The spectra best utilized by green plants on earth are "red" and "Yellow" light, respectively. These spectra represent the bulk of the useful spectra recieved on earth, and are why green plants appear green. (they absorb nearly everything in the red spectrum, and most of the yellow, reflecting blue and some of the yellow, making a green colored surface.)
The bulk of the visible light around a red dwarf will be "red". Photosynthetic earth plants will be able to make use of it, but inefficiently. (yellow light carries more energy per photon. Chlorophyll is able to absorb multiple red photons to make up for the difference in energy, and still catalyze the reactions needed, but less activity will be possible without a congruent increase in the total number of photons delivered.) Thus only some plant forms would be able to thrive there.
This is assuming surface conditions suited to plantlife anyway.
On a planet dominated by a heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere held temperate by greenhouse effects, sending oxygen respiring photosynthetic plants would have dire long term consequences for the global climate as the global average temperatures drop precipitously. Unless there is A LOT of dirty manufacturing and other carbon unfriendly activities conducted by humans to put the greenhouse gasses back, the planet will go into a botanically induced iceage.
But yes. Chlorophyll should work with the light emitted from red dwarfs, just not efficiently.
Amarid plastic (poly amide) is thermostable at venus's surface temperature, and is theoretically capable of being biosynthesized.
It turns into "goop" when mixed with strong acids (it does not have a melting point. it is spun into fiber after mixing it with HCl, which then evaporates in the spinning process, leaving fiber.), and would turn into a gelatinous sea on the surface of venus.
The process would take millions of years, but would punctuate venus' otherwise purpetual cycle of greenhouse heating by effectively sinking the carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid components of the atmosphere.
Above the cloud haze layer, temperature and pressure are comparable to earth's surface. Only the acidic and dry conditions need to be accounted for in the engineered extremophile microbes. Both could be effectively handled with a sulphur respiration cycle based biochemistry.
We are at a level of biotechnology that we could engineer such microbes and deliver them to the venusian atmosphere.
We DONT (and wont) do this because the planetary society feels that barren, lifeless balls of hellishly hot acidic gas covering pools of molten lead and tortured silicates are still of scientific value, and need to not be disturbed. It is considered unethical (somehow) to contaminate these worlds with terrestrial life, engineered or not.
Heaven forbid that humanity becomes the progenitor of life on another planet. Unthinkable.
Now, with that in mind, I wonder why we send useless crap into space (like little metal figurines, and golden records) and not substantially more interesting things, like freezedried samples of microbes, tardigrades, and other interesting earth flora in sealed containers.
Which would you be more excited (as a scientist) to get from another species: A metal figurine of unknown significance, or a well catalogued sampling of hardy lifeforms from a distant star system, ready for study?
Really, I have to wonder about my species sometimes.
If these were originally hot neptunes, then the death of the parent star would have blown most of the atmosphere off allright, but would leave enough behind to be interesting.
Definately a study candidate. This class of planet is predicted, but has not (to my knowledge) been confirmed to exist yet.
There is also the potential for orbital migration after the star loses its cool and blows its top like that-- Objects that are analogous to our kuiper belt objects having thier orbits disturbed by the nova, then falling in on oblique angles, and getting captured at lower orbits.
If we have learned anything at all from the population of extrasolar planets detected so far, it is that systems like ours are the minority, so theories based on how our system evolved need questioning. In many systems observed to date, very large planets have transmigrated closer to the star they orbit, for instance.
These objects need not be giant balls of glass, just because their star went nova.
I see the word "metadata" thrown around like it means something innocuous.
This makes me very disturbed.
Metadata, is data about data.
That can take a wide universe of forms. It could be something as simple as an access statistic, to a simple parity bit for each byte on media, down to full data protection correction codes to prevent corruption of the data. (say RLL encoding, or the full parity stripe set from a disk array-- or both together.)
All of those are metadata.
Some are more or less harmless as individual pieces of information-- such as the access log for a file.
Others allow you to completely reconstitute the data they describe, and basically are functionally the same as giving them the data.
Blandly just saying "it's just metadata!" is ignorant at best, and willfully disingenuous at worst.
Given that these agencies have some very intelligent/capable people working for them, I cannot attribute it to incompetence. I have to seriously consider blatant malice.
Given that these people are able to make a quantification of exactly how much Snowden accellerated encryption adoption, this means that they have been actively observing and metricising encryption adoption for some time, otherwise they would have no baseline from which to make such a detetmination. Since this is a requirement for their metric to be accurate, coupled with how angry they are about it changing ahead of their projections, it means that these people are clearly not ignorant, and are actively engaged in malicious intent to violate privacy, and to stay ahead of advancements that would lock them out.
The "metadata" rhetoric came straight out of one of these agencies. I know what forms metadata can take, and it is not all just benign metrics data. What kinds of metadata do they collect, and how do they use it?
Do they use it to reconstitute messages of people they do not have warrants for?
If so, they are violating the right of privacy and security of papers and posessions of the people they are collecting metadata on.
"Just metadata!" is not justification for looking aside. There IS something to see there citizen, do NOT just move along.
See for instance: This bit of cleverness.
The feds want to know about the contents of my voicemail mailbox. They dont have a warrant, and have been given absurd power to demand "metadata" without a warrant.
They can thus demand:
Information about the file format used by voice messaging system.
The dates and times of the messages.
The disk parity data for the files implicated, and the data stored in the block inode (whatever filesystem this.) which gives what blocks were written, and in what order-- along with total file size, and some other useful tidbits, like parity data, and if compression was used, the entries of the dictionary and how well each block was compressed.
With this information, the possible solution space for reconstruction is narrowed down from the total permutation of a file of n length, to one of n length which follows the conventions and behaviors of that file format, with data comprised of atoms contained in the dictionary, further constrained by internal granularity structure imposed by how well compressed each block was, and then finally on each byte, with even-odd parity or disk-stripe parity.
The resulting reduced solution space takes a previously insurmountable problem, and renders it into a "computationally expensive, but reasonably possible" one.
The more useful pieces of metadata they can bring against it, the greater their odds of successfully reconstructing the data they want without needing a warrant.
No. I will not accept "it's just metadata!" as an excuse.
They need a warrant for metadata as well, as far as I am concerned.
While I applaud this ISP for waking up and smelling the sewer, this is what happens when unfettered power is given to any group of people with an interest and a will to enforce it against others.
You can think about it this way:
The copyright holders and their shell organizations were initially granted a boon from society in exchange for continuing to produce new works. This boon gave them legitimate grounds to assert that society owed them something. This initial boon was not enough for them though, and through various methods, they have incrementally demanded, and obtained more and more from society, and society so far has accepted the increased demands.
We are now to the point where the demands are absurd.
The copyright holders and their satelites act like you are trying to put them into a sweatshop if you suggest that they have overstepped what they are actually owed by society, while simultaneously taking unilateral and extrajudicial action against society to obtain what it wants.
I propose that the next time they demand copyright reform, we give it to them, but actually reform it so that this abusive relationship is properly reset and expectations are forced back into the realm of reality.
Writing a book does not make you entitled to a heredetary estate. The purpose of copyright is to keep your lights on, your bills paid, and food on your table so that you can continue to write. Nothing more. It is not a free ride for either you or your children. It is not providence for limitless profits by a corporate body either, and any corporation profiting from copyright is going against the foundational concept of copyright as an allowance between authors and the rest of society. (EG, to extract a profit from the situation resulting from properly maintained copyright allowances, the corporations would have to be taking food off the author's table, and making him unable to pay his bills, because that is all the more copyright protections should be providing to authors.)
The actions of this ISP are laudible, but it is too little, too late on that front.
What needs to happen is for the copyright cartels to get busted into the stoneage for vigilanteism, racketeering, and barratry, followed by REAL copyright reform.
There is a difference between climate and weather bro.
What you see outside your window right now is weather.
Recurring trends in weather patterns over time is climate.
We have been collecting data long enough to have information on changes in climate. Your denial of this based on current weather conditions is a nonsequitor.
Amazing how very shortly after this feed gets put up, the first postings all follow the MO of the petro-chemical industry and the GOP...
So, let us address a few things here.
1) "Bill Nye isn't a 'Science Guy', he just holds a BS degree!"
Assuming for a moment that we overlook the obviously implied "appeal to authority" fallacy this involves, he could be a bumbling idiot with cabbage in his beard that talks to empty chairs-- The data he directs people to is correct, and will continue being correct no matter what degrees or qualifications he has. So, discounting this obvious fallacy, there's buried ad-hominem goodness there too. Shooting the messenger like this does not make climate change less real, nor the message inaccurate.
2) "The climate change crazies want to force their religion on us!!"
Science is not a religion. It is a process, and a damned cuthroat one too. It might surprise you to know that the scientifically literate population have known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1909, and have raised the red flag on industrial release of this gas through fossil fuel combustion since the 20's, predicting mass climate change. Here it is, a century later, and we have bulletproof data showing exactly this. What exactly consistutes religion to you? The belief in something without proof (which is what denialism is, given the massive amounts of experimental and climatological data collected so far showing that fossil fuel use is cumulatively deleterious to the climactic environment) or observing repeatable phenomena, creating testable hypotheses, and then strongly advising the world based on those findings? (science, and in this case-- the message of 99% of the world's climate scientists.)
3)
"Release XXX from prison so they can (euphamism for harm) Bill Nye!"
Seriously? You advocate physical violence and harm to silence a message you find disfavorable? For real? No wonder the world is so fucked up, if you actually think killing the messenger makes the reality of the message go away. That is some premium magical thinking you have going there!
4) "Bill Nye is a known shill/hippocrite! Everything he says is a lie!"
From whom exactly does he accept money in exchange for his activism (since he is "known" to be a shill, this should be easy.) and in what respects is he a hippocrite? Because he uses electricity? (There are carbon neutral means of generating it, and he has expressed a preferrence for this. How then is his message hippocritical here?) Because he drives a car? (There are some very nice looking electric vehicles these days. I dont know for sure if he drives one, but I would expect that he would prefer to use one over a destructive internal combustion vehicle, given his rhetoric. Unless you have proof he drives a gas guzzler, this isnt hippocricy either.) Seriously, where does this come from? Hopefully it isnt imagination land.
5) "He and Al Gore........"
Guilt by association and bandwagon fallacies. Try to be intellectually honest here folks.
I grow tired of hearing all these absurd rationalisms for denying the realities happening all around us, just so we can pretend that everything is OK, when all the data shows it most certainly is not.
I know this is old, but you clearly didnt read his published paper.
The explanation of requiring accelleration to accomodate the wavelength needs of the EM radiation gives a reasonable explanation for hubble expansion, which causes redshifting-- exactly the thing you were complaining about. (basically, the observable universe isnt large enough to accomodate all mathematical modes of emitted EM, so the radiation causes the universe to accellerate, similarly to how the modes cannot fit at the narrow end of the EMdrive's cavity, but can at the wide end. The difference is converted into accelleration, albeit a very small one. This explains hubble expansion without the need for dark energy.)
The effect WILL be miniscule, but at cosmic scales, the miniscule adds up-- and you get hubble expansion.
Try reading the literature next time before asserting that something is "unrelated."
Here's a possible use case, but it feels awefully retro:
Use one of the many free ramdisk drivers out there, and have it load a minimalist ntfs image on boot. (usually only 1 to 3mb, depending.) This image is then junction mounted in all the places windows wants to write temporary files. Just keep in mind that the usual places where this would get the most benefit (CBS.log and pals) were designed so horribly that softlinks and junctions will break windows, because microsoft does not know how to make a quality product anymore.
For browser cache, downloads folders, and things of that nature it still looks very promising though.
Other uses for that much RAM:
assuming you are running linux, you can set up a bootable ramdisk for "legacy OSes" (9x, DOS, and pals) that is heavily compressed in its storage location using memdisk. You start it like you would a kernel, and the initrd is the disk image you want to load. It accepts gziped images. This would let you run real legacy games in their original legacy environments, if you so wished. (This is also useful for when your older relatives insist on using your computer and complain about modern windows. You can throw them in a ramdisk'ed win98se with a lot of 3rd party patches that they simply cannot break, and do so without much risk to your actual system.)
There's also lossless video capture to think about, where you need a device with high enough bandwidth to accept very large, time sensitive data streams getting written. A huge honking ramdisk does great there. (conversion from analog video, such as say 35mm film, to archival quality lossless video codecs and the like, as well as people wanting to convert VHS to something digital, while being lossless. For lossy applications, a set-top converter is the way to go.)
Then of course, there's the usual memory hogging applications like transactional database daemons, and scientific number crunching simulations, but your typical user isnt going to be running those.
The real killer app for that much ram would be a powertool option to manually commit that memory to disk caching of a specific volume, with manual flush to disk being possible. Currently, disk caching subsystems dont expose that level of per-disk control, so the same caches are used for spinny disks that are used for write wearing SSDs. Having a dedicated cache pool with enough ram to properly back it, with per-disk manual flushing would be useful. (On windows, the caching subsystem does not expose any user configurable elements that I am aware of. On linux, you can poke some values in the system variables, but these are still global, and not per-disk. sync command flushes all caches to all disks, not just a specific one. This level of control is not currently available to my knowledge.)
When there is a resource available, people will find ways to make use of that resource.
This DOES happen, due to redshifting of the object moving away from us due to hubble inflation.
The longer you look at a a very distant object, the redder it appears. The rate of change for objects not at the extreme edge of the observable universe is nearly undetectable, but distant supernovae do indeed have changes in oberved wavelengths proportional to the hubble expansion between source and observer.
It may actually explain the inflationary period, where rate of inflation was so absurdly large that it totally outpaced gravitational attraction.
(Neutrinos have *real* mass. The neutrino density just a few picoseconds after the big bang would give the universe a density higher than that permitted by its diameter according to the shwartzchild limit. The universe not only continued to expand (instead of collapsing into a singularity again) it did so explosively then slowed down mysteriously as its diameter increased.)
To my knowledge, nothing adequately explained the inflationary period, but this might.
A FOSS created server daemon that permits normal citizens to make digital libraries available with exclusive locking and DRM to prevent library replication.
As far as I can tell from the US copyright law concerning public access libraries, there is nothing to prohibit this.
www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108
Imagine, if instead of Torrent based replication, we simply had enough digital libraries made public to digitally check out any work ever made, and do it completely aboveboard, at any time.
The deal is, under current law, you dont need to be funded by the state to operate as a public library. You just need the license/ownership of the materials, and decide to make them available-- at least that's how the pertinent section of us copyright law reads to me:
www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108
Nowhere does it say that you have to be funded or supported by the state. The provision is the providence of public access as part of a collection for the benefit of the public.
There are regional requirements to operating a public library that pertain to individual states that certainly apply, but at the federal level, there is fuck all to prevent somebody with a large enough private collection of media to declare it a public access library, and have all the necessary federal protections that offers.
Given the efforts that the *AAs have gone through with the "making available" legal argument, I find this kind of surprising. The intent of the making available argument is 180 degrees away from the wording of this section.
Due to this, I expect that the authors guild, and the AAs to shit bloody bricks if a private citizen created a public access library of their personal collection of media materials, as described under this section of US copyright law.
They dont go after state and federally funded libraries, because of the bad press this would cause-- but I definately see them trying to quash the creation of new public libraries dealing exclusively in digital versions of works undertaken by private individuals and private enterprises.
Given that the costs of data storage and bandwidth are the main expenses in a digital only library, it is well within the bounds of reason that ordinary citizens can realistically create and manage such pubic collections--
This is essentially what Google has done: Created a massive body of publicly searchable materials, without state/government fincancing.
And lo-- the the authors guild shit a bloody gold brick over it.
I note how there is no requirement mandating that works be of expired copyright, or any such related restriction. Something the publishers are really butthurt over it seems.
The library shouldnt pay anything besides bandwidth and storage costs after the initial purchase. Thats how it works with paper books, why should it be any different for digital data?
The publisher is NOT entitled to endlessly recurring fees for access.
In the old days (pre internet), the only way to get a book was in the dead tree variety. Back then, the world still recognized that free public access to paid periodicals, reference materials, and even works of cultural fiction resulted in a more well rounded, better educated, and more cultured public.
To facilitate that noble goal, exceptions to publisher exclusivity for public libraries came into being. As long as the physical books were never duplicated, just kept in good repair, and purchased from the publisher at onset, these operations were and still are perfectly legal and have provided tremendous public good.
Now, we find ourselves in a pickle:
These days, it is possible to purchase a "book" that has no physical substance whatsoever. Ebooks are here to stay, and this is what I wonder.
If a person wanted to buy all those ebooks directly from the publisher, set up a digital lockout system to prevent simultanous viewing (to better approximate the book being physically checked out) do you suppose these author's guild types would consider the creation of such a digital library above board?
Recent history with the motion picture association and the recording industry of america suggests that the answer is a resounding "FUCK NO." These people have lobbied hard to get congress to evaluate the contents as being provided as a service with a highly restrictive license, not as something that can have steward/ownership transferred. In fact, these people have lobbied hard to make any such 3rd party, after market transfers "illegal,", by forbidding them in an absurd license agreement.
As a consequence, I feel obliged to tell these poor, wounded darlings the following:
Either allow public access ebook checkouts for digital libraries (that bend over backwards to prevent concurrent access, and probably even additional copy protection you did not have to pay for, out of courtesy to you, free of charge) or shut the fuck up when somebody with deeper pockets than you (and can fight you in court) offers a similar modern public service.
No, that doesn't mean "you have to be this big to make a deal with us"-- the days of that shit are over. The cost to reproduce a digital download are less than a cent per copy. There are no overhead costs beyond the initial production, and the library will be footing all subsequent bills for data retention and bandwidth for public access. The way the laws covering libraries in the US are worded, anyone can open one.
Your lust for money is what is destroying american culture. Open access is what helped create it.
I wonder, but very much doubt about the prospects of a modern lending library with digital versions. I have the firmly bases suspicion that you would consider such a modern version of a classic cultural staple to be a dire threat to your financials, because of your addiction to exclusivity, and recent binging on extended copyright terms and laws.
I also wonder, what do you intend to replace the public library WITH, given that attendence of these august organizations is declining in the digital age, and that as a consequence, they are doomed to posterity.
Not entirely true. Blizzard very much hates PvPGN, which emulates battle.net for a number of their very old titles.
Blizzard is like any other spoiled modern corporation. They feel they are entitled to change the terms of the agreements they make, darth vader style, and dont feel even the tiniest bit bad about it. But, should end users try any such thing, or try to weaken their supreme overlord position, even on properties that simply cannot be monetized any longer, and they react like you just fucked their mother with an actual jackhammer and put her in the hospital.
Oh yes.. I remember my community college (NOT ITT!) experience with Novell's educational materials.
The books? Giant outlines with precisely zero actual literary value. Just an outline of the lecture topics. Not worth the paper they were printed on.
The networking implementation itself? Not bad in concept, but the implementation had serious issues.
for starters, the requirement that every object in the NDS tree have an administering object can be circumvented with a simple arrangement: Two user accounts that administer each other, but are not subject to the global admin. This would allow an intruder the power to set up a PERMANENT foothold in the network, and the global admin wouldnt even see them, let alone have admin power to remove them.
Then there are the strange loop problems with NDS contexts as introduced with alias objects. Basically, you can create endless context trees if you do it right. NDS should stop this as it can cause strange authentication behavior when you exhaust the context space.
The issue with creating print queues on system volumes. This should never be allowed, due to the issue of full system volumes downing the network. A malicious print job, and bam-- network down.
Thankfully nobody uses that shit anymore.
I remember having the "we really should be studying NT domain admin, not novell nds admin." with the instructors and getting nowhere. Look which one is still around. Hmmmmm.
I hate to think this way, because it kills brain cells and makes me dumber-- but:
There *IS* something that gets consumed (in the scarcity sense) from being exposed to media. That being, the original state of having never been exposed to that media. A kind of media "virginity."
That "virginity" is valuable to media companies. Without it, they have a much more difficult time monetizing known lacklustre properties, like shitty movies and album filler music. A public that has lost that virginity wont go see the shitty flop of a movie in the theater, so the media company loses money when they invest poorly in a script, etc.
This is the single biggest thing that gets lost from things like theater cams.
A theater cam is in no way a suitable substitute for a quality theater experience. What it DOES do is let you know if you will get a good show at the theater without having to drop the theater showing cash. It lets you go to the movie being an old whore, and not a niave virgin.
While true that the GPL makes use of copyright law to have power behind it, the purpose of the license is to be a bullwark against the kind of madness that Rightscorp and pals are up to.
Also, with software the potential to completely rebrand the code under a completely new name and claim it as new and proprietary exists. THAT is what the GPL is out to stop. Not small scale redistribution. Last I checked, music pirates arent out taking EG, Madonna's album backlog and reselling them wholesale under a fake artists name and claiming them as original works. The closest you are going to find in that vein is the "club mix" scene. The club mixers are a tiny minority of "music pirates" though, and NOT who rightscorp and their ilk are targeting here.
Like most copyright shills you fail to see the forest for the trees.
The GPL exists because of copyright bullshit, for the purposes of preventing software freedoms from being trampled on.
Without copyright bullshit, there would be no need for it, and free software makers would use BSD license instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Would chlorophyll work?
Probably, just not ideally.
The spectra best utilized by green plants on earth are "red" and "Yellow" light, respectively. These spectra represent the bulk of the useful spectra recieved on earth, and are why green plants appear green. (they absorb nearly everything in the red spectrum, and most of the yellow, reflecting blue and some of the yellow, making a green colored surface.)
The bulk of the visible light around a red dwarf will be "red". Photosynthetic earth plants will be able to make use of it, but inefficiently. (yellow light carries more energy per photon. Chlorophyll is able to absorb multiple red photons to make up for the difference in energy, and still catalyze the reactions needed, but less activity will be possible without a congruent increase in the total number of photons delivered.) Thus only some plant forms would be able to thrive there.
This is assuming surface conditions suited to plantlife anyway.
On a planet dominated by a heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere held temperate by greenhouse effects, sending oxygen respiring photosynthetic plants would have dire long term consequences for the global climate as the global average temperatures drop precipitously. Unless there is A LOT of dirty manufacturing and other carbon unfriendly activities conducted by humans to put the greenhouse gasses back, the planet will go into a botanically induced iceage.
But yes. Chlorophyll should work with the light emitted from red dwarfs, just not efficiently.
Amarid plastic (poly amide) is thermostable at venus's surface temperature, and is theoretically capable of being biosynthesized.
It turns into "goop" when mixed with strong acids (it does not have a melting point. it is spun into fiber after mixing it with HCl, which then evaporates in the spinning process, leaving fiber.), and would turn into a gelatinous sea on the surface of venus.
The process would take millions of years, but would punctuate venus' otherwise purpetual cycle of greenhouse heating by effectively sinking the carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid components of the atmosphere.
Above the cloud haze layer, temperature and pressure are comparable to earth's surface. Only the acidic and dry conditions need to be accounted for in the engineered extremophile microbes. Both could be effectively handled with a sulphur respiration cycle based biochemistry.
We are at a level of biotechnology that we could engineer such microbes and deliver them to the venusian atmosphere.
We DONT (and wont) do this because the planetary society feels that barren, lifeless balls of hellishly hot acidic gas covering pools of molten lead and tortured silicates are still of scientific value, and need to not be disturbed. It is considered unethical (somehow) to contaminate these worlds with terrestrial life, engineered or not.
Heaven forbid that humanity becomes the progenitor of life on another planet. Unthinkable.
Now, with that in mind, I wonder why we send useless crap into space (like little metal figurines, and golden records) and not substantially more interesting things, like freezedried samples of microbes, tardigrades, and other interesting earth flora in sealed containers.
Which would you be more excited (as a scientist) to get from another species: A metal figurine of unknown significance, or a well catalogued sampling of hardy lifeforms from a distant star system, ready for study?
Really, I have to wonder about my species sometimes.
In the case of brown dwarf, then there is the potential for a very thick atmosphere on the candidate planet.
A venus hothouse atmosphere with a very dim star could result in temperate climate conditions. Just not very bright.
Uhmm, before the nova both of those candidate classes would have not been habitable.
Hot neptunes would have crushing pressure and denaturating temperatures.
Kuiper belt analogs would have been balls of ice.
Life would have a chance to start AFTER the nova. Dont expect anything more complex than germs.
Perhaps not entirely true.
If these were originally hot neptunes, then the death of the parent star would have blown most of the atmosphere off allright, but would leave enough behind to be interesting.
Definately a study candidate. This class of planet is predicted, but has not (to my knowledge) been confirmed to exist yet.
There is also the potential for orbital migration after the star loses its cool and blows its top like that-- Objects that are analogous to our kuiper belt objects having thier orbits disturbed by the nova, then falling in on oblique angles, and getting captured at lower orbits.
If we have learned anything at all from the population of extrasolar planets detected so far, it is that systems like ours are the minority, so theories based on how our system evolved need questioning. In many systems observed to date, very large planets have transmigrated closer to the star they orbit, for instance.
These objects need not be giant balls of glass, just because their star went nova.
I see the word "metadata" thrown around like it means something innocuous.
This makes me very disturbed.
Metadata, is data about data.
That can take a wide universe of forms. It could be something as simple as an access statistic, to a simple parity bit for each byte on media, down to full data protection correction codes to prevent corruption of the data. (say RLL encoding, or the full parity stripe set from a disk array-- or both together.)
All of those are metadata.
Some are more or less harmless as individual pieces of information-- such as the access log for a file.
Others allow you to completely reconstitute the data they describe, and basically are functionally the same as giving them the data.
Blandly just saying "it's just metadata!" is ignorant at best, and willfully disingenuous at worst.
Given that these agencies have some very intelligent/capable people working for them, I cannot attribute it to incompetence. I have to seriously consider blatant malice.
Given that these people are able to make a quantification of exactly how much Snowden accellerated encryption adoption, this means that they have been actively observing and metricising encryption adoption for some time, otherwise they would have no baseline from which to make such a detetmination. Since this is a requirement for their metric to be accurate, coupled with how angry they are about it changing ahead of their projections, it means that these people are clearly not ignorant, and are actively engaged in malicious intent to violate privacy, and to stay ahead of advancements that would lock them out.
The "metadata" rhetoric came straight out of one of these agencies. I know what forms metadata can take, and it is not all just benign metrics data. What kinds of metadata do they collect, and how do they use it?
Do they use it to reconstitute messages of people they do not have warrants for?
If so, they are violating the right of privacy and security of papers and posessions of the people they are collecting metadata on.
"Just metadata!" is not justification for looking aside. There IS something to see there citizen, do NOT just move along.
See for instance: This bit of cleverness.
The feds want to know about the contents of my voicemail mailbox. They dont have a warrant, and have been given absurd power to demand "metadata" without a warrant.
They can thus demand:
Information about the file format used by voice messaging system.
The dates and times of the messages.
The disk parity data for the files implicated, and the data stored in the block inode (whatever filesystem this.) which gives what blocks were written, and in what order-- along with total file size, and some other useful tidbits, like parity data, and if compression was used, the entries of the dictionary and how well each block was compressed.
With this information, the possible solution space for reconstruction is narrowed down from the total permutation of a file of n length, to one of n length which follows the conventions and behaviors of that file format, with data comprised of atoms contained in the dictionary, further constrained by internal granularity structure imposed by how well compressed each block was, and then finally on each byte, with even-odd parity or disk-stripe parity.
The resulting reduced solution space takes a previously insurmountable problem, and renders it into a "computationally expensive, but reasonably possible" one.
The more useful pieces of metadata they can bring against it, the greater their odds of successfully reconstructing the data they want without needing a warrant.
No. I will not accept "it's just metadata!" as an excuse.
They need a warrant for metadata as well, as far as I am concerned.
Seriously,
While I applaud this ISP for waking up and smelling the sewer, this is what happens when unfettered power is given to any group of people with an interest and a will to enforce it against others.
You can think about it this way:
The copyright holders and their shell organizations were initially granted a boon from society in exchange for continuing to produce new works. This boon gave them legitimate grounds to assert that society owed them something. This initial boon was not enough for them though, and through various methods, they have incrementally demanded, and obtained more and more from society, and society so far has accepted the increased demands.
We are now to the point where the demands are absurd.
The copyright holders and their satelites act like you are trying to put them into a sweatshop if you suggest that they have overstepped what they are actually owed by society, while simultaneously taking unilateral and extrajudicial action against society to obtain what it wants.
I propose that the next time they demand copyright reform, we give it to them, but actually reform it so that this abusive relationship is properly reset and expectations are forced back into the realm of reality.
Writing a book does not make you entitled to a heredetary estate. The purpose of copyright is to keep your lights on, your bills paid, and food on your table so that you can continue to write. Nothing more. It is not a free ride for either you or your children. It is not providence for limitless profits by a corporate body either, and any corporation profiting from copyright is going against the foundational concept of copyright as an allowance between authors and the rest of society. (EG, to extract a profit from the situation resulting from properly maintained copyright allowances, the corporations would have to be taking food off the author's table, and making him unable to pay his bills, because that is all the more copyright protections should be providing to authors.)
The actions of this ISP are laudible, but it is too little, too late on that front.
What needs to happen is for the copyright cartels to get busted into the stoneage for vigilanteism, racketeering, and barratry, followed by REAL copyright reform.
I think you spoke too soon there friend.
Downmodded twice now. Troll and Redudnant, respectively.
There is a difference between climate and weather bro.
What you see outside your window right now is weather.
Recurring trends in weather patterns over time is climate.
We have been collecting data long enough to have information on changes in climate. Your denial of this based on current weather conditions is a nonsequitor.
Amazing how very shortly after this feed gets put up, the first postings all follow the MO of the petro-chemical industry and the GOP...
So, let us address a few things here.
1)
"Bill Nye isn't a 'Science Guy', he just holds a BS degree!"
Assuming for a moment that we overlook the obviously implied "appeal to authority" fallacy this involves, he could be a bumbling idiot with cabbage in his beard that talks to empty chairs-- The data he directs people to is correct, and will continue being correct no matter what degrees or qualifications he has. So, discounting this obvious fallacy, there's buried ad-hominem goodness there too. Shooting the messenger like this does not make climate change less real, nor the message inaccurate.
2)
"The climate change crazies want to force their religion on us!!"
Science is not a religion. It is a process, and a damned cuthroat one too. It might surprise you to know that the scientifically literate population have known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas since 1909, and have raised the red flag on industrial release of this gas through fossil fuel combustion since the 20's, predicting mass climate change. Here it is, a century later, and we have bulletproof data showing exactly this. What exactly consistutes religion to you? The belief in something without proof (which is what denialism is, given the massive amounts of experimental and climatological data collected so far showing that fossil fuel use is cumulatively deleterious to the climactic environment) or observing repeatable phenomena, creating testable hypotheses, and then strongly advising the world based on those findings? (science, and in this case-- the message of 99% of the world's climate scientists.)
3)
"Release XXX from prison so they can (euphamism for harm) Bill Nye!"
Seriously? You advocate physical violence and harm to silence a message you find disfavorable? For real? No wonder the world is so fucked up, if you actually think killing the messenger makes the reality of the message go away. That is some premium magical thinking you have going there!
4)
"Bill Nye is a known shill/hippocrite! Everything he says is a lie!"
From whom exactly does he accept money in exchange for his activism (since he is "known" to be a shill, this should be easy.) and in what respects is he a hippocrite? Because he uses electricity? (There are carbon neutral means of generating it, and he has expressed a preferrence for this. How then is his message hippocritical here?) Because he drives a car? (There are some very nice looking electric vehicles these days. I dont know for sure if he drives one, but I would expect that he would prefer to use one over a destructive internal combustion vehicle, given his rhetoric. Unless you have proof he drives a gas guzzler, this isnt hippocricy either.) Seriously, where does this come from? Hopefully it isnt imagination land.
5)
"He and Al Gore........"
Guilt by association and bandwagon fallacies. Try to be intellectually honest here folks.
I grow tired of hearing all these absurd rationalisms for denying the realities happening all around us, just so we can pretend that everything is OK, when all the data shows it most certainly is not.
I know this is old, but you clearly didnt read his published paper.
The explanation of requiring accelleration to accomodate the wavelength needs of the EM radiation gives a reasonable explanation for hubble expansion, which causes redshifting-- exactly the thing you were complaining about. (basically, the observable universe isnt large enough to accomodate all mathematical modes of emitted EM, so the radiation causes the universe to accellerate, similarly to how the modes cannot fit at the narrow end of the EMdrive's cavity, but can at the wide end. The difference is converted into accelleration, albeit a very small one. This explains hubble expansion without the need for dark energy.)
The effect WILL be miniscule, but at cosmic scales, the miniscule adds up-- and you get hubble expansion.
Try reading the literature next time before asserting that something is "unrelated."
I would think that there is.
Here's a possible use case, but it feels awefully retro:
Use one of the many free ramdisk drivers out there, and have it load a minimalist ntfs image on boot. (usually only 1 to 3mb, depending.) This image is then junction mounted in all the places windows wants to write temporary files. Just keep in mind that the usual places where this would get the most benefit (CBS.log and pals) were designed so horribly that softlinks and junctions will break windows, because microsoft does not know how to make a quality product anymore.
For browser cache, downloads folders, and things of that nature it still looks very promising though.
Other uses for that much RAM:
assuming you are running linux, you can set up a bootable ramdisk for "legacy OSes" (9x, DOS, and pals) that is heavily compressed in its storage location using memdisk. You start it like you would a kernel, and the initrd is the disk image you want to load. It accepts gziped images. This would let you run real legacy games in their original legacy environments, if you so wished. (This is also useful for when your older relatives insist on using your computer and complain about modern windows. You can throw them in a ramdisk'ed win98se with a lot of 3rd party patches that they simply cannot break, and do so without much risk to your actual system.)
There's also lossless video capture to think about, where you need a device with high enough bandwidth to accept very large, time sensitive data streams getting written. A huge honking ramdisk does great there. (conversion from analog video, such as say 35mm film, to archival quality lossless video codecs and the like, as well as people wanting to convert VHS to something digital, while being lossless. For lossy applications, a set-top converter is the way to go.)
Then of course, there's the usual memory hogging applications like transactional database daemons, and scientific number crunching simulations, but your typical user isnt going to be running those.
The real killer app for that much ram would be a powertool option to manually commit that memory to disk caching of a specific volume, with manual flush to disk being possible. Currently, disk caching subsystems dont expose that level of per-disk control, so the same caches are used for spinny disks that are used for write wearing SSDs. Having a dedicated cache pool with enough ram to properly back it, with per-disk manual flushing would be useful. (On windows, the caching subsystem does not expose any user configurable elements that I am aware of. On linux, you can poke some values in the system variables, but these are still global, and not per-disk. sync command flushes all caches to all disks, not just a specific one. This level of control is not currently available to my knowledge.)
When there is a resource available, people will find ways to make use of that resource.
This DOES happen, due to redshifting of the object moving away from us due to hubble inflation.
The longer you look at a a very distant object, the redder it appears. The rate of change for objects not at the extreme edge of the observable universe is nearly undetectable, but distant supernovae do indeed have changes in oberved wavelengths proportional to the hubble expansion between source and observer.
It may actually explain the inflationary period, where rate of inflation was so absurdly large that it totally outpaced gravitational attraction.
(Neutrinos have *real* mass. The neutrino density just a few picoseconds after the big bang would give the universe a density higher than that permitted by its diameter according to the shwartzchild limit. The universe not only continued to expand (instead of collapsing into a singularity again) it did so explosively then slowed down mysteriously as its diameter increased.)
To my knowledge, nothing adequately explained the inflationary period, but this might.
What I would love to see:
A FOSS created server daemon that permits normal citizens to make digital libraries available with exclusive locking and DRM to prevent library replication.
As far as I can tell from the US copyright law concerning public access libraries, there is nothing to prohibit this.
www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108
Imagine, if instead of Torrent based replication, we simply had enough digital libraries made public to digitally check out any work ever made, and do it completely aboveboard, at any time.
That's what I would love to see.
The deal is, under current law, you dont need to be funded by the state to operate as a public library. You just need the license/ownership of the materials, and decide to make them available-- at least that's how the pertinent section of us copyright law reads to me:
www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108
Nowhere does it say that you have to be funded or supported by the state. The provision is the providence of public access as part of a collection for the benefit of the public.
There are regional requirements to operating a public library that pertain to individual states that certainly apply, but at the federal level, there is fuck all to prevent somebody with a large enough private collection of media to declare it a public access library, and have all the necessary federal protections that offers.
Given the efforts that the *AAs have gone through with the "making available" legal argument, I find this kind of surprising. The intent of the making available argument is 180 degrees away from the wording of this section.
Due to this, I expect that the authors guild, and the AAs to shit bloody bricks if a private citizen created a public access library of their personal collection of media materials, as described under this section of US copyright law.
They dont go after state and federally funded libraries, because of the bad press this would cause-- but I definately see them trying to quash the creation of new public libraries dealing exclusively in digital versions of works undertaken by private individuals and private enterprises.
Given that the costs of data storage and bandwidth are the main expenses in a digital only library, it is well within the bounds of reason that ordinary citizens can realistically create and manage such pubic collections--
This is essentially what Google has done: Created a massive body of publicly searchable materials, without state/government fincancing.
And lo-- the the authors guild shit a bloody gold brick over it.
I note how there is no requirement mandating that works be of expired copyright, or any such related restriction. Something the publishers are really butthurt over it seems.
The library shouldnt pay anything besides bandwidth and storage costs after the initial purchase. Thats how it works with paper books, why should it be any different for digital data?
The publisher is NOT entitled to endlessly recurring fees for access.
You know, Things like this make me wonder:
In the old days (pre internet), the only way to get a book was in the dead tree variety. Back then, the world still recognized that free public access to paid periodicals, reference materials, and even works of cultural fiction resulted in a more well rounded, better educated, and more cultured public.
To facilitate that noble goal, exceptions to publisher exclusivity for public libraries came into being. As long as the physical books were never duplicated, just kept in good repair, and purchased from the publisher at onset, these operations were and still are perfectly legal and have provided tremendous public good.
Now, we find ourselves in a pickle:
These days, it is possible to purchase a "book" that has no physical substance whatsoever. Ebooks are here to stay, and this is what I wonder.
If a person wanted to buy all those ebooks directly from the publisher, set up a digital lockout system to prevent simultanous viewing (to better approximate the book being physically checked out) do you suppose these author's guild types would consider the creation of such a digital library above board?
Recent history with the motion picture association and the recording industry of america suggests that the answer is a resounding "FUCK NO." These people have lobbied hard to get congress to evaluate the contents as being provided as a service with a highly restrictive license, not as something that can have steward/ownership transferred. In fact, these people have lobbied hard to make any such 3rd party, after market transfers "illegal,", by forbidding them in an absurd license agreement.
As a consequence, I feel obliged to tell these poor, wounded darlings the following:
Either allow public access ebook checkouts for digital libraries (that bend over backwards to prevent concurrent access, and probably even additional copy protection you did not have to pay for, out of courtesy to you, free of charge) or shut the fuck up when somebody with deeper pockets than you (and can fight you in court) offers a similar modern public service.
No, that doesn't mean "you have to be this big to make a deal with us"-- the days of that shit are over. The cost to reproduce a digital download are less than a cent per copy. There are no overhead costs beyond the initial production, and the library will be footing all subsequent bills for data retention and bandwidth for public access. The way the laws covering libraries in the US are worded, anyone can open one.
Your lust for money is what is destroying american culture.
Open access is what helped create it.
I wonder, but very much doubt about the prospects of a modern lending library with digital versions. I have the firmly bases suspicion that you would consider such a modern version of a classic cultural staple to be a dire threat to your financials, because of your addiction to exclusivity, and recent binging on extended copyright terms and laws.
I also wonder, what do you intend to replace the public library WITH, given that attendence of these august organizations is declining in the digital age, and that as a consequence, they are doomed to posterity.
Not entirely true. Blizzard very much hates PvPGN, which emulates battle.net for a number of their very old titles.
Blizzard is like any other spoiled modern corporation. They feel they are entitled to change the terms of the agreements they make, darth vader style, and dont feel even the tiniest bit bad about it. But, should end users try any such thing, or try to weaken their supreme overlord position, even on properties that simply cannot be monetized any longer, and they react like you just fucked their mother with an actual jackhammer and put her in the hospital.
Oh yes.. I remember my community college (NOT ITT!) experience with Novell's educational materials.
The books? Giant outlines with precisely zero actual literary value. Just an outline of the lecture topics. Not worth the paper they were printed on.
The networking implementation itself? Not bad in concept, but the implementation had serious issues.
for starters, the requirement that every object in the NDS tree have an administering object can be circumvented with a simple arrangement: Two user accounts that administer each other, but are not subject to the global admin. This would allow an intruder the power to set up a PERMANENT foothold in the network, and the global admin wouldnt even see them, let alone have admin power to remove them.
Then there are the strange loop problems with NDS contexts as introduced with alias objects. Basically, you can create endless context trees if you do it right. NDS should stop this as it can cause strange authentication behavior when you exhaust the context space.
The issue with creating print queues on system volumes. This should never be allowed, due to the issue of full system volumes downing the network. A malicious print job, and bam-- network down.
Thankfully nobody uses that shit anymore.
I remember having the "we really should be studying NT domain admin, not novell nds admin." with the instructors and getting nowhere. Look which one is still around. Hmmmmm.
Oh that one's easy. Just wait in line at the DMV. It's a wonder satan himself hasnt shown up there half a dozen times already.
The ISPs just want to cut out the middle man. Instead of service that makes you shit yourself, they sell you service that is made of shit. ;)
I hate to think this way, because it kills brain cells and makes me dumber-- but:
There *IS* something that gets consumed (in the scarcity sense) from being exposed to media. That being, the original state of having never been exposed to that media. A kind of media "virginity."
That "virginity" is valuable to media companies. Without it, they have a much more difficult time monetizing known lacklustre properties, like shitty movies and album filler music. A public that has lost that virginity wont go see the shitty flop of a movie in the theater, so the media company loses money when they invest poorly in a script, etc.
This is the single biggest thing that gets lost from things like theater cams.
A theater cam is in no way a suitable substitute for a quality theater experience. What it DOES do is let you know if you will get a good show at the theater without having to drop the theater showing cash. It lets you go to the movie being an old whore, and not a niave virgin.
The media companies, naturally, hate that.
Your argument it twisted beyond all reason.
While true that the GPL makes use of copyright law to have power behind it, the purpose of the license is to be a bullwark against the kind of madness that Rightscorp and pals are up to.
Also, with software the potential to completely rebrand the code under a completely new name and claim it as new and proprietary exists. THAT is what the GPL is out to stop. Not small scale redistribution. Last I checked, music pirates arent out taking EG, Madonna's album backlog and reselling them wholesale under a fake artists name and claiming them as original works. The closest you are going to find in that vein is the "club mix" scene. The club mixers are a tiny minority of "music pirates" though, and NOT who rightscorp and their ilk are targeting here.
Like most copyright shills you fail to see the forest for the trees.
The GPL exists because of copyright bullshit, for the purposes of preventing software freedoms from being trampled on.
Without copyright bullshit, there would be no need for it, and free software makers would use BSD license instead.
Also, the battle.net protocol used for DII is already broken, and fully emulatable. (In Europe. Illegal in the US.)
Grew out of a now defunct project called BnetD. Now called PvPGN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
DII installs do not know the difference between a PvPGN server and the real Battle.net server farm.