Copyright is a bargain between the people and the creators and owners of content, in which the people grant a temporary and limited monopoly in return for the ultimate ownership of the content.
The people of the United States (and, for that matter, the rest of the world) have shifted the terms of that bargain some. It will take a while for their representatives to catch up, but they will.
In my experience, it is an iron rule that when you find a good service tech for home accounts, they are about to be let go or take a buy-out or their department is being outsourced or whatever. And, when I say "about to be let go," I mean "have gotten notice."
Oh, am I sure that they do inquire first. It is intended as an honor and if by some chance I was offered one I would certainly turn it down politely and quietly. But, still, it is an archaic way to organize a system of government.
They eliminate leap days in favor of an intercalary "leap week" every five or six years, and have the gall to say that they have a "stable calendar that is absolutely identical from year to year."
Well, except for the intercalary week. That couldn't cause any confusion now, could it ?
And, just to make sure they are really ignored, they call for the whole planet to go on UTC. If they had any guts, they would have said TAI. At least that would get rid of leap seconds.
Many of these secrets were, and weren't. The Hubble Space Telescope was built in Danbury, Conn., for example, in that very same building. Anyone involved in the HST, or even following it closely before launch, knew about its close design and engineering connections to the then current spy satellites. That was never really directly discussed in the press, but it was certainly common knowledge in the astronomy community. (In the same way, the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft shared a lot of engineering heritage with the KH-9.)
That is what generally strikes me about the "deep secrets" that get revealed after decades - it's rare to have anything be a total secret. The clues are generally there, if you have the wit to put them together.
The angle between us (specifically, the line of sight vector) and the orbital plane is the inclination (for external solar systems). So,
"Can't a planet can be detected using the transit method so long as the orbit is one that causes the target to pass through our line of sight to the star"
Is just another way of saying "if the inclination is near 90 degrees."
Not only that, there's a theory that the humanoid "form factor" is optimal in many ways, so any alien characters appear on TV will have a similar body plan to save costs.
Yes. These are transit measurements. They see the drop in light of the star, or not. If they see it, they can estimate how much the intensity changes, which gives them the ratio of the area of the star and the area of the planet. They can also time the duration of the transit, which, together with the period between transits and some information about the star, gives them the star's radius, and thus the planet's radius. If you can detect the transit at all, you should be able to get all of these things.
Kepler detects transits - i.e., only planets that happen to pass in front of their stars as seen from Earth. That is going to be pretty rate. If you had two Keplers, you (or at least I) would point it at another patch of sky, to get more samples.
Here is a way to think about the math - the radius of the Sun is about 1/200th the radius of the Earth's orbit, so for some random observer in the galaxy (or for us, trying to find something like Earth), there is only about a 1 in 40,000 chance that transits will occur and, of course, for Earth they will happen once per year, so it's going to take 3 or 4 years to really confirm it (and get a good handle on the orbit). Kepler is looking at 145,000 stars with a nominal mission length of 3.5 years, so it has a decent chance of detecting one or a few Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits, if almost every stellar system has such a planet. (That choice of mission parameters is, of course, no accident.)
Now, for these new Kepler-20 guys, the orbital period of the Earth-sized planet is 20 days, so you only have to wait maybe 60-80 days to confirm it, and the orbital radius is much smaller, so the probability of transit is much higher. (If the orbital radius is 10 stellar radii, this probability is about 1%, or hundreds of time larger than for a true Earth analogue).
So, putting all of that together, you would expect Kepler to spot hundreds of hot Earth's for every Earth analogue it seems (assuming both are more or less equally common out there) and that is, more or less, what is happening. (Of course, we won't know about the objects in Earth type orbits for a few years yet.)
Here is my answer to the inevitable "it's public, and you have no expectation of privacy."
Suppose that the mayor or governor where you live doesn't like you, and arranged so that whenever you left your house, there was a squad car (or foot patrol) waiting on the street, and they followed you where-ever you went. If you go in a store, they're just down the aisle. If you go to church, they sit in the next pew. If you go to a bar, they are there a few feet away. At no time do they invade your house, or touch you, but they are always there, watching and listening.
You have just described the life of a dissident in Eastern Europe, circa 1975-1985. If you think this is OK, or normal, or part of a civilized society, you are crazy.
If you think that it is OK to do all of this with machinery instead of people, you are also crazy. It's no different if it is a goon or a robotic gnat.
What, you think that Lamar Smith has suddenly developed a deep and abiding love for DNS ? Or that he intrigued by the parallels between the Border Gateway Protocol (version 4+) and the Book of Exodus ? Anyone who doesn't think he is coin-operated is a mark and an idiot, ripe for the fleecing.
It's not just an idea though. It's a body of work. Just because you've figured out a way to duplicate it with no cost to yourself doesn't magically take away its designation of "property".
It never had it to begin with. Seriously. Copyright is a temporary monopoly, not real property.
The people, through their representatives, a relatively short time ago gave creators of content temporary monopolies to encourage them to create and share such content with the public. Now, the people have clearly taken some of that monopoly power back, although their representatives are (as usual) slow to recognize that fact, and the industries built on those monopolies are fighting it tooth and nail. The real danger here is not that the monopoly based industries will win, but that they will annoy the public enough that the grants of monopoly will be withdrawn completely.
Europa, although an "obvious" choice, is problematic.
Yes. The radiation in the equatorial plane of Jupiter is incredibly intense. Someone who should know told me once that an unprotected human on the surface of Europa would die from the radiation before they died from vacuum exposure, which takes seconds. The Juno spacecraft has a radiation vault to protect its computer, or its lifetime in orbit would be measured in days. (Previous missions spent very little time in the equatorial plane, and could survive plunging through the very thin plane at speed OK.) A Europa base would almost certainly have to be in / under the ice to give the crew a chance of survival.
Deep space (outside the van Allen belts, i.e., anything but low Earth orbit) has a serious amount of radioactivity. This takes two forms
- Solar flares (where the solar radiation suddenly increases by many orders of magnitude). These require shelters, with warning times in hours. The worst (biggest) flares could kill an unprotected human. These are most likely to occur at certain times of the solar cycle, and there might be a few a year to really worry about then.
and
- Galactic cosmic radiation (high energy particles - aka cosmic rays). The lifetime occupational dose for an astronaut would be reached in about 2 years. So, these can be (more or less) ignored for voyages, but cannot be ignored for habitation. In particular, a pregnant woman will need serious shielding.
Now, there is a wrinkle in shielding for high energy galactic cosmic radiation - these particles have kinetic energies > the rest mass energies of pions, protons, and the like, and, so, when they hit a nucleus in the shielding, they turn into a shower of pions, protons, and the like, each of which itself has enough energy to be dangerous. On the Earth, we avoid this as this all happens 20 + km up. In space, that means that a modest amount of shielding can make things worse if it is close to you. So, you either need room, or a lot of shielding, or both. And, if people work outside (or in lightly shielded auxiliary ships or stations) they need a solar flare warning system plus some sort of shelter within easy reach.
So, if by colony you mean "a place where children are brought to term," you need to address this. That, to me, says that the first colonies (under that definition) will be either on the Moon, in lunar caves (aka lunar skylights), where 40+ of rock will provide excellent shielding (and where lunar ice likely exists and will be much easier to access than at the Lunar poles), or in a O'Neill type cylinder or habitat, where there is enough space to shield the inhabitants properly. If I had to guess, the O'Neill cylinder / habitat would be at least 1 km long, and would be made from either Lunar material (brought up by a Lunar Space Elevator), or from an asteroid (and probably made in place, i.e., using asteroid material without moving it very much.
By the way, water (liquid or ice) would make an excellent shield, if you don't have megatons of rock handy.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright is a bargain between the people and the creators and owners of content, in which the people grant a temporary and limited monopoly in return for the ultimate ownership of the content.
The people of the United States (and, for that matter, the rest of the world) have shifted the terms of that bargain some. It will take a while for their representatives to catch up, but they will.
In my experience, it is an iron rule that when you find a good service tech for home accounts, they are about to be let go or take a buy-out or their department is being outsourced or whatever. And, when I say "about to be let go," I mean "have gotten notice."
Oh, am I sure that they do inquire first. It is intended as an honor and if by some chance I was offered one I would certainly turn it down politely and quietly. But, still, it is an archaic way to organize a system of government.
I would have been more impressed if he had turned it down.
"Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government."
and when a 1/4 lb computer can process as well as a grasshopper we might be making progress. We can't even do it with a 1 ton computer at this time.
The scary thing is that I can remember people saying the same thing 30 years ago.
Actually, the Slinky is what comes to my mind here. It's really good at going down stairs.
"... modeled after grasshoppers, bats and other non-traditional forms of movement, including leaping and gliding."
I suspect that grasshoppers and bats might find these forms of movement to be pretty traditional indeed.
As good an explanation as any for this reform.
They eliminate leap days in favor of an intercalary "leap week" every five or six years, and have the gall to say that they have a "stable calendar that is absolutely identical from year to year."
Well, except for the intercalary week. That couldn't cause any confusion now, could it ?
And, just to make sure they are really ignored, they call for the whole planet to go on UTC. If they had any guts, they would have said TAI. At least that would get
rid of leap seconds.
You must be kidding, right ? You seriously think that there are no major "black" programs that are not in the press ?
Many of these secrets were, and weren't. The Hubble Space Telescope was built in Danbury, Conn., for example, in that very same building. Anyone involved in the HST, or even following it closely before launch, knew about its close design and engineering connections to the then current spy satellites. That was never really directly discussed in the press, but it was certainly common knowledge in the astronomy community. (In the same way, the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft shared a lot of engineering heritage with the KH-9.)
That is what generally strikes me about the "deep secrets" that get revealed after decades - it's rare to have anything be a total secret. The clues are generally there, if you have the wit to put them together.
The Russians, not having Mythbusters, have to resort to expensive rockets to mess up local neighborhoods.
The angle between us (specifically, the line of sight vector) and the orbital plane is the inclination (for external solar systems). So,
"Can't a planet can be detected using the transit method so long as the orbit is one that causes the target to pass through our line of sight to the star"
Is just another way of saying "if the inclination is near 90 degrees."
That's because of Pluto's inclination, not eccentricity.
Gravitational microlensing does the same thing, and we don't even have to travel 500 AU to use it.
Yes. And I'm seeing Slashdot as it was 0.2 seconds ago... maybe it's not even there any longer ?
Who knows, things happen, but typically not that fast.
Not only that, there's a theory that the humanoid "form factor" is optimal in many ways, so any alien characters appear on TV will have a similar body plan to save costs.
There. Fixed that for you.
Yes. These are transit measurements. They see the drop in light of the star, or not. If they see it, they can estimate how much the intensity changes, which gives them the ratio of the area of the star and the area of the planet. They can also time the duration of the transit, which, together with the period between transits and some information about the star, gives them the star's radius, and thus the planet's radius. If you can detect the transit at all, you should be able to get all of these things.
Kepler detects transits - i.e., only planets that happen to pass in front of their stars as seen from Earth. That is going to be pretty rate. If you had two Keplers, you (or at least I) would point it at another patch of sky, to get more samples.
Here is a way to think about the math - the radius of the Sun is about 1/200th the radius of the Earth's orbit, so for some random observer in the galaxy (or for us, trying to find something like Earth), there is only about a 1 in 40,000 chance that transits will occur and, of course, for Earth they will happen once per year, so it's going to take 3 or 4 years to really confirm it (and get a good handle on the orbit). Kepler is looking at 145,000 stars with a nominal mission length of 3.5 years, so it has a decent chance of detecting one or a few Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits, if almost every stellar system has such a planet. (That choice of mission parameters is, of course, no accident.)
Now, for these new Kepler-20 guys, the orbital period of the Earth-sized planet is 20 days, so you only have to wait maybe 60-80 days to confirm it, and the orbital radius is much smaller, so the probability of transit is much higher. (If the orbital radius is 10 stellar radii, this probability is about 1%, or hundreds of time larger than for a true Earth analogue).
So, putting all of that together, you would expect Kepler to spot hundreds of hot Earth's for every Earth analogue it seems (assuming both are more or less equally common out there) and that is, more or less, what is happening. (Of course, we won't know about the objects in Earth type orbits for a few years yet.)
Here is my answer to the inevitable "it's public, and you have no expectation of privacy."
Suppose that the mayor or governor where you live doesn't like you, and arranged so that whenever you left your house, there was a squad car (or foot patrol) waiting on the street, and they followed you where-ever you went. If you go in a store, they're just down the aisle. If you go to church, they sit in the next pew. If you go to a bar, they are there a few feet away. At no time do they invade your house, or touch you, but they are always there, watching and listening.
You have just described the life of a dissident in Eastern Europe, circa 1975-1985. If you think this is OK, or normal, or part of a civilized society, you are crazy.
If you think that it is OK to do all of this with machinery instead of people, you are also crazy. It's no different if it is a goon or a robotic gnat.
What, you think that Lamar Smith has suddenly developed a deep and abiding love for DNS ? Or that he intrigued by the parallels between the Border Gateway Protocol (version 4+) and the Book of Exodus ? Anyone who doesn't think he is coin-operated is a mark and an idiot, ripe for the fleecing.
It's not just an idea though. It's a body of work. Just because you've figured out a way to duplicate it with no cost to yourself doesn't magically take away its designation of "property".
It never had it to begin with. Seriously. Copyright is a temporary monopoly, not real property.
The people, through their representatives, a relatively short time ago gave creators of content temporary monopolies to encourage them to create and share such content with the public. Now, the people have clearly taken some of that monopoly power back, although their representatives are (as usual) slow to recognize that fact, and the industries built on those monopolies are fighting it tooth and nail. The real danger here is not that the monopoly based industries will win, but that they will annoy the public enough that the grants of monopoly will be withdrawn completely.
Europa, although an "obvious" choice, is problematic.
Yes. The radiation in the equatorial plane of Jupiter is incredibly intense. Someone who should know told me once that an unprotected human on the surface of Europa would die from the radiation before they died from vacuum exposure, which takes seconds. The Juno spacecraft has a radiation vault to protect its computer, or its lifetime in orbit would be measured in days. (Previous missions spent very little time in the equatorial plane, and could survive plunging through the very thin plane at speed OK.) A Europa base would almost certainly have to be in / under the ice to give the crew a chance of survival.
Deep space (outside the van Allen belts, i.e., anything but low Earth orbit) has a serious amount of radioactivity. This takes two forms
- Solar flares (where the solar radiation suddenly increases by many orders of magnitude). These require shelters, with warning times in hours. The worst (biggest) flares could kill an unprotected human. These are most likely to occur at certain times of the solar cycle, and there might be a few a year to really worry about then.
and
- Galactic cosmic radiation (high energy particles - aka cosmic rays). The lifetime occupational dose for an astronaut would be reached in about 2 years. So, these can be (more or less) ignored for voyages, but cannot be ignored for habitation. In particular, a pregnant woman will need serious shielding.
Now, there is a wrinkle in shielding for high energy galactic cosmic radiation - these particles have kinetic energies > the rest mass energies of pions, protons, and the like, and, so, when they hit a nucleus in the shielding, they turn into a shower of pions, protons, and the like, each of which itself has enough energy to be dangerous. On the Earth, we avoid this as this all happens 20 + km up. In space, that means that a modest amount of shielding can make things worse if it is close to you. So, you either need room, or a lot of shielding, or both. And, if people work outside (or in lightly shielded auxiliary ships or stations) they need a solar flare warning system plus some sort of shelter within easy reach.
So, if by colony you mean "a place where children are brought to term," you need to address this. That, to me, says that the first colonies (under that definition) will be either on the Moon, in lunar caves (aka lunar skylights), where 40+ of rock will provide excellent shielding (and where lunar ice likely exists and will be much easier to access than at the Lunar poles), or in a O'Neill type cylinder or habitat, where there is enough space to shield the inhabitants properly. If I had to guess, the O'Neill cylinder / habitat would be at least 1 km long, and would be made from either Lunar material (brought up by a Lunar Space Elevator), or from an asteroid (and probably made in place, i.e., using asteroid material without moving it very much.
By the way, water (liquid or ice) would make an excellent shield, if you don't have megatons of rock handy.
There was a (very rare) House filibuster today. I am not sure if this was part of it, but every little bit helps.