BTW: Mercury is locked in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance - if somebody's selling you some real-estate on the Hermian day-night terminators, better buy the Broolyn bridge. If you however decide to go for Mercury, take an insurance: they are saying that Mercury is bound to collide with Venus somewhere in the future (others say that even if you buy the Brooklyn bridge you have some chances to lose: Mercury may collide even with Earth - and that's because of Jupiter).
If it's tidelocked, there shouldn't be any significant tidal heating, and with minimal atmosphere, it should just have a really hot side, and a really cold side, with more moderate temps in between, just like Mercury.
Tidal locking doesn't preclude core tides if the core has a fluid component. Here's from a source in CA (they may know better than the guys in Houston - even if the californians aren't quite renowned for their sanity).
Well, if it's a thick layer, that might be difficult. A thin layer on your visor might obscure visibility a bit. Naturally, the solution is to live underground, run pipes over to the hot side for power, and use UV lamps for growing your food in your underground oasis until the planet spirals into it's sun.
What? Closer to that hell of a core, heated to UV-hot by the core tides?
Minor details. I mean, if you can't handle breathing a little metal vapor (or building a respirator to filter it), what kind of space explorer are you?
Not quite about breathing only. Can you imagine yourself moving when a "thick layer of ice" of "condensed wolfram" forms on the joints of your space suit?
All these telescopes are looking for planets that orbit in front of their suns, relative to our viewing angle. We only know they are there from the shadow they cast toward us.
How will we discover planets that are orbiting stars, but that do not cross in front of our field of view?
Whoa, but this is elementary... just pay them a visit. Until then, discovering them isn't much of a benefit anyway, or is it?
To me it seems that it is going to be a very slow start (apart from these totally hotrock type planets with insanely quick orbit) but then the taps will be turned on and they will start finding exponentially more and more?
Given exponential time and budget, I hereby state that "the Kepler programme" is theoretically able to eventually detect all the planets in this and nearby galaxies. (seriously... this is to say that "the law of the most restricting factor" will seriously skew the "discovery curve" you mention... just don't hold your breath).
Life at the anaerobic microbial level would be well suited to this, but higher organisms not
Not even those evolved from the "primordial soup of molten silica with the abundant phosporic and alumina nutrients in the presence of the rich cesium vapour atmosphere with the right amount sodium and that extra pinch of lithium, in the just-about-right-100m-tides created by their star which feeds them with the hydrogen and helium so generosly every day"?
I like it. If I had mod points, you would already be at a 5 - funny.
Of course, if it's tidelocked, there is probably a ring slightly on the dark side of the equator that isn't hellishly hot or cold.
Even if the temperature would be bearable, other conditions may be not. Hermian atmosfere suggest that such a ring would probably show metal vapour atmosphere in the terminators line (in Mercury's case: sodium; in Hell-560's case, given a much closer proximity to its start, probably other - refractory elements - would contribute more, as the more volatile ones would be blown away by the solar-wind).
While there's no guarantee, I haven't seen any progress yet in the absence of science, so looks to me as science (and funding it thereof) might be still needed.
I think you're right. But what I see as a growing problem is the assumption that funding is science. Just because the money is spent doesn't mean it was spent well or even that it was spent on the intended goal.
"Spent well" is a hind-sight concept and yes, science is about taking risks as well. Also, "spent well" correlates with "I don;t have enough for everything, thus I need to prioritize". If you agree, then we have a ground to make considerations on the current budgeting priorities (and I'd argue that better cut opportunities are found in other areas). What I can however guarantee you: if you don't spend any on science, you finish burning the Quran as a civic duty or having laws that punish blasphemy by death. Is it better?
The problem that people continually seem to ignore is that merely funding science doesn't guarantee that we get useful science, either to us now or to our descendants centuries from now.
While there's no guarantee, I haven't seen any progress yet in the absence of science, so looks to me as science (and funding it thereof) might be still needed.
Keep in mind that the great minds of the past, which boast of the uselessness of science, had some degree of mundane incentives to produce useful things. And they did. I think it is unwise to mythologize the past and assume on that basis that one can continue the progress of the past without the incentives and goals prevalent in the past.
That's interesting. Posted already, can't mod anymore.
Not because we will get results tomorrow, but because some of it may very well end up in home appliances in 80 years.
Fuck yeah... I want my grand-grand children to play with at least the Tevatron when toddlers. (note: take a pill to boots your humor detection sense, the amount of it in my post is tiny. Don't bother though with troll-detection pils, though).
One silly recession, and everyone's going all budget cuts crazy. They're saving money so that we can have more big Wall Street firms
In other words, there are real, huge and long-lived black-holes already in action, why do we need yet one extra way that only would hypothetically produce one at atto-scale living for so short that you need years to study the data see if you actualy create one, eh? You see... it is called efficiency and it is an attribute of the capitalistic world and free-markets in action... or so some scoundrels are trying to convince me.
Members of a free society must not allow information to be suppressed simply because it inconveniences those in power. We share the responsibility to defend vital liberties.
The vital liberties of being able to max out your credit card at Walmart, watch reality tv, become obese, go into debt slavery and work for the rest of your life.
The trick with a free society: if one wishes all the above, why not? However, in a true free society:
a. only because one wishes so this doesn't imply that all the others must choose the same.
b. if one wishes so, the one should be absolutely free to do it without being affraid to be ridiculed! (works both ways, actually)
Mod me offtopic (the post fully deserves it), but I couln't resist
Is it something related with the liver? Le'me try:
"Civil liVertarianism is a strain of political thought that supports civil liVerties, or who emphasizes the supremacy of liver-rights and personal liverdoms over and against any kind of authority."
Nah, doesn't sound right. It is a typo for sure.
Yeah I was staying fairly generic in not separating out our levels & types of government:)
My understanding is that changes to law are raised by ministers...
"Nitpicking - I thought it is the parliament that passes the laws?"
Government is the majority of parliment,
Not when the Parliament is a hung one, in which cases whatever law proposals the govt injects may or may not pass. The same happen when the conscience votes come into play (even if the govt party support a law/policy, some of its own MP-es may not agree with when it comes to voting it).
This is *exactly* what government does - propose, debate and pass laws, add clauses against identified workarounds/loopholes, clarifying and updating terminology etc. Have a look at HANSAARD one day...
Nitpicking - I thought it is the parliament that passes the laws? Not saying the govt cannot be a source of legislation proposals, but I wouldn't like to have it able to approve them without any control.
If the taxes change, is only because the taxation laws allow the govt to manage how current taxes are applied. I seem to remember that the introduction of the GST still required parliament approval.
My dear latin speaking friend: if the law was broken by Google, you go after Google as a company. Not after individuals that got nothing to gain from the actions: I don't see how the developer (that made a honest mistake to capture more than necessary) and the manager (that didn't take enough care to double check the tools) can be more responsible than the "minimum-wage drones": I argue that none of them had something to gain from the excessive WiFi traffic collection (do you know otherwise?)
If you go after individuals in this case, why not go after all the individuals that were part of the actions violating the laws? (since when not knowing that you break the law is a defence?)
BTW: in your reply at point 2, what the "minimum-wage" has to do with the responsibility of breaking the law?
It's still under investigation, ultimately the case rests on information...
I wouldn't raise the question if the wording would allow me. Let me quote again the TFA, with a bit of emphasis.
“We are looking to penalize whoever ordered and developed the program,...” said a police official.
Hmmmm... the police... to penalize more than 1 person... So, what's going on with the police in SK: investigates, judges and inflicts penalties all together?
... letting aside the "breaking the encryption behind the hard-drives" containing "sensitive private information from unencrypted wireless networks during the filming process."... what the hell is with:
“We are looking to penalize whoever ordered and developed the program, but are unsure as of yet who that might be,” said a police official.
1. first whoever ordered and whoever developed are highly probable two different persons.Did both of them broke the SK law?
2. why they go after the "whoever ordered and developed" and not after "whoever used the tools"? Is it in SK customary to go after the person that manufactured the knife used in a stabbing?
3. the way I know, Google used some open-source components in putting the "tool" together. Is the original author of these components equally guilty?
Guess what though, its still annoying to that person. Its his comment, not in a newspaper or scientific journal, what's the basis of your bitching about his bitching? Oh thats right, its conversation, and your post is completely irrelevant.
Are my feeling less relevant than the ones of the original bitch-er?
Because guess what? Being a nerd myself, I'm annoyed that others bitch about our habit of caring more about what we write on our personal blogs than we care about the feelings of our readers. Can't be helped, that's why we are nerds, details are important to us even if they don't seem important to others.
From TFA, "Since World War II, the United States has played a key role in international standardization"
Umm. Played a key role in international standardisation? This is a country - the only major industrialised nation in the entire world - that so far refuses to embrace the metric system. Key role, indeed.
Not everything's lost - only 4 labs! Given that NIST has still a lab for neutrons research, who knows what measurements system will be they able to derive?
But didn't we learn from the promise and price fiasco with the 1.0 and beta of this hardware?
Side-effect learning: they were the first to step into what is now called netbook and probably the very existence of the netbooks and ebook readers has roots in their first attempt (even if they failed on price, they showed there is a market for low-end laptops). Keeping into acount they are not a for-profit, it's still remarkable they managed to pull such a trick.
For an adult I agree. Harmful to the integrity of the story, again I agree. For a grade school edition...? Although I agree, its a compromise I'm willing to make... since they aren't going to include it at all in its current form.
The best argumentation I read so far on/. My congrats.
There is a hidden flaw into it: the school is suppose to educate the kids, not only tell them the stories (and "tame" them). Thus I'd argue the compromise... well... compromises... I don't think the one can educate a real respect for a human being by stickying the head into the sand of "politically correctness"... simply because the quality of light cannot be perceived without accepting or at least looking into the darkness.
For example in this instance, replacing nigger with slave, I cannot teach the kids that being called by derogatory names is far less important than integrity. A "slave" was a social condition, doesn't exist today in the western world, I cannot imagine a child being able to feel/resonate with what the condition meant; while "nigger" is still carrying today the deprecating meaning.
I'm reading what I wrote above... I admit myself "guilty of translation"... still using the form (words) but attaching other meanings. I suspect in Mark Twain's time the two were exactly synonymic. Thanks you for making me realize my sin (just who am I to think that my understanding of Huck Finn and the way I resonated with the text should be adopted by everybody; along with my idea of education and the means to educate).
Slashdot Mirror
p>If it's tidelocked, ... , just like Mercury.
BTW: Mercury is locked in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance - if somebody's selling you some real-estate on the Hermian day-night terminators, better buy the Broolyn bridge.
If you however decide to go for Mercury, take an insurance: they are saying that Mercury is bound to collide with Venus somewhere in the future (others say that even if you buy the Brooklyn bridge you have some chances to lose: Mercury may collide even with Earth - and that's because of Jupiter).
If it's tidelocked, there shouldn't be any significant tidal heating, and with minimal atmosphere, it should just have a really hot side, and a really cold side, with more moderate temps in between, just like Mercury.
Tidal locking doesn't preclude core tides if the core has a fluid component. Here's from a source in CA (they may know better than the guys in Houston - even if the californians aren't quite renowned for their sanity).
Well, if it's a thick layer, that might be difficult. A thin layer on your visor might obscure visibility a bit. Naturally, the solution is to live underground, run pipes over to the hot side for power, and use UV lamps for growing your food in your underground oasis until the planet spirals into it's sun.
What? Closer to that hell of a core, heated to UV-hot by the core tides?
Minor details. I mean, if you can't handle breathing a little metal vapor (or building a respirator to filter it), what kind of space explorer are you?
Not quite about breathing only. Can you imagine yourself moving when a "thick layer of ice" of "condensed wolfram" forms on the joints of your space suit?
All these telescopes are looking for planets that orbit in front of their suns, relative to our viewing angle. We only know they are there from the shadow they cast toward us.
How will we discover planets that are orbiting stars, but that do not cross in front of our field of view?
Whoa, but this is elementary... just pay them a visit. Until then, discovering them isn't much of a benefit anyway, or is it?
To me it seems that it is going to be a very slow start (apart from these totally hotrock type planets with insanely quick orbit) but then the taps will be turned on and they will start finding exponentially more and more?
Given exponential time and budget, I hereby state that "the Kepler programme" is theoretically able to eventually detect all the planets in this and nearby galaxies.
(seriously... this is to say that "the law of the most restricting factor" will seriously skew the "discovery curve" you mention... just don't hold your breath).
Life at the anaerobic microbial level would be well suited to this, but higher organisms not
Not even those evolved from the "primordial soup of molten silica with the abundant phosporic and alumina nutrients in the presence of the rich cesium vapour atmosphere with the right amount sodium and that extra pinch of lithium, in the just-about-right-100m-tides created by their star which feeds them with the hydrogen and helium so generosly every day"?
I like it. If I had mod points, you would already be at a 5 - funny.
Of course, if it's tidelocked, there is probably a ring slightly on the dark side of the equator that isn't hellishly hot or cold.
Even if the temperature would be bearable, other conditions may be not. Hermian atmosfere suggest that such a ring would probably show metal vapour atmosphere in the terminators line (in Mercury's case: sodium; in Hell-560's case, given a much closer proximity to its start, probably other - refractory elements - would contribute more, as the more volatile ones would be blown away by the solar-wind).
While there's no guarantee, I haven't seen any progress yet in the absence of science, so looks to me as science (and funding it thereof) might be still needed.
I think you're right. But what I see as a growing problem is the assumption that funding is science. Just because the money is spent doesn't mean it was spent well or even that it was spent on the intended goal.
"Spent well" is a hind-sight concept and yes, science is about taking risks as well. Also, "spent well" correlates with "I don;t have enough for everything, thus I need to prioritize". If you agree, then we have a ground to make considerations on the current budgeting priorities (and I'd argue that better cut opportunities are found in other areas).
What I can however guarantee you: if you don't spend any on science, you finish burning the Quran as a civic duty or having laws that punish blasphemy by death. Is it better?
The problem that people continually seem to ignore is that merely funding science doesn't guarantee that we get useful science, either to us now or to our descendants centuries from now.
While there's no guarantee, I haven't seen any progress yet in the absence of science, so looks to me as science (and funding it thereof) might be still needed.
Keep in mind that the great minds of the past, which boast of the uselessness of science, had some degree of mundane incentives to produce useful things. And they did. I think it is unwise to mythologize the past and assume on that basis that one can continue the progress of the past without the incentives and goals prevalent in the past.
That's interesting. Posted already, can't mod anymore.
Not because we will get results tomorrow, but because some of it may very well end up in home appliances in 80 years.
Fuck yeah... I want my grand-grand children to play with at least the Tevatron when toddlers.
(note: take a pill to boots your humor detection sense, the amount of it in my post is tiny. Don't bother though with troll-detection pils, though).
One silly recession, and everyone's going all budget cuts crazy. They're saving money so that we can have more big Wall Street firms
In other words, there are real, huge and long-lived black-holes already in action, why do we need yet one extra way that only would hypothetically produce one at atto-scale living for so short that you need years to study the data see if you actualy create one, eh?
You see... it is called efficiency and it is an attribute of the capitalistic world and free-markets in action... or so some scoundrels are trying to convince me.
But I did not DOS the government...
Should have done it the other way around.
I mean, who's actually the sheriff? (hint: who tells you to kill it before it grows?)
Members of a free society must not allow information to be suppressed simply because it inconveniences those in power. We share the responsibility to defend vital liberties. The vital liberties of being able to max out your credit card at Walmart, watch reality tv, become obese, go into debt slavery and work for the rest of your life.
The trick with a free society: if one wishes all the above, why not? However, in a true free society:
a. only because one wishes so this doesn't imply that all the others must choose the same.
b. if one wishes so, the one should be absolutely free to do it without being affraid to be ridiculed! (works both ways, actually)
Livertarianism
Mod me offtopic (the post fully deserves it), but I couln't resist
Is it something related with the liver?
Le'me try:
"Civil liVertarianism is a strain of political thought that supports civil liVerties, or who emphasizes the supremacy of liver-rights and personal liverdoms over and against any kind of authority."
Nah, doesn't sound right. It is a typo for sure.
Yeah I was staying fairly generic in not separating out our levels & types of government :)
My understanding is that changes to law are raised by ministers ...
Not only by ministers.
Any Member can introduce a proposed law (bill) but most are introduced by the Government. To become law, bills must be passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate. They may start in either house but the majority of bills are introduced in the House of Representatives.
Other countries (not Australia) allow citizens to propose laws or require a referendum (if enough number of signatures are collected).
"Nitpicking - I thought it is the parliament that passes the laws?"
Government is the majority of parliment,
Not when the Parliament is a hung one, in which cases whatever law proposals the govt injects may or may not pass.
The same happen when the conscience votes come into play (even if the govt party support a law/policy, some of its own MP-es may not agree with when it comes to voting it).
This is *exactly* what government does - propose, debate and pass laws, add clauses against identified workarounds/loopholes, clarifying and updating terminology etc. Have a look at HANSAARD one day...
Nitpicking - I thought it is the parliament that passes the laws?
Not saying the govt cannot be a source of legislation proposals, but I wouldn't like to have it able to approve them without any control.
If the taxes change, is only because the taxation laws allow the govt to manage how current taxes are applied. I seem to remember that the introduction of the GST still required parliament approval.
Not after individuals that got nothing to gain from the actions: I don't see how the developer (that made a honest mistake to capture more than necessary) and the manager (that didn't take enough care to double check the tools) can be more responsible than the "minimum-wage drones": I argue that none of them had something to gain from the excessive WiFi traffic collection (do you know otherwise?)
If you go after individuals in this case, why not go after all the individuals that were part of the actions violating the laws? (since when not knowing that you break the law is a defence?)
BTW: in your reply at point 2, what the "minimum-wage" has to do with the responsibility of breaking the law?
It's still under investigation, ultimately the case rests on information...
I wouldn't raise the question if the wording would allow me. Let me quote again the TFA, with a bit of emphasis.
“We are looking to penalize whoever ordered and developed the program, ...” said a police official.
Hmmmm... the police... to penalize more than 1 person... So, what's going on with the police in SK: investigates, judges and inflicts penalties all together?
“We are looking to penalize whoever ordered and developed the program, but are unsure as of yet who that might be,” said a police official.
1. first whoever ordered and whoever developed are highly probable two different persons.Did both of them broke the SK law?
2. why they go after the "whoever ordered and developed" and not after "whoever used the tools"? Is it in SK customary to go after the person that manufactured the knife used in a stabbing?
3. the way I know, Google used some open-source components in putting the "tool" together. Is the original author of these components equally guilty?
Guess what though, its still annoying to that person. Its his comment, not in a newspaper or scientific journal, what's the basis of your bitching about his bitching? Oh thats right, its conversation, and your post is completely irrelevant.
Are my feeling less relevant than the ones of the original bitch-er?
Because guess what? Being a nerd myself, I'm annoyed that others bitch about our habit of caring more about what we write on our personal blogs than we care about the feelings of our readers. Can't be helped, that's why we are nerds, details are important to us even if they don't seem important to others.
(mumble... what a bitch this world become!)
From TFA, "Since World War II, the United States has played a key role in international standardization"
Umm. Played a key role in international standardisation? This is a country - the only major industrialised nation in the entire world - that so far refuses to embrace the metric system. Key role, indeed.
Not everything's lost - only 4 labs! Given that NIST has still a lab for neutrons research, who knows what measurements system will be they able to derive?
But didn't we learn from the promise and price fiasco with the 1.0 and beta of this hardware?
Side-effect learning: they were the first to step into what is now called netbook and probably the very existence of the netbooks and ebook readers has roots in their first attempt (even if they failed on price, they showed there is a market for low-end laptops). Keeping into acount they are not a for-profit, it's still remarkable they managed to pull such a trick.
For an adult I agree. Harmful to the integrity of the story, again I agree. For a grade school edition...? Although I agree, its a compromise I'm willing to make... since they aren't going to include it at all in its current form.
The best argumentation I read so far on /. My congrats.
There is a hidden flaw into it: the school is suppose to educate the kids, not only tell them the stories (and "tame" them). Thus I'd argue the compromise... well... compromises... I don't think the one can educate a real respect for a human being by stickying the head into the sand of "politically correctness"... simply because the quality of light cannot be perceived without accepting or at least looking into the darkness.
For example in this instance, replacing nigger with slave, I cannot teach the kids that being called by derogatory names is far less important than integrity. A "slave" was a social condition, doesn't exist today in the western world, I cannot imagine a child being able to feel/resonate with what the condition meant; while "nigger" is still carrying today the deprecating meaning.
I'm reading what I wrote above... I admit myself "guilty of translation" ... still using the form (words) but attaching other meanings. I suspect in Mark Twain's time the two were exactly synonymic. Thanks you for making me realize my sin (just who am I to think that my understanding of Huck Finn and the way I resonated with the text should be adopted by everybody; along with my idea of education and the means to educate).
My sincere and best regards