Actually, I think Venus has a thicker atmosphere than Titan, and the reason Titan can hold on to its atmosphere is because it's really, really cold, and because of the gas torus effect.
Titan's air isn't just held in by Titan's gravity, it's also held by Saturn's. Titan orbits through a torus of gas surrounding Saturn, so a lot of the gas molecules that drift away from Titan into space wind up circling Saturn and coming right back to Titan.
This won't work on Mars, unless... say, we move it into orbit around Jupiter or something. Io also has a gas torus, sulfer oxides, mainly.
> Solar panels, ocean thermal transfer, hydroelectric, wind and other alternative sources feeding giant flywheels could lower our dependence upon fossil fuels.
So could nuclear. Japan's done well, most of the time, with that approach. The fissionables are there anyway, we're just turning the heat into electricity instead of volcanoes. We have the perfect place to put the radioactive waste - in a subduction fault, where it'll get recycled back into the mix.
I'd understand if people were against certain applications of nuclear power, but I don't understand why some people are against the entire idea.
> And isn't the much thicker atmosphere and different chemical composition the reason it became a greenhouse, not the closeness to the sun?
I would think the closeness to the sun would certainly be a factor. Whether it's the main cause or not, I have no idea - but my personal theory is that Venus recently turned itself inside out.
When the surface of Venus was mapped, they found that the density of craters was roughly equal everywhere - a totally random distribution, meaning Venus apparantly does not have plate tectonics, since all parts of the surface must have cooled at about the same time.
This gives us two possibilities - A, Venus's surface is very, very old, and all the heat generated in the core is released through simple volcanoes, or B, Venus's surface is rather young, and every once in a while the crust melts away from the trapped heat, in a frenzy of outgassing. This explains the high air pressure and temperature, as well.
> I don't see the sun making the air so much thicker... in fact, I'd almost expect the atmosphere to be far less dense (due to the planet's closeness during the T Tauri phase.)
I agree, the sun surely would have stripped away Venus's atmosphere during that period - but if Venus occasionally turns itself inside out, and one of those times was recently, then Venus could still be shedding heat and air from that outburst.
My personal theory, but then I still think Venus has life.:) Don't take anything I say too serious...
Because you are rich you know what you are talking about? Explain, please.
> Iknow that truth hurts.
How many times have I heard that? That's getting *really* old.
Truth hurts when we're lying to ourselves. Are we lying to ourselves? Insults hurt. Two-by-fours hurt. Just because something hurts doesn't mean it's true.
> So it is a natural right to listen to others peoples creations?
If it's in public, yes. If it's displayed in the public square, shouted out over a megaphone, or transmitted on the radio, the publishers lose all right and ability to control who hears and sees it.
Otoh, if it's in private, no I have no such right to see or hear it. If it's in private, it's their choice. If it's in public, it's my choice.
> Gee, that's funny I always considered it a privelege. Is television a natural right since the airwaves are free?
If they put it on the airwaves, it's free. Personally, I consider most television a punishment,:) not a privilege, but that's beside the point. They are creating the show and beaming it all over creation. I don't have a right to any show they create, but I have the right to any radio waves I happen to find in my house.
That includes encrypted tv transmitted from satillites, analog (at least) cellphone conversations, or whatever else is in radio form and is beamed into my house.
The internet is iffy - I no longer decide, now it's my isp that decides what goes on. If I don't like it, I can find another isp.
> many people on the net (Dare I say..Netizens `;^) seem to think that the advent of the internet is the advent of getting everything in the world for nothing. Sorry but I disagree.
Not everything. Merely those things that can be copied for free and you can find someone willing to copy it for you for free. Kinda like mixing a tape for someone.
Personally, I disagree with Lars - scale doesn't matter. If it's wrong, it's wrong no matter how big or small it is. Imho, if bootlegging mp3's is wrong, so is bootlegging tapes. I don't know if it's wrong or not, but right now I tend to think there's nothing wrong with it.
There is one argument against napster that really struck me, though. I heard someone say that napster only hurts the smaller artists, not the power-greedy ones. If that's true, then the only people Napsterites are hurting are the ones they claim to want to help.
Of course, anyone who actually buys the cds of the mp3s he likes is not part of that problem.
> To do so, we need to find those running for US HoR or US Senate that is anti-big government and pro-individualism and give them our "collective" support. Yes, I'm afraid I'm talking about forming a "special interest group" to combat Big Brother/Bill.
I thought that was what the libertarians were after? I understand, right now it seems likebig business is a bigger threat than big goverment, but these business are using legal threats and lawyers to do their dirty work for them. These businesses are using bad laws. Repeal the bad laws, keep the good ones, rip out big business's Fangs of Venom(tm, patent pending) and at the same time, reduce the scope of federal power. I am talking about the US here, no offense to people who don't live in the same country I do.
> It may simply be the quantum version of the trick where you take three pennies, put your finger on the one in the middle, put the other one on the "far" side touching it, and then throw the other penny at the one on your finger. Your finger doesn't move, but the penny on the other side "jumps" away.
That's a good point, but it doesn't apply here. I heard one example not long ago where you have a long, thin tube full of 100 marbles in a row. You push one marble into the tube every second, and one marble falls out of the end every second. The individual marbles that you're pushing in take 100 seconds to get all the way through, but the *information* saying that you just pushed a marble through, that comes out nearly instantly.
Kinda like the difference between lag and bandwidth. Or like the difference between the speed of electrons through wire (bout the same as a fast car), and the speed of the electric signal through wire(.1 c or so?)
The information, the shock, the ripple, the irregularities carried by the wave is what is limited by the speed of light, not the carrier or the medium. It may be that they sent the carrier wave through FTL, but any information came through at only the speed of light.
I forgot what my point was about three paragraphs ago, so I'll stop talking now.:)
I completely agree - copyright is a legal measure to give a certain amount of control to authors, artists, creators, in order to encourage more creating.
However, I have one question. It's fairly obvious, at least to me and you, why copyright is not a real, natural, God-given right. My question is, how do we explain why we believe that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are natural rights?
Robert A Heinlein made a good case in Starship Troopers (the book) that nobody has any rights. What "right to life" does a drowning man in the ocean have? I respectfully disagree with RAH, but I'm not sure why.
I started with msdos batch, assembler, and ms quickbasic. I'm still trying to recover.;) Seriously, though - writing assembler and machine code on my 386 running dos 5.0 was a good experience.
Yeah, on second thought, I think you're right. It's a shame. O'Reilly is an example - they make money documenting other people's programs that they wrote for free. O'Reilly makes great books, and I got no problem with them, but it would be nice if they supported (with money, or maybe stock) the authors of the programs that their books document.
"As I said, I think this is unfortunate. It would be great if in all circumstances it would be as easy to make money of open sourced sw than of closed source sw and every program would become open sourced."
Yeah, that's the thing. Closed sw makes more money than open sw. I have no clue how to fix it. Write books for O'Reilly, articles for Linux Journal, sell cds of big things people might not want to download... it's not an easy problem.
Good point. Yeah, copyright is useful. It's not a natural right, and intellectual property is an oxymoron, but copyright can be an incredibly useful incentive, and a great benefit to creators. If we limited copyright back to what it used to be, I'd be happy.
I'm I the only one who keeps forgetting that the ARM is a computer chip? I mean, arm is a body part, and Arm is innocous enough, but ARM?
Buford Early, Gil Hamilton, Lucas Garner... I'm pretty sure Larry Niven was writing about the ARM before it became the name of a chip. Still a cool name to have.:)
"2) Don't put stuff up in violation of copyright. It does not belong to you."
Only information, words, speech, etc can be copyrighted, and they, by definition, do not belong to anyone. Copyright-as-property is an illusion, and a lie. Copyright-as-incentive is a decision the Founding Fathers made long ago, and it seems to work within limits.
"Seriously, I think half of my flames come from people just annoyed at my choice of email address."
Oh, I can understand that - someone looking at your email address might be insulted, might think you're being arrogent. Now that I've read what you just wrote, it makes a lot more sense.
I don't mind, in fact, I think I agree with you, most of the time.:)
"3) Not all Open Source software is of a high quality. (duh! 90% of the stuff on Freshmeat isn't at 1.0 yet!)"
I'd just like to mention that, imho, 90% of the commercial, proprietary software out there shouldn't be at 1.0 yet.:)
Who was that guy who said... "90% of science fiction is junk. But then again, 90% of everything is junk." Yeah, I read in Analog, iirc, he actually said junk.
I totally agree, but I'd like to add one thing. Another way to make money off free software.
Physical objects are much easier to sell than virtual, if virtual objects can be sold at all. Suppose a company writes software. They could put their old versions up on ftp for download, and sell their newer versions. They could make everything virtual free, and just sell physical objects that go with it - floppies or cds with the program & source on them, user manuals (physical books still can do things datafiles cannot, and it's not practical to print out everything I'm interested in.
So, release a program for free, then sell user manuals for it. Could work, I think...
"E.g. a lot of companies interchange information in Winword's.doc format. If I don't have compatible software I won't be able to communicate effectively with these companies."
Yes, and the Ford car analogy can apply to that, too. You're an employee. One way of looking at that is you're in competition with other potential employees, competing for jobs, money, employers. To compete effectively, you need a car.
Suppose Ford gave away free parking spaces, special in some way so they worked better. Patented parking spaces. These parking spaces work only with Ford cars, and no one can make compatible cars that compete, because it's patented. In that case, Ford would be able to pressure you to buy one of their cars.
In reality, it's word processing, not cars. And it's not patented parking spaces, it's document formats changing just enough with each version to break compatibility. Microsoft can't force me to get Word, but it can strongly pressure me, because they have a monopoly.
"Everyone here has been saying that "free speech" software has only to do with freedom, not money. This is not true."
Why might I buy Red Hat Linux(for example), then? I don't need the support, and everything on it is downloadable. I don't need the physical manuals when there are manuals online.
When I examine, or modify, or talk about Red Hat Linux, I'm not opening myself up to a lawsuit. When I do anything with a Microsoft product, I am. I can get sued for reverse-engineering their software, or for talking about their bugs.
In reality, the reason I don't give money to Microsoft is they are an unethical company. Red Hat is ethical. It's not about freedom with me, though freedom is the second most important thing. It's about ethics. I'm willing to give my money to Red Hat, but not to Microsoft.
"Yes, the GPL supposedly permits you to sell software, but it doesn't really. Everything you sell can be redistributed by the purchaser."
The GPL permits you to sell software. It's just that it lets everyone else sell software, too, so if you want to sell software, you're going to have to do something better than most of your competition, besdies writing code. I think that's a good thing, personally, but that's just me.
"it's entirely possible and likely that you sell one copy of your software and then the buyer puts it on an FTP server and you never sell another copy."
Yes, that's true. You have competition. That's capitalism. Anyone who can't stand competition, anyone who needs a monopoly, shouldn't stay in business.
There is the argument that a creator should be compensated for their work, and I agree with that. Just, not if it takes creating a monopoly. Monopolies mean less competition, higher prices, lower quality, less choices. Microsoft can teach us that.
The question is, then, how can we compensate an artist for their work? The Street Preformer Protocol I've heard Bruce Perens talking about? Sounds good to me, but I'm not an artist, so I wouldn't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Carbon monoxide can also be used as rocket fuel. Hydrogen is hard to come by at Mars, so we wouldn't want to waste any by burning it in a rocket.
Any carbon monoxide that got created on Mars wouldn't be vented into the air, it would be stored, it's very valuble.
Actually, I think Venus has a thicker atmosphere than Titan, and the reason Titan can hold on to its atmosphere is because it's really, really cold, and because of the gas torus effect.
Titan's air isn't just held in by Titan's gravity, it's also held by Saturn's. Titan orbits through a torus of gas surrounding Saturn, so a lot of the gas molecules that drift away from Titan into space wind up circling Saturn and coming right back to Titan.
This won't work on Mars, unless... say, we move it into orbit around Jupiter or something. Io also has a gas torus, sulfer oxides, mainly.
> Solar panels, ocean thermal transfer, hydroelectric, wind and other alternative sources feeding giant flywheels could lower our dependence upon fossil fuels.
So could nuclear. Japan's done well, most of the time, with that approach. The fissionables are there anyway, we're just turning the heat into electricity instead of volcanoes. We have the perfect place to put the radioactive waste - in a subduction fault, where it'll get recycled back into the mix.
I'd understand if people were against certain applications of nuclear power, but I don't understand why some people are against the entire idea.
> And isn't the much thicker atmosphere and different chemical composition the reason it became a greenhouse, not the closeness to the sun?
:) Don't take anything I say too serious...
I would think the closeness to the sun would certainly be a factor. Whether it's the main cause or not, I have no idea - but my personal theory is that Venus recently turned itself inside out.
When the surface of Venus was mapped, they found that the density of craters was roughly equal everywhere - a totally random distribution, meaning Venus apparantly does not have plate tectonics, since all parts of the surface must have cooled at about the same time.
This gives us two possibilities - A, Venus's surface is very, very old, and all the heat generated in the core is released through simple volcanoes, or B, Venus's surface is rather young, and every once in a while the crust melts away from the trapped heat, in a frenzy of outgassing. This explains the high air pressure and temperature, as well.
> I don't see the sun making the air so much thicker... in fact, I'd almost expect the atmosphere to be far less dense (due to the planet's closeness during the T Tauri phase.)
I agree, the sun surely would have stripped away Venus's atmosphere during that period - but if Venus occasionally turns itself inside out, and one of those times was recently, then Venus could still be shedding heat and air from that outburst.
My personal theory, but then I still think Venus has life.
Because you are rich you know what you are talking about? Explain, please.
> Iknow that truth hurts.
How many times have I heard that? That's getting *really* old.
Truth hurts when we're lying to ourselves. Are we lying to ourselves? Insults hurt. Two-by-fours hurt. Just because something hurts doesn't mean it's true.
> ...with theft (making copies of musical recordings without the permission of the artist).
No, copying mp3s of copyrighted songs is not theft. It's not piracy, either. It's copyright infringement.
> The post I was responding too said they had the "natural right" to listen to any music I created whether I said they could or not.
If you preform your music in public, or send it out on the radio, I have the natural right to hear it, yes. Is that what you're talking about?
> So it is a natural right to listen to others peoples creations?
:) not a privilege, but that's beside the point. They are creating the show and beaming it all over creation. I don't have a right to any show they create, but I have the right to any radio waves I happen to find in my house.
If it's in public, yes. If it's displayed in the public square, shouted out over a megaphone, or transmitted on the radio, the publishers lose all right and ability to control who hears and sees it.
Otoh, if it's in private, no I have no such right to see or hear it. If it's in private, it's their choice. If it's in public, it's my choice.
> Gee, that's funny I always considered it a privelege. Is television a natural right since the airwaves are free?
If they put it on the airwaves, it's free. Personally, I consider most television a punishment,
That includes encrypted tv transmitted from satillites, analog (at least) cellphone conversations, or whatever else is in radio form and is beamed into my house.
The internet is iffy - I no longer decide, now it's my isp that decides what goes on. If I don't like it, I can find another isp.
> many people on the net (Dare I say..Netizens `;^) seem to think that the advent of the internet is the advent of getting everything in the world for nothing. Sorry but I disagree.
Not everything. Merely those things that can be copied for free and you can find someone willing to copy it for you for free. Kinda like mixing a tape for someone.
Personally, I disagree with Lars - scale doesn't matter. If it's wrong, it's wrong no matter how big or small it is. Imho, if bootlegging mp3's is wrong, so is bootlegging tapes. I don't know if it's wrong or not, but right now I tend to think there's nothing wrong with it.
There is one argument against napster that really struck me, though. I heard someone say that napster only hurts the smaller artists, not the power-greedy ones. If that's true, then the only people Napsterites are hurting are the ones they claim to want to help.
Of course, anyone who actually buys the cds of the mp3s he likes is not part of that problem.
> To do so, we need to find those running for US HoR or US Senate that is anti-big government and pro-individualism and give them our "collective" support. Yes, I'm afraid I'm talking about forming a "special interest group" to combat Big Brother/Bill.
I thought that was what the libertarians were after? I understand, right now it seems likebig business is a bigger threat than big goverment, but these business are using legal threats and lawyers to do their dirty work for them. These businesses are using bad laws. Repeal the bad laws, keep the good ones, rip out big business's Fangs of Venom(tm, patent pending) and at the same time, reduce the scope of federal power. I am talking about the US here, no offense to people who don't live in the same country I do.
> It may simply be the quantum version of the trick where you take three pennies, put your finger on the one in the middle, put the other one on the "far" side touching it, and then throw the other penny at the one on your finger. Your finger doesn't move, but the penny on the other side "jumps" away.
:)
That's a good point, but it doesn't apply here. I heard one example not long ago where you have a long, thin tube full of 100 marbles in a row. You push one marble into the tube every second, and one marble falls out of the end every second. The individual marbles that you're pushing in take 100 seconds to get all the way through, but the *information* saying that you just pushed a marble through, that comes out nearly instantly.
Kinda like the difference between lag and bandwidth. Or like the difference between the speed of electrons through wire (bout the same as a fast car), and the speed of the electric signal through wire(.1 c or so?)
The information, the shock, the ripple, the irregularities carried by the wave is what is limited by the speed of light, not the carrier or the medium. It may be that they sent the carrier wave through FTL, but any information came through at only the speed of light.
I forgot what my point was about three paragraphs ago, so I'll stop talking now.
I completely agree - copyright is a legal measure to give a certain amount of control to authors, artists, creators, in order to encourage more creating.
However, I have one question. It's fairly obvious, at least to me and you, why copyright is not a real, natural, God-given right. My question is, how do we explain why we believe that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are natural rights?
Robert A Heinlein made a good case in Starship Troopers (the book) that nobody has any rights. What "right to life" does a drowning man in the ocean have? I respectfully disagree with RAH, but I'm not sure why.
I started with msdos batch, assembler, and ms quickbasic. I'm still trying to recover. ;) Seriously, though - writing assembler and machine code on my 386 running dos 5.0 was a good experience.
> Face it. GPL is not about free speech...
What is GPL about? Not free beer. I'd pay money for good, Free, libre GPL software.
I can't tell if that's flamebait or making fun of flamebait, but LOL
> you freak
:)
Yeah, on second thought, I think you're right. It's a shame. O'Reilly is an example - they make money documenting other people's programs that they wrote for free. O'Reilly makes great books, and I got no problem with them, but it would be nice if they supported (with money, or maybe stock) the authors of the programs that their books document.
"As I said, I think this is unfortunate. It would be great if in all circumstances it would be as easy to make money of open sourced sw than of closed source sw and every program would become open sourced."
Yeah, that's the thing. Closed sw makes more money than open sw. I have no clue how to fix it. Write books for O'Reilly, articles for Linux Journal, sell cds of big things people might not want to download... it's not an easy problem.
Good point. Yeah, copyright is useful. It's not a natural right, and intellectual property is an oxymoron, but copyright can be an incredibly useful incentive, and a great benefit to creators. If we limited copyright back to what it used to be, I'd be happy.
I'm I the only one who keeps forgetting that the ARM is a computer chip? I mean, arm is a body part, and Arm is innocous enough, but ARM?
:)
Buford Early, Gil Hamilton, Lucas Garner... I'm pretty sure Larry Niven was writing about the ARM before it became the name of a chip. Still a cool name to have.
"2) Don't put stuff up in violation of copyright. It does not belong to you."
Only information, words, speech, etc can be copyrighted, and they, by definition, do not belong to anyone. Copyright-as-property is an illusion, and a lie. Copyright-as-incentive is a decision the Founding Fathers made long ago, and it seems to work within limits.
"Seriously, I think half of my flames come from people just annoyed at my choice of email address."
:)
Oh, I can understand that - someone looking at your email address might be insulted, might think you're being arrogent. Now that I've read what you just wrote, it makes a lot more sense.
I don't mind, in fact, I think I agree with you, most of the time.
"3) Not all Open Source software is of a high quality. (duh! 90% of the stuff on Freshmeat isn't at 1.0 yet!)"
:)
I'd just like to mention that, imho, 90% of the commercial, proprietary software out there shouldn't be at 1.0 yet.
Who was that guy who said... "90% of science fiction is junk. But then again, 90% of everything is junk." Yeah, I read in Analog, iirc, he actually said junk.
I totally agree, but I'd like to add one thing. Another way to make money off free software.
Physical objects are much easier to sell than virtual, if virtual objects can be sold at all. Suppose a company writes software. They could put their old versions up on ftp for download, and sell their newer versions. They could make everything virtual free, and just sell physical objects that go with it - floppies or cds with the program & source on them, user manuals (physical books still can do things datafiles cannot, and it's not practical to print out everything I'm interested in.
So, release a program for free, then sell user manuals for it. Could work, I think...
"E.g. a lot of companies interchange information in Winword's .doc format. If I don't have compatible software I won't be able to communicate effectively with these companies."
Yes, and the Ford car analogy can apply to that, too. You're an employee. One way of looking at that is you're in competition with other potential employees, competing for jobs, money, employers. To compete effectively, you need a car.
Suppose Ford gave away free parking spaces, special in some way so they worked better. Patented parking spaces. These parking spaces work only with Ford cars, and no one can make compatible cars that compete, because it's patented. In that case, Ford would be able to pressure you to buy one of their cars.
In reality, it's word processing, not cars. And it's not patented parking spaces, it's document formats changing just enough with each version to break compatibility. Microsoft can't force me to get Word, but it can strongly pressure me, because they have a monopoly.
"Everyone here has been saying that "free speech" software has only to do with freedom, not money. This is not true."
Why might I buy Red Hat Linux(for example), then? I don't need the support, and everything on it is downloadable. I don't need the physical manuals when there are manuals online.
When I examine, or modify, or talk about Red Hat Linux, I'm not opening myself up to a lawsuit. When I do anything with a Microsoft product, I am. I can get sued for reverse-engineering their software, or for talking about their bugs.
In reality, the reason I don't give money to Microsoft is they are an unethical company. Red Hat is ethical. It's not about freedom with me, though freedom is the second most important thing. It's about ethics. I'm willing to give my money to Red Hat, but not to Microsoft.
"Yes, the GPL supposedly permits you to sell software, but it doesn't really. Everything you sell can be redistributed by the purchaser."
The GPL permits you to sell software. It's just that it lets everyone else sell software, too, so if you want to sell software, you're going to have to do something better than most of your competition, besdies writing code. I think that's a good thing, personally, but that's just me.
"it's entirely possible and likely that you sell one copy of your software and then the buyer puts it on an FTP server and you never sell another copy."
Yes, that's true. You have competition. That's capitalism. Anyone who can't stand competition, anyone who needs a monopoly, shouldn't stay in business.
There is the argument that a creator should be compensated for their work, and I agree with that. Just, not if it takes creating a monopoly. Monopolies mean less competition, higher prices, lower quality, less choices. Microsoft can teach us that.
The question is, then, how can we compensate an artist for their work? The Street Preformer Protocol I've heard Bruce Perens talking about? Sounds good to me, but I'm not an artist, so I wouldn't know.
I knew there were good lawyers out there, nice to see one every one in awhile.
:)
And I thought lawyers had no sense of humor, too.