The real trick is to post everything directly to "The Cloud".... Destroying the device doesn't destroy the data, and you also have a record of the destruction.
This is what happened at the Democratic Convention protests in Chicago in 1968.
Chicago was a machine-run city and the police were able to keep pictures of their misdeeds out of the newspapers by seizing and/or smashing the photographers' cameras. In preparation for the convention (and the pre-announced protests) the machine's unions had prevented the stringing of video cabling to likely protest sites.
But this was the first serious deployment of the "minicam" by the three networks' news operations. It was a massive shoulder-mounted camera, feeding a backpack full of electronics and batteries, radio-linked to a truck full of equipment within a block or two that relayed it to the studio. But it worked. And Chicago was a main switching/mixing/studio center for all three networks' transcontinental feeds.
So the police, with orders to keep things out of the media, did their standard smash-the-camera number (like they did when the local newsies got ouf-of-line and tried to report on them). And when the police batons smashed a camera lens the image, from the lens' viewpoint, was already out of the camera and into living rooms nationwide.
With the improvements in video camera technology - first the personal portable video camera, then the inclusion of cameras and video-record functionaltiy in most modern cellphones - the bulk of the population has been in a position to play Chicago News Cameraman. "Who watches the watchmen?" can now be answered "All of us!" Since the Rodney King incident the police have been hunting for ways to suppress this coverage. And this bunch seems to have settled on the pre-minicam Chicago Police approach. In this case the camara man managed to extract and protect the "film". But the real solution is the same as it was in '68: Real time upload to external archive and/or live publication. You hit it dead-on.
Fortunately the pieces of that are now available as stock products (minor assembly required). Smartphone plus applet for live streaming to archive and/or social-network/video publication. The readers' letters attached to TFA name at least two such applets: QIK (and QIK Plus) and Ustream.
doesn't it seem like this is way overdue ? brilliant idea.
It's been tried repeatedly. The problem has always been that, with available solar panels, computers, and displays, the laptop doesn't have enough area by a LARGE factor to collect as much power as it uses. It also doesn't present its surface to the sun very well when in use. About the best you could get is a laptop you could leave in the sun all day to charge enough for a few minutes use. (Want to leave it unattended that long?)
Further, more crunch has been the target for a long time and that requires more power than less crunch at the same silicon fabrication technology level. A lot of people have not wanted their laptops to be several-generations-back stupid. Improvements in run time have been driven more by improved batteries that store more power and hacks to turn parts of the machine off or down to slower running when not in use than by actual improvements in watts per crunch (though the latter has been worked on as well - beyond the desktop "keep it from melting as you make it faster and smaller" target.)
And then there's radio-based networking to eat more power. If you can't be bothered to plug in the charger you certainly don't want to find a network jack. And if you're out in the boonies with no outlets (or even in a city park) you're probably far enough from the wireless networking access point that the transmitter has to be running at the high end of its power range.
With new high-efficiency panels, low-power processors, e-ink displays (which only use power to change, not to sustain or to backlight) or LED backlighting, and a leveling out of the demand for crunch when just browsing non-animated web sites, editing documents, or the like, a low-capability machine that's fully solar powered may be coming into reach.
Or at least for people in perpetually-sunny areas who are willing to expose themselves to the thermonuclear cancer-generator in the sky for hours per day. And it might be useful in disaster scenarios (though I really don't want lives to depend on it not running down in a crunch).
But I think we're still far from on that is practical for most usage scenarios.
The summery says: "Created the videos in his own time, off-campus."
The video says: "This was done up back in November of 2010, for an economics course project."... He said his teachers had no problem with the content â" one even lent his voice to an animation â" and he didnâ(TM)t get in trouble until he uploaded the videos to YouTube.
All the signs are that something in one (or more) of the videos made fun of the school principal and he's got a burr up his ass over it and is punishing the kid for refusing to bow to his perceived authority.
Looks to me like the real problem is this: The school administration is embarrassed at the exposure to the public of what they were encouraging and rewarding in their classes.
Where do you think the money in those "deep pockets" comes from? How much money will they be able to transfer if we don't give them any to begin with.
You're not going to give money to Lime Wire? Or other torent software providesr? Or torrent indexing sites? Or to other people that the RIAA or MPAA sue? You're not going to use Google or Bing or other web crawling sites, or click on their ads? (I could go on...)
I think you misunderstood my posting. Let me rephrase:
As long as the likes of RIAA can SUE OTHER PEOPLE and WIN BIG JUDGEMENTS or BIG OUT OF COURT SETTLEMENTS, they and their member companies DON'T NEED TO SELL RECORDS AT ALL.
Boycott them down to ZERO SALES INCOME and it won't do squat. (It will just give them bigger sales drops to use when crying to congress and the courts about how the awful internet has enabled awful pirates who are ruinging their business and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!)
It would be a court ordered injunction. Much like a restraining order, it prohibits a party or parties from engaging in certain acts, it is not a determination of criminality per se. No criminal act need have been committed in order to get an injunction, nor one even alleged - let alone proven.
And in the case of such injunctions brought pursuant to a civil case, the party requesting one must indemnify they parties damaged by the injunction if they don't later successfully show the enjoined act was improper. For instance: If distribution of a work for profit is enjoined and it later turns out that the distributor had, or had licensed, the distribution rights, the party asking for the injunction must pay to replace the lost profit and other damages to the distributor.
Unfortunately, Amazon and BN don't seem to be so inclined to [repeat Apple's low-priced e-music store success with books], which surprises the hell out of me, honestly. They benefit from the reader sales, too (though, of the two, Amazon's is the scummier), but then hamstring themselves by not only pushing back, but letting Apple screw them over at the same time.
It boggles the mind.
There is SO much money to be made in computer-driven enterprises that executives can make HORRIBLY wrong decisions, repeatedly, and still avoid bankruptcy or dismissal for years. Sometimes they even make lots of money despite such decisions (though enormously less than they might if they weren't so dunderheaded).
(Now you know why PHBs are so common as to be stereotypical.)
Nevertheless, the bulk of the startups and a good fraction of the old-school companies trying to transition to the networked era still manage to blow it. Eventually they go belly-up (or petition the government to replace their shrinking market share).
We do it economically. How many times yesterday did you give your money to the corporations that are behind this assault on our freedom?
It takes a lot of boycotting to counter court decisions that impose HALF BILLION DOLLAR transfers of wealth from companies that have deep enough pockets to pay to the "agents of the poor injured artists".
Throttling is where they simply slow down your entire internet connection. Typically when you download more than a certain amount of data the ISP punishes you with throttling.
I note that this can be accomplished in a hierarchical traffic manager / policer: The first level of the hierarchy might be each of several classes of traffic to (or from) your machine, while the second level might be the aggregate composed of all of this traffic. Throttling would consist of turning down the second level's programmed rate from its normal setting (which presumably would be your line rate, where it prevents buffer bloat in the last hop machine, or from your contracted max rate under normal circumstances).
Of course ISPs which don't have fancy hierarchical traffic management boxes can also apply throttling by telling the DSLAM (or other last-hop box) to downsize your link.
That's also why just blocking the bogus URL shortening services is also not as easy a solution as it sounds: Apparently these services were up for a while, gaining legitimate users and an air of legitimacy, before the spammers began using them for malware.
Actually, US telecoms get sued in the US and sometimes lose.
They even get sued by the government. That's how AT&T got broken up in the first place. (What's now called AT&T is one of the kids born from the lawsuit, which ate what was left of the mother and several of its siblings. Though perhaps a more graphic analogy would be the reconstitution of Terminator II from the merger of most of its shattered pieces.)
But the US telecoms mostly win because the laws are very much in their favor and thus easy and profitable for them to follow - or to settle out of court before it comes to trial.
What's next - someone suing a wife for adultery in an Iranian court because they want a death sentence!
As I understand it, conviction for adultery under Islamic law requires several witnesses to the act.
Now I know there are people in the US who think that, if their wives had sex with someone else in front of an audience they'd deserve the death penalty...
So when the fuck is the USA Govt going to get it's ass sued for doing all that and worse?
In US courts? Probably never.
The Constitution includes a provision that the US can't be sued in its own courts unless it consents to be, either on a case-by-case basis or a law waiving immunity in advance. Such laws have only been passed with respect to suits over contracts with the US government and torts committed by US employees. (And the "tort" exception doesn't stretch that far.)
... the US has been doing this for some time. How do you think the rash of DMCA-like laws
The example is quite an understatement of the time frame, too. Two words: "Cuba embargo". Five more: "Letters of Marque and Reprisal."
Egypt is no stranger to this. One of the first actions projecting US laws abroad, under Jefferson, was the military attack on the Barbary "Pirates" - who in turn had been acting as tax collectors enforcing a claim to sovereignty over the waters around the Straits of Gibraltar and a demand for tolls, individual or in block from the government of the ship's country of registry, for passage. (This is the origin of the line "to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marine Hymn.)
... it's a pain to block [skype]on the firewall...
It honestly acts more like Malware than anything, so it'll be interesting to see how Microsoft deals with it since it sells ISA (and now Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010) this seems like the two are going to be at loggerheads.
Maybe Microsoft bought Skype so they could figure out how to block it with their security products and/or kill it so it's no longer an issue? B-)
Shaping is when they give you a rate and enforce it. (The faster burst at startup is because you had accumulated some credit by not using your bandwidth in the immediately preceeding time.) There may be separate shaping mechanisms for different protocol families and there may also be shaping on aggregates - like total bandwidth across multiple users of a common DSLAM.
Throttling is when, after they notice that you've used a lot of bandwidth lately, they turn down the rate on the shaper ("traffic manager").
Shaping is mainly about things like keeping protocols from interfering with each other (by giving different classes of them separate allowances) and avoiding congestion and queue-too-full latency (by limiting the traffic sent to a following box to the amount it can handle.)
Throttling is about keeping a user's resource consumption down by slowing him down after he's run fast for a while.
why not just make a universal, self-contained application bundle,... that contains all necessary dependencies without having to download them separately?
In addition to many duplications of the dependencies in multiple clients of it (which has already been mentioned)...
If any IP issues with the dependencies are discovered later, the trolls have far more people to go after.
Why increase risk? By NOT shipping the dependencies the authors of the depending code are insulated from liability - while still having an incentive to help wich the legal battle where the loss would pull the libraries out from under their products.
Goodbye Microsoft profit? How? They got the money from you already.
I was presuming they'd subsidized the deal in order to try to hook the student into future purchases (and specifying their stuff for businesses after graduation). This IS the typical operation of such programs (and has been since at least the middle of the 20th century.
If that's the case they make a loss on the deal. Then if the student converts the subsidized equipment to run a competitive system, they lose much of the brand loyalty they tried to buy.
If the finances are better than breakeven then, yes, they would still make some money on the deal.
Seriously:
1) Buy the $699 PC.
2) Get the free XBox console.
3) Install Linux on the PC. (Dual-boot so you can hang on to any Windows-only functionality you need for the XBox or on a separate, swappable, hard drive to provide an "airgap firewall" against possible dual-boot cross-OS malware.)
4) Have fun with Linux.
5) Goodbye Microsoft profit!
Schools are funded, everyone has a job, housing market is stable, health care system is awesome. Right? Nope. But hey, we need to allow no-knock warrants where someone might be committing the heinous act of burning a bunch of DVDs. Clearly that is worthy of felony charges and huge fines. The MPAA & RIAA sure think so.
Of course. From their viewpoint, CD and DVD copying caused the economic collapse.
I wouldn't even be surprised to hear them assert that over their members' media outlets any minute now.
[baryon shortage on helium density evidence], [insufficient fragmentation in molecular clouds],... it would require an insanely HUGE number of [free roaming planets] to explain dark matter observations.
Thought experiment:
Leave aside problems like not having enough baryons and models not predicting 80% of them (by mass) might organize into free roaming planets.
If there WERE that many free roaming planets would there be an appropriate size and arrangement of them to explain the observations?
And if so, are there observations we could make that would distinguish such a massive fleet of wandering planets from clouds of truly invisible, gravitationally interaction only, dark matter?
Calling people incompetent for not being able to read the minds of physicists from a distance is sheer arrogance.
Especially when the physicists use the same term, "dark matter" without qualifications, to refer to two allegedly separate problems.
If they're going to dumb it down for the newsies who dumb it down further for their readers, thus avoiding handing out any clues, they have only themselves to blame when the general public is clueless.
Most calculations based on stellar orbits consistently come up with figures for dark matter of over 80% of the matter in the universe. There's more than four times as much dark matter as what we can see. And whatever dark matter is, it apparently is diffuse enough that we don't see it micro-lensing anything, and doesn't otherwise interact with light or other EM radiation, because we find no trace of it in the light that reaches earth from all corners of the universe;
There's two ways for "dark matter" to not be visible by microlensing:
1) It's very diffuse rather than being organized into star-sized lumps.
2) It's mostly compressed into planet-sized and smaller lumps - massive enough to hold a bunch of mass per lump but not enough for the lumps to produce detectable microlensing, sef-ignitte, collapse into black holes, or collect into "dust clouds" and obscure the background.
Only four times as much "dark matter" as "visible matter", eh? Solar systems seem to be organized fractally. I wonder if extending that fractical computation might predict enough "homeless planets", distributed in a mostly invisible way, to account for the "missing mass" and missing gravitational lensing?
Even dialup may fail on "snow days". You can't use dialup when the ice storm, falling snow-laden tree branches, or skidding cars have knocked out your phone, cable, and power lines (or a necessary subset of them).
Slashdot Mirror
The real trick is to post everything directly to "The Cloud". ... Destroying the device doesn't destroy the data, and you also have a record of the destruction.
This is what happened at the Democratic Convention protests in Chicago in 1968.
Chicago was a machine-run city and the police were able to keep pictures of their misdeeds out of the newspapers by seizing and/or smashing the photographers' cameras. In preparation for the convention (and the pre-announced protests) the machine's unions had prevented the stringing of video cabling to likely protest sites.
But this was the first serious deployment of the "minicam" by the three networks' news operations. It was a massive shoulder-mounted camera, feeding a backpack full of electronics and batteries, radio-linked to a truck full of equipment within a block or two that relayed it to the studio. But it worked. And Chicago was a main switching/mixing/studio center for all three networks' transcontinental feeds.
So the police, with orders to keep things out of the media, did their standard smash-the-camera number (like they did when the local newsies got ouf-of-line and tried to report on them). And when the police batons smashed a camera lens the image, from the lens' viewpoint, was already out of the camera and into living rooms nationwide.
With the improvements in video camera technology - first the personal portable video camera, then the inclusion of cameras and video-record functionaltiy in most modern cellphones - the bulk of the population has been in a position to play Chicago News Cameraman. "Who watches the watchmen?" can now be answered "All of us!" Since the Rodney King incident the police have been hunting for ways to suppress this coverage. And this bunch seems to have settled on the pre-minicam Chicago Police approach. In this case the camara man managed to extract and protect the "film". But the real solution is the same as it was in '68: Real time upload to external archive and/or live publication. You hit it dead-on.
Fortunately the pieces of that are now available as stock products (minor assembly required). Smartphone plus applet for live streaming to archive and/or social-network/video publication. The readers' letters attached to TFA name at least two such applets: QIK (and QIK Plus) and Ustream.
doesn't it seem like this is way overdue ? brilliant idea.
It's been tried repeatedly. The problem has always been that, with available solar panels, computers, and displays, the laptop doesn't have enough area by a LARGE factor to collect as much power as it uses. It also doesn't present its surface to the sun very well when in use. About the best you could get is a laptop you could leave in the sun all day to charge enough for a few minutes use. (Want to leave it unattended that long?)
Further, more crunch has been the target for a long time and that requires more power than less crunch at the same silicon fabrication technology level. A lot of people have not wanted their laptops to be several-generations-back stupid. Improvements in run time have been driven more by improved batteries that store more power and hacks to turn parts of the machine off or down to slower running when not in use than by actual improvements in watts per crunch (though the latter has been worked on as well - beyond the desktop "keep it from melting as you make it faster and smaller" target.)
And then there's radio-based networking to eat more power. If you can't be bothered to plug in the charger you certainly don't want to find a network jack. And if you're out in the boonies with no outlets (or even in a city park) you're probably far enough from the wireless networking access point that the transmitter has to be running at the high end of its power range.
With new high-efficiency panels, low-power processors, e-ink displays (which only use power to change, not to sustain or to backlight) or LED backlighting, and a leveling out of the demand for crunch when just browsing non-animated web sites, editing documents, or the like, a low-capability machine that's fully solar powered may be coming into reach.
Or at least for people in perpetually-sunny areas who are willing to expose themselves to the thermonuclear cancer-generator in the sky for hours per day. And it might be useful in disaster scenarios (though I really don't want lives to depend on it not running down in a crunch).
But I think we're still far from on that is practical for most usage scenarios.
Looks to me like the real problem is this: The school administration is embarrassed at the exposure to the public of what they were encouraging and rewarding in their classes.
Where do you think the money in those "deep pockets" comes from? How much money will they be able to transfer if we don't give them any to begin with.
You're not going to give money to Lime Wire? Or other torent software providesr? Or torrent indexing sites? Or to other people that the RIAA or MPAA sue? You're not going to use Google or Bing or other web crawling sites, or click on their ads? (I could go on...)
I think you misunderstood my posting. Let me rephrase:
As long as the likes of RIAA can SUE OTHER PEOPLE and WIN BIG JUDGEMENTS or BIG OUT OF COURT SETTLEMENTS, they and their member companies DON'T NEED TO SELL RECORDS AT ALL.
Boycott them down to ZERO SALES INCOME and it won't do squat. (It will just give them bigger sales drops to use when crying to congress and the courts about how the awful internet has enabled awful pirates who are ruinging their business and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!)
It would be a court ordered injunction. Much like a restraining order, it prohibits a party or parties from engaging in certain acts, it is not a determination of criminality per se. No criminal act need have been committed in order to get an injunction, nor one even alleged - let alone proven.
And in the case of such injunctions brought pursuant to a civil case, the party requesting one must indemnify they parties damaged by the injunction if they don't later successfully show the enjoined act was improper. For instance: If distribution of a work for profit is enjoined and it later turns out that the distributor had, or had licensed, the distribution rights, the party asking for the injunction must pay to replace the lost profit and other damages to the distributor.
Is that the case with THIS abomination?
Unfortunately, Amazon and BN don't seem to be so inclined to [repeat Apple's low-priced e-music store success with books], which surprises the hell out of me, honestly. They benefit from the reader sales, too (though, of the two, Amazon's is the scummier), but then hamstring themselves by not only pushing back, but letting Apple screw them over at the same time.
It boggles the mind.
There is SO much money to be made in computer-driven enterprises that executives can make HORRIBLY wrong decisions, repeatedly, and still avoid bankruptcy or dismissal for years. Sometimes they even make lots of money despite such decisions (though enormously less than they might if they weren't so dunderheaded).
(Now you know why PHBs are so common as to be stereotypical.)
Nevertheless, the bulk of the startups and a good fraction of the old-school companies trying to transition to the networked era still manage to blow it. Eventually they go belly-up (or petition the government to replace their shrinking market share).
We do it economically. How many times yesterday did you give your money to the corporations that are behind this assault on our freedom?
It takes a lot of boycotting to counter court decisions that impose HALF BILLION DOLLAR transfers of wealth from companies that have deep enough pockets to pay to the "agents of the poor injured artists".
Why would we say goodbye to Google? They do have servers hosted in most countries,
Because they're a US corporation. As such they have to obey the legal limits of BOTH the US and the country where they're operating a server.
Throttling is where they simply slow down your entire internet connection. Typically when you download more than a certain amount of data the ISP punishes you with throttling.
I note that this can be accomplished in a hierarchical traffic manager / policer: The first level of the hierarchy might be each of several classes of traffic to (or from) your machine, while the second level might be the aggregate composed of all of this traffic. Throttling would consist of turning down the second level's programmed rate from its normal setting (which presumably would be your line rate, where it prevents buffer bloat in the last hop machine, or from your contracted max rate under normal circumstances).
Of course ISPs which don't have fancy hierarchical traffic management boxes can also apply throttling by telling the DSLAM (or other last-hop box) to downsize your link.
Easy solution: Block all URL-shortening services.
Which breaks a lot of web traversal.
That's also why just blocking the bogus URL shortening services is also not as easy a solution as it sounds: Apparently these services were up for a while, gaining legitimate users and an air of legitimacy, before the spammers began using them for malware.
Actually, US telecoms get sued in the US and sometimes lose.
They even get sued by the government. That's how AT&T got broken up in the first place. (What's now called AT&T is one of the kids born from the lawsuit, which ate what was left of the mother and several of its siblings. Though perhaps a more graphic analogy would be the reconstitution of Terminator II from the merger of most of its shattered pieces.)
But the US telecoms mostly win because the laws are very much in their favor and thus easy and profitable for them to follow - or to settle out of court before it comes to trial.
What's next - someone suing a wife for adultery in an Iranian court because they want a death sentence!
As I understand it, conviction for adultery under Islamic law requires several witnesses to the act.
Now I know there are people in the US who think that, if their wives had sex with someone else in front of an audience they'd deserve the death penalty ...
So when the fuck is the USA Govt going to get it's ass sued for doing all that and worse?
In US courts? Probably never.
The Constitution includes a provision that the US can't be sued in its own courts unless it consents to be, either on a case-by-case basis or a law waiving immunity in advance. Such laws have only been passed with respect to suits over contracts with the US government and torts committed by US employees. (And the "tort" exception doesn't stretch that far.)
... the US has been doing this for some time. How do you think the rash of DMCA-like laws
The example is quite an understatement of the time frame, too. Two words: "Cuba embargo". Five more: "Letters of Marque and Reprisal."
Egypt is no stranger to this. One of the first actions projecting US laws abroad, under Jefferson, was the military attack on the Barbary "Pirates" - who in turn had been acting as tax collectors enforcing a claim to sovereignty over the waters around the Straits of Gibraltar and a demand for tolls, individual or in block from the government of the ship's country of registry, for passage. (This is the origin of the line "to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marine Hymn.)
... it's a pain to block [skype]on the firewall ...
It honestly acts more like Malware than anything, so it'll be interesting to see how Microsoft deals with it since it sells ISA (and now Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010) this seems like the two are going to be at loggerheads.
Maybe Microsoft bought Skype so they could figure out how to block it with their security products and/or kill it so it's no longer an issue? B-)
Is shaping the same as throttling?
Shaping is when they give you a rate and enforce it. (The faster burst at startup is because you had accumulated some credit by not using your bandwidth in the immediately preceeding time.) There may be separate shaping mechanisms for different protocol families and there may also be shaping on aggregates - like total bandwidth across multiple users of a common DSLAM.
Throttling is when, after they notice that you've used a lot of bandwidth lately, they turn down the rate on the shaper ("traffic manager").
Shaping is mainly about things like keeping protocols from interfering with each other (by giving different classes of them separate allowances) and avoiding congestion and queue-too-full latency (by limiting the traffic sent to a following box to the amount it can handle.)
Throttling is about keeping a user's resource consumption down by slowing him down after he's run fast for a while.
why not just make a universal, self-contained application bundle, ... that contains all necessary dependencies without having to download them separately?
In addition to many duplications of the dependencies in multiple clients of it (which has already been mentioned)...
If any IP issues with the dependencies are discovered later, the trolls have far more people to go after.
Why increase risk? By NOT shipping the dependencies the authors of the depending code are insulated from liability - while still having an incentive to help wich the legal battle where the loss would pull the libraries out from under their products.
Goodbye Microsoft profit? How? They got the money from you already.
I was presuming they'd subsidized the deal in order to try to hook the student into future purchases (and specifying their stuff for businesses after graduation). This IS the typical operation of such programs (and has been since at least the middle of the 20th century.
If that's the case they make a loss on the deal. Then if the student converts the subsidized equipment to run a competitive system, they lose much of the brand loyalty they tried to buy.
If the finances are better than breakeven then, yes, they would still make some money on the deal.
Seriously:
1) Buy the $699 PC.
2) Get the free XBox console.
3) Install Linux on the PC. (Dual-boot so you can hang on to any Windows-only functionality you need for the XBox or on a separate, swappable, hard drive to provide an "airgap firewall" against possible dual-boot cross-OS malware.)
4) Have fun with Linux.
5) Goodbye Microsoft profit!
I'll be at work, waiting for my shift to end in 3.5 hours. At that point, I would probably welcome an apocalyptic earthquake.
Sorry. According to the prediction the earthquakes are scheduled for 6:00 AM, 12 hours before the Rapture. The already dead get to go first.
Schools are funded, everyone has a job, housing market is stable, health care system is awesome. Right? Nope. But hey, we need to allow no-knock warrants where someone might be committing the heinous act of burning a bunch of DVDs. Clearly that is worthy of felony charges and huge fines. The MPAA & RIAA sure think so.
Of course. From their viewpoint, CD and DVD copying caused the economic collapse.
I wouldn't even be surprised to hear them assert that over their members' media outlets any minute now.
[baryon shortage on helium density evidence], [insufficient fragmentation in molecular clouds], ... it would require an insanely HUGE number of [free roaming planets] to explain dark matter observations.
Thought experiment:
Leave aside problems like not having enough baryons and models not predicting 80% of them (by mass) might organize into free roaming planets.
If there WERE that many free roaming planets would there be an appropriate size and arrangement of them to explain the observations?
And if so, are there observations we could make that would distinguish such a massive fleet of wandering planets from clouds of truly invisible, gravitationally interaction only, dark matter?
Calling people incompetent for not being able to read the minds of physicists from a distance is sheer arrogance.
Especially when the physicists use the same term, "dark matter" without qualifications, to refer to two allegedly separate problems.
If they're going to dumb it down for the newsies who dumb it down further for their readers, thus avoiding handing out any clues, they have only themselves to blame when the general public is clueless.
Most calculations based on stellar orbits consistently come up with figures for dark matter of over 80% of the matter in the universe. There's more than four times as much dark matter as what we can see. And whatever dark matter is, it apparently is diffuse enough that we don't see it micro-lensing anything, and doesn't otherwise interact with light or other EM radiation, because we find no trace of it in the light that reaches earth from all corners of the universe;
There's two ways for "dark matter" to not be visible by microlensing:
1) It's very diffuse rather than being organized into star-sized lumps.
2) It's mostly compressed into planet-sized and smaller lumps - massive enough to hold a bunch of mass per lump but not enough for the lumps to produce detectable microlensing, sef-ignitte, collapse into black holes, or collect into "dust clouds" and obscure the background.
Only four times as much "dark matter" as "visible matter", eh? Solar systems seem to be organized fractally. I wonder if extending that fractical computation might predict enough "homeless planets", distributed in a mostly invisible way, to account for the "missing mass" and missing gravitational lensing?
Even dialup may fail on "snow days". You can't use dialup when the ice storm, falling snow-laden tree branches, or skidding cars have knocked out your phone, cable, and power lines (or a necessary subset of them).