Re: Whatever next?
Marlins with Missiles?
Icon, because them Missiles be Minutemen
4255 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
IEEE allows the authors to place the material on their website, provided that IEEE copyright notice is included, and that the server prominently displays a notice alerting readers to their obligations with respect to copyrighted material. An example is this one here (bottom of page in particular). This is a very good way of doing things I feel. Elseviers is FAR more restrictive, which is why I prefer publishing with IEEE.
There is a big move towards open-access publishing. This allows anyone to access the paper, but is more costly for the authors. However, given the total cost of a typical research project, open access publishing costs are insignificant
I do not think they would make ANY mention of "improved functionality" in that case, they would simply take a page out of their version of the BOFH excuse generator for patching. After all "correcting several buffer overflow errors" sounds perfectly plausible. Maybe the vague "improvements to enhance the functionality" clause simply is a euphemism for "bricks/borks fewer machines than the previous update"
Or if you do not want to be cynical, it might refer to some modest algorithmic improvements somewhere in this huge amount of code. I have often made a series of incremental improvements to code (improving memory efficiency, slight improvements to speed, etc) in image processing and visualisation code in various releases, and not bothered to specify each and every one.
Whatever the meaning I will not be installing it on any machine of mine any time soon.
The minimum does refer to sunspots, and the total energy output of the sun does not vary much, but there is a definite correlation between sunspot activity and global temperature (spanning hundreds of years). The current understanding of the physics suggests that the weaker solar magnetic field during minimum causes more cosmic rays to penetrate the atmosphere, seeding more clouds, which increases Earth's mean albedo.
This correlation between solar activity and global temperature does not necessarily deny the existence of AGW, but no doubt it will muddle (and muddy) the discussion on AGW (yet again). Futile, really, because getting rid of dependence of fossil fuels is a good thing for many reasons besides the warming issue (as many others have noted).
What worries me (a bit) is that I have got myself a load of (expensive) solar astronomy kit, and it would be a shame if the views get boring. On the other hand, nobody knows what the sun looks like in H-alpha during the onset of a Maunder-type minimum, so recording it (IF it happens) is going to be interesting. Even a fairly quiet sun in white light can be full of drama in H-alpha, as can be seen in this shot (with Earth to scale added)
I have much the same problems on long flights, and rarely if ever manage any real shut-eye. The same holds for the sleeper-trains I have been on, alas (not so much the toddlers, but the vibrations and noise). I have had a ride on a Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto which was so amazingly smooth that I do believe I could sleep on that one.
My main concern is building a long under-sea tunnel in a tectonically active region.
You won't be saying that as you get dragged screaming towards CERN one day!
Simple conservation of mass (or equivalently energy) will tell you that the black holes formed have no more mass than the particles from which they formed. The black holes do not exert more gravitational attraction than those selfsame particles. Only if they live long enough (which they shouldn't) and have time enough to accrete more mass could they pose any danger. The very same theory that predicts their formation suggests they should decay before this happens. A scenario like in Larry Niven's "The Hole Man" is perhaps not impossible, but very, very, improbable.
What you should not do is work out the exact improbability, and feed that into an infinite improbability drive, of course.
I just love these missions, they put me in mind of the excitement of the Viking, Pioneer, and Voyager missions to planets in my youth (not to mention the Apollo program I followed avidly as a kid). These blurry-but-best-yet images of Pluto are really thrilling. Cannot wait to see the results of the flyby
I remember pointing out Mars to my kids a few years back, and they were reasonably impressed at the red appearance. I then told them that two robot cars from earth were trundling about on that red dot in the sky (Curiosity had not yet landed). That lit up their imagination. For that alone I am very thankful to the engineers at NASA.
Kids! The beer is for dad, and for the engineers, not for you two!!
I always find it interesting that people who see copyright only as a barrier are those who have created little themselves. Many people (like me) own copyright to stuff and explicitly state that anyone can use it freely, often through variants of the BSD, GPL, CC, or my favourite, the Free Beverage License (You can use it, but you owe me a drink next time). Alternatively, educational or other non-profit use is allowed. However, it is my choice.
People that create something very many people want to copy, are special in a way. Anybody else might have made it, but they didn't. Special or not, they are within their rights to say others cannot use it without my permission. The fact that it is much easier now to copy works than it has ever been before does not change that right per se. Let us not forget that that same ease of copying has lead to unprecedented generosity as well, as witnessed by the load of free stuff available today.
In the unlikely case the above is of use, please feel free to use any of the above, and you don't even have to buy e a drink ;-)
it might commit hara-kiri on seeing some of the code I have had to grade, and, to be brutally honest, have written at some points in time. Scientific code is often VERY ugly (but, hey, the article is documentation enough, isn't it? ;-) )
*GPP: Genuine People Personality is a registered trademark of Sirius Cybernetics. Please only use after clearance with the Sirius Cybernetics Complaints Division. Share and Enjoy!!
OK, just to freak out the Vegans (or is it Vogons):
Can they guarantee that all the fossil bits in fossil fuel needed to make plastic is purely plant derived. I bet there are quite some hydrocarbons of animal origin in there; animals who quite likely (given the nature of natural death) suffered a horrible death, were crushed under tonnes and tonnes of rock for eons, their bodies slowly liquifying, only to be recycled as toys for a bunch of arrogant bipedal semi-hairless apes! The horrror, the HORROR!!!!!!
True, progress is often made by eliminating most of the ways of getting it wrong. I tend to get an uneasy feeling when something I have built (or programmed for that matter) works perfectly at the first test. You are left with the awkward feeling that things might blow up in your face later.
Hence the icon
Let's hope it doesn't say "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle", and ends up in the hands of the Vl'hurgs (although a small dog might once again come to the rescue)
OK, time to go, the one with the cassette tapes of the radio play in the pocket, please
Things do change rapidly. I still have an 8" floppy (128 kB!!) with (supposing the magnetic layer hasn't degraded) CP/M 2.0 on it used in one of the first computers I used for image processing. I now think nothing of filling 80GB of disk space with solar data in the space of 10-15 minutes and then grumble the PC is taking a few hours to chug through that mass of data.
Blue,....
No, RED!!
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
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And now for something completely different:
I could imagine some online forms choking on Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch as a place of birth
Coat please! Mine is the one with the souvenir ruler from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in the pocket
Reminds me of the BOFH episode where Simon reminisced about the time he set the password expiry time to 24 hours and minimum required length to 32 characters, forcing people to use a password generator which produced results looking like "vaguely pronounceable line noise"
Brilliant
If you use those to commit a crime, according to that reasoning apparently: yes. Without wanting to go into the right or wrong of the current court decision, I would expect many countries have similar provisions. A home might be difficult to see as a tool in a crime, but if someone is a persistent drunk driver, and kills somebody whilst driving under influence, few would argue that confiscating car (and licence) would be excessive punishment. If someone uses his credit card to defraud people, confiscating it could be part of the punishment.
What is needed in most countries is a court order.