They've already said it. As far as I can tell, the article is simply rehashing the dispute currently being argued in court, and this information is months old. There's nothing new in it, other than SCO suckering in a gullible reporter who hasn't been following the court case.
The article is just attention grabbing and spin by Mr. McBride.
Initially the lawsuit was over copyrights, but SCO was unable to produce any evidence that IBM violated SCO copyrights, and SCO turned it into a licensing battle, which they are not winning either.
Re:The future sucks, it always does
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Why does the future always suck?
Maybe that seems more realistic than the stuff Arthur C. Clarke used to put out, which was boundlessly optimistic, and the future never sucked.
Cases in point:
The level of space technology in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The race to land first on the moon, in which the USA, Britain and the USSR (Russia) each mounted an effort to land on the moon, and they all succeeded simultaneously.
Childhood's End, in which the aliens were 100% good and noble and had only the best interests in humanity at heart.
Sky and Telescope (my favorite) Scientific American (2nd favorite) National Geographic (interesting photography) Air and Space Smithsonian
Living people have indeed witnessed Venus transits
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· Score: 1, Insightful
...no living person has witnessed it before today.
Well, this actually isn't true.
Plenty of living people have witnessed Venus transits before today.
What is true is that nobody now living has ever personally witnessed a Venus transit, since the last one occurred over 100 years ago, and everyone who witnessed it is now dead.
Could this by any chance have anything to do with the Dark Energy "antigravity" effect that the universe appears to be experiencing?
No. What you're talking about is the motions of distant galaxies.
What the article is talking about is powerful and extremely massive black holes at the centers of certain galaxies, whose centers are obscured by dust.
Using a technique of observing the same objects at widely different wavelengths and correlating the observations, spectra can be obtained, yielding information that implies the existence of the black holes.
This population had been theorized, but not observed until now.
You are, however, presuming we *can* make observations of the previous cycle.
No, I'm not. I am asserting that observations (in the current era, of course) do not support anything like cycles, or that the expansion will change to a contraction.
The observations of the character of the current expansion (including the observations made by Chandra cited in the article) imply that the current expansion will continue forever, and that it is accelerating.
Obviously we don't know if it will continue forever or not, but there is no viable theory that suggests otherwise.
By "viable", I mean a theory that does not conflict in a big way with observations.
The article itself refers to the recent observations by Chandra which show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that this acceleration started about 6 billion years ago after a period of decelerating.
The Hubble Space Telescope has made observations of supernovae which show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating unexpectedly.
The whole point of the article was to show that the Chandra observations of galaxy clusters agreed with previous observations of supernovae that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
There is no evidence at all for oscillation. It is an interesting idea, but it is simply not supported by any facts at all.
By the way, here is the part of your comment I was responding to:
Why are they ignoring the obvious (at least to me) possiblity that the universe oscillates around some optimal size. Imagine the universe as a rubber ball. Squeeze the ball and let it go. Every particle inside will immediately start moving away from the others at an accelerated pace, continuing to accelerate until passing the rest boundary, when it will start slowing down.
I thought it was decided that the universe's expansion was expanding at the speed of light.
No. The expansion of the universe refers to the fact that distant galaxies are moving away from us, and that the farther they are, the faster they are moving. This is expressed by the Hubble constant, which has a value of about 50 km/s/Mpc.
The acceleration of the expansion is reflected as this "constant" increasing with increasing distance.
The acceleration is caused by Dark Energy, not Dark Matter.
Dark Matter is either normal matter or subnuclear matter that makes its presence felt as increased gravity, but is not directly observable.
I realize that they have technical explanations of how they are moving faster than light, but the fact is that there are (as far as I know) never any consequences or effects of either a limited lightspeed, or moving faster than the limited lightspeed, except that they can get to remote stars and planets faster than it would otherwise take at a limited speed.
Operationally, they are in a flat Euclidean space (aka E3) with no limits on speed (kind of like the way the lot of a Hollywood prime-time adventure series must seem to its inhabitants).
If there ever were any consequences or effects of either a limited lightspeed, or moving faster than the limited lightspeed in any Star Trek episode, I'd love to be educated.
By the way, I am a (not super hard-core) Star Trek fan, and I do enjoy having this debate with my friends who are harder-core fans than I am.
"What is the universe" and "What is the shape of the universe" are two different questions.
I don't think the universe being discussed is "everything that exists".
The shape being discussed is more technically the shape (or topological character) of the geometry of the universe we find ourselves in.
There are many kinds of shapes that are possible, some "space filling" and some not. (I am sure there is a more correct technical term from topology to describe "space filling".)
The question of shape does not address what's in the gaps if it's not space-filling.
In the Star Trek, Euclidean world, the universe is flat, the speed of light appears to be essentially infinite and there is also no physical limit to speed, and simultaneity holds.
This is clearly not the case in our universe, and locally, it's not even flat, but positively curved.
The overally curvature has been debated ever since Einstein released General Relativity, and the answer seems to vacillate between flat and negatively curved.
The article is discussing the simplest kind of negative curvature, but it is taking the discussion to extremes that I have not seen discussed before.
The trumpet shape being discussed is a two-dimensional analog of the actual case in our universe, and is clearly not space-filling.
I wasn't counting on it succeeding, but if it does, that would certainly shorten the time frame!
It's actually kind of funny what has happened so far: Metaphorically speaking, IBM has been turning over stones, send SCO scurrying, cockroach-like, for cover under another stone.
Eventually they're going to run out of stones, or they're going to get squished, or they will find a stone that resists turning over.
I've seen alot less SCO news lately. I hope that this is a sign that it's almost over.
"Almost over"?
The SCO trial with IBM hasn't even begun yet.
There are one or two other cases with SCO (vs. Novell and/or Red Hat) -- I don't know what phase those are in.
They are still in the discovery phase in the case of SCO vs. IBM, where they are debating what evidence will be included in the trial, and both IBM and SCO are pressing each other for information they believe is there, or for information that one side claims is there, but the other side claims does not exist.
This thing may never reach trial -- I assume that is SCO's goal. IBM wants it to, so that precedents are set and issues are settled. SCO just wants people to do what they tell them and they want money. They want to keep things murky and scary.
In a hundred years or so, when Mars is colonized, there will probably be museams at the landing spots of the various rovers with all their debris collected and displayed. People will pass by and ooh and aah at our antique technology.
Yeah, in 100 years, preservationists will gather all that crap up and put it into museums.
In 200 years, later preservationists will gather all the stuff out of the museums, and strew it over the landscape, to make it "as it was" when humans made the first robotic baby-steps in space exploration.
REXX was way ahead of its time when it came out, and when I used it in 1989, it was still very powerful and useful, though it was playing catchup with the personal computer world.
The programs we ran on the the IBM 370-type mainframes generally had their user interfaces written in REXX, and they were easy to write and easy to change.
REXX became the scripting language of choice for OS/2, which beats to hell the pitiable DOS batch file language, but other scripting languages have far surpassed it now, yet play a similar role.
So, I'd say REXX is pretty much a relic, but I still have fond memories of using it to advantage 15 years ago.
All this info is in the press release, but here is my commentary on it. They haven't had a chance to really study the image yet--it was just released to everyone--scientists and lay people alike.
...the million-second-long exposure reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called "dark ages," the time shortly after the big bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dark universe. The new image should offer new insights into what types of objects reheated the universe long ago.
It goes back to an era quite a bit earlier than the earlier deep-fields--about 400 and 800 million years after the big bang--and they are noticing quite a bit more chaos in the early universe, as the first galaxies were forming:
In vibrant contrast to the image's rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others like links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting. Their strange shapes are a far cry from the majestic spiral and elliptical galaxies we see today. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge.
So, they are already seeing oddball things that they didn't see in earlier deep-field images.
The image as presented is actually a composite of two images, one taken in visible light and one taken in near-infrared. This allows the image to show details that would have normally been obscurred by dust.
The post was exactly and certainly a troll: It was a copy of a good message from September 21st, 2003 about the Galileo probe. It added a sig, which was the troll "payload".
The whole point of the post was for people to see the sig.
Otherwise, the post was redundant and was offtopic. It was also informative (if you're interested in Galileo, not Saturn), but only because it slavishly copied an original good post.
The whole point of the post was to fool moderators and trick people into reading the sig. That makes it a troll.
Slashdot Mirror
They've already said it. As far as I can tell, the article is simply rehashing the dispute currently being argued in court, and this information is months old. There's nothing new in it, other than SCO suckering in a gullible reporter who hasn't been following the court case.
The article is just attention grabbing and spin by Mr. McBride.
Initially the lawsuit was over copyrights, but SCO was unable to produce any evidence that IBM violated SCO copyrights, and SCO turned it into a licensing battle, which they are not winning either.
Maybe that seems more realistic than the stuff Arthur C. Clarke used to put out, which was boundlessly optimistic, and the future never sucked.
Cases in point:
This statement is preposterous, but I think I know what he means:
The best counterexample of Trippi's original statement is the chess match between Kasparov and "the world" in 1999.
The world was voting on their moves, and the majority of average players often won out over the best players, thus lowering the level of their play.
Sky and Telescope (my favorite)
Scientific American (2nd favorite)
National Geographic (interesting photography)
Air and Space
Smithsonian
Well, this actually isn't true.
Plenty of living people have witnessed Venus transits before today.
What is true is that nobody now living has ever personally witnessed a Venus transit, since the last one occurred over 100 years ago, and everyone who witnessed it is now dead.
Bravo! This is one of the funniest Slashdot posts I've ever seen!
No. What you're talking about is the motions of distant galaxies.
What the article is talking about is powerful and extremely massive black holes at the centers of certain galaxies, whose centers are obscured by dust.
Using a technique of observing the same objects at widely different wavelengths and correlating the observations, spectra can be obtained, yielding information that implies the existence of the black holes.
This population had been theorized, but not observed until now.
Reminds me of a joke:
Q: What's the difference between an actuary and an accountant?
A: An actuary has a personality.
No, I'm not. I am asserting that observations (in the current era, of course) do not support anything like cycles, or that the expansion will change to a contraction.
The observations of the character of the current expansion (including the observations made by Chandra cited in the article) imply that the current expansion will continue forever, and that it is accelerating.
Obviously we don't know if it will continue forever or not, but there is no viable theory that suggests otherwise.
By "viable", I mean a theory that does not conflict in a big way with observations.
He has certainly been under appreciated since Copernicus.
See this for more information about him, and this for some similar views.
The whole point of the article was to show that the Chandra observations of galaxy clusters agreed with previous observations of supernovae that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
There is no evidence at all for oscillation. It is an interesting idea, but it is simply not supported by any facts at all.
By the way, here is the part of your comment I was responding to:
Why not? Because observations do not support it. Other than that, it's a fine idea!
You are quite right.
Here is a synopsis of signs that things are due for a big shakeup:
The last two are probably not mandatory, but most people feel like any general theory should account for those two things.
No. The expansion of the universe refers to the fact that distant galaxies are moving away from us, and that the farther they are, the faster they are moving. This is expressed by the Hubble constant, which has a value of about 50 km/s/Mpc.
The acceleration of the expansion is reflected as this "constant" increasing with increasing distance.
The acceleration is caused by Dark Energy, not Dark Matter.
Dark Matter is either normal matter or subnuclear matter that makes its presence felt as increased gravity, but is not directly observable.
Dark Energy is not well understood at all.
Launching a mission to put a man on the moon for a 3rd world country like China is a huge waste of resources for nothing but a little prestige.
Having a space station or at least a few low earth-orbit missions is actually somewhat useful.
So, it seems to me that they have returned to their senses.
I realize that they have technical explanations of how they are moving faster than light, but the fact is that there are (as far as I know) never any consequences or effects of either a limited lightspeed, or moving faster than the limited lightspeed, except that they can get to remote stars and planets faster than it would otherwise take at a limited speed.
Operationally, they are in a flat Euclidean space (aka E3) with no limits on speed (kind of like the way the lot of a Hollywood prime-time adventure series must seem to its inhabitants).
If there ever were any consequences or effects of either a limited lightspeed, or moving faster than the limited lightspeed in any Star Trek episode, I'd love to be educated.
By the way, I am a (not super hard-core) Star Trek fan, and I do enjoy having this debate with my friends who are harder-core fans than I am.
"What is the universe" and "What is the shape of the universe" are two different questions.
I don't think the universe being discussed is "everything that exists".
The shape being discussed is more technically the shape (or topological character) of the geometry of the universe we find ourselves in.
There are many kinds of shapes that are possible, some "space filling" and some not. (I am sure there is a more correct technical term from topology to describe "space filling".)
The question of shape does not address what's in the gaps if it's not space-filling.
In the Star Trek, Euclidean world, the universe is flat, the speed of light appears to be essentially infinite and there is also no physical limit to speed, and simultaneity holds.
This is clearly not the case in our universe, and locally, it's not even flat, but positively curved.
The overally curvature has been debated ever since Einstein released General Relativity, and the answer seems to vacillate between flat and negatively curved.
The article is discussing the simplest kind of negative curvature, but it is taking the discussion to extremes that I have not seen discussed before.
The trumpet shape being discussed is a two-dimensional analog of the actual case in our universe, and is clearly not space-filling.
I wasn't counting on it succeeding, but if it does, that would certainly shorten the time frame!
It's actually kind of funny what has happened so far: Metaphorically speaking, IBM has been turning over stones, send SCO scurrying, cockroach-like, for cover under another stone.
Eventually they're going to run out of stones, or they're going to get squished, or they will find a stone that resists turning over.
"Almost over"?
The SCO trial with IBM hasn't even begun yet.
There are one or two other cases with SCO (vs. Novell and/or Red Hat) -- I don't know what phase those are in.
They are still in the discovery phase in the case of SCO vs. IBM, where they are debating what evidence will be included in the trial, and both IBM and SCO are pressing each other for information they believe is there, or for information that one side claims is there, but the other side claims does not exist.
This thing may never reach trial -- I assume that is SCO's goal. IBM wants it to, so that precedents are set and issues are settled. SCO just wants people to do what they tell them and they want money. They want to keep things murky and scary.
In 200 years, later preservationists will gather all the stuff out of the museums, and strew it over the landscape, to make it "as it was" when humans made the first robotic baby-steps in space exploration.
REXX was way ahead of its time when it came out, and when I used it in 1989, it was still very powerful and useful, though it was playing catchup with the personal computer world.
The programs we ran on the the IBM 370-type mainframes generally had their user interfaces written in REXX, and they were easy to write and easy to change.
REXX became the scripting language of choice for OS/2, which beats to hell the pitiable DOS batch file language, but other scripting languages have far surpassed it now, yet play a similar role.
So, I'd say REXX is pretty much a relic, but I still have fond memories of using it to advantage 15 years ago.
I agree that a missile could probably bring this thing down, but nothing moving at Mach 1 is "highly maneuverable", other than simply moving fast.
When you're looking at distant objects in the universe, older = further.
This new image shows objects 400-800 million years after the Big Bang.
The earlier Hubble deep fields showed objects 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang.
Hubble just did something new, and something that is not possible with ground-based telescopes, which lack the sensitivity of Hubble.
It goes back to an era quite a bit earlier than the earlier deep-fields--about 400 and 800 million years after the big bang--and they are noticing quite a bit more chaos in the early universe, as the first galaxies were forming:
So, they are already seeing oddball things that they didn't see in earlier deep-field images.
The image as presented is actually a composite of two images, one taken in visible light and one taken in near-infrared. This allows the image to show details that would have normally been obscurred by dust.
The post was exactly and certainly a troll: It was a copy of a good message from September 21st, 2003 about the Galileo probe. It added a sig, which was the troll "payload".
The whole point of the post was for people to see the sig.
Otherwise, the post was redundant and was offtopic. It was also informative (if you're interested in Galileo, not Saturn), but only because it slavishly copied an original good post.
The whole point of the post was to fool moderators and trick people into reading the sig. That makes it a troll.