Read the article. It didn't talk about life in space at all. It said that the earliest chemical steps, which may be one of the neccesary footholds for life to take place, are present in space.
The article explains that if these components come into a favourable environment there is a strong possibility that primitive life could spontaneously develop.
The article over-extends what the scientists are saying, but popular articles always do that. The article didn't even say that "there was life in space" though.
This may get me modded down as a troll, but what DirectTV did was a hack and a beautiful one no less. I actually feel that I need to tip my hat to the engineers involved. If companies are going to try and prevent hackers from using their product then this is the way to go. I have respect for this as opposed to the "send in the lawyers" approach. Sure, DirectTV did that as well, but this was elegant. They hacked the hackers.
I personally believe that any signals that happen to cross the boundaries of my property are mine to do with as I wish, but I also believe that the senders of those signals have the right (and in the case of a commercial enterprise, the necessity) to try and protect those signals.
This should be listed as one of the Top Ten Hacks of all time.
Wouldn't we be better off spending that money to prevent all the disease, famine
and war on our own planet before we go about fucking up all the other planets? How many starving children could be fed with the
money it takes to launch one spacecraft? NASA is a parasite on our society and needs to be put on hold until we can sort out our real
problems.
Those are all admirable goals, but NASA's budget is 14 billion dollars, as requested by President Clinton (FY2001). That sounds like a lot, but its really miniscule compared to the money the pharmaceutical industry already has. For instance, in 1998 they spent 5.9 billion dollars on product promotion. From the same source prescription sales totalled 107.1 billion dollars. That doesn't include over the counter medicines such as asprin, cough medicines and the like.
The solution to starving children isn't to feed them, thats a short term solution and is almost a ponzi scheme since those starving children will in turn have more starving children etc. The real solution is to make sure that people who can't afford to feed their children don't have any more (while feeding the children there). Birth control is more cost effective and also more humane than allowing people to breed children, through their own ignorance, who will die of starvation.
All the money in the world won't prevent war. The current conflicts are based on differences in ethnicity, religion or political leanings. How many trillions of dollars were wasted by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. over their 'cold' war? Money just enables more destructive wars.
Space exploration, which NASA enables the U.S. to compete in, is one of the few nationalistic goals that provides worldwide benefits. NASA doesn't just lob robots at rocks, it also launches satelites that explore space, and more mundanely but perhaps more important to us, track climatic conditions. It's made technologies like the phone both widely available and inexpensive. NASA builds enabling technologies.
The transistors in the memory of your computer store a value which is nearly identical to the "1" or "0" which was written to it. If a high voltage is written it is drained over time through parasitic capacitances. Periodically the value is refreshed (brought back up to the correct level) through refresh.
When you read from memory you're essentially reading through a high gain buffer which restores any signals which are almost high to a high signal or which are almost low to a low signal.
As long as there is some means to detect the appropriate value of a signal with a high enough probability of success nearly is good enough.
Well, I've got broadband. I could download DiVX files if I wanted. Even if I wasn't opposed to paying for what I use, the quality of DiVX sucks, at least on the couple of things I took a look at.
You can find DVD's for 13 bucks or so, a little more for special editions and the picture quality is great. I live in a smallish community and I can even rent DVD, which only costs a few bucks.
The fact that most people don't have the ability to download DiVX doesn't mean that the MPAA should not be worried. Broadband will eventually be the status quo, and there are enough people that are cheap enough to sacrifice quality for free access that they should be worried.
The problem is how to ensure the encyclopedia is relatively unbias. It's impossible to be completely unbiased, so let's strive for the next best thing. And
RMS and his fans are not it. I dread to see the article on "freedom" that passes his muster.
I'm don't adhere to a lot of RMS' ideals. I believe commercial software has its place, I believe patents have there place as well. I also believe that despite this, RMS' take on freedom is the least biased I've seen.
At least RMS practices what he preaches, more than I can say for most advocates of anything else.
If this really remains "Free", as in anybody can contribute this project will fail miserably. As mentioned in other articles some form of editorial control is needed. In addition some form of fact checking needs to be done. An encyclopedia's quality is directly proportional to the judiciousness of the fact checking done.
There will be a segment of the population who will endeavour to do what is done on public forums such as slashdot: Troll and destroy the integrity of the project. On slashdot it isn't that much of an issue. Sometimes trolls don't get moderated down but usually it's just inane banter which is easy to detect. I also don't put much stock in slashdot as an information resource. It's entertainment to me. There is some useful content on some subjects and some insightful commentary (and some inciteful commentary as well!) but I wouldn't be caught dead citing slashdot in any meaningful report.
I've seen in other projects where credibility is more important, such as mindpixel (the projects thesis is that a system can be developed that reflects the average mind of an internet user) flooded with bogus information. Some of it may just be people answering outside of the area of their expertice, some of it was obviously malicious.
I know I sound very negative, I really hope the project succeeds and I'm airing these observations in the hopes that they're already addressed. I will contribute to this project in the areas that I consider myself well versed in.
A backdoor is never a good thing. It can always be exploited by people who are either curious, unfriendly or both.
If a user forgets a password on a workstation physical access to the workstation almost always allows this problem to be resolved. A backdoor allows the problem to be resolved remotely, convienent? Yes. Dangerous? Yes.
Arguing for a back door is like arguing that your unbreakable encryption product should have a backdoor just in case you happen to forget your key phrase. If you needed that level of security then a) you shouldn't have forgotten the password and b) you're better off cutting your losses and losing the data rather than opening yourself up to the possibility that any script kiddie can hack into it.
I almost had a similar problem. I was 5'10, 262 lbs. I found another insurance company that would use the results of a stress test, nurses evaluation and a physical. Since I actually was at 18% body fat and everything else was perfect I qualified for the 5A rating and rate.
Look into this if your circumstances would indicate that they're just looking at a height/weight chart (if I took myself down to the 180 pounds indicated on one of those my doctor assured me I'd be dead).
It may be something else entirely, it may mean that scientists need to look back at the sets of equations and theories that they use to bound planets with. Right now all they know is that an object more massive than they expect is orbiting a planet. Indications are that it is 30% more massive than their research would indicate is possible.
They don't know any characteristics about this object yet, it may mean a new class of objects which would mean that current theory needs revising. It might be a brown dwarf. It might be a planet, which would mean that current theories need fine tuning. The state of the art in terms of theory is constantly under revision, thats the difference between science and religion.
Before jumping to conclusions maybe there was something that indicated there may have been a problem. I've been an eBay user for years, have the bare minimum of email notices set (I only want to know if I'm outbid, if I win an auction etc) and didn't get this 'spam'.
It could've been handled better (ask you to double check your settings) but since not everybody received the message indications would be that for some reason they thought there might be a problem.
Tapes are excellent devices for backup, relatively cheap per gigabyte of storage. As long as you don't treat them like a primary device they're very reliable. Every tape storage format I've used: audio, video and digital storage has suffered from reliability and data integrity problems when used as a primary device (playing Led Zepplin twice a day, watching Debby Does Dalls ad infinitum or mounting a DAT on the desktop and using it as a cheap but slow drive)
DVD's are great, with adequate care they can last a very long time. The same goes with CD's. If you invest in the clear protective overlays for the top surface as many rental places do then they can last an extremely long time.
The other problem I don't see how this device could be affordable. The media may be inexpensive but the bandwidth required to handle 2.5 gigabytes/sec will be expensive. 2000 bucks for the recorder, 10000! bucks for the TV.
Claiming that large uncompressed data will prevent piracy is rather inane as well. If there's that much data the picture quality will be incredible making it that much easier to rip a copy (albeit degraded) that is acceptable and is tradeable via broadband.
While I think that $3.95/mo is pretty steep, I am not opposed in principle to paying for high quality information.
It depends on what you get for that 3.95/mo, if its mostly static content with the occasional new thing (or even monthly new thing) then its an exorbidant price when you consider other sites you may subscribe to. The incremental costs add up quickly.
For sites like this a better idea might be to form a partnership with similar sites (in both content and quality) and charge 3.95/mo or some other fee for open access to them all. An even smarter idea might be to form a co-operative web hosting site. Add up the bandwidth, support and administrative fees each month, take a little slice for future expansion and charge to the members of the co-operative. Maybe this has already been done someplace (I'd actually be interested).
I'm not that smart of a guy. Just you're average Joe on the street, so forgive me if this question seems kind of dumb. Do you mean to tell me that
something as huge and violence as the Big Bang didn't make any noise at all? A completly silent exploision or implosion or whatever that created
universes was completly silent?
It depends on where you were listening. If you were outside of the Big Bang then there would be silence, since outside of this event there was no matter to conduct sound vibrations. As the leading edge of the big bang passed you there would be noise, but the amplitude of the noise would vary depending on the density of matter.
This doesn't qualify, its more like "look, noise, its from space isn't it cool?", but there are useful reasons to do this. It's all part of understanding data, we usually do this visually by taking some massive amount of data, perform filtering on it (like a low pass, high pass or band pass filter for instance), and applying a mapping function to it (data that falls between here and there goes into this bin, bins with this much amplitude are coloured this way).
I know people who can analyze mechanical problems in machinery through a stethoscope for instance.
I think the story has the purpose wrong. I think they were trying to build a Faraday shield around the building to block out external radio interference, and possibly to block anything from being transmitted out as well.
Think of the shielding inside of a computer case, there's metal all around and by making sure everything contacts the radio frequency emissions are diminished.
All of your complaints are easily explained. The slashdot editors are illiterate. Either that or they've been replaced by the equivalent of a procmail filter that rejects 99.99% of all stories and blindly posts the remaining 0.01%.
Think about it, it would work. For any apple story insert some lame comment about jobs from a fortune database. For linux stories some comment like "I'm glad to see that linux is finally immanitizing the eschelon".
Gack! I've figured out to much. The VA linux corporate assassins just knocked down my door and are in my office.
Fortunately since the collapse of their stock they couldn't afford competent assassins, nor weapons beyond a broken nerf gun purchased at a garage sale for a nickel.
Saying that Microsoft isn't an appropriate choice stinks of zealousy rather than a valid argument. This may be shocking but trying to teach somebody word processing using MS Word on MS Windows is many times more likely to get them gainful employment then teaching them how to use AbiWord on Debian. The same goes for any other package.
When you walk in for one of these jobs they will (hopefully) test your familiarity with the applications they use. Do you know the applications well enough to get the job done with enough efficiency to justify some multiple of minimum wage.
There is no on the job training for word processing or image manipulation etc. You'll get 10 minutes of training on their filing system and thats it.
Why are corps always making up new software licenses for their 'open-source' projects? Why not just use the proven GPL or
BSD license with minor changes where necessary?
Because Apple and other corporate entities have a lot more to protect themselves against. A company with billions of dollars in cash is a tempting target for small companies with patents of dubious quality. Usually after spending a lot of money the patent dispute is thrown out, this has been demonstrated with the attempt at suing over ColorSync among other things.
What happens if a law suit is successful and the infringing code happens to be part of Darwin or other open source code that Apple provides? Apple can't leave the code in, they'd be breaking the law and inviting huge punitive damages.
Other clauses are because the concept of releasing your code to the community is absolutely alien to them, especially to their lawyers. It's less worrying now, some clauses get dropped. Will Apple ever go to a pure Open Source license, such as BSD? Probably never, there will always be additional requirements on their part to prove due dilligence. Will they go to the GPL? Never, since they're using code license under BSD as a base.
More justly, since the average user is being penalized a priori for copywrite violation, this should be considered an approval to copy to your hearts desire. I've always been a proponent of paying for what you use, but if corporations are going to keep lobbying for kick backs for assumed piracy then I'm going to change my tune. I'll pay for what I use from companies I support.
When you order stuff online its typically either held at the border or shipped along with a customs invoice for the duties, tarrifs and tax. At least this is always what happened to me when ordering stuff online.
It is a great idea, more as a research device than a deterent. This thing has been done before, and similar operations have been going on for a long time. There have been disclosed ones, such as at hacker conventions, as well as private efforts.
Crackers won't be deterred by the possibility of entrapment. The good ones will be cautious, the script kiddies will be caught.
I run a MUD, I get a number of port scans daily. It annoys me a bit, they do use up bandwidth and I do get a number with spoofed IP addresses, which concern me, but I wouldn't go ballistic over somebody who is just satisfying their curiousity.
There's another class of scanning though, I've got a user who's threatened to hack into my machine. He's just a script kiddy, I'm not terribly concerned since I don't have any services other than the bare minimum running. Still, it seems to me that when this kid scans me I should be able to have it treated more seriously than a random scan.
The problem I see right now is that things are both too lax and too strict. People try to make valuable tools illegal which is absolutely wrong. On the other hand positive rulings without the requisite pause to think about how the circumstances which surround an event, the intent, should dictate how the event is classed.
This is only tangentially related to the story, but at least its not a Nth post post.
There's still a following for games built around craftily written descriptions and puzzles. In fact new textual interactive fiction pieces are developed by a small buy loyal fanbase. Some of the games are really good.
There's information about the current state of the (well, somewhat ancient in internet time) art of interactive fiction here.
Peer to peer file sharing has been around for a long time, it predates the buzzword that describes it. FTP sites are peer to peer exchanges. When I first started on the internet it wasn't very hard to find anything on an FTP site. There were crack downs and this dried up to a large extent.
FSP became the protocol du jour for illicit activity (and some legal activity as well) but things changed a bit. It was no longer easy to find sites and they often involved bartering, give me a good piece of software, a good site or a good picture and I'll give you a link to a good site. The BBS scene had this already of course, they often enforced upload to download ratios.
FSP dried up as well (I don't even know if FSP is still around) due to the same pressures as FTP clients. Other peer-to-peer architectures showed up, Hotline and others. They all were self restricting in that it wasn't automatic that you could access copyrighted materials. You had to click banner adds, submit software and agree that you weren't a Fed (har har, has anybody even researched whether a federal agent has to reply truthfuly, especially to a form letter?)
Napster changed this a bit, it was only meant for one thing, and that was to facilitate the exchange of music. It didn't enforce restrictions on what you downloaded and since it wasn't a true P2P, more of a peer to server to peer, it was easy to find what you wanted. The central server handled the searching and host details for you. It was possible to get what you wanted without worrying about keeping up with the scene. It's a tool that the adepts would enjoy using, but didn't have a bar of entry that will keep out the casual users.
I could easily set up my dad with Napster on his Windows box if he were the type of person who listened to music. He probably wouldn't even realize that there were copyright issues involved. It's easy enough and risk free enough that he probably wouldn't care. Most people won't lift a CD out of a record store, the risk is too high and there's a stigma attached to it.
The agencies such as the RIAA are scared, and they should be. Previously they could rob their customers blind since most people really had no comcept of what the value of their products were. With prevalent sharing of music people will realize that the distribution costs are minimal, there will still be some fuzziness on production costs but not enough fuzziness to justify paying over a buck per song.
The present scenario where a bag of money is handed over to the RIAA companies, who grab most of it, then handed down the corporate chain with each successive person getting a smaller and smaller cut until the artist (the person who actually CREATED the music, who had SKILLS that most people do NOT have) gets only a penny or two will have to end. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon.
Slashdot Mirror
The article explains that if these components come into a favourable environment there is a strong possibility that primitive life could spontaneously develop.
The article over-extends what the scientists are saying, but popular articles always do that. The article didn't even say that "there was life in space" though.
I personally believe that any signals that happen to cross the boundaries of my property are mine to do with as I wish, but I also believe that the senders of those signals have the right (and in the case of a commercial enterprise, the necessity) to try and protect those signals.
This should be listed as one of the Top Ten Hacks of all time.
The solution to starving children isn't to feed them, thats a short term solution and is almost a ponzi scheme since those starving children will in turn have more starving children etc. The real solution is to make sure that people who can't afford to feed their children don't have any more (while feeding the children there). Birth control is more cost effective and also more humane than allowing people to breed children, through their own ignorance, who will die of starvation.
All the money in the world won't prevent war. The current conflicts are based on differences in ethnicity, religion or political leanings. How many trillions of dollars were wasted by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. over their 'cold' war? Money just enables more destructive wars.
Space exploration, which NASA enables the U.S. to compete in, is one of the few nationalistic goals that provides worldwide benefits. NASA doesn't just lob robots at rocks, it also launches satelites that explore space, and more mundanely but perhaps more important to us, track climatic conditions. It's made technologies like the phone both widely available and inexpensive. NASA builds enabling technologies.
When you read from memory you're essentially reading through a high gain buffer which restores any signals which are almost high to a high signal or which are almost low to a low signal.
As long as there is some means to detect the appropriate value of a signal with a high enough probability of success nearly is good enough.
You can find DVD's for 13 bucks or so, a little more for special editions and the picture quality is great. I live in a smallish community and I can even rent DVD, which only costs a few bucks.
The fact that most people don't have the ability to download DiVX doesn't mean that the MPAA should not be worried. Broadband will eventually be the status quo, and there are enough people that are cheap enough to sacrifice quality for free access that they should be worried.
At least RMS practices what he preaches, more than I can say for most advocates of anything else.
There will be a segment of the population who will endeavour to do what is done on public forums such as slashdot: Troll and destroy the integrity of the project. On slashdot it isn't that much of an issue. Sometimes trolls don't get moderated down but usually it's just inane banter which is easy to detect. I also don't put much stock in slashdot as an information resource. It's entertainment to me. There is some useful content on some subjects and some insightful commentary (and some inciteful commentary as well!) but I wouldn't be caught dead citing slashdot in any meaningful report.
I've seen in other projects where credibility is more important, such as mindpixel (the projects thesis is that a system can be developed that reflects the average mind of an internet user) flooded with bogus information. Some of it may just be people answering outside of the area of their expertice, some of it was obviously malicious.
I know I sound very negative, I really hope the project succeeds and I'm airing these observations in the hopes that they're already addressed. I will contribute to this project in the areas that I consider myself well versed in.
If a user forgets a password on a workstation physical access to the workstation almost always allows this problem to be resolved. A backdoor allows the problem to be resolved remotely, convienent? Yes. Dangerous? Yes.
Arguing for a back door is like arguing that your unbreakable encryption product should have a backdoor just in case you happen to forget your key phrase. If you needed that level of security then a) you shouldn't have forgotten the password and b) you're better off cutting your losses and losing the data rather than opening yourself up to the possibility that any script kiddie can hack into it.
Look into this if your circumstances would indicate that they're just looking at a height/weight chart (if I took myself down to the 180 pounds indicated on one of those my doctor assured me I'd be dead).
They don't know any characteristics about this object yet, it may mean a new class of objects which would mean that current theory needs revising. It might be a brown dwarf. It might be a planet, which would mean that current theories need fine tuning. The state of the art in terms of theory is constantly under revision, thats the difference between science and religion.
It could've been handled better (ask you to double check your settings) but since not everybody received the message indications would be that for some reason they thought there might be a problem.
DVD's are great, with adequate care they can last a very long time. The same goes with CD's. If you invest in the clear protective overlays for the top surface as many rental places do then they can last an extremely long time.
The other problem I don't see how this device could be affordable. The media may be inexpensive but the bandwidth required to handle 2.5 gigabytes/sec will be expensive. 2000 bucks for the recorder, 10000! bucks for the TV.
Claiming that large uncompressed data will prevent piracy is rather inane as well. If there's that much data the picture quality will be incredible making it that much easier to rip a copy (albeit degraded) that is acceptable and is tradeable via broadband.
For sites like this a better idea might be to form a partnership with similar sites (in both content and quality) and charge 3.95/mo or some other fee for open access to them all. An even smarter idea might be to form a co-operative web hosting site. Add up the bandwidth, support and administrative fees each month, take a little slice for future expansion and charge to the members of the co-operative. Maybe this has already been done someplace (I'd actually be interested).
I know people who can analyze mechanical problems in machinery through a stethoscope for instance.
Think of the shielding inside of a computer case, there's metal all around and by making sure everything contacts the radio frequency emissions are diminished.
Think about it, it would work. For any apple story insert some lame comment about jobs from a fortune database. For linux stories some comment like "I'm glad to see that linux is finally immanitizing the eschelon".
Gack! I've figured out to much. The VA linux corporate assassins just knocked down my door and are in my office.
Fortunately since the collapse of their stock they couldn't afford competent assassins, nor weapons beyond a broken nerf gun purchased at a garage sale for a nickel.
When you walk in for one of these jobs they will (hopefully) test your familiarity with the applications they use. Do you know the applications well enough to get the job done with enough efficiency to justify some multiple of minimum wage.
There is no on the job training for word processing or image manipulation etc. You'll get 10 minutes of training on their filing system and thats it.
What happens if a law suit is successful and the infringing code happens to be part of Darwin or other open source code that Apple provides? Apple can't leave the code in, they'd be breaking the law and inviting huge punitive damages.
Other clauses are because the concept of releasing your code to the community is absolutely alien to them, especially to their lawyers. It's less worrying now, some clauses get dropped. Will Apple ever go to a pure Open Source license, such as BSD? Probably never, there will always be additional requirements on their part to prove due dilligence. Will they go to the GPL? Never, since they're using code license under BSD as a base.
More justly, since the average user is being penalized a priori for copywrite violation, this should be considered an approval to copy to your hearts desire. I've always been a proponent of paying for what you use, but if corporations are going to keep lobbying for kick backs for assumed piracy then I'm going to change my tune. I'll pay for what I use from companies I support.
When you order stuff online its typically either held at the border or shipped along with a customs invoice for the duties, tarrifs and tax. At least this is always what happened to me when ordering stuff online.
Crackers won't be deterred by the possibility of entrapment. The good ones will be cautious, the script kiddies will be caught.
There's another class of scanning though, I've got a user who's threatened to hack into my machine. He's just a script kiddy, I'm not terribly concerned since I don't have any services other than the bare minimum running. Still, it seems to me that when this kid scans me I should be able to have it treated more seriously than a random scan.
The problem I see right now is that things are both too lax and too strict. People try to make valuable tools illegal which is absolutely wrong. On the other hand positive rulings without the requisite pause to think about how the circumstances which surround an event, the intent, should dictate how the event is classed.
There's still a following for games built around craftily written descriptions and puzzles. In fact new textual interactive fiction pieces are developed by a small buy loyal fanbase. Some of the games are really good.
There's information about the current state of the (well, somewhat ancient in internet time) art of interactive fiction here.
FSP became the protocol du jour for illicit activity (and some legal activity as well) but things changed a bit. It was no longer easy to find sites and they often involved bartering, give me a good piece of software, a good site or a good picture and I'll give you a link to a good site. The BBS scene had this already of course, they often enforced upload to download ratios.
FSP dried up as well (I don't even know if FSP is still around) due to the same pressures as FTP clients. Other peer-to-peer architectures showed up, Hotline and others. They all were self restricting in that it wasn't automatic that you could access copyrighted materials. You had to click banner adds, submit software and agree that you weren't a Fed (har har, has anybody even researched whether a federal agent has to reply truthfuly, especially to a form letter?)
Napster changed this a bit, it was only meant for one thing, and that was to facilitate the exchange of music. It didn't enforce restrictions on what you downloaded and since it wasn't a true P2P, more of a peer to server to peer, it was easy to find what you wanted. The central server handled the searching and host details for you. It was possible to get what you wanted without worrying about keeping up with the scene. It's a tool that the adepts would enjoy using, but didn't have a bar of entry that will keep out the casual users.
I could easily set up my dad with Napster on his Windows box if he were the type of person who listened to music. He probably wouldn't even realize that there were copyright issues involved. It's easy enough and risk free enough that he probably wouldn't care. Most people won't lift a CD out of a record store, the risk is too high and there's a stigma attached to it.
The agencies such as the RIAA are scared, and they should be. Previously they could rob their customers blind since most people really had no comcept of what the value of their products were. With prevalent sharing of music people will realize that the distribution costs are minimal, there will still be some fuzziness on production costs but not enough fuzziness to justify paying over a buck per song.
The present scenario where a bag of money is handed over to the RIAA companies, who grab most of it, then handed down the corporate chain with each successive person getting a smaller and smaller cut until the artist (the person who actually CREATED the music, who had SKILLS that most people do NOT have) gets only a penny or two will have to end. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon.