This is actually a pet project of a group calling itself The Global Railway, which believes rail is a sustainable transportation technology that will assist development while keeping hydrocarbon emissions and depletion of non-renewable energy resources low. The fellow Razbegin has been pumping for the Bering Project for some time. This is getting some press not only because of the push forward on the Sakhalin Island fixed link, which the Russians believe to be a precursor to a rail link with Japan, but also because the former railways minister Aksyoneyev has become an influential big-shot in Putin's government (allegedly as a tool of Boris Berezovsky). ----
See, allegedly, one of the reasons they changed the title of Star Wars Episode VI to Return of the Jedi was that it was to come out around the same time as Star Trek II, which had the working title Revenge of Khan... perceived as a conflict with the working title Revenge of the Jedi.
Ghana is a country with an average wage of only $160 per year. Out of a total population of 20 million, some 20 thousand are online. Why are we creating charities to get such nations online? Isn't that like forming a charity to send them Beluga Caviar? We should surely be concentrating on building their infrastructure in the proper way, and try to bring them through the industrial revolution first.
Your post reminds me of the posts in response to stories about 100" monitors that ask "what Quake player has the money?" when the product isn't even intended for retail.
This project isn't about turning the average Ghanaian into a happy websurfer. It's about giving the average Ghanaian a chance at a decent job, or his business a chance at success.
Don't discount third-world countries just because they haven't developed, say, an automobile industry: the time for that is past. That strategy was tried by the World Bank in 2nd tier countries like Brazil and India in the 1960s with disastrous results. Unregulated manufacturers polluted, the products were inferior to other markets, and the only people who made money were the bankers.
India has gotten smart. They never caught up industrially with the West. Jumping from agrarian to industrial proved expensive and futile. Instead, they've concentrated on the Second Industrial Revolution, building technical schools that turn out skilled programmers by the metric ton. These knowledge workers find work in outsourcing firms, or travel to the West for high-paying jobs. The resource that India is wisely exploiting here is its people.
It worries me to see that companies such as Shell and BT are contributing funds to send IT technicians there, when what we should be doing is sending agricultural experts and trying to attract magnates of industry
Another poorly considered policy of the latter half of Century Twenty was building Third World countries into agricultural exporters. Many of those countries could not feed their own people, and did not have the infrastructure or resources to support an exporting food industry. Once again, the bankers made money. The people often ended up poorer and hungrier. The grain available from traditional heartlands like the US and Russia was of higher quality and easily shipped. (Actually this fiasco largely predated the industrialization fiasco.)
Don't underestimate the ingenuity and inventiveness found in "third world" countries. Some of them are building out their telecommunications by skipping the 19th (copper) and 20th (fiber) century and jumping straight to the 21st (wireless). They don't have any installed base to protect. Innovations like "texting" (SMS messaging) and wacky computer virii have sprung from the Phillippines.
Dooming third world countries to another century of building up their economies "the hard way" is typical exclusivist Western thinking.
As the west moves towards an increasingly service based economy, there are opportunities for countries such as Ghana to grab onto our coattails and provide our manufacturing capabilty, before moving up to join us.
Perhaps. But they'd have to compete with already-cheap industrial powers like Mexico and China. Meanwhile, they have few resources, no industrial infrastructure, and it's enormously expensive to build.
Why, again, do they HAVE to have an industrial 20th century economy before they can move into the 21st? What does that gain them? What does it gain us? So in whose interest is it for them to build an old-style manufacturing base? Yep.
You'd make a great IMF banker a generation ago. ----
Tax Write-off? Not exactly. Motorola probably took a loss in the bankruptcy, so they get a big enough tax write-off for their investment (which isn't the full five B's). What they'll have to do, though, is write down a loss for the 4th Quarter and this will affect corporate earnings, so it's not all a bed of roses for them.
It wasn't completely "worth more down than up", but it was getting close. This way, at least, the new Iridium company gets to survive while most of the investors, like Motorola, swallow the loss of their investment. ----
I think I was just wondering if a new "planet" will ever be discovered -- one that causes everyone to say "Oh, we now have ten planets!" as opposed to sticking with the current nine.
Ah. Well that we don't know. I think it's safe to say that anything bigger than Pluto has an excellent chance to get dubbed "planet". Still, there we're talking about something that's probably 50 to 100 times the mass of the new object WR-106. ----
I don't think there was any suggestion that 100Mpbs was for surfing.
This is actually potentially a really great deal for people who are paying through the nose for a T1 (typically $2000/month, or 12 times more expensive) or a DS-3 (even more exorbitant, $5000/mo not unheard of). If you're in a metro area, you're hosting your own web servers, and especially if you're stuck with a static market defined mainly by one Baby Bell, you're gonna love this. ----
Is this another one that will be forgotten or are they considering this one an actual planet?
Who will forget them, the wilfully ignorant?
Who are "they"?
If an astronomer discovers something today, do you believe that "they" suddenly hold a conference call to change all the textbooks? It's a little more complicated than that. ----
Planetlet? Planette? Heck, we already had planetoid.
Actually the astronomical term "minor planet" has long been used to describe the thousands of identified solar system objects that are neither full-fledged planets nor moons. This new one, WR-106, is a member of the Kuiper Belt, essentially a large amorphous cloud of asteroids outside the orbit of Neptune; hence the official grouping Trnns-Neptunian Objects.
This is an exciting class of discoveries. It was surmised for a number of years but only in the 1990s did significant identifications of these objects begin. Now we're reached the hundreds, and there's likely many more to come, as techniques for locating them are refined. (In a nutshell, using computers to do the same flash image comparisons that Clyde Tombaugh used to find Pluto.)
What's significant about WR-106 is its hypothetical size -- which is far from verified. It could possibly be larger than Ceres (d. 570 mi), in the asteroid belt, which up until now has reigned as the largest minor planet. What this suggests is that the larger objects in the outer solar system are by no means all identified and discovered. Heck, there could even be a full-fledged twin of Mercury, or even Mars, way out in the deep dark. It's possible, and discoveries like WR-106 mean you can't just discount that possibility.
The whole question of Pluto's planethood has never really been open. What reached the press was a badly garbled story of disrespect to Clyde Tombaugh; what really happened is simply that the people who track minor planets wanted to include Pluto (and its almost-as-big moon) as part of the TNO group. There's no question, or at least wasn't, that Pluto would be at the head of that class, just as Ceres is at the head of the list of asteroids. It wasn't about downgrading Pluto, but about recognizing it as the first discovery in a vast new universe of discoveries in our outer solar system.
It's not really important to most astronomers what they're called. We've gone beyond the simplistic question of "how many planets, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10?" to the full realization that our solar system is made up of an infinite number of objects, from Jupiter-sized gas giants, to rocks like Pluto or Phobos, down to dust specks too small to see let alone count. The list of numbered asteroids is closing on 20,000, and that's just what we can find from Earth!
The importance of this discovery doesn't lie in the headline-grabbing reconsider-what-you-all-learned-in-fourth-grade aspects, but in how this affects the questions of cosmology and planetary formation, as well as the prospects for the future. If our solar system is made up of so many small rocks, it increases the odds that there are more rock-strewn star systems out in the larger galaxy. If our solar system has ore-filled rocks all over the place, that's probably a good omen for anyone contemplating colonizing the outer solar system. ----
Uh, put more soberly:
The official press release about the news conference was released 12/1, a week in advance, which is completely normal. This is the way this sort of thing has always been done, it's just that 99% of the time you don't hear about the news release that told you there'd be a press conference. (When you're on the internet, this happens -- geez, get used to it.)
Obviously if you're going to hold a major news conference you want to give the newsies plenty of time to show up, run up the antennas on their satellite trucks, and prepare good questions for the reporters. You also want the scientists around the world who are going to be eagerly watching this live the opportunity to set up conference rooms with cable feeds.
NASA's science news is of a different nature than its space program news. Technical news can be issued immediately, but science news does not, technically, belong to NASA: it belongs to the scientists who discovered it. All science results are "embargoed" based on the precedence of the science team in question, so that they can publish their results and get the career credit and institutional credit that they deserve for devoting, probably, years of their life to an obscure niche of science. They get this one chance to shine in the sun; NASA gets 'em every other week or so (though rarely as big as this one may prove). So NASA patiently waits for the release of the published science results until they can officially announce anything.
Another thing: Science news, when it's reported prematurely, is often distorted. (Prime example: early orbital results for NEO asteroids always seem to result in Tuesday's DOOM IS NIGH headline being replaced by MAYBE NOT the next day. This leads to public disrespect for science, among other deleterious effects.) By refusing to issue breathless incomplete press releases as soon as pimple-faced slashdot readers demand, NASA increases the chance that:
science reporters will ask questions, not who ever isn't covering the election;
fully qualified experts will be on hand to answer those questions;
last-minute glitches in the publication process don't embarrass everyone;
science releases proceed professionally through the peer review process before publication;
the appropriate science community is aware and informed.
There's more, probably, but that's it in a nutshell. This leisurely approach works; peer review is better than press-release sniping. ----
six bands asks:
Also why is it more cost beneficial to 'waste' the satellites than to sell them on for other purposes?
Don't think they have not tried to sell it. Last summer they were prepared to sell the entire company for US$50 million, or approximately one cent for every dollar that was spent building the network. The deal failed. Most recently, there have been some last minute talks in the $25 million range.
They're ready to sell it for half a penny on the dollar. But the takers are skeptical, because even if you can imagine repurposing the network, in just two or three years you'd have to start replacing the flying birds. It's a proposition, then, that comes something like getting a free car knowing that it needs tires, a new engine, and a new body.
Iridium isn't the only Low-Earth-Orbit satellite network, but it was the largest and most extensive (and expensive). It's become clear that the need for the technology is limited.
Whatever prupose you can imagine, it will have to be one that you can make about $1B to $5B over the next ten years to cover your capital replacement costs. Right now, Iridium's customer base is measured in something like the low thousands. Are you ready to pay $1 million for cellular service over ten years? ----
Generally the satellite business has benefited not so much from technological advances but from industrial maturity. It is now possible to build satellites with a greater variety of off-the-shelf components, which are able to be tested and made reliable at a much lower cost than one-offs. Some satellites are designed for lifetimes up to 15 years. Still, a more typical design lifetime is between 5 and 10 years.
The trouble is that designing longer lifetime into satellites actually is not cost-effective. Technological advances or economic changes on Earth could completely eclipse a satellite's originally-intended functionality. In the case of Iridium, a $5 billion LEO satellite network that took a decade to build was eclipsed by cellular networks spreading worldwide during the same time period. Even though the overall cost of the cell network is probably greater for the same approximate coverage, its per-customer cost ends up being much lower. By the same token, a weather satellite returning 10m resolution images of the atmosphere could be designed for 20 years of life, but if ten years from now the market will only buy 5m resolution images, that satellite is useless.
If you are to contrast Iridium with the Pioneer program, you should also consider the failures of that program. No satellite or interplanetary probe is invulnerable. In most cases, the best defense isn't higher reliability, but greater volume. A satellite may be expensive in the event of a failure, but unlike humans, it is not irreplaceable.
Think long and hard about the technology that you were personally using 15 or 20 years ago, and how much you'd pay now for that functionality. Eight-track tape players for music? Betamax VCR? Non-cellular radio telephone? TRS-80 computer?
Don't be so sure that longevity is a good thing for all technology!
Iridium was a good idea. It was just an unlucky one. Lots of telephone companies in the 19th century failed, too, but we all use Bell technology today. ----
Very funny. Anyway, it is NOT an acronym. The word has clear relatives in other Germanic languages, which variously mean "to hit", "to push", or even "to have sex".
The other "backronym" that was invented to explain the word is "Fornication Under Consent of the King". Not true either.
In addition to being limited to Internet Explorer users, this site lets you pull up a 3-D visualization using a plug-in. Unfortunately, it's a 2.3Mb download, and after the wizard installs it, you're required to reboot. I clicked the "close" box on that dialog with... unpleasant... consequences.
Mappa Mundi, a good webzine that often discussed these types of visualization issues before it ceased production, ran an article on Tim Bray's Hyperlink Totems, referring to an early mapping-the-web project of his.
I suspect that for someone doing a lot of traveling, something like AT&T's Digital One-Rate would be a good idea. All calls, whether local or long-distance, are charged at the same per-minute rate. Basically it no longer matters where you're calling.
For receiving calls, that's basically a freebie that some places like Cellular One give you for calls to/from other Cellular One network phones. You'd have to find out who you'd be calling a lot and get on the same network as them.
You could also skip the long-distance carrier and use phone cards. My phone can auto-dial a card number for long-distance calls. ----
Tackhead, apologies from here too. I've seen your other responses and they revealed a much more reasonable person than the first post would have indicated. ----
Tackhead, you don't need to get so sanctimonious and theatrical. A coup d'etat?! Good grief. Untwist your panties a little bit, and go through the WayBack machine to the dark ages of last week, when Bush was plotting his own legal challenges to an electoral-college loss. In that benighted time, everyone was worried that Nim would win the popular vote and Rod would eke out a victory in the electoral college. It now appears the other way around, which is the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.
According to sources within the Bush campaign, their battle against an electoral college loss would include media blitz, radio and tv ads, and a "popular uprising".
So far, the Democrats have expressed full faith in the laws of the United States, and made a few noises, not yet written in stone, about challenges within the legal system.
Now, which approach sounds more like a coup?
I've worked up close to political campaigns in local races, and I've been an election judge. The process of a recount or legal challenge to ballots involves discrediting certain votes, which are thrown out. The losing party in these cases always asks for a new election, but judges rarely grant them. The judge can rule on a process for disqualifying ballots, or she can just throw a number of them out, depending on the extent of the problem or the applicability of state election laws. The vote as determined by the judicial challenge becomes the official and legal vote.
Election laws exist for a reason. Every candidate is within his rights to pursue those laws to the very end. It's legal, and if it overturns the original result, that's legal too.
Stuff your coup talk up the hole it came from. ----
Way off-topic for a "news site traffice on election day" thread... but hey. I can burn some karma.
The common criticism of the Electoral College is that "the founders didn't trust the people", so they devised the college to thwart populist movements. If that were so they would have kept King George. In fact, the Electoral College was designed because of States' Rights. When the Constitution was written, there was still a strong sense that we were Thirteen United (and somewhat separate) States. The Electoral College is designed to ensure that the winner is approved of by a majority of the states, or something closer to it than a simple population majority. A population majority would have favored Yankees from Philadelphia, New York, and Boston for President; instead, the first three Presidents were all from rural, agrarian Virginia.
Today, this Federal method of electing the President still has merit. Instead of campaigning simply in the largest states, a candidate must campaign by region. Individual voters' power is increased, on average, fifty times over a national election, because there are fifty times more opportunities for a single voter to influence the outcome. And smaller states that might be ignored have outsized electoral votes (one Representative by population, but three Electors), compared with the big prizes like California and Texas.
Even so, it's no surprise that an outsized number of presidents are from large states than simple chance would imply. ----
In case people are still wondering why we get an announcement one week that Mir will come down, and the next week we get one that it will stay up... and then two or three months down the line the cycle repeats itself...
The Russian Space Agency is much less in charge of their space program than are the two main contractors (which became private companies after the breakup of the USSR), Energia and Krunichev. These companies can see the writing on the wall: the vaunted Russian space program is no more. They're not sitting around, though. They know that they need to generate business outside of Russia. Energia formed MirCorp as a Western company to attract investment dollars, yes, but also as a base for networking with the European and American aerospace industries.
Some of the constant tug-of-war over ISS and Mir is Energia and Krunichev competing cold-bloodedly for scarce aerospace dollars. Another part of it is these companies singly or jointly playing chicken with the Russian government over the operation of Mir. By forming MirCorp, then holding out their empty pockets, they perform a neat hat trick of appearing to make every effort to attract Western dollars, of appearing to make every effort to become fully privatized and self-sustaining Westernized companies, and of increasing their power to pull the rug out from under the Russian government -- which after all still technically runs the space program and can't bear to see it shut down.
The realistic prospects for MirCorp as a permanent source of funding for Mir were always extremely dubious. Even if you assume that everything in Russia costs less, US$50M is still a ludicrously low figure for the cost of a single Soyuz mission. The true cost to the government of Russia must be several times that. It follows that MirCorp is essentially a way to get hard Western currency directly into the pockets of the Russian space industry, rather than the just-barely-not-worthless Russian government scrip.
If you see another report that Mir is coming down, read it carefully. It's probably a calculated political maneuver, more than hard-and-fast news about the station's fate. ----
This is actually interesting for two reasons. One, naturally, is the/. nerd quotient that it was made on a Palm. The other interesting thing is that it's a time-series art project. Most people seem to have missed this.
Each of the drawings was done sequentially. While individually they are merely doodles, what's interesting is to look at the square-by-square progression of each doodle to the next.
No, it's no Mona Lisa, but art isn't merely about making pretty pictures. A work like this makes you think about the production process, the mindset of the artist as he proceeds through all N iterations of the project. It makes you think about what can be accomplished with just a few pixels. It's not representational art, and approaching it that way is a mistake.
It's the 21st century. Hasn't anyone had an art class since 1891? ----
One simple plan will do more for democracy than any other. It may seem counterintuitive to the afore-described apathetic voters, but trust me on this one:
Bring back political parties.
In years past, political parties were defined by their platforms, and candidates were defined by their party. The party provided discipline in advancing legislation and accountability in local involvement.
This went away, replaced by a generic "independence" that candidates have advanced as the new ethos. It resembles the development of classic 20th century journalistic neutrality, which in reality was a way to sell newspapers to a wider audience. In the same way candidates sought to define their own agendas and sell their personality to the electorate.
One of the main reasons this happened was television. Television provided a mass-media market for political advertising. TV ads became a necessity for almost all candidates, save a few iconoclastic safe incumbents like William Proxmire (who famously spent as little as $200 on his Senate campaigns). TV ads, however, cost money.
A lot of money.
The candidates running for office in the last 20 years have fallen more and more into two categories:
The independently wealthy candidate. This person sells his or her "independence" from the political system, and despite the obvious conclusion that someone with a large personal fortune will tend to represent mainly the interests of those with large personal fortunes, they are immune from the depredations of the other kind.
That other kind, representing an easy majority of national offices today, is the money-grubbing candidate. The money-grubbing candidate is not personally wealthy, or not to the same extent, and as a result must finance the re-election kitty with a steady stream of political appearances and favors. Financing a "small" $1 million House campaign means that a candidate, during two years in office, must raise $10,000 every week. That's a lot of luncheons, or a lot of favors. Unsurprisingly this type of candidate becomes beholden to political contributors.
There are very few candidates today who feel beholden to their political party for very much.
The simple lesson is that with television remaining ascendant, and political parties considered important mainly as a production staff for presidential conventions, candidates become bought and sold. The few who aren't have their own interests first at heart.
Of course you're joking, but the search for Trans-Neptunian objects has barely begun, with about half the objects discovered being found just this year. Partly due to "SpaceGuard" type concerns (hitting Earth), and partly due to better Earth-based telescopes, we can now undertake this systematic search. Once people began looking with the latest instruments, the planetoids started turning up by the bucketful. ----
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually a pet project of a group calling itself The Global Railway, which believes rail is a sustainable transportation technology that will assist development while keeping hydrocarbon emissions and depletion of non-renewable energy resources low. The fellow Razbegin has been pumping for the Bering Project for some time. This is getting some press not only because of the push forward on the Sakhalin Island fixed link, which the Russians believe to be a precursor to a rail link with Japan, but also because the former railways minister Aksyoneyev has become an influential big-shot in Putin's government (allegedly as a tool of Boris Berezovsky).
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See, allegedly, one of the reasons they changed the title of Star Wars Episode VI to Return of the Jedi was that it was to come out around the same time as Star Trek II, which had the working title Revenge of Khan ... perceived as a conflict with the working title Revenge of the Jedi.
Sly joke, rather mild, but very inside.
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Ghana is a country with an average wage of only $160 per year. Out of a total population of 20 million, some 20 thousand are online. Why are we creating charities to get such nations online? Isn't that like forming a charity to send them Beluga Caviar? We should surely be concentrating on building their infrastructure in the proper way, and try to bring them through the industrial revolution first.
Your post reminds me of the posts in response to stories about 100" monitors that ask "what Quake player has the money?" when the product isn't even intended for retail.
This project isn't about turning the average Ghanaian into a happy websurfer. It's about giving the average Ghanaian a chance at a decent job, or his business a chance at success.
Don't discount third-world countries just because they haven't developed, say, an automobile industry: the time for that is past. That strategy was tried by the World Bank in 2nd tier countries like Brazil and India in the 1960s with disastrous results. Unregulated manufacturers polluted, the products were inferior to other markets, and the only people who made money were the bankers.
India has gotten smart. They never caught up industrially with the West. Jumping from agrarian to industrial proved expensive and futile. Instead, they've concentrated on the Second Industrial Revolution, building technical schools that turn out skilled programmers by the metric ton. These knowledge workers find work in outsourcing firms, or travel to the West for high-paying jobs. The resource that India is wisely exploiting here is its people.
It worries me to see that companies such as Shell and BT are contributing funds to send IT technicians there, when what we should be doing is sending agricultural experts and trying to attract magnates of industry
Another poorly considered policy of the latter half of Century Twenty was building Third World countries into agricultural exporters. Many of those countries could not feed their own people, and did not have the infrastructure or resources to support an exporting food industry. Once again, the bankers made money. The people often ended up poorer and hungrier. The grain available from traditional heartlands like the US and Russia was of higher quality and easily shipped. (Actually this fiasco largely predated the industrialization fiasco.)
Don't underestimate the ingenuity and inventiveness found in "third world" countries. Some of them are building out their telecommunications by skipping the 19th (copper) and 20th (fiber) century and jumping straight to the 21st (wireless). They don't have any installed base to protect. Innovations like "texting" (SMS messaging) and wacky computer virii have sprung from the Phillippines.
Dooming third world countries to another century of building up their economies "the hard way" is typical exclusivist Western thinking.
As the west moves towards an increasingly service based economy, there are opportunities for countries such as Ghana to grab onto our coattails and provide our manufacturing capabilty, before moving up to join us.
Perhaps. But they'd have to compete with already-cheap industrial powers like Mexico and China. Meanwhile, they have few resources, no industrial infrastructure, and it's enormously expensive to build.
Why, again, do they HAVE to have an industrial 20th century economy before they can move into the 21st? What does that gain them? What does it gain us? So in whose interest is it for them to build an old-style manufacturing base? Yep.
You'd make a great IMF banker a generation ago.
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Tax Write-off? Not exactly. Motorola probably took a loss in the bankruptcy, so they get a big enough tax write-off for their investment (which isn't the full five B's). What they'll have to do, though, is write down a loss for the 4th Quarter and this will affect corporate earnings, so it's not all a bed of roses for them.
It wasn't completely "worth more down than up", but it was getting close. This way, at least, the new Iridium company gets to survive while most of the investors, like Motorola, swallow the loss of their investment.
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I think I was just wondering if a new "planet" will ever be discovered -- one that causes everyone to say "Oh, we now have ten planets!" as opposed to sticking with the current nine.
Ah. Well that we don't know. I think it's safe to say that anything bigger than Pluto has an excellent chance to get dubbed "planet". Still, there we're talking about something that's probably 50 to 100 times the mass of the new object WR-106.
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Count it per byte. Based on the figures quoted, a T1 is 12 times as expensive. Contrary to myth, a T1 is not "unlimited bandwidth".
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I don't think there was any suggestion that 100Mpbs was for surfing.
This is actually potentially a really great deal for people who are paying through the nose for a T1 (typically $2000/month, or 12 times more expensive) or a DS-3 (even more exorbitant, $5000/mo not unheard of). If you're in a metro area, you're hosting your own web servers, and especially if you're stuck with a static market defined mainly by one Baby Bell, you're gonna love this.
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Haven't they discovered three or four other "planets" in the past couple years?
Scores of them.
Is this another one that will be forgotten or are they considering this one an actual planet?
Who will forget them, the wilfully ignorant?
Who are "they"?
If an astronomer discovers something today, do you believe that "they" suddenly hold a conference call to change all the textbooks? It's a little more complicated than that.
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Planetlet? Planette? Heck, we already had planetoid.
Actually the astronomical term "minor planet" has long been used to describe the thousands of identified solar system objects that are neither full-fledged planets nor moons. This new one, WR-106, is a member of the Kuiper Belt, essentially a large amorphous cloud of asteroids outside the orbit of Neptune; hence the official grouping Trnns-Neptunian Objects.
This is an exciting class of discoveries. It was surmised for a number of years but only in the 1990s did significant identifications of these objects begin. Now we're reached the hundreds, and there's likely many more to come, as techniques for locating them are refined. (In a nutshell, using computers to do the same flash image comparisons that Clyde Tombaugh used to find Pluto.)
What's significant about WR-106 is its hypothetical size -- which is far from verified. It could possibly be larger than Ceres (d. 570 mi), in the asteroid belt, which up until now has reigned as the largest minor planet. What this suggests is that the larger objects in the outer solar system are by no means all identified and discovered. Heck, there could even be a full-fledged twin of Mercury, or even Mars, way out in the deep dark. It's possible, and discoveries like WR-106 mean you can't just discount that possibility.
The whole question of Pluto's planethood has never really been open. What reached the press was a badly garbled story of disrespect to Clyde Tombaugh; what really happened is simply that the people who track minor planets wanted to include Pluto (and its almost-as-big moon) as part of the TNO group. There's no question, or at least wasn't, that Pluto would be at the head of that class, just as Ceres is at the head of the list of asteroids. It wasn't about downgrading Pluto, but about recognizing it as the first discovery in a vast new universe of discoveries in our outer solar system.
It's not really important to most astronomers what they're called. We've gone beyond the simplistic question of "how many planets, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10?" to the full realization that our solar system is made up of an infinite number of objects, from Jupiter-sized gas giants, to rocks like Pluto or Phobos, down to dust specks too small to see let alone count. The list of numbered asteroids is closing on 20,000, and that's just what we can find from Earth!
The importance of this discovery doesn't lie in the headline-grabbing reconsider-what-you-all-learned-in-fourth-grade aspects, but in how this affects the questions of cosmology and planetary formation, as well as the prospects for the future. If our solar system is made up of so many small rocks, it increases the odds that there are more rock-strewn star systems out in the larger galaxy. If our solar system has ore-filled rocks all over the place, that's probably a good omen for anyone contemplating colonizing the outer solar system.
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Uh, put more soberly:
The official press release about the news conference was released 12/1, a week in advance, which is completely normal. This is the way this sort of thing has always been done, it's just that 99% of the time you don't hear about the news release that told you there'd be a press conference. (When you're on the internet, this happens -- geez, get used to it.)
Obviously if you're going to hold a major news conference you want to give the newsies plenty of time to show up, run up the antennas on their satellite trucks, and prepare good questions for the reporters. You also want the scientists around the world who are going to be eagerly watching this live the opportunity to set up conference rooms with cable feeds.
NASA's science news is of a different nature than its space program news. Technical news can be issued immediately, but science news does not, technically, belong to NASA: it belongs to the scientists who discovered it. All science results are "embargoed" based on the precedence of the science team in question, so that they can publish their results and get the career credit and institutional credit that they deserve for devoting, probably, years of their life to an obscure niche of science. They get this one chance to shine in the sun; NASA gets 'em every other week or so (though rarely as big as this one may prove). So NASA patiently waits for the release of the published science results until they can officially announce anything.
Another thing: Science news, when it's reported prematurely, is often distorted. (Prime example: early orbital results for NEO asteroids always seem to result in Tuesday's DOOM IS NIGH headline being replaced by MAYBE NOT the next day. This leads to public disrespect for science, among other deleterious effects.) By refusing to issue breathless incomplete press releases as soon as pimple-faced slashdot readers demand, NASA increases the chance that:
There's more, probably, but that's it in a nutshell. This leisurely approach works; peer review is better than press-release sniping.
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six bands asks:
Also why is it more cost beneficial to 'waste' the satellites than to sell them on for other purposes?
Don't think they have not tried to sell it. Last summer they were prepared to sell the entire company for US$50 million, or approximately one cent for every dollar that was spent building the network. The deal failed. Most recently, there have been some last minute talks in the $25 million range.
They're ready to sell it for half a penny on the dollar. But the takers are skeptical, because even if you can imagine repurposing the network, in just two or three years you'd have to start replacing the flying birds. It's a proposition, then, that comes something like getting a free car knowing that it needs tires, a new engine, and a new body.
Iridium isn't the only Low-Earth-Orbit satellite network, but it was the largest and most extensive (and expensive). It's become clear that the need for the technology is limited.
Whatever prupose you can imagine, it will have to be one that you can make about $1B to $5B over the next ten years to cover your capital replacement costs. Right now, Iridium's customer base is measured in something like the low thousands. Are you ready to pay $1 million for cellular service over ten years?
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Generally the satellite business has benefited not so much from technological advances but from industrial maturity. It is now possible to build satellites with a greater variety of off-the-shelf components, which are able to be tested and made reliable at a much lower cost than one-offs. Some satellites are designed for lifetimes up to 15 years. Still, a more typical design lifetime is between 5 and 10 years.
The trouble is that designing longer lifetime into satellites actually is not cost-effective. Technological advances or economic changes on Earth could completely eclipse a satellite's originally-intended functionality. In the case of Iridium, a $5 billion LEO satellite network that took a decade to build was eclipsed by cellular networks spreading worldwide during the same time period. Even though the overall cost of the cell network is probably greater for the same approximate coverage, its per-customer cost ends up being much lower. By the same token, a weather satellite returning 10m resolution images of the atmosphere could be designed for 20 years of life, but if ten years from now the market will only buy 5m resolution images, that satellite is useless.
If you are to contrast Iridium with the Pioneer program, you should also consider the failures of that program. No satellite or interplanetary probe is invulnerable. In most cases, the best defense isn't higher reliability, but greater volume. A satellite may be expensive in the event of a failure, but unlike humans, it is not irreplaceable.
Think long and hard about the technology that you were personally using 15 or 20 years ago, and how much you'd pay now for that functionality. Eight-track tape players for music? Betamax VCR? Non-cellular radio telephone? TRS-80 computer?
Don't be so sure that longevity is a good thing for all technology!
Iridium was a good idea. It was just an unlucky one. Lots of telephone companies in the 19th century failed, too, but we all use Bell technology today.
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Very funny. Anyway, it is NOT an acronym. The word has clear relatives in other Germanic languages, which variously mean "to hit", "to push", or even "to have sex".
The other "backronym" that was invented to explain the word is "Fornication Under Consent of the King". Not true either.
See alt.usage.english FAQ, or Snopes.
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Because Democrats are tired of being called socialists/communists/etc., because of "union blue", because Reagan had red hair ...
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In addition to being limited to Internet Explorer users, this site lets you pull up a 3-D visualization using a plug-in. Unfortunately, it's a 2.3Mb download, and after the wizard installs it, you're required to reboot. I clicked the "close" box on that dialog with ... unpleasant ... consequences.
Just so you know what you're getting into.
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Mappa Mundi, a good webzine that often discussed these types of visualization issues before it ceased production, ran an article on Tim Bray's Hyperlink Totems, referring to an early mapping-the-web project of his.
That was 1995. He's been doing this a while!
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I suspect that for someone doing a lot of traveling, something like AT&T's Digital One-Rate would be a good idea. All calls, whether local or long-distance, are charged at the same per-minute rate. Basically it no longer matters where you're calling.
For receiving calls, that's basically a freebie that some places like Cellular One give you for calls to/from other Cellular One network phones. You'd have to find out who you'd be calling a lot and get on the same network as them.
You could also skip the long-distance carrier and use phone cards. My phone can auto-dial a card number for long-distance calls.
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Careful, though. Chicago has PCS, but not GSM. Unless someone knows differently.
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Tackhead, apologies from here too. I've seen your other responses and they revealed a much more reasonable person than the first post would have indicated.
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Tackhead, you don't need to get so sanctimonious and theatrical. A coup d'etat?! Good grief. Untwist your panties a little bit, and go through the WayBack machine to the dark ages of last week, when Bush was plotting his own legal challenges to an electoral-college loss. In that benighted time, everyone was worried that Nim would win the popular vote and Rod would eke out a victory in the electoral college. It now appears the other way around, which is the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.
According to sources within the Bush campaign, their battle against an electoral college loss would include media blitz, radio and tv ads, and a "popular uprising".
So far, the Democrats have expressed full faith in the laws of the United States, and made a few noises, not yet written in stone, about challenges within the legal system.
Now, which approach sounds more like a coup?
I've worked up close to political campaigns in local races, and I've been an election judge. The process of a recount or legal challenge to ballots involves discrediting certain votes, which are thrown out. The losing party in these cases always asks for a new election, but judges rarely grant them. The judge can rule on a process for disqualifying ballots, or she can just throw a number of them out, depending on the extent of the problem or the applicability of state election laws. The vote as determined by the judicial challenge becomes the official and legal vote.
Election laws exist for a reason. Every candidate is within his rights to pursue those laws to the very end. It's legal, and if it overturns the original result, that's legal too.
Stuff your coup talk up the hole it came from.
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Way off-topic for a "news site traffice on election day" thread ... but hey. I can burn some karma.
The common criticism of the Electoral College is that "the founders didn't trust the people", so they devised the college to thwart populist movements. If that were so they would have kept King George. In fact, the Electoral College was designed because of States' Rights. When the Constitution was written, there was still a strong sense that we were Thirteen United (and somewhat separate) States. The Electoral College is designed to ensure that the winner is approved of by a majority of the states, or something closer to it than a simple population majority. A population majority would have favored Yankees from Philadelphia, New York, and Boston for President; instead, the first three Presidents were all from rural, agrarian Virginia.
Today, this Federal method of electing the President still has merit. Instead of campaigning simply in the largest states, a candidate must campaign by region. Individual voters' power is increased, on average, fifty times over a national election, because there are fifty times more opportunities for a single voter to influence the outcome. And smaller states that might be ignored have outsized electoral votes (one Representative by population, but three Electors), compared with the big prizes like California and Texas.
Even so, it's no surprise that an outsized number of presidents are from large states than simple chance would imply.
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In case people are still wondering why we get an announcement one week that Mir will come down, and the next week we get one that it will stay up ... and then two or three months down the line the cycle repeats itself ...
The Russian Space Agency is much less in charge of their space program than are the two main contractors (which became private companies after the breakup of the USSR), Energia and Krunichev. These companies can see the writing on the wall: the vaunted Russian space program is no more. They're not sitting around, though. They know that they need to generate business outside of Russia. Energia formed MirCorp as a Western company to attract investment dollars, yes, but also as a base for networking with the European and American aerospace industries.
Some of the constant tug-of-war over ISS and Mir is Energia and Krunichev competing cold-bloodedly for scarce aerospace dollars. Another part of it is these companies singly or jointly playing chicken with the Russian government over the operation of Mir. By forming MirCorp, then holding out their empty pockets, they perform a neat hat trick of appearing to make every effort to attract Western dollars, of appearing to make every effort to become fully privatized and self-sustaining Westernized companies, and of increasing their power to pull the rug out from under the Russian government -- which after all still technically runs the space program and can't bear to see it shut down.
The realistic prospects for MirCorp as a permanent source of funding for Mir were always extremely dubious. Even if you assume that everything in Russia costs less, US$50M is still a ludicrously low figure for the cost of a single Soyuz mission. The true cost to the government of Russia must be several times that. It follows that MirCorp is essentially a way to get hard Western currency directly into the pockets of the Russian space industry, rather than the just-barely-not-worthless Russian government scrip.
If you see another report that Mir is coming down, read it carefully. It's probably a calculated political maneuver, more than hard-and-fast news about the station's fate.
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This is actually interesting for two reasons. One, naturally, is the /. nerd quotient that it was made on a Palm. The other interesting thing is that it's a time-series art project. Most people seem to have missed this.
Each of the drawings was done sequentially. While individually they are merely doodles, what's interesting is to look at the square-by-square progression of each doodle to the next.
No, it's no Mona Lisa, but art isn't merely about making pretty pictures. A work like this makes you think about the production process, the mindset of the artist as he proceeds through all N iterations of the project. It makes you think about what can be accomplished with just a few pixels. It's not representational art, and approaching it that way is a mistake.
It's the 21st century. Hasn't anyone had an art class since 1891?
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One simple plan will do more for democracy than any other. It may seem counterintuitive to the afore-described apathetic voters, but trust me on this one:
Bring back political parties.
In years past, political parties were defined by their platforms, and candidates were defined by their party. The party provided discipline in advancing legislation and accountability in local involvement.
This went away, replaced by a generic "independence" that candidates have advanced as the new ethos. It resembles the development of classic 20th century journalistic neutrality, which in reality was a way to sell newspapers to a wider audience. In the same way candidates sought to define their own agendas and sell their personality to the electorate.
One of the main reasons this happened was television. Television provided a mass-media market for political advertising. TV ads became a necessity for almost all candidates, save a few iconoclastic safe incumbents like William Proxmire (who famously spent as little as $200 on his Senate campaigns). TV ads, however, cost money.
A lot of money.
The candidates running for office in the last 20 years have fallen more and more into two categories:
The independently wealthy candidate. This person sells his or her "independence" from the political system, and despite the obvious conclusion that someone with a large personal fortune will tend to represent mainly the interests of those with large personal fortunes, they are immune from the depredations of the other kind.
That other kind, representing an easy majority of national offices today, is the money-grubbing candidate. The money-grubbing candidate is not personally wealthy, or not to the same extent, and as a result must finance the re-election kitty with a steady stream of political appearances and favors. Financing a "small" $1 million House campaign means that a candidate, during two years in office, must raise $10,000 every week. That's a lot of luncheons, or a lot of favors. Unsurprisingly this type of candidate becomes beholden to political contributors.
There are very few candidates today who feel beholden to their political party for very much.
The simple lesson is that with television remaining ascendant, and political parties considered important mainly as a production staff for presidential conventions, candidates become bought and sold. The few who aren't have their own interests first at heart.
Nobody works for the people.
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Why did it take them so long to find it?
Of course you're joking, but the search for Trans-Neptunian objects has barely begun, with about half the objects discovered being found just this year. Partly due to "SpaceGuard" type concerns (hitting Earth), and partly due to better Earth-based telescopes, we can now undertake this systematic search. Once people began looking with the latest instruments, the planetoids started turning up by the bucketful.
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