So, he wrote a fucking wish-list of things for other scientists to do. Any schmuck can do that. Goddard actually built something that mattered.
By that rationale, any theoretical work in any field is useless. And men like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Hawking were and are just schmucks too.
I didn't say that Goddard's contributions to rocketry and astronautics were useless, I simply pointed out that someone else was working in the field way before he started out and that individual should get due credit. Perhaps you should get your dictionary out and look up the word 'pioneer'.
The original article in the Boston Globe never mentions Tsiolkovsky, even in passing. In fact, the only other achievers that it mentions are Orville and Wilbur Wright and Charles Lindbergh. Coincidence that these men were Americans while Tsiolkovsky was Russian? I don't think so.
It's this kind of neo-revisionist crap that has most Americans believing that they invented everything from the wheel onwards.
Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) was proposing manned and unmanned spaceflight using rockets while Robert Goddard was still in diapers.
Tsiolkovsky, who was self-taught from the age of 10, was inspired by sci-fi pioneer Jules Verne. He became a writer himself but left fiction behind to work on the more theoretical problems of space exploration.
His contributions to the field are too numerous to list here, but here is his seminal "Plan of Space Exploration" of 1926:
Creation of rocket airplanes with wings.
Progressively increasing the speed and altitude of these airplanes.
Production of real rockets - without wings.
Ability to land on the surface of the sea.
Reaching excape velocity (about 8 Km/second), and the first flight into Earth
orbit.
Lengthening rocket flight times in space.
Experimental use of plants to make an artificial atmosphere in spaceships.
Using pressurized space suits for activity outside of spaceships.
Making orbiting greenhouses for plants.
Constructing large orbital habitats around the Earth.
Using solar radiation to grow food, to heat space quarters, and for transport
throughout the Solar System.
Colonisation of the asteroid belt.
Colonisation of the entire Solar System and beyond.
Acheivement of individual and social perfection.
Overcrowding of the Solar System and the colonization of the Milky Way (the
Galaxy).
The Sun begins to die and the people remaining in the Solar System's population
go to other suns.
Goddard may have been the first to launch a rocket in modern times (as earlier posters pointed out, the Chinese were using rockets centuries earlier), but he followed and everyone else followed in Tsiolkovsky's footsteps.
Hmmm, if he has an American accent then you're probably right, but even that's hardly conclusive - Angela Lansbury of Murder, She Wrote fame clearly has an American accent too but most people (herself included) would probably class her as British.
I guess what I'm saying is that what's important isn't so much how a person pronounces tomato or even where they were born but more where they were raised, what cultural influences they were subjected to, etc.
Personally, I believe that the cultural background of the original author/writer has more relevance to whether a piece of work is proclaimed American, British or Martian than where it was filmed. After all, it's his/her vision that's providing the sci-fi spark, not the running around on set that happens much later down the line.
The majority of the filming for Star Wars Episode I happened in England and Italy, but it's clearly an American film, thanks to George Lucas. The Fifth Element, despite being an english-speaking Hollywood production is widely regarded as a French film, thanks to the input of Luc Besson. Similarly, James Bond is British, no matter who shoots it or where, because he's a creation of a British author, the late Ian Fleming. (The fact that the character himself is British I don't particularly find relevant.)
Ditto for any production based on the writings of William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens. The fact that the recent modern-day adaptation of Great Expectations was a Hollywood movie staring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert de Niro doesn't negate the input of the original English author.
But that's only my opinion and yours - that it was filmed primarily for an American TV audience - is equally valid. Still, it leaves the origin of multinational movies in the air though. I mean, where do you draw the line?
There are really only two series that were ever truly good Science Fiction, both American, and neither mentioned in your rant: Babylon 5 and The Twilight Zone. These are timeless classics that I will never be embarrassed to watch again. TZ is sort of a special case having no regular cast or plot, putting B5 in a class by itself.
Erm, I not 100 per cent certain, but isn't the author/writer of Babylon 5 British?
And if so, despite it's (mostly) American cast and crew and it's Amercian production, doesn't that make it effectively British?
It's called freedom. If you don't like it then move to a socalist area like Europe, or Kentucky.
Want to make another inaccurate blanket statement?
Sure, by US standards some of the nations in Europe would be described as "socialist" but most people this side of the pond wouldn't call state-provided health, welfare and education services (not to mention effective gun control) that way. What they do call it is progressive and civilised.
You keep your right to bear arms and I'll keep my right to see a doctor if I need to. When your next-door neighbour starts going crazy with his M-16, or you need a malignant tumour removed, I'll be thinking of you.
In the meantime, you take care now, y'hear?
(Oh, and by the way, choosing to move to Europe, or Kentucky, would be exercising a freedom. Duh.)
"DirecTV is simply bombarding MY air waves with this encrypted content, so I'm listening in."
Yes, perhaps but the US government has given them the right to operate in this way, just as they have given similar rights to other users who use the airwaves, such as radio broadcasters, wireless communications companies (and their users), etc. But just because something is transmitted over the airwaves, it doesn't make it public domain. Otherwise, what's to stop you stealing any wireless broadcast and/or communication, selling it on as you own, etc?
And just because you intercepting their signal, decrypting it and using it for your personal benefit doesn't physically interfere with DirecTV's relationship with their legitimate customers, don't kid yourself into thinking that no one's getting hurt.
Think about this for a minute: if you and your fellow pirates were to stop taking something that you hadn't paid for and put your hand in your pocket and paid for DirecTV's services honestly, don't you think that the company, it's shareholders and perhaps even it's customers would benefit?
If every pirate (hacker is the wrong word as someone else pointed out in another thread) did this, Hughes service would generate more income and running costs per customer would decrease (basic economics: the more you sell, the cheaper it becomes to sell it). With this greater cash flow, they could do various things. They could increase their dividends to their shareholders, invest in new technology, broaden their range of services, and/or reduce their prices (see, you are hurting the average Joe).
And that's assuming you ante-up and buy their services. You don't have to of course. You could go elsewhere (eg, cable) or forget about TV altogether (the real world is outside your window, not on MTV). Even if every pirate just stopped stealing DirecTV's services (yes, they might be "your" airwaves but I bet they are not your patented encryption and decryption algorithms), the company would benefit immensely. It would no longer have to pump it's resources into fighting the theft of it's services, and the money constantly spent on newer, more secure encryption, educating their markets, legal actions, etc could be better spent elsewhere.
Kid yourself all you like that your actions aren't hurting anyone else but, morally and legally, what your doing is plain wrong.
What would have happenned if this hacker kept the secret for him and his small group of underground friends? DirecTV would have never found out about it, and never fixed the problem, and never been able to fight back.
Let me get this straight, you're suggesting that the continual hacks of DirecTV's technology and their widespread dissemination was done to help DirecTV in some way?
Next you will be suggesting that it's OK to go around stealing cars because, without car crime, vehicle owners would buy fewer new vehicles.
1) This wasn't hacking for hacking's sake. This was hacking for greed. People who gained unauthorised access to the signals being broadcast knew they were getting something for nothing and breaking the law. They knew the risks and they took them.
2) Satellite television companies don't get the channels and/or programming that they broadcast for free. It costs them money. They then take what they buy, create some "value-add", package it, and sell it on - just like McDonalds, the NFL or Apple Computer.
3) The "if I had to pay for the service then I wouldn't use it" argument doesn't work here for two reasons:
Firstly, the magnitude of the abuse is the crux of the problem. If someone steals a nickel from you, then it's not going to hurt you too much - you're a victim but you'll survive. But when half the country is stealing from you, those nickels soon add up. Before you know it, that $20,000 dollars that you had saved up for the car of your dreams is gone.
Secondly, almost everyone who has been cut off by Hughes' action invested a significant amount of time and money to get their product at minimal cost. You don't invest that amount of time taking something that's not yours again and again and again, unless your a hope to benefit from your efforts.
Want to see what makes the box tick? Fine, go ahead. But don't equate "just wanting to know" with "I'm just going to take what I want because I can". The difference between unlocking someone's front door and stealing all their furniture begins at the threshold, when you cross the line.
The reason your every step isn't being tracked yet is because the tech's not quite up to it. You'd need good automated face recognition...which is just around the corner. The point is you're putting the infrastructure in place to make that sort of thing easy.
True - perhaps. But then I could argue that, by permitting unchecked and widespread gun ownership, the US has put the infrastructure n place to make mass murder easy too. I mean, do you really need a semi-automatic rifle or two? Does your neighbour? Does the freak at the end of the road?
CCTV cameras aren't on every street corner and Britain isn't a police state. Sure, some things that the present government is trying to foister upon us are disgusting (such as the RIP bill) but most observers agree that such legislation contravene's Europe-wide Human Rights Act, and so won't stand up in court.
On a parallel note, I just finished reading Tom Clancy's Executive Orders. In the book, US federal agents are able to intecept a Presidential assassin thanks to instant access to the annual call history for the Washington D.C. area. Now I know Tom Clancy writes fiction (hopefully), but we all know the technology to do this is here, as is the ability to tap someone's phone at the touch of a button.
Personally, I'm more worried about someone listening in on what I have to say and who I have to say it to than I am the possibility that someone wants to watch me go down to the supermarket and buy some milk.
As a life-long Londoner who's reasonably well-travelled (continental North America, Europe, Asia) I can honestly say that Britain is not as bad as some of the postings here have made it seem.
CCTV just isn't an issue over here. Yes, most city centres, shopping malls,etc have some sort of TV surveillance but what is this targetted at, and how effective is it?
Almost without exception, CCTV is in place to catch petty criminals, such as shoplifters and to prevent major terrorism, most notably by the IRA and it's various splinter groups. Most of the time, such cameras have a very limited recording cycle (24 or 48 hours is typical) and in many cases, their footage is not being viewed live. Big Brother isn't always watching you.
The idea that someone is tracking your ever step from the moment you walk out of you door is scary. But it's not the reality that we live in. I'd have to travel to my local shopping centre (mall) to see a CCTV in a public place. And if I'm in a public place, aren't there always other people around me who can see what I'm doing? (There are, and that's why I don't go shopping in the buff.)
Ours is essentially a very safe and open society. Gun crime is virtually nonexistant. Personal freedoms are cherished. And last time I checked, we still live in the United Kingdom and not Airstrip One.
The chances are that you'll soon get to bash the U.S.A. again -- most probably under an MPAA or a patent article.
Maybe. But just because a few people with poor judgement in positions of authority (government, industry standard setting bodies, major corporations) make a bad decision or two, I won't take it as carte blanche to fire off banal, inaccurate, semi-racist blanket comments at Americans or any one else.
Thankfully, most Slashdotters have a brain and can distinguish between the few and the many, and don't sully themselves by making xenophobic statements. Freedom of speech is a great thing - but so is using your head.
How much of a mindless bigot are you? I'm assuming that you American and are just taking this opportunity to lash out at another society. Ironic, isn't it, that you choose to target the country that gave birth to yours.
British cuisine and literature? Well, roast dinners and apple pie are just two popular exports from "this sceptred isle" (look it up) that most Americans seem to appreciate, as are
the English language itself and some of the finest writers in history, such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats, Dickens.
And our sports? Well football (which is the game that you call soccer) is the most popular sport on the planet, with a World Cup that is the most globally televised sporting event and an international federation that has more member countries than the United Nations. American football is a derivation of both this game and rugby (also a british invention) and baseball shares common ancestry with cricket.
I'm a great fan of most American culture and sports, just as many Americans are happy to describe themselves as anglophiles.
Pity your so insular that you can't appreciate anything remotely different. God help you if you ever had to set foot outside your little world.
Slashdot Mirror
So, he wrote a fucking wish-list of things for other scientists to do. Any schmuck can do that. Goddard actually built something that mattered.
By that rationale, any theoretical work in any field is useless. And men like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Hawking were and are just schmucks too.
I didn't say that Goddard's contributions to rocketry and astronautics were useless, I simply pointed out that someone else was working in the field way before he started out and that individual should get due credit. Perhaps you should get your dictionary out and look up the word 'pioneer'.
The original article in the Boston Globe never mentions Tsiolkovsky, even in passing. In fact, the only other achievers that it mentions are Orville and Wilbur Wright and Charles Lindbergh. Coincidence that these men were Americans while Tsiolkovsky was Russian? I don't think so.
It's this kind of neo-revisionist crap that has most Americans believing that they invented everything from the wheel onwards.
Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) was proposing manned and unmanned spaceflight using rockets while Robert Goddard was still in diapers.
Tsiolkovsky, who was self-taught from the age of 10, was inspired by sci-fi pioneer Jules Verne. He became a writer himself but left fiction behind to work on the more theoretical problems of space exploration.
His contributions to the field are too numerous to list here, but here is his seminal "Plan of Space Exploration" of 1926:
Currently, we're about half way down the list.
More info on the recognised father of astronautics can be found at the Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics, which also has a more complete biography. Even NASA recognises that modern rocketry began with his endeavours in this article oriented for kids.
Goddard may have been the first to launch a rocket in modern times (as earlier posters pointed out, the Chinese were using rockets centuries earlier), but he followed and everyone else followed in Tsiolkovsky's footsteps.
Hmmm, if he has an American accent then you're probably right, but even that's hardly conclusive - Angela Lansbury of Murder, She Wrote fame clearly has an American accent too but most people (herself included) would probably class her as British.
I guess what I'm saying is that what's important isn't so much how a person pronounces tomato or even where they were born but more where they were raised, what cultural influences they were subjected to, etc.
Personally, I believe that the cultural background of the original author/writer has more relevance to whether a piece of work is proclaimed American, British or Martian than where it was filmed. After all, it's his/her vision that's providing the sci-fi spark, not the running around on set that happens much later down the line.
The majority of the filming for Star Wars Episode I happened in England and Italy, but it's clearly an American film, thanks to George Lucas. The Fifth Element, despite being an english-speaking Hollywood production is widely regarded as a French film, thanks to the input of Luc Besson. Similarly, James Bond is British, no matter who shoots it or where, because he's a creation of a British author, the late Ian Fleming. (The fact that the character himself is British I don't particularly find relevant.)
Ditto for any production based on the writings of William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens. The fact that the recent modern-day adaptation of Great Expectations was a Hollywood movie staring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert de Niro doesn't negate the input of the original English author.
But that's only my opinion and yours - that it was filmed primarily for an American TV audience - is equally valid. Still, it leaves the origin of multinational movies in the air though. I mean, where do you draw the line?
There are really only two series that were ever truly good Science Fiction, both American, and neither mentioned in your rant: Babylon 5 and The Twilight Zone. These are timeless classics that I will never be embarrassed to watch again. TZ is sort of a special case having no regular cast or plot, putting B5 in a class by itself.
Erm, I not 100 per cent certain, but isn't the author/writer of Babylon 5 British?
And if so, despite it's (mostly) American cast and crew and it's Amercian production, doesn't that make it effectively British?
It's called freedom. If you don't like it then move to a socalist area like Europe, or Kentucky.
Want to make another inaccurate blanket statement?
Sure, by US standards some of the nations in Europe would be described as "socialist" but most people this side of the pond wouldn't call state-provided health, welfare and education services (not to mention effective gun control) that way. What they do call it is progressive and civilised.
You keep your right to bear arms and I'll keep my right to see a doctor if I need to. When your next-door neighbour starts going crazy with his M-16, or you need a malignant tumour removed, I'll be thinking of you.
In the meantime, you take care now, y'hear?
(Oh, and by the way, choosing to move to Europe, or Kentucky, would be exercising a freedom. Duh.)
"DirecTV is simply bombarding MY air waves with this encrypted content, so I'm listening in."
Yes, perhaps but the US government has given them the right to operate in this way, just as they have given similar rights to other users who use the airwaves, such as radio broadcasters, wireless communications companies (and their users), etc. But just because something is transmitted over the airwaves, it doesn't make it public domain. Otherwise, what's to stop you stealing any wireless broadcast and/or communication, selling it on as you own, etc?
And just because you intercepting their signal, decrypting it and using it for your personal benefit doesn't physically interfere with DirecTV's relationship with their legitimate customers, don't kid yourself into thinking that no one's getting hurt.
Think about this for a minute: if you and your fellow pirates were to stop taking something that you hadn't paid for and put your hand in your pocket and paid for DirecTV's services honestly, don't you think that the company, it's shareholders and perhaps even it's customers would benefit?
If every pirate (hacker is the wrong word as someone else pointed out in another thread) did this, Hughes service would generate more income and running costs per customer would decrease (basic economics: the more you sell, the cheaper it becomes to sell it). With this greater cash flow, they could do various things. They could increase their dividends to their shareholders, invest in new technology, broaden their range of services, and/or reduce their prices (see, you are hurting the average Joe).
And that's assuming you ante-up and buy their services. You don't have to of course. You could go elsewhere (eg, cable) or forget about TV altogether (the real world is outside your window, not on MTV). Even if every pirate just stopped stealing DirecTV's services (yes, they might be "your" airwaves but I bet they are not your patented encryption and decryption algorithms), the company would benefit immensely. It would no longer have to pump it's resources into fighting the theft of it's services, and the money constantly spent on newer, more secure encryption, educating their markets, legal actions, etc could be better spent elsewhere.
Kid yourself all you like that your actions aren't hurting anyone else but, morally and legally, what your doing is plain wrong.
What would have happenned if this hacker kept the secret for him and his small group of underground friends? DirecTV would have never found out about it, and never fixed the problem, and never been able to fight back.
Let me get this straight, you're suggesting that the continual hacks of DirecTV's technology and their widespread dissemination was done to help DirecTV in some way?
Next you will be suggesting that it's OK to go around stealing cars because, without car crime, vehicle owners would buy fewer new vehicles.
1) This wasn't hacking for hacking's sake. This was hacking for greed. People who gained unauthorised access to the signals being broadcast knew they were getting something for nothing and breaking the law. They knew the risks and they took them.
2) Satellite television companies don't get the channels and/or programming that they broadcast for free. It costs them money. They then take what they buy, create some "value-add", package it, and sell it on - just like McDonalds, the NFL or Apple Computer.
3) The "if I had to pay for the service then I wouldn't use it" argument doesn't work here for two reasons:
Firstly, the magnitude of the abuse is the crux of the problem. If someone steals a nickel from you, then it's not going to hurt you too much - you're a victim but you'll survive. But when half the country is stealing from you, those nickels soon add up. Before you know it, that $20,000 dollars that you had saved up for the car of your dreams is gone.
Secondly, almost everyone who has been cut off by Hughes' action invested a significant amount of time and money to get their product at minimal cost. You don't invest that amount of time taking something that's not yours again and again and again, unless your a hope to benefit from your efforts.
Want to see what makes the box tick? Fine, go ahead. But don't equate "just wanting to know" with "I'm just going to take what I want because I can". The difference between unlocking someone's front door and stealing all their furniture begins at the threshold, when you cross the line.
The reason your every step isn't being tracked yet is because the tech's not quite up to it. You'd need good automated face recognition...which is just around the corner. The point is you're putting the infrastructure in place to make that sort of thing easy.
True - perhaps. But then I could argue that, by permitting unchecked and widespread gun ownership, the US has put the infrastructure n place to make mass murder easy too. I mean, do you really need a semi-automatic rifle or two? Does your neighbour? Does the freak at the end of the road?
CCTV cameras aren't on every street corner and Britain isn't a police state. Sure, some things that the present government is trying to foister upon us are disgusting (such as the RIP bill) but most observers agree that such legislation contravene's Europe-wide Human Rights Act, and so won't stand up in court.
On a parallel note, I just finished reading Tom Clancy's Executive Orders. In the book, US federal agents are able to intecept a Presidential assassin thanks to instant access to the annual call history for the Washington D.C. area. Now I know Tom Clancy writes fiction (hopefully), but we all know the technology to do this is here, as is the ability to tap someone's phone at the touch of a button.
Personally, I'm more worried about someone listening in on what I have to say and who I have to say it to than I am the possibility that someone wants to watch me go down to the supermarket and buy some milk.
As a life-long Londoner who's reasonably well-travelled (continental North America, Europe, Asia) I can honestly say that Britain is not as bad as some of the postings here have made it seem.
CCTV just isn't an issue over here. Yes, most city centres, shopping malls,etc have some sort of TV surveillance but what is this targetted at, and how effective is it?
Almost without exception, CCTV is in place to catch petty criminals, such as shoplifters and to prevent major terrorism, most notably by the IRA and it's various splinter groups. Most of the time, such cameras have a very limited recording cycle (24 or 48 hours is typical) and in many cases, their footage is not being viewed live. Big Brother isn't always watching you.
The idea that someone is tracking your ever step from the moment you walk out of you door is scary. But it's not the reality that we live in. I'd have to travel to my local shopping centre (mall) to see a CCTV in a public place. And if I'm in a public place, aren't there always other people around me who can see what I'm doing? (There are, and that's why I don't go shopping in the buff.)
Ours is essentially a very safe and open society. Gun crime is virtually nonexistant. Personal freedoms are cherished. And last time I checked, we still live in the United Kingdom and not Airstrip One.
Calm down.
The chances are that you'll soon get to bash the U.S.A. again -- most probably under an MPAA or a patent article.
Maybe. But just because a few people with poor judgement in positions of authority (government, industry standard setting bodies, major corporations) make a bad decision or two, I won't take it as carte blanche to fire off banal, inaccurate, semi-racist blanket comments at Americans or any one else.
Thankfully, most Slashdotters have a brain and can distinguish between the few and the many, and don't sully themselves by making xenophobic statements. Freedom of speech is a great thing - but so is using your head.
How much of a mindless bigot are you? I'm assuming that you American and are just taking this opportunity to lash out at another society. Ironic, isn't it, that you choose to target the country that gave birth to yours. British cuisine and literature? Well, roast dinners and apple pie are just two popular exports from "this sceptred isle" (look it up) that most Americans seem to appreciate, as are the English language itself and some of the finest writers in history, such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats, Dickens. And our sports? Well football (which is the game that you call soccer) is the most popular sport on the planet, with a World Cup that is the most globally televised sporting event and an international federation that has more member countries than the United Nations. American football is a derivation of both this game and rugby (also a british invention) and baseball shares common ancestry with cricket. I'm a great fan of most American culture and sports, just as many Americans are happy to describe themselves as anglophiles. Pity your so insular that you can't appreciate anything remotely different. God help you if you ever had to set foot outside your little world.