I am involved somewhat in the development of the Virtual Observatory. There are some details that often get overlooked in articles about the VO. First off, its more than putting data on the web. That we do already (the Hubble Space Telescope archive is a 7+ terrabyte archive that is on the web). The real challenge is to make an infrastructure to allow these archives and terabyte databases to interact with grid computing services. We have been working on this for several months now and are working on some demos of the technology for the January American Astronomical Socieity meeting in Seatle.
An example of such a VO project is the Galaxy Morphology demo. We take catalogs of a cluster of galaxies from one source, identify those sources with emission form a separate catalog, fetch images of all of those galaxies, and send the images and brightness information to a grid computer service that calculates the morphology of the galaxies, sending this result to the user to visualize in a VO complient piece of software. The user did nothing but pick the cluster and then look at the results. Much more than simply putting data on the web. And once this service is developed, it can simply be put into a web page for others to use and learn from.
Most of this involves creating simple to use yet potentially powerful interfaces to services. While we are not using true RPCs like SOAP yet, the idea is to create standard interfaces to things like image servers, catalog servers, and the like. With those services, we will extend beyond to data and service discovery. Standard data and metadata formats are also being developed, as are common datamodels, all with the intent that these will make data and service exchange simpler. This all leads to service registries, where many applications will go to discover data and services that could be used for a particular project.
Jim Grey is involved with the project. He lead the Terraserver project at Microsoft Research. He found that, as he put it, images of the earth are worth money; those of the stars are not. Because of this, he found the research he was doing on distributed data with the terraserver project was running into snags where making money hindered access to the data. This not to be true for astronomical data. Hence he is now looking up rather than down now. There is in development a version of Terraserver for different parts of the VO in the works.
There will be usage points for people all the way from my mother who loves astronomical wallpaper to the hard core researcher and all points in between. Public outreach is being built in at the ground level, so this is not just for astronomers. Many of these will be web bases interfaces to the VO, but others may be simple toolkits to make your own services. Some could be simple to use to do basic science projects in school, some may be for science fair level projects, and some for people to develop educational web-based lesson plans.
Yes, 10 million dollars seems small. But its a start. And we are not the only ones working on VO technologies. The Europeans have thier own VO, as does Canada, Russia, India... The divisions are mostly political (each funding agency has its own VO title). The IVO has been establised to act as a stearing body to help us share efforts and make things interoperable from the start.
Two words that make Public Transportation work...population density. Boston, New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and most European cities all have dence population cores. People are willing to walk a little to get to a subway stop or bus stop. They are even willing to wait 5 to 10 minutes to get on the thing. More than that and they lose interest.
In a dence population area, one subway/bus stop (which is an expensive thing to build) can serve many people. Hence you have a short walk and a short wait (more demand = more frequent service).
Out here in most of the west (appart from the centers of Seatle and San Francisco) we have urban sprawl. There are only two solutions for public transportation: very infrequent service or large distances between stops. Neither work, as either you have to plan your day around catching the bus, or you have to drive to the bus stop. And face it, if you have a car in either situation, your going to use it. And this doesn't even begin to address the problems of trying to go from point a to point b which are served by different infrequent services, leading to more waiting for a different bus.
Don't get me wrong. I love public transportation. I'd use it in a heart beat if it worked for me. But I live in a low population density town in Colorado that, if the population growth got to big, I'd probably move. Sort of a catch-22 for many of us here in the west.
Yesterday I went to may mail box and found that I had a bill for heat, a check from the state of Maryland, 5 catalogs, 3 flyers, 2 letters from charities, 4 ads wanting to refinance my house, and a bunch of coupons I already got in my Sunday paper. If the USPS would just stop delivering this spam I might be able to handle this mail thing, but I'm thinking of going back to a human messenger service instead.
Could one use an IR LED instead? Does any one know what the LED detector is in these mice? If so, you could possibly find a wavelenght of IR light that doesn't tramsit through your glass tabletop (which depends on the purity of the glass and any coatings on it) and BINGO...Optical Mice on Glass.
Just FYI...the "small company" QWEST was dealing with was COVAD. Somehow I think they have some good attack dogs to make the ILECs do what they are supposed to.
Here here...only problem is then you have to deal with the Phone Company.
I wanted to go with DirectTV's dsl...good company good performance and good deal. However, here in Colorado right around the corner from their company headquarters our phone service is provided by QWEST and directdsl will not deal with QWEST at all.
Got a Speakeasy account setup for 20 bucks more a month (with slightly more on the account). However now,with the installation finally working a MONTH after the inital estimate (all due to the phone company dragging their feet), I understand why DirectDSL doesn't deal with QWEST.
Anyone else out there want to start a ILAC Chapter 11 pool?
Its about the bottom line. Most people will go through any lengths of voice mail maze before they ask for a real person. If they do that, thats one less low level job they have to fill. To date I have found no voice mail system that doesn't hand you to a real person if you just sit quite long enough or simply try the 0 key, which they often neglect to tell you is an option.
That being said, companies phone systems are now being designed around requiring automated services be used. With voice recognition working for numbers, they can service those without touch tone phones. Soon there will be no need for anything but voicemail hell.
Sometimes I think Wallstreet is taking lessons from the DMV.
OK so we all know we hate ads. Because they typically don't lead us to what we want. Thats no secret. I personally don't need a cure for that ED, but some people do (and theres nothing wrong with that). But some ads do work for me.
We all buy stuff off the internet. Most PVR owners do as well. TIVO has this "if you watched this and gave it thumbs up" system for taping random stuff for me...and Amazon likes to try to sell me stuff that relates to what I've bought in the past. Why not take the information out of the corporation databases and put it in the box? If I could shop (and I meen really shop where you look at stuff and compare features and prices and all that sort of stuff) from my TIVO simply...now theres something. And if it would recomend thing that I might like (and if it learns from the scorn I give it when it blows it) then this sort of advertizement might work.
Show me ads when I want to buy something. Let me do some research on what I need...if that is a Pizza to get me through the Buffy marathon...then show me who's got pizza I like and on sale. If I'm bored and need a new game show me the ads for the ones I might actually buy.
This won't cover the "gee...I really feel like drinking that last Frapachino in my fridge" ads that are also out there, but it does get the ads I might want to se to me in a more targeted way, without a central registry of what I like.
So how do the networks get in on this...how about having some of the spare bandwidth for the new digital TV go to allowing the PVR to catalog whats advertized on that network and download the interesting ones for me to use if I need them.
I don't know if this would work or not. I'm not sold on it...but its an interesting twist from the way we do things now. Would it be used or simply ignored...of course that depends on how good of a shopping interface you can get to with only tens of buttons.
One historical note about Astronomy is we have had to deal with (for the past 20+ years at least) is that we use chips for both our data taking and processing. The size of light detectors are growing at the same Moore's law rate in size as computer chips are in speed. Its a zero-sum game we play as we have always relied on the CPUs to keep up with their CCD brothers.
The part here that made me worry about the future of any non-MS browser software was
"What these other browser makers should do is stop complaining about what Microsoft is doing and start supporting what Microsoft is supporting," Hurd said. "People out there aren't reading these specs; they're using IE."
On the surface I agree with this (though philosophically I don't like the idea of establishing standards by enforcing a monopoly). If your going to compete you have to do what the leader is doing and try to do it better. What I worry about is that only the leader, who has large resources and a vested interest in seeing everyone else fail, inovates while the others spends all their time catching up.
I don't think thats happening with Opera or Mozilla...yet.
The idea here was to keep people in regions where a film had not been released from getting the film ahead of time. Once again the MPAA has the kneejerk reaction of stopping the flow of things. Just like when the VCR came out...how to keep people from reprodicing movies.
I go to movies in the theater not because its the only place to see a film. I can wait for most films to be released on DVD before I truge off to the theater to stand in line and pay too much for popcorn. No I go to the theater to got the theater...to see Spiderman on a 36 YARD diagonal screen. Film is much more engrosing not having a pause button.
This is also obvious when you see how rare the MPAA rereleases great films. How many out there who own 2001 on DVD would pay to see it on the big screen. I'm sure we could come up with a list of hundreds of films they could put back out and have people flock to see them (think about how much better the summer would be if you knew there were going to be some good films that you could look forward to in addition to the list of ones you hope will be good like MIBII).
I think overall the real problem with the MPAA and the RIAA for that matter is they are in it for the money...not for the art. Yes the money may currently be in getting the 13-21 year olds into the seats, but if they tried to focus on the art rather than the product they might just be able to get the rest of us in there a little more often (and we'd still buy the DVD).
The whole basis for relativity is that no mater how your moving, if you measure the speed of light relative to your frame of reference (ignoring how you are moving) it will be the same. If you measure the speed of light relative to your standing on the face of the earth, its the same as if you were flying in the same direction as the light as fast as you can. Exactly the same reguardless of your speed.
This is the equivelant of one person (call them a) parked and one traveling at 100 miles per hour (b) seeing someone (c) pass them both. They each measure c's speed realitive to how fast they are going and c is moving at 200 mph relative to a and 200 mph relative to b. In one hour of time measured by a, c is 200 miles away from a. Also in one hour for b, c is 200 miles away from b. The only way this is possible is if time is different for a and b. This is relativity.
In my years of working with data format standards (in particular the FITS format which is supervised by the International Astronomical Union) I have found that many developers cannot wait for standards to be debated and adopted. For FITS this can be years (not quite as long as the WC3). As developers we need this thing done yesterday. You are quickly forced to adopt some other set of standards, or roll your own. If someone has invented the nonstandard standard that suits your needs, you quickly jump on it and call it a day.
This is no different than all the cpp #ifdefs that litter all C++ code on Unix machines or configures doing its best to compile an application. Isn't this sort of web browser capability checking and telling you what will not work any different from GNU configure finding you don't have libjpeg.so installed and not putting JPEG support into whatever program you are compiling? As long as I can do what I need to do with the site (and they don't deny me partial access) then my choises are the same as compiling...either get the needed components or deal with the missing bits.
Of course most web users are not developers so they grow tired of being told they cannot do something with their browser. Its our jobs as a community to look at what they need and add the needed features as quickly and transparently as possible.
Not tring to troll here but I have had my eyes opened about many things along this topic. The first came when I moved from Austin Texas to Baltimore Maryland. I too thought that most of the reps in Washington leaned to the right of the middle. Then I moved out of Austin. Now I see they are left of this middle from this side of the country. Often those of us who are in much more academically related fields (and CS is certainly that) find that the world outside of our sphere is not what we see it as from within.
Secondly the "left wing" media. Yes the mogles of media are good capitalists who want to protect the status quo. Thats their job is to keep the New York Times, CNN, and even USA Today in business. But most people who go into the media these days do so to "change the world". Its a selection effect. You really don't go into journalism if you want to report " just the facts mame" in our post Watergate/Deep Through world. Uncle Walter is gone and were stuck in a Dan Rather universe. So what do we get out of this? Perhaps a forum for open debate (if they can pack it full of SUV commercials). Open as long as the minds watching are too...
So let me get this strait. I am going to pay almost 60% as much for something that costs them network and storage space, is of an inferior quality to what I get on a CD, and requires that I spend good time creating my own low quality CD with my own equipment and CD-R. Sounds like its not any cheeper once you factor in the oportunity costs.
Most of us make more per hour than this is worth. This needs to be a service that allows me to do much more than I currently can to make it worth my while. Now if for 20 bucks a month you would keep my IPod filled with new (at least new to me) music that I will like (sort of Tivo like) then maybe we've got something.
Why not do a two key version of this. The card has a key and your eye/finger/toe/ear print can be used to produce the other key. And if you have something happen to one of the two keys, you can go somewhere where, using something more secure than your mothers Maden name (which is what scares me most about credit card verification today) you can have a new one issued.
Would this end 9/11 stuff...no. Would it make verifying who I am more secure. Yes. Infallable...no, but as I said, guessing where I was born or my home zip code is much worse than what could be done with this.
The real problem with these taxes is that even if someone uses them to buy a clue about the issues they are trying to solve, once a tax is in place no one wants to get rid of it any time soon. Take as an example the "temporary"
telephone tax from the Spanish-American War we Americans pay each month. These are the reasons we have to work now to stop these foolish laws and regulations before they hit the books.
On the very web page they send to Mozilla and Opera they have a link to Advertise, which links you to Advantage Marketing at MSN. So do you think they really want to sell adds to be placed on the Upgrade Required page. Be a great place to put banners for the Linux Distribs and./!!!
Another interesing test is to load the page into IE and then save it to disk. The load it into the other browsers and see whats the difference. Only IE gets the layout the way MS wants it. Notice that only the home page and the my MSN pages are blocked as well, so you can still go get the information someone mails a URL to (and all the popup adds as well).
Standards are simple if its my way or the highway.
The mass of the super massive black holes in galaxies is accounted for in the "missing mass" problem. The problem is that when the mass density of a galaxy starts to fall off (e.g. you start running out of galaxy), the velocity of the orbits at that radius should start getting smaller the further out you go. An orbits velocity measures the mass of everything within the orbit. In the real world, you never see this even when you run out of luminous objects in the galaxy. Hence the term "dark matter".
Slashdot Mirror
I am involved somewhat in the development of the Virtual Observatory. There are some details that often get overlooked in articles about the VO. First off, its more than putting data on the web. That we do already (the Hubble Space Telescope archive is a 7+ terrabyte archive that is on the web). The real challenge is to make an infrastructure to allow these archives and terabyte databases to interact with grid computing services. We have been working on this for several months now and are working on some demos of the technology for the January American Astronomical Socieity meeting in Seatle.
An example of such a VO project is the Galaxy Morphology demo. We take catalogs of a cluster of galaxies from one source, identify those sources with emission form a separate catalog, fetch images of all of those galaxies, and send the images and brightness information to a grid computer service that calculates the morphology of the galaxies, sending this result to the user to visualize in a VO complient piece of software. The user did nothing but pick the cluster and then look at the results. Much more than simply putting data on the web. And once this service is developed, it can simply be put into a web page for others to use and learn from.
Most of this involves creating simple to use yet potentially powerful interfaces to services. While we are not using true RPCs like SOAP yet, the idea is to create standard interfaces to things like image servers, catalog servers, and the like. With those services, we will extend beyond to data and service discovery. Standard data and metadata formats are also being developed, as are common datamodels, all with the intent that these will make data and service exchange simpler. This all leads to service registries, where many applications will go to discover data and services that could be used for a particular project.
Jim Grey is involved with the project. He lead the Terraserver project at Microsoft Research. He found that, as he put it, images of the earth are worth money; those of the stars are not. Because of this, he found the research he was doing on distributed data with the terraserver project was running into snags where making money hindered access to the data. This not to be true for astronomical data. Hence he is now looking up rather than down now. There is in development a version of Terraserver for different parts of the VO in the works.
There will be usage points for people all the way from my mother who loves astronomical wallpaper to the hard core researcher and all points in between. Public outreach is being built in at the ground level, so this is not just for astronomers. Many of these will be web bases interfaces to the VO, but others may be simple toolkits to make your own services. Some could be simple to use to do basic science projects in school, some may be for science fair level projects, and some for people to develop educational web-based lesson plans.
Yes, 10 million dollars seems small. But its a start. And we are not the only ones working on VO technologies. The Europeans have thier own VO, as does Canada, Russia, India... The divisions are mostly political (each funding agency has its own VO title). The IVO has been establised to act as a stearing body to help us share efforts and make things interoperable from the start.
Two words that make Public Transportation work...population density. Boston, New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and most European cities all have dence population cores. People are willing to walk a little to get to a subway stop or bus stop. They are even willing to wait 5 to 10 minutes to get on the thing. More than that and they lose interest.
In a dence population area, one subway/bus stop (which is an expensive thing to build) can serve many people. Hence you have a short walk and a short wait (more demand = more frequent service).
Out here in most of the west (appart from the centers of Seatle and San Francisco) we have urban sprawl. There are only two solutions for public transportation: very infrequent service or large distances between stops. Neither work, as either you have to plan your day around catching the bus, or you have to drive to the bus stop. And face it, if you have a car in either situation, your going to use it. And this doesn't even begin to address the problems of trying to go from point a to point b which are served by different infrequent services, leading to more waiting for a different bus.
Don't get me wrong. I love public transportation. I'd use it in a heart beat if it worked for me. But I live in a low population density town in Colorado that, if the population growth got to big, I'd probably move. Sort of a catch-22 for many of us here in the west.
Yesterday I went to may mail box and found that I had a bill for heat, a check from the state of Maryland, 5 catalogs, 3 flyers, 2 letters from charities, 4 ads wanting to refinance my house, and a bunch of coupons I already got in my Sunday paper. If the USPS would just stop delivering this spam I might be able to handle this mail thing, but I'm thinking of going back to a human messenger service instead.
Could one use an IR LED instead? Does any one know what the LED detector is in these mice? If so, you could possibly find a wavelenght of IR light that doesn't tramsit through your glass tabletop (which depends on the purity of the glass and any coatings on it) and BINGO...Optical Mice on Glass.
Just FYI...the "small company" QWEST was dealing with was COVAD. Somehow I think they have some good attack dogs to make the ILECs do what they are supposed to.
Here here...only problem is then you have to deal with the Phone Company.
I wanted to go with DirectTV's dsl...good company good performance and good deal. However, here in Colorado right around the corner from their company headquarters our phone service is provided by QWEST and directdsl will not deal with QWEST at all.
Got a Speakeasy account setup for 20 bucks more a month (with slightly more on the account). However now,with the installation finally working a MONTH after the inital estimate (all due to the phone company dragging their feet), I understand why DirectDSL doesn't deal with QWEST.
Anyone else out there want to start a ILAC Chapter 11 pool?
First Microsoft reinvented computing by giving us Windows 95 and now the tablet PC a little over eight years later in 2003. Brilliance.
First Apple reinvented computing by giving us the Macintosh in 1984 and now the Newton a little over eight years yater in 1993. Brilliance.
I guess the real question is when did PARC come up with all of this. 1978?
Its about the bottom line. Most people will go through any lengths of voice mail maze before they ask for a real person. If they do that, thats one less low level job they have to fill. To date I have found no voice mail system that doesn't hand you to a real person if you just sit quite long enough or simply try the 0 key, which they often neglect to tell you is an option.
That being said, companies phone systems are now being designed around requiring automated services be used. With voice recognition working for numbers, they can service those without touch tone phones. Soon there will be no need for anything but voicemail hell.
Sometimes I think Wallstreet is taking lessons from the DMV.
OK so we all know we hate ads. Because they typically don't lead us to what we want. Thats no secret. I personally don't need a cure for that ED, but some people do (and theres nothing wrong with that). But some ads do work for me.
We all buy stuff off the internet. Most PVR owners do as well. TIVO has this "if you watched this and gave it thumbs up" system for taping random stuff for me...and Amazon likes to try to sell me stuff that relates to what I've bought in the past. Why not take the information out of the corporation databases and put it in the box? If I could shop (and I meen really shop where you look at stuff and compare features and prices and all that sort of stuff) from my TIVO simply...now theres something. And if it would recomend thing that I might like (and if it learns from the scorn I give it when it blows it) then this sort of advertizement might work.
Show me ads when I want to buy something. Let me do some research on what I need...if that is a Pizza to get me through the Buffy marathon...then show me who's got pizza I like and on sale. If I'm bored and need a new game show me the ads for the ones I might actually buy.
This won't cover the "gee...I really feel like drinking that last Frapachino in my fridge" ads that are also out there, but it does get the ads I might want to se to me in a more targeted way, without a central registry of what I like.
So how do the networks get in on this...how about having some of the spare bandwidth for the new digital TV go to allowing the PVR to catalog whats advertized on that network and download the interesting ones for me to use if I need them.
I don't know if this would work or not. I'm not sold on it...but its an interesting twist from the way we do things now. Would it be used or simply ignored...of course that depends on how good of a shopping interface you can get to with only tens of buttons.
One historical note about Astronomy is we have had to deal with (for the past 20+ years at least) is that we use chips for both our data taking and processing. The size of light detectors are growing at the same Moore's law rate in size as computer chips are in speed. Its a zero-sum game we play as we have always relied on the CPUs to keep up with their CCD brothers.
The part here that made me worry about the future of any non-MS browser software was
"What these other browser makers should do is stop complaining about what Microsoft is doing and start supporting what Microsoft is supporting," Hurd said. "People out there aren't reading these specs; they're using IE."
On the surface I agree with this (though philosophically I don't like the idea of establishing standards by enforcing a monopoly). If your going to compete you have to do what the leader is doing and try to do it better. What I worry about is that only the leader, who has large resources and a vested interest in seeing everyone else fail, inovates while the others spends all their time catching up.
I don't think thats happening with Opera or Mozilla...yet.
The idea here was to keep people in regions where a film had not been released from getting the film ahead of time. Once again the MPAA has the kneejerk reaction of stopping the flow of things. Just like when the VCR came out...how to keep people from reprodicing movies.
I go to movies in the theater not because its the only place to see a film. I can wait for most films to be released on DVD before I truge off to the theater to stand in line and pay too much for popcorn. No I go to the theater to got the theater...to see Spiderman on a 36 YARD diagonal screen. Film is much more engrosing not having a pause button.
This is also obvious when you see how rare the MPAA rereleases great films. How many out there who own 2001 on DVD would pay to see it on the big screen. I'm sure we could come up with a list of hundreds of films they could put back out and have people flock to see them (think about how much better the summer would be if you knew there were going to be some good films that you could look forward to in addition to the list of ones you hope will be good like MIBII).
I think overall the real problem with the MPAA and the RIAA for that matter is they are in it for the money...not for the art. Yes the money may currently be in getting the 13-21 year olds into the seats, but if they tried to focus on the art rather than the product they might just be able to get the rest of us in there a little more often (and we'd still buy the DVD).
The whole basis for relativity is that no mater how your moving, if you measure the speed of light relative to your frame of reference (ignoring how you are moving) it will be the same. If you measure the speed of light relative to your standing on the face of the earth, its the same as if you were flying in the same direction as the light as fast as you can. Exactly the same reguardless of your speed.
This is the equivelant of one person (call them a) parked and one traveling at 100 miles per hour (b) seeing someone (c) pass them both. They each measure c's speed realitive to how fast they are going and c is moving at 200 mph relative to a and 200 mph relative to b. In one hour of time measured by a, c is 200 miles away from a. Also in one hour for b, c is 200 miles away from b. The only way this is possible is if time is different for a and b. This is relativity.
In my years of working with data format standards (in particular the FITS format which is supervised by the International Astronomical Union) I have found that many developers cannot wait for standards to be debated and adopted. For FITS this can be years (not quite as long as the WC3). As developers we need this thing done yesterday. You are quickly forced to adopt some other set of standards, or roll your own. If someone has invented the nonstandard standard that suits your needs, you quickly jump on it and call it a day.
This is no different than all the cpp #ifdefs that litter all C++ code on Unix machines or configures doing its best to compile an application. Isn't this sort of web browser capability checking and telling you what will not work any different from GNU configure finding you don't have libjpeg.so installed and not putting JPEG support into whatever program you are compiling? As long as I can do what I need to do with the site (and they don't deny me partial access) then my choises are the same as compiling...either get the needed components or deal with the missing bits.
Of course most web users are not developers so they grow tired of being told they cannot do something with their browser. Its our jobs as a community to look at what they need and add the needed features as quickly and transparently as possible.
Not tring to troll here but I have had my eyes opened about many things along this topic. The first came when I moved from Austin Texas to Baltimore Maryland. I too thought that most of the reps in Washington leaned to the right of the middle. Then I moved out of Austin. Now I see they are left of this middle from this side of the country. Often those of us who are in much more academically related fields (and CS is certainly that) find that the world outside of our sphere is not what we see it as from within.
Secondly the "left wing" media. Yes the mogles of media are good capitalists who want to protect the status quo. Thats their job is to keep the New York Times, CNN, and even USA Today in business. But most people who go into the media these days do so to "change the world". Its a selection effect. You really don't go into journalism if you want to report " just the facts mame" in our post Watergate/Deep Through world. Uncle Walter is gone and were stuck in a Dan Rather universe. So what do we get out of this? Perhaps a forum for open debate (if they can pack it full of SUV commercials). Open as long as the minds watching are too...
So let me get this strait. I am going to pay almost 60% as much for something that costs them network and storage space, is of an inferior quality to what I get on a CD, and requires that I spend good time creating my own low quality CD with my own equipment and CD-R. Sounds like its not any cheeper once you factor in the oportunity costs.
Most of us make more per hour than this is worth. This needs to be a service that allows me to do much more than I currently can to make it worth my while. Now if for 20 bucks a month you would keep my IPod filled with new (at least new to me) music that I will like (sort of Tivo like) then maybe we've got something.
Why not do a two key version of this. The card has a key and your eye/finger/toe/ear print can be used to produce the other key. And if you have something happen to one of the two keys, you can go somewhere where, using something more secure than your mothers Maden name (which is what scares me most about credit card verification today) you can have a new one issued.
Would this end 9/11 stuff...no. Would it make verifying who I am more secure. Yes. Infallable...no, but as I said, guessing where I was born or my home zip code is much worse than what could be done with this.
The real problem with these taxes is that even if someone uses them to buy a clue about the issues they are trying to solve, once a tax is in place no one wants to get rid of it any time soon. Take as an example the "temporary" telephone tax from the Spanish-American War we Americans pay each month. These are the reasons we have to work now to stop these foolish laws and regulations before they hit the books.
On the very web page they send to Mozilla and Opera they have a link to Advertise, which links you to Advantage Marketing at MSN. So do you think they really want to sell adds to be placed on the Upgrade Required page. Be a great place to put banners for the Linux Distribs and ./!!!
Another interesing test is to load the page into IE and then save it to disk. The load it into the other browsers and see whats the difference. Only IE gets the layout the way MS wants it. Notice that only the home page and the my MSN pages are blocked as well, so you can still go get the information someone mails a URL to (and all the popup adds as well).
Standards are simple if its my way or the highway.
The mass of the super massive black holes in galaxies is accounted for in the "missing mass" problem. The problem is that when the mass density of a galaxy starts to fall off (e.g. you start running out of galaxy), the velocity of the orbits at that radius should start getting smaller the further out you go. An orbits velocity measures the mass of everything within the orbit. In the real world, you never see this even when you run out of luminous objects in the galaxy. Hence the term "dark matter".