Strangely enough, the 9/8 article on the slac.stanford.edu site has an image showing the lenses, shutter, filter assembly, and other components of this camera; it includes a link to an article at llnl.gov describing the LSST and their work on the 1.57-meter L-1 and 1.2-meter L-2 lenses.

To clarify: When it is complete the camera will have the largest optical lens ever constructed, which will be small compared to the mirror system (8.4 meters) of the telescope of which the camera is a part.

With that out of the way, does anyone happen to know how they plan to deal with the gaps between sensors in the array?

I shut it down if I'm going to be away for more than a day or so. Otherwise it's running SETI@Home and Milkyway$Home, so the energy cost of leaving it up is going to what I consider a good cause. And that system is also the DNS and DHCP server for my network, so I need it running most of the time when I'm awake.

It gets rebooted from time to time for updates and to recover from problems that can't be resolved by just logging out and logging in again; recovery reboots happen maybe four or five times a year.

Oh, this sounds so familiar, except that for me that ends with "pattern" instead of PIN. I mostly go straight to the pattern these days, but every once in a while I'll give the old fingerprint another try.

The slides that accompany TFA indicate that the percentages for individual devices are what fraction of the total failures for that OS came from that device. So if 0.58 x # of failing iOS devices = N, then N x 0.29 = # of failing iPhone 6. The summary simply removes the information content for the device-level numbers.

As an undergraduate I took an Introduction to FORTRAN Programming course because I needed another course to maintain full-time student status after dropping a much-hated French literature course. Punch cards on a CDC 3600, with later use of a CDC 6500 and an IBM 1800 prior to graduation. That first course was the second quarter of my freshman year; I took a CS course every quarter until I graduated, then spent two years in grad school working on a master's degree in computer science, until I dropped out to go to work in compiler development at Sperry Univac.

But that's not what the summary says! It says 3.67% of the 1.3 million are Alexa Top 1000 sites, so 47,710 of those 1000 sites are blocking Tor users. Hmm. Not much better.

Good idea in principle, not always helpful in practice. I diagnosed an application failure on a UNIX system some years back that resulted from using the system's "time since last boot" function as a real-time clock with greater than one-second precision. We discovered that in order to prevent the terrible things that would happen if the 32-bit signed counter of 0.01-second intervals ever overflowed, the UNIX vendor had programmed the reported time to stop changing when it reached 2^31-1. Since the system provided no other interface that provided elapsed time with greater than one-second precision, we ultimately had to tell those of our customers with systems from that vendor to be sure to reboot their servers at least every six months.

Voted for "ordered a new HDD"; should probably have voted for "Something else". Bought a new 2-TB drive on Tuesday at the local hardware emporium, to replace a 32-month old drive that is starting to show bad spots. Prices had gone up slightly since Saturday, but the same drive (bare drive, rather than the retail package I bought) is $30 higher from NewEgg today.

I picked "11-20", but I suspect I low-balled the count by ignoring, among other things, the car (!), the programmable thermostats, the pocket calculators, the digital clocks, the CRT monitor and TVs, and probably a few miscellaneous bits that I simply forgot. "Too many" would only apply if some of the processors would be better replaced with simpler controls or simply eliminated altogether, and I can't point to any that fit that criterion at the moment. Well, with a few exceptions that are only being retained for sentimental (read "hoarder") value -- I could probably live without the Z-80 in the Exidy Sorcerer that hasn't been out of its box for at least twenty years!

+5 Insightful? Only on Slashdot...

"The only sure defense against rape is the willingness to fight, and even this may be no protection against gang assault. In many prisons a small, unaggressive white is sure to be raped, probably by blacks or Hispanics. As one prison guard explains, a young white has “almost zero” chance of escaping rape “unless he’s willing to stick someone with a knife and fortunate enough to have one.” Some of the tougher inmates may even fight each other for the chance to rape an effeminate young white." link

Have you never, ever committed a crime? Really? Because if you have, maybe you would like to reconsider your views.

"I hate to say this, but if you weren't racist when you came to prison more than likely you will be when you leave."

Sounds like a great way to rehabilitate criminals and build a better society. Not.

Especially since 4 months after 9/11 scanners at Boston's Logan airport, let me take 6" barbers shears in my ditty bag onto a flight to Norfolk.

They didn't really appreciate the 4" kbar mule, though. Or the swiss army knife.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1597631/no-firefox-windows-mobile

"Parmenter ['head honcho of mobile software development' for Firefox] laments at the lack of a native development kit that's available to developers, meaning that they are unable to create native applications for Windows Phone 7 Series."

True Microsoft doesn't "limit" you to a specific language, but in reality does it really matter if no matter what language you program in, it's just a front end for IL? I'd much rather be able to develop truly native apps

That's irrelevant. If you hack the Pentagon in the UK, you should stay in the UK, whether you believe in aliens or allahs.

Exactly! Wery well said.

My problem is the people who always strive for some divine "elegance". If someone (especially an academic) calls something "elegant" you can be 99% sure that it is pain in the ass in practice.

  - Elegant theorems are usually oversimplified -- therefore unusable in practice (at least in the original form)
  - Elegant proofs are too compressed -- you are not able to learn from them, because the original ideas and failures of the prover got weeded out. They need a mental reverse engineering without "source code" or "documentation"
  - Elegant programming languages are too opinionated and constrained -- pure OO, pure FP, pure whatever. Static vs Dynamic typing.

etc.