Uhhh, no. Xfinity 50 Mb/s speeds cost $100. A total pipe of 1 Gb/s will therefore cost $2,000 per month, which equals $24,000 per year. A Cisco router capable of handling 20-way multipath will add $14,000 to this. So for a year's service at equal capacity via Comcast, you'll need to pay $38,000. This is NOT cheaper than what this metropolitan network is charging.
I don't see the difficulty. We now know "Transparency" = "keeping the scientists invisible" (you can't get much more transparent than that) and "accountability" = "having bean-pushers really run the country".
Scientists very rarely drive out dissenting views. Science is based on the idea that if a theory is any good, the bulk of it will survive being stress-tested and the bits that do fail needed replacing anyway. When practiced in this fashion, the good views will get stronger. Maybe a mistaken belief is accepted for a while (such as the aether), but eventually the more correct theory will become strong enough that it will supplant all others. Eliminate the weakest links and replace them with links as strong as the remainder.
True, sometimes you do get fanaticism. The Anti-Global Warming scientists (none of whom are climatologists or environmental chemists) demonstrate fanaticism over and above the tried-and-tested method outlined above. They do not test their own beliefs to the breaking point, nor are they concerned with establishing whether global warming is indeed the stronger theory or not. Such people drive themselves out. Science is not the people, nor is it the end result, science is the method. The method is all that matters, nothing else. If you renounce that method, you have stepped from science to religion, regardless of what you say, because that is how these terms are defined.
One of the reasons I retain my UK citizenship as well as my US citizenship is that I know perfectly well that very few in America can tell the difference. It has harmed US competitiveness (the US slipped down a couple more ranks in world competitiveness in the latest studies).
Oh, and yes, there's no question that ITAR is spurring innovation elsewhere. Adversity in the face of all logic will do that. However, the innovation caused through adversity will be misshapen, distorted by the pressure that causes it. That's generally not so good. It's why wartime innovation is usually far in excess of peacetime innovation but is also perverse in emphasis and can take ages to bash into an actual usable form. The net result is that you don't really get any more innovation overall, you just get the initial release a lot sooner and a lot of bugfixes later.
Without ITAR, people would still be designing and building their own jet engines, they'd still have figured out how to use embedded computers and GPS systems to provide guidance, and they'd have thought through what this implies. The difference being that instead of having paranoid engineers building guided missiles 10 years ago and enthusiasts building flying wings now, you'd have had the flying wings maybe 5 years ago and have drone versions of them for landing supplies to stranded mountaineers by now. In short, a slower start but a far more productive conclusion.
To me, modularizing involves combining those things that are related, encapsulating them properly in a single unit and abstracting out all the stuff that simply doesn't matter. Ok, let's say you've an object-oriented program and you discover that a whole bunch of classes all do some set of operations in common but are otherwise unrelated. Well, to split out those operations into a sub-class is only proper encapsulation if those operations describe an object. If they do not, it is not the correct abstraction. In such a case, you'd probably want to look at macros, patterns or templates, depending on the language and also on what the operations actually do model.
There are indeed reasons why technology exports are restricted. I just can't think of any, right now.
Past restrictions included banning the Beowulf clustering technology (which caused such an uproar that the code was smuggled into Canada, and ITAR-free alternatives were developed such as MOSIX and Kerrighd) and the banning of crypto in excess of 40 bits (which, combined with RSA patents, led to the International PGP versions, but which had a severe impact on nascent e-Commerce).
During that same time, a New Zealand engineer developed a home-made cruise missile using off-the-shelf parts, a Scottish rocket club built a flying waverider airframe, the Swedish navy were designing stealth ships that were invisible to Radar and nuclear weapons research continued unabated in the Indian subcontinent.
In more recent times, the entire schematics for the Raptor were exported to Iran (where they were published online) because those dealing with actual secrets were not bothering with elementary containment procedures in order to make a fast buck off eBay.
So, yes, I can believe that ITAR has value and importance. What I cannot believe is that the things that get caught in the net are of greater significance than the things that get through. This does not mean removal of ITAR, but it does mean it should be no stronger than the US is willing or able to enforce. Otherwise it hinders allies without hurting threats. ITAR, as it stands, is also open to extreme abuse. In Britain, it is illegal to export anything to any country for the purpose of, or in the knowledge it will be used for, violating international law. Doesn't matter if the recipient is an ally, doesn't matter if the export would have been legal for any other use. Criminal cases along these lines usually don't change behaviour and don't often succeed, but they do generate some measure of accountability that simply doesn't exist in the current ITAR.
And that, ultimately, is the sole purpose of any sort of export control on militarizable technology - preventing it from being abused by the recipient. If it was going to be used sensibly and rationally, what would it matter who it was sent to? It may be entirely reasonable to assume that X is never going to be sensible or rational, but if X is likely to develop the technology soon anyway and is threatening Y who is not, then blocking the technology helps, not hinders, X. Since the US cannot police the world (it has tried!), all of these different factors need to be considered. A law that is absolutely rigid by name and not by any other criteria can never consider such factors.
I don't know what the correct solution would be, that would require considerable analysis in areas I'm not familiar enough with, but it will involve more role-based access controls and fewer fixed lists.
If you take a look at the still photographs at the LOC from the photographer who toured Russia in 1913 or so, you'll see that anything moving splits into the components as a function of the speed of motion. I would imagine something similar is taking place here, albeit to a smaller degree because of the higher speed of the film and not needing to swap filters physically.
Re:Here I was thinking HDR video was old hat
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HDR Video a Reality
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· Score: 1
The first still HDR camera was developed in the late 1800s. The chances are extremely high that video HDR dates back much earlier than 1993. The chances are extremely high that garage developers had started work on such devices before sound had been introduced.
Re:The holy grail of camera tech....
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HDR Video a Reality
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· Score: 1, Insightful
You do realize they said "intelligent". Anyone who puts a populist political slam into a Slashdot post clearly lacks intelligence.
Any given point in a cube exists along three lines - one parallel to X, one parallel to Y and one parallel to Z. If you wish to find a fourth orthogonal axis, please do so. Your TARDIS awaits.
Regardless, three is plenty. If you want to improve reliability still further, then if turbo codes are mapped onto X, use LDPC (low-density parity-check code) alone -X.
Since Reed-Solomon is for random errors, you'd probably want to use a conventional ten-bit system - 8 bits of data, 2 bits of ECC. A layout used by a lot of modern electronics. Since turbo codes and LDPC are intended to fix bursty errors, they're useless if the block size used is smaller than the size of burst that you can expect. In the scenario the DoD is interested in, it's extremely hard to say what to do here. If the block size is too big, then the error correction codes have an increased probability of being damaged by such a burst. Thus, not only is there a lower limit but there is also an upper limit.
NB: If you not only want to ECC each line but also each plane using turbo codes, then you have a further constraint. The line cannot exceed the minimum size but the plane cannot exceed the maximum size.
My thinking is that each line's turbo codes would also cover the Reed-Solomon codes, and each planar turbo code would also cover all of the turbo codes for each line within that plane.
Since the same object is mapped from three (or six, using LDPC) different perspectives and the probability of the noise being such that all three/six perspectives are damaged in mathematically identical ways is extremely low, you can generate a set of the most probable original messages at that level. This could be done by combining the probabilities generated from each of the algorithms, a voting system, or some sort of statistical analysis. How doesn't matter that much, so long as you can produce a bounded set of messages that could be described by the codes.
Here, you can use Reed-Solomon not as an error-correction code but as an error-detection code. You know for a fact that the original pattern will satisfy each and every one of the Reed-Solomon ECCs. Any one of the candidate original messages that does not meet this constraint is incorrect. It has to be.*
If the slices used are one bit thick and each line drawn has a diameter of one bit, then I see no possible way for any aliasing effect to occur, which means you'll end up with exactly one reconstituted message even if fairly extensively damaged in transit. That's probably still true even if working using byte-sized atoms, but bit-planes have some definite advantages for this kind of work.
*Ok, it may be possible to inject deliberate corruption such that the resultant turbo codes would produce a candidate solution which aliased onto the Reed-Solomon codes. It'd be better if you could use cryptographic hashes, but those tend to be big and therefore more subject to being corrupted via a wireless connection. You could break the data into fixed-sized chunks, cryptographically hash each chunk, append the hash to that chunk, then do the whole process as outlined for the composite message. If you did this, then you would test the turbo code candidates against the hashes and if they all failed then you'd use the Reed-Solomon to re-fix the messages before testing against the hashes again.
This method is by no means foolproof, it is not intended to be optimal, it has not been evaluated for every possible scenario to see if it's watertight, it is not FDA-approved and it's likely signals analysts and crypto experts would regard it skeptically. It is not intended as an actual submission to the DoD. What it is intended to do is show that the problem does not require any tools that do not already exist. Indeed, it does not require any tools that aren't already being used by industry to tackle some subset of the problem. There is no novelty in this problem, beyond what combination of tools it will take to defeat deliberate interference of arbitrary nature.
The conventional approach by NASA is to use Turbo Codes to handle burst errors and Reed-Solomon to handle randomly-distributed errors. You'd need to increase the error correction bits to handle really significant errors, but that seems like a good starting point. If you were to imagine the data as a cube, then produce the error-correction codes for each and every line you could draw through that cube, then each unit within that cube is represented by three sets of error-correction codes.
Fried, perhaps - there's plenty of thermophiles that love temperatures other organisms can't stand. The Chuck Norris' of the microbial world. Chemistry alone won't prevent an appropriately-charged particle converting a neutron into a proton (or vice versa), though. Which is actually very handy for people on Earth, as it allows you to determine the age of any exposed rock face with amazing accuracy - and, by implication, the age of any meteorite crater on, say, the moon, where direct evidence is extremely hard to obtain. Relying on counting the pock-marks where later meteorites struck is... well, haphazard. Grabbing a chunk of the surface of the crater and using AMS to date it via isotope ratios - now you've got a very direct measure.
Unfortunately for life, this process is going to really screw up the chemistry of any cell, given long enough. The key is "given long enough". When you fly on an aircraft, you're exposed to sufficient high-energy particles to alter your structure at the atomic level, but it would take thousands of years before you could even measure the effect sensibly. Mars hasn't had any significant surface climate for about 3 billion years, easily long enough to have radically altered single-cell lifeforms.
And that's the crux of the problem with the Voyager experiment. Scraping a very tiny amount of surface material will not even have necessarily produced authentic Martian matter. We have absolutely no way of knowing how great the errors were on even the common stuff. The rovers actually drilled into rock and did a fair amount of experiments on less-exposed surfaces - which, given the limitations of what you can take to Mars is extremely good going. They were also looking for decent-strength signals, whereas a life detector will have been pushed to the absolute design limits.
IIRC, the fourth experiment was a very cut-down replacement of the one developed by a team including Carl Sagan, and that Sagan regarded it as somewhat worthless. Whether I got that right or not (and indeed whether Sagan got that right or not) is less important than the fact that there was uncertainty as to what sort of test would indeed be useful. As a trivial example, let's say you've a soil sample containing some sort of organic material where the soil is very reactive with that organic material under the conditions of the experiment. The experiment would not then be capable of getting a useful result.
Was that the case? Probably not, though as I recall the rovers have detected some fairly reactive compounds on their respective journeys.
More likely, there was no organic material that close to the surface. With no atmosphere and a blasting by both solar and extra-solar radiation, I would imagine anything remotely close to the surface will have been well-and-truly fried, frozen, refried, then altered in isotopes.
I very much agree with you, which is why I'm absolutely in favour of keeping peer-review. Ultimately, though, it should be one filter out of several rather than the sole filter, which should deal with the need to question authority without rejecting the authoritative.
If someone can come up with an alternative method that can identify valuable work that would be rejected by peer-review without producing a significantly higher ratio of false positives to true positives than peer-review, it should not replace peer-review but be used in parallel. I don't see any serious scientist objecting to something that stringent. On the other hand, anything more relaxed and academics would rip it to shreds as burdening them with nonsense.
On the flip-side, academics are already being burdened with things that, frankly, are fairly obviously bogus but are accepted because it has become traditional to accept them. There needs to be an added layer that forces appropriate questioning, with the understanding that academics need freedom to think and play with ideas that are neither obvious nor necessarily entirely rational, but that excess exposure to non-obvious, non-rational ideas that are also nonsensical merely burns brain cycles for no purpose.
This is razor-edge stuff, because you can't add excessive latency and you can't add excessive burdens, but at the same time you also can't damage the freedoms that are essential. Although what I describe might sound ok, I don't know if implementing it would even be possible.
In most academic domains including philosophy there is broad agreement on what positions are reasonable.
Great minds think alike and fools never differ. (The last, and most important part, of that quote is often forgotten.) Peer review is important and is the best solution to many academic problems to date, but it is prone to false positives and false negatives. Ideally, you'd have three methodologies - two (peer review being one) run in parallel such that the second methodology is going to pick up probably good information that is rejected by peer review but is not going to pick up more than an absolute minimum of gunk. A third method is then needed to collate the two sets of potentially-good information. It only has to filter out the remaining gunk, it doesn't have to do anything more than that.
A previous generation feared boxes with plungers. (See KLM/The Time Lords spoof video "Doctorin' The TARDIS".)
I'd point to any of the so-called Golden Eras of Doctor Who. What they have in common is a good writing team, a script editor who is more passionate about a job well done than any award, and a producer who believes that a good tale is worth the telling.
The same is true of any series, of course, but it is most visible in a show that has been around long enough that you can make the comparison.
As for New Who - where it is good (eg: Blink, Girl in the Fireplace) it has been brilliant. Where it has been bad, it has been worse than Silver Nemesis. There's not been much in the middle.
They also need to sort out if this is a reboot or a continuation. Trying to eliminate continuity except for specials is just confusing.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh, no. Xfinity 50 Mb/s speeds cost $100. A total pipe of 1 Gb/s will therefore cost $2,000 per month, which equals $24,000 per year. A Cisco router capable of handling 20-way multipath will add $14,000 to this. So for a year's service at equal capacity via Comcast, you'll need to pay $38,000. This is NOT cheaper than what this metropolitan network is charging.
Hmmmm. No reflection in the mirror, either. Does anyone know if Canada has banned garlic imports?
It seems pretty standard for New York.
I don't see the difficulty. We now know "Transparency" = "keeping the scientists invisible" (you can't get much more transparent than that) and "accountability" = "having bean-pushers really run the country".
Because all the sane scientists packed up and moved to Scandanavia?
May I advise you and your parents to re-read Fred Hoyle's book "The Molecule Men"? You will find it most enlightening, given your current situation.
Scientists very rarely drive out dissenting views. Science is based on the idea that if a theory is any good, the bulk of it will survive being stress-tested and the bits that do fail needed replacing anyway. When practiced in this fashion, the good views will get stronger. Maybe a mistaken belief is accepted for a while (such as the aether), but eventually the more correct theory will become strong enough that it will supplant all others. Eliminate the weakest links and replace them with links as strong as the remainder.
True, sometimes you do get fanaticism. The Anti-Global Warming scientists (none of whom are climatologists or environmental chemists) demonstrate fanaticism over and above the tried-and-tested method outlined above. They do not test their own beliefs to the breaking point, nor are they concerned with establishing whether global warming is indeed the stronger theory or not. Such people drive themselves out. Science is not the people, nor is it the end result, science is the method. The method is all that matters, nothing else. If you renounce that method, you have stepped from science to religion, regardless of what you say, because that is how these terms are defined.
It's so transparent the policy is now invisible. How much more do you want from them?
Ok, that's fair enough.
Other options included exposing three different plates using a prism arrangement, then combining the image later.
One of the reasons I retain my UK citizenship as well as my US citizenship is that I know perfectly well that very few in America can tell the difference. It has harmed US competitiveness (the US slipped down a couple more ranks in world competitiveness in the latest studies).
Oh, and yes, there's no question that ITAR is spurring innovation elsewhere. Adversity in the face of all logic will do that. However, the innovation caused through adversity will be misshapen, distorted by the pressure that causes it. That's generally not so good. It's why wartime innovation is usually far in excess of peacetime innovation but is also perverse in emphasis and can take ages to bash into an actual usable form. The net result is that you don't really get any more innovation overall, you just get the initial release a lot sooner and a lot of bugfixes later.
Without ITAR, people would still be designing and building their own jet engines, they'd still have figured out how to use embedded computers and GPS systems to provide guidance, and they'd have thought through what this implies. The difference being that instead of having paranoid engineers building guided missiles 10 years ago and enthusiasts building flying wings now, you'd have had the flying wings maybe 5 years ago and have drone versions of them for landing supplies to stranded mountaineers by now. In short, a slower start but a far more productive conclusion.
To me, modularizing involves combining those things that are related, encapsulating them properly in a single unit and abstracting out all the stuff that simply doesn't matter. Ok, let's say you've an object-oriented program and you discover that a whole bunch of classes all do some set of operations in common but are otherwise unrelated. Well, to split out those operations into a sub-class is only proper encapsulation if those operations describe an object. If they do not, it is not the correct abstraction. In such a case, you'd probably want to look at macros, patterns or templates, depending on the language and also on what the operations actually do model.
There are indeed reasons why technology exports are restricted. I just can't think of any, right now.
Past restrictions included banning the Beowulf clustering technology (which caused such an uproar that the code was smuggled into Canada, and ITAR-free alternatives were developed such as MOSIX and Kerrighd) and the banning of crypto in excess of 40 bits (which, combined with RSA patents, led to the International PGP versions, but which had a severe impact on nascent e-Commerce).
During that same time, a New Zealand engineer developed a home-made cruise missile using off-the-shelf parts, a Scottish rocket club built a flying waverider airframe, the Swedish navy were designing stealth ships that were invisible to Radar and nuclear weapons research continued unabated in the Indian subcontinent.
In more recent times, the entire schematics for the Raptor were exported to Iran (where they were published online) because those dealing with actual secrets were not bothering with elementary containment procedures in order to make a fast buck off eBay.
So, yes, I can believe that ITAR has value and importance. What I cannot believe is that the things that get caught in the net are of greater significance than the things that get through. This does not mean removal of ITAR, but it does mean it should be no stronger than the US is willing or able to enforce. Otherwise it hinders allies without hurting threats. ITAR, as it stands, is also open to extreme abuse. In Britain, it is illegal to export anything to any country for the purpose of, or in the knowledge it will be used for, violating international law. Doesn't matter if the recipient is an ally, doesn't matter if the export would have been legal for any other use. Criminal cases along these lines usually don't change behaviour and don't often succeed, but they do generate some measure of accountability that simply doesn't exist in the current ITAR.
And that, ultimately, is the sole purpose of any sort of export control on militarizable technology - preventing it from being abused by the recipient. If it was going to be used sensibly and rationally, what would it matter who it was sent to? It may be entirely reasonable to assume that X is never going to be sensible or rational, but if X is likely to develop the technology soon anyway and is threatening Y who is not, then blocking the technology helps, not hinders, X. Since the US cannot police the world (it has tried!), all of these different factors need to be considered. A law that is absolutely rigid by name and not by any other criteria can never consider such factors.
I don't know what the correct solution would be, that would require considerable analysis in areas I'm not familiar enough with, but it will involve more role-based access controls and fewer fixed lists.
If you take a look at the still photographs at the LOC from the photographer who toured Russia in 1913 or so, you'll see that anything moving splits into the components as a function of the speed of motion. I would imagine something similar is taking place here, albeit to a smaller degree because of the higher speed of the film and not needing to swap filters physically.
The first still HDR camera was developed in the late 1800s. The chances are extremely high that video HDR dates back much earlier than 1993. The chances are extremely high that garage developers had started work on such devices before sound had been introduced.
You do realize they said "intelligent". Anyone who puts a populist political slam into a Slashdot post clearly lacks intelligence.
Ok, so we all seem to have learned the basics of Computer Science:
Then there are the remaining rules:
Any given point in a cube exists along three lines - one parallel to X, one parallel to Y and one parallel to Z. If you wish to find a fourth orthogonal axis, please do so. Your TARDIS awaits.
Regardless, three is plenty. If you want to improve reliability still further, then if turbo codes are mapped onto X, use LDPC (low-density parity-check code) alone -X.
Since Reed-Solomon is for random errors, you'd probably want to use a conventional ten-bit system - 8 bits of data, 2 bits of ECC. A layout used by a lot of modern electronics. Since turbo codes and LDPC are intended to fix bursty errors, they're useless if the block size used is smaller than the size of burst that you can expect. In the scenario the DoD is interested in, it's extremely hard to say what to do here. If the block size is too big, then the error correction codes have an increased probability of being damaged by such a burst. Thus, not only is there a lower limit but there is also an upper limit.
NB: If you not only want to ECC each line but also each plane using turbo codes, then you have a further constraint. The line cannot exceed the minimum size but the plane cannot exceed the maximum size.
My thinking is that each line's turbo codes would also cover the Reed-Solomon codes, and each planar turbo code would also cover all of the turbo codes for each line within that plane.
Since the same object is mapped from three (or six, using LDPC) different perspectives and the probability of the noise being such that all three/six perspectives are damaged in mathematically identical ways is extremely low, you can generate a set of the most probable original messages at that level. This could be done by combining the probabilities generated from each of the algorithms, a voting system, or some sort of statistical analysis. How doesn't matter that much, so long as you can produce a bounded set of messages that could be described by the codes.
Here, you can use Reed-Solomon not as an error-correction code but as an error-detection code. You know for a fact that the original pattern will satisfy each and every one of the Reed-Solomon ECCs. Any one of the candidate original messages that does not meet this constraint is incorrect. It has to be.*
If the slices used are one bit thick and each line drawn has a diameter of one bit, then I see no possible way for any aliasing effect to occur, which means you'll end up with exactly one reconstituted message even if fairly extensively damaged in transit. That's probably still true even if working using byte-sized atoms, but bit-planes have some definite advantages for this kind of work.
*Ok, it may be possible to inject deliberate corruption such that the resultant turbo codes would produce a candidate solution which aliased onto the Reed-Solomon codes. It'd be better if you could use cryptographic hashes, but those tend to be big and therefore more subject to being corrupted via a wireless connection. You could break the data into fixed-sized chunks, cryptographically hash each chunk, append the hash to that chunk, then do the whole process as outlined for the composite message. If you did this, then you would test the turbo code candidates against the hashes and if they all failed then you'd use the Reed-Solomon to re-fix the messages before testing against the hashes again.
This method is by no means foolproof, it is not intended to be optimal, it has not been evaluated for every possible scenario to see if it's watertight, it is not FDA-approved and it's likely signals analysts and crypto experts would regard it skeptically. It is not intended as an actual submission to the DoD. What it is intended to do is show that the problem does not require any tools that do not already exist. Indeed, it does not require any tools that aren't already being used by industry to tackle some subset of the problem. There is no novelty in this problem, beyond what combination of tools it will take to defeat deliberate interference of arbitrary nature.
The conventional approach by NASA is to use Turbo Codes to handle burst errors and Reed-Solomon to handle randomly-distributed errors. You'd need to increase the error correction bits to handle really significant errors, but that seems like a good starting point. If you were to imagine the data as a cube, then produce the error-correction codes for each and every line you could draw through that cube, then each unit within that cube is represented by three sets of error-correction codes.
Fried, perhaps - there's plenty of thermophiles that love temperatures other organisms can't stand. The Chuck Norris' of the microbial world. Chemistry alone won't prevent an appropriately-charged particle converting a neutron into a proton (or vice versa), though. Which is actually very handy for people on Earth, as it allows you to determine the age of any exposed rock face with amazing accuracy - and, by implication, the age of any meteorite crater on, say, the moon, where direct evidence is extremely hard to obtain. Relying on counting the pock-marks where later meteorites struck is... well, haphazard. Grabbing a chunk of the surface of the crater and using AMS to date it via isotope ratios - now you've got a very direct measure.
Unfortunately for life, this process is going to really screw up the chemistry of any cell, given long enough. The key is "given long enough". When you fly on an aircraft, you're exposed to sufficient high-energy particles to alter your structure at the atomic level, but it would take thousands of years before you could even measure the effect sensibly. Mars hasn't had any significant surface climate for about 3 billion years, easily long enough to have radically altered single-cell lifeforms.
And that's the crux of the problem with the Voyager experiment. Scraping a very tiny amount of surface material will not even have necessarily produced authentic Martian matter. We have absolutely no way of knowing how great the errors were on even the common stuff. The rovers actually drilled into rock and did a fair amount of experiments on less-exposed surfaces - which, given the limitations of what you can take to Mars is extremely good going. They were also looking for decent-strength signals, whereas a life detector will have been pushed to the absolute design limits.
IIRC, the fourth experiment was a very cut-down replacement of the one developed by a team including Carl Sagan, and that Sagan regarded it as somewhat worthless. Whether I got that right or not (and indeed whether Sagan got that right or not) is less important than the fact that there was uncertainty as to what sort of test would indeed be useful. As a trivial example, let's say you've a soil sample containing some sort of organic material where the soil is very reactive with that organic material under the conditions of the experiment. The experiment would not then be capable of getting a useful result.
Was that the case? Probably not, though as I recall the rovers have detected some fairly reactive compounds on their respective journeys.
More likely, there was no organic material that close to the surface. With no atmosphere and a blasting by both solar and extra-solar radiation, I would imagine anything remotely close to the surface will have been well-and-truly fried, frozen, refried, then altered in isotopes.
I very much agree with you, which is why I'm absolutely in favour of keeping peer-review. Ultimately, though, it should be one filter out of several rather than the sole filter, which should deal with the need to question authority without rejecting the authoritative.
If someone can come up with an alternative method that can identify valuable work that would be rejected by peer-review without producing a significantly higher ratio of false positives to true positives than peer-review, it should not replace peer-review but be used in parallel. I don't see any serious scientist objecting to something that stringent. On the other hand, anything more relaxed and academics would rip it to shreds as burdening them with nonsense.
On the flip-side, academics are already being burdened with things that, frankly, are fairly obviously bogus but are accepted because it has become traditional to accept them. There needs to be an added layer that forces appropriate questioning, with the understanding that academics need freedom to think and play with ideas that are neither obvious nor necessarily entirely rational, but that excess exposure to non-obvious, non-rational ideas that are also nonsensical merely burns brain cycles for no purpose.
This is razor-edge stuff, because you can't add excessive latency and you can't add excessive burdens, but at the same time you also can't damage the freedoms that are essential. Although what I describe might sound ok, I don't know if implementing it would even be possible.
Great minds think alike and fools never differ. (The last, and most important part, of that quote is often forgotten.) Peer review is important and is the best solution to many academic problems to date, but it is prone to false positives and false negatives. Ideally, you'd have three methodologies - two (peer review being one) run in parallel such that the second methodology is going to pick up probably good information that is rejected by peer review but is not going to pick up more than an absolute minimum of gunk. A third method is then needed to collate the two sets of potentially-good information. It only has to filter out the remaining gunk, it doesn't have to do anything more than that.
A previous generation feared boxes with plungers. (See KLM/The Time Lords spoof video "Doctorin' The TARDIS".)
I'd point to any of the so-called Golden Eras of Doctor Who. What they have in common is a good writing team, a script editor who is more passionate about a job well done than any award, and a producer who believes that a good tale is worth the telling.
The same is true of any series, of course, but it is most visible in a show that has been around long enough that you can make the comparison.
As for New Who - where it is good (eg: Blink, Girl in the Fireplace) it has been brilliant. Where it has been bad, it has been worse than Silver Nemesis. There's not been much in the middle.
They also need to sort out if this is a reboot or a continuation. Trying to eliminate continuity except for specials is just confusing.