"Security through obscurity" is well known to mean attempting to keep the algorithm/implementation secure, not a key.
A modern encryption technique is considered secure if an attacker is assumed to have full knowledge of the algorithm/implementation and all other relevant data other than the plaintext and the encryption key, and still can not extract the plaintext from the encrypted text. (This is probably simplified a bit.)
If you're trying to be snarky, you've merely shown you don't understand the meaning of "security through obscurity" in this context. The key doesn't count, by definition.
The encryption technique in question is very crackable through a non-computer-assisted analysis based on just the plaintext; for Caeser ciphers you don't even really need to know the algorithm because standard analysis will cause it to jump out of the statistics and slap you across the face. Calling a use of the most famous encryption technique in the world an attempt at "obscurity" is a great example of that low-key mathematician humor, but it's clearly the only hope of security this guy had.
"Ha ha! Here's an example of Not-X! You're totally and completely wrong!"
What's wrong with this picture?
(The bubble may seem like a really big counter-example, but it's really a whole bunch of people making the same mistake, and it's still swamped by a long history supporting Cringely's argument. It's not proof, since markets can be wrong, but it's a very valid point in support of his argument.)
Now, how would you feel if every square inch of this public space was being constantly monitored by closed-circuit cameras whose feeds are reviewed by police officers?
I don't like physical metaphors when dealing with computers. Computers and websites aren't cameras, pictures, books, newspapers, or any other physical objects; they just differ in too many ways.
Why make a belabored metaphor when the question here is quite simple: If you put up material on a website that a cop can access as a normal citizen with no circumvention whatsoever, and that includes both websites with no access control, with open registration, and anything that they can get into through normal channels (i.e., a cop who is also a college student can get into Facebook, I would gather), on what grounds are you going to exclude the cop?
Are there answers to that? Well, I can certainly imagine some sort of argument. Are any of them likely to stand up in a court of law, win in a court of public opinion, be solid ethical arguments, or be in society's best interests? I can't come up with anything that can pass that gauntlet; all I got is "argument for the sake of argument" which is a popular pasttime but just because you can articulate some vague argument doesn't mean you actually have one.
Basically, if you spew forth proof of your crime in a freely-accessible public manner, well, you lose. Be less stupid next time.
I'm perfectly ready and willing to argue that there are some things that some people might consider crimes that you should have the right to hide; certain things we associate with "anonymous speech", for instance, are that important. I strongly support the Fifth Amendment. But a critical part of claiming your rights against self-incrimination is, you know, not self-incriminating.
I find it hard to have that much pity for these people, or feel that anything should be "done" about this "problem".
Is there a single American game series that has (if I'm counting right) over a dozen sequels each?
Ah, a challenge.
Your point stands that you can come up with many more Japanese examples than US examples, but the set of US examples is definitely not empty.
Assuming you mean "sequels" in the sense that the "sequel" is at least in the same basic genre as the original, barring technology advances (i.e., Mario 64 is a sequel to Super Mario Brothers by a clear progression, but Super Mario Cart is not), I have:
Alkalabeth (sorta), Ultimas 1 - 9, plus two Ultima Underworlds, and to a lesser degree two extra games in the same series based on the Ultima 6 engine.
Might and Magic might make it if you're a bit generous with at least some of the spinoffs.
I thought Wizardry might make it, but apparently only in Japan, which is humorous.
If you consider the Madden series as a series of sequels and not a series of refinements, that qualifies; Wikipedia doesn't have a simple listing, but there are "Madden Bowl" winners from 1995 - 2006, which is 12 years, and there's basically a new one... well, "another" one... every year. There may be gaps as I'm not a sports-game player. However, one can argue that when you're deliberately trying to model a more-or-less constant real-world game that "sequels" naturally follow.
Just a point of interest, but the PS2 was supposed to do "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" level graphics, not "Toy Story 2". That claim was made by Bill Gates about the XBox.
In the first page of those results (that I see), there are three reasonably-official confirmations that connect the PS2 and "Toy Story", and two more that aren't what I'd consider official, but reference it.
Claiming FF: TSW-level graphics for the PS2 would have been absurd, as the PS2 came out before FF: TSW, so all FF: TSW would have had to do to exceed the PS2 in graphics would be to use two of them in realtime, hardly a high standard for a movie that was supposed to revolutionize the movie industry forever. FF: TSW was released July 11, 2001, and the PS2 was released March, 2000.
There were numerous reports that the PS3 would form a distributed Grid computer for things like running the game servers or providing Mhz for rent (over broadband).I'm wondering if this is still the plan?
No, it was just a way of trying to demonstrate the phenomenal cosmic powers the PS3 will possess. I truly doubt that was ever anything other than talk.
See also the "Emotion Engine" (translation: "CPU"), "real-time Toy Story graphics" (something the new generation is getting close to if you fudge the resolution issue, but the only way the PS/2 was getting Toy Story-quality graphics was by playing the Toy Story DVD), and the nations that were polite enough to classify the PS2 as a "supercomputer" worthy of import/export controls, which made for wonderful, if meaningless, news stories for Sony.
'Course, at the time they were babbling about grids and stuff the PS3 sounded amazingly more powerful than anything available at the time. Now it mere seems kinda powerful for the price. In another year it'll be underpowered at best, and soon after that, the idea of network PS3s together for any sort of computation will be about as silly as the idea of networking PS2s together now.
That may be conservative, too; with the latest multi-core processors from Intel and AMD not being all that much more expensive than single cores, and the ever dropping price of 3D graphics, the point at which a computer costing the same as a PS3 will best the PS3 in most ways may come very quickly. (You can probably blame the Blu-Ray drive for that, since I wouldn't put one in the PC, and that's a lot of margin for the PC to play with.)
(However, the real final killer is that if they expect me to leave my PS3 on for any extra period of time, they're going to have to pay me for the electricity, which can be ~$10 a month or more, or restrict the grid to things I don't mind donating that sort of money to, which wouldn't make Sony any money.)
What would the state have to gain by promoting global warming? Is everyone on Slashdot insane?
Wha? You can't see any political reason to get people all riled up and in an irrational panic?
It's possible to overdo the cynicism, but you need to bulk up.
In actuality, "the state" is too broad a classification. There are many forces in play here. There are people who genuinely believe the worst-case scenarios, and are just trying to help. There are people who see the worst-case scenarios as an opportunity to increase their power; you'll find some of these people in the EPA, or driving anything where "environmentalism" and "money" collide. There are people who may or may not care about global warming per se, but see it as the perfect tool to block industry, because they believe industrialization is instrinsically evil. (These people can be identified by asking them whether they'd support the use of a perfectly clean power source that enables us all to use ten times the power; there are people who will say "no" to this, because they really do think we should all go back to living as "noble savages".)
Also, for every accusation leveled at a global warming skeptic impugning the person, there is a corresponding motive on the global warming side. For instance, "you're in the pocket of the oil companies" corresponds to the anti-industrialists above, who will fight industry in any form.
And that's not even a complete list.
The issue has become extremely politicized, and I personally am not at all confident the science has survived the process. Science may be impersonal and rational, but the actual scientists are all political animals themselves and not immune to any of this, or even especially resistant.
I've never really wanted to be a professional game developer. But as I got more experience in the field, what desire I had was fully quenched, as I acquired enough wisdom to derive from just what I knew from the outside what you just said, along with use of the output of game developers.
The core engine developers of engines might have time to have well-architected code, but most games are self-evidently held together by the equivalent of duct tape, bubblegum, and spit. Bugs in projects that size are inevitable, but the type of bugs indicate poor development practices, where the solution to every problem is to throw code monkeys at the problem until it goes away.
I have no desire to work and live in a code environment like that. There's never time to do it right, but somehow there's always a lot more time to sort of half-fix the fuckups...
Now re-read my post and try to see what I'm getting at.
A point defense system is way more energy- and material-efficient than a (fictional) area-based system. It's "harder" to set up in the sense it takes much more sensors and intelligence, but then again, it's "easier" in that it can actually be built whereas FTL seems more likely to be possible than sci-fi style force fields... and given my opinions on the likelihood of FTL ("don't hold your breath"), that's a pretty damning condemnation.
"Unless unless unless". Since force fields are fictional, you can impute to them any properties you want. I was using a standard "average" science fiction forcefield, and if they work like that, across hundreds of episodes of Trek and a number of other series, they've never mentioned it.
Not surprising, really. Trek et al tend to have a lot of "sufficiently advanced technologies" a.k.a. "magic", but in terms of understanding real technology, they've pretty uniformly struck out since the days of the Original Series.
I disagree, at least to some extent. A sci-fi forcefield covers a large area, and will require an investment of some kind of energy and matter proportional at least proportional to the area of the protection surface. It may even be proportional to volume or worse, depending on the implementation.
This technology is a linear energy and material investment. I think that's much cooler.
(I can vaguely imagine a force-field with a linear investment, but I think that adds another level of difficulty on top of the probably already-impossible task of building a force field. "Proportional to area" is the best bet.)
Also, this thing actually exists in some form. Personally, I consider that a net positive coolness contributor, but I know many here would disagree.
Maybe you're doing something where there's no math required.
Or maybe you're not applying math where it should be applied. Or possibly, you've got a bad definition of math.
While I certainly don't do math everyday, even by a more proper definition of math that includes "graph theory" and "algorithms", I have done the following over the course of the past three years:
Utilized graph theory multiple times; not necessarily the really advanced stuff, but I have had to work out how to deal with real graphs in real systems without ye olde infinite loops. I did once have to work out a cute and possibly novel (albeit useless outside of this exact problem) algorithm for displaying certain complicated graphs in a way that made sense to the user while minimizing the number of "branches" that appeared on the screen.
Done some pretty fancy date math, which is sort of math in the traditional "numbers" sense. What makes this hard is that it's not like you're doing the math for one particular computation; that's easy. You're doing it for all possible inputs, and dates are tricky things. It's best to have a full arsenal of mathematical knowledge when dealing with them.
I haven't done it quite yet, but I'm going to use a bona-fide Neural Network here in the next couple of weeks, for combining multiple fuzzy inputs and producing an output in the range [OK, Bad, Human Must Check Manually]. It's a tough problem that several other developers have jousted with using only "programming without math" tools, but I think this definitely calls for a neural net. I can't be much more specific, though, due to an NDA. (Note I'm not really using it as "AI" either; I can't guarantee the marketting department will see it that way but I just see it as a way to off-load a tricky bit of weight setting onto an algorithm that I can tweak and re-train with less effort and higher accuracy than I can get manually.)
I've implemented a couple of my own Finite State Automaton variations and proved (empirically, i.e., through exhausitive testing of the state space; fortunately it's small enough I can do that) that certain properties of concern to the user hold in my modified model. This isn't Arithmetic, this is math.
And in all of this, I've had bog-standard jobs, mostly web development, not physics simulations or market predictions or anything like that. The graph-theory came in with a web-based learning system. The FSA work was on a factory modeling and tracking system. I can't tell you what I'm going to use the neural nets for, but most of you would consider it "just a programming" job.
If you go into something thinking math is useless, by golly, you'll be proven correct. But as I like to say, the code of such a person tends to show up their lack of math skills. Most likely, if you knew the math and actually considered using it, you'd find places where a careful application can turn a jungle of code into something much simpler and more correct, or do something you didn't even think was possible.
Every time I hear somebody whine about how useless math is, I think "there's another wasted developer".
Ah, there's your problem. You can't "copyright" an air conditioner. You can only copyright an expressive work, and an air conditioner is not an expressive work.
You can copyright the design documents, but copyright itself does not forbid anyone else from using those documents to then create their own identical air conditioner. Only patents can do that.
Certain pieces of machines can be expressive; auto companies can trademark the hood ornament, elements of the front, elements of the dashboard layout, and a few other things, but they can't trademark anything the customer won't see, and they can't trademark the entire design, lock, stock, and barrel.
In designing an air conditioner, it is possible to violate a patent, but you can't violate a copyright, no matter how hard you try.
In designing software, it is possible to violate both.
Remember, the "violation" is merely one side of the equation. The real issue is that you can get copyright protection and patent protection on the same piece of software. Both patents and copyrights are balances between social needs and individual needs, and software is the only thing I know that you can have both in force.
Close; I believe the usual question is actually "WHAT IF WE CHANGE THE MOON'S ORBIT?", actually.
Also something about wondering if we smash enough things into the moon if we'll lower the Earth's gravity and make the Moon heavier. For extra bonus points ask if someday (presumably "someday" in the near-enough future that the question actually concerns the asker) that will cause the Earth and Moon to collide.
For double extra bonus points, be worried about the possible effect on the Earth's climate all these massive cosmic changes will be having.
I'm not being totally sarcastic; I've seen the equivalent of all of these, even that last one, posted on this very site.
I'm more curious of why they want to do it at all. Isn't the moon covered with craters? Many of which are a lot more than 16 ft deep? Can't they observe the dust and debris around those craters?
Good question. Unfortunately, the dust around those craters aren't glowing from heat, allowing you to use emission spectroscopy. The article doesn't say that's what they're doing, but that's the only thing I can imagine they'd be doing it for.
It would probably be satisfactory if a normal asteroid would be polite enough to smash itself at our leisure and on a schedule (although the asteroid would contaminate the results by adding an unknown quantity to the system; we know what our machine is made out of and can "subtract" it), but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
Slashdot Mirror
How does a paint-on "laser" supercede a regular junction laser?
Quantum.
How do you solve the diffraction problem?
Quantum.
How does light communication solve the Moore's law problem?
Quantum.
Moore's law may be peering out, but mainly due to leakage and noise issues.
Quantum. Also, Bell's inequality. Quantum.
Usually the denser a chip, the less need for wide paths (to cache, RAM).
Quantum!
Any questions? (Give ya one guess what my answer is...)
You must have hit the wrong "reply" button; that makes much more sense as a reply to the great-grandparent of this post than my post.
You could not play that game without two identical joysticks.
Yes you could. One joystick and two analog triggers would be fine. Katamari only uses three axes, not all four.
And I'm sure we could work out a way to do it with the Revolution controller alone.
"Security through obscurity" is well known to mean attempting to keep the algorithm/implementation secure, not a key.
A modern encryption technique is considered secure if an attacker is assumed to have full knowledge of the algorithm/implementation and all other relevant data other than the plaintext and the encryption key, and still can not extract the plaintext from the encrypted text. (This is probably simplified a bit.)
If you're trying to be snarky, you've merely shown you don't understand the meaning of "security through obscurity" in this context. The key doesn't count, by definition.
The encryption technique in question is very crackable through a non-computer-assisted analysis based on just the plaintext; for Caeser ciphers you don't even really need to know the algorithm because standard analysis will cause it to jump out of the statistics and slap you across the face. Calling a use of the most famous encryption technique in the world an attempt at "obscurity" is a great example of that low-key mathematician humor, but it's clearly the only hope of security this guy had.
"X is usually true."
"Ha ha! Here's an example of Not-X! You're totally and completely wrong!"
What's wrong with this picture?
(The bubble may seem like a really big counter-example, but it's really a whole bunch of people making the same mistake, and it's still swamped by a long history supporting Cringely's argument. It's not proof, since markets can be wrong, but it's a very valid point in support of his argument.)
Did you do that on purpose? Or did you mean inconvenience?
Either way, I got a chuckle out of it.
Now, how would you feel if every square inch of this public space was being constantly monitored by closed-circuit cameras whose feeds are reviewed by police officers?
I don't like physical metaphors when dealing with computers. Computers and websites aren't cameras, pictures, books, newspapers, or any other physical objects; they just differ in too many ways.
Why make a belabored metaphor when the question here is quite simple: If you put up material on a website that a cop can access as a normal citizen with no circumvention whatsoever, and that includes both websites with no access control, with open registration, and anything that they can get into through normal channels (i.e., a cop who is also a college student can get into Facebook, I would gather), on what grounds are you going to exclude the cop?
Are there answers to that? Well, I can certainly imagine some sort of argument. Are any of them likely to stand up in a court of law, win in a court of public opinion, be solid ethical arguments, or be in society's best interests? I can't come up with anything that can pass that gauntlet; all I got is "argument for the sake of argument" which is a popular pasttime but just because you can articulate some vague argument doesn't mean you actually have one.
Basically, if you spew forth proof of your crime in a freely-accessible public manner, well, you lose. Be less stupid next time.
I'm perfectly ready and willing to argue that there are some things that some people might consider crimes that you should have the right to hide; certain things we associate with "anonymous speech", for instance, are that important. I strongly support the Fifth Amendment. But a critical part of claiming your rights against self-incrimination is, you know, not self-incriminating.
I find it hard to have that much pity for these people, or feel that anything should be "done" about this "problem".
Is there a single American game series that has (if I'm counting right) over a dozen sequels each?
Ah, a challenge.
Your point stands that you can come up with many more Japanese examples than US examples, but the set of US examples is definitely not empty.
Assuming you mean "sequels" in the sense that the "sequel" is at least in the same basic genre as the original, barring technology advances (i.e., Mario 64 is a sequel to Super Mario Brothers by a clear progression, but Super Mario Cart is not), I have:
Alkalabeth (sorta), Ultimas 1 - 9, plus two Ultima Underworlds, and to a lesser degree two extra games in the same series based on the Ultima 6 engine.
Might and Magic might make it if you're a bit generous with at least some of the spinoffs.
I thought Wizardry might make it, but apparently only in Japan, which is humorous.
If you consider the Madden series as a series of sequels and not a series of refinements, that qualifies; Wikipedia doesn't have a simple listing, but there are "Madden Bowl" winners from 1995 - 2006, which is 12 years, and there's basically a new one... well, "another" one... every year. There may be gaps as I'm not a sports-game player. However, one can argue that when you're deliberately trying to model a more-or-less constant real-world game that "sequels" naturally follow.
Hmmmmm... that's all for now.
Just a point of interest, but the PS2 was supposed to do "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" level graphics, not "Toy Story 2". That claim was made by Bill Gates about the XBox.
No.
In the first page of those results (that I see), there are three reasonably-official confirmations that connect the PS2 and "Toy Story", and two more that aren't what I'd consider official, but reference it.
Claiming FF: TSW-level graphics for the PS2 would have been absurd, as the PS2 came out before FF: TSW, so all FF: TSW would have had to do to exceed the PS2 in graphics would be to use two of them in realtime, hardly a high standard for a movie that was supposed to revolutionize the movie industry forever. FF: TSW was released July 11, 2001, and the PS2 was released March, 2000.
Surprisiness is good in a news source, but truthiness is way better.
There were numerous reports that the PS3 would form a distributed Grid computer for things like running the game servers or providing Mhz for rent (over broadband).I'm wondering if this is still the plan?
No, it was just a way of trying to demonstrate the phenomenal cosmic powers the PS3 will possess. I truly doubt that was ever anything other than talk.
See also the "Emotion Engine" (translation: "CPU"), "real-time Toy Story graphics" (something the new generation is getting close to if you fudge the resolution issue, but the only way the PS/2 was getting Toy Story-quality graphics was by playing the Toy Story DVD), and the nations that were polite enough to classify the PS2 as a "supercomputer" worthy of import/export controls, which made for wonderful, if meaningless, news stories for Sony.
'Course, at the time they were babbling about grids and stuff the PS3 sounded amazingly more powerful than anything available at the time. Now it mere seems kinda powerful for the price. In another year it'll be underpowered at best, and soon after that, the idea of network PS3s together for any sort of computation will be about as silly as the idea of networking PS2s together now.
That may be conservative, too; with the latest multi-core processors from Intel and AMD not being all that much more expensive than single cores, and the ever dropping price of 3D graphics, the point at which a computer costing the same as a PS3 will best the PS3 in most ways may come very quickly. (You can probably blame the Blu-Ray drive for that, since I wouldn't put one in the PC, and that's a lot of margin for the PC to play with.)
(However, the real final killer is that if they expect me to leave my PS3 on for any extra period of time, they're going to have to pay me for the electricity, which can be ~$10 a month or more, or restrict the grid to things I don't mind donating that sort of money to, which wouldn't make Sony any money.)
if you want to call subsidized by higher cable rates "free"
I have a simple rule: s/free/paid-for/g, in all promotional material.
Then you think about who is paying for it.
Every once in a while, the answer won't be "you, the customer", and that's when you should jump if you're interested. But usually, it's you.
Nope. Second at best.
What would the state have to gain by promoting global warming? Is everyone on Slashdot insane?
Wha? You can't see any political reason to get people all riled up and in an irrational panic?
It's possible to overdo the cynicism, but you need to bulk up.
In actuality, "the state" is too broad a classification. There are many forces in play here. There are people who genuinely believe the worst-case scenarios, and are just trying to help. There are people who see the worst-case scenarios as an opportunity to increase their power; you'll find some of these people in the EPA, or driving anything where "environmentalism" and "money" collide. There are people who may or may not care about global warming per se, but see it as the perfect tool to block industry, because they believe industrialization is instrinsically evil. (These people can be identified by asking them whether they'd support the use of a perfectly clean power source that enables us all to use ten times the power; there are people who will say "no" to this, because they really do think we should all go back to living as "noble savages".)
Also, for every accusation leveled at a global warming skeptic impugning the person, there is a corresponding motive on the global warming side. For instance, "you're in the pocket of the oil companies" corresponds to the anti-industrialists above, who will fight industry in any form.
And that's not even a complete list.
The issue has become extremely politicized, and I personally am not at all confident the science has survived the process. Science may be impersonal and rational, but the actual scientists are all political animals themselves and not immune to any of this, or even especially resistant.
Didn't get to the last line of my post, did you?
Snotty and hasty. I see why you start out at 0. I'll cop to being snotty sometimes, but I try to be careful about it.
I've never really wanted to be a professional game developer. But as I got more experience in the field, what desire I had was fully quenched, as I acquired enough wisdom to derive from just what I knew from the outside what you just said, along with use of the output of game developers.
The core engine developers of engines might have time to have well-architected code, but most games are self-evidently held together by the equivalent of duct tape, bubblegum, and spit. Bugs in projects that size are inevitable, but the type of bugs indicate poor development practices, where the solution to every problem is to throw code monkeys at the problem until it goes away.
I have no desire to work and live in a code environment like that. There's never time to do it right, but somehow there's always a lot more time to sort of half-fix the fuckups...
No, I understood perfectly.
Now re-read my post and try to see what I'm getting at.
A point defense system is way more energy- and material-efficient than a (fictional) area-based system. It's "harder" to set up in the sense it takes much more sensors and intelligence, but then again, it's "easier" in that it can actually be built whereas FTL seems more likely to be possible than sci-fi style force fields... and given my opinions on the likelihood of FTL ("don't hold your breath"), that's a pretty damning condemnation.
"Unless unless unless". Since force fields are fictional, you can impute to them any properties you want. I was using a standard "average" science fiction forcefield, and if they work like that, across hundreds of episodes of Trek and a number of other series, they've never mentioned it.
Not surprising, really. Trek et al tend to have a lot of "sufficiently advanced technologies" a.k.a. "magic", but in terms of understanding real technology, they've pretty uniformly struck out since the days of the Original Series.
Very cool, but not as cool as a real force field.
I disagree, at least to some extent. A sci-fi forcefield covers a large area, and will require an investment of some kind of energy and matter proportional at least proportional to the area of the protection surface. It may even be proportional to volume or worse, depending on the implementation.
This technology is a linear energy and material investment. I think that's much cooler.
(I can vaguely imagine a force-field with a linear investment, but I think that adds another level of difficulty on top of the probably already-impossible task of building a force field. "Proportional to area" is the best bet.)
Also, this thing actually exists in some form. Personally, I consider that a net positive coolness contributor, but I know many here would disagree.
Or maybe you're not applying math where it should be applied. Or possibly, you've got a bad definition of math.
While I certainly don't do math everyday, even by a more proper definition of math that includes "graph theory" and "algorithms", I have done the following over the course of the past three years:
And in all of this, I've had bog-standard jobs, mostly web development, not physics simulations or market predictions or anything like that. The graph-theory came in with a web-based learning system. The FSA work was on a factory modeling and tracking system. I can't tell you what I'm going to use the neural nets for, but most of you would consider it "just a programming" job.
If you go into something thinking math is useless, by golly, you'll be proven correct. But as I like to say, the code of such a person tends to show up their lack of math skills. Most likely, if you knew the math and actually considered using it, you'd find places where a careful application can turn a jungle of code into something much simpler and more correct, or do something you didn't even think was possible.
Every time I hear somebody whine about how useless math is, I think "there's another wasted developer".
Damn it, 5.39e-44 seconds.
Sigh, mod me to oblivion on that. I deserve it.
5.39e44 seconds.
Ah, there's your problem. You can't "copyright" an air conditioner. You can only copyright an expressive work, and an air conditioner is not an expressive work.
You can copyright the design documents, but copyright itself does not forbid anyone else from using those documents to then create their own identical air conditioner. Only patents can do that.
Certain pieces of machines can be expressive; auto companies can trademark the hood ornament, elements of the front, elements of the dashboard layout, and a few other things, but they can't trademark anything the customer won't see, and they can't trademark the entire design, lock, stock, and barrel.
In designing an air conditioner, it is possible to violate a patent, but you can't violate a copyright, no matter how hard you try.
In designing software, it is possible to violate both.
Remember, the "violation" is merely one side of the equation. The real issue is that you can get copyright protection and patent protection on the same piece of software. Both patents and copyrights are balances between social needs and individual needs, and software is the only thing I know that you can have both in force.
Close; I believe the usual question is actually "WHAT IF WE CHANGE THE MOON'S ORBIT?", actually.
Also something about wondering if we smash enough things into the moon if we'll lower the Earth's gravity and make the Moon heavier. For extra bonus points ask if someday (presumably "someday" in the near-enough future that the question actually concerns the asker) that will cause the Earth and Moon to collide.
For double extra bonus points, be worried about the possible effect on the Earth's climate all these massive cosmic changes will be having.
I'm not being totally sarcastic; I've seen the equivalent of all of these, even that last one, posted on this very site.
I'm more curious of why they want to do it at all. Isn't the moon covered with craters? Many of which are a lot more than 16 ft deep? Can't they observe the dust and debris around those craters?
Good question. Unfortunately, the dust around those craters aren't glowing from heat, allowing you to use emission spectroscopy. The article doesn't say that's what they're doing, but that's the only thing I can imagine they'd be doing it for.
It would probably be satisfactory if a normal asteroid would be polite enough to smash itself at our leisure and on a schedule (although the asteroid would contaminate the results by adding an unknown quantity to the system; we know what our machine is made out of and can "subtract" it), but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.