I have thought about this alot. Growing up in an environmentalist family, I tend towards the "leave nothing but footprints" ideals. There have been so many times in history where humans have royally fscked up a new environment by spreading disease or introducing an unchecked species with no natural predators.. But is this different?
Obviously, if there is no life there, its not as if we would be destroying a species or habitat, but how do we prove there is no life there?
We are at a unique point in the grand scheme of things because for the first time in history, we as a species have the capability to spread life beyond the bounds of our world. Life wants to spread. With this new found cpability, is it our duty to help it spread?
Now, terraforming is a bit extreme, but I really struggle with even the basic idea of wether it is ethical to, say, introduce bacteria to other worlds and give life a chance to do what it does in other places.
Well, I agree with your sentiment, but I think there is a real problem with granting patents that aren't enforcable. Mainly it eats up patent office resources and makes the process more expensive and slower for those who have legitimate patentable ideas.
Well, he does state that he wrote it in an hour. I think he intended for the quickness of his reply to carry some meaning, and then for consistency and accuracy he did not want to modify it much when he posted it to the puplic.
I went to the store a couple weeks ago looking for a 802.11b card that would work under linux (prism or similar) and was the ms cards. *shudder* Now, I wasn't about to buy one (*shudder* again), but has anyone used one of these under non-windows?
I second this recomendation. Good Eats (Alton Brown) is a great show that teaches more than just how to follow a recipe, but also delves into the "why" certain ingredients are used and what they do chemically. High quality geek programming for food related stuff!
And of course there are exceptions to every gernerality,
but I bet most individuals who want to buy a computer
to put linux on and are smart enough to fix their own
problems will just buy a computer from some local shop
or build it themselves. Dell's not where I go to get a
new box. But they are a big company, and its nice to see
some companies aren't completely in bed with MS.
The real win here is that Dell is trying to stand up to MS a bit.
Now as much as I hate to admit it, MS has a legitimate
argument for requesting that no computers ship without an OS.
They may fear that it encourages pirating of their OS. I'm
sure they were pleaed as punch that it might inhibit
the proliferation of linux, which is why I'm thrilled to see
Dell actually find a solution without caving to MS pressure.
I really wish they wouldn't hype it up as 'teleportation.'
I don't doubt that the research has demonstrated some useful phenominon, but its hard to find much excitement in a bunch of claims that 'teleportation of humans is a ways off yet.'
For a long time I was willing to concede that linux was harder to maintain for average users, but the payoff was worth it for those of us who don't mind tinkering. I'm actually starting to change my opinion, however. I have had some truly frustrating experinces with windows, and particularly with helping others sort out their problems. Configuring linux may take some time and learning, but if you work for a small company with employees using both linux and windows and you happen to be the unofficial guy that everyone turns to when something goes wrong on their box, you find that fixing a problem under windows is just as hard or harder than wwith linux. Largely because windows has almost no logging or informative error messages, I am much happier AND more efficient helping someone fix strange behavior under linux than any flavor of windows.
Yeah, so we have the law of indeterminacy preventing encryption cracking, blah, blah blah.
But if we are going to consider laws of quantum mechanics, we only have a finite (less than 100%) chance of detecting the photon. So the LED will have to emmit multiple photon so there is a 100% chance of detection.
But then the indeterminacy law breaks down, doesn't it?
A massive black hole this close to Earth would probably be quite useful in developing high energy procedures, and also as a interstellar navigational tool, since it could be use to perform very effective "gravity whip" manoevres, such as are used by NASA deep space probes.
Well, thats all well and good, but it would still take 40,000 years for light to get there, let alone a probe traveling much slower. I think we can safely say this won't get much use as a gravity sling-shot anytime soon.
As far as an energy source, a black whole doesn't really offer much (that I know of) that any other mass out there would. I think we are better off trying to capture the energy of a much closer object, the sun. Hey, its green too, even if it is fusion.:-) The more exciting thing about this is that since it is relatively close, it will be easier to resolve with telescopes the miscellaneous things that go on around a black hole. We can learn a lot about how the universe works from watching how stuff falls into it and what things come shooting out from near the event horizon.
umm, maybe you should actually read the article. Its not clear to me that Dell is now 'cool with linux'.
I do agree that I will probably always build my own systems, but it was nice to see one of the really big suppliers offering linux. Dell did that for a while. You could select redhat instead of win when you ordered a system. In august, they quit doing that, and if you read the article, its not as if they are about to start again.
One of the old worries of Dynamic memory, ages ago, was that some cosmic particle could corrupt it, not that I've ever seen evidence of this happening, maybe it was just BS.
I just have to point out that Cosmic rays are probably not the cause. There are many causes for randomness, and especially when dealing with particles, these radnom factors become more important. Remember that all of quantum mechanics is based on probablities, not absolutes.
This is from the Jargon File: Factual note: Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not (except occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha particle emissions from
thorium (and to a much lesser degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly distributed through the
earth's crust, with the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that one has to design memories to withstand these hits.
JD
Re:It may not be just a joy ride...
on
Ballooning into Space
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Here is at least one of NASA's pages about balloons.
I wouldn't discount this as a hairbrain idea from some thrill seekers. If you look at the cost of launching any payloads to that altitude, it makes the cost of specialized ballons look a lot better. I'm not sure what the use of getting people up there is, but as stated in the post, there isn't much atmosphere above you and hence not much turbulance, so things like short, month-long telescope missions and other scientific observation could be done much cheaper.
If I can dig up some links I've seen about this, I'll post.
When the Hubble Telescope went up with a seriously flawed mirror, good software made it possible to get scientifically valid results without replacing the flawed optics.
Actually, good optics were used to correct flawed optics. It wasn't a software solution, but rather a corrective lens that was added to get the good results.
I just asked a Professor here at the optical sciences center if he knew of any good publications on scanner technology.. He said to check out books/papers by Leo Beiser. He has apparently written some books on Optical Scanning technology and various SPIE papers as well. This may give you a starting point for a more rigorous look at the tech behind scanning.
I think its a great idea to use cheap commercial hardware for shoestring budget experiments. But be aware that scientific grade measurement hardware are expensive for a reason, and you get what you pay for. For instance, I bought a cheap $200-$300 CCD camera for recording images from an optical microscope. It works fine if I want just pictures of what I'm seeing with my eyes, but as a measurement device, its terrible. The camera is color, but uses an array of filters such that every group of four pixels has two that record green, one red and one blue. An algorithm is then used to generate resolution and color for the image that is captured. This means that knowing the CCD pixel size doesn't mean you can take measurements in your image by simple counting pixels. You have to calibrate the system.
The same goes for your scanner. There are a ton of problems you will run accross when you try it, so just make sure that you compare the results you get in your traditional meaurement aproach with what you get using the scanner.
Working for the summer at Sandia, I receive the Snadia Daily News. I thought it was ironic that I heard about this on/. first, but whats better is that todays SDN has a blurb about the article showing up on/.
Slashdot Mirror
I have thought about this alot. Growing up in an environmentalist family, I tend towards the "leave nothing but footprints" ideals. There have been so many times in history where humans have royally fscked up a new environment by spreading disease or introducing an unchecked species with no natural predators.. But is this different?
Obviously, if there is no life there, its not as if we would be destroying a species or habitat, but how do we prove there is no life there?
We are at a unique point in the grand scheme of things because for the first time in history, we as a species have the capability to spread life beyond the bounds of our world. Life wants to spread. With this new found cpability, is it our duty to help it spread?
Now, terraforming is a bit extreme, but I really struggle with even the basic idea of wether it is ethical to, say, introduce bacteria to other worlds and give life a chance to do what it does in other places.
Well, I agree with your sentiment, but I think there is a real problem with granting patents that aren't enforcable. Mainly it eats up patent office resources and makes the process more expensive and slower for those who have legitimate patentable ideas.
Well, he does state that he wrote it in an hour. I think he intended for the quickness of his reply to carry some meaning, and then for consistency and accuracy he did not want to modify it much when he posted it to the puplic.
Heads up: You have to submit your estimate on the site linked in the story.
I went to the store a couple weeks ago looking for a 802.11b card that would work under linux (prism or similar) and was the ms cards. *shudder* Now, I wasn't about to buy one (*shudder* again), but has anyone used one of these under non-windows?
This was already covered by /. a few weeks ago, but this new space.com article does seems tohave more details.
Ah, a comment from someone who actually read the article.. nice.
I agree it was a VERY light interview. I got the impression its purpose was as much to raise some positive hype as to squelch fears.
I always wanted one of these. A solar charger that comes with converters for pda and cell phones.. neat.
I second this recomendation. Good Eats (Alton Brown) is a great show that teaches more than just how to follow a recipe, but also delves into the "why" certain ingredients are used and what they do chemically. High quality geek programming for food related stuff!
I still say that the Star Trek writers were misquoted. You can't tell me the origional script didn't say, "I am Locutus of Microsoft.."
And of course there are exceptions to every gernerality, but I bet most individuals who want to buy a computer to put linux on and are smart enough to fix their own problems will just buy a computer from some local shop or build it themselves. Dell's not where I go to get a new box. But they are a big company, and its nice to see some companies aren't completely in bed with MS.
The real win here is that Dell is trying to stand up to MS a bit.
Now as much as I hate to admit it, MS has a legitimate argument for requesting that no computers ship without an OS. They may fear that it encourages pirating of their OS. I'm sure they were pleaed as punch that it might inhibit the proliferation of linux, which is why I'm thrilled to see Dell actually find a solution without caving to MS pressure.
If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.
Because it costs nothing to send. If they get one more customer because of their spam, they probably break even. Bastards.
I really wish they wouldn't hype it up as 'teleportation.'
I don't doubt that the research has demonstrated some useful phenominon, but its hard to find much excitement in a bunch of claims that 'teleportation of humans is a ways off yet.'
Awe.. Did somebody miss a tag when posting?
For a long time I was willing to concede that linux was harder to maintain for average users, but the payoff was worth it for those of us who don't mind tinkering. I'm actually starting to change my opinion, however. I have had some truly frustrating experinces with windows, and particularly with helping others sort out their problems. Configuring linux may take some time and learning, but if you work for a small company with employees using both linux and windows and you happen to be the unofficial guy that everyone turns to when something goes wrong on their box, you find that fixing a problem under windows is just as hard or harder than wwith linux. Largely because windows has almost no logging or informative error messages, I am much happier AND more efficient helping someone fix strange behavior under linux than any flavor of windows.
JD
Yeah, so we have the law of indeterminacy preventing encryption cracking, blah, blah blah.
But if we are going to consider laws of quantum mechanics, we only have a finite (less than 100%) chance of detecting the photon. So the LED will have to emmit multiple photon so there is a 100% chance of detection.
But then the indeterminacy law breaks down, doesn't it?
Well, thats all well and good, but it would still take 40,000 years for light to get there, let alone a probe traveling much slower. I think we can safely say this won't get much use as a gravity sling-shot anytime soon.
As far as an energy source, a black whole doesn't really offer much (that I know of) that any other mass out there would. I think we are better off trying to capture the energy of a much closer object, the sun. Hey, its green too, even if it is fusion. :-) The more exciting thing about this is that since it is relatively close, it will be easier to resolve with telescopes the miscellaneous things that go on around a black hole. We can learn a lot about how the universe works from watching how stuff falls into it and what things come shooting out from near the event horizon.
JD
umm, maybe you should actually read the article. Its not clear to me that Dell is now 'cool with linux'.
I do agree that I will probably always build my own systems, but it was nice to see one of the really big suppliers offering linux. Dell did that for a while. You could select redhat instead of win when you ordered a system. In august, they quit doing that, and if you read the article, its not as if they are about to start again.
JD
One of the old worries of Dynamic memory, ages ago, was that some cosmic particle could corrupt it, not that I've ever seen evidence of this happening, maybe it was just BS.
I just have to point out that Cosmic rays are probably not the cause. There are many causes for randomness, and especially when dealing with particles, these radnom factors become more important. Remember that all of quantum mechanics is based on probablities, not absolutes.
This is from the Jargon File:
Factual note: Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not (except occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not explain random bit drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser degree uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that one has to design memories to withstand these hits.
JD
Here is at least one of NASA's pages about balloons.
I wouldn't discount this as a hairbrain idea from some thrill seekers. If you look at the cost of launching any payloads to that altitude, it makes the cost of specialized ballons look a lot better. I'm not sure what the use of getting people up there is, but as stated in the post, there isn't much atmosphere above you and hence not much turbulance, so things like short, month-long telescope missions and other scientific observation could be done much cheaper.
If I can dig up some links I've seen about this, I'll post.
Cheers,
JD
When the Hubble Telescope went up with a seriously flawed mirror, good software made it possible to get scientifically valid results without replacing the flawed optics.
Actually, good optics were used to correct flawed optics. It wasn't a software solution, but rather a corrective lens that was added to get the good results.
I just asked a Professor here at the optical sciences center if he knew of any good publications on scanner technology.. He said to check out books/papers by Leo Beiser. He has apparently written some books on Optical Scanning technology and various SPIE papers as well. This may give you a starting point for a more rigorous look at the tech behind scanning.
I think its a great idea to use cheap commercial hardware for shoestring budget experiments. But be aware that scientific grade measurement hardware are expensive for a reason, and you get what you pay for. For instance, I bought a cheap $200-$300 CCD camera for recording images from an optical microscope. It works fine if I want just pictures of what I'm seeing with my eyes, but as a measurement device, its terrible. The camera is color, but uses an array of filters such that every group of four pixels has two that record green, one red and one blue. An algorithm is then used to generate resolution and color for the image that is captured. This means that knowing the CCD pixel size doesn't mean you can take measurements in your image by simple counting pixels. You have to calibrate the system.
The same goes for your scanner. There are a ton of problems you will run accross when you try it, so just make sure that you compare the results you get in your traditional meaurement aproach with what you get using the scanner.
Good luck,
JD
Working for the summer at Sandia, I receive the Snadia Daily News. I thought it was ironic that I heard about this on /. first, but whats better is that todays SDN has a blurb about the article showing up on /.
There's a loop for ya,
JD