say enough good things about them.
Democracy ain't perfect, but it's the best system we've got. And contrary to many gun totin' American's opinions, countries such as Japan run just fine with no gun ownership whatsoever.
Well, 5+4 zipcodes are a bit different from Australian postcodes. Aussie postcodes are 4 digit, and in a city generally cover an area about 1.5km to 2km square. 5+4 zipcodes, on the other hand, are so hi-res that they can easily distinguish down to the level of individual houses. After all, in 9 digits there's a billion possible codes, and only about 0.25 billion Americans.
For another of my friends, you don't need to write his street address on the envelope, as his family have moved several times within the one postcode. So on the envelope, you just write [name], [postcode], AUSTRALIA; and that's all.
Can you give an example of three Imperial units (one each for E, m, c) for which this is the case? I couldn't think of any.
For metric, it's true for the most obvious choice: m in kilograms, c in metres per second, E in joules ('cos joules are really kg.m^2.s^-2).
For a second, there are so many conversion factors that just because you've seen the conversion factor once doesn't mean that you've automatically memorised it. And that's not even thinking about conversions within Imperial. Quick, off the top of your head: how many chains in a league?
Here then is a potential work-around: write our own.
Previous discussions here on /. have established that it would be difficult to create an effective open-source block list, because of the difficulty of trusting people who submit to the list; not to mention all of the usual problems inherent in censorware: regional differences in mores, overblocking, underblocking, etc.
So we ship it with an ineffective block list, say a token list of a dozen or so sites, and give the people who operate the software (e.g. librarians)the ability to edit block list. No competing censorware companies can point out that it underblocks, because their own products are guilty of the same thing.
I've even unkowingly recapitulated parts of the book. Ender sees that all the commanders have their teams practice formations, and he sees this as a weakness, and beats them. In the first season of team competition in my city, I had my team practice one maneuver. For almost the whole season, we won all our games, because we were coordinated and the other teams weren't. But as Ender realised, it's a brittle kind of coordination, and once the other teams became sufficiently coordinated themselves, our one trick stopped working, and we lost in the finals.
... and also look at the last few volumes of Risks; all the ones since the US election, basically. Much detailed analysis, mostly with the conclusion that it can't be done well.
Secondly, if you're gonna make up symbols, you could at least make up ones that make sense. The "1", "3" and "4" in this character set are OK; they've all got a vertical bar at the left, and then 1, 3 or 4 strokes respectively coming off that bar. Why not continue this theme through all the numbers? (OK, so there's not enough pixels to do that literally, but you get the idea.) And the idea of using a half-line shift upwards to signify exponentiation is just deeply wrong.
Some parts of it would be easy for an alien who has already figured out the base ten, positional, left-to-right stuff which the first part of the page is supposed to teach. For example, we've just been reading a list of prime numbers, and then we get to a big complicated looking number. I immediately said to myself, "This is gonna be a prime number, and a big one." I didn't immediately expect it to involve a power of two minus one, but there are a whole bunch of primes of this form. So when our alien mathematician sees:
2 [symbol] 3021377 [symbol] 1
, he/she/it can pretty quickly guess that the first symbol is "exponentiate", and the second is "subtraction".
But that isn't what we see. Instead of a symbol for exponentiation, we see a superscript. This is a big fat clue for humans like me, but completely cryptic as far as aliens are concerned. It makes it inobvious as to how the line should be read, as it breaks the left-to-right-then-down-a-line rule that we've just been trying to establish.
Large numbers of DVD players here in the Rest Of The World are either sold region free, are modified after sale to be region free, or are in a region other than what you would expect them to be. (A friend in Finland has a region 1 player, and owns exclusively region 1 disks.)
Incidentally, here's a map. Why the f*** is South Africa in a different region to the rest of Africa? Why is Australia in the same region as Mexico, and Japan in the same as Europe?
Expect to see a few more like this over the next couple of years.
LED's are, after all, diodes. If you feed one an AC voltage, all that happens is that it turns on whenever the voltage is high enough. That means it's off for a touch over 50% of it's duty cycle. But you don't actually need to do any rectification; the LED effectively does it itself.
Just string together more LEDs in series until you've got enough to take the voltage. Simplifying just a little, if your LEDs have a breakover of 2.2V, and you're working from 110V power, just string 50 of the wee beasties together. (I suspect that this is what is sone in LED traffic lights.)The real reason that LEDs aren't used for lighting much yet is capital cost: particularly for high brightness, an LED array is way more expensive than an incandescent or fluorescent light.
Still, I wouldn't have thought that, say, the Pacific would be that hard to hit -- especially for a satellite that's still got heaps of fuel. You could use all this fuel to bring them in on a quite steep descent; a steeper attack into the atmosphere would make things more predictable, I think.
(b) Memory space in phone machinery. Lots of telephone equipment has the ability to memorise or process phone numbers. In adding an extra digit, you're forcing the obsolescence of any equipment which can't cope with the extra digit. This would probably turn into an infrastructure nightmare.
They revamped our area codes at the same time, and they are a single digit -- that's right: ten area codes for the whole continent! My area code, 08, (all long distance numbers begin with '0') covers more than half the continent, area-wise. I'm not so sure about the wisdom of this area code scheme, but the 8-digit local numbers are pretty nifty.
Oh, and mobile phones have their own area code, 04. You Americans should do this; it is packed with much subtle goodness.
'Course, what we really need is DNS for telephones.