Probably because it's the kind of environment that values damn-good research above all else, be it in RF, astrophysics, astrochemistry or even in IT (where I work). I've gone from job-hopping every 3-18 months at my previous employers to staying at NRAO for 6 years now. And every year at the annual service awards presentation they give out 30 or even 40-year service awards. Sure, there's no money in astronomy and our budget is projected flat for the next what... 5 years or something, but even with that people like it here and stick around.

Proof (IMO) that you can develop and sustain a great R&D culture on a limited budget!

Disclaimer: I work for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (the US partner for ALMA).

There's lots more info on the transporters available on the ALMA web site. The two antenna transporters, named "Otto" and "Lore", have their own page at http://almaobservatory.org/en/technology/transporters. Each transporter actually has 2 500kW power plants (for redundancy) and cooling them at 5km altitude is a major challenge (actually, the datacenter has the same problem -- there's just not enough air up there to remove the heat).

There's lots more pictures of them carrying antennas there, too.

Finally, a video of the transporter taking the first ALMA antenna to the high site .

Yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise

And apparently he won an award for his work on Tron, too.

Yes :) FITS files are HUGE!

As a sysadmin for an astronomy observatory I find this laughable. FITS was designed to store every last detail about an image (and frequencies for radio astronomy) and it seems WAY overkill to burn that many bits digitizing manuscripts.

But hey, who am I to question the word of the church? :)

Which made me wonder why Disney would need an semiconductor manufacturing company? Especially one without a fab.

Yes, that's right - not all slashdotters care about comics. /me defends his geek card against the ensuing calls to surrender it

You seem to be able to disable root CAs in firefox. In "preferences" > "advanced" > "view certificates" > "authorities". FreeSSL is in there, listed as "startcom ltd". I guess we might all want to remove that now?