If the article's author believes that a single-atom emitter will work better in a field-emission SEM then he's in for a disappointment. The maximum amount of current you'd get off a single-atom tip is 'way too low to give you any kind of decent image at all once it gets through all the lensing- and forming-fields in a SEM column.
Anyone who has managed an such instrument (I've run C&W Quikscans and Hitachi 4000 series) probably knows more about tip dynamics than he does - tips are not stable, tips erode (the current density obviously is quite high) - they build up layers of gas/contaminant molecules that ultimately form the sharp 'almost-single-atom' tips that account for proper, stable, low-noise imaging. An 'ultimate-sharp' (i.e. single-atom of ANYTHING) tip is just too unstable to be useful.
Manufactured tips can be TOO sharp and require rather high-current conditioning ('high' compared to normal operating current) to sufficiently blunt the tips to get them in an acceptably stable range.
Ultra-sharp tips may be required for high-res scanning-tunneling microscopy (most of what I've done is tapping-mode, lateral-force, and nanoindentation - DI, now Veeco stuff) but that's an entirely different animal from electron microscopy.
"I [David Miller, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Space Systems Laboratory] rented the first 'Star Wars' movie and showed (a) class the scene where Luke is practicing the use of the Force with a floating droid," Miller told the Christian Science Monitor. "I said: 'I want three of those. How do we start doing this?'"
...that an educational administrator can watch a 'Saturday morning serial'-kind of movie and can "start doing this" by finding enough budgetary feebs at NASA & DARPA that'll give him a wet-dream-amount of OUR tax $$$ for "satellites [that] might be used for such tasks as building giant space telescopes and closely monitoring Earth".
Yeah - "might": just about as plausible as defending the Earth from the FSM, or killing the Ori, or letting us know when the Vogons arrive. WTF - don't we already have sufficient technology for satellites that can "closely" monitor the Earth?
More likely they'll just end-up being more orbital junk endangering something-or-other or making pretty, bright flashes when they de-orbit. Yeah, Miller - keep finding gov't funding for practically anything for MIT or else the management might look for someone who can.
Jesus Christ, all you have to do is get a new email address. Better yet, 3 of them. One is your spam-me address, which you don't even read but simply delete all the messages once a month; one is a "business" address in case you do online shopping or sign up for discussion boards, etc; the last is your personal address which you only give out to actual human beings. It's not the end of the freaking world.
Sounds good; the only problem is what then happens if one of those addresses is 'harvested' between sender and receiver.? The more people using that one name to contact you, the more people you have to update with that one name.
I bought my own domain name ($15/year from www.directnic.com) and all I do is use the mail redirector - I have a virtually infinite number of email names and can block any at-will. I use some for business reasons, relatives and friends use their name (at) my domain, and several companies use their name at my domain. The redirector also lets me have email lists for multiple recipients.
Everything comes to me and when I see I'm getting investment crap from Aunt Betty then I only have the one name to change (add a 1/2/3/etc to her name and put the old one on my banned list). If a company sells the name they use to someone I'll update them once and if THAT one gets sold too then the company gets banned in its entirety.
Seven years now and I have a bit more than two dozen names on the list; most harvested, five to ten names sold/banned, and I don't get nearly the spam everyone else is bitching about.
If the phone's capabilities were limited to just necessary family and emergency/taxi/etc contacts, it's a pretty sure bet these kids wouldn't be voicing and texting all that much during school hours - that probably being the main reason the admins don't WANT the kids to have the phones in the schools, no?
The idea is to eliminate the distraction of the phone during school hours when they're supposed to be learning (for whatever 'learning' is worth anymore).
How 'bout this then: two (or more) setups on a phone so that during a set time period of the day (e.g. school hours) the phones would be sufficiently crippled (family/emergency/etc. only) and wide-open the rest of the 24 hours (or whatever the parents decide)?
I could see a function for a list of accessible numbers on the phone; police & fire local #s, 911 of course, home, grandparents, taxi, family cell #s and so forth.
I don't think it has to be a kid's right to be able to dial, or receive calls from, every number in the known universe. And the access to the phone setup should require a PIN code. The kids can see "home", "Mom-cell", and so forth to know who they're dialing; but IN NO WAY do school admins need to see numbers dialed, numbers answered, voicemail messages, or bookmarked numbers.
Listed-number voicemail for the family's use too - no one else should need to leave a cell message for your kid if YOU'RE paying the bill. When they're old enough to afford their own cell phone bill then it becomes a different matter.
Wouldn't you figure that if an American hacks the UK's defense computers that they'll want him to stand trial there?
Say it with me: re-ci-pro-ci-ty. SAY IT!
As for reid - it was an American Airlines plane from Paris to Miami (22 Dec 2001) and I think international law says that wherever you land: they get you; not your birth-country or embarkation-country.
In the name of Jebus/Ghod/Buddha/FSM/Cthulhu/Phil: DO NOT try to get 'edgy' and 'hip' like family guy did. It will be absolute death to a season 6.
Futurama was a nice clean show (with its occasional burlesque moments) and no one I've ever spoken with ever had a bad thing to say about an episode.
Everything worked just fine the way it was and if the FauX network hadn't been yanking the times all over the place the series never would have closed after 4 seasons.
In 2003, a foam chunk brought down space shuttle Columbia, killing seven astronauts. And a similar problem last year prompted an in-space repair before returning to Earth.
I think what really brought down STS-93 was NASA's decision, even before STS-1 got off the ground, to not pursue development of a tile repair process because they thought it wasn't worth the additional risk and training - even though they tout that the tiles are necessary to keep the vehicle from melting on the way back down.
They were flying on the luck that no absolutely critical tiles were broken until said luck finally ran-out in 2003.
Should Discovery's STS-121 spacewalkers be forced to make a serious heat shield repair, the chances of which NASA officials believe to be extremely remote, flight controllers could opt to try to save the orbiter without endangering its astronaut crew.
Herring said that a 28-foot (8.5-meter) cable packed in the orbiter's middeck has been certified to fly in just such a situation, which would keep an astronaut crew aboard the ISS while the orbiter returns home on remote control.
"It's kind of like a jumper cable that would only be used in an event where you had done a repair, but couldn't be 100 percent certain [it] would be something that would be flight worthy with a crew," Herring said.
The cable would connect an avionics bay in Discovery's middeck with the controls one level up on its flight deck, effectively allowing flight controllers in Houston to perform landing activities currently done by shuttle astronauts.
Those manual activities include starting the shuttle's auxiliary power units, deploying an air data probe, unstowing the orbiter's landing gear and releasing its drag chute after landing, Herring said.
"The things that would be manually controlled, this jumper cable allows them to be controlled from mission control," Herring said.
In such a contingency, Discovery or any future shuttle would land at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, NASA said.
"We would not target a landing site at KSC or Edwards Air Force Base [in California]," Herring said. "The prime landing site would be at White Sands because of the wide expanse of the range."
Damn! I hope it never has to be used (of course); but that would be one hell of a thing to watch. The article also talks about a tile patching/repair system.
(Ever heard of booting from a live CD FBI "experts"[?])
True enough - I know I can boot from my Knoppix CD (http://www.knoppix.net/) and, as far as I've been able to determine, it does not touch the drive (i.e. write anything anywhere) even once.
Slashdot Mirror
If the article's author believes that a single-atom emitter will work better in a field-emission SEM then he's in for a disappointment. The maximum amount of current you'd get off a single-atom tip is 'way too low to give you any kind of decent image at all once it gets through all the lensing- and forming-fields in a SEM column.
Anyone who has managed an such instrument (I've run C&W Quikscans and Hitachi 4000 series) probably knows more about tip dynamics than he does - tips are not stable, tips erode (the current density obviously is quite high) - they build up layers of gas/contaminant molecules that ultimately form the sharp 'almost-single-atom' tips that account for proper, stable, low-noise imaging. An 'ultimate-sharp' (i.e. single-atom of ANYTHING) tip is just too unstable to be useful.
Manufactured tips can be TOO sharp and require rather high-current conditioning ('high' compared to normal operating current) to sufficiently blunt the tips to get them in an acceptably stable range.
Ultra-sharp tips may be required for high-res scanning-tunneling microscopy (most of what I've done is tapping-mode, lateral-force, and nanoindentation - DI, now Veeco stuff) but that's an entirely different animal from electron microscopy.
Yeah - "might": just about as plausible as defending the Earth from the FSM, or killing the Ori, or letting us know when the Vogons arrive. WTF - don't we already have sufficient technology for satellites that can "closely" monitor the Earth?
More likely they'll just end-up being more orbital junk endangering something-or-other or making pretty, bright flashes when they de-orbit. Yeah, Miller - keep finding gov't funding for practically anything for MIT or else the management might look for someone who can.
Sounds good; the only problem is what then happens if one of those addresses is 'harvested' between sender and receiver.? The more people using that one name to contact you, the more people you have to update with that one name.
I bought my own domain name ($15/year from www.directnic.com) and all I do is use the mail redirector - I have a virtually infinite number of email names and can block any at-will. I use some for business reasons, relatives and friends use their name (at) my domain, and several companies use their name at my domain. The redirector also lets me have email lists for multiple recipients.
Everything comes to me and when I see I'm getting investment crap from Aunt Betty then I only have the one name to change (add a 1/2/3/etc to her name and put the old one on my banned list). If a company sells the name they use to someone I'll update them once and if THAT one gets sold too then the company gets banned in its entirety.
Seven years now and I have a bit more than two dozen names on the list; most harvested, five to ten names sold/banned, and I don't get nearly the spam everyone else is bitching about.
And? So? Make up four numbers and see how much further you can get toward figuring out what they want.
If the phone's capabilities were limited to just necessary family and emergency/taxi/etc contacts, it's a pretty sure bet these kids wouldn't be voicing and texting all that much during school hours - that probably being the main reason the admins don't WANT the kids to have the phones in the schools, no?
The idea is to eliminate the distraction of the phone during school hours when they're supposed to be learning (for whatever 'learning' is worth anymore).
How 'bout this then: two (or more) setups on a phone so that during a set time period of the day (e.g. school hours) the phones would be sufficiently crippled (family/emergency/etc. only) and wide-open the rest of the 24 hours (or whatever the parents decide)?
I could see a function for a list of accessible numbers on the phone; police & fire local #s, 911 of course, home, grandparents, taxi, family cell #s and so forth.
I don't think it has to be a kid's right to be able to dial, or receive calls from, every number in the known universe. And the access to the phone setup should require a PIN code. The kids can see "home", "Mom-cell", and so forth to know who they're dialing; but IN NO WAY do school admins need to see numbers dialed, numbers answered, voicemail messages, or bookmarked numbers.
Listed-number voicemail for the family's use too - no one else should need to leave a cell message for your kid if YOU'RE paying the bill. When they're old enough to afford their own cell phone bill then it becomes a different matter.
Um: sqrt(2 * 6.6742e-11 * 5.16 / 0.4) = 4.1496e-5 = .000041496
???
Say it with me: re-ci-pro-ci-ty. SAY IT!
As for reid - it was an American Airlines plane from Paris to Miami (22 Dec 2001) and I think international law says that wherever you land: they get you; not your birth-country or embarkation-country.
You just gave AOL your credit card number just so you could call 'em up again to cancel? Ummm... [shaking head]
WELL, if it doesn't have !!!$$$---NANOTUBES (C)(R)(TM)---$$$!!! in it then, well, who would want to buy something so obviously low-tech?
Idiots will market it in such a way that other idiots will be unable to resist buying it.
In the name of Jebus/Ghod/Buddha/FSM/Cthulhu/Phil: DO NOT try to get 'edgy' and 'hip' like family guy did. It will be absolute death to a season 6.
Futurama was a nice clean show (with its occasional burlesque moments) and no one I've ever spoken with ever had a bad thing to say about an episode.
Everything worked just fine the way it was and if the FauX network hadn't been yanking the times all over the place the series never would have closed after 4 seasons.
How about: "Errrk! :thump:"?
In 2003, a foam chunk brought down space shuttle Columbia, killing seven astronauts. And a similar problem last year prompted an in-space repair before returning to Earth.
I think what really brought down STS-93 was NASA's decision, even before STS-1 got off the ground, to not pursue development of a tile repair process because they thought it wasn't worth the additional risk and training - even though they tout that the tiles are necessary to keep the vehicle from melting on the way back down.
They were flying on the luck that no absolutely critical tiles were broken until said luck finally ran-out in 2003.
Remote landing capability
Should Discovery's STS-121 spacewalkers be forced to make a serious heat shield repair, the chances of which NASA officials believe to be extremely remote, flight controllers could opt to try to save the orbiter without endangering its astronaut crew.
Herring said that a 28-foot (8.5-meter) cable packed in the orbiter's middeck has been certified to fly in just such a situation, which would keep an astronaut crew aboard the ISS while the orbiter returns home on remote control.
"It's kind of like a jumper cable that would only be used in an event where you had done a repair, but couldn't be 100 percent certain [it] would be something that would be flight worthy with a crew," Herring said.
The cable would connect an avionics bay in Discovery's middeck with the controls one level up on its flight deck, effectively allowing flight controllers in Houston to perform landing activities currently done by shuttle astronauts.
Those manual activities include starting the shuttle's auxiliary power units, deploying an air data probe, unstowing the orbiter's landing gear and releasing its drag chute after landing, Herring said.
"The things that would be manually controlled, this jumper cable allows them to be controlled from mission control," Herring said.
In such a contingency, Discovery or any future shuttle would land at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, NASA said.
"We would not target a landing site at KSC or Edwards Air Force Base [in California]," Herring said. "The prime landing site would be at White Sands because of the wide expanse of the range."
Damn! I hope it never has to be used (of course); but that would be one hell of a thing to watch. The article also talks about a tile patching/repair system.
Good stuff to know. Thanks!
You haven't yet met the (mis-)managers where I work...
Nonononono - I was chuckling at the line; not the punctuation.
One could SO wish that One had mod points to crush your nutz with on this fine evening... Tsk.
I've always wondered where Rachel Corrie got the idea... (well, no - not really)
(chuckle)
yah, well: "terrorism is in the eye of the beholder" ("one man's terrorism is another man's freedom-fighting"?)
Best thing on the OSX platform (=>10.2) for stopping 'phoning home': http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.ht ml
Ouch.
Beer.
Nose.
*SNORT*
Ouch.
True enough - I know I can boot from my Knoppix CD (http://www.knoppix.net/) and, as far as I've been able to determine, it does not touch the drive (i.e. write anything anywhere) even once.
It's Scien-terrific! :)
Well, at least that's not as bad as " doing [more incredible] science "..