Like it or not, expletives are very much a part of our language, and can be powerfully expressive at times. They are to found throughout classical literature. Indeed it would be impossible to portray human drama in it's entirety without them, as it is a fact that thousands upon thousands of people use these words with frequency. These words well up from our racial memory and strike a chord deep within us all. Slang and expletives were originally the language of common folk. Like primitive art and folklore, this language style has an certain authenticity that is universally understood. Though I respect the concerns of parents, I would hate to see heavy handedness employed to keep these words of the air.
The other is the resolution gain that is possible with the binocular setup through interferometry.
Could you please elaborate on that? I found one of the original research papers that led to this telescope, and it said something like "the advantages of a binocular telescope to interferometry are well known" - not very helpful to us non-astronomers.
This was my question when I read the FA. Like another respondent, I thought that with the stars so far away there wouldn't even be any parallax. I decided to ask my friend Google what are the advantages of a binocular telescope and found this...
"So what does it feel like to actually use a large aperture binocular telescope? David gives us his account; Mind blowing is probably the phrase that springs to mind..."
"The incredible sense of total immersion in the reality of the experience is what binoculars are all about. It's astronomy at another level. Seeing the large globular cluster Omega Centauri for the first time almost made me fall backwards off the step. The depth and resolving power on this object is spellbinding. Moving just outside the field of view of this object and panning slowly towards it, you're firstly presented with a pitch black sky with a scattering of random stars. As you move onto the object your eyes and senses are completely overwhelmed. You can look deeper and deeper inside this cluster and there is always more to see. It feels as though I've arrived on the doorstep to this cluster in my spaceship."
"A definite three-dimensional feeling is present, the objects appear to float almost in front of you, even though this is obviously not possible due to the enormous distance of these objects. One explanation is an effect called chromatic stereopsis, which due to chromatic aberrations in your eyes makes the red and blue stars focus at slightly different distances. Simple things, like double stars that have never captured my imagination are suddenly transformed into objects worth gazing at. Smaller and much fainter globular clusters all benefited from the relaxing view using two eyes. The fainter globular clusters if viewed with only one eye, needed averted version to make them visible, however with both eyes open, they were blatantly obvious."
This amateur astronomer with a binocular 16" telescope concludes after 6 months of constant use: "So far I have not found any category of object to observe that does not benefit greatly from the advantages of a true binocular telescope."
What about Darl? I've heard he'll be made a Microsoft Fellow, in recognition to his outstanding contributions to that company. He'll begin a new role there as a Microsoft Technology Evangelist;-)
This is one of the worst articles I have ever seen! Not one bit of investigation was done, while there is voluminous information readily available elsewhere on this topic. It is like posting some company's press release and calling it news reporting. My first impulse was to do a little research to find out who is this TG Daily. Apparently it sprang from Tom's Hardware, but both are owned by TG Publishing LLC, a Bestofmedia Group company. The author is Wolfgang Gruener, a senior editor. A half hour on Google only found one little negative comment about TG Daily which I determined to be merely gossip not worthy of repeating. I found one other gripe over an article they had done on Linux. It was an esoteric complaint. In the end, that blogger posted an update saying that TG Daily had rectified the problem. Really, after scanning all the Google results, it certainly appeared that this journal had at least a "satisfactory" reputation. So then, how can such lousy piece of fluff journalism have come into existence? Maybe writers are only human, and have their good days and bad days like everyone else. This article must have been written on a very bad day in the life of Mr. Gruener.
The current top article, for example, is about the ISO BRM on OOXML.
I am really amazed that Slashdot hasn't picked up this story yet. I mean, I just can't believe it! This is the story of the week. This is a huge thing, as those who have been following it are well aware. The process at the BRM was so flawed as to bring into serious question the integrity of the ISO/IEC JTC-1. I won't add to the tens of thousands of lines of text that have been written about it here, in fear of being ruled off-topic. I only want to question why this hasn't been aired on Slashdot.
Beginning on Friday, I was scanning the news anxiously to see how the BRM went, and shortly the first reports began to emerge. By Monday, the first report from an actual BRM participant came out. By Tuesday, the available information was growing exponentially. I was following all this on Groklaw, and kept flipping back and forth from Groklaw to Slashdot to see if they had picked it up yet. When a second blog by Andy Updegrove became a resource of links to every report by BRM participants, I could wait no longer. I wanted to see how this story was viewed by my fellow Slashdotters, naturally. I was so concerned that this still hadn't reached Slashdot that I reluctantly submitted the story myself. Then I started backtracking on the Firehose and discovered that there had already been 6 submissions at that point, and that was on Monday. I'll bet there have been dozens by now, besides thousands of people people clicking on those "Submit to Slashdot buttons all over the place". I just can't imagine why the editors haven't put this important story in front of Slashdot readers yet.
Please forgive me for interrupting the current story. I just had to get this off my chest.
It simply of such a small scale effect against such a massive landscape that it's pretty much unthinkable.
It is peculated that only creators at the south pole who's depths are in permanent shadow may contain water ice. How many creators would that be, anyhow? - after this test - one less - whatever the count!
I agree with you. Impetus to transform the internet is coming from every direction. They won't be happy until we have a "trusted path" to our "trusted computers". We discussed all this before from a different context, when Stanford University was announcing their Clean Slate Design initiative. I was so inspired by the slashdot discussion at the time that I did some in depth research on the topic and put up a blog Since then, Stanford has removed their Clean Slate design White Paper from their site. (Why?)
Discussion so far seems to have missed one little line, where they say it may be powerful enough to boil the vacuum of space, and perhaps bring virtual particles into existence. Think about that for a minute - matter from nothing... kind'a scary, isn't it? Like in those super particle accelerators where they just might end up creating microscopic black holes. So one of these little black holes would start sucking in matter and not stop until the whole world is consumed. Well there we go - this laser could be the antidote for that. We have all these particles popping into existence over there at the that university with the laser, and a little black hole on the other side of the ocean sucking up matter, and an infinite loop between creating and destroying and us all caught in the middle. I think physics is getting into dangerous territory.
possibly 80% of the internet is secured by passwords or some other mechanism
Well you raise a good point there, so archiving the entire internet is out. But as you say, archiving what MacDonalds.com chooses to present isn't that valuable. Then we could just turn it to another purpose. How about a completely independent, non-commercial web that is only for people, and this web is accessed by P2P. Something like a giant social web site. Of course, it will soon fill up with commercial messages and spam, and end up just like the Web, so I don't know... only speculating on what use the resources I mentioned could be - the idea of unlimited storage and CPU cycles. Must be some good use we could put it to. Any ideas?
What would be a productive use for these terabytes of wasted space?
Well, I had this idea when I read about some Open Source software that allowed distributed storage (sorry, forgot what that was, but by now I am sure it has already been mentioned in this discussion). The idea was this - suppose we have such software for unlimited distributed storage, so that people can download it and volunteer some unused space on their HD for a storage pool. Then suppose we have some software for distributed computing like we have for the SETI program. Now we have ziggabytes of storage and googleplexflops of processing power, what can we do with that? How about, for one thing, storing the entire internet (using compression, of course) on that endless distributed storage, and then running a decentralized, independent internet via P2P software? The distributed database could be constantly updated from the original sources, and the distributed storage then becomes in effect a giant cache that contains the entire internet. Now we could employ the distributed computing software to datamine that cache and we could have searching independent of Google or Yahoo or M$FT. Beyond that we could develop some AI that uses all that computing power and all that data to do... what? - I'm not sure yet. Just thought I would throw this out there to perhaps maybe get stepped on, or who knows, inspire further thought.
Even the human observers' heads will compress and dilate as the gravity wave passes!
Wouldn't that give you a headache? Would tinfoil protect one from such an event do you think? Anyhow, kidding aside, your reasoning sounds very logical.
All the movies are QuickTime format, and I refuse to install that on my computer. Last time I checked, at least, you can't just install a plugin to play the.mov type - you and up with this huge download that installs iPod stuff that I don't want littering my computer. There was a time when my VLC played QuickTime movies, but I just tried it with one of these Mercury approach videos and VLC played nothing but black frames. Suggestions? I think NASA should use some format that is a little more universal. Like what? What is the most universal, cross-platform format, anyhow? Is it mp4?
To cook something (as in heating the water inside that thing) the frequency must be around 2.4GHz.
Where did you get that idea? A broad range of radio frequencies (RF) have been used for many decades for industrial heating - most commonly in the megahertz region. No doubt any of these industrial heaters could easily cook food if you cranked up the intensity. This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_heating/ reference directs itself to the theory behind dielectric heating, which is not limited to gigahertz radiation. A Google search on RF heating yielded many interesting articles and applications, but few mentioned the actual frequencies employed. Finally, I found an article "Radio frequency heating: a potential method for post-harvest pest control in nuts and dry products" http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?&pubmedid=15362185/ where they state they are using a 27 MHz radio frequency (RF) system.
This is just plain wrong. There is no way that schools should be standardized on a single commercial brand instead of a generic solution. In many other areas we (society) take great pains to not mention commercial brand names (though I can't think of an appropriate example at the moment). It is very foolish, as well, to allow an entire nation to become dependent on a single commercial vendor. What were people thinking? If there was ever an appropriate task for a learning institution, it is to fight against any potential monoculture. People should be forced to use alternative solutions such as Open Source, and be taught the concept of word processing technology rather than forced to use one particular commercial brand at the exclusion of all others. Students should get credit for inventiveness and imagination in what solution they choose to employ. I mean - why hasn't a law suite been launched by other supplies of word processors? The current situation is not fair to them. Obviously, ODF should become the default format. I am not sure about this business of teachers marking up exams to hand back, how that should be done, but however it is done, it must have a generic solution that does not favour any particular commercial product. That should be law. How did this come about, that schools are promoting a single commercial product at the expense of all others? How did it all go so wrong?
This truck is going to be like a big target driving through the streets of Baghdad. When it gets hit, the result most likely will be a big, messy explosion with poisonous chemicals released and many lives lost.
Lets also say we want to heat the thing from ambient (35 degrees Celcius, coz remember we're in the desers of Iraq) to 100 degrees
I think you're missing something here. Shells fired from guns get nearly white hot from their high speed passage through the air. Now, this applies more to canon fire from big guns like ship-to-shore. I am sure a morter round doesn't get anywhere near as hot, but certainly it is hotter than you suggest. There undoubtedly will be Slashdot readers who will be able to tell us how hot. The point is, many posts wonder about the effectiveness of a brief laser beam on a spinning shell, but we need to realize that that shell may already be near to the limit of the heat it can tolerate.
Slashdot Mirror
Like it or not, expletives are very much a part of our language, and can be powerfully expressive at times. They are to found throughout classical literature. Indeed it would be impossible to portray human drama in it's entirety without them, as it is a fact that thousands upon thousands of people use these words with frequency. These words well up from our racial memory and strike a chord deep within us all. Slang and expletives were originally the language of common folk. Like primitive art and folklore, this language style has an certain authenticity that is universally understood. Though I respect the concerns of parents, I would hate to see heavy handedness employed to keep these words of the air.
The other is the resolution gain that is possible with the binocular setup through interferometry.
Could you please elaborate on that? I found one of the original research papers that led to this telescope, and it said something like "the advantages of a binocular telescope to interferometry are well known" - not very helpful to us non-astronomers.
This was my question when I read the FA. Like another respondent, I thought that with the stars so far away there wouldn't even be any parallax. I decided to ask my friend Google what are the advantages of a binocular telescope and found this...
"So what does it feel like to actually use a large aperture binocular telescope? David gives us his account; Mind blowing is probably the phrase that springs to mind..."
"The incredible sense of total immersion in the reality of the experience is what binoculars are all about. It's astronomy at another level. Seeing the large globular cluster Omega Centauri for the first time almost made me fall backwards off the step. The depth and resolving power on this object is spellbinding. Moving just outside the field of view of this object and panning slowly towards it, you're firstly presented with a pitch black sky with a scattering of random stars. As you move onto the object your eyes and senses are completely overwhelmed. You can look deeper and deeper inside this cluster and there is always more to see. It feels as though I've arrived on the doorstep to this cluster in my spaceship."
"A definite three-dimensional feeling is present, the objects appear to float almost in front of you, even though this is obviously not possible due to the enormous distance of these objects. One explanation is an effect called chromatic stereopsis, which due to chromatic aberrations in your eyes makes the red and blue stars focus at slightly different distances. Simple things, like double stars that have never captured my imagination are suddenly transformed into objects worth gazing at. Smaller and much fainter globular clusters all benefited from the relaxing view using two eyes. The fainter globular clusters if viewed with only one eye, needed averted version to make them visible, however with both eyes open, they were blatantly obvious."
This amateur astronomer with a binocular 16" telescope concludes after 6 months of constant use: "So far I have not found any category of object to observe that does not benefit greatly from the advantages of a true binocular telescope."
What about Darl? I've heard he'll be made a Microsoft Fellow, in recognition to his outstanding contributions to that company. He'll begin a new role there as a Microsoft Technology Evangelist ;-)
article here = incorrect
This is one of the worst articles I have ever seen! Not one bit of investigation was done, while there is voluminous information readily available elsewhere on this topic. It is like posting some company's press release and calling it news reporting. My first impulse was to do a little research to find out who is this TG Daily. Apparently it sprang from Tom's Hardware, but both are owned by TG Publishing LLC, a Bestofmedia Group company. The author is Wolfgang Gruener, a senior editor. A half hour on Google only found one little negative comment about TG Daily which I determined to be merely gossip not worthy of repeating. I found one other gripe over an article they had done on Linux. It was an esoteric complaint. In the end, that blogger posted an update saying that TG Daily had rectified the problem. Really, after scanning all the Google results, it certainly appeared that this journal had at least a "satisfactory" reputation. So then, how can such lousy piece of fluff journalism have come into existence? Maybe writers are only human, and have their good days and bad days like everyone else. This article must have been written on a very bad day in the life of Mr. Gruener.
The current top article, for example, is about the ISO BRM on OOXML.
I am really amazed that Slashdot hasn't picked up this story yet. I mean, I just can't believe it! This is the story of the week. This is a huge thing, as those who have been following it are well aware. The process at the BRM was so flawed as to bring into serious question the integrity of the ISO/IEC JTC-1. I won't add to the tens of thousands of lines of text that have been written about it here, in fear of being ruled off-topic. I only want to question why this hasn't been aired on Slashdot.
Beginning on Friday, I was scanning the news anxiously to see how the BRM went, and shortly the first reports began to emerge. By Monday, the first report from an actual BRM participant came out. By Tuesday, the available information was growing exponentially. I was following all this on Groklaw, and kept flipping back and forth from Groklaw to Slashdot to see if they had picked it up yet. When a second blog by Andy Updegrove became a resource of links to every report by BRM participants, I could wait no longer. I wanted to see how this story was viewed by my fellow Slashdotters, naturally. I was so concerned that this still hadn't reached Slashdot that I reluctantly submitted the story myself. Then I started backtracking on the Firehose and discovered that there had already been 6 submissions at that point, and that was on Monday. I'll bet there have been dozens by now, besides thousands of people people clicking on those "Submit to Slashdot buttons all over the place". I just can't imagine why the editors haven't put this important story in front of Slashdot readers yet.
Please forgive me for interrupting the current story. I just had to get this off my chest.
Re: creators at the south pole
your homework assignment crater (krtr) 1. A bowl-shaped depression at the top of a volcano or at the mouth of a geyser
Who's to say there aren't any creators at the south pole of the moon, anyhow? Ever been there, wise guy? :-)
(Geez - I never even noticed that one! I can't spell any more - and the spelling checking doesn't flag it when I use the wrong word.)
I don't know if to mod this funny for a typo so reversing the meaning of the post
Look it up - Peculate: verb; meaning to both speculate and postulate at the same time.
Found it! - 0n the wayback machine: CleanSlateWhitepaperV2
It simply of such a small scale effect against such a massive landscape that it's pretty much unthinkable.
It is peculated that only creators at the south pole who's depths are in permanent shadow may contain water ice. How many creators would that be, anyhow? - after this test - one less - whatever the count!
is this: yuba.stanford.edu/csdi/dm.pdf what you have in mind?
Not the same thing at all!
I agree with you. Impetus to transform the internet is coming from every direction. They won't be happy until we have a "trusted path" to our "trusted computers". We discussed all this before from a different context, when Stanford University was announcing their Clean Slate Design initiative. I was so inspired by the slashdot discussion at the time that I did some in depth research on the topic and put up a blog Since then, Stanford has removed their Clean Slate design White Paper from their site. (Why?)
The overall energy of the impact will ... kick up 1,102 tons of debris and dust.
...and suppose water is a limited resource, and they just blew away/polluted a significant proportion of that reserve?
Anyway, what can it do?
Discussion so far seems to have missed one little line, where they say it may be powerful enough to boil the vacuum of space, and perhaps bring virtual particles into existence. Think about that for a minute - matter from nothing... kind'a scary, isn't it? Like in those super particle accelerators where they just might end up creating microscopic black holes. So one of these little black holes would start sucking in matter and not stop until the whole world is consumed. Well there we go - this laser could be the antidote for that. We have all these particles popping into existence over there at the that university with the laser, and a little black hole on the other side of the ocean sucking up matter, and an infinite loop between creating and destroying and us all caught in the middle. I think physics is getting into dangerous territory.
possibly 80% of the internet is secured by passwords or some other mechanism
Well you raise a good point there, so archiving the entire internet is out. But as you say, archiving what MacDonalds.com chooses to present isn't that valuable. Then we could just turn it to another purpose. How about a completely independent, non-commercial web that is only for people, and this web is accessed by P2P. Something like a giant social web site. Of course, it will soon fill up with commercial messages and spam, and end up just like the Web, so I don't know... only speculating on what use the resources I mentioned could be - the idea of unlimited storage and CPU cycles. Must be some good use we could put it to. Any ideas?
What would be a productive use for these terabytes of wasted space?
Well, I had this idea when I read about some Open Source software that allowed distributed storage (sorry, forgot what that was, but by now I am sure it has already been mentioned in this discussion). The idea was this - suppose we have such software for unlimited distributed storage, so that people can download it and volunteer some unused space on their HD for a storage pool. Then suppose we have some software for distributed computing like we have for the SETI program. Now we have ziggabytes of storage and googleplexflops of processing power, what can we do with that? How about, for one thing, storing the entire internet (using compression, of course) on that endless distributed storage, and then running a decentralized, independent internet via P2P software? The distributed database could be constantly updated from the original sources, and the distributed storage then becomes in effect a giant cache that contains the entire internet. Now we could employ the distributed computing software to datamine that cache and we could have searching independent of Google or Yahoo or M$FT. Beyond that we could develop some AI that uses all that computing power and all that data to do... what? - I'm not sure yet. Just thought I would throw this out there to perhaps maybe get stepped on, or who knows, inspire further thought.
Tantalizing - but not enough to go on, so it is pretty much useless. I found the abstract here but it does little to elucidate the article.
to 'force "consumers" to buy what they're told to buy -- corporate "content," Where is the force?
It gets sillier...
From TFA..
"...Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG and their RIAA is trying to sue students into buying 'product'."
So the articles suggests that if you don't buy their product, they'll sue you. Such a conclusion is more than a bit ridiculous, no?
Even the human observers' heads will compress and dilate as the gravity wave passes!
Wouldn't that give you a headache? Would tinfoil protect one from such an event do you think? Anyhow, kidding aside, your reasoning sounds very logical.
All the movies are QuickTime format, and I refuse to install that on my computer. Last time I checked, at least, you can't just install a plugin to play the .mov type - you and up with this huge download that installs iPod stuff that I don't want littering my computer. There was a time when my VLC played QuickTime movies, but I just tried it with one of these Mercury approach videos and VLC played nothing but black frames. Suggestions? I think NASA should use some format that is a little more universal. Like what? What is the most universal, cross-platform format, anyhow? Is it mp4?
To cook something (as in heating the water inside that thing) the frequency must be around 2.4GHz.
Where did you get that idea? A broad range of radio frequencies (RF) have been used for many decades for industrial heating - most commonly in the megahertz region. No doubt any of these industrial heaters could easily cook food if you cranked up the intensity. This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_heating/ reference directs itself to the theory behind dielectric heating, which is not limited to gigahertz radiation. A Google search on RF heating yielded many interesting articles and applications, but few mentioned the actual frequencies employed. Finally, I found an article "Radio frequency heating: a potential method for post-harvest pest control in nuts and dry products" http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?&pubmedid=15362185/ where they state they are using a 27 MHz radio frequency (RF) system.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1096
This is just plain wrong. There is no way that schools should be standardized on a single commercial brand instead of a generic solution. In many other areas we (society) take great pains to not mention commercial brand names (though I can't think of an appropriate example at the moment). It is very foolish, as well, to allow an entire nation to become dependent on a single commercial vendor. What were people thinking? If there was ever an appropriate task for a learning institution, it is to fight against any potential monoculture. People should be forced to use alternative solutions such as Open Source, and be taught the concept of word processing technology rather than forced to use one particular commercial brand at the exclusion of all others. Students should get credit for inventiveness and imagination in what solution they choose to employ. I mean - why hasn't a law suite been launched by other supplies of word processors? The current situation is not fair to them. Obviously, ODF should become the default format. I am not sure about this business of teachers marking up exams to hand back, how that should be done, but however it is done, it must have a generic solution that does not favour any particular commercial product. That should be law. How did this come about, that schools are promoting a single commercial product at the expense of all others? How did it all go so wrong?
This truck is going to be like a big target driving through the streets of Baghdad. When it gets hit, the result most likely will be a big, messy explosion with poisonous chemicals released and many lives lost.
Lets also say we want to heat the thing from ambient (35 degrees Celcius, coz remember we're in the desers of Iraq) to 100 degrees
I think you're missing something here. Shells fired from guns get nearly white hot from their high speed passage through the air. Now, this applies more to canon fire from big guns like ship-to-shore. I am sure a morter round doesn't get anywhere near as hot, but certainly it is hotter than you suggest. There undoubtedly will be Slashdot readers who will be able to tell us how hot. The point is, many posts wonder about the effectiveness of a brief laser beam on a spinning shell, but we need to realize that that shell may already be near to the limit of the heat it can tolerate.