Well, you *do* need to create a real lump of silicon in order to ensure that your newly-defined kilogram has the same mass as the old standard kilogram.
But the advantage of the new definition is, in the future anyone who wants to create a kilogram can read your recipe in a book and make their own -- they don't need to use your lump of matter to do it.
Second, I don't care what the experts say, a kilogram is equal to the mass of one litre of water, which is equal to 1000 cubic centimetres of water, or a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm box full of water.
Does it have to be pure water, or can it have some impurities in it? What temperature is the water? What pressure? When you're trying to do especially delicate measurements, these details matter!
The "weight of a liter of water" will continue to be the useful informal definition, but we need something more precise for technical use.
This is Fox News. From their perspective, *all* concerns are political concerns.
Global warming, economic policy, genetic engineering, epidemiology: all of these are relevant to Fox News (and MSNBC etc) only for their impact on the great battle between conservatism and liberalism.
Ugh. I teach college intro physics, and even *I* think that's a sociopathically pedantic distinction.
In my class, I'm happy to use "an object weighs 5 kilograms" to describe the mass of something. I'm just careful to call the gravitational force on the object the "gravitational force", and never the "weight".
It's all clear and consistent unless you try to use the Imperial system, in which the pound is a unit of force. So I don't.
Very clever, Mr. Wittgenstein. Unfortunately shortly after you died we defined the meter in terms of the speed light travels in a certain amount of time, and abandoned the Paris standard meter. So one thing can be said for sure: the Paris standard meter is definitely *NOT* one meter long."
Because a pound is defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilogram, by international agreement since 1959. D'oh! We've secretly been using the filthy metric system all along!
The goal is to use a single atom as the artifact. Atoms (of a specific isotope) are always *exactly* the same, so there's no concern about variations in the weight of the artifact over time.
So all you've got to do is build an object with a mass as close to 1 kilogram as possible, precisely count the number of atoms it contains, and then make a definition like:
"A Kilogram is defined as the mass of 5.018451 x 10^22 atoms of Carbon 12".
The difficulty is precisely counting the number of atoms in a macroscopic object: the Avogadro Project has been working on this for years.
This is similar to how a second is defined, as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."
Okay, this sounds terrible in the article, but I can't see how bad it is until I see it in action. But because facebook has NO DOCUMENTATION TO SPEAK OF, I can't figure out how to do it. Even the cheerily sinister official announcement spends the whole time talking about how great the friend stalker tool is, but gives zero information on how to find and use it.
It seemed weird that the US government should be in the patent game, so I did a little homework.
This document shows the number of patents held by US government agencies. The total is over 30,000 -- as usual, Slashdot is posting old news! The majority are held by the armed forces; DOE and NASA hold several thousand each.
At first, this seems appalling: why should the US gubmint, which we're paying taxes to support, make patents to keep us from using the products of its research? But think about it from a different perspective: if US agencies' inventions went into the public domain, than anyone who wanted could pick them up for free and potentially make billions off them, without doing a bit of R&D on their own. Isn't it more fair to ask the people who want to use government inventions for profit to pony up some cash? It's not like that money's going to pay for the NASA chief's next yacht: it's going right back into more research at NASA Goddard. Net result: more inventions!
It's really the same idea as patents held by universities. Patentable inventions are not their primary focus, but they do naturally arise from the universities' activities. If they *don't* patent them, the ideas get snapped for free by some undeserving entrepreneur who's spawn camping the university. If they do patent them, the license profits go to improving teaching and research at the university.
15 sec x 10000 cars / 96 vans = 30 minutes in line
Yeah, but 96 vans x $800,000 per van = serious money. Not to mention the salary of the team that runs each van.
Fortunately we can re-use the vans for the Superbowl next year too. Oh, but wait! What about the Rose Bowl! Or the Pro Bowl? Or the World Series? Or the hundreds of college football and basketball games that are played every week? What about the Iowa State Fair and the Middlesex County Spelling Bee?
Shit, we're gonna need more vans...... or maybe we're going to have to stop thinking of terrorism as a list of potential targets and start thinking of it as a list of known bad guys.
Expectation of privacy. You implicitly allow search by entering an airport, but a billion court rulings state that the authorities cannot look inside your house or car without probable cause.
X ray tech counts as a search. What kind of legal advisor could ever sign off on this?
Besides, it's totally impractical. 15 seconds per scan? Useless in open traffic. Useless at a major event (15 sec x 10000 cars = 2 days in line to be searched).
Nah, it's just styling. Ten years ago, Apple would have built six little ones in rainbow colors; five years before that it would have been matte black, and five years before *that* they'd have painted it beige.
Sparse symmetric systems are actually *very* common in the physical world. The numerical solution to any elliptic partial differential equation will generally boil down to the solution of a sparse symmetric matrix equation -- that includes the static Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism, pressure equations for fluid flow, and many others.
Just to give people an idea of how useful this is, here are a couple examples of real-world problems that this may help with:
Aerodynamics simulations Weather and ocean models Electric and magnetic field models Earthquake and geophysics models
It may also be useful for modeling wave processes (light, sound, etc) depending on how they're handled. As a general rule, any time you use a computer to solve problems involving electricity and magnetism or the pressures and stresses on solid or fluid materials, you're going to be encountering linear symmetric diagonally-dominant matrices.
In many applications, approximate solutions are faster and more useful than the exact solution described here, but it's still a big deal.
And if your satellite was launched by a multinational conglomorate holding assets in X countries from a seaborne vessel, who's responsible then?
Any of the countries involved can seize your assets and arrest your person, or demand your extradition from a non-party nation. This isn't some new legal domain: it's just good old fashioned international organized crime, which we already have legal frameworks to fight.
And if you use a frequency spectrum easily accessible with OTS equipment how could you stop people from connecting their own uplinks?
Receivers will be hard to detect, but transmitters will be regulated by the FCC (or local equivalent), which has the equipment needed to find the transmitters.
Once again: if you did everything in space outside the reach of the law, you'd be fine. But every useful communications system has a footprint on the soil of a real nation, which puts you in their jurisdiction.
In the case of Sea Launch, the U.S. requires that American individuals or corporations obtain a license to launch from the FAA, whether they're launching within the U.S. or not. Interesting article on all the legal ramifications here.
Other countries likely have similar rules. But it just proves the overall point: whether the legally-sketchy activities take place in space or in international waters, whoever is controlling those activities generally lives in an actual country, and the laws of that country can be brought to bear against them.
And my entire point is that whether or not they can lay hands on your rogue satellite, they can still throw you in jail. Moving your hardware into orbit doesn't protect *you* from the law.
It's probably a legal loophole, but let me point out one thing: until the main engine shuts off, an orbital launch is almost indistinguishable from an intercontinental ballistic launch.
What do you think is going to happen when your unregistered ship launches what looks to all the world like a surprise intercontinental ballistic missile attack?
(And if you decide to play nice and announce the launch in advance, odds are good your launch platform will receive a visit from some nice men carrying machine guns who think you should come for a ride with them in their helicopter.)
So let me get this straight: since buying an oil platform is too expensive, your cheaper alternative is to construct an entire aerospace infrastructure for a small, moderately developed nation?
Okay, then.
(PS: also keep in mind that flight paths from the best launch sites in Columbia pass over Venezuela. Given their recent relations, this would be... problematic.)
Sea piracy is just as illegal as ever, but it still happens.
Yes, but it does not happen in places with effective governments and comfortable living conditions. If the Pirate Party simply wanted to break the law with impunity, they could move to Somalia. But for some reason, they want to do their thing while living within walking distance of a good cappucino, which is much much more difficult.
A satellite is beyond the jurisdiction of anyone who would normally care about copyright violation.
No, the Outer Space Treaty says that the satellite remains in the jurisdiction of its owner's country. It's beyond the *physical reach* of the law, but its owners are definitely not.
And how exactly will country X enforce it's law on something flying in space if the owners and users of said something are not living in country X and country X does not have any anti-satellite weapons?
Country X will ask Country Y, where the owners live, to extradite them. Same as if the server were actually hosted in Country X.
The point I'm making is that operating from a satellite gains you nothing in terms of *legal* immunity: if the law can get you for doing stuff on the ground, the same laws can get you for doing stuff in space.
You do gain some *physical* immunity from search and seizure of the hardware, but at a pretty tremendous dollar price.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you *do* need to create a real lump of silicon in order to ensure that your newly-defined kilogram has the same mass as the old standard kilogram.
But the advantage of the new definition is, in the future anyone who wants to create a kilogram can read your recipe in a book and make their own -- they don't need to use your lump of matter to do it.
Second, I don't care what the experts say, a kilogram is equal to the mass of one litre of water, which is equal to 1000 cubic centimetres of water, or a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm box full of water.
Does it have to be pure water, or can it have some impurities in it? What temperature is the water? What pressure? When you're trying to do especially delicate measurements, these details matter!
The "weight of a liter of water" will continue to be the useful informal definition, but we need something more precise for technical use.
This is Fox News. From their perspective, *all* concerns are political concerns.
Global warming, economic policy, genetic engineering, epidemiology: all of these are relevant to Fox News (and MSNBC etc) only for their impact on the great battle between conservatism and liberalism.
Ugh. I teach college intro physics, and even *I* think that's a sociopathically pedantic distinction.
In my class, I'm happy to use "an object weighs 5 kilograms" to describe the mass of something. I'm just careful to call the gravitational force on the object the "gravitational force", and never the "weight".
It's all clear and consistent unless you try to use the Imperial system, in which the pound is a unit of force. So I don't.
Actually, thanks to the drug trade, the kilogram is the one unit we *do* have a good understanding of.
Because US units are defined as multiples of SI units. The pound, for example, is defined to be 0.45359237 kilogram.
No matter what the local custom is, the SI system *is* the world standard for everything.
Very clever, Mr. Wittgenstein. Unfortunately shortly after you died we defined the meter in terms of the speed light travels in a certain amount of time, and abandoned the Paris standard meter. So one thing can be said for sure: the Paris standard meter is definitely *NOT* one meter long."
Because a pound is defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilogram, by international agreement since 1959. D'oh! We've secretly been using the filthy metric system all along!
The goal is to use a single atom as the artifact. Atoms (of a specific isotope) are always *exactly* the same, so there's no concern about variations in the weight of the artifact over time.
So all you've got to do is build an object with a mass as close to 1 kilogram as possible, precisely count the number of atoms it contains, and then make a definition like:
"A Kilogram is defined as the mass of 5.018451 x 10^22 atoms of Carbon 12".
The difficulty is precisely counting the number of atoms in a macroscopic object: the Avogadro Project has been working on this for years.
This is similar to how a second is defined, as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."
Okay, this sounds terrible in the article, but I can't see how bad it is until I see it in action. But because facebook has NO DOCUMENTATION TO SPEAK OF, I can't figure out how to do it. Even the cheerily sinister official announcement spends the whole time talking about how great the friend stalker tool is, but gives zero information on how to find and use it.
Anybody know what buttons to push?
It seemed weird that the US government should be in the patent game, so I did a little homework.
This document shows the number of patents held by US government agencies. The total is over 30,000 -- as usual, Slashdot is posting old news! The majority are held by the armed forces; DOE and NASA hold several thousand each.
At first, this seems appalling: why should the US gubmint, which we're paying taxes to support, make patents to keep us from using the products of its research? But think about it from a different perspective: if US agencies' inventions went into the public domain, than anyone who wanted could pick them up for free and potentially make billions off them, without doing a bit of R&D on their own. Isn't it more fair to ask the people who want to use government inventions for profit to pony up some cash? It's not like that money's going to pay for the NASA chief's next yacht: it's going right back into more research at NASA Goddard. Net result: more inventions!
It's really the same idea as patents held by universities. Patentable inventions are not their primary focus, but they do naturally arise from the universities' activities. If they *don't* patent them, the ideas get snapped for free by some undeserving entrepreneur who's spawn camping the university. If they do patent them, the license profits go to improving teaching and research at the university.
15 sec x 10000 cars / 96 vans = 30 minutes in line
Yeah, but 96 vans x $800,000 per van = serious money. Not to mention the salary of the team that runs each van.
Fortunately we can re-use the vans for the Superbowl next year too. Oh, but wait! What about the Rose Bowl! Or the Pro Bowl? Or the World Series? Or the hundreds of college football and basketball games that are played every week? What about the Iowa State Fair and the Middlesex County Spelling Bee?
Shit, we're gonna need more vans... ... or maybe we're going to have to stop thinking of terrorism as a list of potential targets and start thinking of it as a list of known bad guys.
Expectation of privacy. You implicitly allow search by entering an airport, but a billion court rulings state that the authorities cannot look inside your house or car without probable cause.
X ray tech counts as a search. What kind of legal advisor could ever sign off on this?
Besides, it's totally impractical. 15 seconds per scan? Useless in open traffic. Useless at a major event (15 sec x 10000 cars = 2 days in line to be searched).
Useless expensive and illegal. Thanks DHS!
Nah, it's just styling. Ten years ago, Apple would have built six little ones in rainbow colors; five years before that it would have been matte black, and five years before *that* they'd have painted it beige.
You *could* idly speculate over what the secret conspiracy's rules are for claiming stuff in outer space...
Or you could *read* the Outer Space Treaty, which spells it out clear and plain.
TLDR version: Natural objects in space cannot be owned by anyone.
Sparse symmetric systems are actually *very* common in the physical world. The numerical solution to any elliptic partial differential equation will generally boil down to the solution of a sparse symmetric matrix equation -- that includes the static Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism, pressure equations for fluid flow, and many others.
Just to give people an idea of how useful this is, here are a couple examples of real-world problems that this may help with:
Aerodynamics simulations
Weather and ocean models
Electric and magnetic field models
Earthquake and geophysics models
It may also be useful for modeling wave processes (light, sound, etc) depending on how they're handled. As a general rule, any time you use a computer to solve problems involving electricity and magnetism or the pressures and stresses on solid or fluid materials, you're going to be encountering linear symmetric diagonally-dominant matrices.
In many applications, approximate solutions are faster and more useful than the exact solution described here, but it's still a big deal.
And if your satellite was launched by a multinational conglomorate holding assets in X countries from a seaborne vessel, who's responsible then?
Any of the countries involved can seize your assets and arrest your person, or demand your extradition from a non-party nation. This isn't some new legal domain: it's just good old fashioned international organized crime, which we already have legal frameworks to fight.
And if you use a frequency spectrum easily accessible with OTS equipment how could you stop people from connecting their own uplinks?
Receivers will be hard to detect, but transmitters will be regulated by the FCC (or local equivalent), which has the equipment needed to find the transmitters.
Once again: if you did everything in space outside the reach of the law, you'd be fine. But every useful communications system has a footprint on the soil of a real nation, which puts you in their jurisdiction.
In the case of Sea Launch, the U.S. requires that American individuals or corporations obtain a license to launch from the FAA, whether they're launching within the U.S. or not. Interesting article on all the legal ramifications here.
Other countries likely have similar rules. But it just proves the overall point: whether the legally-sketchy activities take place in space or in international waters, whoever is controlling those activities generally lives in an actual country, and the laws of that country can be brought to bear against them.
And my entire point is that whether or not they can lay hands on your rogue satellite, they can still throw you in jail. Moving your hardware into orbit doesn't protect *you* from the law.
It's probably a legal loophole, but let me point out one thing: until the main engine shuts off, an orbital launch is almost indistinguishable from an intercontinental ballistic launch.
What do you think is going to happen when your unregistered ship launches what looks to all the world like a surprise intercontinental ballistic missile attack?
(And if you decide to play nice and announce the launch in advance, odds are good your launch platform will receive a visit from some nice men carrying machine guns who think you should come for a ride with them in their helicopter.)
So let me get this straight: since buying an oil platform is too expensive, your cheaper alternative is to construct an entire aerospace infrastructure for a small, moderately developed nation?
Okay, then.
(PS: also keep in mind that flight paths from the best launch sites in Columbia pass over Venezuela. Given their recent relations, this would be ... problematic.)
No, but I believe all countries with the technical capability to build and launch a satellite have agreed to it, which is all that matters.
Sea piracy is just as illegal as ever, but it still happens.
Yes, but it does not happen in places with effective governments and comfortable living conditions. If the Pirate Party simply wanted to break the law with impunity, they could move to Somalia. But for some reason, they want to do their thing while living within walking distance of a good cappucino, which is much much more difficult.
A satellite is beyond the jurisdiction of anyone who would normally care about copyright violation.
No, the Outer Space Treaty says that the satellite remains in the jurisdiction of its owner's country. It's beyond the *physical reach* of the law, but its owners are definitely not.
And how exactly will country X enforce it's law on something flying in space if the owners and users of said something are not living in country X and country X does not have any anti-satellite weapons?
Country X will ask Country Y, where the owners live, to extradite them. Same as if the server were actually hosted in Country X.
The point I'm making is that operating from a satellite gains you nothing in terms of *legal* immunity: if the law can get you for doing stuff on the ground, the same laws can get you for doing stuff in space.
You do gain some *physical* immunity from search and seizure of the hardware, but at a pretty tremendous dollar price.