What IS surprising, is that there is no image - not even the obligatory 100-pixel-across thumbnail, which links to a lame-ass 200-pixel-across "Large Picture". I am very interested in seeing this thing - so where the bloody hell is it?
So unless most airspace is declared class B, it's not really an issue. I really don't think the FAA / ATC want to deal with the millions of clearance requests, etc they'd encounter if they did something so drastic.
Ah, but if you've been paying attention the past few years, the FAA and the major airlines seem hellbent on removing general aviation from the US altogether (closing non-airline airports, insisting on implementing per request fees for ATC, trying to ground all aircraft built before the last few decades. And don't get me started on the stupidity of every major city wanting a Washington D.C. style Air Defense Identificaton Zone). I suspect having nothing flying anywhere near the ground except governemnt controled drones would suit them just fine.
What's more likely is that they'll swiss-cheese the airspace with temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) around areas where the drones operate. Presumably they could become so numerous as to make private flight planning a bit difficult.
Besides, indie music and films are much better, so it's not like I've been missing much.
No, it's really not. The vast majority of it is much, much worse. But there's a lot more of it, so the odds are good if you look hard enough you will find something that is better - or at least something that you like more.
(Very long essay on current and classical ways of paying for entertainment and art deleted. It's been said more concisely, and probably better, by way too many others.)
Er, right. In summary, everyone should be able to enjoy whatever they happen to like, the performers and creators need to be compensated, and any system where anyone in the chain makes more than an artist is hopelessly corrupt and can only be sustained for any length of time by tyranny.
You obviously never graded any of my homework. As an undergrad or graduate student. Or published journal articles. There's no official abbreviation, but it gets abbreviated 90% of the time. Like with seconds (s, sec, or even " seen frequently. Of course the last IS offical when describing divisions of an arc.) 'Lyrs' is also common.
If there's observing time available on a 10-meter ground-based telescope, you'd better believe there will be competition for that observing time, and papers will be published. But if really amazing things are going to be discovered, it's probably going to come from techniques that are a big leap ahead of what we have now, like telescopes in space. Telescopes in space can have apertures as big as you like without buckling under their own weight, they can probe parts of the spectrum that don't get through the atmosphere, and they're not affected by issues like clouds and contrails.
If the cost of building and operating a telescope in space were the same as on the ground then this would be dead on - all the advantages are above the atmosphere. But it's not. You can't have apertures "as big as you like" in the real world. The launch costs are, er, astronomical for even a small telescope. And what most people forget is that a research telescope is more like a fighter jet than a television set: an hour of observing by one astronomer requires ten hours or more in maintanence by a small army of technicians. Until we have a permanenet manned workforce in orbit or on the moon it will still be more affordable to build gigantic telescopes on Earth instead of small ones in space. Except for wavelengths that you can't observe from the ground.
I don't find it hard to believe that contrails could be a major issue. Every time I go backpacking and spend a lot of time in a remote spot in the Seirras looking up at the sky, that's what I see a lot of -- jet contrails. If ground-based astronomy is already being pushed to the limits of what it can do, then presumably they're often working at levels of sensitivity a gazillion orders of magnitude beyond the naked eye, so I can easily imagine that contrails that would appear to the naked eye to have completely dissipated could be an issue.
You're right. Contrails have a surprisingly drastic effect on climate. This was shown pretty well over the days that flights in the US were all grounded immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
I don't have a reference, but I've heard several times that the temperature of of Pheonix, AZ drops by 15 degrees Fahrenheit everytime there's a power outage. That additional 15 degrees the rest of the time is heating from all of the air condioner exhaust. Astounding how easy it is to make drastic changes to the (local) climate.
For those of us in the old world, I reckon the possible Alexander connection is the interesting bit. Maybe a re-titling of the headline to reflect this? 4th century BCE walls and remains? got them all over the place. Maybe the date is more exciting to folks whose archaeological records only stretch back a couple of hundred years;-)
Every continent except Antartica has archaelogical records stretching back more than a few hundred years. Architectural records, too - which is what I think you meant to imply.
Or did you mean that if a city wasn't built by white people it doesn't count? I cheap shot at us Americans is all in fun, but even in the United States we have ruins dating more than 1000 years. (Fort Ancient, Kahokia, Chaco Canyon, etc.) Unfortunately Our ancestors shared your prejudice, as most of them were torn down for farmland. And old books are full of scholarly arguments about how Europeans could have sailed across the ocean, built the cities, then suddenly vanished - because all the obviously Indian burials and household goods found at the sites HAD to come from later squatters, and not the "civilized" builders.
Bronze coins from the period of Theodosius, the 4th-century AD Byzantine Emperor who abolished the ancient Olympic Games, were also found hidden inside the wall.
Sounds like the wall was under construction for over 800 years. Or the later Romans did some extensive modifications.
Totally unrelated except for the name. If I recall correctly they both had explantions for that on their respective websites, back in the day. Essentially it was just two separate groups of nerds thinking of the same name for themselves at the same time.
The fact you can zoom in, to the highest zoom level, anywhere in the US... and the roads line up with the satellite maps.. is amazing.
Not quite. Everyplace I look at in the satellite views never have the highest view zoom resolutions available. Outside of the largest metropolitan areas coverage is not quite as reliable. For instance they show my house as being at the wrong end of my street. (What it claims is my house is a small apartment building.)
China is really big and really powerful. They're so big and powerful they can tell MS to shove it. And they can tell the US to shove it. If or when China changes, it will be because Chinese people do it. No one is going to push them into doing anything they don't want to do.
And would they go to such great lengths to suppress the concepts of things like "freedom" and "democracy" if those in power didn't fear that a sizable amount of their people wanted to decide what was best for China? I hate to sound like the old codger, but some of us still remember Tiananmen Square.
And if you think that foreign corporations can't have any influence on wealthy nations that chose to subjugate their people history disagrees.
"Same goes for carbon which is why if a planet's not drenched in water, ten to one it's flooded with methane or some other hydrocarbon."
I wouldn't take THAT bet! The only place we know of in the solar system which is "flooded with hydrocarbons" is Titan. An absence of water is absolutely by no means a determinant factor in whether a world has lots of hydrocarbons! (eg. Venus, the Moon, Mercury, Io, Phobos, Neptune, Jupiter...... all have no water and NO huge amounts of hydrocarbons!) The solar system seldom lends itself to easy characterization by the application of overly simple maxims of the sort you seem to have affection toward.
Really- no water and no hydrocarbons on Jupiter, huh? So what, pray tell, are these swirling bands of dark stuff that I'm seeing?
'The project was led by Robert Brunner, who was Apple's chief designer from 1989 to 1996, and who oversaw the design of the PowerBook line, among many other hit products.'"
He must be a design genius- 89-96 were such wonderful years for Apple!
This is a great discovery, but only for what it tells us about what things were like 32,000 years ago. Everytime something like this is discovered everybody immediately jumps up and down about life on Mars. At this point it's pretty damn clear that life has found ways to survive everywhere on Earth from the highest clouds to somewhere around the planet's core. But it didn't start there. All of these discoveries are the harshest possible environments on Earth- but they're more like the best conditions on Mars. In fact each new discovery makes the odds of finding life on Mars less- if it's so easy to find life in such amazingly cold and barren conditions why have we still found nothing on Mars that isn't, at best, something that isn't easily made by simple geological (areological?) chemical processes? (But also, sometimes, are by-products of living things.)
Then again no one's gotten a chance to really peak under any Martian rocks. Yet...
In reply to my own post, what we WERE told to do was buy more two, or even three different kinds of locks. All bike locks are easily defeated, but a thief probably would skip yours as being too much of a hassle to have to overcome all the different types. Especially since the bike parked next to yours probably just had a single chain or u-bolt.
At my freshman orientation at Ohio State in 1993 we we told about this on the first day by the RAs. I'm really surprised at seeing the cycling community react with total shock to this. I also can't believe the manufacturers weren't aware of the problem a decade ago, since it seemed to be pretty well known then.
He adds that when the FDA eight years ago began allowing off-the-shelf software in medical devices, it didn't foresee the kinds of security issues, such as computer worms, that plague networks.
This is just too stupid to be believed.
There have been several instances in which viruses originated from medical instruments straight from the vendors, says Bill Bailey, enterprise architect at ProHealth Care, a Milwaukee healthcare provider. Medical equipment arrived with computer viruses on it or service technicians introduced the viruses while maintaining the equipment, he says.
Does any vendor check this stuff before they ship it out the door? And what are the service technicians doing - downloading pr0n on someone's dialysis machine? The levels of incompetence and criminal negligence it would require for worms to get into patient care equipment are staggering to contemplate. If you so much as think of checking your hotmail account on that laptop Phillips gave you to diagnose equipment you should be fired. I can see doctors' and staffs' office computers being easy pickings, but the same security holes exisitng in equipment used in any actual medical capacity is the kind of disregard for life that I thought corporations only possesed in bad comicbook movies.
I'm not a Dr. Who fan at all, but I read the headline as "Dr Who, Daleks, Kiss and Makeup". That imagined comma made me think for a minute that KISS were getting involved. I've been wondering why they never made another move...
I have a 17" Powerbook G4 and the battery life is really remarkable. I thought for sure that I'd have to run such a beast on AC all the time, but after a year it seems I rarely plug the thing in at all (increased wireless internet availability has also played a big part.) Some activities drain the battery much quicker than others, but I know that I've watched entire DVDs and had plenty of juice left in the battery. Playing games for an hour or so I think has been the biggest drain.
One of the things Newton prided himself on was his virginity. Despite being married, he claimed to be a virgin up until his death.
I can see a few options for this.
1. Being the ubergeek of his time, he simply couldn't get laid.
2. He was lying.
3. He was confused as to what 'virgin' meant.
4. He was gay.
Now, I should mention that, for #4 to hold true, he'd either have had to not act on his impulses, or to have defined sex as being between a man and a woman. I think the latter's probably quite likely.
So depicting Newton as gay, while potentially controversial, isn't entirely improbable.
I don't have a history book in front of me, but to the best of my knowledge Newton never married. I think he mayhave proposed to a woman once, but was rejected. I think the evidence comes from one letter that isn't really clear.
Newton had several roommates, all young men except for late in his life he took in his niece. Many accounts by others from that time seem to strongly imply that there were romantic relationships between Newton and one or two men, but most likely he did maintain his virginity until he died. Although the suggestion that he strictly regarded that as being between a man and a woman sounds very probable, also.
If someone can recall more details, or better yet has a reliable biography handy please post. But I'm pretty damn certain Sir Isaac never had a Lady Newton.
Interesting. Everyone seems to have immediately thought of this being used by retailers besides the obvious document watermarking. My first thought was the entertainment industry would love something like this: DVDs, CDs, and whatever's next (especially whatever's next!) that can only be played on RFID enabled devices, and such devices that only read RFID printed media.
Next front for 21st century hackers: chemistry, bio, and molecular physics. Will the next DeCSS be a protein chain?
Slashdot Mirror
What IS surprising, is that there is no image - not even the obligatory 100-pixel-across thumbnail, which links to a lame-ass 200-pixel-across "Large Picture". I am very interested in seeing this thing - so where the bloody hell is it?
Picture courtesy of New Scientist.
Ah, but if you've been paying attention the past few years, the FAA and the major airlines seem hellbent on removing general aviation from the US altogether (closing non-airline airports, insisting on implementing per request fees for ATC, trying to ground all aircraft built before the last few decades. And don't get me started on the stupidity of every major city wanting a Washington D.C. style Air Defense Identificaton Zone). I suspect having nothing flying anywhere near the ground except governemnt controled drones would suit them just fine.
What's more likely is that they'll swiss-cheese the airspace with temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) around areas where the drones operate. Presumably they could become so numerous as to make private flight planning a bit difficult.Or they'll just make private flying illegal.
Besides, indie music and films are much better, so it's not like I've been missing much.
No, it's really not. The vast majority of it is much, much worse. But there's a lot more of it, so the odds are good if you look hard enough you will find something that is better - or at least something that you like more.
(Very long essay on current and classical ways of paying for entertainment and art deleted. It's been said more concisely, and probably better, by way too many others.)
Er, right. In summary, everyone should be able to enjoy whatever they happen to like, the performers and creators need to be compensated, and any system where anyone in the chain makes more than an artist is hopelessly corrupt and can only be sustained for any length of time by tyranny.
You obviously never graded any of my homework. As an undergrad or graduate student. Or published journal articles. There's no official abbreviation, but it gets abbreviated 90% of the time. Like with seconds (s, sec, or even " seen frequently. Of course the last IS offical when describing divisions of an arc.) 'Lyrs' is also common.
If the cost of building and operating a telescope in space were the same as on the ground then this would be dead on - all the advantages are above the atmosphere. But it's not. You can't have apertures "as big as you like" in the real world. The launch costs are, er, astronomical for even a small telescope. And what most people forget is that a research telescope is more like a fighter jet than a television set: an hour of observing by one astronomer requires ten hours or more in maintanence by a small army of technicians. Until we have a permanenet manned workforce in orbit or on the moon it will still be more affordable to build gigantic telescopes on Earth instead of small ones in space. Except for wavelengths that you can't observe from the ground.
I don't find it hard to believe that contrails could be a major issue. Every time I go backpacking and spend a lot of time in a remote spot in the Seirras looking up at the sky, that's what I see a lot of -- jet contrails. If ground-based astronomy is already being pushed to the limits of what it can do, then presumably they're often working at levels of sensitivity a gazillion orders of magnitude beyond the naked eye, so I can easily imagine that contrails that would appear to the naked eye to have completely dissipated could be an issue.You're right. Contrails have a surprisingly drastic effect on climate. This was shown pretty well over the days that flights in the US were all grounded immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
I don't have a reference, but I've heard several times that the temperature of of Pheonix, AZ drops by 15 degrees Fahrenheit everytime there's a power outage. That additional 15 degrees the rest of the time is heating from all of the air condioner exhaust. Astounding how easy it is to make drastic changes to the (local) climate.
From TFA (er, press release):
Legendary fantasy artist Brian Froud, designer of the original film, will return to design the new characters.The only person missing is Jim... and he could be anywhere.
Every continent except Antartica has archaelogical records stretching back more than a few hundred years. Architectural records, too - which is what I think you meant to imply.
Or did you mean that if a city wasn't built by white people it doesn't count? I cheap shot at us Americans is all in fun, but even in the United States we have ruins dating more than 1000 years. (Fort Ancient, Kahokia, Chaco Canyon, etc.) Unfortunately Our ancestors shared your prejudice, as most of them were torn down for farmland. And old books are full of scholarly arguments about how Europeans could have sailed across the ocean, built the cities, then suddenly vanished - because all the obviously Indian burials and household goods found at the sites HAD to come from later squatters, and not the "civilized" builders.
From TFA:
Bronze coins from the period of Theodosius, the 4th-century AD Byzantine Emperor who abolished the ancient Olympic Games, were also found hidden inside the wall.
Sounds like the wall was under construction for over 800 years. Or the later Romans did some extensive modifications.
I think you meant Olympus Mons. Mons Veneris is something completely different...
Totally unrelated except for the name. If I recall correctly they both had explantions for that on their respective websites, back in the day. Essentially it was just two separate groups of nerds thinking of the same name for themselves at the same time.
Not quite. Everyplace I look at in the satellite views never have the highest view zoom resolutions available. Outside of the largest metropolitan areas coverage is not quite as reliable. For instance they show my house as being at the wrong end of my street. (What it claims is my house is a small apartment building.)
China is really big and really powerful. They're so big and powerful they can tell MS to shove it. And they can tell the US to shove it. If or when China changes, it will be because Chinese people do it. No one is going to push them into doing anything they don't want to do.
And would they go to such great lengths to suppress the concepts of things like "freedom" and "democracy" if those in power didn't fear that a sizable amount of their people wanted to decide what was best for China? I hate to sound like the old codger, but some of us still remember Tiananmen Square.
And if you think that foreign corporations can't have any influence on wealthy nations that chose to subjugate their people history disagrees.
Really- no water and no hydrocarbons on Jupiter, huh? So what, pray tell, are these swirling bands of dark stuff that I'm seeing?
He must be a design genius- 89-96 were such wonderful years for Apple!
This is a great discovery, but only for what it tells us about what things were like 32,000 years ago. Everytime something like this is discovered everybody immediately jumps up and down about life on Mars. At this point it's pretty damn clear that life has found ways to survive everywhere on Earth from the highest clouds to somewhere around the planet's core. But it didn't start there. All of these discoveries are the harshest possible environments on Earth- but they're more like the best conditions on Mars. In fact each new discovery makes the odds of finding life on Mars less- if it's so easy to find life in such amazingly cold and barren conditions why have we still found nothing on Mars that isn't, at best, something that isn't easily made by simple geological (areological?) chemical processes? (But also, sometimes, are by-products of living things.)
Then again no one's gotten a chance to really peak under any Martian rocks. Yet...
Sweeeeeeeeeeeet.
I thought that was why he grew the sideburns...
In reply to my own post, what we WERE told to do was buy more two, or even three different kinds of locks. All bike locks are easily defeated, but a thief probably would skip yours as being too much of a hassle to have to overcome all the different types. Especially since the bike parked next to yours probably just had a single chain or u-bolt.
At my freshman orientation at Ohio State in 1993 we we told about this on the first day by the RAs. I'm really surprised at seeing the cycling community react with total shock to this. I also can't believe the manufacturers weren't aware of the problem a decade ago, since it seemed to be pretty well known then.
This is just too stupid to be believed.
There have been several instances in which viruses originated from medical instruments straight from the vendors, says Bill Bailey, enterprise architect at ProHealth Care, a Milwaukee healthcare provider. Medical equipment arrived with computer viruses on it or service technicians introduced the viruses while maintaining the equipment, he says.Does any vendor check this stuff before they ship it out the door? And what are the service technicians doing - downloading pr0n on someone's dialysis machine? The levels of incompetence and criminal negligence it would require for worms to get into patient care equipment are staggering to contemplate. If you so much as think of checking your hotmail account on that laptop Phillips gave you to diagnose equipment you should be fired. I can see doctors' and staffs' office computers being easy pickings, but the same security holes exisitng in equipment used in any actual medical capacity is the kind of disregard for life that I thought corporations only possesed in bad comicbook movies.
I'm not a Dr. Who fan at all, but I read the headline as "Dr Who, Daleks, Kiss and Makeup". That imagined comma made me think for a minute that KISS were getting involved. I've been wondering why they never made another move ...
I have a 17" Powerbook G4 and the battery life is really remarkable. I thought for sure that I'd have to run such a beast on AC all the time, but after a year it seems I rarely plug the thing in at all (increased wireless internet availability has also played a big part.) Some activities drain the battery much quicker than others, but I know that I've watched entire DVDs and had plenty of juice left in the battery. Playing games for an hour or so I think has been the biggest drain.
I don't have a history book in front of me, but to the best of my knowledge Newton never married. I think he mayhave proposed to a woman once, but was rejected. I think the evidence comes from one letter that isn't really clear.
Newton had several roommates, all young men except for late in his life he took in his niece. Many accounts by others from that time seem to strongly imply that there were romantic relationships between Newton and one or two men, but most likely he did maintain his virginity until he died. Although the suggestion that he strictly regarded that as being between a man and a woman sounds very probable, also.
If someone can recall more details, or better yet has a reliable biography handy please post. But I'm pretty damn certain Sir Isaac never had a Lady Newton.
A story about nerds who get picked on, are really good at videogames, and have a messiah complex? I think I read that daily on slashdot.
Interesting. Everyone seems to have immediately thought of this being used by retailers besides the obvious document watermarking. My first thought was the entertainment industry would love something like this: DVDs, CDs, and whatever's next (especially whatever's next!) that can only be played on RFID enabled devices, and such devices that only read RFID printed media.
Next front for 21st century hackers: chemistry, bio, and molecular physics. Will the next DeCSS be a protein chain?