the courts have actually spanked them rather than shrugging and saying "oh well, you found a loophole, have a nice day"...
Nope. MOST of the court cases have gone their way... They're appealing ONE that did not, right now.
You or I have every right to time-shift what we watch; that doesn't even play in the same fair-use-ballpark as a for-profit company actively rebroadcasting someone else's content without permission.
Except it does... Courts have found that cable companies can host "Network DVRs", legally, without broadcaster's permission.
I think you'll find that, for most people (though not necessarily the courts), the key test of "fair use" ends with a single word: commercial.
Complete nonsense. Many for-profit works use excerpts of material. See any documentaries, ever. See any news reports, ever. See cable companies' DVRs. etc.
Calling it a British company is debatable, but more defensible than calling it "British Petroleum (BP)". British Petroleum isn't even its previous name.
No idea what you're talking about. Here's the top line from Wikipedia:
BP plc, sometimes referred to by its former name British Petroleum, is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Working at the shop I talk to a LOT of college aged kids, know what I've found? Frankly TV is The Lawrence Welk Show, something old folks liked that the kids honestly don't understand and don't want.
Except the stats show the exact opposite of your anecdotal experience. Younger people are MORE likely to use an OTA antenna than older people. Poor people are always disproportionately represented, but they're absolutely not the only group where OTA viewership is growing.
"The number of households relying on OTA reception only is also growing, [...] Growth is especially strong amongst younger households,"
"One in five young households never bothered to get a TV subscription to begin with."
"Also, 28 percent of all households with a head of household under the age of 35 use an antenna instead of a pay-TV subscription."
No doubt internet streaming contributes to the trend, but it's mostly a lot of OTA antennas (and DVRs). The economics of broadcast are so much better than unicast, not to mention the increasing prices for high-speed internet access.
copyright was never updated in peoples' favor, only in corporations' favor
This is a meaningless assertion. Whatever way a law goes, it benefits some corporations, while disadvantaging different corporations. For instance, CD and DVD recorder sales benefit tech corporations, but possibly at the expense of motion picture corporations.
And changes to copyright law since publications have absolutely benefited the public... Fair use, to name but one (and entirely destroy your absolutist assertions).
when you send out content to the internet, not everyone is bound by US rules!
That's true, but has ZERO affect on US laws. If you're sending out video on the internet, you have to follow the laws of your locality. People in other countries may have different restrictions on what they can do, but it doesn't change your rights and restrictions.
the world in tech is so different, its not sensible to apply what we considered 'content distribution' to today's world. too much is not applicable and some things we have today were not even conceived of back then.
I disagree entirely. Laws should be general enough that they don't ever need to be updated to suit the technology of the moment. Your position is why we end up with 10,000 page long laws on the storage and sale of cantaloupes...
If you can't describe right and wrong without resorting to specific technicalities and intricacies of current technologies, then what you're trying to enshrine in law just doesn't belong there. Notice that the internet didn't change MURDER laws one damn bit.
what could any 80 year old law possibly have to do with modern nuances of virtual, cloud, broadcast (in modern times), store-and-forward, proxy, repeat, bridge and route?
I just murdered someone... but you can't arrest me, because it was in the cloud!
I live at the edge of my broadcast area and I rent, so I can't install a serious outdoor antenna
If you rent a house, or otherwise have any exclusive-use space (eg. in a single-story rental, you're free to stick an antenna on the roof, if you don't damage the building doing so). I've found that chimney-mount straps work quite well for holding an antenna mast to a roof-top central-air condenser unit... Alternatively, a tripod and some guy wires can do the job quite well.
and a change in the weather means a 20 minute break to randomly adjust the antenna to stop the freezing
If weather is affecting your reception, you've just got a crappy antenna system. Buy a nice 8-bay antenna like a Winegard 8800, and a mast-mount preamp like a Winegard LNA-200, and you'll probably see vastly different results.
(I actually preferred analog broadcast: a 70% quality signal was a lot nicer than a video that freezes 18 seconds out of every minute...).
Except that's not the situation at all... I had a number of analog stations that were so far gone you could BARELY tell, if you focused hard enough, that there was a discernible picture and sound buried under the wall of static. After the switchover, they finally became watchable, perfect picture 99% of the time.
What tricks most people into damming digital, is the fact that VHF-lo channels (2-6) were almost universally switched to UHF frequencies, and a few VHF-hi channels (7-13) did the same, too. If you are/were 60-100 miles away from the broadcast tower, or only had a VHF antenna, you'll suddenly find that 2-6 disappeared entirely, or are just hard to pick up. A VHF antenna will pick-up STRONG UHF signals, but NOT WELL. The answer, of course, is getting a good UHF antenna, and mounting it nice and high up a mast.
A Series 3 platform TiVo would let you record digital OTA for $12.95 per month maxium
Why would anyone ever bother with Tivo?
eMatic/iView/HomeWorx/ViewTV sell $30-60 "Digital converter boxes" with USB ports. Plug in a portable USB hard drive (most support up to 3TB) and you can record any TV shows you want in 1080i, time-shift the current program, watch any of the sub-channels on the channel you're recording, connect the drive to your computer and watch/edit/reencode them there, etc. Under $100 total for 1TB, with no monthly fees. ATSC has a built-in guide, anyhow, so why pay Tivo to give it to you in a roundabout way?
When you're paying for Aereo, you're paying as much as anything to have somebody else worry about providing you with an outdoor antenna.
At $8/month, you'd pay off even a high-end fringe (60mi) antenna system and cheap DVR (above) in 3 years. Slightly longer if you want to account for a few hours of installation time. Less time if you count the saving of switching your internet service to a lower-speed tier.
If monitoring finds a modem to be tampered with or no longer responsive -- most likely service will be temporarily turned off, until support clears it after the customer pays for a truck roll (in the case someone did something dumb such as insert a pin in the reset slot of our modem).
Not legally enforceable. The user just has to play dumb, saying your modem is defective and just stopped working, and you're on the hook to "fix" it, unless you can PROVE that the user went out of his way to tamper with it. And no, a reset button getting pressed isn't enough tampering to void a warranty.
And Stemme has trust issues. Of Comcast, he said he doesn't "trust their (customer-service) team to provide accurate info."
In general... Request any important statements IN-WRITING. When they ask why, you can tell them that you want your lawyer to review it... They might say they don't / can't do that, but just insist, and they will do so, as they must.
Mark my words, what you get in writing is often completely and totally different than what you've been told verbally. You can record your calls, too, and it's legally admissible if you tell them you're recording, or their system tells you it might be recording... but it doesn't have the same psychological effect as explicitly telling them you want a hard copy for reference.
IMHO, nothing they've claimed is impossible, just unlikely... A combined DOCSIS modem and wifi AP *can* certainly uncap your bandwidth when third-party users log-on. It *could* also have dual radios, so 3rd parties are not even on the same channel as your WiFi. It *could* be issuing a second IP so customers can't troll/. and get your IP perma-banned. And the firewall *MIGHT* just be good enough to ensure that those customers can't possibly reach your inside network even with lots of forged packets... But I doubt it. And I bet what you get officially, in writing, will instead say there's potential for problems, and offer you some minor compensation if they've screwed up and your home network is hacked wide open...
"people these days think meatcomes in packages in the store. There'sbeena complete disconnect between what meatis andwhat it comes from"
People still buy whole chickens and turkeys, and cook them from scratch. It's certainly not as if we've replaced thanksgiving diner with turkey flavored lunch-meat.
And it's only true of birds, because they're the smallest. I don't know many families that could cook and eat a whole pig or cow.
There is also a possibility to hyperventilate by forcibly mouth-breathing for hours at a time. I've done this on work projects where I had to wear a mask the entire time. It's also tiring due to the extra effort just to breathe.
I've long, long wondered why face-masks don't come with a small battery pack and powerful DC fan. The fan increasing air pressure would certainly make it easier to inhale. How much easier for how much power, I've never bothered to figure out.
Why does DSL in the US seemingly mean crappy speed?
Long runs from the CO, lots of pairs bundled together, and lots of people in an area using DSL.
AT&T's (SBC) U-Verse can give pretty good DSL speeds ("download speeds up to 45Mbps"), but only if you're in a neighborhood where they've already installed their refrigerator-sized boxes, so the distance the copper runs to the D-SLAM is very short.
Verizon is the other huge player, and they've opted to deploy FIOS, and not putting much effort into upgrading their DSL options at all, so you won't be getting 20Mbps DSL from them
Continual inflation, ever-rising demand (even with increasing efficiency), increasing emissions / safety regulations, etc., would account for all of that. This isn't something you need to speculate about... You can find the recorded profits of energy companies in the public record quite easily, and point out specific examples of growing and excess profits, if you can find them.
To (over-simplified I know) compare with inflation, click the "S&P 500" box to show the two side-by-side. Expand it out to 10+ years, and show me where this big spike in profitability (far in excess of inflation) is for the energy company... And you can check all those "related" companies linked just below, if you think some others might be more sinister...
By all means, let me know when you find something significant.
Do NG customers get NG delivered at anywhere near its real cost to deliver? No. It's horribly expensive, it's been horribly expensive, and it's going to stay horribly expensive. And all the while, energy company executives receive salaries in the eye-popping range.
Those "eye-popping" executive salaries are a problem across ALL US industries, certainly not just energy. And I don't see any evidence that natural gas companies are pulling in ridiculous profits, either:
And more to the point, natural gas prices absolutely have been falling, with only a few brief spikes when the aging and inadequate pipelines can't handle sudden huge demand:
Conspiracy theories are nice, but you need something... anything to back them up. Any little bit of solid evidence will do.
For instance, right now, the US has a huge surplus of natural gas. There's so much they just burn it right off at the oil fields
They don't burn it just for the hell of it... Whether their storage / transport / pipeline capacity is exceeded, or it's excess pressure that blows a valve, incidental seepage they can't capture, or something similar... burning (flaring) it is the proper and safe way to release/dispose of it. Technology is improving how much of it can be captured/stored, and increasing energy prices are making it more economical to go to great lengths to capture it. The use of flaring has been gradually declining over the years:
Anybody with any background or just causal knowledge of US history can say, yes, there is plenty of corruption, but it's a tiny and continually declining fraction as much as there was in previous decades and centuries. It's believed technology has a lot to do with gradually reducing it. The level of corruption 100 years ago just would blow your mind, yet people look back with nostalgia at a sanitized version of history, without the warts you see living day-to-day.
By making it come from rate-payers, the assembly has neatly divorced itself from the effective tax by making it look like the electric utility is just raising its own rates out of pure greed.
And how is this different from gasoline / fuel taxes IN ANY WAY?
And is your electric utility deregulated? If not, they CAN'T raise their own rates, at all, without government approval (who aren't motivated by other people's greed).
The problem with deepwater wind is that far less costly non-offshore wind projects can provide the power.
So you're suggesting that these subsidies apply only to off-shore wind, and couldn't be applied to on-shore wind projects? And this off-shore subsidy is larger (in total) than all the on-shore wind subsidies?
That's not about green energy, that's taxing power that has been granted to a private entity over the rate payers.
No, it's a subsidy created by the elected representatives to encourage companies like the one you listed, to encourage them to do just what they are doing. In the case of power, studies have shown quite conclusively that eliminating the pollution would turn into many billions of dollars of savings in medical treatment for the population at large. So 15 cents probably isn't unreasonable.
I'm sure you're not going to take a position against ALL subsidies, which are beneficial to untold industries and people, usually having very positive effects. And I doubt you'd get far arguing against two centuries of representative democracy... The "taxing authority" you mentioned is simply not true. So just WHAT is it you're complaining about, here?
Worse, what stops them from the outright fraud of pulling power off the grid at the retail rate and returning it to the grid at their grossly inflated rate?
The same laws that grant them their subsidized prices, also prevent them from doing what you describe. Committing fraud results in prison sentences.
If you're talking about detection, well, the power company is going to have DETAILED records of precisely how much power was going into and coming out of that facility at what times. If it differs from projections, providing lots of power when there's little wind, and when other facilities are under-producing, they'll raise big red flags quickly.
Not to mention they'd have to construct at least a convincing facade of their facility first, and probably doesn't raise the price much to finish the job and avoid jail time.
Green is probably good, but hey, I just can't bring myself to care a whole lot.
I'm amazed that someone so utterly indifferent (about everything) could muster the motivation to type up a post, explaining how very indifferent they are.
An investor is not an owner. The money he paid for the stock did not go to Apple,
...unless it did. Companies issue their stocks to investors in the first place. And when the need arises, they sell more of it. If nothing, the market price of stocks will allow the company to earn more for the new stock certs. And generally, the estimated market value is what made it a good idea to buy the stock at the price it was sold for, in the first place. After all, what's the point in owning a company stock if you can't get any money out of it? There'd be boards voting to liquidate companies left and right, to get their money back, as soon as the company started profiting.
I am thrilled to see companies like Apple doing this stuff of there own will.
Companies ALWAYS do good things of their own free will... just as soon as it looks like the government is getting ready to force it on them.
Either they want to show they can be trusted to do the right thing without the regulations... and then in the longer-term go cheaper and not continue to follow the strict standards. Or they just want to stay ahead of the curve, and not be the last of their competitors to meet the looming guidelines
Try finding out what the price will be once the 6 month promotion runs out.
I already listed the regular prices... You'd know that if you took 30 seconds to check, instead of complaining about baseless nonsense here.
There's always promotions, but I only quote the non-promotional prices. Some providers hide it a bit, but it's not very hard to find the small print. Nothing you've said means anything.
Why is it that every damn mouse fart non-story about Mars gets posted to the front-page here, and always with a heavy-handed spin on how THIS ONE is finally going to be the bit of evidence that proves there was life on Mars? It's as if both NASA, SETI, and/. think that if they just try hard enough, they can *will* reality to match up with their dogma and fantasies about little green men.
All the indirect conjecture anyone can provide is WORTHLESS. Even irrefutable evidence of life on Mars would still be pretty close to worthless. It won't get remotely interesting until there are fossils and DNA to study. Without that, it's just a trivial footnote in a text book.
Quick... tell us the latest Apple rumor, and the latest bit of global warming proof/denial!
Your moral relativism and "there is no such thing as unbiased" crap are worse than any of those you listed.
Throwing those who are incredibly, unflinchingly biased, in the same category as those who strive to be unbiased, and only fall short a minuscule amount of time, makes yours an extremely dangerous world view, that undermines all efforts to improve.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. MOST of the court cases have gone their way... They're appealing ONE that did not, right now.
Except it does... Courts have found that cable companies can host "Network DVRs", legally, without broadcaster's permission.
Complete nonsense. Many for-profit works use excerpts of material. See any documentaries, ever. See any news reports, ever. See cable companies' DVRs. etc.
No idea what you're talking about. Here's the top line from Wikipedia:
You're talking about Aereo, right?
No?
Awkward...
I never suggested MythTv. The brands of boxes I listed are consumer electronics appliances, NOT COMPUTERS.
Except the stats show the exact opposite of your anecdotal experience. Younger people are MORE likely to use an OTA antenna than older people. Poor people are always disproportionately represented, but they're absolutely not the only group where OTA viewership is growing.
"The number of households relying on OTA reception only is also growing, [...] Growth is especially strong amongst younger households,"
"One in five young households never bothered to get a TV subscription to begin with."
"Also, 28 percent of all households with a head of household under the age of 35 use an antenna instead of a pay-TV subscription."
http://broadcastengineering.co...
No doubt internet streaming contributes to the trend, but it's mostly a lot of OTA antennas (and DVRs). The economics of broadcast are so much better than unicast, not to mention the increasing prices for high-speed internet access.
This is a meaningless assertion. Whatever way a law goes, it benefits some corporations, while disadvantaging different corporations. For instance, CD and DVD recorder sales benefit tech corporations, but possibly at the expense of motion picture corporations.
And changes to copyright law since publications have absolutely benefited the public... Fair use, to name but one (and entirely destroy your absolutist assertions).
http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc...
That's true, but has ZERO affect on US laws. If you're sending out video on the internet, you have to follow the laws of your locality. People in other countries may have different restrictions on what they can do, but it doesn't change your rights and restrictions.
I disagree entirely. Laws should be general enough that they don't ever need to be updated to suit the technology of the moment. Your position is why we end up with 10,000 page long laws on the storage and sale of cantaloupes...
If you can't describe right and wrong without resorting to specific technicalities and intricacies of current technologies, then what you're trying to enshrine in law just doesn't belong there. Notice that the internet didn't change MURDER laws one damn bit.
I just murdered someone... but you can't arrest me, because it was in the cloud!
If you rent a house, or otherwise have any exclusive-use space (eg. in a single-story rental, you're free to stick an antenna on the roof, if you don't damage the building doing so). I've found that chimney-mount straps work quite well for holding an antenna mast to a roof-top central-air condenser unit... Alternatively, a tripod and some guy wires can do the job quite well.
If weather is affecting your reception, you've just got a crappy antenna system. Buy a nice 8-bay antenna like a Winegard 8800, and a mast-mount preamp like a Winegard LNA-200, and you'll probably see vastly different results.
Except that's not the situation at all... I had a number of analog stations that were so far gone you could BARELY tell, if you focused hard enough, that there was a discernible picture and sound buried under the wall of static. After the switchover, they finally became watchable, perfect picture 99% of the time.
What tricks most people into damming digital, is the fact that VHF-lo channels (2-6) were almost universally switched to UHF frequencies, and a few VHF-hi channels (7-13) did the same, too. If you are/were 60-100 miles away from the broadcast tower, or only had a VHF antenna, you'll suddenly find that 2-6 disappeared entirely, or are just hard to pick up. A VHF antenna will pick-up STRONG UHF signals, but NOT WELL. The answer, of course, is getting a good UHF antenna, and mounting it nice and high up a mast.
Why would anyone ever bother with Tivo?
eMatic/iView/HomeWorx/ViewTV sell $30-60 "Digital converter boxes" with USB ports. Plug in a portable USB hard drive (most support up to 3TB) and you can record any TV shows you want in 1080i, time-shift the current program, watch any of the sub-channels on the channel you're recording, connect the drive to your computer and watch/edit/reencode them there, etc. Under $100 total for 1TB, with no monthly fees. ATSC has a built-in guide, anyhow, so why pay Tivo to give it to you in a roundabout way?
At $8/month, you'd pay off even a high-end fringe (60mi) antenna system and cheap DVR (above) in 3 years. Slightly longer if you want to account for a few hours of installation time. Less time if you count the saving of switching your internet service to a lower-speed tier.
Not legally enforceable. The user just has to play dumb, saying your modem is defective and just stopped working, and you're on the hook to "fix" it, unless you can PROVE that the user went out of his way to tamper with it. And no, a reset button getting pressed isn't enough tampering to void a warranty.
In general... Request any important statements IN-WRITING. When they ask why, you can tell them that you want your lawyer to review it... They might say they don't / can't do that, but just insist, and they will do so, as they must.
Mark my words, what you get in writing is often completely and totally different than what you've been told verbally. You can record your calls, too, and it's legally admissible if you tell them you're recording, or their system tells you it might be recording... but it doesn't have the same psychological effect as explicitly telling them you want a hard copy for reference.
IMHO, nothing they've claimed is impossible, just unlikely... A combined DOCSIS modem and wifi AP *can* certainly uncap your bandwidth when third-party users log-on. It *could* also have dual radios, so 3rd parties are not even on the same channel as your WiFi. It *could* be issuing a second IP so customers can't troll /. and get your IP perma-banned. And the firewall *MIGHT* just be good enough to ensure that those customers can't possibly reach your inside network even with lots of forged packets... But I doubt it. And I bet what you get officially, in writing, will instead say there's potential for problems, and offer you some minor compensation if they've screwed up and your home network is hacked wide open...
"people these days think meatcomes in packages in the store. There'sbeena complete disconnect between what meatis andwhat it comes from"
People still buy whole chickens and turkeys, and cook them from scratch. It's certainly not as if we've replaced thanksgiving diner with turkey flavored lunch-meat.
And it's only true of birds, because they're the smallest. I don't know many families that could cook and eat a whole pig or cow.
I've long, long wondered why face-masks don't come with a small battery pack and powerful DC fan. The fan increasing air pressure would certainly make it easier to inhale. How much easier for how much power, I've never bothered to figure out.
Yes, this is a worthless story that was just posted here solely as fodder for people to come and complaint about anything Facebook-related.
Long runs from the CO, lots of pairs bundled together, and lots of people in an area using DSL.
AT&T's (SBC) U-Verse can give pretty good DSL speeds ("download speeds up to 45Mbps"), but only if you're in a neighborhood where they've already installed their refrigerator-sized boxes, so the distance the copper runs to the D-SLAM is very short.
Verizon is the other huge player, and they've opted to deploy FIOS, and not putting much effort into upgrading their DSL options at all, so you won't be getting 20Mbps DSL from them
Continual inflation, ever-rising demand (even with increasing efficiency), increasing emissions / safety regulations, etc., would account for all of that. This isn't something you need to speculate about... You can find the recorded profits of energy companies in the public record quite easily, and point out specific examples of growing and excess profits, if you can find them.
In fact, I'll give you a start...
http://www.google.com/finance?...
To (over-simplified I know) compare with inflation, click the "S&P 500" box to show the two side-by-side. Expand it out to 10+ years, and show me where this big spike in profitability (far in excess of inflation) is for the energy company... And you can check all those "related" companies linked just below, if you think some others might be more sinister...
By all means, let me know when you find something significant.
Those "eye-popping" executive salaries are a problem across ALL US industries, certainly not just energy. And I don't see any evidence that natural gas companies are pulling in ridiculous profits, either:
http://www.google.com/finance?...
And more to the point, natural gas prices absolutely have been falling, with only a few brief spikes when the aging and inadequate pipelines can't handle sudden huge demand:
http://www.indmin.com/Article/...
Conspiracy theories are nice, but you need something... anything to back them up. Any little bit of solid evidence will do.
They don't burn it just for the hell of it... Whether their storage / transport / pipeline capacity is exceeded, or it's excess pressure that blows a valve, incidental seepage they can't capture, or something similar... burning (flaring) it is the proper and safe way to release/dispose of it. Technology is improving how much of it can be captured/stored, and increasing energy prices are making it more economical to go to great lengths to capture it. The use of flaring has been gradually declining over the years:
http://triblive.com/news/14420...
http://www.energyandcapital.co...
Anybody with any background or just causal knowledge of US history can say, yes, there is plenty of corruption, but it's a tiny and continually declining fraction as much as there was in previous decades and centuries. It's believed technology has a lot to do with gradually reducing it. The level of corruption 100 years ago just would blow your mind, yet people look back with nostalgia at a sanitized version of history, without the warts you see living day-to-day.
And how is this different from gasoline / fuel taxes IN ANY WAY?
And is your electric utility deregulated? If not, they CAN'T raise their own rates, at all, without government approval (who aren't motivated by other people's greed).
So you're suggesting that these subsidies apply only to off-shore wind, and couldn't be applied to on-shore wind projects? And this off-shore subsidy is larger (in total) than all the on-shore wind subsidies?
No, it's a subsidy created by the elected representatives to encourage companies like the one you listed, to encourage them to do just what they are doing. In the case of power, studies have shown quite conclusively that eliminating the pollution would turn into many billions of dollars of savings in medical treatment for the population at large. So 15 cents probably isn't unreasonable.
I'm sure you're not going to take a position against ALL subsidies, which are beneficial to untold industries and people, usually having very positive effects. And I doubt you'd get far arguing against two centuries of representative democracy... The "taxing authority" you mentioned is simply not true. So just WHAT is it you're complaining about, here?
The same laws that grant them their subsidized prices, also prevent them from doing what you describe. Committing fraud results in prison sentences.
If you're talking about detection, well, the power company is going to have DETAILED records of precisely how much power was going into and coming out of that facility at what times. If it differs from projections, providing lots of power when there's little wind, and when other facilities are under-producing, they'll raise big red flags quickly.
Not to mention they'd have to construct at least a convincing facade of their facility first, and probably doesn't raise the price much to finish the job and avoid jail time.
I'm amazed that someone so utterly indifferent (about everything) could muster the motivation to type up a post, explaining how very indifferent they are.
Companies ALWAYS do good things of their own free will... just as soon as it looks like the government is getting ready to force it on them.
Either they want to show they can be trusted to do the right thing without the regulations... and then in the longer-term go cheaper and not continue to follow the strict standards. Or they just want to stay ahead of the curve, and not be the last of their competitors to meet the looming guidelines
I already listed the regular prices... You'd know that if you took 30 seconds to check, instead of complaining about baseless nonsense here.
There's always promotions, but I only quote the non-promotional prices. Some providers hide it a bit, but it's not very hard to find the small print. Nothing you've said means anything.
Why is it that every damn mouse fart non-story about Mars gets posted to the front-page here, and always with a heavy-handed spin on how THIS ONE is finally going to be the bit of evidence that proves there was life on Mars? It's as if both NASA, SETI, and /. think that if they just try hard enough, they can *will* reality to match up with their dogma and fantasies about little green men.
All the indirect conjecture anyone can provide is WORTHLESS. Even irrefutable evidence of life on Mars would still be pretty close to worthless. It won't get remotely interesting until there are fossils and DNA to study. Without that, it's just a trivial footnote in a text book.
Quick... tell us the latest Apple rumor, and the latest bit of global warming proof/denial!
Your moral relativism and "there is no such thing as unbiased" crap are worse than any of those you listed.
Throwing those who are incredibly, unflinchingly biased, in the same category as those who strive to be unbiased, and only fall short a minuscule amount of time, makes yours an extremely dangerous world view, that undermines all efforts to improve.
It's possible this is true in your state, but it's certainly not true elsewhere.