Hackers Forced Announcement of 10th Planet Find

JCY2K writes "According to The Inquirer, hackers gained access to the secure server where the data about the new planet was being held and threatened to reveal it. Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis."

Comments

They should check Karl Rove's computer

[Anonymous Coward]

who knows what you could find there

Re:They should check Karl Rove's computer

[entrex]

not Patrick Fitzgerald.

Re:They should check Karl Rove's computer

[ackthpt]

who knows what you could find there

Probably all the best places to get artery clogging fatty foods. The guy needs to go biking with the pres or something. All he's missing is a curly tail.

Seriously, you don't think someone as intelligent as Karl Rove would do something incriminating and leave it on his...

Ok, you've got a point there.

Re:They should check Karl Rove's computer

[Mondoz]

You mean in his garbage file?

Re:They should check Karl Rove's computer

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll find the video of Clinton getting it on with Lewinsky. It looks a lot like the Hot Coffee mod.

Re:They should check Karl Rove's computer

[Nataku564]

I wish I had mod points right now. Kudos for the awesome hacker reference.

Re:They should check Karl Rove's computer

[Neward Rylet]

You mean Karl Rove wouldn't have leaked it? Have you been reading the news?

Re:They should check Karl Rove's computer

[PakProtector]

Listen. Kid, I know you saw the Movie Hackers when you were 12. So did I. However, that movie was not awesome, nor are any references to it.

The only thing that even slightly, marginally, redeems that movie, that moves that movie one angstrom away from the 'garbage file,' is Angelina Jolie.

Christ Kid, what are you doing here? You do know that Hackers wasn't even realistic, right?

Re:They should check Karl Rove's computer

[Zen Punk]

You know, I think the appeal of that movie is the unintended campiness of it. Of course it wasn't realistic. It was the epitome of all the Hollywood BS cliches about computers and "hacking." I think that the references are awesome in a sarcastic, tongue in cheek way.

Re:They should check Karl Rove's computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Kid.

Supports the Hacker Creed

[WebHostingGuy]

That information wants to be set free.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Swamii]

No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.

Open-source software advocates want information to be free, as do civil liberty groups and other political organizations that fall near the Slashdot line of thinking.

But to say information wants to be free is like saying my computer monitor wants to be plugged into a high-end video card: it may be better for all parties, but in the end, the monitor is just a monitor. Likewise, information is just information.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[deathcloset]

well, yes.

But that information doesn't want to be used as fodder for extortion.

if the hacker had just made the find publicly available that would have been one thing. but, rather, the hacker choose to use his find to threaten the researchers.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[BlowChunx]

Is every one in your family that literal? It must be difficult to use metaphors, metonome, etc.

Information wants to be free because sunshine is the best antiseptic.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[EccentricAnomaly]

more from here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/science/29cnd-pl anet.html

Dr. Brown had still hoped to hold back announcements of 2003 UB313 and another large Kuiper Belt object, 2005 FY9, until October, but his hand was tipped by Brian Marsden, director of the Minor Planet Center, who said that he was worried about hanky panky.

Dr. Marsden said that it was possible by looking on the Internet at the logs of one of the telescopes Dr. Brown's team had been using to find out where they had been pointed. He had evidence, he said, that someone had done that and computed crude orbits of the two unannounced planetoids, "presumably" in preparation for their own observations.

perhaps we should call the planet P4w-N3d :)

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Adrilla]

or maybe they believe in the motto of 'Serenity', "Can't Stop the Signal".

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.

Yeah, it hates it when you do that.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[nickptar]

Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance. What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[MrWhitefolkz]

Actually, no information wants anything. If I'm wrong, can I have your credit card numbers please? I'm sure that wants to be free :)

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anne_Nonymous]

I sure wish beer just wanted to be free half as much as information does.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Andorion]

You obviously misunderstood the use of the word "wants" in that statement, it has nothing to do with anthropomorphism. The phrase "Information wants to be free" doesn't apply to this situation, but what it really means is that information has a natural tendancy to slip out, to disseminate - to be free. It takes special effort to contain information, by its very nature it wants to be free, just like a river wants to flow, a raindrop wants to fall, etc.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[eno2001]

Woke up on the wrong side of the planet again did we? ;P

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Golias]

It takes special effort to contain information, by its very nature it wants to be free, just like a river wants to flow, a raindrop wants to fall, etc.

A very good analogy, but not in the way you meant.

A raindrop falls because gravity forces it towards the ground.

Likewise, information gets spread because people spread it.

It does not take "special effort" to contain information, only the lack of effort to spread it.

For example, you do not know my Driver's License number. Unless I tell you right now, you will die not knowing it.

Regardless of my silly signature says, information wants to nothing but stay put, just like everything else in the universe.

Now if you said "people want to free information", that would have been correct.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[monkeydo]

No, we can't agree that's true. Information doesn't become anything without measures to make it so.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Golias]

But that information doesn't want to be used as fodder for extortion.

Won't somebody think of the information!?!?!?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Omnifarious]

Actually, information wants to be free in the same sense that life wants to reproduce. The statement is about the general nature of information. Once more than a few people know it, you might as well assume that everybody might know it.

The statement is overused and misunderstood, but your rebuttal indicates that you don't have a clue either.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely! Hey, what's your credit card number?
4525 2450 8213 7539

How is that?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[geekee]

"Open-source software advocates want information to be free, as do civil liberty groups and other political organizations that fall near the Slashdot line of thinking."

Except their own information. That must remain protected.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[PitaBred]

He extorted them to release the information, if I read the article correctly. Which was actually more "responsible" to the information than him releasing it, since they know more about it and can make at least a semi-informed release of the information, rather than putting up a bunch of random data he swiped.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[suitepotato]

Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.

Things don't want to fall to the ground; the ground is merely in the way.

What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.

No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist. It may be true, but information is a concept relative to those holding it as such. This is why 1984 is so relevant to information technology. What people consider to be true or factual is dependent upon information as recorded or held in the minds of others and transmitted to them. 1984 tells you why hackers can be dangerous. Should information not be held in the mind and be changed in some database and it not exist in anyone's mind until it is read after the changes, it is assumed to be right and it becomes "information" at that point.

Information doesn't want to be at all. People insist on it being. The fewer the people with it, the closer it gets to its ephemeral basis of nonexistance, just waiting for some entity to come along and encompass it back into being.

You may now return to not-so-deep end of the /. world.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[budgenator]

But it really wasn't information, just preliminary data, premature release would have been embarassing if the data was faulty. When the security of millions is at stake, greasing the wheels to get a exploit fixed by threatening disclosure is one thing, but this was just wrong.

Give the guys a chance to get some big glass pointed at the thing, some orbit tracking. For something that far a way, take two plates, two years apart and you're still talking about measuring with a freaken microscope!

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[fitten]

No. Information being "free" isn't the path of least resistance. Information becoming "free" is a lot more work than information being forgotten or ignored.

Information does nothing without someone doing something with it. If information is there and (the path of least resistance is that) no one does anything with it, it is ignored and/or forgotten.

It's only when someone takes it upon themselves to do something with that information (crack security measures, break into a system, search it out, post it on some boards, gossip, brag about breaking into somewhere and getting some information, etc.) that it becomes "free". That's a lot more work than just doing nothing.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[pboulang]

What is a metonome?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[MooseByte]

"For example, you do not know my Driver's License number. Unless I tell you right now, you will die not knowing it."

D00d, we flipped that database months ago.

PS- That haircut isn't you at all. Experiment!

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has no "line of thinking" other than this...THINK...

And yes, you come across as quite the prick..

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Breakfast Pants]

Yeah it is hard to use metonome anywhere; it isn't even in the dictionary.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Savantissimo]

That is not what happened.

Michael E. Brown, a Caltech professor and one of the original observers of the planetwrites:

As has been widely reported in the press, the announcement of the new planet was made in a rather hasty manner because of fears that our discovery was going to be made public by someone who had hacked a web site and gained access to information about where the object is. The details are a little more complicated than this, the terminology can be debated ("hacked?" "sleuthed?" "stole?" "stumbled across?") and not all are 100% clear to me, but here is a reconstruction of the events that lead to the announcement as best I can discern them. Some aspects remain mysterious.

In mid-July short abstracts of scientific talks to be given at a meeting in September became available on the web (for example, here). We intended to talk about the object now known as 2003 EL61, which we had discovered around Christmas of 2004, and the abstracts were designed to whet the appetite of the scientists who were attending the meeting. In these abstracts we call the object a name that our software automatically assigned is, K40506A (the first Kuiper belt object we discovered in data from 2004/05/06, May 6th). Using this name was a very very bad idea on our part! Unbeknownst to us, some of the telescopes that we had been using to study this object keep open logs of who has been observing, where they have been observing, and what they have been observing. A two-second Google search of "K40506A" immediately reveals these observing logs. Ouch. Bad news for us. From the moment the abstracts became public anyone on the planet with a web connection and a little curiosity about this "K40506A" object could have found out where it was. Anyone on the planet with even a modest-sized telescope could then go find the object and claim a discovery as their own.

Interestingly, this is not what we then happened. The Spanish group headed by J.-L. Ortiz legitimately discovered the object on their own in data from 2 and 3 years ago. The fact that this discovery happened days after the data were potentially available on the web is, I believe, a coincidence. At the time, however, some in the community privately expressed their concerns to me that this coincidence was too good to be true and wanted to know if there was any possible way that anyone could have found out the location of our object. I insisted it was impossible. I was wrong. I myself went to Google late on the night after the Spanish announcement, typed K40506A into Google, and let out a gasp. Even though I don't believe the Spanish group did this, I realized anyone could have found our object with very little effort. To be very clear, from the first day I have very publicly stated that the official discovery credit goes to Ortiz et al. and no one else.

By Friday morning it occurred to me that once someone knew about the web site where the information on where the telescopes we had been using had been pointing it would take only a little more effort to carefully peruse this web site to see if we had been looking at anything else moving in the sky. At this point I contacted Brian Marsden at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) by email, told him confidentially about the two objects that we had not yet announced (now known as 2003 UB313 and 2005 FY9), expressed my concerns that someone may be able to nefariously find our data and attempt to claim credit for discovering these objects, and sought his advice. His chilling response came less than an hour later: someone had already used a web service of the MPC to use past observations of an object to predict locations for tonight. The past observations were precisely the logs from the telescope we had used! The culprit and not even bothered to change the names that we used (K31021C for 2003 UB313 and K50331A for 2005 FY9). At this point we had no choice but to hastily pull together a press

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[SparafucileMan]

the path of least resistence is steady deterioration. without constant effort/energy keeping information free, it becomes not free, as thermodynamics clearly states.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[OreoCookie]

You're missing the analogy. Saying "Information wants to be free" is like saying "water seeks it's own level" or "hot air wants to go up". The point being that once something is known to any one person it is likely to become known by many more people.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[keraneuology]

No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist.

Nature records information all the time. There will always be information available to any who wish to retrieve it. It will always exist: a single atom of hydrogen at coordinates 5.28E25, 1.92883E18E298, 42 contains information and, some might argue, is information itself. It not only contains the information of where it is, but the information of where it is not. Watch its path and it will tell you what has influenced it in the past.

"Information wants to be free" may not be as accurate as "people generally want to share information and make it available", but sounds a bit more philosophicalisticalish.

Personally, I'm on the information-should-freely-flow side of things. With the exception of anything that requires massive quantities of money and very expensive machines and large collections of disciplined manpower there is nothing that the government can do even half as efficiently as the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than plink.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[ultranova]

Won't somebody think of the information!?!?!?

Factoids. Won't somebody think of factoids, the bastard children of Information and Short Attention Span !?!

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[rumblin'rabbit]

...please stop anthropomorphizing it.

Swamii, information wants to be anthropomorphized.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anm]

I think he means "metonym", from m-w.com: a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated (as "crown" in "lands belonging to the crown")

Anm

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[pclminion]

Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.

No. Anthropomorphization is an insidiously dangerous thing. Object DO NOT want to fall to the ground. They merely do. To impart, even metaphorically, the idea that inanimate objects have a will subtly taints the thought processes of even the most advanced thinkers, and it is absolutely disasterous to those who have not yet learned the entire suite of critical thinking skills, namely, children.

Saying that something happens because it "wants" to is a cop out which releases you from the responsibility of CORRECTLY explaining what's actually going on. If nobody knows why something is the way it is, then that should be admitted, rather than explaining away the phenomenon by saying that it "wants" to happen.

For a much more eloquent explanation of why anthropomorphization (also known appropriately as The Pathetic Fallacy) is so dangerous, see Alistair B. Fraser's page on Bad Science. (I don't agree with Fraser on everything, but I do on this.)

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Zing!!

Wow, what a mind you have, Rush. Private organizations protecting their data puts them on the same level as a (supposedly) democratic government hiding its methods of generating policy.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[nickptar]

No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist.

I said "the absence of measures taken to prevent it from [becoming free]."

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[h4rm0ny]

A good analogy would be to liken closed (non-free) information to potential energy, such as a bolder on top of a hill. There is only one way it can go, and it's natural state is at rest at the bottom of the hill (lowest energy state). In the same way, the natural state of information is to be free and it requires resistance to prevent this.

What you are talking about when you say it is easier for information to be forgotten, is merely valueless facts. This is not the same thing because information has worth.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[nickptar]

Jeez, I put "want" in quotes... I agree that impressionable young minds shouldn't be exposed to this fallacy (and I wince whenever I see any serious text use it), but it can work fine as a metaphor among people who know it's just that.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

I say we call it Rupert.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[rbgaynor]

Should information not be held in the mind and be changed in some database and it not exist in anyone's mind until it is read after the changes, it is assumed to be right and it becomes "information" at that point.

John...John Bolton...I thought that was you. How the hell are you Mr. Ambassador.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[harlows_monkeys]

That information wants to be set free

So post your name, credit card number, expiration date, and billing address. That information wants to be free.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[HiThere]

If I read the article properly, that's not what happened.

Somebody searched for something, probably on Google, based on a published conference prospectus. They found something interesting (his research) and published where someone should point their telescopes to see something interesting. (I'm no astronomer, so I'm fuzzy about the details here.) He found out about it before it was the time when others could look, so he hastily put together a press conference.

His site needs to know about robots.txt. As to what others knew or thought they were doing...that's interpretation, and only one side has been given. He's not accusing anyone of any crime, merely of unethical behavior. (Perhaps it was...I don't know what the searchers saw, and whether they knew it was intended to be private. Probably not, as they didn't even change the assigned names.)

I suspect that everyone was acting with good intentions and limited knowledge. He was quite fortunate.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[NitsujTPU]

Things don't want to fall to the ground; the ground is merely in the way.

Please go back to physics class. The ground is definately not merely "in the way" of the motion of the object falling into it.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[abborren]

How can information become "information"?

Information is just information. Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom. The distinction is important. Your senses pick up information, you are the judge in what becomes knowledge.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Lemmy Caution]

It's bad science, but often good philosophy, poetry, literature, art, or other types of discourse that are also central to what it means to be human and sentient.

I have considerable respect of the scientific episteme. I have little interest in seeing it dominate all others.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Norfair]

Please go back to spelling class. 'Definately' was definitely spelt 'definitely' last time I checked.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Hope Thelps]

I agree that impressionable young minds shouldn't be exposed to this fallacy

Yes, if we expose people to figures of speech at an early age then we run the risk of raising a generation that can use language effectively. This could be the end of the internet as we know it.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Norfair]

Argh, that should have been English class. Why is the Preview button next to the Submit button?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[STrinity]

Please go back to physics class. The ground is definately not merely "in the way" of the motion of the object falling into it.
 
Yes it is. A falling object "wants" to get to the center of the Earth, but the ground's there preventing it.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[d34thm0nk3y]

But to say information wants to be free is like saying my computer monitor wants to be plugged into a high-end video card: it may be better for all parties, but in the end, the monitor is just a monitor. Likewise, information is just information.

Perhaps we should say:

"Information tends to be duplicated"

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[heatdeath]

That information wants to be set free.

I bet you're also a privacy freak who won't use gmail because you're afraid that they'll do something evil with your e-mails.

"Information wants to be free - unless it's mine!"

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[kryten_nl]

...a single atom of hydrogen at coordinates 5.28E25, 1.92883E18E298, 42 contains information and, some might argue, is information itself. It not only contains the information of where it is, but the information of where it is not. Watch its path and it will tell you what has influenced it in the past.

If we blatently disregard the (Heisenberg) uncertainty principle, .... you're still wrong.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[NitsujTPU]

The ground is contributing to the mass of the planet, thereby increasing the earth's gravitational pull, correct?

IE, if I annihilated half of the Earth, the Earth would have half as much gravity. This means that the ground plays a role in this process.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[91degrees]

That's information that really wants to be free! I regularly recieve emails that want to free them. It's only because I keep said information tightly controlled and chained up that it remains non-free.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

To impart, even metaphorically, the idea that inanimate objects have a will subtly taints the thought processes of even the most advanced thinkers

Yeah, it's like pretending that computers have bootstraps they can pull themselves up by. Bastards, it was years before I realized the truth. They wear sandals.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

More info here

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[91degrees]

No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.

Information wants to be anthropomorphised!

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Digitalia]

The particle in question is not information. It may inform those who have instruments available to detect the particle, but the actual generation of information takes place when the particle is perceived by a sentient being. It is the act of viewing, measuring, or thinking which brings information into being. Even though the particle may continue to exist long after the scientist who observed it has died, the information gleaned from that particle will inevitably decay unless preserved. Decay is the ultimate fate of information, not freedom.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Dogtanian]

> > > That information wants to be set free.
> > No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.
> Is every one in your family that literal? It must be difficult to use metaphors, metonome, etc.

No, anthropomorphisation of computer (and information) concepts is valid when there is some sort of logic or structure behind that particular piece or type of information.

When (for example) we say a flawed computer program "will happily read as much input as you feed it and not worry about overflowing the buffer", we're not implying the program is sentient, let alone "thinks" in human terms. We're either describing the logic behind its design, or (in this case) the implications of its *actual* behaviour against the *intended* behaviour (the latter "intelligence" and "purpose" being that of the programmer/designer).

Now, to apply the same technique to information and say that "information wants to be free" is completely meaningless; information is (a) A very generalised concept, and (b) In the eye of the beholder.

Why does information "want to be free"? This is doing no more than projecting your pseudo-"libertarian" desires onto some abstract concept.

It has nothing to do with being "literal" or "metaphorical" (let's skip the "metonome", since I don't have a clue what the hell that's meant to be). As I said above, if there is a specific human meaning behind a specific piece of information (including a computer program), it's valid to anthropomorphise.

"Information wants to be free" is nothing *but* touchy-feely ideological anthropomorphism. It has no basis in fact, and isn't necessarily desirable when you consider all the implications.

As one of the other replies said, "you can begin by publicizing all of your personal, medical, and financial records, including your mother's maiden name, your card and PIN numbers, email addresses, account passwords, treatments for any STD's, and so forth".

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely in this context the ground is simply an interface between the Earth and the atmosphere. In that sense it has no mass, it is simply where two concepts meet. Thus it has no mass and doesnt contribute to the gravitational pull.

or something.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[oasisbob]

Nice point about anthropomorphizing.

I'd be surprised if many people on Slashdot have even heard the original quote:

"Information wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

--Stewart Brand, writing in 1984

Makes a lot more sense in context, doesn't it? I find it surprising how old this quote is and how perfectly it is proven by the Internet and modern file sharing.

It is also obvious that he is talking about free "as in beer."

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[STrinity]

A good analogy would be to liken closed (non-free) information to potential energy, such as a bolder on top of a hill. There is only one way it can go, and it's natural state is at rest at the bottom of the hill (lowest energy state). In the same way, the natural state of information is to be free and it requires resistance to prevent this.

Unfortunately, science does not work by analogy. PE is a quantifiable property of matter -- given a set of scales and a measuring stick, I can tell you the PE of every object on my desk. But "information wants to be free" is just a slogan someone made up with no scientific rationale.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[ScrewMaster]

You're still anthropomorphizing. Information isn't some wild animal or bacterium that needs to be contained. Left to itself it just stays where the last person that moved it put it. What you really mean is that people have a natural tendency to want to know things that other people don't want them to know. Security is there to keep interested eyes out, not to keep information in.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[hyperizer]

You're confusing beer with speech. The actual quote (Stewart Brand) is:

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Fall near the "Slashdot line of thinking"? How does owning a mac and worshipping steve jobs have anything to do with anthropomorphizing information?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[srleffler]

Um, no. Objects don't fall toward the 'center' of the Earth. Objects are pulled on by all the mass of the Earth (and everything else). The 'ground' is the outer surface of the mass that is pulling on the object. It is explicitly part of the process, not merely 'in the way'. Furthermore, since the ground is closest to the object, it exerts more force on the object than any other similar mass of material in the Earth. The force exerted by the ground is proportionally the strongest gravitational force acting on the object. (Of course it is still an insignificant portion of the total force. The Earth is big.)

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[alpha_foobar]

Perhaps he meant:
metronome Audio pronunciation of "metronome" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (mtr-nm)
n. Music

        A device used to mark time by means of regularly recurring ticks or flashes at adjustable intervals.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[STrinity]

The ground is contributing to the mass of the planet, thereby increasing the earth's gravitational pull, correct?

No, the ground is the surface; it's the stuff under the ground that contributes to the mass. If I dug a hole to the center of the Earth, you would keep falling towards the center of mass even while you're below ground level.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic, no?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[millennial]

Your excellent attention to semantics aside, you people are freaking me out.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[srleffler]

Saying that an object 'wants' to fall to the ground is worse than the usual 'Pathetic Fallacy', in that it also gets the cause and effect backward. The object does not cause itself to fall to the ground. The ground pulls the object toward it. (Although one could also justifiably say that the object pulls the Earth towards itself.)

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[STrinity]

Um, no. Objects don't fall toward the 'center' of the Earth. Objects are pulled on by all the mass of the Earth (and everything else). The 'ground' is the outer surface of the mass that is pulling on the object. It is explicitly part of the process, not merely 'in the way'.

Imagine if the Earth was a cube with pefectly flat sides. Now imagine setting a marble near one of the corners. Would it just sit there? No. It'd be pulled towards the center of mass, which means rolling towards the middle of the face, which is closer to the center than the corners.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Aumaden]

things "want" to fall to the ground

So, if I throw you off a tall building, you want to fall?

Information does not "want" anything. It simply *is*. It's people that want to control access to information. And regardless of the "hacker creed", no one wants *all* information freely available. For example: social security number, credit card numbers, the list of pr0n sites visited this week.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[outsider007]

information is sad at the implication that it mighht not want to be free.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[robertjw]

Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.

Actually it's more a function of entropy than gravity. Like all things in nature Information wants to move from a state of higher order, secrecy, to a state of lower order, freedom.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[ray9x]

I believe that he meant metonymy.
Please don't be a prick in order to get '+1 Funny'
-r.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[PhotoGuy]

No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.

Yeah, it hates it when you do that.

Funniest... comment... ever...

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless, of course, one believes in the equivalent of David Brin's E-Space, a level of reality where ideas are lifeforms.

Impossible? I don't know.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Doc Ruby]

What is that "Slashdot line of thinking"? The one where gun nuts demand they get whatever penis surrogate they want, justified by some grammatical error in the Second Amendment, in response to any discussion of government protection of rights? And what have you got against "civil liberty groups"? Do you support some kind of "civil slavery"?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[extrasolar]

Absolutely. I get tired of slashdotters complaining about "anthropomorphizing". The main problem is that we have too many two-bit geeks who can't help taking everything literally. Get over it Spock, we love rhetoric, and just because you can't read rhetoric doesn't mean that everything we say is a fallacy.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[NitsujTPU]

Ok, so, digging through webster we see that the ground is the surface of the Earth.

Now, we see "surface"
1 : the exterior or upper boundary of an object or body
2 : a plane or curved two-dimensional locus of points (as the boundary of a three-dimensional region)
3 a : the external or superficial aspect of something b : an external part or layer

Ok, so, now that we have surface, we can accept definition 1, that it's a boundary, in which case, you are correct.

If we accept definition 3, however, I am correct, because the mass of that layer is contributing to the Earth's gravitational pull.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

so why is the Free. capitalised?

Free is Freedom.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

(Although one could also justifiably say that the object pulls the Earth towards itself.)

Saying that the object pulls the Earth towards itself is the same as saying that the object pulls itself towards the earth (which you objected to). The only difference is in the perspective of the observer.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[empaler]

Well, I'm pretty sure that special schools have spelling class. Before recess, right after "Personal Hygiene and You - not Mortal Enemies"-class...

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Hatta]

No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist.

Wrong! Information is never destroyed. It may become irretreivable to a human being, but to an ideal observer For example, if you burn a document, the information on the document is still encoded in the ashes and smoke. If you knew the exact position of every atom, you could calculate back and reconstruct the original document. Of course, it is not feasible to do this, but the universe does not care about the limitations of mere mortals. Even information thrown into a black hole gets conserved as hawking radiation.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[empaler]

Why didn't I read this and refer to it before I blurbed all this shit out? Xp

I prefer concise.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Hatta]

Doh, shoulda previewed

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

lol w00t.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

dictionary.com much?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[horn_in_gb]

maybe metonym?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[mikael]

You're being pulled in every direction you can see ground. However, the forces cancel out in all sideways directions, so the only force not cancelled out is straight downwards. If you were to hollow out a hole all the down to the centre of the Earth and out the other side (assuming you could deal with the heat and pressure), you would find that you are still being pulled downwards, but the gravity decreases the closer you are to the centre of the Earth. And if you jumped down this hole you would keep bouncing from end to end until air friction brought you to a stop at the centre of the Earth.

To work out the contre-of-gravity for arbitary shapes, you break up the shape into convex pieces, work out the centre-of-gravity of those pieces, then sum the centre-points weighted by mass.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[MyLongNickName]

What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.

Only on Slashdot would this be considered insightful. I estimate 50-70 Billion people have walked this Earth. Please give me information about all of them.

Heck, we don't know that must about the most famous people born just a few centuries ago... contradictory "information" abounds. Is it part of some global cospiracy? It would have to be if your theory is true.

Fact is, if there is any global phenomenon related to information, this would be it: Information becomes obsure and difficult to find as time goes on unless active measures are taken to prevent it from doing so.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[jhcarnelian]

The phrase "information wants to be free" elegantly conveys a particular view of information and its relation to society.

Natural language is not a set of logical propositions, it's a way of communicating emotions as well as facts. If you don't understand that, then the fault isn't with the people who coined the phrase, the fault is with your understanding of natural language.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[MyLongNickName]

Not sure which is freaking me out more. The pedantic arugments, or the folks who moderated the discussion up.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Freeptop]

Really? Then please, set free all of your userids with associated server names, the passwords to those accounts, your credit card numbers, your ATM PIN, your bank account numbers, and any information needed to access said accounts.

After all, all of that is information, so if it wants to be set free....

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean such measures as not copying it? Because information doesn't spread on it's own - it spreads because human beings actively copy it.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[RobbieGee]

Or at least very cheap.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't confuse data with information. Data are always present. How we gather and process this data and what we decide to do with it becomes information. To be 'informed' that this data exists is to gain knowlegde of its presence which leads to the unbinding of human ignorance. Thus information wants to be free, as we do not want to be thought ignorant.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

I anthropomorphized my OS. It feels snappier now!

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[poopdeville]

In the absence of friction, it would move sinusoidally from one corner (through the minimal point you mentioned) to the other. This is because of conservation of energy.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[soft_guy]

What is a metonome?

It's that thing that sits on your piano and goes "tick tick tick" to help you keep the beat.
 

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[pyrrho]

jesus, it's language, language is not literal.

it's not anthropomorphication, it's just a way of saying that information tend to get out... what's done in the dark tend to come to light... you maybe missed the point.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[srleffler]

Everything you have said is true, and yet completely irrelevant. I have no idea how you thought this example would help. Go back and re-read the original post to which I was replying.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[fitten]

No, that's a craptastic analogy. Rationalize it all you want, you're just spewing some hippy garbage that you thought sounded good.

Suppose I discover the cure to cancer and all things that ail you. It's up to me to spread that around. If I decide not to tell anyone, the information (clearly you can't dispute that this is your worthy "information" and not merely valueless facts) goes to the grave with me. At no time was it beating on my head to fall out and roll down some hill.

Stop using analogies to attempt to explain things. They are one of the worst forms of explanation that exists because, no matter what, part of your analogy is simply wrong by definition because if you had a precise description of what you wanted to say, you'd say it and not waste time on stupid analogies.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

"Open-source software advocates want information to be free, as do civil liberty groups and other political organizations that fall near the Slashdot line of thinking."

      I could go into the regular arguments, but no doubt it's going be covered thoroughly by the rest so I'm going to have some fun with a slightly different perspective today. Truths about situations are rarely explainable by one concept. It usually is a cocktail of thoughts. This is my theory on one of the more minor ones. Why is it "Slashdotters" butt heads with the alleged "elite" regarding issues of free flowing information.

      I am loathe to stereotype since one can always find exceptions. However if we are going to identify Slashdotters as a group this would be what seems to be most common.

1.we tend to be very intelligent
2.we also tend to be awkward in real life groups
3.we are very humanistic and philosophical despite this (not politically ideological though)
4.we spend massive amounts of time gathering information (on all kinds of subjects) that we mostly never use but we do it anyways.
5. Contrary to popular belief many of us don't make much money because we're too busy gathering that information and interpreting it.
5.We are ruthless in picking apart arguments based on rhetoric not facts
6.We don't give laid much (come on you can admit it!)

        The "elite" in our society (whatever ideology they follow) are usually very intelligent and are used to being near the top of the intelligence and information heap. Unfortunately technology has created a situation where they are often well.... to be nice.... impotent. It seems they are at the mercy of us nerdy types everywhere to get their information (from the NSA, to Google, even (dare I say it) I suspect secret Slashdotters at MS) This obviously makes them very insecure since they don't have a frigging clue what's going on without our help and are used to controlling all the information reins.

        Now Slashdot types are not to blame for this career move. The elite only have themselves to blame for pursuing business, law and politics in lew of the technical knowledge that propels the world today. They wanted to feel powerful and to parade their penises around cameras-- and that has come at the expense of performance.

        Sure there still are some tech types that don't agree but they are a dwindling bunch and usually have very specific financial situations. Even big companies like IBM are starting to see the light by adopting O/S on a massive scale. There is a reason why there now are millions of software engineers with Slashdot attitudes towards free information and it goes far beyond OSTG, Linux, hacking, politics and philosophy. The reason so many of us think the same? We are armed with enough information to make a qualified opinion on this this particular subject. I know very little about tort, but please spare me the attitude when the alleged "elite" tries to explain to me the nature of computer security and the "morality" of how information should be controlled. If anyone is anthropomorphizing it's the types that don't have a clue but would say anything because they need cash NOW. Slashdot is not against business or government like some trolls around here like to rant. It is against the government and various corporations manipulating and controlling information at the expense of truth and social justice.

"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

bet you feel pretty stupid

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[arminw]

...Information is never destroyed. It may become irretreivable to a human being...

It is intersesting that you should make that observation about the indestructibleness of information. In the Bible we find a similar statement by Jesus in Matthew 12:36-37

And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. 37 For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.

An "ideal observer" ie. God would certainly be able to retrieve *any* information that has ever existed in the Universe. Has anyone ever uttered the words: "I'll be God damned?" So then watch what you say!

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Dabido]

Oh ... the piano teachers splinter ruler! It sometimes goes WHACK WHACK WHACK too! :-)

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, a sg-1 fan!

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Emmettfish]

Maybe 'Pax Digitalis,' or 'Pax Digitamus,' but 'Pax Digitalia' makes it sound like 'The Peace of Fingers.'

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Where would you like it to be?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

actually yes it does. Data does not want to be set free. However by its very nature information is the propagation of data to those who do not already have it therefore Information REQUIRES disemmination

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you're talking about a "metronome". Dimwit.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[h4rm0ny]

Analogies are used for explanation, a comparison to help someone understand a concept as was used here. You clearly understood the explanation of "Information Wants to Be Free." Therefore, analogy successful. Information wants to be free is not a slogan. It is a nice and poetic way of saying it takes effort to prevent its flow.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[h4rm0ny]

Well then lets talk in specifics. Let's apply some realism to the idea that fitten discovers the cure to cancer.

In order to develop this cure, you have done research, spent time and effort, purchased cancer-developing mice, et al. You must now put effort into concealing all this.

"it's up to me to spread that around."

If you mention it once, then you do not have to do any work to spread it. The greater the value of information, the more it will spread with less effort.

What you are proposing is a very very finely balanced situation (you are the only one that knows with no tell-tale evidence). Let one person in on the secret and the effort to contain that information has increased dramatically. Two people in on it, more so. A research group, you'll need to take quite dramatic security measures. In each case we're moving away from your hypothetical ideal (perfectly balanced on the top of my hill). A very small amount of work is needed to disturb this careful balance, which in anything other than your hypothetical woke up one morning with a vision scenario, is going to be less than the work needed to contain it.

Essentially, my analogy was to illustrate that information kept secret is not the lowest energy state. And the greater the value of the information the less the onus is on you to spread it around, and the harder it will be to contain.

So there you go, the same explanation stripped of the boulder and hill image as you asked.

If you want to come up with a different specific example than discovering the cure for cancer and all that ails me (which would have to include Visual Basic, please), then go ahead. Try and find something where the Information has value (my height of hill / weight of boulder) where the information doesn't want to be free. I've illustrated my principle, and am happy to move on to testing it.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Kaorimoch]

I just pooped my pants.

Sorry, that piece of information just wanted to get out. I figured the path of least resistance was a slashdot post.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[bentcd]

"Information wants to be free" for much the same reason that "gas wants to fill all available volume" or "liquid wants to flow downhill". It is an anthropomorphic way of describing how it acts when there is nothing to stop it. As for information, the ease with which information can be copied and spread means that once even one copy of it has been compromised, there is no known way to guarantee that you are able to obtain all copies of it, thereby recapturing it. Therefore, once freed, it will stay free, and there really isn't anything you can do about it. And so, "it wants to be free".
From a hacker standpoint this is good because once a hacker has managed to "free" some piece of information, there is an almost 100% guarantee that it remains free and so the work was not wasted and cannot be un-done.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Things don't want to fall to the ground; the ground is merely in the way

Hmmm.... the ground being part of the body which is exerting the force of gravity on the thing that's falling.....

You could say things fall towards the ground....

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Dogtanian]

"Wants" does not fit what I consider to be valid anthropomorphism as I described, because the concept of "information" is so generalised that there is no underlying logic to *all* of it except that it is "useful to someone".

Anthropomorphising software is valid, because it reflects (or reflects against) the underlying thought processes of that particular piece of software. Generally, "information" does not have that level of consistent thought process behind it.

And what is "information" anyway? Does it have any meaning before we extract or require it? No. It isn't free then. In addition, claiming that "information wants to be free" once it is freed is flawed, because until it is freed, it does not necessarily tend to reproduce; on the contrary, it can die off.

Saying that information wants to be free once it is free is kind of flawed...

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? That seems to be the easiest way around here.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anonymous Coward]

You should take your own advice.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[fitten]

It sounds more like an explanation of human behavior than any "property" of information. People want to gossip. It gives them some sense of feeling important. People will blab about anything whether it is useful (what you call "information") or not (what they saw Joe doing the other night). It isn't that information wants to be "free". It's that humans have an overwhelming urge to feel important by "letting someone in on their secret".

What you are describing is what many who have been on the bad side of gossip would define as a negative psychological trait in humans.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[bentcd]

I think it can be valid to anthropomorphise anything, regardless of whether there's any sort of thought process behind it. I would consider "a proton wants to move towards negative charge" a valid anthropomorphisation even though this behaviour is obviously not preplanned by anyone in particular.
I find, however, that anthropomorphisation should be used with the utmost care, and prefferably only in a circle of people that are intimately familiar with the topic in question.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[stonecypher]

Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.

This is a cute analogy, but it's also boldfacedly false. There is a physical principle underlying gravity. There is no physical principle attempting to disseminate knowledge. In fact, if you bother to actually figure out what physics says, it says something very ugly: Information wants to disappear. Entropy increases, signal fades.

Information doesn't want to be free. Human ethics want knowledge to spread. Phrased that way, not only is it more powerful, clearer and broader in scope, but it's also accurate.

Stop flinging catch phrases around as arguments. If you bother to think for yourself and say what you mean to say, instead of adopting some sentence you've heard several times because you admire who said it, you'll find that you can communicate with significance, instead of to simply self-label such that educated people tune you out.

What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.

No. Information disappears without measures taken to keep it around. Any measures regarding preventing it from spreading are absolute nonsense. I'm not taking any such measures with my backup discs, yet you don't see my filesystem's layout leaking into general knowledge.

Information is not alive, and it does not grow or breed. Putting information onto the web or into a filesharing client isn't the absence of measures against dissemination. That's the active transmission and support of said data. That modern systems and clients make that so easy that people with a tendency to smear the details to better suit their worldview can actually forget that transmission is an action rather than the lack of one is testament to the design of those systems, not to some fundamental intangible property of information to spread.

If information spread on its own, we wouldn't lose data. Grow up. It's not information that wants to spread, it's ethics that demand that we share. There's a gigantic and important difference between the two. The latter demands you share medicine, theology, science, mathematics, all that good stuff, just like the former does.

The only difference is that the ethical need to share doesn't extend to stealing music and tv. Funny how a detail like that makes a community lie to itself, isn't it?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Anm]

Yeah, he meant metronome because that makes plenty of sense in context.... Suuurrreeee...

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[h4rm0ny]

Now you're getting it. ;) You can't define information without it being in the context of someone / thing knowing it. Describing the behaviour of information depends on describing the medium in which operates. I'm describing much more than gossip however. We can apply this to any sort of information, from Nuclear secrets to movies, and it is irrelevant to moral attribution (whether gossip or the enigma codes).

I disagree that people will blab about things that have no value, however. What Joe did last night is relevant to the people who know him. Just as they might think the same about you talking about computer protocols. The information will spread amongst those who assign value to it. To others, it's not information, just noise.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[stonecypher]

No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist.

Nature records information all the time. There will always be information available to any who wish to retrieve it.

How is it that you get from "in the absence of measures" to "nature is making recordings?" There are two things to which you might be referring. A more careful selection of language reveals them both to be fundamentally broken arguments.

One is that an active process of nature creates a derivative product of information with long-term storage characteristics. One can make this non-argument for cases like fossils, where the information of the creature's structure can be determined occasionally billions of years after the organism itself disappears. The problem is, this isn't the lack of measures to maintain information to which the grandparent referred; there requires some active process, such as sedimentation or water fossilization (petrifaction) in order to occur. In the absence of such a mechanism, which is extremely rare (there's a reason there are so few fossils,) creatures do not leave significant information behind.

The other case is more difficult to explain. There is the argument that information is retreivable through some or another forensic process. Examples include using carbon patterns to determine the nature and temperature of fires or lava, gulleys to divine the presence of water on Mars, and pretty much anything you'd see on CSI: Miami which isn't a self serving pablumessage about the evils of racism or profiteering or some damned thing. There are those who would try to cast this as Nature or The World or something "recording information" which the intrepid researcher can come back and re-discover. Find something rotting? Plot out the progress of the putrifaction and you can (mostly) reconstruct the corpse's original state.

The problem is, that's not recording information at all. That's an incomplete loss of information. In many ways you can think of the physical world as an immensely error correcting signal. This is a fundamentally false analogy, but it serves my explanatory purpose, so run with it anyway. What we're doing when we walk back through partial information to reconstruct the original information is not finding other recordings of that information. What we're doing is looking for correlary effects which when summed give us the complete set of original information. It may sound like the same thing, but there's a critical semantic difference: we're not relocating, we're recreating. Granted it's the same information. Still, it's information lost and remade from evidence, not information located through crafty means.

The difference is quite real. I'm not just playing semantics. Consider The Einstein Puzzle as a good example of a way to recreate lost information, whose goal can only be reached thus.

"Information wants to be free" may not be as accurate as "people generally want to share information and make it available", but sounds a bit more philosophicalisticalish.

If you choose your phrasing to make yourself sound smart instead of to accurately convey information, then you deserve the opinion of ignorance other people aim your way. Besides, philosophy literally translates as "the love of knowledge;" even if the word meant what you seem to think it means, the bit about sharing would be far more in tune with the word than some vacuous notion about the supposed intent of recorded state.

there is nothing that the government can do even half as efficiently as the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than plink.

Exactly what do you think the government is, if not the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than solve tasks? (Yes, tens of millions. The government employs more than 5% of this nation, and the nation's around 300 million these days.)

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[stonecypher]

If you want to worry about the exposure of impressionable young minds to bad information, I suggest you begin by learning the difference between fallacy and falsehood.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[stonecypher]

Uh, no. If you understood thermodynamics and/or information theory, you'd know that the state of higher order is information, and that the state of lower order is noise. There is no "higher order" to secrecy versus freedom. That's just a nonsense emotional argument.

Do us a favor and argue only things you grok, in the future. This one ... yeesh.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[soft_guy]

I was making a joke, silly.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[rhendershot]

As one of the other replies said, "you can begin by publicizing all of your personal, medical, and financial records, including your mother's maiden name, your card and PIN numbers, email addresses, account passwords, treatments for any STD's, and so forth".

I would postulate that over time this is exactly what we'll see happen. The actions of the number of random biological and electromechanical entities in our space will combine to spread all kinds of data like this.

...much like energy dissipating or organized systems crumbling.

So much of this debate centers around the semantic nuances of the meaning of the concept of Information. All that hacker credo refers to is D A T A. And you don't have to have a human container to the data for it to be considered information. A human container defines the concept of K N O W L E D G E.

The fact of the matter is that highly organized and controlled containment of data will naturally devolve to random distributions of that data - in most cases. Not all. Data uncontained can be lost and can devolve into non-existance. Some can be reconstructed from second-tier related datum.

After all, there's a reason this phrase is oft-repeated; it resonates with our understanding of how the world works. All denials aside, Information does have a tendancy to propogate.

simple, neh?

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Madcapjack]

What is a metonome?

It's that thing that sits on your piano and goes "tick tick tick" to help you keep the beat.

Ohhh, you mean a Metrognome. I had one of them. That bleepin nazi dyke. All she did was yell out "Hep one! Hep two! Hep three!"

Anyways she left she left me when she saw that my buddy had a bigger piano.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[coopex]

Too bad that you only took the jr high QM. It's still an unsolved problem whether particles have definate places before you measure them.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[kryten_nl]

Yes, I'm interested in the subject, but simple can't find the time.

Re:Supports the Hacker Creed

[Cappy Red]

Yes, if we expose people to figures of speech at an early age then we run the risk of raising a generation that can use language effectively. This could be the end of the internet as we know it.

Did you use sarcasm in that sentence? It is just that I have heard rumors of the concept, and as your statement seemed odd, I thought this would be a good opportunity to ask.

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[Laebshade]

Is it really that small? (yes, I know I'm repeating my last funny comment. Die)

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[Daxx_61]

What I'm waiting for is to see the astrologer's reactions to all this...

wtf

[Anonymous Coward]

The new planet's name is Xena.

Re:wtf

[bearinboots]

Actually "xena" is just the "working title" of the planet/planetoid. An official name has yet to be announced.

Re:wtf

[hattig]

It'll have a moon called Hercules.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Solar System, the KBOs 'Buffy', 'Angel', 'Willow' and 'Spike' are soon going to clash.

I quite like Xena as a name though. Better than Xanthros or Xerces or Xybots.

Re:wtf

[Rei]

Meanwhile, Renee O'Connor is desparately hoping that it has a moon...

Re:wtf

[Whisperingwolf]

So it orbits around the sun yelling war cries and throwing a chakram at everything that moves?

Re:wtf

[WebHostingGuy]

Hey, Xena was hot.

And don't forget the actress playing Xena (Lucy Lawless) has the power of flight.

Re:wtf

[Rei]

Hey, Firefly has plenty of names to offer up ;)

Ariel, Bellerophon, Londinium, Osiris, Greenleaf, Sunflower, Sihnon, Boros, Beaumonde, Whimsy, Cairo, Trident, Newhall, Hudzen, Lister, Islington, Rune-Ring, Nevada, Gecko, Leon, Persephone, Silverstri, Hera, Wolf, Waterloo, Whitechapel, Athens, Higgens' Moon, Three Hills, Ita, Whitefall, Georgia, Joe's Rock, Anniversary, Ezra, Beylix, Ember, Banyon, Paquin, St. Albans, Avatar, Penal Moon (Dyton Colony), Santo, Gower Moon, Taipei, Knightsbridge, Shadow, Honeymoon, Boxer, Xin Shanghai, Silverhold Colonies, Dakota, Jaingyin, New Hall, Bernadette, Archer's Moon, New Melbourne, New Canaan, Cervantes, Triumph, Hunan, Seven Sisters Belt, Verbena, Walden, Oberon

And that's just planets and moons ;) I'd love a planet called, say, Yosafbridge, but that's just me. ;)

Re:wtf

[wimp_org]

So it orbits around the sun yelling war cries and throwing a chakram at everything that moves?

Nice for them to place her beyond pluto's orbit then. :-)

Wimp_org
-- I'm going to sue them. This really messed up my horoscope.

Re:wtf

[Anonymous Coward]

You are teh awesome! Will you have my babies?

go figure.

[Anonymous Coward]

shocking.

A bad thing?

[ect5150]

while they waited for full analysis

So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?

Re:A bad thing?

[hackwrench]

Before telling anybody else about it, yes. Also, how come no one is asking the question why it took 2 years before such analysis was done.

Re:A bad thing?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

In America, sure. Think if we had waited for a full analysis of Iraq's WMD's, or if they had anything at all to do with 9/11. Then we never would have had an excuse to go to war.

Re:A bad thing?

[TheRealMindChild]

In some cases it can be!

Consider the following:

If geeks fully analylized their winnings from random bar, almost all would never get laid (And have lack of good "Oh MY GOD WHAT DID I DO!!?!?! stories)

Re:A bad thing?

[Valiss]

So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?

Of course. How can you expect us to mob the scientist with questions you know they can't answer so we can cut their funding if they have done all the needed analyst?

Re:A bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. Maybe they wanted to make astrologers look silly?

Re:A bad thing?

[pyrrhonist]

Also, how come no one is asking the question why it took 2 years before such analysis was done.

Explained here. There's no conspiracy - they didn't discover it until January:

Because the new planet is so far away it is moving slower than most of the objects that we find. It is movng so slowly, in fact, that our computers didn't notice it the first time around! We began a special reanalysis a year later to specifically look for very distant objects. This reanalysis found the new planet on January 8th 2005, almost 1 1/2 years after the initial data were obtained.

Re:A bad thing?

[NitsujTPU]

Yes.

Conspiracy theorists are convinced that the reason that NASA is holding back data on Deep Impact isn't because they haven't analyzed it yet (science is, of course, a fast process, which is why most PhD's finish grad school in weeks), but because they accidentally killed some aliens on the surface of Tempel 1.

They're also convinced that this is tied into the occult.

So, there you have it. Waiting for full analysis is for good scientists. If you want to be a proper crackpot, you just make up what happened.

Re:A bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you must know nothing about the scientific community. No one should ever release a finding without proper testing to ensure that the finding is in fact a finding. For example, I could come up with a cure to aids and after two weeks of the people being cured they could drop dead because the cure is also a poison. So before I go telling everyone this and spreading it around and killing people its best if I do more research.

In this case the results of a faulty find are less severe except that these individuals would be mocked and laughed at or even loose their funding because they totally screwed up (this happens a lot to scientists who make completely false and unfounded claims). Full analysis is a good thing because it can save lives and jobs. If you thought about it for more then two seconds and pulled your head out of your slash dot ass you would realize that you're wrong. The crackers were in the wrong too and should have never done this. You might not think it sounds bad but the public sure will and the computer geek community will look like immature assholes once again.

Re:A bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now now now ... Iraq only have themselves to blame for that fiasco, ok ... if anybody *didn't* have those weapons of mass destruction, it was Iraq. It was their fault all along.

(Copyright Jon Stewart of the Daily Show)

Re:A bad thing?

[Pharmboy]

FUD. Bush has NEVER said Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. Lots of "sources" have said that he did, but it never happened. Even the NY Times admits that much. Yet, so many still persist that he did, similar to the whole "Al Gore said he invented the Internet" nonsense. Just because people keep saying that he said it, doesn't mean he said it. Either one of them.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Bush, (like the WDMs) but Iraq and 9/11 simply isn't one of them.

Re:A bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

while they waited for full analysis

So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?

It's not so much the analysis but the waiting which can be bad.

If they had important information which they were incapable of analyzing in a timely manner, then they should have released their monopoly on it long ago.

In another example, the Dead Sea Scrolls were kept under wraps by scholars for a very long time, and were published only after a computer whiz reverse-reconstructed the text from an exhaustive concordance which was available.

Also there's a certain state of mind, where people get some kind of power trip from having an important secret.

Re:A bad thing?

[hexi]

He hasn't explicitly said that 9/11 and Iraq were connected but he has implied so on many occassions. Also you can't forget Powell's speech before the UN.

The least you can say is that Bush hasn't been very clear on the issue.

Re:A bad thing?

[h4rm0ny]

Tony Blair said they did. He should be deeply ashamed of that.

Re:A bad thing?

[Joe U]

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is what got us into the war in the first place.

Re:A bad thing?

[Spackler]

Well, if you can call ours FUD, I can call you a republican.

Re:A bad thing?

[EvilSS]

What are you thinking, of course it is! Otherwise, slashdotters wouldn't be able to complain about it being over-hyped and incomplete.

Re:A bad thing?

[hackstraw]

FUD. Bush has NEVER said Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. Lots of "sources" have said that he did, but it never happened. Even the NY Times admits that much. Yet, so many still persist that he did, similar to the whole "Al Gore said he invented the Internet" nonsense. Just because people keep saying that he said it, doesn't mean he said it. Either one of them.

WE ARE OFFTOPIC, but politics.slashdot.org has pretty much gone away.

I agree that Bush never directly said Iraq did 9/11, but it gets press anyway. Before I officially banned my local "news"paper, I sent a letter to the editor asking them to correct an AP or some other newsfeed that said the Bush did the Iraq thing because of 9/11.

Unfortunately, I do not have the mails with the editor, but he said it was not worthy of a correction because of the way the sentence was worded. Something like "instigated" vs caused or something similar. I still disagreed, and was politely told to fuck off. I tried to be clear that it was irresponsible news reporting to print crap like that, but I guess they are in the business of selling newspaper advertisements vs reporting news.

It is almost a crime to think that a vast majority of the US population believes that the Iraq war was due to 9/11. These misinformed people also have the same vote power as I do, actually more of one because the ignorant have become a majority.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Bush, (like the WDMs) but Iraq and 9/11 simply isn't one of them.

Inquiring minds blame the pet goat. The pet goat mesmerized the President of the United States, the Secret Service, NORAD, and the most powerful Air Force in the world into inaction during the largest attack within the borders of the United States.

Re:A bad thing?

[SpiritGod21]

Attribute it to Bush's administration, then. Furthermore, Al Gore did state that he contributed to the creation of the internet. In fact, he was recently given an award for it.

Re:A bad thing?

[blamanj]

That statement is literally true, in the same lawyerly, weaseling way that Bill Clinton didn't have sex with Monical Lewinsky, if you define having sex specifically as intercourse.

However, take for example, this quote from Bush in 2003, "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained." Now you can't say the average person wouldn't read an implied link between SH and 9/11 there. But, he's safe on the technicality.

Actually, I'm not sure you're correct and that he hasn't slipped up once or twice. Cheney certainly has directly made that link.

Re:A bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush has strongly implied it, and has consistently 'linked' the two in his speeches.

Cheney has explicitly stated it.

Re:A bad thing?

[InadequateCamel]

That doesn't make any sense. If they told people about it then they wouldn't be waiting for further analysis, now would they? How did your not being informed about a 10th planet adversely affect your life?

If you tell the public there is a 10th planet and then have to retract that information, people then start ridiculing the scientists. If you don't tell the people until you get further evidence but the information gets forced out anyways, people start complaining that information was being withheld.

You might say "Hey, it's just a planet, why not let us know?", but it just serves to illustrate the underlying problem. For example, if this was information about a cure for AIDS that was withheld for more research then everyone would have lost their minds. However, once this drug was studied for 2 more years and shown to cause an 80% cancer rate, everyone would have been even angrier than before and tried to blame the scientists who wanted to do more research in the first place!

I know that scientists are at times guilty of rushing to press, but honestly! Stuff like this makes me wonder why people bother doing research...

Re:A bad thing?

[espo812]

Think if we had waited for a full analysis of Iraq's WMD's

Humm... a full analysis of a scientific observation versus a full analysis of clandestine weapons production? Yea, those two are easily comparable.

Iraq violated UN sanction after UN sanction for more than a decade. How much analysis did you want? Iraqi generals thought they had WMD, good luck analyzing that.

Re:A bad thing?

[Aerion]

The real problem isn't whether or not he said it, but that a lot of people believe it's true because nobody cares to refute it.

Re:A bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush and all of his PNAC buddies had the Iraq war planned out before the 2000 election took place.

9/11 turned the inbred bible thumpers against brown people, and made it easier for them to accept...

The Bush administration did one hell of a job continually using Sadam and Bin Laden in the same sentences. They used the same rhetoric tactics that were common during the Nazi buildup to WWII. (See, The Big Lie).

He has people convinced that we are at war due to WMDs, etc. We are in the middle east for one reason, and one reason alone. Israel.

Read up on it, get a good healthy world view that is not fed by Fox News.

Re:A bad thing?

[Pharmboy]

It is almost a crime to think that a vast majority of the US population believes that the Iraq war was due to 9/11.

The vast majority do not. Sure, many polls say this, but we both know that polls and pollsters often have agendas. Many do not see Iraq as even part of the War on Terrorism, no less a cause for 9/11. Maybe in January 2002, but not now.

Whether I agree or not with the WMD situation, I will openly admit that I would rather see terrorists go to Iraq to take on the US military, than come to the US to take on the citizens. My guess is that was Bush's goal to begin with, to "take the war to them", and away from the western hemisphere. Many would call this cynical, I would instead call it good tactics.

On the WMD issue, Bush WAS wrong. So was every other country in the world and UN. Lets be intellectually honest about this. France, Germany, UK, US, Russia, EVERYONE thought he had WMDs, and Saddam ACTED like he did. Doesn't make Bush right, but he was in good company and I can forgive this mistake, since everyone made the same mistake, including the Europeans who hate Bush.

I am not a Bush fan but I am not going to lie, make up stuff, or pretend that things I know to be false, are true. The truth is enough, it just doesn't apply to those two points.

Patriot Act. Fetal tissue research. Overfunding an underperforming Education Dept. There are plenty of ligitimate complaints to pick from.

Re:A bad thing?

[d34thm0nk3y]

Some of the choice quotes from the timeframe. Make your own opinion...

President Bush:
We know that Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.

Oct. 14, 2002: "After September the 11th, we've entered into a new era and a new war. This is a man [Hussein] that we know has had connections with Al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use Al Qaeda as a forward army."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
Sept. 26, 2002: "Yes, there is a linkage between Al Qaeda and Iraq."

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
Sept. 25, 2002: There "have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of Al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time."

Dick Cheney
"If we're successful in Iraq then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11,"

Colin Powell
We know that there had been connections and there had been exchanges between al Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein regime. And those have been pursued and looked at

Re:A bad thing?

[dvnelson72]

However, take for example, this quote from Bush in 2003, "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained." Now you can't say the average person wouldn't read an implied link between SH and 9/11 there. But, he's safe on the technicality.

This is an example of how perception taints reality.

It sounds like you read that quote and think, "see Bush is saying Saddam was involved in 911."

I read that quote and think, "we are not safe just because an ocean divides us. our enemies can strike without an army and 911 is the proof."

I submit to you that you are naturally cynical of Bush, and possibly rhinos in general, and you choose to find implied meaning in words that mean something completely different.

Meanwhile there are going to be people who will gleefully blame Bush when the next terrorist act happens on our turf and they will say he didn't do enough, because he did too much and people hate us because of him. They always forget to blame the actual terrorists.

Re:A bad thing?

[delirium of disorder]

Bush NEVER said that Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks on 9-11-01. However, a majority of the American people were convinced that some link existed between the Iraqi government and those who committed the 911 attacks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename= article&node=&contentId=A32862-2003Sep5&notFound=t rue/
The grandparent poster never blamed Bush for this fact. Maybe there's something wrong with the American media or education system that has made people so ignorant. Perhaps the fact that we are one of the most religious industrialized nations means more of us are willing to have faith in blatant falsehoods. Regardless of the forces that shape public opinion, I think it's safe to say that the US military and executive branch would not have attacked Iraq if the American public was strongly against such an attack. Our support, through public opinion poles, election of right wing leaders, willingness to work in the defense industry, willingness to pay taxes, unwillingness to protest, etc, has directly lead to this war. Modern states do not go to war because of some arbitrary dictum from their commander in chief, they go to war due to a complex set of forces that cause the commander and chief to make decisions that he knows the public will support. We do not live in an authoritarian dictatorship. Most leftists view those in power as the sinners who are manipulating the people, and the masses as the sheep who are blindly following the leaders. I see the media, the politicians, the religious leaders, and all of those in power as the result of social forces just as much as "the people" are. Hardly anyone makes rational decisions! We're all just getting swept on and away by the invisible hand of history. We (the voters, the students, the congressmen and women, the solderers, the teachers, everyone!) need to stop and think and evaluate what exactly are the implications of our choices on our fellow human beings. We should be conservative in action, making sure to first do no harm before doing anything at all. We should be scientific in thought, meaning willing to accept any idea as possible, but subjecting every idea to scepticism and rational scrutiny. As the world grows more interdependent, humans must either become smarter, or live in fear of terror attacks they are unwilling to understand.

Re:A bad thing?

[jtosburn]

Bush has NEVER said Iraq had anything to do with 9/11.

You're splitting hairs. Bush and his administration have repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein had links to al quaeda. No it's not literally the same thing, but come on! He was playing on people's emotional reaction to the magic words "al qaeda" to drum up support for invasion. The Whitehouse is the only governmental body still not admitting that that information was bogus; everyone else from the CIA to Colin Powell has said that al qaeda had no connections to Iraq.

See Bush's speech here, which includes this:

We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.

Here's CNN covering the Bush administration steadfastly hanging onto that vision: link

And the Washington Post covers the backpedaling here, including this:

  While not explicitly declaring Iraqi culpability in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, administration officials did, at various times, imply a link. In late 2001, Cheney said it was "pretty well confirmed" that attack mastermind Mohamed Atta had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official. Later, Cheney called Iraq the "geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Bush, in 2003, said "the battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001."

Beyond the Sept. 11 attacks, administration officials have also suggested that there had been cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda that went beyond contacts. Bush last year called Hussein "an ally of al Qaeda." Just this Monday, Cheney said Hussein "had long-established ties with al Qaeda."

Those are just the top four hits that Google gives. There are, of course, more.

Re:A bad thing?

[Smurf]

You might want to read letter of Bush to Congress that was linked by a grandson of your post. I'm just repeating it because it may escape your attention, as the poster didn't reply to you directly.

Although GWB doesn't directly say that the links exist, it is absolutely evident that he wanted to imply it (see point 2). Please note also that the document linked comes from the White House site, not an external "source".

Re:A bad thing?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Lots of "sources" have said that he did

That's a funny way of saying "Presidential Advisors".

Re:A bad thing?

[int19h]

It's not hard to agree that things were far from perfect in Irak. But, it's a long way from there, to going to war against it.

I don't see the automatics here, and I don't think it should be an automatic reaction either.

Re:A bad thing?

[admiralh]

I think your perception is a bit tainted, too. Back to that later.

OK, I get the whole, "oceans can't protect us anymore" line. And that argument is reasonable. But what we forget is that Europeans have been dealing with all kinds of terrorists for a couple of generations. They've managed to adjust and protect themselves without destroying the fabric of their society. Perhaps we should look there as a guide rather that just strike out blindly in anger, no matter how justified that anger may be.

Regardless, I think you are badly misreading (perception issues?) Bush's line. Let's look at it critically.

"Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained."

This statement implies that 9/11 should change your opinion about the possibility that Saddam could be contained. But if Saddam wasn't partially responsible for 9/11, isn't he still contained. So in truth, even with other Islamist factions (al Qaeda) able to mount attacks, Saddam was still contained, and even the events of 9/11 should not have changed your opinion about that specific fact.

So Bush *is* conflating the two. Just not directly.

I admit to being cynical of Bush. But I think Bush has earned that cynicism most thoroughly. remember, he advertised himself as "a uniter, not a divider". But it became apparent from the beginning that his definition of compromise was that you had to change your position so that you agreed with him, while he didn't have to change a thing.

The simple fact is he is a spoiled bully who throws a tantrum when he can't get his way. Bolton's recess appointment today is a good example. Not to mention his condescending nicknames for his acquaintances. I could go on.

As to *gleefully* blaming Bush if another attack happens - IMO, if another 9/11-type attack happens in Bush's term, I don't think you'll see another Presidential election in our lifetime.

Re:A bad thing?

[allgood2]

God read, already! It's not like the planets right next door. It takes a long time for light to travel that far a distance. Why is it that everyone now expects all other sciences to move at the same rate as computer or information science. Even with things that can be physically held, it can take years upon years to perfect things. Decades to introduce a new medicine, centuries to identify all current variants of a plant family, etc.

The world, the solar system, and probably the galaxies beyond deal in time in 100s of years, if not 1000s; not split seconds. Two years is nothing in that time frame. Hell, I have a friend who's a biochemist, who spent over three years testing for the same thing. Different tests, different lengths of time, different chemical reactions, etc., etc., but three years, and when she left the test were still going.

Astronomy is not the field to get into if you like your information fast.

Re:A bad thing?

[omeomi]

It is almost a crime to think that a vast majority of the US population believes that the Iraq war was due to 9/11.

It may not have been the cause, but do you really think that the war would have had the initial popularity that it needed in congress were it not for 9/11? Prior to 9/11 Iraq was seen (by the general public at least) as a bit of a distant threat. Our military pushed them out of Kuwait relatively quickly, and I don't think many people would have thought Iraq warranted an invasion prior to 9/11

Whether I agree or not with the WMD situation, I will openly admit that I would rather see terrorists go to Iraq to take on the US military, than come to the US to take on the citizens. My guess is that was Bush's goal to begin with, to "take the war to them", and away from the western hemisphere. Many would call this cynical, I would instead call it good tactics.

I would call it shortsighted. This tactic relies on the idea that there's a finite amount of terrorists that can be lured to and killed off in Iraq, leaving a safer world for the rest of us. However, what if we're creating new terrorists by occupying Iraq faster that we can kill off the old ones? We have to pull troops out of Iraq eventually, and if we do so with more terrorists than when we started, how does that help us?

Re:A bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD. Bush has NEVER said Iraq had anything to do with 9/11.

"We meet here during a crucial period in the history of our nation, and of the civilized world. Part of that history was written by others; the rest will be written by us. (Applause.) On a September morning, threats that had gathered for years, in secret and far away, led to murder in our country on a massive scale. As a result, we must look at security in a new way, because our country is a battlefield in the first war of the 21st century." -- G W Bush, 2/26/03 speech to American Enterprise Inst.

http://www.themoderntribune.com/george_bush_speech _february_26,_2003_plans_for_iraq_and_iraq_war.htm

What "September morning" do you think he meant?

Sept. 9th?

Re:A bad thing?

[CheshireCatCO]

While I agree with your sentiment whole-hearedly, I feel the need to note that light-speed is not the limit to this problem. The object in question is about 100 AU away, so it takes around 830 minutes for light from it to reach us. While that's a long work-day (or a long flight), that's not really a long time as far as slowing research down.

What does slow things down is that the object mmmmmooooovvvveeessss vvvvveeeeerrrrrryyyyyyy sssssllllooooowwwwllllyyyyy. So getting an orbit determined takes a lot of patience since you need the target to move significantly between observations.

Re:A bad thing?

[bugnuts]

Iraq violated UN sanction after UN sanction for more than a decade.

Go check how many UN sanctions and resolutions there have been against Israel, and for how many decades.

The Economist, a fairly good news source, published an article in 2002 documenting why Iraq's sanctions were different than Israel's but with the current information gathered today, it's clear they were wrong. They believed Iraq had wmd and was hotly pursuing a nuclear program as they had in the past. But the program was shut down and wasn't restarted.

Although it's a complete threadjack to go into the reasons for the war, whether we were lied to, why it was a good idea, and why it was a bad idea, one thing is clear: the reasons for going to war (and getting americans to agree) were based on false information and spin. Plain and simple. The end result might be good for the world and the region ... but the reasons cited were not sound. You can see exactly what I'm talking about in old news articles. It makes the spin that much clearer.

Re:A bad thing?

[Pharmboy]

I appreciate your perspective and honest opinions, even tho I disagree.

This tactic relies on the idea that there's a finite amount of terrorists that can be lured to and killed off in Iraq,

Actually, it relies more on causing terrorist to spend resources, and do so closer to home where it is easier to track them. Yes, a few "new" terrorists are born, but realistically, there wasn't a shortage of hate in saudi arabia before this.

I always thought we left the job unfinished in the first Gulf war (i'm 40, AF vet, and son of a Vet, I know the costs....) It would seem to me the best thing is to bring democracy into the middle east, and iraq is the best candidate since the current (now former) leadership was obviously a problem.

I am not saying I agree with HOW Bush has done this (some good, lots bad) but I do agree with the idea of getting a democratic foothold in the middle east. It will cost lives. It will be expensive. Same as the alternative, except the alternative (learning to live with terrorism) doesn't have an end plan.

Democracy is messy, but persistant. Once you get people used to a little freedom, they are more willing to fight to keep it. It's only been a few years, a blink of the eye in historical terms. Like WW2, with Germany and Japan, it takes several years. Like you, I hope our govt. doesn't fuck it up in the meantime. Unlike you, I still think it's the better of the two choices.

Re:A bad thing?

[adoarns]

I will openly admit that I would rather see terrorists go to Iraq to take on the US military, than come to the US to take on the citizens.

As if this was the choice.

Re:A bad thing?

[exegene]

How about this one:

"THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction."

This statement was made on May 29, 2003 however, slightly past the timeframe you mentioned.

Re:A bad thing?

[Really Wannabe Geek]

"If we're successful in Iraq then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11,"

Maybe he was talking about the geographic center of gravity or center of mass of the terrorists spread out all over the middle east. Maybe it is indeed in Iraq. Did you think of that you... you... Democrat! huh?

Re:A bad thing?

[omeomi]

Wow, that was probably the most mature, well thought out response I've ever gotten on Slashdot. You didn't even imply that I still live with my mom (which I don't). Much appreciated. Anyway, I hope you're right, because it looks like that's the way we're going for at least the next 3.5 years...I think the determining factor will be whether or not we can realistically drain the resources of terrorist groups that are supported by countries in a part of the world that's sitting on more oil/money than they know what to do with, and whether we're able to dispose of more terrorists than we create. Oh well, at least the "war against terrorism" is over, but the "struggle against extremism" has just begun.

Re:A bad thing?

[Peter La Casse]

He hasn't explicitly said that 9/11 and Iraq were connected but he has implied so on many occassions.

They are connected: 9/11 spurred a "gloves-off" approach to international relations. That's what they mean when they say "attacking Iraq is consistent with attacking terrorists" (see Bush's letter, quoted a few posts over.) The similarity isn't "Iraq:terrorists", it's "attack:attack".

Whether they're right or not is still debatable, but for different reasons.

Re:A bad thing?

[0111 1110]

There is a third option. They could simply have released the (now freed) information as work in progress. With the caveat that it has not been verified yet and is quite likely to be wrong. What you are suggesting is that CYA is the most important consideration. They could have just said something like: "This data here has led us to believe that there is an object out there that may qualify as a tenth planet, but we do not yet have any evidence that we regard as conclusive." We see press releases like this all the time on slashdot. Although they do tend to get overhyped by the media trying to sensationalize everything, I think it is still interesting and useful information.

Re:A bad thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yes, they have had contact. Al Qaeda thinks Saddam is the right-hand man of evil incarnate.

Mind, you Saddam has had contact with the US. Some good and two major ones, the two "wars".

Re:A bad thing?

[sean.peters]

Well, you're right about one thing. There are certainly lots of legitimate complaints to be made about the Bush administration.

I will openly admit that I would rather see terrorists go to Iraq to take on the US military, than come to the US to take on the citizens.

Oh, please. The so-called "flypaper" theory is so discredited I can't believe even Bush supporters are still spouting it. First of all, is it really "supporting our troops" to cynically use them to bait a gigantic terrorist trap? It is moral (not to mention legal) to invade a country that had nothing to do with international terrorism just to serve as a venue for said trap? And most important, do you really think that there's some finite number of terrorists out there, and if we just kill them all in Iraq, we'll be done? We're creating and training vast numbers of new terrorists there!

On the WMD issue, Bush WAS wrong. So was every other country in the world and UN. Lets be intellectually honest about this. France, Germany, UK, US, Russia, EVERYONE thought he had WMDs, and Saddam ACTED like he did.

Every country in the world thought that because we told them we had evidence that that was true. We now know that the evidence for WMD's in Iraq was very weak, and that the Bush administration suppressed evidence that didn't support the preferred story (see the "Downing Street Memo"). Yes, Saddam was evil. He did a lot of things that weren't in his own best interest in the run up to the war. But as long as we're being intellectually honest, let's acknowledge that if we propose to invade another country, it's our responsibility to ensure that doing so is justified - not the target country's responsibility to prove that it's not.

Sean

Re:A bad thing?

[xcham]

We know that Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.

Does he mean Ronald Reagan?

Re:A bad thing?

[stonecypher]

However, take for example, this quote from Bush in 2003, "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained." Now you can't say the average person wouldn't read an implied link between SH and 9/11 there. But, he's safe on the technicality.

Hardly. This is a textbook fallacy of composition, arguably also questionable cause, and can even be cast as the spotlight fallacy, if you don't believe Americans are as stupid about the Middle East as the Bush administration would have you believe. Either way, it's a red herring, given that the quote given was as regards justifying his war, when in fact whether the average american holds any given belief about Saddam has approximately nothing to do with us stomping the Taliban flat.

You really shouldn't declare someone's arguments sound until you've actually inspected them. Bush is absolutely rife with nonsense, and the idea that he's "technically correct" is an appalling testament to the low quality of our public schools. You should be able to see through that by third grade.

Re:A bad thing?

[hackwrench]

There is a difference between reporting an observation and declaring it an irrefutable fact. Nobody is going to drop dead just because someone announces he found something that may be a cure for AIDS. There's no big loss on reporting novel things without a degree of certainty as long as you don't go around saying you're sure, but reporting unsure things will often make it quicker that it becomes sure one way or the other. I find it likely that too often something goes unreported that is wrong but only slightly wrong and then the person discovers they are wrong and abandons the whole course of investigation, whereas if there had been more eyes on the issue a correction could be made so that the observation becomes repeatable.

In other news...

[djfray]

crazy alien theorists were disproved about the government hiding information about alien life forms, through them hiding information about the tenth planet

Article quality

[Anonymous Coward]

I question the reliability of that publication. I mean, they even have a - bad - Uranus joke in the end. I really don't think there's anything to it. Move along.

Re:Article quality

[Ingolfke]

The Inquirer article is actually just rehashing what the South African Sunday Independant reported. That publication seems to have more credibility (or at least didn't make any Uranus jokes... was that a joke?)

Re:Article quality

[Ingolfke]

The link to the original South African Sunday Independant article.

10th Planet

[esmokey]

Reportedly, it was green and smiling. No word yet from the Real Hitchiker's Guide, which was revealed only hours ago.

So, did they...

[John Napkintosh]

Hack the planet?

Re:So, did they...

[jolande]

Shut up. Just, shut up! Shut up! I though I had finally blocked that movie out of my head. I hate you.

Re:So, did they...

[glassjaw rocks]

That place is probably full of super leet garbage files!

Re:So, did they...

[phoenix42]

I was asking myself the exact same thing.

Re:So, did they...

[TransEurope]

*ROTFL*

That was my first thought, too :D

Re:So, did they...

[k0hlrabi]

root/.workspace/.garbage.

UFO deniers

[truckaxle]

So all of you smarty pants UFO deniers what do you think of that!!! Just wait until I hack into the USAF computers and force them reveal the truth likewise.

Re:UFO deniers

[TheTimoo]

pfft been done.
But maybe you could do it with only two weeks and a $100 budget...

Re:UFO deniers

[Adrilla]

You may want to think twice about that, the last guy that tried breaking into military computers to look for UFO info is facing an extradition and 70 years in federal prison.

Re:UFO deniers

[Anonymous Coward]

UFO's exist. Anybody who doesn't believe UFOs exist is either an idiot or they don't understand simple english. UFO = Unidentified Flying Object. Anything you see in the night sky that is not indentifiable is a UFO. A UFO is NOT neccesarily an alien space ship piloted by green men or huge worms or intelligent shades of the color blue. A UFO is nothing but an UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT.

Re:UFO deniers

[sartin]

The Red Lectroids are really going to be pissed now.

Regards,

John Lycrapants

Security through Obscurity

[Natchswing]

When will corporations ever learn? Obscuring the knowledge of the 10th planet will not keep us safe from their eventual attempt to take over Earth.

Re:Security through Obscurity

[Malc]

The California Institute of Technology is considered a corporation?

Re:Security through Obscurity

[Procrastin8er]

I for one welcome our new 10th planet overlords.

Also, I have just recieved a patent for that joke, so anyone who dares use it or any other variation can expect a letter from my attorney.

Re:Security through Obscurity

[jc42]

Well, yeah; most schools (other than the smallest) are incorporated.

It's usually not mentioned much, mostly because it's not exactly relevant in a typical discussion of education or research. If you ask, you'll probably get an answer of the form "Yes, of course. Why?"

Re:Security through Obscurity

[AJWM]

Well, I, for one, welcome our 10th planet overlords.

(Hey, somebody was going to say it!)

Re:Security through Obscurity

[humdinger70]

Corporations? Bah! It's the Christian Scientists who blocked the announcement! They didn't want the world to find out, we'd found their great planet Xenu!

Bad typo, that:

[el-spectre]

The summary misspells "confirmed observations" as "withholding this information".

Re:Bad typo, that:

[ackthpt]

The summary misspells "confirmed observations" as "withholding this information".

Sure. Let's all have the hard work of people forced into the open before they get a chance to confirm it or examine it for flaws, just so they don't miss out on getting credit for all that work by some butt-pirate.

How'd you like to be plugging away on your end of term project and then get busted because someone at your school turned the exact results and report in the day before you did? Or maybe some shark in your company finds that once in a life time inspiration which would make you golden, on your computer and pilfers it, then shows it to the big cheeses and gets the window office and a company car, eh?

Yeah, by all means privacy should be dead. Long live the Patriot Act.

Re:Bad typo, that:

[jfengel]

Absolutely! Because nothing helps a scientific career along like a lot of media attention on a theory you're not ready to commit to.

Re:Bad typo, that:

[el-spectre]

Hey, I think you misread me... I agree with you.

Re:Bad typo, that:

[Buran]

Exactly. You don't release data without confirming what you have discovered and disclosing exactly what you did to gather that data in the first place, so that others can replicate your experiments.

Seriously, why would it have been so bad to wait til October? As has been said elsewhere, withholding this research until thoroughly checked does not put people at risk. It is perfectly safe, and in fact preferred, to make sure that all is OK before publishing.

And this kind of thing is supposed to be published in a journal, not in a news release.

Whoever wrote that article needs to go spend some time with some scientists and learn about what they're writing about. This is just another example of the all-too-frequent tendency to jump on any science/space issue and start screaming bloody murder that those responsible aren't doing their jobs, blah blah.

They are doing their jobs, but most people don't like the fact that science and engineering are by nature slow and methodical. Theorize, experiment/build, observe/test, check results, modify theory/experiment, test again, etc. until you get results.

You shouldn't be surprised that the foam issue with the shuttle isn't fixed yet, as the fixes have to be tested to see whether they work or not, and can't be tested on the ground. So something still needs work. It'll be fixed, and then tested again, and so on. What's the problem? Same with these guys. They made some observations that need to be confirmed, so they were working on that before, yet again, someone who was uninformed started loudly criticizing, with no justification to do so.

Re:Bad typo, that:

[Pharmboy]

How'd you like to be plugging away on your end of term project and then get busted because someone at your school turned the exact results and report in the day before you did?

And where exactly did this happen in this situation? Nowhere? Exactly.

Yeah, by all means privacy should be dead. Long live the Patriot Act.

WTF does this have to do with the Patriot Act? Or personal privacy, for that matter? He was keeping scientific data under wraps until he could verify it, but this isn't the same as privacy concerns for your Social Security number for Christs sake.

What you say doesn't add up to the content of the article. A someone broke into thier server, and threatened to reveal the findings. The cracker didn't threaten to take the credit for the finding.

No one is argueing the ethical lapse of the cracker, but both your arguements are simply not based on the facts of this particular case, and are more akin to standing on a soapbox, offtopic at best.

Re:Bad typo, that:

[HiThere]

If you actually read the story THERE WAS NO CRACKER!!

What happend was a google search revealing results that he wasn't ready to release, because of a misconfigured internet connection. And somebody who was interested in personally observing stuff way out there. Anything much beyond that is not factually evident, but is attributing motives to person or persons unknown that aren't substantiated by the evidence. And extortion is definitely a creation out of whole-cloth.

Re:Bad typo, that:

[JCY2K]

Whoops!

Secure

[alop]

I guess their "secure website" wasn't up to snuff... BTW, what the heck is a boffin?

Re:Secure

[SparafucileMan]

boffin: a cock who is also a cockblocker, who upon getting laid tells the entire world that said lady is easy.

aka, "But for many young people in Britain, it is indeed derogatory, but for a different reason. When it came into fashion among them some 20 years ago, it took on much the same sense that my generation gave to swot, as a disparaging description of someone good at school work--a person acknowledged to be brainy, but inoffensive and definitely not respected."

http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-bof1 .htm

Re:Secure

[geniusj]

I asked a friend..

me: wtf IS a boffin?
him: you don't know what a boffin is dawg?
me: nope
him: you kinda suck :(
him: it's what dumb people call clever people to make up for their own dumbness
him: pretty much a lame insult to clever people

Re:Secure

[SilverCanary]

boffin Noun.
1. A person involved in scientific/technical research, usually associated with the wearing of white laboratory coats, glasses, and carrying a clipboard. Derog. {Informal}
2. An intellectual.

According to http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/b.htm anyway.

Re:Secure

[dusik]

>> "...what the heck is a boffin?"

What, you serious? A boffin is slang for a scientist, preferably in a white lab coat. Like, what you see in the comic strips.

Re:Secure

[Andy Gardner]

BTW, what the heck is snuff?

Re:Secure

[twiddlingbits]

Assuming you are serious, it is an orally usable form of tobbacco. It comes in forms from a fine powder (like talc) to a kind of coarse ground about like coffee. Often it is flavored with menthol, etc. It is popular with snokers who work in areas they cannot smoke, this way they can get thier nicotine "fix" without lighting up. The stuff is nasty and often new users swallow some, thus causing them to disgorge thier stomach contents. The saying "up to snuff" means having a strong constitution so that one could hold thier lunch down after ingesting some snuff. It may also mean the ability to tolerate snuff, which I am told tastes horrible.

Planet X

[Game_Ender]

Wasn't this the planet X we heard about?

Re:Planet X

[Surr3al]

Yes, and this planet was reported in the news over a year ago.

What jerks

[grasshoppa]

Seriously, they were sitting on the data for a reason. And as this data doesn't affect anybody on a day to day basis, I can see why they'd want to hold off on the announcement until they could give real numbers.

This is of course assuming the story isn't bullshit. I seem to remember one scientist saying he had a bet with another that he'd discover a 10th planet by the end of last year.

Re:What jerks

[jasongetsdown]

The probably didn't want to announce without final and definitive analysis to back their claim. No harm in being careful. No one wants to go off half cocked.

Re:What jerks

[snuf23]

"This is of course assuming the story isn't bullshit. I seem to remember one scientist saying he had a bet with another that he'd discover a 10th planet by the end of last year."

This was found by the same guy. He lost the bet by 10 days. You can read more at Xena Planet X or Big Lump of Rock.

Re:What jerks

[Anonymous Coward]

2 problems:
1. The bet lasted until 1st January and the planet was foundon the 8th of January.

2. People know where to look, and so can check.

The Scientists Had No Right...

[Nom du Keyboard]

The scientists had no right to keep this information secret if they used publically funded (one of the telescopes on Mount Palomar) equipment to make this discovery, or their salaries are paid from tax money. Taxpayers deserved to hear about it when it was discovered.

The people involved in this should be banned from using public equipment due to their clear lack of ethics!

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Ingolfke]

The people involved in this should be banned from using public equipment due to their clear lack of ethics!

No, they should be commended for not rushing out their findings until they had been properly analyzed and validated. The public doesn't track or care about retracted or falsified scientific studies, so to come out with unchecked data would end up confusing most people if the conclusion made based on that data was proven to be incorrect. And it's not like this was some big discovery that was actually going to change the average person's life... they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[MustardMan]

And if the scientists made the announcement before properly analyzing the data, and it turned out to be a false positive, the backlash from the bad press could very well cause them to lose their funding.

There's a big difference between "withholding information" and "scientific rigor"

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

You lack a basic understanding of how the scientific process works. Confirmation of an observation, analysis of the resulting data, peer reviewing of those data, and replication of the original observation ALL ensure the accuracy of the scientific find.

Ban them!?! The scientists were clearly planning on releasing their discovery but were forced to do it prematurely. They were abiding by scientific principles.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Listen Up]

Not only are you completely wrong, but you are a fucking idiot too.

Science needs rigorous review, no matter what. You don't have a right to a fucking thing until it is properly reviewed.

People exactly like you are what leads to the bad public image of science by ignorant non-scientists.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[cribdasig]

Science isn't a magic process by which great discoveries spontaneously occur. It is a tedious process of observation, theory, and trial & error attempts to validate either. Reporting an unconfimed observation to the public, especially one as prone to media hype as this one, could spell academic suicide for the scientists involved should it turn out to be false.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight: /. nerds want to bash astronomers when they announce findings early before they can verify their analysis is actually correct (remember the "deep impact" scare a couple of years ago?) and yet you don't want them to withhold information in order to specifically verify the data so that they can conduct good science AND avoid scorn, avoiding the ridicule of nerds everywhere?

Which do you want? You cannot have it both ways. You either get early and often-incorrect "news" releases from scientists, or you can wait until the information is analyzed and verified prior to release. Which is better? Which will nerds ridicule less?

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[doyen2000]

You have to be very sure to announce something as big as a tenth planet.. understanding every effect that could mimick the data that you are attributing to a new planet. If you get it wrong and peers can tell the analysis was rushed for publicity. Credibility of the team and perhaps funding of the project will be in jeopardy.

For a scientist, the respect of your peers is one of the most valuable assests that you have. It almost sounds like gta2 but no one will want to work with you or take your work seriously if they think your work is a joke.

Could the hackers find something better to do with their time? A lot of money and time goes into making systems secure and obviously in this case there needs to be more invested. The problem is that it is time and money scientist do not have.

Cheers, A.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[stonedonkey]

No, they should be commended for not rushing out their findings until they had been properly analyzed and validated.

I think an announcement of the possibility of a tenth planet, larger than Pluto, would be quite newsworthy, myself. And although I am no astronomer, it occurs to me that the data could have been shared and therefore processed within two years. The discoverers still get primary credit, right? Why sit on this for so long?

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[rk]

Of course they had the right. I don't know how it works for terrestrial based projects, but in space missions, a team wins a contract with NASA to fly an experiment on a spacecraft. The gist of the contract is: We will put your experiment on our spacecraft. We will give you money to operate in and maintain it. In return, you will release all data to the public after a certain period of time (typically 6 months). I imagine the terms are similar in essence, if not in detail, for research done from Earth.

This gives scientists good reasons (funding, prestige, and first crack at the data) to come up with interesting instrument proposals and in return, we (the human race) eventually get all the data.

Regardless of this contract, it always behooves a scientist to cautiously verify their observations and conclusions. Look up Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann as a hard example of what happens when scientists jump the gun on making discoveries public.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Junior J. Junior III]

Oh, the panic that would have ensued had it been prematurely announced that there was a 10th planet...

Hey, wait, wasn't this the umpteenth tenth planet that's been discovered? We keep hearing about a new one every few years. So far, order has been kept in the streets.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Ingolfke]

The astronomer who made the discovery has more details on this website. It wasn't discovered 2 years ago, just around Christmas of 2004. And it sounds like he and his team had already released some initial abstracts to a scientific audience (so they weren't hiding anything).


I think an announcement of the possibility of a tenth planet, larger than Pluto, would be quite newsworthy,

The press would have reported this using the following headlines:

Astronomer Claims 10th Planet Found
10th Planet Found?
New Planet Discovered

Because this sells advertisements. MAYBE, they would have commented about the fact that this was a preliminary discovery in the body of the article. All that said, if you read the astronomer's material on the website and the articles published by the press you see how horid their reporting actually is.

Releasing this information wouldn't have been a bad thing per se, but the original post I responded to specifically attacked them for NOT releasing the information, calling their behavior unethical. My position is that they did not act unethically.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[agwilliams1000]

they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.
Are you ... sure?

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Ingolfke]

The point isn't that chaos would have ensued. It's that this was reported as major headline and average people don't read the articles in much detail, let alone keep up with a particular scientific issue for any exteneded period of time. The end-result of this type of reporting is that the average person becomes confused: are there 9 or 10... or did I just hear about 11 planets? Also, by seeing a large amount of pre-tested scientific speculation trumpeted as a big find they may begin to question the validity of science... if 9 out 10 science stories are proven to be bogus (assuming reporting prior to validation and thorough testing) then science in general is just a shot in the dark and is equal to any other form of speculation, Scientology, Greek Mythology, or whatever else is the thought of the day. The point is science is supposed to provide tested facts and reasoned theories, more testing is a good thing when the knowledge itself brings little value to the average person.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[phlegmofdiscontent]

And it's not like this was some big discovery that was actually going to change the average person's life... they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.

Hell, even if they (or any other researcher) were sitting on a cure for cancer, they would have to analyse and test and be damned sure of the discovery because getting it wrong could a. wreck their careers b. kill people (possibly through unforseen side effects, etc) or c. not work at all.

I've been reading the threads and there seem to be two camps: the "they're bad people for withholding this information, information wants to be free" camp and the "well, they're just trying to confirm what they think they know" camp. I fall on the side of the latter camp. If anyone was unethical, it was the "hackers" who threatened to go public with incomplete information.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[The_Wilschon]

I work at the CDF collaboration at Fermilab, owned and operated by US DOE (yes, that means public) funds. The DOE requires that any analysis (yes, I said requires) be thoroughly reviewed by all members of the collaboration. This is a process called "blessing" the analysis. Since there are over 700 collaborators, this can take quite a while. However, if you think this is unethical, and think it would be far better to publish raw, unanalysed data, well, write a letter to the government. If you think that access to this data is a right granted by being a taxpayer, complain to the government that owns said equipment. Because if those telescopes are anything like our accelerator, that government doesn't allow them to do anything as abysmally stupid as releasing results that haven't been carefully considered.

You sir, are a fool, and have no idea how the scientific community operates on a daily basis, nor how it should operate. Do us all a favor, and next time there is an article relating to science, keep your mouth firmly shut. Better yet, buy yourself a muzzle. Wear it.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[DonniKatz]

unless the planet is %90 fortified WITH CUREFORCANCERNIUM!

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[srleffler]

And rightfully so. Prematurely releasing a discovery of this magnitude would be very bad scientific procedure.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually know people sitting on the cure for cancer. To bad the FDA forces 3 years of testing before you can start curing people.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[jmd82]

Really? I work in cancer research and would be interested to hear about this cure for cancer...BTW, there won't be one cure for cancer, but rather multiple cures for different kinds and degrees, but I digress.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[typidemon]

if every single conjecture was published nobody would listen to anything researchers said.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are a fool, and have no idea how the scientific community operates on a daily basis, nor how it should operate.

Lest you look the fool, replace "scientific community" with "governement". Arguably, the difference is small and growing smaller but always significant nonetheless.

Re:The Scientists Had No Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

The scientists had no right to keep this information secret if they used publically funded equipment to make this discovery

Two words:

Pons
Fleischmann

Now sit down and shut-up.

RE:

[Anonymous Coward]

What harm would come if the data was released? None that I can think of.

"Nothing to see here. Please move along."

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess there is no 10th planet after all. Or is there even a 9th? I smell a conspiracy!

Oh noes! Hackers!

[Dirtside]

I traced through the friendly articles, and I'm not sure where the Sunday Independent got the info that a hacker "forced" them to announce their findings. Brown isn't quoted as saying anything about a hacker, and they didn't source that info.

Of course, what's even stupider is how both the Independent and, to an even stupider degree, the Inquirer make it sound all ominous and elitist that the scientists didn't release the info as soon as they found it. Like, maybe they didn't want to risk the media flaming them for prematurely announcing a tenth planet if they had to recant part of their data?

Damn the Hackers!!

[Tibor the Hun]

Damn those Hackers. Who are they and how can they be stopped?

This past year they were not responsible for things such as millions of private records being given out by various credit card companies, banking institutions and what not. They were also not responsible for vast majority of copyright infringment, ie theft, ie grand larceny, ie murder in the first.
I am sick and tired of Hackers.

ooh... Hersch just wrote to tell me about the new Cialis prices... gotta go...

What else?

[PktLoss]

What else is sceince & government keeping from us, untill they have finished studying it.

Re:What else?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Lost Ark. Didn't you see Indiana Jones?

As any good scientist should do!

[hattig]

Instead they had to announce the discovery of a planet they don't even know the diameter of.

Right now it is looking to be bigger than Pluto.

And for my contribution to the inevitable 'Asteroid', 'Minor Planet', 'Planet' argument, I'm tending to the viewpoint that any body in space that is spherical under its own gravity is a planet. Even if it has been flung from its parent solar system into deep space.

Yes, that means the Moon is a Planet.

Planets include Gas Giants, Ice Bodies, Rocky Planets, and so on.

Re:As any good scientist should do!

[argent]

Even if it has been flung from its parent solar system into deep space.

One would imagine that would give a body a rather eccentric orbit. Aren't these bodies in fairly circular ones (even Pluto's orbit is pretty much circular to the naked eye)?

Re:As any good scientist should do!

[wambaugh]

At least one of the new objects has an orbit 45 degrees out of the plane of the solar system. Though I'm not exactly certain where the Kuiper belt ends and the Oort Cloud of comets begins, I believe that once you get as far out as the Oort Cloud the distribution of objects is much more spherical than it is closer to the sun.

See this NASA site for more details:
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/comet_worldbook.html

Re:As any good scientist should do!

[polysylabic psudonym]

To be a planet a body must orbit a star. The Moon is not a planet simply because it orbits a planet rather than a star.

For those of you

[Anonymous Coward]

who are thinking "err....WHAT 10th planet????" you may want to see:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/01/xena_plane t_or_rock/

No big deal

[FortKnox]

There are 'planetoids' that are bigger than pluto that are considered simple KBO even though some consider them to be planets.

I think Pluto is only considered a planet because it was grandfathered into the current (confusing and not entirely adhered to) rules on what is and isn't a planet.

Odds are, this will just be classified as another KBO.

Re:No big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Bwahahahaha!

Re:No big deal

[pyrrhonist]

There are 'planetoids' that are bigger than pluto that are considered simple KBO even though some consider them to be planets.

No there aren't. From here:

This new planet (see "What makes a planet?" below) is the largest object found in orbit around the sun since the discovery of Neptune and its moon Triton in 1846. It is larger than Pluto, discovered in 1930. Like Pluto, the new planet is a member of the Kuiper belt, a swarm of icy bodies beyond Neptune in orbit around the sun. Until this discovery Pluto was frequently described as "the largest Kuiper belt object" in addition to being called a planet. Pluto is now the second largest Kuiper belt object, while this is the largest currently known.

All other known KBOs are smaller than Pluto, and so is Sedna. The only things in the solar system larger than Pluto are the Sun, the rest of the planets (including the new one), the Moon, Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Europa, and Triton.

Re:No big deal

[jc42]

... Pluto is only considered a planet because it was grandfathered into the current (confusing and not entirely adhered to) rules ...

Actually, astronomical organizations (AAS, etc.) generally haven't officially defined "planet". It's considered somewhat of a sloppy, media term, not a technical term. Real astronomers tend to use more specific terms, of which there are many.

After all, what's the astronomical value of a term that includes Pluto, Earth, and Jupiter, but excludes objects like Luna, Titan and Ganymede? (And Charon? ;-)

Another problem is that the usual lay definitions include orbiting the sun (or another star). But, strictly speaking, this isn't a property of the body itself. Rather, it's a relationship between two or more bodies. If you were to remove Titan from Saturn and put it into an orbit about the sun, you wouldn't actually be changing Titan itself. You'd be merely rearranging the real estate of the Solar System a bit.

There have been suggestions to restrict "planet" to objects large enough that their self-gravity forces them into a spherical or sperhoidal form. But this encounters lay/media objections, because Luna, Ganymede, Titan, Pluto and Charon all become planets. For some reason, people object to the idea that there may be several dozen planets in the Solar System, or that a "moon" may also be a "planet".

OTOH, some astronomers argue that Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon should be classified as double planets, not as planets with large moons.

It's easier to just not define the term at all.

Re:No big deal

[Betelgeuse]

I think Pluto is only considered a planet because it was grandfathered into the current (confusing and not entirely adhered to) rules on what is and isn't a planet.

I think this is a nice way of putting it. Pluto is pretty much "grandfathered" in. If you were to take the 8 inner planets in one group and the KBO's in another group and ask to which group Pluto belongs, I think that a lot of planetary scientists would say that it's a KBO (I argue this mostly because of its inclination relative to the plane of the Solar System).

However, as the discovering scientists quite rightly point out on their page, the word "planet" has entered the common usage of the English language to include Pluto. Maybe the scientists can't have the term back . . .

Witholding information

[Zordak]

Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis.

You mean they held on to their data until they could do a proper analysis and really determine what they had, rather than jump all over a premature and sensationalistic announcement? Those charlatans! Pons and Fleischman would be ashamed of them.

Source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Short article, short on evidence or sources.
Next?

Uranus...

[Anonymous Coward]

The end of the article:

The find should further stuff up modern astrologers - they still have not got the hang of Uranus.

Haha

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

but not the first 10th planet found

What The Hack...

[__aaclcg7560]

The domains of Pure Science has been hacked. Is nothing sacred anymore?

According to who!?

[djSpinMonkey]

That's nothing! According to the Weekly World News, Batboy has been secretly in communication with the denizens of Planet X since early 2000!

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

first post

ObJoke

[RedLaggedTeut]

Quote from the end of the referred article:

The find should further stuff up modern astrologers - they still have not got the hang of Uranus.

Well, I hadn't noticed their probes yet, I didn't think someone would go the distance to get to know me inside out ..

A Mad Affair.

[Anonymous Coward]

""According to The Inquirer, hackers gained access to the secure server where the data about the new planet was being held and threatened to reveal it."

*Mad Magazine Cover*

Buy this magazine or else the dog gets it.

Re:A Mad Affair.

[Bjimba]

That was a National Lampoon cover, not a Mad cover.

Typo in summary

[renimar]

Shouldn't that be '... hackers gained access to the unsecured server ...'?

Let's state this properly

[Nom du Keyboard]

hackers gained access to the secure server

Shouldn't that be the not-so-secure server?

Re:Let's state this properly

[jc42]

hackers gained access to the secure server

Shouldn't that be the not-so-secure server?

Heh. The so-called "security" was probably little more than hiding the data behind an index.html file. That suffices to hide the data from prying eyes and search bots, until you're ready to publish. This is standard practice in most research.

Then you send the URL to colleagues, and they can fetch the data at their leisure. It remains hidden unless someone puts a link on their web site or posts it to a newsgroup or archived mailing list. That's probably how google found it, and the "hackers" found the link from google.

This happens all the time, and doesn't usually get anyone all uptight over security violations. Except for people who are clueless about how researchers use the Web. If exposure of the URL is a problem you just rename the hidden directory.

In this case, the researchers have said that they contacted others for help in analyzing the object and its orbit. So they sent email with the hidden URL, and an unknown number of other astronomers and grad students went to work on the data. Nothing at all unusual; that's how it's done.

I'd classify the reporters with security concerns in the same bin as the people who consider pings to be hacker attacks.

If so

[Anonymous Coward]

then push for Sibel Edmunds to be able to talk with being buried in a Texas prison.

Meanwhile...

[daviq]

Hackers got into a secure server where the request to keep back the information was being processed and took over the world.

Full disclosure?

[Sv-Manowar]

This method of using intrusions to force 'full disclosure' by scientists is interesting, and begs why this information can be kept out of the public eye, where it would benefit the scientific community at large, and is instead held back to bolster the reputations of those who make the initial discovery. Should they really have the right to keep the information secret until they've had the opportunity to make time-critical observations and gain all the information they require to make impressive enough announcements. Who knows what else could be kept back from the scientific community until its observer deems it 'impressive' enough to release..

Re:Full disclosure?

[geoffspear]

I think they should send every bit of data they collect each day to all of the world's major newspapers, myself. And shame on the publishers if they don't publish it all without knowing what, if anything, it all might mean.

Re:Full disclosure?

[GISGEOLOGYGEEK]

By 'impressive enough' do you perhaps mean ... 'enough evidence to be sure that the planet is real'?

Perhaps by releasing the data sooner, we are meeting your requirement of 'full disclosure' ... which for you seems to mean 'releasing scientific data before it has been properly verified'.

Keeping in line with the way you feel the world should think ... I have a great Cold Fusion device I'd like to sell you.

Re:Full disclosure?

[fishbowl]

"This method of using intrusions to force 'full disclosure' by scientists is interesting, and begs why this information can be kept out of the public eye, where it would benefit the scientific community at large, and is instead held back to bolster the reputations of those who make the initial discovery."

If you release an announcement before you're finished with your research or due diligence, you expose yourself and your institution to controversy.

When you're making a claim as ostentatious as a discovery of a 10th planet, you might not want to put your name on it before you are satisfied that you're ready to stake your career on the paper.
Also, you're going to expose yourself to other people usurping your work.

And what if it's a different type of research? What if you're in the process of doing patent searches or negotiating something of that nature?

Re:Full disclosure?

[Listen Up]

It is called FULL SCIENTIFIC REVIEW.

WTF? You sound like a completely ignorant and arrogant baffoon. You need to learn respect kid.

You don't the right to a damn thing before it is fully scientifically reviewed. And you do not have a Ph.D, so your life and career does not ride on completely accurate and fully reviewed scientific discovery and achievement. Therefore, you should only deal with the things you are qualified to speak about and deal with. Your arrogance is unfounded.

Re:Full disclosure?

[Stween]

"Should they really have the right to keep the information secret until they've had the opportunity to make time-critical observations and gain all the information they require"

Well, yes.

Re:Full disclosure?

[Tsiangkun]

Scientist recieve funding to collect and analyze data.

Rushing a pile of shit out the door to satisfy some nerd living in his mom's basement is not the scientific way.
Data collection, data analysis, peer review, and publication takes time.

The next round of funding will be based on publications from the data collected.

One piss poor "discovery" rushed to press is a career ending mistake.

Saying the scientist are with holding information is an arrogant statement. Their careers depend on publishing the data, once it's been looked at carefully.

How big is the diameter of this planet ???
I imagine the scientist would have liked to have had this information, plus a first approximation of the composition of the new planet before going public.

The group who wrote the grant application to get the funding to aquire the data has every right to that data, and it's analysis until they publish it. Then it become public and benefits everyone. This group of scientists have already shown, to a board of reviewers, they have the insights, equipment, and experience to do the analysis, and that is why they are being funded to do the research.

Re:Full disclosure?

[fiori]

First, the existence of a tenth planet is not time critical. A tenth planet has been postulated to exist for many years, but without corraboration from direct observations. Moreover, fame and fortune are not made from this type of discovery.

Second, the paranoia of "Who knows what else could be kept back from the scientific community until its observer deems it 'impressive' enough to release" is BS. Any ethical scientist will publish data once they are convinced they know what they are talking about. It is rare that a discovery in any science is made by a single research group. New publications are always a race against some other group publishing first and your data becoming irrelevent.

Third, a full analysis is what the Cold Fusion or the Polywater folks should have done before they announced these great discoveries and destroyed their reputations as researchers.

Raw data shouldn't be released without a distinct understanding of its meaning. It's the difference between saying 'Dihydrogen monoxide will kill you' and 'You can drown in water.'

Re:Full disclosure?

[Shihar]

As someone who has actually done research, there is a good reason why scientist hold things back. Often times when you make a discovery, you do it in a half-assed sort of way. You are poking around for something and find it. Now, before you go running to the press, you want to conduct another experiment to make confirm what you actually have. Why? Because if scientist started shouting each time they 'found' something, there would be far too much noise in this world. I recall on experiment I worked on while I was at a nanotechnology company. I had a solid half of a dozen moments where I thought "Holy shit! I found it!" Each time though, I tempered my excitement and performed another experiment to try and confirm what I thought I had.

Of those half of a dozen times where I got excited, only one of them was the true "Eureka!" moment. One time it was simply a defect in the instrument I was using. Another time a part had become defective and had muddled my results. Another time everything looked awesome for the first part of my analysis, but when I did the second part it was clear that there was a problem.

This is not rare. This happens all the time in scientific study. You think you find something, and it turns out to be nothing. You hold back telling the world and having people try and replicate what you did until you yourself know what you did and are sure that you did it right. Only then do you release it to the world. It saves you looking like an idiot when you release promising results a dozen times only to withdraw them, it saves your fellow scientist dozens of false starts, and it save Slashdot from stupid head lines like CANCER IS CURED SCIENTIST SAY, when in fact someone managed to kill a specific type of cancer in a test tube.

These scientist did the right thing. They held back their announcement which was sure to be butchered by the press until such time as they had confirmed their discovery.

Re:Full disclosure?

[gomel]

Shihar,
I read your comment here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146002&cid =12228868.
"What people don't realize is that often times the people that make the technology and the people that build the technology are two very different people."

That's an observation I had myself. (Patents allow to set up specialized research companies which are separated from the production industry.) I'd like to discuss this topic with you, per email. I don't know your email adress, if you could contact me at: mg20163 AT sgh.waw.pl

No matter where you go, there you are!

[Black Art]

"wh3R r w3 901n'? Pl4N37 10! WH3n r W3 901n'? r34L 500N!"

Re:No matter where you go, there you are!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not my planet, Monkey Boy!

so..

[Turn-X Alphonse]

That hacker who went in look for UFOs doesn't seem so crazy now does he? If they're hiding whole planets surely a few space ships/bases/fleets would be simple.

Can you really blame them?

[jesuscyborg]

Can you blame them for holding back on announcing the discovery? After all, it would be very embarassing to the astronomer community to retract such an important discovery, like the chemists did with Ununoctium.

Re:Can you really blame them?

[fishbowl]

"Can you blame them for holding back on announcing the discovery?"

No, but what puzzles me is how the "hacker" had the power to make them sacrifice their academic principles and announce anyway. If they were not ready, the hacker didn't magically make them ready.

Re:Can you really blame them?

[Stween]

Ongoing research is oft published, and in itself doesn't go against their 'academic principles' -- so long as the published work contributes in some way. Presumably the researchers in question simply hadn't planned on releasing anything on their work so soon, but had enough material to put together a reasonable and verifiable work-in-progress.

The work contributes because the rest of the scientific community can attempt to confirm this group's findings, and the debate on planetary status can begin. (That aside, I haven't read enough to know if the work was reviewed and published via normal channels.)

Serves 'em right

[Anonymous Coward]

So says I.

Blackmail

[FlatCatInASlatVat]

If it's true, said Hacker should have his/her computer taken away. It's not like the planet was going to go away. Were astrologers or other "common people" suffering for lack of the data? The astronomer was right to confirm and tighten up the data before going public. He'd be embarassed and ridiculed if he released too soon and got it wrong.

Well... in this CASE...

[alexandreracine]

I for one would like to welcome our new 10th planet overlords!

After Futher Analysis

[Nom du Keyboard]

After further analysis...

This new planet will be discovered to be the home of Cold Fusion.

That may be why

[TykeClone]

it is "temporarily named" 2003 UB313

Info was not withheld since 2003

[YoDave]

From a BBC article: The object was first observed on 21 October 2003, but the team did not see it move in the sky until looking at the same area 15 months later on 8 January 2005.

Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good science

[Listen Up]

Congratulations and Thank You to the Astronomers/Researchers involved with this discovery. Thank You for discovering something and then waiting for a full peer review and analysis before presenting your data to the public. WAAAAY too much today that process does not occur, because of bad scientists, and gives a bad name to good science and scientists.

Fuck you to the hackers who feel that something like this needed to be public without review. If it was 'revealed' and then found to be false, nobody would have remembered some script kiddie illegally, immorally, and unethically published the data before it was reviewed. Everyone would have jumped on the Astronomers/Researchers and science in general like a bunch of ignorant cattle (like they always do) and the true facts would have been buried in the mess.

Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[team99parody]

So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?

And in the mean time, millions - hundreds of millions - of schoolkids were being lied to everwhere.

This _is_ a bad thing.

The result of these lies is that the kids are taught "if you know something, and a bunch of people around you are telling lies, it's OK to play along with the lie and hide the truth from people".

Re:Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the very next thing you need to do is learn the definition of "lying" and how you are using it poorly.

Re:Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[Anonymous Coward]

Researchers were aware of a 10th planet but teaching kids there were 9. How is this not lying.

Re:Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[lrucker]

At the rate school textbooks get replaced, even if this is confirmed schoolkids are going to be taught there are 9 planets for years to come.

I was a National Geographic space article junkie when I was in grade school (mid 70s) and knew my textbook was wrong when it claimed Jupiter had only 12 moons, but my teacher would not accept any answer other than what was in the book.

Re:Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[nickptar]

What if the findings were announced prematurely and then found wrong? Do you want children to be taught there are 10 planets, and a month later to be told "we goofed, there are 9"?

Re:Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[Anonymous Coward]

Best would have been to teach them "it is believed there's tenth planet - and this [explanation left to astronomers] is the process astronomers will use to verify if it's true or now".

Re:Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[UserGoogol]

Because the researchers weren't teaching kids.

Re:Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought there were only 8 planets.

Re:Millions of schoolkids were being lied to.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they weren't ALL aware of it. The ones that knew were a very small group out of hundreds of thousands of professors and teachers.

They're not a hive mind.

So Maybe The Other Hacker Was Right

[Master of Transhuman]

Maybe that guy who busted into computers looking for evidence of a UFO coverup was right.

He just didn't bust into the RIGHT computers and he was sloppy about it.

Anybody ever try to hack the computers at Area 51? That might be fun.

Don't do this from home. "That's universally stupid, dude!"

sorry, fixed link...

[EccentricAnomaly]

teach me not to preview my comments :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/science/29cnd-pl anet.html

Well thank you too much

[ackthpt]

Stupid crackers.

How about cracking imdb and putting the endings to movies on line.

Get a life, fer Bobsake.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Of course, what's even stupider is how ....

I think you probably mean "more stupid".

'stupider' ain't proper usage.

Name One

[SteveM]

There are 'planetoids' that are bigger than pluto that are considered simple KBO even though some consider them to be planets.

Really, name one.

You cannot, as this is the first KBO discovered that is larger than Pluto.

SteveM

Re:Name One

[FidelCatsro]

As I always understood it , a planet and a planet was an object in orbit of a sun. and a KBO was a large body in the Kuiper belt which may or may not be a planet.
I do have limited knowledge of astronomy but Could something not be both a KBO and a planet .

Re:Name One

[FortKnox]

Ack! Sorry, you got me. Shoulda investigated before posting. I was thinking of Qauoar or however it is spelled. It is 'brighter' than pluto, not larger.
Sorry about that.

Re:Name One

[Dirtside]

a planet was an object in orbit of a sun

The asteroids in the asteroid belt orbit the sun, and nobody calls them planets.

The distinction is truly academic, anyway; humans love classifying things, as it helps with conveying information about an object without going into great deal about it. If I say "planet" that automatically gives you some information about the object, based on our shared cultural understanding of what a planet is...

...unfortunately, "planet" still doesn't tell you much of anything except that the object (probably) orbits a star, is at least several hundred kilometers in diameter, and is probably massive enough to be have collapsed into a sphere due to gravity. It doesn't tell you whether it's a small rocky planet like Earth or a gas giant, or whether bipedal carbon-based lifeforms could live on it.

Anyway, to answer your other question, sure, something could be both a KBO and a planet. Imagine if Earth was in the Kuiper Belt.

Re:Name One

[FidelCatsro]

Thanks , Astronomy is something that fascinates me but i have never really had the time to get in-depth on the subject.
Having a look around google , it is really hard to get any consensus on what a planet is .. a KBO was pretty easy , being that it defines an object in the belt ..
Really fascinating though , i have for a long time enjoyed watching "the sky at night "(TV show , BBC) and own a couple of small telescopes. a place of dreams and science.
Pigeon holing is a natural thing for us , helps us organising things in our minds . Unfortunately we just need to keep adding more and more sub holes

Re:Name One

[mfender9]

Imagine if Earth was in the Kuiper Belt.

We would all probably need an extra sweater for one thing...

Re:Name One

[arbitraryaardvark]

They are out there, just as yet undiscovered.
I hereby name the next three fred, goofy, and quahog.

Re:Name One

[CheshireCatCO]

A planet is technically any natural object that orbits the Sun. (Let's leave extrasolar planets out of this for the moment, for simplicity.)
The Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are planets. So are Pluto, all of the comets, KBOs, and asteroids.

The difference between the first list and the second (putting Pluto where you wish) is the first are "major" planets and the latter are "minor" planets. So, yes, all KBOs are, by definition, planets.

Now, can you be a major planet and a KBO? Currently, Pluto is both. So there is nothing technically to prevent this. However, whether Pluto *belongs* there is another question.

Re:Name One

[CheshireCatCO]

"The asteroids in the asteroid belt orbit the sun, and nobody calls them planets."

Not true. Astronomers call them minor planets all the time. That's why the outfit that's charged with tracking all of them is called the "Minor planet center", after all.

Re:Name One

[Dirtside]

"Minor planet" != "planet"

Re:Name One

[FidelCatsro]

Looks like we need to standardise the classifications a bit , having read several articles last night on the topic its hard to find two groups which actually agree on the subject .
Still a fascinating debate non the less .
It would be easier if we settled on something like
A planet is an Object orbiting a star with a diameter over 1800 KM
A minor planet is an object orbiting a star with a Diameter 1800 KM or less and is not a comet
A satellite is an object orbiting a planet or minor planet (naturally having a few sub classes on all)
A KBO is an object in the KB which could be any of the above
or something like that , obviously far more extensive

Re:Name One

[CheshireCatCO]

No. Minor planet != Major planet.
The term "planet" when used colloquially is used to mean "major planet". But that's not, in fact, the definition used by astronomers.

Re:Name One

[CheshireCatCO]

The trouble is that different groups within the planetary community what the term "planet" (meaning "major planet") for different purposes. Geologists are interested in objects large enough to possess interesting geology. (Size is only part of the story there, actually. Moons of the outer solar system are often more geologically active than, say, Mercury...) Dynamicists care more about the orbits and how the bodies effect other objects. Or, in other circumstances, how they formed. And so forth. It's a subtle thing that took me about two years into grad school to even notice. When I did, the whole debate suddenly took on a different shape, though.
In some ways, we are better off *not* rigidly defining the term and letting each subcommunity have it's own nuance.

That's awesome!

[daVinci1980]

This way, when the researchers get a chance to get more data and then decide that it's actually a comet, asteroid, or an object in the Kuiper belt and make an announcement to such an effect, the public will condemn them for releasing their initial findings too soon!

Yay!
 
...
 
Oh wait, that sucks.

I've always wanted to see...

[jwigum]

A missile target by IP address, why don't you go and mess with the air force...

Ah The Inquirer...

[Anonymous Coward]

now there is a reliable news site. NOT.

I have been involved in events which The Inquirer covered and they not only got the facts wrong, they mangled the facts into out-and-out-lie to push their own warped idea of how things are or should be.

Re:Ah The Inquirer...

[77Punker]

Not only that, but hackers pushed them? Yeah, right. Like a bunch of scientists were scared that their credibility would be ruined by a bunch of wannabe-scientist computer thugs.

Someone please tell me

[Evets]

What in the world is a "boffin"?

Re:Someone please tell me

[Bambi Dee]

British slang for "scientist".

Area51 - hack that system

[bigbinc]

Can somebody find out what happened to Area51 back in 1947, some unexplained crash. I would love to see the US govt story on that one.

I will even chip in on a hacker system.

Re:Area51 - hack that system

[Anonymous Coward]

wasn't that an alien weather balloon ?

Re:Area51 - hack that system

[bigbinc]

Read up on Philip Corso, UFO guy with
an impecable military record.

The Tenth Planet wants to be free!

[infonography]

Support the peaceful, freedom loving natives of Planet Freedonia! WORKERS OF THE TENTH WORLD UNITE! you have nothing to lose but your (err icy incasement?) Must be pretty cold up there.....

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[pyrrhonist]

Brown isn't quoted as saying anything about a hacker, and they didn't source that info.

It's on this page. But, yeah, it wasn't really hacking, it was just using Google well.

Like, maybe they didn't want to risk the media flaming them for prematurely announcing a tenth planet if they had to recant part of their data?

Also, the computers they use for analysis didn't see it because it moves so slowly. They found it on reanalysis a year and a half after they imaged it. They weren't actually sitting on the discovery for two years - just since January.

Zecharaiah Sitchin Was Right!!!

[eno2001]

The Niburu of Planet X are coming back to enslave us all! This explains the dead NASA astronaut found in the desert. It was a cover-up all along. Be prepared for the return of the Niburu. Every man-woman and child will have to unite to fight against the mighty power of the Niburu!

This is BS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis.

In today's scientific climate, it is publish or perish.

There is no way a scientist could sit on this information for that long if they value their career (most do).

"Middle-Finger" Nation

[Anonymous Coward]

The question that will be asked, but never answered is... What kind of society has individuals that when they don't get what they want, when they want it, under the terms they want, resort to illegal (possibly crimminal) acts?

Re:"Middle-Finger" Nation

[__aaclcg7560]

Republican.

Re:"Middle-Finger" Nation

[stratjakt]

No, American.

Ever been to Japan? You'll see shops with racks of goods sitting out on the street, no one guarding them. When people there find a wallet, they generally turn it in at the closest police station.

You can park your motorcycle on a street in tokyo, with the keys in it, and chances are real good it'll be there when you get back. Try that in NYC.

It's purely cultural. Japanese are taught empathy from a small age - how would I feel if I lost my wallet, or someone stole my bike. The social stigma of being a thief is worse to them than anything the courts are going to hand down. In America, it just makes you a real bad-ass and cool.

They also recognize a society is made up of individuals, and its strengths and weaknesses are about those individuals.

Americans turn to the government to fix all problems. I was watching the news the other day, and the story line was something akin to "Is the government doing all it can to protect us against the heat wave?" Yeah, there's a heat wave. Fix it with laws, government!

It's not a democrat or republican thing. Americans need the government to do everything for them these days, they need a law for everything. We believe that people won't obstain from an action because it's socially unacceptable, no, it has to be against the law. We have this "it's OK if you don't get caught" mentality.

This post isnt pro-Japan or anti-America, it's just a huge difference between the cultures that I noticed.

Re:"Middle-Finger" Nation

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yeah, there's a heat wave. Fix it with laws, government!"

Lol, well they could fine all the weathermen like $150 for everyday there is a heat wave. I'm sure that would stop these horribly hot summers. If that doesn't work maybe they can make an amendment to those anti-terror laws saying weathermen who predict bad weather are terrorists. Either way, these weathermen are ruining the economy with their bad weather.

Thats right folks. Full disclosure..

[Anonymous Coward]

..of information is more important the verifying the facts first. I mean really, who on Earth would take half assed information and accept them as full blown facts before proof is verified.

sarcasm off

Maybe only Bush does that. Certainly not /.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

hacked an astronomy website?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want to know is who's the loser who hacked into an astronomy website?

Mod TFA Flamebait

[rdwald]

Seriously, I've seen less biased articles from the RIAA's anti-piracy campaigns. The reason Brown held onto the information was so he could get all the data before making an announcement. He wanted to be able to say, "New object is 2.73 times as large as Pluto," not "New object is probably bigger than Pluto." Is the existence of another Kupier Belt object really going to affect anyone? It's not like this was cancer research.

Re:Mod TFA Flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

My astrology is going to be F.U.B.A.R.ed now

Re:Mod TFA Flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

Only in Russia

There was no hacker

[tricaric]

This claim has been extensively discussed in the Minor Planet Mailing List, in particular in this thread, where the "hacker" tells the whole story.

Re:There was no hacker

[tetrahedrassface]

Mod this up!

These two links in his post say a lot about what really happened.

My Horoscope ick FUBAR!

[Henriok]

Bah! My horoscope was beaten to a pulp when NASA shot Deep Impact into Tempel 1. now they are withholding info that will be of immense importance in my future. I'll sue their asses!

Cisco...

[_14k4]

We all know it had to do with the fact that the scientists neglected to update their routers...

Can't blame them

[MiKM]

The keys are close together.

Beer wants to be Free?

[infonography]

Generally in about an hour it wants out. Is that what you ment?

Re:Beer wants to be Free?

[Anne_Nonymous]

Hmmmmmm... I wasn't thinking of its freedom in that sense, but now that you describe as such, perhaps beer seeks more liberty than I had previously given it credit for.

Now if coffee would just demand justice...

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupider?

See Here or here before posting next time.

one year is the customary delay period

[peter303]

Astronomers and other scientists are usually allow each other to analyze data for a year before publication. Then you are supposed to share with anyone who asks. You risk not getting future grants if you peeve off too many of your fellow scientists.

Usually the problem is the other way around- people rush to publication. With so many eyes looking out there, a comet or asteroid may be seen by many others before long. Theres even a place to send a "telegram" to give you priority and naming rights. Plus it gets confirmation. There may be phenomena that is transient enough that it is important for others to know about it before it changes.

11th perhaps?

[Janek Kozicki]

Lets say it's this planet mentioned before. Now, I want to remind sedna.

mercury
venus
earth
mars
jupiter
saturn
uranus
neptune
pluto
sedna
planetX

or sedna is not a planet (just like pluto )

Re:11th perhaps?

[pyrrhonist]

No, that was 2003 EL61.
This is 2003 UB313.

Both Sedna and 2003 EL61 are smaller than Pluto and not considered planets.

The new KBO, 2003 UB313, is larger than Pluto, which is why the discoverers are considering it a planet.
They also discovered Sedna, so they would probably know.

Oh well.

[mcc]

At least that's better than "Rupert".

What's the actual problem here?

[jesterzog]

Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis.

Is there really a problem with not releasing immediately? The linked article is very biased to suggest there is, but it seems like quite a naive attitude to me.

They wanted to know more information first, and it's not exactly a piece of information critical to safety or people's future. It was always their risk that their discovery might have been overshadowed by someone else discovering it, but it was their risk to take.

It's common practice for researchers to hold off presenting something for many reasons, including wanting to have something extra to report or that they want to make sure that they understand what they have. It's also common for astronomers to make announcements that are prematurely mis-interpreted by the media... and right now there a thousands of news reports around the world speculating about the planet/asteroid argument all over again.

Yes, a bad thing.

[ackthpt]

while they waited for full analysis

So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?

Please, that is so 2002.

Ask the Whitehouse and No. 10 Downing Street.

An Analogy...

[ThinkFr33ly]

So, this is a "just" or noble thing to do? Interesting.

What about if a scientist had instead "discovered" that there was an asteriod hurtling torward our pale blue dot? What if that scientist, much like this one, hadn't yet confirmed that the asteriod would hit us, but it was going to be close. And what if there was absolutely nothing we could do about it either way?

That same hacker discovers this information and leaks it to the media. Knowing the media they would scare the crap out of basically everybody with a TV, radio, or newspaper. It might even cause widespread panic.

Now lets suppose that during that panic lots of people are hurt, and some die.

Was it still a justified action on the part of the hacker?

I think, regardless of the outcome of the asteriod flight, it was not. If the asteriod hit us and millions died, the few that were killed died before they would have otherwise. If the asteriod missed us, they likely died far before they would have otherwise.

Because this hacker decided he knew better than the scientist and took matters into his own hands, people died.

An arbitary example, perhaps... but apparently so is the opinion of many of those people on this forum saying that what the hacker did was "good".

Re:Brown was forced?

[DrGrafx]

So what did the hackers blackmail him with, pictures of Uranus? I find it hard to believe they were 'forced' to release anything, despite the claims...

The Lesson?

[bahwi]

Don't put your secrets on the web. Even if it's encrypted/secure/firewalled. If it's not connected to the net, it's not at as much risk.

In other news...

[RAMMS EIN]

...scientists had coined the name `Persephone' for the newly discovered planet, but the hackers forced them to change the name to `Rupert'.

Information Just Wants To Be Free

[WillAffleckUW]

You got a problem with that?

Re:Information Just Wants To Be Free

[Tsiangkun]

It would have been released, free as in speach style, when they were done analysing the data. That's how government funding works. They have cash for a certain number of years, and renewed funding depends on publications from the data collected in the previous round of funding. One bad publication, and you won't be getting more funding. The information would have been free, but now it's been taken hostage by a googler and forced to stand in front of a firing squad, without the scientist saying "our data is bullet proof, fire away"

Re:Information Just Wants To Be Free

[WillAffleckUW]

next thing you know, you'll want time for peer review so people can look at the data, verify the methods, analyze it themselves, and agree it's scientifically sound ...

geesh, it's not like it was going to be published in some scientific paper or something ...

.

.

.

[darn, where is that sarcasm key, gotta be here somewhere]

.

.

From M-W.com :

[solios]

Function: noun
Etymology: origin unknown
chiefly British : a scientific expert; especially : one involved in technological research

So it's a prettier word for "geek" :)

No, they've been sitting on it since 2005

[Michael Woodhams]

From the NASA press release:

Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. However, the object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.

They first suspected they had a planet in January of this year. In October 2003, all they had was a star-like object in a photographic image. If they'd announced that as a possible planet, we'd be getting about 100,000 such announcements per day from astronomers.

Star Trek

[AviLazar]

Dear 10th Planet,

After carefully reviewing your application to join the United Federation of Planets, we have determined that you are inelligible to join. We based this decision on the fact that we would have to re-write one-too many episodes. While we could do this with a time jaunt, we realize our viewers are sick and tired of time skipping ever since it was abused on Enterprise.

Sincerely Yours,

Admiral J.T.K.

P.S. Go to PriceLine where you can name your own price!

Re:Star Trek

[Biogenesis]

I'd prefer "your application has been rejected as you were not formed in the initial solar system's accretion disk* and therefore should not qualify as a planet." Why do we count glorified KBO's as planets anyway?


Since this "10th planet" is probably an icy, dense, object I believe it's more likely to be orbiting near the sun like all the other dense objects if it were made from matter in the early solar system. It's probably just been captured by the Sun's gravity. IANAC (cosmologist), but this seems reasonable to me, feel free to prove me wrong as it'll give me more to write about in my end-of-semester astronomy exam...

Re:Star Trek

[AviLazar]

Why? Probably because it is big. We do not know enough about it to know when it was formed. Though if we can spot planets millions of light years away, I can't imagine this being THAT hard - other then the edge of our solar system is pretty dark.

Time will tell. I have no problem with a 10th planet being discovered.

Re:Star Trek

[Biogenesis]

Well the main problem is that we know of ~100 objects in the region beyond Neptune, Pluto just happens to be the easiest to spot (it's big and close compared to the others). In the end it's just a minor technicality that some get called planets and others don't, it'd just be nice to have some hard and fast definitions. For example if you take size as the only feature to define planets then the large moons of Jupiter count as a couple are larger than Mercury. If you take the original meaning of the word "planet" then anything that moves in the sky compared to the background stars is a planet, everything from asteroids to commets to our current planets...So yeah, basically it's just hard to classify them but due to this new object's location (in amoung many other similar icy objects varying in size in the kuypler belt) I hope it doesn't get classed as a planet.

Re:Star Trek

[AviLazar]

I am not sure of your definition for planet: "Anything that moves in the sky compared to the background stars" That sounds like a Nebula would be defined as a star, a comet, a piece of dust, the ISS, etc.

To have definitions would be to assign absolutes, and there are always exceptions. I think a general guideline is:

Revolves around a star on a regular cycle
Has a specific size category

The best people to ask would be those in astromy.

The moons of jupiter (i.e. Titan) do not revolve around the Sun. They revolve around the planet, and are thusly considered Moons.

The fact is, they have a scientific committee that makes this decision, and that is fine by me. Just because it is not automated, does not mean it is incorrect or flawed.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[Krakhan]

'stupider' ain't proper usage.

Speak for yourself, AC.

Re:Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good scie

[Malc]

If it really were hackers and they got their information in this way, then I very much doubt they revealed it for the good of the public. I suspect they would do it to inflate their egos and prestige, which isn't something to be respected for.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[TexVex]

Interesting. Dictionary.com does return a result for "stupider" and doesn't even say it's nonstandard usage. Not checking your sources, then, looks stupider than the grandparent's use of the word to begin with. While you go over there to look it up, how about using this link to get there.

Re:Do NOT click Link

[SenFo]

Warning to anybody that comes across that link, do NOT click it unless you want to see a very disturbing pornographic picture.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[Dirtside]

Says you, dipshit.

Their Emissary demanded Planetary Status

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the reports, the Emissary from the planet demanded planetary status, hence it was published: Top News.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[Anonymous Coward]

"But, yeah, it wasn't really hacking, it was just using Google well."

In that case I think they need some info on using "robots.txt"

Planet Z not Planet X

[WillAffleckUW]

Wasn't this the planet X we heard about?

No, Planet X is a comet, Planet Y is being kept on ice at Gitmo as a suspected alien planet [which has oil on it, along with vinegar].

This is Planet Z. Let's send the B-52's to attack it!

Read scientist's actual side of story

[rdwald]

Scroll to the bottom of this page to read what Michael Brown (the professor who co-discovered 2003UB313) has to say about the alleged "hacking."

should I be happy that they broke in?

[0xdeaddead]

I mean this is like criminal. Now we risk real science being like the fad diet studys of yes/no/maybe/yes/no results.

This is a bad day for people that think of the internet of a place to connect computers to work.

Mod parent up

[fredistheking]

I KNEW I wasn't crazy. I was arguing with a friend that I had heard about this several years ago and he insisted that I was FOS.

Re:Mod parent up

[YoDave]

Perhaps I should re-phrase my comment. They first imaged it in 2003. But the motion wasn't apparent until they re-imaged it in January 2005. In 2003 they didn't know it was anything special. They *have* been sitting on the announcement. But only since January 2005, not since 2003.

Buckaroo Banzai warned us about this...

[Anonymous Coward]

...back in the '80s, when he and his crack team of hard-rocking scientists stopped an invasion of Red 'Lectroids from Planet 10 from across the 8th dimension.

Alas, here we are facing the same danger. Will we never learn?

Laugh-a while you can, monkey boy!

This is a good thing?

[stlhawkeye]

I'm so glad. Because there's never any potentially harmful consequences of taking scientific research that has not undergone rigorous peer review and may in fact be influenced by political biases and questionable metholodigies or data series.

All scientific information should be heralded and released the community without due diligence. And we should immediately begin basing public policy on it. There's no harm.

With today's politics, it's to be expected

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad but true, many organizations run today with secrecy rivaling top secret military operations. It's not uncommon for me to find breaking news about the company I work for from slashdot or other news sites before hearing it from within my working group first.

Re:Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good scie

[kmmatthews]

Uh, except it wasn't a script kiddie, it was some guy using google.

Report from the Scientists

[Betelgeuse]

If you look at the bottom of this page, you get a very interesting account from the view of the scientists who have done a lot of work on it. The so-called "hacking" sounds much less nefarius than in the article.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Yeah Just like I BET George Noory will say IT'S WORMWOOD or PLANET X! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! :D

George just cracks me up.

Woot! I'm a Uber hacker for using google?

[Lumpy]

Cripes, no hacking was involved, someone googled for a keyaord thatwas mentioned at a talk and found their observation logs about the object.

I am waiting for the TERRORIST story next on how the TERRORISTS are attacking middle america by lighting bags of poop and ringing doorbells.

I can understand a bit of talking up a story to sell it but this National Enquirer style of reporting is mind blowing.

Sterile thoughts

[rumblin'rabbit]

Information wants to be free because sunshine is the best antiseptic.

Fine. You can begin by publicizing all of your personal, medical, and financial records, including your mother's maiden name, your card and PIN numbers, email addresses, account passwords, treatments for any STD's, and so forth.

That should leave you feeling good and sterilized.

Re:Sterile thoughts

[Protonyc]

hoo burn! hehe

But i still think this information should be pubic. I mean there is no money to make about it and it will help research.

Re:Sterile thoughts

[lastchance_000]

Freud would love you.

Re:Sterile thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

But i still think this information should be pubic.

Ewwww, PUBIC? :o

Re:Sterile thoughts

[JuliusRV]

Fine. You can begin by publicizing all of your personal, medical, and financial records, including your mother's maiden name, your card and PIN numbers, email addresses, account passwords, treatments for any STD's, and so forth.

Well, I think the true hacker credo actually says, "free public information, protect private information"!

Yes and no...

[Ariane 6]

This 'Hacker Theory' has been alleged by Brown et al., however AFAIK the Caltech team has yet to produce any evidence substantiating their claim. There was significant discussion on the MPML that the so-called 'hacker' may in fact have been one or more members accessing publically-available pointing data after the Spanish team led by Ortiz discovered 2003 EL61.
      Others believed that Brown, through Colleagues at the MPC were accusing Ortiz directly, which outraged many list members. At this point, a spokesman from the MPC has denied this to the list in a rather sincere-sounding way, however. For now, the individual to whom Brown was referring remains a mystery.

LA - flying tonight

[Cally]

From TFA linked to from TFA linked to here....

Hacker 'outs' news of the 10th planet of our solar system
July 31, 2005
br> By Alicia Chang

Los Angeles - It's icy, rocky and bigger than Pluto and, according to scientists who found it orbiting the Sun, it's the newest planet in our solar system.

Wow, you know, I have to wonder how I missed this event! Anyone know what caused it - Hollywood special effect run amok? mega-volcano? Explosion of methane built up from the decomposing, rotting wreckage of the copyright mafia's business models, honesty and decency?

Confirm, then report

[dazedNconfuzed]

Remember not long ago when some scientists reported the "color of the universe"? that they claimed it was sort of a pale mauve or something? Lots of hype and excitement, only to be thrown into rank confusion when they came back a few days later and said "oops, sorry, it's really pretty much just straight white." The whole story got mangled, and soon dropped with a "um, ok, uh ..." attitude.

And that was just identifying a color.

Showed that it makes sense for scientists to get a better handle on what they've found (which is not necessarily obviously clear) before telling the public, which tends to grab onto nifty ideas - even if dramatically wrong.

Re:Confirm, then report

[Tim C]

Well, that pretty much proves his point - I remember the original story, but not the retraction, and I actually have an interest in such things.

I for one support these guys waiting until they were sure of their data before going public; that's the way it's supposed to work. Before making claims, make sure your data support them...

Mod parent up, way up

[Anonymous Coward]

Right on.

The word of the day

[vivin]

The word of the day is pedantic.

Thank you.

Wasn't it already expected?

[ZeroExistenZ]

I thought they saw a deviation in Pluto's orbit already, which suggested another planet would've been influencing it but just haven't observed the planet yet.

Wasn't this the same way they discovered Pluto?

Re:Wasn't it already expected?

[0111 1110]

I had heard something like that but regarding the existence of some brown dwarf kind of object. Or maybe even an actual black hole.

RELIABLE source?!

[Transcendent]

Is there any backup source?

Why would the guy come out and admit it when the hacker threatened to... do it.... for.... him.

This whole story just smells of bull sh*t.

Re:Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good scie

[thelost]

mod grand-parent down, his reactionary statement say's very little when you read this. Mod parent up most definately.

Remember The Astrologist Lawsuit??

[Anonymous Coward]

"Russian astrologist who says NASA has altered her horoscope by crashing a spacecraft into a comet is suing the U.S. space agency for damages of $300 million, local media has reported."

NASA should definately use this new planet in their defense... 'The original prediction was invalid FAR before our test-crash'

Re:Remember The Astrologist Lawsuit??

[antispam_ben]

"Russian astrologist who says NASA has altered her horoscope by crashing a spacecraft into a comet is suing the U.S. space agency for damages of $300 million, local media has reported."

She is now suing God for damages related to His creation of this extra planet.

I'm confused.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was never that good a student, but I remember the discovery of planet X being discussed while I was in middle school back in 1985. What's all the current hoopla about?

Link: Brown announced 10th "Planet" on 15 Mar 2004

[forgoodmeasure]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/03/14/planet.di scovery/ I don't know if that's the same 10th "planet", but it was given the name of Sedna but was said to be smaller than Pluto (as opposed to 1.5x). It was actually called an "object", as the definition of planet is a matter of some controversy.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[BillyBlaze]

Oh come now, all scientists, especially those from Harvard, know that manually modifying a URL, or clicking a link that connects you to a different server than the server that gave you the link, is vile hacking and must be punished.

Re:Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good scie

[TopShelf]

Unless, of course, the planet is heading RIGHT TOWARDS PLANET EARTH!

Re:information wants to be set free

[ReidMaynard]

The Dead Sea Scrolls didn't want to be free; they were doing a fantastic job hiding.

this is how science works

[farble1670]

you don't go public until you accumulate sufficient evidence.

2003?

[Trogre]

So are we still talking about Quaoraror?

Re:Do NOT click Link

[spoonsman]

All it is is goatse. It's not like it's something all of use here haven't seen before.

It's not a planet yet

[sycomonkey]

It has to be officially designated as a planet by the International Astronomical Union before it can be called a planet. Considering that it is bigger than Pluto, and there may (read: almost definantly) be more bodies in the Kupier belt that are bigger than Pluto, I think it might be safe to say that Pluto has just as much of a chance of having it's planatary status removed, as 2003-UB313 has of becoming an official planet. The International Astronomical Union is going to have to announce some sort of definition as to what does and does not qualify as a planet, so that we can avoid these confusions in the future.

Re:Brown was forced?

[sartin]

So what did the hackers blackmail him with, pictures of Uranus?

I realize it's unpopular to RTFA, but even the link to TFA says " threatened to reveal it" - the hackers threatened to reveal the data, so the scientists pre-empted them.

Re:Hey CmdrTaco

[Anonymous Coward]

IT to ME.

There.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, in British English you are wrong. "More stupid" would be correct.

After 2003 EL61

[PingPongBoy]

Michael Brown was scooped once when 2003 EL61 was taken. The entire situation can be aptly described with "The plot thickens."

Since Brown had already analyzed confirming evidence obtained in Jan. 2005 it's quite possible he was on the verge of announcing a new planet, complete with website, which someone may have quickly tried to peek into since Brown is quite famous in this area.

In the age of the Internet you'd have to be a really patient person to sit on information from Jan to July, especially on something as controversial as Planet X. It makes you wonder if Prof. Brown has even bigger fish to fry.

The Internet is not peer-reviewed publishing at its best, but rather the poor-man's way of gaining the attention of the world. However, the best information on the Internet tends to gain the most hits. Scientists shouldn't be too shy about posting their findings and bypassing the rigamorole of peer review. Web publishing also carries a high standard, especially because the presentation has to be accessible as in understandable and palatable by people outside a narrow field. Good web publishing might be characterized by its ability to persist on a server due to its popularity.

Re:Hey CmdrTaco

[91degrees]

Made sense back in the late 90's.

These days, Slashdot is a commercial concern. It makes its money from our patronage (indirectly). As such, we have every right to demand a better service.

Taco, of course, has every right to tell us to get stuffed, or ingore us, and we have every right to go elsewhere. But that's the beauty of freedom.

Protecting the UFO Base

[Alien54]

Due to the treaty agreements, NASA and the rest have to sit on any information regarding any possible outlying base locations.

Not like we are going there any time soon.

It's basically the whole MIB scenario. They told us the truth by making it into a hit comedy.

Vega

[Reignking]

Is it me, or is this the 3rd 10th planet people have found? I could've sworn it was named "Vega"...

Re:Vega

[mozkill]

Without a doubt, the planet should be named "PLanet X" (because of the roman numeral 10 )

If its named anything else, i will be disappointed since it has been called this for years already.

Actaul story:

[kf6auf]

If scientists notified the public every time there is a possibility of there being Planet X somewhere there would be 100 announcements each day and then 100 retractments a couple hours later 99% of the time. The computers that look for objects spit out these 100 objects each day and a person looks at most of them and says that they are just minor camera issues or some small asteroid or comet most of the time. Most of this would not interest the public at all.

Furthermore, I attend Caltech, have taken Planetary Science class from Mike Brown, and my girlfriend is doing Astrophysics research into searching for more planets and she told me that someone looked up telescope records to figure out where Mike Brown has been looking when so that they can reconstruct the orbit and find the object. It doesn't sound that improbable, and I can't imagine someone here at Caltech in the Planetary Science or Astrophysics Departments making it up.

Now that I've written this, I checked his site at the bottom and it confirms what I said is possible, though maybe no one bothered to actually try it.

Thought 'twas Mos Def 1999

[FathomIT]

"Nine planets faithfully keep
in orbit With the probable tenth, the universe expands length..." -Mathmatics

who wouldn't want credit for this?

[E8086]

If I found another planet of course I'd want full credit for myself and everyone else on the project. For something this big I'd also want enough proof to ensure I don't look like an idiot if it turns out to not be a planet, just a large asteroid or planetary fragment. Two years, big deal, if this 'planet' is really 3 times as far from the sun then two earth years is only a day or two for it. Even with the release the press still manages to screw things up, I've read it's size is between 70% and 150% that of Pluto. Back to the only two years thing, FDA drug testing takes longer than two years as does the decision to make and eventual release of Window Vista. It's been at least two years since the announcement of longhord and will probably be at least another two years until it's eventual release. This is NOT a government cover up, it's two independent groups of credible scientists who want to fully test their theory that there's another chunk of rock out there large enough to be considered a planet.
If it's released too early and not sufficently confirmed them we'll have another myth to be tested on Mythbusters or Penn&Teller: BullSh*T! just the usual media frenzy, people claiming hoax and conspiracy theorists claiming it's a plot to cover up to the UFO's home planet/base in this galaxy.

Nothing has been withheld

[Bizzeh]

the information has been withheld since 2003 has it? is that why i heard about it in 2003 and also heard about the analysis that would be goin on to confirm it was a planet

Planet X is old news

[brw12]

Does anyone else remember reading about Planet X, which had been detected because of its periodic blocking of light from nearby stars, around 1990? What about the other Pluto-sized Kuiper belt objects under discussion for the past three years? This announcement seems strangely out of context.

Re:Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good scie

[Malc]

But it's not is it? Do you really think that researchers from Caltech would keep quiet for so long about something so serious if it were?

Also, signed statement to Congress

[michaelmalak]

Before Bush could go to war, Bush was obligated under the October, 2002 so-called war authorization by Congress to inform Congress that such action was "consistent" with "taking action against" the Sep. 11 terrorists. Leading up to the war, Bush was desperately pounding the CIA to come up with such evidence. They were unable to, so Bush simply issued a letter to Congress blandly asserting the completely unsupportable proposition anyway:

Text of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate

March 18, 2003

Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)

Consistent with section 3(b) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:

(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Sincerely,

GEORGE W. BUSH

This letter, and the need for it, is the most underreported aspect of the entire war, in my opinion, and an article on it is one of the most viewed on my blogs -- I was the first to break the story, simply by reading the text of the war authorization act on thomas.loc.gov. Too bad the mass media couldn't have done the same.

Re:Also, signed statement to Congress

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the mass media couldn't have done the same.

For those who wanted government entangled in commerce: here are the fruits of your labor.

Re:Also, signed statement to Congress

[AA1]

Here is Public Law 107-243 that parent post was referring to. You can see in the first few pages that it talks about the alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

PDF Format

Re:Also, signed statement to Congress

[initialE]

Bush simply issued a letter to Congress blandly asserting the completely unsupportable proposition anyway:
I think the word you were looking for is "blatantly". There's nothing bland about Bush, like it or not.

Re:Also, signed statement to Congress

[Anonymous Coward]

And what does any of this have to do with the announcement of a 10th planet? I guess Bush-bashing--even when it's completely off-topic is still a good kharma whoring tactic.

The question was does he *still* have WMD

[AHumbleOpinion]

The question was not "does Saddam have WMD?". The question was "does he *still* have WMD?". Syria said he did, Russia said he did, Germany said he did, it was not just the US. Actually not just the Republicans that is, some Democrats said he still had them as well.

Saddam was supposed to get rid of them under UN supervision, he did not do so. Furthermore he impeded UN teams try to determine if they were really gone. He wanted people to think he still had them believing it added to his clout and/or security. He guessed wrong.

That said, the question of what to do about the situation, going to war or not, is a different subject. Believing that Sadaam had WMD was a quite reasonable and prudent thing to believe. Believing that there was an imminent threat is something else and I expect that it will be decades before we know is the war in Iraq helped or hurt the war on terror.

Re:They better name it Rupert

[kalidasa]

What idiot modded this offtopic? "Rupert" is the name of the 10th planet in Douglas Adams's Mostly Harmless (well, the actual name is Persephone, but everyone calls it Rupert for reasons which it's best not to go in to here). The only way this could be modded negative is if there were a "-1 Blindingly obvious" mod.

So Much Wrong: Inexcusable Whining

[reallocate]

Let's see what's wrong here:

First, the Inquirer credits the Jo'burg Sunday Telegraph. But, if they'd read all the way to the end of the piece, they'd have noticed it was a "SAPA-AP" story. That means the Telegraph bought the sotry from the South African Press Association, who in turn got it from Associated Press. Since, however, the Inquirer has no standing as a reputable news journal, there's no reason to assume anyone on their staff would have half a clue.

Second, the whining that these researchers deliberately withheld their data from the public is inexcusable. It was preliminary unconfirmed data that belonged to the researchers, not the public. The public has no more right to see it than they do to see my checkbook.

Like Slashdot, the Inquirer is in the business of making money by playing to the juvenile emotions of people who believe everything belongs to everybody.

New world has a moon - mass now known!

[Savantissimo]

Here's something back on topic:
The New Scientist reports:

Newly disclosed observations of the giant world revealed on Friday to orbit in the outer solar system show that it has a moon....

The moon is not the first discovered around a Kuiper Belt object, but it is the smallest, only about 1% the mass of 2003 EL61. More importantly, observations of the satellite's 49-day orbit allowed Brown to precisely calculate the masses of both 2003 EL61 and its moon.

Brown's results - posted on his website - show the object is about 32% as massive as Pluto. Assuming its composition is similar, that implies its diameter is about 70% of Pluto's, or about 1600 kilometres. That would probably make it larger than Sedna, an object beyond the Kuiper Belt discovered earlier by Brown's group.

No.

[porkchop_d_clown]

They *thought* they could find a 9th planet based on the orbital perturbations of Neptune's orbit, but they actually found pluto by accident - Pluto is too small and too far from Neptune to perturb its orbit.

Re:Information is the opposite force of entropy.

[vertinox]

People don't insist on it being... The universe does. If humans were all dead, nature would still have information weather that would be in it's DNA or some bird making a nest in an ordered fashion.

The only force in the universe that negates entropy is information. Weather this is DNA information, human, or machine processedinformation.

Information can be applied to uniformity of matter or energy or the creation of uniformity in a sense into ordered patters. This can be groves for 0 and 1's on a CD or it can be electrons stored in RAM.

This is opposed to the theory that everything in the universe eventually goes into chaos and becomes less uniform.

But from this billions of years of chaos sprung life by chance (lets not start an evolution of Intelligent Design debate) and through life things started to put things back into order.

Although information doesn't lead always directly to the uniformity of matter is can lead to the manipulation of physical matter... Say human knowhow can lead to build a uniform block of a perfect cube of uranium.

Considering the chances of actually coming across a perfect cube in the universe without intelligent life involed is very very very small so we must consider information to be the key role into organizing matter.

Humans only think they want information because it's inherit in being a living organism. All creatures have some type of information and would eventually evolve to take advantage of that informtion (or they could just go extinct because they failed to do so).

Point being... The universe has information weather we choose to like it or not.

Not so top secret.

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing I thought when I saw this news was this is two year old news. It wasn't top secret they were reviewing the data. I don't see how hackers forced anything. It was made public two years ago.

Analysis

[Michael Woodhams]

The analysis they'd need to do to prove that this object orbits the sun, and get some idea of the orbit, is to get both a parallax and a proper motion.

Parallax is the apparent motion of a nearby object relative to distant ones, caused by the Earth's orbit around the sun (i.e. because our viewpoint location is changing.) To get a parallax, you need to observe its position at several times of the year, so this inherently takes at least about 6 months. The size of the parallax is inversely proportional to the distance (so for a solar system object it will be very large.) (Incidentally, the definition of a parsec is the distance to an object with a parallax of one second of arc.)

Proper motion is the apparent motion of an object relative to distance ones due to the object's own straight-line motion through space. Again, it takes time to measure proper motion - you have to wait long enough for the object to move appreciably. In this case, the period between 2003 and now should easily suffice - except that you need to disentangle the effect of parallax, so you can't do this until you have a parallax measurement (or reimage at the same time of year as your previous image.)

Proper motion is an angular measurement. Combined with the distance, we can calculate its true velocity perpendicular to our line of sight.

They might also have taken a third measurement, the Doppler shift. This requires taking a spectrum, which for such a dim object would require a very large telescope, if it is possible at all. The Doppler shift gives the velocity parallel to the line of sight.

Those three measurements (parallax (hence distance), proper motion and doppler shift) suffice to completely determine the orbit. In practice, after such a short period of observation, the measurements will have low precision and the orbit known imprecisely. This imprecision will decrease with time and more observations. This is why we every so often get an object on possible Earth collision orbit (initial orbit determination has large error bars, which cannot preclude a collision) which then later is announced not to be a danger afterall (precision has improved.) To get a really good orbit, we want to observe the object through an appreciable fraction of its orbit. From memory, the orbit for this object is about 600 years, so this will take a long time.

Re: Your Sig

[Anonymous Coward]

My wood chipper's been acting up lately. Could you take a look at it for me? Thanks.

How is the 10th planet news?

[SleezyG]

I don't see how hackers could possibly have forced the announcement of the existence of a 10th planet. Hasn't the theory of additional celestial bodies been common knowledge for a very long time? I remember learning about planets in our solar system beyond Pluto 20 years ago when I was in elementary school!

News Flash

[Keaster]

Considering the argument, I agree with everyone; concurrently, all readings of the (King James) Bible, the United States Constitution and old issues of phrack magazine will now be charged a 10.00 reading fee whenever read. Please send me money, the ideas listed are now owned by Keaster. Please send the funds to: Keaster Island P.O. Box Holy Crap Get a Life Island Seriously, Relax 20702

witheld information!

[aqsv49]

So they witheld some info for a few years, so what? its not like its gonna affect my life in any way seriously. Personally i couldnt give a crap if theyd discovered a new Earth. As far as im concerned let people withold pointless secrets from each other when they dont have to! when the people that need your help to develop a new habitat on another planet cos earth is out of resources you just deny u knew about the other planet and call the other guy crazy, Then all humans die because they cant work as a team and help each other survive.

Threatening? Uh oh...

[Spy der Mann]

Hackers... revealing... information?

Oh no! Planet X has a security hole!!!

*jumps out the window*

I think I speak for everyone here when I say...

[TheLittleJetson]

"Eat a bag of dicks."

It's obvious that objects don't have desires. The poster was merely using some colorful speech. Other examples of non-factual satements that you'd be quick to contradict and look like a prick for doing so:
"It's hot as hell out here!"
"I'm so hungry, I could eat a horse!"
"Slashdot is food for thought."

Yes it is considering it might be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is considering it might be the planet that the book "the 12th planet" talks about. If it is them I know why they might not want to reveal it!

Geez

[empaler]

By that measure, "7bDgew24FV3%4lbBså^r!" is as valid as "To be or not to be...". Yes, they are both transmitted pieces of information. They even carry the same length. The first one is complete rubbish, however. This, by the way, is consistent with Shannon's Information Theory.
The problem is that the first piece of information is completely useless whereas the second is an excerpt from the world's best known play.

Not all information is important, we cannot always learn anything from information, and also, I need more sleep.

Apart from that, as others have replied, information does not seek anywhere by itself. The position, speed, spin and size of a rock does not opine to stardom.

It's not even as if the scientists censored the information - they were just following a (very important) tradition of rechecking results, making more tests and generally learning more before going out into the public and shouting "Oo, look at us, we found number ten!". A scientist's job is not that of sensationalism but learning about the universe, checking the results, then sharing his findings.

Re:Geez

[keraneuology]

By that measure, "7bDgew24FV3%4lbBså^r!" is as valid as "To be or not to be...". Yes, they are both transmitted pieces of information. They even carry the same length. The first one is complete rubbish, however.

Context is everything. That funky string of "complete rubbish" happens to be my passphrase for my PGPdisk which contains every Q-level document ever drafted, Jessica Simpson's cell phone # (and complete list of never-fail 100% guaranteed turn-ons) and the complete sourcecode for Microsoft Bob. Still think it "is completely useless"?

Your statement "Not all information is important" must be qualified by &" to all people at all times". And you are correct, the information does not seek to spread on its own: information never does anything but just hang around waiting to be collected like so many rotten pieces of fruit waiting to accelerate into the forehead of some science dude. But given any two life forms that interact, the exchange of information is the absolutely essential foundation of every interaction. Hammers convey to the thumb the information that 15N on a hangnail = pain. Pizza broadcasts the information that it is yummy. Life is about little -other- than the flow and exchange of information... as a result, the artificial obstruction of this exchange is unnatural and prone to failure.

Re:Geez

[arminw]

.....whereas the second is an excerpt from the world's best known play....

That is only true, because at least two people have agreed on the meaning and design of the little pictures we call letters and how they happen to be arranged in a code called English. To someone who knows only say German, that arrangement of these symbols carries no meaning although he may recognize the shape of the symbols. To a Chinese, the symbols themselves are also indecipherable. To have any communication, there must be some previous agreement on the meaning of the carriers of said information and their arrangements.

Wrong Decision

[Phragmen-Lindelof]

I think Brown, etc. made an inappropriate decision to withhold this information. I hope CalTech is embarrassed by this episode. I believe this contributes to the "What is a planet?" debate and whets the public's interest in astronomy. Greater interest in astronomy and interesting new discoveries might lead to increases in NASA's budget; why delay this two years?

Two words.

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

Publicity. Stunt.

Hello, wall...

[ShavedGuerilla]

Hey, you guys are getting annoyed at scientists not jumping the gun and releasing this early. Aren't you the same people who are still pissed that MicroSchlock released Windoes 95 with roughly 2000 known bugs?? /. readers = schizophrenic or just forgetful??

What is freedom?

[SuperKendall]

No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist.

Is that in itself not a form of freedom? It would seem to uphold the previous point. Someone once contained information; in the absense of an attempt to maintain containment the information generally goes "free", which means it is no longer bounded by the original holder.

As for things falling to the ground; they are actually attracting each other if you want to get all anal about it. I'm sure someone else could be even more anal still but what is the point when it's completely off-topic and is no longer a valid metaphor?

Re:Information is the opposite force of entropy.

[Anonymous Coward]

whether... the word is whether.

Isn't this old news?

[bill_kress]

Am I the only one who remembers hearing about Planet X, a planet possibly larger than pluto, years ago? WTF? Whoever was in charge of keeping it a secret wasn't doing a very good job.

Re:Do NOT click Link

[MyLongNickName]

We don't want to know about your hobbies. Thanks.

Not the 10th planet

[caviare]

Mike Brown, a member of the team that discovered this object, has the following page on the definition of a planet: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/sedna/#What%20i s%20the%20definition%20of%20a%20planet? According to his preferred definition neither the new object nor Pluto are planets.

Re:Not the 10th planet

[rdwald]

Actually, Prof. Brown has changed his opinion on the "What is a planet" question. He now thinks that anything Pluto-sized or larger should be a planet, thus making 2003UB313 the 10th planet (not more than ten, because this is the first to actually be larger than Pluto).

Re:Not the 10th planet

[caviare]

I can't help wondering whether this is because he might now get the credit for discovering the tenth planet. Once upon a time the sun and the moon were considered to be planets. They are no longer. We have figured out that calling Pluto a planet doesn't allow us a useful definition of the word. Culture will eventually catch up.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[anthony_dipierro]

Of course, what's even stupider is how both the Independent and, to an even stupider degree, the Inquirer make it sound all ominous and elitist that the scientists didn't release the info as soon as they found it. Like, maybe they didn't want to risk the media flaming them for prematurely announcing a tenth planet if they had to recant part of their data?

Couldn't they have at least told people "hey, look at this, isn't it cool?" Or did they do that?

Re:Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good scie

[Rich0]

Uh, if you look at this site the worst the guy alleges is that somebody looked like they were planning on peeking at his planet with a telescope.

He published his code-name for the planet. Somebody did a search for that name and found some publicly-available telescope logs that had that name in it. (One might think that the reason those logs are publicly available is since the public pays for them at least in part.)

Then somebody did some calculations on a website to figure out where the planet was now, presumably to take a look at it.

At no point did anybody claim discovery of the planet, hold the investigator at ransom, threaten to release data, etc.

Essentially the astronomer in question is probably highly paranoid and considers it unethical for anybody else to peek at "his" planet.

Re:Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good scie

[01000011011101000111]

Of course they would. Any research institution with half a brain would shut up and call every government they could - that way at least there's a chance of deflecting the thing, or else launching a "all-or-nothing-colony" endevour. I mean, c'mon, just imagine the world-wide panic if it were announced. There'd be no way we could save ourselves, the proles would all be running round getting wasted...

OT

[pyrrho]

I've been waiting for you, what took so long?

Re:OT

[pyrrhonist]

What is thy bidding, my master?

fantastic

[pyrrho]

now define sentient and you're all done.

alternately...

[squidgyhead]

These quotes make perfect sense if you assume that the NY Trade Center attacks were carried out by an Iraqi-sponsored group. I mean, we all assume that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks on 2001-09-11, but, hey, it wouldn't be the first time that they've taken credit for stuff that they haven't done.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's on this page. But, yeah, it wasn't really hacking, it was just using Google well.

From the quoted page:

If the object falls under the rules for other Kuiper belt objects, however, it must be named after some figure in a creation mythology.

I certainly like the way the author puts it - that creation is a mythology. How entirely perfect. Problem is, Bush will probably cut some funding somewhere for whatever program is run by this school and administered by NASA.

Another Government Cover up?

[Speefnarkle1982]

If the hackers had released the info on the plantet, the scientists could have simply said there was no planet, just a high altitude weather balloon!!!

When are they going to announce this:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.screwballsquirrel.net/stuff/space-alien -backs-bush-for-president.jpg

You can lock my door.

[bronney]

It's true that the information was available without breaking into any sites. It's also true that sometimes I don't lock the door to my house. I hope that people don't think it's therefore OK to come in and take my stuff.

No sir if you don't lock your door I won't be the one coming in to take your stuff but you can bet on it if you keep it unlocked long enough, someone will go in. What the hell is wrong with you, if you don't want people to see your photos, don't upload them to your blogs..

More training, you need..

Information wants to be free?

[GoofyBoy]

>You for discovering something and then waiting for a full peer review and analysis before presenting your data to the public.

They weren't waiting for peer review, they were waiting for another telescope for a more precise size. Sounds like they wanted their announcement to be more dramatic. The peer review would come later.

>Fuck you to the hackers who feel that something like this needed to be public without review.

If it came from an anonoymous email/message on the Internet, how does this hurt the astronomers/researchers? I remember when Fermat's Last Therom was proved there was alot of rumors about it beforehand. I don't think that Wiles ever complained about this.

>If it was 'revealed' and then found to be false,

You will never be sure if its false or not, peer review doesn't automatically make it "TRUE". Alot of bad science has been peer reviewed and published.

>some script kiddie illegally, immorally, and unethically published the data before it was reviewed.

The person used publically available information, nothing was illegal.

It's true that the information was available without breaking into any sites.

>the true facts would have been buried in the mess.

Thats pretty ironic since the "hackers" were just trying to get the true facts out there.

Is it.....

[flawedgeek]

...really a secure server if someone hacked it?

Yes, I am

[Luthair]

they haven't printed a hard copy yet! I know this because of the hackers!

Mike Brown (the discoverer)'s clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/inde x.html

Why the hasty announcement? What about the hacking? What is going on here?

As has been widely reported in the press, the announcement of the new planet was made in a rather hasty manner because of fears that our discovery was going to be made public by someone who had hacked a web site and gained access to information about where the object is. The details are a little more complicated than this, the terminology can be debated ("hacked?" "sleuthed?" "stole?" "stumbled across?") and not all are 100% clear to me, but here is a reconstruction of the events that lead to the announcement as best I can discern them. Some aspects remain mysterious.

In mid-July short abstracts of scientific talks to be given at a meeting in September became available on the web (for example, here). We intended to talk about the object now known as 2003 EL61, which we had discovered around Christmas of 2004, and the abstracts were designed to whet the appetite of the scientists who were attending the meeting. In these abstracts we call the object a name that our software automatically assigned is, K40506A (the first Kuiper belt object we discovered in data from 2004/05/06, May 6th). Using this name was a very very bad idea on our part! Unbeknownst to us, some of the telescopes that we had been using to study this object keep open logs of who has been observing, where they have been observing, and what they have been observing. A two-second Google search of "K40506A" immediately reveals these observing logs. Ouch. Bad news for us. From the moment the abstracts became public anyone on the planet with a web connection and a little curiosity about this "K40506A" object could have found out where it was. Anyone on the planet with even a modest-sized telescope could then go find the object and claim a discovery as their own.

Interestingly, this is not what we then happened. The Spanish group headed by J.-L. Ortiz legitimately discovered the object on their own in data from 2 and 3 years ago. The fact that this discovery happened days after the data were potentially available on the web is, I believe, a coincidence. At the time, however, some in the community privately expressed their concerns to me that this coincidence was too good to be true and wanted to know if there was any possible way that anyone could have found out the location of our object. I insisted it was impossible. I was wrong. I myself went to Google late on the night after the Spanish announcement, typed K40506A into Google, and let out a gasp. Even though I don't believe the Spanish group did this, I realized anyone could have found our object with very little effort. To be very clear, from the first day I have very publicly stated that the official discovery credit goes to Ortiz et al. and no one else.

By Friday morning it occurred to me that once someone knew about the web site where the information on where the telescopes we had been using had been pointing it would take only a little more effort to carefully peruse this web site to see if we had been looking at anything else moving in the sky. At this point I contacted Brian Marsden at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) by email, told him confidentially about the two objects that we had not yet announced (now known as 2003 UB313 and 2005 FY9), expressed my concerns that someone may be able to nefariously find our data and attempt to claim credit for discovering these objects, and sought his advice. His chilling response came less than an hour later: someone had already used a web service of the MPC to use past observations of an object to predict locations for tonight. The past observations were precisely the logs from the telescope we had used! The culprit and not even bothered to change the names that we used (K31021C for 2003 UB313 and K50331A for 2005 FY9). At this point we had no choice but to hastily pull together

dunno

[Anonymous Coward]

But I remember articles from space.com and other astronomy sites around that time, that did mention that discovery and that they wanted to further analyse it to make it clear what they discovered (size, orbit, etc)

so nothing gained on information in my opinion, just a show for all to get some more advertisement for space ...

Re:Thank you Astronomers/Researchers for good scie

[elpapacito]

Let' say the "hacker" reveals some notion. The "cattle" listen to what they hear and react as they please, regardless of the accuracy of the notion. If they like it, they'll praise the scientist..just to blame him/her two minutes later for something else they don't like.

It seems to me you still belong to the cattle you so much dislike and in particular to the malevolent subset of them because

1. you completely disregard the fact even peer-reviewed notions can be found, after intellectually honest peer-review, false. In other words it seems that you believe peer-review is always better then no peer-review, as if peer-review was something ameliorative by itself..while it can be done dishonestly and erroneously as much as everything else can.

2. you blame the hackers for revealing information still not reviewed AS IF that single action was the cause of confusion in the cattle..but that's flatly false because

3. cattle more often the not can't tell peer-reviewed material from articles of faith. They believe and hope that there are authorities that will always tell them "the truth" ...either a scientific authority or a political or a religious one..always some benevolent AUTHORITY.

The best way to say "thank you" to intellectually honest scientist is to become one, just saying "thanks" doesn't help a bit.

Additionally it seems to me you're just reacting in a way most people was conditioned to..just blame the bad guy..and we'll tell you who the bad guy is, you needn't understand by yourself if they're really bad or not..WE SAY IT IS therefore IT IS.

Dude, you still belong to the herd you hate so much and you still don't realize it.

Who's going to get sued now?

[wafty_cranker]

I'm sure you remember the story of the astrologist sueing NASA for $300 million for hurting that poor little comet that wasn't doing anything to hurt anyone. http://www.physorg.com/news4927.html

So, who's fault is it that all the astrology charts are wrong now?

I blame that stooopid scientist for saying that he found a new planet. What a dork. Jeeez.

Off Topic -1?

[tom75646437]

Meta mod these people some smackdown please.

Wildly off-topic, but...

[sean.peters]

The one where gun nuts demand they get whatever penis surrogate they want, justified by some grammatical error in the Second Amendment

Doc, on most of this kind of stuff on with you. But I challenge you to point out which rule of grammar is violated by the 2nd amendment. If you want to say that the amendment doesn't clearly spell out what we can and can not do with guns, well, you're probably right. But there's nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence of interest.

I'll spare you the part about how "a well-regulated militia" != "the National Guard".

Sean

Re:Wildly off-topic, but...

[Doc Ruby]

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The commas are gratuitously wrong. The sentence is really one and a half sentences. The first clause, ending with "State", is half a sentence that would be a complete sentence if "being" were "is". The sentence is correct rhetorically, with its justification preamble rolling right into its specified action. Like this sentence, which resembles speech, but is not grammatically correct.

Even in the construction of the Amendment's language, we can see how it's been a device more suited to rhetoric than governance, since its inception. All that's changed is that 200 years later, many of us think "well regulated militia" means "$1T:year Pentagon", rather than "local farmers with their own working guns". So we've got the giant standing army that the Amendment ignores in favor of an organized citizenry. And we've got millions of guns in the hands of totally disorganized citizens, who shoot ourselves more often than we shoot each other, certainly more than we need to shoot anyone.

BTW, I've spared you the ironic, joyless part about your grammatical typo in your last sentence :).

Re:Star Trek ... Hackers or Crackers? And...

[davidsyes]

Hmmm, is what these guys did the work of crackers or hackers? I thought "hackers" were the "ethical", trustworth (even if at armslength) guys/girls, and "crackers" he "bad guys" who busted into your box and did nasty things or retrieved information with intent to bribe, extort, embarrass, run out of business, steal money or info, and so on...

Now, as far as people who hoard or hide information of unprecedented and interesting value, why hide it, when they already KNOW the damned source (the planet) exists?

I have not yet RTFA, but if they have had some 2 years of hard evidence, then why continue hiding it? It's almost as if they might be scientists who "found "god"" but didn't want to reopen the Galileo/Copernicus, et al story of repression, oppression, house arrests, burnings at the stakes, accusations of witchcraft/witcher/sorcery and so on.

OTOH, maybe it's not a planet. It could be an ET or even a US hidden base. THAT'S IT: Pioneer and manifest destiny at work, except they didn't want to spring the news on us until the "aliens" were nuked, knived, batoned, microwaved and locked up... and THEN put thru the "shake n' bake" and Easy-Bake oven...

Actually, I hope they finally find life (well, rather quickly a planet's beings find us) from a planet that is far more enlightened than us but which has no compunction about "whipping our asses into planetary shape". I most certainly hope Earthlings are not the founders of any Federation or UFP or such. We need the moral, ethical, and other sorts of competition or pressure, and we SURE as hell don't deserve to escapade or forage beyond the Moon until we clean up our act down here. We have far too much warfare, pestilence, famine, social malaise, and political corruption and need to be "smacked down" a number of times to simulate and eventually effect are "real, hard, lasting moral reset" button.

I realize NASA has brought back information and manufacturing processes or advances and helped us learn a lot more than we could in 1G, but, dammit, too many other things can be done with that kind of money so we don't have to keep mortgaging our and our kids' futures on mostly-hoarded knowledge, or amassing information that can't be harvested in near-term with planet-enhancing results. Enough of the nation-superiority complexes.

ET, are you listening. Come and get us... Or, just keep initiating mission-failures that confound and befuddle the "experts". Maybe we'll end up diverting boondogle budgets to diminish hunger and deliver the food and medicines directly to those who need it, and bypass corrupt regimes' administrators.

Nah, these are HYUMANS I'm talking about. It'll be another 500 years before even SOME of the vestiges of the past 400 finally are washed out of the gene pool...

Deplorable?

Hmmm anti-script-word image happens to be... "deplore", hehehhe

That planet is old news, it was called Sedna!

[roqetman]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3511678. stm
Why is everyone talking about this like it's news; it's history!

You just don't understand...

[Myrkridian42]

Anyone who said Iraq had WMDs is a filty no-good lier. But strangely, "Anyone" seems to exclude Democats.

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." - President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998 Source

"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country." -Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002 Source

"Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members." - Sen. Hillary Clinton, Oct 10, 2002 Source

Hubble Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

People should not get bent because others are interested in PUBLIC DATA made possible with PUBLIC DOLLARS. The Hubble telescope fuck up was a case in point, no one could check it out except a select few
Astro - Divas and their huge bloated egos.

The public was screwed for years. Yeah fight about
naming the 10th planet for your pet or whatever,
blaming "hackers" for scientific inquiry is moronic.

Re:Do NOT click Link

[SenFo]

To anybody out there with mod points, can you please do Slashdot a favor and check the context of the message before modding a message as Offtopic? I was attempting to do people a favor by warning them ahead of time that the parent message contained a link that was not appropriate.

Re:Oh noes! Hackers!

[Lesson No. 25]

That link should have been posted in the article summary! The bottom section fills in the details of the "hacking".

Thanks.

Had to wait for hollywood's o.k.

[Anonymous Coward]

Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis.

...or a movie studio to finish production on movie about a previously undiscovered 10th planet from the sun. That way hollywood could cash in on the current media.

disclaimerthesearemyopinionsonly

/. also delays publication

[juggledean]

10th planet Sunday July 31, @09:01PM Rejected

It's curious that a rumor of a hacker is more interesting than the planet itself.

.sigfree