The sun's effects might be different in polar directions versus equatorially - it might be interesting to learn. However, only captured objects would orbit the sun in such directions so until we can get into interstellar space quickly, there's likely little benefit in going in such directions.
I think an argument could be made that true interstellar space is where the Sun's dominance over the environment fades to the point where other stars have similar or greater influence. This point might be inside the Oort cloud by a significant margin.
The metric being used today is cosmic radiation. The sun emits its own, which dominates the parts of the solar system we occupy - but it seems, where Voyager is now, that interstallar cosmic radiation now dominates.
Space is awfully empty. The odds of it actually striking anything in interstellar space are barely higher than zero.
Consider this: the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are expected to collide in a few hundred million years. Even though there is a good chance that the collision will be a direct hit as opposed to a glancing blow, it is probable that not a single star from one galaxy will hit a star from the other galaxy (or be disrupted to hit one from its own). Space, even in densely-populated galaxies, is a very empty place.
True. The article also mentions that there is only about a one in one million chance that Proxima is not in orbit around Alpha Centauri A and B, based on what is known today. Astronomers treat it as being in orbit, and more data is being collected to refine the probability.
For it to have the same proper motion and not be gravitionally bound to A and B, it would have to have skirted by the Alpha Centauri system at just the right angle and speed to appear from here to be moving in the same direction and at the same speed as A and B. That is possible, but it is extremely unlikely.
Quite right. It's three stars in total: Proxima orbits the combined pair of Alpha Centauri A and B. If I recall, they orbit each other at roughly the distance of Neptune from the sun. If Earth were orbiting either, it would be a very interesting night sky for years at a time.
Saskatchewan permanently went on DST, in most of its territory. Saskatchewan straddles the 105th parallel so it should be in the Mountain time zone, except for the easternmost strip. However, in 1966, it went onto mountain daylight time - and stayed there. (Technically, it went off but changed to Central time, where it has been ever since.) To this day Saskatchewan remains on CST year round.
In my city local noon is at 12:57 pm each day - solid evidence that we should be on Mountain time. But we aren't.
It's a huge nuisance, to be honest, since television schedules, airline schedules, and meetings between people in multiple time zones change (and the habit of people who are really on daylight time to continue to call their time standard time can be very confusing - witness the Winnipegger who tells a Saskatonian about an 11 am CST meeting when she really means CDT - the Saskatonian will be an hour late because he'll actually attend to the call at 11 am CST).
It would be a lot more convenient if the entire continent were ST or DT - but if there is all this evidence that DT has issues, maybe we should just, effectively, be on DT year-round.
The stupid thing is, if we had 8-4:30 workdays in winter and 7-3:30 in summer, we'd effectively *have* daylight time. But society apparently needs government to make that happen.
You bring up a valid point - a used book is as useful as a new book. Still, a new book is nicer to read and many people prefer them to used books.
This disappears entirely when it comes to digital products, so I fully expect the used market of digital goods to be significantly more popular than used markets of physical goods.
I make no comment as to the desirability of this - just my predictions of human behaviour.
Presumably there is a markup in their products and at the end, there is some sort of marginal profit. Otherwise there is no point in providing this electronic product.
If you can buy a product - let's say a book - as an electronic product, and you can buy it from eBooks Inc. for $10 or used from who knows whom for $2, and there is no discernable difference between the products, which would you buy?
Normally we might prefer new products to used because they are in new condition, include all accessories, etc., come with instructions, and so on, but none of these issues apply to electronic books or music or videos. You have them, or you don't. There is nothing else to own.
At the end of the day, that profit that the new product vendor would realize is now gone, and the cut of the sale price that would go to the ebook author or musician is gone, now, too. So there absolutely is a difference.
They stand to lose more revenue than with physical products. Assuming the issues of DRM can be overcome, a used digital product works precisely the same as a new digital product. There is no discernable difference between the products when you use them. This is not true for physical goods like cameras, cars, houses, etc.
These are all bridges of which I have personal knowledge - and I have paid tolls on that bridge (even though I live in Saskatchewan). I remember seeing an article when the tolls were ended.
Maybe it doesn't happen in the US, but I've seen it happen in many places. The Firth of Forth and the Skye bridges in Scotland. The harbour bridge in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada (and even when it had a toll it was really cheap, like 50 cents - as recently as a couple of years ago). Actually it does happen in the US, too - the Coronado bridge in San Diego has obvious toll booths but they haven't been in use in years.
I have to say, society would have a huge incentive to stop spammers if spammers cost individual people hundreds of dollars in fraudulent sent email charges.
My point was, to pay 25% of what something costs to get it isn't all that disproportionate. It can be worked around simply by having more expensive Internet. At a certain point the extra costs for the connectivity outweigh the incremental costs of the bandwidth on the cheaper plan.
Anything physical is still subject to these rules, but choosing to download virtual products doesn't make the transportation cost free, unless you are already paying for transport in bulk (i.e. good enough Internet connectivity that this adds no incremental cost).
In the old days, when people bought games on physical media, they probably paid well over $4 extra to get that physical copy, considering physical disc production, packaging, shipping and distribution, etc. So soon, we are spoiled.
That depends on your ISP. Mine has an account page where I can check configurations, and monitor usage, but mine is extremely unlikely to be yours since mine is a small regional Saskatchewan cable company.
But the median user uses well under ten gigabytes a month (6-ish if I recall). Very high use customers significantly skew the average up, and the large number of lower-use customers skew the median down.
Dialup ought to still be a viable alternative, but it really isn't. With the average website pushing 1.5 MB (or so I read earlier today), the slow speed of dialup Internet is increasingly less usable, even if the actual total bandwidth you can get on dialup is adequate.
I have limited bandwidth at my cottage, and occasionally use dialup as a workaround (I get 20 free hours of dialup with my home wired ISP, and my home city is still a local phone call from the cottage). If you need to update your web browser or other software, dialup is horrid. On the other hand, for something like slashdot or IRC, it's actually quite livable. (Slashdot is shockingly dialup Internet friendly.)
Still... no one would want to use dialup today unless they simply couldn't afford better, or there was nothing better. These offerings here are oodles better.
I did this with my mother-in-law. VPN connection home so that I can ssh into her box, or VNC, as required, even if her IP address should change. Works great.
Now, if she has a problem, she can show me the problem instead of just telling me about it. As a result, most of her problems can be solved in almost no time at all.
No reasonable person would infer that a 55-mile track life on the Top Gear track would equate to a 55-mile life on the real roads, even if driven aggressively. The British court ruling states this in quite plain English, and I agree with the opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
The sun's effects might be different in polar directions versus equatorially - it might be interesting to learn. However, only captured objects would orbit the sun in such directions so until we can get into interstellar space quickly, there's likely little benefit in going in such directions.
I think an argument could be made that true interstellar space is where the Sun's dominance over the environment fades to the point where other stars have similar or greater influence. This point might be inside the Oort cloud by a significant margin.
The metric being used today is cosmic radiation. The sun emits its own, which dominates the parts of the solar system we occupy - but it seems, where Voyager is now, that interstallar cosmic radiation now dominates.
Space is awfully empty. The odds of it actually striking anything in interstellar space are barely higher than zero.
Consider this: the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are expected to collide in a few hundred million years. Even though there is a good chance that the collision will be a direct hit as opposed to a glancing blow, it is probable that not a single star from one galaxy will hit a star from the other galaxy (or be disrupted to hit one from its own). Space, even in densely-populated galaxies, is a very empty place.
True. The article also mentions that there is only about a one in one million chance that Proxima is not in orbit around Alpha Centauri A and B, based on what is known today. Astronomers treat it as being in orbit, and more data is being collected to refine the probability.
For it to have the same proper motion and not be gravitionally bound to A and B, it would have to have skirted by the Alpha Centauri system at just the right angle and speed to appear from here to be moving in the same direction and at the same speed as A and B. That is possible, but it is extremely unlikely.
It was a little different in the days of the VCR. You could duplicate content, but there were serious generational losses.
Quite right. It's three stars in total: Proxima orbits the combined pair of Alpha Centauri A and B. If I recall, they orbit each other at roughly the distance of Neptune from the sun. If Earth were orbiting either, it would be a very interesting night sky for years at a time.
Alright, Mr. Anonymous Pedant. It averages 12:57 pm. I don't think it varies by more than a handful of minutes though.
True, but Proxima Centauri is a part of the Alpha Centauri star system, so that still makes this the third closest star system.
Saskatchewan permanently went on DST, in most of its territory. Saskatchewan straddles the 105th parallel so it should be in the Mountain time zone, except for the easternmost strip. However, in 1966, it went onto mountain daylight time - and stayed there. (Technically, it went off but changed to Central time, where it has been ever since.) To this day Saskatchewan remains on CST year round.
In my city local noon is at 12:57 pm each day - solid evidence that we should be on Mountain time. But we aren't.
It's a huge nuisance, to be honest, since television schedules, airline schedules, and meetings between people in multiple time zones change (and the habit of people who are really on daylight time to continue to call their time standard time can be very confusing - witness the Winnipegger who tells a Saskatonian about an 11 am CST meeting when she really means CDT - the Saskatonian will be an hour late because he'll actually attend to the call at 11 am CST).
It would be a lot more convenient if the entire continent were ST or DT - but if there is all this evidence that DT has issues, maybe we should just, effectively, be on DT year-round.
The stupid thing is, if we had 8-4:30 workdays in winter and 7-3:30 in summer, we'd effectively *have* daylight time. But society apparently needs government to make that happen.
You bring up a valid point - a used book is as useful as a new book. Still, a new book is nicer to read and many people prefer them to used books.
This disappears entirely when it comes to digital products, so I fully expect the used market of digital goods to be significantly more popular than used markets of physical goods.
I make no comment as to the desirability of this - just my predictions of human behaviour.
Presumably there is a markup in their products and at the end, there is some sort of marginal profit. Otherwise there is no point in providing this electronic product.
If you can buy a product - let's say a book - as an electronic product, and you can buy it from eBooks Inc. for $10 or used from who knows whom for $2, and there is no discernable difference between the products, which would you buy?
Normally we might prefer new products to used because they are in new condition, include all accessories, etc., come with instructions, and so on, but none of these issues apply to electronic books or music or videos. You have them, or you don't. There is nothing else to own.
At the end of the day, that profit that the new product vendor would realize is now gone, and the cut of the sale price that would go to the ebook author or musician is gone, now, too. So there absolutely is a difference.
They stand to lose more revenue than with physical products. Assuming the issues of DRM can be overcome, a used digital product works precisely the same as a new digital product. There is no discernable difference between the products when you use them. This is not true for physical goods like cameras, cars, houses, etc.
These are all bridges of which I have personal knowledge - and I have paid tolls on that bridge (even though I live in Saskatchewan). I remember seeing an article when the tolls were ended.
Maybe it doesn't happen in the US, but I've seen it happen in many places. The Firth of Forth and the Skye bridges in Scotland. The harbour bridge in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada (and even when it had a toll it was really cheap, like 50 cents - as recently as a couple of years ago). Actually it does happen in the US, too - the Coronado bridge in San Diego has obvious toll booths but they haven't been in use in years.
I have to say, society would have a huge incentive to stop spammers if spammers cost individual people hundreds of dollars in fraudulent sent email charges.
My point was, to pay 25% of what something costs to get it isn't all that disproportionate. It can be worked around simply by having more expensive Internet. At a certain point the extra costs for the connectivity outweigh the incremental costs of the bandwidth on the cheaper plan.
Anything physical is still subject to these rules, but choosing to download virtual products doesn't make the transportation cost free, unless you are already paying for transport in bulk (i.e. good enough Internet connectivity that this adds no incremental cost).
In the old days, when people bought games on physical media, they probably paid well over $4 extra to get that physical copy, considering physical disc production, packaging, shipping and distribution, etc. So soon, we are spoiled.
That depends on your ISP. Mine has an account page where I can check configurations, and monitor usage, but mine is extremely unlikely to be yours since mine is a small regional Saskatchewan cable company.
And a median user would pay $25-30. That would be half of all US users that fit into that category.
eBook readers hardly use any bandwidth. Even a very large book is only a few megabytes.
But the median user uses well under ten gigabytes a month (6-ish if I recall). Very high use customers significantly skew the average up, and the large number of lower-use customers skew the median down.
Dialup ought to still be a viable alternative, but it really isn't. With the average website pushing 1.5 MB (or so I read earlier today), the slow speed of dialup Internet is increasingly less usable, even if the actual total bandwidth you can get on dialup is adequate.
I have limited bandwidth at my cottage, and occasionally use dialup as a workaround (I get 20 free hours of dialup with my home wired ISP, and my home city is still a local phone call from the cottage). If you need to update your web browser or other software, dialup is horrid. On the other hand, for something like slashdot or IRC, it's actually quite livable. (Slashdot is shockingly dialup Internet friendly.)
Still... no one would want to use dialup today unless they simply couldn't afford better, or there was nothing better. These offerings here are oodles better.
Given your bandwidth usage, clearly a wired solution makes more sense than WiMAX, which is what this provider is using.
I did this with my mother-in-law. VPN connection home so that I can ssh into her box, or VNC, as required, even if her IP address should change. Works great.
Now, if she has a problem, she can show me the problem instead of just telling me about it. As a result, most of her problems can be solved in almost no time at all.
No reasonable person would infer that a 55-mile track life on the Top Gear track would equate to a 55-mile life on the real roads, even if driven aggressively. The British court ruling states this in quite plain English, and I agree with the opinion.