While it's not quite "literally", add to that this, seen over much of central Europe on the Christmas eve. Curiously (and echoing somewhat the confusion on the other recent space-debris reports), news-outlets are following officials quoting it's either "99.9% certainly a meteorite" or the story about that having been the failed Meridian launch. Based on information from USSTRATCOM (ex NORAD) this was re-entry of the rocket stage from the successful ISS mission. Yet I don't think they've ever been quite this spectacular before!
Quick Googling now that I had time turned up this. It's the rocket body of the Soyuz SL-4 on TMA-22 mission that took US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts to ISS on 16th November. Predicted re-entry location was in the sea south of Africa, but the predicted location isn't necessarily exact, plus there's several stages that would each break up across longer range. In any case it's certainly a good match for the vague "Mid November" reported.
It's a COPV, see here or page 11 here. The wrapping has probably shielded it enough during the atmospheric re-entry and then ripped away, or it could be from lower altitude flight. In fact NASA and ESA have already studied this object, and most responsible news outlets have explained it along with the newsreport. The only real question is which mission or ship it is from, but unfortunately that might never be found out.
If you take a quick look at the Drupal repository itself, you'll find the statement "Please note that all code which is committed into a Drupal repository must be covered under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or greater; the same as Drupal itself." The only halfway interesting question out of this post seems to be, if you submit your work to a repository which requires all submissions to be GPL, will it be GPL even if you don't explictly declare it as such? I would assume not, as most high-profile GPL projects have been requiring signed GPL assignment papers from any major contributors.
This whole argument about the works license is, of course, mostly moot since obviously as the Drupal licensing FAQ http://drupal.org/licensing/faq puts it: "Drupal modules and themes are a derivative work of Drupal. If you distribute them, you must do so under the terms of the GPL version 2 or later."
There is a clear danger that this kind of move could lead to ruling that GPL is invalid and standard copyright laws apply (Already it seems many people are calling to try this under normal copyright laws!). Because of the number of people who have contributed to GPL software, many who are only known by long-expired e-mail address if even that, this would totally kill off GPL software. At this point, it seems the only possible logical reason for SCO's actions would be to simply try to ruin Linux regardless of what happens to them. I wonder who would want such a thing?
Sunspots itself are not rare, though they're much more common close to the "solar max" on the 11 year solar activity cycle. This was in 2000-2001 last time. Apparently, this many this big spots have never been visible at the same time however, and the invidual spots apepar to be second largest ever pictured.
By the way, use extreme care when observing the sun, if even small part of the sun is uncovered (eclipse, smoke, clouds) one risks eye damage. The only generally safe method of observing the sun is taking a telescope/binocular and pointing it at a sun *without looking from the eyepiece* and using that to reflect an image of the sun on a paper. Some people point out this may damage the lenses, but unless you leave it pointed at the sun for long time this is quite unlikely. Actually looking through the binoculars/telescope at the sun will lead to instant eye-damage, ofcourse.
According to NOAA there's been Severa radio-blackouts associated with the event already. These are defined as "HF Radio: : HF radio communication blackout on most of the sunlit side of Earth for one to two hours. HF radio contact lost during this time.
Navigation: Outages of low-frequency navigation signals cause increased error in positioning for one to two hours. Minor disruptions of satellite navigation possible on the sunlit side of Earth."
In addition http://www.sec.noaa.gov/ftpdir/lists/radio/radio_b ursts.txt gives a list of the measured radio-bursts from sun. Somebody more experienced in radio-waves would have to comment, but the 2695Mhz signals seem relatively close to WLAN frequency and if sufficiently strong, could hamper it.
Still, as noted, there are several other causes that are much more likely than solar-based for WLAN problems at this point.
Altough, there's now talk that the CME impact speed might be 1600km/s instead. It's hard to tell, since many of the major instruments on satellites used to measure the event were overwhelmed or shut down to protect them from the high-energy proton event.
http://www.spaceweather.com lets us know "DON'T PANIC: Some rumors spreading across the internet claim that the ongoing solar storm could wreak terrible havoc on Earth. Not so. There is a slim chance of power blackouts and communication outages, but the main side effect of this solar activity will be harmless and beautiful auroras."
However, all the predictions currently are that this event has the potential of causing a K-inded 9 geomagnetic storm (G5). NOAA's classification of G5 effects is:
Power systems: : widespread voltage control problems and protective system problems can occur, some grid systems may experience complete collapse or blackouts. Transformers may experience damage.
Spacecraft operations: may experience extensive surface charging, problems with orientation, uplink/downlink and tracking satellites.
Other systems: pipeline currents can reach hundreds of amps, HF (high frequency) radio propagation may be impossible in many areas for one to two days, satellite navigation may be degraded for days, low-frequency radio navigation can be out for hours, and aurora has been seen as low as Florida and southern Texas (typically 40 geomagnetic lat.)**.
In addition, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has issued a press-release warning that "In California, where raging wildfires have damaged many microwave communication antennas on the ground, satellite communications have been crucial to emergency efforts. Emergency personnel should be prepared for potential disruptions and communication interference."
All of this, however, is somethign that MAY happen, while it likely won't. A lot of factors about the nature of the event and the situation in the interplanetary space between Sun and Earth affect how it'll turn out. But there's still a lot of potential for this one.
They had an odd way of putting this. The proton flare caused a solar storm which hit Earth within minutes of the flare commencing. However, the associated CME is significantly slower (Still over 2000 kilometers per second) and will hit within hours. The CME will have higher total energy and is what will cause fluctuations in the gemmagnetic field, ie. a gemomagnetic storm. "Next day or two" is probably because they didn't know this was a high-speed event yet.
These events are already causing a slashdot effect on the solar weather sites without Slashdot even mentioning them, so here's a copy of the best report I've come across, from http://www.spacew.com/cme/index.html:
Event #49 - 28 October 2003
Issued: 16:30 UTC, 28 October 2003
SOURCE EVENT
Class X17.2 Flare in Region 486 at 11:10 UTC on 28 October 2003 Type II: 1250 km/sec Estimated LASCO-derived Plane of Sky Velocity: 2125 km/sec
ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL OF SHOCK AT EARTH
Estimated Impact Window: 00:00 UTC on 29 October to 21:00 UTC on 29 October Preferred Predicted Impact Time: 08:00 UTC, 29 October 2003 (3 am EST on 29 October) Estimated Shock Strength (0=Weakest, 9=Strongest): 9
Predicted Behavior of IMF at Shock Impact
At Shock Impact, the Interplanetary Magnetic Field is predicted to initially turn: SOUTHWARD
IMPORTANT TIME OF ARRIVAL NOTICE FOR NORTH AMERICANS The preferred time of arrival is ***TONIGHT***, TUESDAY NIGHT (before you go to bed that night) near or after 3 am Eastern Standard Time). That's 2 am Central Standard Time on TONIGHT. That's 1 am Mountain Standard Time on TONIGHT. That's MIDNIGHT Pacific Standard Time on TONIGHT.
EXPECT RESIDUAL ACTIVITY (LESS INTENSE) TOMMORROW NIGHT (WEDNESDAY, 29 OCT) AS WELL !
EVENT #49 NOTES:
This is the most energetic Earthward-directed event of the solar cycle.
SEVERE to MAJOR geomagnetic storming is expected to abruptly commence following the arrival of the shock front from this flare.
This flare was associated with a Ground-Level Event. It was also associated with very high energy protons at greater than 100 MeV (which are still climbing, over 5 hours after the event began). A magnetic crochet was observed over the daylit sections of the ionosphere. An exceptionally intense shortwave fadeout and polar cap absorption event are in progress. There are reports this event was observed in white-light. Intense radio bursts were associated with this event across the spectrum. The type II shock velocity is not representative of the observed velocity of this CME. The observed velocity as determined by SOHO was 2125 km/sec.
This event has the potential to produce the strongest geomagnetic storm since 1989. Auroral activity could become visible into the deep low latitude regions. This one is worth driving a good long distance over to find clear skies. It has better potential to produce low-latitude aurora than almost any other event observed in the past decade. Keep in mind that it is also possible the disturbance may not be nearly as geoeffective as many would like. It all depends on the character of the magnetic fields imbedded within the coronal mass ejection. However, we believe it will either be very large, or only modestly large in terms of its capacity to produce disturbed geomagnetic and auroral activity. We do not expect this disturbance to be small.
These predictions may be based on preliminary data and may be revised without warning. The predictions should not be used as a definitive indication of CME impact times or strengths and may frequently be in error. The proprietary methods used to estimate shock impact times are under continual development. Caution is advised.
Except that GIC (Geomagnetically Induced Currents) would likely render landlines unusable and possibly hazarous;)
For the less catastrophic failure modes, see http://www.spaceweather.gc.ca/effects_e.shtml which has some quite nice resources on the "normal" effects of space-weather events.
Terrestrial electronics are at practically no risk from solar flares; that's thanks to our atmosphere and magnetosphere. However, yes planetary fluctuations of the planetary magentic field (geomagnetic storms) caused by the proton flux from such an event can and are known to induce huge currents into any large-scale conducts. There's a nice pic near the end of http://www.spacew.com/gic/index.html about what one 1989 geomagnetic storm did to some transformers.
An interesting overview of the threat to power networks in particular is preseted at http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/eiskappenman.html with the lead-on that "Only a few amps are needed to disrupt transformer operation, but over 100 amps have been measured in the grounding connections of transformers in affected areas."
Ofcourse, the problem isn't limited to telegraph and powegrids; all large spans of conducts are affected, such as pipelines, land phoneline systems and even railways. http://sumppu.fmi.fi/MAGN/GIC/ provides realtime data on Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GIC) at some power grids and pipeline operators in the Nordic countries as well as more information on this aspect.
Yes, instead of small monthgly payments, you get to go through the whole rumba of buying a new expansion pack every once in a while. Those companies are out there to make money, after all. Despite the software being fairly buggy.
I would neither really underwrite that class balance is never an issue; it's quite horrible really if you care about powergaming issues. And face it, practically all NWN PW's are built with the "bigger, better" which essentially forces powergaming and the level-up treadmill.
But for all it's shortcomings, still, I'd say that it's a great environment and move forward. Interestingly taking out the MM in MMORPG may be one of the best contributions. More people has always meant more troublemakers and more trouble, and the more people you try to please, the fewer of them will actually get what they want.
NWN PW's are more like small communities where getting to know (and become known by) significant number of your co-players isn't impossible, and the admins can and sometimes will respond to player suggestions and improvements. And if you don't like the way a particular world is being played, you can just move to another game-server (or start your own) without having to pay again for the client, sometimes even being able to take your old character along!
Kinda opposite story from another famous fauilure, where after-fact review of pictures of the launch vehicle revealed the stages had been stuck to each other with tape, causing them not to separate properly. Maybe they tried the opposite now, holding them together during burn with tape alone?
Well, first of all, the flare classes are logarithmic, so X10 actually is 100 times stronger than X1, "One of the common X class ones". I suspect like to earthquakes, there are strict limits to how strong solar-flare is possible from a specific sun.
We actually had something in that category during this solar-peak; nobody is exactly sure how strong it was, though, because it flooded out all the satellites set to monitor those events for a good while, so the size had to be estimated.
Bottom line is, it had no really observable effects to the Earthlings, even the CME missed us enough that as I recall it wasn't much of an aurora-show. That's why we have the atmosphere, it protects us from lot of cosmic stuff, and even from things out of our own solar system.
Unless you count few mysterious radio/television blackouts as observable effects, ofcourse - though sometimes I suspect most Earthlings would notice that better than if a spaceship landed on their front-yard, so it's all relative...
One type of "solar flare" there is that you probably could worry about; when stars collapse, they shoot immense gamma-bursts off their poles. Were Earth to be caught in the way of such an event from a star in our part of the galaxy, all life (Save for the deepest oceans) here would likely get fried in an instant.
Some scientists theorize this might be the reason of some of the mass-extinctions Earth has seen in its past, from stars far away not to kill everything on their way. Unlike asteroids, there isn't much that could even conceivably be done, though, so it's perhaps one thing better to not worry about.
Back on out own Sun, I think sub-cycles in solar activity might have caused increased mutations during some periods, leading to the creation of new dominant species (Including humans) which have then quickly taken over as conditions have become more stable. In genetic algorithms this is known as "annealing". It might have caused events that to us look like mass-extinctions.
Except that due to less civilization, there's less light pollution (and other kind of pollution, ie. smog) out there, meaning the aurora is brighter and more spectacular, were someone there to observe it.
Ps. the solar max is well past us now. This doesn't, in essence, mean that strong geomagnetic storms that could cause such auroral activity don't happen anymore, the solar max affects more their frequency of appearance. Because of this it's unlikely further expeditions will be sent in to picture them anymore.
Somebody's probably mentioned this already, and moved on, but... It sounds like FEC/Digital Fountain/Tornado Codes all over again. If this, as I suspect, is true, then Cringely is strictly speaking right, the improvement is more or less Layer 2 (Error Correction), but they're being way too unclear about the implementation, probably for no good reason.
The idea of FEC (Forward Error Correction) and related techniques is, in short, that you will send enough information about the data, that even if some of it were to be missed, it could all be reconstructed. Hence you're not defeating Shannon, you're just prepared for that loss, and meeting it, while traditional approaches often enough allows very little if at all error-correction, with strict limits on the nature of the error.
As Cringely suggests, this is, then, applicable to all transmission media, including the backbones. I suspect cable-networks have been chosen for a need to demonstrate the technology first on a more marketable system.
Well, it's getting a bit off-topic from the original discussion...
But still I can't help but remark that messaging between "entities", that is nicks and nick-lists was the initial application of IRC (Which was built as a more convenient replacement of talk). The subscription channels, first as numbers and then as the present named channels, appeared only much later. There are still many people who never join channels, just wait for people on their notify-lists to pop up or the other way around.
I'm not sure what you mean by "reserved and enforced by the protocol itself". IRC protocol is pretty militant about that, and has had support for password-protected logins back from day one as it were. Persistence of entities is a problem that was solved by the different services-systems half a decade ago.
I'm not saying IRC is the best protocol out there and a model for the future of Instant Messaging, but it is very hard to find examples of anything that all present Instant Messagign systems do that IRC didn't do already five years back - including crashing, ofcourse;)
And yes, SMTP could've served as IM as well, had somebody written up an aplication to broker out presence requests and notifications and guaranteed real-time delivery, but nobody did.
-Donwulff (And let's not even talk about, er, talk...)
Not just were, FidoNet is still alive, and some would say well. Dial-up connections have in many places been replaced by data exchange over Internet, but otherwise little has changed. And, in many ways, it's a giant step above Usenet.
Unfortunately SETI@home and SETI-like searches in general are typically very tight-lipped about their actual capabilities. Somewhere on SETI@home's pages I recall reading that with their latest "science additions" (More complex calculations in the client) they're now able to distinquish the equivalent of a cellular phone used on the surface of Mars. Whether this would actually be noticed and flagged as an intelligent signal is anybodys guess, though: By now SETI@home has "distinquished" over three hundred million events of interest.
SETI@home offers some other statistics asked after here. Their FAQ circles the issue a bit, but finally admits in essence that SETI@home is unable to detect Earth-level technology even on the closest stars. (And there's no guarantee beyond-Earth civilizations still use radio-frequencies - in fact odds are against it). Their latest "Science Newsletter" just happens to discuss the separation of intelligent signals from noise as well, but leaves pretty hazy impression.
Other wisdom gleamed from the SETI@home web-site includes the notion that the projects budget so-far has been $500.000, and they're capable of detecting signals tenth of the strength of best other SETI projects - which scan wider frequencies and typically concentrate on the likely locations, though.
It would be nice to hear your definition of Instant Messaging, otherwise any discussion on whether IRC fullfills it or not is jsut empty lip-slapping.
However, I feel I have to remark that a primitive presence-protocol was defined in the RFC 1459, May 1993, "The ISON command was implemented to provide a quick and efficient means to get a response about whether a given nickname was currently on IRC." This is a polling presence-mechanism, and was extended in 1995 to allow more fine-grianed identification. On October 1997, the increase in user-counts and decrease in memory-prices led to the official roll-out of the WATCH system, which implements passive presence notification, on DALnet IRC network. This extension has since then been adopted by most major IRC networks and clients.
I personally consider IM just a subset of chat/IRC. Now I'm fully aware IRC protocol has significant problems with authenticiation (To some degree solved by development and integration of Services around 1997), segmentation of the IRC community (But you don't expect ICQ presence to work on AIM etc. do you?) and scaling. However, it yet remains to be seen what a major company running a centralized server-farm for IRC could've accomplished; most of IRC's scaling-problems are due to decentralization using 1980's architecture and assumptions.
However, I think the kind of single-eyed software-patriotism as this thread suggests is only harmful to the open-source movement as a whole. It wasn't even automatically clear that IRC was under an open-source license, and there was a strong movement to hold it under a properitary license. Luckily, perhaps, open-source won then - but had they known many in the open-source movement would later disown and ignore this important pioneer, I think they'd thought twice about it.
Well, according to the likes of SETI@home, distributed computing, now dubbed "P&P" to include Napster etc. is the "next big thing for Internet". There's indeed an explosion of commercial activity on this arena right now. Hopefully each one will be able to carve out their own niche, of people who'd mostly not be interested in the other projects - altough doubtlessly some overlapping exists. Luckily the commercial ventures with big risks are the ones to suffer mostly from this, the non-profit outfits can hopefully weather it out.
Something I've been waiting with interest is a resurgence of the "Free Computer" idea, originally intended to be financed through advertisement, customer profiling and such. Adding distributed computing to this equation might be just what it takes to make it profitable: Imagine the ability to run the equivalences of huge server-farms with no space, maintenance or electricity investments! And advertisement benefits on top of that. It might work, and bring more people into distributed computing.
When this technology could still be called new, with GIMPS and Distributed.net pretty much the only ones out there, I too used to be worried about the use of "this power" for what I considered "wrong purposes". There seemed to be just something so inherently wrong about the ability to attain results that would normally need larger supercomputers than yet existed, even for the "common good". More than anything, I was really worried the mankind wouldn't be ready for that yet. As it had turned out now, there is no single "distributed supercomputer", and likely never will, so I am less concerned it will ever be used for unethical things the humankind isn't ready for yet. There's always choice what you run, and in a sense the TCP/IP stack already was a hugely successful distributed computing experiment. It's probably also going to remain the largest.
Slashdot Mirror
Euronews footage of the sphere and damage. Not much to look at, but I for one was curious to see it. "Pics or it didn't happen" and all that.
While it's not quite "literally", add to that this, seen over much of central Europe on the Christmas eve. Curiously (and echoing somewhat the confusion on the other recent space-debris reports), news-outlets are following officials quoting it's either "99.9% certainly a meteorite" or the story about that having been the failed Meridian launch. Based on information from USSTRATCOM (ex NORAD) this was re-entry of the rocket stage from the successful ISS mission. Yet I don't think they've ever been quite this spectacular before!
Quick Googling now that I had time turned up this. It's the rocket body of the Soyuz SL-4 on TMA-22 mission that took US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts to ISS on 16th November. Predicted re-entry location was in the sea south of Africa, but the predicted location isn't necessarily exact, plus there's several stages that would each break up across longer range. In any case it's certainly a good match for the vague "Mid November" reported.
It's a COPV, see here or page 11 here. The wrapping has probably shielded it enough during the atmospheric re-entry and then ripped away, or it could be from lower altitude flight. In fact NASA and ESA have already studied this object, and most responsible news outlets have explained it along with the newsreport. The only real question is which mission or ship it is from, but unfortunately that might never be found out.
If you take a quick look at the Drupal repository itself, you'll find the statement "Please note that all code which is committed into a Drupal repository must be covered under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or greater; the same as Drupal itself."
The only halfway interesting question out of this post seems to be, if you submit your work to a repository which requires all submissions to be GPL, will it be GPL even if you don't explictly declare it as such? I would assume not, as most high-profile GPL projects have been requiring signed GPL assignment papers from any major contributors.
This whole argument about the works license is, of course, mostly moot since obviously as the Drupal licensing FAQ http://drupal.org/licensing/faq puts it:
"Drupal modules and themes are a derivative work of Drupal. If you distribute them, you must do so under the terms of the GPL version 2 or later."
There is a clear danger that this kind of move could lead to ruling that GPL is invalid and standard copyright laws apply (Already it seems many people are calling to try this under normal copyright laws!). Because of the number of people who have contributed to GPL software, many who are only known by long-expired e-mail address if even that, this would totally kill off GPL software. At this point, it seems the only possible logical reason for SCO's actions would be to simply try to ruin Linux regardless of what happens to them. I wonder who would want such a thing?
Sunspots itself are not rare, though they're much more common close to the "solar max" on the 11 year solar activity cycle. This was in 2000-2001 last time. Apparently, this many this big spots have never been visible at the same time however, and the invidual spots apepar to be second largest ever pictured.
By the way, use extreme care when observing the sun, if even small part of the sun is uncovered (eclipse, smoke, clouds) one risks eye damage. The only generally safe method of observing the sun is taking a telescope/binocular and pointing it at a sun *without looking from the eyepiece* and using that to reflect an image of the sun on a paper. Some people point out this may damage the lenses, but unless you leave it pointed at the sun for long time this is quite unlikely. Actually looking through the binoculars/telescope at the sun will lead to instant eye-damage, ofcourse.
According to NOAA there's been Severa radio-blackouts associated with the event already. These are defined as "HF Radio: : HF radio communication blackout on most of the sunlit side of Earth for one to two hours. HF radio contact lost during this time.
b ursts.txt gives a list of the measured radio-bursts from sun. Somebody more experienced in radio-waves would have to comment, but the 2695Mhz signals seem relatively close to WLAN frequency and if sufficiently strong, could hamper it.
Navigation: Outages of low-frequency navigation signals cause increased error in positioning for one to two hours. Minor disruptions of satellite navigation possible on the sunlit side of Earth."
In addition http://www.sec.noaa.gov/ftpdir/lists/radio/radio_
Still, as noted, there are several other causes that are much more likely than solar-based for WLAN problems at this point.
Altough, there's now talk that the CME impact speed might be 1600km/s instead. It's hard to tell, since many of the major instruments on satellites used to measure the event were overwhelmed or shut down to protect them from the high-energy proton event.
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/solar-weather/pig eons.html
That does it. We're back to stone age.
http://www.spaceweather.com lets us know "DON'T PANIC: Some rumors spreading across the internet claim that the ongoing solar storm could wreak terrible havoc on Earth. Not so. There is a slim chance of power blackouts and communication outages, but the main side effect of this solar activity will be harmless and beautiful auroras."
However, all the predictions currently are that this event has the potential of causing a K-inded 9 geomagnetic storm (G5). NOAA's classification of G5 effects is:
Power systems: : widespread voltage control problems and protective system problems can occur, some grid systems may experience complete collapse or blackouts. Transformers may experience damage.
Spacecraft operations: may experience extensive surface charging, problems with orientation, uplink/downlink and tracking satellites.
Other systems: pipeline currents can reach hundreds of amps, HF (high frequency) radio propagation may be impossible in many areas for one to two days, satellite navigation may be degraded for days, low-frequency radio navigation can be out for hours, and aurora has been seen as low as Florida and southern Texas (typically 40 geomagnetic lat.)**.
In addition, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics has issued a press-release warning that "In California, where raging wildfires have damaged many microwave communication antennas on the ground, satellite communications have been crucial to emergency efforts. Emergency personnel should be prepared for potential disruptions and communication interference."
All of this, however, is somethign that MAY happen, while it likely won't. A lot of factors about the nature of the event and the situation in the interplanetary space between Sun and Earth affect how it'll turn out. But there's still a lot of potential for this one.
They had an odd way of putting this. The proton flare caused a solar storm which hit Earth within minutes of the flare commencing. However, the associated CME is significantly slower (Still over 2000 kilometers per second) and will hit within hours. The CME will have higher total energy and is what will cause fluctuations in the gemmagnetic field, ie. a gemomagnetic storm. "Next day or two" is probably because they didn't know this was a high-speed event yet.
These events are already causing a slashdot effect on the solar weather sites without Slashdot even mentioning them, so here's a copy of the best report I've come across, from http://www.spacew.com/cme/index.html:
Event #49 - 28 October 2003
Issued: 16:30 UTC, 28 October 2003
SOURCE EVENT
Class X17.2 Flare in Region 486 at 11:10 UTC on 28 October 2003
Type II: 1250 km/sec
Estimated LASCO-derived Plane of Sky Velocity: 2125 km/sec
ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL OF SHOCK AT EARTH
Estimated Impact Window: 00:00 UTC on 29 October to 21:00 UTC on 29 October
Preferred Predicted Impact Time: 08:00 UTC, 29 October 2003 (3 am EST on 29 October)
Estimated Shock Strength (0=Weakest, 9=Strongest): 9
Predicted Behavior of IMF at Shock Impact
At Shock Impact, the Interplanetary Magnetic Field is predicted to initially turn:
SOUTHWARD
IMPORTANT TIME OF ARRIVAL NOTICE FOR NORTH AMERICANS
The preferred time of arrival is ***TONIGHT***, TUESDAY NIGHT (before you go to bed that night) near or after 3 am Eastern Standard Time).
That's 2 am Central Standard Time on TONIGHT.
That's 1 am Mountain Standard Time on TONIGHT.
That's MIDNIGHT Pacific Standard Time on TONIGHT.
EXPECT RESIDUAL ACTIVITY (LESS INTENSE) TOMMORROW NIGHT (WEDNESDAY, 29 OCT) AS WELL !
EVENT #49 NOTES:
This is the most energetic Earthward-directed event of the solar cycle.
SEVERE to MAJOR geomagnetic storming is expected to abruptly commence following the arrival of the shock front from this flare.
This flare was associated with a Ground-Level Event. It was also associated with very high energy protons at greater than 100 MeV (which are still climbing, over 5 hours after the event began). A magnetic crochet was observed over the daylit sections of the ionosphere. An exceptionally intense shortwave fadeout and polar cap absorption event are in progress. There are reports this event was observed in white-light. Intense radio bursts were associated with this event across the spectrum. The type II shock velocity is not representative of the observed velocity of this CME. The observed velocity as determined by SOHO was 2125 km/sec.
This event has the potential to produce the strongest geomagnetic storm since 1989. Auroral activity could become visible into the deep low latitude regions. This one is worth driving a good long distance over to find clear skies. It has better potential to produce low-latitude aurora than almost any other event observed in the past decade. Keep in mind that it is also possible the disturbance may not be nearly as geoeffective as many would like. It all depends on the character of the magnetic fields imbedded within the coronal mass ejection. However, we believe it will either be very large, or only modestly large in terms of its capacity to produce disturbed geomagnetic and auroral activity. We do not expect this disturbance to be small.
These predictions may be based on preliminary data and may be revised without warning. The predictions should not be used as a definitive indication of CME impact times or strengths and may frequently be in error. The proprietary methods used to estimate shock impact times are under continual development. Caution is advised.
Except that GIC (Geomagnetically Induced Currents) would likely render landlines unusable and possibly hazarous ;)
For the less catastrophic failure modes, see http://www.spaceweather.gc.ca/effects_e.shtml which has some quite nice resources on the "normal" effects of space-weather events.
Terrestrial electronics are at practically no risk from solar flares; that's thanks to our atmosphere and magnetosphere. However, yes planetary fluctuations of the planetary magentic field (geomagnetic storms) caused by the proton flux from such an event can and are known to induce huge currents into any large-scale conducts. There's a nice pic near the end of http://www.spacew.com/gic/index.html about what one 1989 geomagnetic storm did to some transformers.
An interesting overview of the threat to power networks in particular is preseted at http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/eiskappenman.html with the lead-on that "Only a few amps are needed to disrupt transformer operation, but over 100 amps have been measured in the grounding connections of transformers in affected areas."
Ofcourse, the problem isn't limited to telegraph and powegrids; all large spans of conducts are affected, such as pipelines, land phoneline systems and even railways. http://sumppu.fmi.fi/MAGN/GIC/ provides realtime data on Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GIC) at some power grids and pipeline operators in the Nordic countries as well as more information on this aspect.
Yes, instead of small monthgly payments, you get to go through the whole rumba of buying a new expansion pack every once in a while. Those companies are out there to make money, after all. Despite the software being fairly buggy.
I would neither really underwrite that class balance is never an issue; it's quite horrible really if you care about powergaming issues. And face it, practically all NWN PW's are built with the "bigger, better" which essentially forces powergaming and the level-up treadmill.
But for all it's shortcomings, still, I'd say that it's a great environment and move forward. Interestingly taking out the MM in MMORPG may be one of the best contributions. More people has always meant more troublemakers and more trouble, and the more people you try to please, the fewer of them will actually get what they want.
NWN PW's are more like small communities where getting to know (and become known by) significant number of your co-players isn't impossible, and the admins can and sometimes will respond to player suggestions and improvements. And if you don't like the way a particular world is being played, you can just move to another game-server (or start your own) without having to pay again for the client, sometimes even being able to take your old character along!
Kinda opposite story from another famous fauilure, where after-fact review of pictures of the launch vehicle revealed the stages had been stuck to each other with tape, causing them not to separate properly. Maybe they tried the opposite now, holding them together during burn with tape alone?
*insert mandatory duct-tape quip here*
Well, first of all, the flare classes are logarithmic, so X10 actually is 100 times stronger than X1, "One of the common X class ones". I suspect like to earthquakes, there are strict limits to how strong solar-flare is possible from a specific sun.
We actually had something in that category during this solar-peak; nobody is exactly sure how strong it was, though, because it flooded out all the satellites set to monitor those events for a good while, so the size had to be estimated.
Bottom line is, it had no really observable effects to the Earthlings, even the CME missed us enough that as I recall it wasn't much of an aurora-show. That's why we have the atmosphere, it protects us from lot of cosmic stuff, and even from things out of our own solar system.
Unless you count few mysterious radio/television blackouts as observable effects, ofcourse - though sometimes I suspect most Earthlings would notice that better than if a spaceship landed on their front-yard, so it's all relative...
One type of "solar flare" there is that you probably could worry about; when stars collapse, they shoot immense gamma-bursts off their poles. Were Earth to be caught in the way of such an event from a star in our part of the galaxy, all life (Save for the deepest oceans) here would likely get fried in an instant.
Some scientists theorize this might be the reason of some of the mass-extinctions Earth has seen in its past, from stars far away not to kill everything on their way. Unlike asteroids, there isn't much that could even conceivably be done, though, so it's perhaps one thing better to not worry about.
Back on out own Sun, I think sub-cycles in solar activity might have caused increased mutations during some periods, leading to the creation of new dominant species (Including humans) which have then quickly taken over as conditions have become more stable. In genetic algorithms this is known as "annealing". It might have caused events that to us look like mass-extinctions.
Except that due to less civilization, there's less light pollution (and other kind of pollution, ie. smog) out there, meaning the aurora is brighter and more spectacular, were someone there to observe it.
Ps. the solar max is well past us now. This doesn't, in essence, mean that strong geomagnetic storms that could cause such auroral activity don't happen anymore, the solar max affects more their frequency of appearance. Because of this it's unlikely further expeditions will be sent in to picture them anymore.
Somebody's probably mentioned this already, and moved on, but... It sounds like FEC/Digital Fountain/Tornado Codes all over again. If this, as I suspect, is true, then Cringely is strictly speaking right, the improvement is more or less Layer 2 (Error Correction), but they're being way too unclear about the implementation, probably for no good reason.
The idea of FEC (Forward Error Correction) and related techniques is, in short, that you will send enough information about the data, that even if some of it were to be missed, it could all be reconstructed. Hence you're not defeating Shannon, you're just prepared for that loss, and meeting it, while traditional approaches often enough allows very little if at all error-correction, with strict limits on the nature of the error.
As Cringely suggests, this is, then, applicable to all transmission media, including the backbones. I suspect cable-networks have been chosen for a need to demonstrate the technology first on a more marketable system.
Well, it's getting a bit off-topic from the original discussion...
;)
But still I can't help but remark that messaging between "entities", that is nicks and nick-lists was the initial application of IRC (Which was built as a more convenient replacement of talk). The subscription channels, first as numbers and then as the present named channels, appeared only much later. There are still many people who never join channels, just wait for people on their notify-lists to pop up or the other way around.
I'm not sure what you mean by "reserved and enforced by the protocol itself". IRC protocol is pretty militant about that, and has had support for password-protected logins back from day one as it were. Persistence of entities is a problem that was solved by the different services-systems half a decade ago.
I'm not saying IRC is the best protocol out there and a model for the future of Instant Messaging, but it is very hard to find examples of anything that all present Instant Messagign systems do that IRC didn't do already five years back - including crashing, ofcourse
And yes, SMTP could've served as IM as well, had somebody written up an aplication to broker out presence requests and notifications and guaranteed real-time delivery, but nobody did.
-Donwulff (And let's not even talk about, er, talk...)
Not just were, FidoNet is still alive, and some would say well. Dial-up connections have in many places been replaced by data exchange over Internet, but otherwise little has changed. And, in many ways, it's a giant step above Usenet.
SETI@home offers some other statistics asked after here. Their FAQ circles the issue a bit, but finally admits in essence that SETI@home is unable to detect Earth-level technology even on the closest stars. (And there's no guarantee beyond-Earth civilizations still use radio-frequencies - in fact odds are against it). Their latest "Science Newsletter" just happens to discuss the separation of intelligent signals from noise as well, but leaves pretty hazy impression.
Other wisdom gleamed from the SETI@home web-site includes the notion that the projects budget so-far has been $500.000, and they're capable of detecting signals tenth of the strength of best other SETI projects - which scan wider frequencies and typically concentrate on the likely locations, though.
It would be nice to hear your definition of Instant Messaging, otherwise any discussion on whether IRC fullfills it or not is jsut empty lip-slapping.
However, I feel I have to remark that a primitive presence-protocol was defined in the RFC 1459, May 1993, "The ISON command was implemented to provide a quick and efficient means to get a response about whether a given nickname was currently on IRC." This is a polling presence-mechanism, and was extended in 1995 to allow more fine-grianed identification. On October 1997, the increase in user-counts and decrease in memory-prices led to the official roll-out of the WATCH system, which implements passive presence notification, on DALnet IRC network. This extension has since then been adopted by most major IRC networks and clients.
I personally consider IM just a subset of chat/IRC. Now I'm fully aware IRC protocol has significant problems with authenticiation (To some degree solved by development and integration of Services around 1997), segmentation of the IRC community (But you don't expect ICQ presence to work on AIM etc. do you?) and scaling. However, it yet remains to be seen what a major company running a centralized server-farm for IRC could've accomplished; most of IRC's scaling-problems are due to decentralization using 1980's architecture and assumptions.
However, I think the kind of single-eyed software-patriotism as this thread suggests is only harmful to the open-source movement as a whole. It wasn't even automatically clear that IRC was under an open-source license, and there was a strong movement to hold it under a properitary license. Luckily, perhaps, open-source won then - but had they known many in the open-source movement would later disown and ignore this important pioneer, I think they'd thought twice about it.
-Donwulff
Something I've been waiting with interest is a resurgence of the "Free Computer" idea, originally intended to be financed through advertisement, customer profiling and such. Adding distributed computing to this equation might be just what it takes to make it profitable: Imagine the ability to run the equivalences of huge server-farms with no space, maintenance or electricity investments! And advertisement benefits on top of that. It might work, and bring more people into distributed computing.
When this technology could still be called new, with GIMPS and Distributed.net pretty much the only ones out there, I too used to be worried about the use of "this power" for what I considered "wrong purposes". There seemed to be just something so inherently wrong about the ability to attain results that would normally need larger supercomputers than yet existed, even for the "common good". More than anything, I was really worried the mankind wouldn't be ready for that yet. As it had turned out now, there is no single "distributed supercomputer", and likely never will, so I am less concerned it will ever be used for unethical things the humankind isn't ready for yet. There's always choice what you run, and in a sense the TCP/IP stack already was a hugely successful distributed computing experiment. It's probably also going to remain the largest.