Redefining Planets

I have been hearing about this redefinition process going on with the IAU and the basic definition of planet sounds good to me.

“A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.”

Not that I get a vote on it. But, I would suggest one additional qualification. That the celestial body have a mean radius greater than 2000 km. Eventually, gravity will let all aggregates form into spherical shapes. For a planet, size matters as well.

For those bodies that have a mean radius of 500-2000 km, let them be called plutons, or minor planets, or something similar.

Let bodies with a mean radius of less than 500 km be asteroids or space junk or dark matter. Things to blow up as you are escaping the Empire’s Star Cruisers.

SSA Budget Accounting

A question arose last Tuesday on how the SSA funds are accounted for in calculating the Federal deficit. So I started looking around and was surprised how long it took me to find an answer. If the SSA is off-budget, then its monies don’t count to the deficit/surplus figures (if I have that right)

Another thought on Net Neut

Google, Yahoo, Youtube, and other large content providers don’t push content to the user. The User requests it, through their service providers. The User’s Service Level Agreement is the gating factor on the Quality of Service that affects the transport. If the Content provider isn’t on the user’s ISP network, there’s no real way for the service provider to identify where the content is coming from, other then the numeric IP address. And that address doesn’t need to be associated with the content provider.

So it is rather difficult/complicated for the service provider to bollix up what is being sent if the user is paying for a QoS.

The Thoughts and Luminations of Jack Heneghan