That's what I'm on this vacation. It would have been my XP desktop mostly, but that had an electrolytic capacitor pop last Friday, and now fails to boot. I've been too lazy to take it apart and fix it. (I fix electronics, computers and lab gear for a living. So phooey on doing that until I go back to work January 2nd.)

Oddly, most of my laptops are far more powerful than any of the desktops I regularly use (I7s versus P4s).

This is a mission I've been watching and waiting for for a while. The original Hipparcos mission did this sort of mapping for a much smaller volume of space.

Think of this as being like how finding the precise latitude and longitude of a large number of places on earth would have been to navigators of a much earlier era. No big new ideas, but it makes navigating so much easier and precise.

This does this for astronomy and cosmology in a greatly expanded region of space.

Something some don't realize is that our measurements of distance to stars and other objects in astronomy are very indirect. We use red shift to measure it in many cases, but that's an indirect method that relies on assumptions and estimates of the Hubble constant.

We also use what are called "standard candles". These are objects we know the brightness of from the physics of the processes going on. Certain kinds of supernovae are some of the best known. But, again, like measuring the distance to the next town by how bright the streetlights are, it's indirect and can have errors from intervening dust, for example..

This will use parallax, the same method as used in surveying to find distance from the change in angle between two separated observations of a far object. It's a direct method that relies on few assumptions.

We must immediately restrict the availability of this 3D printing technology to prevent $11,900 cheap knockoff copies of firearms from flooding the streets!

"Do you think the US president is powerless when it comes to the policy of one of this executive departments?"

When the house, for example, puts the words "no money shall be spent to implement $policy.", they can be surprisingly near to being exactly that.

And Ron Paul, firebrand that he is, would have had to moderate his position if he wanted to get anything else done that had to go through congress.

Just like Obama had to. (When is Guantanamo closing? When Obama wanted to bring the prisoners to an Illinois prison he got stuffed by a bipartisan majority and had to back down. And that's an executive branch policy area.)

Yes, you can do things, but it costs political capital. And presidents who embark on radical change often find themselves short of it.

Imagine if you were able to post a link to this discussion here on slashdot from that dim and distant time of 2008 during the election with unforgeable timestamps showing that it indeed was a slashdot discussion from late 2013..

What a shift in a lot of people's viewpoint has happened.

Just after the election in 2008, I said that the level of expectation surrounding Obama was so great Superman couldn't have lived up to it. I'll revise that now, and say God couldn't have lived up to it.

I wasn't a supporter of Obama, but it probably would have mattered less than most think who won that election. My guess is that the world situation wouldn't be radically different (might be a little better, might be a little worse), and definitely the case of NSA surveillance wouldn't be all that different. It's the result of policy decisions over the last, at least, 50 years.

We've been shown once again a truth that we seem to forget every 4-8 years in the "irrational exuberance" of campaigns.

National political leaders (presidents, prime ministers, whatever) are amazingly limited in what they really can do. The existing policies, public perceptions, politics and geopolitical realities massively constrain their options for what decisions to make.

Those offices are bully pulpits, as Teddy Roosevelt said, and sometimes can move nations with the preaching.

But, in the end, it's still limited. (And you don't want to live in places where they do have largely unlimited power.)

And, when those leaders fail to live up to what is expected (often unreasonably) by those who elected them, the backlash can be ferocious.

Witness this discussion (or some of the ones while W. was in office here on slashdot).

"Win XP, all updated to SP3"

That new?

I work for a chemistry department at a major state university. We still are using a fair number of analytical machines with controllers running DOS on 486s, let alone the large numbers running XP.

The only upgrade path is whichever company bought out the original manufacturer telling you they'd be happy to sell you a new one. But the machine would be half a million to replace (X-ray diffraction system).

Not everybody has uber grants from Howard Hughes Medical, or the like to pay that. So, you keep on working with what you've got.

I chuckle when these "It's XP. Running a system that old is immoral" posts come up on Slashdot. The choice is often running the old system, or not being able to do your job.

Oh, and if you choose not doing your job, the state's in a budget crisis and they've been eliminating positions.

That's a pretty big game of roulette to play with being able to support your family just because the OS is too old to suit you. ;)

They quite possibly are part of the problem. If not as a main cause, then as an exacerbating factor. And, though the neonicotinoids are currently under suspicion, it could be other chemicals, or combinations of them that are contributing. Nearly anything that reduces the overall health of a hive is going to make it just that much worse whether it's the main cause or not.

And, it could be that varroa mites and diseases have hurt the colonies enough that chemicals in amounts that wouldn't have had a major impact now do.

The restrictions in the EU make for an interesting experiment with the US and other areas as a control. But, it'll take a bit of time to get good data.
 

I work for a university in central Illinois that does a large amount of bee related research. (Full disclosure: I'm not one of the researchers. I do the repair work on their instruments from vacuum pumps to mass specs. The guy in the shop across the street does even more work for those groups. We get to talk to them a lot about their work, and bees are an interest of mine. see below for the reasons.)

Though there is thought that the neonicotinoids may be related, it's probably not the whole story. (see: http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/3231/page=1/list=list and http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/73513/page=1/list=list for some insight by two of our researchers). Most of the ones I've talked to think it's a combination of factors.

Agriculture here uses large amounts of the neonicotinoids, and the bee declines started before they were being used.

Just from my own observations (I kept bees along with my dad when I was a kid), the declines in bee population were happening here in Illinois long before the neonicotinoids were fielded. I was amazed at the drop in the numbers of wild bees here in the early nineties. The stress of varroa mites was likely a big part of that. Some other diseases are thought to have been involved as well.

The EU has largely restricted the neonicotinoids so we should have some comparison data in a few years.

"like live organs or components of the Technetium99 supply chain"

Oh heavens, just think of all the conspiracy theories about that one.

"It was bad enough when it was just chem trails from jets. Now they're doing close air support with HIV infected livers and radioactives!"

They found I-401 in 2005 off of Oahu.

This is what was left after Takao and Hyuuga got their vengeance on I-400 for what happened in that extra scene after the credits in this weeks episode. ;)

Now they just have to hunt down her twin sister, I-402.

"Honest officer. It just fell off a drone that flew by!"

Indeed!

Now, come closer so I can whack you with my cane. ;)

I-401?

They've found Iona! (If she was on the bottom, this doesn't bode well for the ending of the latest episode.)

But I thought she was still closer to Iwo Jima.

Let em try it with my 1982 diesel Suburban.

It should survive the EMP and radiation from a nearby nuke without even stalling let alone some HERF gun wannabe.

I'd probably not survive that though it might take a couple weeks to die.