His conclusion: the $3 million engineer may exist, but is a rare bird indeed if so."
In other words, given that anyone who has any understanding of the business at all could have said the same thing without doing any research at all, he actually found out nothing.
It is obvious that there are parts of the universe that are not (and never have been) causally connected with our universe.Those are just the parts of our universe we can't see, which are inevitable in an infinite universe with a finite duration and a finite speed of light. You don't need either quantum mechanics or inflation for that, and it has never been called the "multiverse."
The multiverse in my experience means exclusively the idea that there are other parts of the universe with different physical laws. That idea is connected to the anthropic principle, and (IMHO) evading tough issues about the nature of physical laws. (Find the cosmological constant to be inconveniently small? That's OK! In a multiverse there are a gazillion universe with large cosmological constants and no life like ours, ours with a small one and our kind of life, and nothing left to explain!) "We" might think that there is that kind of multiverse, but "we" in this case decidedly does not include "me." (People like me tend to call such ideas "Just so stories," which in physics is an insult.)
L3 won't help you (neither will L1 or L2). L4 and L5 would. The big thing here is the cost. This is like a 1.3% tax on all Mars missions, which to date NASA has seen as cheaper than putting in relay satellites.
Once per synodic period (779.94 days) you will lose 10 days or so during superior conjunction, or ~ 1.3% of the time. NASA gives its spaceships at Mars a vacation (for the rovers, generally a long integration X ray spectrum of some rock). If Mars One really worries losing contact even for that little, they can either build a cycler, or put a relay somewhere else (say, orbiting Venus).
The billionaires are destroying the middle class, by extracting their wealth; Internet efficiencies are just one means they use to do that. This is, simply put, not inevitable, and if the power structures were different, the Internet would be enriching, not destroying, the middle class.
How to change that, and the end game if it is not changed, are left as exercises for the reader.
They are in near exactly 12 sidereal hour inclined orbits (i.e., the period is 1/2 a sidereal, not solar, day). That makes them decidedly not geostationary (24 hour equatorial orbits) or geosynchronous (24 hour inclined orbits), but it does mean that their positions repeat every two orbits (more or less) compared to the "fixed" stars (not the Sun).
"Harris has yet to account for perturbations to the satellites’ orbits due to relativity, and the gravitational pull of the sun and moon."
That, alone, would make this fail peer review, not to mention that the GPS satellites (which are big and messy and do stationkeeping and get replaced) are not the satellites to use to do this with (the Lageos satellites fit both requirements, being both well monitored and with very low non-gravitational perturbations). The Lageos orbit at a lower altitude than GPS, and so would be expected to exhibit a greater difference with the orbit of the Moon (the other very stable and well characterized Earth orbiter, thanks to Lunar Laser Ranging).
Back in 2008, Adler compared Lageos and LLR estimates of Earth gravity in http://arxiv.org/pdf/0808.0899.pdf and concluded that Earth bound dark matter (outside of the 12,000 km semi major axis of Lageos) is 4 x 10^-9 Earth masses, much below Harris's 5 x 10^-5 estimate (which is based on a comparison with an ancient IAU determination from the 1960's). Given the poor analysis and the discrepancy with the more accurate data used by Adler, I do not think that these results can be given any credence.
I think that right wing talking points jumped the shark years ago.
By the way, the Ozone hole was saved by concerted international effort. Too bad that was prevented this time around by a small band of billionaires and their useful idiots.
The "S" in SEC stands for Securities. It is their job to regulate that kind of thing.
As you say, Kickstarter is different. Not only are you not getting any equity in the company, you aren't getting any financial stake in the project or anything. It is an investment for creative return, not financial, and thus not something that would be covered.
You need to pay income tax on Kickstarter funds, of course, but that's all. They aren't an investment as far as the SEC is concerned.
My understanding (and IANAL and this isn't legal advice) is that Kickstarter income counts as sales, and thus ordinary income, while Indiegogo counts as a gift. Either way, it is taxable.
None of the US based crowdfunding sites are providing equity investments, and so this is an entirely new way of raising funds, and thus a positive thing.
Hmm, now that I've read through some more information and other comments, it seems that what I described is pretty close to what's actually happening. This only affects crowdfunded projects with an "investor tier" and life goes on otherwise.
Wow, how about that? Government making sensible regulatory changes and not stomping on the little guy... I gotta mark this day on the calendar.
And a Slashdot article summary totally misrepresentative of the actual facts. That, unfortunately, is not an unusual day on the calendar.
I am convinced that Mr. Snowden represents more than himself, and that he has help and assistance from a faction or factions inside the organs of state security that do not like the way things are headed.
This piece by Mr. Kaplan clearly represents a bit of propaganda from the other side, the elements inside state security that do like the way things are going. In that light, while not informational, it is informative about the shadow play going on behind the scenes.
'It may be telling that Snowden did not release — or at least the recipients of his cache haven't yet published — any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China,'
Why would he have access to Russian or Chinese documents?
If he did have access to Russian or Chinese documents, it would be because
- the NSA (or CIA or...) stole or snooped them and
- they would be important enough that they would be mentioned in the briefing powerpoints that make up so much of what Snowden apparently has access to.
In other words, this is a sign he is protecting some of the NSA's most truly important secrets, and also a sign that Kaplan is dealing in misinformation if not disinformation.
The SEC is about to make equity crowdfunding possible. It is not possible at all at present, and business plan, etc., seems entirely appropriate for equity investors. Current crowdfunding is not equity investment at all, it is either pre-order (by my understanding typical on Kickstarter) or a gift (by my understanding typical on IndieGoGo). My understanding is that the SEC rules will not affect those two modes of crowdfunding at all.
So this is a good thing. The Slashdot summary... not so much.
It's a 48 bit address space. They have lots of addresses. This is the minimum allocation IEEE hands out. Lot's of companies have a/24 of Mac addresses.
Phobos is one of the darkest (lowest albedo) bodies in the Solar System. Since it is probably a Carbonaceous chondrite, it really is not too far from just big lump of tar.
"[S]ent on a trajectory that took it only 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the dusty surface"
What is the range of a BFG?
In the context, effectively infinite, as the escape velocity is ~ 10 m / sec. In fact, that would be true for almost any projectile - a fastball in baseball is 90 mph or 40 m / sec.
Now, hitting a target 45 km away moving at a few km / sec relative velocity is another matter...
This was a radiometric (Doppler tracking) pass, with the main antenna pointed at the Earth. Pictures would have required re-orienting the spacecraft, and ideally rotating it to remove any motion blur on the close approach. You cannot do that and keep lock on the Earth, and they wanted to nail down the mass of Phobos. Initial reports from the DSN are the the Phobos gravity Doppler shift was visible in the "raw" residuals, so it's likely they will meet this goal.
However, the simulation missed something - Mars Express has a 40 meter dipole antenna - at 45 km, that's 3 arc min, so you could see Sun glint on the dipoles with your naked eye (i.e., you could resolve it as a structure, not just a dot of light). With a pair of binoculars, you could even see the spacecraft's solar panels.
Slashdot Mirror
This must be a report from some other planet, because on the one I live on, the record companies are frequently the only voice that is heard.
And we should trust them why, exactly? Because they were on top of this stuff before? Sure doesn't seem that way to me.
In other words, given that anyone who has any understanding of the business at all could have said the same thing without doing any research at all, he actually found out nothing.
This is really talking about eternal slow roll inflation, so let me fix this for you :
There has always been nothing, and it has always been exploding.
I think that this is a great article, but...
It is obvious that there are parts of the universe that are not (and never have been) causally connected with our universe.Those are just the parts of our universe we can't see, which are inevitable in an infinite universe with a finite duration and a finite speed of light. You don't need either quantum mechanics or inflation for that, and it has never been called the "multiverse."
The multiverse in my experience means exclusively the idea that there are other parts of the universe with different physical laws. That idea is connected to the anthropic principle, and (IMHO) evading tough issues about the nature of physical laws. (Find the cosmological constant to be inconveniently small? That's OK! In a multiverse there are a gazillion universe with large cosmological constants and no life like ours, ours with a small one and our kind of life, and nothing left to explain!) "We" might think that there is that kind of multiverse, but "we" in this case decidedly does not include "me." (People like me tend to call such ideas "Just so stories," which in physics is an insult.)
L3 won't help you (neither will L1 or L2). L4 and L5 would. The big thing here is the cost. This is like a 1.3% tax on all Mars missions, which to date NASA has seen as cheaper than putting in relay satellites.
Once per synodic period (779.94 days) you will lose 10 days or so during superior conjunction, or ~ 1.3% of the time. NASA gives its spaceships at Mars a vacation (for the rovers, generally a long integration X ray spectrum of some rock). If Mars One really worries losing contact even for that little, they can either build a cycler, or put a relay somewhere else (say, orbiting Venus).
So, if Ford gets a court order requiring the tracking of someone, or some class of someones, they will disobey it?
Sure. And all Fords get 1000 miles per gallon, too.
Look for the scenes in new mob movies where part of the initiation into the mafia is taking the GPS out of your car.
The billionaires are destroying the middle class, by extracting their wealth; Internet efficiencies are just one means they use to do that. This is, simply put, not inevitable, and if the power structures were different, the Internet would be enriching, not destroying, the middle class.
How to change that, and the end game if it is not changed, are left as exercises for the reader.
They are in near exactly 12 sidereal hour inclined orbits (i.e., the period is 1/2 a sidereal, not solar, day). That makes them decidedly not geostationary (24 hour equatorial orbits) or geosynchronous (24 hour inclined orbits), but it does mean that their positions repeat every two orbits (more or less) compared to the "fixed" stars (not the Sun).
From New Scientist :
That, alone, would make this fail peer review, not to mention that the GPS satellites (which are big and messy and do stationkeeping and get replaced) are not the satellites to use to do this with (the Lageos satellites fit both requirements, being both well monitored and with very low non-gravitational perturbations). The Lageos orbit at a lower altitude than GPS, and so would be expected to exhibit a greater difference with the orbit of the Moon (the other very stable and well characterized Earth orbiter, thanks to Lunar Laser Ranging).
Back in 2008, Adler compared Lageos and LLR estimates of Earth gravity in http://arxiv.org/pdf/0808.0899.pdf and concluded that Earth bound dark matter (outside of the 12,000 km semi major axis of Lageos) is 4 x 10^-9 Earth masses, much below Harris's 5 x 10^-5 estimate (which is based on a comparison with an ancient IAU determination from the 1960's). Given the poor analysis and the discrepancy with the more accurate data used by Adler, I do not think that these results can be given any credence.
I think that right wing talking points jumped the shark years ago.
By the way, the Ozone hole was saved by concerted international effort. Too bad that was prevented this time around by a small band of billionaires and their useful idiots.
A balance of power competition is not a war, and it is deeply misleading to characterize it that way.
In one week will we be reading about how country X is sending an icebreaker to free the three stuck icebreakers?
Good thing it's summer down there. Wouldn't want to be stuck all winter. That would be a pain.
The "S" in SEC stands for Securities. It is their job to regulate that kind of thing.
As you say, Kickstarter is different. Not only are you not getting any equity in the company, you aren't getting any financial stake in the project or anything. It is an investment for creative return, not financial, and thus not something that would be covered.
You need to pay income tax on Kickstarter funds, of course, but that's all. They aren't an investment as far as the SEC is concerned.
My understanding (and IANAL and this isn't legal advice) is that Kickstarter income counts as sales, and thus ordinary income, while Indiegogo counts as a gift. Either way, it is taxable.
None of the US based crowdfunding sites are providing equity investments, and so this is an entirely new way of raising funds, and thus a positive thing.
Hmm, now that I've read through some more information and other comments, it seems that what I described is pretty close to what's actually happening. This only affects crowdfunded projects with an "investor tier" and life goes on otherwise.
Wow, how about that? Government making sensible regulatory changes and not stomping on the little guy... I gotta mark this day on the calendar.
And a Slashdot article summary totally misrepresentative of the actual facts. That, unfortunately, is not an unusual day on the calendar.
I am convinced that Mr. Snowden represents more than himself, and that he has help and assistance from a faction or factions inside the organs of state security that do not like the way things are headed.
This piece by Mr. Kaplan clearly represents a bit of propaganda from the other side, the elements inside state security that do like the way things are going. In that light, while not informational, it is informative about the shadow play going on behind the scenes.
'It may be telling that Snowden did not release — or at least the recipients of his cache haven't yet published — any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China,'
Why would he have access to Russian or Chinese documents?
If he did have access to Russian or Chinese documents, it would be because
- the NSA (or CIA or...) stole or snooped them and
- they would be important enough that they would be mentioned in the briefing powerpoints that make up so much of what Snowden apparently has access to.
In other words, this is a sign he is protecting some of the NSA's most truly important secrets, and also a sign that Kaplan is dealing in misinformation if not disinformation.
The SEC is about to make equity crowdfunding possible. It is not possible at all at present, and business plan, etc., seems entirely appropriate for equity investors. Current crowdfunding is not equity investment at all, it is either pre-order (by my understanding typical on Kickstarter) or a gift (by my understanding typical on IndieGoGo). My understanding is that the SEC rules will not affect those two modes of crowdfunding at all.
So this is a good thing. The Slashdot summary... not so much.
It's a 48 bit address space. They have lots of addresses. This is the minimum allocation IEEE hands out. Lot's of companies have a /24 of Mac addresses.
How about some closeup pictures of the satellite? The photo in the link in TFS was from 2010.
I'm disappointed. Oh, well.
Here you go (from 2010, but pretty up close and personal).
There are plenty of color photographs of Phobos.
Phobos is one of the darkest (lowest albedo) bodies in the Solar System. Since it is probably a Carbonaceous chondrite, it really is not too far from just big lump of tar.
"[S]ent on a trajectory that took it only 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the dusty surface"
What is the range of a BFG?
In the context, effectively infinite, as the escape velocity is ~ 10 m / sec. In fact, that would be true for almost any projectile - a fastball in baseball is 90 mph or 40 m / sec.
Now, hitting a target 45 km away moving at a few km / sec relative velocity is another matter...
This was a radiometric (Doppler tracking) pass, with the main antenna pointed at the Earth. Pictures would have required re-orienting the spacecraft, and ideally rotating it to remove any motion blur on the close approach. You cannot do that and keep lock on the Earth, and they wanted to nail down the mass of Phobos. Initial reports from the DSN are the the Phobos gravity Doppler shift was visible in the "raw" residuals, so it's likely they will meet this goal.
Here is a simulated view of the Mars Express pass from the surface of Phobos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-YlKEKt-_k
However, the simulation missed something - Mars Express has a 40 meter dipole antenna - at 45 km, that's 3 arc min, so you could see Sun glint on the dipoles with your naked eye (i.e., you could resolve it as a structure, not just a dot of light). With a pair of binoculars, you could even see the spacecraft's solar panels.