I'd sure like to see some smack down on whoever hits the 'send' button on this crap
Most spam has been rerouted or spoofed to look like it came via some innocent third party. If you have a "smackdown" button on your e-mail client, then it will likely take out the third party, not the original spammer.
And we have enough of a problem trying to get people to take spam seriously as a problem without shooting ourselves in the foot like this.
This is the text of my comment, as submitted to their comments page. I am posting it here in case it does not pass review.
-----
I would like to focus on one very specific measure suggested by the status report.
It suggests that the only way to plug the analog hole is to require watermark detection mechanisms to be included in every device capable of converting from analog signals to digital data.
This, unfortunately, shows a woeful ignorance of the process of analog-to-digital conversion, and its uses.
Analog-to-Digital converters (ADCs) are all around us, and an entry-level ADC chip typically cost less than $0.50 in quantity. Due to economies of scale and the speed of digital electronics, virtually all ADCs produced are, in principle, capable of converting music from analog to digital form, even if their intended application is elsewhere.
They are used in many applications, some of them mission critical. Fly-by wire aircraft, for example, get input from sensors via ADCs which, as I mentioned above, are in principle capable of performing conversion of music from analog to digital form. They would therefore come under the remit of this document.
Aircraft manuafacturers would then be forced to specify a component which is designed to turn itself off given certain inputs. In addition, the nature of those problematic inputs would not revealed, since this information would itself be subject to restriction under the DMCA.
We are therefore in the highly worrying situation that, in order to protect the rights of the recording artists, we are forced to risk our lives in aircraft which contain components which can turn themselves off at any moment if they spot something resembling a watermark in the signals they receive.
Even if legislation successfully enforces the rule that commercially available integrated ADCs are required to have this technology embedded within them, analog to digital conversion is not rocket science.
It is perfectly possible to create a good quality analog-to-digital converter using discrete components (transistors, resistors, etc.) which by their nature cannot have watermark-detecting technology built into them. The analog hole will remain wide open to those who can do the most damage to the industry, legislation or not.
This document, as drafted, would impose a punitive cost on the embedded electronics industry, for whom reliable and durable ADC technology is a must.
If this document is enacted into law, then I am afraid to say that I will be waiting for news of the first aircraft crash caused by an engine temperature sensor erroneously shutting down. No doubt their friends and relatives will be comforted by the fact that this sacrifice helped Britney Spears' record label keep her music under wraps.
The electronics industry's position is unclear for now... they could stand to benefit by this legislation ('oh gosh, Mr & Mrs. Consumer! All of your electronics are now incompatible with the current releases from Hollywood! Tsk. You'll have to buy a totally new set of consumer electronics.').
As a hardware hacker who has a certain amount of contact with professional hardware designers, I cannot see them taking this position for two reasons.
1. It's unworkable. You cannot expect to tell someone to upgrade their equipment too often. They won't stand for it.
2. Many of the uses of ADCs (which are theoretically capable of encoding the content which is so cherished by the MPAA and RIAA) are not in consumer electronics of this type. If you have a nuclear reactor which uses ADCs to read sensors in the core, you don't want them burdened with a load of secret code which can shut them down at any time if the random noise happens to look like the watermark they're intended to protect.
have the Slashdot (dare I say "geek" crowd) write their representatives and encourage the support of this bill.
I think you meant "discourage". This will be a grandstanding mission, which will suck up all the money from other areas of NASA and space science in general. Planet finder telescope? Cut. Pluto mission? Cut. Asteroid prospecting? Cut. I can go on.
We're not ready to do a manned mission to Mars yet. We don't have the NEO infrastructure to support a Mars mission. Any manned mission would thus be a one-off, expendable, unsustainable publicity shot. Sure, lots of flag-waving, lots of political kudos, but not worth the trillion dollars.
Spend the money instead on a fleet of cheap reusable launchers (VTVL of course, something like Roton or DC-X). As a cheap launch platform, shuttle is a bust. Contract out to industry for development, under non-exclusive licenses.
Then get some economic return from deep space. This is the only way that deep space exploration can get out from under the control of the politicians. I've said this before: land an automated factory on a NEO in the same time frame as the proposed manned Mars mission (by 2025), producing something useful in Earth orbit (water, fuel, solar cells).
It has come to my attention that AGFA Monotype is threatening to use the DMCA legislation to protect the unsetting of the "don't embed" bit in certain fonts.
This is absurd, and unfortunately seems to be another example of a corporation who does not seem to understand that the best way to lose customers is to treat them like criminals.
The DMCA as currently worded prevents trafficking in programs which can be used to remove copy protection. Since the embed protection (which is, incidentally, not the same thing as copy protection) can be undone using the "debug" program present in every Microsoft operating system since at least MS-DOS 2.0, this would make virtually every desktop machine on the planet an infringing system.
The DMCA is widely seen as fundamentally flawed legislation, due to examples such as the one in the previous paragraph. By endorsing it through use (or threats of use, anyway), your corporation is tarred with the same brush.
We need a space program which is not at the whim of the government of the day, or the will of the people (who are more interested in Oprah's weight than weightlessness).
A Mars mission would be a big fanfare for those who like to see people saluting flags, but not for long-term space exploration. It would suck up funding from everything else in sight, and TV coverage would be cancelled by the 2nd week. After that, no more funding. What's the point of flag-waving if no-one is watching?
Anyway, who said space had to be all gosh-wow? Is the welfare program gosh-wow? Are farming subsidies gosh-wow? Why should space exploration be any different? I was struck this morning by the low-key, no fanfare approach of the launch from Baikonur. No countdown, and about as much fuss as launching a boat. That's what we need - willingness to get the job done, without need for spectacle and fanfare.
In order to insulate the space industry from reliance on fanfare, we need to get it self-funding as quickly as possible, and asteroid mining is the most obvious medium-term objective.
I say skip the moon. It's still at the bottom of a hole, and the regolith on the moon is poorer as ore than the slag we throw away from refining plants on Earth.
Therefore, I propose a cancellation of all manned Mars mission plans and instead concentrate on sending an automated factory to a NEO by 2025.
It should create something useful in Earth orbit (solar cells? steel girders? fuel? water?) and launch a package or packages back to LEO for less money than it would have taken to get them up there from Earth in the first place.
Also, scrap the shuttle and contract out to commercial launch companies. Award development grants and incentives for cheap launch technology.
And above all, let's stamp on the meme that Space = NASA. It doesn't.
If a student cheats his way through ANY of these concepts, and expects to survive a later computer science course, he will not only damage his own grade, but the grade of his teammates as well.
I would disagree, and would like to offer a counterexample. Sometimes, this kind of collaboration acts as a key to unlock understanding of an important field.
I did a Cybernetics degree, which involved a lot of electronics. I found the analog stuff impenetrable in some areas. One time, we got a homework assignment to work out the voltages at various points in a circuit with a couple of transistors. I was stumped.
So I asked a friend (Tim Parry - if you're reading this, many thanks!) to help me out. We went through the problem with him leading, and together we not only cracked the problem, but solidified my understanding.
I now knew how to apply the theoretical knowledge of Kirchoff's law, and the ideal transistor model. I then went back and redid the excercise by myself, in order to ensure that I had understood it. I still use this stuff today.
Regardless of the particulars of the one case at Georgia Tech, a code of conduct that prevents this kind of cross-fertilization in the name of reducing cheating seems to me to be counterproductive. If it it had been in force at Reading University in 1987, I would have flunked electronics badly. As it is, I now have a valuable mental tool I use every week.
why not have SETI use that to it's advantage, and look for Earth-like life FIRST
For SETI@Home at least, this is because the project is woefully underfunded and has to piggy-back on other people's observations using the the Arecibo telescope. This means that they can't select their targets at all.
This is a piece I wrote some time ago and never posted, but which seems appropriate to the virtual redefinition of the term "miracle", which is now far more commonly used in conjunction with real scientific discoveries like this than with supposed magic tricks by a nonexistent creator:
An Awesome New Millennium To You All
Dr George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, used his Christmas 1999 sermon to set the stage for life in the new millennium. Rather than concentrate on peace, spiritual matters, or the relevance of Jesus into the next 1000 years, Dr. Carey used his unique position instead to attack science.
"We live in a world where our sense of awe has been somewhat anaesthetised," he said. "The awesome seems increasingly circumscribed."
If the pursuit of knowledge has taught me anything, it's that the sense of awe and wonder gleaned from observing the universe as it really is, is orders of magnitude beyond that which the Church peddles.
Water into wine? A conjuring trick for children. How about changing sand into stuff that thinks? How about seeing and moving individual atoms? Isn't that more awesome?
Resurrection of the dead? Highly speculative. How about the revelation that every cell in our bodies contains all the information required to generate the whole thing over again from scratch? Doesn't that engage your sense of wonder?
He goes on: "We increasingly bring with us the expectation that whatever is revealed can be explained - if not now, then later."
Is explanation not a good thing, then? And the expectation of explanation often drives us to look for one. In a capricious, arbitrary universe, where natural laws are there to be broken, then this might be an adequate excuse, but we don't appear to live in a universe like that.
Every time this argument for ignorance is presented, I am minded of the penultimate scene in The Wizard of Oz, where the powerful wizard commands the hapless travellers to "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." Of course, the Archbishop is merely upholding church dogma, which encourages people not to apply critical thinking too strongly otherwise it might undermine church dogma.
In any case, the argument fails because explanations are often the most awesome part of any scientific endeavour. The classic question is "Where do we come from?", to which the church replies that we were created on a whim by a capricious superbeing and that's the end of the matter - sit down and be quiet.
The actual answer is staggering, and required centuries of patient research to discover. In the beginning, space and time expanded together from a dense, incomprehensibly hot state. After a while, the expansion caused this to cool, and the primordial maelstrom settled down into clouds of stable atoms. Although some hydrogen still remains, almost all the atoms in our bodies were forged in the heart of huge stars, which exploded, flinging the material out into space where it coalesced into a second generation of stars with planets. Somehow, these atoms teamed up into molecules which were able to reproduce. A huge arms race then developed between these replicators, culminating in the fantastic diversity of life on this planet with us as one particularly gifted species.
Notice how this isn't cut and dried. How did life start? Is intelligence inevitable? What started the big bang? Lots of room for bigger, better wonders in the future.
It occurs to me that Dr. Carey's speech makes sense if your viewpoint is a relatively narrow one. If you stand in front of a room full of people, and the best you can offer them in the wonder stakes is a few parlour tricks from a left-wing revolutionary nearly 2000 years dead, it's little wonder that they yawn and fidget. After all, an evening's viewing on the Discovery channel can show them things that are more awesome and more wonderful. Every day. With evidence. In their living rooms.
Sorry Dr. Carey. Awe and wonder are alive and well beyond 2000. It's the Church that's anaesthetised and circumscribed.
This story of a cure created by "playing god" is one example of the awesome stuff that science comes up with every day.
It is nice to know that the Daily Mail has this as front page news, with a positive spin.
This is, of course, entirely consistent with their centre page spread a few months ago stating in no uncertain terms that genetic modification would lead to the extinction of humanity by the year 2200. (I kid you not.)
you've got to design a system that won't need repair in a long time
Or, you design cheap enough that you don't care if some of them fail, and send more. I'm not advocating one mission, but a cluster. Perhaps to the same asteroid to save on launch costs.
a Mars mission as outlined by Zubrin (and, increasingly, favoured by NASA) is to send a crew there for six months. That's no two-week propaganda mission
Yes, but John Q Public is not going to be interested after a couple of weeks. And then the politicians lose interest. And then the budgets get cut. See what happened to Apollo 18, 19, 20. See what happened to Space Station Freedom, er.. Fred, er... Ed. See what happened to the Pluto mission in order to keep the Space Station running in order to save face.
The only way to ensure funding is to move it out of the control of the politicians, who don't care about space as anything other than a gosh-wow morale booster and flag-waving excercise.
if you haven't read Zubrin's The Case For Mars, do so. You'll be on the streets demanding Mars missions within minutes of finishing it.
The current Mars Rush has all the potential to become another Apollo program - siphon off all the money from everything else, in return for 2 weeks of TV coverage, some flag-waving, and then everyone goes back to watching reruns of Star Trek Voyager. Bye bye funding, bye bye Mars, direct or not. And bye bye the rest of the space program.
Here's a radical thought - long term space projects should be self-funding.
Mars is at the bottom of an inconveniently large gravity well, so its export potential is severely limited. Exports are essential for an economic entity which is not self-sufficient.
So, how about a real, useful goal for the space program? I propose that, rather than land a man on Mars (what for?) we resolve, by 2020, to deploy an automated factory on a near-Earth asteroid.
The factory should make something that would be useful in low Earth orbit (fuel, oxidiser, solar cells, whatever), and be capable of delivering those somethings back to Earth orbit for use. It should produce enough useful stuff to pay back its development and deployment costs well within its design lifetime.
The ideal "useful something" for our factory to make should really be other factories, but that's a little further down the line. An oxygen/water/methane refinery would be a good start.
Of course, this won't happen. Good ol' George wants a nice pretty picture of an American astronaut saluting a flag on Mars, not a working space infrastructure.
Once again, the Cult of Greed and Power's attempts to silence the critics have blown up in its face.
Before, when you searched for "scientology" on Google, you got an unobtrusive link to a critical website at about link #4.
Now, you get a news story about the cult's attempted censorship, adverts which direct you to www.xenu.net, and a couple of new sites listed which, up until yesterday, had never heard of scientology but now know all about its attempts to silence criticism and its heavy handed use of the law courts to harass.
Scientologists have obviously been told to spread the message. They are succeeding. Fortunately, the message they are spreading is that scientology is litigious, money grabbing, and above all incompetent.
Rather than doing it this way, why not just set a capacity cap which is enforced by bandwidth which starts out high and degrades slowly. For example, if you have a 128MB/day limit, you deliver the first 64MB at full rate, then next 32MB at half rate, the next 16MB at 1/4 rate, the next 8MB at 1/8 rate, etc.
You can save up unused capacity from one day to the next (up to a maximum limit?), and so on.
In this way, you put a limit on the heavy users and don't penalize those of us who need to get the odd 600MB Linux distro.
If you are a U.S. citizen, write your congressional representative...
Does anyone have any idea how a non-US citizen can register his concern about US policy? Write to the US ambassador?
We have our own share of dumb IT legislation (*cough* RIP act *cough*) but I don't want to import any more. I find that legislation agreed in the US already has a direct effect on me: try buying a copy of "Forbidden Planet" on DVD in the UK, for example.
There's a saying in the UK - when the USA sneezes, Britain catches a cold. The USA has already sneezed up the DMCA - I don't want the same thing happening over here.
I too experimented with Ogg recently, but even to my tin ears beep there were significant artifacts click in a 128kbps-encoded bloop track that were not present pip in a 128kbps-encoded MP3 psst.
I will, however, be monitoring its progress, as with so many free software projects, it deserves to succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are two examples of one-bit messages that cost over $100M each.
1 bit message #1: Yes/no - did you detect the beacon signal from the Mars Polar Lander?
1 bit message #2: Yes/no - did you detect the beacon signal from Pioneer 10?
I'd sure like to see some smack down on whoever hits the 'send' button on this crap
Most spam has been rerouted or spoofed to look like it came via some innocent third party. If you have a "smackdown" button on your e-mail client, then it will likely take out the third party, not the original spammer.
And we have enough of a problem trying to get people to take spam seriously as a problem without shooting ourselves in the foot like this.
This is the text of my comment, as submitted to their comments page. I am posting it here in case it does not pass review.
-----
I would like to focus on one very specific measure suggested by the status report.
It suggests that the only way to plug the analog hole is to require watermark detection mechanisms to be included in every device capable of converting from analog signals to digital data.
This, unfortunately, shows a woeful ignorance of the process of analog-to-digital conversion, and its uses.
Analog-to-Digital converters (ADCs) are all around us, and an entry-level ADC chip typically cost less than $0.50 in quantity. Due to economies of scale and the speed of digital electronics, virtually all ADCs produced are, in principle, capable of converting music from analog to digital form, even if their intended application is elsewhere.
They are used in many applications, some of them mission critical. Fly-by wire aircraft, for example, get input from sensors via ADCs which, as I mentioned above, are in principle capable of performing conversion of music from analog to digital form. They would therefore come under the remit of this document.
Aircraft manuafacturers would then be forced to specify a component which is designed to turn itself off given certain inputs. In addition, the nature of those problematic inputs would not revealed, since this information would itself be subject to restriction under the DMCA.
We are therefore in the highly worrying situation that, in order to protect the rights of the recording artists, we are forced to risk our lives in aircraft which contain components which can turn themselves off at any moment if they spot something resembling a watermark in the signals they receive.
Even if legislation successfully enforces the rule that commercially available integrated ADCs are required to have this technology embedded within them, analog to digital conversion is not rocket science.
It is perfectly possible to create a good quality analog-to-digital converter using discrete components (transistors, resistors, etc.) which by their nature cannot have watermark-detecting technology built into them. The analog hole will remain wide open to those who can do the most damage to the industry, legislation or not.
This document, as drafted, would impose a punitive cost on the embedded electronics industry, for whom reliable and durable ADC technology is a must.
If this document is enacted into law, then I am afraid to say that I will be waiting for news of the first aircraft crash caused by an engine temperature sensor erroneously shutting down. No doubt their friends and relatives will be comforted by the fact that this sacrifice helped Britney Spears' record label keep her music under wraps.
Yours,
Sean Ellis
Farnham
Surrey
UK
-----
The electronics industry's position is unclear for now... they could stand to benefit by this legislation ('oh gosh, Mr & Mrs. Consumer! All of your electronics are now incompatible with the current releases from Hollywood! Tsk. You'll have to buy a totally new set of consumer electronics.').
As a hardware hacker who has a certain amount of contact with professional hardware designers, I cannot see them taking this position for two reasons.
1. It's unworkable. You cannot expect to tell someone to upgrade their equipment too often. They won't stand for it.
2. Many of the uses of ADCs (which are theoretically capable of encoding the content which is so cherished by the MPAA and RIAA) are not in consumer electronics of this type. If you have a nuclear reactor which uses ADCs to read sensors in the core, you don't want them burdened with a load of secret code which can shut them down at any time if the random noise happens to look like the watermark they're intended to protect.
the chicks will certanly dig it
You obviously haven't met my wife. If I went up to her, with 1000 sleek and horribly beweaponed mechanoid warriors at my command and said:
"Finally my plans for an evil army of robots are becoming complete! the world will be mine! Muhahahahah!!"
Her response would be: "That's nice, dear. Don't forget you promised to insulate the loft this weekend, though."
If you don't know what I'm talking about, shame on you. Read this.
... and Sony's lawsuit.
have the Slashdot (dare I say "geek" crowd) write their representatives and encourage the support of this bill.
I think you meant "discourage". This will be a grandstanding mission, which will suck up all the money from other areas of NASA and space science in general. Planet finder telescope? Cut. Pluto mission? Cut. Asteroid prospecting? Cut. I can go on.
We're not ready to do a manned mission to Mars yet. We don't have the NEO infrastructure to support a Mars mission. Any manned mission would thus be a one-off, expendable, unsustainable publicity shot. Sure, lots of flag-waving, lots of political kudos, but not worth the trillion dollars.
Spend the money instead on a fleet of cheap reusable launchers (VTVL of course, something like Roton or DC-X). As a cheap launch platform, shuttle is a bust. Contract out to industry for development, under non-exclusive licenses.
Then get some economic return from deep space. This is the only way that deep space exploration can get out from under the control of the politicians. I've said this before: land an automated factory on a NEO in the same time frame as the proposed manned Mars mission (by 2025), producing something useful in Earth orbit (water, fuel, solar cells).
Me too:
----
It has come to my attention that AGFA Monotype is threatening to use the DMCA legislation to protect the unsetting of the "don't embed" bit in certain fonts.
This is absurd, and unfortunately seems to be another example of a corporation who does not seem to understand that the best way to lose customers is to treat them like criminals.
The DMCA as currently worded prevents trafficking in programs which can be used to remove copy protection. Since the embed protection (which is, incidentally, not the same thing as copy protection) can be undone using the "debug" program present in every Microsoft operating system since at least MS-DOS 2.0, this would make virtually every desktop machine on the planet an infringing system.
The DMCA is widely seen as fundamentally flawed legislation, due to examples such as the one in the previous paragraph. By endorsing it through use (or threats of use, anyway), your corporation is tarred with the same brush.
----
You couldn't do this. Really Bad Sci-fi would be your major revenue source.
The Scientologists have a virtual monopoly on Really Bad Sci-fi and they're a tax exempt organization.
We need a space program which is not at the whim of the government of the day, or the will of the people (who are more interested in Oprah's weight than weightlessness).
A Mars mission would be a big fanfare for those who like to see people saluting flags, but not for long-term space exploration. It would suck up funding from everything else in sight, and TV coverage would be cancelled by the 2nd week. After that, no more funding. What's the point of flag-waving if no-one is watching?
Anyway, who said space had to be all gosh-wow? Is the welfare program gosh-wow? Are farming subsidies gosh-wow? Why should space exploration be any different? I was struck this morning by the low-key, no fanfare approach of the launch from Baikonur. No countdown, and about as much fuss as launching a boat. That's what we need - willingness to get the job done, without need for spectacle and fanfare.
In order to insulate the space industry from reliance on fanfare, we need to get it self-funding as quickly as possible, and asteroid mining is the most obvious medium-term objective.
I say skip the moon. It's still at the bottom of a hole, and the regolith on the moon is poorer as ore than the slag we throw away from refining plants on Earth.
Therefore, I propose a cancellation of all manned Mars mission plans and instead concentrate on sending an automated factory to a NEO by 2025.
It should create something useful in Earth orbit (solar cells? steel girders? fuel? water?) and launch a package or packages back to LEO for less money than it would have taken to get them up there from Earth in the first place.
Also, scrap the shuttle and contract out to commercial launch companies. Award development grants and incentives for cheap launch technology.
And above all, let's stamp on the meme that Space = NASA. It doesn't.
If a student cheats his way through ANY of these concepts, and expects to survive a later computer science course, he will not only damage his own grade, but the grade of his teammates as well.
I would disagree, and would like to offer a counterexample. Sometimes, this kind of collaboration acts as a key to unlock understanding of an important field.
I did a Cybernetics degree, which involved a lot of electronics. I found the analog stuff impenetrable in some areas. One time, we got a homework assignment to work out the voltages at various points in a circuit with a couple of transistors. I was stumped.
So I asked a friend (Tim Parry - if you're reading this, many thanks!) to help me out. We went through the problem with him leading, and together we not only cracked the problem, but solidified my understanding.
I now knew how to apply the theoretical knowledge of Kirchoff's law, and the ideal transistor model. I then went back and redid the excercise by myself, in order to ensure that I had understood it. I still use this stuff today.
Regardless of the particulars of the one case at Georgia Tech, a code of conduct that prevents this kind of cross-fertilization in the name of reducing cheating seems to me to be counterproductive. If it it had been in force at Reading University in 1987, I would have flunked electronics badly. As it is, I now have a valuable mental tool I use every week.
why not have SETI use that to it's advantage, and look for Earth-like life FIRST
For SETI@Home at least, this is because the project is woefully underfunded and has to piggy-back on other people's observations using the the Arecibo telescope. This means that they can't select their targets at all.
This is a piece I wrote some time ago and never posted, but which seems appropriate to the virtual redefinition of the term "miracle", which is now far more commonly used in conjunction with real scientific discoveries like this than with supposed magic tricks by a nonexistent creator:
An Awesome New Millennium To You All
Dr George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, used his Christmas 1999 sermon to set the stage for life in the new millennium. Rather than concentrate on peace, spiritual matters, or the relevance of Jesus into the next 1000 years, Dr. Carey used his unique position instead to attack science.
"We live in a world where our sense of awe has been somewhat anaesthetised," he said. "The awesome seems increasingly circumscribed."
If the pursuit of knowledge has taught me anything, it's that the sense of awe and wonder gleaned from observing the universe as it really is, is orders of magnitude beyond that which the Church peddles.
Water into wine? A conjuring trick for children. How about changing sand into stuff that thinks? How about seeing and moving individual atoms? Isn't that more awesome?
Resurrection of the dead? Highly speculative. How about the revelation that every cell in our bodies contains all the information required to generate the whole thing over again from scratch? Doesn't that engage your sense of wonder?
He goes on: "We increasingly bring with us the expectation that whatever is revealed can be explained - if not now, then later."
Is explanation not a good thing, then? And the expectation of explanation often drives us to look for one. In a capricious, arbitrary universe, where natural laws are there to be broken, then this might be an adequate excuse, but we don't appear to live in a universe like that.
Every time this argument for ignorance is presented, I am minded of the penultimate scene in The Wizard of Oz, where the powerful wizard commands the hapless travellers to "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." Of course, the Archbishop is merely upholding church dogma, which encourages people not to apply critical thinking too strongly otherwise it might undermine church dogma.
In any case, the argument fails because explanations are often the most awesome part of any scientific endeavour. The classic question is "Where do we come from?", to which the church replies that we were created on a whim by a capricious superbeing and that's the end of the matter - sit down and be quiet.
The actual answer is staggering, and required centuries of patient research to discover. In the beginning, space and time expanded together from a dense, incomprehensibly hot state. After a while, the expansion caused this to cool, and the primordial maelstrom settled down into clouds of stable atoms. Although some hydrogen still remains, almost all the atoms in our bodies were forged in the heart of huge stars, which exploded, flinging the material out into space where it coalesced into a second generation of stars with planets. Somehow, these atoms teamed up into molecules which were able to reproduce. A huge arms race then developed between these replicators, culminating in the fantastic diversity of life on this planet with us as one particularly gifted species.
Notice how this isn't cut and dried. How did life start? Is intelligence inevitable? What started the big bang? Lots of room for bigger, better wonders in the future.
It occurs to me that Dr. Carey's speech makes sense if your viewpoint is a relatively narrow one. If you stand in front of a room full of people, and the best you can offer them in the wonder stakes is a few parlour tricks from a left-wing revolutionary nearly 2000 years dead, it's little wonder that they yawn and fidget. After all, an evening's viewing on the Discovery channel can show them things that are more awesome and more wonderful. Every day. With evidence. In their living rooms.
Sorry Dr. Carey. Awe and wonder are alive and well beyond 2000. It's the Church that's anaesthetised and circumscribed.
This story of a cure created by "playing god" is one example of the awesome stuff that science comes up with every day.
It is nice to know that the Daily Mail has this as front page news, with a positive spin.
This is, of course, entirely consistent with their centre page spread a few months ago stating in no uncertain terms that genetic modification would lead to the extinction of humanity by the year 2200. (I kid you not.)
The Daily Mail: Journalism With Integrity. Not.
you've got to design a system that won't need repair in a long time
Or, you design cheap enough that you don't care if some of them fail, and send more. I'm not advocating one mission, but a cluster. Perhaps to the same asteroid to save on launch costs.
a Mars mission as outlined by Zubrin (and, increasingly, favoured by NASA) is to send a crew there for six months. That's no two-week propaganda mission
Yes, but John Q Public is not going to be interested after a couple of weeks. And then the politicians lose interest. And then the budgets get cut. See what happened to Apollo 18, 19, 20. See what happened to Space Station Freedom, er.. Fred, er... Ed. See what happened to the Pluto mission in order to keep the Space Station running in order to save face.
The only way to ensure funding is to move it out of the control of the politicians, who don't care about space as anything other than a gosh-wow morale booster and flag-waving excercise.
if you haven't read Zubrin's The Case For Mars, do so. You'll be on the streets demanding Mars missions within minutes of finishing it.
The current Mars Rush has all the potential to become another Apollo program - siphon off all the money from everything else, in return for 2 weeks of TV coverage, some flag-waving, and then everyone goes back to watching reruns of Star Trek Voyager. Bye bye funding, bye bye Mars, direct or not. And bye bye the rest of the space program.
Here's a radical thought - long term space projects should be self-funding.
Mars is at the bottom of an inconveniently large gravity well, so its export potential is severely limited. Exports are essential for an economic entity which is not self-sufficient.
So, how about a real, useful goal for the space program? I propose that, rather than land a man on Mars (what for?) we resolve, by 2020, to deploy an automated factory on a near-Earth asteroid.
The factory should make something that would be useful in low Earth orbit (fuel, oxidiser, solar cells, whatever), and be capable of delivering those somethings back to Earth orbit for use. It should produce enough useful stuff to pay back its development and deployment costs well within its design lifetime.
The ideal "useful something" for our factory to make should really be other factories, but that's a little further down the line. An oxygen/water/methane refinery would be a good start.
Of course, this won't happen. Good ol' George wants a nice pretty picture of an American astronaut saluting a flag on Mars, not a working space infrastructure.
Oh well, now I duck and wait for the flames...
Once again, the Cult of Greed and Power's attempts to silence the critics have blown up in its face.
Before, when you searched for "scientology" on Google, you got an unobtrusive link to a critical website at about link #4.
Now, you get a news story about the cult's attempted censorship, adverts which direct you to www.xenu.net, and a couple of new sites listed which, up until yesterday, had never heard of scientology but now know all about its attempts to silence criticism and its heavy handed use of the law courts to harass.
Scientologists have obviously been told to spread the message. They are succeeding. Fortunately, the message they are spreading is that scientology is litigious, money grabbing, and above all incompetent.
Easy: on the other side of the paper.
Rather than doing it this way, why not just set a capacity cap which is enforced by bandwidth which starts out high and degrades slowly. For example, if you have a 128MB/day limit, you deliver the first 64MB at full rate, then next 32MB at half rate, the next 16MB at 1/4 rate, the next 8MB at 1/8 rate, etc.
You can save up unused capacity from one day to the next (up to a maximum limit?), and so on.
In this way, you put a limit on the heavy users and don't penalize those of us who need to get the odd 600MB Linux distro.
Subject line says it all, really.
Commercial spacelines wouldn't be using NASA facilities anyway; they're too expensive.
If you are a U.S. citizen, write your congressional representative ...
Does anyone have any idea how a non-US citizen can register his concern about US policy? Write to the US ambassador?
We have our own share of dumb IT legislation (*cough* RIP act *cough*) but I don't want to import any more. I find that legislation agreed in the US already has a direct effect on me: try buying a copy of "Forbidden Planet" on DVD in the UK, for example.
There's a saying in the UK - when the USA sneezes, Britain catches a cold. The USA has already sneezed up the DMCA - I don't want the same thing happening over here.
Hmm. "Automatic commercial skip facility." If spammers can sue their ISPs now, how long until some advertiser sues Replay for loss of revenue?
Sean
Did you check that these 'artifacts' weren't present in the .wav file you ripped [...]
Absolutely. I used the same ripper (EZ-CDDA Extractor) and ran the data through LAME and the Ogg encoder.I too experimented with Ogg recently, but even to my tin ears beep there were significant artifacts click in a 128kbps-encoded bloop track that were not present pip in a 128kbps-encoded MP3 psst.
I will, however, be monitoring its progress, as with so many free software projects, it deserves to succeed.