How about instead we forbid by law geeks and gamers from upgrading their hardware more often than every 5 years? There's no real reason you need the latest and best, and you could rent disposable CD-ROMs every night for five years without causing nearly the disposal problems of one junked computer chassis or monitor, what with all that lead 'n' stuff in the soldered circuit boards.
For that matter, why should you be legally able to buy a new pair of gym shoes just because they fit better? I bet throwing aware a pair of Nikes adds as much plastic to the landfill as six months' worth of CD rentals. Just fucking suffer with the blisters until your calluses get thick enough. Otherwise Mother Earth is doomed, I tell you.
Sheesh. I remember when environmentalism was a rational appreciation for limits and the unexpected consequences of one's action. Now it's like some kind of weird dark Krishna cult, complete with mindlessly chanted slogans and buzzwords ("recycle!") polished of nearly all rational meaning.
Well in my case it's because the kids get XP boxes, so they can run their damn games, and they have to have Administrator privileges to install and run them....so, naturally, they download trojans and spyware and all sorts of evil cruft, and sure as death and taxes the machine gronks every few months.
My choices are:
(1) Get the 13-year-old to become a qualified Microsoft system admin (snrk! hah!).
(2) Become one myself (like I've got nothing better to do).
(3) Wipe the drive and reinstall every so often.
Thanks, Microsoft and partners (e.g. game developers), for a truly brainless security model.
BTW, please don't bother telling me how if I only took off six months to learn all about Windows I could manage this without pain. I've got a regular job, thanks. Plus I don't have to learn anything to turn 'em loose on my Ubuntu box, because they can install and run anything they like -- Google browser bars, random Java crap -- but the worst they can do is screw up their own home directory and maybe lock the machine up and make me reboot it and run fsck on/home.
That was your fault. You sent over all this newfangled music that made our girls suddenly forget about saving it for marriage -- and how can anyone expect young men to pay attention to the job at hand under those cirx?
Bastards. What was that about? Payback for all the Anglo-American babies born in '45 and '46?
Next time when your involvement in a help organization causes its teams to be barred from entering a foreign country
Next time? When was the first time, pray? You talking about Burma? Because they barred everyone, including the UN, from helping. And, uh, I don't think you want to hold up the Burmese junta as any kind of beacon of moral righteousness. They are evil monstrous thugs that need to burn in the lowest circles of hell for what they've done (and continue to do) to their own people.
And...um...even if this happened, you are seriously expecting me, a tax-payin' American citizen, to feel hurt if some foreign silly snobs turn down my offer to send some of my hard-earned cash their way in a disaster? Oh dear, they don't like me, boo hoo! Goodness, that's a laugh. I only wish more of the world would refuse to take American help and solve their problems themselves. I wouldn't mind keeping a bit more of my money in my own pocket, that's for sure.
Oh yeah, because, you know, you shouldn't hide military objectives. They should be done right out in the open. Gentlemen don't read other gentlemens' mail. And all this hiding behind rocks and stuff when you're in a shooting war? Totally not cricket, old boy. You're supposed to just form ranks in your nice red uniforms and march out into the machine-gun fire, closing up ranks whenever someone takes a bullet.
Knowing where on the surface the Thresher went down is quite different from knowing where she lies on the bottom, 11,000 or so feet below. Ships travel significant distances on their way to the bottom, since they don't just drop vertically. Not only are there currents, but also the boat is not spherical, so it has more hydrodynamic resistance in some aspects than others. That makes it glide and twirl down like a leaf falling through air. It's also breaking apart on the way, and releasing air, and these impulses further push and pull on the wreckage as it sinks. They reach a respectable downward velocity, probably 40-80 MPH near the end, but even so it takes a good 5-10 minutes to get to the bottom. Plenty of time to travel many miles horizontally.
In any event, the purpose of Ballard's expedition was not just to know where the subs were, but to know whether the Soviets had found them yet, and to know what condition they were in (so if the Soviets did find them, it would be known what knowlege might have been at risk).
Must be a really slow news day, as this falls below even/. editors' usual low, low bar for Eek The Sky Is Falling Big Brother Is Watching FUD.
That a Communist regime spies extensively on its own citizens is news? Hello? Did you miss the entire 20th century or what? Some reports only half-jokingly suggest that roughly a fourth of East Germans were employed in some fashion or other on spying on their friends and neighbors through the Stasi. That's what happens when most of society is directed from the top -- "the top" needs extensive information about you to make decisions. More central control always requires less privacy, duh.
Then there's the tired old 20th century Marxist crap at the end about how this is all not, as you might naively think, the result of the morally corrupt and inhuman foundations of the Chinese Communist state, a direct and obvious form of Maoism, but instead...bwa ha ha...a fiendishly clever plot by IBM and friends to develop a new market for hardware. Wow, there's an original thought. Just a weird coincidence that it looks so much like classical 1920s Marxist assertions that the First World War was the result of heavy industries (Ford, Krupps) needing to develop a new market for steel products.
Gosh, if we're to be subjected to paranoid loony ravings, I wish they were at least original ravings, and not the warmed over groupthink of 1950s pseudo-Soviet apparatchiks with zero grasp of history. Feh.
I dunno, man. There's a whole lot of amazing confidence in these broad statements:
The reason that America hasn't been subsequently attacked had nothing to do with punishing the silly, stupid Taleban in Afghanistan, or fomenting a war in Iraq.
No subsequent acts have occurred for any number of reasons, almost none of which have to do with the wars, as the wars were about pride and oil.
And you know this because....? Because you're tight with the top thinkers inside al Qaeda? You've got good contacts in the backcountry of Pakistan? You speak all the relevant languages and have access to intelligence intercepts of the phone conversations? You've spent two decades studying the history of terrorism from original sources, interviewing suspects and counter-terrorism agents?
Or is it just that these conclusions seems reasonable to you, based on your average-Joe reading of the news and your common sense (supplemented of course by your ideology)?
I'm not saying you're wrong, because I don't have access to all the information necessary to make a judgment one way or the other, and I know that.
But I daresay if some politician made some equally sweeping general statement about why Microsoft is despised by Linux groupies, or whether or not the GNU license model made sense or not, based on a similar combination of what's in the nightly TV news plus his own "gut instinct," you'd jump all over him for being an arrogant ass and speaking far more assuredly than he should about stuff that is for the most part completely outside of his experience.
I realize this is/. and all, but perhaps there's something to be said for following the same standards of knowing what the f*** you're talking about before you open your mouth that folks here demand of others when they, for example, opine or legislate on tech issues. Otherwise the general perception of this crowd as pointy-headed geeks who are immature children outside their area of professional expertise is...well, justified.
Er...who, exactly, do you think gets technical stuff done? Martians? NGOs? Neighborhood watch associations?
Nope. Corporations. You know, like Amazon.com, Cisco, Google, Sun, and a thousand tiny tech start-ups you won't hear about until the day you sure wish you'd bought stock early in 'em.
So I'm pretty mystified by how you see it as conceivable that "corporate interests" are opposed to "technical interests." Seems to me the only way to really advance technical interests is to advance the corporate interests of technical corporations. Or are you thinking you still live in some quaint 18th century world where the individual inventor can do it all himself, and there is no real need to form large cooperating teams of technical folks and provide them with good support staff and plenty of capital investment -- i.e. found "a corporation"?
As for "popular" interests: the "popular" interests are what the vast seething market of consumers want, and, guess what, they don't give a flying fsck about technical interests at all, because they're not techies. They want their tech stuff to Just Work and be incredibly cheap, if not free. They're not the least bit interested in coolness, or advancing the art in amazing ways, or any of those other geeky kinds of goals you might find among people who seek each other out and associate into a corporation so that they can spend the productive part of their lives advancing those technical interests.
Sheesh, get a clue. Or a job. Find out how the world actually works instead of regurgitating mindless slogans from the 19th century.
And what you've said, that they aren't tech fanboys, is a good thing. Or do you imagine that, amazingly enough, they'd be fans of exactly the same tech you are, and see all the Correct Solutions exactly the way you do? Ha ha, huh? Do you really want a President who not only has the power of the Chief Executive but also the arrogance to think he knows what's best for your industry?
What you want from these guys is the wisdom to see that letting folks alone to work out stuff for themselves is the best default option, and government should step in only as the utter last resort. You want them to know their own limits, to realize they're not only not experts in tech stuff, but also not experts in farming, or energy exploration and transportation, or medicine, or housing, or education, or any of the other million and a half things people do to keep the wheels humming. They're just lawyers, and if they confine themselves to drafting (or if President promoting the drafting of) well-written, focussed, modest laws that address the relatively few issues that actually can be helped with a good law...well, they'll do a lot more good than any number of demagogues and wannabe Caesars.
A completely minor comment, but I'm struck by that strange and vaguely illiterate use of "precisely." I mean, could the spacecraft not touch down at some "precise" instant? Isn't it the nature of momentary events like touchdown to, well, happen in one precise moment?
I guess if it exploded and came down in pieces, it might not touch down at one instant, so maybe the fact that it touched down at precisely 7.53, instead of at roughly 7.53 (with some parts coming in early at 7.50 and a few stragglers not making it down until past 8) is good news.
So how are you going to set up your high-voltage electric field so that it accelerates protons toward each other?
It's certainly possible to do it if you only want to accelerate a handful of protons toward each other in a high vacuum. That's what proton colliders do.
But it's not going to solve anybody's energy problem to be able to spend, say, a million dollars worth of electricity to make 50 protons collide with each other. You need to be able to get grams of hydrogen (i.e. 10^23 protons) to collide with each other each second. How are you going to set up your electric fields to do that?
Golly, of course it is. The repulsive electrostatic force between protons at the range where the strong nuclear force finally takes over and causes fusion is enormous, and you need a huge amount of energy per proton to overcome that.
It doesn't matter what "orientation" the hydrogen atoms have. What matters is the distance between them. The strong nuclear force, which is what pulls protons together to fuse and make helium (and release loads of energy) has an incredibly short range, roughly 100,000 time smaller than the size of a hydrogen atom. Unless you can get the protons this close, they do not feel the strong force, and they cannot possible fuse.
The difficulty with getting them that close together is, of course, the fact that they strongly repel each other because they're both positively charged. The potential energy of two protons almost close enough to feel the strong force is roughly equal to the kinetic energy per particle in a gas at temperature of a million degrees or so.
That is, it requires a staggeringly huge force to push protons close enough, against their mutual electrostatic repulsion, for them to finally feel the strong force and fuse. This force hugely exceeds that available in chemical bonds of any type, in any arrangement. You can get that force by raising the temperature to a million degrees, which increase the momentum of the protons so much that they supply the force themselves, when they crash into each other. But any material at all would fracture, vaporize, disintegrate long before it supply that kind of force. Which means pretty much any kind of cold fusion that depends on solid-state material properties is impossible. It's all bullshit, the usual magic catalysis/perpetual-motion kind of scam.
There are ways to get fusion going at lower temperatures, the most interesting of which is to catalyze it with muons. Google muon-catalyzed fusion for more info.
As a matter of fact, it doesn't, at least not as long as it's big enough to be legitimately called "dust" (say at least 50 microns). It's very different, although there are similarities, and there's a whole field of research devoted to these so-called "granular" materials.
One of the obvious differences is that the larger dusty and all sandy materials lacks surface tension, since they're not held together by attractive forces like the van der Waals forces holding a liquid together.
Another interesting difference is that dust particles can easily pick up a charge, which makes their interactions even more complex. Fascinating stuff.
How about: "Since the first observations date to the time of the invention of that which you need to observe the phenomenon, then we have no idea when the Spot first appeared." Another way to put it is that there have been no observations of Jupiter with sufficient resolution to see the Spot in which the Spot hasn't appeared.
Let us not go to extremes, hmm? The fact of externalities does not vitiate the concept of property rights. No property right can be absolute, because we are a social species; we depend on each other for our survival. No man can do anything he wants with his property, because he's got to get along with his neighbors at some minimal level, lest they band together and kill him.
So externalities are never fully off-loaded onto everyone else, because by definition "everyone else" has the power of the majority to push them right back onto the individual property owner. How they should choose to do so -- whether informally through social pressure, ostracism, et cetera, or through a formal government structure, police power, et cetera -- is a matter for much serious debate. But only a fool goes to one extreme (no property) or another (anarchy). We are neither genetically-programmed perfectly cooperative insects nor ultra-individualist sole survivors like male tigers.
private property is a form of power, and like all power, it corrupts.
Balls. You abuse Lord Acton's warning, which is meant to apply to active power over others. Private property is largely the power to resist the power of the majority to push you around. It says maybe all you bastards want to build a road or casino or toxic waste dump here, but I all by my lonesome say no, and "private property" says that sticks. It's a passive power to resist the will of others, a civil right, like the right not to be put in jail because you say unpopular things, or the right not to be strip-searched randomly because you're an unpopular minority. Do you think those individual rights are corrupting? Does the right to free speech corrupt?
That's because on Earth most storms arise from the interaction of sunlight with the ocean.
Which, come to think of it, argues that the storms we have in our atmosphere are really just manifestation of energy circulation in the hydrosphere. Maybe the Earth's atmosphere by itself is too small to sustain any significant weather systems at all. Maybe if there were no oceans, there'd be very little weather on the Earth.
But then again, the experience of Mars suggests otherwise. Mars has no oceans, and can generate enormous and long-lasting storms.
Um...did you actually read the article to which you point? As opposed to skim? If so, you'll notice that the first recorded observations of the Great Red Spot are, by a strange coincidence, around the time of the invention of the telescope. What does that tell you?
Slashdot Mirror
How about instead we forbid by law geeks and gamers from upgrading their hardware more often than every 5 years? There's no real reason you need the latest and best, and you could rent disposable CD-ROMs every night for five years without causing nearly the disposal problems of one junked computer chassis or monitor, what with all that lead 'n' stuff in the soldered circuit boards.
For that matter, why should you be legally able to buy a new pair of gym shoes just because they fit better? I bet throwing aware a pair of Nikes adds as much plastic to the landfill as six months' worth of CD rentals. Just fucking suffer with the blisters until your calluses get thick enough. Otherwise Mother Earth is doomed, I tell you.
Sheesh. I remember when environmentalism was a rational appreciation for limits and the unexpected consequences of one's action. Now it's like some kind of weird dark Krishna cult, complete with mindlessly chanted slogans and buzzwords ("recycle!") polished of nearly all rational meaning.
Well in my case it's because the kids get XP boxes, so they can run their damn games, and they have to have Administrator privileges to install and run them....so, naturally, they download trojans and spyware and all sorts of evil cruft, and sure as death and taxes the machine gronks every few months.
/home.
My choices are:
(1) Get the 13-year-old to become a qualified Microsoft system admin (snrk! hah!).
(2) Become one myself (like I've got nothing better to do).
(3) Wipe the drive and reinstall every so often.
Thanks, Microsoft and partners (e.g. game developers), for a truly brainless security model.
BTW, please don't bother telling me how if I only took off six months to learn all about Windows I could manage this without pain. I've got a regular job, thanks. Plus I don't have to learn anything to turn 'em loose on my Ubuntu box, because they can install and run anything they like -- Google browser bars, random Java crap -- but the worst they can do is screw up their own home directory and maybe lock the machine up and make me reboot it and run fsck on
That was your fault. You sent over all this newfangled music that made our girls suddenly forget about saving it for marriage -- and how can anyone expect young men to pay attention to the job at hand under those cirx?
Bastards. What was that about? Payback for all the Anglo-American babies born in '45 and '46?
Next time when your involvement in a help organization causes its teams to be barred from entering a foreign country
Next time? When was the first time, pray? You talking about Burma? Because they barred everyone, including the UN, from helping. And, uh, I don't think you want to hold up the Burmese junta as any kind of beacon of moral righteousness. They are evil monstrous thugs that need to burn in the lowest circles of hell for what they've done (and continue to do) to their own people.
And...um...even if this happened, you are seriously expecting me, a tax-payin' American citizen, to feel hurt if some foreign silly snobs turn down my offer to send some of my hard-earned cash their way in a disaster? Oh dear, they don't like me, boo hoo! Goodness, that's a laugh. I only wish more of the world would refuse to take American help and solve their problems themselves. I wouldn't mind keeping a bit more of my money in my own pocket, that's for sure.
You were really planning to click on a link pointing to a 20 gigabyte image? Then what?
Oh yeah, because, you know, you shouldn't hide military objectives. They should be done right out in the open. Gentlemen don't read other gentlemens' mail. And all this hiding behind rocks and stuff when you're in a shooting war? Totally not cricket, old boy. You're supposed to just form ranks in your nice red uniforms and march out into the machine-gun fire, closing up ranks whenever someone takes a bullet.
Sheesh.
"Royal Mail Ship" is a mark of honor for especially fast ships, qualified to carry the mail.
Probably also because it's similar to the Royal Navy title, HMS = "Her/His Majesty's Ship."
If you can't do something better than they did 20 years ago, just don't even try, m'kay?
Bad news for virgins, huh?
Knowing where on the surface the Thresher went down is quite different from knowing where she lies on the bottom, 11,000 or so feet below. Ships travel significant distances on their way to the bottom, since they don't just drop vertically. Not only are there currents, but also the boat is not spherical, so it has more hydrodynamic resistance in some aspects than others. That makes it glide and twirl down like a leaf falling through air. It's also breaking apart on the way, and releasing air, and these impulses further push and pull on the wreckage as it sinks. They reach a respectable downward velocity, probably 40-80 MPH near the end, but even so it takes a good 5-10 minutes to get to the bottom. Plenty of time to travel many miles horizontally.
In any event, the purpose of Ballard's expedition was not just to know where the subs were, but to know whether the Soviets had found them yet, and to know what condition they were in (so if the Soviets did find them, it would be known what knowlege might have been at risk).
Must be a really slow news day, as this falls below even /. editors' usual low, low bar for Eek The Sky Is Falling Big Brother Is Watching FUD.
That a Communist regime spies extensively on its own citizens is news? Hello? Did you miss the entire 20th century or what? Some reports only half-jokingly suggest that roughly a fourth of East Germans were employed in some fashion or other on spying on their friends and neighbors through the Stasi. That's what happens when most of society is directed from the top -- "the top" needs extensive information about you to make decisions. More central control always requires less privacy, duh.
Then there's the tired old 20th century Marxist crap at the end about how this is all not, as you might naively think, the result of the morally corrupt and inhuman foundations of the Chinese Communist state, a direct and obvious form of Maoism, but instead...bwa ha ha...a fiendishly clever plot by IBM and friends to develop a new market for hardware. Wow, there's an original thought. Just a weird coincidence that it looks so much like classical 1920s Marxist assertions that the First World War was the result of heavy industries (Ford, Krupps) needing to develop a new market for steel products.
Gosh, if we're to be subjected to paranoid loony ravings, I wish they were at least original ravings, and not the warmed over groupthink of 1950s pseudo-Soviet apparatchiks with zero grasp of history. Feh.
I dunno, man. There's a whole lot of amazing confidence in these broad statements:
/. and all, but perhaps there's something to be said for following the same standards of knowing what the f*** you're talking about before you open your mouth that folks here demand of others when they, for example, opine or legislate on tech issues. Otherwise the general perception of this crowd as pointy-headed geeks who are immature children outside their area of professional expertise is...well, justified.
The reason that America hasn't been subsequently attacked had nothing to do with punishing the silly, stupid Taleban in Afghanistan, or fomenting a war in Iraq.
No subsequent acts have occurred for any number of reasons, almost none of which have to do with the wars, as the wars were about pride and oil.
And you know this because....? Because you're tight with the top thinkers inside al Qaeda? You've got good contacts in the backcountry of Pakistan? You speak all the relevant languages and have access to intelligence intercepts of the phone conversations? You've spent two decades studying the history of terrorism from original sources, interviewing suspects and counter-terrorism agents?
Or is it just that these conclusions seems reasonable to you, based on your average-Joe reading of the news and your common sense (supplemented of course by your ideology)?
I'm not saying you're wrong, because I don't have access to all the information necessary to make a judgment one way or the other, and I know that.
But I daresay if some politician made some equally sweeping general statement about why Microsoft is despised by Linux groupies, or whether or not the GNU license model made sense or not, based on a similar combination of what's in the nightly TV news plus his own "gut instinct," you'd jump all over him for being an arrogant ass and speaking far more assuredly than he should about stuff that is for the most part completely outside of his experience.
I realize this is
Er...who, exactly, do you think gets technical stuff done? Martians? NGOs? Neighborhood watch associations?
Nope. Corporations. You know, like Amazon.com, Cisco, Google, Sun, and a thousand tiny tech start-ups you won't hear about until the day you sure wish you'd bought stock early in 'em.
So I'm pretty mystified by how you see it as conceivable that "corporate interests" are opposed to "technical interests." Seems to me the only way to really advance technical interests is to advance the corporate interests of technical corporations. Or are you thinking you still live in some quaint 18th century world where the individual inventor can do it all himself, and there is no real need to form large cooperating teams of technical folks and provide them with good support staff and plenty of capital investment -- i.e. found "a corporation"?
As for "popular" interests: the "popular" interests are what the vast seething market of consumers want, and, guess what, they don't give a flying fsck about technical interests at all, because they're not techies. They want their tech stuff to Just Work and be incredibly cheap, if not free. They're not the least bit interested in coolness, or advancing the art in amazing ways, or any of those other geeky kinds of goals you might find among people who seek each other out and associate into a corporation so that they can spend the productive part of their lives advancing those technical interests.
Sheesh, get a clue. Or a job. Find out how the world actually works instead of regurgitating mindless slogans from the 19th century.
And what you've said, that they aren't tech fanboys, is a good thing. Or do you imagine that, amazingly enough, they'd be fans of exactly the same tech you are, and see all the Correct Solutions exactly the way you do? Ha ha, huh? Do you really want a President who not only has the power of the Chief Executive but also the arrogance to think he knows what's best for your industry?
What you want from these guys is the wisdom to see that letting folks alone to work out stuff for themselves is the best default option, and government should step in only as the utter last resort. You want them to know their own limits, to realize they're not only not experts in tech stuff, but also not experts in farming, or energy exploration and transportation, or medicine, or housing, or education, or any of the other million and a half things people do to keep the wheels humming. They're just lawyers, and if they confine themselves to drafting (or if President promoting the drafting of) well-written, focussed, modest laws that address the relatively few issues that actually can be helped with a good law...well, they'll do a lot more good than any number of demagogues and wannabe Caesars.
A completely minor comment, but I'm struck by that strange and vaguely illiterate use of "precisely." I mean, could the spacecraft not touch down at some "precise" instant? Isn't it the nature of momentary events like touchdown to, well, happen in one precise moment?
I guess if it exploded and came down in pieces, it might not touch down at one instant, so maybe the fact that it touched down at precisely 7.53, instead of at roughly 7.53 (with some parts coming in early at 7.50 and a few stragglers not making it down until past 8) is good news.
Sorry, carry on.
oh
So how are you going to set up your high-voltage electric field so that it accelerates protons toward each other?
It's certainly possible to do it if you only want to accelerate a handful of protons toward each other in a high vacuum. That's what proton colliders do.
But it's not going to solve anybody's energy problem to be able to spend, say, a million dollars worth of electricity to make 50 protons collide with each other. You need to be able to get grams of hydrogen (i.e. 10^23 protons) to collide with each other each second. How are you going to set up your electric fields to do that?
Golly, of course it is. The repulsive electrostatic force between protons at the range where the strong nuclear force finally takes over and causes fusion is enormous, and you need a huge amount of energy per proton to overcome that.
It doesn't matter what "orientation" the hydrogen atoms have. What matters is the distance between them. The strong nuclear force, which is what pulls protons together to fuse and make helium (and release loads of energy) has an incredibly short range, roughly 100,000 time smaller than the size of a hydrogen atom. Unless you can get the protons this close, they do not feel the strong force, and they cannot possible fuse.
The difficulty with getting them that close together is, of course, the fact that they strongly repel each other because they're both positively charged. The potential energy of two protons almost close enough to feel the strong force is roughly equal to the kinetic energy per particle in a gas at temperature of a million degrees or so.
That is, it requires a staggeringly huge force to push protons close enough, against their mutual electrostatic repulsion, for them to finally feel the strong force and fuse. This force hugely exceeds that available in chemical bonds of any type, in any arrangement. You can get that force by raising the temperature to a million degrees, which increase the momentum of the protons so much that they supply the force themselves, when they crash into each other. But any material at all would fracture, vaporize, disintegrate long before it supply that kind of force. Which means pretty much any kind of cold fusion that depends on solid-state material properties is impossible. It's all bullshit, the usual magic catalysis/perpetual-motion kind of scam.
There are ways to get fusion going at lower temperatures, the most interesting of which is to catalyze it with muons. Google muon-catalyzed fusion for more info.
As a matter of fact, it doesn't, at least not as long as it's big enough to be legitimately called "dust" (say at least 50 microns). It's very different, although there are similarities, and there's a whole field of research devoted to these so-called "granular" materials.
One of the obvious differences is that the larger dusty and all sandy materials lacks surface tension, since they're not held together by attractive forces like the van der Waals forces holding a liquid together.
Another interesting difference is that dust particles can easily pick up a charge, which makes their interactions even more complex. Fascinating stuff.
Points for wit, I guess.
How about: "Since the first observations date to the time of the invention of that which you need to observe the phenomenon, then we have no idea when the Spot first appeared." Another way to put it is that there have been no observations of Jupiter with sufficient resolution to see the Spot in which the Spot hasn't appeared.
Let us not go to extremes, hmm? The fact of externalities does not vitiate the concept of property rights. No property right can be absolute, because we are a social species; we depend on each other for our survival. No man can do anything he wants with his property, because he's got to get along with his neighbors at some minimal level, lest they band together and kill him.
So externalities are never fully off-loaded onto everyone else, because by definition "everyone else" has the power of the majority to push them right back onto the individual property owner. How they should choose to do so -- whether informally through social pressure, ostracism, et cetera, or through a formal government structure, police power, et cetera -- is a matter for much serious debate. But only a fool goes to one extreme (no property) or another (anarchy). We are neither genetically-programmed perfectly cooperative insects nor ultra-individualist sole survivors like male tigers.
private property is a form of power, and like all power, it corrupts.
Balls. You abuse Lord Acton's warning, which is meant to apply to active power over others. Private property is largely the power to resist the power of the majority to push you around. It says maybe all you bastards want to build a road or casino or toxic waste dump here, but I all by my lonesome say no, and "private property" says that sticks. It's a passive power to resist the will of others, a civil right, like the right not to be put in jail because you say unpopular things, or the right not to be strip-searched randomly because you're an unpopular minority. Do you think those individual rights are corrupting? Does the right to free speech corrupt?
On the contrary, it's one of my favorite books. But...um...as light reading matter, not as a textbook on physics or economics.
That's because on Earth most storms arise from the interaction of sunlight with the ocean.
Which, come to think of it, argues that the storms we have in our atmosphere are really just manifestation of energy circulation in the hydrosphere. Maybe the Earth's atmosphere by itself is too small to sustain any significant weather systems at all. Maybe if there were no oceans, there'd be very little weather on the Earth.
But then again, the experience of Mars suggests otherwise. Mars has no oceans, and can generate enormous and long-lasting storms.
Back to square one.
Um...did you actually read the article to which you point? As opposed to skim? If so, you'll notice that the first recorded observations of the Great Red Spot are, by a strange coincidence, around the time of the invention of the telescope. What does that tell you?