Re:A Clean Alternative
on
Solar Sails
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· Score: 1
Actually, there's a simpler way to do this. What people always forget in these sailing analogies is that space (at least our solar system) is a rotating system. So if you want to go inward, simply turn your sail 45 degrees to the sun to oppose your orbital velocity. Voila -- you fall deeper into the gravity well.
However, for moving outward from the Earth, it may be more efficient to make use of the solar wind than radiation pressure. Tacking against the solar wind it trickier, though.
Dude! The model names refer to Chinstrap, King, and Emperor... Penguins! In increasing order of size, too.
So they aren't necessarily smoking crack. Though on the other hand, I have to wonder about any company willing to ship you a computer that comes standard with hardware that is not and likely will not be supported by the OS. Built-in winmodems, for instance -- but one of these models (the Chinstrap, I think) uses an audio chipset that only has buggy early-alpha support.
Believe me, plenty of people would like to. Thing is, space-based interferometry is a tricky business. I believe the first mission to seriously test this technology will be this one, scheduled for 2005. Once space-based interferometry gets developed, though, you're going to see all sorts of cool science come out of these missions, especially since the probes are relatively cheap to build. Just tricky.
I, for one, am eagerly awaiting 10^9 meter baseline radio interferometers. Also, if you build an optical interferometer of that kind of scale, you can pick out the canals on Mars from Alpha Centauri. Or vice-versa.
Firstly, I don't see why there isn't room for multiple projects in this area. Mini-GRAIL doesn't seem to be starving for resources, so I'd say they're not being that adversely affected by the attention that LIGO is receiving.
Secondly, LIGO and Mini-GRAIL are searching for entirely different phenomena. LIGO is sensitive to low-frequency resonant modes with very low amplitude, and as such are (with luck) going to detect neutron star mergers, black-hole collapses, and such. Mini-GRAIL has much lower sensitivity, and a narrow bandwidth at a fairly high frequency. They may see (and indeed, are looking for) axial asymmetries in spinning neutron stars.
Finally, while I wish Mini-GRAIL the best of luck, they are being very optimistic about the magnitude of perturbation they can detect, and the amplitude of the incident metric distortions in that band. With the size and type of detector they are using, the most powerful metric fluctuations likely to occur will still only produce signals on the order of 10 times the theoretical minimum noise, limited by quantum effects.
Nice theory, been proposed plenty of times before. Unfortunately, it just doesn't reconcile with current geological or archeological knowledge. We've got a pretty good handle on just what was alive at each point in the last 4 Gyrs. You'd better believe a technological civilization would be noticed.
As for pre-4 Gyrs, you ask? Nope, the Earth (and the rest of our solar system) actually did form about 5 Gyrs ago. The most reliable indicators are the U-238/Th-??? ratio, which gives the amount of time since our planet's material stopped being processed by cosmic rays in the interstellar medium, and studies of the sun, which according to all models should, in fact, be about 5 Gyrs old as well.
While the details of why the Red Spot exhibits such stability are still unknown, let me try and paint an explanation in broad strokes.
First off, Jupiter (at least it's outer atmosphere, presumably the whole thing) rotates very quickly, which leads to both a nasty coriolis force and significant velocity differentials in the middle-latitudes. Thus, cyclonic activity is favored.
Moreover, the Red Spot actually behaves a great deal like a terrestrial hurricane, except that it's always over warm water (not water, really, but the same convective processes occur) since there is no "land" and a considerable amount of heat flowing from the interior. Infrared pictures, as it happens, do show the Spot as a intense radiator.
Both computer models and observations suggest that this combination of factors in conducive to stable cyclones that will tend to swallow up smaller ones.
Life without sunlight -- not for long, if at all (theoretically, something could eat up complex compounds that randomly formed, but that would quickly be exhausted without sunlight to catalyze reactions).
However, that isn't the case here. First, this isn't just a collection of random gas giants. What was actually found was a loosely bound cluster of young dim stars, brown dwarfs, and gas giant planets. Based upon the surveyed area and the estimated size of the cluster, we're actually talking about several hundred objects. In fact, the reason they were looking there at all was because of spectroscopic anomalies in the vicinity of a visible star (the brightest star in the cluster).
Sure, planetary nebulae are pretty and impressive, but that's not what humanity should be worried about, at least as far as our sun goes. Current theories of stellar evolution point out that already, the Sol should have a sizable core of He "ash" that isn't yet hot enough to fuse into higher elements. As this He core grows, the pressure will build under the force of gravity, causing both the core temperature to rise and the sun to shrink. Solar luminosity could increase by a factor of 10% over the next 100 million years.
If this doesn't sound like much, recall that climatologists predict dire consequences of a 1-2 degree greenhouse effect. A 10% increase in solar output would cause much worse heating. However, we humans wouldn't even last that long. The seas regulate greenhouse gasses by locking up carbonates in seabed sediment; increase the temperature (a little) and the rate of deposition increases. Unfortunately, increase solar output by about 5% and this process runs away. Result: no more oxygen in our atmosphere. Or carbon dioxide, for that matter, so the forests won't help then. By the time Sol gets to +10% luminosity, we're talking about oceans at a rolling boil. The atmosphere fills up with water vapour, solar radiation spits this into oxygen and hydrogen (unfortunately the oxygen at this point is too late to do any good) and the hydrogen escapes to space. Poof -- 200 million years and the Earth is as dry as Venus, and possibly as acidic.
Well, if you're not an astrophotographer, at least go outside around local midnight the night of June 8 (tomorrow). Last time we had a CME this big, the auroras were visible as far south as the Carolinas. So much of the nation should be in for a show. I know I'll be outside.
The first thing I noticed in the article is that this deal still has (only) two steps left to go before getting implemented -- it has to be ratified by the European parliament, and then by the European Commission, before it goes into effect. So, I ask myself, is this deal still stoppable?
One would presume that the European Parliament is in some fasion amenable to public pressure, especially when an issue like this is likely to to generate a considerable outcry. But then again, a quick check gives me the suspicion that the Parliament is mostly controlled by (admittedly, European) business concerns. After all, in the last couple of months, we've had major decisions that relieve agribusinesses of liability related to genetically modified foods, and another ordering EU member nations to lower their trade barriers (to British chocolate products, in this case).
Now, this could go either way, in my view. (Mind you, I'm hardly an expert in European politics.) On the one side, you've got the big companies with American counterparts, arguing for this policy. On the other side, there are European companies who don't want to be at a disadvantage relative to the partnered companies. So, who knows which way this could go... though I'd tend to suspect inertia and American pressure will probably push this one through.
Too bad, I was kinda looking forward to the Europeans cracking down on American companies with European partners and lax privacy policies.
I suppose this could be taken to mean that they're going to open up the specs to this chipset. However, since they refer specifically to the LiViD projet, I am more inclined to suspect that this actually means that they're preparing (closed source?) codecs that interface with Lamp's plugin API. Which isn't terrible, but isn't an optimal solution, either.
But since we don't actually know anything, I'd say do one of two things: 1) Find an e-mail address for their marketing department (or, preferably, someone more informed) and politely ask for clarification, and 2) don't flame them in the meantime for not telling us more, not promising to open-source the spec, etc.
Now, the next tough question is could I find users on Freenet. Well, yes and no. There is at least one basic flaw I've found in the distribution mechanism. I'm not going to comment on it any further because it would just be re-engineered. So, to be brutally honest, I'll rely on the egos of the developer(s) to think that there is no problem and go ahead with the network as they've designed it. I'm sure they think they've done enough research to make it fool proof. If they go ahead as they are now- the answer is, yes, I can have software that will track back to the origination points of files.
Well, anybody know what he's talking about? I can't believe that nobody's brought this up already. If there's a way to track files back to their original posters, it really needs to be fixed before Freenet hits v1.0 and the protocol is solidified. After all, one of the points of the Freenet is to ensure that people can exercise their free speech without fear of reprisal and without worrying that their posting will be squelched by the powers-that-be.
N.b. Yes, I'm perfectly aware of the fact that it will also be used for IP violation, but that's not the point -- there's already no shortage of ways to violate IP law. There isn't a vast supply of ways to safely exercise free speech.
Looking at the Freenet protocol now, I don't see any obvious flaws that would let me track down a file's poster, but that's not surprising, given that the programmers have been working on this protocol for some time now. Anyone else want to check on this?
The previous threads indicated this would help with font anti-aliasing. How would an alpha channel help with text? Isn't this just for graphics?
As has been mentioned by XFree developers, the most direct way to implement font (and everything-else) antialiasing is to have an alpha channel to use as a mask. So if Gecko now has proper support for 8-bit alpha rendering, it shouldn't be terribly hard to use this code to render masks to antialias fonts in browser windows.
On the other hand, there is talk (again, among the XFree developers) of adding native server-level alpha channel support, which would make everybody's life easier in this respect -- plus, someone might finally be able to properly implement those silly transparent terminal windows.:-) More importantly, though, server level alpha support would make it much easier to render anti-aliased fonts, shaped windows, and such.
Instead of rebelling against Microsoft by violating their copyrights, someone out there should rebel by using Microsoft's published information to extend Samba and MIT Kerberos to support MS's extensions. Then you can fight the real legal battle over whether or not MS can release a public 'trade secret' and whether they can use a click-wrap license to restrict what you do with information. If you win those fights, Slashdot can remove MS documents all day long, and it won't matter one bit.
This would actually be a very bad idea. Regardless of whether or not Microsoft's claims of trade secret protection actually hold any water, their lawyers will happily continue to act as though they do. The result of this is that, if the Samba team went and implemented the PAC field using Microsoft's spec, they would be immediately sued for trade secret violation. The result: no updates to Samba for the next couple of years as all of their resources are sucked dry by MSFT's legal team.
In fact, even if they implemented the field through good old reverse engineering now, they'd still be in danger. Since the spec has been so widely distributed, if MSFT pressed a suit, the burden of proof would be on the Samba team's lawyers to either prove that the trade secret status was no longer applicable, or else prove that none of their programmers has been "tainted" by the spec.
It's been suggested before that MSFT actually released the spec in this way specifically to ensure that the Samba team would be unable to implement full interoperability. I certainly wouldn't put it past them.
Check out the sources for the 2.3 kernel tree. There are working drivers for a lot of the AC97 codecs already, and more are progressing towards stability. If you feel up to using the unstable kernel tree (just be careful - there's still a few serious flakynesses left) go for it, and if it doesn't work, submit bug reports. As far as OEMs go, I wouldn't look to see them supporting these crap-chips anytime too soon, though. The drivers are certainly not up to production quality yet. That said, I would venture to say that most (nay, practically all) of the linux boxes shipping these days are server systems, where sound doesn't matter and stability does. Heck, a bunch of server systems never even see X.
Only if it's code that has been modified. I can take gcc compile it, distribute the binaries and not give anybody any source code. Unless you can prove I modified it it is not a violation of the GPL. I am not required to provide a download site for every GPl-ed piece of software I distributed if the source is available elsewhere.
Well, you're partially right. If you actually read the GPL (v2 or higher), it says that if you commercially redistribute GPLed software, even unmodified, you cannot rely on a third party to distribute the source code; you must host it yourself. If you're just redistributing to a friend, or even giving away your own custom distribution for free, nobody requires that you offer the source.
I don't see why these processes couldn't be implemented in OSS work. They already are, in part. The "many eyes" principle ensures rigourous code checking.
The reason open software still tends to be buggy (at least compared to the space shuttle software) is partially the lack of a coherent plan for the software before writing begins. Most OSS projects start life as a small chunk of sloppy code that is interesting enough to attract the attention of other developers. Consider what would happen if, instead, a project began life as a high-level spec, and the specs were filled out through an open-source process before coding began. This could produce very sophisticated code quite quickly. It requires pretty good organization, though.
Interestingly, most large OSS projects use CVS repositories and bug-tracking software, which fill the role of the code and error databases mentioned in the article. So it would seem that the only thing standing between OSS and this kind of sophistication is the need for a coherent and detailed design for the software before coding starts.
That said, I doubt that this process would ever generate anything much more creative than a hardware driver. The Shuttle Group programmers themselves admit that the all-important process stifles creativity. If you think about it, considering the level of specification they've been given, their end-product is really little more than a device driver for the entire space shuttle. You would be hard-pressed to write something requiring real innovation this way. If you tried, you'd probably find that you spend the same amount of effort making the spec book for the software, which would end up with subtle bugs in the spec due to the evolutionary nature of the project, which would then get translated directly into software bugs in the code. Oh well...
Simple answer is no. You can't link a GPL program to closed libraries, unless they are part of the base OS distribution. This is how you can write GPL code for OS's like Solaris or MS Windows.
Fortunately for us all, you have this exactly backwards. A GPLed program if free to link to whatever it wants. The issue is with a non-GPL program linking to a GPL library, because doing so is considered (at least by the GPL) to be incorporating GPL code into your program - which makes a kind of sense, since the code is combined at runtime. Therefore, if you link to GPL code, you cannot distribute the software except under the terms of the GPL.
The LGPL is considered a "Lesser" license because it doesn't consider linking to be an incorporation of code, which means that software under any license, even a proprietary one, is allowed to link to it. That's why you usually see libraries placed under the LGPL - a library won't be successful, as in widely used, unless a variety of software can use it, which generally means allowing differently licensed software to use it.
With respect to the original problem, note that the GPL doesn't forbid a proprietary program from ever linking to a GPL library. For instance, Netscape Navigator for Linux was developed with the Motif libraries, which are proprietary. Now, I believe that the LessTif libraries are under the LGPL... but if I was to find a GPL library that implemented the Motif widget set, nothing would prevent me from running Navigator with this library. I could not, however, distribute Navigator with this library (and neither could Netscape, or anyone else). Nor could Netscape develop Navigator with this library without GPL-contaminating their code. But they used Motif; as long as I don't distribute Navigator with this GPL Motif clone, everything's alright.
Yes, I'm sure Hemos is aware of the fact that "picking up some Iridium satellites while they're up there" is a silly idea. But for the humor impaired, here's why -
Iridium satellites are in polar orbits; Mir orbits at an inclination of around 55 degrees or so. And at a different altitude. The change of orbit would be really expensive.
Iridium satellites are big. The mass of a craft capable of carrying "a few" of these things back to Earth would be substantial. We're talking a Shuttle-class mission, at best. You could change their orbits with some kind of tug, I suppose... but why?
In fact, but, why describes most of this hypothetical undertaking. The things are next to useless on the ground, unless somebody wants one for a museum. After all, I could build a ground-based device with pretty much the same capabilities as an Iridium satellite would have on the ground (i.e. a solar-powered microwave relay). And in space, they're not any more useful than they already are if you move them (arguably, they'd be less useful due to reduced coverage).
Conclusion: why bother? It would be a very expensive, very silly operation. Though now that I think about it, Red Hat might be interested. Rearrange their orbits just right, and they'd flash "LINUX" in the evening and morning sky every 90 minutes around the world. I envision Redmond being the first target.:-)
As far as I know, MirCorp (the Holland-based consortium backing the mission) is mainly planning to make money by selling advertising space and by taking people up for a few days. The figure I've heard bandied about is around $600K/day. Although, they're being very tight-lipped about who, if anybody, is signed up to go... which I tend to suspect means that they don't have any committed clients. That is why the RSA is being circumspect about the role of the cosmonauts up there right now - they might just fix some things and come home having prepared the Mir to go swimming in the Pacific, or they might stay up to get the place ready for guests.
Another thing that troubles me is that Energya is one of the largest members of MirCorp. As we all know, Energya (which has very tight connections to the Russian government) has significant motives other than profit to see the Mir stay in orbit, i.e. national/corporate pride, plus the possibility of revenue from a continuing stream of resupply missions to the station. In short, it's worth a lot to them for political and economic reasons, regardless of whether MirCorp ever succeeds in getting people up there.
I've seem lots of complaints about the safety of Mir, here and elsewhere. I might point out that, for the most part, there's nothing wrong with Mir that a good fixing-up and a regularly changed crew wouldn't solve. Yes, it leaks air, but not as fast as the Shuttle; plus, it doesn't leak corrosive volatiles like hydrazine, which the shuttle does. I heard that Energya, in fact, had considerable safety concerns with docking the shuttle to Mir for just these reasons, out of worry that the assorted stuff the Shuttle puts out might damage the station. As for the fire, etc, this mostly had to do with ancient equipment up there, which should certainly be replaced - and will be, if MirCorp can come up with the kind of money it seems to believe it can.
And there are no orbital telescopes that can be tasked for planet searching? How pathetic is that.
Don't be so quick to judge. You can't just point the Hubble at a star and see if there are any planets going around it. First of all, since they are so faint and close to the disk of the star, no existing instrument can resolve planets optically.
Secondly, the major method used to find planets (doppler shift in stellar spectra to detect the star's wobble) works as well from the ground as from space, and there are more telescopes on the ground.
Thirdly, you can't find earth-like planets this way, so this won't help any when it comes time to look for other planets to move to. But the sun won't explode, either, so we're fine for quite some time. The gradual heating of the sun will, if anything, probably mean that, in 100 Myr, when the Earth is uninhabitably hot, Mars should be plenty warm enough to support liquid water (just add air).
Fourthly, to see earth-like planets, you need huge interferometers. Look at Deep Space 3 for an example of what NASA is trying to do in this direction. But interferometers are hard, so it'll be a while before the planet finder goes on line, or is even technically feasible, for that matter.
BTW for those who care, is there any realizable time pay off to computing in 0 gravity (I suppose Moore's law keeps relativity (which tells us time goes faster where there is less gravity) in perspective.)
Not really. From the perspective of a zero-g environment, calculations would seem to take longer on the surface of the earth than in space, but by such a miniscule amount that it doesn't matter. For the money spent to develop and orbit the thing, you can probably double many times over the number of processor nodes in your computing system.
Discovery of the Saturn-sized planets, however, supports a theory that planets, such as those in the solar system, formed around many stars in the universe. It also supports the theory that most planets are relatively small, such as Earth, Mars and Venus.
Yes, finding more planets reinforces the notion that planetary systems are relatively common. This theory didn't need a whole lot of shoring up, though... it's patently obvious by now.
On the other hand, I don't at all see what this discovery has to say about the relative abundance of terrestrial-class planets. In fact, since the current models of planetary formation indicate that these bodies must have migrated in from the outer reaches of their solar systems (via either migration or interaction with other large bodies) we can actually surmise that, in all of the systems thus far examined, any inner, terrestrial planets that once existed have been ejected by interacting with these gas giants.
Remember, in our own solar system, the major reason there are (practically) no small sun-orbiting bodies between the asteroid belt and the Kupier belt is that the gas giants swept up most of the mass and ejected the rest in that zone.
Part of the problem here is that NASA, like most government agencies, gets its funding allocated very finely. While this is generally a good thing (we DO want congress to have control over government projects, after all), politics has caused a real mess in space science. Ever since the Republicans pushed through spending caps, nobody wants to be the one to blame for exceeding them, despite the massive government surplus.
Now throw in the fact that the ISS has developed a huge political momentum, which means that its money is sacrosanct - ISS allocations actually increased last year - which meant that the chunk of money that was supposed to be skimmed from NASA's budget almost all came from the planetary and earth science budgets. Remember when there was going to be a rover on the Polar Lander? That's where it went. These projects were cut to the bone, leaving too few engineers working too much unpaid overtime to finish the lander.
So to the people out there complaining that NASA just wants to return to the "good old days" of multi-billion dollar missions, think again. The press release put out by NASA even says that they're going to continue with the "better, faster, cheaper" philosophy, but "properly applied" this time. Essentially, all they really want is the breathing room to hire a few extra engineers, to retain the most experienced workers (think "institutional experience"), and do tests over when need be.
These things are almost generic items now. When I needed to hook up a bunch of nodes in my dorm room I just nosed around in the nearby CompUSA for a few minutes and came out with the second least-expensive 4-port hub I could find. The one I got is probably smaller than a zip-drive, and would fit in my laptop case just fine. The PSU isn't huge, either. Just make sure to get one with an uplink switch on one of the ports, so you don't have to use crossover cable.
Oh, and don't get the absolute cheapest one, either. It generally comes in a white box and rattles when you shake it.
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Actually, there's a simpler way to do this. What people always forget in these sailing analogies is that space (at least our solar system) is a rotating system. So if you want to go inward, simply turn your sail 45 degrees to the sun to oppose your orbital velocity. Voila -- you fall deeper into the gravity well.
However, for moving outward from the Earth, it may be more efficient to make use of the solar wind than radiation pressure. Tacking against the solar wind it trickier, though.
Dude! The model names refer to Chinstrap, King, and Emperor ... Penguins! In increasing order of size, too.
So they aren't necessarily smoking crack. Though on the other hand, I have to wonder about any company willing to ship you a computer that comes standard with hardware that is not and likely will not be supported by the OS. Built-in winmodems, for instance -- but one of these models (the Chinstrap, I think) uses an audio chipset that only has buggy early-alpha support.
Believe me, plenty of people would like to. Thing is, space-based interferometry is a tricky business. I believe the first mission to seriously test this technology will be this one, scheduled for 2005. Once space-based interferometry gets developed, though, you're going to see all sorts of cool science come out of these missions, especially since the probes are relatively cheap to build. Just tricky.
I, for one, am eagerly awaiting 10^9 meter baseline radio interferometers. Also, if you build an optical interferometer of that kind of scale, you can pick out the canals on Mars from Alpha Centauri. Or vice-versa.
Firstly, I don't see why there isn't room for multiple projects in this area. Mini-GRAIL doesn't seem to be starving for resources, so I'd say they're not being that adversely affected by the attention that LIGO is receiving.
Secondly, LIGO and Mini-GRAIL are searching for entirely different phenomena. LIGO is sensitive to low-frequency resonant modes with very low amplitude, and as such are (with luck) going to detect neutron star mergers, black-hole collapses, and such. Mini-GRAIL has much lower sensitivity, and a narrow bandwidth at a fairly high frequency. They may see (and indeed, are looking for) axial asymmetries in spinning neutron stars.
Finally, while I wish Mini-GRAIL the best of luck, they are being very optimistic about the magnitude of perturbation they can detect, and the amplitude of the incident metric distortions in that band. With the size and type of detector they are using, the most powerful metric fluctuations likely to occur will still only produce signals on the order of 10 times the theoretical minimum noise, limited by quantum effects.
Nice theory, been proposed plenty of times before. Unfortunately, it just doesn't reconcile with current geological or archeological knowledge. We've got a pretty good handle on just what was alive at each point in the last 4 Gyrs. You'd better believe a technological civilization would be noticed.
As for pre-4 Gyrs, you ask? Nope, the Earth (and the rest of our solar system) actually did form about 5 Gyrs ago. The most reliable indicators are the U-238/Th-??? ratio, which gives the amount of time since our planet's material stopped being processed by cosmic rays in the interstellar medium, and studies of the sun, which according to all models should, in fact, be about 5 Gyrs old as well.
While the details of why the Red Spot exhibits such stability are still unknown, let me try and paint an explanation in broad strokes.
First off, Jupiter (at least it's outer atmosphere, presumably the whole thing) rotates very quickly, which leads to both a nasty coriolis force and significant velocity differentials in the middle-latitudes. Thus, cyclonic activity is favored.
Moreover, the Red Spot actually behaves a great deal like a terrestrial hurricane, except that it's always over warm water (not water, really, but the same convective processes occur) since there is no "land" and a considerable amount of heat flowing from the interior. Infrared pictures, as it happens, do show the Spot as a intense radiator.
Both computer models and observations suggest that this combination of factors in conducive to stable cyclones that will tend to swallow up smaller ones.
However, that isn't the case here. First, this isn't just a collection of random gas giants. What was actually found was a loosely bound cluster of young dim stars, brown dwarfs, and gas giant planets. Based upon the surveyed area and the estimated size of the cluster, we're actually talking about several hundred objects. In fact, the reason they were looking there at all was because of spectroscopic anomalies in the vicinity of a visible star (the brightest star in the cluster).
Check out this article in Science magazine for full details.
Sure, planetary nebulae are pretty and impressive, but that's not what humanity should be worried about, at least as far as our sun goes. Current theories of stellar evolution point out that already, the Sol should have a sizable core of He "ash" that isn't yet hot enough to fuse into higher elements. As this He core grows, the pressure will build under the force of gravity, causing both the core temperature to rise and the sun to shrink. Solar luminosity could increase by a factor of 10% over the next 100 million years.
If this doesn't sound like much, recall that climatologists predict dire consequences of a 1-2 degree greenhouse effect. A 10% increase in solar output would cause much worse heating. However, we humans wouldn't even last that long. The seas regulate greenhouse gasses by locking up carbonates in seabed sediment; increase the temperature (a little) and the rate of deposition increases. Unfortunately, increase solar output by about 5% and this process runs away. Result: no more oxygen in our atmosphere. Or carbon dioxide, for that matter, so the forests won't help then. By the time Sol gets to +10% luminosity, we're talking about oceans at a rolling boil. The atmosphere fills up with water vapour, solar radiation spits this into oxygen and hydrogen (unfortunately the oxygen at this point is too late to do any good) and the hydrogen escapes to space. Poof -- 200 million years and the Earth is as dry as Venus, and possibly as acidic.
Now how's Mars sound?
Well, if you're not an astrophotographer, at least go outside around local midnight the night of June 8 (tomorrow). Last time we had a CME this big, the auroras were visible as far south as the Carolinas. So much of the nation should be in for a show. I know I'll be outside.
One would presume that the European Parliament is in some fasion amenable to public pressure, especially when an issue like this is likely to to generate a considerable outcry. But then again, a quick check gives me the suspicion that the Parliament is mostly controlled by (admittedly, European) business concerns. After all, in the last couple of months, we've had major decisions that relieve agribusinesses of liability related to genetically modified foods, and another ordering EU member nations to lower their trade barriers (to British chocolate products, in this case).
Now, this could go either way, in my view. (Mind you, I'm hardly an expert in European politics.) On the one side, you've got the big companies with American counterparts, arguing for this policy. On the other side, there are European companies who don't want to be at a disadvantage relative to the partnered companies. So, who knows which way this could go ... though I'd tend to suspect inertia and American pressure will probably push this one through.
Too bad, I was kinda looking forward to the Europeans cracking down on American companies with European partners and lax privacy policies.
I suppose this could be taken to mean that they're going to open up the specs to this chipset. However, since they refer specifically to the LiViD projet, I am more inclined to suspect that this actually means that they're preparing (closed source?) codecs that interface with Lamp's plugin API. Which isn't terrible, but isn't an optimal solution, either.
But since we don't actually know anything, I'd say do one of two things: 1) Find an e-mail address for their marketing department (or, preferably, someone more informed) and politely ask for clarification, and 2) don't flame them in the meantime for not telling us more, not promising to open-source the spec, etc.
Says the anonymous programmer in the interview:
Well, anybody know what he's talking about? I can't believe that nobody's brought this up already. If there's a way to track files back to their original posters, it really needs to be fixed before Freenet hits v1.0 and the protocol is solidified. After all, one of the points of the Freenet is to ensure that people can exercise their free speech without fear of reprisal and without worrying that their posting will be squelched by the powers-that-be.
N.b. Yes, I'm perfectly aware of the fact that it will also be used for IP violation, but that's not the point -- there's already no shortage of ways to violate IP law. There isn't a vast supply of ways to safely exercise free speech.
Looking at the Freenet protocol now, I don't see any obvious flaws that would let me track down a file's poster, but that's not surprising, given that the programmers have been working on this protocol for some time now. Anyone else want to check on this?
Freenet home page
As has been mentioned by XFree developers, the most direct way to implement font (and everything-else) antialiasing is to have an alpha channel to use as a mask. So if Gecko now has proper support for 8-bit alpha rendering, it shouldn't be terribly hard to use this code to render masks to antialias fonts in browser windows.
On the other hand, there is talk (again, among the XFree developers) of adding native server-level alpha channel support, which would make everybody's life easier in this respect -- plus, someone might finally be able to properly implement those silly transparent terminal windows. :-) More importantly, though, server level alpha support would make it much easier to render anti-aliased fonts, shaped windows, and such.
This would actually be a very bad idea. Regardless of whether or not Microsoft's claims of trade secret protection actually hold any water, their lawyers will happily continue to act as though they do. The result of this is that, if the Samba team went and implemented the PAC field using Microsoft's spec, they would be immediately sued for trade secret violation. The result: no updates to Samba for the next couple of years as all of their resources are sucked dry by MSFT's legal team.
In fact, even if they implemented the field through good old reverse engineering now, they'd still be in danger. Since the spec has been so widely distributed, if MSFT pressed a suit, the burden of proof would be on the Samba team's lawyers to either prove that the trade secret status was no longer applicable, or else prove that none of their programmers has been "tainted" by the spec.
It's been suggested before that MSFT actually released the spec in this way specifically to ensure that the Samba team would be unable to implement full interoperability. I certainly wouldn't put it past them.
Check out the sources for the 2.3 kernel tree. There are working drivers for a lot of the AC97 codecs already, and more are progressing towards stability. If you feel up to using the unstable kernel tree (just be careful - there's still a few serious flakynesses left) go for it, and if it doesn't work, submit bug reports. As far as OEMs go, I wouldn't look to see them supporting these crap-chips anytime too soon, though. The drivers are certainly not up to production quality yet. That said, I would venture to say that most (nay, practically all) of the linux boxes shipping these days are server systems, where sound doesn't matter and stability does. Heck, a bunch of server systems never even see X.
Well, you're partially right. If you actually read the GPL (v2 or higher), it says that if you commercially redistribute GPLed software, even unmodified, you cannot rely on a third party to distribute the source code; you must host it yourself. If you're just redistributing to a friend, or even giving away your own custom distribution for free, nobody requires that you offer the source.
I don't see why these processes couldn't be implemented in OSS work. They already are, in part. The "many eyes" principle ensures rigourous code checking.
The reason open software still tends to be buggy (at least compared to the space shuttle software) is partially the lack of a coherent plan for the software before writing begins. Most OSS projects start life as a small chunk of sloppy code that is interesting enough to attract the attention of other developers. Consider what would happen if, instead, a project began life as a high-level spec, and the specs were filled out through an open-source process before coding began. This could produce very sophisticated code quite quickly. It requires pretty good organization, though.
Interestingly, most large OSS projects use CVS repositories and bug-tracking software, which fill the role of the code and error databases mentioned in the article. So it would seem that the only thing standing between OSS and this kind of sophistication is the need for a coherent and detailed design for the software before coding starts.
That said, I doubt that this process would ever generate anything much more creative than a hardware driver. The Shuttle Group programmers themselves admit that the all-important process stifles creativity. If you think about it, considering the level of specification they've been given, their end-product is really little more than a device driver for the entire space shuttle. You would be hard-pressed to write something requiring real innovation this way. If you tried, you'd probably find that you spend the same amount of effort making the spec book for the software, which would end up with subtle bugs in the spec due to the evolutionary nature of the project, which would then get translated directly into software bugs in the code. Oh well...
Fortunately for us all, you have this exactly backwards. A GPLed program if free to link to whatever it wants. The issue is with a non-GPL program linking to a GPL library, because doing so is considered (at least by the GPL) to be incorporating GPL code into your program - which makes a kind of sense, since the code is combined at runtime. Therefore, if you link to GPL code, you cannot distribute the software except under the terms of the GPL.
The LGPL is considered a "Lesser" license because it doesn't consider linking to be an incorporation of code, which means that software under any license, even a proprietary one, is allowed to link to it. That's why you usually see libraries placed under the LGPL - a library won't be successful, as in widely used, unless a variety of software can use it, which generally means allowing differently licensed software to use it.
With respect to the original problem, note that the GPL doesn't forbid a proprietary program from ever linking to a GPL library. For instance, Netscape Navigator for Linux was developed with the Motif libraries, which are proprietary. Now, I believe that the LessTif libraries are under the LGPL ... but if I was to find a GPL library that implemented the Motif widget set, nothing would prevent me from running Navigator with this library. I could not, however, distribute Navigator with this library (and neither could Netscape, or anyone else). Nor could Netscape develop Navigator with this library without GPL-contaminating their code. But they used Motif; as long as I don't distribute Navigator with this GPL Motif clone, everything's alright.
Yes, I'm sure Hemos is aware of the fact that "picking up some Iridium satellites while they're up there" is a silly idea. But for the humor impaired, here's why -
Conclusion: why bother? It would be a very expensive, very silly operation. Though now that I think about it, Red Hat might be interested. Rearrange their orbits just right, and they'd flash "LINUX" in the evening and morning sky every 90 minutes around the world. I envision Redmond being the first target. :-)
As far as I know, MirCorp (the Holland-based consortium backing the mission) is mainly planning to make money by selling advertising space and by taking people up for a few days. The figure I've heard bandied about is around $600K/day. Although, they're being very tight-lipped about who, if anybody, is signed up to go ... which I tend to suspect means that they don't have any committed clients. That is why the RSA is being circumspect about the role of the cosmonauts up there right now - they might just fix some things and come home having prepared the Mir to go swimming in the Pacific, or they might stay up to get the place ready for guests.
Another thing that troubles me is that Energya is one of the largest members of MirCorp. As we all know, Energya (which has very tight connections to the Russian government) has significant motives other than profit to see the Mir stay in orbit, i.e. national/corporate pride, plus the possibility of revenue from a continuing stream of resupply missions to the station. In short, it's worth a lot to them for political and economic reasons, regardless of whether MirCorp ever succeeds in getting people up there.
I've seem lots of complaints about the safety of Mir, here and elsewhere. I might point out that, for the most part, there's nothing wrong with Mir that a good fixing-up and a regularly changed crew wouldn't solve. Yes, it leaks air, but not as fast as the Shuttle; plus, it doesn't leak corrosive volatiles like hydrazine, which the shuttle does. I heard that Energya, in fact, had considerable safety concerns with docking the shuttle to Mir for just these reasons, out of worry that the assorted stuff the Shuttle puts out might damage the station. As for the fire, etc, this mostly had to do with ancient equipment up there, which should certainly be replaced - and will be, if MirCorp can come up with the kind of money it seems to believe it can.
Oops. The quote is from the CNN article.
Don't be so quick to judge. You can't just point the Hubble at a star and see if there are any planets going around it. First of all, since they are so faint and close to the disk of the star, no existing instrument can resolve planets optically.
Secondly, the major method used to find planets (doppler shift in stellar spectra to detect the star's wobble) works as well from the ground as from space, and there are more telescopes on the ground.
Thirdly, you can't find earth-like planets this way, so this won't help any when it comes time to look for other planets to move to. But the sun won't explode, either, so we're fine for quite some time. The gradual heating of the sun will, if anything, probably mean that, in 100 Myr, when the Earth is uninhabitably hot, Mars should be plenty warm enough to support liquid water (just add air).
Fourthly, to see earth-like planets, you need huge interferometers. Look at Deep Space 3 for an example of what NASA is trying to do in this direction. But interferometers are hard, so it'll be a while before the planet finder goes on line, or is even technically feasible, for that matter.
Not really. From the perspective of a zero-g environment, calculations would seem to take longer on the surface of the earth than in space, but by such a miniscule amount that it doesn't matter. For the money spent to develop and orbit the thing, you can probably double many times over the number of processor nodes in your computing system.
Yes, finding more planets reinforces the notion that planetary systems are relatively common. This theory didn't need a whole lot of shoring up, though ... it's patently obvious by now.
On the other hand, I don't at all see what this discovery has to say about the relative abundance of terrestrial-class planets. In fact, since the current models of planetary formation indicate that these bodies must have migrated in from the outer reaches of their solar systems (via either migration or interaction with other large bodies) we can actually surmise that, in all of the systems thus far examined, any inner, terrestrial planets that once existed have been ejected by interacting with these gas giants.
Remember, in our own solar system, the major reason there are (practically) no small sun-orbiting bodies between the asteroid belt and the Kupier belt is that the gas giants swept up most of the mass and ejected the rest in that zone.
Now throw in the fact that the ISS has developed a huge political momentum, which means that its money is sacrosanct - ISS allocations actually increased last year - which meant that the chunk of money that was supposed to be skimmed from NASA's budget almost all came from the planetary and earth science budgets. Remember when there was going to be a rover on the Polar Lander? That's where it went. These projects were cut to the bone, leaving too few engineers working too much unpaid overtime to finish the lander.
So to the people out there complaining that NASA just wants to return to the "good old days" of multi-billion dollar missions, think again. The press release put out by NASA even says that they're going to continue with the "better, faster, cheaper" philosophy, but "properly applied" this time. Essentially, all they really want is the breathing room to hire a few extra engineers, to retain the most experienced workers (think "institutional experience"), and do tests over when need be.
These things are almost generic items now. When I needed to hook up a bunch of nodes in my dorm room I just nosed around in the nearby CompUSA for a few minutes and came out with the second least-expensive 4-port hub I could find. The one I got is probably smaller than a zip-drive, and would fit in my laptop case just fine. The PSU isn't huge, either. Just make sure to get one with an uplink switch on one of the ports, so you don't have to use crossover cable.
Oh, and don't get the absolute cheapest one, either. It generally comes in a white box and rattles when you shake it.