Every now and again, an event comes along and takes our breath away by reminding us just how far out of step the legal system can be with today’s changing world. The latest example is last week’s attempt by a federal judge in California to shutter Wikileaks, a website devoted to disclosing confidential information that exposes unethical behavior.
Wikileak’s response:
“We have the usual small army of stupid lawyers that think we will piss our pants because they send us a scary letter”
One of the biggest questions in astronomy today is, are there any other Earths out there, and if so, how many?
We know that there are over 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and that a lot of them have planets. But we’re still groping round trying to nail down the frequency of planets, and how many are rocky bodies like Earth (as opposed to gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter).
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A new study using the Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that planets like Earth may be common! The procedure was actually rather simple. They looked at over 300 sun-like stars, and grouped them by ages (very young, young, middle aged, etc). They then used Spitzer to look for the presence of dust around the stars; dust glows in the infrared when warm, and the temperature (and thus the distance of the dust from the star) can be found.
Given the number of solar systems in our universe the probability of the existence of another earth like planet, has to be nearly 1. However until now this is just theory. This could be quite an exciting step forward to finding other sources of life in our universe.
The interesting question is why a company that claims to know how to program would pay anything for Yahoo, much less a P/E ratio of more than 60.
Google unseated Yahoo at a cost of about $20 million in financing, simply by being effective software developers and tasteful interface designers. We can infer from this offer that Microsoft expects its own programmers to be only 1/2000th as effective, dollar for dollar, as Google’s. In comparing Vista to XP and dividing by the amount of coding effort that went into Vista, it would be tough to argue with this conclusion.
