The leap second is added to compensate for the slowing in earth's rotation, not its motion around the sun.
It is somewhat odd that the rotation has stopped slowing down. Some have speculated that as more and larger dams are built, creating large lakes far from the equator, that there's a net movement of mass closer to the axis -- causing the earth's rotation to increase in speed slightly.
On the other hand, global warming and the melting icecaps and warming oceans should move mass away from the axis, slowing down rotation.
It will be very interesting to see what happens over the next few years. I'd be curious if there's any relationship between the non-slowing of the earth's rotation and the decrease in the earth's magnetic field, mentioned in Slashdot a couple of weeks ago.
It's kind of amazing, in the last two days we've had a couple of interesting space stories, both involving about the same sum. Two more 'space tourists' are going to fly to the ISS in Soyuz capsules, for $20MM. Paul Allen is revealed as the sponser of Rutan's effort -- total cost, about $20MM.
So, where one person gets to go into space, by himself, atop a converted Russian ICBM -- somebody with a little more sand kickstarts an entire private space industry. The tourists have only their memories, while Allen will have his own spaceship!
I agree that I should not have said that they were "easy to build." It has been demonstrated that it is hard. Not just the antenna design, but the software issues are significant.
Vinge wrote about localizers in the very good A Deepness in the Sky after talking to the people at Ather Wire and Location.
I went to a presentation by the principals of Aether Wire about eight years ago, at that point they had working localizers that were about the size of a stack of two or three quarters. These devices use Ultra-Wide-Band signalling for extremely low-power low-probability-of-intercept communication. The UWB pulse-trains they were using were remarkably able to penetrate thin metal walls (e.g. a refrigerator.)
UWB technology has a long and sordid history of patent fights, and fights with the FCC over how much interference it would cause. For the conspiracy theorists out there, some suspect that the gov't would like to squash UWB because it's so easy to build almost undetectable (not just undecipherable) radios.
Forgotten (or ignored) in the cited rant, the law before congress now also mandates a "Do Not Spam" list. This would make moot the question over how the spam was labeled, questions about opt-out, and everything else. It would make it illegal to spam you in any case.
This is a good thing. I'd get on the list, whitelist all of my foreign correspondents, and consign the rest of the world into a seldom-checked file. This would be quite nice.
The real solution is e-postage. But for that, a federal do-not-spam list is a good idea.
But this PDF file from the "Office of Science" seems to be something straight of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Just weird Big Science apparently mostly driven by the need to Spend a Lot of Other People's Money.
Then, on page 5, there is a picture of the Secretary of Energy, and if he is not a dead ringer for Cuffy Meigs in the book, I can't think of a better candidate.
Plus, the spell Feynman's name wrong. Death is too good for them.
No no, really, it was a joke. I had been trying to use hyperbole to express the depth of my indignation at SCO, attempting to steal the work of thousands of volunteer programmers -- any one of which is better than all the people at SCO put together.
In the end, the millstone that is IBM's phalanx of lawyers will grind SCO into sand, and that is as it should be. SCO chose the battlefield of the courtroom, and that will be the forum of their defeat.
HP actually offers to indemnify users using their systems running HP-installed Linux, so they may actually not mind this very much -- it might direct renderfarm sales their direction.
There's also BSD, of course -- BSD has been adjudicated to be non-infringing of the SVr4 code already. It wouldn't be too hard to switch to that.
Lyons suggested that I didn't really care about the whole SCO fiasco, and I was trying to demonstrate the depth of my feeling. It was stupid. I'm sorry. It won't happen again.
Another thing he said that didn't make it into the article, for some reason, is that the reason SCO is taking on Hollywood is to generate publicity -- that anything to do with movies gets many times the publicity it deserves.
What this implies is that they don't really want money from this, they want press, they want buzz, they want to be in people's faces. The obvious reason would be to raise the stock price, something that has been flat for the last two months.
In the classic Shockwave Rider, Brunner describes exactly these kind of contests. In the book they were called "Delphi Polls", and were used by the government to both predict the future and, more subtley, guide public opinion.
Shockwave Rider was, of course, a novelization of Toffler's Future Shock -- I don't know if that's where the Delphi Polls idea came from.
thad
As I read it, Boies & Co. already got $10M
on
SCO's Lawyers Analyzed
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As I read the SEC filing, Boies's law firm gets 20% of any new stock offering. This would seem to include the $50 Million recently received from the private investment from BayStar and Royal Bank of Canada.
Thus, the lawyers are no longer working strictly on contingency, they have received a lot of money up front (or, in the middle, anyway.)
Burt Rutan's X-Prize vehicle is being funded by an anonymous donor. The expected final cost is around $20M, somewhat more than the $10M prize if Spaceship 1 actually wins the contest.
Note too that Rutan has been involved in space work before. The wing and tail surfaces of the Pegasus orbital launch vehicle are built by Rutan, as was the aeroshell of the DC-X vertical takeoff/landing test vehicle.
Rutan is also working on something called RASCAL, a grown-up version of the X-Prize system. It uses four large military turbojet engines to get up to Mach 3.5, in a very similar flight profile to SpaceShip 1, to act as the first stage of an orbital launcher. He intends to get Mach 3.5 performance out of normal turbojets at very high altitudes by using water and LOX injection, a concept that has been around since the late 50's, but one that nobody has put into practice.
It takes about 8 times as much energy to get into orbit as it does to achieve the X-Prize parameters. You can't go that far wrong.
Still, you do have to worry about re-entry heating, even at "only" Mach 3.5. Rutan's ship will have an ablative coating that sublimates away, carrying heat, for the hottest parts of the trip -- Rutan's ship needs this as it is made of composites that cannot tolerate even moderately high temperatures. This ablative coating would be applied every flight. The X-15 used a similar coating for its highest speed flights. As others note, the X-15 flight profile is very similar the profile for Rutan's SpaceShip 1.
The Armadillo aerospace vehicle uses aluminum, and is massive enough that there is enough of a heat sink that it won't get too hot for the short time there is significant aerodynamic heating.
Burt Rutan has used truck-mounted systems for years to do the equivalent of wind-tunnel tests. It makes a tremendous amount of sense, mostly because it is super cheap.
To build a wind tunnel to test a full-scale airplane would cost tens of millions of dollars. The tunnels at Nasa Ames in Mountain View have been shut down because it's too expensive to run them -- to run the fans in the 120x80 tunnel took more than 100 megawatts.
On the other hand, driving a truck down the runway will generate the same windspeeds over the airplane using about 100 horsepower or about 75 kilowatts, more than 1000 times as efficient.
Burt's early van-based systems for testing the VariEze used very cute aerodynamic balances to measure the forces on the airplane models. In pictures I've seen he had a model on one side of a pivot, and a circular disk on the other side. The circular disk generates a known amount of drag, and by moving it closer and further from the pivot will show how much drag/lift/whatever the model was generating.
Disclaimer -- I tried but failed to name my son Elbert.
My idea of hacking is effort amplification. I would suggest...
1) a fulcrum, denoting leverage. The MiG-29 was called by NATO "Fulcrum", and the Soviets liked that so much they use that name themselves. [They didn't appreciate the Ka-50 Hokum, though]
2) a glider gun. It's a life pattern that makes an infinite number of gliders. It's a little more complex than the 5 cel glider, having some 200 cells.
3) the sorcerer's hat from Disney's Fantasia. Ok, it's stealing, but it's the perfect logo, isn't it? Get's both the power of hacking and the possibility for things going wrong.
One problem is that Carmack's H202 suppliers demanded that he sign papers saying that he wouldn't concentrate the H202 any further, IIRC.
You've got to hand it to Carmack, he takes things seriously.
One of Carmack's biggest problems now is where to launch his rocket, as the parachute descent could end anywhere within a few dozen mile radius, and it's hard to secure that large an area. He's seriously considering going to a powered landing just so he can land it at a particular place.
The X-Prize is seriously hard. I'd be surprised if anybody actually makes it by the specified cut-off time of Jan 1 2005.
Dreamchaser says: > IANAL, but isn't the plaintiff required to point out exactly where copyright or trademark has been infringed? I think the burden of proof is on SCO.
SCO has changed their story multiple times, but the current story is that the basis of SCO's argument is that IBM infringed their contract. It is not a question of copyright, trademarks, or patents. They are saying that IBM infringed their contract with SCO by using ideas learned from the SVR4 codebase, or developed integrally with that codebase, to build similar tools for Linux.
SCO would then have to ask IBM who developed things for AIX, to see if they then took those ideas to Linux. This is what they are now asking for.
I don't think that SCO has a chance in hell of prevailing, but you should at least know what they are arguing. Well, what they are arguing today.
You claim to have read the article, but you were apparently poleaxed by the word 'tax', as so many right-wing neocons today are. In the very next sentence the article suggests that we need not raise taxes overall, that the increase of the gas tax should be offset by lower taxes on other things. Their idea is to encourage conservation of oil and exploration of other energy sources.
Surely you cannot object to that. This is not raising taxes, it is shifting them to further a devoutly-to-be-wished-for social outcome. How could one with children (or the hope of having them someday) not desire conservation of oil? It is so precious for so many things that we need.
I smile at your characterization of The Economist as liberal. Libertarian, perhaps, but they are almost always allied with conservatives in Britain and the US.
AllenChristopher said: Today's conspiracy theory: Remember when AOL bought Time-Warner with junk bonds? SCO are just trying to get their stock price high enough to buy a better company.
1) It wasn't junk bonds -- it was AOL stock.
2) It can't happen, because no legitimate company would take SCOX stock in return for their company. SCOX stock really isn't like money, it is unlikely that you could really sell a huge amount of it for the current market price. The shareholders and board of the potential target company, in doing their due diligence, would recognize this and torpedo the deal.
2a) SCOX did buy Vultus with SCOX stock, but that was not a legitimate transaction, both companies are owned by the Canopy Group. The SCOX/Vultus deal really does look like a stock scam, a way to make money from the rediculous valuation of SCOX stock.
2b) What happened in the AOL case? The Time Warner board of directors wrestled with the case for quite some time, and demanded a relatively large premium over the AOL market value to account for the volatility of AOL stock -- but the BOD bought the 'new economy' story just like the rest of us. They believed that AOL really was worth the hundred billion or so the stock market said it was. The premium that they asked was (unfortunately for them) nowhere near the amount that AOL was actually overvalued.
Say water goes in at 30 degrees C and comes out at 50 degrees C. According to the spectacular Google calculator, 1000 watts is 239 calories per second, and it takes 1 calorie to increase the temperature of 1 cc of water 1 degree C, so you'd have to move 239/20 or about 11 cubic centimeters of water through the cooler every second assuming a delta-v of 20 degrees C. Doesn't sound unattainable.
There are any number of ways to watermark films without compromising quality. I'm really quite surprised that studios would mark the films with huge brown dots instead of doing something subtle, for two reasons.
It degrades the movie-going experience, nobody wants that.
It is so obvious the pirates could edit it out.
Simple techniques to watermark films would be to add a tiny amount of flicker to the whole frame for a sequence, or to use techniques similar to the (failed) SMDI system to watermark the audio. I really expected more sophistication from the studios than big brown dots. At least at this point, the sophistication of the pirates is not great -- and identifying them through subtle, persistent watermarks could make a difference.
Pentel makes a spectacular technical pen that has far more utility than the old Rapidograph pens. The ceramic tip, in particular, is far more durable and resistant to clogging, and the pens just don't leak the way older technical pens did. The tip and ink cartridge are replaced together in one unit, so refilling is a snap (literally:))
You can't write quite as quickly with a technical pen, but the line it makes is so precise and clean that it makes up for that limitation. Notes I took twenty years ago are still perfeclt sharp and legible -- if the printing has gotten a little small for my 43-year-old eyes:)
I can't describe how much I love these pens, you really have to try them to understand.
I don't know about television, but there is little question that the only possible response to movie piracy is product placement. With product placement, you might even encourage people to pirate movies.
Slashdot Mirror
The leap second is added to compensate for the slowing in earth's rotation, not its motion around the sun.
It is somewhat odd that the rotation has stopped slowing down. Some have speculated that as more and larger dams are built, creating large lakes far from the equator, that there's a net movement of mass closer to the axis -- causing the earth's rotation to increase in speed slightly.
On the other hand, global warming and the melting icecaps and warming oceans should move mass away from the axis, slowing down rotation.
It will be very interesting to see what happens over the next few years. I'd be curious if there's any relationship between the non-slowing of the earth's rotation and the decrease in the earth's magnetic field, mentioned in Slashdot a couple of weeks ago.
thad
It's kind of amazing, in the last two days we've had a couple of interesting space stories, both involving about the same sum. Two more 'space tourists' are going to fly to the ISS in Soyuz capsules, for $20MM. Paul Allen is revealed as the sponser of Rutan's effort -- total cost, about $20MM.
So, where one person gets to go into space, by himself, atop a converted Russian ICBM -- somebody with a little more sand kickstarts an entire private space industry. The tourists have only their memories, while Allen will have his own spaceship!
Very inspiring, Mr Allen.
thad
My favorite movie was very short, only 90 seconds. It was IBM's Linux ad titled 'Prodigy'. It was the most moving thing I've seen all year.
Unfortunately, it can't win any film awards.
thad
I agree that I should not have said that they were "easy to build." It has been demonstrated that it is hard. Not just the antenna design, but the software issues are significant.
Still, I recall reading in Aviation Week quite a number of years ago about a demonstration of UWB radios for the defense department. Of the four companies that presented radios, only the one from Time Domain actually worked. But it was amazing -- it had a range of about 100 miles on about 100 milliwatts of power.
thad
Vinge wrote about localizers in the very good A Deepness in the Sky after talking to the people at Ather Wire and Location.
I went to a presentation by the principals of Aether Wire about eight years ago, at that point they had working localizers that were about the size of a stack of two or three quarters. These devices use Ultra-Wide-Band signalling for extremely low-power low-probability-of-intercept communication. The UWB pulse-trains they were using were remarkably able to penetrate thin metal walls (e.g. a refrigerator.)
UWB technology has a long and sordid history of patent fights, and fights with the FCC over how much interference it would cause. For the conspiracy theorists out there, some suspect that the gov't would like to squash UWB because it's so easy to build almost undetectable (not just undecipherable) radios.
thad
Forgotten (or ignored) in the cited rant, the law before congress now also mandates a "Do Not Spam" list. This would make moot the question over how the spam was labeled, questions about opt-out, and everything else. It would make it illegal to spam you in any case.
This is a good thing. I'd get on the list, whitelist all of my foreign correspondents, and consign the rest of the world into a seldom-checked file. This would be quite nice.
The real solution is e-postage. But for that, a federal do-not-spam list is a good idea.
thad
Sorry, that was Atlas Shrugged. Hey, it's been 25 years.
thad
But this PDF file from the "Office of Science" seems to be something straight of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Just weird Big Science apparently mostly driven by the need to Spend a Lot of Other People's Money.
Then, on page 5, there is a picture of the Secretary of Energy, and if he is not a dead ringer for Cuffy Meigs in the book, I can't think of a better candidate.
Plus, the spell Feynman's name wrong. Death is too good for them.
thad
No no, really, it was a joke. I had been trying to use hyperbole to express the depth of my indignation at SCO, attempting to steal the work of thousands of volunteer programmers -- any one of which is better than all the people at SCO put together.
In the end, the millstone that is IBM's phalanx of lawyers will grind SCO into sand, and that is as it should be. SCO chose the battlefield of the courtroom, and that will be the forum of their defeat.
thad
HP actually offers to indemnify users using their systems running HP-installed Linux, so they may actually not mind this very much -- it might direct renderfarm sales their direction.
There's also BSD, of course -- BSD has been adjudicated to be non-infringing of the SVr4 code already. It wouldn't be too hard to switch to that.
thad
Lyons suggested that I didn't really care about the whole SCO fiasco, and I was trying to demonstrate the depth of my feeling. It was stupid. I'm sorry. It won't happen again.
Another thing he said that didn't make it into the article, for some reason, is that the reason SCO is taking on Hollywood is to generate publicity -- that anything to do with movies gets many times the publicity it deserves.
What this implies is that they don't really want money from this, they want press, they want buzz, they want to be in people's faces. The obvious reason would be to raise the stock price, something that has been flat for the last two months.
thad
In the classic Shockwave Rider, Brunner describes exactly these kind of contests. In the book they were called "Delphi Polls", and were used by the government to both predict the future and, more subtley, guide public opinion.
Shockwave Rider was, of course, a novelization of Toffler's Future Shock -- I don't know if that's where the Delphi Polls idea came from.
thad
As I read the SEC filing, Boies's law firm gets 20% of any new stock offering. This would seem to include the $50 Million recently received from the private investment from BayStar and Royal Bank of Canada.
Thus, the lawyers are no longer working strictly on contingency, they have received a lot of money up front (or, in the middle, anyway.)
thad
Burt Rutan's X-Prize vehicle is being funded by an anonymous donor. The expected final cost is around $20M, somewhat more than the $10M prize if Spaceship 1 actually wins the contest.
Note too that Rutan has been involved in space work before. The wing and tail surfaces of the Pegasus orbital launch vehicle are built by Rutan, as was the aeroshell of the DC-X vertical takeoff/landing test vehicle.
Rutan is also working on something called RASCAL, a grown-up version of the X-Prize system. It uses four large military turbojet engines to get up to Mach 3.5, in a very similar flight profile to SpaceShip 1, to act as the first stage of an orbital launcher. He intends to get Mach 3.5 performance out of normal turbojets at very high altitudes by using water and LOX injection, a concept that has been around since the late 50's, but one that nobody has put into practice.
thad
It takes about 8 times as much energy to get into orbit as it does to achieve the X-Prize parameters. You can't go that far wrong.
Still, you do have to worry about re-entry heating, even at "only" Mach 3.5. Rutan's ship will have an ablative coating that sublimates away, carrying heat, for the hottest parts of the trip -- Rutan's ship needs this as it is made of composites that cannot tolerate even moderately high temperatures. This ablative coating would be applied every flight. The X-15 used a similar coating for its highest speed flights. As others note, the X-15 flight profile is very similar the profile for Rutan's SpaceShip 1.
The Armadillo aerospace vehicle uses aluminum, and is massive enough that there is enough of a heat sink that it won't get too hot for the short time there is significant aerodynamic heating.
thad
Burt Rutan has used truck-mounted systems for years to do the equivalent of wind-tunnel tests. It makes a tremendous amount of sense, mostly because it is super cheap.
To build a wind tunnel to test a full-scale airplane would cost tens of millions of dollars. The tunnels at Nasa Ames in Mountain View have been shut down because it's too expensive to run them -- to run the fans in the 120x80 tunnel took more than 100 megawatts.
On the other hand, driving a truck down the runway will generate the same windspeeds over the airplane using about 100 horsepower or about 75 kilowatts, more than 1000 times as efficient.
Burt's early van-based systems for testing the VariEze used very cute aerodynamic balances to measure the forces on the airplane models. In pictures I've seen he had a model on one side of a pivot, and a circular disk on the other side. The circular disk generates a known amount of drag, and by moving it closer and further from the pivot will show how much drag/lift/whatever the model was generating.
Disclaimer -- I tried but failed to name my son Elbert.
thad
My idea of hacking is effort amplification. I would suggest...
1) a fulcrum, denoting leverage. The MiG-29 was called by NATO "Fulcrum", and the Soviets liked that so much they use that name themselves. [They didn't appreciate the Ka-50 Hokum, though]
2) a glider gun. It's a life pattern that makes an infinite number of gliders. It's a little more complex than the 5 cel glider, having some 200 cells.
3) the sorcerer's hat from Disney's Fantasia. Ok, it's stealing, but it's the perfect logo, isn't it? Get's both the power of hacking and the possibility for things going wrong.
thad
One problem is that Carmack's H202 suppliers demanded that he sign papers saying that he wouldn't concentrate the H202 any further, IIRC.
You've got to hand it to Carmack, he takes things seriously.
One of Carmack's biggest problems now is where to launch his rocket, as the parachute descent could end anywhere within a few dozen mile radius, and it's hard to secure that large an area. He's seriously considering going to a powered landing just so he can land it at a particular place.
The X-Prize is seriously hard. I'd be surprised if anybody actually makes it by the specified cut-off time of Jan 1 2005.
thad
Dreamchaser says:
> IANAL, but isn't the plaintiff required to point out exactly where copyright or trademark has been infringed? I think the burden of proof is on SCO.
SCO has changed their story multiple times, but the current story is that the basis of SCO's argument is that IBM infringed their contract. It is not a question of copyright, trademarks, or patents. They are saying that IBM infringed their contract with SCO by using ideas learned from the SVR4 codebase, or developed integrally with that codebase, to build similar tools for Linux.
SCO would then have to ask IBM who developed things for AIX, to see if they then took those ideas to Linux. This is what they are now asking for.
I don't think that SCO has a chance in hell of prevailing, but you should at least know what they are arguing. Well, what they are arguing today.
thad
You claim to have read the article, but you were apparently poleaxed by the word 'tax', as so many right-wing neocons today are. In the very next sentence the article suggests that we need not raise taxes overall, that the increase of the gas tax should be offset by lower taxes on other things. Their idea is to encourage conservation of oil and exploration of other energy sources.
Surely you cannot object to that. This is not raising taxes, it is shifting them to further a devoutly-to-be-wished-for social outcome. How could one with children (or the hope of having them someday) not desire conservation of oil? It is so precious for so many things that we need.
I smile at your characterization of The Economist as liberal. Libertarian, perhaps, but they are almost always allied with conservatives in Britain and the US.
thad
AllenChristopher said: Today's conspiracy theory: Remember when AOL bought Time-Warner with junk bonds?
SCO are just trying to get their stock price high enough to buy a better company.
1) It wasn't junk bonds -- it was AOL stock.
2) It can't happen, because no legitimate company would take SCOX stock in return for their company. SCOX stock really isn't like money, it is unlikely that you could really sell a huge amount of it for the current market price. The shareholders and board of the potential target company, in doing their due diligence, would recognize this and torpedo the deal.
2a) SCOX did buy Vultus with SCOX stock, but that was not a legitimate transaction, both companies are owned by the Canopy Group. The SCOX/Vultus deal really does look like a stock scam, a way to make money from the rediculous valuation of SCOX stock.
2b) What happened in the AOL case? The Time Warner board of directors wrestled with the case for quite some time, and demanded a relatively large premium over the AOL market value to account for the volatility of AOL stock -- but the BOD bought the 'new economy' story just like the rest of us. They believed that AOL really was worth the hundred billion or so the stock market said it was. The premium that they asked was (unfortunately for them) nowhere near the amount that AOL was actually overvalued.
thad
Say water goes in at 30 degrees C and comes out at 50 degrees C. According to the spectacular Google calculator, 1000 watts is 239 calories per second, and it takes 1 calorie to increase the temperature of 1 cc of water 1 degree C, so you'd have to move 239/20 or about 11 cubic centimeters of water through the cooler every second assuming a delta-v of 20 degrees C. Doesn't sound unattainable.
thad
It degrades the movie-going experience, nobody wants that.
It is so obvious the pirates could edit it out.
Simple techniques to watermark films would be to add a tiny amount of flicker to the whole frame for a sequence, or to use techniques similar to the (failed) SMDI system to watermark the audio. I really expected more sophistication from the studios than big brown dots. At least at this point, the sophistication of the pirates is not great -- and identifying them through subtle, persistent watermarks could make a difference.
thad
Pentel makes a spectacular technical pen that has far more utility than the old Rapidograph pens. The ceramic tip, in particular, is far more durable and resistant to clogging, and the pens just don't leak the way older technical pens did. The tip and ink cartridge are replaced together in one unit, so refilling is a snap (literally :))
:)
You can't write quite as quickly with a technical pen, but the line it makes is so precise and clean that it makes up for that limitation. Notes I took twenty years ago are still perfeclt sharp and legible -- if the printing has gotten a little small for my 43-year-old eyes
I can't describe how much I love these pens, you really have to try them to understand.
thad
I don't know about television, but there is little question that the only possible response to movie piracy is product placement. With product placement, you might even encourage people to pirate movies.
thad