We live in an age where we learn about children being kidnapped thousands of miles away as if it was local news. We and our kids are safer than any time in history, but thanks to instant mass communication and the simple fact that bad news gets more attention and therefore sells more ad space and Lemon Joy, we hear about a number of kidnappings on a daily basis. I'm not saying the world is absolutely safe, and kids do get kidnapped, but we hear about it so much today that the risk rules a lot more of our world than it should. Of 1,000,000 kids, let's say one gets kidnapped by a stranger. But if all 1,000,000 parents keep their kids indoors, probably 20 of them will die of something related to the fact that they aren't outside burning off energy like kids should be.
Result: A *Big Deal* is made of a mother allowing a preteen to ride the subways alone. Parents can no longer allow their 10-year-olds to play at the park all day, unsupervised, because someone from Child Protective Services will be knocking on their door as soon as it is discovered.
If this tool allows a parent (who otherwise lives in fear of Something Bad happening to their child the instant the child leaves the house) to let Little Jimmy or Janie engage in a solid day of unsupervised free play, then for that family it's probably the single greatest tool they could purchase for the mental and emotional development of their child. Unsupervised free play is incredibly important to fostering the development of an independent, imaginative child.
The kid doesn't need this. But some parents do.
Is it right that the parents need this? No, of course not. But we live in an age of paranoia and fear, and this might help overcome that fear for a few parents.
Is this profiteering on irrational fear? Yes, it is. But it may also help mitigate that fear.
And the publisher who put "1984" and "Animal Farm" on Amazon's marketplace claimed they WERE Public Domain. Except they turned out to be wrong.
Amazon was roundly criticized for it, and their clumsy handling of it. Now Amazon needs to make sure that any works that they publish as Public Domain REALLY ARE Public Domain. They can't recall the works - they promised they wouldn't. But if they are not authorized to sell it then they end up selling it, things could get really ugly.
I sincerely doubt that Amazon is involved in a black helicopter conspiracy to keep anyone from reading any public domain work they damned well please on their Kindle, for the very simple reason that there is no benefit to Amazon for doing so.
However, they do have an obligation to copyright holders and their own stakeholders to make sure that anything they claim as public domain is, in fact, public domain. They can't afford another mistake.
And they also have a vested interest in making sure that people can find a single, well-formatted, vetted version of each book. If I search for (as the example states) "Pride and Prejudice" and I find dozens of copies of it, I'm going to think that the Amazon bookstore is a jumbled confused mess. Especially if I have to download a dozen of them to find one that is in acceptably readable format for the Kindle.
A lot of older works are/were only available in hardcover editions, which means there is a cost of converting them to a text format. It's a one-time cost, sure, but it's not insignificant.
There are a number of sites like Distributed Proofreaders who organize a boatload of volunteer effort to convert the print works to digital. The article yesterday about Google's application of reCAPTCHA is another way of getting the words into digital format.
But then, beyond that, there's the issue of formatting. A lot of people like readable illustrations, placed in the text where the original author intended. Some want the book to show as pages, with page numbers matching that of the original work, and if Amazon wants a good user experience they have to make sure to select (or reformat) a work that looks good on the Kindle.
The works themselves are public domain, yes, but that doesn't mean there's no profit to be made in formatting them for a specific device or even converting them from one format to another.
I agree that Public Domain works should be clearly labeled so if the user wants to go get the Project Gutenberg or Distributed Proofreader version for free (or a donation if they want), they have that option. However, that doesn't mean that Amazon or their publishers shouldn't be allowed to profit from doing the conversion and formatting work.
Didn't Amazon get in hot water by allowing someone to offer up "1984" and "Animal Farm" claiming they were public domain works, then yanking them back when it turned out the third party who submitted them was (I'll give them the benefit of doubt) in error as to the status of that work in the US? Didn't everyone get their unmentionables in a big old snarled bunch about that? I think I can still hear faint echoes of the screams.
Result: Amazon has to make damned sure every claim of public domain work is accurate by the laws of the country in which the work is sold. So if someone submits "1984" as a public domain work again, they'll have to stop it before it gets published. If they make another mistake, they're either gonna get boned with sand instead of vaseline by the copyright holder or have to break their promise never to delete the works again and suffer another PR nightmare.
If Amazon is to be held responsible in the eyes of the public for any mistakes their publishing partners might happen to make, then they have an obligation to their stakeholders to audit the holy living crap out of everything, which means even if FSM Himself came down with the 10 Rules of Noodly Appendagement claiming them to be public domain, Amazon would have to do a due diligence check.
The Drake Equation is about finding intelligent life, so that's why I'm mixing them. But good points, finding life should be pretty easy as long as we can recognize the processes. Of course, recognizing the processes might not be so easy.
PS: Keep in mind that we're talking about the waste of cases.
Let's say you have a production run of 10,000 computers, and design your cases in such a way that NOTHING could be replaced.
For an extra $50, you offer your customers a "metal case" upgrade where they get the same crappy (but at least openable) case they get today, and 20% of your customers think they'll want to upgrade so they order those.
5 years down the road, 1,000 of your "didn't buy the metal case" customers decide they want to put in a larger hard drive and add some memory. For those customers, you add $75 to the cost of the upgrade and move all their components. They saved $50 up front, so it's all good.
If you remove the metal from the equation of making 10,000 cases, then 1,000 of them need to be upgraded and get moved to a good-quality steel case, you've still saved the manufacture of 9,000 metal cases at the cost of manufacturing 1,000 "unnecessary" cardboard ones.
But for the number of people who have asked, there are many more that don't even ask. I'd guess that maybe 20% of machines get some form of upgrade at all, and that's probably being generous.
I worked for a very large company a few years back that never opened a case. If you needed more memory, it turned out to be faster and easier to simply reimage a new machine with more memory and swap your machine out. Your old machine would get reimaged and repurposed for someone else.
There were cases when machines got repaired, but by and large that was rare - most machines reached obsolescence and were taken out of service while they still worked (because having a PC break down unexpectedly cost more in lost wages and productivity than the replacement cost of the PC).
So, yeah, there are certainly people who will upgrade their machines, but they are in the minority.
Plus, for those few that do redo their machines, put the rebuilt machine in a metal case and it'll be good for a long time.
When I was a kid, I saved up paper route money for the better part of a year to buy a TI 99/4A. With the cassette drive interface cable so I could save my programs at 75 baud to cassette.:)
But, sorry, how did several million lives depend on Windows 3.1? I'm sure the payment for saving lives did, but billing records and payment information is not life-critical data. Unless by "client information" you are talking about their medical histories, and even then the loss of them isn't going to be life-threatening for the majority of people. It's not like the doctors or their medical equipment will suddenly blue-screen if the central computer goes away...
"Wing Flying" (using air resistance on wings to gain altitude) is not a particularly efficient way to gain altitude. We do it for human transportation because the altitudes we are talking about are negligible when compared to the lateral distance we want to cover. We might fly to 10,000 feet when covering 200 miles, for example, and possibly as much as 50,000 feet to cover a thousand miles. Using wings for lift are really only practical because flights are largely about covering horizontal distance, and the wings are really about covering horizontal distance as efficiently as possible. Not to mention wings are a really cheap and handy way to control descent so the aircraft can be reused (one would hope).
But any sort of rocket is going to need to go UP over 200 miles to develop any sort of orbit. The Space Shuttle is in "Low Orbit" which is around 200-350 miles. 250 miles equates to 1,320,000 feet. Even a transcontinental flight on an airplane never reaches a significant percentage of that altitude.
To get up to escape velocity, the most efficient way up is the one in which you encounter the least atmosphere and resistance. In other words, pretty much "straight up" for as long as you can with as few drag-inducing bits sticking out of the unit as possible. When you reach an altitude were wind resistance is not an issue, you can start adjusting your horizontal speed for an orbital entry.
But you don't want to waste a lot of time noodling around in low atmosphere because you'd burn up all of your fuel in aerodynamic drag, and you'd never have enough fuel to reach escape velocity.
Given how many lawyers later become politicians, and how many sex scandals politicians seem to become embroiled in, I also wonder about the TPL (thrust per lawsuit).
I still have my Warp discs, and remember OS/2 VERY fondly. It was my desktop OS at work for a number of years, and was absolutely and utterly groundbreaking for its day. The rest of the company was on DOS and Windows 3.11, and I could run both of them as virtual machines on top of OS/2. All that on a "top end" 386SX.:)
Then Windows 95 came out a year later, based on largely the same codebase, and everyone flocked to it. I was sad, because OS/2 was a vastly superior OS, but since the company decided to go Win95, I had little choice but to follow suit, since I couldn't run Windows 95 VMs in OS/2.
I don't have a quibble with most of your post, but cardboard is a MUCH better dampener of noise and vibrations than metal, especially thin sheet metal. Metal can easily become a sounding board for vibrations. Cardboard, not so much...
Also, cardboard is pretty structurally strong. Stronger than very thin metal. The only reason cases hold any weight is the internal frame, not the thin sheet metal and plastic most "disposable computer-grade" cases are made out of. That frame could either be retained, or replaced with some triangular corner cardboard reinforcements. It doesn't really get brittle if treated properly (seal it so the humidity remains constant and it can last FAR longer than the 5-year lifespan of the computer inside.
I see your point on the fireproof thing, though. Once you start effectively fireproofing the cardboard you'll likely undo a lot of the cost savings and environmental benefits.
Right, and since you build your own machines you'll probably pony up a few more bucks and want a metal case.
But the average computer consumers of the world aren't going to reuse a case. They are going to buy a machine that costs as little as possible to fulfill their computer needs for 5 years or so, then when it gets too slow or no longer supports the titles they want to buy on the shelf they will throw it away or give it to a charity, and go out and buy a new one.
Plus, have you seen the cases that the likes of HP, Dell, and other mass manufacturers are putting out? Most require specialized power supplies because the power supply bay is tiny or oddly-shaped, or have other serious issues that ensure you can't really do much in the way of upgrading, much less doing a motherboard replacement. These cases are made to be as cheap as possible for one-time use. Replacing the metal with cardboard and lining the inside of the cardboard with a vanishingly-thin coating of spray-on aluminum would probably cut a precious few bucks off manufacturing costs, save some weight, and put a little more biodegradable stuff in the trash when the box is obsolete.
Hell, they could save some extra cash by molding the case around the assembled computer - no screws, no fasteners, no frame. Need to maintain it? Forget it! It's not going to be done anyway - if something goes wrong these people are going to take it to Best Buy so the Geek Squad can charge $150 to tell them their hard drive is toast and is unrecoverable, and the user will buy a new one. Then the Geek Squad guy's gonna make some money selling the Quicken files he found on the hard drive on the Internet. There's no need to be able to reassemble the case once it's taken apart for maintenance, because the only reason to take a machine like that apart is (maybe) to salvage a few parts.
I don't honestly see WiFi as any more of a threat than cell signal, but I also think that the more frequencies we flood, the more likely it is we're going to find some good reason to regret it in a few decades.
Which is not to say it's at all certain, or that the risks aren't worth the benefits.
In other words, he's against the introduction of something he sees as a threat. 20 years from now, if it turns out that WiFi signals are detrimental to the growth of plants, will he still be freaking nuts?
The guy was a rebel years ago, and was proven right against the best the current science had to offer. Maybe he's wrong again, but how long have we been irradiating crops with sustained 2.4GHz frequency, day in and day out, year in and year out? How many rigorous studies have been done on the long-term effects of gigahertz band exposure?
There's a very good chance he's wrong, sure. But, seen from the perspective of the 70's, there was a very good chance he was wrong then, too. Except, 30 years later, turns out he wasn't.
Right. So, if we're looking for life as close to ourselves as possible, and we have a lot of very similar planets to choose from, we're going to want to use a moon as a differentiating factor. But it's not a primary factor in choosing candidate planets.
I wouldn't dismiss an otherwise-vaguely-Earthlike planet just because it lacked a moon, nor would I prioritize a Mercury-like planet just because it had one. If I had two kinda-Earthish planets and one had a moon, and there were no other important differences between the two of them, I might choose the one with the moon.
But I wouldn't consider a moon essential, or even terribly important, in the development of life. OUR life, yes, but not as an overall rule.
When you handcraft things, occasional errors appear in the work. This doesn't devalue the work at all, it just serves to make each piece unique and therefore worth more.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly!
We live in an age where we learn about children being kidnapped thousands of miles away as if it was local news. We and our kids are safer than any time in history, but thanks to instant mass communication and the simple fact that bad news gets more attention and therefore sells more ad space and Lemon Joy, we hear about a number of kidnappings on a daily basis. I'm not saying the world is absolutely safe, and kids do get kidnapped, but we hear about it so much today that the risk rules a lot more of our world than it should. Of 1,000,000 kids, let's say one gets kidnapped by a stranger. But if all 1,000,000 parents keep their kids indoors, probably 20 of them will die of something related to the fact that they aren't outside burning off energy like kids should be.
Result: A *Big Deal* is made of a mother allowing a preteen to ride the subways alone. Parents can no longer allow their 10-year-olds to play at the park all day, unsupervised, because someone from Child Protective Services will be knocking on their door as soon as it is discovered.
If this tool allows a parent (who otherwise lives in fear of Something Bad happening to their child the instant the child leaves the house) to let Little Jimmy or Janie engage in a solid day of unsupervised free play, then for that family it's probably the single greatest tool they could purchase for the mental and emotional development of their child. Unsupervised free play is incredibly important to fostering the development of an independent, imaginative child.
The kid doesn't need this. But some parents do.
Is it right that the parents need this? No, of course not. But we live in an age of paranoia and fear, and this might help overcome that fear for a few parents.
Is this profiteering on irrational fear? Yes, it is. But it may also help mitigate that fear.
Excellent point.
Someone please mod parent insightful. Thanks! :)
And the publisher who put "1984" and "Animal Farm" on Amazon's marketplace claimed they WERE Public Domain. Except they turned out to be wrong.
Amazon was roundly criticized for it, and their clumsy handling of it. Now Amazon needs to make sure that any works that they publish as Public Domain REALLY ARE Public Domain. They can't recall the works - they promised they wouldn't. But if they are not authorized to sell it then they end up selling it, things could get really ugly.
I sincerely doubt that Amazon is involved in a black helicopter conspiracy to keep anyone from reading any public domain work they damned well please on their Kindle, for the very simple reason that there is no benefit to Amazon for doing so.
However, they do have an obligation to copyright holders and their own stakeholders to make sure that anything they claim as public domain is, in fact, public domain. They can't afford another mistake.
And they also have a vested interest in making sure that people can find a single, well-formatted, vetted version of each book. If I search for (as the example states) "Pride and Prejudice" and I find dozens of copies of it, I'm going to think that the Amazon bookstore is a jumbled confused mess. Especially if I have to download a dozen of them to find one that is in acceptably readable format for the Kindle.
A lot of older works are/were only available in hardcover editions, which means there is a cost of converting them to a text format. It's a one-time cost, sure, but it's not insignificant.
There are a number of sites like Distributed Proofreaders who organize a boatload of volunteer effort to convert the print works to digital. The article yesterday about Google's application of reCAPTCHA is another way of getting the words into digital format.
But then, beyond that, there's the issue of formatting. A lot of people like readable illustrations, placed in the text where the original author intended. Some want the book to show as pages, with page numbers matching that of the original work, and if Amazon wants a good user experience they have to make sure to select (or reformat) a work that looks good on the Kindle.
The works themselves are public domain, yes, but that doesn't mean there's no profit to be made in formatting them for a specific device or even converting them from one format to another.
I agree that Public Domain works should be clearly labeled so if the user wants to go get the Project Gutenberg or Distributed Proofreader version for free (or a donation if they want), they have that option. However, that doesn't mean that Amazon or their publishers shouldn't be allowed to profit from doing the conversion and formatting work.
Didn't Amazon get in hot water by allowing someone to offer up "1984" and "Animal Farm" claiming they were public domain works, then yanking them back when it turned out the third party who submitted them was (I'll give them the benefit of doubt) in error as to the status of that work in the US? Didn't everyone get their unmentionables in a big old snarled bunch about that? I think I can still hear faint echoes of the screams.
Result: Amazon has to make damned sure every claim of public domain work is accurate by the laws of the country in which the work is sold. So if someone submits "1984" as a public domain work again, they'll have to stop it before it gets published. If they make another mistake, they're either gonna get boned with sand instead of vaseline by the copyright holder or have to break their promise never to delete the works again and suffer another PR nightmare.
If Amazon is to be held responsible in the eyes of the public for any mistakes their publishing partners might happen to make, then they have an obligation to their stakeholders to audit the holy living crap out of everything, which means even if FSM Himself came down with the 10 Rules of Noodly Appendagement claiming them to be public domain, Amazon would have to do a due diligence check.
My error, the NT kernel and OS/2 were the cooperative codebase. Bad memory. Sorry.
And I typed uphill! Both ways! In the snow! Get off my lawn!
Happy? :)
No,I got all high tech and ordered the CDs. Two of them - "Install" and "Bonus". :)
The Drake Equation is about finding intelligent life, so that's why I'm mixing them. But good points, finding life should be pretty easy as long as we can recognize the processes. Of course, recognizing the processes might not be so easy.
PS: Keep in mind that we're talking about the waste of cases.
Let's say you have a production run of 10,000 computers, and design your cases in such a way that NOTHING could be replaced.
For an extra $50, you offer your customers a "metal case" upgrade where they get the same crappy (but at least openable) case they get today, and 20% of your customers think they'll want to upgrade so they order those.
5 years down the road, 1,000 of your "didn't buy the metal case" customers decide they want to put in a larger hard drive and add some memory. For those customers, you add $75 to the cost of the upgrade and move all their components. They saved $50 up front, so it's all good.
If you remove the metal from the equation of making 10,000 cases, then 1,000 of them need to be upgraded and get moved to a good-quality steel case, you've still saved the manufacture of 9,000 metal cases at the cost of manufacturing 1,000 "unnecessary" cardboard ones.
But for the number of people who have asked, there are many more that don't even ask. I'd guess that maybe 20% of machines get some form of upgrade at all, and that's probably being generous.
I worked for a very large company a few years back that never opened a case. If you needed more memory, it turned out to be faster and easier to simply reimage a new machine with more memory and swap your machine out. Your old machine would get reimaged and repurposed for someone else.
There were cases when machines got repaired, but by and large that was rare - most machines reached obsolescence and were taken out of service while they still worked (because having a PC break down unexpectedly cost more in lost wages and productivity than the replacement cost of the PC).
So, yeah, there are certainly people who will upgrade their machines, but they are in the minority.
Plus, for those few that do redo their machines, put the rebuilt machine in a metal case and it'll be good for a long time.
LOL.
When I was a kid, I saved up paper route money for the better part of a year to buy a TI 99/4A. With the cassette drive interface cable so I could save my programs at 75 baud to cassette. :)
But, sorry, how did several million lives depend on Windows 3.1? I'm sure the payment for saving lives did, but billing records and payment information is not life-critical data. Unless by "client information" you are talking about their medical histories, and even then the loss of them isn't going to be life-threatening for the majority of people. It's not like the doctors or their medical equipment will suddenly blue-screen if the central computer goes away...
"Wing Flying" (using air resistance on wings to gain altitude) is not a particularly efficient way to gain altitude. We do it for human transportation because the altitudes we are talking about are negligible when compared to the lateral distance we want to cover. We might fly to 10,000 feet when covering 200 miles, for example, and possibly as much as 50,000 feet to cover a thousand miles. Using wings for lift are really only practical because flights are largely about covering horizontal distance, and the wings are really about covering horizontal distance as efficiently as possible. Not to mention wings are a really cheap and handy way to control descent so the aircraft can be reused (one would hope).
But any sort of rocket is going to need to go UP over 200 miles to develop any sort of orbit. The Space Shuttle is in "Low Orbit" which is around 200-350 miles. 250 miles equates to 1,320,000 feet. Even a transcontinental flight on an airplane never reaches a significant percentage of that altitude.
To get up to escape velocity, the most efficient way up is the one in which you encounter the least atmosphere and resistance. In other words, pretty much "straight up" for as long as you can with as few drag-inducing bits sticking out of the unit as possible. When you reach an altitude were wind resistance is not an issue, you can start adjusting your horizontal speed for an orbital entry.
But you don't want to waste a lot of time noodling around in low atmosphere because you'd burn up all of your fuel in aerodynamic drag, and you'd never have enough fuel to reach escape velocity.
Given how many lawyers later become politicians, and how many sex scandals politicians seem to become embroiled in, I also wonder about the TPL (thrust per lawsuit).
So the answer would be "No, no one has ever heard of the Anderson Drive" then... :)
I still have my Warp discs, and remember OS/2 VERY fondly. It was my desktop OS at work for a number of years, and was absolutely and utterly groundbreaking for its day. The rest of the company was on DOS and Windows 3.11, and I could run both of them as virtual machines on top of OS/2. All that on a "top end" 386SX. :)
Then Windows 95 came out a year later, based on largely the same codebase, and everyone flocked to it. I was sad, because OS/2 was a vastly superior OS, but since the company decided to go Win95, I had little choice but to follow suit, since I couldn't run Windows 95 VMs in OS/2.
Was it THAT good, or is it doubly obsolete? ;)
I don't have a quibble with most of your post, but cardboard is a MUCH better dampener of noise and vibrations than metal, especially thin sheet metal. Metal can easily become a sounding board for vibrations. Cardboard, not so much...
Also, cardboard is pretty structurally strong. Stronger than very thin metal. The only reason cases hold any weight is the internal frame, not the thin sheet metal and plastic most "disposable computer-grade" cases are made out of. That frame could either be retained, or replaced with some triangular corner cardboard reinforcements. It doesn't really get brittle if treated properly (seal it so the humidity remains constant and it can last FAR longer than the 5-year lifespan of the computer inside.
I see your point on the fireproof thing, though. Once you start effectively fireproofing the cardboard you'll likely undo a lot of the cost savings and environmental benefits.
Right, and since you build your own machines you'll probably pony up a few more bucks and want a metal case.
But the average computer consumers of the world aren't going to reuse a case. They are going to buy a machine that costs as little as possible to fulfill their computer needs for 5 years or so, then when it gets too slow or no longer supports the titles they want to buy on the shelf they will throw it away or give it to a charity, and go out and buy a new one.
Plus, have you seen the cases that the likes of HP, Dell, and other mass manufacturers are putting out? Most require specialized power supplies because the power supply bay is tiny or oddly-shaped, or have other serious issues that ensure you can't really do much in the way of upgrading, much less doing a motherboard replacement. These cases are made to be as cheap as possible for one-time use. Replacing the metal with cardboard and lining the inside of the cardboard with a vanishingly-thin coating of spray-on aluminum would probably cut a precious few bucks off manufacturing costs, save some weight, and put a little more biodegradable stuff in the trash when the box is obsolete.
Hell, they could save some extra cash by molding the case around the assembled computer - no screws, no fasteners, no frame. Need to maintain it? Forget it! It's not going to be done anyway - if something goes wrong these people are going to take it to Best Buy so the Geek Squad can charge $150 to tell them their hard drive is toast and is unrecoverable, and the user will buy a new one. Then the Geek Squad guy's gonna make some money selling the Quicken files he found on the hard drive on the Internet. There's no need to be able to reassemble the case once it's taken apart for maintenance, because the only reason to take a machine like that apart is (maybe) to salvage a few parts.
I'm from just to your south (Maine).
I don't honestly see WiFi as any more of a threat than cell signal, but I also think that the more frequencies we flood, the more likely it is we're going to find some good reason to regret it in a few decades.
Which is not to say it's at all certain, or that the risks aren't worth the benefits.
In other words, he's against the introduction of something he sees as a threat. 20 years from now, if it turns out that WiFi signals are detrimental to the growth of plants, will he still be freaking nuts?
The guy was a rebel years ago, and was proven right against the best the current science had to offer. Maybe he's wrong again, but how long have we been irradiating crops with sustained 2.4GHz frequency, day in and day out, year in and year out? How many rigorous studies have been done on the long-term effects of gigahertz band exposure?
There's a very good chance he's wrong, sure. But, seen from the perspective of the 70's, there was a very good chance he was wrong then, too. Except, 30 years later, turns out he wasn't.
I, for one, welcome our new Garlic Overlords.
(sorry, obligatory slashdot meme reference)
(sorry sorry, obligatory acknowledgment of use of obligatory slashdot meme reference)
(infinite loop encountered, terminating...
Two words: "Organic Fertilizer"
'nuff said.
Right. So, if we're looking for life as close to ourselves as possible, and we have a lot of very similar planets to choose from, we're going to want to use a moon as a differentiating factor. But it's not a primary factor in choosing candidate planets.
I wouldn't dismiss an otherwise-vaguely-Earthlike planet just because it lacked a moon, nor would I prioritize a Mercury-like planet just because it had one. If I had two kinda-Earthish planets and one had a moon, and there were no other important differences between the two of them, I might choose the one with the moon.
But I wouldn't consider a moon essential, or even terribly important, in the development of life. OUR life, yes, but not as an overall rule.
When you handcraft things, occasional errors appear in the work. This doesn't devalue the work at all, it just serves to make each piece unique and therefore worth more.