Been a long time since I was I was into nuclear phys, but how can it maintain that density with such (relatively) small mass? The process of fusion, which tends to expand a star, equally balances gravity which tends to contract a star. Seems to me a normal star would expand due to fusion.
Basically, it doesn't make sense that it can maintain being 1/10 the mass of the sun and 50x as dense. This means its fusion output must be tiny (little to balance gravity), but why? Is it mainly made of non-hydrogen mass? They should be able to tell the elemental composition from the spectrum. And how could it have such little fusion and not be a brown dwarf?
Wish this press release had some science in it.
Actually, you got the right answer! The star has expanded due to nuclear fusion taking place it just hasn't expanded dramatically because it doesn't take a dramatic amount of fusion to support a star with so little mass.
The reason fusion is needed to support a star is because the heat generated through contraction is radiated in to space. The energy lost through this process needs to be replaced to keep the volume of the star constant - and fusion provides this energy.
There are two reasons why a star this small can exist. The first is the low mass of the star. The smaller the mass of the star the less heat it takes less energy to raise the tempreture of the entire star. This means it takes less energy to maintain the tempreture of the star and this means less fusion.
The second reason is surface area. The Sun has a surface area of approximately 6 x 10^20 meters compared with Jupiter's 6.4 x 10^18 meters. This star is only slightly larger than Jupiter in terms of volume and so will have a comparable surface area. This means that the radiation of heat in the star will not be as efficient as in the sun and that means less fusion is required to keep the tempreture of the star constant.
Since the tempreture, among other things, determines the size of a star both of these factors allow the star to remain balanced and still stay fairly compact. So while it suprising that stars this small exist it is not inconsistent with theory.
The broadcast flag isn't quite dead yet, but at least it's in trouble
This is by no means dead. When the entertainment industry can't foist something on you by the backdoor they use plan B:
Ask the senate for a nice bit of special interest legislation.
You can tell the quality of your opponent by the cunning of their plan B, in this case their plan B is
just as good as their plan A. In a way, I kinda admire the cunts..:)
"The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card," she said.
"This kind of attack has been around for a long time and it's just because of our higher profile that it has sparked such interest," she said.
But isn't this the point? All it takes a little software tool and suddenly everyone can do it. You can't just "ignore" attacks - because the attackers certainly wont.
I could go on and on forever. The point is that according to my religion gays are sinners, even if many of them are not aware of that. Is it really "discrimination" or "hatred" if I dare to save them from the hell fire by telling them that what they do is wrong? I am not discriminating, I am against violence. I only want to educate people. I only talk to people, write to people, write articles. Is that really wrong? Is education really the same as the crimes of holocaust? Do we really have to compare education to hatred for Jews?
Education implies that you impart some truth upon people. The only truth you've imparted on me today is that the Bible is an instrument of hate and repression.
Personally, I don't believe in God. I don't believe in hell and I think Jesus was a clever, manipulative man but a man non-the-less. If that makes me a sinner in your eyes then so be it - I'll gladly live in sin because your alternative looks such much worse.
Get your on domain and blog from there. That's what I do. It's then your fault if your journal disappears from the net..
You will never see problems like what LiveJournal experienced and you don't have to worry about a the blogging company going into administration. ( I think we'll see a few of these soon )
For employee blogs, treat like you would your e-mail except that you should expect everyone in your company can read the blog.. Security through obsecurity is no security at all.
Where's the catch? I mean, there has to be for MS to open up one of the keys to its kingdom. Even if Open Source apps can't use it, commercial ones like WordPerfect can. MS would have to compete on merits, not on their monopoly, from now on. That doesn't sound something MS would want to do.
It's the lesser of two evils for Microsoft. The thought of being excluded from the government contracts for not being open would probably make Microsoft's management squirm.
The reason being is that we would probably see the widespread deployment of some non-MS office suite as a result and this would work towards loosening their strangle-hold on the desktop productivity suite.
By opening formats, they can get in on these contracts. So while it may still damange their business model it will damage it less than not opening formats.
.. I'd have to look at the license before I rejoice about this news. If Microsoft really did open up it's document format that would be a big bonus for everyone..
But in the back of my mind, I've got a feeling this is "embrace and extend" all over again. They might well give the outward appearence of openness while in fact restricting the license in such a way that it really doesn't change the situation.
I don't know.. i just can't trust a convicted monopolist with this stuff.
.. to just producing a decent product and letting the market decide if it wants it or not? Why does every corporation have to be a blood thirsty, morally defunct, money grabing ass?
This is why I choose free software because it's in the spirit of cooperation rather than subversion.
It's as simple as that unfortuantely - we *never* learn from our mistakes. Over the last thirty years every system we can dream of has been built from nuclear power plant control system to stock market analysis systems.
Yet we keep playing the buzzword bingo with our new systems, e.g. "Extreme programming", we still keep promise a schedule we can't keep to, we still allow the customer to shift requirement much later in the project than should be allowed, management still don't have enough dialog with the programmers on the ground floor, the list goes on..
Wake up! We're not special.. the construction industry has been doing huge projects of equal complexity for centuries. Get past your intellectual snobbery and start working together..
I don't know about you but I think he has egg on his face.. ASP.Net was a revolution..
For the first time rather than having three hundred asp/php pages with cut-and-copy disease we had a way to make structured code that could be developed very quickly and maintained easily.
At work we've got loads of legacy ASP and lots of new.NET stuff. I'll probably never understand all the ASP. Cut-and-copy disease has made the thing a fucking pain to maintain. In contrast, the.NET stuff is readily understood.
I don't think.NET was a tremendous revolution but it did improve things considerably from a web development point of view.
Oh... yeah... IE is great... no need to change it until longhorn...
I wont repeat Ghandi's famous adage because comparing the strugle for Indian freedom to that of free software isn't remotely the same as the battle between proprietary and free software..
However, there is a strong symmetry between the two. Microsoft all too often has ignored the competition and then nearly missed the boat only to use it's desktop dominance to muscle back in on the action.
The problem is that this time, they've already played that card. We already have IE in windows. If people start switching to Firefox and stay switched to Firefox what good is Longhorn going to do?
Oh dear jesus god no. If you're going to put all your eggs in one basket at least guard the basket well!
The problem is that by unifying all the ID card systems they don't defend the basket as much as they should.
This point can be illustrated well with Safes. If it costs fifty pounds to break into a safe and only put forty pounds worth of
valuables in the safe my safe is secure. If I get ten of these safes, each with forty pounds in them then the total of four hundred pounds
worth of valuables is secure. Now let's say I decide to replace my ten safes with a single safe! A safe that only takes three hundred
and fifty pounds to break in to is no good; I need a safe that is secure in the face of a four hundred pound attack or more.
The problem with centralising identifications systems is that the new scheme is rarely more secure than numerous schemes it replaces. Except,
Except, this time this one ID acts as identification for many types of service and this makes everything less secure.
Just for the sake of argument. Let's suppose I choose to attack the system in a certain way. Let say I want to obtain a real "fake"; that is, a card that
is authentic but I've paid an employee that produces the cards to put bogus information on to the card. Rather than finding two friends in two different branches of
government to supply me with a real card in a fake name I only have to find a single person. This type of weaking isn't just true for this limited
type of attack - this weaking is there across the board.
Having different IDs is a simple security mechanism. It's the same reason that Microsoft's Passport technology is dying. Yes it might be
more convient to have a single "sign in" but it means that you've produced a single global failure point for the entire system. Such systems
are brital so please, I ask these people: hire some security professionals to make these decisions. Silly politicians making "security" decisions is about as helpful
as putting a football coach in control of skyscrapper construction.
Knowing a lawyer, the legal system in the UK doesn't put up with the shit the American system does. It is possible for legal events in other countries to influence our law. My friend cited a case regarding a patent dispute where the patent had been filed in the EU and prior art was being shown to exist in the EU. However, they'd already filed a patent in the US convering that technology and that pre-dated the european prior art. They won the case.
Returning to topic, SCO have to tread really carefully here. Firstly, if the British courts find their claim to be baseless that surely more ammunition for a motion to have the cases in the States dismissed.
Secondly, we have some pretty strict rules about business practices. They could find themselves in hot water with the regulators if they're shown to be effectively extorting people.
Thirdly, they have the EU to deal with. Lots of EU countries are rolling linux out. For this reason, they automatically have many powerful enemies who will be looking for ways to silence SCO. Microsoft learned the EU has teeth. So will SCO.
The point of IP is to allow the inventor of an invention profit from their creation. The other point is of IP is that because the patent is made public society gets to keep the invention once the IP has expired.
A key feature of most IP implementations is that you can sell a patent to another company. A lot of the problems with the patent sharks could be solved if this were not possible.
If a patent can't be transfered then sharks can't get hold of it. You should have to renew a patent every year.. making keeping huge portfolios expensive.
In the software patent world, I think one small change would make it (more) aggreeable to FOSS. Make the time the patent lasts much shorter, like on the order of five years. That way, FOSS is protected. In software, if you haven't made your millions in five years then your not going to full stop. This would also protect FOSS from huge damages claims if they are caught infriging since the time to claim damages over is much shorter.
While i'd like software patents to disappear in the US, it wont happen and therefore I believe a third way is needed. A compromise that restores sanity to the system. My suggestions would be a good first step.
My proposal? Let people have their pornography. Sex is something for everyone and
I really don't understand how cultures get so upset about it; after all, it is the most
important human function.. our society is built on the foundations of sexual relationships.
India may be a democracy but theres no point in democracy if you're
no more free than you would be under a tyrant. Freedom is not the same as democracy.
Biometric identification is the way to go. No passwords. The only time you need administrative support is if you've been in a horrible accident and lost your eyes/fingers/vocal cords/etc.
Biometrics are not secrets. I leave my finger prints everwhere.. i've had my eyes photographed many times.. everyone knows how tall I am.. a few girls know how big my penis is.. you get the picture..
For security you need a secret but you also need something that is easy to change. Biometrics don't satisfy either of these constraints. Remember, there's a different between identification and authentication.
Slashdot Mirror
Been a long time since I was I was into nuclear phys, but how can it maintain that density with such (relatively) small mass? The process of fusion, which tends to expand a star, equally balances gravity which tends to contract a star. Seems to me a normal star would expand due to fusion.
Basically, it doesn't make sense that it can maintain being 1/10 the mass of the sun and 50x as dense. This means its fusion output must be tiny (little to balance gravity), but why? Is it mainly made of non-hydrogen mass? They should be able to tell the elemental composition from the spectrum. And how could it have such little fusion and not be a brown dwarf?
Wish this press release had some science in it.
Actually, you got the right answer! The star has expanded due to nuclear fusion taking place it just hasn't expanded dramatically because it doesn't take a dramatic amount of fusion to support a star with so little mass.
The reason fusion is needed to support a star is because the heat generated through contraction is radiated in to space. The energy lost through this process needs to be replaced to keep the volume of the star constant - and fusion provides this energy.
There are two reasons why a star this small can exist. The first is the low mass of the star. The smaller the mass of the star the less heat it takes less energy to raise the tempreture of the entire star. This means it takes less energy to maintain the tempreture of the star and this means less fusion.
The second reason is surface area. The Sun has a surface area of approximately 6 x 10^20 meters compared with Jupiter's 6.4 x 10^18 meters. This star is only slightly larger than Jupiter in terms of volume and so will have a comparable surface area. This means that the radiation of heat in the star will not be as efficient as in the sun and that means less fusion is required to keep the tempreture of the star constant.
Since the tempreture, among other things, determines the size of a star both of these factors allow the star to remain balanced and still stay fairly compact. So while it suprising that stars this small exist it is not inconsistent with theory.
Simon.
The broadcast flag isn't quite dead yet, but at least it's in trouble
This is by no means dead. When the entertainment industry can't foist something on you by the backdoor they use plan B: Ask the senate for a nice bit of special interest legislation.
You can tell the quality of your opponent by the cunning of their plan B, in this case their plan B is just as good as their plan A. In a way, I kinda admire the cunts.. :)
Simon.
"The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card," she said.
"This kind of attack has been around for a long time and it's just because of our higher profile that it has sparked such interest," she said.
But isn't this the point? All it takes a little software tool and suddenly everyone can do it. You can't just "ignore" attacks - because the attackers certainly wont.
Simon.
Usenet will be here for another 20 years.. These stories about the "death" of these things are hugely over-rated.
Next it'll be that AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN messenger are killing IRC.
There are plenty of good groups on usenet with loyal posters - it's like trying to kill fortran - it'll only happen over dead bodies..
Simon.
Trust them with one job and one job only: maximising profits for their shareholders.
I'm sorry google but you lost favour with me when you sold out. Your now a money grabbing company like any other. Keep your damn hands of wikipedia.
Simon.
All they have to do is just make it so that if you stop paying the subscription you still keep the songs.
That would be a very attractive deal that I would consider.
Simon.
I could go on and on forever. The point is that according to my religion gays are sinners, even if many of them are not aware of that. Is it really "discrimination" or "hatred" if I dare to save them from the hell fire by telling them that what they do is wrong? I am not discriminating, I am against violence. I only want to educate people. I only talk to people, write to people, write articles. Is that really wrong? Is education really the same as the crimes of holocaust? Do we really have to compare education to hatred for Jews?
Education implies that you impart some truth upon people. The only truth you've imparted on me today is that the Bible is an instrument of hate and repression.
Personally, I don't believe in God. I don't believe in hell and I think Jesus was a clever, manipulative man but a man non-the-less. If that makes me a sinner in your eyes then so be it - I'll gladly live in sin because your alternative looks such much worse.
Simon
Get your on domain and blog from there. That's what I do. It's then your fault if your journal disappears from the net..
You will never see problems like what LiveJournal experienced and you don't have to worry about a the blogging company going into administration. ( I think we'll see a few of these soon )
For employee blogs, treat like you would your e-mail except that you should expect everyone in your company can read the blog.. Security through obsecurity is no security at all.
Simon.
Where's the catch? I mean, there has to be for MS to open up one of the keys to its kingdom. Even if Open Source apps can't use it, commercial ones like WordPerfect can. MS would have to compete on merits, not on their monopoly, from now on. That doesn't sound something MS would want to do.
It's the lesser of two evils for Microsoft. The thought of being excluded from the government contracts for not being open would probably make Microsoft's management squirm.
The reason being is that we would probably see the widespread deployment of some non-MS office suite as a result and this would work towards loosening their strangle-hold on the desktop productivity suite.
By opening formats, they can get in on these contracts. So while it may still damange their business model it will damage it less than not opening formats.
Simon.
.. I'd have to look at the license before I rejoice about this news. If Microsoft really did open up it's document format that would be a big bonus for everyone..
But in the back of my mind, I've got a feeling this is "embrace and extend" all over again. They might well give the outward appearence of openness while in fact restricting the license in such a way that it really doesn't change the situation.
I don't know.. i just can't trust a convicted monopolist with this stuff.
Simon.
.. to just producing a decent product and letting the market decide if it wants it or not? Why does every corporation have to be a blood thirsty, morally defunct, money grabing ass?
This is why I choose free software because it's in the spirit of cooperation rather than subversion.
Simon.
Don't forget to put that attribute in your track-back links either :)
Simon.
this time.. we probably wont have the ability to turn it off.
This will become the new ActiveX.. I can see it already..
Simon.
I don't think the math is right there. If it's a straight mast then the wave front will spread out radially.
So increasing the power wouldn't give you a linear increase in distance like the OP seems to believe it would.
Simon.
It's as simple as that unfortuantely - we *never* learn from our mistakes. Over the last thirty years every system we can dream of has been built from nuclear power plant control system to stock market analysis systems.
Yet we keep playing the buzzword bingo with our new systems, e.g. "Extreme programming", we still keep promise a schedule we can't keep to, we still allow the customer to shift requirement much later in the project than should be allowed, management still don't have enough dialog with the programmers on the ground floor, the list goes on..
Wake up! We're not special.. the construction industry has been doing huge projects of equal complexity for centuries. Get past your intellectual snobbery and start working together..
Simon.
I don't know about you but I think he has egg on his face.. ASP.Net was a revolution..
.NET stuff. I'll probably never understand all the ASP. Cut-and-copy disease has made the thing a fucking pain to maintain. In contrast, the .NET stuff is readily understood.
.NET was a tremendous revolution but it did improve things considerably from a web development point of view.
For the first time rather than having three hundred asp/php pages with cut-and-copy disease we had a way to make structured code that could be developed very quickly and maintained easily.
At work we've got loads of legacy ASP and lots of new
I don't think
Simon.
Oh... yeah... IE is great... no need to change it until longhorn...
I wont repeat Ghandi's famous adage because comparing the strugle for Indian freedom to that of free software isn't remotely the same as the battle between proprietary and free software..
However, there is a strong symmetry between the two. Microsoft all too often has ignored the competition and then nearly missed the boat only to use it's desktop dominance to muscle back in on the action.
The problem is that this time, they've already played that card. We already have IE in windows. If people start switching to Firefox and stay switched to Firefox what good is Longhorn going to do?
simon.
Oh dear jesus god no. If you're going to put all your eggs in one basket at least guard the basket well! The problem is that by unifying all the ID card systems they don't defend the basket as much as they should.
This point can be illustrated well with Safes. If it costs fifty pounds to break into a safe and only put forty pounds worth of valuables in the safe my safe is secure. If I get ten of these safes, each with forty pounds in them then the total of four hundred pounds worth of valuables is secure. Now let's say I decide to replace my ten safes with a single safe! A safe that only takes three hundred and fifty pounds to break in to is no good; I need a safe that is secure in the face of a four hundred pound attack or more.
The problem with centralising identifications systems is that the new scheme is rarely more secure than numerous schemes it replaces. Except, Except, this time this one ID acts as identification for many types of service and this makes everything less secure. Just for the sake of argument. Let's suppose I choose to attack the system in a certain way. Let say I want to obtain a real "fake"; that is, a card that is authentic but I've paid an employee that produces the cards to put bogus information on to the card. Rather than finding two friends in two different branches of government to supply me with a real card in a fake name I only have to find a single person. This type of weaking isn't just true for this limited type of attack - this weaking is there across the board.
Having different IDs is a simple security mechanism. It's the same reason that Microsoft's Passport technology is dying. Yes it might be more convient to have a single "sign in" but it means that you've produced a single global failure point for the entire system. Such systems are brital so please, I ask these people: hire some security professionals to make these decisions. Silly politicians making "security" decisions is about as helpful as putting a football coach in control of skyscrapper construction.
Simon.
The janitor pulled out the plug for the mainframe and used it to drive is floor polisher..
Simon.
Knowing a lawyer, the legal system in the UK doesn't put up with the shit the American system does. It is possible for legal events in other countries to influence our law. My friend cited a case regarding a patent dispute where the patent had been filed in the EU and prior art was being shown to exist in the EU. However, they'd already filed a patent in the US convering that technology and that pre-dated the european prior art. They won the case.
Returning to topic, SCO have to tread really carefully here. Firstly, if the British courts find their claim to be baseless that surely more ammunition for a motion to have the cases in the States dismissed.
Secondly, we have some pretty strict rules about business practices. They could find themselves in hot water with the regulators if they're shown to be effectively extorting people.
Thirdly, they have the EU to deal with. Lots of EU countries are rolling linux out. For this reason, they automatically have many powerful enemies who will be looking for ways to silence SCO. Microsoft learned the EU has teeth. So will SCO.
Simon
The point of IP is to allow the inventor of an invention profit from their creation. The other point is of IP is that because the patent is made public society gets to keep the invention once the IP has expired.
A key feature of most IP implementations is that you can sell a patent to another company. A lot of the problems with the patent sharks could be solved if this were not possible.
If a patent can't be transfered then sharks can't get hold of it. You should have to renew a patent every year.. making keeping huge portfolios expensive.
In the software patent world, I think one small change would make it (more) aggreeable to FOSS. Make the time the patent lasts much shorter, like on the order of five years. That way, FOSS is protected. In software, if you haven't made your millions in five years then your not going to full stop. This would also protect FOSS from huge damages claims if they are caught infriging since the time to claim damages over is much shorter.
While i'd like software patents to disappear in the US, it wont happen and therefore I believe a third way is needed. A compromise that restores sanity to the system. My suggestions would be a good first step.
Simon.
My proposal? Let people have their pornography. Sex is something for everyone and I really don't understand how cultures get so upset about it; after all, it is the most important human function.. our society is built on the foundations of sexual relationships. India may be a democracy but theres no point in democracy if you're no more free than you would be under a tyrant. Freedom is not the same as democracy.
Simon.
So view here instead.
Don't shoot the messenger. Desktop search is only exposing a weakness that is already there as it can only index stuff it has permission to index.
As always, Schneier is particularly lucid on this issue, see his essay here
Simon.
Biometric identification is the way to go. No passwords. The only time you need administrative support is if you've been in a horrible accident and lost your eyes/fingers/vocal cords/etc.
Biometrics are not secrets. I leave my finger prints everwhere.. i've had my eyes photographed many times.. everyone knows how tall I am.. a few girls know how big my penis is.. you get the picture..
For security you need a secret but you also need something that is easy to change. Biometrics don't satisfy either of these constraints. Remember, there's a different between identification and authentication.
Simon.