The bill may or may not have passed (still trying to find some confirmation on the various government websites), but the actual hearing on the "proposed" amounts to be charged for the levies on blank media for the 2003-2004 period is just starting (tomorrow actually).
Whoa... Slashdot is giving folks the wrong impression. Bill C-32 was given royal assent (ie: became a law) in 1997!
What the MP meant was that copyright levies are already in place. This was done with C-32, and has been in effect for five years. What is new is that the Canadian Copyright Board is holding hearings on whether or not to increase the existing levies to the astronomical level which/. readers are acquianted. This is not a bill before parliament - it is a request before an unelected board of civil servants and "community leaders." Those hearings begin tomorrow.
So, in other words: CALM DOWN. NOTHING HAS CHANGED.
...MIT grads buying old hard discs from eBay and elsewhere, and finding credit card numbers, ATM transactions, porn and emails all accessible on them. Comments?
Wow! I guess no one learned anything from the story last week!
So what does Microsoft do to keep growing their revenue? They raise prices, that's what. Microsoft knows that their existing customers have large investments in their Microsoft software. Replacing this software would be very difficult, and so Microsoft is making these customers pay the price of their misplaced loyalty.
An excellent point, but not entirely correct. Microsoft has one other option available to it: increase revenue by increasing volume. The market is already saturated, so the only way they can hope to accomplish this is by making people actually want to buy into the next upgrade.
MS's latest move is.NET, which is, as I'm sure many MS developers would agree, is actually a big step forward. It certainly isn't perfect, but it is undoubtedly superior to COM and COM+ from the development perspective. So what? Well, if MS can get application developers onto.NET (perhaps by slashing/eliminating prices on Visual Studio and MSDN?) then they can get real leverage over their customer base to pay for the upgrades.
After all, if the 2004 version of your tax software or your image processor with cool new feature X, or your spanky new 3D game won't run on Win 98, you have a positive incentive to upgrade. (Keep in mind that Win 95 + 98 + NT4 still make up a larger install base than 2000 + XP, and ME sucks too much to matter) If MS can triple its upgrade rate, it can triple revenue without touching the price for the end-user. The catch, of course, is that all of these (except 95) are.NET compatible. Will MS poison the architecture for their own gain?
Time will tell:)
Slashdot version?
on
Web Zeitgeist
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Just a thought on a cool Slashcode idea... Track trends on/.! The google graph for the "Las Ketchup" craze has inspired me... Could we track the first occurances, and subsequent uptake/getting-oldness of various/. trends? The first "first post!!!", the height of goatse-ism, the birth of "IN SOVIET RUSSIA"?
You're wrong, a lot of computer science for example, and mathematics of course, is based on proofs that are absolutely certain.
Mathematics (and by extension computer science) actually has very little to do with the universe around us. It is simply the study of patterns and logic. I'm not saying that math is bad or anything --- merely that it is different from empirical science.
You're right, of course. I just think that math can't be called a "science" properly... It's not a science, nor is it really an art. It's math, and it's unique.
Actually, the article says they may have produced some, not that they did produce some... The trouble with high-level physics is that theoritical models are actually built on clay... nothing is ever sure, there are always things you need to adjust, and such...
More to the point, nothing is ever certain in any science. Science can only disprove hypotheses - it can never prove anything. The language is pretty standard for researchers talking about an unconfirmed result. They're pretty sure that they got it, but until it's been checked by other independent teams, no one will consider this a done deal.
It's just like Einstein saying he "may" have had new gravitational laws, or Pasteur saying he "may" have found a way to prevent disease. Both were sure, but the results were yet to be confirmed.
Give 'er a year and we'll have a definitive answer.
What's happening to this planet ? (1) You can't buy a cd/dvd/firewire product w/o permission. (2) Taxi drivers have to pay royalty if their passengers listen to radio. (3) New audio cds which will not work on standard audio equipment, but only on PCs with security locks. (4) The DMCA which just abt doesnt let you comment/work on any digital product. (5) Billing Kazaa users - no small amounts either (6) MP3 compression usage now demands a royalty fee.
It isn't all bad news... Consider:
(1) No one's passed a law enforcing your #1 yet... just having hearings. (2) You can have a quiet cab ride in Finland. (3) You can download music and do away with physical media altogether. (4) You could move to Finland;-) (5) gnutella is free (and better)! (6) Two words: Ogg Vorbis.
You have to realize that a lot of us here also get goosebumps whenever the government is given the job of "approving" any information source, even if it's in the name of the children. The whole idea of government-approved information sources (consciously or not) stirs up bad images of communist and totalitarian regimes.
I think, ultimately, the solution to this American fear is to look at Canada and the UK. Both of state-run media outlets (the CBC and the BBC respectively), which are highly respected for the quality of their news programming. How does it work? Being run independently, at arms-length. I'm not sure about how the.kids.us idea decides what's "good" and what isn't, but it seems to me that creating a totally independent commission (or the equivalent of a crown-corporation like the CBC or Canada Post) would help to allay these concerns and make for a better sub-web.
Why hasn't Microsoft gone after them for using the likeness of Windows(TM)?
Simple. People spend money on these "speed booster" programs, just like they do on system optimizers and security utilities. Your average dumb Windows user probably dumps a lot of cash into stuff like this. The more money the user spends, the less likely he is to back out of his investment in Windows and go to a different technology like OS X or Linux. He's locked in - or his money is wasted.
Solution? Get your own computer, and get your own domain name.
Or am I missing something...
Yes, it's called a chilling effect. The University didn't ask the students to remove their website because it violated their acceptable use policy, or because its content was inappropriate for university students or staff. It was because it *might* be illegal under a federal law. Ergo, it is the federal law that has caused the removal of this website, and it has chilled the dissemination of FARC-related discourse (at least in theory - in practice, it's exploded all over/. and other sites).
Does the U have a right to ask for a page to come down? Yes. Does the federal government have the right to pass a law which inhibits free speech? No. That's the point.
BTW, on an semi-related note, I believe UC is a state university. I don't know much about the American public university system, but I do know that, in Canada, public universities have a *legal* obligation to "promote discourse dissent." Does anyone know if anything like that might apply in this case?
he problem that I have with that logic in this case is that the Patriot Act does not say that you can't praise terrorists or say how wonderful you think they are or whatever you want. By linking them, the University is contending that you've provided a vehicle by which the terrorists can communicate. At that point it ceases to be about free speech.
No, it doesn't. A link is free speech. I am speaking your address when I link to you. For example, I could take a stack of paper and print an address to which you could write to get a pamphlet about FARC and this would not be illegal. Indeed, it is *exactly* the same as posting a link, except for the fact that printed material enjoys a wide body of case law defending it and online media does not. In any case, whatever the USA PATRIOT Act says about the legalities of this situation is irrelevant - it is blatantly unconstitutional in this regard, and is therefore unenforceable - it is an illegal law.
So this is still a free speech issue. Can I tell you where to find information? (I'd point out that both in the case of a web page and an address, the receipient of the information must initiate a request to receive it) If not, we'd better shutdown the search engines, lock up the library catalogues, tear the bibliographies out of the backs of our books, shut down the postal service and keep or children far away from schools.
8 degrees / hour? is that even fast enough to notice movement with the naked eye?
No, it sure isn't. Of course, seeing as the object will peak at eighth magnitude, it'll be 16 times dimmer than the dimmest thing that most people can see with the naked eye anyway, so no one will really care.
A more interesting question is "will you be able to notice the movement in your telescope?" I happen to have a 4.5" Newtonian that I track stuff with in my backyard. Most of the stuff I track rotates 360 degrees in the sky in 24 hours. (And whatever anyone tells you about the Earth rotating - lies! It's the Celestial Sphere!) So that'd be... 15 degrees per hour.
Is this noticable? You bet. A star will fly out of my field of view in around three minutes. So 8 degrees per hour means I'll have to adjust my telescope's pointing at least every six minutes. That's TEN TIMES every hour.
Actually, the best data to date suggest that the Milky Way galaxy is a type SB barred-spiral galaxy, such as this one, which is M83, an SBa. Most sources still list us as an Sb, though... standard sprial like Andromeda (M31).
As far as our location goes, we are *definitely* in an arm, near the surface of the disc. The majority of the galaxy is located in the direction of Sagittarius, but is only dimly visible because of large amounts of intervening dust. Fortunately, the dust scatters radio wavelengths far less than visible ones, so accurate mapping is possible throughout.
Note that it probably isn't perfect - even Hubble can only measure the distances to stars directly out to about 200 ly (or around 80pc). The galaxy itself is approximately 50 kpc in diameter, so all of the distant stars are ranged using "standard candles," or guessing at the brightness of a distant star because its spectrum/oscillations look like a nearby one and extrapolating.
While this is a great idea.. and something that has been proposed since the earliest days of Sci-Fi, (using heavy masses as centerpoints for gravitational slingshots, among other things), we need to get a lot of other things settled first.
Gravitational assists are hardly a new idea. NASA has been using them since the earliest days of the space programme. Pioneers 10 and 11 both use a gravity assist from Jupiter to leave the Solar System. Voyager 1 swung around Jupiter, picking up enough speed to get to Saturn. Voyager 2 used *four* gravity assists to get to the gas giants and then a solar escape orbit.
Even the vaunted Apollo missions used something of a gravity assist around the moon. If the astronauts didn't fire their rockets to brake at the moon, they'd get a "free return" to Earth automatically. The moon's gravity would slingshot them back.
Hmmm... I'm a physics student, and I just had a course on nuclear physics...
The existence of this stable element that your talking about has been theorised for a long time, but has never been observed or created in the lab. These guys that the story is talking about said they had found it, but actually didn't.
As far as experimental evidence goes, the largest completely stable atom is lead. The most stable atom (ie: the one requiring the most energy to upset) is iron.
The real issue is stability. How long must a nucleus hang together to be qualified as stable? Anything radioactive obviously isn't.
I know that there are stability "gaps" in the total number of nucleons (protons AND neutrons) that can be in a nucleus. This is a big problem in trying to figure out where the heavy (ie: not hydrogen/helium) elements came from.
The theory is that they came from fusion in stars. In calculating these reactions, we usually assume two-body collisions, since they're overwhelmingly more probably than multi-body ones. What you run into is the 5/8 gap. There are no stable nuclei with 5 or 8 nucleons.
So how do you get anything above 8 nucleons? It's got to be from multi-body collisions, because no two-body collisions can create one! (Actually, 7 + 2 or 7 + 3 break you out, but forming 7 is already unlikely). It's kind of cool that all of the heavy elements come from these chance occurances.
(As a side note, the predicted abundances match those observed, so this is probably a pretty good theory)
And, why bother with the construction paper? Just a FAX modem, an all-black TIFF file and some know-how and you can do the same job
in a much more reliable way (the tape seams tend to fray and split after 15 or so passses). And, it'll be more impressive to your cow-orkers.
Nah, I think you lose some of the sheer glee of watching that black loop go around and around and around and around...
What happens if some geologist of the future unknowingly takes a core sample in just the wrong place, to name just one of many not entirely unlikely scenarios.
I would hope that future archaeologists, especially ones studying our era, carry Geiger counters with them at all times. Consider finding the ruins of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, even... they're going to be dangerous for a lot longer than the cities will be there.
Opponents, including a number of environmental groups, argue Yucca Mountain and shipments of nuclear waste to it would provide an inviting target for terrorists.
Seriously... Let's get realistic. "Let's not build anything big, because it might be a target for terrorists. Let's all live in flat houses that all look alike, and we can each keep a little bit of nuclear waste in our backyards so that it's take FOREVER for the terrorists to build a bomb. That way we can all get cancer together."
Get a life, protest groups. Nuclear waste is nasty stuff, and it'll be around for thousands of years. We can either trust thousands of people in thousands of places to keep it under lock and key, or we can pile all of it under one mountain and know FOR SURE that it'll be safe forever.
Hands down, OWL is probably the coolest Earth-based telescope that might actually be built. But it's not the pinnacle of possible telescope technologies.
One idea that researchers in the field have been bouncing around is to construct a space-telescope at a distance of 550 AU out from the sun, and in solar orbit. This is well beyond the heliopause, and in the interstellar medium. At this particular distance, the 'scope could use the Sun as a gravitational lens.
Theoretically, if we parked Hubble there, it could resolve surface features of an Earth-sized planet orbiting a nearby star. A 1-meter telescope in this orbit could use parallax to directly measure the distance to most stars in the Milky Way as well. It could also resolve individual, ordinary stars in distant galaxies.
So that'd be, like, the coolest telescope you could build:-)
Wouldnt a large array of telescopes in a grid give you just as much resolution these days? You can integrate the images from lots of smaller mirrors pretty easily in software, and a small mirror is much easier to make than a big one.
Not really. Interferometry is wonderful for some types of works, but it only detects differences between two beams. This is cool if you're trying to discover new objects and such, but if you want to see them... take spectral measurements, etc. then you need an actual solid mirror.
Whether it is a lunar rock or a piece of candy, it should not be the possessor's responsiblity to prove ownership, it should be the government's responsibility to prove theft.
Fair enough. But this is VERY easy with Moon rock. Only two nations have launched successful sample-return missions: the US and Russia.
Therefore, the US government must prove: (a) The rock in question is from the Moon. (b) The rock is not a meteorite. (Easy - meteorites get all toasty on their way down, which causes chemical changes such as oxidisation) (c) The rock is not Russian in origin. (Maybe the Russians keep better track of these things than the Americans do...)
If you have A, B and C then the rock MUST be from a NASA mission. As NASA has NEVER released ownership of any of those materials, it must also be US Government property.
NASA's little paper trail and presumption of guilt is going to fall to pieces then...are we still going to presume guilt, or return to the rule of law (including the highest law of the land, the constitution) we should have been employing the entire time?
Duh. Presume innocence, of course. It's just that right now the burden of proof isn't so burdensome.
If memory serves (which is does at its own conviences, the punk), Voyagers overtook their Pioneer cousins a while ago.
Your memory is doing just fine:)
The most distant spacecraft right now is Voyager 2, followed by Voyager 1, and then the Pioneers 10 and 11 (not sure which order).
The Pioneers, of course, were just test probes to make a rough estimate of what the Voyagers could expect. Went to Jupiter and Saturn. Discovered the Jupiter-Io flux tube (which resulted in a major Voyager redesign) and proved that it was possible to get through the asteroid belt (which was a big question at the time).
Slashdot Mirror
The bill may or may not have passed (still trying to find some confirmation on the various government websites), but the actual hearing on the "proposed" amounts to be charged for the levies on blank media for the 2003-2004 period is just starting (tomorrow actually).
/. readers are acquianted. This is not a bill before parliament - it is a request before an unelected board of civil servants and "community leaders." Those hearings begin tomorrow.
Whoa... Slashdot is giving folks the wrong impression. Bill C-32 was given royal assent (ie: became a law) in 1997!
The bill can be viewed online.
Use the dorky little right-arrow thing to read it.
What the MP meant was that copyright levies are already in place. This was done with C-32, and has been in effect for five years. What is new is that the Canadian Copyright Board is holding hearings on whether or not to increase the existing levies to the astronomical level which
So, in other words: CALM DOWN. NOTHING HAS CHANGED.
...MIT grads buying old hard discs from eBay and elsewhere, and finding credit card numbers, ATM transactions, porn and emails all accessible on them. Comments?
Wow! I guess no one learned anything from the story last week!
An excellent point, but not entirely correct. Microsoft has one other option available to it: increase revenue by increasing volume. The market is already saturated, so the only way they can hope to accomplish this is by making people actually want to buy into the next upgrade.
MS's latest move is
After all, if the 2004 version of your tax software or your image processor with cool new feature X, or your spanky new 3D game won't run on Win 98, you have a positive incentive to upgrade. (Keep in mind that Win 95 + 98 + NT4 still make up a larger install base than 2000 + XP, and ME sucks too much to matter) If MS can triple its upgrade rate, it can triple revenue without touching the price for the end-user. The catch, of course, is that all of these (except 95) are
Time will tell
Just a thought on a cool Slashcode idea... Track trends on /.! The google graph for the "Las Ketchup" craze has inspired me... Could we track the first occurances, and subsequent uptake/getting-oldness of various /. trends? The first "first post!!!", the height of goatse-ism, the birth of "IN SOVIET RUSSIA"?
:-)
I'd be amused
... all I got was a 6.4% tuition hike, plus an extra $2,000 differential slapped on professional programmes (ie: medicine, engineering, law).
This at a publicly-run institution that posted a profit last year. Makes me feel loved...
You're wrong, a lot of computer science for example, and mathematics of course, is based on proofs that are absolutely certain.
Mathematics (and by extension computer science) actually has very little to do with the universe around us. It is simply the study of patterns and logic. I'm not saying that math is bad or anything --- merely that it is different from empirical science.
You're right, of course. I just think that math can't be called a "science" properly... It's not a science, nor is it really an art. It's math, and it's unique.
Actually, the article says they may have produced some, not that they did produce some...
The trouble with high-level physics is that theoritical models are actually built on clay... nothing is ever sure, there are always things you need to adjust, and such...
More to the point, nothing is ever certain in any science. Science can only disprove hypotheses - it can never prove anything. The language is pretty standard for researchers talking about an unconfirmed result. They're pretty sure that they got it, but until it's been checked by other independent teams, no one will consider this a done deal.
It's just like Einstein saying he "may" have had new gravitational laws, or Pasteur saying he "may" have found a way to prevent disease. Both were sure, but the results were yet to be confirmed.
Give 'er a year and we'll have a definitive answer.
What's happening to this planet ?
;-)
(1) You can't buy a cd/dvd/firewire product w/o permission.
(2) Taxi drivers have to pay royalty if their passengers listen to radio.
(3) New audio cds which will not work on standard audio equipment, but only on PCs with security locks.
(4) The DMCA which just abt doesnt let you comment/work on any digital product.
(5) Billing Kazaa users - no small amounts either
(6) MP3 compression usage now demands a royalty fee.
It isn't all bad news... Consider:
(1) No one's passed a law enforcing your #1 yet... just having hearings.
(2) You can have a quiet cab ride in Finland.
(3) You can download music and do away with physical media altogether.
(4) You could move to Finland
(5) gnutella is free (and better)!
(6) Two words: Ogg Vorbis.
You have to realize that a lot of us here also get goosebumps whenever the government is given the job of "approving" any information source, even if it's in the name of the children. The whole idea of government-approved information sources (consciously or not) stirs up bad images of communist and totalitarian regimes.
.kids.us idea decides what's "good" and what isn't, but it seems to me that creating a totally independent commission (or the equivalent of a crown-corporation like the CBC or Canada Post) would help to allay these concerns and make for a better sub-web.
I think, ultimately, the solution to this American fear is to look at Canada and the UK. Both of state-run media outlets (the CBC and the BBC respectively), which are highly respected for the quality of their news programming. How does it work? Being run independently, at arms-length. I'm not sure about how the
Why hasn't Microsoft gone after them for using the likeness of Windows(TM)?
Simple. People spend money on these "speed booster" programs, just like they do on system optimizers and security utilities. Your average dumb Windows user probably dumps a lot of cash into stuff like this. The more money the user spends, the less likely he is to back out of his investment in Windows and go to a different technology like OS X or Linux. He's locked in - or his money is wasted.
Solution? Get your own computer, and get your own domain name.
/. and other sites).
Or am I missing something...
Yes, it's called a chilling effect. The University didn't ask the students to remove their website because it violated their acceptable use policy, or because its content was inappropriate for university students or staff. It was because it *might* be illegal under a federal law. Ergo, it is the federal law that has caused the removal of this website, and it has chilled the dissemination of FARC-related discourse (at least in theory - in practice, it's exploded all over
Does the U have a right to ask for a page to come down? Yes. Does the federal government have the right to pass a law which inhibits free speech? No. That's the point.
BTW, on an semi-related note, I believe UC is a state university. I don't know much about the American public university system, but I do know that, in Canada, public universities have a *legal* obligation to "promote discourse dissent." Does anyone know if anything like that might apply in this case?
he problem that I have with that logic in this case is that the Patriot Act does not say that you can't praise terrorists or say how wonderful you think they are or whatever you want. By linking them, the University is contending that you've provided a vehicle by which the terrorists can communicate. At that point it ceases to be about free speech.
No, it doesn't. A link is free speech. I am speaking your address when I link to you. For example, I could take a stack of paper and print an address to which you could write to get a pamphlet about FARC and this would not be illegal. Indeed, it is *exactly* the same as posting a link, except for the fact that printed material enjoys a wide body of case law defending it and online media does not. In any case, whatever the USA PATRIOT Act says about the legalities of this situation is irrelevant - it is blatantly unconstitutional in this regard, and is therefore unenforceable - it is an illegal law.
So this is still a free speech issue. Can I tell you where to find information? (I'd point out that both in the case of a web page and an address, the receipient of the information must initiate a request to receive it) If not, we'd better shutdown the search engines, lock up the library catalogues, tear the bibliographies out of the backs of our books, shut down the postal service and keep or children far away from schools.
8 degrees / hour? is that even fast enough to notice movement with the naked eye?
No, it sure isn't. Of course, seeing as the object will peak at eighth magnitude, it'll be 16 times dimmer than the dimmest thing that most people can see with the naked eye anyway, so no one will really care.
A more interesting question is "will you be able to notice the movement in your telescope?" I happen to have a 4.5" Newtonian that I track stuff with in my backyard. Most of the stuff I track rotates 360 degrees in the sky in 24 hours. (And whatever anyone tells you about the Earth rotating - lies! It's the Celestial Sphere!) So that'd be... 15 degrees per hour.
Is this noticable? You bet. A star will fly out of my field of view in around three minutes. So 8 degrees per hour means I'll have to adjust my telescope's pointing at least every six minutes. That's TEN TIMES every hour.
Annoying, no?
Alf
Actually, the best data to date suggest that the Milky Way galaxy is a type SB barred-spiral galaxy, such as this one, which is M83, an SBa. Most sources still list us as an Sb, though... standard sprial like Andromeda (M31).
As far as our location goes, we are *definitely* in an arm, near the surface of the disc. The majority of the galaxy is located in the direction of Sagittarius, but is only dimly visible because of large amounts of intervening dust. Fortunately, the dust scatters radio wavelengths far less than visible ones, so accurate mapping is possible throughout.
Note that it probably isn't perfect - even Hubble can only measure the distances to stars directly out to about 200 ly (or around 80pc). The galaxy itself is approximately 50 kpc in diameter, so all of the distant stars are ranged using "standard candles," or guessing at the brightness of a distant star because its spectrum/oscillations look like a nearby one and extrapolating.
It's not totally accurate, but it's pretty good!
While this is a great idea.. and something that has been proposed since the earliest days of Sci-Fi, (using heavy masses as centerpoints for gravitational slingshots, among other things), we
need to get a lot of other things settled first.
Gravitational assists are hardly a new idea. NASA has been using them since the earliest days of the space programme. Pioneers 10 and 11 both use a gravity assist from Jupiter to leave the Solar System. Voyager 1 swung around Jupiter, picking up enough speed to get to Saturn. Voyager 2 used *four* gravity assists to get to the gas giants and then a solar escape orbit.
Even the vaunted Apollo missions used something of a gravity assist around the moon. If the astronauts didn't fire their rockets to brake at the moon, they'd get a "free return" to Earth automatically. The moon's gravity would slingshot them back.
So this *is* important to those goals.
Hmmm... I'm a physics student, and I just had a course on nuclear physics...
The existence of this stable element that your talking about has been theorised for a long time, but has never been observed or created in the lab. These guys that the story is talking about said they had found it, but actually didn't.
As far as experimental evidence goes, the largest completely stable atom is lead. The most stable atom (ie: the one requiring the most energy to upset) is iron.
The real issue is stability. How long must a nucleus hang together to be qualified as stable? Anything radioactive obviously isn't.
I know that there are stability "gaps" in the total number of nucleons (protons AND neutrons) that can be in a nucleus. This is a big problem in trying to figure out where the heavy (ie: not hydrogen/helium) elements came from.
The theory is that they came from fusion in stars. In calculating these reactions, we usually assume two-body collisions, since they're overwhelmingly more probably than multi-body ones. What you run into is the 5/8 gap. There are no stable nuclei with 5 or 8 nucleons.
So how do you get anything above 8 nucleons? It's got to be from multi-body collisions, because no two-body collisions can create one! (Actually, 7 + 2 or 7 + 3 break you out, but forming 7 is already unlikely). It's kind of cool that all of the heavy elements come from these chance occurances.
(As a side note, the predicted abundances match those observed, so this is probably a pretty good theory)
And, why bother with the construction paper? Just a FAX modem, an all-black TIFF file and some know-how and you can do the same job
in a much more reliable way (the tape seams tend to fray and split after 15 or so passses). And, it'll be more impressive to your cow-orkers.
Nah, I think you lose some of the sheer glee of watching that black loop go around and around and around and around...
It's a truly euphoric experience!
What happens if some geologist of the future unknowingly takes a core sample in just the wrong place, to name just one of many not entirely unlikely scenarios.
I would hope that future archaeologists, especially ones studying our era, carry Geiger counters with them at all times. Consider finding the ruins of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, even... they're going to be dangerous for a lot longer than the cities will be there.
Opponents, including a number of environmental groups, argue Yucca Mountain and shipments of nuclear waste to it would provide an inviting target for terrorists.
Seriously... Let's get realistic. "Let's not build anything big, because it might be a target for terrorists. Let's all live in flat houses that all look alike, and we can each keep a little bit of nuclear waste in our backyards so that it's take FOREVER for the terrorists to build a bomb. That way we can all get cancer together."
Get a life, protest groups. Nuclear waste is nasty stuff, and it'll be around for thousands of years. We can either trust thousands of people in thousands of places to keep it under lock and key, or we can pile all of it under one mountain and know FOR SURE that it'll be safe forever.
Duh.
One idea that researchers in the field have been bouncing around is to construct a space-telescope at a distance of 550 AU out from the sun, and in solar orbit. This is well beyond the heliopause, and in the interstellar medium. At this particular distance, the 'scope could use the Sun as a gravitational lens.
Theoretically, if we parked Hubble there, it could resolve surface features of an Earth-sized planet orbiting a nearby star. A 1-meter telescope in this orbit could use parallax to directly measure the distance to most stars in the Milky Way as well. It could also resolve individual, ordinary stars in distant galaxies.
So that'd be, like, the coolest telescope you could build
Some links:
Wouldnt a large array of telescopes in a grid give you just as much resolution these days? You can integrate the images from lots of smaller mirrors pretty easily in software, and a small mirror is much easier to make than a big one.
Not really. Interferometry is wonderful for some types of works, but it only detects differences between two beams. This is cool if you're trying to discover new objects and such, but if you want to see them... take spectral measurements, etc. then you need an actual solid mirror.
(unless you signed a microsoft licence, and how do you tell that without making a search?)
:-)
Easy. Probe your IP for security holes
Whether it is a lunar rock or a piece of candy, it should not be the possessor's responsiblity to prove ownership, it should be the government's responsibility to prove theft.
Fair enough. But this is VERY easy with Moon rock. Only two nations have launched successful sample-return missions: the US and Russia.
Therefore, the US government must prove:
(a) The rock in question is from the Moon.
(b) The rock is not a meteorite. (Easy - meteorites get all toasty on their way down, which causes chemical changes such as oxidisation)
(c) The rock is not Russian in origin. (Maybe the Russians keep better track of these things than the Americans do...)
If you have A, B and C then the rock MUST be from a NASA mission. As NASA has NEVER released ownership of any of those materials, it must also be US Government property.
NASA's little paper trail and presumption of guilt is going to fall to pieces then...are we still going to presume guilt, or return to the rule of law (including the highest law of the land, the constitution) we should have been employing the entire time?
Duh. Presume innocence, of course. It's just that right now the burden of proof isn't so burdensome.
If memory serves (which is does at its own conviences, the punk), Voyagers overtook their Pioneer cousins a while ago.
:)
Your memory is doing just fine
The most distant spacecraft right now is Voyager 2, followed by Voyager 1, and then the Pioneers 10 and 11 (not sure which order).
The Pioneers, of course, were just test probes to make a rough estimate of what the Voyagers could expect. Went to Jupiter and Saturn. Discovered the Jupiter-Io flux tube (which resulted in a major Voyager redesign) and proved that it was possible to get through the asteroid belt (which was a big question at the time).
Good ships, all of them!