I'd like to respond in more detail, but it all comes down to your final, appallingly ignorant line:
Emerson Williwick wrote:
It's a good idea, scientists, but why waste effort on idealistic dreams of settling other planets? I'd rather see our great scientific minds work to fix the growing shortage of resources here on Earth.
First of all, some of us do NOT believe that these dreams are at all idealistic. They are practical, they are achievable, and they represent the future of the human race. How silly to think that interplanetary exploration is within our grasp, and we won't take it! (I won't even address the vast array of misinformation you throw about regarding the cost and feasibility of Mars missions; it's plain you just don't know moe than you've learned from headlines.)
But second: the growing shortage of resources here on Earth exists for one simple reason, because Earth is finite. What resources would you have scientists conjure up? Star Trek style mass replicators? Shall we grow a continent of jungle, compress it beneath the sea, and thereby create new sources of oil and coal?
Certainly for the short-term humans will not completely use up all our resources, and even those we use up we will find substitutes for. Whether it's petroleum or simply the ever-useful copper, we'll have to face up one day to the fact that it's all been used and the rest is too expensive to mine. At that point getting resources from off-Earth sources, like asteroids, becomes not only feasible but economically necessary.
Earth is finite. You can't change that fact. What you can change is whether or not Earth is the finite boundary of human society. ----
Nowhere is the Devon Island project being billed as "science". Of course we cannot do Mars "science" on Earth, that would be nonsensical. This project is about the practical knowledge needed to support a long-term habitat on another planet.
"The outpost is not intended to be a high-fidelity mockup of a martian outpost, with regenerative systems and enclosed life support. Rather, the point of the habitat is to learn how to operate on Mars, to coordinate the people, robots, vehicles and mission control centers."
To some extent this is above all a public relations project ("stunt" being in the eye of the beholder). The Mars Society, though, is all about making Mars exploration practical. This isn't so much a "science experiment" as it is a dry run using the model proposed by Dr. Robert Zubrin, the society's president. It's a learning experiment, in other words.
NASA does plenty of pure research science in this area -- for example, astronauts have spent months at a time in very rigorous closed systems that test air and water recycling technologies. (This is much like Biosphere, actually, but with experimental controls.) But NASA is barred by Congress from funding almost anything resembling true preparation for a Mars mission. The Mars Society is seeking to fill that niche with the Devon Island station.
Don't think of this as science, because it isn't about getting scientific results. It's about learning what works and what doesn't so that when we DO go to Mars we have plenty of foreknowledge.
It's also about education, about public outreach, and about motivating the troops. And last but not least, it's our (the Mars Society's) money -- we can spend it any way we like. So there! ----
I don't mean to rain on NASA's parade, but, seriously, who would want to live on other planets? Personally, I'd be extremely reluctant to leave everything I know behind on Earth and ship myself off to another planet where living conditions would likely be much poorer (at least at first) -- especially knowing that I'd probably never be able to come back.
You're looking at moving to Mars like moving to the suburbs. Where are the movie theatres? Is there a public swimming pool nearby? Are the schools any good?
Frankly, the people moving to Mars (and there will be, not if, just when) aren't looking for creature comforts. They're looking for adventure -- a once-in-many-lifetimes adventure; looking for a challenge; looking to escape poverty, or repression (political; religious; ethnic; take your pick); looking just to get away from it all. These kinds of people have always existed, and they have always driven exploration and colonization movements. Right now people like this, in America, often go to places like Alaska; even though they grew up in cushy California exurbia, they now live in remote cabins and see people once every three months. Yes, it's an unusual way to live your life... but then, you don't see these people in your life because they've all gone elsewhere. Maybe they're living on an oil platform with 25 guys who speak Arabic, or taking an HVAC job in Antarctica. They may be Turks living in Germany, or Kazakhs living in Chicago, or Chinese living in Peru. Just because you're not one of them, don't believe they don't exist.
Before you hit that reply button to flame me, sit back and think what you would really do if you could leave on a space shuttle for Mars tomorrow. Would you really want to abandon the Earth, home of humanity for many millenia, and all of its scenic mountains, awe-inspiring oceans, and beautiful forests to go live on a God-forsaken hump of red rock? I think not.
No flame. Just a straight-up Jerry-Springer-show "You don't know me!" Face it: you may be right that most people are like you, but fortunately for humanity, not all people are. ----
You jest, of course, but the fact is there is Asteroid & Comet Impact Hazards information at NASA and a consortium of astronomers called Spaceguard Project that is attempting to locate and evaluate as many potentially dangerous objects out there as they can, so that in the event we determine one is a danger, we can do something about it.
Until then it's a pretty random event that we may or may not need to worry about, on a scale of "during the whole of human civilization". From my perspective, this warrants caution and contingency planning but no real action so far. The fact is that the earlier we find a potentially-colliding object, the simpler it is to deal with; a minor orbital deflection, perhaps by a nuclear weapon, perhaps by a lander with a big-ass rocket engine, may be enough to eliminate any future concerns of a collision. ----
I didnt know there were comets with active volcanoes. Correct me if im wrong, but i thought they were all dead? maybe im thinking of asteroids - im certainly no astronomer.
Dead? Well, they're not tectonically active, really. Only planets with hot molten metal cores can do that, and comets are generally balls of rock and ice that spend most of their lives way out in the Oort cloud beyond Neptune. Io is a small planet in its own right, but the main reason it's volcanically active is the constant push-pull gravitational pressures of Jupiter.
Anyway, as comets swing down close to the sun, which is what makes them comets to us, they constantly slough off material due to similar heating and gravitational pressure by the sun. Whatever held them together... ice, mostly... cracks and degrades. (This is possibly why the granddaddy of all comets, Halley, was pretty unspectacular on its most recent visit: there just isn't as much of it anymore.) What this event with LINEAR showed is that (unsurprisingly) this process is not a long even one but pretty chaotic and stochastic.
In short: no volcanoes. Just melting, dirty ice. ----
This won't markedly increase the "stuff going into space" anytime soon. For that you need a market, and right now, that market is pretty stable. From 1990 to present, there have been around 150 satellites a year launched on an average of about 70 rockets. Even the big build-up of satellite constellations in the late 90s (along with the entry of new spacefaring nations like Brazil and India) didn't change this much, although for a time, it resulted in much rocketry investment and several startups in the cheap-access-to-space field.
But make no mistake: with Iridium failing to sell at a penny on the dollar (that's right, 1% of the investment so far, and the buyer walked away), its strongest competitor Globalstar perilously close to bankruptcy, ICO just emerging from Chapter 11, Orbcomm losing money despite orders, and so on, the LEO constellation market is pretty much over and done with.
With the end of speculation in the LEO constellation business [as well as a tanking tech stock sector], Rotary Rocket failed to get further investment despite an operational vehicle. This pretty much put the kibosh on anyone like Kistler or Beal or energizing the Cheap Access to Space market by dramatically reducing launch costs, at least anytime soon.
It may seem counterintuitive, but there actually are only a limited number of things you can do in space. Communications satellites in GEO are one; scientific satellites in LEO are another. And there are already plenty of commercial devices selling the data they collect.
What the launch limitations did was two things. First, they were political cover for an administration burned by Loral malfeasance in assisting China with a launch. Second, they were a simple protectionist measure aimed at giving homegrown companies (Rotary, Beal, Kistler) a window in which to develop vehicles and compete for business against the established American leaders, Boeing and Lockmart.
The irony is that most post-Soviet space vendors (Khrunichev, Energiya, Ukraine's Sea Launch) have partnered with one or more of the leading American vendors, who are now able to steer customers to a "preferred" international partner, in effect recapturing lost business. There has been no new American vendor to reach maturity. Whether these quasi-monopolies constitute improved American competition for the global satellite business, which pretty much remains a zero-sum game, is an exercise for the reader. ----
... was Jeremy Nixon's Deja power search, especially after the redesign/relaunch. It's basically just a reorganization of the form from Deja's own power search page, but I find the slightly different interface (with no unnecessary graphics and no scrolling) to be simpler and quicker to use.
Unfortunately Jeremy doesn't have his own back archives... ----
>Bluetooth is NOT a wireless networking protocol. It's a wireless cabling protocol..... >802.11 last I heard required at the very least a PCMCIA card.
So I'm guessing bluetooth will only require a small chip...
The chip is 9mm by 9mm. About the size of a dime. I'm not sure how much larger the entire device would need to be, though. Anyway, it won't need a 2-3 inch dongle antenna like wireless ethernet, making it attractive for handheld devices.
Hmm, yeah, the first thing anybody's going to want to do is abuse the technology with this is try and network their computers this way-but then again, there's the people who have been storming up ideas to network between 2 houses, there was even an "Ask Slashdot" involving it... but if the power consumption of the bluetooth chips is low enough that they can put it in cell phone/PDA/relativly low power devices, then wouldn't this be feasable to buy about 4 of these devices, plug a couple of AA batteries/9v batteries, stick them in a ziplock bag, and hang them in the trees (as repeaters) between your house and your friends, get a bluetooth device hooked up to each of your computer's serial ports, and finally be able to play Quake with sombody over a LAN-type connection? I'm sure this wouldn't be anywhere near as fast as actual T1/10bT, but even a null modem connection/speed would be pretty spiff.
Heh. Well, figure 50-90Kbps, so slightly better than a modem connection -- if you don't get any interference. The nominal upper range of a standard Bluetooth device is supposedly 10m, but with power boosters, 100m is believed possible. So you/could/ do this, assuming you were all desperate and couldn't afford DSL or something. But you'd be better off with HomeRF: for just slightly more cost, maybe actually less considering all the Bluetooth repeaters you'd need, you could build a 1.6Mbps neighborhood wireless network.
But sure, I don't think there's any technical reason you could NOT do it with Bluetooth. As a practical solution, probably not (performance, security, reliability, etc.). For a crazy summer weekend experiment... ----
Can't wait for Bluetooth? Then look into HomeRF. It's a mid-level wireless protocol that isn't going to be an IEEE standard and will probably eventually disappear, positioned as it is somewhere between the device-level connectivity of Bluetooth and the robust networking of 802.11b.
Mainly available to consumers in the form of Intel Anypoint and running at 1.6Mpbs, it's a decent solution for SOHO and hobbyist applications, and most important, it's in stores now, where a one-PC kit (no cards, USB pluggable) retails for around $60.
The minimal 802.11b "wireless ethernet" (or "Wi-Fi", ecch) configuration right now requires an expensive ($200-1500) base unit that's basically an Ethernet hub with robust IR ports, as well as IR Ethernet cards (~$100) for each PC to be connected. This will be fine for professional environments, who will demand the 11Mpbs throughput, but a bit steep for most consumers. (FYI, 802.11 is the protocol that Apple Airport and its PC sibling, Lucent's Orinoco, as well as future products like Cisco Aironet and 3Com AirConnect, run. For reasons probably related to "Steve Jobs", Airport base stations plus card can be had for as little as $400 total, while Orinoco and other companies' PC-compatible offerings run $1000 and up for essentially the same equipment. If all 802.11 products were available at the Airport price level, there would be no market for HomeRF at all.)
OK, if you are one of those "only the highest possible bandwidth will do" users, you will want to jump straight to the wireless ethernet offering, damn the pricetag. But for most people the most taxing thing they'll run is web-browsing, gameplaying, or Napstering, and since 1.6Mpbs is superior to almost any home internet connection, it won't bottleneck you. HomeRF gives you freedom of movement in your apartment or even backyard if you like for a reasonable cost.
I do expect Bluetooth to ultimately take over this market, since it will be available on many more devices than just computers, and may finally make things like remotely programmable air conditioners an affordable reality.
Bottom line: there are three wireless standards out there, and you're advised to read labels carefully the next couple of years. Me, I'll be trawling the 10%-off-returns shelves at Micro Center...
[Disclaimer: I can't report yet on how well it works, I've just looked closely at the product so far.] ----
YuNicks sez: Nonsense: there's 802.11b, already running and on the ground. Coupled with IPv6 and the QoS guarantees it has, tell me what I can do with Bluetooth that I can't do with wireless Ethernet?
Bluetooth is NOT a wireless networking protocol. It's a wireless cabling protocol. Sure, it can do some of the same things, but it isn't intended for the massive amounts of data that pass through an Ethernet connection, but instead for the piddling bits and bytes that pass from keyboards to PCs and such. Bluetooth is low-power and will be adaptable to PDAs and cell phones; 802.11 last I heard required at the very least a PCMCIA card.
They're intended for entirely different purposes and situations; don't even think of them as competitors. 802.11 offers, as you note, the kinds of QOS -- throughput, robustness, security -- that corporations require to connect up laptops. It will make office networking much easier. Bluetooth isn't about that; it's about getting all the piddly little electronic toys you use to interoperate, exchange address books, and such. ----
Thanks for pointing out my goof. I forgot that Rumania is the old spelling.
To summarize: while long known as Rumania, and so spelled on independence from the Ottoman empire in 1859, the official spelling has been Romania since around 1945. It took until the 1960s for many Western references to be updated.
The spelling Rumania is believed to be a reflection of the name for Rome and Romans in Turkish (Ottoman) dialects, and as such, some modern Romanians actually find it offensive. (Whoops.) But the Roman origin is also considered controversial, and may be more legend than fact.
It's described in much more detail than anyone on/. may care to know...
The designation of Rumania (Roumania, Romania) is a more sensitive issue. It is related to the whole question of historical claims concerning the origin and destiny of Rumania in Eastern Europe. As such it is also directly tied to the emergence of the Rumanian people as a self-conscious, state-building community. It is controversial, because historical claims to Transylvania are based on prior settlement, which in turn depends on whether or not present-day Rumanians are recognized as descendants of Trajan's Romans who conquered the Dacians in A.D. 106. Those who do not accept the Daco-Roman theory of Rumanian continuity are more likely to spell the national designation with a "u."
First off, I don't think the MSNBC columnist was saying they WERE in Romania. He said their registration data SAID they were in Romania, which, based on the name "South Ural", was pretty unlikely.
(I did check to see if there was a city like "Ural" in Romania, anyway. Mapquest says no.)
Second, it could be his confusion (or somebody else's along the line) between RUssia and ROmania (whose local name is RUmania). I've see people assume RU = Rumania all the time. Two letter country codes are easy to confuse.
Third, what Russian or Rumanian would use the English word "South" in their city name anyway? If they really lived there they would have registered it as "Yuzhniyuralsk" or something like that. No, this registration address info is about as bogus as saying "123 Easy St., Anywhere, USA". ----
Disclaimer: I own and adore my Handspring Visor Deluxe.
With the M100, Palm is repositioning its entry point. Obviously the cell phone custom-cover idea is carrying over to treat this as yet another consumer electronics device. The features set is pretty much established: you can hit 80% of the market with 20% of the functionality. Make it smaller, put on bright colors, keep the price low, and you've instantly targeted a new demographic.
The Palm has amply proven itself in the business market, and they're clearly not abandoning that with their high-end models. The VIIx (mentioned later in the article, but not pictured) will up the ante for wireless PDAs with more RAM and custom software. Personally I think this is just a lot of experimentation since Bluetooth is going to be the real future in this area, but there is a market for the well-connected businessman or geek.
People are saying things like "gosh, same old Palm, just with colors". Well, yes. It's a proven product that they are now trying to expand the market for. "It's the iMacification of everything". Well, get used to it. Most people don't care about the Megahertz or the Level II cache on their motherboard. The iMac does what they want for a good price and it looks attractive in a den. But the iMac hasn't made towers or big beige boxen disappear, has it? This M100 isn't going to hurt the PDA market at all. In fact, this will be the starter PDA for a lot of people, who will later realize they need wireless modems and web-browsing-on-the-go (or whatever). But a lot more people are willing to experiment at the $150 price point than spend $500+ on yet another electronic toy that turns out to be useless to them.
Also, some people have complained about the wedge at the bottom -- don't forget this is a smaller size case. I haven't used a Palm V... series so I can't comment on how it feels. I do think that it would actually be easier to hold if the bulge were at the top, but maybe that's just me.
As for replacing the IIIe and competing with the Visor, I think they have a good chance. I've bet on Handspring, mainly on the strength of their expansion technology, but the long delays in getting Springboard modules released is getting frustrating (e.g. still no GPS unit; only two games, both golf!). I was also hoping for more movement towards a high-end Visor. I think the M100 is clearly a much stronger competitor than the IIIe ever was, and if it had been out last fall it would have been a more difficult decision for me.
Get ready for the M100 to be under a LOT of Christmas trees.
Prior to this story, the most frequently mentioned candidate was Chris Noth, formerly of Law & Order, and recently "Mr. Big" (guess why) on Sex and the City. This Yahoo article incorporates both the new and old rumors.
(In an exclusive interview, Noth replied that he was looking forward to starring in a series without a preposition in its name.) ----
Amusing use of the referrer property by zap2it.com: if and only if you clicked on this story from Slashdot, you get the final line, "In a related story, Natalie Portman got hot grits poured on her by rabid slashdot fans."
(Unfortunately, whatever they were doing behind the scenes, that managed to break the "back to headlines" link badly.) ----
SvnLyrBrto asks: Okay... this is something that's bugged me in in a number of other stories here on/. By what streach of the law, imagination, or simple arrogant presumption does an Illinois judge claim jurisdiction over people in California?!?!?!? Or vice versa, for that matter (MPAA's restraining order on 500 john does, many of which most certianly live outside CA comes to mind)?
Don't take this personally... but I am sick and tired of people who don't seem to have a junior-high-school level of knowledge of the world posting away on Slashdot. The legal system of this country isn't exactly simple, but it surely shouldn't be beyond the abilities of the self-taught coders who allegedly populate Slashdot. Unfortunately, every time we have a legal story here, it's a self-evident truth that nobody listened in Government class.
I'll try to use short words.
To start, the United States Constitution, Article IV, Section I, states the following:
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
This is why you can be arrested in California for murdering someone in Maine. It's also why you can be sued in Florida by a customer you have in Montana. Often contracts actually specify which court will be the first choice of the contracting parties.
Beyond that, an injunction is simply an order covering the parties in a lawsuit. As such, it does not have to actually conform to any law -- in fact injunctions can be quite broad (e.g. a gag order, which does not violate the first amendment) to suit the requirements of the case. Injunctions are intended to prevent one party from accomplishing a de facto win while losing a de jure case.
It's pretty irrelevant to this case, though, which is in a Federal court.
Is this a *FEDERAL* judge, whose bench just happens to be in Illinois?
Yes, and Illinois happens to be where Yesmail.com is headquartered, therefore the most likely place for them to choose to sue. They are suing in Federal court because they are seeking injunctive relief under Federal law.
Or does any old state judge have carte blanche to order around people outside their jurisdictions?
When the judge has jurisdiction, YES. Sometimes jurisdiction is indeed a matter of dispute, which is why the other side will enter an appeal. This is normal. (Frankly, it's normal for any target of a court injunction to argue against it.)
Seems like MANY states would STRENOUSLY object to such a violation of what little sovereignity the states have left (Texas and Mass come to mind, for starters)
Uh... I hate to say this, but they signed the Constitution. Quite some time ago. In other words, they exchanged certain kinds of sovereignty for certain presumed benefits. This is the way that a federal republic works.
And if the latter *IS* the case, why do we bother with jurisdictions at all?
Because normal criminal and civil law is handled by the states. The presumption is that doing business in a state (which can be merely, e.g. selling to someone there) exposes you to its jurisdiction (for the protection of the person you sold to). Anyway, again, this is a FEDERAL lawsuit under FEDERAL law so the assumption is that it applies to all parties in the jurisdiction of the United States.
Of course, it *IS* a common arrogance for our legal system to presume that it has domain outside its jurisdiction (certian OTHER DeCSS-related actions, in Norway, for example, come to mind).
The copyrights of one nation are recognized by another nation under the Berne convention, a treaty which the United States signed in 1985. Again, under the Constitution, treaties have the effect of federal law. Norway, as a signatory to the treaty (much earlier than us!), has to recognize our copyrights just as we promised to recognize theirs.
You may not like the particular application of copyright in this case, but you should be able to understand the legal process.
I'm *SURE* that there are at least a FEW bona fide lawyers who read Slashdot. Could one of you PLEASE shed some enlightenment here?
IANAL. But I do have a college education, and I can pick up a World Almanac and read the Constitution. It is highly suggested that you do the same. This isn't some boring quiz for half-asleep eighth-graders, after all -- this is REAL LIFE, and as we see is not inconsequential.
Besides, this is the real bottom line: MAPS lists a page on its Web site (http://www.mailabuse.org) titled "how to sue MAPS," hoping a legal case would establish that its tactics were legal. Yesmail is the first company to take up the challenge.
In other words, MAPS has been waiting eagerly for this day in court. They've probably had briefs prepared well in advance, and pro bono legal counsel all lined up. ----
I didn't read the CNN story closely enough. Apparently it's the same group, after all, but they are now operating under a different name for the nonprofit archive activity (as opposed to the commercial search-engine activity). ----
Jon Erickson spewed: [much repetition deleted]... any study that attempts to categorise how we live at the moment using the web is doomed to be prejudiced and incomplete. Until everyone is online and has equal access, this is just another arrogant study attempting to categorise who is worth enough to be able to use the net.
So what you're saying is that the ONLY records worthwhile to historians are those that reflect "everyone"? Just who the hell are you to tell future historians what will and won't be useful to them? Do you understand history at all?
The importance of any given historical document is often not found in the document itself, but in that document's context.
My father managed a professional local historical society and museum while I was a kid. The museum was a high Italianate mansion in the upper Midwest built by a lawyer who got rich on land speculation. You are correct that the biggest danger facing future generations is to look at a museum such as a rich lawyer's house and believe This is the way people lived in 1870. In fact, only about 1% of the people lived that way (servants, nice furniture from Europe, that sort of thing). To help counter this one of the first things my father had done was to take custody of a "fortuitously" threatened building, one of the first in town, which was more typical of your average family.
By themselves, neither building is representative. Even together they fail to represent everyone in this particular community. But by putting them together in context you can illuminate things that would otherwise be much more difficult to see.
What a snapshot of the web ca. 1996 shows is most definitely a subset of the larger society. But you can't say to me that it doesn't say anything useful. You yourself note that the people, ideas, and connections that it shows are a particular and identifiable subset of the larger society. Realize then: That, in and of itself, is useful to historians. Even more so is the randomness and complexity of the archive, because having a human select what future generations of historians will find useful or interesting is a dubious proposition.
If you're waiting for the day when "everyone is online" to start recording our digital history, you'll have to hold your breath a very long time. ----
Bankruptcy is often the end of a business, but as with individuals, it's mainly a way to force creditors to renegotiate terms. APBNews.com is posting current content, though with staff cut by about 90%, it won't be as much or as good as it used to be.
Hopefully they can eke out a living long enough for a guardian angel to appear, though with the tech stock market in the tank that possibility is slimmer by far than it used to be. Still, news operations like UPI have hung on by a thread for sometimes decades! There's a lot of worthwhile content there, and even in the worst case perhaps another news site will acquire it.
Though the prognosis is not robust, I still wish APBnews.com a long and happy life. ----
One of the "Powertools" for MSIE includes a feature which adds two items to your "Tools" menu: "Add to Trusted Zone" and "Add to Restricted Zone". These items, when clicked, will automatically add the domain of the site you are currently viewing to the specified security zone. This should work just as effectively as the button you mention, since you can instantly add a site to the restritcted zone. Actually this would be better than a "toggle" button, because it will remember the site in the future.
It's called IE5 PowerTweaks. If you turn off Active Scripts for the Internet Zone, you can then go to a site and decide if you trust it to run Javascript or leave a cookie and pull down your menu. Boom! Instant Javascript. ----
In fact, Microsoft offers a freebie add-on called IE5 PowerTweaks. Among other things, the handful of tools includes menu items (on the Tools menu) called "Add to Restricted Zone" and "Add to Trusted Zone". This lets you manage your cookie-and-javascript-enabled sites without messing around in the "Security" dialog box for five minutes. ----
maddog42 asks: Why don't we take useless national defense projects like Star Wars and turn the technology around to propel solar sails with all the high-powered laser and particle cannons that are probably still up in orbit somewheres?
Ha ha. We wish we had particle cannons in space. (You do realize that the Strategic Defense Initiative never led to anything, right? Except the recent National Missile Defense system proposals. And it still isn't deployed.)
Actually, you're closer to the truth than you think. I can't say for certain, but it seems highly likely to me that the experiment relied on advances in laser and microwave technology made under SDI funding. (Indeed, one researcher's home page shows that he's done contract work for Raytheon to "suppress enemy air defense".)
So in a sense, this is beating swords into plowshares. ----
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to respond in more detail, but it all comes down to your final, appallingly ignorant line:
Emerson Williwick wrote:
It's a good idea, scientists, but why waste effort on idealistic dreams of settling other planets? I'd rather see our great scientific minds work to fix the growing shortage of resources here on Earth.
First of all, some of us do NOT believe that these dreams are at all idealistic. They are practical, they are achievable, and they represent the future of the human race. How silly to think that interplanetary exploration is within our grasp, and we won't take it! (I won't even address the vast array of misinformation you throw about regarding the cost and feasibility of Mars missions; it's plain you just don't know moe than you've learned from headlines.)
But second: the growing shortage of resources here on Earth exists for one simple reason, because Earth is finite. What resources would you have scientists conjure up? Star Trek style mass replicators? Shall we grow a continent of jungle, compress it beneath the sea, and thereby create new sources of oil and coal?
Certainly for the short-term humans will not completely use up all our resources, and even those we use up we will find substitutes for. Whether it's petroleum or simply the ever-useful copper, we'll have to face up one day to the fact that it's all been used and the rest is too expensive to mine. At that point getting resources from off-Earth sources, like asteroids, becomes not only feasible but economically necessary.
Earth is finite. You can't change that fact. What you can change is whether or not Earth is the finite boundary of human society.
----
Nowhere is the Devon Island project being billed as "science". Of course we cannot do Mars "science" on Earth, that would be nonsensical. This project is about the practical knowledge needed to support a long-term habitat on another planet.
"The outpost is not intended to be a high-fidelity mockup of a martian outpost, with regenerative systems and enclosed life support. Rather, the point of the habitat is to learn how to operate on Mars, to coordinate the people, robots, vehicles and mission control centers."
(Right there on the Discovery website you didn't read.)
To some extent this is above all a public relations project ("stunt" being in the eye of the beholder). The Mars Society, though, is all about making Mars exploration practical. This isn't so much a "science experiment" as it is a dry run using the model proposed by Dr. Robert Zubrin, the society's president. It's a learning experiment, in other words.
NASA does plenty of pure research science in this area -- for example, astronauts have spent months at a time in very rigorous closed systems that test air and water recycling technologies. (This is much like Biosphere, actually, but with experimental controls.) But NASA is barred by Congress from funding almost anything resembling true preparation for a Mars mission. The Mars Society is seeking to fill that niche with the Devon Island station.
Don't think of this as science, because it isn't about getting scientific results. It's about learning what works and what doesn't so that when we DO go to Mars we have plenty of foreknowledge.
It's also about education, about public outreach, and about motivating the troops. And last but not least, it's our (the Mars Society's) money -- we can spend it any way we like. So there!
----
I don't mean to rain on NASA's parade, but, seriously, who would want to live on other planets? Personally, I'd be extremely reluctant to leave everything I know behind on Earth and ship myself off to another planet where living conditions would likely be much poorer (at least at first) -- especially knowing that I'd probably never be able to come back.
... but then, you don't see these people in your life because they've all gone elsewhere. Maybe they're living on an oil platform with 25 guys who speak Arabic, or taking an HVAC job in Antarctica. They may be Turks living in Germany, or Kazakhs living in Chicago, or Chinese living in Peru. Just because you're not one of them, don't believe they don't exist.
You're looking at moving to Mars like moving to the suburbs. Where are the movie theatres? Is there a public swimming pool nearby? Are the schools any good?
Frankly, the people moving to Mars (and there will be, not if, just when) aren't looking for creature comforts. They're looking for adventure -- a once-in-many-lifetimes adventure; looking for a challenge; looking to escape poverty, or repression (political; religious; ethnic; take your pick); looking just to get away from it all. These kinds of people have always existed, and they have always driven exploration and colonization movements. Right now people like this, in America, often go to places like Alaska; even though they grew up in cushy California exurbia, they now live in remote cabins and see people once every three months. Yes, it's an unusual way to live your life
Before you hit that reply button to flame me, sit back and think what you would really do if you could leave on a space shuttle for Mars tomorrow. Would you really want to abandon the Earth, home of humanity for many millenia, and all of its scenic mountains, awe-inspiring oceans, and beautiful forests to go live on a God-forsaken hump of red rock? I think not.
No flame. Just a straight-up Jerry-Springer-show "You don't know me!" Face it: you may be right that most people are like you, but fortunately for humanity, not all people are.
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You jest, of course, but the fact is there is Asteroid & Comet Impact Hazards information at NASA and a consortium of astronomers called Spaceguard Project that is attempting to locate and evaluate as many potentially dangerous objects out there as they can, so that in the event we determine one is a danger, we can do something about it.
Until then it's a pretty random event that we may or may not need to worry about, on a scale of "during the whole of human civilization". From my perspective, this warrants caution and contingency planning but no real action so far. The fact is that the earlier we find a potentially-colliding object, the simpler it is to deal with; a minor orbital deflection, perhaps by a nuclear weapon, perhaps by a lander with a big-ass rocket engine, may be enough to eliminate any future concerns of a collision.
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I didnt know there were comets with active volcanoes. Correct me if im wrong, but i thought they were all dead? maybe im thinking of asteroids - im certainly no astronomer.
... ice, mostly ... cracks and degrades. (This is possibly why the granddaddy of all comets, Halley, was pretty unspectacular on its most recent visit: there just isn't as much of it anymore.) What this event with LINEAR showed is that (unsurprisingly) this process is not a long even one but pretty chaotic and stochastic.
Dead? Well, they're not tectonically active, really. Only planets with hot molten metal cores can do that, and comets are generally balls of rock and ice that spend most of their lives way out in the Oort cloud beyond Neptune. Io is a small planet in its own right, but the main reason it's volcanically active is the constant push-pull gravitational pressures of Jupiter.
Anyway, as comets swing down close to the sun, which is what makes them comets to us, they constantly slough off material due to similar heating and gravitational pressure by the sun. Whatever held them together
In short: no volcanoes. Just melting, dirty ice.
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This won't markedly increase the "stuff going into space" anytime soon. For that you need a market, and right now, that market is pretty stable. From 1990 to present, there have been around 150 satellites a year launched on an average of about 70 rockets. Even the big build-up of satellite constellations in the late 90s (along with the entry of new spacefaring nations like Brazil and India) didn't change this much, although for a time, it resulted in much rocketry investment and several startups in the cheap-access-to-space field.
But make no mistake: with Iridium failing to sell at a penny on the dollar (that's right, 1% of the investment so far, and the buyer walked away), its strongest competitor Globalstar perilously close to bankruptcy, ICO just emerging from Chapter 11, Orbcomm losing money despite orders, and so on, the LEO constellation market is pretty much over and done with.
[See Lloyd's Satellite Constellations for more info.]
With the end of speculation in the LEO constellation business [as well as a tanking tech stock sector], Rotary Rocket failed to get further investment despite an operational vehicle. This pretty much put the kibosh on anyone like Kistler or Beal or energizing the Cheap Access to Space market by dramatically reducing launch costs, at least anytime soon.
It may seem counterintuitive, but there actually are only a limited number of things you can do in space. Communications satellites in GEO are one; scientific satellites in LEO are another. And there are already plenty of commercial devices selling the data they collect.
What the launch limitations did was two things. First, they were political cover for an administration burned by Loral malfeasance in assisting China with a launch. Second, they were a simple protectionist measure aimed at giving homegrown companies (Rotary, Beal, Kistler) a window in which to develop vehicles and compete for business against the established American leaders, Boeing and Lockmart.
The irony is that most post-Soviet space vendors (Khrunichev, Energiya, Ukraine's Sea Launch) have partnered with one or more of the leading American vendors, who are now able to steer customers to a "preferred" international partner, in effect recapturing lost business. There has been no new American vendor to reach maturity. Whether these quasi-monopolies constitute improved American competition for the global satellite business, which pretty much remains a zero-sum game, is an exercise for the reader.
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... was Jeremy Nixon's Deja power search, especially after the redesign/relaunch. It's basically just a reorganization of the form from Deja's own power search page, but I find the slightly different interface (with no unnecessary graphics and no scrolling) to be simpler and quicker to use.
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Unfortunately Jeremy doesn't have his own back archives
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>Bluetooth is NOT a wireless networking protocol. It's a wireless cabling protocol.....
/could/ do this, assuming you were all desperate and couldn't afford DSL or something. But you'd be better off with HomeRF: for just slightly more cost, maybe actually less considering all the Bluetooth repeaters you'd need, you could build a 1.6Mbps neighborhood wireless network.
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>802.11 last I heard required at the very least a PCMCIA card.
So I'm guessing bluetooth will only require a small chip...
The chip is 9mm by 9mm. About the size of a dime. I'm not sure how much larger the entire device would need to be, though. Anyway, it won't need a 2-3 inch dongle antenna like wireless ethernet, making it attractive for handheld devices.
Hmm, yeah, the first thing anybody's going to want to do is abuse the technology with this is try and network their computers this way-but then again, there's the people who have been storming up ideas to network between 2 houses, there was even an "Ask Slashdot" involving it... but if the power consumption of the bluetooth chips is low enough that they can put it in cell phone/PDA/relativly low power devices, then wouldn't this be feasable to buy about 4 of these devices, plug a couple of AA batteries/9v batteries, stick them in a ziplock bag, and hang them in the trees (as repeaters) between your house and your friends, get a bluetooth device hooked up to each of your computer's serial ports, and finally be able to play Quake with sombody over a LAN-type connection? I'm sure this wouldn't be anywhere near as fast as actual T1/10bT, but even a null modem connection/speed would be pretty spiff.
Heh. Well, figure 50-90Kbps, so slightly better than a modem connection -- if you don't get any interference. The nominal upper range of a standard Bluetooth device is supposedly 10m, but with power boosters, 100m is believed possible. So you
But sure, I don't think there's any technical reason you could NOT do it with Bluetooth. As a practical solution, probably not (performance, security, reliability, etc.). For a crazy summer weekend experiment
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Rookie mistake. ;-) On rereading how could I make that particular goof?
All three standards, 802.11, Bluetooth, and HomeRF, use radio frequencies.
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Can't wait for Bluetooth? Then look into HomeRF. It's a mid-level wireless protocol that isn't going to be an IEEE standard and will probably eventually disappear, positioned as it is somewhere between the device-level connectivity of Bluetooth and the robust networking of 802.11b.
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Mainly available to consumers in the form of Intel Anypoint and running at 1.6Mpbs, it's a decent solution for SOHO and hobbyist applications, and most important, it's in stores now, where a one-PC kit (no cards, USB pluggable) retails for around $60.
The minimal 802.11b "wireless ethernet" (or "Wi-Fi", ecch) configuration right now requires an expensive ($200-1500) base unit that's basically an Ethernet hub with robust IR ports, as well as IR Ethernet cards (~$100) for each PC to be connected. This will be fine for professional environments, who will demand the 11Mpbs throughput, but a bit steep for most consumers. (FYI, 802.11 is the protocol that Apple Airport and its PC sibling, Lucent's Orinoco, as well as future products like Cisco Aironet and 3Com AirConnect, run. For reasons probably related to "Steve Jobs", Airport base stations plus card can be had for as little as $400 total, while Orinoco and other companies' PC-compatible offerings run $1000 and up for essentially the same equipment. If all 802.11 products were available at the Airport price level, there would be no market for HomeRF at all.)
OK, if you are one of those "only the highest possible bandwidth will do" users, you will want to jump straight to the wireless ethernet offering, damn the pricetag. But for most people the most taxing thing they'll run is web-browsing, gameplaying, or Napstering, and since 1.6Mpbs is superior to almost any home internet connection, it won't bottleneck you. HomeRF gives you freedom of movement in your apartment or even backyard if you like for a reasonable cost.
I do expect Bluetooth to ultimately take over this market, since it will be available on many more devices than just computers, and may finally make things like remotely programmable air conditioners an affordable reality.
Bottom line: there are three wireless standards out there, and you're advised to read labels carefully the next couple of years. Me, I'll be trawling the 10%-off-returns shelves at Micro Center
[Disclaimer: I can't report yet on how well it works, I've just looked closely at the product so far.]
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YuNicks sez:
Nonsense: there's 802.11b, already running and on the ground. Coupled with IPv6 and the QoS guarantees it has, tell me what I can do with Bluetooth that I can't do with wireless Ethernet?
Bluetooth is NOT a wireless networking protocol. It's a wireless cabling protocol. Sure, it can do some of the same things, but it isn't intended for the massive amounts of data that pass through an Ethernet connection, but instead for the piddling bits and bytes that pass from keyboards to PCs and such. Bluetooth is low-power and will be adaptable to PDAs and cell phones; 802.11 last I heard required at the very least a PCMCIA card.
They're intended for entirely different purposes and situations; don't even think of them as competitors. 802.11 offers, as you note, the kinds of QOS -- throughput, robustness, security -- that corporations require to connect up laptops. It will make office networking much easier. Bluetooth isn't about that; it's about getting all the piddly little electronic toys you use to interoperate, exchange address books, and such.
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To summarize: while long known as Rumania, and so spelled on independence from the Ottoman empire in 1859, the official spelling has been Romania since around 1945. It took until the 1960s for many Western references to be updated.
The spelling Rumania is believed to be a reflection of the name for Rome and Romans in Turkish (Ottoman) dialects, and as such, some modern Romanians actually find it offensive. (Whoops.) But the Roman origin is also considered controversial, and may be more legend than fact.
It's described in much more detail than anyone on
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First off, I don't think the MSNBC columnist was saying they WERE in Romania. He said their registration data SAID they were in Romania, which, based on the name "South Ural", was pretty unlikely.
(I did check to see if there was a city like "Ural" in Romania, anyway. Mapquest says no.)
Second, it could be his confusion (or somebody else's along the line) between RUssia and ROmania (whose local name is RUmania). I've see people assume RU = Rumania all the time. Two letter country codes are easy to confuse.
Third, what Russian or Rumanian would use the English word "South" in their city name anyway? If they really lived there they would have registered it as "Yuzhniyuralsk" or something like that. No, this registration address info is about as bogus as saying "123 Easy St., Anywhere, USA".
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Disclaimer: I own and adore my Handspring Visor Deluxe.
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With the M100, Palm is repositioning its entry point. Obviously the cell phone custom-cover idea is carrying over to treat this as yet another consumer electronics device. The features set is pretty much established: you can hit 80% of the market with 20% of the functionality. Make it smaller, put on bright colors, keep the price low, and you've instantly targeted a new demographic.
The Palm has amply proven itself in the business market, and they're clearly not abandoning that with their high-end models. The VIIx (mentioned later in the article, but not pictured) will up the ante for wireless PDAs with more RAM and custom software. Personally I think this is just a lot of experimentation since Bluetooth is going to be the real future in this area, but there is a market for the well-connected businessman or geek.
People are saying things like "gosh, same old Palm, just with colors". Well, yes. It's a proven product that they are now trying to expand the market for. "It's the iMacification of everything". Well, get used to it. Most people don't care about the Megahertz or the Level II cache on their motherboard. The iMac does what they want for a good price and it looks attractive in a den. But the iMac hasn't made towers or big beige boxen disappear, has it? This M100 isn't going to hurt the PDA market at all. In fact, this will be the starter PDA for a lot of people, who will later realize they need wireless modems and web-browsing-on-the-go (or whatever). But a lot more people are willing to experiment at the $150 price point than spend $500+ on yet another electronic toy that turns out to be useless to them.
Also, some people have complained about the wedge at the bottom -- don't forget this is a smaller size case. I haven't used a Palm V... series so I can't comment on how it feels. I do think that it would actually be easier to hold if the bulge were at the top, but maybe that's just me.
As for replacing the IIIe and competing with the Visor, I think they have a good chance. I've bet on Handspring, mainly on the strength of their expansion technology, but the long delays in getting Springboard modules released is getting frustrating (e.g. still no GPS unit; only two games, both golf!). I was also hoping for more movement towards a high-end Visor. I think the M100 is clearly a much stronger competitor than the IIIe ever was, and if it had been out last fall it would have been a more difficult decision for me.
Get ready for the M100 to be under a LOT of Christmas trees.
P.S. M100 is also a nice spiral galaxy, as well as a classic Mercedes Benz sedan
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Prior to this story, the most frequently mentioned candidate was Chris Noth, formerly of Law & Order, and recently "Mr. Big" (guess why) on Sex and the City. This Yahoo article incorporates both the new and old rumors.
(In an exclusive interview, Noth replied that he was looking forward to starring in a series without a preposition in its name.)
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Amusing use of the referrer property by zap2it.com: if and only if you clicked on this story from Slashdot, you get the final line, "In a related story, Natalie Portman got hot grits poured on her by rabid slashdot fans."
(Unfortunately, whatever they were doing behind the scenes, that managed to break the "back to headlines" link badly.)
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Okay... this is something that's bugged me in in a number of other stories here on
Don't take this personally
I'll try to use short words.
To start, the United States Constitution, Article IV, Section I, states the following:
This is why you can be arrested in California for murdering someone in Maine. It's also why you can be sued in Florida by a customer you have in Montana. Often contracts actually specify which court will be the first choice of the contracting parties.
Beyond that, an injunction is simply an order covering the parties in a lawsuit. As such, it does not have to actually conform to any law -- in fact injunctions can be quite broad (e.g. a gag order, which does not violate the first amendment) to suit the requirements of the case. Injunctions are intended to prevent one party from accomplishing a de facto win while losing a de jure case.
It's pretty irrelevant to this case, though, which is in a Federal court.
Is this a *FEDERAL* judge, whose bench just happens to be in Illinois?
Yes, and Illinois happens to be where Yesmail.com is headquartered, therefore the most likely place for them to choose to sue. They are suing in Federal court because they are seeking injunctive relief under Federal law.
Or does any old state judge have carte blanche to order around people outside their jurisdictions?
When the judge has jurisdiction, YES. Sometimes jurisdiction is indeed a matter of dispute, which is why the other side will enter an appeal. This is normal. (Frankly, it's normal for any target of a court injunction to argue against it.)
Seems like MANY states would STRENOUSLY object to such a violation of what little sovereignity the states have left (Texas and Mass come to mind, for starters)
Uh
And if the latter *IS* the case, why do we bother with jurisdictions at all?
Because normal criminal and civil law is handled by the states. The presumption is that doing business in a state (which can be merely, e.g. selling to someone there) exposes you to its jurisdiction (for the protection of the person you sold to). Anyway, again, this is a FEDERAL lawsuit under FEDERAL law so the assumption is that it applies to all parties in the jurisdiction of the United States.
Of course, it *IS* a common arrogance for our legal system to presume that it has domain outside its jurisdiction (certian OTHER DeCSS-related actions, in Norway, for example, come to mind).
The copyrights of one nation are recognized by another nation under the Berne convention, a treaty which the United States signed in 1985. Again, under the Constitution, treaties have the effect of federal law. Norway, as a signatory to the treaty (much earlier than us!), has to recognize our copyrights just as we promised to recognize theirs.
You may not like the particular application of copyright in this case, but you should be able to understand the legal process.
I'm *SURE* that there are at least a FEW bona fide lawyers who read Slashdot. Could one of you PLEASE shed some enlightenment here?
IANAL. But I do have a college education, and I can pick up a World Almanac and read the Constitution. It is highly suggested that you do the same. This isn't some boring quiz for half-asleep eighth-graders, after all -- this is REAL LIFE, and as we see is not inconsequential.
Besides, this is the real bottom line:
MAPS lists a page on its Web site (http://www.mailabuse.org) titled "how to sue MAPS," hoping a legal case would establish that its tactics were legal. Yesmail is the first company to take up the challenge.
In other words, MAPS has been waiting eagerly for this day in court. They've probably had briefs prepared well in advance, and pro bono legal counsel all lined up.
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I didn't read the CNN story closely enough. Apparently it's the same group, after all, but they are now operating under a different name for the nonprofit archive activity (as opposed to the commercial search-engine activity).
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Jon Erickson spewed: ... any study that attempts to categorise how we live at the moment using the web is doomed to be prejudiced and incomplete. Until everyone is online and has equal access, this is just another arrogant study attempting to categorise who is worth enough to be able to use the net.
[much repetition deleted]
So what you're saying is that the ONLY records worthwhile to historians are those that reflect "everyone"? Just who the hell are you to tell future historians what will and won't be useful to them? Do you understand history at all?
The importance of any given historical document is often not found in the document itself, but in that document's context.
My father managed a professional local historical society and museum while I was a kid. The museum was a high Italianate mansion in the upper Midwest built by a lawyer who got rich on land speculation. You are correct that the biggest danger facing future generations is to look at a museum such as a rich lawyer's house and believe This is the way people lived in 1870. In fact, only about 1% of the people lived that way (servants, nice furniture from Europe, that sort of thing). To help counter this one of the first things my father had done was to take custody of a "fortuitously" threatened building, one of the first in town, which was more typical of your average family.
By themselves, neither building is representative. Even together they fail to represent everyone in this particular community. But by putting them together in context you can illuminate things that would otherwise be much more difficult to see.
What a snapshot of the web ca. 1996 shows is most definitely a subset of the larger society. But you can't say to me that it doesn't say anything useful. You yourself note that the people, ideas, and connections that it shows are a particular and identifiable subset of the larger society. Realize then: That, in and of itself, is useful to historians. Even more so is the randomness and complexity of the archive, because having a human select what future generations of historians will find useful or interesting is a dubious proposition.
If you're waiting for the day when "everyone is online" to start recording our digital history, you'll have to hold your breath a very long time.
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Another group, the private company Alexa, has also engaged in internet archiving. A couple of years ago Alexa donated an archive to the Library of Congress. It was written up in Brill's Content last November (article text not online, alas).
(Alexa's normal business involves a browser plug-in that is What's Related on steroids.)
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Bankruptcy is often the end of a business, but as with individuals, it's mainly a way to force creditors to renegotiate terms. APBNews.com is posting current content, though with staff cut by about 90%, it won't be as much or as good as it used to be.
Hopefully they can eke out a living long enough for a guardian angel to appear, though with the tech stock market in the tank that possibility is slimmer by far than it used to be. Still, news operations like UPI have hung on by a thread for sometimes decades! There's a lot of worthwhile content there, and even in the worst case perhaps another news site will acquire it.
Though the prognosis is not robust, I still wish APBnews.com a long and happy life.
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One of the "Powertools" for MSIE includes a feature which adds two items to your "Tools" menu: "Add to Trusted Zone" and "Add to Restricted Zone". These items, when clicked, will automatically add the domain of the site you are currently viewing to the specified security zone. This should work just as effectively as the button you mention, since you can instantly add a site to the restritcted zone. Actually this would be better than a "toggle" button, because it will remember the site in the future.
It's called IE5 PowerTweaks. If you turn off Active Scripts for the Internet Zone, you can then go to a site and decide if you trust it to run Javascript or leave a cookie and pull down your menu. Boom! Instant Javascript.
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In fact, Microsoft offers a freebie add-on called IE5 PowerTweaks. Among other things, the handful of tools includes menu items (on the Tools menu) called "Add to Restricted Zone" and "Add to Trusted Zone". This lets you manage your cookie-and-javascript-enabled sites without messing around in the "Security" dialog box for five minutes.
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James Benford of Material Sciences and Energy Sciences Laboratories.
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maddog42 asks:
Why don't we take useless national defense projects like Star Wars and turn the technology around to propel solar sails with all the high-powered laser and particle cannons that are probably still up in orbit somewheres?
Ha ha. We wish we had particle cannons in space. (You do realize that the Strategic Defense Initiative never led to anything, right? Except the recent National Missile Defense system proposals. And it still isn't deployed.)
Actually, you're closer to the truth than you think. I can't say for certain, but it seems highly likely to me that the experiment relied on advances in laser and microwave technology made under SDI funding. (Indeed, one researcher's home page shows that he's done contract work for Raytheon to "suppress enemy air defense".)
So in a sense, this is beating swords into plowshares.
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