Re:Plenty of colors for the dirty deed.
on
Reverse Graffiti
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The difference between a billboard and graffiti is that a billboard has the permission of the owner of the property to exist.
Graffiti with negative paint (cleaning fluid) is still graffiti, is still done without the permission of the property owner, and the doer thereof should still be subject to the legal penalties for trespassing and vandalism.
Beagle 2 was a 100% failure. Nothing at all was learned from it. It sent back zero bits of science, and accomplished zero of its mission goals. It also returned zero bits of engineering data after it was released and switched from being a payload to an independent spacecraft. This means no one can even tell what went wrong.
How can you tell that Beagle was high quality? Once it was released, how was Beagle distinguishable from an equivalent mass of bricks? How is it distinguishable from puting 30 million pound notes in a bag and dropping it from Mars Express?
Basically all we learned is that that particular spacecraft team with that particular budget on that particular schedule cannot build a successful lander. Even then we cannot be sure, because Beagle may have just had bad luck. An identical spacecraft targeted a few meters away may have had a different result. We just don't know.
Nothing was learned, nothing was gained. Everyone knew it was a high risk mission, and they crapped out. This doesn't mean they shouldn't try again, but don't try to sugarcoat it.
Excuse me? Energy required to hold the moon in orbit? Puh-leeze.
Words mean things, especially to physicists. Energy has a precise mathematical definition, and that mathematical quantity is what is conserved and not used up, not whatever you might think sounds like energy.
Holding the moon in orbit with gravity is no different from holding a swinging rock in a circle with a rope. The rope uses no energy to hold the rock, and you can demonstrate this by noting that the rope is inert, and that no matter how long you swing the rock, nothing in the rope which might provide energy is used up. What? The person swinging the rock around provides the energy? Tie two rocks together, and set them spinning in space, where they won't hit anything and there is no friction, the worst enemy to intuitive understanding of physics. The rope will hold the rocks spinning forever. If it required energy, then since energy is conserved, eventually that energy would be used up and the rope would no longer be able to hold the rocks together in a circle.
Anyway, gravity is a conservative field, which means that if you move around the field and return to the same point, you will still have the same "potential" as when you started, no matter what path you take. Potential is a difficult concept to understand (at least to me), so my physics teacher explained it to us as height. Our campus is on a hill, and has a lot of vertical change. So, if you start at the door to the physics lab, wander around campus in any path you choose, up stairs, down hills, through buildings, it doesn't matter, and return to the physics lab, you will be at the same height as when you started. If the whole class does it, all the class members will have the same height when they are done, even though they all took different routes.
So how is gravity like height? Discounting friction again, think about rolling a rock around my campus. If I push it up a hill, true, it does require energy, but that energy is stored and released when I roll it back down the hill. A rock could roll or slide along a level patch of ground, and when it reached the other side, it would still have the same speed and energy as it did when it started. If it then reaches a hill, it will start to coast up the hill, but lose speed (kinetic energy, KE=1/2*m*v^2) and trade it for potential energy (PE=m*g*h). When it starts sliding back down, the potential energy will be traded back for kinetic energy, and the rock will have the same speed when it reaches the same height. My rock could slide around campus all day, with only the energy I gave to it when I first pushed it. The Moon is exactly the same. It does slide frictionlessly about the Earth's field and uses no energy to do so. It still has the same mechanical (KE+PE) energy it did on the day it was formed.
But don't trust me, learn the math and prove it to yourself. Learn the mathematical definition of work and vector fields, and apply the line integral to a particle moving around a gravity field back to the same point. You will find that any closed path (such as an orbit) uses no energy. These topics were covered in my college sophomore calculus class, and can be easily traced back to the definition of energy, field, and derivative. It's just not that complicated, and easily within the grasp of anyone willing to put forth the energy (heh) to understand it.
As you noted, Newton's theory of gravity is valid at low mass densities and speeds (compared to black holes and the speed of light). Any new theory of a phenomenon must give the same answers as an old, accepted theory in the range where the old theory is known by experimentation to be valid. General Relativity does, and therefore we are free to choose whichever theory is more convenient. Newton's theory uses ordinary differential equations and vector fields, while Einstein's uses tensor fields, and I still don't understand what a tensor is, so I will choose Newton every time, in the range where Newton is applicable, confident in the fact that if I had used General Relativity, it would have given the same answers. If your author's "expansion theory" is valid, it too must produce the same answers as Newton where Newton is applicable, and therefore must also represent a conservative field.
Whatever happened to the refrigerator sized hydrogen fuel cells that had zero emmission and somehow ran off natural gas?
Preposterous. A fuel cell emits the same emissions that buring the fuel the old fashion way would. A pure hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell only emits water, but methane has carbon in it, and that carbon has to go somewhere. The somewhere is that it is burned too, and turns into carbon dioxide.
The advantages of a fuel cell are greater efficiency (since it goes straight from chemical to electrical energy) and no problem with NOx and O3 (since there is no combustion chamber to have nitrogen in it to react) but chemically a fuel cell and an engine are alike.
Maybe it hasn't happened yet, but I can see it happening. I already use a utility every day which is too cheap to meter... bandwidth. Many other utilities come with the same pricing model, such as landline phone service. If I had a landline, I could pay a fixed price each month for service, no matter how much I used it.
And come to think of it, I do pay a flat rate for water and power, to my landlord.
Some day we will get the political will to use nukes, and our children really will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.
You completely missed the point of your parent's argument. A razor handle is a stupid hunk of plastic which once the injection mold is paid for can be stamped out by the zillion with a marginal cost of a fraction of a penny. An inkjet printer is not. It is an extremely complicated hunk of plastic. It costs a lot to design, and a lot to produce each copy.
Sure, the value of an item is whatever someone will pay for it, but no one will sell an item (except for an XBox maybe) for less than it costs them to make it. Or to put it another way, the transaction is symmetrical and the value of what someone will pay for an item is whatever someone will sell the item for.
Besides, I don't use razor handles. Gilette Mach 3 blades work best when I grab them by the little plastic tab which is supposed to connect them to the nice shiny metal handle. Most blades cannot be handled that way, but Mach 3's work better in my experience that way.
Let's be honest. The New Horizons mission is being launched for completeness. Once it completes its flyby, all of the nine planets will have been explored by a visiting spacecraft.
Classifying Sedna and Quaoar and all that other stuff out there as planets will require more missions. Demoting Pluto would elimiate the need for New Horizons. So lets make sure New Horizons hits space before doing anything else.
The first asteroid, Ceres, was predicted before it was discovered. According to the Titus-Bode series, there is a gap between Mars and Jupiter where there must be a planet. So, astronomers looked and surprise surprise, there's Ceres. But it didn't take too long to discover Vesta and Juno and Pallas and all of Ceres' other friends. Its those friends, immediately discovered, which caused Ceres to be demoted.
Pluto was predicted to explain otherwise unexplained perturbations in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. So, astronomers looked and looked and looked and eventually found Pluto in the predicted position. Then they stopped looking. If they had kept it up, they would have discovered the rest of the Kuiper belt, and Pluto would have suffered the same fate as Ceres.
The proposed Gravity Rule would cause the answer to the question "How many planets are there in the solar system?" to change from "9" to "we don't know." We can be reasonably confident based on the tracks of the Pioneers and Voyagers that there aren't any other large masses out in the outer solar system. We will never be sure we have discovered all the round things out there.
Besides, there are objects which should be round, but aren't, like Hyperion, and things which have no business being round, but are, like Comet Wild/2. How would the Gravity Rule treat those?
Anyway, ISS is pretty safe. The small stuff is like bullets, and ISS has a pretty good layer of armor plate on the front facing surfaces. The large stuff is impossible to survive an impact with, using any reasonable amount of armor, but all the large stuff is tracked by the Air Force and the station can steer around it.
There may be a middle range, large enough to be dangerous, but small enough to not be trackable, and this is the dangerous stuff. But, it is worth noting that ISS has been inhabited for almost 4 continuous years, and Mir for over 10 years before that, and in all that time, there has never been a problem except for that docking incident which you wrote about, and that one was an intentional rendezvous and collision anyway. They just intended to impact the docking port, not the hull and solar panels of the ship.
In fact, I believe that there has only been one satellite ever lost due to collision with another object.
Its not even that complicated. The thing which killed all the Venera landers wasn't temperature or pressure, but battery life. The batteries only lasted two hours on the surface. Next probably would have been temperature. Pressure doesn't seem to be a problem, since Venera lives inside a pressure vessel and that worked just fine.
I have seen a design for a long-lived lander which uses an RTG (nuclear power) instead of batteries, to run a refrigerator and the rest of the gadgets for months or years.
Have you ever looked at a computer theory book? Or taken a compilers class? Just a moment, I have a book here... Introduction to Computer Theory, Second Edition by Daniel I. A. Cohen. It is pretty good, and quite readable, if you are prepared to see the word language 10 times on every page.
The first chapter is introduction, but the very first chapter with any content is called "Languages." It starts out with mathematical definitions of what a language is, before it even gets to the very first machine of any kind. This is because the machines are thought of as language processors.
There are very many theorems in computer theory which are difficult or impossible to prove by looking at the machine, and easy to prove when looking at the language the machine processes. Likewise, there are theorems in formal language theory which are difficult to prove purely in language terms, but easy when you look at a machine that can process language. More powerful computer models are created by designing machines which can process more complex languages, culminating with the Turing machine or one of its equivalents. Computability or uncomputability is defined for a Turing machine in terms of a TM being able or unable to decide if a given string of symbols is in a certain language.
Computer theory is inseperable from linguistics. They are two sides of the same thing.
I didn't read the article, but I am sure the ESA scientists are reporting that their observations confirm those made by Mars Odyssey over a year ago.
So what if Mars Express wasn't the first instrument to discover martian water? It is important to independently verify observations, and ESA did so. An independent organization with a completely different kind of instrument reporting the same findings pretty much nails down the fact that the water is there.
Of course the online stuff has biases, just like everything else published by humans. The important part is that that bias is usually obvious, in fact the publisher is usually proud of his bias. And just like in an experiment, known biases in writings can be accounted for and subtracted out if necessary.
Also on almost every controversial subject, it is trivially easy to find the opposite viewpoint, also on the net.
Contrast with sources that claim to be objective, like the "old" media. They pretend they have no bias, and since their bias is harder to determine, it is harder to subtract out.
Fox is clearly not "Fair and Balanced(TM)" but it is a counterbalance to almost all the rest of the old media. As such it is of value.
Bias bias bias. When you start saying a word over and over, it starts sounding weird.
You are working on missile defense? What are you doing here reading slashdot then? Get the lead out! If you hurry, you might have the missile defense ready by the time the North Koreans are ready to sell ballistic missiles that can reach us to the highest bidder.
Sure, that's not the only way to attack us, but it is a way to do so. The FBI and CIA are working on preventing some kinds of attacks, the TSA others, and the and Marines still others, with varying degrees of success, but at present if some crazy did get a hold of a ballistic missile (and I am sure the package would include a launcher and technicians to punch in the lat and lon) there is no defense against it.
Until you hurry up and build us one.
And about the ABM treaty... It was an agreement between two parties, the Government of the USA and the Government of the Soviet Union. Those two parties were solely responsible to eachother, not the UN or the world at large, to keep their obligations. One of those parties no longer exists, thank the Lord, and our obligation to them to uphold the treaty evaporated at the same time they did. We pretended to continue the treaty out of courtesy and inertia, and finally negotiated a formal end to it, but we did not have to.
Face it, the balance of world power IS broken, and thank whatever God you believe in that it broke our way.
And as far as the original article goes: I watched "Real Genius" and even adopted some of its philosophy about not wanting to develop weapons. I may have talked myself out of a job that way. But then September 11 happened, and we had a war thrust upon us. Project Crossbow would sure be useful right now, but we don't have it in part because people like me couldn't see that even weapons have moral purposes.
There is an easy solution to this. As we all know, port 80 will never be blocked, because otherwise how would we get our pr0n? The Web is the Net.
So, just tunnel everything through port 80. There is an existing protocol for this defined in RFC 3093 called FEP (Firewall enhancement protocol). Problem solved.
Sure, in theory you could use interferometry to get large effective apertures, but you need all sorts of fancy equipment to measure the distance between the scopes to the nearest nanometer. A new scope could carry this equipment (look up the Terrestrial Planet Finder) but Hubble does not.
No, this is far from the first mission to the Earth-Sun lagrange points. I know of at least two sat at L1 (between Earth and Sun), SOHO, a solar obervatory, and Genesis, a solar wind collector. There is also at least one at L2 (opposite side of Earth from Sun), MAP, a cosmic background radiation mapper.
All the stories about colonization of the lagrange points are the Earth-Moon points. I don't know if there have been any missions to these points, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been any.
However, Congress can always specifically permit backup copies (or anything else) to be made regardless of whether or not it is fair. And they did so, at least partially.
17 USC Sec. 117. Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.-- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: ...
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes
only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that
continued possession of the computer program should cease to be
rightful.
Historical and Revision Notes
house report no. 94-1476
...
Since it would be premature to change existing law on computer uses at present, the purpose of section 117 is to preserve the status quo. It is intended neither to cut off any rights that may now exist, nor to create new rights that might be denied under the Act of 1909 or under common law principles currently applicable.
...
The notes for this law state in effect that since software is a relatively new thing and legislating in ignorance would have unintended consequences, they made this law to follow and codify existing case law on this aspect of fair use. Fair use basically stems from case law (judicial branch) and this aspect has been codified by the legislative branch and endorsed by the executive branch.
Also: It does not appear that there is any limit on the number of archival copies are allowed, as long as they are really used only as archive copies.
6b people on earth, each one gets 5.67e28 addresses
Give each one a computer with a billion transistors in it, and you have 5.67e19 addresses per transistor.
Surface area of the Earth, in m^2: 5.11e14. Each one gets 6.6e23 addresses
Mass of Earth in grams: 5.9e27. Each one gets a mere 57 billion addresses.
Estimate of number of atoms in the Earth, assuming solid Iron: 3.6e49. Uh oh, this is not enough addresses! 105 billion atoms have to share the same address!
I think we should move to 256 bit addressing. There are an estimated 10^76 atoms in the entire visible universe, and 256 bits would give each one its own address.
Anyway, the whole point of this is sparseness, and not having to care about conserving addresses. If I had an IPv6 subnet, on a purely numerical basis I could solve the IPv4 address shortage problem all by myself. If I decided to be stingy and keep something like 100 devices on 2^40 addresses, the evil portscanners would have to scan 2^33 addresses on average to find one of my machines. With any reasonable use of bandwidth, this would take longer than the present age of the universe, and would therefore invalidate one of the worst of the skr1p7 k1dd13s t001z.
Just as 640k ought to be enough for anybody, 100 ip addresses hought to be enough. Right? Trust me, when you have 2^40 addresses to yourself, you will think of something to do with them, if just make your network sparse, so the evil bad scanners have to scan 2^35 empty addresses per machine of yours they want to find.
Excuse me? Have we been watching the same US space program?
If you do it in a safe way (stand way back, have self destruct charges, etc) rocket testing is very safe. No one on the ground has ever been killed by a launch from either Canaveral or Vandenburg. We can test rockets, even failures, safely.
Compare and contrast with China, where a launch vehicle went out of control and crashed into a town and killed hundreds of people because it either lacked range safety devices or they didn't work.
Also: Exactly one test was required to certify the atomic bomb. The second nuclear explosion in history occured in battle, over Hiroshima.
You pay money for something alright, you are buying two things when you go to the record store:
1) The physical media - the CD itself 2) The right to listen to that physical media
Wrong. When you buy a copy of a piece of music, you own it. Copyright is just that -- the right to copy. The owner of the copyright does not give up the right to copy (All rights reserved), nor do you gain the right to copy (aside from fair use) but you own the copy. It is your property to do anything you please with, except make further duplicates or make derivative works.
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definition s. html 5. What is copyright infringement? As a general matter, copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/dvd/drafts/ lo c-copy.html#SECTION00061000000000000000 Conflicts with the First Sale doctrine
In the spirit of the LOC's request for comments, let us first consider how the plaintiffs' interpretation of the DMCA relates to the First Sale doctrine, codified at 17 USC 109. This section of the copyright laws governs what rights are transferred to the purchaser of a published work, in the absence of a contract with the copyright owner (which clearly does not exist in the case of DVDs). It states that when a copy of a published work is sold, the purchaser acquires all rights other than those listed in 17 USC 106 as exclusive rights of the copyright owner. In fact, 17 USC 109(c) specifically provides that the right to privately display the work is transferred.
Copyright is the exclusive right to duplicate, perform, or make derivatives of a work. These are the rights an author has, and no others. Just because the author created a work, doesn't mean he has the right to force you to use it a certain way.
The Physical media is a copy. And you paid for it. So you own it.
You don't need a license to use property you own, except for things like the drivers license, and that is really a license to use the road, not your car.
Since you own the copy, you have the right to listen to it, since it is not one of the explicit copy rights. If you are deaf, or just curious, you have the right use an oscilliscope to watch your music, instead of listen to it, since that is not one of the explicit copyrights. You have the right to use it as a coaster, since that is not one of the explicit copy rights. You have the right to use the media as a shotgun target, or do anything else you like with the media, except those things explicilty laid out as the copy rights.
17 USC 117 (United States Code, Title 17, Section 117)
Sec. 117. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. -
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
Translation: You do not need a license to copy the program from the distribution medium to your hard drive to your system memory, since that is essential to using the program. This specifically refutes the point you brought up which is so often claimed to justify EULAs.
The basis of a EULA is "Even though you bought this program, copyright law would normally prohibit you from copying it, and you need to copy it to run it. We will allow you to copy it, if you agree to this EULA and by so doing agree to all these other provisions." It is just like the GPL says. Most EULAs are designed to remove your rights, or to give certain things to the authors of a program you wouldn't otherwise.
You do not need a license to run software you legally acquired. Assuming that a EULA is a valid (but unnecessary) contract, it has termination clauses and such. If you violate the EULA, the termination clauses kick in and the EULA contract ends. The only thing that happens is you lose the license you don't need. You already acquired all the authority you need to run the program when you purchased it.
There is no wiggle room. There is no loophole. When you buy a boxed program, you purchase all the physical media, the disks, the cds, the manuals. You OWN it. You may use it however you please, as long as you make no illegal copies. You may use the disks as intended, or you can use them as coasters, avant garde room decorations, shotgun targets, or fuel for your fireplace. The distribution medium IS a copy of the copyrighted work. Therefore both clauses of "the owner of a copy of a cumputer program" are satisfied. If it is a download you paid for, you own the device that stores it, down to the ferric oxide particles, therefore you own that copy also.
The only thing you don't have the right to duplicate the program, except where you have fair use. You can't (by the rest of Title 17) just make and distribute copies at random. If you did not acquire the copyrighted work legally, this section does not apply to you, since you are not the owner of the copy, but the owner of stolen property in the case of physical media, or in violation of copyright and holding a copy which should not exist. It actually seems to be a pretty clear, good law.
The notes to section 117 indicate that this is a specific legislative encoding of what was formerly case law. It is a portion of our fair use rights endorsed by all three branches of government.
IANAL, but I can read. Don't take legal advice from random people you read on/.
It really depends on the kinds of weapons a small fighter can support. In the 20th and 21st century, a small plane is capable of carrying a weapon, such as a bomb, torpedo, or missile, large enough to destroy its carrier. If it absolutely positively has to be sunk in 5 minutes, a nuke could be used. A nuke can be carried by any reasonable sized fighter-bomber and will ruin the day of any ship presently afloat. This is the regime of the carriers.
Suppose defenses start getting really good when someone develops a force field. Now all of the sudden there is no kind of torpedo which can breach the defenses, or if there is, it is too large for a fighter plane to launch. Now in order to kill the enemy you need something like the supergun on SDF-1 or the gravity blast cannon on Nadesico. Both of these ships are basically built around their main weapons. Each weapon weighs many thousands of tons and requires more energy than can ever be extracted from an engine of a fighter. Here we are back in the regime of battleships.
Enterprise seems to be out of its regime, since photon torpedoes are small enough to be carried by a fighter. Perhaps rather than being a battleship, it is more like an attack submarine? Carrier launched aircraft are an order of magnitude faster than their carriers. Attack subs are basically underwater battleships. They rule beneath the sea because it is presently impossible to build a minisub which is an order of magnitude faster than its carrier. In Star Trek, the starships are invariably faster than their shuttles, just the opposite of a modern carrier. In this case there is nothing a small craft can do which the starship cannot.
Summary: Small fast planes carrying effective weapons lead to carriers. Small fast planes carrying ineffective weapons lead to battleships. Small slow planes lead to submarines.
It really all depends on the technological state of the art and the laws of physics.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between a billboard and graffiti is that a billboard has the permission of the owner of the property to exist.
Graffiti with negative paint (cleaning fluid) is still graffiti, is still done without the permission of the property owner, and the doer thereof should still be subject to the legal penalties for trespassing and vandalism.
Beagle 2 was a 100% failure. Nothing at all was learned from it. It sent back zero bits of science, and accomplished zero of its mission goals. It also returned zero bits of engineering data after it was released and switched from being a payload to an independent spacecraft. This means no one can even tell what went wrong.
How can you tell that Beagle was high quality? Once it was released, how was Beagle distinguishable from an equivalent mass of bricks? How is it distinguishable from puting 30 million pound notes in a bag and dropping it from Mars Express?
Basically all we learned is that that particular spacecraft team with that particular budget on that particular schedule cannot build a successful lander. Even then we cannot be sure, because Beagle may have just had bad luck. An identical spacecraft targeted a few meters away may have had a different result. We just don't know.
Nothing was learned, nothing was gained. Everyone knew it was a high risk mission, and they crapped out. This doesn't mean they shouldn't try again, but don't try to sugarcoat it.
Excuse me? Energy required to hold the moon in orbit? Puh-leeze.
Words mean things, especially to physicists. Energy has a precise mathematical definition, and that mathematical quantity is what is conserved and not used up, not whatever you might think sounds like energy.
Holding the moon in orbit with gravity is no different from holding a swinging rock in a circle with a rope. The rope uses no energy to hold the rock, and you can demonstrate this by noting that the rope is inert, and that no matter how long you swing the rock, nothing in the rope which might provide energy is used up. What? The person swinging the rock around provides the energy? Tie two rocks together, and set them spinning in space, where they won't hit anything and there is no friction, the worst enemy to intuitive understanding of physics. The rope will hold the rocks spinning forever. If it required energy, then since energy is conserved, eventually that energy would be used up and the rope would no longer be able to hold the rocks together in a circle.
Anyway, gravity is a conservative field, which means that if you move around the field and return to the same point, you will still have the same "potential" as when you started, no matter what path you take. Potential is a difficult concept to understand (at least to me), so my physics teacher explained it to us as height. Our campus is on a hill, and has a lot of vertical change. So, if you start at the door to the physics lab, wander around campus in any path you choose, up stairs, down hills, through buildings, it doesn't matter, and return to the physics lab, you will be at the same height as when you started. If the whole class does it, all the class members will have the same height when they are done, even though they all took different routes.
So how is gravity like height? Discounting friction again, think about rolling a rock around my campus. If I push it up a hill, true, it does require energy, but that energy is stored and released when I roll it back down the hill. A rock could roll or slide along a level patch of ground, and when it reached the other side, it would still have the same speed and energy as it did when it started. If it then reaches a hill, it will start to coast up the hill, but lose speed (kinetic energy, KE=1/2*m*v^2) and trade it for potential energy (PE=m*g*h). When it starts sliding back down, the potential energy will be traded back for kinetic energy, and the rock will have the same speed when it reaches the same height. My rock could slide around campus all day, with only the energy I gave to it when I first pushed it. The Moon is exactly the same. It does slide frictionlessly about the Earth's field and uses no energy to do so. It still has the same mechanical (KE+PE) energy it did on the day it was formed.
But don't trust me, learn the math and prove it to yourself. Learn the mathematical definition of work and vector fields, and apply the line integral to a particle moving around a gravity field back to the same point. You will find that any closed path (such as an orbit) uses no energy. These topics were covered in my college sophomore calculus class, and can be easily traced back to the definition of energy, field, and derivative. It's just not that complicated, and easily within the grasp of anyone willing to put forth the energy (heh) to understand it.
As you noted, Newton's theory of gravity is valid at low mass densities and speeds (compared to black holes and the speed of light). Any new theory of a phenomenon must give the same answers as an old, accepted theory in the range where the old theory is known by experimentation to be valid. General Relativity does, and therefore we are free to choose whichever theory is more convenient. Newton's theory uses ordinary differential equations and vector fields, while Einstein's uses tensor fields, and I still don't understand what a tensor is, so I will choose Newton every time, in the range where Newton is applicable, confident in the fact that if I had used General Relativity, it would have given the same answers. If your author's "expansion theory" is valid, it too must produce the same answers as Newton where Newton is applicable, and therefore must also represent a conservative field.
Preposterous. A fuel cell emits the same emissions that buring the fuel the old fashion way would. A pure hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell only emits water, but methane has carbon in it, and that carbon has to go somewhere. The somewhere is that it is burned too, and turns into carbon dioxide.
The advantages of a fuel cell are greater efficiency (since it goes straight from chemical to electrical energy) and no problem with NOx and O3 (since there is no combustion chamber to have nitrogen in it to react) but chemically a fuel cell and an engine are alike.
Maybe it hasn't happened yet, but I can see it happening. I already use a utility every day which is too cheap to meter... bandwidth. Many other utilities come with the same pricing model, such as landline phone service. If I had a landline, I could pay a fixed price each month for service, no matter how much I used it.
And come to think of it, I do pay a flat rate for water and power, to my landlord.
Some day we will get the political will to use nukes, and our children really will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.
Insightful? Insightful?
You completely missed the point of your parent's argument. A razor handle is a stupid hunk of plastic which once the injection mold is paid for can be stamped out by the zillion with a marginal cost of a fraction of a penny. An inkjet printer is not. It is an extremely complicated hunk of plastic. It costs a lot to design, and a lot to produce each copy.
Sure, the value of an item is whatever someone will pay for it, but no one will sell an item (except for an XBox maybe) for less than it costs them to make it. Or to put it another way, the transaction is symmetrical and the value of what someone will pay for an item is whatever someone will sell the item for.
Besides, I don't use razor handles. Gilette Mach 3 blades work best when I grab them by the little plastic tab which is supposed to connect them to the nice shiny metal handle. Most blades cannot be handled that way, but Mach 3's work better in my experience that way.
Let's be honest. The New Horizons mission is being launched for completeness. Once it completes its flyby, all of the nine planets will have been explored by a visiting spacecraft.
Classifying Sedna and Quaoar and all that other stuff out there as planets will require more missions. Demoting Pluto would elimiate the need for New Horizons. So lets make sure New Horizons hits space before doing anything else.
The first asteroid, Ceres, was predicted before it was discovered. According to the Titus-Bode series, there is a gap between Mars and Jupiter where there must be a planet. So, astronomers looked and surprise surprise, there's Ceres. But it didn't take too long to discover Vesta and Juno and Pallas and all of Ceres' other friends. Its those friends, immediately discovered, which caused Ceres to be demoted.
Pluto was predicted to explain otherwise unexplained perturbations in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. So, astronomers looked and looked and looked and eventually found Pluto in the predicted position. Then they stopped looking. If they had kept it up, they would have discovered the rest of the Kuiper belt, and Pluto would have suffered the same fate as Ceres.
The proposed Gravity Rule would cause the answer to the question "How many planets are there in the solar system?" to change from "9" to "we don't know." We can be reasonably confident based on the tracks of the Pioneers and Voyagers that there aren't any other large masses out in the outer solar system. We will never be sure we have discovered all the round things out there.
Besides, there are objects which should be round, but aren't, like Hyperion, and things which have no business being round, but are, like Comet Wild/2. How would the Gravity Rule treat those?
Are you sure you are not thinking of Mir?
Anyway, ISS is pretty safe. The small stuff is like bullets, and ISS has a pretty good layer of armor plate on the front facing surfaces. The large stuff is impossible to survive an impact with, using any reasonable amount of armor, but all the large stuff is tracked by the Air Force and the station can steer around it.
There may be a middle range, large enough to be dangerous, but small enough to not be trackable, and this is the dangerous stuff. But, it is worth noting that ISS has been inhabited for almost 4 continuous years, and Mir for over 10 years before that, and in all that time, there has never been a problem except for that docking incident which you wrote about, and that one was an intentional rendezvous and collision anyway. They just intended to impact the docking port, not the hull and solar panels of the ship.
In fact, I believe that there has only been one satellite ever lost due to collision with another object.
Its not even that complicated. The thing which killed all the Venera landers wasn't temperature or pressure, but battery life. The batteries only lasted two hours on the surface. Next probably would have been temperature. Pressure doesn't seem to be a problem, since Venera lives inside a pressure vessel and that worked just fine.
I have seen a design for a long-lived lander which uses an RTG (nuclear power) instead of batteries, to run a refrigerator and the rest of the gadgets for months or years.
Have you ever looked at a computer theory book? Or taken a compilers class? Just a moment, I have a book here... Introduction to Computer Theory, Second Edition by Daniel I. A. Cohen. It is pretty good, and quite readable, if you are prepared to see the word language 10 times on every page.
The first chapter is introduction, but the very first chapter with any content is called "Languages." It starts out with mathematical definitions of what a language is, before it even gets to the very first machine of any kind. This is because the machines are thought of as language processors.
There are very many theorems in computer theory which are difficult or impossible to prove by looking at the machine, and easy to prove when looking at the language the machine processes. Likewise, there are theorems in formal language theory which are difficult to prove purely in language terms, but easy when you look at a machine that can process language. More powerful computer models are created by designing machines which can process more complex languages, culminating with the Turing machine or one of its equivalents. Computability or uncomputability is defined for a Turing machine in terms of a TM being able or unable to decide if a given string of symbols is in a certain language.
Computer theory is inseperable from linguistics. They are two sides of the same thing.
I didn't read the article, but I am sure the ESA scientists are reporting that their observations confirm those made by Mars Odyssey over a year ago.
So what if Mars Express wasn't the first instrument to discover martian water? It is important to independently verify observations, and ESA did so. An independent organization with a completely different kind of instrument reporting the same findings pretty much nails down the fact that the water is there.
A mathematician discovers a fire on his desk. In somewhat of a panic, he finds a fire extingisher, squrts it at his desk and is saved.
The next day, his trash can catches on fire. Not to worry, he knows what to do. He dumps the wastebasket on his desk.
Satisfied at having reduced this to a previously solved problem, he leans back in his chair and goes back to his math...
Of course the online stuff has biases, just like everything else published by humans. The important part is that that bias is usually obvious, in fact the publisher is usually proud of his bias. And just like in an experiment, known biases in writings can be accounted for and subtracted out if necessary.
Also on almost every controversial subject, it is trivially easy to find the opposite viewpoint, also on the net.
Contrast with sources that claim to be objective, like the "old" media. They pretend they have no bias, and since their bias is harder to determine, it is harder to subtract out.
Fox is clearly not "Fair and Balanced(TM)" but it is a counterbalance to almost all the rest of the old media. As such it is of value.
Bias bias bias. When you start saying a word over and over, it starts sounding weird.
You are working on missile defense? What are you doing here reading slashdot then? Get the lead out! If you hurry, you might have the missile defense ready by the time the North Koreans are ready to sell ballistic missiles that can reach us to the highest bidder.
Sure, that's not the only way to attack us, but it is a way to do so. The FBI and CIA are working on preventing some kinds of attacks, the TSA others, and the and Marines still others, with varying degrees of success, but at present if some crazy did get a hold of a ballistic missile (and I am sure the package would include a launcher and technicians to punch in the lat and lon) there is no defense against it.
Until you hurry up and build us one.
And about the ABM treaty... It was an agreement between two parties, the Government of the USA and the Government of the Soviet Union. Those two parties were solely responsible to eachother, not the UN or the world at large, to keep their obligations. One of those parties no longer exists, thank the Lord, and our obligation to them to uphold the treaty evaporated at the same time they did. We pretended to continue the treaty out of courtesy and inertia, and finally negotiated a formal end to it, but we did not have to.
Face it, the balance of world power IS broken, and thank whatever God you believe in that it broke our way.
And as far as the original article goes: I watched "Real Genius" and even adopted some of its philosophy about not wanting to develop weapons. I may have talked myself out of a job that way. But then September 11 happened, and we had a war thrust upon us. Project Crossbow would sure be useful right now, but we don't have it in part because people like me couldn't see that even weapons have moral purposes.
There is an easy solution to this. As we all know, port 80 will never be blocked, because otherwise how would we get our pr0n? The Web is the Net.
So, just tunnel everything through port 80. There is an existing protocol for this defined in RFC 3093 called FEP (Firewall enhancement protocol). Problem solved.
Sure, in theory you could use interferometry to get large effective apertures, but you need all sorts of fancy equipment to measure the distance between the scopes to the nearest nanometer. A new scope could carry this equipment (look up the Terrestrial Planet Finder) but Hubble does not.
No, this is far from the first mission to the Earth-Sun lagrange points. I know of at least two sat at L1 (between Earth and Sun), SOHO, a solar obervatory, and Genesis, a solar wind collector. There is also at least one at L2 (opposite side of Earth from Sun), MAP, a cosmic background radiation mapper.
All the stories about colonization of the lagrange points are the Earth-Moon points. I don't know if there have been any missions to these points, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been any.
You mean like this? The notes for this law state in effect that since software is a relatively new thing and legislating in ignorance would have unintended consequences, they made this law to follow and codify existing case law on this aspect of fair use. Fair use basically stems from case law (judicial branch) and this aspect has been codified by the legislative branch and endorsed by the executive branch.
Also: It does not appear that there is any limit on the number of archival copies are allowed, as long as they are really used only as archive copies.
IPv6 has 128 bits, which is 3.4e38
6b people on earth, each one gets 5.67e28 addresses
Give each one a computer with a billion transistors in it, and you have 5.67e19 addresses per transistor.
Surface area of the Earth, in m^2: 5.11e14. Each one gets 6.6e23 addresses
Mass of Earth in grams: 5.9e27. Each one gets a mere 57 billion addresses.
Estimate of number of atoms in the Earth, assuming solid Iron: 3.6e49. Uh oh, this is not enough addresses! 105 billion atoms have to share the same address!
I think we should move to 256 bit addressing. There are an estimated 10^76 atoms in the entire visible universe, and 256 bits would give each one its own address.
Anyway, the whole point of this is sparseness, and not having to care about conserving addresses. If I had an IPv6 subnet, on a purely numerical basis I could solve the IPv4 address shortage problem all by myself. If I decided to be stingy and keep something like 100 devices on 2^40 addresses, the evil portscanners would have to scan 2^33 addresses on average to find one of my machines. With any reasonable use of bandwidth, this would take longer than the present age of the universe, and would therefore invalidate one of the worst of the skr1p7 k1dd13s t001z.
Just as 640k ought to be enough for anybody, 100 ip addresses hought to be enough. Right? Trust me, when you have 2^40 addresses to yourself, you will think of something to do with them, if just make your network sparse, so the evil bad scanners have to scan 2^35 empty addresses per machine of yours they want to find.
Excuse me? Have we been watching the same US space program?
If you do it in a safe way (stand way back, have self destruct charges, etc) rocket testing is very safe. No one on the ground has ever been killed by a launch from either Canaveral or Vandenburg. We can test rockets, even failures, safely.
Compare and contrast with China, where a launch vehicle went out of control and crashed into a town and killed hundreds of people because it either lacked range safety devices or they didn't work.
Also: Exactly one test was required to certify the atomic bomb. The second nuclear explosion in history occured in battle, over Hiroshima.
Hmmm. I could not find anything looking like either an iso or a kernel rpm at this link. Maybe they already pulled it?
Wrong. When you buy a copy of a piece of music, you own it. Copyright is just that -- the right to copy. The owner of the copyright does not give up the right to copy (All rights reserved), nor do you gain the right to copy (aside from fair use) but you own the copy. It is your property to do anything you please with, except make further duplicates or make derivative works.
Copyright is the exclusive right to duplicate, perform, or make derivatives of a work. These are the rights an author has, and no others. Just because the author created a work, doesn't mean he has the right to force you to use it a certain way.
The Physical media is a copy. And you paid for it. So you own it.
You don't need a license to use property you own, except for things like the drivers license, and that is really a license to use the road, not your car.
Since you own the copy, you have the right to listen to it, since it is not one of the explicit copy rights. If you are deaf, or just curious, you have the right use an oscilliscope to watch your music, instead of listen to it, since that is not one of the explicit copyrights. You have the right to use it as a coaster, since that is not one of the explicit copy rights. You have the right to use the media as a shotgun target, or do anything else you like with the media, except those things explicilty laid out as the copy rights.
Translation: You do not need a license to copy the program from the distribution medium to your hard drive to your system memory, since that is essential to using the program. This specifically refutes the point you brought up which is so often claimed to justify EULAs.
The basis of a EULA is "Even though you bought this program, copyright law would normally prohibit you from copying it, and you need to copy it to run it. We will allow you to copy it, if you agree to this EULA and by so doing agree to all these other provisions." It is just like the GPL says. Most EULAs are designed to remove your rights, or to give certain things to the authors of a program you wouldn't otherwise.
You do not need a license to run software you legally acquired. Assuming that a EULA is a valid (but unnecessary) contract, it has termination clauses and such. If you violate the EULA, the termination clauses kick in and the EULA contract ends. The only thing that happens is you lose the license you don't need. You already acquired all the authority you need to run the program when you purchased it.
There is no wiggle room. There is no loophole. When you buy a boxed program, you purchase all the physical media, the disks, the cds, the manuals. You OWN it. You may use it however you please, as long as you make no illegal copies. You may use the disks as intended, or you can use them as coasters, avant garde room decorations, shotgun targets, or fuel for your fireplace. The distribution medium IS a copy of the copyrighted work. Therefore both clauses of "the owner of a copy of a cumputer program" are satisfied. If it is a download you paid for, you own the device that stores it, down to the ferric oxide particles, therefore you own that copy also.
The only thing you don't have the right to duplicate the program, except where you have fair use. You can't (by the rest of Title 17) just make and distribute copies at random. If you did not acquire the copyrighted work legally, this section does not apply to you, since you are not the owner of the copy, but the owner of stolen property in the case of physical media, or in violation of copyright and holding a copy which should not exist. It actually seems to be a pretty clear, good law.
The notes to section 117 indicate that this is a specific legislative encoding of what was formerly case law. It is a portion of our fair use rights endorsed by all three branches of government.
IANAL, but I can read. Don't take legal advice from random people you read on
It really depends on the kinds of weapons a small fighter can support. In the 20th and 21st century, a small plane is capable of carrying a weapon, such as a bomb, torpedo, or missile, large enough to destroy its carrier. If it absolutely positively has to be sunk in 5 minutes, a nuke could be used. A nuke can be carried by any reasonable sized fighter-bomber and will ruin the day of any ship presently afloat. This is the regime of the carriers.
Suppose defenses start getting really good when someone develops a force field. Now all of the sudden there is no kind of torpedo which can breach the defenses, or if there is, it is too large for a fighter plane to launch. Now in order to kill the enemy you need something like the supergun on SDF-1 or the gravity blast cannon on Nadesico. Both of these ships are basically built around their main weapons. Each weapon weighs many thousands of tons and requires more energy than can ever be extracted from an engine of a fighter. Here we are back in the regime of battleships.
Enterprise seems to be out of its regime, since photon torpedoes are small enough to be carried by a fighter. Perhaps rather than being a battleship, it is more like an attack submarine? Carrier launched aircraft are an order of magnitude faster than their carriers. Attack subs are basically underwater battleships. They rule beneath the sea because it is presently impossible to build a minisub which is an order of magnitude faster than its carrier. In Star Trek, the starships are invariably faster than their shuttles, just the opposite of a modern carrier. In this case there is nothing a small craft can do which the starship cannot.
Summary:
Small fast planes carrying effective weapons lead to carriers.
Small fast planes carrying ineffective weapons lead to battleships.
Small slow planes lead to submarines.
It really all depends on the technological state of the art and the laws of physics.