Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: NOT providing means of monitoring? (Score 0) 83

by Shag (#43935109) Attached to: Saudi Arabia Blocks Viber Messaging Service

Really? This is an app that, at least on iOS, refuses to run if you turn off notifications. I tried it a month or so ago, and if I recall, had to agree to have my phone make noise when messages arrived them and display the full text of them, even when locked. If I tried tot turn off any of those features, it refused to work until I turned them all back on. Anybody around me could "monitor" that easily. It's about the most indiscrete, "hey look I'm getting a message!" attention-whoring app of its sort.

Comment: "Small" is a matter of scale. (Score 1) 187

by Shag (#43881097) Attached to: My plans for summer ...

I'm unsure what would constitute a "big" trip. A round-trip to my folks is almost 10,000 miles, and one to my in-laws is 24,900 miles. The first four months of the year I went to Turkey, Spain, Taiwan and Indonesia, along with a little domestic travel. In a week I'll be checking my family in for a 2-week trip to the East Coast, and I'm waiting to hear whether I'm confirmed for Fiji next month, and to see whether anything interesting comes up in August and September before Japan in October. This is a "small" planet.

Comment: Which email? (Score 1) 438

by Shag (#43544015) Attached to: Israel Airport Security Allowed To Read Tourists' Email

This could give me a very good reason to stop deleting all the stuff I get on one of my dot-edu accounts.
If there's anything that can incapacitate a Mossad agent, it's reading a few years of mail-to-all from vice-chancellors of whatever.

If they insisted on accessing the address that's on my business cards, that might be almost as good, since my email at the dot-org that gives me business cards is full of nearly a decade worth of stuff about international policy on environment and development.

I don't think I'd give them the other dot-edu, the dot-gov, or my personal account.

Comment: Re:Boy, will UH-Hilo be surprised! (Score 1) 77

by Shag (#43524431) Attached to: Construction of World's Largest Optical Telescope Approved

Oh, there'll definitely be jobs. Some UH-Hilo physics, astronomy or natural science majors will almost certainly wind up there. They'll probably be outnumbered by the Hawaii Community College grads, first in construction trades, then in electronic tech, admin, et cetera.

The control building will be at the summit. If you mean the base facility/office, I've heard it'll be on the corner of Nowelo and A'ohoku, next to Gemini, below CalTech, and across A'ohoku from 'Imiloa.

Comment: Re:Apple does this routinely (Score 1) 953

by Shag (#43524365) Attached to: Some Windows XP Users Can't Afford To Upgrade

Adobe, too. As a Creative Suite Master Collection user, I have two rules: never be the first to install anything from Adobe, and never be the first to install a new major release of OS X. Better to wait a few weeks first and read up on exactly which piece of Creative Suite is totally going to fall over if I so much think about upgrading.

Comment: Re:Funny abbreviations (Score 1) 77

by Shag (#43453393) Attached to: Construction of World's Largest Optical Telescope Approved

I know it's in the summary, but why use an abbreviation if it's not immediately clear what the abbreviation stands for?

TMT = Twenty Meter Telescope, Thirty Meter Telescope, Two Mile Telescope (etc.)?

This is actually the second TMT that U.Cal and CalTech have been involved in. Before they got the money from the Keck Foundation, what we now know as Keck was the Ten Meter Telescope. ...but they designed new stationery anyway. ;)

Comment: Re:Public Access (Score 1) 77

by Shag (#43453317) Attached to: Construction of World's Largest Optical Telescope Approved

But... earlier this year some idiot tourists took their rental sedan up the mountain and forgot to put it in park when they got out. It slowly drove itself off the road and flipped over. It took the state more than a month to be able to get machinery in place to retrieve the wrecked car and take it down the mountain. Guess what - those tourists had to pay for the car AND the removal.

In the interim, it snowed, and the local snowboarders made good use of the car as a jump. There are photos. :)

Comment: Re:What about these EELT at 39m and (Score 1) 77

by Shag (#43453311) Attached to: Construction of World's Largest Optical Telescope Approved

VLT is already built, and consists of four scopes which can be linked for interferometry in the IR, but don't always function that way. Even when they do, their light-collecting area is smaller than TMT.
EELT is approved but not built, and when built, will be bigger than TMT.
GMT will have an effective aperture and light-collecting area smaller than TMT.

Basically, the TMT folks now have to try to build it before EELT. If they do, it will unquestionably be the largest optical scope in the world for some period of time. And EELT and TMT, if both are built, will unquestionably be the largest optical scopes on their respective sides of the Equator.

Comment: Boy, will UH-Hilo be surprised! (Score 2) 77

by Shag (#43453291) Attached to: Construction of World's Largest Optical Telescope Approved

Living in Hilo, and working on Mauna Kea, I think the administration of UH-Hilo would have heart attacks if they were ever approved to do anything involving the word "billion." They're constantly struggling to get funding for things like a permanent building for their pharmacy Ph.D program (which would help quite a bit with continuing accreditation). No, the TMT isn't a UH-Hilo project, at all.

It's actually University of California and CalTech (the main partners in Keck), plus ACURA (the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, not Honda's sporty brand, sorry), Japan, China, India, the NSF, and maybe whoever else wants to jump in at this point now that things are approved. A mere $3.57 million might be enough to get yourself a 1-night-a-year slice of the pie. ;)

Your good nature will bring unbounded happiness.

Working...