They are trying to keep this secret because it would be politically poisonous if revealed.
As I think our friends in Europe have begun to realize, laws based on treaties prepared in secret by bureaucrats without democratic accountability are inherently corrupting of democracy itself. They are also an invitation for the corrupting influence of special interests, who will try and accomplish in secret what they cannot in public.
If these restrictions are worthwhile, let them be proposed and debated in public, as normal laws are. Otherwise, I think this whole process should be shut down. It has been going on far too long for any good that we have been getting from it.
There are conventional bars in Utah, or at least there are things that look a lot like bars, they just are technically clubs and require you to fill out a form and pay a small "membership fee" to get a drink.
I don't know whether, like Virginia, they require the bar to also serve food, but I would bet that they do, and the ones that I went to had restaurants attached. (In the 1960's, by the way, bars in Fairfax, Virginia, also required, or at least were supposed to require, membership.)
First, go back to the original research article. It is interesting, but it includes one open source project, Hipergate 3.0.26, which has 100 times the issues of all the other projects considered, and which skews the statistics. Note, too, that they also consider Hipergate 3.25, which has very few issues. I am not familiar with Hipergate, and it is not clear to me if these are separate products, or if version 3.0.26 is just a very buggy beta version, or even if 3.0.26 comes before or after 3.25. Poking around Sourceforge doesn't find either of these versions; the version there is up to 4.0.3.
The report itself makes the point that OSS should do better, and that it could do better. Fair enough. But what of the bigger implications ? What should be done, except maybe avoiding Hipergate 3.0.26 ?
Of course, saying that the UK should not use Hipergate 3.0.26 is unlikely to make the news. To conclude that the UK government should not use OSS, however, I would want to see a comparison of OSS software and proprietary software on similar points. (Some proprietary software companies make it easy to post security issues, others do not, for example. Is that better or worse in practice than OSS ?)
I don't see that sort of analysis here, and that makes me suspect astroturfing. (Again, I am not saying this for the original research report, but for the announcement about the UK Conservative Party.)
The thing that makes me especially suspicious is that one would normally expect a company like Fortify to say something like, here is a opportunity to really improve OSS, the Conservative Party should announce a major software security initiative to go along with their OSS initiative and, by the way, we at Fortify have a number of products and services that would really help with that initiative.
Just to say that it is a bad idea seems to be against their self-interest, and whenever companies act against their apparent self-interest I start to wonder what's going on.
In orbit, the preferred term is "microgravity". Manned space flights are notoriously prone to bursts of acceleration, but no spacecraft is acceleration free, and they all tend to vibrate a lot (causing acceleration to the pieces, if not the whole).
Basically, every panel, every antenna, every boom, has one or more resonance frequencies. Every time something shakes the spacecraft (such as going from dark to sunlight, or vice-versa, or a thruster burst, or a piece of equipment being moved), every one of those spacecraft components will be excited somewhat, and each will vibrate at its resonance frequency, maybe for weeks. These motions can be clearly seen in RF carrier phase from spacecraft; and for most spacecraft they are always present (shaking occurs more frequently than their damping time). Theis has to be considered anytime you have an experiment that does require micro-gravity.
This idea was (in some sense) around in the 1960's, believe it or not.
The high neutron flux produced means that the CFNS would itself become radioactive, and the steel of its construction weakened by neutron irradiation. I would like to see a life-cycle analysis to make sure that the total waste consumed was more than that produced by the CFNS itself.
This general issue is why I would like to see a lot more emphasis places on He3 fusion, and also on linear fusion devices. (He3 fusion, either He3 - Dt or He3-He3, produces much less neutron flux. To me, the end goal would be to have nuclear fusion power that did not produce radioactive waste, which ITER definitely will do. Linear fusion is for spacecraft propulsion, of course - it is thought to be much easier technically than making a tokomak work.)
And then there's always the possibility that an auto maker will put a similar system in a car.
That's way old. In World War II, trucks (and cars) were converted to run on just about anything that could burn - charcoal, wood, even garbage. In occupied France, these were called Gazogenes
As soon as the War was over, those trucks were junked.
Note that agricultural waste is generally used already and is definitely not free.
Partially, this is what tends to happen in any case when Science gets into the public. How many times have we discovered water and methane on Mars ? How many "second Moons" does the Earth have ? (Both of these have been slashdot stories recently.)
But in this case you also get the political idiots involved, which makes it much worse. The early days of AIDS research was similar - whenever you have a bunch of people who deny a problem for political reasons, you are going to have an intensification of the response on the other side.
Different masses require different speeds to keep the same orbit.
Uh, no they don't - that would be a violation of the Strong Equivalence Principal (SEP), which holds exactly in General Relativity, and has been tested via the Nordtvedt effect in Lunar Laser Ranging to better than a part per thousand.
These co-orbitals do indeed have very low speeds relative to Earth. They are not in the same orbit, just very close ones.
Well, Moons can be defined a lot of ways. If you look at an orbital plot in a reference frame that rotates with the Earth's orbit (so that the Earth and the Sun appear to be fixed, or nearly so), then these "co-orbitals" may appear to orbit the Earth. So from that standpoint, they appear to be satellites.
I might also point out that from the Sun's point of view the orbit of the Moon (the big one) never appears to actually cross itself as it orbits around the Earth (i.e., as plotted from a Sun fixed frame the Moon's orbit is an S-shaped curve, not a series of loops), so you could say that the "real" Moon is co-orbital too
But, I think that the real purpose of calling these "second Moons" is to get these discoveries into the press, and the tactic seems to be having the desired effect.
There are plenty of larger NEOs that are energetically easy to get to. In fact, there are quite a number that the Apollo spacecraft could have reached and returned from, and there were plans to do this in the late 1960's (using the Saturn V 3rd stage as living quarters in route, and replacing the LEM with provisions), but neither LBJ nor Nixon was really interested in manned exploration beyond the Moon. I have a feeling that JFK would have gone for this, though, as well as for the manned Venus orbiter plans using the same technology.
3753 Cruithne is in a Earth resonance orbit and is the first asteroid called "Earth's second moon". I don't know how many we are supposed to have now, but with this one, it is at least 3.
Whenever I hear of something like this, I have to wonder if it is a "lost" interplanetary probe (or the upper stage of one, or some other related debris). With this orbit, 2009 BD could be an old lunar flyby, maybe from the 1960's.
Remember, the size estimate requires an albedo estimate, and rocket pieces tend to be very reflective, and thus will appear to be larger if the albedo is set too low, so if it was a spacecraft it would not be 10 meters, but maybe 4 or 5 at most. The Apollo 8, 10 and 11 third stages would be a possible candidate. (After Apollo 11, the third stages were impacted on the Moon to serve as sources for the seismometers.)
Such lost probes will return to near the Earth, but perturbations will tend to move them slowly further away with time.
Slashdot Mirror
They are trying to keep this secret because it would be politically poisonous if revealed.
As I think our friends in Europe have begun to realize, laws based on treaties prepared in secret by bureaucrats without democratic accountability are inherently corrupting of democracy itself. They are also an invitation for the corrupting influence of special interests, who will try and accomplish in secret what they cannot in public.
If these restrictions are worthwhile, let them be proposed and debated in public, as normal laws are. Otherwise, I think this whole process should be shut down. It has been going on far too long for any good that we have been getting from it.
Hmm. I was curious too. From the most recent data I could find :
Murder rate, 2007, Utah, per 100,000 : 2.2
Murder rate, 2004, Germany, per 100,000 : 0.98
Murder rate, 2002, Saudi Arabia, per 100,000 : 0.92
So, clearly Utah is either too religious, or not religious enough. Or something.
There are conventional bars in Utah, or at least there are things that look a lot like bars, they just are technically clubs and require you to fill out a form and pay a small "membership fee" to get a drink.
I don't know whether, like Virginia, they require the bar to also serve food, but I would bet that they do, and the ones that I went to had restaurants attached. (In the 1960's, by the way, bars in Fairfax, Virginia, also required, or at least were supposed to require, membership.)
This is not about legislating adulthood, it is about legislating religion. There is a difference.
That didn't take long. Slashdot strikes again.
When the House of Lords (!) comes out against the surveillance society you do get the feeling that something is awry.
I have to wonder if this is an Astroturf attack.
First, go back to the original research article. It is interesting, but it includes one open source project, Hipergate 3.0.26, which has 100 times the issues of all the other projects considered, and which skews the statistics. Note, too, that they also consider Hipergate 3.25, which has very few issues. I am not familiar with Hipergate, and it is not clear to me if these are separate products, or if version 3.0.26 is just a very buggy beta version, or even if 3.0.26 comes before or after 3.25. Poking around Sourceforge doesn't find either of these versions; the version there is up to 4.0.3.
The report itself makes the point that OSS should do better, and that it could do better. Fair enough. But what of the bigger implications ? What should be done, except maybe avoiding Hipergate 3.0.26 ?
Of course, saying that the UK should not use Hipergate 3.0.26 is unlikely to make the news. To conclude that the UK government should not use OSS, however, I would want to see a comparison of OSS software and proprietary software on similar points. (Some proprietary software companies make it easy to post security issues, others do not, for example. Is that better or worse in practice than OSS ?)
I don't see that sort of analysis here, and that makes me suspect astroturfing. (Again, I am not saying this for the original research report, but for the announcement about the UK Conservative Party.)
The thing that makes me especially suspicious is that one would normally expect a company like Fortify to say something like, here is a opportunity to really improve OSS, the Conservative Party should announce a major software security initiative to go along with their OSS initiative and, by the way, we at Fortify have a number of products and services that would really help with that initiative.
Just to say that it is a bad idea seems to be against their self-interest, and whenever companies act against their apparent self-interest I start to wonder what's going on.
For bit rates less than 24 Kbps I prefer mono.
(What, RTFA ? Who has time for that ?)
I had the same reaction. I bet people would make it through the snow for a 12 pound laptop. Heck, they probably would for a 50 pound laptop.
No, it's approximately 4000 euros for a 5 kg laptop.
(If you are going to adopt, go whole hog.)
This is all over the NANOG list, with positive reports of the trouble from all over the planet.
In orbit, the preferred term is "microgravity". Manned space flights are notoriously prone to bursts of acceleration, but no spacecraft is acceleration free, and they all tend to vibrate a lot (causing acceleration to the pieces, if not the whole).
Basically, every panel, every antenna, every boom, has one or more resonance frequencies. Every time something shakes the spacecraft (such as going from dark to sunlight, or vice-versa, or a thruster burst, or a piece of equipment being moved), every one of those spacecraft components will be excited somewhat, and each will vibrate at its resonance frequency, maybe for weeks. These motions can be clearly seen in RF carrier phase from spacecraft; and for most spacecraft they are always present (shaking occurs more frequently than their damping time). Theis has to be considered anytime you have an experiment that does require micro-gravity.
Plausible, but, as I said, I would like to see a life-cycle analysis to see if the numbers really work out.
This idea was (in some sense) around in the 1960's, believe it or not.
The high neutron flux produced means that the CFNS would itself become radioactive, and the steel of its construction weakened by neutron irradiation. I would like to see a life-cycle analysis to make sure that the total waste consumed was more than that produced by the CFNS itself.
This general issue is why I would like to see a lot more emphasis places on He3 fusion, and also on linear fusion devices. (He3 fusion, either He3 - Dt or He3-He3, produces much less neutron flux. To me, the end goal would be to have nuclear fusion power that did not produce radioactive waste, which ITER definitely will do. Linear fusion is for spacecraft propulsion, of course - it is thought to be much easier technically than making a tokomak work.)
And then there's always the possibility that an auto maker will put a similar system in a car.
That's way old. In World War II, trucks (and cars) were converted to run on just about anything that could burn - charcoal, wood, even garbage. In occupied France, these were called Gazogenes
As soon as the War was over, those trucks were junked.
Note that agricultural waste is generally used already and is definitely not free.
If a bird eats my tomatoes, or a deer the grass on my lawn, that's part of nature.
If a robot eats my tomatoes, somebody is going to pay.
Partially, this is what tends to happen in any case when Science gets into the public. How many times have we discovered water and methane on Mars ? How many "second Moons" does the Earth have ? (Both of these have been slashdot stories recently.)
But in this case you also get the political idiots involved, which makes it much worse. The early days of AIDS research was similar - whenever you have a bunch of people who deny a problem for political reasons, you are going to have an intensification of the response on the other side.
We could put a sunshade at the Earth's L1 Lagrange point and cool us down as much as we wanted to.
There are other possible mega-engineering possibilities to deal with global warming, but this one would certainly work is within our capabilities.
It is hard to get some people to think outside the box.
Yeah, I replied there.
Different masses require different speeds to keep the same orbit.
Uh, no they don't - that would be a violation of the Strong Equivalence Principal (SEP), which holds exactly in General Relativity, and has been tested via the Nordtvedt effect in Lunar Laser Ranging to better than a part per thousand.
These co-orbitals do indeed have very low speeds relative to Earth. They are not in the same orbit, just very close ones.
Well, Moons can be defined a lot of ways. If you look at an orbital plot in a reference frame that rotates with the Earth's orbit (so that the Earth and the Sun appear to be fixed, or nearly so), then these "co-orbitals" may appear to orbit the Earth. So from that standpoint, they appear to be satellites.
I might also point out that from the Sun's point of view the orbit of the Moon (the big one) never appears to actually cross itself as it orbits around the Earth (i.e., as plotted from a Sun fixed frame the Moon's orbit is an S-shaped curve, not a series of loops), so you could say that the "real" Moon is co-orbital too
But, I think that the real purpose of calling these "second Moons" is to get these discoveries into the press, and the tactic seems to be having the desired effect.
There are plenty of larger NEOs that are energetically easy to get to. In fact, there are quite a number that the Apollo spacecraft could have reached and returned from, and there were plans to do this in the late 1960's (using the Saturn V 3rd stage as living quarters in route, and replacing the LEM with provisions), but neither LBJ nor Nixon was really interested in manned exploration beyond the Moon. I have a feeling that JFK would have gone for this, though, as well as for the manned Venus orbiter plans using the same technology.
This is just sloppy terminology.
They are in close, but not identical, orbits around the Sun.
3753 Cruithne is in a Earth resonance orbit and is the first asteroid called "Earth's second moon". I don't know how many we are supposed to have now, but with this one, it is at least 3.
Whenever I hear of something like this, I have to wonder if it is a "lost" interplanetary probe (or the upper stage of one, or some other related debris). With this orbit, 2009 BD could be an old lunar flyby, maybe from the 1960's.
Remember, the size estimate requires an albedo estimate, and rocket pieces tend to be very reflective, and thus will appear to be larger if the albedo is set too low, so if it was a spacecraft it would not be 10 meters, but maybe 4 or 5 at most. The Apollo 8, 10 and 11 third stages would be a possible candidate. (After Apollo 11, the third stages were impacted on the Moon to serve as sources for the seismometers.)
Such lost probes will return to near the Earth, but perturbations will tend to move them slowly further away with time.