The hypothetical tenth planet already has a name, assigned to it by common consensus of SF authors. It's Persephone, the bride of Pluto.
That said, my classical mythology is rusty: I think Persephone was the Roman one, daughter of Ceres, and Proserpina was the Greek one, daughter of Demeter - but I might be wrong. Time to inquire of the Overmind we call Google, methinks...
Cue conspiracy theories, New Age freaks, Planet X believers and other idiots.
What do you mean, 'cue'? GodlikeProductions.com scooped Slashdot on this one, and that place is so kooky that Nancy Lieder gets most of her evidence for Planet X from posts there:-)
... and the last I heard was that it was about the size of Charon. I doubt it will ever be recognised as a planet - we already have Quaoar out there and swarms of other little Plutinos.
Whether Pluto is 'really' a planet or just a big Kuiper object seems to be a silly argument. Even if it's not justifiable, we'll call Pluto a planet out of tradition.
Unfortunately if you look back at the Earth you're looking towards the sun.
While the cameras are probably good enough, the Moon isn't well lit and there's a lot of glare.
What's the maximum angular separation of Earth and Sun, as seen from Mars? Venus - as we see in the night sky right now - can get a long way from the sun and become very, very prominent in the evening sky. Spirit can't see the Moon now, but perhaps in a couple of months?...
Our big problem will probably be that the Moon is a very dark body. Earth is covered with highly reflective seawater, and bright white clouds, but the Moon is dull rock all over. Perhaps the big problem in seeing the Moon would be the glare of Earth, not the Sun?
Moving from one inch away to only one foot away from the Wi-Fi antenna weakens the signal by a factor of 100.
Suddenly I doubt Dr Brown, if this is his idea of accuracy. It weakens the signal by a factor of 144. Come on, the inverse square law isn't _that_ difficult...
OK, I'm imagining it. I'm imagining sitting there on Titan and really kicking myself for going all that way for a closeup view of Saturn and then picking as my vantage point the one and only moon in the entire Solar System with a thick smoggy atmosphere so that I can't see a damn thing;-)
Wow... a genuine UFO picture from NASA. Who'd have thought it?
Then again, with the number of dead spaceprobes around Mars it's perhaps not so surprising if they've spotted one of them. Now, if they could find the Beagle we'd be tremendously pleased...
Sounds like the small dot doesn't feed your ego in quite the same way as the pictures from Apollo 8 did.
It's not quite that. With Apollo 8's images, you look at it and it's Earth, obviously and plainly Earth. With the images from Mars, it's a dot. I know intellectually that it's Earth, but that's just not the same. If the picture was detailed enough that I could _see_ that it was Earth - as I mentioned, maybe if we could see the Moon beside it - then I might feel something for it.
If I only know that it's Earth because it's in the position in the Martian sky where Earth is calculated to be, then it's just another manifestation of mathematics.
... I don't think this will be very important. It's a dot in the sky like any other, with just an arrow pointing to it to say that it's Earth. There's no real visceral connection there.
I doubt any image returned by space exploration in the next few thousand years will change our perspective on things as much as the Earthrise photographs from Apollo 8. Our first view of Earth from the Moon, and it showed so much. It was large and clear enough to connect with, it was plainly Earth with oceans and continents and clouds, and it was tiny - all of human history and culture, all our achievements, in that small spot. Now that's quite a culture shock.
But 'pale blue dot' images? It's just a dot. It might just as well be Venus for all the emotional impact I get from it. Maybe if we could see _two_ dots from Mars - Earth and Moon - then we'd get the same sense of smallness we got from the Apollo views, because that would establish identity at the gut level.
Do you keep it on a shelf with "The Bible II", "Lord of the Rings IV", and a collection of post-1880 Shakespeare plays?
I'm reminded of Lucien's library in the Sandman series, which contained all the books that were never written... Tolkien's The Lost Road, Conan Doyle's The Conscience of Sherlock Holmes, Marlowe's Merrie Comedie of the Redemption of Doctor Faustus...
Well, I don't see any problems in policing international travel. I'd use the passport/visa system as a model for the more robust internet authentication.
Passports and visas are the product of agreements between independent countries, not of any global government. So, for instance, most countries within the EU will allow movement between them with no passport or visa required. Britain and Ireland require passports. The US requires a visa. The degree of authentication needed depends on how much your destination country trusts the country you just left.
What if you're an Afghan trying to go to the USA? Well, the USA has had a lot of problems with illegal immigrants from that part of the world, some of whom turned out to be terrorists. Even if you're on perfectly legitimate business, you'll have a tough time being allowed entrance. What if you're Cuban? No chance. Cuba is a communist country, and the USA hates those on ideological grounds.
So, an internet governed along the lines of passports and visas would presumably consist of ISPs who trust each other exchanging all data more or less untroubled, while data coming from an ISP that your ISP doesn't trust, or doesn't like, gets dumped. Why might an ISP decide to treat another ISP this way? Maybe because the ISP whose data is being dropped is full of spammers, I suppose. Just like the legitimate Afghan visitor to the USA, the legitimate customer of that dodgy ISP is going to have big problems. Or maybe because your ISP hates that ISP for ideological reasons - they're a major competitor, for instance. Like the Cuban who wants to legitimately start selling cigars in the US, the legitimate customer of the hated ISP will have problems.
So... I'm still having difficulty seeing what your problem is with SPEWS. Sounds like exactly what you're advocating. A system where ISPs block what they want, for whatever reason they choose.
So, if not 'vigilantes' - I think this is inaccurate in SPEWS' case, it's more like the nosey neighbour who gossips about your misdemeanours - who would you suggest we appoint? A US government agency? Microsoft? The UN? How could they enforce their rulings?
Right now, I don't think there's any real authority on the net other than the democratic mandate granted by the goodwill of sysadmins. The net's authorities, whether government-endorsed like ICANN or unofficial like SPEWS, only have real power because the network owners agree to follow their lead.
As long as there is no world government, surely a US government attempting to police the net is just as much a vigilante as Sergei Didorenko from Lake Baikal?
So what to do? Well, if the problem is the same as in the real world, use the tools we already have for controlling travel, gun ownership or who gets to drive a car or practise a profession. Age limits for net access, controlled net hardware (punishments in the same class as dealing "class A controlled substances"), tightly controlled licenses for running a business on the net and most of all a compulsory international e-identity (smartcard/bio authentication; equivalent of a passport) without which you cannot even access the net.
Interesting. So, you want really heavy, hardline controls on the internet - draconian regulations about who can do what, in just about every aspect of net existence. And yet...
Pro-SPEWS? Welcome to my foe-list.
You don't like people publishing a list of ISPs that harbour spammers and suggesting that it be used for email blocking.
My only major request would be that it plays xvid/divx encoded avis in the BIOS environment as well - licence issues aside, I can easily foresee this being a great addition to one of those hushpc computers.
If you want to play your divx backups on a computer, and you don't want to boot into a full-size OS, why not try eMovix? Makes the CD bootable, with of mplayer to play the video. Nice.
I'm going to see it in Malvern later this month. Saw the dub at the cinema when it was on its main release - and I have to confess I really quite liked it:-) I imagine the sub on the DVD will be the same as the one in the cinema, if it's being handled by the same people... but maybe that would be too sane?
Gah. Correction: 'By all reports, they did a fine job in the _US_.' Then they buggered up in the UK, giving us a DVD identical in all respects save the subtitle. Bizarre.
Well, in addition to it being hard for me to get over Japanese characters with strong American accents (which might just be a British thing - it's probably perfectly natural if you're American) there's still another matter. Dubs tend to be more Disneyfied, while subs stick more closely to the Japanese. They add dialogue in times when nobody's saying a word. As an example, compare Jiji the cat in the English and Japanese versions of Kiki. In English he's played pretty much for laughs, has _lots_ of extra lines and sounds suspiciously like Troy McClure.
There's no reason in principle why dubs can't be faithful to the Japanese - Mononoke Hime was pretty damn good - but in practice they frequently aren't.
I realise this is/., and I realise what we usually think about large corporations and copyright, especially Disney, but seriously: this is Miyazaki we're talking about. These are pirate.
So speaketh the man with divx versions of every last Miyazaki film. But I'm buying legit DVDs as they come out, conditional only on there being a decent literal subtitle...
True for region 1. I neglected to mention that I'm in the UK, and Disney screwed up our releases. I am baffled as to why, since by all reports they did a fine job in the UK. Yet the fact remains that my Kiki DVD has no literal English sub, only the sub for the deaf. Doubly baffling is the fact that the _storyboard_ special feature has the proper literal sub...
If they mess up Spirited Away, then I'll start importing from Australia. Madman seem to take subs seriously, and they make region 2+4 DVDs. Nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Assassins' Redoubt, final message.
We've built the Dream Twister. I feel nauseous already...
"I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux 'Linux'".
So, it's Leenus, as you say, but Linux had an 'i' roughly as in tin, rather than in lie. His 'u' was rather odd, too... sort of an 'oo' sound to it.
Mandos, the Quendi god of the dead. An appropriate companion for Pluto, I think...
That said, my classical mythology is rusty: I think Persephone was the Roman one, daughter of Ceres, and Proserpina was the Greek one, daughter of Demeter - but I might be wrong. Time to inquire of the Overmind we call Google, methinks...
What do you mean, 'cue'? GodlikeProductions.com scooped Slashdot on this one, and that place is so kooky that Nancy Lieder gets most of her evidence for Planet X from posts there :-)
Whether Pluto is 'really' a planet or just a big Kuiper object seems to be a silly argument. Even if it's not justifiable, we'll call Pluto a planet out of tradition.
What's the maximum angular separation of Earth and Sun, as seen from Mars? Venus - as we see in the night sky right now - can get a long way from the sun and become very, very prominent in the evening sky. Spirit can't see the Moon now, but perhaps in a couple of months?...
Our big problem will probably be that the Moon is a very dark body. Earth is covered with highly reflective seawater, and bright white clouds, but the Moon is dull rock all over. Perhaps the big problem in seeing the Moon would be the glare of Earth, not the Sun?
Suddenly I doubt Dr Brown, if this is his idea of accuracy. It weakens the signal by a factor of 144. Come on, the inverse square law isn't _that_ difficult...
OK, I'm imagining it. I'm imagining sitting there on Titan and really kicking myself for going all that way for a closeup view of Saturn and then picking as my vantage point the one and only moon in the entire Solar System with a thick smoggy atmosphere so that I can't see a damn thing ;-)
Then again, with the number of dead spaceprobes around Mars it's perhaps not so surprising if they've spotted one of them. Now, if they could find the Beagle we'd be tremendously pleased...
It's not quite that. With Apollo 8's images, you look at it and it's Earth, obviously and plainly Earth. With the images from Mars, it's a dot. I know intellectually that it's Earth, but that's just not the same. If the picture was detailed enough that I could _see_ that it was Earth - as I mentioned, maybe if we could see the Moon beside it - then I might feel something for it.
If I only know that it's Earth because it's in the position in the Martian sky where Earth is calculated to be, then it's just another manifestation of mathematics.
I doubt any image returned by space exploration in the next few thousand years will change our perspective on things as much as the Earthrise photographs from Apollo 8. Our first view of Earth from the Moon, and it showed so much. It was large and clear enough to connect with, it was plainly Earth with oceans and continents and clouds, and it was tiny - all of human history and culture, all our achievements, in that small spot. Now that's quite a culture shock.
But 'pale blue dot' images? It's just a dot. It might just as well be Venus for all the emotional impact I get from it. Maybe if we could see _two_ dots from Mars - Earth and Moon - then we'd get the same sense of smallness we got from the Apollo views, because that would establish identity at the gut level.
I'm reminded of Lucien's library in the Sandman series, which contained all the books that were never written... Tolkien's The Lost Road, Conan Doyle's The Conscience of Sherlock Holmes, Marlowe's Merrie Comedie of the Redemption of Doctor Faustus...
Passports and visas are the product of agreements between independent countries, not of any global government. So, for instance, most countries within the EU will allow movement between them with no passport or visa required. Britain and Ireland require passports. The US requires a visa. The degree of authentication needed depends on how much your destination country trusts the country you just left.
What if you're an Afghan trying to go to the USA? Well, the USA has had a lot of problems with illegal immigrants from that part of the world, some of whom turned out to be terrorists. Even if you're on perfectly legitimate business, you'll have a tough time being allowed entrance. What if you're Cuban? No chance. Cuba is a communist country, and the USA hates those on ideological grounds.
So, an internet governed along the lines of passports and visas would presumably consist of ISPs who trust each other exchanging all data more or less untroubled, while data coming from an ISP that your ISP doesn't trust, or doesn't like, gets dumped. Why might an ISP decide to treat another ISP this way? Maybe because the ISP whose data is being dropped is full of spammers, I suppose. Just like the legitimate Afghan visitor to the USA, the legitimate customer of that dodgy ISP is going to have big problems. Or maybe because your ISP hates that ISP for ideological reasons - they're a major competitor, for instance. Like the Cuban who wants to legitimately start selling cigars in the US, the legitimate customer of the hated ISP will have problems.
So... I'm still having difficulty seeing what your problem is with SPEWS. Sounds like exactly what you're advocating. A system where ISPs block what they want, for whatever reason they choose.
Right now, I don't think there's any real authority on the net other than the democratic mandate granted by the goodwill of sysadmins. The net's authorities, whether government-endorsed like ICANN or unofficial like SPEWS, only have real power because the network owners agree to follow their lead.
As long as there is no world government, surely a US government attempting to police the net is just as much a vigilante as Sergei Didorenko from Lake Baikal?
Interesting. So, you want really heavy, hardline controls on the internet - draconian regulations about who can do what, in just about every aspect of net existence. And yet...
Pro-SPEWS? Welcome to my foe-list.
You don't like people publishing a list of ISPs that harbour spammers and suggesting that it be used for email blocking.
Does this strike you as inconsistent in any way?
If you want to play your divx backups on a computer, and you don't want to boot into a full-size OS, why not try eMovix? Makes the CD bootable, with of mplayer to play the video. Nice.
This is _exactly_ what I need for my new Aston Martin!
I'm going to see it in Malvern later this month. Saw the dub at the cinema when it was on its main release - and I have to confess I really quite liked it :-) I imagine the sub on the DVD will be the same as the one in the cinema, if it's being handled by the same people... but maybe that would be too sane?
Gah. Correction: 'By all reports, they did a fine job in the _US_.' Then they buggered up in the UK, giving us a DVD identical in all respects save the subtitle. Bizarre.
There's no reason in principle why dubs can't be faithful to the Japanese - Mononoke Hime was pretty damn good - but in practice they frequently aren't.
So speaketh the man with divx versions of every last Miyazaki film. But I'm buying legit DVDs as they come out, conditional only on there being a decent literal subtitle...
If they mess up Spirited Away, then I'll start importing from Australia. Madman seem to take subs seriously, and they make region 2+4 DVDs. Nice.
Lilarcor the talking sword as Haku the river god. Any other reasons needed?
note to self: if they screw up Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi in the same way, buy the Aussie edition...