Optical aperture synthesis is working quite well from the ground at specialist observatories. COAST gets fringes from 5 telescopes and synthesises a baseline of 67m, while CHARA has achieved fringes from 2 telescopes separtaed by 400m. It has 6 telescopes in all. The combination of beams is, however, not done in software because we don't have instruments capable of recording the detailed phases of a beam of light, as can be done in the radio. All these optical interferometers use light pipes and mirrors on trollies to match path lengths and to directly combine the beams of light coming from the sub-telescopes.
The key with these projects though is that they all use small sub-telescopes, so can only observe fairly bright objects. Still, it can give you images of the surface of a star like Betelgeuse. Getting to fainter objects means going to larger apertures for the sub-telescopes, and that brings problems. With the small telescopes the wavefront across them is affected in the same way by the atmosphere, so things are coherent when they're combined. With a large aperture (like the VLT primaries at 8m) the wavefront is not the same across the mirror, so this needs to be corrected before the individual telescopes can be combined. This is a major sticking point that has taken a long time to sort out. The corrections needed still limit these systems to quite bright obejcts, though.
How much more would it cost to build a 100m filled aperture in space? Lots more because launching to low earth orbit is very expensive, much more expensive than doing multi-conjugate adaptive optics from the ground.
Space does bring unique capabilities even in the adaptive optics era, since the atmosphere is opaque at many wavelengths. Hence the need for space-based X-ray, ultraviolet, and mid- and far-infrared telescopes. In this sense Hubble is an aberration (pun intended), in that its doing from orbit what can be done from the ground. But adaptive optics was nowhere near as developed when it was launched. The other benefit Hubble gets is low background, which makes it more sensitive, but when compared to a 100m telescope, that doesn't make a lot of difference.
Likely to be online before OWL is CELT - the CalTech Extremely Large Telescope.
There's enough nuclear fuel to last for billions of years.
Depends on which technology you use.
d-p fusion has plenty of available energy, but doesn't work yet.
Fast breeder fission has plenty available (though not as much as fusion) but is still far from commercial. The available resources are *not* enough for billions of years though.
Conventional slow neutron fission though has got problems. There are limits to the amount of U-235 out there. Its not as bad as oil yet, but there is a definite limit in the foreseeable future.
So which nuclear fuel do you want, and are you willing to pay for the development and cleanup?
Or are you referring to the fusion reactor we have got - the sun? Then you need to get into orbit for solar power farms again!
I'll take the resource use imbalence first... with any production there needs to be some resource used. If there is NO resource use, then there is NO production.
Actually, software and a lot of other intellectual property is much less resource intensive than many industries. And if I just download my software overt the net, the resource use gets even lower. This is a good thing!
Now, let's say the free market of the world supports 2 widget factories, and both are in the United States, what would happen if Burundi decided to get into the widget business? One of the factories will either merge with another, or go bankrupt.
Lets be a little more realistic here...
First the US Widget Manufacturers Association will claim that the Burundi factories are violating its patents and trademarks. If Burundi can afford that litigation, they'll then claim the widgets are substandard and demand a ban on Burundian widgets on grounds of safety. If Burundi gets past that, they'll claim the Burundians are using slave labour to undercut them and demand tariffs or import restrictions. Only if the Burundian widget makers have the money to see off all these legal challenges will one of the US factories close... But wait, then there's an appeal to the appropriate Congressional district, and we're back to tariffs or some other way that rich countries prevent a level playing field because they have more power than the developing ones.
Hmmmm... I thought that the Revolutionary War was fought over tea. Oh yeah... and taxes. When the American colonies actually started to produce, the British king decided that it was his. And the people thought otherwise.
Yes, a power imbalence - the Revolutionaries were being oppressed by taxes the king had power to impose until they got rid of him. If he'd withdrawn the taxes (ie. made a concession) maybe no revolution and no USA...
If Burundi decides to start producing things, I doubt that there would be any revolution since it is already classified as a sovereign nation. Unlike the American colonies many years ago.
This is where the current world is different. Its no longer an issue of revolution against an occupying colonial power, now we have the potential for revolution against economic power. Call it globalised revolution if you want. It will be very bloody, so its not something I want to see, so some concessions should be made to reduce these pressures.
Huh? Who needs to concede anything? Is the US going to start bombing aspirin factories if they try to compete with us?
At the moment you don't need to, you send in the lawyers instead. Far more devastating!
It works inside the US too, with RIAA and MPAA sending in lawyers so they can control distribution.
Look at the strict words of what the Greenpeace guy says, and not place your own interpretation on it. What he's saying is that we have a major imbalence in power and resource use. In just the same way that the power imbalence between the British and the American colonies created a violent revolution when it got too large, and the same applied to the Tsars and people of Russia, there will be increasing conflict if the current situation persists. This is the lesson of history.
Either concessions need to be made, or there will be conflict. How those concessions should be made is not stated, but the alternative to making concessions is likely to be worse for everyone.
Yes - if you have access to an infinite supply of energy you can sort a lot of these problems out. Solar power stations are a way to do that.
But hold on, how are you going to build them if all the energy you need for the launch vehicles has been used up already?
This is a bootstrapping problem. You have to invest energy to get more. If you don't have the initial amount of energy to invest, then you're stuck.
If we burn all our fossil fuels in SUVs etc., and not in building the solar power stations, that's it, game over.
We live in a unique period in history. We can either invest the energy we have easily available at the moment to ensure a large future supply - and perhaps have some generations of hardship while that's happening - or we can go on using up the local resources living a good life, and sealing the fate of future generations. This takes conscious planning, and is not something that a blind 'market solution' is capable of, because that always works on a much shorter timescale.
I don't see anyone taking this long view and doing something about it, so by 2050, we may be stuck on this planet forever.
Now that's a believable solution to the Fermi Paradox.
I agree with many of your comments. I think later episodes were driven by the view that it was a kids show and didn't really need a consistant story or character development if it had fast editing, flashy costumes and something fantastic in the plot.
For me the hayday of Dr Who was with Jon Pertwee stuck on Earth with UNIT.
Meanwhile, in case you didn't know, John Nathan Turner died recently.
While your list of requirements here is a nice set, there are a lot of practical issues in getting the world's nations to agree, becuase many of them don't want something that gives users real privacy. And that's even ignoring the lobbying of people like RIAA.
Can you seriously imagine the Chinese government backing a secure operating system that they don't have back doors to? Perhaps that's the background to Red Flag linux - the Chinese government can put in all the backdoors they want. Even the UK government is so far in bed with Microsoft that they're using hardly anything that's open source.
Any movements in this direction will have to come from the bottom up, not the top down. Hopefully we can point out the problems with Palladium and its descendents, and MS's rep. as a convicted trust abuser will help raise warning signs when they propose such things.
Of course, given their record of security screwups, does anyone think Palladium will actually work?
As has been pointed out here, buying up software companies and killing their Windoze versions is a good way to annoy users, unless there is a process by which they can be encouraged to make the transition to Macs as painlessly as possible. The whole SWITCH campaign may be part of this, but I'd hope they're going to do much more. With these companies come their lists of registered users. I would not be surprised if Apple didn't offer favourable deals on hardware purchase to help users of these packages move from Windows to Mac. This is one way to reduce the bad PR that comes from such, frankly, Microsoft-like actions, and it could even be turned into good PR given the right spin.
There was a time when the EULA 'agreement' was 'confirmed' by unsealing the envelope holding the install disks. I recall someone arranging for their cat to shred the envelope, so it was the cat that agreed to the EULA, not the user. You could do something with the mouse button I guess, but if it went to court, it'll be the usual 'he with the most lawyers wins', and M$ has an awful lot of lawyers!
Its good to see progress from some of the small launch vehicle companies, especially after the failure of Rotary Rocket.
The actual success here, though, is perhaps not as revolutionary as it first appears. The DC-X had a similarly reusable and relightable rocket even though it was in a more conventional vertical 'rocket ship' design.
Getting cheaper access to space is the key to broader space tourism and proper space industires. Other companies trying this include Pioneer Rocketplane, Armadillo Aerospace, JP Areospace and TGV Rockets to name but a few. There's even a UK outfit, Bristol Spaceplanes, and the European Space Agency is beginning to think in this direction too, according to CNN. All the companies are small and desperately in need of money if anyone wants to invest. Its probably less risky than Worldcom!
Another useful resource is the Space Access Society. Indeed they've argued that the whole X-33 mess was in fact Lockheed-Martin protecting their lucrative disposable launcher market by messing up the project. Sadly, NASA seems to have been complicit in this.
Assuming this idea goes through, and RIAA's minions can attack P2P sites, one has to ask what constitutes a P2P network. Yes, there's Kazaa, there was Napster etc., but the most fundamental P2P I'm aware of is good old FTP. A *lot* of stuff is transferred through FTP, much of it quite legitimate (I shift scientific data almost daily with FTP and SCP when I'm being security conscious), but a lot of it is probably also MP3s etc.. So would this give RIAA the right to attack anyone running an FTP client or other file sharing utility? If so, you've just destryed most scientific use of the internet, and much more besides.
I can think of four things that non-UK citizens can do, some of which depend on where you live.
Firstly, cash always helps. Making donations to UK organisations that fight against these measures will always do some good. STAND is a place you could start.
Secondly, you could try writing as non-UK citizens to express concerns about the legislation. I doubt this will do much, but the fuller the mailbags are, the more likely they are to take notice.
Thirdly, if you are an EU citizen, write to the European parliament to fight off similar measures there, and to make sure there are European safeguards on privacy. If the UK signs up to these it has to implement them, and that might be a way of getting rid of these stupid measures. The real danger though is even more intrusive legislation coming from the EU, and that needs to be stopped.
Finally, if you are a businessman with links to the UK, or with potential links, write to the Department fo Trade and Industry saying that these new regulations will make you think twice about staying in the UK or openning offices there. Money talks, again, and if the government sees the real economic dangers of these actions, they might think twice.
Of course given past experience, they'll ignore all protests and carry on regardless.
Anyone got lists of countries with more sensible laws to move to?
DERA was in fact cut in half, and the section deemed to be privatisable is now QinetiQ (minus a large amount of money for the damn silly name).
The other half still does more secret government work. I think it may still be called DERA, but I'm not sure. I suspect the break up would've happened whichever party won the 97 election, since the conservatives were privatisation mad at the time.
The RIAA President quoted in the article implies that what they're doing to copy protect disks is some kind of encryption. My understanding is that this is not the case. They're basically messing with the directory structure of the disk in such a way that computers will misunderstand what's going on and will, at minimum, be unable to play or read the music. Isn't he being somewhat misleading by calling this encryption when in fact its an issue of deliberately failing to follow the CD standard? Is this distinction going to play a significant role in the class action?
One set of users of radio spectrum who should not be ignored are radio astronomers - in fact it could be argued that they helped to establish global radio communications in the first place, so should get some credit!
Radio astronomy is now restricted to a few small regions of radio spectrum. Many interesting scientific targets cannot be observed because of man made interference (eg. HI emission lines in moderately redshifted galaxies). Even the small scientific reserves that exist are being encroached upon - for example by the Glonas satellites - and are under threat of commercial exploitation.
One thing that a review of radio frequency use should do is to formalise and strengthen the protections of parts of the spectrum for scientific use.
You have to look at how these fields function in the real world. You don't get a press release and grant funding if you say 'We really don't know, whats happening. We need more resources to find out'. Instead you get a press release, and become famous, for saying 'This is how it is, and everyone who says it isn't is wrong'. The media prefers certainty even when its not available.
If you really want to know whats going on, with the economy, diet or SETI, don't trust press releases, read up on the subject and draw your own conclusions. There are many people willing to sell you their conclusions, why not do it yourself. Be a more active consumer of information!
Yes, its difficult if the people inside are crooks, but that's always the case.
One thing I've heard suggested, which is interesting, is that some sort of clear statement of professional ethics is needed in the computing field - a bit like the 'Hippocratic Oath' in medicine, and that people who breach this should be 'disbarred' in some way by a professional body.
This illustrates once again that the most frequent abuses of security are inside jobs. The vast majority of cases where security systems are breached for personal gain are done by people inside the organisations keeping the data.
How much bigger would this story be if the data had come from hackers penetrating the FBI? Since its an inside job, its not front page news.
We don't need huge security structures and new laws to keep out black hat hackers, we need a closer watch on people inside companies and organisations keeping data. And, if the data isn't needed for a clear purpose, it shouldn't be collected.
And that applies as much to government agencies as companies, since the people inside those, as this case proves, can't be trusted either.
There's extensive coverage of this book, maybe even by someone who's read it, in this week's Nature (16 May issue).
Sadly they have a closed subscription list.
Key quotes include:
Gene Stanley, a physicist at Boston University, has used other mathematical methods to study some of the same systems that Wolfram considers in his text. Stanley does not believe that cellular automata can do everything that Wolfram ascribes to them, but says that the book has persuaded him that they are more than just a curiosity. "This is a much-needed complementary approach," he says. "It's a profound book, perhaps the book of the decade."
And:
But to many, the fact that Wolfram's ideas still lack the predictive power of established theories built on more conventional mathematics is a sign that the wunderkind has come up short. With the book's publication date having been repeatedly pushed back, some speculate that Wolfram has been striving, but never quite succeeding, to pull off his promised scientific revolution. Michael Berry, a theoretical physicist at the University of Bristol, UK, remains unconvinced that Wolfram has done more than embellish the basic idea that simple systems such as cellular automata can generate complexity. "We've known this for 20 years," says Berry. "He'll have some fans, but I think others are going to react strongly against him."
Their bottom line - the jury is still out how much this is hype and how much real advance. There are also some interesting insights into how Wolfram conducts himself too.
I have doubts about some of the claims here on the basis of fundamental physics. The laws of thermodynamics set clear limits on the efficiency you can get out of a heat engine, and I worry that the claimed figures are too high to be allowed by physical law - especially for the power generation claims.
This isn't all a good thing. If you read to the end of the apple support page, you find the sting in the tail. Since these are not legally CDs, trying to play one in your Mac constitutes improper use. This menas you get to void your warranty and have to pay any repair charges.
Now this is partly apple covering their backside, which is not unreasonable, but it could all get very interesting if someone with a significant repair bill and a lot of annoyance starts firing lawyers from the hip to get someone else to pay. Who will they go for - the record company, the people who devised this particular anti-computer scheme, the artists...
Slashdot Mirror
Optical aperture synthesis is working quite well from the ground at specialist observatories. COAST gets fringes from 5 telescopes and synthesises a baseline of 67m, while CHARA has achieved fringes from 2 telescopes separtaed by 400m. It has 6 telescopes in all. The combination of beams is, however, not done in software because we don't have instruments capable of recording the detailed phases of a beam of light, as can be done in the radio. All these optical interferometers use light pipes and mirrors on trollies to match path lengths and to directly combine the beams of light coming from the sub-telescopes.
The key with these projects though is that they all use small sub-telescopes, so can only observe fairly bright objects. Still, it can give you images of the surface of a star like Betelgeuse.
Getting to fainter objects means going to larger apertures for the sub-telescopes, and that brings problems. With the small telescopes the wavefront across them is affected in the same way by the atmosphere, so things are coherent when they're combined. With a large aperture (like the VLT primaries at 8m) the wavefront is not the same across the mirror, so this needs to be corrected before the individual telescopes can be combined. This is a major sticking point that has taken a long time to sort out. The corrections needed still limit these systems to quite bright obejcts, though.
How much more would it cost to build a 100m filled aperture in space? Lots more because launching to low earth orbit is very expensive, much more expensive than doing multi-conjugate adaptive optics from the ground.
Space does bring unique capabilities even in the adaptive optics era, since the atmosphere is opaque at many wavelengths. Hence the need for space-based X-ray, ultraviolet, and mid- and far-infrared telescopes. In this sense Hubble is an aberration (pun intended), in that its doing from orbit what can be done from the ground. But adaptive optics was nowhere near as developed when it was launched. The other benefit Hubble gets is low background, which makes it more sensitive, but when compared to a 100m telescope, that doesn't make a lot of difference.
Likely to be online before OWL is CELT - the CalTech Extremely Large Telescope.
And Hi from the ESO Guesthouse in Chile!
There's enough nuclear fuel to last for billions of years.
Depends on which technology you use.
d-p fusion has plenty of available energy, but doesn't work yet.
Fast breeder fission has plenty available (though not as much as fusion) but is still far from commercial. The available resources are *not* enough for billions of years though.
Conventional slow neutron fission though has got problems. There are limits to the amount of U-235 out there. Its not as bad as oil yet, but there is a definite limit in the foreseeable future.
So which nuclear fuel do you want, and are you willing to pay for the development and cleanup?
Or are you referring to the fusion reactor we have got - the sun? Then you need to get into orbit for solar power farms again!
That's the problem here. Too many people define 'better for the US' as being equivalent to 'better for everyone' when it might well not be true.
Of course you get elected in the US for being good to the US, which is why something supranational is needed.
And who knows, maybe the world would be better if the UK still included the whole of North America. The UK would be at least...
I'll take the resource use imbalence first ... with any production there needs to be some resource used. If there is NO resource use, then there is NO production.
... I thought that the Revolutionary War was fought over tea. Oh yeah ... and taxes. When the American colonies actually started to produce, the British king decided that it was his. And the people thought otherwise.
Actually, software and a lot of other intellectual property is much less resource intensive than many industries. And if I just download my software overt the net, the resource use gets even lower. This is a good thing!
Now, let's say the free market of the world supports 2 widget factories, and both are in the United States, what would happen if Burundi decided to get into the widget business? One of the factories will either merge with another, or go bankrupt.
Lets be a little more realistic here...
First the US Widget Manufacturers Association will claim that the Burundi factories are violating its patents and trademarks. If Burundi can afford that litigation, they'll then claim the widgets are substandard and demand a ban on Burundian widgets on grounds of safety. If Burundi gets past that, they'll claim the Burundians are using slave labour to undercut them and demand tariffs or import restrictions. Only if the Burundian widget makers have the money to see off all these legal challenges will one of the US factories close... But wait, then there's an appeal to the appropriate Congressional district, and we're back to tariffs or some other way that rich countries prevent a level playing field because they have more power than the developing ones.
Hmmmm
Yes, a power imbalence - the Revolutionaries were being oppressed by taxes the king had power to impose until they got rid of him. If he'd withdrawn the taxes (ie. made a concession) maybe no revolution and no USA...
If Burundi decides to start producing things, I doubt that there would be any revolution since it is already classified as a sovereign nation. Unlike the American colonies many years ago.
This is where the current world is different. Its no longer an issue of revolution against an occupying colonial power, now we have the potential for revolution against economic power. Call it globalised revolution if you want. It will be very bloody, so its not something I want to see, so some concessions should be made to reduce these pressures.
Huh? Who needs to concede anything? Is the US going to start bombing aspirin factories if they try to compete with us?
At the moment you don't need to, you send in the lawyers instead. Far more devastating!
It works inside the US too, with RIAA and MPAA sending in lawyers so they can control distribution.
BTW, I'm all for moving Microsoft to Burundi.
On this we can agree!
Look at the strict words of what the Greenpeace guy says, and not place your own interpretation on it. What he's saying is that we have a major imbalence in power and resource use. In just the same way that the power imbalence between the British and the American colonies created a violent revolution when it got too large, and the same applied to the Tsars and people of Russia, there will be increasing conflict if the current situation persists. This is the lesson of history.
Either concessions need to be made, or there will be conflict. How those concessions should be made is not stated, but the alternative to making concessions is likely to be worse for everyone.
Yes - if you have access to an infinite supply of energy you can sort a lot of these problems out. Solar power stations are a way to do that.
But hold on, how are you going to build them if all the energy you need for the launch vehicles has been used up already?
This is a bootstrapping problem. You have to invest energy to get more. If you don't have the initial amount of energy to invest, then you're stuck.
If we burn all our fossil fuels in SUVs etc., and not in building the solar power stations, that's it, game over.
We live in a unique period in history. We can either invest the energy we have easily available at the moment to ensure a large future supply - and perhaps have some generations of hardship while that's happening - or we can go on using up the local resources living a good life, and sealing the fate of future generations. This takes conscious planning, and is not something that a blind 'market solution' is capable of, because that always works on a much shorter timescale.
I don't see anyone taking this long view and doing something about it, so by 2050, we may be stuck on this planet forever.
Now that's a believable solution to the Fermi Paradox.
25 hours a day... This guy must be a Martian, since they get nearly 25 hours a day there (24.75 to be more accurate).
This clearly demonstrates that the whole metric system is a Martian plot!
That's way Mars Polar Explorer got killed by the metric/imperial system mix up! They've already infiltrated NASA!!!!
Watch the skies!
I agree with many of your comments. I think later episodes were driven by the view that it was a kids show and didn't really need a consistant story or character development if it had fast editing, flashy costumes and something fantastic in the plot.
For me the hayday of Dr Who was with Jon Pertwee stuck on Earth with UNIT.
Meanwhile, in case you didn't know, John Nathan Turner died recently.
Sadly, the Beeb deny this here.
When are they going to realise that Dr Who could be a major money spinner and stop being so phobic towards anything science fictional? Sigh.
While your list of requirements here is a nice set, there are a lot of practical issues in getting the world's nations to agree, becuase many of them don't want something that gives users real privacy. And that's even ignoring the lobbying of people like RIAA.
Can you seriously imagine the Chinese government backing a secure operating system that they don't have back doors to? Perhaps that's the background to Red Flag linux - the Chinese government can put in all the backdoors they want. Even the UK government is so far in bed with Microsoft that they're using hardly anything that's open source.
Any movements in this direction will have to come from the bottom up, not the top down. Hopefully we can point out the problems with Palladium and its descendents, and MS's rep. as a convicted trust abuser will help raise warning signs when they propose such things.
Of course, given their record of security screwups, does anyone think Palladium will actually work?
As has been pointed out here, buying up software companies and killing their Windoze versions is a good way to annoy users, unless there is a process by which they can be encouraged to make the transition to Macs as painlessly as possible.
The whole SWITCH campaign may be part of this, but I'd hope they're going to do much more. With these companies come their lists of registered users. I would not be surprised if Apple didn't offer favourable deals on hardware purchase to help users of these packages move from Windows to Mac. This is one way to reduce the bad PR that comes from such, frankly, Microsoft-like actions, and it could even be turned into good PR given the right spin.
But are they going to do this?
There was a time when the EULA 'agreement' was 'confirmed' by unsealing the envelope holding the install disks. I recall someone arranging for their cat to shred the envelope, so it was the cat that agreed to the EULA, not the user. You could do something with the mouse button I guess, but if it went to court, it'll be the usual 'he with the most lawyers wins', and M$ has an awful lot of lawyers!
Still, there should be a test case...
Its good to see progress from some of the small launch vehicle companies, especially after the failure of Rotary Rocket.
The actual success here, though, is perhaps not as revolutionary as it first appears. The DC-X had a similarly reusable and relightable rocket even though it was in a more conventional vertical 'rocket ship' design.
Getting cheaper access to space is the key to broader space tourism and proper space industires. Other companies trying this include Pioneer Rocketplane, Armadillo Aerospace, JP Areospace and TGV Rockets to name but a few. There's even a UK outfit, Bristol Spaceplanes,
and the European Space Agency is beginning to think in this direction too, according to CNN.
All the companies are small and desperately in need of money if anyone wants to invest. Its probably less risky than Worldcom!
Another useful resource is the Space Access Society. Indeed they've argued that the whole X-33 mess was in fact Lockheed-Martin protecting their lucrative disposable launcher market by messing up the project. Sadly, NASA seems to have been complicit in this.
Assuming this idea goes through, and RIAA's minions can attack P2P sites, one has to ask what constitutes a P2P network. Yes, there's Kazaa, there was Napster etc., but the most fundamental P2P I'm aware of is good old FTP. A *lot* of stuff is transferred through FTP, much of it quite legitimate (I shift scientific data almost daily with FTP and SCP when I'm being security conscious), but a lot of it is probably also MP3s etc.. So would this give RIAA the right to attack anyone running an FTP client or other file sharing utility? If so, you've just destryed most scientific use of the internet, and much more besides.
I can think of four things that non-UK citizens can do, some of which depend on where you live.
Firstly, cash always helps. Making donations to UK organisations that fight against these measures will always do some good. STAND is a place you could start.
Secondly, you could try writing as non-UK citizens to express concerns about the legislation. I doubt this will do much, but the fuller the mailbags are, the more likely they are to take notice.
Thirdly, if you are an EU citizen, write to the European parliament to fight off similar measures there, and to make sure there are European safeguards on privacy. If the UK signs up to these it has to implement them, and that might be a way of getting rid of these stupid measures. The real danger though is even more intrusive legislation coming from the EU, and that needs to be stopped.
Finally, if you are a businessman with links to the UK, or with potential links, write to the Department fo Trade and Industry saying that these new regulations will make you think twice about staying in the UK or openning offices there. Money talks, again, and if the government sees the real economic dangers of these actions, they might think twice.
Of course given past experience, they'll ignore all protests and carry on regardless.
Anyone got lists of countries with more sensible laws to move to?
That's only half the story...
DERA was in fact cut in half, and the section deemed to be privatisable is now QinetiQ (minus a large amount of money for the damn silly name).
The other half still does more secret government work. I think it may still be called DERA, but I'm not sure.
I suspect the break up would've happened whichever party won the 97 election, since the conservatives were privatisation mad at the time.
The RIAA President quoted in the article implies that what they're doing to copy protect disks is some kind of encryption. My understanding is that this is not the case. They're basically messing with the directory structure of the disk in such a way that computers will misunderstand what's going on and will, at minimum, be unable to play or read the music. Isn't he being somewhat misleading by calling this encryption when in fact its an issue of deliberately failing to follow the CD standard? Is this distinction going to play a significant role in the class action?
One set of users of radio spectrum who should not be ignored are radio astronomers - in fact it could be argued that they helped to establish global radio communications in the first place, so should get some credit!
Radio astronomy is now restricted to a few small regions of radio spectrum. Many interesting scientific targets cannot be observed because of man made interference (eg. HI emission lines in moderately redshifted galaxies). Even the small scientific reserves that exist are being encroached upon - for example by the Glonas satellites - and are under threat of commercial exploitation.
One thing that a review of radio frequency use should do is to formalise and strengthen the protections of parts of the spectrum for scientific use.
You have to look at how these fields function in the real world. You don't get a press release and grant funding if you say 'We really don't know, whats happening. We need more resources to find out'. Instead you get a press release, and become famous, for saying 'This is how it is, and everyone who says it isn't is wrong'. The media prefers certainty even when its not available.
If you really want to know whats going on, with the economy, diet or SETI, don't trust press releases, read up on the subject and draw your own conclusions. There are many people willing to sell you their conclusions, why not do it yourself. Be a more active consumer of information!
Yes, its difficult if the people inside are crooks, but that's always the case.
One thing I've heard suggested, which is interesting, is that some sort of clear statement of professional ethics is needed in the computing field - a bit like the 'Hippocratic Oath' in medicine, and that people who breach this should be 'disbarred' in some way by a professional body.
No idea if this is at all practical though!
This illustrates once again that the most frequent abuses of security are inside jobs. The vast majority of cases where security systems are breached for personal gain are done by people inside the organisations keeping the data.
How much bigger would this story be if the data had come from hackers penetrating the FBI? Since its an inside job, its not front page news.
We don't need huge security structures and new laws to keep out black hat hackers, we need a closer watch on people inside companies and organisations keeping data. And, if the data isn't needed for a clear purpose, it shouldn't be collected.
And that applies as much to government agencies as companies, since the people inside those, as this case proves, can't be trusted either.
There's extensive coverage of this book, maybe even by someone who's read it, in this week's Nature (16 May issue).
Sadly they have a closed subscription list.
Key quotes include:
Gene Stanley, a physicist at Boston University, has used other mathematical methods to study some of the same systems that Wolfram considers in his text. Stanley does not believe that cellular automata can do everything that Wolfram ascribes to them, but says that the book has persuaded him that they are more than just a curiosity. "This is a much-needed complementary approach," he says. "It's a profound book, perhaps the book of the decade."
And:
But to many, the fact that Wolfram's ideas still lack the predictive power of established theories built on more conventional mathematics is a sign that the wunderkind has come up short. With the book's publication date having been repeatedly pushed back, some speculate that Wolfram has been striving, but never quite succeeding, to pull off his promised scientific revolution. Michael Berry, a theoretical physicist at the University of Bristol, UK, remains unconvinced that Wolfram has done more than embellish the basic idea that simple systems such as cellular automata can generate complexity. "We've known this for 20 years," says Berry. "He'll have some fans, but I think others are going to react strongly against him."
Their bottom line - the jury is still out how much this is hype and how much real advance. There are also some interesting insights into how Wolfram conducts himself too.
I have doubts about some of the claims here on the
basis of fundamental physics. The laws of thermodynamics set clear limits on the efficiency you can get out of a heat engine, and I worry that the claimed figures are too high to be allowed by physical law - especially for the power generation claims.
This isn't all a good thing. If you read to the end of the apple support page, you find the sting in the tail. Since these are not legally CDs, trying to play one in your Mac constitutes improper use. This menas you get to void your warranty and have to pay any repair charges.
Now this is partly apple covering their backside, which is not unreasonable, but it could all get very interesting if someone with a significant repair bill and a lot of annoyance starts firing lawyers from the hip to get someone else to pay. Who will they go for - the record company, the people who devised this particular anti-computer scheme, the artists...
And more importantly, would they have a case???