Ah, someone who disagrees must inherently be irrational. You're up to ad hominem attacks now. Makes a person wonder who isn't worth arguing with.
NASA's primary focus has never really been robotics. The manned spaceflight initiatives have (either directly or indirectly) always taken up more of the budget than robotics. Cassini has another five years on it, after that I have plenty of options. I'm not worried about my funding in either the short or long term, I'm merely concerned about NASA's future and dollars that could have been better spent. If you're smart, you'll note that I've never said that that money should have been spent on robotics. Your personal attacks aside, I don't really expect to ever see much more funding to unmanned exploration than we're seeing now. I would have no problem with NASA spending the money on manned spaceflight if they weren't just flushing it down the toilet on projects that yield almost no results.
But by all means, ignore me. I disagree with you, therefore I must be an idiot. Either way, you're not making a very good case for your side (you've never answered the original question, I can't help but notice) and you're trying to start a flamewar. I see no need to continue this. (Now I know you're reply to this because your type loves to get in the last word. Go ahead, but if you do, remember that you're breaking your own stated belief that there's no point.)
I believe that staying in one place is a big mistake. In particular, we are a very prone species (esp as we do a lot of damage to our ecosystem). Ah, you're one of those people who thinks that terraforming another planet would be easier than fixing the environment here. I've always found that argument a bit odd, when you think about it. Anything we can do to Mars, we can really do to Earth, only it's easier here because even under the worst environmental damage I can imagine, this planet will be inherently more habitable.
History should have taught you that with England vs. China. Not really. The histories that I've read suggest that the comparison you're making is vastly oversimplified to the point of being almost blatantly wrong. (And England for crying out loud? England didn't foot the bill of most of the exploration, they vultured in. Which, by the way, is suggestive: Spain trashed its own economy thanks to it's endeavors in the New World.) The analogy to space exploration also breaks down: Europe was getting copious resources from the New World that it couldn't get elsewhere or could only get at higher prices. To date, no one has convinced me that there is anything economically viable about colonizing another world in this solar system. The very cost of bring materials back makes any resource more expensive than if it were produced/mined/grown here.
Maybe you needed to pay more attention in history class.
As to the Science, just the ability to live in space it worth it. And now the appeal to "it's cool!" A valid point, but a far cry from your initial claims of "we must go into space" and about the scientific value of ISS. If we want to spend $100 billion plus (over about 17 years, actually; the $100 billion doesn't include R&D) for the "Cool" factor, fine. But convince Congress and the taxpayers that the coolness is worth that much. If they are willing to foot the bill knowing what they're really getting, I'm thrilled. (Because it *is* cool.) But I hate seeing people sold fraudulent claims like ISS was pitched on.
As I pointed out, I think that the private enterprise will take over the exploration and move us to other worlds soon enough. Great! So why are you asking NASA to fund it instead? Private enterprise is less likely to be a pile of political pork like ISS has turned out, so I think letting them make the next move would be fantastic idea.
But let me point out that the some of the biggest arguments for the work that you do, and the work that I did, was for mankind to go to these places. I have yet to hear anyone argue that the word I do is in support of the manned spaceflight initiative in any way. People fund my research because they're interested in the answer. Apart from the Moon and Mars, I know of no claims that solar system exploration, let alone astrophysics in general, is about manned spaceflight.
Try getting a pure science project approved that creates jobs in exactly 1 place. It will never happen. That is why NASA is the political creature that it is. Sorry, that happens all the time. Not $3 billion projects to be sure, but there are many projects which create jobs in one district. (Hell, the lion's share of the money for robotic missions goes to JPL as it is.)
Really, why? And why now? You state this like it is an agreed upon conclusion and I don't see why that should be.
And if you believe (as you apparently do) that ISS is doing new, useful science, then by all means, point out what's worth the over $100 billion cost (the last projected cost I've seen).
Are they learning a lot about breakdowns that those previous missions (Mir, for example) didn't tell us all? Maybe a few things, but worth many billions of dollars? You think so?
And no, they're really not doing any new and useful research anymore, at least in my opinion. The science budget has basically been slashed to non-existence. (The original plans included some useful and interesting research, but that's gone up in balloon engineering budgets.)
Didn't Heinlein raise pretty much this issue (romantic entanglements endangering the entire crew) in _Stranger in a Strange Land_? I mean, it wasn't the central theme of the book, but love affairs gone bad is what did in the first mission to Mars in the book. This is hardly a new concern.
In fairness, I don't know of any actual experiments adding enlisted women to the crew mix. So the strongest thing you can conclude from the submarines is a subset of what works, not the entire set. The Navy doesn't seem to be the sort of place inclined to experiment much to figure out what other mixes are viable, though.
Sure, and you have the exact same potential, as do I. But that doesn't mean that any of us are being stressed "properly" and are bent on acquiring power for ourselves. The police are people the same as you are and they are -- by and large -- every bit as concerned about other people as you. More, in all likelihood.
Again, this doesn't mean that we don't need to watch them. But you might just trying listening to their suggestions with an open mind. Is that such a difficult thing to ask?
I take offense with that characterization and would go so far as to say that you're trying to divine a lot from a simple statement. And the statement is pretty simple: the police, by and large, are decent people trying to do a job. They're not power-mad little dictators, they're trying to protect people. Now, that doesn't mean we don't need to check them, because we surely do. But when they request a power with new technology, I'm willing to listen to their reasons with the assumption that they're sincere. I'm not always willing to grant them that power, however. (In fact, I tend to lean the other way. You might want to recalibrate your magic people stereotyper there.)
All I said, and all that was meant, was that I can see the police's case here. Using a GPS tracker is not, in may respects, different from just following a person around. (Which they are allowed to do, as far as have ever heard.) But, as I noted, there are some differences that make me balk and not really feel that they're quite the same and that the tracker is going too far.
In short, next time, try reading more careful and *not* leaping to assumptions. You'll save yourself some embarassment.
My street is public space and the police or anyone else may drive down it. It in no way compares to tracking a person's movements. As for shooting someone, the police can't do that in general. They *can* do it if there is some form of crisis at hand, but those times make up a small minority of the time a policeman is on-duty. So you're comparing actions allowed during such a time (I have no problem with the cops tossing a tracking device into a vehicle if they're witnessing the crime or pursuing the presumed criminals right after it has happened. It's the idea that they can sneak up to a suspect's vehicle and put a tracker in during calmer times when more opportunity affords itself to get a warrant that bothers people. (That's the key point right there: most of the time, they can request a warrant pretty easily.)
Frankly, I can very much see the police's side of this and there is a very reasonable argument to be made that this isn't *that* much different from tailing a suspect (but there's a key difference in the fact that live-tailing is limited because each tail requires an officer), but the entire idea still leaves me quite nervous. I don't think it's reasonable to dismiss fears so quickly as you appear to do.
That falls under "logistics", I do believe. But I honestly don't think it's the safety or the cost: they're still building ISS, which is just as useless as retrieving HST. It's just a question of which symbolic, political money sink do you fund.
A good point, except that I'm not certain that Discovery hasn't been refitted since the launch 15 years ago. I have heard similar stories from people people pretty close to HST (other astronomers who have used it), so there may be truth in the rumor that either Challenger or Columbia was intended to bring it down. (And remember, the shuttle has to be able to hold the telescope *and* land with it. It's possible that the remaining craft aren't robust enough to handle the landing.)
I have yet to see a definitive answer on why they won't retrieve HST, but I do think it's difficult to rule the above out. (Of course, it seems more likely that it's just a mattter of logistics.)
Well, to be fair it's more akin to printer ink-cartridges than like screws. I can get the right size screws made by many different companies if I choose, but a lot of companies (replacement mop heads are another example) lock you into using them as a source to load their products. I agree with your sentiment completely (although I won't complain if Apple could drop the DRM entirely), I'm just trying to refine the case a bit.
Of course, there's a different between iTMS and my printer: if I can't get ink-cartridges, my printer ceases to be useful. If I can't get iTMS songs for my iPod and iTunes, I still have my vast library of already-purchased music *and* I can use that old standby method that has supplied almost all of that music already: buy the damn CD and rip it. So really, Apple is comparatively clean in this behavior. Again, I would love to see them drop the DRM, assuming it's even up to them, but I can't get upset at Apple specifically when so many other companies pull much worse crap in this same vein and aren't ever targeted by politicians.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1
Another thing, why does no one consider that perhaps the exit pollsters are not necessarily always honest? This seems unlikely, but it should still be on the table. Sure should be. But you're smart enough to figure out that the exit polls have zero value except if they're accurate. The pollsters who want to keep their jobs are primarily interested in producing the most accurate predictions they can for their clients. If they're wrong, they lose business so any motivation they may have to do so (whatever that may be) needs to be considered against their personal fiscal stake in simply being accurate. On the other hand, the actual voting results count for something by themselves so there's rather a lot more motivation (to everyone involved) to cheat the system.
Combine that with the fact that there are multiple, independent exit pollsters out there and you can probably understand why people focus most of their attention on the voting when it comes to questions of honesty. (Systematic, unintentional bias is an entirely different matter naturally.)
I used "studies show" because I can't recall where I read it now since it was a couple of years ago, just after the 2004 elections. And while you're right that pure number doesn't tell the entire story, it's difficult to quantify much better than that because to go any finer would require some serious questions of personal taste and that's hard to reproduce.
As for it's slant, I disagree entirely. I've watched it looking for this "left leaning slant" for more than two years now and have yet to see it. They repeatedly call the Democrats incompentent, stupid, and disorganized. They have never called W a baby-killer that I can recall or really accused him of malice (Cheney, maybe). Are you sure you're not projecting your sensitivities, here?
The Daily Show isn't left of center, either. It's been studied (someone counted the number of jokes made at the expenses of both sides) and it's basically 50/50. Any sense that TDS is "liberal" comes from a skewed perception on the part of the person with that sense, apparently. (Maybe that's telling us that the rest of the media leans right?)
I don't think that the media is left of center at the moment to begin with (studies have been done: at least with local media it depends entirely on the local population's voting habits and isn't monolithic across the country) and I won't even speculate about which political direction this would move us in. That said, I share your concern at the ability to regulate "fairness" as much as I am sickened by what I see and hear on some stations passing for news. It's just too nebulous to regulate beyond libel and slander. That's to say nothing of the First Amendment challenges here.
Basically, I think it's a good in theory but bad in practice.
Movie studios do this kind of thing all the time. Frequently they give actors and directors "points on the back" which is supposed to mean a portion of "profit".
What the studios do is claim the film hasn't made any profit, and cite an enormous number of line items which cost the producers money.
What the studios have actually done is just shuffled money around: Spending in one place, and earning back somewhere else. Its an effort to avoid paying for those points. Philip Henslowe: But I have to pay the actors and the author. Hugh Fennyman: Share of the profits. Philip Henslowe: There's never any. Hugh Fennyman: Of course not. Philip Henslowe: Oh, oh, Mr. Fennyman. I think you might have hit upon something.
Picking a battle with Cisco like this over something so petty is idiotic. That remains to be seen, I suspect. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that Apple isn't stupid about naming things and if they think that this name is worth the battle, they might just be right. Time will tell, I suppose.
Oh, I accept that there may be other explanations, but not being an astronomer, I can only make my guesses based on what I know. It's you guys who must be willing to explain what we see. Sure, but you should have no expectation of seeing that much detail in the typical press-release. More than 99% of the audience won't notice the weird effects and doesn't care about what causes them, so it's up to people who do to ask.:-)
But still, shouldn't the rings themselves be visibly obscuring the planet, at least near the edge of the shadow where there will be reflected light on the rings? The rings do obscure the planet. Look at the A and B rings where the the optical depths are high enough the block the light. They're dark in front of the planet, especially the very opaque B ring.
And what could possibly cause the effect of wedges apparently missing from the ring at 4 and 8 o'clock? I can't see what could be casting that shadow just there, but not higher up on the rings. If you're talking about what I think you are, that's Saturn's shadow. You can see the effect in up close (from another viewing geometry) in some of other other images).
And what causes the second and less visible lens flare to the right of the first one? The images being taken over a time period, perhaps? No idea, but the flares are not well-understood to begin with. They are due to internal reflections in the optics of the camera and are not well-characterized, as I understand it. We don't usually have to deal with, but we're not usually in this kind of geometry. The spacecraft did move a little bit between images (and color frames), but it wasn't going very fast so that shouldn't be an issue I don't think. If I had to guess, I'd say that the flares are purely inherent to the camera and not due to anything else like spacecraft behavior.
Yeah, that's just the T1's now. Believe me, I know... I'm trying to read my email from home since we're snowed out of work here today and y'all are making it painful:)
If the pattern of previous Slashdottings holds, it'll let up within a day or so.
You're right, the one Phil posted was the stretched version. The one we try to pass around is the "true color" version. I think that National Geographic ran the true color one on the cover, though, so there's some hope for exposure there:-)
Sorry, you're right: in the image that Phil showed on his site the colors where *stretched*. I didn't look that closely at which one he posted.
But you're other claims of manipulations are unfounded. You can claim that the were done, but I was there when the image was assembled. (Admittedly, not the entire time, but I trust my coworker not to try to sneak one past me.) If I have learned one thing from working on the imaging team it has been this: the viewing geometry can fool you. If the rings look discontinuous across the planet, there's probably a reason for it. For example, I remember seeing the effect you mentioned with the inner edge of the B ring. It baffled us at first (we didn't add it, see) until we realized what actually was causing it: it isn't the inner edge of the B ring on the planet, it's the planetshine on the planet. The effect is real, it's your brain that needs recalibration. The flares are also real (we *want* to remove them, actually). What you're telling us in your post above is that you're not smart enough to work out what you're actually seeing and you're not willing to accept that there are other explanations other than we manipulated the image.
I stand corrected. Typically, my above explanation would be true. In this case, it was a database error of some sort. Fixed now, the CICLOPS site works. (Or should, anyway.) Please try again as they just rolled out some updates that they'd love to have people test out.
It's basically true-color. I just asked the guy who put the mosaic together and he used some IR and UV filters so it isn't strictly exactly "true" color in that sense, but it is calibrated so all of the colors are balanced to their correct values so that should be what your eye would see. (I think that that should make sense.) Mind you, the colors were not calibrated to research-grade tolerance since it's a diminishing return, so don't take everything as 100% accurate. (And yes, there are lens flares and probably other optics effects in the image.)
The link works fine for me (of course, it's a local connection from here...). But we only have two T1's to serve the image to y'all, so I think you can understand why there might be some lag if everyone on Slashdot tries to get it at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, someone who disagrees must inherently be irrational. You're up to ad hominem attacks now. Makes a person wonder who isn't worth arguing with.
NASA's primary focus has never really been robotics. The manned spaceflight initiatives have (either directly or indirectly) always taken up more of the budget than robotics. Cassini has another five years on it, after that I have plenty of options. I'm not worried about my funding in either the short or long term, I'm merely concerned about NASA's future and dollars that could have been better spent. If you're smart, you'll note that I've never said that that money should have been spent on robotics. Your personal attacks aside, I don't really expect to ever see much more funding to unmanned exploration than we're seeing now. I would have no problem with NASA spending the money on manned spaceflight if they weren't just flushing it down the toilet on projects that yield almost no results.
But by all means, ignore me. I disagree with you, therefore I must be an idiot. Either way, you're not making a very good case for your side (you've never answered the original question, I can't help but notice) and you're trying to start a flamewar. I see no need to continue this. (Now I know you're reply to this because your type loves to get in the last word. Go ahead, but if you do, remember that you're breaking your own stated belief that there's no point.)
Maybe you needed to pay more attention in history class. As to the Science, just the ability to live in space it worth it. And now the appeal to "it's cool!" A valid point, but a far cry from your initial claims of "we must go into space" and about the scientific value of ISS. If we want to spend $100 billion plus (over about 17 years, actually; the $100 billion doesn't include R&D) for the "Cool" factor, fine. But convince Congress and the taxpayers that the coolness is worth that much. If they are willing to foot the bill knowing what they're really getting, I'm thrilled. (Because it *is* cool.) But I hate seeing people sold fraudulent claims like ISS was pitched on. As I pointed out, I think that the private enterprise will take over the exploration and move us to other worlds soon enough. Great! So why are you asking NASA to fund it instead? Private enterprise is less likely to be a pile of political pork like ISS has turned out, so I think letting them make the next move would be fantastic idea. But let me point out that the some of the biggest arguments for the work that you do, and the work that I did, was for mankind to go to these places. I have yet to hear anyone argue that the word I do is in support of the manned spaceflight initiative in any way. People fund my research because they're interested in the answer. Apart from the Moon and Mars, I know of no claims that solar system exploration, let alone astrophysics in general, is about manned spaceflight. Try getting a pure science project approved that creates jobs in exactly 1 place. It will never happen. That is why NASA is the political creature that it is. Sorry, that happens all the time. Not $3 billion projects to be sure, but there are many projects which create jobs in one district. (Hell, the lion's share of the money for robotic missions goes to JPL as it is.)
"But we need to get off this rock."
Really, why? And why now? You state this like it is an agreed upon conclusion and I don't see why that should be.
And if you believe (as you apparently do) that ISS is doing new, useful science, then by all means, point out what's worth the over $100 billion cost (the last projected cost I've seen).
Are they learning a lot about breakdowns that those previous missions (Mir, for example) didn't tell us all? Maybe a few things, but worth many billions of dollars? You think so?
And no, they're really not doing any new and useful research anymore, at least in my opinion. The science budget has basically been slashed to non-existence. (The original plans included some useful and interesting research, but that's gone up in balloon engineering budgets.)
Didn't Heinlein raise pretty much this issue (romantic entanglements endangering the entire crew) in _Stranger in a Strange Land_? I mean, it wasn't the central theme of the book, but love affairs gone bad is what did in the first mission to Mars in the book. This is hardly a new concern.
In fairness, I don't know of any actual experiments adding enlisted women to the crew mix. So the strongest thing you can conclude from the submarines is a subset of what works, not the entire set. The Navy doesn't seem to be the sort of place inclined to experiment much to figure out what other mixes are viable, though.
Sure, and you have the exact same potential, as do I. But that doesn't mean that any of us are being stressed "properly" and are bent on acquiring power for ourselves. The police are people the same as you are and they are -- by and large -- every bit as concerned about other people as you. More, in all likelihood.
Again, this doesn't mean that we don't need to watch them. But you might just trying listening to their suggestions with an open mind. Is that such a difficult thing to ask?
I take offense with that characterization and would go so far as to say that you're trying to divine a lot from a simple statement. And the statement is pretty simple: the police, by and large, are decent people trying to do a job. They're not power-mad little dictators, they're trying to protect people. Now, that doesn't mean we don't need to check them, because we surely do. But when they request a power with new technology, I'm willing to listen to their reasons with the assumption that they're sincere. I'm not always willing to grant them that power, however. (In fact, I tend to lean the other way. You might want to recalibrate your magic people stereotyper there.)
All I said, and all that was meant, was that I can see the police's case here. Using a GPS tracker is not, in may respects, different from just following a person around. (Which they are allowed to do, as far as have ever heard.) But, as I noted, there are some differences that make me balk and not really feel that they're quite the same and that the tracker is going too far.
In short, next time, try reading more careful and *not* leaping to assumptions. You'll save yourself some embarassment.
My street is public space and the police or anyone else may drive down it. It in no way compares to tracking a person's movements. As for shooting someone, the police can't do that in general. They *can* do it if there is some form of crisis at hand, but those times make up a small minority of the time a policeman is on-duty. So you're comparing actions allowed during such a time (I have no problem with the cops tossing a tracking device into a vehicle if they're witnessing the crime or pursuing the presumed criminals right after it has happened. It's the idea that they can sneak up to a suspect's vehicle and put a tracker in during calmer times when more opportunity affords itself to get a warrant that bothers people. (That's the key point right there: most of the time, they can request a warrant pretty easily.)
Frankly, I can very much see the police's side of this and there is a very reasonable argument to be made that this isn't *that* much different from tailing a suspect (but there's a key difference in the fact that live-tailing is limited because each tail requires an officer), but the entire idea still leaves me quite nervous. I don't think it's reasonable to dismiss fears so quickly as you appear to do.
That falls under "logistics", I do believe. But I honestly don't think it's the safety or the cost: they're still building ISS, which is just as useless as retrieving HST. It's just a question of which symbolic, political money sink do you fund.
A good point, except that I'm not certain that Discovery hasn't been refitted since the launch 15 years ago. I have heard similar stories from people people pretty close to HST (other astronomers who have used it), so there may be truth in the rumor that either Challenger or Columbia was intended to bring it down. (And remember, the shuttle has to be able to hold the telescope *and* land with it. It's possible that the remaining craft aren't robust enough to handle the landing.)
I have yet to see a definitive answer on why they won't retrieve HST, but I do think it's difficult to rule the above out. (Of course, it seems more likely that it's just a mattter of logistics.)
Well, to be fair it's more akin to printer ink-cartridges than like screws. I can get the right size screws made by many different companies if I choose, but a lot of companies (replacement mop heads are another example) lock you into using them as a source to load their products. I agree with your sentiment completely (although I won't complain if Apple could drop the DRM entirely), I'm just trying to refine the case a bit.
Of course, there's a different between iTMS and my printer: if I can't get ink-cartridges, my printer ceases to be useful. If I can't get iTMS songs for my iPod and iTunes, I still have my vast library of already-purchased music *and* I can use that old standby method that has supplied almost all of that music already: buy the damn CD and rip it. So really, Apple is comparatively clean in this behavior. Again, I would love to see them drop the DRM, assuming it's even up to them, but I can't get upset at Apple specifically when so many other companies pull much worse crap in this same vein and aren't ever targeted by politicians.
Combine that with the fact that there are multiple, independent exit pollsters out there and you can probably understand why people focus most of their attention on the voting when it comes to questions of honesty. (Systematic, unintentional bias is an entirely different matter naturally.)
I used "studies show" because I can't recall where I read it now since it was a couple of years ago, just after the 2004 elections. And while you're right that pure number doesn't tell the entire story, it's difficult to quantify much better than that because to go any finer would require some serious questions of personal taste and that's hard to reproduce.
As for it's slant, I disagree entirely. I've watched it looking for this "left leaning slant" for more than two years now and have yet to see it. They repeatedly call the Democrats incompentent, stupid, and disorganized. They have never called W a baby-killer that I can recall or really accused him of malice (Cheney, maybe). Are you sure you're not projecting your sensitivities, here?
The Daily Show isn't left of center, either. It's been studied (someone counted the number of jokes made at the expenses of both sides) and it's basically 50/50. Any sense that TDS is "liberal" comes from a skewed perception on the part of the person with that sense, apparently. (Maybe that's telling us that the rest of the media leans right?)
I don't think that the media is left of center at the moment to begin with (studies have been done: at least with local media it depends entirely on the local population's voting habits and isn't monolithic across the country) and I won't even speculate about which political direction this would move us in. That said, I share your concern at the ability to regulate "fairness" as much as I am sickened by what I see and hear on some stations passing for news. It's just too nebulous to regulate beyond libel and slander. That's to say nothing of the First Amendment challenges here.
Basically, I think it's a good in theory but bad in practice.
What the studios do is claim the film hasn't made any profit, and cite an enormous number of line items which cost the producers money.
What the studios have actually done is just shuffled money around: Spending in one place, and earning back somewhere else. Its an effort to avoid paying for those points. Philip Henslowe: But I have to pay the actors and the author.
Hugh Fennyman: Share of the profits.
Philip Henslowe: There's never any.
Hugh Fennyman: Of course not.
Philip Henslowe: Oh, oh, Mr. Fennyman. I think you might have hit upon something.
--"Shakespeare in Love"
Yeah, that's just the T1's now. Believe me, I know... I'm trying to read my email from home since we're snowed out of work here today and y'all are making it painful :)
If the pattern of previous Slashdottings holds, it'll let up within a day or so.
You're right, the one Phil posted was the stretched version. The one we try to pass around is the "true color" version. I think that National Geographic ran the true color one on the cover, though, so there's some hope for exposure there :-)
Thanks for catching that!
Sorry, you're right: in the image that Phil showed on his site the colors where *stretched*. I didn't look that closely at which one he posted.
But you're other claims of manipulations are unfounded. You can claim that the were done, but I was there when the image was assembled. (Admittedly, not the entire time, but I trust my coworker not to try to sneak one past me.) If I have learned one thing from working on the imaging team it has been this: the viewing geometry can fool you. If the rings look discontinuous across the planet, there's probably a reason for it. For example, I remember seeing the effect you mentioned with the inner edge of the B ring. It baffled us at first (we didn't add it, see) until we realized what actually was causing it: it isn't the inner edge of the B ring on the planet, it's the planetshine on the planet. The effect is real, it's your brain that needs recalibration. The flares are also real (we *want* to remove them, actually). What you're telling us in your post above is that you're not smart enough to work out what you're actually seeing and you're not willing to accept that there are other explanations other than we manipulated the image.
I stand corrected. Typically, my above explanation would be true. In this case, it was a database error of some sort. Fixed now, the CICLOPS site works. (Or should, anyway.) Please try again as they just rolled out some updates that they'd love to have people test out.
It's basically true-color. I just asked the guy who put the mosaic together and he used some IR and UV filters so it isn't strictly exactly "true" color in that sense, but it is calibrated so all of the colors are balanced to their correct values so that should be what your eye would see. (I think that that should make sense.) Mind you, the colors were not calibrated to research-grade tolerance since it's a diminishing return, so don't take everything as 100% accurate. (And yes, there are lens flares and probably other optics effects in the image.)
The link works fine for me (of course, it's a local connection from here...). But we only have two T1's to serve the image to y'all, so I think you can understand why there might be some lag if everyone on Slashdot tries to get it at the same time.