A lot of things come at no cost though. I find it amazing how many people for example will spend a fortune on their graphics card, motherboard, processor, ram, hard drives, etc... but then run it with a cheapo power supply.
Let's say that you're one of those (probably the majority) that leaves their computer on 24/7. Let's say your gaming computer's average power consumption, between idling and heavy usage, is maybe 200W. Let's say the power supply lasts an average 3 years. Let's say that the difference between a cheapo 75% efficient power supply and an excellent 95% efficient supply is $50. Then the better supply saves 40W on average, or 1051 kWh over its lifespan. At an average US electricity price of, what, 12 cents per kWh, that's a savings of $126. You not only help the environment, but you easily save yourself money.
It's not just power supplies that matter - the same logic can be applied to processors, graphics cards, and other hardware as well. Always check the power consumption - not just for the environment, but for your pocketbook as well. Often it saves money to spend more upfront.
IMHO, countries that care about pollution should set up a Pollution-Added Tax (PAT), equivalent to VAT, replacing their current patchwork of pollution regulations. Since VAT is already clearly in compliance with WTO rules (given that it exists), PAT should be as well. Just like how VAT works by taxing products at each stage of adding value to them during manufacture, PAT would tax them by the embodied pollution in their manufacture during that stage (plus any "delayed" pollution released when the product is consumed). And like VAT, PAT goods for export would receive a full tax rebate, and goods for import from non-PAT states would be taxed on entry.
The main point is that states with weaker pollution regulations cannot gain an unfair economic advantage over states with stronger pollution regulations. Thus it encourages even non-member-states to tighten their regulations.
Things like Stuxnet is not at all what the person was talking about. They're talking about hacks to try to embarrass people or steal corporate secrets. Stuxnet was to take down a nuclear program, which is clearly a geopolitical, not industrial, goal.
My personal opinion: countries breaking into each other's governments or trying in general to gather/use classic "spying" data for geopolitical purposes is fair game. State-sponsored industrial espionage is not. That said, even in the first case, one runs the risk of uncontrolled escalation, so it's important for all sides to keep themselves in check and mutually agree to ratchet down the activity from time to time, for everyone's sake.
Also: it probably hasn't gotten past the US that it's in an advantageous state right now. Russia hasn't been more vulnerable in a long time, and now even China's star has taken a pounding in the market. US industry is benefiting from cheap thermal energy prices due to low cost shale gas. And Europe is probably going to be on the US's side in all of this.
I don't have a very clean way - I usually do egrep "^......$"/usr/share/dict/words (with the number of dots matching the length of the word) and then pipe it into a series of other greps - for example for two "r"s I'd do egrep -i "r.*r" while for one d I'd just use grep -i "d". There's probably a better way.
I can't remember who it was... it might have been Halldór Laxnes... who said that a piece of nature isn't really a piece of nature unless it doesn't have a name. That is, the first thing people do once they start interacting with an object or place is to give it a name, and so once something is named it starts to become about the history of people rather than the history of the land itself. And that if you want to establish a real connection with nature, you don't go sit on top of that well-known named peak that people climb... you go to that little nameless stream or that remote nameless cliff or whatnot - places which tell only their own story.
There's a whole lot more that could be done with the stroke of a pen, like passing legislation that will actually improve the lives of Native Americans.
What, you expect him to give them their lands back with an executive order?
Also "nailed", "leadin", "Daniel" and "Aldine". Less common examples would be enalid (marine grass), Delian (Greek league of city states), and alined (rarer spelling of aligned).
... because it's not one of the 8 highest mountains in the world, the USGS has decided to declare it a "dwarf mountain" and says that it doesn't really count as a mountain.;)
More to the point, the James Webb telescope is supposed to be launched in late 2018; this flyby isn't until 2019. With seven times the light collecting area as Hubble, it could be a nice addition to the arsenal for finding bodies along Pluto's projected route (especially now that we know better what that route is going to be:) ) Though it operates in mid-IR to low-frequency visible, while Hubble operates primarily in visible/UV... I'm not sure how that would affect the ability to find solid objects. I know that far-IR is very good for it, but James Webb doesn't go down that far.
It's even worse than that. Compare Neptune's Stern-Levison parameter to Mars's. Neptune has at least two bodies that are each around 2-3% the mass of Mars in its "neighborhood" (quite possibly even larger ones), yet it has 290 times greater ability to "clear its neighborhood" than Mars. The concept that planets like Mars cleared their own neighborhood of bodies this size is not only unsupported by the research, but blatantly silly on the face of it. The IAU is attributing Jupiter's work at clearing the inner solar system to the inner planets in order to force their definition. And this isn't exactly news - pretty much all orbital dynamics simulations for a long time have been showing this.
Mars is more than capable of clearing its neighborhood on its own, as seen by measures like the Stern-Levison parameter and others that have been derived from dynamics and simulation scalings. It isn't even close to being marginal.
Jupiter's Stern-Levison parameter is 1,38 million times larger than Mars's. No, Mars would not have "cleared its neighborhood"; it's well recognized in the literature that the majority of "neighborhood clearing" in our solar system was done by Jupiter and Saturn. There's lots of niggling over the exact details (here's one scenario), but there's no reputable peer-reviewed source involving orbital dynamics simulations arguing that Mars did the majority of work to clear its neighborhood. Heck, Neptune has a Stern-Levison parameter 290 times higher than Mars and it still has at least two bodies with around 1/50th the mass of Mars each in its neighborhood (and possibly even larger ones). If a 290 times greater ability to clear its neighborhood couldn't do it, why do you think Mars stands a chance on its own?
The whole "cleared the neighborhood" concept for planets is built on a bare falsehood: that the majority of them are actually responsible for clearing their own neighborhoods. The science says exactly the opposite: that the gas giants cleared the majority of bodies from our solar system.
Because some people care more about the dynamics of the planets and their orbits than what is on/in the planets. Even in geology on Earth, there are classifications for what makes up a mineral, and classifications for structures and locations they are found in.
Are you seriously trying to claim that, say, stilbite will be classified as a different mineral based on whether it occurs in Iceland or the United States? Minerals are what they are. The individual structures minerals are found in may have names (for example, the "Bakken Shale"), but those are just names. You know, like "Kuiper Belt".
Some geologists don't care where it came from as long as the make up is similar, others very much care if samples come from near the same location, even if they are very different minerals.
What on Earth are you talking about? If you're trying to say "Some scientists want to study the variety of objects in the Kuiper Belt and compare them to each other", then you already have a word for that: KBO.
You can go on and on about how dissimilar you think Jupiter and Earth are, but that doesn't change that there are metrics where they are much more similar than other rocky planets are to Earth.
You realize that in that evaluation, the F-35 being tested was AF-2, a flight science model, right? It had:
* No situational awareness software
* No advanced weapons targeting software
* No stealth coating
It was not designed to be a combat evaluation of the full system, rather just an attempt to stress the system with visual combat maneuvers.
That said, the F-35 is not designed to be a visual dogfighter. It has dogfighting capabilities, but its main design principle is high situational awareness enabling kills from far away - seeing the enemy from long before it itself is seen.
1. Is just a nomenclature problem. The key issue was whether Pluto belongs in the same category as Mercury through Neptune.
First off, the problem category was called "nomenclature". Secondly, you act like mercury has bloody anything at all in common with Jupiter and Saturn. It's far, far more like Pluto. It's not an "edge case" issue, it's a fundamental misgrouping issue.
2. If a planet changes its orbit, one of two things will happen:
It clears its new neighborhood It gets cleared out by a new neighbor or falls into a resonance with it
As was mentioned, this is not correct. Mars-sized planets don't clear their own neighborhoods. Mars did not clear its neighborhood - Jupiter did. Your "two things" are simply not accurate. It's a false supposition that's the entire foundation of this definition.
More to the point, extrasolar planets show how ridiculous this definition is even more. There are extrasolar planets larger than Earth which orbit their star closer to each other at times than the Earth is to the moon. They don't "clear" each other at all. It's just a ridiculous, completely false premise.
3. and 4. In geological terms yes, but I think the IAU was correct in preferring to define planets through orbital characteristics over geological ones.
Why? Why should we define what something is based on where it is rather than what it is? The answer is basically given in the question itself. When you say, "X is a planet", you're making a statement about what it is. That's the meaning of the word is. If you want single words to talk about orbits, we already have terms for that - that's what "asteroid", "KBO", etc are.
And really, you completely avoided these points. Pluto and Earth are far more like each other than either are like Jupiter. So grouping Earth with Jupiter and not Pluto is a complete absurdity. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a meaningful distinction - it has all sorts of consequences for the body. The nobody-can-agree-upon "neighborhood" definition has little to no bearing on what you're going to find there.
5. The neighborhood of a planet cannot be simply changed without significant consequences. If through some freak incident a formerly solitary planet ends up suddenly having a neighbor of significantly higher mass, that planet will not remain a planet for very long. Its "mutability" is then not even restricted to definition games, it will quite be literally destroyed or thrown away into deep space.
These are anything but the only two options. They can change orbits, migrate inward, migrate outward, get locked into new resonances, etc. A planet can be moved into for example a more out-of-plane orbit by an intruder and still receive the same insolation, and thus be exactly the same on the surface, but no longer be a planet. It's an absurdity.
6. An Earth-copy that hasn't cleared its neighborhood yet won't be an Earth-copy due to frequent crust destroying meteorite impacts
That's not true. For one example among many, the Earth copy and the other bodies in its neighborhood could both be in orbital resonance with a larger body.
. Such a child solar system will probably not be described well by our current terminology but these systems are also very rare because that phase of life only lasts for a very short time.
Yet another unsupported statement.
7. There will clearly eventually be edge cases, but Pluto isn't. There is an object with 10000 times its mass within its perihel and apohel. Its orbital period is not independantly "chosen" but defined by Neptune
And if Earth were located where Pluto is now, its orbital period would also not either be indepdently "chosen" but defined by Neptune.
New Horizons has cost about $45 million a year on average during the 15 years it was under development and operation, not $18 billion. And it was not developed by private corporations.
... here's 19 reasons why the IAU's Pluto decision was ridiculous. But first, the definition
The IAU...resolves that planets and other bodies in the Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way: (1) A planet [1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [2], (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
(3) All other objects [3] orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".
[1] The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
[2] An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.
[3] These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.
1. Nomenclature: An "adjective-noun" should always be considered a subset of "noun". A "dwarf planet" should be no less seen as a type of planet than a "dwarf star" is seen as a type of star.
2. Erroneous foundation: Current research suggests that individual planets do not necessarily cleared their own neighborhoods, and their neighborhoods may not always have where they are. Jupiter, and Saturn to a lesser extent, have cleared most neighborhoods.
3. Comparative inconsistency: Earth is far more like Ceres and Pluto than it is like Jupiter, yet these very dissimilar groups - gas giants and terrestrial planets - are lumped together as "planets" while dwarfs are excluded.
4. Poor choice of dividing line: While defining objects inherently requires drawing lines between groups, the chosen line has been poorly selected. Achieving a rough hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful dividing line - it means differentiation, mineralization processes, alteration of primordial materials, and so forth. It's also often associated with internal heat and, increasingly as we're realizing, a common association with subsurface fluids. In short, a body in a category of "not having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body which one would study to learn about the origins of our solar system, while a body in a category of "having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body one would study, for example, to learn more about tectonics, geochemistry, (potentially) biology, etc. By contrast, a dividing line of "clearing its neighborhood" - which doesn't even meet standard #2 - says little about the body itself.
5. Mutability: What an object is declared at can be altered without any of the properties of the object changing simply by its "neighborhood" changing in any of countless ways.
6. Situational inconsistency: An exact copy of Earth (what the vast majority of people would consider the prototype for what a planet should be), identical down to all of the life on its surface, would not be considered a planet if orbiting in the habitable zone of a significantly larger star (harder to clear zone), or a young star (insufficient time to clear), a star without a Jupiter equivalent (no assistance in clearing), or so forth.
7. Ambiguous definition: There is still no consensus on what defines having "cleared the neighborhood" - in particular, what the "neighborhood" is.
8. Lack of terminology: Exoplanets - indeed, including any potential Earthlike planets - are arbitrarily declared to not be planets. This deprives those studying exoplanets of an IAU-acceptable term to refer to them by.
9. Inability to describe exoplanets even if not ruled out: There is no way that even if
I think I'm going to take a cue from the IAU's attitude and go ahead and make my own definition for the IAU:
"The International Astronomical Union is defined as a member body of navel-gazing self-important wankers who use grant money to travel to exotic locales to get drunk and make shit up in the name of science."
"Ice chunk" is so dismissive. First off, it's not going to be 100% ice. Its surface will probably be mostly ices, of which water will most probably be the most common one, but maybe not. The body should also contain some rock. And while it's small compared to Pluto, it's still not "small"; its cross section is nearly the size of Rhode Island.
Pluto proved to be way more interesting than most people were expecting. While most people are setting the bar pretty low for this one ("Ice chunk", for example), while I certainly don't expect it to have the level of interestingness of Pluto, I think a lot of people will be surprised.
The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard requires that the "facts of the case" be proven beyond a reasonable doubt - every one of them individually, with a list of facts to prove being given in the jury instructions and depending on the crime and jurisdiction For example, in a murder case, basic facts can be "The victim is dead" and "The defendant deliberately killed them". Beyond that, the prosecution "bears the burden" of demonstrating these facts as undeniably true. For more about what the legal burden is, there's details here.
The same does not hold true to what are called "affirmative defenses" or "defense theories". For example, if you charge me with assault and say I hit you with a chair, and I say that I was trying to stop you because you were trying to rape me, you don't face a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard and 100% of the burden to prove that you weren't trying to rape me. Depending on the circumstances, there's either a "shared burden" or I would bear the burden of proof on my own. If the defense is to be analyzed on its own, as it's not a "basic fact", but rather a "defense theory", it would not on its own face a "reasonable doubt" standard (generally a "preponderance of the evidence" or "clear and convincing evidence" - although the claim may shift the jury's views toward whether there's reasonable doubt toward the basic facts in other ways.
There are many different types of defense theories, too numerous to go into here. And in most crimes, claims of consent are treated as defense theories - they don't on their own need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (they contribute to doubt relating to the basic facts but are not themselves a specific fact for jury evaluation), and there's either a shared or shifted defense burden. If you say "Hey, I wasn't robbing her, she gave me the money because she wanted to help me out", the burden doesn't fall 100% on me to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt that I didn't - it's your theory, you have to bear part of the burden of proof for it. The case as a whole still needs to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, of course.
It would be nice - and in fact, would only be basic fairness - if rape cases faced the same standard. Unfortunately, in most jurisdictions, it does not work that way. Consent is not treated as a defense theory. Humans are not treated as in a perpetual state of consent for giving away money, for being taken strange places by strangers, or any of the other sorts of cases where "consent" defenses are common.... except that they generally are treated as being in a perpetual state of consent for sex. No matter how weird, twisted, sick the sexual practice, with whatever person they may be, even with a person not matching your sexuality, you're presumed by default to be in consent for it. And the burden falls 100% on the accuser in this one type of case to prove that consent was not given.
Where I live, there's pretty much no sexual shame for a woman to have sex, which eliminates the concept of this argument. Yet rape rates are still very high.
And seriously, I simply cannot comprehend this logic. The (incredibly common) logic used by people like you is based on the following premises:
1) The concept that a woman had sex is shameful 2) The concept of going down to a police station, telling them that you were raped, having strangers probe you, having the media cover your sex life, getting countless threats and personal attacks and people calling you a liar and a slut, etc, all for what everyone knows is a pitifully tiny chance of getting a conviction (wherein even more calls of "liar" and "slut" will be fielded), is totally easy and totally not shameful.
Of course he believes him. Someone alleged rape, and thus she's automatically a liar simply regretting consensual sex, QED. Likewise, in his world, consensual sex is a horrible shameful mark that can only be erased by the totally-no-shame, totally-not-getting-your-name-dragged-through-the-mud, just-another-tuesday process of pressing charges for rape.
Step right up, see the rape culture!
The answer is, they were unable to prove that the sex was not consensual. That's not quite the same as saying that the sex was consensual.
In MRA-land, they're identical.
Do I believe him? I have no reason to believe, nor to disbelieve. I have no way to know either way.
Slashdot Mirror
The old one wasn't Comic-Sans-y enough.
They still need to add bad kerning, however.
A lot of things come at no cost though. I find it amazing how many people for example will spend a fortune on their graphics card, motherboard, processor, ram, hard drives, etc... but then run it with a cheapo power supply.
Let's say that you're one of those (probably the majority) that leaves their computer on 24/7. Let's say your gaming computer's average power consumption, between idling and heavy usage, is maybe 200W. Let's say the power supply lasts an average 3 years. Let's say that the difference between a cheapo 75% efficient power supply and an excellent 95% efficient supply is $50. Then the better supply saves 40W on average, or 1051 kWh over its lifespan. At an average US electricity price of, what, 12 cents per kWh, that's a savings of $126. You not only help the environment, but you easily save yourself money.
It's not just power supplies that matter - the same logic can be applied to processors, graphics cards, and other hardware as well. Always check the power consumption - not just for the environment, but for your pocketbook as well. Often it saves money to spend more upfront.
IMHO, countries that care about pollution should set up a Pollution-Added Tax (PAT), equivalent to VAT, replacing their current patchwork of pollution regulations. Since VAT is already clearly in compliance with WTO rules (given that it exists), PAT should be as well. Just like how VAT works by taxing products at each stage of adding value to them during manufacture, PAT would tax them by the embodied pollution in their manufacture during that stage (plus any "delayed" pollution released when the product is consumed). And like VAT, PAT goods for export would receive a full tax rebate, and goods for import from non-PAT states would be taxed on entry.
The main point is that states with weaker pollution regulations cannot gain an unfair economic advantage over states with stronger pollution regulations. Thus it encourages even non-member-states to tighten their regulations.
Things like Stuxnet is not at all what the person was talking about. They're talking about hacks to try to embarrass people or steal corporate secrets. Stuxnet was to take down a nuclear program, which is clearly a geopolitical, not industrial, goal.
My personal opinion: countries breaking into each other's governments or trying in general to gather/use classic "spying" data for geopolitical purposes is fair game. State-sponsored industrial espionage is not. That said, even in the first case, one runs the risk of uncontrolled escalation, so it's important for all sides to keep themselves in check and mutually agree to ratchet down the activity from time to time, for everyone's sake.
Also: it probably hasn't gotten past the US that it's in an advantageous state right now. Russia hasn't been more vulnerable in a long time, and now even China's star has taken a pounding in the market. US industry is benefiting from cheap thermal energy prices due to low cost shale gas. And Europe is probably going to be on the US's side in all of this.
I don't have a very clean way - I usually do egrep "^......$" /usr/share/dict/words (with the number of dots matching the length of the word) and then pipe it into a series of other greps - for example for two "r"s I'd do egrep -i "r.*r" while for one d I'd just use grep -i "d". There's probably a better way.
I can't remember who it was... it might have been Halldór Laxnes... who said that a piece of nature isn't really a piece of nature unless it doesn't have a name. That is, the first thing people do once they start interacting with an object or place is to give it a name, and so once something is named it starts to become about the history of people rather than the history of the land itself. And that if you want to establish a real connection with nature, you don't go sit on top of that well-known named peak that people climb... you go to that little nameless stream or that remote nameless cliff or whatnot - places which tell only their own story.
What, you expect him to give them their lands back with an executive order?
Who said he was?
He's making Alaskans happy with the stroke of a pen. What's the problem with that?
Also "nailed", "leadin", "Daniel" and "Aldine". Less common examples would be enalid (marine grass), Delian (Greek league of city states), and alined (rarer spelling of aligned).
Thank you, grep and /usr/share/dict/words!
... because it's not one of the 8 highest mountains in the world, the USGS has decided to declare it a "dwarf mountain" and says that it doesn't really count as a mountain. ;)
More to the point, the James Webb telescope is supposed to be launched in late 2018; this flyby isn't until 2019. With seven times the light collecting area as Hubble, it could be a nice addition to the arsenal for finding bodies along Pluto's projected route (especially now that we know better what that route is going to be :) ) Though it operates in mid-IR to low-frequency visible, while Hubble operates primarily in visible/UV... I'm not sure how that would affect the ability to find solid objects. I know that far-IR is very good for it, but James Webb doesn't go down that far.
It's even worse than that. Compare Neptune's Stern-Levison parameter to Mars's. Neptune has at least two bodies that are each around 2-3% the mass of Mars in its "neighborhood" (quite possibly even larger ones), yet it has 290 times greater ability to "clear its neighborhood" than Mars. The concept that planets like Mars cleared their own neighborhood of bodies this size is not only unsupported by the research, but blatantly silly on the face of it. The IAU is attributing Jupiter's work at clearing the inner solar system to the inner planets in order to force their definition. And this isn't exactly news - pretty much all orbital dynamics simulations for a long time have been showing this.
Jupiter's Stern-Levison parameter is 1,38 million times larger than Mars's. No, Mars would not have "cleared its neighborhood"; it's well recognized in the literature that the majority of "neighborhood clearing" in our solar system was done by Jupiter and Saturn. There's lots of niggling over the exact details (here's one scenario), but there's no reputable peer-reviewed source involving orbital dynamics simulations arguing that Mars did the majority of work to clear its neighborhood. Heck, Neptune has a Stern-Levison parameter 290 times higher than Mars and it still has at least two bodies with around 1/50th the mass of Mars each in its neighborhood (and possibly even larger ones). If a 290 times greater ability to clear its neighborhood couldn't do it, why do you think Mars stands a chance on its own?
The whole "cleared the neighborhood" concept for planets is built on a bare falsehood: that the majority of them are actually responsible for clearing their own neighborhoods. The science says exactly the opposite: that the gas giants cleared the majority of bodies from our solar system.
Are you seriously trying to claim that, say, stilbite will be classified as a different mineral based on whether it occurs in Iceland or the United States? Minerals are what they are. The individual structures minerals are found in may have names (for example, the "Bakken Shale"), but those are just names. You know, like "Kuiper Belt".
What on Earth are you talking about? If you're trying to say "Some scientists want to study the variety of objects in the Kuiper Belt and compare them to each other", then you already have a word for that: KBO.
You can't be serious.
You realize that in that evaluation, the F-35 being tested was AF-2, a flight science model, right? It had:
* No situational awareness software
* No advanced weapons targeting software
* No stealth coating
It was not designed to be a combat evaluation of the full system, rather just an attempt to stress the system with visual combat maneuvers.
That said, the F-35 is not designed to be a visual dogfighter. It has dogfighting capabilities, but its main design principle is high situational awareness enabling kills from far away - seeing the enemy from long before it itself is seen.
Wrong - all diplomatic passports must be approved by the hosting country before they're granted - the request can be refused at will.
First off, the problem category was called "nomenclature". Secondly, you act like mercury has bloody anything at all in common with Jupiter and Saturn. It's far, far more like Pluto. It's not an "edge case" issue, it's a fundamental misgrouping issue.
As was mentioned, this is not correct. Mars-sized planets don't clear their own neighborhoods. Mars did not clear its neighborhood - Jupiter did. Your "two things" are simply not accurate. It's a false supposition that's the entire foundation of this definition.
More to the point, extrasolar planets show how ridiculous this definition is even more. There are extrasolar planets larger than Earth which orbit their star closer to each other at times than the Earth is to the moon. They don't "clear" each other at all. It's just a ridiculous, completely false premise.
Why? Why should we define what something is based on where it is rather than what it is? The answer is basically given in the question itself. When you say, "X is a planet", you're making a statement about what it is. That's the meaning of the word is. If you want single words to talk about orbits, we already have terms for that - that's what "asteroid", "KBO", etc are.
And really, you completely avoided these points. Pluto and Earth are far more like each other than either are like Jupiter. So grouping Earth with Jupiter and not Pluto is a complete absurdity. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a meaningful distinction - it has all sorts of consequences for the body. The nobody-can-agree-upon "neighborhood" definition has little to no bearing on what you're going to find there.
These are anything but the only two options. They can change orbits, migrate inward, migrate outward, get locked into new resonances, etc. A planet can be moved into for example a more out-of-plane orbit by an intruder and still receive the same insolation, and thus be exactly the same on the surface, but no longer be a planet. It's an absurdity.
That's not true. For one example among many, the Earth copy and the other bodies in its neighborhood could both be in orbital resonance with a larger body.
Yet another unsupported statement.
And if Earth were located where Pluto is now, its orbital period would also not either be indepdently "chosen" but defined by Neptune.
Should I even bother mentioni
New Horizons has cost about $45 million a year on average during the 15 years it was under development and operation, not $18 billion. And it was not developed by private corporations.
... here's 19 reasons why the IAU's Pluto decision was ridiculous. But first, the definition
1. Nomenclature: An "adjective-noun" should always be considered a subset of "noun". A "dwarf planet" should be no less seen as a type of planet than a "dwarf star" is seen as a type of star.
2. Erroneous foundation: Current research suggests that individual planets do not necessarily cleared their own neighborhoods, and their neighborhoods may not always have where they are. Jupiter, and Saturn to a lesser extent, have cleared most neighborhoods.
3. Comparative inconsistency: Earth is far more like Ceres and Pluto than it is like Jupiter, yet these very dissimilar groups - gas giants and terrestrial planets - are lumped together as "planets" while dwarfs are excluded.
4. Poor choice of dividing line: While defining objects inherently requires drawing lines between groups, the chosen line has been poorly selected. Achieving a rough hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful dividing line - it means differentiation, mineralization processes, alteration of primordial materials, and so forth. It's also often associated with internal heat and, increasingly as we're realizing, a common association with subsurface fluids. In short, a body in a category of "not having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body which one would study to learn about the origins of our solar system, while a body in a category of "having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body one would study, for example, to learn more about tectonics, geochemistry, (potentially) biology, etc. By contrast, a dividing line of "clearing its neighborhood" - which doesn't even meet standard #2 - says little about the body itself.
5. Mutability: What an object is declared at can be altered without any of the properties of the object changing simply by its "neighborhood" changing in any of countless ways.
6. Situational inconsistency: An exact copy of Earth (what the vast majority of people would consider the prototype for what a planet should be), identical down to all of the life on its surface, would not be considered a planet if orbiting in the habitable zone of a significantly larger star (harder to clear zone), or a young star (insufficient time to clear), a star without a Jupiter equivalent (no assistance in clearing), or so forth.
7. Ambiguous definition: There is still no consensus on what defines having "cleared the neighborhood" - in particular, what the "neighborhood" is.
8. Lack of terminology: Exoplanets - indeed, including any potential Earthlike planets - are arbitrarily declared to not be planets. This deprives those studying exoplanets of an IAU-acceptable term to refer to them by.
9. Inability to describe exoplanets even if not ruled out: There is no way that even if
Such a program already exists. And guess what - shock of all shocks, the IAU is throwing a hissy fit about it. They're basically at war with NH's director Alan Stern and are planning to refuse a large portion of the NH team's feature names for Pluto.
I think I'm going to take a cue from the IAU's attitude and go ahead and make my own definition for the IAU:
"The International Astronomical Union is defined as a member body of navel-gazing self-important wankers who use grant money to travel to exotic locales to get drunk and make shit up in the name of science."
"Ice chunk" is so dismissive. First off, it's not going to be 100% ice. Its surface will probably be mostly ices, of which water will most probably be the most common one, but maybe not. The body should also contain some rock. And while it's small compared to Pluto, it's still not "small"; its cross section is nearly the size of Rhode Island.
Pluto proved to be way more interesting than most people were expecting. While most people are setting the bar pretty low for this one ("Ice chunk", for example), while I certainly don't expect it to have the level of interestingness of Pluto, I think a lot of people will be surprised.
To be more technical:
The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard requires that the "facts of the case" be proven beyond a reasonable doubt - every one of them individually, with a list of facts to prove being given in the jury instructions and depending on the crime and jurisdiction For example, in a murder case, basic facts can be "The victim is dead" and "The defendant deliberately killed them". Beyond that, the prosecution "bears the burden" of demonstrating these facts as undeniably true. For more about what the legal burden is, there's details here.
The same does not hold true to what are called "affirmative defenses" or "defense theories". For example, if you charge me with assault and say I hit you with a chair, and I say that I was trying to stop you because you were trying to rape me, you don't face a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard and 100% of the burden to prove that you weren't trying to rape me. Depending on the circumstances, there's either a "shared burden" or I would bear the burden of proof on my own. If the defense is to be analyzed on its own, as it's not a "basic fact", but rather a "defense theory", it would not on its own face a "reasonable doubt" standard (generally a "preponderance of the evidence" or "clear and convincing evidence" - although the claim may shift the jury's views toward whether there's reasonable doubt toward the basic facts in other ways.
There are many different types of defense theories, too numerous to go into here. And in most crimes, claims of consent are treated as defense theories - they don't on their own need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (they contribute to doubt relating to the basic facts but are not themselves a specific fact for jury evaluation), and there's either a shared or shifted defense burden. If you say "Hey, I wasn't robbing her, she gave me the money because she wanted to help me out", the burden doesn't fall 100% on me to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt that I didn't - it's your theory, you have to bear part of the burden of proof for it. The case as a whole still needs to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, of course.
It would be nice - and in fact, would only be basic fairness - if rape cases faced the same standard. Unfortunately, in most jurisdictions, it does not work that way. Consent is not treated as a defense theory. Humans are not treated as in a perpetual state of consent for giving away money, for being taken strange places by strangers, or any of the other sorts of cases where "consent" defenses are common.... except that they generally are treated as being in a perpetual state of consent for sex. No matter how weird, twisted, sick the sexual practice, with whatever person they may be, even with a person not matching your sexuality, you're presumed by default to be in consent for it. And the burden falls 100% on the accuser in this one type of case to prove that consent was not given.
And this is wrong.
Which is, of course, not even remotely true.
Where I live, there's pretty much no sexual shame for a woman to have sex, which eliminates the concept of this argument. Yet rape rates are still very high.
And seriously, I simply cannot comprehend this logic. The (incredibly common) logic used by people like you is based on the following premises:
1) The concept that a woman had sex is shameful
2) The concept of going down to a police station, telling them that you were raped, having strangers probe you, having the media cover your sex life, getting countless threats and personal attacks and people calling you a liar and a slut, etc, all for what everyone knows is a pitifully tiny chance of getting a conviction (wherein even more calls of "liar" and "slut" will be fielded), is totally easy and totally not shameful.
I mean, WTF people?
Of course he believes him. Someone alleged rape, and thus she's automatically a liar simply regretting consensual sex, QED. Likewise, in his world, consensual sex is a horrible shameful mark that can only be erased by the totally-no-shame, totally-not-getting-your-name-dragged-through-the-mud, just-another-tuesday process of pressing charges for rape.
Step right up, see the rape culture!
The answer is, they were unable to prove that the sex was not consensual. That's not quite the same as saying that the sex was consensual.
In MRA-land, they're identical.
Do I believe him? I have no reason to believe, nor to disbelieve. I have no way to know either way.
Indeed.