I've often wondered if such a sig has any effect on moderation. My post was obviously (at least to anyone with a sense of humor, which might exclude most religious people) was intended as humor. But it got +5 Insightful. Go figure.
OTOH, there is the acronym HHOS (Ha Ha Only Serious). Look it up in the Jargon File if you don't know it.
Something pointed out in Apples instructions is that the life of their Li-ion batteries is determined mostly by the number of charges, not hours of use. If you keep it plugged in and charging whenever possible, battery life will be greatly extended. What runs it down is a lot of draining and recharging. At least that's what they say; it's probably a bit more complicated than that.
I'm sorry, but I couldn't let this kind of ignorance go unanswered. It's just such a false view of the world it's not even funny. The church-men were the only ones who *knew* the Earth was round during the middle ages because they were the only ones with an education.
OK; I suppose I really should challenge that one. They weren't the only ones. And it didn't require an "education" to know the Earth's shape.
Sailors on large bodies of water have always known that they were on a more-or-less spherical body. After enough time on the water, even if you don't go out of sight of land and just sail up and down the coast, you start to "see" the shape. Your brain infers it from the way that things appear and disappear behind the horizon. Any competent sailor will see this. I can attest that even on smaller bodies like Lake Michigan, a few hours of actively sailing around will make the people controlling the sails very aware of the shape of the surface and shores. Their passengers might not see it, but the sailors will.
The academic and clerical crowd has traditionally considered people like sailors "uneducated". But the idea of a flat world would have been laughable to any good sailor at any time in history. Or prehistory, for that matter. By the time you've become good with a sail, you've spent enough time studying the water that you know without thinking what shape it's in.
If you read the histories of Columbus' trip, you'll find that there was no dispute about the world's shape then, especially not among sailors. The dispute was over its size. It turns out that Columbus was badly wrong. He thought the world's circumference was only about 2/3 of what it really is. If he hadn't run into those continents out in the middle of the ocean, he and his crew would most likely have died before they made it to land.
Some time ago, I read a cute puzzle: Using only technology available to the classical Greek and Roman engineers, and standing in one place, how can you measure the size of the Earth? The answer turns out to be quite simple.
Which reminds me: I've never seen a technical name for the common style of geek humor that consists of ignoring the nature of rhetorical questions, and answering them in a straightforward manner. ("How many times do I have to tell you...?" "Three.") There's also the closely-related humor of ignoring metaphorical usage and answering a question literally.
Considering how common this is in geek circles, you'd think we'd have a well-known name for it.
That's a simpler version of the theory that I've long liked: When God created this world, he went to a lot of effort faking the geological and fossil records. He obviously wanted us to believe that our world was billions of years old, and life had evolved here from simple precursors. If we don't believe this, we are going against God's will. So we should believe what God's evidence tells us.
Those who believe some old book written by ignorant desert shepherds will be punished by God for their refusal to follow his story line that He wrote in the very rocks of our world.
Indeed. And ultimately, what will matter most is whether astronomers and astrophysicists find the new definition useful. If not, they'll continue to just not use the term (except when talking to the media), and keep using terms like "body" or "object", plus some detailed specs. Whether it's useful probably won't be obvious to much of anyone else.
Any sci-fi that refers to Pluto as a planet after the 21st century
Nah; just wait a few months. Or maybe a couple years. Another IAU committee will come up with a new definition.
Alternatively, people might realize how sneaky this one was. Pluto is now a "dwarf planet". That means that it's a "planet", of the "dwarf" variety, according to standard English grammar.
They're now only one slight step from ratifying the earlier IAU committee's recommendation that "planet" be used only with a qualifier. The remaining step is to define the qualifier(s) for the four inner planets.
Also, they might give us a list of what they think are some other dwarf planets. Is Ceres one? Sedna? Quaoar? 2003 UB313?
Inquiring minds (with too much time on their hands) want to know.
A dwarf planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
Hey, wait a minute. Earth hasn't cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. There's this big hunk of rock out there, a mere 400,000 km away, with a mass more than 1% of Earth's. So Earth is also a "dwarf planet".
Heh. Actually, your phrase and the IAU's vote are pretty much following the recommendation of the IAU committee from some months back, to the effect that "planet" not be used alone, but only with a qualifier.
So Pluto is now a "dwarf planet". Normal English grammar would conclude that it's still a planet, but of the specific "dwarf" variety. It is indeed differently proportioned from the 8 major planets.
But then, four of those are "gas giant planets". Except that some astronomers point out that Jupiter and Saturn are materially different from Uranus (Urectum?;-) and Neptune, and use phrases like "ice giant planet" for the latter two.
What we're missing now is a standard qualifier for the inner four planets. Actually, here we probably need two qualifiers, since Mercury is materially different from the other three.
Then there are those who point out that Mercury and Luna really belong in the same class, and probably Ceres, Ganymede, Ariel and maybe Pluto belong in that class, too.
This classification discussion is far from over...
Indeed, and the main other problem is our own moon. Various astronomers have commented that they consider Earth-Luna to be a pair of planets sharing a common orbit around the sun, and changing places periodically. (There are examples of this on a smaller scale in the Saturn system.)
Not that it really matters all that much. As other astronomers have commented, they mostly just say "body" and give a list of specs. Terms like "planet" are a bit too vague to be useful as technical terms. After all, Mercury, Luna and Pluto are more like each other than either is like Venus, Earth or Titan. This by itself tells us that "planet" can't be a very useful term for any technical purposes.
This is of interest mostly to mass-media journalists and authors of school textboks.
He was trying to make the point that the internet became what it is today because it was unregulated and untampered with,...
This is a rather bizarre take on how the internet was developed. Almost all the development before 1990 or so was done with US government (military) funding. The funding contracts said a lot about how it was to be used. Go find the contracts and read them.
Now, granted, the DoD was primarily interested in funding all those academic geeks to build a comm system that had capabilities; they'd worry about controlling the traffic within the milnet after the working stuff was handed over. They mostly took a hands-off approach because they wanted to see what interesting stuff those academics could come up with. But note that this "hands-off" approach really was a policy, and it amounts to what we're now calling net neutrality. They wanted stuff built that worked; they weren't particularly interested in developing stuff that intentionally didn't work, which is what the big comm companies want now.
It's perhaps also worth pointing out that much of the motive behind the original ARPAnet's funding was a general problem with commercial electronic stuff: It was very difficult to make equipment from vendor X talk to equipment from vendor Y. By the 1960s, the military folks understood that this problem wasn't getting solved, because the companies were too good at making their equipment incompatible with their competitors' equipment. So they went to the academics, and funded research on a comm layer that would intercede and make communication possible. This turned into the Internet, whose primary reason for existence is to make gadgets from different vendors talk to each other sanely, despite all the vendors' efforts.
The net neutrality issue is just the current form of this old battle. All the companies involved in comms want to limit communication between different vendors' equipment. The big comms companies see the possibility of adding aftermarket blocking, so they can make customers pay piecemeal to have communication enabled. But this is really just the old story: Commercial companies always want to limit communication with their competitors. Customers want to maximise communication.
Maybe the way to fight this is to see if we can again get the military involved. Here in the US, we have several cases where this worked. The Internet is just the most recent. Before that, the DoD forced Congress to fund the Interstate Highway system, again because it obviously wasn't going to get done otherwise. Commercial interests don't like distributed, multi-vendor systems like those, and do everything in their power to block them. But if we can get the military to see this blocking as a threat to their livelihood, maybe they'll again get behind the effort to do it right.
(are there any logs in my access point? could it at least keep a list of MAC addresses?)
We should expect that the capability is there, though it might not be turned on. The programmers who debugged the thing would have added at least some simple logs of recent events. You always need such debugging hooks, and a good programmer will build them in from the start. Google for "test-driven development".
Whether the vendor will tell a customer how to enable and real this debug data is another question. This is probably done via some undocumented commands. OTOH, they probably would tell government agents how to do it.
I've pretty much included debug hooks in every program I've ever written that's more than a dozen lines of code. I always document the debug hooks, at least telling users how to turn them on and off. I haven't seen such things documented in very many commercial products, but I'd bet that they are there.
If the box is full of malware, you can say that anyone at all could have been using it:)
Good point.
So the best defense, if you are dragged into court, is to show that you were using MS Windows from an open AP. They'd have to prove not only that the traffic came from your machine, but also that it didn't come from any of the malware that you didn't know about.
Maybe we should be commending Microsoft for making software that provides such a good alabi.
How long do you think it will be before filesharing clients start overriding port 25 for the purpose of dumping on massive amounts of content (massive amounts of content)?
In a fairly real sense, that's how online sharing started. Look up "uuencode" and "shar". Those are encodings from back in the 1980s whose primary purpose was encoding material so that it could be easily shared via email. The reason for doing this was that email was usually the most reliable way to get large files across, due to its "store and forward" scheme that would keep trying until the data got to the next hop.
The current schemes that use port 80 for non-HTTP traffic are well within this tradition. If other ports are unreliable (because firewalls or ISPs block them), programmers simply study the problem, do a bit of testing, and use the ports that test out to be the most reliable.
Port 25 isn't all that usable in general, because of all the ISPs that block port 25. They want customers' email sitting on the ISP's servers temporarily, for various reasons such as collecting data on customers' interests for marketing purposes, cooperating with government spying, etc. Port 25 may be useful in cases where it isn't being blocked. But it should be only one of a list of ports to try. The most likely to work is 80, because most ISPs are really only selling a browsing service, not internet service. OTOH, they often block incoming connections to port 80.
Actually doing end-to-end connections the way that IP was designed has become more and more difficult, due to both incompetence and intentional misimplementation by commercial internet companies.
More importantly, can you be prosecuted when a piece of malware 'clicks' the button?
And its best if you're using wifi, and you've covered yourself (and your IP address) by turning off security. As the recent case showed, with an open access point, you can simply say "It wasn't me; it could have been any neighbor using my wireless" and the prosecution won't have much an argument, because you'll be telling the literal truth.
At least here in the US, almost everyone has just a single IP address for everything past their modem, so everything using your wifi will have the same address, and there's no way at all to prove which of the many computers in the neighborhood may have clicked that button.
If you're on an open wireless AP, you can accuse as many people you want of as many crimes as you want, and nobody can prove it was you.
I doubt if any astronomer would consider a grain of interplanetary dust to have an atmosphere. In fact, some consider it silly to consider the slightly thicker gases around our moon as an atmosphere. I've seen a definition that essentially requires an atmosphere to have some minimal "weather" that affects the surface. By that definition, Triton and probably Pluto would qualify as planets with atmospheres. Mercury, Ceres and Ganymede wouldn't. Io is an interesting case.
Of course, a definition from Merriam-Webster is probably going to be different from an astronomer's definition. The weather requirement probably came from someone who only wanted to consider atmospheres that have some measurable effect on their body. That's reasonable for a scientists, who generally want definitions that are useful. If a word's definition is so general that it applies to everything, then it's useless, because you can always delete the word without any change in meaning.
OTOH, there are a lot of jokes about celebrities with "celestial bodies", satellites, etc.
On the contrary, gold has a number of practical uses. All the best electronic connectors use gold-plated contacts. They're soft and deformable, making for good contact, and they don't tarnish in our atmosphere.
If gold were cheaper, it would be used in electronics a lot more.
... the most secure storage site on the plan... eh... in the solar system.
Just wait until the right time, and an IAU committee will redefine "planet" so that the moon is one. But that'll only last a few weeks, and another committee will redfine it back.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
Well, he certainly did a rather incompetent job of that part. Fully half the time the sun and moon are on the same side of the Earth, and the other side doesn't have much light at all. He could have at least put us inside a cluster of bright start, so the night side of the planet would be lit up a bit better.
Heh. No, I don't know it. But I've noticed that astrophysicists routinely talk about solar or stellar atmospheres, apparently not as a joke. If they consider those layers of plasma (with a few actual molecules mixed in) as an atmosphere, who am I to tell them they're wrong?
I have seen descriptions of the solar atmosphere as extending out to the termination shock, but I suspect that's maybe a bit extreme. More often, I get the impression that only the junk out to the corona is considered atmosphere. The rest is just a bubble formed by the solar wind. But I suppose there's room for terminological indecision here. It is a case of nested Russian dolls, each layer a bit thinner than the one inside, and no well-defined boundaries anywhere.
I do sorta like the idea of a neutron cloud as an atmosphere. I can imagine visitors who grew up on a neutron star, and consider most of the Solar System to be terribly insubstantial, like most of the stuff in the galaxy. But the flux from Hubble would probably be not nearly enough to breathe (eat?), compared to the flux at home. They'd probably realize that it's an artifact, and try to find out who built it. I wonder if they'd be surprised that something as wispy as a human could actually be intelligent?
Our moon does not have an atmosphere, neither does the Sun, nor the Stars.
What???
You just totally discredited yourself right there. The sun certainly does have an atmosphere. Overly-picky physicists might argue that it's nothing but atmosphere, but usually the term is restricted to the gases above the photospere "surface". It's quite a bit deeper than Earth's atmosphere. Not to mention somewhat hotter.;-)
You can get a basic description of the sun's atmosphere from wikipedia, with lots of links to the details.
Other equally picky astronomers would counter that our moon has an atmosphere, but although it is measurable and denser than interplanetary space, it would qualify as a "hard vacuum" down on Earth. It's not very stable, either, which does sorta disqualify it for being a "real" atmosphere.
It's more likely that laws will restrict what can be done with data. Even politicians can probably be convinced that it's not reasonable to restrict what data can be collected. For example, if it's illegal to "collect" the IP addresses in packets, the courts might interpret this to mean that IP addresses can't be stored in tables in memory. This would make IP itself illegal to implement, because the software requires storing the addresses in memory temporarily, in order to send a packet on its way.
But legislatures have in fact outlawed things via poorly-worded laws. My favorite was the town in Oregon a few years ago that wanted to outlaw exhibitionism. One of the things they did was to outlaw "sex visible from any place public or private". Bemused lawyers pointed out that they had just outlawed all sex within the town limits. Oops!
We saw a weaker version of this a few years ago, with courts interpreting the copyright laws such that making a backup copy of your disk was a violation if the disk contained anything copyrighted. And most of the software on your disk is copyrighted. Oops! Laws were passed making it clear that computer backups were not a copyright violation. More generally, we've seen more people pointing out that the problem is distribution, not copying, and the courts are becoming unwilling to look at cases that involve copying without distribution. It got through to the legal people that a strict "no copying" interpretation effectively outlaws all computer handling of text. (Whether it's still legal to walk down a street whistling a copyrighted tune hasn't yet been decided.;-)
We could see some similar stumbling around with client data collection, until the legal system finally comes to terms with the fact that "collection" must be allowed if computers are to be permitted to operate on data at all. The question will have to be what is done with the data, not whether it is stored in a computer. The technical details will have so many pitfalls for legal types that they'll have to skip over that, and go straight for their effects on the people involved.
Medical data systems have been facing this, with mixed success so far. It's obvious that medical data systems are needed, and the more data you can keep about a patient, the better, at least if it's relevant to medical issues. But this data is highly susceptible to abuse. Different countries have instituted different controls on this, with different levels of success. There's a lot of both technical and legal development still ahead in this field.
The IAU's definition, then, does NOT meet any quantifiable standard whatsoever, it is merely political window-dressing.
Good point. And it answers the implied question:
It is a pity that there has been so little adverse reaction to the decision,...
This is because the astronomical community considers the whole topic basically a joke. In earlier discussions here, many astronomers have pointed out that "planet" isn't really an astronomical term. They don't discuss it, because the definition isn't technically interesting or useful. They mostly refer to "bodies" and give their specs.
The definition of "star" is astronomically interesting, because there are all sorts of special things about a body that does nuclear fusion. But if there's no fusion process going on, they are just "bodies" (or "dust" if sufficiently small;-).
The whole debate is a media event. It has no real scientific value.
Slashdot Mirror
I've often wondered if such a sig has any effect on moderation. My post was obviously (at least to anyone with a sense of humor, which might exclude most religious people) was intended as humor. But it got +5 Insightful. Go figure.
OTOH, there is the acronym HHOS (Ha Ha Only Serious). Look it up in the Jargon File if you don't know it.
Something pointed out in Apples instructions is that the life of their Li-ion batteries is determined mostly by the number of charges, not hours of use. If you keep it plugged in and charging whenever possible, battery life will be greatly extended. What runs it down is a lot of draining and recharging. At least that's what they say; it's probably a bit more complicated than that.
I'm sorry, but I couldn't let this kind of ignorance go unanswered. It's just such a false view of the world it's not even funny. The church-men were the only ones who *knew* the Earth was round during the middle ages because they were the only ones with an education.
OK; I suppose I really should challenge that one. They weren't the only ones. And it didn't require an "education" to know the Earth's shape.
Sailors on large bodies of water have always known that they were on a more-or-less spherical body. After enough time on the water, even if you don't go out of sight of land and just sail up and down the coast, you start to "see" the shape. Your brain infers it from the way that things appear and disappear behind the horizon. Any competent sailor will see this. I can attest that even on smaller bodies like Lake Michigan, a few hours of actively sailing around will make the people controlling the sails very aware of the shape of the surface and shores. Their passengers might not see it, but the sailors will.
The academic and clerical crowd has traditionally considered people like sailors "uneducated". But the idea of a flat world would have been laughable to any good sailor at any time in history. Or prehistory, for that matter. By the time you've become good with a sail, you've spent enough time studying the water that you know without thinking what shape it's in.
If you read the histories of Columbus' trip, you'll find that there was no dispute about the world's shape then, especially not among sailors. The dispute was over its size. It turns out that Columbus was badly wrong. He thought the world's circumference was only about 2/3 of what it really is. If he hadn't run into those continents out in the middle of the ocean, he and his crew would most likely have died before they made it to land.
Some time ago, I read a cute puzzle: Using only technology available to the classical Greek and Roman engineers, and standing in one place, how can you measure the size of the Earth? The answer turns out to be quite simple.
Which reminds me: I've never seen a technical name for the common style of geek humor that consists of ignoring the nature of rhetorical questions, and answering them in a straightforward manner. ("How many times do I have to tell you ...?" "Three.") There's also the closely-related humor of ignoring metaphorical usage and answering a question literally.
Considering how common this is in geek circles, you'd think we'd have a well-known name for it.
Anyone know?
That's a simpler version of the theory that I've long liked: When God created this world, he went to a lot of effort faking the geological and fossil records. He obviously wanted us to believe that our world was billions of years old, and life had evolved here from simple precursors. If we don't believe this, we are going against God's will. So we should believe what God's evidence tells us.
Those who believe some old book written by ignorant desert shepherds will be punished by God for their refusal to follow his story line that He wrote in the very rocks of our world.
Indeed. And ultimately, what will matter most is whether astronomers and astrophysicists find the new definition useful. If not, they'll continue to just not use the term (except when talking to the media), and keep using terms like "body" or "object", plus some detailed specs. Whether it's useful probably won't be obvious to much of anyone else.
Damn! I got a 17" Powerbook, and its batteries are also approaching senility. But 17" PB batteries aren't in the recall list.
;-)
Guess I'll just have to pay for a new one. (Then they'll recall the old ones.
Any sci-fi that refers to Pluto as a planet after the 21st century
Nah; just wait a few months. Or maybe a couple years. Another IAU committee will come up with a new definition.
Alternatively, people might realize how sneaky this one was. Pluto is now a "dwarf planet". That means that it's a "planet", of the "dwarf" variety, according to standard English grammar.
They're now only one slight step from ratifying the earlier IAU committee's recommendation that "planet" be used only with a qualifier. The remaining step is to define the qualifier(s) for the four inner planets.
Also, they might give us a list of what they think are some other dwarf planets. Is Ceres one? Sedna? Quaoar? 2003 UB313?
Inquiring minds (with too much time on their hands) want to know.
Awww ... And you call yourself "The Fun Guy". You're no fun at all. ;-)
A dwarf planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
Hey, wait a minute. Earth hasn't cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. There's this big hunk of rock out there, a mere 400,000 km away, with a mass more than 1% of Earth's. So Earth is also a "dwarf planet".
Heh. Actually, your phrase and the IAU's vote are pretty much following the recommendation of the IAU committee from some months back, to the effect that "planet" not be used alone, but only with a qualifier.
...
So Pluto is now a "dwarf planet". Normal English grammar would conclude that it's still a planet, but of the specific "dwarf" variety. It is indeed differently proportioned from the 8 major planets.
But then, four of those are "gas giant planets". Except that some astronomers point out that Jupiter and Saturn are materially different from Uranus (Urectum?;-) and Neptune, and use phrases like "ice giant planet" for the latter two.
What we're missing now is a standard qualifier for the inner four planets. Actually, here we probably need two qualifiers, since Mercury is materially different from the other three.
Then there are those who point out that Mercury and Luna really belong in the same class, and probably Ceres, Ganymede, Ariel and maybe Pluto belong in that class, too.
This classification discussion is far from over
Indeed, and the main other problem is our own moon. Various astronomers have commented that they consider Earth-Luna to be a pair of planets sharing a common orbit around the sun, and changing places periodically. (There are examples of this on a smaller scale in the Saturn system.)
Not that it really matters all that much. As other astronomers have commented, they mostly just say "body" and give a list of specs. Terms like "planet" are a bit too vague to be useful as technical terms. After all, Mercury, Luna and Pluto are more like each other than either is like Venus, Earth or Titan. This by itself tells us that "planet" can't be a very useful term for any technical purposes.
This is of interest mostly to mass-media journalists and authors of school textboks.
He was trying to make the point that the internet became what it is today because it was unregulated and untampered with, ...
This is a rather bizarre take on how the internet was developed. Almost all the development before 1990 or so was done with US government (military) funding. The funding contracts said a lot about how it was to be used. Go find the contracts and read them.
Now, granted, the DoD was primarily interested in funding all those academic geeks to build a comm system that had capabilities; they'd worry about controlling the traffic within the milnet after the working stuff was handed over. They mostly took a hands-off approach because they wanted to see what interesting stuff those academics could come up with. But note that this "hands-off" approach really was a policy, and it amounts to what we're now calling net neutrality. They wanted stuff built that worked; they weren't particularly interested in developing stuff that intentionally didn't work, which is what the big comm companies want now.
It's perhaps also worth pointing out that much of the motive behind the original ARPAnet's funding was a general problem with commercial electronic stuff: It was very difficult to make equipment from vendor X talk to equipment from vendor Y. By the 1960s, the military folks understood that this problem wasn't getting solved, because the companies were too good at making their equipment incompatible with their competitors' equipment. So they went to the academics, and funded research on a comm layer that would intercede and make communication possible. This turned into the Internet, whose primary reason for existence is to make gadgets from different vendors talk to each other sanely, despite all the vendors' efforts.
The net neutrality issue is just the current form of this old battle. All the companies involved in comms want to limit communication between different vendors' equipment. The big comms companies see the possibility of adding aftermarket blocking, so they can make customers pay piecemeal to have communication enabled. But this is really just the old story: Commercial companies always want to limit communication with their competitors. Customers want to maximise communication.
Maybe the way to fight this is to see if we can again get the military involved. Here in the US, we have several cases where this worked. The Internet is just the most recent. Before that, the DoD forced Congress to fund the Interstate Highway system, again because it obviously wasn't going to get done otherwise. Commercial interests don't like distributed, multi-vendor systems like those, and do everything in their power to block them. But if we can get the military to see this blocking as a threat to their livelihood, maybe they'll again get behind the effort to do it right.
(are there any logs in my access point? could it at least keep a list of MAC addresses?)
We should expect that the capability is there, though it might not be turned on. The programmers who debugged the thing would have added at least some simple logs of recent events. You always need such debugging hooks, and a good programmer will build them in from the start. Google for "test-driven development".
Whether the vendor will tell a customer how to enable and real this debug data is another question. This is probably done via some undocumented commands. OTOH, they probably would tell government agents how to do it.
I've pretty much included debug hooks in every program I've ever written that's more than a dozen lines of code. I always document the debug hooks, at least telling users how to turn them on and off. I haven't seen such things documented in very many commercial products, but I'd bet that they are there.
If the box is full of malware, you can say that anyone at all could have been using it :)
Good point.
So the best defense, if you are dragged into court, is to show that you were using MS Windows from an open AP. They'd have to prove not only that the traffic came from your machine, but also that it didn't come from any of the malware that you didn't know about.
Maybe we should be commending Microsoft for making software that provides such a good alabi.
How long do you think it will be before filesharing clients start overriding port 25 for the purpose of dumping on massive amounts of content (massive amounts of content)?
In a fairly real sense, that's how online sharing started. Look up "uuencode" and "shar". Those are encodings from back in the 1980s whose primary purpose was encoding material so that it could be easily shared via email. The reason for doing this was that email was usually the most reliable way to get large files across, due to its "store and forward" scheme that would keep trying until the data got to the next hop.
The current schemes that use port 80 for non-HTTP traffic are well within this tradition. If other ports are unreliable (because firewalls or ISPs block them), programmers simply study the problem, do a bit of testing, and use the ports that test out to be the most reliable.
Port 25 isn't all that usable in general, because of all the ISPs that block port 25. They want customers' email sitting on the ISP's servers temporarily, for various reasons such as collecting data on customers' interests for marketing purposes, cooperating with government spying, etc. Port 25 may be useful in cases where it isn't being blocked. But it should be only one of a list of ports to try. The most likely to work is 80, because most ISPs are really only selling a browsing service, not internet service. OTOH, they often block incoming connections to port 80.
Actually doing end-to-end connections the way that IP was designed has become more and more difficult, due to both incompetence and intentional misimplementation by commercial internet companies.
More importantly, can you be prosecuted when a piece of malware 'clicks' the button?
And its best if you're using wifi, and you've covered yourself (and your IP address) by turning off security. As the recent case showed, with an open access point, you can simply say "It wasn't me; it could have been any neighbor using my wireless" and the prosecution won't have much an argument, because you'll be telling the literal truth.
At least here in the US, almost everyone has just a single IP address for everything past their modem, so everything using your wifi will have the same address, and there's no way at all to prove which of the many computers in the neighborhood may have clicked that button.
If you're on an open wireless AP, you can accuse as many people you want of as many crimes as you want, and nobody can prove it was you.
Hey, don't be so hard on yourself. ;-)
I doubt if any astronomer would consider a grain of interplanetary dust to have an atmosphere. In fact, some consider it silly to consider the slightly thicker gases around our moon as an atmosphere. I've seen a definition that essentially requires an atmosphere to have some minimal "weather" that affects the surface. By that definition, Triton and probably Pluto would qualify as planets with atmospheres. Mercury, Ceres and Ganymede wouldn't. Io is an interesting case.
Of course, a definition from Merriam-Webster is probably going to be different from an astronomer's definition. The weather requirement probably came from someone who only wanted to consider atmospheres that have some measurable effect on their body. That's reasonable for a scientists, who generally want definitions that are useful. If a word's definition is so general that it applies to everything, then it's useless, because you can always delete the word without any change in meaning.
OTOH, there are a lot of jokes about celebrities with "celestial bodies", satellites, etc.
On the contrary, gold has a number of practical uses. All the best electronic connectors use gold-plated contacts. They're soft and deformable, making for good contact, and they don't tarnish in our atmosphere.
If gold were cheaper, it would be used in electronics a lot more.
... the most secure storage site on the plan... eh... in the solar system.
Just wait until the right time, and an IAU committee will redefine "planet" so that the moon is one. But that'll only last a few weeks, and another committee will redfine it back.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
Well, he certainly did a rather incompetent job of that part. Fully half the time the sun and moon are on the same side of the Earth, and the other side doesn't have much light at all. He could have at least put us inside a cluster of bright start, so the night side of the planet would be lit up a bit better.
Where do they hire these bungling gods, anyway?
Heh. No, I don't know it. But I've noticed that astrophysicists routinely talk about solar or stellar atmospheres, apparently not as a joke. If they consider those layers of plasma (with a few actual molecules mixed in) as an atmosphere, who am I to tell them they're wrong?
I have seen descriptions of the solar atmosphere as extending out to the termination shock, but I suspect that's maybe a bit extreme. More often, I get the impression that only the junk out to the corona is considered atmosphere. The rest is just a bubble formed by the solar wind. But I suppose there's room for terminological indecision here. It is a case of nested Russian dolls, each layer a bit thinner than the one inside, and no well-defined boundaries anywhere.
I do sorta like the idea of a neutron cloud as an atmosphere. I can imagine visitors who grew up on a neutron star, and consider most of the Solar System to be terribly insubstantial, like most of the stuff in the galaxy. But the flux from Hubble would probably be not nearly enough to breathe (eat?), compared to the flux at home. They'd probably realize that it's an artifact, and try to find out who built it. I wonder if they'd be surprised that something as wispy as a human could actually be intelligent?
Our moon does not have an atmosphere, neither does the Sun, nor the Stars.
;-)
What???
You just totally discredited yourself right there. The sun certainly does have an atmosphere. Overly-picky physicists might argue that it's nothing but atmosphere, but usually the term is restricted to the gases above the photospere "surface". It's quite a bit deeper than Earth's atmosphere. Not to mention somewhat hotter.
You can get a basic description of the sun's atmosphere from wikipedia, with lots of links to the details.
Other equally picky astronomers would counter that our moon has an atmosphere, but although it is measurable and denser than interplanetary space, it would qualify as a "hard vacuum" down on Earth. It's not very stable, either, which does sorta disqualify it for being a "real" atmosphere.
It's more likely that laws will restrict what can be done with data. Even politicians can probably be convinced that it's not reasonable to restrict what data can be collected. For example, if it's illegal to "collect" the IP addresses in packets, the courts might interpret this to mean that IP addresses can't be stored in tables in memory. This would make IP itself illegal to implement, because the software requires storing the addresses in memory temporarily, in order to send a packet on its way.
;-)
But legislatures have in fact outlawed things via poorly-worded laws. My favorite was the town in Oregon a few years ago that wanted to outlaw exhibitionism. One of the things they did was to outlaw "sex visible from any place public or private". Bemused lawyers pointed out that they had just outlawed all sex within the town limits. Oops!
We saw a weaker version of this a few years ago, with courts interpreting the copyright laws such that making a backup copy of your disk was a violation if the disk contained anything copyrighted. And most of the software on your disk is copyrighted. Oops! Laws were passed making it clear that computer backups were not a copyright violation. More generally, we've seen more people pointing out that the problem is distribution, not copying, and the courts are becoming unwilling to look at cases that involve copying without distribution. It got through to the legal people that a strict "no copying" interpretation effectively outlaws all computer handling of text. (Whether it's still legal to walk down a street whistling a copyrighted tune hasn't yet been decided.
We could see some similar stumbling around with client data collection, until the legal system finally comes to terms with the fact that "collection" must be allowed if computers are to be permitted to operate on data at all. The question will have to be what is done with the data, not whether it is stored in a computer. The technical details will have so many pitfalls for legal types that they'll have to skip over that, and go straight for their effects on the people involved.
Medical data systems have been facing this, with mixed success so far. It's obvious that medical data systems are needed, and the more data you can keep about a patient, the better, at least if it's relevant to medical issues. But this data is highly susceptible to abuse. Different countries have instituted different controls on this, with different levels of success. There's a lot of both technical and legal development still ahead in this field.
The IAU's definition, then, does NOT meet any quantifiable standard whatsoever, it is merely political window-dressing.
...
;-).
Good point. And it answers the implied question:
It is a pity that there has been so little adverse reaction to the decision,
This is because the astronomical community considers the whole topic basically a joke. In earlier discussions here, many astronomers have pointed out that "planet" isn't really an astronomical term. They don't discuss it, because the definition isn't technically interesting or useful. They mostly refer to "bodies" and give their specs.
The definition of "star" is astronomically interesting, because there are all sorts of special things about a body that does nuclear fusion. But if there's no fusion process going on, they are just "bodies" (or "dust" if sufficiently small
The whole debate is a media event. It has no real scientific value.