Posts by Tom 13

If Sony let them get away with that

they'd still be due some blame. Most password systems let you force that a password cannot be re-used for x number of times. But I concur MOST of the blame still belongs with the wetware at the far end (from Sony) of internet connection.

For as much as I dislike Sony, I gotta agree with Barry on this one.

If I'm dumb enough to use the same username and password on two websites, there's not a damn thing the second site can do to protect my account if the first one gets hacked.

And it seems that Sony have learned from their previous mistake: the accounts were immediately locked, owners notified, mediation of damages were offered, and the incident was publicized.

I guess you didn't hear B of A is now charging their customers

cause the politicians on this side of the pond decided to moot your debit card statement.

If structured properly it wouldn't interfere

with non HFT - say 0.1% of the transaction as a fee. That wouldn't inhibit actual investors, but it would put the bite on HFTs.

Related but separate rant:

The extent of program trading in markets concerns me. Once upon a time markets were useful predictors about the futures of companies because successful people studied companies on the market and invested accordingly. These days people (me included) dump money in retirement plans that are managed by nominally smart people who tell programers who in turn do the actual buying and selling of the stocks. I worry that the algorithms have become more important than the company evaluations, and therefore the stock markets are now useless as economic indicators.

I expect that before the end of the month

we'll see an announcement about a pricing change. A 60% price hike is a bit much in any field, even medicine. They would have been much better off planning to increase prices 10% each year for the next 6 years.

Same as it ever was, though MS keep changing its name:

ActiveX

The parallax calculations depend on the baseline,

so it depends on how you take your baseline. The use of photographic plates and keeping precise records on time, location, and orientation of the telescope has allowed us to extend the baseline a fair piece. Not only can we get the AU as a baseline, but because we can approximate the sun's orbit around the center of the galaxy, we can extend the baseline beyond an AU.

That does still limit to relatively close stars, but from there you can start to work with relative/absolute magnitude to determine the distance to the star. The initial work there was done with binary pairs where you have an independent means of determining mass. But once that is established you work more with red-shifting. It all keeps feeding back on itself, but you get further and further away and become more and more comfortable that you assumptions and calculations are correct.

Except that all spectra are red-shifted.

This is one of the observations which leads to the hyper-exapnding universe hypothesis. So you first have to get the average red shift, and then look at the relative red shifts to find what is blue-shifted compared to the average.

In astro, 50% is damn good.

For most things, you're happy just to get in the right order of magnitude. One of the reasons they work so hard to add more digits on the end of an AU is so they can trim the error margins when you have to multiply it by the billion billions that is your baseline to the next star.

In the US vote casting and vote counting are as public as the public wants to make them.

I say this as the a Republican precinct leader in the People's Republic of Maryland. I got to be leader because I was the first person to walk in and volunteer for the job in a while. The other volunteers would love to have more people involved so they could take a break at some point of the day instead of working a 16 hour shift for pittance gratuity. So quite your whining and get involved if you think the process is corrupt. I will say that I have not observed any irregularities, and I expect that just because it IS the People's Republic of Maryland, they are Democrats, not Republicans.

2000? They've upgraded?

I thought those things were only certified for NT4.*

* with no network connection.

Sorry, I'm a tech and don't mindlessly click yes to every pop-up.

I was once building out a machine and made one fatal mistake which caused the system to be compromised when I hooked it to the network to run updates - I forgot to change the default home page from MSN to Google. MSN loaded, BAM! Antivirus 2009 or some variant thereof pwned the computer with no clicks required.

Yes they've improved since then, and I'll give them kudos for this cleanup, but at least half the problem HAS been MS.

You can't put a price tag on the most important benefit of manned space exploration:

It fires the imagination as little else can.

Downvoted for tone and disrespect.

While I concur that Congress is more of the problem than either NASA or the administration, it is difficult to tell of the bean counters when you are asking them for money.

Furthermore, even IF Congress had provided the money, I'm rather convinced that the middle-management-itis that has set in at NASA would have pissed it away. So given that the least dysfunctional part of the problem was still enough to kill it, we have a rather large problem with our space program on this side of the pond.

Here, here!

I'd go a step further. NASA does that until a specified level of development is reached, at which point it becomes a space version of the FAA.

Yes, I realized that about 30 seconds after I hit the POST button,

but couldn't find my post to correct it.

Thanks.

No, it is the speed of light in the medium

because the photons still need to pass through the medium, and the information is passed by the photons. The focus point is keeping causality in tact, and one of the observations which is key on this is being able to detect the orbit of pulsars around other stars. If strict Newtonian physics held you would get a confused signal. The speed of light in a vacuum is taken to be the uberlimit because vacuum has the highest speed for any medium.

The specific part of the equation your looking for is the correction factor

which takes different forms but the easiest expression to work with is 1/sqrt(c*c - v*v) where c is the speed of light and v is the observed speed of the object. If v=c the divisor is 0, iv v>c the divisor is imaginary. What division by 0 and what imaginary might mean is left as an exercise for the student.

Einstein essentially reasoned that is was an inherently continuous process and you could therefore never get an object with mass to the speed of light. Since quanta are very, very small quantities of energy, and increased acceleration requires every increasing amounts of energy, it seems a reasonable assumption.

Why?

I would say it is rather more prototypical of how far ahead the sorts of people who do these sorts of things can think.