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Slashback: OSS, Lawsuits, History
Record Label Supports Accused File-Sharer. arabagast writes "The Nettwerk Music Group has said it will pay for the defense of David Greubel. Greubel is the defendant in a complaint filed by the RIAA in a U.S. District Court in Fort Worth, Texas accusing him of having 600 illegally downloaded music files on his home computer."
Qluster's OpenQRM goes OSS. Decibel writes "While Microsoft, Oracle and now IBM have made news by releasing free versions of their databases, other companies have gone one better and released versions of their products as OSS. Qlusters is one example, in that they just released OpenQRM. The CTO's previous company (Symbiot) also made a similar play, releasing OpenSIMS. Could this be the start of a change to where commercial software starts melding more and more into OSS?"
US Government says 2008 IPv6 still on track. DrkShadow writes to tell us that the Government is holding fast to their 2008 IPv6 switch commitment. From the article: "The White House Office of Management and Budget said it would issue a policy memorandum dictating full federal 'IPv6' compliance in an effort to spur its deployment throughout government agencies."
EU Warned Microsoft source code not enough. Joe Barr writes "According to WindowsITPro, the Wall Street Journal has obtained a copy of a confidential memo sent from the EU to Microsoft last month which warned Microsoft that an offer of the source code would not be enough to satisfy the EU's requirements for interoperability. Open source advocates have blasted the offer because it lacks the knowledge required to interoperate with Windows behind its IP licensing, thus making it unusable."
RIM celebrates a victory in Germany. PDG writes "Looks like not everything is going bad for RIM as they have recently won another patent based lawsuit, but this time in Germany. At least they don't have all their legal eggs in one basket."
10th planet a reality. smooth wombat writes "After measuring twice and cutting once, a team of German astrophysicists at the University of Bonn led by Frank Bertoldi have concluded that the object located beyond the orbit of Pluto and named 2003 UB313, is 435 miles larger in diameter than Pluto. As a result, there will be increasing pressure on the IAU (International Astronomical Union) to classify this object as the 10th planet. From the article: '"It is now increasingly hard to justify calling Pluto a planet if UB313 is not also given this status," Bertoldi said.'"
Looking forward to the year 2001. ChristianNerds writes "Atari Magazine is serving up an article written in 1989 concerning what the next century would be like. From the article: 'A typical morning in the year 2001: You wake up, scan the custom newspaper that's spilling from your fax, walk into the living room. There you speak to a giant screen on the wall, part of which instantly becomes a high-quality TV monitor. When you leave for work, you carry a smart wallet, a computer the size of a credit card. When you come home, you slip on special eyeglasses and stroll through a completely artificial world.' They got a great deal right, like the spread of optical disk usage, the internet (ISDN), and parallel processing."
I guess I can quit holding my breath.
...
I remember last century wondering if IPv6 would ever get implemented.
Guess a few billion Chinese with email addresses and IP-enabled devices probably forced the issue, huh? That plus the fact that my fridge, toaster, TV, computers, and microwave oven all have IP addresses
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"Looking forward to the year 2001. ChristianNerds writes "Atari Magazine is serving up an article written in 1989 concerning what the next century would be like. From the article: 'A typical morning in the year 2001: You wake up, scan the custom newspaper that's spilling from your fax, walk into the living room. There you speak to a giant screen on the wall, part of which instantly becomes a high-quality TV monitor. When you leave for work, you carry a smart wallet, a computer the size of a credit card. When you come home, you slip on special eyeglasses and stroll through a completely artificial world.' They got a great deal right, like the spread of optical disk usage, the internet (ISDN), and parallel processing."
:O
I get custom RSS feeds, that pretty much counts as a custom newspaper for me. I've seen voice-controlled switches and HDTVs, wouldn't surprise me that some people have connected the two. American Express makes Blue, a credit card that is quite really a computer. I haven't seen the virtual world like described, but most MMORPGs would count if your monitor is big enough.
Wow. I never thought predictions of the new millennium would be accurate. Turns out they were mostly right.
Do you Gentoo?
The prediction guys aren't quite wrong. they just got some ideas 10 or 20 years ahead.
:P
:) :) but companies' interests kinda screwed that up. However, Google video search is here, too :)
Voice recognition: Check.
E-paper on the wall: Kinda, but the technology's there.
3-D glasses: Well um...
Vast amounts of information: "With instant referencing of thousands of volumes of information, computing will be like working with an army of electronic elves, all ready to fetch in a flash any tidbit you like."
They got it half right... had they thought about the internet, they might have figured about Google and Wikipedia. No, Encarta doesn't count. It sucks
"It'll also allow you to store audio and video". DivX - check
""You'll be able to capture segments of a show you like, cut them out, and put them in a video report for school."
TiVo is here
Hmmm. Pretty interesting.
I figure if you take UB313 as having a density of 6 kg/m^3 (very dense) and diameter 340,000 (largest estimate), and take its minimum distance from the sun (37 AU), it exerts roundabout the same gravitational force on the sun as an object of about 7 x 10^14 kg at a distance of 1 AU from the sun.
So by your definition Phobos and Deimos - at a distance of 1.3 to 1.7 AU from the sun - would both be planets.
In case anyone isn't aware, Phobos and Deimos are really small ...
> Yes, this would work, if you, for some reason, wanted to arbitrarily limit the
> number of Heliocentric planets to nine
The problem here is that the number of known small iceballs out there past Neptune is growing fairly rapidly, and if we classify them all as planets, we'll no longer be able to teach elementary school children the list of planets.
Personally, I think Pluto should be grandfathered in just because it was classified as a planet before its size was known, but apart from Pluto anything with less than about 5% of Earth's mass should be considered a "minor planet" or "planetoid" if it's roughly spherical, a comet if it has a "tail" pointing away from the primary more than about twice its diameter in the other direction (at periapsis), or an asteroid (or meteoroid, or speck of dust if it's really small). This is all assuming that the bulk of its acceleration relative to the rest of the system is due to the gravitational pull of a primary; if a planet has a larger impact on its motion than the primary does, then it's a moon. (That leaves the definition of "primary" to be sorted out later, but for the purposes of the solar system the Sun is obviously the only primary.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Astronomers and their ilk simply need to abandon terms like 'planet', 'moon' and possibly even 'star' and invent new words with precise meanings. It's not uncommon to have to do this in science when the meaning of old words becomes impossibly difficult to deal with.
...until we imagine ourselves ourselves are close by a distant star - when we'll want to call it a 'Sun' again. When we sit on a sunny day on some extrasolar planet, we'll still say "What a nice day it is, the sun is shining"...no matter how much the astronomers complain about it.
Non-scientists have words like 'butterfly' and 'moth' - which have no clear scientific distinction - we also make distinctions where there are none. In common parlance, we orbit a "Sun" - not a "Star". Stars are little dots in the sky - but a sun is a huge nearby thing.
So scientific rigor can only be satisfied by making new words with rigerous definitions - rather than trying to pin down arbitary non-scientific historical usage of existing words.
If they allow new solar-orbiting bodies to be called planets then whatever cutoff they choose will be utterly arbitary. If they define Pluto to not be a planet then a few billion people will have learned the wrong thing in school and a similar number of books will now be *WRONG* for no other reason than we decided to make them wrong. You can't easily change what people believe to be a fact - and you certainly can't re-publish a billion text books.
So: Pluto is a "Planet" because it always was one. Astronomers should not care a damn about whether the 10th 'thing' is a planet or not because the word 'planet' and 'asteroid' carry about as much distinction as 'butterfly' and 'moth' or 'sun' and 'star'.
They just need new words.
We can do this - and it's easier than arguing about definitions of commonplace words that do not have (and never have had) a formal definition.
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