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--Bob

The fireball was bright not so much because of size as because it was an Earth-grazer. It wasn't like normal Leonid debris where the Earth basically slams into a cloud of tiny pebbles (think of driving through a bunch of no-see-ums); this was something that was travelling roughly in Earth's orbit and slowly grazed along the upper reaches of the atmosphere. It was in the far North, which suggests a slower planetary rotation time, as well.

Bolides like this don't always break up, either. There was one a year or two ago (in the Southwest?) that was seen by thousands of people during daylight, but the trace it left suggested that it passed through and then left our atmosphere again.

Space junk is usually travelling pretty fast (90 minute orbit, compared with 24 hrs for the ground just a couple hundred miles below). We know about the big space junk (Cheyenne Mountain keeps close track of it); this doesn't sound much like a satellite orbit to me. It's possible, though.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

Here's a useful overview of the law surrounding trademark confusion. I recommend that Slashdotters read it before posting uninformed opinions.

It's not mentioned here, but there's a new law (the Trademark Anti Dilution Act of 1999) addressing this issue, that gives more protection to so-called "famous marks". This has been cited before in regards to domain names, which seems to be one of its main thrusts.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

danmcs says:
How can goto claim to own a traffic signal design? If someone used a similar label for a site called stop.com, would they sue over that? Craziness.

Once again showing the pure ignorance that passes for "insightful" on slashdot! Trademarking of common items has always been acceptable: Apple Computer, Eagle Foods, Lighthouse Films. But if the "common item" in question is part of the industry the company is in, getting exclusive use is more difficult. (For instance, many landscaping firms will probably use an emblem of a tree in their logo.) In this case, the emblem has metaphoric value in regards to the purpose of the company, but certainly isn't directly related. The prior usage is by Goto.com, and it was clear from the beginning that Disney was trying to outlawyer them, to make up for their woefully inadequate research. (Any IP lawyer with an ounce of sense would have advised them to trash GO.com on seeing the other logo.)

I think a general rule of thumb should be: Don't get your Intellectual Property legal advice from anybody on Slashdot. Some days, it's appalling.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

winglover writes:
>I agree that the logos are similar, but they're certainly differnt enough that anyone with an IQ higher than an old pair of socks should be able to tell the difference. The GoTo.com logo is essentially "GoTo.COM" in white on a green circle background. The Go Network logo is "Go" superimposed on a traffic light. Sooner or later there will be no acceptable logos left.. the courts will rule that Westinghouse's "W" logo is too close to the McDonald's "M" logo. After all, it may confuse someone if one is just an upside-down version of the other.

It's not whether you can tell the difference, it's whether the average consumer might be confused. There's also a question of whether they're in the same "trade" (hence the term "trademark"). There would be no confusion between McDonald's and Westinghouse because they are in different industries; but if Westinghouse decided to start selling, say, the home-burger-and-shake-machine with a big "W" on the side, you might get an objection.

GOTO.com had been using their logo for over a year when Disney came up with the GO.com logo. They were both in the same business (net portals) and were using similar names (GO/GOTO) and were playing off the same motif (green traffic light). I think this was a clear failure of Disney's lawyers to properly research the market.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

Seriously, I've got $20,000 in confederate money?

The Confederate States of America, having been defeated on the battlefield, ceased to have legal standing anywhere in the United States of America. There was probably an Act of Congress specifically stating this at some point -- essentially it was scrip issued by an illegal authority.

Sorry but when governments go, they're gone- along with any promises they made. The new gov't might say they'll carry out the old agreements, but that's by their own graciousness, and they're by no means bound to those old agreements.

That may be, but there can be wide-ranging side-effects. If you say you're not the same country and spit in the face of those agreements, who's going to loan you money to rebuild? One of the key questions that the former USSR faced was how to divvy up the national debt. This was something of a new situation, and so there were multilateral discussions with the other newly-created "nuclear states" (Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan), leading to agreements to eliminate weapons in all three. At that point the new agreement superseded the old one.

If a country could get out of agreements just by having a constitutional crisis, there wouldn't be much point to agreements. Russia could have said "screw you", in a practical sense, but then they would not have been trusted worth a tinker's damn, for nuke agreements let alone IMF loans. That's the carrot we hold out: participation in the world economic system.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

scherry wrote:
I am not aware of a treaty signed with the new Russian Republic that brings over all treaties that we have signed although I wouldn't put it past Clinton to have slipped such a thing in without going to the Senate for ratification.

You aren't aware of much, then. First of all, just because a government changes, don't imagine that their obligations change. The Russian Federation is the inheritor of all the obligations of the USSR, including monetary debt, trade agreements, extradition treaties, and yes, arms treaties. Your silly kneejerk suspicions aside, Clinton can't just sign a new treaty with the Russians; it would have no legal force without Senate ratification (read your Constitution).

I know that lots of the START treaty that we've subsequently signed was continued from negotiations with the USSR but those are new treaties for all intents and purposes.

And, thanks to inviting Poland into NATO, the Russian Duma did not ratify START II. Therefore it has no force as a treaty. The Clinton and Yeltsin administrations are both observing parts of it, as a matter of polite cooperation, but either side could abrogate it at any time.

I could be wrong about the lack of said "continuance" treaty but barring its existence, and from my recollection the ABM treaty was specifically between the two powers and not a general non-proliferation treaty like nuclear testing. That said, the ABM treaty is effectively dead.

As noted, no such magical "continuance" treaty is needed; the treaty would be considered to be in force until a new agreement is reached. The question of making it a general non-proliferation treaty came up at renewal time in 1993 and is part of the current tiff. It may be effectively dead, but there is still great weight in being the country to first break a treaty.

If we don't deploy a system that makes successful delivery of such warheads unlikely, thus drastically increasing the risk that a launch would be intercepted inviting an overwhelming and potentially nuclear retaliation without the intended benifits, its not likely that we'll get out of the next decade without a missle being launched against a major power.

I consider a much more likely scenario to be a regional nuclear conflict, such as Pakistan-India. In any case, whether we deploy an ABM system or not, it's doubtful that it could make "delivery of warheads unlikely". Even if it were an airtight missile defense (and predecessors like the Patriot system don't inspire confidence), the enemy could simply choose another delivery method, such as a Ryder truck.

I don't consider this ABM system worth unilaterally pulling out of existing agreements, especially when it might lead to other negative consequences, like the Russians going back to targeting American cities and going on a hairtrigger nuke alert. What we really need is to find a way (START II would have been one way) to start dismantling nukes so that there aren't as many lying around Russia to steal. That should be our ultimate real world goal. In fact, this is approximately what the Clinton administration is proposing -- helping the Russians finish that Siberian radar facility, for instance.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

scherry wrote:
I am not aware of a treaty signed with the new Russian Republic that brings over all treaties that we have signed although I wouldn't put it past Clinton to have slipped such a thing in without going to the Senate for ratification.

You aren't aware of much, then. First of all, just because a government changes, don't imagine that their obligations change. The Russian Federation is the inheritor of all the obligations of the USSR, including monetary debt, trade agreements, extradition treaties, and yes, arms treaties. Your silly kneejerk suspicions aside, Clinton can't just sign a new treaty with the Russians; it would have no legal force without Senate ratification (read your Constitution).

I know that lots of the START treaty that we've subsequently signed was continued from negotiations with the USSR but those are new treaties for all intents and purposes.

And, thanks to inviting Poland into NATO, the Russian Duma did not ratify START II. Therefore it has no force as a treaty. The Clinton and Yeltsin administrations are both observing it, as a matter of polite cooperation, but either side could abrogate it at any time.

I could be wrong about the lack of said "continuance" treaty but barring its existence, and from my recollection the ABM treaty was specifically between the two powers and not a general non-proliferation treaty like nuclear testing. That said, the ABM treaty is effectively dead.

As noted, no such magical "continuance" treaty is needed; the treaty would be considered to be in force until a new agreement is reached. The question of making it a general non-proliferation treaty came up at renewal time in 1993 and is part of the current tiff. It may be effectively dead, but there is still great weight in being the country to first break a treaty.

If we don't deploy a system that makes successful delivery of such warheads unlikely, thus drastically increasing the risk that a launch would be intercepted inviting an overwhelming and potentially nuclear retaliation without the intended benifits, its not likely that we'll get out of the next decade without a missle being launched against a major power.

I consider a much more likely scenario to be a regional nuclear conflict, such as Pakistan-India. In any case, whether we deploy an ABM system or not, it's doubtful that it could make "delivery of warheads unlikely". Even if it were an airtight missile defense (and predecessors like the Patriot system don't inspire confidence), the enemy could simply choose another delivery method, such as a Ryder truck.

I don't consider this ABM system worth unilaterally pulling out of existing agreements, especially when it might lead to other negative consequences, like the Russians going back to targeting American cities and going on a hairtrigger nuke alert. What we really need is to find a way (START II would have been one way) to start dismantling nukes so that there aren't as many lying around Russia to steal. That should be our ultimate real world goal. In fact, this is approximately what the Clinton administration is proposing -- helping the Russians finish that Siberian radar facility, for instance.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

We already have "millions of people being able to freely trade with each other". It's called online stock trading. Actually, we already had it before that, too: it's called over-the-phone stock trading.

The only difference between then, and now, is that you can do it with a point and click interface instead of a highly-compensated broker in the middle. Nevertheless, this simple change has largely fueled the stock boom of the last several years, leading to price inflation and a more volatile market. And a lot of uneducated investors losing money, too.

The difference between a stock trade done via Etrade and a stock trade done with Joe Blow via Ebay is that the former is a licensed broker with the proper oversight and communication so that the stock trade is registered correctly and honestly. It's one thing to privately sell your brother some stock; it's another thing to buy stock from somebody you don't know on the other side of the country. The securities markets are highly regulated for good reason, and knee-jerk "nanny-state" responses are simply ignorant. Without oversight, the little investor is blindsided by insider trading and price scams.
There is nothing in the regulations that prevents you or I from buying the stocks we want; it prevents abuses.

The most important shift in the stock market in the last generation, by the way, has been the 401(k) plan: an artifact of an obscure banking regulation that turned out to permit employer-managed tax-deferred investment, which since its creation in the early 80s has poured $billions into the stock market. There are more stock owners today than there ever have been, and with mutual funds and IRAs and the like the obstacles to stock ownership are few indeed. And you call this a "nanny state"?
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Lake Effect, a weblog

But, duh, that was before they succeeded in getting the carcass out of the ice. Can we have a single freaking slashdot update, once, where some bozo doesn't ask "didn't we talk about this already"?

Otherwise I'm going to start posting "didn't we talk about this already?" posts in every Linux-vs-Microsoft thread, I swear.

Sheesh. You'd think people paid to use the place.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

Uh, after this post, I'll let others judge which of us is resorting to more rhetoric.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

In any case, the counterexamoke which was offered was invalid, because Challenger flew on account of bureaucrats ignring their engineers. The moral of the story is: listen to the scientists, ESPECIALLY if they say something's not safe.

Which could be construed as undermining your original argument. Still, when faced with scientist X saying it's safe, and scientist Y saying it isn't, you don't always have the grace of an easy decision. Not all the "engineers" were objecting to the launch. And the attitude at NASA was very much post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The point I'm trying to make is roughly: any bureaucrat/politician/careerist scientist may choose to demonstrate a 1 in 1^n probability of risk. But are they correct, or are they cooking the numbers? Do we assume that we know enough to calculate these things with necessary precision? Before Trinity (to return to your original example) there had been not a single nuclear explosion in all of human history. With no experimental data, how could the Manhattan Project experts who calculated the risk of "igniting the atmosphere" really be certain? They couldn't. They could make educated guesses, and they did, and fortunately they were right.

My deeper point here is that we are at a point in human capability where we can make things -- quark guns, atom bombs -- that have potentially devastating side-effects. Therefore, a minor amount of prudence and forethought seems like a small price to pay for peace of mind.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

mister attack says:
The idea that we are going to destroy the world with the RHIC is absolutely ridiculous. I remember reading that a large number of physicists thought the first nuclear weapon would ignite the atmosphere, destroying all life on Earth. Didn't happen.

This is a logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. Just because we haven't destroyed the earth in the past doesn't mean we can't do it.

Now we have a _journalist_ - not even a Ph.D. in physics - claiming that we're going to create a black hole with the RHIC.

Ad hominem. In fact, objections have been raised within the scientific community. They have been taken seriously enough to be reviewed by the laboratory. They disagreed, of course.

This is a remote possibility, to say the least - collisions at much higher energy than this happen in our upper atmosphere daily without destroying us. But assuming for a moment that a black hole is created, what happens? The answer is simple: it will evaporate.

At last a real argument. I happen to agree with you in principle; I'm not going to lose sleep over these experiments. But I don't think that going around shouting "rubbish!" at people is the way to make your point. There are valid scientific questions to be raised here, and while the field of high-energy physics may be dominated by people who believe it's perfectly safe, the objections do not come from left field. It may not be this experiment, but I would not rule out the possibility that in the near future we could devise experiments that would be capable of creating (say) a microscopic black hole.

I'd be more worried about ballistic nukes from China.

Most people should worry about a) heart disease, b) lung cancer, and c) an auto accident, in roughly that order. Since we all know that very few people give those very real dangers any thought at all ....

No, I don't believe RHIC is going to kill us all. But can we indeed come up with an experimental device that could? Most certainly. And human history is filled with enough follies by people who "know what they're doing" (say, Challenger) that I don't put all my trust in the intelligentsia here. The only safeguard is an atmosphere of collegiality where objections such as the one raised against RHIC are treated seriously and given due consideration in a peer review process.

That has happened, and has completed. It's only afterwards that the media really got hold of the story, and as they always do, they report it as if it were two equally valid political positions. Don't give in to the hysteria by treating all such objections with contempt.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

Recalling that normal matter is made up of atomic particles, which themselves are composed of subparticles (quarks and leptons). Quarks summarized here. "Strange matter" is simply matter that is made up mainly of the quark with the flavor "strange" (the name comes from the strangeness of their long lifetimes compared with other known particles).

It holds a relationship to normal matter something akin to antimatter's, although it is not antimatter (there is "normal" strange matter and "antimatter" strange matter). Basically, it looks like normal matter but isn't made up of the same kinds of subparticles. I think that strange matter in general is nowhere near as stable as normal matter.
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Lake Effect, a weblog

(Who moderated that as "informative"?)

The NSF shut down the NSFNET backbone in April of 1995. At that time the various functions were distributed among several organizations and commercial entities, effectively ending the government-funded internet.

From then until this year, Network Solutions was the sole entity responsible for domain name policies, creation, management, and so on.

It was only belatedly, as the commercial promise of the web crystallized, that the government created the ICANN to oversee the domain name system, formalize the process for creating new TLDs, and decentralize the registration process.

Your "friend" is spouting half-truths he read long ago. Don't trust him. (Besides, there is no "seven dirty words" list, there never was; there are only broad FCC guidelines for indecency.)
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Lake Effect, a weblog

I didn't consider Red Mars *sad*, just sober. I don't believe you can focus on the "unhappiness and senseless destruction" without considering the heroism and selfless attempts of other characters to create the utopian Mars they believe in.

The only problem is that everyone believes in a different utopian Mars.

As I've said, the trilogy is a roman à clef for the ecological debates on Earth today. On Earth, you make a small change and it may take years to see an effect. On Mars, you make that change and almost immediately you can judge it. It's both laboratory and metaphor.

While Robinson is no dystopic sf writer, he's clearly telling us that we take ourselves with us when we travel to other places/planets, and taht our motivations for simple actions can be deep and complex, with wide-ranging unforeseen consequences. This is a truth about life, and a lesson in living with a coherent ecosystem like Mars ... or Earth. It's the kind of thing that a highly evolved society tends to forget, being divorced from the real effects of their actions (e.g. the gradual lowering of the Ogalalla Water Table, or the hard choice between nasty DDT or widespread malaria).
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Lake Effect, a weblog

Mr Piccolo asks:
I know that there is a movie named Antarctica with a great soundtrack by Vangelis.

That sounds like Antarctica (1983), a (true?) story about two scientists returning to rescue their sled dogs in 1958. Since it came out about 15 years before Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, which is set in the near future, I don't think they're related!
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Lake Effect, a weblog

Since so many people complain about this, I was wondering where the web page was with the slashdot rule that there can only be one article per topic. I've been very concerned with this matter. I nominate that there should only be one article each year comparing Linux with Windows. This means that it's been approximately 36.732 hours since the last version of that article, for a posting rate of around 238.64 Linux/Windows articles annually. This is clearly 237.64 more articles than necessary. [wrings hands] What should be done?
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Lake Effect, a weblog

Disclaimer: I'm only 80% through the book so far.

The Mars trilogy has its fans and its anti-fans. Still, it was a downhill slope: If you didn't really like _Red Mars_, you were not likely to enjoy Green and Blue at all. I enjoyed the deep politics, but even I -- an admitted political junkie -- found it tedious by the end of the trilogy. Still, there was enough character development, travelogue, and hard-sf detail to keep me reading.

Antarctica is both tighter and lighter than the Mars books. KSR has clearly worked to insert more fun and tone down the political theory. The characters are less complex and more accessible, while not losing their personality or individual motivations. The storyline moves along at a much faster pace, clearly inspired by the recent trend of high-altitude/low-temperature adventure stories (Into Thin Air, Endurance, Across the Top of the World, et al.). I've read a lot of those, and so I was well-versed in the early history of Antarctica to which KSR frequently refers. It's good to read this book with a map and a couple of reference works close at hand, ideally with a photographic work to ground you to the experience. I looked up a LOT of Antarctic web pages in the process (start with The Ice), and I even looked at the _Lonely Planet_ guide to the continent -- yes, an Antarctic travel book.

Even if you didn't like Red Mars much, this book touches on many of the same themes in a much more immediate, action-oriented adventure context. In the same way that the Mars trilogy was really a roman à clef for the ecological arguments currently swirling about how to manage the Earth*, Antarctica contains thoughtful lessons to absorb for our very near future.

In short, this is basically _Red Mars_ aimed at a wider audience, successfully. It's not as deep as the trilogy, but that's a good thing. Whereas the trilogy is, in any practical sense, unfilmable (cf. LoTR), this would make a really fun 2-hour movie.

* and if you didn't read that into it, try thinking that one over and picking the books up again -- especially if you were bored!

[GETTING REALLY PISSED OFF as I hit "Preview" three times in a row and got "Error" three times in a row. Slashdot and proxy servers simply do not mix.]
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Lake Effect, a weblog

Those of you in the crusade for linguistic precision should take some tips in activism from this site. LS

WAV version: http://members.aol.com/manitsas2/cantina.wav (8-bit mono, 1.93MB)

:)