Just thought I should point out it's not China that's responsible for the Tank Man photo being missing from the Tienamen Square massacre article. It's good old western copyright law. The Tank Man photo is copyrighted and not freely licensed so Wikipedia can only include it as fair use. Fair use on Wikipedia is held to very strict standards; fair use images can only be used on articles where the image is otherwise indispensible. So you can find it over at Tank Man, which is specifically about the photo.
Extrasolar planets have a whole other definition that was established just for them already. If you've got a problem with that one, arguing about the 2006 definition of solar planets instead is kind of pointless. The extrasolar one is labeled as a "working" definition anyway so I doubt there's much controversy over the fact that it's not very good yet.
The Stern-Levison parameter of an object is unaffected by whether it's being bombarded, it's only meant to show the object's orbit-clearing capability. Unsurprisingly, now that billions of years have passed since our solar system formed, objects with high orbit-clearing capability happen to have orbits that are clear of other debris. But Earth would have had the same Stern-Levison parameter four and a half billion years ago as it does now, so by that measure it's quite clear what it would have been.
It's probably not a productive exercise to try to figure out the exact moment when a single grain of sand lands on a dwarf planet and makes it into a planet. The current definition has a clear bimodal distribution to it which is probably the best we can hope for for something like this.
An object can be "cleared" from another object's orbit without actually leaving the physical proximity of the other object. It suffices that the dynamics of the situation are such that there's no chance that the two objects will ever collide. This means that both moons and objects in resonant orbits (eg Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, which are in a 1:1 resonant orbit, and Pluto, which is in a 3:2 resonance with Neptune) are considered "cleared" from a planet's orbit.
There actually are more rigorous ways of defining and measuring the degree to which a planet has cleared its orbit, or the degree to which a planet is capable of clearing its orbit. You can see a good summary of them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood. I expect the Stern-Levison method is the main one the IAU had in mind since the paper describing it was presented to the IAU back in 2000. It's a mathematical formula that's applicable to any planet that you know the mass and orbital period of and gives an objective value for how capable it is of clearing its orbital neighborhood. Plotting the Stern-Levison parameters for the major bodies of the Solar System shows an orders-of-magnitude gap between the planets and the dwarf planets.
The IAU already has a separate working definition for what constitutes an "extrasolar planet", BTW: http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/boss/definition.html. It says that "The minimum mass/size required for an extrasolar object to be considered a planet should be the same as that used in our Solar System." So probably the 2006 IAU definition of Sun-orbiting planets already applies to extrasolar ones even though the 2006 definition explicitly required planets to orbit the Sun. It just doesn't matter much yet because we generally can't detect anything small enough around other stars to be considered borderline.
I am sure that this team of scientists and engineers, despite being intimately familiar with the rover's systems and having spent eight months studying the problem of getting it unstuck, have not thought of using the robotic arm yet. I hope they read Slashdot.:)
Frustrating as it is that the rover's stuck in something that a good solid push would likely get it out of, one also has to consider the costs involved in adding that capability to future rovers. If adding arms for self-maintenance and so forth doubles the cost of the rover it had better at least double the projected lifespan of the rover or it would make more sense to simply send two of them instead.
Sending a human to Mars might cost on the order of a hundred times what one of these rovers cost. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a hundred of these rovers scooting around a hundred different places on Mars for five years or more?
Actually, the quest-giver is added dynamically to existing game areas by the DLC itself. There's future DLC in the pipeline even now and there's no way all their quest givers could have been pre-loaded into the game, they haven't even been written yet.
The game is just as "complete" without any of the DLC installed, actually. The addons are just that - addons, extra stuff, things that aren't really necessary. There's 80+ hours of gameplay (including plenty of side quests) already in the game out of the box.
It's also really hard to balance a pyramid of 144 live scorpions on one's nose. Does that mean we should do it? Or is there perhaps a better use our effort could be directed toward, with better results?
as for your unstable balance of o2 and carbon, thats pretty much earth, right now. i can walk into most any nonwater environment on earth and start an inferno by myself if i wanted to. and yet our biosphere has lasted a plenty long time, mainly because the biosphere maintains the balance. it would be maintained biologically the same way on venus
I think you're underestimating the magnitude of the difference here, and just how reactive that much pure oxygen would be. The Apollo 1 fire happened because the capsule was filled with slightly more than one atmosphere of pure oxygen, which made anything remotely flammable turn into a blowtorch the moment it ignited. This would be more than an order of magnitude worse than that. And the planet wouldn't cool down appreciably until after you'd got rid of the atmosphere, so it'd still be hot enough to melt lead while you're starting to introduce both high-pressure oxygen and a fuel source to the environment. Photosynthetic life might help maintain a livable environment after you've made it livable, but it's not going to get there by itself - no way no how. Sagan himself retracted the idea in his book Pale Blue Dot.
One of the proposals I've seen that seems much more plausible is to refine calcium and magnesium metal from extravenusian sources such as the Moon or asteroids, and bombard the planet with ingots of it. Calcium and magnesium metal can react with carbon dioxide to form solid carbonates. You'd still need an enormous amount of it, though, and I'm not 100% sure on whether even inorganic carbonates would be stable at Venusian temperatures.
Alternately, you could perhaps colonize Venus as-is using aerostat cities. At an altitude of 50 kilometers above Venus' surface the atmospheric pressure is about the same as sea level on Earth and the temperature is in the 0-50 degree C range, the most Earthlike conditions you can find anywhere in the solar system outside of Earth itself. What's more, an Earthlike oxygen-nitrogen mix is lower density than Venus' carbon dioxide atmosphere, so your balloon city would be able to float using nothing but its own internal air as a lifting gas. A spiffy idea, IMO.
There's no need to add nitrogen. Nitrogen is only 3.5% of Venus' atmosphere, but thanks to the sheer mass of Venus' atmosphere this is still more than three times as much nitrogen as is present in Earth's atmosphere.
Nowhere near "plenty" as far as the job of converting all that CO2 into organic molecules is concerned, unfortunately. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AtmosphereofVenus.png - the only hydrogen-bearing compound abundant enough to even make it on the chart is water vapor, at twenty parts per million.
but i always thought venus was a better target for terraforming.
its easier to subtract out of venus' atmosphere than put in mars' atmosphere what isn't there. i didn't say EASY, i said EASIER.
some sort of genetically engineered bug that sequesters all of the CO2 and H2SO4, and permanently precipitates it out, preferably leaving O2 and H2O. something that could live on top of the clouds and in them.
Actually, no, it's way harder to terraform Venus than it is to terraform Mars. The "just introduce algae" idea was proposed in 1961 by Carl Sagan, before the full extent of just how awful Venus' atmosphere was was fully appreciated. Venus has 90 atmospheres worth of carbon dioxide, and pretty much no available hydrogen. If you want to convert carbon into organic molecules, you need to have hydrogen - carbon alone is not sufficient. But if by some chance you did somehow convert 90 atmospheres worth of carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen, what you'd wind up with is a furnace-hot planet with 60 atmospheres of pure oxygen and a layer of flammable carbon several hundred feet thick. This is not a stable situation, it'll go right back to the way it is now very quickly and spectacularly (though since the carbon would have been burning as fast as it's produced you'd never get such an extreme disequilibrium in real life). The permanent sequestration of all that carbon dioxide will require the addition of more material to the planet's atmosphere from the outside than would be required to give Mars a whole new atmosphere from scratch.
Furthermore, once you've given Venus an Earthlike atmosphere, there's another issue to consider; Venus has a rotation that's 243 Earth days long. Night lasts for 122 days on Venus. Without its ultra-dense atmosphere to convey heat around it's going to get extremely cold in the dark. We'll have to come up with a whole new ecology to endure those conditions and it doesn't sound all that fun for human inhabitants.
(Practically speaking I imagine it'll come down to something entirely different, such as taking up there offer of low resolution images in order to avoid the risk of a personal tragedy of a lawsuit).
This probably isn't a possible compromise. The person they're threatening to sue, Dcoetzee, is just an individual Wikipedia editor. He can't "take up an offer" on the behalf of Wikipedia, or delete the high-resolution pictures that he's already uploaded. That's up to the Wikimedia foundation, who have declined the gallery's many previous demands to do so (since under US law such demands are completely groundless).
I suspect that what the gallery really wants is to make an example of Dcoetzee and establish precedent within UK law. A compromise seems unlikely to achieve that.
Other posters have already mentioned erosion via the expansion and contraction of the monthly day/night cycle's heating and cooling, and erosion by micrometeors. There's also moonquakes and electrostatic levitation of moon dust that come to mind as other natural sources of erosion.
On top of all that, there's artificial sources of erosion. Bear in mind that the footprint was made at the base of a ladder that a couple of astronauts spent hours coming and going from; it probably got stepped on a few times. And then the lander took off again by firing a powerful rocket engine, directly blasting the area with high-velocity gases. You can see in a video of Apollo 17's lander launch that quite a lot of dust and debris gets blown about in the process. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXs4tncQcAE
But frankly, even if that first footprint was still magically pristine, I don't think returning there and putting down new footprints would somehow "ruin" the historical significance. It would add to the historical significance. The site would no longer be just the site of the first manned lunar landing, it'd be the site of the first manned lunar landing and the first return to the site of the first manned lunar landing. That's pretty neat too.
You can check the edit history, as you yourself have done in this case, to see how recently and how often the article in question has been edited. As for figuring out which version is more "correct", that's what the citations are there for. Follow the citations and see which ones seem more reliable.
Yes, it's a few extra clicks and a bit more research than simply reading the current version of the article and taking whatever it says as faith. But we're talking about journalists here. It's their job to do a bit more research. If they're not willing to do their job properly I'd say that's a problem for their editors to deal with, not Wikipedia's. Wikipedia provides everything they should need.
So, in a comment thread under a Slashdot article that's about mainstream media doing shoddy reporting, you cast aspersions on a study in a peer-reviewed journal and use a USA Today article to back your claim up?
As an aside about this particular incident, I find it enlightening that despite active attempts by Fitzgerald to keep his bogus quote in the Wikipedia article the longest it managed to stay there was 24 hours. On the other hand the various news articles in non-user-editable media are stuck with it. So Wikipedia does seem to be working quite well here by comparison.
Two: Nobel prize laureate James Tobin, for another. In 1992 he wrote that "[t]he 'Laffer Curve' idea that tax cuts would actually increase revenues turned out to deserve the ridicule with which sober economists had greeted it in 1981."
And three, economist Paul Pecorino calculated in 1995 that peak revenue was generated at a tax rate of around 65%, much higher than current tax rates in the US.
We haven't here on Earth because humans are much much cheaper down here.
For the cost of one human mission to Mars, with all the immense life support expenses and technologies that would have to be carted along, I suspect you could indeed do a more capable job with robots. Lots of robots. You could scatter them all over the planet.
For purposes of argument, sure, let's say that's all true. There's lots of quibbling that can be done over recycling and such but one way or another there's lots of additional resources out in space.
Why do we need actual living breathing humans in space to get access to those resources? Robots have done wonders for deep space exploration, there's no fundamental reason why they couldn't also be used for deep space exploitation. Once we've landed a nice big automated robotic factory/mining complex on the Moon we can have it go ahead and build us a giant dome to live in if we like.
In the case of someplace like Mars there's the additional concern of contamination of potential native life to consider. If you send humans there's no way they're going to avoid shedding all sorts of bacteria and other grue while they explore the place, with robots it's easier to sterilize them and keep them sterile. I'm not raising that issue out of some fundamental need to keep space "pristine", I'm more concerned about making sure we get all the data we can get out of those environments.
I borrowed it from a friend, read it, and gave it back to him when I was done. No extra copies were ever sold as a result.
Did I rip off the orignal creators any worse than the guy who downloaded it? I'm actually not sure, it seems like I didn't but I can't think of exactly why not. The net result was exactly the same.
BTW, I rea;;y liked Dr. Manhattan's time-awareness but thought the plot's ultimate resolution was ridiculous. I didn't pay any money for the experience, though, so some may consider my opinion invalid.
Actually, you can mathematically estimate with a great deal of confidence whether an object has "cleared its neighborhood" by knowing just the object's mass and the object's orbital period. There's a formula that was derived in 2002 by Alan Stern and Harold Levison for a parameter they called lambda that estimates how long it takes for an object to scatter other objects out of its orbital zone. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleared_the_neighbourhood for more details.
Ironically, Alan Stern has gone on to be one of the most prominent and vocal opponents of the new definition. I wouldn't be surprised if it has something to do with being principle investigator for the New Horizons probe to Pluto.:)
Our party once spent nearly an hour in a huddle trying to figure out a mathematical puzzle that formed the code for a vault's lock. Eventually, while we continued scribbling diagrams and filling pages with numbers, the player of one of our party's rogues slipped away and conferred briefly with the DM. A few dice were rolled and then the DM finally broke into our discussion to inform us that the door was open - the rogue had succeeded in her disable device and pick lock rolls. Sometimes a high level abstraction is your friend.
Once it's compromised, sure. But antivirus software can actually prevent that from happening. Every once in a while my antivirus software will find a virus tucked away in some file I've downloaded but haven't yet run, and although I don't recall it ever being something I was planning to run (mostly email attachments) I can see how this would help to protect a user who was less security-conscious and more "clicky" than I am. If you catch the virus before it runs, you're as clean as if you never downloaded it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Just thought I should point out it's not China that's responsible for the Tank Man photo being missing from the Tienamen Square massacre article. It's good old western copyright law. The Tank Man photo is copyrighted and not freely licensed so Wikipedia can only include it as fair use. Fair use on Wikipedia is held to very strict standards; fair use images can only be used on articles where the image is otherwise indispensible. So you can find it over at Tank Man, which is specifically about the photo.
Extrasolar planets have a whole other definition that was established just for them already. If you've got a problem with that one, arguing about the 2006 definition of solar planets instead is kind of pointless. The extrasolar one is labeled as a "working" definition anyway so I doubt there's much controversy over the fact that it's not very good yet.
The Stern-Levison parameter of an object is unaffected by whether it's being bombarded, it's only meant to show the object's orbit-clearing capability. Unsurprisingly, now that billions of years have passed since our solar system formed, objects with high orbit-clearing capability happen to have orbits that are clear of other debris. But Earth would have had the same Stern-Levison parameter four and a half billion years ago as it does now, so by that measure it's quite clear what it would have been.
It's probably not a productive exercise to try to figure out the exact moment when a single grain of sand lands on a dwarf planet and makes it into a planet. The current definition has a clear bimodal distribution to it which is probably the best we can hope for for something like this.
An object can be "cleared" from another object's orbit without actually leaving the physical proximity of the other object. It suffices that the dynamics of the situation are such that there's no chance that the two objects will ever collide. This means that both moons and objects in resonant orbits (eg Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, which are in a 1:1 resonant orbit, and Pluto, which is in a 3:2 resonance with Neptune) are considered "cleared" from a planet's orbit.
There actually are more rigorous ways of defining and measuring the degree to which a planet has cleared its orbit, or the degree to which a planet is capable of clearing its orbit. You can see a good summary of them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood. I expect the Stern-Levison method is the main one the IAU had in mind since the paper describing it was presented to the IAU back in 2000. It's a mathematical formula that's applicable to any planet that you know the mass and orbital period of and gives an objective value for how capable it is of clearing its orbital neighborhood. Plotting the Stern-Levison parameters for the major bodies of the Solar System shows an orders-of-magnitude gap between the planets and the dwarf planets.
The IAU already has a separate working definition for what constitutes an "extrasolar planet", BTW: http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/boss/definition.html. It says that "The minimum mass/size required for an extrasolar object to be considered a planet should be the same as that used in our Solar System." So probably the 2006 IAU definition of Sun-orbiting planets already applies to extrasolar ones even though the 2006 definition explicitly required planets to orbit the Sun. It just doesn't matter much yet because we generally can't detect anything small enough around other stars to be considered borderline.
Clearly the solution to the declining quality of Slashdot's articles is to add more editors.
I am sure that this team of scientists and engineers, despite being intimately familiar with the rover's systems and having spent eight months studying the problem of getting it unstuck, have not thought of using the robotic arm yet. I hope they read Slashdot. :)
Frustrating as it is that the rover's stuck in something that a good solid push would likely get it out of, one also has to consider the costs involved in adding that capability to future rovers. If adding arms for self-maintenance and so forth doubles the cost of the rover it had better at least double the projected lifespan of the rover or it would make more sense to simply send two of them instead.
Sending a human to Mars might cost on the order of a hundred times what one of these rovers cost. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a hundred of these rovers scooting around a hundred different places on Mars for five years or more?
Actually, the quest-giver is added dynamically to existing game areas by the DLC itself. There's future DLC in the pipeline even now and there's no way all their quest givers could have been pre-loaded into the game, they haven't even been written yet.
The game is just as "complete" without any of the DLC installed, actually. The addons are just that - addons, extra stuff, things that aren't really necessary. There's 80+ hours of gameplay (including plenty of side quests) already in the game out of the box.
It's also really hard to balance a pyramid of 144 live scorpions on one's nose. Does that mean we should do it? Or is there perhaps a better use our effort could be directed toward, with better results?
I think you're underestimating the magnitude of the difference here, and just how reactive that much pure oxygen would be. The Apollo 1 fire happened because the capsule was filled with slightly more than one atmosphere of pure oxygen, which made anything remotely flammable turn into a blowtorch the moment it ignited. This would be more than an order of magnitude worse than that. And the planet wouldn't cool down appreciably until after you'd got rid of the atmosphere, so it'd still be hot enough to melt lead while you're starting to introduce both high-pressure oxygen and a fuel source to the environment. Photosynthetic life might help maintain a livable environment after you've made it livable, but it's not going to get there by itself - no way no how. Sagan himself retracted the idea in his book Pale Blue Dot.
One of the proposals I've seen that seems much more plausible is to refine calcium and magnesium metal from extravenusian sources such as the Moon or asteroids, and bombard the planet with ingots of it. Calcium and magnesium metal can react with carbon dioxide to form solid carbonates. You'd still need an enormous amount of it, though, and I'm not 100% sure on whether even inorganic carbonates would be stable at Venusian temperatures.
Alternately, you could perhaps colonize Venus as-is using aerostat cities. At an altitude of 50 kilometers above Venus' surface the atmospheric pressure is about the same as sea level on Earth and the temperature is in the 0-50 degree C range, the most Earthlike conditions you can find anywhere in the solar system outside of Earth itself. What's more, an Earthlike oxygen-nitrogen mix is lower density than Venus' carbon dioxide atmosphere, so your balloon city would be able to float using nothing but its own internal air as a lifting gas. A spiffy idea, IMO.
There's no need to add nitrogen. Nitrogen is only 3.5% of Venus' atmosphere, but thanks to the sheer mass of Venus' atmosphere this is still more than three times as much nitrogen as is present in Earth's atmosphere.
Nowhere near "plenty" as far as the job of converting all that CO2 into organic molecules is concerned, unfortunately. Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AtmosphereofVenus.png - the only hydrogen-bearing compound abundant enough to even make it on the chart is water vapor, at twenty parts per million.
Actually, no, it's way harder to terraform Venus than it is to terraform Mars. The "just introduce algae" idea was proposed in 1961 by Carl Sagan, before the full extent of just how awful Venus' atmosphere was was fully appreciated. Venus has 90 atmospheres worth of carbon dioxide, and pretty much no available hydrogen. If you want to convert carbon into organic molecules, you need to have hydrogen - carbon alone is not sufficient. But if by some chance you did somehow convert 90 atmospheres worth of carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen, what you'd wind up with is a furnace-hot planet with 60 atmospheres of pure oxygen and a layer of flammable carbon several hundred feet thick. This is not a stable situation, it'll go right back to the way it is now very quickly and spectacularly (though since the carbon would have been burning as fast as it's produced you'd never get such an extreme disequilibrium in real life). The permanent sequestration of all that carbon dioxide will require the addition of more material to the planet's atmosphere from the outside than would be required to give Mars a whole new atmosphere from scratch.
Furthermore, once you've given Venus an Earthlike atmosphere, there's another issue to consider; Venus has a rotation that's 243 Earth days long. Night lasts for 122 days on Venus. Without its ultra-dense atmosphere to convey heat around it's going to get extremely cold in the dark. We'll have to come up with a whole new ecology to endure those conditions and it doesn't sound all that fun for human inhabitants.
This probably isn't a possible compromise. The person they're threatening to sue, Dcoetzee, is just an individual Wikipedia editor. He can't "take up an offer" on the behalf of Wikipedia, or delete the high-resolution pictures that he's already uploaded. That's up to the Wikimedia foundation, who have declined the gallery's many previous demands to do so (since under US law such demands are completely groundless).
I suspect that what the gallery really wants is to make an example of Dcoetzee and establish precedent within UK law. A compromise seems unlikely to achieve that.
Other posters have already mentioned erosion via the expansion and contraction of the monthly day/night cycle's heating and cooling, and erosion by micrometeors. There's also moonquakes and electrostatic levitation of moon dust that come to mind as other natural sources of erosion.
On top of all that, there's artificial sources of erosion. Bear in mind that the footprint was made at the base of a ladder that a couple of astronauts spent hours coming and going from; it probably got stepped on a few times. And then the lander took off again by firing a powerful rocket engine, directly blasting the area with high-velocity gases. You can see in a video of Apollo 17's lander launch that quite a lot of dust and debris gets blown about in the process. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXs4tncQcAE
But frankly, even if that first footprint was still magically pristine, I don't think returning there and putting down new footprints would somehow "ruin" the historical significance. It would add to the historical significance. The site would no longer be just the site of the first manned lunar landing, it'd be the site of the first manned lunar landing and the first return to the site of the first manned lunar landing. That's pretty neat too.
You can check the edit history, as you yourself have done in this case, to see how recently and how often the article in question has been edited. As for figuring out which version is more "correct", that's what the citations are there for. Follow the citations and see which ones seem more reliable.
Yes, it's a few extra clicks and a bit more research than simply reading the current version of the article and taking whatever it says as faith. But we're talking about journalists here. It's their job to do a bit more research. If they're not willing to do their job properly I'd say that's a problem for their editors to deal with, not Wikipedia's. Wikipedia provides everything they should need.
So, in a comment thread under a Slashdot article that's about mainstream media doing shoddy reporting, you cast aspersions on a study in a peer-reviewed journal and use a USA Today article to back your claim up?
As an aside about this particular incident, I find it enlightening that despite active attempts by Fitzgerald to keep his bogus quote in the Wikipedia article the longest it managed to stay there was 24 hours. On the other hand the various news articles in non-user-editable media are stuck with it. So Wikipedia does seem to be working quite well here by comparison.
One: The Congressional Budget Office issued a report to that effect in 2005 (when the US federal government was entirely Republican-run). http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/69xx/doc6908/12-01-10PercentTaxCut.pdf
Two: Nobel prize laureate James Tobin, for another. In 1992 he wrote that "[t]he 'Laffer Curve' idea that tax cuts would actually increase revenues turned out to deserve the ridicule with which sober economists had greeted it in 1981."
And three, economist Paul Pecorino calculated in 1995 that peak revenue was generated at a tax rate of around 65%, much higher than current tax rates in the US.
We haven't here on Earth because humans are much much cheaper down here. For the cost of one human mission to Mars, with all the immense life support expenses and technologies that would have to be carted along, I suspect you could indeed do a more capable job with robots. Lots of robots. You could scatter them all over the planet.
For purposes of argument, sure, let's say that's all true. There's lots of quibbling that can be done over recycling and such but one way or another there's lots of additional resources out in space. Why do we need actual living breathing humans in space to get access to those resources? Robots have done wonders for deep space exploration, there's no fundamental reason why they couldn't also be used for deep space exploitation. Once we've landed a nice big automated robotic factory/mining complex on the Moon we can have it go ahead and build us a giant dome to live in if we like. In the case of someplace like Mars there's the additional concern of contamination of potential native life to consider. If you send humans there's no way they're going to avoid shedding all sorts of bacteria and other grue while they explore the place, with robots it's easier to sterilize them and keep them sterile. I'm not raising that issue out of some fundamental need to keep space "pristine", I'm more concerned about making sure we get all the data we can get out of those environments.
I borrowed it from a friend, read it, and gave it back to him when I was done. No extra copies were ever sold as a result. Did I rip off the orignal creators any worse than the guy who downloaded it? I'm actually not sure, it seems like I didn't but I can't think of exactly why not. The net result was exactly the same. BTW, I rea;;y liked Dr. Manhattan's time-awareness but thought the plot's ultimate resolution was ridiculous. I didn't pay any money for the experience, though, so some may consider my opinion invalid.
If they're truly idiots who don't understand how to secure my data properly, then I want them to lose my data. I wouldn't trust them with it.
Ironically, Alan Stern has gone on to be one of the most prominent and vocal opponents of the new definition. I wouldn't be surprised if it has something to do with being principle investigator for the New Horizons probe to Pluto. :)
She's the DM's wife. We know when something terrible is about to happen to her character when the DM starts with a spontaneous "I love you, honey."
Our party once spent nearly an hour in a huddle trying to figure out a mathematical puzzle that formed the code for a vault's lock. Eventually, while we continued scribbling diagrams and filling pages with numbers, the player of one of our party's rogues slipped away and conferred briefly with the DM. A few dice were rolled and then the DM finally broke into our discussion to inform us that the door was open - the rogue had succeeded in her disable device and pick lock rolls. Sometimes a high level abstraction is your friend.
Once it's compromised, sure. But antivirus software can actually prevent that from happening. Every once in a while my antivirus software will find a virus tucked away in some file I've downloaded but haven't yet run, and although I don't recall it ever being something I was planning to run (mostly email attachments) I can see how this would help to protect a user who was less security-conscious and more "clicky" than I am. If you catch the virus before it runs, you're as clean as if you never downloaded it in the first place.