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User: woxingma

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  1. Re:bad press for the state itself. on NC Man Fined For Using Vegetable Oil As Fuel · · Score: 1

    The News and Observer is not a small paper by any means. Growing up near Raleigh, it was the only real newspaper around (I never even heard of The Charlotte Observer). So if if western NC never hears of this, Central NC sure will, and heck, that is where the legislature meets anyway. Don't give up on old NC yet!

  2. Re:Yay! on Funding Cut For Arecibo Observatory · · Score: 1

    Uh, but the NSF as a whole might be allotted less money this year than in, say, 2000, as a result of other Federal costs.

    You're absolutely right, but currently other federal costs are NOT as big an influence as the looming, gigantic costs of future projects. Sure the government could stop funding wars or some such and give more money (or cut less), but since that's not gonna happen, the reality is that when working with a limited budget the old's gotta give way to the new.

  3. Re:Yay! on Funding Cut For Arecibo Observatory · · Score: 1

    Actually, the NSF senior review is not trying to shift money to other projects. It's only trying to decided how to use the money they DO have in light of future projects. The reality is that Arecibo gets the axe because a large portion of the astronomical community wants a 50-m class telescope to be built. Why it gets picked instead of some smaller optical telescopes is because most astronomers observe in the optical. That's just the facts.

  4. Re:No offense... on Funding Cut For Arecibo Observatory · · Score: 1

    Errr, it's not a super-huge radio, it's a super huge radio TELESCOPE. It's used mostly to map out things like neutral hydrogen in our galaxy and others to try and understand galactic structure and formation. It's as important to Astronomy as say the subaru telescope (in my sort-of biased opinion).

  5. Re:Dark Spot on Uranus? on Hubble Discovers Dark Spot on Uranus · · Score: 1

    The reason this is so eventful is because when Voyager 2 swept passed Uranus, there was a whole lot of nothing going on. It is only recently that we've seen glipses of the atmosphere kicking up a bit and these are the first good visible (vs. infrared) images that show a storm. The key is trying to understand why this global climatic change occurs. (It most likely has to do with the huge tilt of Uranus's rotation axis.)

  6. Re:Just goes to show... on Strange New 'Twin' Worlds Found · · Score: 1

    And the fact is no real astronomer really cares what you categorize the suckers to be. We just wanna figure out how these low-mass bodies came about. Honestly, I'd bet less astronomers are disturbed or surprised by this discovery than they were when "hot jupiters" were discovered. That REALLY threw a wrench in the works! This is just icing on that delicious cake of discovery!
    1

  7. Clearplay on Cutting out the Naughty Bits Ruled Illegal · · Score: 1

    Exactly, fair-use is how http://www.clearplay.com/ gets around it. You are just paying someone else to tell you how to "slice it up". (it's done by downloading the appriate filter to the special clearplay dvd player, which then skips the filtered parts). The orginal dvd is left intact.