Although there certainly deserves to be a classification note of some kind that identifies those objects which are dominated gravitationally by some other body, I don't think it really is well deserving to be so hard-nosed about dismissing Titan as a planet here either. With the sole exception that it happens to be dominated by Saturn rather than the Sun, it really does fit every other conceivable definition of a planet, and certainly would be called one if it were merely orbiting the Sun.
I do envision that a problem is soon going to develop going the other direction too, in terms of the very small bodies of the Solar System. We have asteroids as a very loose definition of being something roughly inside the orbit of Jupiter that is not really planet sized. A slightly better definition is something smaller than a dwarf planet. Just how small of an object can something be to still be classified as an asteroid? Something the size of a city, a house, a sofa, or a fist (to give some rough scale equivalents)? Does a grain of sand count as something which should be named and given a classification number in the IAU minor planet catalog? We are very nearly at that point of absurdity right now.
I could argue that perhaps a legal definition might even be eventually adopted, where something formally classified as an asteroid might have some sort of "protected" status but smaller object can be manipulated and refined into manufactured good. When people start to get serious about mining asteroids, it will become a big deal. The date that will start to happen is sooner than you think.
BTW, stars are classified based strictly on its spectral type and raw physical characteristics, not by its particular relationship with other objects in the universe. Why should planets be different?
Which is precisely why the definition including a reference to Sol is a bad definition. Taxonomy of astronomical bodies should be made based on the physical characteristics of that body, not the evolutionary state of whatever place it happens to be located near.
I still don't get why Mercury is a planet, yet Titan isn't. Or better yet, why Mercury isn't a dwarf planet either? This was an arbitrary decision of an arbitrary definition that in the long run is going to need an adjustment when other things show up. Indeed I would argue that the definition of clearing its orbit really only applies to Mercury, as the other "major planets" all have atmospheres that could fit a better definition of a planet. Oh wait.... Titan has a substantial atmosphere too, and they didn't want to give that body a "promotion"?
As for how you can tell whether something in another stellar system has cleared its orbit, I would presume that would imply sending a probe to that star system and checking out the planetary bodies when that probe arrives. That kind of astronomical observation is merely going to take a few centuries before NASA or some other similar agency decides to make such an effort.... the definition itself doesn't necessarily have the teeth to cope when new discoveries are found (and have been found!)
I say we stick with the good an ancient definition of planets, which includes the Moon and the Sun, but not Uranus or Neptune. Something like "Visible objects that 'wander' in the sky". Then again the Space Shuttle and the ISS would fit that definition of a planet. See what a reference frame can do to really muck things up?
So what is the point of the heliocentric definition of a planet?
I don't mind if Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and other similar bodies are all classified as "dwarf planets". It would be an excellent definition.
Heck, I think Mercury ought to be classified as perhaps a "dwarf planet" and that a line be drawn between planets that are merely large enough to become spherical and those which can hold an atmosphere. Another category ought to also include those planets for which a majority of the mass is gaseous (aka the "gas giants"). BTW, I would put Titan in the same classification as the Earth, Venus, and Mars under this non-heliocentric classification.
This is only going to become much more of an issue when the exo-planets are studied in detail, and we start to discover smaller non-stellar bodies that don't even orbit stars of any kind except the center of the galaxy. I'd even be willing to wager that the number of these objects that don't even orbit stars that are "planetary sized" outnumber those objects which orbit stars under a reasonable definition of what constitutes a planet.
The current IAU definition really is a poor solution, particularly if they keep tweaking the definition in all sorts of weird ways.
It was stupid to retire the shuttle. NASA should design an updated version that can use the same parts for 1 shuttle and work on the Constellation program.
While I would agree with you in terms of a Shuttle Mark II program that would have built on the shuttle technology and gone in a different direction, I disagree completely with you in terms of retiring the Shuttle.
The Space Shuttle should have been considered a problem technology with the destruction of the Challenger, and it was painfully obvious with the loss of the Columbia. Each flight has at least a 1 in 50 chance of not coming back in one piece, which is a horrible failure rate and for most other endeavors in life is something considered unacceptable. The loss of another vehicle is inevitable if it continues to fly.
The completion of the ISS was something that IMHO was worth the risk, and while other vehicles were in the pipeline to be completed it was useful to keep flying the Space Shuttle. Unfortunately the vehicles intended to "replace" the shuttle in terms of at least getting an astronaut into orbit are not done yet in spite of promises made back years ago. Worse yet, the really useful programs like the DC-X were prematurely canceled before they could even really be tested to see if they work or not. Constellation was hardly the only program that NASA tried to get going, and is merely the last of well over a dozen different projects that NASA has started and eventually canceled as well. Some had even flight history and certainly "bent metal" on many of those projects too.
What for me is so sad is that since the 1960's when James Webb was the NASA administrator not one single manned spaceflight program has gone from the drawing boards to getting into space. Yes, it was under James Webb that the Space Shuttle was proposed and started, so he deserves whatever kudos go to that program in this regard. That to me is a really sad statement, particularly as there have been nine administrators running the agency since him, and seven presidential administrations of both political parties. Blame can be pointed in a whole bunch of ways and areas, but you can't complain about one particular political party nor even a particular administration or president other than nobody has really cared on the top levels of the government about what is happening with NASA.
I'd have to say that this apathy continues with the current presidential administration, as it took nearly half a year just to get a nomination made and submitted to the Senate to run the agency. What Charles Bolden has done since taking charge is to me incredible, but at the same time without support from the President, even this bold leadership will flap in the wind with no practical impact on the agency.
Do we need to keep engineering talent in place to build potentially the next generation of ICBMs and to develop future generations of rockets? Yes, and it is unfortunate that many are being laid off, as are the workers who build these things that have developed fabrication skills that are also going to be lost with the cancellation of all of these programs. What is worse is that the morale of the engineers that are left is abysmal, as most engineers only nominally do their job for the money in the first place. If you tell an engineer to spend a lifetime to develop something only to see it canceled or thrown away at the end, you are also telling that engineer that his whole purpose in life was meaningless. Engineers love to build things and make things happen, so a "make work" jobs program that merely gives them a paycheck is something they most certainly don't want to get involved with except if you were never a good engineer in the first place.
The real question here is how should the billions of dollars projected to be spent in the next several years for NASA projects be spent? This is something that is going to require leadership on a very substantive level, and I am hoping that the leadership will be there. The crucial
I think this is a good point. Gold speculation and advertisements have been talking about double digit inflation in the USA, and based on the current debt load, deficit spending by both the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government, and increased tax obligations from things like the health care legislation are only putting more pressure to devalue the dollar as a way to get a handle on the debt load.
BTW, this is also one of the reasons why China is concerned with holding so much debt that is dollar denominated, and why OPEC is now considering to move its pricing off of the U.S. dollar.. For the past half century (with the exception of perhaps the Carter administration) U.S. foreign policy has been to maintain a strong dollar against other currencies, and that has led to a presumption that dollar denominated assets were considered equivalent to gold (more or less). That is no longer the case.
I actually agree with the AC reply to this saying you are a freaking idiot. I promise you than once the American Republic is no more, your life and the lives of your children, grandchildren, and anybody you may know personally or will ever know will be far worse than it is right now.
I seriously don't understand why some people want to seek the downfall of America. Sure, we have had some idiots running the show at the top, such as the current (and some would say the previous two as well) occupants of the White House, but the American people are trying hard to fix that problem too. No, I'm not happy with American becoming a banana republic, and I am trying to do something about that too.
As for what Russia is doing here.... more power to them! They currently have a monopoly on sending people into space, and they are taking advantage of that monopoly. Being the capitalists that Russia has become, it is awesome that they are raising the price of going up in a spaceship.... which can only encourage companies like SpaceX, Boeing, and Orbital Science to accelerate their spacecraft development to cash in on the gold rush. All three of these companies BTW have vehicles under development which will put people into orbit that is in direct competition to the Soyuz spacecraft, and there are other groups like ARCA and a couple of Canadian companies that might get into the game too.
As for China and Taiwan deciding to increase manufacturing prices, I say BRING IT ON! That would only encourage some investment in domestic manufacturing production and help America get out of its recession. It would also be China shooting itself in the foot if they did that.
As for causing the internal collapse of America, that is being done well enough by those in control of the government within America. No additional help is needed as they are doing seemingly everything possible to cause the economy to collapse as it is and doing precisely the worst possible actions to encourage a recovery. Just wait until the U.S. economy has triple digit inflation, then you will see how bad it really can get.
There still is a role for a professional and experienced astronaut, and the astronauts certainly do much more than flying spacecraft. Even if the whole program is mothballed and somehow NASA boycotts or is blocked from using the Soyuz spacecraft, the astronauts will still have things to do at NASA for awhile.
Still, I'd have to admit that the draw to becoming an astronaut is to get into space and doing stuff "up there".
I do know that several companies have been hiring astronauts explicitly for their services to work in orbit, including Orbital Science, Bigelow Aerospace (currently has about 2-3 positions on their website with a resume request for interested parties), and SpaceX. I expect that all of the astronauts hired by these companies will eventually get into space too at some point in the not too distant future. Heck, I'd dare say they'll make it to space before the current NASA group does on government contracts. Virgin Galactic is also going to be hiring in the not too distant future as well, and those will be full-time paid positions.
From what I've heard, there is even a mild dispute going on with SpaceX in terms of if it will be their pilots flying that vehicle or if it will be NASA astronauts controlling "the stick" on the Dragon vehicles going to the ISS. SpaceX is going to have non-government flight contracts where this will be a more significant detail. Several feelers are already being tendered but are waiting for the flight success of the Falcon 9 before anything firm is signed.
Before Charles Bolden there was Richard Truly and Frederick Gregory (acting administrator for 62 days). So yeah, being an astronaut has at least helped a couple of people in getting the job. Also, more than a few have become deputy administrators and filled other key positions in NASA as well, certainly adding to leadership pool for the agency.
While I would generally agree with what you are saying here, the Shuttle did "prove" that at least in theory a "reusable" vehicle could be built. As a **very** expensive prototype done with six test beds, the Shuttle at least met the engineering test goals of the program, and they did have over 130 different test flights working out some of the bugs in the system with two notable failures.
For an experimental vehicle, I think the Shuttle met its criteria of success, at least comparable to the X-15.... which BTW also took out some lives of some of the test pilots. When viewed from this perspective, the Shuttle program isn't all that bad.
On the other hand, why there are members of Congress that are trying to extend an experimental research vehicle a couple more flights when it has proven itself as unreliable and dangerous merely to take trash down from orbit is beyond me. This next flight of the Shuttle that is supposed to happen tomorrow (Monday) is precisely such a garbage hauler trip.
I've considered an algorithm that would try to compare edit changes from one version to the next and try to at least attribute who wrote literally each and every word in a Wikipedia article, although you are correct that there are some "soft mergers" that simply do a copy/paste from one article to the next without really giving proper attribution.
Attribution of Wikipedia articles is something that is a big deal in a legal sense, and for precisely the kinds of problems you are noting here that can cause some significant heartburn. I wish there were some way to try and do a survey of how much of the content on Wikipedia that these sort of problems from a copy/paste from a supposedly "legal" copy (i.e. from a GFDL'd or CC-by-SA original source) that was merely moved over without proper attribution on the presumption that since it is all copyleft content nobody minds anyway.
This became an even bigger issue with cross-project content moves where it was openly acknowledged for years that edit histories couldn't be preserved. This is no longer the case as content imports are now mostly enabled between the various projects (an admin-only tool), but not everybody is so careful about the process. I also don't think English Wikipedia has this enabled with the other sister projects as it does chew up a fairly significant amount of CPU bandwidth to perform one of these article imports too, but I may be mistaken on this point as well.
As for resellers, it is a huge deal, or even somebody trying to "fork" Wikipedia. I can't even imagine some of the legal headaches if a significant fraction of the community decided to tell the WMF to shove it and started their own version. This happened, BTW, with the Spanish-language community of Wikipedia.
Yes, this makes the original Wikipedia authors liable for copyright infringement. This is a point I've made on several other public wikis where sometimes contributors are fast and loose with culling copyrighted content. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects even have a "test" they apply which is simply called the "Google test". If a suspect piece of prose is considered to have been lifted from another source (there are various ways to suspect this), simply post about 10-15 words into Google and check if the text is somewhere else on the internet.
Such passages tend to be removed on the better Wikipedia and Wikibooks articles.
Attribution implies that the source was noted, and that something more than a paraphrasing was turned into a verbatim quote.
As far as making it dangerous to post on Wikipedia, just make sure all of your own personal contributions are original prose. It may take a little more work (compared to those so lazy they just copy whole paragraphs or more from another source), but it keeps you from any sort of liability on the issue.
The Wikimedia Foundation is absolved of any liability as they function more as an internet service provider with the associated protections that come with it. The WMF does have DMCA take-down procedures that have and are being used when copyright violations are formally noticed as well, with the content being deleted not just from the public view but from the administrator's view of the pages as well. Wikipedia itself isn't going to be in any danger at all, but certainly you should be aware of potential liabilities if you contribute.
This is an insightful comment. Typically a CPU on a typical desktop computer operates at temperatures that are comparable to the heating element of a kitchen stove top. The reason for this is largely due to inefficiencies and the fact that current materials can operate at that temperature, so it isn't that big of a deal.
Most of the earlier computers from the 1970's and earlier (not the micros, but the mini computers and mainframes) all required some sort of significant environmental control system, including flat out refrigeration equipment to keep the components at a reasonable operating temperature. Water cooled circuits weren't unknown either. From this perspective, it wouldn't even be new territory in terms of requiring cooling circuits down to at least liquid nitrogen temperatures if this was useful.
I don't see this as something you would put into an iPod or some portable consumer electronics package, but it could be useful for high-end computer research and for machines that have to do some significant number crunching.
Diffusing governmental authority in the hands of as many people as is possible and pushing that authority down to the lowest possible level to where those impacted by those decisions can have a direct role in the decision making process.
One problem is that this is highly inefficient to the point of being unworkable in modern world.
You are forgetting, of course, that such a governance model was explicitly designed to be inefficient. That is the whole point. Government should be the very last place for efficiency and the whole point of the American experiment was to abolish the central authority entirely. That was the source of the problems in the first place.
Yes, I'll admit that a central planning authority can be more efficient, but it also bring tyranny and loss of freedom to choose. The trick is for where to find that balance, where it does good for everybody to have establish standards.
Then again, I've seen some advanced technological devices that seem to survive without any kind of standard. For example, the profusion of cell phone battery recharging transformers/adaptors that have non-standard interfaces doesn't seem to hurt cell phone sales or stop their market expansion. The whole debate over video formats is interesting, and it is the marketplace of ideas where standards of this nature get worked out.
I'll also point out that international standardization happens not because of some central authority asserting that a change must happen, but by having a whole bunch of people get together and agree to those standards through negotiation and working out differences between each other. Those standards are often voluntary and not always followed either... sometimes for a very good reason.
Data standards certainly don't need to be imposed by a commanding central authority except when trying to communicate with that commanding central authority. In this chicken or egg situation, the question here is why have the chicken in the first place? I've been involved with using and even setting international data standards, and the marketplace of ideas certainly is a useful role model. Besides, very very few actual data standards exist even for official purposes and those tend to be interface type stuff. The internet certainly was not built on data standards imposed from above by a central authority, but rather by grass-roots efforts of ordinary people who had a need and sought to build those standards between each other. For example, nobody is forcing you to use HTML and HTTP for reading graphical hypertext content. It certainly isn't enshrined in the form of law.
A whole bunch of this is simply trust. It is a faith in democracy and the willingness to let ordinary people live their own lives and trust that they will be able to figure things out for themselves when the time comes. That is the type of trust that is really the most difficult to do for some people, particularly those in positions of political authority.
As for the homogenizing aspects of mass-media, that is a separate issue and something completely unrelated to a central authority.
The problem with the Linux kernel is that Linus Torvalds didn't like the "or later" clause in GPL v 2. He started to accept patches to the kernel with this slightly modified version of the GPL.
BTW, his fears did prove to be somewhat legitimate, as can be seen with Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and their abuse of the GFDL. They used the "or later version" clause of that particular licensing document to move the entire text database to CC-by-SA through strong arming the FSF to allowing an escape clause as a legitimate "or later version" in the license. Yeah, "the community" voted on approving the change but it was a biased and stacked vote when that happened anyway, or at least it felt forced to me.
The concern still exists there for the Linux kernel, and it is interesting how even a minor tweak of this nature in a license can significantly impact the legal implications for a project. I put the impact of that decision by Linus Torvalds to be on par with the advertising clause of the original BSD license.
No where does it say in the GPL or other similar licensing models that you are forced to release future code under an open source license. But what it does provide is the "right" to fork the code, the ability to tweak existing software to get it to continue working the way that you need it to work.
What the GPL forces people to do is to "give back" to the community if you use a community resource. You can't have it both ways, as if you are applying a patch or appropriating some licensed software, all the GPL forces you to do is to maintain that same license for tweaks to that software. If you don't want to let others have those tweaks, the answer is simple: Don't distribute the software with your tweaks.
It sounds like you need to actually read the license for a change and see what it says and doesn't say. Where Richard Stallman gets angry is if you use HIS software, or software owned by the FSF, and then claim that software as your own. Microsoft does the same thing BTW, as does Oracle and most other larger organizations.
For those who think the GPL matters in this case, how will it be different when Oracle discontinues development efforts on MySQL?
You might be surprised. At least MySQL can be forked and the code based tweaked by people who aren't Oracle employees. I can't say the same thing about Windows 2000 or some other very definitely proprietary software packages and in fact the GPL may just be the one thing saving that software from complete extinction.
I've seen some glorification of gladiators, but this really is an important point. Each time a gladiator stepped into The Colosseum (or other gladiatorial arena), they had a 50/50 chance of never seeing the next day. Well, usually as there were exceptions. Also it is important to remember that many gladiators were also slaves where their choice was to participate or die in a simple execution where their families would get killed with them. If they participated as a gladiator, their families would (or might) be spared.
Christians typically were a favorite for cannon fodder provided to the gladiators too.
I really don't see how this experiment can genuinely capture the true essence of what it was like as a gladiator, including some of the comments listed above about how the wives of senators and patricians (Roman nobility) would likely have sex with these guys simply for the thrill of getting it on with a guy that might die the next day. This is blood sport taken to an extreme, where thousands of people would spend money as "recreation" to witness the death of somebody whose only crime is that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or had philosophical differences of opinion from their own.
I consider "Environmentalism" to be a religious movement that some individuals are hoping will become an established and official state religion. It has its own mythos, saints and founders, creeds, and theocratic universities. Unfortunately few of these features of this movement are rarely called out as such.
As a religious movement it isn't necessarily terrible, other than when they try to cram their philosophies down the throats of others at the point of a gun. That is where I and others tend to disagree with this philosophy. Of course this can be said about most religious movements and philosophies too.
Government is a monopoly, and is in fact the ultimate monopoly. The State has final say on justice and taxation in a certain geographical area; anything less than that would not be a state.
This is precisely the reason for why the American Republic was founded on the principles of local government having the most authority, locally operated school districts and police departments, and only letting the top most "national" authority having the most limited powers that are absolutely essential for preserving national identity. Diffusing governmental authority in the hands of as many people as is possible and pushing that authority down to the lowest possible level to where those impacted by those decisions can have a direct role in the decision making process.
One thing that ultimately has to prevail under such a model is that you always have the ability to "vote with your feet" if things go wrong. Just ask the governments of Massachusetts and California how that experiment is working out for them. Both are likely to lose seats in the U.S. House of Representatives with the 2010 Census.
Somehow those in authority in what used to be the American Republic have somehow forgotten these principles, or at the very least want to spit in their face. There is also value in having a greater world that is free to simply chuck the whole concept of something like the American Republic and do something else completely different. That is also something lost with this "proposal" that is becoming increasingly hip among the intelligencia when talk of one world government is proposed.
Of course this is precisely the reason for licenses like the GPL that explicitly prohibit this kind of bait and switch tactic for "open source" software development. Trusting and relying upon the goodwill of a for-profit company that can have management changes or get taken over by a different company as is this case will always happen.
Score one more for Richard Stallman being proven correct.
Perhaps that is the reason my ancestors decided to hop on the next ship to America to get out of there. About half of my ancestry is from the British Isles, mostly from England but it includes Wales, Scotland, and Ireland too.
I guess those that stayed behind could put up with anything:)
I'd rather have a bunch of super rich pricks going up into space on their own dime and trying to be "explorers" in search of fame and fortune than have a bunch of government employees going into space being paid for by a bunch of poor people and using money taken at gunpoint from widows and orphans.
Spending government money is a special trust, something not to be taken lightly. Unfortunately too many people don't really take into account where the bulk of most money that the government spends comes from. It isn't the wealthy, and still wouldn't be even if you confiscated everything that the wealthy people in this world have as well.
What exactly do you want? Either you're in space for commercial goals, or you're in them for nationalistic goals. You may call them humaistic goals, but i don't see who is going to pay for that until there is a single global government. And I don't see that happening until there is someone to compete with outside of this globe.
I've never completely understood the hard-core Star Trek fans myself. I like the show in the sense that it explores some interesting themes and can look at concepts that would be otherwise incredibly hard to work with in a "normal" show. The whole story arc of dealing with Kahless is something that would have been impossible to objectively deal with in terms of Jesus or the Shia Islamic Mahdi. I mean, who cares about Klingon religious practices, but what happens to a society when its messianic leader and "savior" returns after thousands of years being gone? That to me is the genius of Star Trek, not the space exploration garbage. I can give many other examples for how Star Trek offers some fun story lines, but space is merely the backdrop, not the reason for being there.
For myself, I want to go into space for profit, and to expand mankind's influence on the universe. I don't care about this humanistic B.S. about world peace and interplanetary harmony. What really ticks me off are stupid things like the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty that are trying to turn extra-terrestrial bodies into scientific playgrounds like Antarctica.
My personal fictional hero is D. Delos Harriman. Now that was a guy who could wheel and deal to get things to happen. Elon Musk thinks it is a good model to use too, and he is quickly becoming the real-life equivalent of that fictional character, solar power panels and all, even though he hasn't built rolling roads yet.
Actually, He-3 has some radioactive by-products and can be somewhat dangerous to use in a fusion reactor. The He-He reaction doesn't give radioactive by-products, but other related reactions do, so you still have to be concerned about radiation from an operating fusion plant using He-3. I'll admit that the radioactivity is nothing compared to working with heavy metals like Uranium and Plutonium, but it still is an issue.
The one problem with dreams of lunar miners extracting He-3, however, is that a practical method of producing nuclear fusion must be found. There are some promising technologies that may eventually get us there, but it isn't a foregone conclusion and at the moment it is completely theoretical. The only significant market for He3 right now is surprisingly for radioactive element detectors, and as a refrigerant for extreme cryogenic research. Apparently He-3 can cool things down to about 0.2 Kelvin, which may have some applications for superconductors on an industrial scale eventually.
The demand for He-3 by the Department of Homeland Security was one that sort of caught me off-guard on the Wikipedia page, and I'd like to find more about that one. Still, I'm not sure if even that application is something which can be profitably met through He-3 extraction from the Moon.
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Although there certainly deserves to be a classification note of some kind that identifies those objects which are dominated gravitationally by some other body, I don't think it really is well deserving to be so hard-nosed about dismissing Titan as a planet here either. With the sole exception that it happens to be dominated by Saturn rather than the Sun, it really does fit every other conceivable definition of a planet, and certainly would be called one if it were merely orbiting the Sun.
I do envision that a problem is soon going to develop going the other direction too, in terms of the very small bodies of the Solar System. We have asteroids as a very loose definition of being something roughly inside the orbit of Jupiter that is not really planet sized. A slightly better definition is something smaller than a dwarf planet. Just how small of an object can something be to still be classified as an asteroid? Something the size of a city, a house, a sofa, or a fist (to give some rough scale equivalents)? Does a grain of sand count as something which should be named and given a classification number in the IAU minor planet catalog? We are very nearly at that point of absurdity right now.
I could argue that perhaps a legal definition might even be eventually adopted, where something formally classified as an asteroid might have some sort of "protected" status but smaller object can be manipulated and refined into manufactured good. When people start to get serious about mining asteroids, it will become a big deal. The date that will start to happen is sooner than you think.
BTW, stars are classified based strictly on its spectral type and raw physical characteristics, not by its particular relationship with other objects in the universe. Why should planets be different?
Which is precisely why the definition including a reference to Sol is a bad definition. Taxonomy of astronomical bodies should be made based on the physical characteristics of that body, not the evolutionary state of whatever place it happens to be located near.
I still don't get why Mercury is a planet, yet Titan isn't. Or better yet, why Mercury isn't a dwarf planet either? This was an arbitrary decision of an arbitrary definition that in the long run is going to need an adjustment when other things show up. Indeed I would argue that the definition of clearing its orbit really only applies to Mercury, as the other "major planets" all have atmospheres that could fit a better definition of a planet. Oh wait.... Titan has a substantial atmosphere too, and they didn't want to give that body a "promotion"?
As for how you can tell whether something in another stellar system has cleared its orbit, I would presume that would imply sending a probe to that star system and checking out the planetary bodies when that probe arrives. That kind of astronomical observation is merely going to take a few centuries before NASA or some other similar agency decides to make such an effort.... the definition itself doesn't necessarily have the teeth to cope when new discoveries are found (and have been found!)
I say we stick with the good an ancient definition of planets, which includes the Moon and the Sun, but not Uranus or Neptune. Something like "Visible objects that 'wander' in the sky". Then again the Space Shuttle and the ISS would fit that definition of a planet. See what a reference frame can do to really muck things up?
So what is the point of the heliocentric definition of a planet?
I don't mind if Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and other similar bodies are all classified as "dwarf planets". It would be an excellent definition.
Heck, I think Mercury ought to be classified as perhaps a "dwarf planet" and that a line be drawn between planets that are merely large enough to become spherical and those which can hold an atmosphere. Another category ought to also include those planets for which a majority of the mass is gaseous (aka the "gas giants"). BTW, I would put Titan in the same classification as the Earth, Venus, and Mars under this non-heliocentric classification.
This is only going to become much more of an issue when the exo-planets are studied in detail, and we start to discover smaller non-stellar bodies that don't even orbit stars of any kind except the center of the galaxy. I'd even be willing to wager that the number of these objects that don't even orbit stars that are "planetary sized" outnumber those objects which orbit stars under a reasonable definition of what constitutes a planet.
The current IAU definition really is a poor solution, particularly if they keep tweaking the definition in all sorts of weird ways.
It was stupid to retire the shuttle. NASA should design an updated version that can use the same parts for 1 shuttle and work on the Constellation program.
While I would agree with you in terms of a Shuttle Mark II program that would have built on the shuttle technology and gone in a different direction, I disagree completely with you in terms of retiring the Shuttle.
The Space Shuttle should have been considered a problem technology with the destruction of the Challenger, and it was painfully obvious with the loss of the Columbia. Each flight has at least a 1 in 50 chance of not coming back in one piece, which is a horrible failure rate and for most other endeavors in life is something considered unacceptable. The loss of another vehicle is inevitable if it continues to fly.
The completion of the ISS was something that IMHO was worth the risk, and while other vehicles were in the pipeline to be completed it was useful to keep flying the Space Shuttle. Unfortunately the vehicles intended to "replace" the shuttle in terms of at least getting an astronaut into orbit are not done yet in spite of promises made back years ago. Worse yet, the really useful programs like the DC-X were prematurely canceled before they could even really be tested to see if they work or not. Constellation was hardly the only program that NASA tried to get going, and is merely the last of well over a dozen different projects that NASA has started and eventually canceled as well. Some had even flight history and certainly "bent metal" on many of those projects too.
What for me is so sad is that since the 1960's when James Webb was the NASA administrator not one single manned spaceflight program has gone from the drawing boards to getting into space. Yes, it was under James Webb that the Space Shuttle was proposed and started, so he deserves whatever kudos go to that program in this regard. That to me is a really sad statement, particularly as there have been nine administrators running the agency since him, and seven presidential administrations of both political parties. Blame can be pointed in a whole bunch of ways and areas, but you can't complain about one particular political party nor even a particular administration or president other than nobody has really cared on the top levels of the government about what is happening with NASA.
I'd have to say that this apathy continues with the current presidential administration, as it took nearly half a year just to get a nomination made and submitted to the Senate to run the agency. What Charles Bolden has done since taking charge is to me incredible, but at the same time without support from the President, even this bold leadership will flap in the wind with no practical impact on the agency.
Do we need to keep engineering talent in place to build potentially the next generation of ICBMs and to develop future generations of rockets? Yes, and it is unfortunate that many are being laid off, as are the workers who build these things that have developed fabrication skills that are also going to be lost with the cancellation of all of these programs. What is worse is that the morale of the engineers that are left is abysmal, as most engineers only nominally do their job for the money in the first place. If you tell an engineer to spend a lifetime to develop something only to see it canceled or thrown away at the end, you are also telling that engineer that his whole purpose in life was meaningless. Engineers love to build things and make things happen, so a "make work" jobs program that merely gives them a paycheck is something they most certainly don't want to get involved with except if you were never a good engineer in the first place.
The real question here is how should the billions of dollars projected to be spent in the next several years for NASA projects be spent? This is something that is going to require leadership on a very substantive level, and I am hoping that the leadership will be there. The crucial
I think this is a good point. Gold speculation and advertisements have been talking about double digit inflation in the USA, and based on the current debt load, deficit spending by both the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government, and increased tax obligations from things like the health care legislation are only putting more pressure to devalue the dollar as a way to get a handle on the debt load.
BTW, this is also one of the reasons why China is concerned with holding so much debt that is dollar denominated, and why OPEC is now considering to move its pricing off of the U.S. dollar.. For the past half century (with the exception of perhaps the Carter administration) U.S. foreign policy has been to maintain a strong dollar against other currencies, and that has led to a presumption that dollar denominated assets were considered equivalent to gold (more or less). That is no longer the case.
I actually agree with the AC reply to this saying you are a freaking idiot. I promise you than once the American Republic is no more, your life and the lives of your children, grandchildren, and anybody you may know personally or will ever know will be far worse than it is right now.
I seriously don't understand why some people want to seek the downfall of America. Sure, we have had some idiots running the show at the top, such as the current (and some would say the previous two as well) occupants of the White House, but the American people are trying hard to fix that problem too. No, I'm not happy with American becoming a banana republic, and I am trying to do something about that too.
As for what Russia is doing here.... more power to them! They currently have a monopoly on sending people into space, and they are taking advantage of that monopoly. Being the capitalists that Russia has become, it is awesome that they are raising the price of going up in a spaceship.... which can only encourage companies like SpaceX, Boeing, and Orbital Science to accelerate their spacecraft development to cash in on the gold rush. All three of these companies BTW have vehicles under development which will put people into orbit that is in direct competition to the Soyuz spacecraft, and there are other groups like ARCA and a couple of Canadian companies that might get into the game too.
As for China and Taiwan deciding to increase manufacturing prices, I say BRING IT ON! That would only encourage some investment in domestic manufacturing production and help America get out of its recession. It would also be China shooting itself in the foot if they did that.
As for causing the internal collapse of America, that is being done well enough by those in control of the government within America. No additional help is needed as they are doing seemingly everything possible to cause the economy to collapse as it is and doing precisely the worst possible actions to encourage a recovery. Just wait until the U.S. economy has triple digit inflation, then you will see how bad it really can get.
There still is a role for a professional and experienced astronaut, and the astronauts certainly do much more than flying spacecraft. Even if the whole program is mothballed and somehow NASA boycotts or is blocked from using the Soyuz spacecraft, the astronauts will still have things to do at NASA for awhile.
Still, I'd have to admit that the draw to becoming an astronaut is to get into space and doing stuff "up there".
I do know that several companies have been hiring astronauts explicitly for their services to work in orbit, including Orbital Science, Bigelow Aerospace (currently has about 2-3 positions on their website with a resume request for interested parties), and SpaceX. I expect that all of the astronauts hired by these companies will eventually get into space too at some point in the not too distant future. Heck, I'd dare say they'll make it to space before the current NASA group does on government contracts. Virgin Galactic is also going to be hiring in the not too distant future as well, and those will be full-time paid positions.
From what I've heard, there is even a mild dispute going on with SpaceX in terms of if it will be their pilots flying that vehicle or if it will be NASA astronauts controlling "the stick" on the Dragon vehicles going to the ISS. SpaceX is going to have non-government flight contracts where this will be a more significant detail. Several feelers are already being tendered but are waiting for the flight success of the Falcon 9 before anything firm is signed.
Before Charles Bolden there was Richard Truly and Frederick Gregory (acting administrator for 62 days). So yeah, being an astronaut has at least helped a couple of people in getting the job. Also, more than a few have become deputy administrators and filled other key positions in NASA as well, certainly adding to leadership pool for the agency.
While I would generally agree with what you are saying here, the Shuttle did "prove" that at least in theory a "reusable" vehicle could be built. As a **very** expensive prototype done with six test beds, the Shuttle at least met the engineering test goals of the program, and they did have over 130 different test flights working out some of the bugs in the system with two notable failures.
For an experimental vehicle, I think the Shuttle met its criteria of success, at least comparable to the X-15.... which BTW also took out some lives of some of the test pilots. When viewed from this perspective, the Shuttle program isn't all that bad.
On the other hand, why there are members of Congress that are trying to extend an experimental research vehicle a couple more flights when it has proven itself as unreliable and dangerous merely to take trash down from orbit is beyond me. This next flight of the Shuttle that is supposed to happen tomorrow (Monday) is precisely such a garbage hauler trip.
I've considered an algorithm that would try to compare edit changes from one version to the next and try to at least attribute who wrote literally each and every word in a Wikipedia article, although you are correct that there are some "soft mergers" that simply do a copy/paste from one article to the next without really giving proper attribution.
Attribution of Wikipedia articles is something that is a big deal in a legal sense, and for precisely the kinds of problems you are noting here that can cause some significant heartburn. I wish there were some way to try and do a survey of how much of the content on Wikipedia that these sort of problems from a copy/paste from a supposedly "legal" copy (i.e. from a GFDL'd or CC-by-SA original source) that was merely moved over without proper attribution on the presumption that since it is all copyleft content nobody minds anyway.
This became an even bigger issue with cross-project content moves where it was openly acknowledged for years that edit histories couldn't be preserved. This is no longer the case as content imports are now mostly enabled between the various projects (an admin-only tool), but not everybody is so careful about the process. I also don't think English Wikipedia has this enabled with the other sister projects as it does chew up a fairly significant amount of CPU bandwidth to perform one of these article imports too, but I may be mistaken on this point as well.
As for resellers, it is a huge deal, or even somebody trying to "fork" Wikipedia. I can't even imagine some of the legal headaches if a significant fraction of the community decided to tell the WMF to shove it and started their own version. This happened, BTW, with the Spanish-language community of Wikipedia.
Yes, this makes the original Wikipedia authors liable for copyright infringement. This is a point I've made on several other public wikis where sometimes contributors are fast and loose with culling copyrighted content. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects even have a "test" they apply which is simply called the "Google test". If a suspect piece of prose is considered to have been lifted from another source (there are various ways to suspect this), simply post about 10-15 words into Google and check if the text is somewhere else on the internet.
Such passages tend to be removed on the better Wikipedia and Wikibooks articles.
Attribution implies that the source was noted, and that something more than a paraphrasing was turned into a verbatim quote.
As far as making it dangerous to post on Wikipedia, just make sure all of your own personal contributions are original prose. It may take a little more work (compared to those so lazy they just copy whole paragraphs or more from another source), but it keeps you from any sort of liability on the issue.
The Wikimedia Foundation is absolved of any liability as they function more as an internet service provider with the associated protections that come with it. The WMF does have DMCA take-down procedures that have and are being used when copyright violations are formally noticed as well, with the content being deleted not just from the public view but from the administrator's view of the pages as well. Wikipedia itself isn't going to be in any danger at all, but certainly you should be aware of potential liabilities if you contribute.
This is an insightful comment. Typically a CPU on a typical desktop computer operates at temperatures that are comparable to the heating element of a kitchen stove top. The reason for this is largely due to inefficiencies and the fact that current materials can operate at that temperature, so it isn't that big of a deal.
Most of the earlier computers from the 1970's and earlier (not the micros, but the mini computers and mainframes) all required some sort of significant environmental control system, including flat out refrigeration equipment to keep the components at a reasonable operating temperature. Water cooled circuits weren't unknown either. From this perspective, it wouldn't even be new territory in terms of requiring cooling circuits down to at least liquid nitrogen temperatures if this was useful.
I don't see this as something you would put into an iPod or some portable consumer electronics package, but it could be useful for high-end computer research and for machines that have to do some significant number crunching.
Diffusing governmental authority in the hands of as many people as is possible and pushing that authority down to the lowest possible level to where those impacted by those decisions can have a direct role in the decision making process.
One problem is that this is highly inefficient to the point of being unworkable in modern world.
You are forgetting, of course, that such a governance model was explicitly designed to be inefficient. That is the whole point. Government should be the very last place for efficiency and the whole point of the American experiment was to abolish the central authority entirely. That was the source of the problems in the first place.
Yes, I'll admit that a central planning authority can be more efficient, but it also bring tyranny and loss of freedom to choose. The trick is for where to find that balance, where it does good for everybody to have establish standards.
Then again, I've seen some advanced technological devices that seem to survive without any kind of standard. For example, the profusion of cell phone battery recharging transformers/adaptors that have non-standard interfaces doesn't seem to hurt cell phone sales or stop their market expansion. The whole debate over video formats is interesting, and it is the marketplace of ideas where standards of this nature get worked out.
I'll also point out that international standardization happens not because of some central authority asserting that a change must happen, but by having a whole bunch of people get together and agree to those standards through negotiation and working out differences between each other. Those standards are often voluntary and not always followed either... sometimes for a very good reason.
Data standards certainly don't need to be imposed by a commanding central authority except when trying to communicate with that commanding central authority. In this chicken or egg situation, the question here is why have the chicken in the first place? I've been involved with using and even setting international data standards, and the marketplace of ideas certainly is a useful role model. Besides, very very few actual data standards exist even for official purposes and those tend to be interface type stuff. The internet certainly was not built on data standards imposed from above by a central authority, but rather by grass-roots efforts of ordinary people who had a need and sought to build those standards between each other. For example, nobody is forcing you to use HTML and HTTP for reading graphical hypertext content. It certainly isn't enshrined in the form of law.
A whole bunch of this is simply trust. It is a faith in democracy and the willingness to let ordinary people live their own lives and trust that they will be able to figure things out for themselves when the time comes. That is the type of trust that is really the most difficult to do for some people, particularly those in positions of political authority.
As for the homogenizing aspects of mass-media, that is a separate issue and something completely unrelated to a central authority.
The problem with the Linux kernel is that Linus Torvalds didn't like the "or later" clause in GPL v 2. He started to accept patches to the kernel with this slightly modified version of the GPL.
BTW, his fears did prove to be somewhat legitimate, as can be seen with Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and their abuse of the GFDL. They used the "or later version" clause of that particular licensing document to move the entire text database to CC-by-SA through strong arming the FSF to allowing an escape clause as a legitimate "or later version" in the license. Yeah, "the community" voted on approving the change but it was a biased and stacked vote when that happened anyway, or at least it felt forced to me.
The concern still exists there for the Linux kernel, and it is interesting how even a minor tweak of this nature in a license can significantly impact the legal implications for a project. I put the impact of that decision by Linus Torvalds to be on par with the advertising clause of the original BSD license.
No where does it say in the GPL or other similar licensing models that you are forced to release future code under an open source license. But what it does provide is the "right" to fork the code, the ability to tweak existing software to get it to continue working the way that you need it to work.
What the GPL forces people to do is to "give back" to the community if you use a community resource. You can't have it both ways, as if you are applying a patch or appropriating some licensed software, all the GPL forces you to do is to maintain that same license for tweaks to that software. If you don't want to let others have those tweaks, the answer is simple: Don't distribute the software with your tweaks.
It sounds like you need to actually read the license for a change and see what it says and doesn't say. Where Richard Stallman gets angry is if you use HIS software, or software owned by the FSF, and then claim that software as your own. Microsoft does the same thing BTW, as does Oracle and most other larger organizations.
For those who think the GPL matters in this case, how will it be different when Oracle discontinues development efforts on MySQL?
You might be surprised. At least MySQL can be forked and the code based tweaked by people who aren't Oracle employees. I can't say the same thing about Windows 2000 or some other very definitely proprietary software packages and in fact the GPL may just be the one thing saving that software from complete extinction.
I've seen some glorification of gladiators, but this really is an important point. Each time a gladiator stepped into The Colosseum (or other gladiatorial arena), they had a 50/50 chance of never seeing the next day. Well, usually as there were exceptions. Also it is important to remember that many gladiators were also slaves where their choice was to participate or die in a simple execution where their families would get killed with them. If they participated as a gladiator, their families would (or might) be spared.
Christians typically were a favorite for cannon fodder provided to the gladiators too.
I really don't see how this experiment can genuinely capture the true essence of what it was like as a gladiator, including some of the comments listed above about how the wives of senators and patricians (Roman nobility) would likely have sex with these guys simply for the thrill of getting it on with a guy that might die the next day. This is blood sport taken to an extreme, where thousands of people would spend money as "recreation" to witness the death of somebody whose only crime is that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or had philosophical differences of opinion from their own.
I consider "Environmentalism" to be a religious movement that some individuals are hoping will become an established and official state religion. It has its own mythos, saints and founders, creeds, and theocratic universities. Unfortunately few of these features of this movement are rarely called out as such.
As a religious movement it isn't necessarily terrible, other than when they try to cram their philosophies down the throats of others at the point of a gun. That is where I and others tend to disagree with this philosophy. Of course this can be said about most religious movements and philosophies too.
Government is a monopoly, and is in fact the ultimate monopoly. The State has final say on justice and taxation in a certain geographical area; anything less than that would not be a state.
This is precisely the reason for why the American Republic was founded on the principles of local government having the most authority, locally operated school districts and police departments, and only letting the top most "national" authority having the most limited powers that are absolutely essential for preserving national identity. Diffusing governmental authority in the hands of as many people as is possible and pushing that authority down to the lowest possible level to where those impacted by those decisions can have a direct role in the decision making process.
One thing that ultimately has to prevail under such a model is that you always have the ability to "vote with your feet" if things go wrong. Just ask the governments of Massachusetts and California how that experiment is working out for them. Both are likely to lose seats in the U.S. House of Representatives with the 2010 Census.
Somehow those in authority in what used to be the American Republic have somehow forgotten these principles, or at the very least want to spit in their face. There is also value in having a greater world that is free to simply chuck the whole concept of something like the American Republic and do something else completely different. That is also something lost with this "proposal" that is becoming increasingly hip among the intelligencia when talk of one world government is proposed.
Of course this is precisely the reason for licenses like the GPL that explicitly prohibit this kind of bait and switch tactic for "open source" software development. Trusting and relying upon the goodwill of a for-profit company that can have management changes or get taken over by a different company as is this case will always happen.
Score one more for Richard Stallman being proven correct.
Perhaps that is the reason my ancestors decided to hop on the next ship to America to get out of there. About half of my ancestry is from the British Isles, mostly from England but it includes Wales, Scotland, and Ireland too.
I guess those that stayed behind could put up with anything :)
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. Instead I have this simple reply:
Amen!
I'd rather have a bunch of super rich pricks going up into space on their own dime and trying to be "explorers" in search of fame and fortune than have a bunch of government employees going into space being paid for by a bunch of poor people and using money taken at gunpoint from widows and orphans.
Spending government money is a special trust, something not to be taken lightly. Unfortunately too many people don't really take into account where the bulk of most money that the government spends comes from. It isn't the wealthy, and still wouldn't be even if you confiscated everything that the wealthy people in this world have as well.
What exactly do you want? Either you're in space for commercial goals, or you're in them for nationalistic goals. You may call them humaistic goals, but i don't see who is going to pay for that until there is a single global government. And I don't see that happening until there is someone to compete with outside of this globe.
I've never completely understood the hard-core Star Trek fans myself. I like the show in the sense that it explores some interesting themes and can look at concepts that would be otherwise incredibly hard to work with in a "normal" show. The whole story arc of dealing with Kahless is something that would have been impossible to objectively deal with in terms of Jesus or the Shia Islamic Mahdi. I mean, who cares about Klingon religious practices, but what happens to a society when its messianic leader and "savior" returns after thousands of years being gone? That to me is the genius of Star Trek, not the space exploration garbage. I can give many other examples for how Star Trek offers some fun story lines, but space is merely the backdrop, not the reason for being there.
For myself, I want to go into space for profit, and to expand mankind's influence on the universe. I don't care about this humanistic B.S. about world peace and interplanetary harmony. What really ticks me off are stupid things like the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty that are trying to turn extra-terrestrial bodies into scientific playgrounds like Antarctica.
My personal fictional hero is D. Delos Harriman. Now that was a guy who could wheel and deal to get things to happen. Elon Musk thinks it is a good model to use too, and he is quickly becoming the real-life equivalent of that fictional character, solar power panels and all, even though he hasn't built rolling roads yet.
Actually, He-3 has some radioactive by-products and can be somewhat dangerous to use in a fusion reactor. The He-He reaction doesn't give radioactive by-products, but other related reactions do, so you still have to be concerned about radiation from an operating fusion plant using He-3. I'll admit that the radioactivity is nothing compared to working with heavy metals like Uranium and Plutonium, but it still is an issue.
The one problem with dreams of lunar miners extracting He-3, however, is that a practical method of producing nuclear fusion must be found. There are some promising technologies that may eventually get us there, but it isn't a foregone conclusion and at the moment it is completely theoretical. The only significant market for He3 right now is surprisingly for radioactive element detectors, and as a refrigerant for extreme cryogenic research. Apparently He-3 can cool things down to about 0.2 Kelvin, which may have some applications for superconductors on an industrial scale eventually.
The demand for He-3 by the Department of Homeland Security was one that sort of caught me off-guard on the Wikipedia page, and I'd like to find more about that one. Still, I'm not sure if even that application is something which can be profitably met through He-3 extraction from the Moon.