"It probably tells you that they live in a world that is seniority based instead of merit based."
Sounds like Congress ("We can vote against the incumbent, he has seniority on Committee X!"). Does that make the Republican-controlled Congress of today "liberal?"
When your dad was a kid the Soviets were still offering free delivery of their fusion devices to US cities. Nowadays fusion isn't as big a deal at the DoD, which means fewer resources and slipping goals.
"I'm not sure if I can agree with your magnitude numbers for a brown dwarf."
I got the +17 number from here. For the record, 17 is pretty damned dim: Proxima Centauri has an absolute magnitude of 15.49. But even if you unrealisticly want to bump up Nemesis' absolute magnitude to 30, at 100,000 AU (twice your largest claim) it'd still have an apparent magnitude from earth of 24, still 16 times brighter than what modern ground-based telescopes can see. All you'd be doing is limiting the data that should be available on Nemesis to 80 years instead of 120.
"Each of these brown dwarfs are warm objects that emit a reasonable amount of infrared radiation. If it is a cold black dwarf similar to a larger Uranus--~60 K (and less than 13 Jupiter masses so that it can't have fusion)"
Aside from the fact that we'd still be able to see it, with 13 Jovian masses at 25,000 AU (half your smallest claim), the gravitational attraction on the sun would be 0.117 pm/s^2 (that's picometers). The center of the galaxy exerts an acceleration on the sun of 19,330 pm/s^s. Nemesis' gravitational influence would be indiscernible and meaningless compared to the gravitational effect of the rest of the galaxy. Its influence on us would literally be background noise, unless one tries to claim it influences us in some way other than gravity (*cough* astrology *cough*)
"Why won't the administration submit requests to FISA?"
For the same reason why the White House likes to keep people in Guantanamo Bay as opposed to someplace where federal courts will admit they have jurisdiction: so they can ignore aspects of federal law they find inconvenient. After all, in the example of Gitmo, if the standards under which the detainees are kept are so humane, wouldn't they pass muster in a federal facility stateside?
"Some commentators have read the constitutional text differently."
Here's what I'm getting from the first paragraph:
There are powers related to war not granted to Congress
Example: the rights of the states to wage defensive or preemptive wars without Congressional intervention is preserved
Therefore: the president (who is neither Congress nor the states) somehow magically has war powers not mentioned in the document
WTF? By the Justice Department's own logic, if anybody is going to have these magical, invisible war powers, it's the states, not the federal executive. The Ninth Amendment seems to drive that one home.
Apparent magnitude of sample dwarf at 100,000 AU = 10.47 (round to 11) Coincidentally, the apparent magnitude of Proxima Centauri is also 11 Apparent magnitude of Neptune, discovered 1846 = 8 (about 16 times brighter) Apparent magnitude of Pluto, photographed 1915 = 14 (about 16 times dimmer) Apparent magnitude visible by ground-based telescopes = 27 (2.5E6 times dimmer) Apparent magnitude visible by Hubble = 30 (4.0E7 times dimmer)
From the looks of things, Nemesis would have been showing up in astronomical photographs starting from the last decade or so of the Nineteenth Century. Curiously, the first confirmed sighting of a brown dwarf was in 1995 (first theorized in the 1960s). Now, unless the spectral pattern put out by this brown dwarf Nemesis somehow looks like much larger, hotter and brighter stars, it would have been Big News in Astronomy that such an odd star exists, regardless of its distance from us.
"It's like putting a telescope in your car while driving down the road and expecting to be able to find a parallax between observations"
Time between the two photographs over which the motion of Pluto first became apparent: 6 days Orbital period of Pluto: 90,600 days Sweep of arc made by Pluto for its discovery ~ 1 minute, 16 seconds of arc
Time between the two photographs over which the motion of Quaoar first became apparent: 180 minutes Orbital period of Quaoar: 105,000 days Sweep of arc made by Quaoar for its discovery ~ 1.5 seconds of arc
You say Nemesis may have an orbital period of 26 million years. Kepler says an object 100,000 AU away should have an orbital period of about 32 million years. We'll take the slower number:
Sweep of arc made by Nemesis in the past 50 years ~ 2 seconds of arc
And an interesting quote about the discovery of real nearby brown dwarfs in Epsilon Indi, 12 light-years away (source):
"Because this system is so close to us, it appears to move quite rapidly in the sky," says Dr. Volk. "We were able to confirm our detection--and rule out a more distant background object--within a few weeks since we could detect the motion of the system relative to the background stars relatively quickly."
If 12 light-years "appears to move quite rapidly in the sky," why not 1.2 light-years?
"If a title is selling for $20 used, drop the new price to $20-$25."
The problem here is that there is very little overhead in selling new games. If we're generous and say that GameWhoreX paid $45 for that $50 disk-in-a-box sitting on the shelf, when the publisher drops the MSRP to $25 that's $20 GameWhoreX will never see again. If they get systematically undercut like that by the publishers, the retailers will be reluctant to order any stock at all from the publishers.
Something similar happened to retailers when the top-loading NES was released; suddenly an NES console cost about as much as (and in some cases less than) a single NES game. Consumers (having no idea what mappers are) insisted that cartridges should always be a fraction of the cost of the system, and the retailers were forced to drop the price of NES cartridges and swallow the loss. Sure, it wasn't the publishers lowering the price, but the result was the same: the prices of current stock were drastically lowered by forces outside of the retailers' control. They were not happy, didn't order any more NES stock after the shelves had emptied, the NES vanished overnight instead of going through a gradual decline, and we're left with top-loading, RF-only NES consoles selling on eBay for more than twice than they ever cost new.
"I don't think you truly appreciate how BIG our solar system is. If there's a twin to our star, it would seem so far away that it would seem like it had nothing to do with us."
And I don't think you realize how big and bright stars are and how long we've been tracking the movement of stars across the heavens. If you have a star identical to the Sun 100 AU away (Pluto is 50 at its greatest), it will still be 40 times brighter than the full moon. I daresay that night as we know it wouldn't exist for months out of the year. And it would move noticably among the background stars (if you could see any) over the course of months or, at most, years (a drop in the bucket compared to the astronomical data we've collected since the development of written language). And there'd be no doubt even to Tycho Brahae that this one particular star/planet showed parallax and probably even measurable retrogade motion.
If the species can find something as small (0.00004 solar masses), dim (no fusion) and distant (20 AU, only 0.0003 light-year) as Uranus during the American Revolution, we'd certainly have found any kind of star closer than Alpha Centauri (let alone within the heliopause) by now, even if it were a black hole.
"Now given how far away this star would be, its gravitational effects might be difficult to detect."
Our sun is over 1000 Jovian masses, 1,300,000 earth masses, and 13.1E21 Pluto masses. The majority of all matter in the solar system is in the sun. It's certainly not something you can hide.
"In fact, IIRC, there are still quite a few odd effects that the discovery of Pluto didn't quite account for. (Not big enough.)"
You see: waves in a pond You find: a 1 g tadpole You'd expect: an 8 kg fish Nemesis: 94 million blue whales put together
... and pay the Senate to make used game sales illegal.
What bothers me is this:
"However, if it continues to grow, it could potentially starve us of the funds necessary for research and development, and therefore, developers will be less willing to take a risk on new and genre-diversifying titles."
This isn't a chicken-or-egg problem, we know new games came before used games. Therefore, this entire cycle was started with new games that had a high degree of suckage, and these high-suckage games were published before the used game industry took off (because, again, new games came first).
The solution seems obvious: publish good games. The better the game, the less likely the owner will sell it back to the store. And if it's really good, they'll buy the same game two or three times (witness Nintendo's business model on the GBA). But making the "We need to make crap games to pay for good games" argument that Hollywood has been touting for the past 50 years or so is simply going to land them in the same place Hollywood is now.
"Do these kind of lawsuits damage the companies initiating them more than they help?"
People still play this game? I thought everybody moved on to the new CCG of The Week long ago.
At any rate, I fail to see how a rumor site could hurt the revenue model: random distribution of cards in packs requiring you to buy them by the pallet to get the ones you really want.
"Sony managed it with the Playstation Dual Shock, which replaced the old playstation main system in stores in 1998/1999."
But there were still PSX consoles in the wild that didn't come with the DualShock, and those folks had to buy a DualShock as an accessory. You couldn't guarantee that a PSX owner had a DualShock any more than you could guarantee that a Genesis owner had the Arcade Pad (or a Sega CD, for that matter). Because of that, 99+% of the games published for the PSX, even well after the release of the DualShock, were backwards-compatible with the original digital pad.
The first Sony console where every user was guaranteed to have analog control and rumble was the PS2.
"1. We've had a chance to watch the 1st next-gen console launch, with its attendant hardware failure stories, and criticise it (X360) 2. We've seen Sony do ridiculously stupid things with DRM in the music space, and so we hate them, and have possibly boycotted them"
You've been on Slashdot too long. In the Real World, few people have heard of the X360 hardware problems and nobody cares about the Sony rootkit (if they even know about it). Neither company is exactly losing money hand over fist because a handfull of Slashdotters are boycotting them.
"They seem to downplay any inprovements in graphical performance"
Because their message has consistently been that they're not about the specs and whiz-bang, they're about fun games. If you're focused on improvements in graphical performance, pick up an X360 or a PS3; they're the ones aimed at you.
"Please correct me if I'm wrong, but "statistics" regarding videogame/machine sales are likely to be highly suspect"
So instead you're just going to pull anecdotal "evidence" out of your ass?
"Just the fact that the primary market is kids"
It is?
"since kids are notoriously indiscriminate when it comes to getting stuff"
"Indiscriminate?" Apparently you weren't one of those kids that ask for Optimus Prime for his birthday and got a Go-Bot isntead. More often than not it's the parent that's indiscriminate ("Maybe he'll shut up if I just get him this...").
"I have a kid that doesn't want one. But apparently they are "popular". With whom?"
I was just browsing through the video game section of my local Tar-zhay and there was a 10 year old girl with her face plastered on the glass case, feverishly explaining to her mother how the DS was the "best video game system ever" and how all her friends had one.
Of course, this is just an anecdote, as is your post. You can't rely on them. That's why we have statistics like the one TFA is using.
Issue 1 started the tradition of "The new Zelda: comign soon! Really!"
I'm still amused that Zelda II was covered in the Official Nintendo Player's Guide even though the game was years away at that point. The box art they put in the book was even hand drawn.
"People. Get a grip. Most companies will comply with government subponeas."
And, in the case of phone companies, less than that. "It's for national security."
However, this is all moot as there were no subpoenas involved (alluded to by TF blurb). All the White House did was ask. At least with Clinton we know it was just some interns under his desk.
"If Microsoft drops support for XP Home at the end of 2006, will SP3 be for XP Pro only?"
The people who most buy XP Pro rather than XP Home (read "IT departments") are the ones least likely to upgrade first. Home users had started to buy and instally Me before large customers decided to migrate from NT 4 WS to 2K Pro. And unlike the upcoming client upgrade to Vista, the move from NT 4 WS to 2K Pro was actually worthwhile, moreso even than the client upgrade from 2K Pro to XP Pro.
Slashdot Mirror
"It probably tells you that they live in a world that is seniority based instead of merit based."
Sounds like Congress ("We can vote against the incumbent, he has seniority on Committee X!"). Does that make the Republican-controlled Congress of today "liberal?"
"They spend entire lecture sessions discussing how Bush has ruined the country."
Would you rather they spend the entire lecture session on their cell phone?
Welcome to university, it's called "tenure."
When your dad was a kid the Soviets were still offering free delivery of their fusion devices to US cities. Nowadays fusion isn't as big a deal at the DoD, which means fewer resources and slipping goals.
I see we're not posting from Tierra del Fuego or other points further south.
"I'm not sure if I can agree with your magnitude numbers for a brown dwarf."
I got the +17 number from here. For the record, 17 is pretty damned dim: Proxima Centauri has an absolute magnitude of 15.49. But even if you unrealisticly want to bump up Nemesis' absolute magnitude to 30, at 100,000 AU (twice your largest claim) it'd still have an apparent magnitude from earth of 24, still 16 times brighter than what modern ground-based telescopes can see. All you'd be doing is limiting the data that should be available on Nemesis to 80 years instead of 120.
"Each of these brown dwarfs are warm objects that emit a reasonable amount of infrared radiation. If it is a cold black dwarf similar to a larger Uranus--~60 K (and less than 13 Jupiter masses so that it can't have fusion)"
Aside from the fact that we'd still be able to see it, with 13 Jovian masses at 25,000 AU (half your smallest claim), the gravitational attraction on the sun would be 0.117 pm/s^2 (that's picometers). The center of the galaxy exerts an acceleration on the sun of 19,330 pm/s^s. Nemesis' gravitational influence would be indiscernible and meaningless compared to the gravitational effect of the rest of the galaxy. Its influence on us would literally be background noise, unless one tries to claim it influences us in some way other than gravity (*cough* astrology *cough*)
"Why won't the administration submit requests to FISA?"
For the same reason why the White House likes to keep people in Guantanamo Bay as opposed to someplace where federal courts will admit they have jurisdiction: so they can ignore aspects of federal law they find inconvenient. After all, in the example of Gitmo, if the standards under which the detainees are kept are so humane, wouldn't they pass muster in a federal facility stateside?
Here's what I'm getting from the first paragraph:
- There are powers related to war not granted to Congress
- Example: the rights of the states to wage defensive or preemptive wars without Congressional intervention is preserved
- Therefore: the president (who is neither Congress nor the states) somehow magically has war powers not mentioned in the document
WTF? By the Justice Department's own logic, if anybody is going to have these magical, invisible war powers, it's the states, not the federal executive. The Ninth Amendment seems to drive that one home.Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf, is 0.12 solar masses, about 270,000 AU away, and was discovered in 1915.
It seems brown dwarfs cap at around 90 jovian masses (0.08 solar masses).
"The Nemesis theory says that it exists about 50,000-100,000 AU away, has an orbital period of 26 million years, and is a brown dwarf."
ballpark absolute magnitude of a brown dwarf: 17
absolute magnitude of the sun: 4.8
difference: 12.2
Apparent magnitude of the sun at 1 AU: -26.73
apparent magnitude of sample dwarf at 1 AU: -26.73 + 12.2= -14.53
Add 5 apparent magnitude for multiple of ten of distance
100,000 AU = 10^5 AU, 5 * 5 = 25, 25 + (-14.53) = 10.47
Apparent magnitude of sample dwarf at 100,000 AU = 10.47 (round to 11)
Coincidentally, the apparent magnitude of Proxima Centauri is also 11
Apparent magnitude of Neptune, discovered 1846 = 8 (about 16 times brighter)
Apparent magnitude of Pluto, photographed 1915 = 14 (about 16 times dimmer)
Apparent magnitude visible by ground-based telescopes = 27 (2.5E6 times dimmer)
Apparent magnitude visible by Hubble = 30 (4.0E7 times dimmer)
From the looks of things, Nemesis would have been showing up in astronomical photographs starting from the last decade or so of the Nineteenth Century. Curiously, the first confirmed sighting of a brown dwarf was in 1995 (first theorized in the 1960s). Now, unless the spectral pattern put out by this brown dwarf Nemesis somehow looks like much larger, hotter and brighter stars, it would have been Big News in Astronomy that such an odd star exists, regardless of its distance from us.
"It's like putting a telescope in your car while driving down the road and expecting to be able to find a parallax between observations"
Time between the two photographs over which the motion of Pluto first became apparent: 6 days
Orbital period of Pluto: 90,600 days
Sweep of arc made by Pluto for its discovery ~ 1 minute, 16 seconds of arc
Time between the two photographs over which the motion of Quaoar first became apparent: 180 minutes
Orbital period of Quaoar: 105,000 days
Sweep of arc made by Quaoar for its discovery ~ 1.5 seconds of arc
You say Nemesis may have an orbital period of 26 million years. Kepler says an object 100,000 AU away should have an orbital period of about 32 million years. We'll take the slower number:
Sweep of arc made by Nemesis in the past 50 years ~ 2 seconds of arc
And an interesting quote about the discovery of real nearby brown dwarfs in Epsilon Indi, 12 light-years away (source):
If 12 light-years "appears to move quite rapidly in the sky," why not 1.2 light-years?
"If a title is selling for $20 used, drop the new price to $20-$25."
The problem here is that there is very little overhead in selling new games. If we're generous and say that GameWhoreX paid $45 for that $50 disk-in-a-box sitting on the shelf, when the publisher drops the MSRP to $25 that's $20 GameWhoreX will never see again. If they get systematically undercut like that by the publishers, the retailers will be reluctant to order any stock at all from the publishers.
Something similar happened to retailers when the top-loading NES was released; suddenly an NES console cost about as much as (and in some cases less than) a single NES game. Consumers (having no idea what mappers are) insisted that cartridges should always be a fraction of the cost of the system, and the retailers were forced to drop the price of NES cartridges and swallow the loss. Sure, it wasn't the publishers lowering the price, but the result was the same: the prices of current stock were drastically lowered by forces outside of the retailers' control. They were not happy, didn't order any more NES stock after the shelves had emptied, the NES vanished overnight instead of going through a gradual decline, and we're left with top-loading, RF-only NES consoles selling on eBay for more than twice than they ever cost new.
"I don't think you truly appreciate how BIG our solar system is. If there's a twin to our star, it would seem so far away that it would seem like it had nothing to do with us."
And I don't think you realize how big and bright stars are and how long we've been tracking the movement of stars across the heavens. If you have a star identical to the Sun 100 AU away (Pluto is 50 at its greatest), it will still be 40 times brighter than the full moon. I daresay that night as we know it wouldn't exist for months out of the year. And it would move noticably among the background stars (if you could see any) over the course of months or, at most, years (a drop in the bucket compared to the astronomical data we've collected since the development of written language). And there'd be no doubt even to Tycho Brahae that this one particular star/planet showed parallax and probably even measurable retrogade motion.
If the species can find something as small (0.00004 solar masses), dim (no fusion) and distant (20 AU, only 0.0003 light-year) as Uranus during the American Revolution, we'd certainly have found any kind of star closer than Alpha Centauri (let alone within the heliopause) by now, even if it were a black hole.
"Now given how far away this star would be, its gravitational effects might be difficult to detect."
Our sun is over 1000 Jovian masses, 1,300,000 earth masses, and 13.1E21 Pluto masses. The majority of all matter in the solar system is in the sun. It's certainly not something you can hide.
"In fact, IIRC, there are still quite a few odd effects that the discovery of Pluto didn't quite account for. (Not big enough.)"
You see: waves in a pond
You find: a 1 g tadpole
You'd expect: an 8 kg fish
Nemesis: 94 million blue whales put together
... and pay the Senate to make used game sales illegal.
What bothers me is this:
"However, if it continues to grow, it could potentially starve us of the funds necessary for research and development, and therefore, developers will be less willing to take a risk on new and genre-diversifying titles."
This isn't a chicken-or-egg problem, we know new games came before used games. Therefore, this entire cycle was started with new games that had a high degree of suckage, and these high-suckage games were published before the used game industry took off (because, again, new games came first).
The solution seems obvious: publish good games. The better the game, the less likely the owner will sell it back to the store. And if it's really good, they'll buy the same game two or three times (witness Nintendo's business model on the GBA). But making the "We need to make crap games to pay for good games" argument that Hollywood has been touting for the past 50 years or so is simply going to land them in the same place Hollywood is now.
"Do these kind of lawsuits damage the companies initiating them more than they help?"
People still play this game? I thought everybody moved on to the new CCG of The Week long ago.
At any rate, I fail to see how a rumor site could hurt the revenue model: random distribution of cards in packs requiring you to buy them by the pallet to get the ones you really want.
Does the talley include the Sony rootkit?
"The average gamer may be a dumbass, but he sure as hell will notice the DRM bullshit if he needs to network the console to play his new games"
/."
The average gamer doesn't play online and especially not on a LAN.
"After all, there was a pretty big backlash against Sony's music CDs, and that was not limited to
Where? Aside from an odd lawsuit from a state AG here and there, you can even still find plenty of affected disks on store shelves.
"Sony managed it with the Playstation Dual Shock, which replaced the old playstation main system in stores in 1998/1999."
But there were still PSX consoles in the wild that didn't come with the DualShock, and those folks had to buy a DualShock as an accessory. You couldn't guarantee that a PSX owner had a DualShock any more than you could guarantee that a Genesis owner had the Arcade Pad (or a Sega CD, for that matter). Because of that, 99+% of the games published for the PSX, even well after the release of the DualShock, were backwards-compatible with the original digital pad.
The first Sony console where every user was guaranteed to have analog control and rumble was the PS2.
Did they include the NSA's illegal wiretaps in that tally?
"Analog stick, Emerson Arcadia, 1982"
I see sticks, but I'm not seeing analog. At the very least, the default controller wasn't analog (something not even Sony managed until the PS2).
"Rumble, Sony Dual Analog Japanese version, 1996 "
It didn't rumble. The dual analog controller was just that: a standard PSX controller with two sticks.
"It's all a pointless pissing contest anyway, the PlayStation 2 is number one."
Until you start to look at GBAs and/or DSs.
"1. We've had a chance to watch the 1st next-gen console launch, with its attendant hardware failure stories, and criticise it (X360)
2. We've seen Sony do ridiculously stupid things with DRM in the music space, and so we hate them, and have possibly boycotted them"
You've been on Slashdot too long. In the Real World, few people have heard of the X360 hardware problems and nobody cares about the Sony rootkit (if they even know about it). Neither company is exactly losing money hand over fist because a handfull of Slashdotters are boycotting them.
"They seem to downplay any inprovements in graphical performance"
Because their message has consistently been that they're not about the specs and whiz-bang, they're about fun games. If you're focused on improvements in graphical performance, pick up an X360 or a PS3; they're the ones aimed at you.
"Please correct me if I'm wrong, but "statistics" regarding videogame/machine sales are likely to be highly suspect"
So instead you're just going to pull anecdotal "evidence" out of your ass?
"Just the fact that the primary market is kids"
It is?
"since kids are notoriously indiscriminate when it comes to getting stuff"
"Indiscriminate?" Apparently you weren't one of those kids that ask for Optimus Prime for his birthday and got a Go-Bot isntead. More often than not it's the parent that's indiscriminate ("Maybe he'll shut up if I just get him this...").
"I have a kid that doesn't want one. But apparently they are "popular". With whom?"
I was just browsing through the video game section of my local Tar-zhay and there was a 10 year old girl with her face plastered on the glass case, feverishly explaining to her mother how the DS was the "best video game system ever" and how all her friends had one.
Of course, this is just an anecdote, as is your post. You can't rely on them. That's why we have statistics like the one TFA is using.
Issue 1 started the tradition of "The new Zelda: comign soon! Really!"
I'm still amused that Zelda II was covered in the Official Nintendo Player's Guide even though the game was years away at that point. The box art they put in the book was even hand drawn.
"People. Get a grip. Most companies will comply with government subponeas."
And, in the case of phone companies, less than that. "It's for national security."
However, this is all moot as there were no subpoenas involved (alluded to by TF blurb). All the White House did was ask. At least with Clinton we know it was just some interns under his desk.
"If Microsoft drops support for XP Home at the end of 2006, will SP3 be for XP Pro only?"
The people who most buy XP Pro rather than XP Home (read "IT departments") are the ones least likely to upgrade first. Home users had started to buy and instally Me before large customers decided to migrate from NT 4 WS to 2K Pro. And unlike the upcoming client upgrade to Vista, the move from NT 4 WS to 2K Pro was actually worthwhile, moreso even than the client upgrade from 2K Pro to XP Pro.