IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art.
Every Spring semester at Michigan State University's Computer Science department, the capstone class (taken by seniors to graduate) did a project and had a "poster competition" to see who did the best project.
The team that won the year I saw them was the team that wrote a program that graphed a song's FFT over time. That's it. They went on to babble about how you can recognize a song based on how it looks, visual recognition, and it did some ill-conceived 3D stuff that, by making the song data fit into even less space on the screen, was even more impossible to see. (I think you were supposed to eventually pick the song you wanted to hear by looking at this tiny, tiny representations.... at the risk of potentially offending one of the authors, who may conceivably read this, that's stupid! If they just seriously tried it once, they'd have seen how poorly this worked.) (See here for an example of a guy playing around with that kind of graph; note most songs look NOTHING like that in an FFT graph.;-) )
The fact is, it's a neat idea but it doesn't work. All songs in a particular pretty much look alike in an FFT graph. The differences are pretty minimal. Making it smaller doesn't help at all. The program looked really cool on a poster, using one song, but use it on six or seven real songs and ask even yourself to distinguish them and you can't; you don't "see" and "hear" that way.
IIRC a dot-com was founded based on this idea, AFAIK indepedently derived.
What does this have to do with your post? I thought about half of the other posters deserved the prize over this project, in that they were useful, interesting, or potentially even groundbreaking, in the small way that a semester project can be. But they didn't have a Beatles song graphed out on their poster. They lose.
Even college professors aren't immune to judging on surface appearences and glitz, rather then real value.
In the 16th century, some Catholic nuns started to walk around with heavy pelvic thrusting all the time. They claimed it was because Satan had visited their convent and ravaged them in both holes with his evil, barbed, bifurcated penis.
I thought about mentioning that but it was already off-topic...;-)
It will easily be millions of years again (and one could make the case for billions in the case of some minerals) before another species on Earth will have a chance to do what we do. In fact, the proof for this far-off species that there was an intelligent species preceding them in history is that the natural resources that replenish on the timescale of billions of years are all gone. (How they will curse us, though we still have the moral imperative to make the best of it, I think, rather then trying to modify our behavior for a hypothetical future species who would then themselves just 'use up' the resources.) Everything we've built will be gone, but not the resources we took.
The fact that we really are using this planet up is not a reason to try to cut back our use; that's doomed anyhow, a "boil the ocean" approach ("an approach that only works if everyone on the planet immediately buys in, which can't happen"; many dot-coms had "boil the ocean" business plans). The fact that we're the last shot means we need to go for broke and get to space while we've still got the resources to do it.
There is always a beneficial argument to be made for anything. I myself once for shock value in High School did a speech on why we should let loose with the nukes and come as close as sterilizing the planet as we can. You can easily fill five minutes with why that is a good idea. (The core point being that it may well be the best thing in the long term for "Mother Nature", a term I carefully left undefined.*)
You need to consider the whole story, and the fact is to start off with that the potential benefits to the consumer are fairly dar out. The only good thing is that increasing the efficiency of the shipping system will lower prices... albiet only marginally, since the efficiency is pretty high. Any other benefit is contrived.
The potential privacy implications are more interesting. Still, even as a certified privacy wonk, bar codes don't scare me much. They need to be actively physically scanned and it's hard to hide that. RFID tags are much more interesting.
(*: Incidentally, I think the opposite is true: The human extinction movement is totally wrong. Humans represent "Mother Nature"'s best and possibly only hope for spreading the biosphere beyond the confines of this planet. A few eggs will be broken on the way, there's no way around that. Even if humanity went extinct, there's no paticularly reason to believe that intelligent, tool-using life would arise again, nor to believe that such life would stand as good a chance to get off the planet as we do, especially since it already exists. (Imagine bobcats as tool-users; sure, they can make sticks but they have no social abilities to speak of, seriously limiting their potential.) The same characteristics that make us dangerous also make it possible to survive; there's no having one without the other.)
Was I the only one that would leave dumb ass messages on my tomb stone so that other students in the computer lab would see them later?
Yes. Of the millions of children who have played Oregon Trail in school, including probably several hundred today still playing on ancient, creaky old Apple II's, you are the only one to leave so-called "Humourous" messages.
Damn, I wish I'd thought of that. My hat is off to you, Mao Che Minh. You truly are one of the cleverest children around.
That's fairly typical; indeed I usually find that most of the time is taken with lightspeed delays; and in congestion.
As a general comment, not aimed specifically at WolfWithoutAClause, also remember that "lightspeed" is only 300,000 km/s in a vacuum, which only applies for the most part if you're looking at a satellite relay (which will travel through mostly vacuum). Fiber-optic's lightspeed is on the order of 200,000 km/s, a full 33% less (reference), which will cause even more delays.
Do a ping across the country and take into account the fact that light is only doing 66% of the speed in a vacuum, and by and large latencies on non-busy servers aren't going to get much better, barring FTL communication networks. Traveling 2000 miles at 124,000 mi/s is going to take 16 ms, period, coming back equally long, and that's 32 ms just to cross the country (USA) right there, not the 20 ms a naive light-speed calculation would give. (And of course it's not like a single piece of fiber is run across, there's delays for hopping and other things.)
Do all the math and normal Internet latencies are as good as they are ever going to get, unless you're hitting traffic problems, barring certain things which as far as we know are impossible.
"Whence X?" is often used as in "Where did X come from? What is X?" which is appropriate in this case. (I looked it up in the dictionary (m-w.com) and didn't see this either, but I've seen it enough to know it's legitimate usage.) "Where the heck did OpenLindows come from?"
"Whither X?" is often used as in "Where is X going?" You could make a case for "Where the heck is OpenLindows going?" but I don't think that was the idea here.
"Often" here being relative, but I have seen each more then once.
If you want to sound correctly psuedo-intellectual, this situation calls for whence.
Still, as a psuedo-intellectual myself, I'd suggest sticking to "where's". (IMHO, the time to lift the restriction in formal writing on contractions has come. OTOH, acronyms still don't belong there yet.;-) or smilies;-) )
...because homeopathy explicitly includes the idea that things get more powerful as the dilution decreases, even past the point that the original substance no longer has even a molecule in the final product. A homeopathy practictioner would thus claim that these exposures are at far too high a level to work, and still need to be diluted by a factor of, oh, at least 10^10 to be more useful, probably more. (That number is not a typo. Yes, Homeopathy shoots right past Advogadro's Number and never looks back.) Homeopathy explicitly claims to be many times more beneficial then these low-level exposures. As they are completely wrong, they still don't win any points. (Nor is this as big a surprise as the article writer thinks it is, it merely establishes some examples of a long-known general principle.)
For those wishing to learn more about homeopathy, please see Homeowatch, and in particular this page which provides an overview of homeopathy.
The problem with Star Trek in the later years was not just that the tech overwhelmed the story, but that it was inconsistent.
I think if you were ever magically transported into the "Star Trek" universe, the first order of business is to figure out which Star Trek universe you got transported to. Is it the one where energy is conserved, or can planets just casually blow up? Is it the one where Warp 9 gets you there in a day, or a month? etc. Very important to figure out.
If you're lucky, you'll end up in one of the many universes where people are pretty clueless about computers and you can make a living showing them a thing or two.;-)
The "knew or should have known" test should not have been applied to the original trade-secret violation case. It appears that not even Norway's prosecutor "knows", and its court certainly thinks not. How would some kid who's never been there be expected to "know"?
"Ignorance of the law is not a defense."
I say this to highlight how absurd that statement has become in an era where coming to a full understanding of the law that affects us every day would take more then a lifetime, literally.
So when they drop in spectacular "booms" when space ships blow up, it's just business as usual. None of the other sounds in movie's are "realistic". It's all about communicating a mood or concept through audio. Why should space be an exception?;-)
Personally, I'm a fan of the "telemetry" theory, that in the future it is a normal event for sound effects to be added to provide information in addition to the visuals. Certainly, in the future this valuable input won't be ignored.
But note I put the word "hear" in quotes. Your ears would certainly be reporting some input. As far as I'm concerned, that counts as "hearing" something. I'd be the first to agree it's not sound in the traditional sense (in fact I've made that point on Slashdot more then once), but you certainly won't "hear" silence 10 feet from an explosion.
A tolerably good definition of "sci-fi" is "A story in which there are rules which are considered unbreakable, and they help drive the story, rather then the story driving the rules."
Many "fantasy" stories can thus be fit under this definition of sci-fi; Larry Niven in particular seems to be fascinated by playing with the definition above and producing "fantasy" that is really hard-core sci-fi in disguise. In particular, see his Svetz the Time Traveller world (pick up Rainbow Mars if you see it, and I think you'll then have all the Svetz stories unless he's written one since; start at the late middle of the book and read the short stories before reading the main novel!), and his Warlock world, where magic existed but was a finite resource that was used up before the modern era.
You don't have to stick with the "real world" science, though there is something to be said for trying to creatively work within those restrictions (for example, Vinge's "Zones of Thought" universe in A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky), you can even specify rules almost completely unlike the real world (I love 1950's and 1960's hard-core sci fi, or Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars, which is horribly anachronistic now but at the time was reasonably good sci-fi; can't write that stuff now unless it's a deliberate throw-back like Rainbow Mars is), but the key is you stick to the rules.
No, it's a SCIENCE fiction movie. "Fiction" would normally be considered redundant; "true story" has to be explicitly labelled, since we assume the opposite.
The problem with SCIENCE fiction movies that don't use correct SCIENCE is that the authors can do whatever the hell they feel like with no consequences to the story, and generally that sucks. The story is one big deus ex machina. I mean hell, even death can be randomly reversed in a non-science SCIENCE fiction movie. Spock's dying was sorta dramatic; who really gave a damn that Data died in Nemesis? Anyone? Anyone? If they want him back there's more ways to get him back then you can shake a stick at. Drains the drama right out. (And provides a vivid illustration of the damage to the Star Trek universe that has been wreaked since then.)
It absolutely destroys the drama. Note I'm not criticising the "reality" or other "nerd" points, I'm making a point about the quality of the movie.
It's a real shame, too, because real science-based SCIENCE fiction movies have a vastly wider drama continuum available to them then traditional movies. Few things are as alienating as being thirty light years from the nearest human, ripped out of one's time into a competely unfamiliar society, or facing some of the unique hells technology can provide. To piss away these opportunities in favor of deus ex machina after deus ex machina is doing everyone, including the author as well as the more-obvious audience, a disservice.
Only science fiction shows think they can get away with this kind of deus ex machina. Even soap operas pay more attention to continuity, and I'm not kidding in the slighest.
Actually, you could "hear" the explosion, when the shockwave gets to you, the same time you can hear it on Earth.
You couldn't hear a spaceship passing 10 inches from you if it is coasting, but you might "hear" the exhaust if it is accelerating, or exhausting for some other reason. Of course you need to be in the exhause to hear it, and that could be fatal. (Or not; not all sci-fi spaceships have high-energy exhausts; you could stand in front of a modern ion-drive for a while before suffering ill effects from radiation exposure, I bet; it's pretty parsimonious with the atoms it spends.)
You don't need air, you just need a medium. Doesn't even need to be gaseous, though our ears are designed best for that case. In the case of an explosion or exhaust, the "medium" is provided by the same event you're hearing; in theory it can carry other sounds as well but you're unlikely to care about them.;-)
You're wrong. Re-read the original message and understand it better. You don't understand what's going on.
Hint: The original guy is complaining about liability for mail he neither sent, nor received, nor even had any knowlege of, because some computer, somewhere else, forged his name.
"Innocent until proven guilty" only applies to criminal cases; it is possible they would charge you with a crime but if they hit you with a civil suit (recovery of damages, much more plausible, much more likely to win) the standards are much lower.
I totally resent this and actually worry about my liability.
Don't. Computers (should) have no standing in court; they are not human. You had no part in the deception and can have no liability.
(Now, proving this could be tough, theoretically, but in this case, it would be pretty easy, since even the major news networks have picked up on this.)
To you and nikal, PGP does not prove X did not come from you, it only proves that X did come from you. Even if you are using PGP it is quite easy to send an unsigned message.
Only somebody else's signiture, establishing that it came from them, could begin to establish that it did not come from you, and you would still need to establish that you aren't that somebody else, since having multiple signitures is trivial. (It would probably be reasonably satisfactory under most normal circumstances, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art.
;-) )
Every Spring semester at Michigan State University's Computer Science department, the capstone class (taken by seniors to graduate) did a project and had a "poster competition" to see who did the best project.
The team that won the year I saw them was the team that wrote a program that graphed a song's FFT over time. That's it. They went on to babble about how you can recognize a song based on how it looks, visual recognition, and it did some ill-conceived 3D stuff that, by making the song data fit into even less space on the screen, was even more impossible to see. (I think you were supposed to eventually pick the song you wanted to hear by looking at this tiny, tiny representations.... at the risk of potentially offending one of the authors, who may conceivably read this, that's stupid! If they just seriously tried it once, they'd have seen how poorly this worked.) (See here for an example of a guy playing around with that kind of graph; note most songs look NOTHING like that in an FFT graph.
The fact is, it's a neat idea but it doesn't work. All songs in a particular pretty much look alike in an FFT graph. The differences are pretty minimal. Making it smaller doesn't help at all. The program looked really cool on a poster, using one song, but use it on six or seven real songs and ask even yourself to distinguish them and you can't; you don't "see" and "hear" that way.
IIRC a dot-com was founded based on this idea, AFAIK indepedently derived.
What does this have to do with your post? I thought about half of the other posters deserved the prize over this project, in that they were useful, interesting, or potentially even groundbreaking, in the small way that a semester project can be. But they didn't have a Beatles song graphed out on their poster. They lose.
Even college professors aren't immune to judging on surface appearences and glitz, rather then real value.
In the 16th century, some Catholic nuns started to walk around with heavy pelvic thrusting all the time. They claimed it was because Satan had visited their convent and ravaged them in both holes with his evil, barbed, bifurcated penis.
Reference? (Seriously.)
I thought about mentioning that but it was already off-topic... ;-)
It will easily be millions of years again (and one could make the case for billions in the case of some minerals) before another species on Earth will have a chance to do what we do. In fact, the proof for this far-off species that there was an intelligent species preceding them in history is that the natural resources that replenish on the timescale of billions of years are all gone. (How they will curse us, though we still have the moral imperative to make the best of it, I think, rather then trying to modify our behavior for a hypothetical future species who would then themselves just 'use up' the resources.) Everything we've built will be gone, but not the resources we took.
The fact that we really are using this planet up is not a reason to try to cut back our use; that's doomed anyhow, a "boil the ocean" approach ("an approach that only works if everyone on the planet immediately buys in, which can't happen"; many dot-coms had "boil the ocean" business plans). The fact that we're the last shot means we need to go for broke and get to space while we've still got the resources to do it.
There is always a beneficial argument to be made for anything. I myself once for shock value in High School did a speech on why we should let loose with the nukes and come as close as sterilizing the planet as we can. You can easily fill five minutes with why that is a good idea. (The core point being that it may well be the best thing in the long term for "Mother Nature", a term I carefully left undefined.*)
You need to consider the whole story, and the fact is to start off with that the potential benefits to the consumer are fairly dar out. The only good thing is that increasing the efficiency of the shipping system will lower prices... albiet only marginally, since the efficiency is pretty high. Any other benefit is contrived.
The potential privacy implications are more interesting. Still, even as a certified privacy wonk, bar codes don't scare me much. They need to be actively physically scanned and it's hard to hide that. RFID tags are much more interesting.
(*: Incidentally, I think the opposite is true: The human extinction movement is totally wrong. Humans represent "Mother Nature"'s best and possibly only hope for spreading the biosphere beyond the confines of this planet. A few eggs will be broken on the way, there's no way around that. Even if humanity went extinct, there's no paticularly reason to believe that intelligent, tool-using life would arise again, nor to believe that such life would stand as good a chance to get off the planet as we do, especially since it already exists. (Imagine bobcats as tool-users; sure, they can make sticks but they have no social abilities to speak of, seriously limiting their potential.) The same characteristics that make us dangerous also make it possible to survive; there's no having one without the other.)
Was I the only one that would leave dumb ass messages on my tomb stone so that other students in the computer lab would see them later?
Yes. Of the millions of children who have played Oregon Trail in school, including probably several hundred today still playing on ancient, creaky old Apple II's, you are the only one to leave so-called "Humourous" messages.
Damn, I wish I'd thought of that. My hat is off to you, Mao Che Minh. You truly are one of the cleverest children around.
That's fairly typical; indeed I usually find that most of the time is taken with lightspeed delays; and in congestion.
As a general comment, not aimed specifically at WolfWithoutAClause, also remember that "lightspeed" is only 300,000 km/s in a vacuum, which only applies for the most part if you're looking at a satellite relay (which will travel through mostly vacuum). Fiber-optic's lightspeed is on the order of 200,000 km/s, a full 33% less (reference), which will cause even more delays.
Do a ping across the country and take into account the fact that light is only doing 66% of the speed in a vacuum, and by and large latencies on non-busy servers aren't going to get much better, barring FTL communication networks. Traveling 2000 miles at 124,000 mi/s is going to take 16 ms, period, coming back equally long, and that's 32 ms just to cross the country (USA) right there, not the 20 ms a naive light-speed calculation would give. (And of course it's not like a single piece of fiber is run across, there's delays for hopping and other things.)
Do all the math and normal Internet latencies are as good as they are ever going to get, unless you're hitting traffic problems, barring certain things which as far as we know are impossible.
"Whence X?" is often used as in "Where did X come from? What is X?" which is appropriate in this case. (I looked it up in the dictionary (m-w.com) and didn't see this either, but I've seen it enough to know it's legitimate usage.) "Where the heck did OpenLindows come from?"
"Whither X?" is often used as in "Where is X going?" You could make a case for "Where the heck is OpenLindows going?" but I don't think that was the idea here.
"Often" here being relative, but I have seen each more then once.
If you want to sound correctly psuedo-intellectual, this situation calls for whence .
;-) or smilies ;-) )
Still, as a psuedo-intellectual myself, I'd suggest sticking to "where's". (IMHO, the time to lift the restriction in formal writing on contractions has come. OTOH, acronyms still don't belong there yet.
...because homeopathy explicitly includes the idea that things get more powerful as the dilution decreases, even past the point that the original substance no longer has even a molecule in the final product. A homeopathy practictioner would thus claim that these exposures are at far too high a level to work, and still need to be diluted by a factor of, oh, at least 10^10 to be more useful, probably more. (That number is not a typo. Yes, Homeopathy shoots right past Advogadro's Number and never looks back.) Homeopathy explicitly claims to be many times more beneficial then these low-level exposures. As they are completely wrong, they still don't win any points. (Nor is this as big a surprise as the article writer thinks it is, it merely establishes some examples of a long-known general principle.)
For those wishing to learn more about homeopathy, please see Homeowatch, and in particular this page which provides an overview of homeopathy.
The problem with Star Trek in the later years was not just that the tech overwhelmed the story, but that it was inconsistent.
;-)
I think if you were ever magically transported into the "Star Trek" universe, the first order of business is to figure out which Star Trek universe you got transported to. Is it the one where energy is conserved, or can planets just casually blow up? Is it the one where Warp 9 gets you there in a day, or a month? etc. Very important to figure out.
If you're lucky, you'll end up in one of the many universes where people are pretty clueless about computers and you can make a living showing them a thing or two.
The "knew or should have known" test should not have been applied to the original trade-secret violation case. It appears that not even Norway's prosecutor "knows", and its court certainly thinks not. How would some kid who's never been there be expected to "know"?
"Ignorance of the law is not a defense."
I say this to highlight how absurd that statement has become in an era where coming to a full understanding of the law that affects us every day would take more then a lifetime, literally.
So when they drop in spectacular "booms" when space ships blow up, it's just business as usual. None of the other sounds in movie's are "realistic". It's all about communicating a mood or concept through audio. Why should space be an exception? ;-)
Personally, I'm a fan of the "telemetry" theory, that in the future it is a normal event for sound effects to be added to provide information in addition to the visuals. Certainly, in the future this valuable input won't be ignored.
Yes sir, you do.
Yes sir, you do.
OK, "shockwave" is the wrong word.
But note I put the word "hear" in quotes. Your ears would certainly be reporting some input. As far as I'm concerned, that counts as "hearing" something. I'd be the first to agree it's not sound in the traditional sense (in fact I've made that point on Slashdot more then once), but you certainly won't "hear" silence 10 feet from an explosion.
A tolerably good definition of "sci-fi" is "A story in which there are rules which are considered unbreakable, and they help drive the story, rather then the story driving the rules."
Many "fantasy" stories can thus be fit under this definition of sci-fi; Larry Niven in particular seems to be fascinated by playing with the definition above and producing "fantasy" that is really hard-core sci-fi in disguise. In particular, see his Svetz the Time Traveller world (pick up Rainbow Mars if you see it, and I think you'll then have all the Svetz stories unless he's written one since; start at the late middle of the book and read the short stories before reading the main novel!), and his Warlock world, where magic existed but was a finite resource that was used up before the modern era.
You don't have to stick with the "real world" science, though there is something to be said for trying to creatively work within those restrictions (for example, Vinge's "Zones of Thought" universe in A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky), you can even specify rules almost completely unlike the real world (I love 1950's and 1960's hard-core sci fi, or Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars, which is horribly anachronistic now but at the time was reasonably good sci-fi; can't write that stuff now unless it's a deliberate throw-back like Rainbow Mars is), but the key is you stick to the rules.
It's a science FICTION movie.
No, it's a SCIENCE fiction movie. "Fiction" would normally be considered redundant; "true story" has to be explicitly labelled, since we assume the opposite.
The problem with SCIENCE fiction movies that don't use correct SCIENCE is that the authors can do whatever the hell they feel like with no consequences to the story, and generally that sucks. The story is one big deus ex machina. I mean hell, even death can be randomly reversed in a non-science SCIENCE fiction movie. Spock's dying was sorta dramatic; who really gave a damn that Data died in Nemesis? Anyone? Anyone? If they want him back there's more ways to get him back then you can shake a stick at. Drains the drama right out. (And provides a vivid illustration of the damage to the Star Trek universe that has been wreaked since then.)
It absolutely destroys the drama. Note I'm not criticising the "reality" or other "nerd" points, I'm making a point about the quality of the movie.
It's a real shame, too, because real science-based SCIENCE fiction movies have a vastly wider drama continuum available to them then traditional movies. Few things are as alienating as being thirty light years from the nearest human, ripped out of one's time into a competely unfamiliar society, or facing some of the unique hells technology can provide. To piss away these opportunities in favor of deus ex machina after deus ex machina is doing everyone, including the author as well as the more-obvious audience, a disservice.
Only science fiction shows think they can get away with this kind of deus ex machina. Even soap operas pay more attention to continuity, and I'm not kidding in the slighest.
Sumptuous.
;-) )
You flunk your Slashdot Editor application.
On second thought, you pass.
(Message kept short to minimize potential errors.
Obviously, without air, there would be no sound.
;-)
Actually, you could "hear" the explosion, when the shockwave gets to you, the same time you can hear it on Earth.
You couldn't hear a spaceship passing 10 inches from you if it is coasting, but you might "hear" the exhaust if it is accelerating, or exhausting for some other reason. Of course you need to be in the exhause to hear it, and that could be fatal. (Or not; not all sci-fi spaceships have high-energy exhausts; you could stand in front of a modern ion-drive for a while before suffering ill effects from radiation exposure, I bet; it's pretty parsimonious with the atoms it spends.)
You don't need air, you just need a medium. Doesn't even need to be gaseous, though our ears are designed best for that case. In the case of an explosion or exhaust, the "medium" is provided by the same event you're hearing; in theory it can carry other sounds as well but you're unlikely to care about them.
Silence can still be as wrong as a loud "boom!".
It's more like NBA forwards asking Slashdot for relationship advice.
;-)
"Don't commit sexual assault?"
(OK, he's a guard, not a forward, but I think you get my point.)
You're wrong. Re-read the original message and understand it better. You don't understand what's going on.
Hint: The original guy is complaining about liability for mail he neither sent, nor received, nor even had any knowlege of, because some computer, somewhere else, forged his name.
Think about it for a bit.
"Innocent until proven guilty" only applies to criminal cases; it is possible they would charge you with a crime but if they hit you with a civil suit (recovery of damages, much more plausible, much more likely to win) the standards are much lower.
You don't really get this "proof" thing, do you?
c.f. broken as designed. "Windows is insecure by design" can be interpreted the same general way.
I totally resent this and actually worry about my liability.
Don't. Computers (should) have no standing in court; they are not human. You had no part in the deception and can have no liability.
(Now, proving this could be tough, theoretically, but in this case, it would be pretty easy, since even the major news networks have picked up on this.)
To you and nikal, PGP does not prove X did not come from you, it only proves that X did come from you. Even if you are using PGP it is quite easy to send an unsigned message.
Only somebody else's signiture, establishing that it came from them, could begin to establish that it did not come from you, and you would still need to establish that you aren't that somebody else, since having multiple signitures is trivial. (It would probably be reasonably satisfactory under most normal circumstances, though.)