You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of proof in science. We've observed those planets about as well as we've observed many subatomic particles. Entities are posited to fit the observation. This is the case in any area of science. Not counting possible margins of error in measurements, we've observed these planets in much the same way as we observe subatomic particles. Would you like to stop believing in those?
If you would, would mind explaining exactly how all our predictions based on those particles ended up being right? Lucky guesses, the lot of them?
That's an awfully big leap of faith.
Your comparison, by the way, entirely fails to hold water. The issue here is a historical mistake having been entrenched in the popular definition, and the lack of a technical definition. IUPAC doesn't have to deal with popular definitions confusing the issue, they're already developed technical definitions for anything within their scope.
Except this is a judgement which makes a large difference for how entities in space are to be classified, entities which are likely to be discovered in increasing amounts from here on.
Clinton was just engaging in leagalese. This actually makes a difference. Technical definitions are what makes science intelligable.
I smell flamebait, but there's an easy answer here: One less planet for elementary school kids to memorize, and the need for new mnenomics.
Enjoy your inward looking mindset.
I hope Pluto finally gets excluded from planet definition. It's too small (only twice the size as it's "moon", Charon, and a little less than a fifth as massive as Luna), it's out of the plane of the elliptic (a trait shared with objects like comets, but not any planets), and it's not even orbiting in a stable configuration with regard to Neptune (for part of it's orbit, Pluto is in fact eighth, and Neptune ninth).
Then there's the fact that it only really got counted as a planet in the first place because astronomers at the time of it's discovery were hung up on the idea of discovering a ninth planet. They thought they found a disturbance in Neptune's orbit, which they attributed to a ninth planet, but ended up being caused by the fact that they were working from bad data about Neptune's mass. Pluto's much too small to have any effect on Neptune's orbit.
This might finally put the final nail in the coffin of the idea of nine major planets in our solar system. We can only hope.
er, no. The website says that the BSDs are each developed centrally, which gives them tighter integration, whereas Linux is built from parts developed seperately, resulting in a more organic "grown" feel to the OS. This says nothing about the quality of either system, it's just the way things are. Just like the fact that BSD was created by unix hackers vs. Linux's pc hackers. That's the way things are, it doesn't say anything about quality, it says something about the culture of the system, the way things are done under that system.
You're the one making these into value statements. You've also failed to recognize the above commenter's pointing out the exact same kind of "design-philosophy" based forks in linux. Or do Debian and Gentoo and Slackware all have the same design philosophy, in your opinion?
I'm still on FM only, but I haven't listened to anything but public/non profit radio for years now. NPR, PRI, and local, creative college stations get me all the radio I need.
It's just a matter of who has more people working on it there. I have no doubt that linux has more ports in the end, but they've got more people porting it.
not that it means any particular thing, as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station.
Even granting that Linux supports more platforms than BSD, how exactly does that affect that claim? Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC? As the wikipedia article appropriately notes: not originally intended as a portable operating system.
You'll have better luck disputing the BSD side of that, actually. If you go to the roots of BSD, it was originally developed for the same hardware that commercial unix was running at the time, because the original BSD was a hacked version of Unix, essentially. Modern BSDs, however, were the reworking of this for the PC. Which again, brings us to the claim you're disputing here. The BSDs really do have a closer tie to the original Unix, for better or worse. I don't think that gets them any particular innate superiority, but it's a fairly accurate claim.
Besides all that, since when has OS advocacy been equal to flamebait? This seems fairly well intentioned to me. The writer acknowledges his biases, and tells the reader to make up their own mind. Seems fair enough to me in that regard.
By the same interest in fairness, my biases: I like BSD on a philosophical level. Both BSD and Linux are fine solutions, and I'm not opposed to proprietary systems either.
I rather like the idea of fixing district boundries to watersheds. You get rid of gerrymandering and increase attention to local environmental issues, hypothetically.. Win-win. Unless you're a politician, I guess.
I've discussed the article with a couple of CNT researchers, and they say that they're not convinced by the paper. My attitude is that we have to wait and see what really happens, because there's a lot about carbon nanotubes that we don't know yet.
Despite anyone's predictions, we won't know what the material will be like until it's made. There's a LOT of other work that needs to be done on SE development regardless of what the material winds up being. And in the "worst" case, you can still build a space elevator on the moon with near-term materials.
One thing to remember is that, even if bulk CNT were limited to 30 GPa, we could still build the space elevator. It would just become limited by finances. That's because, with a density of 1300kg/m^3 and a strength of 30GPa, the mass of a seed ribbon (using the same assumptions as in my November article - safety factor of 2, and 1,000kg capacity) would be roughly 3,440 tonnes (i.e., 3.44*10^6 kg), or roughly 170 rocket launches (using current medium-lift rockets) to loft it (i.e., ~80 times as massive as in the 2002 NIAC report). The expense and logistics of creating a seed ribbon at that point (assuming you're launching from Earth) becomes much more daunting, but not impossible.
and for people raising other concerns, which I see in several places here:
Breaking is a minor issue. Most of it would fall up. The base station doesn't support the elevator, it holds it down. The Earth's rotation keeps it up. People tend to forget the scale we're dealing with here. The bits that fall down would burn up, land as ash.
Space debris is well mapped. We can avoid it, for the most part. Small adjustments made from either end of the elevator can be used to shift the bulk of the thing. Remember, serious plans for it call for building it on a floating platform, which can move, and rockets can be used to adjust the space end of things.
Storms, well, like I said, we can move the thing. Also bear in mind that storms only affect the part of it in the lower atmosphere. Resonance is an issue which is being seriously considered, as well as induced current.
if it breaks, points above the halfway mark fall fall upwards. Don't think of it as starting at the ground and going up. It's more accurate to think of it as starting in space and hanging down. Storms would only affect a small portion of it, although resonance is a serious issue and one that it is carefully considered. Planes would route around it, like they do any suitably tall structure. Satelites and orbiting debris is also a consideration, but those are well mapped and regular: the elevator would be controlled to move around them as need be.
The BSD lisence was never intended to promote open source. It's intended to promote standards, which is exactly what Nokia has said they're trying to do here. As for whether it will work or not, beats me.
Only/. said their open sourced the browser.
This was covered at least twice earlier. It's absolutely possible: the whole point of the LGPL is to let it be linked to things under other licenses without causing those other things to be GPL. In this case, they're releasing their previously proprietary code, which uses LGPL code under the terms of that license, under the BSD license.
Why do people have such a hard time getting that? This is what the LGPL does. Any changes they made to the LGPL licensed code were od course already available under LGPL.
I sympathize, but that's not a reason to not adopt open standards, that's a reason to develop better software. Microsoft is going to try to paint it the other way though, and I worry the press will but into that interpretation overall.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of proof in science. We've observed those planets about as well as we've observed many subatomic particles. Entities are posited to fit the observation. This is the case in any area of science. Not counting possible margins of error in measurements, we've observed these planets in much the same way as we observe subatomic particles. Would you like to stop believing in those?
If you would, would mind explaining exactly how all our predictions based on those particles ended up being right? Lucky guesses, the lot of them?
That's an awfully big leap of faith.
Your comparison, by the way, entirely fails to hold water. The issue here is a historical mistake having been entrenched in the popular definition, and the lack of a technical definition. IUPAC doesn't have to deal with popular definitions confusing the issue, they're already developed technical definitions for anything within their scope.
So you're posting on /., ridiculing me for being a nerd? Good work on the avoiding hypocrisy there.
Except this is a judgement which makes a large difference for how entities in space are to be classified, entities which are likely to be discovered in increasing amounts from here on. Clinton was just engaging in leagalese. This actually makes a difference. Technical definitions are what makes science intelligable.
I smell flamebait, but there's an easy answer here: One less planet for elementary school kids to memorize, and the need for new mnenomics. Enjoy your inward looking mindset.
I hope Pluto finally gets excluded from planet definition. It's too small (only twice the size as it's "moon", Charon, and a little less than a fifth as massive as Luna), it's out of the plane of the elliptic (a trait shared with objects like comets, but not any planets), and it's not even orbiting in a stable configuration with regard to Neptune (for part of it's orbit, Pluto is in fact eighth, and Neptune ninth).
Then there's the fact that it only really got counted as a planet in the first place because astronomers at the time of it's discovery were hung up on the idea of discovering a ninth planet. They thought they found a disturbance in Neptune's orbit, which they attributed to a ninth planet, but ended up being caused by the fact that they were working from bad data about Neptune's mass. Pluto's much too small to have any effect on Neptune's orbit.
This might finally put the final nail in the coffin of the idea of nine major planets in our solar system. We can only hope.
er, no. The website says that the BSDs are each developed centrally, which gives them tighter integration, whereas Linux is built from parts developed seperately, resulting in a more organic "grown" feel to the OS. This says nothing about the quality of either system, it's just the way things are. Just like the fact that BSD was created by unix hackers vs. Linux's pc hackers. That's the way things are, it doesn't say anything about quality, it says something about the culture of the system, the way things are done under that system.
You're the one making these into value statements. You've also failed to recognize the above commenter's pointing out the exact same kind of "design-philosophy" based forks in linux. Or do Debian and Gentoo and Slackware all have the same design philosophy, in your opinion?
I'm still on FM only, but I haven't listened to anything but public/non profit radio for years now. NPR, PRI, and local, creative college stations get me all the radio I need.
With Linux supporting many more non-PC platforms than the BSD's
NetBSD will you a run for your money with that statement:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/
It's just a matter of who has more people working on it there. I have no doubt that linux has more ports in the end, but they've got more people porting it.
not that it means any particular thing, as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station.
Even granting that Linux supports more platforms than BSD, how exactly does that affect that claim? Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC? As the wikipedia article appropriately notes: not originally intended as a portable operating system.
You'll have better luck disputing the BSD side of that, actually. If you go to the roots of BSD, it was originally developed for the same hardware that commercial unix was running at the time, because the original BSD was a hacked version of Unix, essentially. Modern BSDs, however, were the reworking of this for the PC. Which again, brings us to the claim you're disputing here. The BSDs really do have a closer tie to the original Unix, for better or worse. I don't think that gets them any particular innate superiority, but it's a fairly accurate claim.
Besides all that, since when has OS advocacy been equal to flamebait? This seems fairly well intentioned to me. The writer acknowledges his biases, and tells the reader to make up their own mind. Seems fair enough to me in that regard.
By the same interest in fairness, my biases: I like BSD on a philosophical level. Both BSD and Linux are fine solutions, and I'm not opposed to proprietary systems either.
I rather like the idea of fixing district boundries to watersheds. You get rid of gerrymandering and increase attention to local environmental issues, hypothetically.. Win-win. Unless you're a politician, I guess.
This has already been addressed by Liftport, the company actually doing the work here:
I've discussed the article with a couple of CNT researchers, and they say that they're not convinced by the paper. My attitude is that we have to wait and see what really happens, because there's a lot about carbon nanotubes that we don't know yet.
Despite anyone's predictions, we won't know what the material will be like until it's made. There's a LOT of other work that needs to be done on SE development regardless of what the material winds up being. And in the "worst" case, you can still build a space elevator on the moon with near-term materials.
One thing to remember is that, even if bulk CNT were limited to 30 GPa, we could still build the space elevator. It would just become limited by finances. That's because, with a density of 1300kg/m^3 and a strength of 30GPa, the mass of a seed ribbon (using the same assumptions as in my November article - safety factor of 2, and 1,000kg capacity) would be roughly 3,440 tonnes (i.e., 3.44*10^6 kg), or roughly 170 rocket launches (using current medium-lift rockets) to loft it (i.e., ~80 times as massive as in the 2002 NIAC report). The expense and logistics of creating a seed ribbon at that point (assuming you're launching from Earth) becomes much more daunting, but not impossible.
and for people raising other concerns, which I see in several places here:
Breaking is a minor issue. Most of it would fall up. The base station doesn't support the elevator, it holds it down. The Earth's rotation keeps it up. People tend to forget the scale we're dealing with here. The bits that fall down would burn up, land as ash.
Space debris is well mapped. We can avoid it, for the most part. Small adjustments made from either end of the elevator can be used to shift the bulk of the thing. Remember, serious plans for it call for building it on a floating platform, which can move, and rockets can be used to adjust the space end of things.
Storms, well, like I said, we can move the thing. Also bear in mind that storms only affect the part of it in the lower atmosphere. Resonance is an issue which is being seriously considered, as well as induced current.
Any more problems you'd like to raise? Read the wikipedia article.
if it breaks, points above the halfway mark fall fall upwards. Don't think of it as starting at the ground and going up. It's more accurate to think of it as starting in space and hanging down. Storms would only affect a small portion of it, although resonance is a serious issue and one that it is carefully considered. Planes would route around it, like they do any suitably tall structure. Satelites and orbiting debris is also a consideration, but those are well mapped and regular: the elevator would be controlled to move around them as need be.
The BSD lisence was never intended to promote open source. It's intended to promote standards, which is exactly what Nokia has said they're trying to do here. As for whether it will work or not, beats me. Only /. said their open sourced the browser.
This was covered at least twice earlier. It's absolutely possible: the whole point of the LGPL is to let it be linked to things under other licenses without causing those other things to be GPL. In this case, they're releasing their previously proprietary code, which uses LGPL code under the terms of that license, under the BSD license. Why do people have such a hard time getting that? This is what the LGPL does. Any changes they made to the LGPL licensed code were od course already available under LGPL.
If people would actually respect that, I might get behind it for the decrease in world population which would follow. It'd almost be worth it.
You've replaced THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING as my favorite slashdot troll. I salute you, good sir.
I meant, of course, buy into.
I sympathize, but that's not a reason to not adopt open standards, that's a reason to develop better software. Microsoft is going to try to paint it the other way though, and I worry the press will but into that interpretation overall.