When I bought my house a year ago, it had extras (placed by the previous owner) that prove the point about paranoia: monitored alarm systems for motion detection, breaking windows, opening doors, opening windows, feeds for cameras, etc. And this is a rather ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood. But that's nothing next to the big one: my house already had a bank-style vault (yeah, the huge black steel door with both combination and key required) about 25 feet (8 meters) deep for storing enough guns to supply an entire army. What do I use the vault for? It makes a really good closet. I keep half of it full of canned food that didn't fit in the kitchen, the other half full of musical instruments my wife doesn't want strewn around the house. One time a gun dealer I know showed me the machine guns and silencers he was selling (yes, even those are completely legal in America, if you do the paperwork and pay the permit fees). No, I didn't buy anything. I would like to hear even one good reason why a machine gun or silencer should be legal to buy. Hunting? Yeah, right! Even the military doesn't normally have any use for silencers.
I've long thought that we need to create far more specific root domains (instead of.COM,.ORG, etc., it would be.SOFT (software),.CONS (consulting), etc.), and force companies to only use those which apply to what they do. It would make perfect sense to have a root domain of.SEX for _all_ pornography, and ban it from anywhere else (*encouraging countries to participate in said ban, levying heavy fines as needed). Thus users could block all of it at once, or make all of it available at once. In the case of Australia, then they wouldn't have to stress so much over rating content of sites, since it would all be grouped together. They could instead focus on the hypocrisy of allowing nudity at the beach and on public TV but not anywhere else.;-)
So I take it the intent of the law is that pornography is only legal in Australia when _everyone_ can see it on a public TV station or at the beach. If you try to see it privately at home(cable, Internet, etc.), then you're breaking the law. Does that mean you can only have sex with your spouse if it's broadcast on the latenight news?;-)
That's a pretty twisted law. That makes Reagan and Clinton not look so bad after all.
How hypocritical that the company claiming someone stole their design is a company whose only purpose is to create tools designed exclusively for stealing designs. We should get the politicians to create legislation which makes sale of reverse engineering tools a felony, putting them out of business.
My easy solution to this fiasco is that we'll have the patent office use Advanced Software's own file comparator to find differences between their binary and Corel's. Result: the entire file. Maybe we should convince the patent office that a binary comparison between any two programs is the only reliable way to verify patent infringement (thus rendering software patents worthless; woohoo!!! Has anyone ever seen a software patent which wasn't absolutely worthless, designed only to make lawyers money?).
Old but good: what do you call a million lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? Answer: (any other suggestions?) => A good start
It's _very_ illegal to dump products on the market at a loss to eliminate the competition, as far as I know. I've always wondered if that's been the case with Celeron chips, and now it looks like Intel is pushing that edge with their PIII's (leaving, of course, the Xeon chips overpriced to make up for it). I definitely think it's about time for a full federal investigation of any (many) illegal activities by Intel. It's every bit as bad as Microsoft giving away browsers and email readers to kill off their competitors (yeah, sure, it didn't cost them a dime to create those, so they can just give them away; right...). In my opinion, the top quarter of Intel and Microsoft employees probably ought to be in the slammer for such activities. Hopefully the feds will keep dragging them into court to put the fear of God into them (or at least the fear of lost revenue, fines, and jailtime).
Not that targetting benchmarks is necessarily bad. What we need is to keep making up new benchmarks in a way which deliberately targets flaws (flaws that actually make a difference, that is) in existing systems. It's much easier to make improvements if you have a simple way to measure the results on any changes.
To be truly productive, we would have to target flaws in both Linux and in NT, to give a real incentive for both sides to improve. As much as I dislike NT, I would still love to come up with ways to make them improve it. If you can't beat it, fix it.
These laws SAY they are to clean up the net. But that's not what they do. Instead they allow the government to arrest, fine, confine, and otherwise penalize those who "have broken the law".
It's hard to run a pornographic - or an anti-government or anti-party-in-power - web site from jail, or without money.
And while martyrs might be an organizing point, the example of what is done to them makes many people think twice before repeating what they did to provoke it - regardless of its virtue.
The next step after the law is passed is to run a test case - by busting the most disgusting pornographer they can find and having a show trial. Then they work their way down through a few less blatant and more lucrative scumbags. After that it might just go on hold until a crisis is brewing.
But come big enough troubles for the people in power, count on some of the internet voices of their opposition being defined as pornographers, and finding their computers, money, and/or bodies siezed by the government. They'll be out-of-service for weeks, months, or years when the crisis times are measured in days or hours.
There will be more of them than the government can sieze. And some will be so obviously the opposition's spokesmen that siezing them would be counter-productive and might be avoided.
But every one down disrupts the opposition's communication some more, and it's the ones who reach the most that are the easiest to find and stop.
I'm not too technically minded, but why have a graphics subsystem that is abstracted away from the core of the OS if you don't want to throw the display across the network. I find X bloated as well - but I get that impression from looking at top.
> But governments no longer represent the will of > the people. They represent the will of [ the > current power elite ].
Governments have NEVER represented the will of the people, and have always represented the wills of power elites. Some of them are just more responsive or less oppressive than others. And some of them give the "will of the people" more lip service than others.
That's why the founders of the US Federal government did all they could to keep it small and make it possible to kick out officials that got out of hand or knock the whole thing over when it became institutionally corrupted.
Seems to me like Cobalt's systems are a lame attempt at [modifying Linux so that it is THE leading web server platform] (no optimizations, just easy setup.
Wasn't it a Cobalt guy who modified the TCP code to make it much more able to handle large numbers of short connections?
I recall catching the tail end of his presentation at SVLUG about a year ago. A big piece of it was shrinking the data structure during the disconnect timeout, when the bulk of it was unused, so tens of thousands of dying connections didn't eat the RAM. I think there were a few other changes, such as reorganizing the data structure so it could be searched quickly when it was large.
If it hasn't been folded into the distribution yet it should still be available (with the rest of the cobalt source code) on their web site.
As one of me sagacious associates remarked to me today, "commonsense is not popular". I've already done my ranting about this subject, so I won't add much here.
Some have suggested that this law was a bone thrown to Senator Harradine in order to get his vote on the GST legislation. That was a nice theory at the time, but we know it didn't work, because Harradine voted against the GST. On the whole, I get the feeling that we have the cart before the horse on this issue: the government wanted the legislation and rammed it through before Harradine lost his balance of power position precisely because they knew he'd vote for it. Harradine's position was always that the proposed law wasn't strong enough, but of course anything is better than nothing. The government really wanted this law, and I don't think we need introduce conspiracy theories to explain it when simple "stupidity" provides an adequate answer.
There's also the suggestion that the general press didn't give this story the airplay and column-space that it deserved because of some self-serving interests. No, I don't see the need for a conspiracy theory here either. Australians in general don't see the film ratings system as an invasion of their rights, and PM John Howard can legitimately claim popular support for the morality-based censorship system that exists. Senator Alston (the minister whose portfolio covers this area) is basically right when he says that this law is simply applying existing censorship laws to the Internet. This is why the whole thing isn't newsworthy, except for a little coverage of the protest marches. Most people buy the logic of our politicians in this matter. Most people simply don't understand that their logic is flawed to hell.
The average Slashdot reader knows that the whole concept of Internet censorship is ludicrous, but the broader public (and our illustrious political leaders) don't. Educating them (the general public, not the politicians -- politicians only want to know about political expediency, not technology) would be a long and slow process if we had to do it ourselves. I can only hope that the vast majority of them will find whatever mechanisms we are obliged to use to "clean up" the Internet for them a complete and utter nuisance. May access times slow, may prices rise, may quality of service in a general sense go to hell, just for a little while. Australians are just as wired as the US, and once the nearly-40% of Australians who use the 'net get sick of their ISP saying "sorry, but we have to do it because of the Broadcasting Act," we'll see how quickly this stupid law gets taken out, or at least cut down to size.
I think the majority of Australians would be in favour of a ratings system for the Internet if it could be done without other negative impact. They just don't understand that it's impossible. Once the price of enforcing this law becomes apparent, I think we will have general support for its abolition. Please, God, may the damage to industry and our global reputation be as little as possible. We are stupid and we deserve the fruits of our own stupidity, but may it be as brief as possible.
Erroneous: the law requires that X and RC (Refused for Classification) stuff be removed from servers within the juristdictional boundaries of Australia, and the rest be blocked. Only the R stuff is allowed, if hidden behind an adult verification mechanism of some kind.
But governments no longer represent the will of the people. They represent the will of the political parties, their vested interests, and the advertising budget of the financially larger party.
Our "democracy" has reached the point where governments do not change. Certainly the MPs change, but the parties do not and the system of government does not. Voting offers the same choice of bad alternatives: anyone who actually wants a job in government should be automatically disqualified from it!
So we need systems like freenet, and we need a distributed internet - one that does not have such a reliance on ISPs and telecomunications companies. Both are a weak link for free communication.
OK, so extrasolar didn't hold his punches, but he makes a good point.
Perhaps I should follow up with something like:
We need a Beowulf cluster of the developer.gnome sites.
...just make sure we cover all the cliches.
But here's a better question: Look at the site. Ask yourself: what isn't here that I need. Compare it to some other developer connections, like Sun's Java site and Netscape's rat-nest of a developer page. Now ask of yourself how can I get involved to provide what I think is missing. Documentation will really help with the acceptance of Linux, I think.
----------------------------- Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
If Mercedes-Benz came out with an MB pickup truck that looked *exactly* like one of the big Dodge RAM pickups, with the minor exception of an MB logo on the hood, you can bet your ass that they'd get sued into the stone age over it.
Actually, no, they wouldn't...you see, something like a year back Mercedes bought Chrysler Corporation, of which Dodge Trucks is a division. (Yes, the official name of the company is Daimler-Chrysler now, too.)
Now, if Forddid a knockoff of it, on the other hand...:)
This article hits it right on the head as far as how they describe/. as filling a niche, but it is wrong on several other points. While it's good to hear/. described as a discussion area, it should also be noted that such discussion groups existed long before/. but have since been assulted by a deluge of newbies and spam to the point where most competent posters have given up. (It would be interesting to see some statistics on how effective usenet spam really is.) Slashdot has grown to be a refuge for people fed up with or entirely unfamiliar with usenet. It not only offers a spam-free discussion area, but also a relatively unmoderated environment and a fairly safe place to express one's views. While it only occasionally offers it's own articles, they appear much more frequent than what you'd find in usenet. Slashdot's surveys (as unofficial as they are) also are something unseen on the usenet.
Other things from the article scared me. For starters, all the conversation about sites like geocities and online greeting cards (will it ever be too soon for the novelty of this beast to wear thin?). While some of these sites provide needed services, I am rather tired of seeing 300 web-based e-mail services and having to be on no less than 6 instant messanger services to be able to talk to my friends (At this point, you can only reach my by good ol' IRC).
What scares me the most is all the talk of this "new level of product integration". With all the hype about push services like pointcast, I am really glad to see that much of this has faded into obscurity. In the past, one could pick up the newspaper, get on the computer, or turn on the TV to see the news, but now it seems the news wants to see YOU. Frankly, if my coffee machine has to read me the news every morning, I'm staying in bed.
Since we've never been able to study a comet's composition it's still speculation what material makes up most of the mass.
When you breakdown water into hydrogen and oxygen and burn them the exhaust is water. Why waste the energy? Just melt it and try to find a way to get rid of the water before it re-freezes.
As to what they're made of, 20 years ago comets were thought of as "dirty snowballs", 10 years ago some astronomers began to think of them as "snowy dirtballs" who knows what they will think 5 years from now. I suppose that the best thing about this "comet landing" is that we will know FOR SURE what the composition is. Well, at least of this one comet.
Oy. When is this boy going to learn the difference? Ooops. I believe I just "slandered" him. There's something about this whole proceeding that reminds me of the Kennedy assassination.
----------------------------- Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
thank goodness for more browsing choices for linux! we need something besides netscape crashigator.
I, of course, probably won't try a browser that doesn't want me to view a web page as it is meant to be displayed. Oh well, just have to wait for opera.
Making the assumption that this takes place in the future and we can actually build a solar sail that large, and we have materials strong enough to stand that much force, and we can anchor them strongly enough to the comet, we're fucked if it's coming at us from the direction of the sun. No?
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by 2B||!2B:
When I bought my house a year ago, it had extras (placed by the previous owner) that prove the point about paranoia: monitored alarm systems for motion detection, breaking windows, opening doors, opening windows, feeds for cameras, etc. And this is a rather ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood. But that's nothing next to the big one: my house already had a bank-style vault (yeah, the huge black steel door with both combination and key required) about 25 feet (8 meters) deep for storing enough guns to supply an entire army. What do I use the vault for? It makes a really good closet. I keep half of it full of canned food that didn't fit in the kitchen, the other half full of musical instruments my wife doesn't want strewn around the house. One time a gun dealer I know showed me the machine guns and silencers he was selling (yes, even those are completely legal in America, if you do the paperwork and pay the permit fees). No, I didn't buy anything. I would like to hear even one good reason why a machine gun or silencer should be legal to buy. Hunting? Yeah, right! Even the military doesn't normally have any use for silencers.
Posted by 2B||!2B:
.COM, .ORG, etc., it would be .SOFT (software), .CONS (consulting), etc.), and force companies to only use those which apply to what they do. It would make perfect sense to have a root domain of .SEX for _all_ pornography, and ban it from anywhere else (*encouraging countries to participate in said ban, levying heavy fines as needed). Thus users could block all of it at once, or make all of it available at once. In the case of Australia, then they wouldn't have to stress so much over rating content of sites, since it would all be grouped together. They could instead focus on the hypocrisy of allowing nudity at the beach and on public TV but not anywhere else. ;-)
I've long thought that we need to create far more specific root domains (instead of
Posted by 2B||!2B:
;-)
So I take it the intent of the law is that pornography is only legal in Australia when _everyone_ can see it on a public TV station or at the beach. If you try to see it privately at home(cable, Internet, etc.), then you're breaking the law. Does that mean you can only have sex with your spouse if it's broadcast on the latenight news?
That's a pretty twisted law. That makes Reagan and Clinton not look so bad after all.
Posted by 2B||!2B:
How hypocritical that the company claiming someone stole their design is a company whose only purpose is to create tools designed exclusively for stealing designs. We should get the politicians to create legislation which makes sale of reverse engineering tools a felony, putting them out of business.
My easy solution to this fiasco is that we'll have the patent office use Advanced Software's own file comparator to find differences between their binary and Corel's. Result: the entire file. Maybe we should convince the patent office that a binary comparison between any two programs is the only reliable way to verify patent infringement (thus rendering software patents worthless; woohoo!!! Has anyone ever seen a software patent which wasn't absolutely worthless, designed only to make lawyers money?).
Old but good: what do you call a million lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
Answer: (any other suggestions?)
=> A good start
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
Relax. Wait until Intel releases their chip and see what the price is like before you go ballistic.
I'm hoping to see AMD stomp Intel's ass into the ground until the Merced comes out.
Then AMD will have to REALLY hustle to get something fast out to market.
LK
Posted by jojie_v:
In the face of strong competition, Intel is forced to drop their prices. It's called market forces.
It's a good thing.
Posted by 2B||!2B:
It's _very_ illegal to dump products on the market at a loss to eliminate the competition, as far as I know. I've always wondered if that's been the case with Celeron chips, and now it looks like Intel is pushing that edge with their PIII's (leaving, of course, the Xeon chips overpriced to make up for it). I definitely think it's about time for a full federal investigation of any (many) illegal activities by Intel. It's every bit as bad as Microsoft giving away browsers and email readers to kill off their competitors (yeah, sure, it didn't cost them a dime to create those, so they can just give them away; right...). In my opinion, the top quarter of Intel and Microsoft employees probably ought to be in the slammer for such activities. Hopefully the feds will keep dragging them into court to put the fear of God into them (or at least the fear of lost revenue, fines, and jailtime).
Posted by 2B||!2B:
Good answer!
Not that targetting benchmarks is necessarily bad. What we need is to keep making up new benchmarks in a way which deliberately targets flaws (flaws that actually make a difference, that is) in existing systems. It's much easier to make improvements if you have a simple way to measure the results on any changes.
To be truly productive, we would have to target flaws in both Linux and in NT, to give a real incentive for both sides to improve. As much as I dislike NT, I would still love to come up with ways to make them improve it. If you can't beat it, fix it.
Posted by Ungrounded Lightning Rod:
These laws SAY they are to clean up the net.
But that's not what they do. Instead they
allow the government to arrest, fine, confine,
and otherwise penalize those who "have broken
the law".
It's hard to run a pornographic - or an
anti-government or anti-party-in-power -
web site from jail, or without money.
And while martyrs might be an organizing
point, the example of what is done to them
makes many people think twice before repeating
what they did to provoke it - regardless of its
virtue.
The next step after the law is passed is to
run a test case - by busting the most disgusting
pornographer they can find and having a show
trial. Then they work their way down through
a few less blatant and more lucrative scumbags.
After that it might just go on hold until a
crisis is brewing.
But come big enough troubles for the
people in power, count on some of the internet
voices of their opposition being defined
as pornographers, and finding their computers,
money, and/or bodies siezed by the government.
They'll be out-of-service for weeks, months,
or years when the crisis times are measured
in days or hours.
There will be more of them than the government
can sieze. And some will be so obviously the
opposition's spokesmen that siezing them would
be counter-productive and might be avoided.
But every one down disrupts the
opposition's communication some more, and it's
the ones who reach the most that are the easiest
to find and stop.
Posted by stodge:
I'm not too technically minded, but why have a graphics subsystem that is abstracted away from the core of the OS if you don't want to throw the display across the network. I find X bloated as well - but I get that impression from looking at top.
Posted by Ungrounded Lightning Rod:
> But governments no longer represent the will of > the people. They represent the will of [ the
> current power elite ].
Governments have NEVER represented the will
of the people, and have always represented
the wills of power elites. Some of them
are just more responsive or less oppressive
than others. And some of them give the
"will of the people" more lip service than
others.
That's why the founders of the US Federal
government did all they could to keep it
small and make it possible to kick out
officials that got out of hand or knock
the whole thing over when it became
institutionally corrupted.
Posted by Ungrounded Lightning Rod:
of the previous poster's comment. It DOESN'T
seem to ME that Cobalt was a "lame attempt".
Posted by Ungrounded Lightning Rod:
Seems to me like Cobalt's systems are a lame
attempt at [modifying Linux so that it is THE
leading web server platform] (no optimizations,
just easy setup.
Wasn't it a Cobalt guy who modified the
TCP code to make it much more able to handle
large numbers of short connections?
I recall catching the tail end of his
presentation at SVLUG about a year ago.
A big piece of it was shrinking the data
structure during the disconnect timeout,
when the bulk of it was unused, so tens
of thousands of dying connections didn't
eat the RAM. I think there were a few
other changes, such as reorganizing the
data structure so it could be searched
quickly when it was large.
If it hasn't been folded into the distribution
yet it should still be available (with the rest
of the cobalt source code) on their web site.
As one of me sagacious associates remarked to me today, "commonsense is not popular". I've already done my ranting about this subject, so I won't add much here.
Some have suggested that this law was a bone thrown to Senator Harradine in order to get his vote on the GST legislation. That was a nice theory at the time, but we know it didn't work, because Harradine voted against the GST. On the whole, I get the feeling that we have the cart before the horse on this issue: the government wanted the legislation and rammed it through before Harradine lost his balance of power position precisely because they knew he'd vote for it. Harradine's position was always that the proposed law wasn't strong enough, but of course anything is better than nothing. The government really wanted this law, and I don't think we need introduce conspiracy theories to explain it when simple "stupidity" provides an adequate answer.
There's also the suggestion that the general press didn't give this story the airplay and column-space that it deserved because of some self-serving interests. No, I don't see the need for a conspiracy theory here either. Australians in general don't see the film ratings system as an invasion of their rights, and PM John Howard can legitimately claim popular support for the morality-based censorship system that exists. Senator Alston (the minister whose portfolio covers this area) is basically right when he says that this law is simply applying existing censorship laws to the Internet. This is why the whole thing isn't newsworthy, except for a little coverage of the protest marches. Most people buy the logic of our politicians in this matter. Most people simply don't understand that their logic is flawed to hell.
The average Slashdot reader knows that the whole concept of Internet censorship is ludicrous, but the broader public (and our illustrious political leaders) don't. Educating them (the general public, not the politicians -- politicians only want to know about political expediency, not technology) would be a long and slow process if we had to do it ourselves. I can only hope that the vast majority of them will find whatever mechanisms we are obliged to use to "clean up" the Internet for them a complete and utter nuisance. May access times slow, may prices rise, may quality of service in a general sense go to hell, just for a little while. Australians are just as wired as the US, and once the nearly-40% of Australians who use the 'net get sick of their ISP saying "sorry, but we have to do it because of the Broadcasting Act," we'll see how quickly this stupid law gets taken out, or at least cut down to size.
I think the majority of Australians would be in favour of a ratings system for the Internet if it could be done without other negative impact. They just don't understand that it's impossible. Once the price of enforcing this law becomes apparent, I think we will have general support for its abolition. Please, God, may the damage to industry and our global reputation be as little as possible. We are stupid and we deserve the fruits of our own stupidity, but may it be as brief as possible.
Posted by The Famous Brett Watson:
Erroneous: the law requires that X and RC (Refused for Classification) stuff be removed from servers within the juristdictional boundaries of Australia, and the rest be blocked. Only the R stuff is allowed, if hidden behind an adult verification mechanism of some kind.
But governments no longer represent the will of the people. They represent the will of the political parties, their vested interests, and the advertising budget of the financially larger party.
Our "democracy" has reached the point where governments do not change. Certainly the MPs change, but the parties do not and the system of government does not. Voting offers the same choice of bad alternatives: anyone who actually wants a job in government should be automatically disqualified from it!
So we need systems like freenet, and we need a distributed internet - one that does not have such a reliance on ISPs and telecomunications companies. Both are a weak link for free communication.
Vik
Posted by !ErrorBookmarkNotDefined:
...just make sure we cover all the cliches.
OK, so extrasolar didn't hold his punches, but he makes a good point.
Perhaps I should follow up with something like:
We need a Beowulf cluster of the developer.gnome sites.
But here's a better question:
Look at the site. Ask yourself: what isn't here that I need.
Compare it to some other developer connections, like Sun's Java site and Netscape's rat-nest of a developer page.
Now ask of yourself how can I get involved to provide what I think is missing.
Documentation will really help with the acceptance of Linux, I think.
-----------------------------
Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
Cirby said:
Actually, no, they wouldn't...you see, something like a year back Mercedes bought Chrysler Corporation, of which Dodge Trucks is a division. (Yes, the official name of the company is Daimler-Chrysler now, too.)
Now, if Forddid a knockoff of it, on the other hand... :)
Posted by stodge:
I've had several crashes. Mostly due to kfm collapsing in a heap
Posted by oNZeNeMo (guns'n ammo):
/. as filling a niche, but it is wrong on several other points. While it's good to hear /. described as a discussion area, it should also be noted that such discussion groups existed long before /. but have since been assulted by a deluge of newbies and spam to the point where most competent posters have given up. (It would be interesting to see some statistics on how effective usenet spam really is.) Slashdot has grown to be a refuge for people fed up with or entirely unfamiliar with usenet. It not only offers a spam-free discussion area, but also a relatively unmoderated environment and a fairly safe place to express one's views. While it only occasionally offers it's own articles, they appear much more frequent than what you'd find in usenet. Slashdot's surveys (as unofficial as they are) also are something unseen on the usenet.
This article hits it right on the head as far as how they describe
Other things from the article scared me. For starters, all the conversation about sites like geocities and online greeting cards (will it ever be too soon for the novelty of this beast to wear thin?). While some of these sites provide needed services, I am rather tired of seeing 300 web-based e-mail services and having to be on no less than 6 instant messanger services to be able to talk to my friends (At this point, you can only reach my by good ol' IRC).
What scares me the most is all the talk of this "new level of product integration". With all the hype about push services like pointcast, I am really glad to see that much of this has faded into obscurity. In the past, one could pick up the newspaper, get on the computer, or turn on the TV to see the news, but now it seems the news wants to see YOU. Frankly, if my coffee machine has to read me the news every morning, I'm staying in bed.
Posted by My_Favorite_Anonymous_Coward:
I interpret this as a Micheal Bay movie. Besides, how's thi sdifferent from the random banners we see on the web everyday, every minute?
CY
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
Since we've never been able to study a comet's composition it's still speculation what material makes up most of the mass.
When you breakdown water into hydrogen and oxygen and burn them the exhaust is water. Why waste the energy? Just melt it and try to find a way to get rid of the water before it re-freezes.
As to what they're made of, 20 years ago comets were thought of as "dirty snowballs", 10 years ago some astronomers began to think of them as "snowy dirtballs" who knows what they will think 5 years from now. I suppose that the best thing about this "comet landing" is that we will know FOR SURE what the composition is. Well, at least of this one comet.
LK
Posted by !ErrorBookmarkNotDefined:
Oy. When is this boy going to learn the difference?
Ooops. I believe I just "slandered" him.
There's something about this whole proceeding that reminds me of the Kennedy assassination.
-----------------------------
Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
Posted by _DogShu_:
thank goodness for more browsing choices for linux! we need something besides netscape crashigator.
I, of course, probably won't try a browser that doesn't want me to view a web page as it is meant to be displayed. Oh well, just have to wait for opera.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
Making the assumption that this takes place in the future and we can actually build a solar sail that large, and we have materials strong enough to stand that much force, and we can anchor them strongly enough to the comet, we're fucked if it's coming at us from the direction of the sun. No?
LK