Statistics doesn't work that way. Stop using it that way. That is like saying 1/3 that were in my year at school will get cancer, why hasn't anyone in my year got cancer yet?
If there was a 1/3 chance for kids in your school to get cancer this , then it would be quite surprising if none of them did get it unless your year was very small. The chance of nobody getting cancer is (2/3)^N where N is the students in your class. For large N it is theoretically possible but extremely unlikely -- and thus perfectly legitimate to ask "Why didn't anyone get cancer?" Probably because the risk factor was miscalculated.
Similarly what the GP was saying is that based on the number of events and the probability of a transit, the Expected Value for transits (if flares have no effect on the existence of a planet and thus transit) was 1. Expecting 1/365 and finding 0/365 is not unusual or improbable, and not a reason to conclude that planets can't form around stars that produce superflares.
That is how statistics work.
Of course randomness is random, so it's always theoretically possible to get an unusual result through chance alone. For every particle physics discovery ever made there is a 1 * 10^-N chance for some N that it was just a fluke. The goal is for N to be large enough that it would be exceedingly unlikely we are wrong and thus make it safe to infer a positive result for now.
The correct rebuttal to the GP's point was as already given: Hot jupiters are expected to orbit at much less than 1 AU and thus the probability of a transit -- and thus expected value -- is much higher. Expecting 36 events and finding 0 is much less likely and while again could still be due to chance alone, is suggestive.
Isn't that exactly the position you're trying to oppose? That the market has decided asteroid defence is a waste of money?
No? They said this is a legitimate weakness of the free market and as a result the only thing being done about asteroids are some companies offering insurance at a rate that is way out of line with the actual risk.
Well being that we don't have any good theoretical models to stop said asteroids, it is difficult for the market to invest into a defense.
Nonsense. There are fantastic models that will definitely work to prevent asteroid strikes given enough lead time. The math has been done. E.g. Let's say Apophis looks like it's going to go through the keyhole and come around and hit earth -- a one ton spacecraft equipped with ion engines operating for 2 years as a gravity tractor bam done earth is saved let's have a parade.
What's lacking is sufficient funding for discovering and tracking asteroids to make sure we find any dangerous ones far enough ahead of time, and development of the theory into an actual capability that's ready for when we do need it.
It's not the lack of models preventing the market from investing. It's the lack of market incentive to invest in preventing something that will happen an unknown amount of time in the future -- possibly even thousands of years. In a business culture where thinking past next quarter is considered ambitious and far-seeing, the market isn't going to do anything until we know something is going to happen soon. and by then it could be too late.
other than a convention of simply calling the largest objects in the Solar System "planets".
... Except not... Conventionally, bodies which constituted only a small proportion of the total matter in their orbits were not considered planets but rather one asteroid in an asteroid belt or trojans captured by an obviously dominant body -- the planet. The model of the solar system and list of planets you and I both learned as kids was based on this premise.
Funny how you don't care if Pluto is a planet but your incorrect recollection of the conventional, uncodified definition is one where Pluto would still be considered one, making it seem like we suddenly decided to change the notion of 'planet' to exclude it. In truth, Pluto would never have been considered a planet if we'd discovered other TNOs at roughly the same time and the codification of the conventional definition wouldn't have raised much of a fuss.
Funny how nobody thought Ceres was misclassified (or even remembered its relationship to the old convention, as in the above quote) but now that its historical example is relevant to the status of Pluto everyone is like "Sure Ceres could be a planet too! Why not?"
Personally I don't care what we call Pluto so long as we acknowledge our updated information that it is not the dominant object of its orbital neighborhood.
If I'd ever heard a proposed "better" definition that acknowledged this new information, one that still classified Pluto as separate from the 8 gravitationally dominant objects, or even included Ceres or Eris but not Pluto, I'd be more likely to believe the 'don't care about Pluto, just don't like the definition' claims.
heliocentric... also doesn't deal with the age of the star system
Both features until we know more about exoplanets and proto-planetary systems.
What is worse, when the IAU definition was being proposed, exo-solar planets had already been discovered.
Once again a feature that they knew better than to leap to conclusions about other systems rather than trying to baselessly create a universal definition as you would have them do, or worse leave "around the sun" as an unstated assumption because hey, those are the only ones that exist amirite?
When you are talking about "orbit clearing" as per the IAU definition, it is involving objects considerably smaller.
Yes which is why your statement that our current discoveries of exoplanets show the 'orbit clearing' criterion is "off the mark" is complete BS, and you know it. It does not. It may, but I suspect we'll find that gravitational dominance is a characteristic of bodies even in other systems, and the problem will come from young systems and classifying them.
A better way to describe these objects can be found than what the IAU currently uses for defining a planet. This does have relevance because studying some kinds of objects can give you legitimate areas of comparison.
I think you've got the purpose of classification backwards. We go from the observed description of an object, to the terminology of what we call it. Not the other way around. I think you overestimate the effect naming has on comparative research. Nobody interested in the composition of large rocky bodies is going to study Mercury but not Ceres because Ceres isn't called a planet, and nobody studying icy worlds is going to refrain from looking at Pluto in favor of some exoplanet that is classified as a planet by whatever definition we eventually come up with.
But that does get into the issue of "brown dwarfs" where fusion hasn't started, trying to distinguish them from objects like Jupiter.
Calling a "star" something that has actual fusion going on in its core should be sufficient to distinguish it from other smaller mass objects.
How about calling a "star" something that has or had actual fusion going on, thus distinguishing it from anything that was never massive enough to fuse hydrogen.
A white dwarf is a stage in the post-fusion life of a star that wasn't massive enough to become a neutron star, but like a neutron star becomes a form of degenerate matter -- there's no reason to call one a star and not the other. It is nothing like a brown dwarf where it really is a matter of degree that separates it from jupiter, not kind.
Besides, in the cosmological zoo, you could call white dwarfs kind of their own type of beast with its own unique area of classification.
Including white dwarf as a type of late-life star does nothing to prohibit you further classification.
With new discoveries of exo-solar planets happening all of the time, the IAU definition of a planet seems more and more off the mark, especially its "orbit clearing" definition.
The IAU smartly avoiding the question of exoplanets until we know more about them. It's the best thing about the definition.
Our exoplanet discoveries so far have given no indication that the 'orbit clearing' criterion is a problem because our instruments can't possibly detect if there are large belts of material to go with the super-earths and super-jupiters. It was only 20 years ago that we could tell that Pluto wasn't the only significant object in its orbit.
There's a ton we don't know, but we have seen systems with more complex orbits than what we have, and systems with types of planets in places we didn't expect them. These could conceivably require a change the definition, but shouldn't we wait until we have observed more to see if there are any characteristics that might suggest a useful classification rather than just leaping to some supposedly universal definition? We might just find some five order of magnitude gap like we have with 'orbit clearing' around Sol that makes a clear delineation between types of stellar systems or objects in them.
That's what I don't get: You rag on the IAU for updating an object's classification that only resulted from a 60-year misunderstanding of its place in the solar system while codifying the intuition that led to that original classification by pointing at an observed five order of magnitude gap in the property in question.
And then you turn around and propose that the IAU leap to defining "planet" for all stellar systems despite us knowing barely anything about the rest of the universe of planets, and advocating for distinguishing based on a property we already know from our own system has fine gradations with no clear divisions like atmospheric pressure.
"Classification updates from 80 years of additional scientific development based on clear observable distinctions bad, classification based on snaps to judgement on where to draw arbitrary lines good!"
Someone already made a zero-G porno with the vomit-comet.
Which considering the well deserved name and the duration of weightlessness you get at one time is quite a feat.
We'll probably never see a proliferation of zero-G porn until we get these space habitats, so I agree Larry Flynt should chip in some investment money!
And conversely, do you think they would have spent nothing at all on music and movies?
Maybe. Depends on how much money they have, and whether they prefer to spend it on something else. Maybe in the absence of piracy, Pandora would be sufficient.
What's your point, anyway? In the course of pirating works supposedly worth 50-large, they may have hypothetically deprived an actual vendor of 15 bucks that they might have spent? That's great, I agree that the alleged costs of piracy are ridiculously over-inflated and based on faulty premises too.
In the context of natural vs artificial, no they aren't natural.
In the context where "natural" is just a synonym for "existent" and then yes, of course they're natural.
Both statements are correct in their own contexts. Personally I think the context where saying something is "unnatural" isn't just a weird way of saying it isn't real is usually the more useful one. But it isn't the only one, to be sure.
These people -- whether they have a physical pathway that is known to medical science or not -- have a reaction to electromagnetic waves.
No. These people are having a reaction to something, and are blaming electromagnetic waves.
This is an important distinction. We must separate the effect from the claimed cause.
If the problem is truly psychosomatic and the thing they're reacting to is in their own heads, then in theory if you take away their chosen bugbear (and they are aware of it) they should feel better. But then again they may not, and will just say the Wifi wallpaper doesn't work or it's one of the many frequencies the wallpaper doesn't block that is causing their problem. It's not like saying "logically, your symptoms cannot be caused by the cause you claim" is a magical way to make psychosomatic illness go away.
If the problem is not psychosomatic (and I fully believe this is the case for at least some of them), then something is affecting their health which is almost certainly not EM radiation, and so it will continue to cause them problems if you block the EM.
However, once again they are likely to continue to blame the EM. If they weren't predisposed to blame EM then they'd be looking at other, more likely causes for their problems already.
In neither case is the solution to the problem to indulge their misbegotten notions in order to turn a profit. It's either treating the psychosomatic illness with medicine and therapy, or trying to figure out the actual environmental or biological cause for their problem.
Don't do what they do, and get so fixated on a specific cause that we assume that the alleged but highly unlikely cause and the effect are a package deal. It's detrimental to their own quest for health because nobody can get past the idea that it must be caused by Wifi.
Damn right, and I love it. When someone says something I don't like, I just give them with a disdainful look and say "I don't have to take that from someone filled with disgusting chemicals."
I would assume that "work the way you want it to" means the effect as in "lets us do the things we want to do", not the mechanism for achieving it as long as that mechanism is reasonable -- this is why the naive single-lens method doesn't work, because it's completely unreasonable to build such a giant lens, right? But who cares if there's a nice relatively compact way to make it work?
If "the way you want it to" work is with a single lens, most visual optic devices outside of spectacles don't "work", either.
If you did that with the entire car without ever depriving me of it at all, then go fucking nuts I say (Porsche might feel differently about you copying their automotive design).
However there's no reason for you to want to duplicate my car key except to subsequently steal -- as in actually deprive me of -- my car, so no, that's not okay.
That isn't even remotely like copyright infringement. And on that note, "is it okay" is a separate question from "is it theft or copyright infringement".
Um, every single part where you affect my material possession in any way? From wear-and-tear to outright damage (seriously?), to simply preventing me from having access to it if I decide to take my date home early or I forgot something in my car that's now not there.
The whole point is that if you pirate something the original copy is not affected in any way whatsoever. There isn't a single change, there isn't a single nanosecond where it's not still available to them.
If you could do something comparable to piracy to my car, like use a Star Trek replicator to instantly and harmlessly scan it, then reproduce a new one in the parking spot next it and then you drove off in that.. Then I wouldn't care.
Of course I also don't care if you did the same thing to my movies, but I'm not the copyright holder so my stake is only in my particular copy. Your argument doesn't even relate to the actual issue copyright holders have with piracy! What was even the point of this argument?
Something was taken. The income that would have otherwise been realized from a legitimate purchase.
That income could be zero, if the pirate would not have made a legitimate purchase in the absence of piracy. This is the #1 mistake made when discussing this -- assuming that if someone pirates a copy, that they would have purchased that copy if they couldn't pirate.
That relation simply doesn't hold, though. This is most obvious if you consider the teenager with $50,000 worth of music and movies on their hard drive. If piracy was impossible, do you think they would have spent $50,000 on music and movies?
It's still stealing, and using a less stark name for it doesn't make it any less theft in absolute terms any more than the difference between lifting a pack of gum is less "theft" than boosting a Porsche.
In both those cases, there was a real, non-hypothetical loss. You don't have to guess whether a car thief would have bought a Porsche if car theft was impossible (probably not) -- the dealer is still out one Porsche. Whereas with piracy the loss is hypothetical and you do need to guess what the pirate would have done to even claim there was a loss.
That's why copyright infringement is not theft. It is not the legal definition of "that kind of theft". It's the legal definition of something which is illegal, but isn't theft.
Things that aren't theft can still be wrong. Maybe this is the third mistake that leads to the previous two mistakes -- If it's not theft it's not wrong, and copyright infringement is wrong therefore it must be theft!
No. Copyright infringement is wrong, but it is not theft.
Why not turn Hubble directly towards Venus as it does its transit? Is there just too much light for Hubble to get a good spectrographic reading by doing it directly?
Yes, because it's very hard to get good readings out of sensors fried to a crisp by the sun's light. As a rule (as in, the control software prohibits it) the Hubble is not allowed to get within 50 degrees of the sun.
Everyone thinks of Donatello as the science nerd of the group, but Leonardo had his own hobbies. He kept them quiet, though, which is why we're only just discovering them. Maybe he didn't want to many questions about why he was so interested in the inner workings of the human body...
No, it's just going to have a whole lot more dead heroes and martyrs.
A key component of any successful insurgency.
From a "military" standpoint, the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been military failures. They've killed a few soldiers, but they've done NOTHING to reassert control.
Bombs are still going off in Baghdad, but we're leaving (thank God). What do you think the goal of (that portion of the insurgency focused on the U.S. presence) was? "Reasserting control" in a direct, conventional sense would be stupid, both because it would fail and because it is unnecessary.
What the insurgencies do is sap political and popular will to support the invasion and occupation, and that's how they attempt to "win" - by bleeding the occupiers too much and making it too politically expensive to continue occupying.
Which they've done an excellent job at. This is victory for an insurgency, and it's extremely foolish to discount it because it's not a traditional "military" "win". Because it is a military win, just a different kind. It also worked for the Mujaheddin against the Soviets. No country is immune to politics or the cost of their invasions. Every country will eventually ask "Is this worth it?" when they find their costs soaring and their ability to project power elsewhere greatly diminished.
So the scenario where there's no cost for occupying Iraq is as relevant to actual asymmetrical warfare as the scenario where the guerrillas have F-22s. "Hypothetically, we could have done this forever!" we say as we pack it up and leave.
At any rate, war with either country is extremely unlikely given this little thing called "mutually assured destruction". Because of that, the U.S. hasn't gone to war with a major power in 60 years, when we fought against China in Korea.
Which, just to hammer the point home, was a decade before China acquired nukes. In Vietnam, China's role was mostly limited to supplying weapons and advisers rather than direct opposition to U.S. forces, as was typical of Cold War conflicts.
Slashdot Mirror
I already ran out of cake. :(
Statistics doesn't work that way. Stop using it that way.
That is like saying 1/3 that were in my year at school will get cancer, why hasn't anyone in my year got cancer yet?
If there was a 1/3 chance for kids in your school to get cancer this , then it would be quite surprising if none of them did get it unless your year was very small. The chance of nobody getting cancer is (2/3)^N where N is the students in your class. For large N it is theoretically possible but extremely unlikely -- and thus perfectly legitimate to ask "Why didn't anyone get cancer?" Probably because the risk factor was miscalculated.
Similarly what the GP was saying is that based on the number of events and the probability of a transit, the Expected Value for transits (if flares have no effect on the existence of a planet and thus transit) was 1. Expecting 1/365 and finding 0/365 is not unusual or improbable, and not a reason to conclude that planets can't form around stars that produce superflares.
That is how statistics work.
Of course randomness is random, so it's always theoretically possible to get an unusual result through chance alone. For every particle physics discovery ever made there is a 1 * 10^-N chance for some N that it was just a fluke. The goal is for N to be large enough that it would be exceedingly unlikely we are wrong and thus make it safe to infer a positive result for now.
The correct rebuttal to the GP's point was as already given: Hot jupiters are expected to orbit at much less than 1 AU and thus the probability of a transit -- and thus expected value -- is much higher. Expecting 36 events and finding 0 is much less likely and while again could still be due to chance alone, is suggestive.
Isn't that exactly the position you're trying to oppose? That the market has decided asteroid defence is a waste of money?
No? They said this is a legitimate weakness of the free market and as a result the only thing being done about asteroids are some companies offering insurance at a rate that is way out of line with the actual risk.
Well being that we don't have any good theoretical models to stop said asteroids, it is difficult for the market to invest into a defense.
Nonsense. There are fantastic models that will definitely work to prevent asteroid strikes given enough lead time. The math has been done. E.g. Let's say Apophis looks like it's going to go through the keyhole and come around and hit earth -- a one ton spacecraft equipped with ion engines operating for 2 years as a gravity tractor bam done earth is saved let's have a parade.
What's lacking is sufficient funding for discovering and tracking asteroids to make sure we find any dangerous ones far enough ahead of time, and development of the theory into an actual capability that's ready for when we do need it.
It's not the lack of models preventing the market from investing. It's the lack of market incentive to invest in preventing something that will happen an unknown amount of time in the future -- possibly even thousands of years. In a business culture where thinking past next quarter is considered ambitious and far-seeing, the market isn't going to do anything until we know something is going to happen soon. and by then it could be too late.
But to me, nothing so far beats this 43 year old photo.
That's my home, there!
Make my eyes tear up every time...
other than a convention of simply calling the largest objects in the Solar System "planets".
... Except not... Conventionally, bodies which constituted only a small proportion of the total matter in their orbits were not considered planets but rather one asteroid in an asteroid belt or trojans captured by an obviously dominant body -- the planet. The model of the solar system and list of planets you and I both learned as kids was based on this premise.
Funny how you don't care if Pluto is a planet but your incorrect recollection of the conventional, uncodified definition is one where Pluto would still be considered one, making it seem like we suddenly decided to change the notion of 'planet' to exclude it. In truth, Pluto would never have been considered a planet if we'd discovered other TNOs at roughly the same time and the codification of the conventional definition wouldn't have raised much of a fuss.
Funny how nobody thought Ceres was misclassified (or even remembered its relationship to the old convention, as in the above quote) but now that its historical example is relevant to the status of Pluto everyone is like "Sure Ceres could be a planet too! Why not?"
Personally I don't care what we call Pluto so long as we acknowledge our updated information that it is not the dominant object of its orbital neighborhood.
If I'd ever heard a proposed "better" definition that acknowledged this new information, one that still classified Pluto as separate from the 8 gravitationally dominant objects, or even included Ceres or Eris but not Pluto, I'd be more likely to believe the 'don't care about Pluto, just don't like the definition' claims.
heliocentric... also doesn't deal with the age of the star system
Both features until we know more about exoplanets and proto-planetary systems.
What is worse, when the IAU definition was being proposed, exo-solar planets had already been discovered.
Once again a feature that they knew better than to leap to conclusions about other systems rather than trying to baselessly create a universal definition as you would have them do, or worse leave "around the sun" as an unstated assumption because hey, those are the only ones that exist amirite?
When you are talking about "orbit clearing" as per the IAU definition, it is involving objects considerably smaller.
Yes which is why your statement that our current discoveries of exoplanets show the 'orbit clearing' criterion is "off the mark" is complete BS, and you know it. It does not. It may, but I suspect we'll find that gravitational dominance is a characteristic of bodies even in other systems, and the problem will come from young systems and classifying them.
A better way to describe these objects can be found than what the IAU currently uses for defining a planet. This does have relevance because studying some kinds of objects can give you legitimate areas of comparison.
I think you've got the purpose of classification backwards. We go from the observed description of an object, to the terminology of what we call it. Not the other way around. I think you overestimate the effect naming has on comparative research. Nobody interested in the composition of large rocky bodies is going to study Mercury but not Ceres because Ceres isn't called a planet, and nobody studying icy worlds is going to refrain from looking at Pluto in favor of some exoplanet that is classified as a planet by whatever definition we eventually come up with.
But that does get into the issue of "brown dwarfs" where fusion hasn't started, trying to distinguish them from objects like Jupiter.
Calling a "star" something that has actual fusion going on in its core should be sufficient to distinguish it from other smaller mass objects.
How about calling a "star" something that has or had actual fusion going on, thus distinguishing it from anything that was never massive enough to fuse hydrogen.
A white dwarf is a stage in the post-fusion life of a star that wasn't massive enough to become a neutron star, but like a neutron star becomes a form of degenerate matter -- there's no reason to call one a star and not the other. It is nothing like a brown dwarf where it really is a matter of degree that separates it from jupiter, not kind.
Besides, in the cosmological zoo, you could call white dwarfs kind of their own type of beast with its own unique area of classification.
Including white dwarf as a type of late-life star does nothing to prohibit you further classification.
With new discoveries of exo-solar planets happening all of the time, the IAU definition of a planet seems more and more off the mark, especially its "orbit clearing" definition.
The IAU smartly avoiding the question of exoplanets until we know more about them. It's the best thing about the definition.
Our exoplanet discoveries so far have given no indication that the 'orbit clearing' criterion is a problem because our instruments can't possibly detect if there are large belts of material to go with the super-earths and super-jupiters. It was only 20 years ago that we could tell that Pluto wasn't the only significant object in its orbit.
There's a ton we don't know, but we have seen systems with more complex orbits than what we have, and systems with types of planets in places we didn't expect them. These could conceivably require a change the definition, but shouldn't we wait until we have observed more to see if there are any characteristics that might suggest a useful classification rather than just leaping to some supposedly universal definition? We might just find some five order of magnitude gap like we have with 'orbit clearing' around Sol that makes a clear delineation between types of stellar systems or objects in them.
That's what I don't get: You rag on the IAU for updating an object's classification that only resulted from a 60-year misunderstanding of its place in the solar system while codifying the intuition that led to that original classification by pointing at an observed five order of magnitude gap in the property in question.
And then you turn around and propose that the IAU leap to defining "planet" for all stellar systems despite us knowing barely anything about the rest of the universe of planets, and advocating for distinguishing based on a property we already know from our own system has fine gradations with no clear divisions like atmospheric pressure.
"Classification updates from 80 years of additional scientific development based on clear observable distinctions bad, classification based on snaps to judgement on where to draw arbitrary lines good!"
That's what makes no sense.
Someone already made a zero-G porno with the vomit-comet.
Which considering the well deserved name and the duration of weightlessness you get at one time is quite a feat.
We'll probably never see a proliferation of zero-G porn until we get these space habitats, so I agree Larry Flynt should chip in some investment money!
And conversely, do you think they would have spent nothing at all on music and movies?
Maybe. Depends on how much money they have, and whether they prefer to spend it on something else. Maybe in the absence of piracy, Pandora would be sufficient.
What's your point, anyway? In the course of pirating works supposedly worth 50-large, they may have hypothetically deprived an actual vendor of 15 bucks that they might have spent? That's great, I agree that the alleged costs of piracy are ridiculously over-inflated and based on faulty premises too.
Man-made elements are not natural...
In the context of natural vs artificial, no they aren't natural.
In the context where "natural" is just a synonym for "existent" and then yes, of course they're natural.
Both statements are correct in their own contexts. Personally I think the context where saying something is "unnatural" isn't just a weird way of saying it isn't real is usually the more useful one. But it isn't the only one, to be sure.
So much win...
These people -- whether they have a physical pathway that is known to medical science or not -- have a reaction to electromagnetic waves.
No. These people are having a reaction to something, and are blaming electromagnetic waves.
This is an important distinction. We must separate the effect from the claimed cause.
If the problem is truly psychosomatic and the thing they're reacting to is in their own heads, then in theory if you take away their chosen bugbear (and they are aware of it) they should feel better. But then again they may not, and will just say the Wifi wallpaper doesn't work or it's one of the many frequencies the wallpaper doesn't block that is causing their problem. It's not like saying "logically, your symptoms cannot be caused by the cause you claim" is a magical way to make psychosomatic illness go away.
If the problem is not psychosomatic (and I fully believe this is the case for at least some of them), then something is affecting their health which is almost certainly not EM radiation, and so it will continue to cause them problems if you block the EM.
However, once again they are likely to continue to blame the EM. If they weren't predisposed to blame EM then they'd be looking at other, more likely causes for their problems already.
In neither case is the solution to the problem to indulge their misbegotten notions in order to turn a profit. It's either treating the psychosomatic illness with medicine and therapy, or trying to figure out the actual environmental or biological cause for their problem.
Don't do what they do, and get so fixated on a specific cause that we assume that the alleged but highly unlikely cause and the effect are a package deal. It's detrimental to their own quest for health because nobody can get past the idea that it must be caused by Wifi.
"Chemical" is used as a perjorative
Damn right, and I love it. When someone says something I don't like, I just give them with a disdainful look and say "I don't have to take that from someone filled with disgusting chemicals."
I would assume that "work the way you want it to" means the effect as in "lets us do the things we want to do", not the mechanism for achieving it as long as that mechanism is reasonable -- this is why the naive single-lens method doesn't work, because it's completely unreasonable to build such a giant lens, right? But who cares if there's a nice relatively compact way to make it work?
If "the way you want it to" work is with a single lens, most visual optic devices outside of spectacles don't "work", either.
those were the good old days when we still though gamma rays gave you super powers instead of cancer
You mean... they aren't the same thing?
* Puts Tumor Man costume back in the closet.*
And if he never rode it, the cost per ride is infinite, ZOMG!
If you did that with the entire car without ever depriving me of it at all, then go fucking nuts I say (Porsche might feel differently about you copying their automotive design).
However there's no reason for you to want to duplicate my car key except to subsequently steal -- as in actually deprive me of -- my car, so no, that's not okay.
That isn't even remotely like copyright infringement. And on that note, "is it okay" is a separate question from "is it theft or copyright infringement".
Where's the flaw in that argument?
Um, every single part where you affect my material possession in any way? From wear-and-tear to outright damage (seriously?), to simply preventing me from having access to it if I decide to take my date home early or I forgot something in my car that's now not there.
The whole point is that if you pirate something the original copy is not affected in any way whatsoever. There isn't a single change, there isn't a single nanosecond where it's not still available to them.
If you could do something comparable to piracy to my car, like use a Star Trek replicator to instantly and harmlessly scan it, then reproduce a new one in the parking spot next it and then you drove off in that.. Then I wouldn't care.
Of course I also don't care if you did the same thing to my movies, but I'm not the copyright holder so my stake is only in my particular copy. Your argument doesn't even relate to the actual issue copyright holders have with piracy! What was even the point of this argument?
Something was taken. The income that would have otherwise been realized from a legitimate purchase.
That income could be zero, if the pirate would not have made a legitimate purchase in the absence of piracy. This is the #1 mistake made when discussing this -- assuming that if someone pirates a copy, that they would have purchased that copy if they couldn't pirate.
That relation simply doesn't hold, though. This is most obvious if you consider the teenager with $50,000 worth of music and movies on their hard drive. If piracy was impossible, do you think they would have spent $50,000 on music and movies?
It's still stealing, and using a less stark name for it doesn't make it any less theft in absolute terms any more than the difference between lifting a pack of gum is less "theft" than boosting a Porsche.
In both those cases, there was a real, non-hypothetical loss. You don't have to guess whether a car thief would have bought a Porsche if car theft was impossible (probably not) -- the dealer is still out one Porsche. Whereas with piracy the loss is hypothetical and you do need to guess what the pirate would have done to even claim there was a loss.
That's why copyright infringement is not theft. It is not the legal definition of "that kind of theft". It's the legal definition of something which is illegal, but isn't theft.
Things that aren't theft can still be wrong. Maybe this is the third mistake that leads to the previous two mistakes -- If it's not theft it's not wrong, and copyright infringement is wrong therefore it must be theft!
No. Copyright infringement is wrong, but it is not theft.
It probably does, but the effect would be minimal since at the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone the gravity gradient is going to be very small.
Why not turn Hubble directly towards Venus as it does its transit? Is there just too much light for Hubble to get a good spectrographic reading by doing it directly?
Yes, because it's very hard to get good readings out of sensors fried to a crisp by the sun's light. As a rule (as in, the control software prohibits it) the Hubble is not allowed to get within 50 degrees of the sun.
Everyone thinks of Donatello as the science nerd of the group, but Leonardo had his own hobbies. He kept them quiet, though, which is why we're only just discovering them. Maybe he didn't want to many questions about why he was so interested in the inner workings of the human body...
No, it's just going to have a whole lot more dead heroes and martyrs.
A key component of any successful insurgency.
From a "military" standpoint, the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been military failures. They've killed a few soldiers, but they've done NOTHING to reassert control.
Bombs are still going off in Baghdad, but we're leaving (thank God). What do you think the goal of (that portion of the insurgency focused on the U.S. presence) was? "Reasserting control" in a direct, conventional sense would be stupid, both because it would fail and because it is unnecessary.
What the insurgencies do is sap political and popular will to support the invasion and occupation, and that's how they attempt to "win" - by bleeding the occupiers too much and making it too politically expensive to continue occupying.
Which they've done an excellent job at. This is victory for an insurgency, and it's extremely foolish to discount it because it's not a traditional "military" "win". Because it is a military win, just a different kind. It also worked for the Mujaheddin against the Soviets. No country is immune to politics or the cost of their invasions. Every country will eventually ask "Is this worth it?" when they find their costs soaring and their ability to project power elsewhere greatly diminished.
So the scenario where there's no cost for occupying Iraq is as relevant to actual asymmetrical warfare as the scenario where the guerrillas have F-22s. "Hypothetically, we could have done this forever!" we say as we pack it up and leave.
Mission Accomplished, then?
At any rate, war with either country is extremely unlikely given this little thing called "mutually assured destruction". Because of that, the U.S. hasn't gone to war with a major power in 60 years, when we fought against China in Korea.
Which, just to hammer the point home, was a decade before China acquired nukes. In Vietnam, China's role was mostly limited to supplying weapons and advisers rather than direct opposition to U.S. forces, as was typical of Cold War conflicts.