The answer is that the North Martian Pole is the one pointing in much the same way as the Earth's North Pole.
Not quite. While it's true that Mars' north pole points in the same general direction as Earth's, north is determined by the direction of spin, not the magnetic field or the orientation of the axis. For example, Venus doesn't have a magnetic field to speak of either, but it is considered to have retrograde rotation because it spins in the opposite sense of most of the other planets. The sun flips its magnetic field every 11 years, so the north magnetic pole swaps places, but the north rotational pole does not. The north pole is the one about which the planet seems to rotate counterclockwise (right hand rule).
I work in TV where commercials pay the freight. Is this so wrong on the net?
Not so much that it's wrong, as it's a turnoff. Ads are the main reason I don't watch much TV (I will endure them mainly for the Simpsons and certain sporting events). It's not that I'm such an idealist or purist or whatever. The ads just bug the hell out of me, and most of the content isn't worth it.
On the web, as long as there are choices without intrusive ads, I will take them. And there always will be. Sure, maybe good content will occasionally drive me to an overly ad-ridden site, but in general I will avoid them. Look at what happened to Salon. I used to read it when it was free, then stopped when they went all subscription. Now that you can get a day pass (for free!) by watching a long annoying ad, I hardly ever do it. It's not worth it, there is better stuff elsewhere that I can read without the hassle.
PS I also think TV channels could draw more viewers with fewer commercials. Maybe it's not worth it to them in terms of the bottom line, but I'm sure it's true.
First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
5. Price. For once, Apple is not selling the most expensive product on the market. The iPod sells for very little above what the HD alone would sell for.
Unfortunately, that's not really true. I looked at getting an iPod when I was shopping for external firewire drives, but since storage was my primary need I couldn't justify getting 1/4 the storage for the same price as an 80 GB La Cie PocketDrive. It is just a hard drive, but it is about the same size as an iPod and much cheaper. You do pay a premium to get the slick MP3 player built into the iPod (not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not what I needed).
The Moon is a like Antarctica, Mars is more like northern Canada - difficult, but liveable.
Well, no. Mars is like Antarctica, but harsher. Take an Antarctic dry valley, subtract 99% of the atmospheric pressure, all of the oxygen, and bombard it with radiation (no magnetic field or ozone layer, remember), and take away any traces of surface water (at least). That's getting close. Sort of makes northern Canada look like paradise.
Living on Mars would be a lot more like living on the Moon than it would be like living in Antarctica. No going outside without a pressure suit. Bring your own oxygen and water, or manufacture it somehow. Protect yourself from radiation. But Mars is months away from rescue or supplies from Earth, unlike the Moon.
Please stop confusing energy and momentum. Thermodynamics refers to energy. Momentum does not transform into heat. Both energy and momentum are conserved; what seems to be confusing you is that some kinetic energy can (indeed will) be "lost" as thermal energy. The momentum is not lost; it could be traded back and forth between the atmosphere and the solid earth.
Read up on elastic and inelastic collisions, for example. Momentum is conserved in both. Kinetic energy is conserved in an elastic collision, but not in an inelastic one.
The problem is that these are all incomplete, and don't keep up with each other. If someone starts another, please comb through these sites and take user comments on reliability, continued existence, free/price, etc.
RAID is not a full replacement for backups. It can protect you against single disk failure, but can't help you retrieve that file you accidently deleted last week, or recover your system if it gets trashed by filesystem corruption or malicious hackers.
All the methodology is there, so quit whining about it being missing. The Wildlife Conservation Society article is just a summary of this peer-reviewed scientific paper. They didn't just pull the numbers out of a hat, and they include things like distance from roads. Also, they say that grazing lands are difficult to map, and most likely underestimated in this study. Even the American West isn't free of the influence of humans in the great "empty" stretches; it's almost all been roaded, grazed, logged and/or mined. Not to mention all the rivers being dammed.
User friendliness is just not the same thing for a newbie and an expert user. Interfaces that are both intuitive and efficient are very rare. Having spent time on the learning curve of Emacs, now I can get things done more quickly within Emacs than I ever could in a point & click editor. It's not intuitive, but it is extremely efficient. Debian is sort of like that; once you understand how it works, it requires less effort to mantain than other distributions - that's why it's worth learning. apt-get is a timesaver, though not necessarily user-friendly for newbies.
I don't mean to imply that Debian's install process couldn't be improved without impairing the distribution's usability for experts. It certainly could be better.
I think the funniest thing about the Onion article is the assertion that a 30-liter Coke would weigh 274 pounds. Or maybe the container itself is supposed to weigh 208 lbs.
Absolutely false when applied to the United States. The most pristine land in the US is owned by the federal government, and protected by the Wilderness Act of 1964. Over 100 million acres are protected ("untrammeled by man"), over half of it in Alaska.
In recent decades, in developed countries, protection of the environment has come by the direct action of government, not despite it as your philosophy holds.
I give money to NPR because they are a nonprofit corporation that I am happy to support. I am not going to donate money to a for-profit corporation out of the goodness of my heart. If the shareholders of VA Linux want to make a profit from me, they will have to provide me with a service that I am willing to pay for, not come around jingling a cup twice a year to beg for money.
I can see the donation model working to support the expenses and personnel of a non-profit website, but it's not a very good business model for a corporate one, which is what/. is now. Why would anyone want to "donate" money to stockholders? Value-added subscriptions are another thing entirely. I can't say that I like them, but I would pay for one that I saw was valuable enough (though I've pretty much stopped reading Salon since most of their news went subscription only).
We've got AT&T @home, which requires special windows only software to run,
Not true, AT&T @Home comes with special Windows software, but the network connection is accessible from any OS, just needs a DHCP client. I set it up on a Debian Sparc box and never used the Windows CD...
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. While it's true that Mars' north pole points in the same general direction as Earth's, north is determined by the direction of spin, not the magnetic field or the orientation of the axis. For example, Venus doesn't have a magnetic field to speak of either, but it is considered to have retrograde rotation because it spins in the opposite sense of most of the other planets. The sun flips its magnetic field every 11 years, so the north magnetic pole swaps places, but the north rotational pole does not. The north pole is the one about which the planet seems to rotate counterclockwise (right hand rule).
Not so much that it's wrong, as it's a turnoff. Ads are the main reason I don't watch much TV (I will endure them mainly for the Simpsons and certain sporting events). It's not that I'm such an idealist or purist or whatever. The ads just bug the hell out of me, and most of the content isn't worth it.
On the web, as long as there are choices without intrusive ads, I will take them. And there always will be. Sure, maybe good content will occasionally drive me to an overly ad-ridden site, but in general I will avoid them. Look at what happened to Salon. I used to read it when it was free, then stopped when they went all subscription. Now that you can get a day pass (for free!) by watching a long annoying ad, I hardly ever do it. It's not worth it, there is better stuff elsewhere that I can read without the hassle.
PS I also think TV channels could draw more viewers with fewer commercials. Maybe it's not worth it to them in terms of the bottom line, but I'm sure it's true.
In the 1960's, it took us under 9 years from Kennedy's pledge to land on the moon.
Now we can do it in 11!
Umm, a naive Bayesian filter would score duplicate posts highly, because after all they contain all the same words that were good last time.
This definition of democracy void the United States of America. Other restrictions apply.
Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor for The New Republic and a fellow of the Brookings Institution. He just happens to write one of the smartest sports columns around as a sidelight.
Well, no. Mars is like Antarctica, but harsher. Take an Antarctic dry valley, subtract 99% of the atmospheric pressure, all of the oxygen, and bombard it with radiation (no magnetic field or ozone layer, remember), and take away any traces of surface water (at least). That's getting close. Sort of makes northern Canada look like paradise.
Living on Mars would be a lot more like living on the Moon than it would be like living in Antarctica. No going outside without a pressure suit. Bring your own oxygen and water, or manufacture it somehow. Protect yourself from radiation. But Mars is months away from rescue or supplies from Earth, unlike the Moon.
Please stop confusing energy and momentum. Thermodynamics refers to energy. Momentum does not transform into heat. Both energy and momentum are conserved; what seems to be confusing you is that some kinetic energy can (indeed will) be "lost" as thermal energy. The momentum is not lost; it could be traded back and forth between the atmosphere and the solid earth.
Read up on elastic and inelastic collisions, for example. Momentum is conserved in both. Kinetic energy is conserved in an elastic collision, but not in an inelastic one.
Well, yes, neat trick, saves you from putting the wires in.
But this guy already has the wires.
Maybe it would be easier for him to use them.
OpenNodes
The Wi-Fi FreeSpot Network
NodeDB
80211hotspots.com
The problem is that these are all incomplete, and don't keep up with each other. If someone starts another, please comb through these sites and take user comments on reliability, continued existence, free/price, etc.
Sure you can.
Congress: "Here's a ton of money. Hire a bunch of smart people and pay them to put some time and energy into it."
RAID is not a full replacement for backups. It can protect you against single disk failure, but can't help you retrieve that file you accidently deleted last week, or recover your system if it gets trashed by filesystem corruption or malicious hackers.
Read the article, look for this reference at the end:
Sanderson, EW. et. al.2002. The Human Footprint and the Last of the Wild. Bioscience 52 (10).891-904.
All the methodology is there, so quit whining about it being missing. The Wildlife Conservation Society article is just a summary of this peer-reviewed scientific paper. They didn't just pull the numbers out of a hat, and they include things like distance from roads. Also, they say that grazing lands are difficult to map, and most likely underestimated in this study. Even the American West isn't free of the influence of humans in the great "empty" stretches; it's almost all been roaded, grazed, logged and/or mined. Not to mention all the rivers being dammed.
User friendliness is just not the same thing for a newbie and an expert user. Interfaces that are both intuitive and efficient are very rare. Having spent time on the learning curve of Emacs, now I can get things done more quickly within Emacs than I ever could in a point & click editor. It's not intuitive, but it is extremely efficient. Debian is sort of like that; once you understand how it works, it requires less effort to mantain than other distributions - that's why it's worth learning. apt-get is a timesaver, though not necessarily user-friendly for newbies.
I don't mean to imply that Debian's install process couldn't be improved without impairing the distribution's usability for experts. It certainly could be better.
Well, that's apparently a myth. A lot of people (including doctors) have taken it on faith.
I think the funniest thing about the Onion article is the assertion that a 30-liter Coke would weigh 274 pounds. Or maybe the container itself is supposed to weigh 208 lbs.
I use GMT and USGS data to make topo maps for my GPS. I get the data from my Garmin eTrex Venture with GPSMan.
It's all free, but takes some work. See my page of details and examples.
Absolutely false when applied to the United States. The most pristine land in the US is owned by the federal government, and protected by the Wilderness Act of 1964. Over 100 million acres are protected ("untrammeled by man"), over half of it in Alaska.
In recent decades, in developed countries, protection of the environment has come by the direct action of government, not despite it as your philosophy holds.
A lot of people hack QuickCams for astronomical images. I've mostly seen images of bright objects, though. If you could put the sensor behind a large-aperture wide-angle lens you might have luck with meteors.
I hate to tell you, but I suspect most people find software litigation at least as dull as water rights or highway funding.
I give money to NPR because they are a nonprofit corporation that I am happy to support. I am not going to donate money to a for-profit corporation out of the goodness of my heart. If the shareholders of VA Linux want to make a profit from me, they will have to provide me with a service that I am willing to pay for, not come around jingling a cup twice a year to beg for money.
/. is now. Why would anyone want to "donate" money to stockholders? Value-added subscriptions are another thing entirely. I can't say that I like them, but I would pay for one that I saw was valuable enough (though I've pretty much stopped reading Salon since most of their news went subscription only).
I can see the donation model working to support the expenses and personnel of a non-profit website, but it's not a very good business model for a corporate one, which is what
Not true, AT&T @Home comes with special Windows software, but the network connection is accessible from any OS, just needs a DHCP client. I set it up on a Debian Sparc box and never used the Windows CD...