I think it may be that one reason the M$ doesn't want to open source itself is that it would reveal that it's already using a buncha open source internally anyway. This would of course be a violation of the GPL and would open M$ to lotsa legal and pr problems. Just a theory of mine.
If generating energy from water is possible, why aren't we doing it here?
Because you have put to energy into it - probably solar on Mars, to dis-associate the H2 and the O2 so you can "reassociate" ("burn") it later as fuel for electricity or rockets.
Believe it or not, NASA does try to sterilize probes for this reason. The original Vikings that went to Mars (not the ones that went to Vinland) were carefully cleaned, and even so, produced results that made some think life was there on Mars. IMHO, the jury's still out on that. ( http://www.resa.net/nasa/mars_life_viking.htm and many others, Google it)
This also has a profound impact on the drake equation: (http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_drake_equ ation.html) This equation estimates the chance of finding life and intelligent life anywhere in the universe. The more places in our Solar System that we find water, the more likely there are Earth-like planets around other stars.
"great big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity and little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity"
Once we get enough observations done, I'm sure we'll figure out a sequnce, like with stars themselves, in which substellar objects evolve - main sequence: in an accretion disk. Secondary sequence: solo but not quite enough to become a star? Other sequence: gawd-awful big accretion disk that allows the protoplanet to suck up enough matter to start glowing... All different kinda scenarios are possible, and given time, they'll observe gobs of them...it's just a matter of years of detections accreting enough data to build actuarial tables.
The real questions are: How do they know the bones of his illegit kid are really of the kid? How do they know that the illegit kid is really his (that is, the mother could have been lying!)? It seems that this would only raise questions, no matter what results came back...earlier post on scam bones is also valid....
From what the article said, make anything big enough, it becomes a star. If it ain't quite big enough, it's a brown dwarf. If it ain't even that big, it's a gas giant planet. The diff is only in how much gas comes together. Apparently, you could just as easily call it a mega-size, mega-hot planet, or call Jupiter a nano-dwarf star.
See if you can patch together the URL in my earlier post (it's a mess- sorry) But it is for an actual NASA report on Galilleo and describes RTG fuel recovered from a weather satellite that actually did go blooey during launch. Fact is, those pellets are designed to withstand actual detonation of the entire launch vehicle with at most fracturing. They won't "vaporize" as the media likes to fret over. This stuff is as hard as steel balls in a steel vault - even a LOX cato won't turn it into confectioner's sugar. Actual experience has shown that these things really are tougher than the "black boxes" they use in commericial airliners.
Concerning the "Plutonium power supply":http://spacelink.nasa.gov/NASA.Projects/Hu man.Exploration.and.Development.of.Space/Human.Spa ce.Flight/Shuttle/Shuttle.Missions/Flight.031.STS- 34/Galileos.Power.Supply/RTG.Fact.Sheet Sorry for the long URL. This documents the history of Radioisotope Thermalelectric Generators, including accidents (Such as Apollo 13) in which the RTG has actually been splashed. In one case, the RTG was recovered and its fuel reused.
Hopefully, by the repetitious reporting of finding a chunk of this planet or that comet, people on Earth will slowly come to this realization: Outer space ain't out there. We're in the middle of it, thinly shielded by air. We're in the midst of a game of cosmic whack-a-mole in a dangerously radioactive arena. If we're going to survive, long term, we'd better learn to live in the environment surrounding us - not just Earth, but the solar system. We'd better learn how to duck - sooner or later, the chunk is going to be life-changing in size (http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/index.html) Soonest likely that we know of now is 2880 AD. We've only scanned a few percent of the sky looking out for this. We're even threatened by the Sun that gives us power (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020516.html). Don't think it's safe just cuz we haven't seen a big whack in recent history - people used to think that about Vesuvius and Karakatoa.
Last time I checked (admittedly, about the time of Desert Storm) the Kuwaiti Gov't was a hereditary dictatorship - only family members allowed citizenship/vote, women not allowed to vote at all. What some Arab countries call "democracy" most Americans would call "cronyism".
Like I said in my post - I did email a real person there. The thing that's wrong with it this: Humans now have a dual existence: In meatspace and in cyberspace. I own my own meat - I can clothe it the way I want, I can move it around the way I want, and by damn, if I want it hid in a closet, that's where I'll put it. My cyberself should be just as much my property as my meatself: I am that data that yahoo was misusing, my meat is attached to it and I should be allowed full consensual control over both my meatself and my cyberself. Nobody decided for, or gave me the chance to vote, over whether or not corporate bigmoney should be allowed to enslave my cyberself.
Here's what's wrong with it: It turns out that Yahoo was able to discover both my work and home emails - without me ever knowingly signing up with yahoo. The first two spams I got: from Yahoo, "Hey we're gonna start spamming you! follow this link to unsubscribe!" I follow the links. It insists I tell yahoo my birthday and my zip code to unsubscribe - BUT I NEVER GAVE THAT INFO TO YAHOO IN THE FIRST PLACE! I had signed up with some list services ("ThisIsTrue" for one) that (unknown to me) were hosted by Yahoo groups, and that's how yahoo misappropriated my email. I had to send nasty grams to Yahoo to get them to unsubscribe me, cuz the online auto system won't tell me what it thinks my Bday and zip code are. By the way, the writer/moderator of ThisIsTrue was equally pissed that Yahoo took HIS mailing list and made it THEIRs without his permission.
One of the tasks I often find myself doing is figuring out how someone else's code works. The internet isn't a superhighway - it's a superrailroad, with everyone's train cars attached to everyone else's. A flatbed one minute is a locomotive the next - it's all interconnected. BUT - under the DMCA you have to pretend it's not. I don't see how you can be a programmer without occassionally opening up someone else's objects to figure out how they did it, if for no other reason than your code must peacefully coexist with theirs. The only programmers who don't do this are the ones who do the MS/Oracle "cookie cutter" application development using exclusively the tools created by those companies. If the process doesn't stop, all programming will be limited to the few monopolistic companies that "own" all the code. Under the DMCA *ALL* programmers are criminals, sooner or later.
It'll be a lot cheaper than most people think. I've worked in the astronaut training facility since before the first shuttle launch - yeah - I'm that old...Let me tell you where "cost overruns" come from and why NASA can't make space pay. We had a building that had the old skylab simulator and some tourist exihibits in it. We needed space for the (then) newly planned space station. But: we needed to have room enough for 3-5 station modules, each one about the size of the skylab simulator. So the building was expanded at the cost of $26M. Half way thru, CONGRESS redesigned the space station's budget, thereby redesigning the station itself. Thus eliminating the need for all but two modules...then again, so only one module was needed for astronaut training. This took place over less than 2 years time. The original building would have been big enough for the one module. Now we have a $26 million dollar "cost overrun". While this was happening, the station contracts were constantly rearranged. Things that should have been done in one place were spread out over various congressional districts, states, and in later years, nations in order to get the political support to make it go. Each time: the cost went up. Guys, you have the most cost-efficient and science worthy space program that Congress can design. And this is why NASA costs ten times as much to get into space as the backyard tinkerers will eventually be able to do it. Should it be cheap? YES. WILL it be cheap? When the innovators figure out how to get Congress and the big industrials to stop blocking it, YES.
With rapid changes in technology, Security is a matter of timing, not an absolute. Make it as secure as technology allows today, and it's just a matter of time - weeks or months, seldom years - until the security is easily cracked or is completely broken. Because of this, and the logistics inherent in updating the security on 20+ million PCs, and you get the MSIE / Outlook express situation. The author's comment about "single point of ownership" is valid no matter what security is used on this.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it may be that one reason the M$ doesn't want to open source itself is that it would reveal that it's already using a buncha open source internally anyway. This would of course be a violation of the GPL and would open M$ to lotsa legal and pr problems. Just a theory of mine.
If generating energy from water is possible, why aren't we doing it here? Because you have put to energy into it - probably solar on Mars, to dis-associate the H2 and the O2 so you can "reassociate" ("burn") it later as fuel for electricity or rockets.
Believe it or not, NASA does try to sterilize probes for this reason. The original Vikings that went to Mars (not the ones that went to Vinland) were carefully cleaned, and even so, produced results that made some think life was there on Mars. IMHO, the jury's still out on that. (
and many others, Google it)
http://www.resa.net/nasa/mars_life_viking.htm
This also has a profound impact on the drake equation: (http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_drake_equ ation.html) This equation estimates the chance of finding life and intelligent life anywhere in the universe. The more places in our Solar System that we find water, the more likely there are Earth-like planets around other stars.
"great big whirls have little whirls
that feed on their velocity
and little whirls have lesser whirls
and so on to viscosity"
Once we get enough observations done, I'm sure we'll figure out a sequnce, like with stars themselves, in which substellar objects evolve - main sequence: in an accretion disk. Secondary sequence: solo but not quite enough to become a star? Other sequence: gawd-awful big accretion disk that allows the protoplanet to suck up enough matter to start glowing...
All different kinda scenarios are possible, and given time, they'll observe gobs of them...it's just a matter of years of detections accreting enough data to build actuarial tables.
The real questions are: How do they know the bones of his illegit kid are really of the kid? How do they know that the illegit kid is really his (that is, the mother could have been lying!)? It seems that this would only raise questions, no matter what results came back...earlier post on scam bones is also valid....
From what the article said, make anything big enough, it becomes a star. If it ain't quite big enough, it's a brown dwarf. If it ain't even that big, it's a gas giant planet. The diff is only in how much gas comes together. Apparently, you could just as easily call it a mega-size, mega-hot planet, or call Jupiter a nano-dwarf star.
Well, if you're gonna patent hammering nails with a hammer, I'm gonna patent holding on to the handle while you do it...
See if you can patch together the URL in my earlier post (it's a mess- sorry) But it is for an actual NASA report on Galilleo and describes RTG fuel recovered from a weather satellite that actually did go blooey during launch. Fact is, those pellets are designed to withstand actual detonation of the entire launch vehicle with at most fracturing. They won't "vaporize" as the media likes to fret over. This stuff is as hard as steel balls in a steel vault - even a LOX cato won't turn it into confectioner's sugar. Actual experience has shown that these things really are tougher than the "black boxes" they use in commericial airliners.
Concerning the "Plutonium power supply":http://spacelink.nasa.gov/NASA.Projects/Hu man.Exploration.and.Development.of.Space/Human.Spa ce.Flight/Shuttle/Shuttle.Missions/Flight.031.STS- 34/Galileos.Power.Supply/RTG.Fact.Sheet
Sorry for the long URL.
This documents the history of Radioisotope Thermalelectric Generators, including accidents (Such as Apollo 13) in which the RTG has actually been splashed. In one case, the RTG was recovered and its fuel reused.
Hopefully, by the repetitious reporting of finding a chunk of this planet or that comet, people on Earth will slowly come to this realization: Outer space ain't out there. We're in the middle of it, thinly shielded by air. We're in the midst of a game of cosmic whack-a-mole in a dangerously radioactive arena.
If we're going to survive, long term, we'd better learn to live in the environment surrounding us - not just Earth, but the solar system. We'd better learn how to duck - sooner or later, the chunk is going to be life-changing in size (http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/index.html) Soonest likely that we know of now is 2880 AD. We've only scanned a few percent of the sky looking out for this.
We're even threatened by the Sun that gives us power (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020516.html). Don't think it's safe just cuz we haven't seen a big whack in recent history - people used to think that about Vesuvius and Karakatoa.
Last time I checked (admittedly, about the time of Desert Storm) the Kuwaiti Gov't was a hereditary dictatorship - only family members allowed citizenship/vote, women not allowed to vote at all. What some Arab countries call "democracy" most Americans would call "cronyism".
Like I said in my post - I did email a real person there. The thing that's wrong with it this:
Humans now have a dual existence: In meatspace and in cyberspace. I own my own meat - I can clothe it the way I want, I can move it around the way I want, and by damn, if I want it hid in a closet, that's where I'll put it. My cyberself should be just as much my property as my meatself: I am that data that yahoo was misusing, my meat is attached to it and I should be allowed full consensual control over both my meatself and my cyberself.
Nobody decided for, or gave me the chance to vote, over whether or not corporate bigmoney should be allowed to enslave my cyberself.
Here's what's wrong with it: It turns out that Yahoo was able to discover both my work and home emails - without me ever knowingly signing up with yahoo. The first two spams I got: from Yahoo, "Hey we're gonna start spamming you! follow this link to unsubscribe!"
I follow the links. It insists I tell yahoo my birthday and my zip code to unsubscribe - BUT I NEVER GAVE THAT INFO TO YAHOO IN THE FIRST PLACE!
I had signed up with some list services ("ThisIsTrue" for one) that (unknown to me) were hosted by Yahoo groups, and that's how yahoo misappropriated my email. I had to send nasty grams to Yahoo to get them to unsubscribe me, cuz the online auto system won't tell me what it thinks my Bday and zip code are.
By the way, the writer/moderator of ThisIsTrue was equally pissed that Yahoo took HIS mailing list and made it THEIRs without his permission.
One of the tasks I often find myself doing is figuring out how someone else's code works. The internet isn't a superhighway - it's a superrailroad, with everyone's train cars attached to everyone else's. A flatbed one minute is a locomotive the next - it's all interconnected. BUT - under the DMCA you have to pretend it's not. I don't see how you can be a programmer without occassionally opening up someone else's objects to figure out how they did it, if for no other reason than your code must peacefully coexist with theirs. The only programmers who don't do this are the ones who do the MS/Oracle "cookie cutter" application development using exclusively the tools created by those companies. If the process doesn't stop, all programming will be limited to the few monopolistic companies that "own" all the code. Under the DMCA *ALL* programmers are criminals, sooner or later.
It'll be a lot cheaper than most people think. I've worked in the astronaut training facility since before the first shuttle launch - yeah - I'm that old...Let me tell you where "cost overruns" come from and why NASA can't make space pay. We had a building that had the old skylab simulator and some tourist exihibits in it. We needed space for the (then) newly planned space station. But: we needed to have room enough for 3-5 station modules, each one about the size of the skylab simulator. So the building was expanded at the cost of $26M. Half way thru, CONGRESS redesigned the space station's budget, thereby redesigning the station itself. Thus eliminating the need for all but two modules...then again, so only one module was needed for astronaut training. This took place over less than 2 years time. The original building would have been big enough for the one module. Now we have a $26 million dollar "cost overrun".
While this was happening, the station contracts were constantly rearranged. Things that should have been done in one place were spread out over various congressional districts, states, and in later years, nations in order to get the political support to make it go. Each time: the cost went up.
Guys, you have the most cost-efficient and science worthy space program that Congress can design.
And this is why NASA costs ten times as much to get into space as the backyard tinkerers will eventually be able to do it.
Should it be cheap? YES. WILL it be cheap? When the innovators figure out how to get Congress and the big industrials to stop blocking it, YES.
With rapid changes in technology, Security is a matter of timing, not an absolute. Make it as secure as technology allows today, and it's just a matter of time - weeks or months, seldom years - until the security is easily cracked or is completely broken.
Because of this, and the logistics inherent in updating the security on 20+ million PCs, and you get the MSIE / Outlook express situation.
The author's comment about "single point of ownership" is valid no matter what security is used on this.