Really. I don't care if Scientist X believes in climate change or not (although we could argue about how many of the list of 16 are scientists) - but Lysenko? They had the frakking balls to compare what's going on today with Lysenko era genetics? Sorry, their credibility has just dropped to zero in my book. (Here is a clue - there were no billionaire brothers funding opponents to Lysenko. They went to the gulag.)
This is agit-prop, pure are simple. I bet half of the signatories drop out within the week, as I doubt they all agreed to this text.
Historically, this practice probably traces back to the early days of the internet when they wanted to prevent home users from using excessive bandwidth that a web server might consume.
It may have more to do with asymmetric bandwidth - home users are frequently given more bandwidth inbound than outbound - for example, it is built into both DSL and Cable Modems. So, they do have reasons to reduce outbound bandwidth, and blocking web servers will do that.
Yes, but in the US this is being viewed as an "Agreement" which can be done by executive order (i.e., the stroke of the President's pen).
The Senate has been kept out of this here, which I regard as a near Constitutional Crisis. If ACTA gets away with this, why should we ever put a treaty through the Senate again ? Just have the Pres. do an Agreement.
(Yes, I know that Treaties are the law of the land. If you think that ACTA won't require changes to US law, you are crazy.)
Nothing says that the networks comprising the Internet have to interoperate either, but they do because people decided to follow protocols. The "well known port" concept is somewhat archaic, but it is still there, and so when someone doesn't use it, it is entirely reasonable to wonder why. I presume that they are using an anonymity network, thus the port 82.
Note that not using port 80 means that you will be blocked by many firewalls, especially including the preconfigured home kinds. That is very unusual for a news service, which presumably actually wants people to read what they are writing.
10 years ago I said that the people pushing copyright everywhere would eventually wind up with copyright nowhere (i.e., with no copyright at all, due to a total loss of public support). This sort of crap does nothing to change that feeling.
I guess they don't teach much about the Easter Rising and the Irish Civil War in British schools, nor probably touch on the invention of concentration camps (a British coinage, you know) in South Africa, or the Mau Mau in Kenya, or, well, you get the picture (or, presumably, didn't beforehand). And, while India basically invented non-violent civil disobedience to get its independence more or less peacefully, that certainly wasn't true a century before, in the "Mutiny" of 1857, which was a large-scale war with a considerable number of civilian casualties.
By the way, "no taxation without representation" dates from the 1750's, so it seems odd to call it an after the fact justification.
You have to rely on forensics not doing things that would put them into jail for many years if found out. First, because they would go to jail, second because they are decent people.
Another point is that the founding fathers never conceived of a situation where evidence could be hidden in plain sight by using a special word. They never took that into account when they wrote the amendment and interpretation has to change to take that issue into account.
Strongly disagree.
In some senses our modern technology is not really that different from what was in use in the late 1700's, the differences being in speed and capabilities and execution, not intent. For example, encryption was commonplace in the 18th century - Ben Franklin, among others, routinely made use of it. Heck, even Mozart routinely made use of it. Find me a court order from before 1850 requiring someone to divulge how they encrypted their letters, or someone jailed for contempt for not doing so. There were several famous cases in the 19th century where people were convicted based on decryption of incriminating documents - why were they not simply jailed for not revealing their keys ?
I think that in this, as in many other cases, the Founding Fathers would be astounded that such shoddy reasoning is used to restrict our liberties.
Scientifically, the trapping of the solar heat on Venus is caused by what is called a greenhouse effect (i.e., the trapping of outbound IR radiation), exactly the same in nature as the greenhouse effect on Earth, but much more efficient due to the considerably thicker atmosphere and different composition of Venus' atmosphere. This has been known since Mariner 2, in 1962.
The existence and importance of greenhouse effects for the Earth, Mars and Venus have all been verified for decades. There is absolutely no scientific controversy about that, not even of the ginned up sort favored by oil billionaires. It's the relationship between the greenhouse effect and terrestrial climate change that is controversial, although that is largely of the ginned up sort (i.e., not really in the scientific community), at least since the 1980's.
And, yes, the atmospheric scientists know that real greenhouses rely on the trapping of convection, not the trapping of IR. It's a label.
I by no means see terrestrial type life on Venus as being impossible or ruled out by existing data. In the regions between 40 and 60 km above the surface, the conditions are roughly Earth like, and a biosphere could presumably be present (as there is a biosphere in the clouds here on Earth. We know that there are aerosols at those levels (i.e., microbe sized droplets), although we don't really know much about them, and finally we know that the atmosphere is out of chemical equilibrium, which is generally regarded as a sign of biological activity.
There have been proposals to send spacecraft to study this further, but they have gotten nowhere, at least at NASA.
That's a lens cap. On Venera 14 the soil probe actually came down on top of the lens cap, ruining the measurements. You can see that here if you enlarge the left image for V. 14.
This is all well known, and I assume that the scientist was talking about something else. If not, he deserves ridicule.
Here are the pictures. Now, they are an extraordinary accomplishment, but I sure don't see any signs of life (except for the bits ejected from the spacecraft, like the camera covers). You can look (and judge) for yourself.
First, the basic facts of the situation. The Iranians got one of our drones. We know that, but we don't know what its condition was. The Iranians announce this, but don't show any pictures for a few days, then display something for the press. Lots of people comment that the drone the Iranians displayed looks like a crude copy, and they don't show the landing carriage at all.
Here is what I think happened :
Once they got the drone, in whatever condition, they spirited it away, took what they have, and the existing pictures of this sort of drone in the Western Press, and quickly made a mockup , which they then show to the world. I would suspect that the mockup has one or two features of the real drone (even if all they had to work with were small pieces), just enough to convince the US that they have something. It doesn't matter otherwise if the mockup is crude, and without any landing gear, as the US intelligence community knows it's a mockup anyway. This way, we know they have something, but not how much. They might have an intact drone. They might have some small pieces. We don't know. I suspect the Iranians regards that as a good outcome.
First, unauthorized overflights by foreign powers are illegal pretty much everywhere, as is espionage, and so it is a mistake to call Capt. Powers a hostage. The Soviets were completely within their rights to hold him. He was a prisoner, who was eventually exchanged for another prisoner.
Second, President Eisenhower was made to look like a fool by Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviets didn't mention capturing the pilot, so the CIA assumed that Powers had either been killed or had committed suicide rather than be captured (as I believe his orders were), so the White House said that the missing plane was a weather plane and that there never been any spy overflights of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev produced the pilot (and the cameras) and proved the lie. This wrecked a planned summit meeting in Paris, and I am sure led to an acceleration of our spy satellite program.
I was very young at the time, and can vaguely remember the fuss about the U2. I am not sure that there was much public sentiment; the Cold War was on, and there certainly wasn't much support for anything the Soviets did. I can remember hearing, much later, than some in the CIA were critical because they felt Powers should have committed suicide, rather than surrender, but I don't think that was widely shared by the public.
The issue is not really the source of the long-period "decade" fluctuations in the length of the day (LOD). It has been known for decades that these have to be caused by "weather" (fluid magnetohydrodynamics) in the liquid outer core. Has to be, as there is no other suitable source of angular momentum. The atmosphere and oceans up here on the surface simply fall short, by as much as an order of magnitude, and nothing else (ice, groundwater, tectonics, etc.) can even match them. The "weather" in the core is dynamically rather different than the weather up here - the heat source is radioactivity and precipitation of solid iron, while the core is quite conductive, and so the dynamics are MHD, not just HD. We don't know much about fluid motions in the core, but we do know that they have to exist, to drive the observed LOD variations (and also drive the observed changes in the geomagnetic field).
What the real question is is the nature of the torque between the mantle and the core. The two leading contenders are pressure torques (differences in pressure across whatever inverse mountains there are at the core mantle boundary) and electromagnetic torques. The E&M torques would be enhanced if the mantle is conducting.
So, this is a plus for the E&M torque theorists, but I wouldn't expect this issue to be really resolved for some centuries, if not longer. The core is not that far away, but it's hard to see through thousands of kilometers of rock...
Life + 70 is just too long. Let's bring it back to 28 years + 1 14-year renewal (the law for most of the history of the USA), and require registration.
That would mean, for example, that "I have a dream" would have reverted to the public domain almost 7 years ago, which seems about right.
Come on. First, the three no's in the summary is really all one needs to read:
"...because he has not explained how his 'reactors' work..., there is no theoretical basis to support his process, and no one has supplied independent measurements to support the specs on his black boxe"
I mean, no theory, no engineering and no independent results, what more do you need to know ?
Second, the actual presentation to NASAcompletely falls apart on page 13. Look carefully at the right side, and ignore the red curve. The D2 curve is not producing energy. It is absorbing energy. It is just absorbing less energy than the H2 curve.
Absorbing less energy is not the same as producing energy. Thanks for playing, come back when you are actually producing energy.
(As for why there is an ~10 second blip where the D2 and H2 curves diverge a little, I could speculate, but I don't really care. It doesn't really matter, as long as the total energy production is negative. Offer me a consulting contract at my full rate, and maybe I'll look into it.)
When I was in the Government, keeping any money you made "on the side" was a big no-no. You could (in some cases) charge for expenses, but otherwise, if you made any money, it had to go to the Treasury.
Under our system of government, the Congress sets the budget for government activities. Setting up some branch of government as a money making entity, and thereby evading the oversight and control of Congress, is flat out unconstitutional. Now, I know that this is literally small change, but still...
Yeah, I had to really dig through the Berkeley web site to figure out what they were actually claiming. It's no wonder people are confused.
It's as if I took pictures of some distant airplanes and posted a blog about taking pictures of UFOs, highlighting my pictures, and talked about how these pictures had all the confirming points I was looking for in a UFO picture, with a note at the bottom saying that, as I didn't have any actual UFO pictures, I substituted these.
It would be hard to claim sympathy if I was then ridiculed, which I suspect they will be.
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Really. I don't care if Scientist X believes in climate change or not (although we could argue about how many of the list of 16 are scientists) - but Lysenko? They had the frakking balls to compare what's going on today with Lysenko era genetics? Sorry, their credibility has just dropped to zero in my book. (Here is a clue - there were no billionaire brothers funding opponents to Lysenko. They went to the gulag.)
This is agit-prop, pure are simple. I bet half of the signatories drop out within the week, as I doubt they all agreed to this text.
Historically, this practice probably traces back to the early days of the internet when they wanted to prevent home users from using excessive bandwidth that a web server might consume.
It may have more to do with asymmetric bandwidth - home users are frequently given more bandwidth inbound than outbound - for example, it is built into both DSL and Cable Modems. So, they do have reasons to reduce outbound bandwidth, and blocking web servers will do that.
Yes, but in the US this is being viewed as an "Agreement" which can be done by executive order (i.e., the stroke of the President's pen).
The Senate has been kept out of this here, which I regard as a near Constitutional Crisis. If ACTA gets away with this, why should we ever put
a treaty through the Senate again ? Just have the Pres. do an Agreement.
(Yes, I know that Treaties are the law of the land. If you think that ACTA won't require changes to US law, you are crazy.)
Or, perhaps they are using Tor.
Nothing says that the networks comprising the Internet have to interoperate either, but they do because people decided to follow protocols. The "well known port" concept is somewhat archaic, but it is still there, and so when someone doesn't use it, it is entirely reasonable to wonder why. I presume that they are using an anonymity network, thus the port 82.
Note that not using port 80 means that you will be blocked by many firewalls, especially including the preconfigured home kinds. That is very unusual for a news service, which presumably actually wants people to read what they are writing.
10 years ago I said that the people pushing copyright everywhere would eventually wind up with copyright nowhere (i.e., with no copyright at all, due to a total loss of public support). This sort of crap does nothing to change that feeling.
I guess they don't teach much about the Easter Rising and the Irish Civil War in British schools, nor probably touch on the invention of concentration camps (a British coinage, you know) in South Africa, or the Mau Mau in Kenya, or, well, you get the picture (or, presumably, didn't beforehand). And, while India basically invented non-violent civil disobedience to get its independence more or less peacefully, that certainly wasn't true a century before, in the "Mutiny" of 1857, which was a large-scale war with a considerable number of civilian casualties.
By the way, "no taxation without representation" dates from the 1750's, so it seems odd to call it an after the fact justification.
You have to rely on forensics not doing things that would put them into jail for many years if found out. First, because they would go to jail, second because they are decent people.
Yes, the same way you have to rely on police labs not to make things up.
No, wait...
Another point is that the founding fathers never conceived of a situation where evidence could be hidden in plain sight by using a special word. They never took that into account when they wrote the amendment and interpretation has to change to take that issue into account.
Strongly disagree.
In some senses our modern technology is not really that different from what was in use in the late 1700's, the differences being in speed and capabilities and execution, not intent. For example, encryption was commonplace in the 18th century - Ben Franklin, among others, routinely made use of it. Heck, even Mozart routinely made use of it. Find me a court order from before 1850 requiring someone to divulge how they encrypted their letters, or someone jailed for contempt for not doing so. There were several famous cases in the 19th century where people were convicted based on decryption of incriminating documents - why were they not simply jailed for not revealing their keys ?
I think that in this, as in many other cases, the Founding Fathers would be astounded that such shoddy reasoning is used to restrict our liberties.
Scientifically, the trapping of the solar heat on Venus is caused by what is called a greenhouse effect (i.e., the trapping of outbound IR radiation), exactly the same in nature as the greenhouse effect on Earth, but much more efficient due to the considerably thicker atmosphere and different composition of Venus' atmosphere. This has been known since Mariner 2, in 1962.
The existence and importance of greenhouse effects for the Earth, Mars and Venus have all been verified for decades. There is absolutely no scientific controversy about that, not even of the ginned up sort favored by oil billionaires. It's the relationship between the greenhouse effect and terrestrial climate change that is controversial, although that is largely of the ginned up sort (i.e., not really in the scientific community), at least since the 1980's.
And, yes, the atmospheric scientists know that real greenhouses rely on the trapping of convection, not the trapping of IR. It's a label.
I by no means see terrestrial type life on Venus as being impossible or ruled out by existing data. In the regions between 40 and 60 km above the surface, the conditions are roughly Earth like, and a biosphere could presumably be present (as there is a biosphere in the clouds here on Earth. We know that there are aerosols at those levels (i.e., microbe sized droplets), although we don't really know much about them, and finally we know that the atmosphere is out of chemical equilibrium, which is generally regarded as a sign of biological activity.
There have been proposals to send spacecraft to study this further, but they have gotten nowhere, at least at NASA.
If someone can provide a link to the paper itself, I would appreciate it. (I can read Russian.)
That's a lens cap. On Venera 14 the soil probe actually came down on top of the lens cap, ruining the measurements. You can see that here if you enlarge the left image for V. 14.
This is all well known, and I assume that the scientist was talking about something else. If not, he deserves ridicule.
The French-Soviet Vega balloons transmitted about 46 hours, until the battery power went out.
I see no reason why, with a little reserve gas, a trapped gas balloon couldn't be kept aloft for months.
Here are the pictures. Now, they are an extraordinary accomplishment, but I sure don't see any signs of life (except for the bits ejected from the spacecraft, like the camera covers). You can look (and judge) for yourself.
First, the basic facts of the situation. The Iranians got one of our drones. We know that, but we don't know what its condition was. The Iranians announce this, but don't show any pictures for a few days, then display something for the press. Lots of people comment that the drone the Iranians displayed looks like a crude copy, and they don't show the landing carriage at all.
Here is what I think happened :
Once they got the drone, in whatever condition, they spirited it away, took what they have, and the existing pictures of this sort of drone in the Western Press, and quickly made a mockup , which they then show to the world. I would suspect that the mockup has one or two features of the real drone (even if all they had to work with were small pieces), just enough to convince the US that they have something. It doesn't matter otherwise if the mockup is crude, and without any landing gear, as the US intelligence community knows it's a mockup anyway. This way, we know they have something, but not how much. They might have an intact drone. They might have some small pieces. We don't know. I suspect the Iranians regards that as a good outcome.
First, unauthorized overflights by foreign powers are illegal pretty much everywhere, as is espionage, and so it is a mistake to call Capt. Powers a hostage. The Soviets were completely within their rights to hold him. He was a prisoner, who was eventually exchanged for another prisoner.
Second, President Eisenhower was made to look like a fool by Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviets didn't mention capturing the pilot, so the CIA assumed that Powers had either been killed or had committed suicide rather than be captured (as I believe his orders were), so the White House said that the missing plane was a weather plane and that there never been any spy overflights of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev produced the pilot (and the cameras) and proved the lie. This wrecked a planned summit meeting in Paris, and I am sure led to an acceleration of our spy satellite program.
I was very young at the time, and can vaguely remember the fuss about the U2. I am not sure that there was much public sentiment; the Cold War was on, and there certainly wasn't much support for anything the Soviets did. I can remember hearing, much later, than some in the CIA were critical because they felt Powers should have committed suicide, rather than surrender, but I don't think that was widely shared by the public.
The Air Force is saying that "Iran's claim to have forced it down is erroneous."
WIth all due respect they would say that, wouldn't they ? So, as an indication of what happened, I am afraid this is not very useful.
The issue is not really the source of the long-period "decade" fluctuations in the length of the day (LOD). It has been known for decades that these have to be caused by "weather" (fluid magnetohydrodynamics) in the liquid outer core. Has to be, as there is no other suitable source of angular momentum. The atmosphere and oceans up here on the surface simply fall short, by as much as an order of magnitude, and nothing else (ice, groundwater, tectonics, etc.) can even match them. The "weather" in the core is dynamically rather different than the weather up here - the heat source is radioactivity and precipitation of solid iron, while the core is quite conductive, and so the dynamics are MHD, not just HD. We don't know much about fluid motions in the core, but we do know that they have to exist, to drive the observed LOD variations (and also drive the observed changes in the geomagnetic field).
What the real question is is the nature of the torque between the mantle and the core. The two leading contenders are pressure torques (differences in pressure across whatever inverse mountains there are at the core mantle boundary) and electromagnetic torques. The E&M torques would be enhanced if the mantle is conducting.
So, this is a plus for the E&M torque theorists, but I wouldn't expect this issue to be really resolved for some centuries, if not longer. The core is not that far away, but it's hard to see through thousands of kilometers of rock...
Life + 70 is just too long. Let's bring it back to 28 years + 1 14-year renewal (the law for most of the history of the USA), and require registration.
That would mean, for example, that "I have a dream" would have reverted to the public domain almost 7 years ago, which seems about right.
Isn't it a little early for April 1 Patents.
RTGs are powered by the heat of radioactive decay, i.e., physics that would have seemed routine 100 years ago). That has nothing to do with LENR.
Come on. First, the three no's in the summary is really all one needs to read:
"...because he has not explained how his 'reactors' work..., there is no theoretical basis to support his process, and no one has supplied independent measurements to support the specs on his black boxe"
I mean, no theory, no engineering and no independent results, what more do you need to know ?
Second, the actual presentation to NASA completely falls apart on page 13. Look carefully at the right side, and ignore the red curve. The D2 curve is not producing energy. It is absorbing energy. It is just absorbing less energy than the H2 curve.
Absorbing less energy is not the same as producing energy. Thanks for playing, come back when you are actually producing energy.
(As for why there is an ~10 second blip where the D2 and H2 curves diverge a little, I could speculate, but I don't really care. It doesn't really matter, as long as the total energy production is negative. Offer me a consulting contract at my full rate, and maybe I'll look into it.)
When I was in the Government, keeping any money you made "on the side" was a big no-no. You could (in some cases) charge for expenses, but otherwise, if you made any money, it had to go to the Treasury.
Under our system of government, the Congress sets the budget for government activities. Setting up some branch of government as a money making entity, and thereby evading the oversight and control of Congress, is flat out unconstitutional. Now, I know that this is literally small change, but still...
Yeah, I had to really dig through the Berkeley web site to figure out what they were actually claiming. It's no wonder people are confused.
It's as if I took pictures of some distant airplanes and posted a blog about taking pictures of UFOs, highlighting my pictures, and talked about how these pictures had all the confirming points I was looking for in a UFO picture, with a note at the bottom saying that, as I didn't have any actual UFO pictures, I substituted these.
It would be hard to claim sympathy if I was then ridiculed, which I suspect they will be.