Depends on your point of view. The 6 Earth-mass planet modeled by the Léger et al. paper I referenced has a 5000 km thick water mantle, but only the top 100 km of that would be liquid, which seems pretty shallow to me, considering. All of the higher phases of ice are denser than liquid water, and they form under pressure, so this conclusion seems pretty robust to me.
In addition, DirectAccess can be integrated with Network Access Protection (NAP). NAP, which was introduced in its current version in Windows Server 2008, automatically checks that a remote PC has up-to-date software and the proper policy-set security settings.
OK, it checks for software status, which I guess is cool, but what makes me suspect that there is a "Refuse to operate unless the licenses appear OK" aspect to this ?
By the way, this sets up an IPSEC VPN, so I am not sure why the OP says it doesn't require a VPN.
I was told by a Microsoft engineer who should know that the Bing name was picked specifically because it could be used as a verb (as in, "I binged Nancy before I asked her out."). I had just made a joke on the (assumed) unfortunate closeness in sound of binging someone and banging someone. An awkward silence ensued, and he told me that was a feature, not a bug.
Interesting. The Wayback machine reveals that during the Australian Period bing.com was a "print your email out and snail mail it" utility.
So, Microsoft could be in trouble, unless (which I doubt) there is a history of use in trade which someone kept track of and eventually sold to Microsoft.
If Microsoft already own a trademark on Bing I can't see how this case would have got even this far.
Why ? Bing! just sued. We don't know the back story. Maybe they tried to contact MS when Bing search came out, and got a run-around. Maybe it took a while to get a lawyer to do this on contingency. We just don't know (yet).
It is possible to have multiple trademarks on the same name, if the uses are sufficiently different. Bing.com does search. Bing.biz does design (apparently for corporate imagery). It is not clear to me that, even if Bing.biz has precedence, Bing.com would necessarily be viewed as interfering.
WHOIS results for bing.com Created on..............: 1996-01-28.
The Wayback Machine shows the first Microsoft Bing.com site (Coming Soon!) in 2003.
Now, Bing! is Bing.biz which is registererd (in Madeira, Portugal) Domain Registration Date: Wed Nov 07 00:01:00 GMT 2001
and it says ion the web site
Bing! is a small design firm started in 2000 in St. Louis, Mo.
So, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but it looks to me that Microsoft started thinking about using this name back in 1996. If they didn't actually start using it until 2003, they will probably have to settle. If they did something back in 1996, as long as it was public, and they kept records, Bing! will lose.
We know exactly what happened... a few *idiots* in AIG's derivatives trading department...
Sorry, but I don't buy it. My experience is that idiocy generally starts at the top, but it doesn't really matter. Like the Captain of a ship, the people at the top of a company should be responsible in any case, even if they didn't know.
I have no doubt that there is a lot of dirty stuff in those emails, so releasing them would be good.
Since clearly not everything could be released (HIPPA stuff, personal bank account numbers, etc.), this raises the question of who would remove the private information, and whether they could be trusted. Clearly, if this was done by AIG, an amazing amount of stuff would presumably be declared personal and private and not for release.
Power laws are ubiquitous in human affairs - almost everything we do as a group involves power laws. This works for the size of cities and the sale of books and traffic to web sites, so I am not surprised it also happens in insurgent attacks.
Whether that will actually result in the effectiveness of Army tactics is another question, and, frankly, I am dubious. The sale of hit records follows a power law, but knowing that doesn't make me into a better musician.
Depends on where you are and your time horizon - you could be bound arbitrarily far away from the Sun in empty space, but in this galaxy, some star will eventually come by and disrupt your orbit if you are more that about 1 light year from the Sun.
The Mediterranean flood hypothesis is not new - these authors have just done more work on the geology. They lean against the giant waterfall idea ("We do not envisage a waterfall..."), which is a shame - I always liked the idea of a supersonic waterfall.
How does one calculate 'north' on the moon of another planet?
Everything rotates. The North Pole for a body is the pole that lies in the Northern hemisphere.
If you mean, how would you navigate if you were walking around on Phobos, well, first you wouldn't be walking - with an escape velocity of 11 meters / second and a surface gravity in the mm / second^2 range, a small hop might take hours to complete. You would presumably instead fly your spacesuit with a small thruster.
Second, if you were on the Mars side, orienting yourself would be easy - Mars is about 40 degrees in diameter from Phobos. On the other side, well hopefully you thought to keep your spacecraft within range.
By the way, Phobos is very non spherical, and the combination of that, its small gravity and the nearness of Mars means that the local gravitational field is very lumpy - the surface gravity varies by almost an order of magnitude around the body, and there are all sorts of odd local orbits. If you threw a rock, you would never know where it was going to go.
Landing large payloads on Mars is tough, if by landing you mean, at a reasonable G force.
"An airbag landing subjects the payload to forces between 10-20 G's." For a human, that's not a landing, that's a crash.
Parachutes are inefficient, especially for the last few hundred meters / second. The best solution for human sized crafts is probably parachutes plus rockets a la Viking.
I don't have a good solution, except that we should always land in Hellas (the deepest basin on Mars, with about 50% higher surface air density than the mean surface), and plan on building a space elevator as soon as is possible.
Well, if you pick times at random, we would say that a 1% chance of encountering something is fairly low. But, of course, 1% events happen all of the time, even in Astronomy.
Here is a better way to look at probability in astrophysics and planetary physics - if you conclude that you just happened to observe something or catch some event at an unlikely point of its life-cycle, that may be a clue that you are calculating your probabilities wrong, i.e., that your theory is wrong or incomplete. So, improbable events tend to get the theorists interested. One obvious way to make Phobos less improbable is to see if the high dissipation could be intermittent.
By the way, when the short lifetime for Phobos was first realized back in the 1950's, it was thought that the orbital decay was due to atmospheric drag, which required a lot of drag at a high altitude. One way to accomplish this would be to have a very low Phobos mass to area ratio, which lead to I.S. Shklovsky hypothesizing that Phobos was a hollow spacecraft. In that case, a short lifetime would not be surprising, as a spacecraft would presumably be a fairly recent addition to Mars's satellites. Alas, with a proper tidal model and data such as the OP, there is no more need for that hypothesis.
Yes, but the arxiv is filled with all sorts of gibberish submissions as well.
So ? Cosmology, for example, is an arxiv.org field, and it attracts all sorts of strange people with poorly thought out ideas, some of which even make it into refereed journals, much less arxiv.org. Doesn't seem to hurt the field much.
The orbit of Phobos, particularly, has an oddity that has attracted a lot of interest, and more data is always welcomed.
The orbit of Phobos is decaying, presumably due to tidal friction - the work required for Phobos to raise a small tidal bugle in the part of Mars below it. There is nothing surprising in that, per se (Moons inside a geostationary orbit will decay inwards due to tidal friction, Moons outside a geostationary orbit will "decay" outwards), but what is surprising is the "Q" required to match the observations. (The Q is total energy in the bulge divided by the rate of energy lost per orbit.) The Q inferred from observations of Phobos's orbital decay, and the rigidity of the Martian surface found from observations of the Martian Solar tide, is about 90. The corresponding Q for the Earth is about 12, but that is mostly due to ocean tides, and the Q inferred for the Earth's mantle is about 280.
So, the Mars-Phobos system has a higher solid-body dissipation than the Earth-Moon system, which is surprising. In nailing this down, all sorts of data have been acquired for Phobos (including eclipse data from the Mars Rovers), but there is always room for more. What the current data should do is provide a tie for the relative longitudes of Phobos and Deimos which (especially if this can be repeated) will help make sure that there are no drifts between the orbits of the two Moons.
Just mandate that all Federally funded research papers be submitted to Arxiv.org. In many fields (e.g., astrophysics), that happens routinely. In others (e.g., geophysics), it is rare. I see no harm arising in the fields where this is routine, and making it universal would mean that the entire scientific world would gain access to all of our scientific research.
Note, again, that the argument is very simple - Methane readily mixes in the Martian atmosphere. To not increase the background after a plume event, you need a strong sink to remove it. It doesn't really matter what the sink is, whether Martian biology or surface chemicals, or even something unexpected, the stronger the sink, the more production you need. The previous estimate of methane production was based purely and simply on the observed background level, and a sink based on terrestrial analogs :
" the 'conventional' atmospheric chemistry scheme, which explains correctly the observed distribution of methane on Earth, loss of methane on Mars occurs primarily by photolysis at heights above 60 km, and by oxidation by OH and O(1D) at lower altitudes."
It is not surprising to me either that Martian atmospheric and surface chemistry doesn't fit terrestrial models, or that models based on observations of Martian methane release would differ radically from earlier models not based on observations of methane release.
They (Lefèvre & Forget) actually looked into the Hydrogen Peroxide sink hypothesis and ruled it out for two reasons :
- Producing enough H2O2 would require that "the electric field must be close to the breakdown field strength value (25 kV m-1) in all the regions with visible dust opacity of 2 or above. The possibility that such extreme bulk electric fields can be sustained in the Martian lower atmosphere has recently been severely questioned."
- Also, such extreme fields would produce about 20 times as much Carbon Monoxide from Carbon Dioxide as is observed.
Where are they getting that kind of methane production figures from? I read figures a full three orders of magnitude lower.
The plumes don't mix with the atmosphere, so the surface destruction rate must be much higher than the previous models (with 300 year residence times). The argument is very simple - the entire yearly production under the old models is not enough to explain the observed plumes. So, production must be higher, but if production is higher, then destruction must be more efficient, raising the required production even more.
Another way to think of this is that undestroyed methane will rapidly mix and reach atmospheric equilibrium, and raise the post plume methane concentration to above the observed background. So, the methane has to be destroyed in less than an atmospheric mixing time, which is roughly an Earth year or less (200 days in the model). That is at least 3 orders of magnitude or so faster than the previous global models, so the background production rate also has to be 3 orders of magnitude or so larger than the previous global models (assuming similar destruction rates for plumes as for the background production). Note that that is a lower bound.
Several troubles with that idea. First, note that the Methane production rates quoted in the original article are much too small based on the observed Martian Methane plumes and their implications. Given that
- it's hard to see how serpentinization explains the observed intermittent methane plumes
- it doesn't explain at all the sink of the methane, which has to be very powerful (to explain the observed plumes)
- the production estimates by Lefèvre & Forget (Nature 460, 720-723 (6 August 2009)) are large for this explanation :
This optimum quantitative agreement with the methane observations is obtained with 150,000 t of methane emitted by the sporadic source. This amount is comparable to the yearly geochemical production of methane by serpentinization (50,000–130,000 t yr-1) along the entire Mid-Atlantic Ridge on Earth.
Of course, there is lots of water along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Where is there a comparable amount of liquid water on Mars coming in contact with new olivine ? To me, this seems like a stretch.
By the way, 150,000 tonnes per year (as a rough guess of Martian production) is about 0.1% of terrestrial biological production, which does not seem outlandishly large or small for a hypothetical Martian biosphere.
Neither the source nor the sink of Martian methane is understood, as was discussed by Lefèvre & Forget in Observed variations of methane on Mars unexplained by known atmospheric chemistry and physics (Nature 460, 720-723 (6 August 2009)). Unlike the statement in the spacefellowship.com writeup, the observed methane plumes require a very quick absorption of methane on the surface, which means that the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is not " a few hundred years" but months or less, maybe even hours or less. Since the shorter the lifetime, the larger the production required to match the observed plumes, we don't know the methane production on Mars to within even 3 orders of magnitude.
We don't know the source, we don't know the sink, and we don't know the production rate, so I personally don't see how biology can be ruled out, despite the editorializing in Lefèvre & Forget.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your point of view. The 6 Earth-mass planet modeled by the Léger et al. paper I referenced has a 5000 km thick water mantle, but only the top 100 km of that would be liquid, which seems pretty shallow to me, considering. All of the higher phases of ice are denser than liquid water, and they form under pressure, so this conclusion seems pretty robust to me.
A "waterworld" would actually have a fairly shallow ocean, on the order of 75 to 100 km deep for an Earth size planet, as other ice phases would form at the bottom of the ocean at depth.
I have to say that this is what struck my eye :
In addition, DirectAccess can be integrated with Network Access Protection (NAP). NAP, which was introduced in its current version in Windows Server 2008, automatically checks that a remote PC has up-to-date software and the proper policy-set security settings.
OK, it checks for software status, which I guess is cool, but what makes me suspect that there is a "Refuse to operate unless the licenses appear OK" aspect to this ?
By the way, this sets up an IPSEC VPN, so I am not sure why the OP says it doesn't require a VPN.
Victor Hugo was wrong, and these long copyright terms are a disgrace - put it back to 28 years (14 years with one extension).
Now that there is an industry interest in shortening copyright, I expect to see some shortening in due course.
I am not a lawyer, but that may not be relevant. You do not have to file to have a valid trademark.
I was told by a Microsoft engineer who should know that the Bing name was picked specifically because it could be used as a verb (as in, "I binged Nancy before I asked her out."). I had just made a joke on the (assumed) unfortunate closeness in sound of binging someone and banging someone. An awkward silence ensued, and he told me that was a feature, not a bug.
All I can say is that they may not get out much.
Interesting. The Wayback machine reveals that during the Australian Period bing.com was a "print your email out and snail mail it" utility.
So, Microsoft could be in trouble, unless (which I doubt) there is a history of use in trade which someone kept track of and eventually sold to Microsoft.
If Microsoft already own a trademark on Bing I can't see how this case would have got even this far.
Why ? Bing! just sued. We don't know the back story. Maybe they tried to contact MS when Bing search came out, and got a run-around. Maybe it took a while to get a lawyer to do this on contingency. We just don't know (yet).
It is possible to have multiple trademarks on the same name, if the uses are sufficiently different. Bing.com does search. Bing.biz does design (apparently for corporate imagery). It is not clear to me that, even if Bing.biz has precedence, Bing.com would necessarily be viewed as interfering.
Hmm. Microsoft got bing.com a while ago
WHOIS results for bing.com
Created on..............: 1996-01-28.
The Wayback Machine shows the first Microsoft Bing.com site (Coming Soon!) in 2003.
Now, Bing! is Bing.biz which is registererd (in Madeira, Portugal)
Domain Registration Date: Wed Nov 07 00:01:00 GMT 2001
and it says ion the web site
Bing! is a small design firm started in 2000 in St. Louis, Mo.
So, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but it looks to me that Microsoft started thinking about using this name back in 1996. If they didn't actually start using it until 2003, they will probably have to settle. If they did something back in 1996, as long as it was public, and they kept records, Bing! will lose.
We know exactly what happened... a few *idiots* in AIG's derivatives trading department...
Sorry, but I don't buy it. My experience is that idiocy generally starts at the top, but it doesn't really matter. Like the Captain of a ship, the people at the top of a company should be responsible in any case, even if they didn't know.
I have no doubt that there is a lot of dirty stuff in those emails, so releasing them would be good.
Since clearly not everything could be released (HIPPA stuff, personal bank account numbers, etc.), this raises the question of who would remove the private information, and whether they could be trusted. Clearly, if this was done by AIG, an amazing amount of stuff would presumably be declared personal and private and not for release.
Power laws are ubiquitous in human affairs - almost everything we do as a group involves power laws. This works for the size of cities and the sale of books and traffic to web sites, so I am not surprised it also happens in insurgent attacks.
Whether that will actually result in the effectiveness of Army tactics is another question, and, frankly, I am dubious. The sale of hit records follows a power law, but knowing that doesn't make me into a better musician.
Depends on where you are and your time horizon - you could be bound arbitrarily far away from the Sun in empty space, but in this galaxy, some star will eventually come by and disrupt your orbit if you are more that about 1 light year from the Sun.
The Mediterranean flood hypothesis is not new - these authors have just done more work on the geology. They lean against the giant waterfall idea ("We do not envisage a waterfall..."), which is a shame - I always liked the idea of a supersonic waterfall.
How does one calculate 'north' on the moon of another planet?
Everything rotates. The North Pole for a body is the pole that lies in the Northern hemisphere.
If you mean, how would you navigate if you were walking around on Phobos, well, first you wouldn't be walking - with an escape velocity of 11 meters / second and a surface gravity in the mm / second^2 range, a small hop might take hours to complete. You would presumably instead fly your spacesuit with a small thruster.
Second, if you were on the Mars side, orienting yourself would be easy - Mars is about 40 degrees in diameter from Phobos. On the other side, well hopefully you thought to keep your spacecraft within range.
By the way, Phobos is very non spherical, and the combination of that, its small gravity and the nearness of Mars means that the local gravitational field is very lumpy - the surface gravity varies by almost an order of magnitude around the body, and there are all sorts of odd local orbits. If you threw a rock, you would never know where it was going to go.
Landing large payloads on Mars is tough, if by landing you mean, at a reasonable G force.
"An airbag landing subjects the payload to forces between 10-20 G's." For a human, that's not a landing, that's a crash.
Parachutes are inefficient, especially for the last few hundred meters / second. The best solution for human sized crafts is probably parachutes plus rockets a la Viking.
I don't have a good solution, except that we should always land in Hellas (the deepest basin on Mars, with about 50% higher surface air density
than the mean surface), and plan on building a space elevator as soon as is possible.
Well, if you pick times at random, we would say that a 1% chance of encountering something is fairly low. But, of course, 1% events happen all of the time, even in Astronomy.
Here is a better way to look at probability in astrophysics and planetary physics - if you conclude that you just happened to observe something or catch some event at an unlikely point of its life-cycle, that may be a clue that you are calculating your probabilities wrong, i.e., that your theory is wrong or incomplete. So, improbable events tend to get the theorists interested. One obvious way to make Phobos less improbable is to see if the high dissipation could be intermittent.
By the way, when the short lifetime for Phobos was first realized back in the 1950's, it was thought that the orbital decay was due to atmospheric drag, which required a lot of drag at a high altitude. One way to accomplish this would be to have a very low Phobos mass to area ratio, which lead to I.S. Shklovsky hypothesizing that Phobos was a hollow spacecraft. In that case, a short lifetime would not be surprising, as a spacecraft would presumably be a fairly recent addition to Mars's satellites. Alas, with a proper tidal model and data such as the OP, there is no more need for that hypothesis.
How is this different from now ? At least in the areas of astrophysics I am interested in, pretty much everything gets put into Arxiv.org.
Yes, but the arxiv is filled with all sorts of gibberish submissions as well.
So ? Cosmology, for example, is an arxiv.org field, and it attracts all sorts of strange people with poorly thought out ideas, some of which even make it into refereed journals, much less arxiv.org. Doesn't seem to hurt the field much.
The orbit of Phobos, particularly, has an oddity that has attracted a lot of interest, and more data is always welcomed.
The orbit of Phobos is decaying, presumably due to tidal friction - the work required for Phobos to raise a small tidal bugle in the part of Mars below it. There is nothing surprising in that, per se (Moons inside a geostationary orbit will decay inwards due to tidal friction, Moons outside a geostationary orbit will "decay" outwards), but what is surprising is the "Q" required to match the observations. (The Q is total energy in the bulge divided by the rate of energy lost per orbit.) The Q inferred from observations of Phobos's orbital decay, and the rigidity of the Martian surface found from observations of the Martian Solar tide, is about 90. The corresponding Q for the Earth is about 12, but that is mostly due to ocean tides, and the Q inferred for the Earth's mantle is about 280.
So, the Mars-Phobos system has a higher solid-body dissipation than the Earth-Moon system, which is surprising. In nailing this down, all sorts of data have been acquired for Phobos (including eclipse data from the Mars Rovers), but there is always room for more. What the current data should do is provide a tie for the relative longitudes of Phobos and Deimos which (especially if this can be repeated) will help make sure that there are no drifts between the orbits of the two Moons.
By the way, with the current orbital decay, the expected lifetime of the orbits is somewhere in the 20 to 40 million year range - it seems unlikely that we just happen to catch Phobos at its end-of-life, which has raised speculation about its decay being time variable.
Just mandate that all Federally funded research papers be submitted to Arxiv.org. In many fields (e.g., astrophysics), that happens routinely. In others (e.g., geophysics), it is rare. I see no harm arising in the fields where this is routine, and making it universal would mean that the entire scientific world would gain access to all of our scientific research.
Note, again, that the argument is very simple - Methane readily mixes in the Martian atmosphere. To not increase the background after a plume event, you need a strong sink to remove it. It doesn't really matter what the sink is, whether Martian biology or surface chemicals, or even something unexpected, the stronger the sink, the more production you need. The previous estimate of methane production was based purely and simply on the observed background level, and a sink based on terrestrial analogs :
" the 'conventional' atmospheric chemistry scheme, which explains correctly the observed distribution of methane on Earth, loss of methane on Mars occurs primarily by photolysis at heights above 60 km, and by oxidation by OH and O(1D) at lower altitudes."
It is not surprising to me either that Martian atmospheric and surface chemistry doesn't fit terrestrial models, or that models based on observations of Martian methane release would differ radically from earlier models not based on observations of methane release.
They (Lefèvre & Forget) actually looked into the Hydrogen Peroxide sink hypothesis and ruled it out for two reasons :
- Producing enough H2O2 would require that "the electric field must be close to the breakdown field strength value (25 kV m-1) in all the regions with visible dust opacity of 2 or above. The possibility that such extreme bulk electric fields can be sustained in the Martian lower atmosphere has recently been severely questioned."
- Also, such extreme fields would produce about 20 times as much Carbon Monoxide from Carbon Dioxide as is observed.
Where are they getting that kind of methane production figures from? I read figures a full three orders of magnitude lower.
The plumes don't mix with the atmosphere, so the surface destruction rate must be much higher than the previous models (with 300 year residence times). The argument is very simple - the entire yearly production under the old models is not enough to explain the observed plumes. So, production must be higher, but if production is higher, then destruction must be more efficient, raising the required production even more.
Another way to think of this is that undestroyed methane will rapidly mix and reach atmospheric equilibrium, and raise the post plume methane concentration to above the observed background. So, the methane has to be destroyed in less than an atmospheric mixing time, which is roughly an Earth year or less (200 days in the model). That is at least 3 orders of magnitude or so faster than the previous global models, so the background production rate also has to be 3 orders of magnitude or so larger than the previous global models (assuming similar destruction rates for plumes as for the background production). Note that that is a lower bound.
Several troubles with that idea. First, note that the Methane production rates quoted in the original article are much too small based on the observed Martian Methane plumes and their implications. Given that
- it's hard to see how serpentinization explains the observed intermittent methane plumes
- it doesn't explain at all the sink of the methane, which has to be very powerful (to explain the observed plumes)
- the production estimates by Lefèvre & Forget (Nature 460, 720-723 (6 August 2009)) are large for this explanation :
This optimum quantitative agreement with the methane observations is obtained with 150,000 t of methane emitted by the sporadic source. This amount is comparable to the yearly geochemical production of methane by serpentinization (50,000–130,000 t yr-1) along the entire Mid-Atlantic Ridge on Earth.
Of course, there is lots of water along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Where is there a comparable amount of liquid water on Mars coming in contact with new olivine ? To me, this seems like a stretch.
By the way, 150,000 tonnes per year (as a rough guess of Martian production) is about 0.1% of terrestrial biological production, which does not seem outlandishly large or small for a hypothetical Martian biosphere.
Neither the source nor the sink of Martian methane is understood, as was discussed by Lefèvre & Forget in Observed variations of methane on Mars unexplained by known atmospheric chemistry and physics (Nature 460, 720-723 (6 August 2009)). Unlike the statement in the spacefellowship.com writeup, the observed methane plumes require a very quick absorption of methane on the surface, which means that the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is not " a few hundred years" but months or less, maybe even hours or less. Since the shorter the lifetime, the larger the production required to match the observed plumes, we don't know the methane production on Mars to within even 3 orders of magnitude.
We don't know the source, we don't know the sink, and we don't know the production rate, so I personally don't see how biology can be ruled out, despite the editorializing in Lefèvre & Forget.