More importantly, if you corrected the images so that it looked as it would look to the human eye (ignore that that's not possible for a second), then you'd have conspiracy theorists yelling about how the RAW images have detail that has been EDITED OUT of the final pictures for public consumption! Oh, I can just see it now...
"In the FALSE images that NASA has chosen to show the public, color odities have been edited out. Clearly this demonstrates that Spirit burned up in the Martian atmosphere due to another "NASA accident" (martians with guns) and they have substituted a makeshift lander lookalike in a studio to take pictures. Hollywood's crack team of fantasy-generating, sabatuers of truth at ILM have clearly post-processed the RAW images in order to make them seem more like the original lander. The worst part is that they flaunt this coverup by releasing the RAW images, assuming that the public is too sheep-like from the constant floridation to actually compare the data for themselves! PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS I tell you! Precious... MY precious...."
So bravo NASA for not giving them yet another set of ready-made rants.
You're comparing two very different things, and while they may be the same, I doubt it. First, there's usage as it what is being provided. That kind of usage can be easily measured. Then there is usage in terms of what is is being downloaded. I suspect that that would give you a very different view of the world.
I use P2P services even now. I downloaded Fedora 1.0 at a rate of about 2-4x that I was getting from an FTP server. When you're sucking down a trio of 600+ MB isos, that's a big savings!
Why do we assume that P2P networks are only being used by college students who want porn and music... could there perhaps be professionals in the industry out there too?
I have said it before, but it bears repeating... if you build better P2P software a lot of the problems will go away. Not all, but a lot.
Right now it is hard to classify information well in a P2P network, so most of what is shared is that sort of information that is most easily described. That is to say, "Hot chix doin nasty stuff" or "Latest bubblegum pop song". It's a bit harder to share something that people are going to look for using more obscure criteria. What we really need is a few ways to insert catagorical info and then a web site like google that indexes all of this junk in meaningful ways. The search engine could even mask out certain objects which have been determined to be illegal, which is fairly trivial with a decent classification system.
The solution is to build a better tool and get EVERYONE using it... copyright violations won't stop, but they will cease to be the REASON people use it, and that means that casusal users won't help the violations.
No, RFID is moving toward uniqueness even now. The single ID per product scheme is very old, and is going to be phased out in the next few years. After all, as a store owner, you want to know interesting things like how many times someone comes into your store wearing a competitor's item vs. one purchased here. Heck, you might even give discounts on that basis...
As for cards, why bother with SS cards? You can do simple trend analysis and nail down who someone is based on 5 or 6 RFIDs on their person. For example, let's say you have a Mobil Gas keychain, a highway pass in your car, an RFID in your brand new shoes and one in your new tires. Well, you can look at someone's credit history, see when they shopped at places that have RFID goods, narrow down each purchase to one of 1000-10,000 RFIDs that might have been acquired. Then you look at the signatures found on a given motorist at a stop-light and statistically, you can probably narrow them down to a single person or at least a small group. Please note that that requires no actual database of what RFIDs you have on you, just the stores that RFIDs went to and credit reports.
Used in the large, this allows you to take a crowd and determine how "dangerous" it is and/or how important it is that you prevent that crowd from becoming a mob.
Make no mistake, this makes strategically placed video cameras look like a consession to civil liberties. RFID allows a brand new kind of tracking of our citizens, and one that is far more accurate than technologies like facial recognition. On the one hand this is good for combatting crime. On the other hand, it constitutes a gross breach of at least two ammendments that make up the Bill of Rights, here in the US. Will it be used this way? Given the relatively discrete nature of such survailence, why the heck not?! Why would someone whos job it is to prevent crime NOT do this? On the other hand, once such usage is entrenched, preventing crime is certainly not the only way in which it will be used.
The sad thing is that I probably have known some of the folks who have worked on the technology for tracking this stuff.... sigh.
For exactly that sort of training, you can also just use the default configuration of SpamAssassin. It does a very good job of training itself based on all of its other rules. Thus, when you get a very spammy message, it trains the bayes filters, and when you get a very hammy message, same. The difference from a pure bayes approach is that collaborative hashing, static text analysis, header validation, RBLs and many other sources go into training the Bayes filters under SpamAssassin.
I always assumed that Verisign was a US government front company. I guess this makes it pretty clear.
Think of it this way, if you were in the FBI, advising the White House about upcoming threats to domestic security, what would you say about a growing global network of computers that it's pretty clear all business will rely on within the next 100 years? Would you advise that the government find a way to have a controling hand close to the heart of such a beast? Would you allow the military to give up control of such a thing whithout maintaining some sort of back-door power?
It's not so much about conspiracy, as about the way you manage resources. Verisign has either been involved in or bought the companies involved in the technologies most likely to scare the government (PGP, DNS, RFID, being a CA). This combination of interests and amazingly lucrative and monopolistic contract awards is fairly damning.
To jump back to topic, adding in RFID means that whoever has access to Verisign now has access to a giant database of what amount to tracer bugs planted (soon) in most of the items that you buy. Just think of the harm caused by the most obvious uses....
I really think that a national database of RFIDs should not be allowed. We should have a national allocation scheme like we do with Ethernet cards, based on industry standardization, but NEVER a database of final numbers.
No, I was not saying Read the Fine Article, I was saying, don't construct a strawman out of the article summary. It's as bad as attacking a scientific paper on the basis of the wording of the abstract.
I never called into question how much he did or did not read of the article, just the falaciousness of his retort.
I'm having a hard time with the math... 35,943 - 148,874 is what again?
[end sarcasm]
No, I'm not new here, and I'm not new to the level of debate on USENET, Slashdot, public mailing lists and other public forums. I'm also unwilling to let it pass without some sort of reality check.
Sorry you had to get it full-on, but poking fun at someone else's work is really an area where one should expect to be poked back...
I see your point, and you are right... from a certain point of view. My take is that Linux desktops like MacOS desktops are simply not the same sort of beast as windows, and thus succeed or fail on their own merits. The Linux desktop for business is, IMHO, "there". For games, multimedia and art it's still growing, and not as usable as it should be in order to build market share.
Would better cut-and-paste be nice? Sure. As would better integration between the browser and the desktop, but I can also look at Windows and say that it could use better remote admin tools (yes, even... perhaps especially for a desktop) and more privacy control.
I'm dubbing this logical falacy the "Slashdot Strawman" because I see it so damn often on Slashdot.
It goes like this, some well-intentioned person goes to Slashdot and submits an article based on real science. In order to make it make sense to the average reader, they dumb it down a bit. Then someone comes along and tries to argue with the summary of the conclusions of the original theory without any citation of the original (and usually without having read the original at all).
Go read the article or paper being cited and then come back and decide if you feel this extrapolation makes sense (or bears any resemblance to the paper in the first place.
It is exactly this kind of vague assertion that I can't rationalize with my experience. For example, you say that "once a few of those Freedesktop.org initiatives start coming out," the desktop will be more on-par with others. But that was said when AbiWord was first under development. It was said again when evolution was in beta. Again when Gnome 2.0's HIG was first published. What line do we draw in the sand to say, "this is now a desktop"?
What's more, what applications are you refering to, and what sort of work do you have in mind? I think the Gnome desktop is more than sufficient for generic web and mail, but not when it comes to many special-purpose niches where 3rd party apps exist only for Windows. I suppose that should be obvious, but it's worth stating.
In the end, Linux (and BSD and even MacOS) have a huge advantage for technical users (programmers, researchers, etc.) which is the command-line. Windows still maintains DOS' primative command-line, and that hobbles it a lot. I hope, for the sake of Windows users everywhere, that this new shell they are talking about will live up to its whitepapers, but THAT is where MS is lagging most.
I have to disagree here. I think the patent system stinks as-is, but I have been using a TiVo for many years, and I *do* think that what they have done is non-obvious in the sense that the technology to do it had existed for a decade or so, and TiVo was the first one to put it together. In fact, by the time TiVo did this, all of the required parts were off-the-shelf (hence the Linux PVR projects).
TiVo's pausing of live TV requires that the user is always watching a playback, even when watching supposedly "live" TV. At least to me, this was not an obvious way to build a digital equivalent of a VCR, but in retrospect, I cannot imagine another way to do so much with such a small innovation. To the people claiming this is obvious, I have to ask the key question... then why didn't you make one before TiVo?
"In the end the Linux desktop is still playing catchup though"
I keep hearing this, and given the power of repetition, sometimes I almost believe it.
But I have been using a Linux desktop at work for six years now (with one short interuption for a specific app I needed back in the late 90s).
It is not an inspiring desktop like MacOS was back in the early days, but it lets me get my work done, provides all of the tools I need to communicate and handles those times that I want to do my own thing admirably. Some of the conviniences of MacOS or Windows are not there, but by the same token some of my conviniences aren't in those desktops either.
I think we've become a little too willing to accept the label of "inferior". Windows it ain't, but then is that such a bad thing? Fire up evolution, galeon and gnome-terminal and tell me what, exactly, we still need. Is the file selection tool poor? Perhaps. I have never been fond of that mode of interaction in the first place, but it's usable (do it every day). Improve away, sure, but do not forget that it works now, and is part of one of the best desktops in the world.
You are vastly mischaracterizing the situation. SCO executives have launched a campaign against linux without any real evidence over the last year. They have done all the wrong things in terms of winning their case (going to the media, trying to pull in profits ahead of time by billing users less now than they claim they will after a decision, etc). During that time they have been selling FAR more stock than they did in months and years before.
It looks to me like the executives of SCO have pushed up their stock price at the cost of the reputation (such as it was) and future of the company while making outrageous profits.
Unless something changes in that outlook, yes, I would call this a pump-and-dump scheme, though one played out quite craftily over the course of over a year.
Your claim for Linux is obviously spurious. You cannot know if TCO will rise or fall.
However, IDC's report is much more conclusive. Measured to within an order of magnitude (and when comparing TCO, which is highly volatile and often subjective, you really can't extract information beyond an order of magnitude), it shows clearly that Linux has exactly the same TCO for every environment sampled as Windows...
Consider that this is a MICROSFT funded report, and yet they were unable to demonstrate a TCO delta of more than a few percent in the real world! I really wasn't sure until I saw it on MS' site, but now I'm certain: Linux rocks for business!
The report also avoided application servers, an area in which Linux shines, normalized for the fact that Linux handles higher workloads, ignored early adopters of Linux. Given all of those factors, I would say that this is quite the rosy report card!
This is the obligatory defanging of management bashers...
In every badly managed company or group that I have worked in, everyone who was badly managed could identify that they were, in fact, badly managed. But time and again they were proven wrong as to WHAT the problem was, because their complaints would get addressed (often slowly) and the situation would not change (only the complaints).
Management practices like XP or Scrum are designed around the idea of solving for one problem: consistency of success. They may or may not prove to be reasonable aproaches in the long run, but what I do know is that most of the people (and I've already seen comments from a few) who are going to reply with some form of "mangers/consultants/paper-pushers are just looking for some buzz-words to keep them employed" wouldn't have a workable suggestion to counter with.
Some of the problem that managers face are so unquantifiable (like level of respect that team members have for eachother) that I honestly do not think that there will ever be a one-size-fits-all approach that works. I liken XP instead to just-in-time manufacturing (a manufacturing process that was popularized by analyzing why Japan was kicking US butt in terms of product cycles)... it is not, nor can it be, the absolute solution, but it may well be a valuable signpost on the way to consistent goal-meeting.
I'm sure that AO was employed for space-based spying long before it was used for astronomy. Defense and Intelligence (in the US) get a lot more money than astronomy, after all, so this research probably fell out of classified work of spy satellites.
However, AO may or may not be practical for general purpose spying. I'm not sure if you could do it "on the fly" easily enough or if you would need to be set up above a single, stationary target for a longish time. It would still be very useful for seeing specifics of troop movements and tracking materials, but probably has significant limitations.
It is important to note that this does cause some distortions in the final image, but astronomers are used to these distortions and can recognize them easily enough. It certainly is confusing to someone not versed in optics though... it seems SO wrong;-)
You are right and wrong. The problem is that AO (adaptive optics) has changed the game significantly. You still want to NOT have an atmosphere in your way, ideally, but with AO you can compensate for it enough that you can build and maintain scopes (like OWL) with far less resources than it would take to build and maintain one in space, and still get acceptable results in terms of the science (not just pretty pictures). Ground-based AO-scopes can get better imaging today than Hubble can for nearly any target, and especially for very close targets (e.g. looking for planetary systems in nearby stars).
All of this is as it has been explained to me by an astronomer friend... IANAA.
I run a gnutella client (just pulled down Fedora 1.0 with it much faster than any single ftp server would have been able... the torrent-like download chunking is a great feature), and I imagine that neilsen would conclude that that is the majority of my "activity". But, most of that traffic is routine communications that are part of gnutella's infrastructure, not "activity" of any sort... there is no good way to tell activity from passive chatter. Even a web browser left on a page with auto-reload can be active for hours or days without user intervention...
You are using your own definition of core here. XFree defined core as a certain set of people. What they have found recently is that the "core" was not in fact at the core of development of XFree, and that those who were were better capable of filling that role. Grats to XFree for having the stones to make that call. THAT is probably the best example of what open source has going for it that proprietary software does not. GCC continues, but companies and steering commities have come and gone. Mozilla continues, but Netscape has come and gone and gone.... Open source endures.
Slashdot Mirror
His clarification was a good one, and I think it addresses your points. However, I do want to point out one innacuracy in what you've said:
"Some licences (e.g. BSD) will even let you copy source code as long as you give credit where credit is due."
You need to either remove the parenthetical there or qualify it. The BSD license has not had such a restriction for years now.
More importantly, if you corrected the images so that it looked as it would look to the human eye (ignore that that's not possible for a second), then you'd have conspiracy theorists yelling about how the RAW images have detail that has been EDITED OUT of the final pictures for public consumption! Oh, I can just see it now...
"In the FALSE images that NASA has chosen to show the public, color odities have been edited out. Clearly this demonstrates that Spirit burned up in the Martian atmosphere due to another "NASA accident" (martians with guns) and they have substituted a makeshift lander lookalike in a studio to take pictures. Hollywood's crack team of fantasy-generating, sabatuers of truth at ILM have clearly post-processed the RAW images in order to make them seem more like the original lander. The worst part is that they flaunt this coverup by releasing the RAW images, assuming that the public is too sheep-like from the constant floridation to actually compare the data for themselves! PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS I tell you! Precious... MY precious...."
So bravo NASA for not giving them yet another set of ready-made rants.
You're comparing two very different things, and while they may be the same, I doubt it. First, there's usage as it what is being provided. That kind of usage can be easily measured. Then there is usage in terms of what is is being downloaded. I suspect that that would give you a very different view of the world.
I use P2P services even now. I downloaded Fedora 1.0 at a rate of about 2-4x that I was getting from an FTP server. When you're sucking down a trio of 600+ MB isos, that's a big savings!
Why do we assume that P2P networks are only being used by college students who want porn and music... could there perhaps be professionals in the industry out there too?
I have said it before, but it bears repeating... if you build better P2P software a lot of the problems will go away. Not all, but a lot.
Right now it is hard to classify information well in a P2P network, so most of what is shared is that sort of information that is most easily described. That is to say, "Hot chix doin nasty stuff" or "Latest bubblegum pop song". It's a bit harder to share something that people are going to look for using more obscure criteria. What we really need is a few ways to insert catagorical info and then a web site like google that indexes all of this junk in meaningful ways. The search engine could even mask out certain objects which have been determined to be illegal, which is fairly trivial with a decent classification system.
The solution is to build a better tool and get EVERYONE using it... copyright violations won't stop, but they will cease to be the REASON people use it, and that means that casusal users won't help the violations.
can you just imagine the party that the folks at IBM were having when they saw this? Let the good times, roll baby! ;-)
No, RFID is moving toward uniqueness even now. The single ID per product scheme is very old, and is going to be phased out in the next few years. After all, as a store owner, you want to know interesting things like how many times someone comes into your store wearing a competitor's item vs. one purchased here. Heck, you might even give discounts on that basis...
As for cards, why bother with SS cards? You can do simple trend analysis and nail down who someone is based on 5 or 6 RFIDs on their person. For example, let's say you have a Mobil Gas keychain, a highway pass in your car, an RFID in your brand new shoes and one in your new tires. Well, you can look at someone's credit history, see when they shopped at places that have RFID goods, narrow down each purchase to one of 1000-10,000 RFIDs that might have been acquired. Then you look at the signatures found on a given motorist at a stop-light and statistically, you can probably narrow them down to a single person or at least a small group. Please note that that requires no actual database of what RFIDs you have on you, just the stores that RFIDs went to and credit reports.
Used in the large, this allows you to take a crowd and determine how "dangerous" it is and/or how important it is that you prevent that crowd from becoming a mob.
Make no mistake, this makes strategically placed video cameras look like a consession to civil liberties. RFID allows a brand new kind of tracking of our citizens, and one that is far more accurate than technologies like facial recognition. On the one hand this is good for combatting crime. On the other hand, it constitutes a gross breach of at least two ammendments that make up the Bill of Rights, here in the US. Will it be used this way? Given the relatively discrete nature of such survailence, why the heck not?! Why would someone whos job it is to prevent crime NOT do this? On the other hand, once such usage is entrenched, preventing crime is certainly not the only way in which it will be used.
The sad thing is that I probably have known some of the folks who have worked on the technology for tracking this stuff.... sigh.
For exactly that sort of training, you can also just use the default configuration of SpamAssassin. It does a very good job of training itself based on all of its other rules. Thus, when you get a very spammy message, it trains the bayes filters, and when you get a very hammy message, same. The difference from a pure bayes approach is that collaborative hashing, static text analysis, header validation, RBLs and many other sources go into training the Bayes filters under SpamAssassin.
I always assumed that Verisign was a US government front company. I guess this makes it pretty clear.
Think of it this way, if you were in the FBI, advising the White House about upcoming threats to domestic security, what would you say about a growing global network of computers that it's pretty clear all business will rely on within the next 100 years? Would you advise that the government find a way to have a controling hand close to the heart of such a beast? Would you allow the military to give up control of such a thing whithout maintaining some sort of back-door power?
It's not so much about conspiracy, as about the way you manage resources. Verisign has either been involved in or bought the companies involved in the technologies most likely to scare the government (PGP, DNS, RFID, being a CA). This combination of interests and amazingly lucrative and monopolistic contract awards is fairly damning.
To jump back to topic, adding in RFID means that whoever has access to Verisign now has access to a giant database of what amount to tracer bugs planted (soon) in most of the items that you buy. Just think of the harm caused by the most obvious uses....
I really think that a national database of RFIDs should not be allowed. We should have a national allocation scheme like we do with Ethernet cards, based on industry standardization, but NEVER a database of final numbers.
No, I was not saying Read the Fine Article, I was saying, don't construct a strawman out of the article summary. It's as bad as attacking a scientific paper on the basis of the wording of the abstract.
I never called into question how much he did or did not read of the article, just the falaciousness of his retort.
You asked if I was new around here, I answered with the most obvious and objective measure I could find. If you didn't want the answer, why ask?
I'm having a hard time with the math... 35,943 - 148,874 is what again?
[end sarcasm]
No, I'm not new here, and I'm not new to the level of debate on USENET, Slashdot, public mailing lists and other public forums. I'm also unwilling to let it pass without some sort of reality check.
Sorry you had to get it full-on, but poking fun at someone else's work is really an area where one should expect to be poked back...
I see your point, and you are right... from a certain point of view. My take is that Linux desktops like MacOS desktops are simply not the same sort of beast as windows, and thus succeed or fail on their own merits. The Linux desktop for business is, IMHO, "there". For games, multimedia and art it's still growing, and not as usable as it should be in order to build market share.
Would better cut-and-paste be nice? Sure. As would better integration between the browser and the desktop, but I can also look at Windows and say that it could use better remote admin tools (yes, even... perhaps especially for a desktop) and more privacy control.
It is all a matter of what you are used to.
I'm dubbing this logical falacy the "Slashdot Strawman" because I see it so damn often on Slashdot.
It goes like this, some well-intentioned person goes to Slashdot and submits an article based on real science. In order to make it make sense to the average reader, they dumb it down a bit. Then someone comes along and tries to argue with the summary of the conclusions of the original theory without any citation of the original (and usually without having read the original at all).
Go read the article or paper being cited and then come back and decide if you feel this extrapolation makes sense (or bears any resemblance to the paper in the first place.
It is exactly this kind of vague assertion that I can't rationalize with my experience. For example, you say that "once a few of those Freedesktop.org initiatives start coming out," the desktop will be more on-par with others. But that was said when AbiWord was first under development. It was said again when evolution was in beta. Again when Gnome 2.0's HIG was first published. What line do we draw in the sand to say, "this is now a desktop"?
What's more, what applications are you refering to, and what sort of work do you have in mind? I think the Gnome desktop is more than sufficient for generic web and mail, but not when it comes to many special-purpose niches where 3rd party apps exist only for Windows. I suppose that should be obvious, but it's worth stating.
In the end, Linux (and BSD and even MacOS) have a huge advantage for technical users (programmers, researchers, etc.) which is the command-line. Windows still maintains DOS' primative command-line, and that hobbles it a lot. I hope, for the sake of Windows users everywhere, that this new shell they are talking about will live up to its whitepapers, but THAT is where MS is lagging most.
I have to disagree here. I think the patent system stinks as-is, but I have been using a TiVo for many years, and I *do* think that what they have done is non-obvious in the sense that the technology to do it had existed for a decade or so, and TiVo was the first one to put it together. In fact, by the time TiVo did this, all of the required parts were off-the-shelf (hence the Linux PVR projects).
TiVo's pausing of live TV requires that the user is always watching a playback, even when watching supposedly "live" TV. At least to me, this was not an obvious way to build a digital equivalent of a VCR, but in retrospect, I cannot imagine another way to do so much with such a small innovation. To the people claiming this is obvious, I have to ask the key question... then why didn't you make one before TiVo?
"In the end the Linux desktop is still playing catchup though"
I keep hearing this, and given the power of repetition, sometimes I almost believe it.
But I have been using a Linux desktop at work for six years now (with one short interuption for a specific app I needed back in the late 90s).
It is not an inspiring desktop like MacOS was back in the early days, but it lets me get my work done, provides all of the tools I need to communicate and handles those times that I want to do my own thing admirably. Some of the conviniences of MacOS or Windows are not there, but by the same token some of my conviniences aren't in those desktops either.
I think we've become a little too willing to accept the label of "inferior". Windows it ain't, but then is that such a bad thing? Fire up evolution, galeon and gnome-terminal and tell me what, exactly, we still need. Is the file selection tool poor? Perhaps. I have never been fond of that mode of interaction in the first place, but it's usable (do it every day). Improve away, sure, but do not forget that it works now, and is part of one of the best desktops in the world.
You are vastly mischaracterizing the situation. SCO executives have launched a campaign against linux without any real evidence over the last year. They have done all the wrong things in terms of winning their case (going to the media, trying to pull in profits ahead of time by billing users less now than they claim they will after a decision, etc). During that time they have been selling FAR more stock than they did in months and years before.
It looks to me like the executives of SCO have pushed up their stock price at the cost of the reputation (such as it was) and future of the company while making outrageous profits.
Unless something changes in that outlook, yes, I would call this a pump-and-dump scheme, though one played out quite craftily over the course of over a year.
Your claim for Linux is obviously spurious. You cannot know if TCO will rise or fall.
However, IDC's report is much more conclusive. Measured to within an order of magnitude (and when comparing TCO, which is highly volatile and often subjective, you really can't extract information beyond an order of magnitude), it shows clearly that Linux has exactly the same TCO for every environment sampled as Windows...
Consider that this is a MICROSFT funded report, and yet they were unable to demonstrate a TCO delta of more than a few percent in the real world! I really wasn't sure until I saw it on MS' site, but now I'm certain: Linux rocks for business!
The report also avoided application servers, an area in which Linux shines, normalized for the fact that Linux handles higher workloads, ignored early adopters of Linux. Given all of those factors, I would say that this is quite the rosy report card!
This is the obligatory defanging of management bashers...
In every badly managed company or group that I have worked in, everyone who was badly managed could identify that they were, in fact, badly managed. But time and again they were proven wrong as to WHAT the problem was, because their complaints would get addressed (often slowly) and the situation would not change (only the complaints).
Management practices like XP or Scrum are designed around the idea of solving for one problem: consistency of success. They may or may not prove to be reasonable aproaches in the long run, but what I do know is that most of the people (and I've already seen comments from a few) who are going to reply with some form of "mangers/consultants/paper-pushers are just looking for some buzz-words to keep them employed" wouldn't have a workable suggestion to counter with.
Some of the problem that managers face are so unquantifiable (like level of respect that team members have for eachother) that I honestly do not think that there will ever be a one-size-fits-all approach that works. I liken XP instead to just-in-time manufacturing (a manufacturing process that was popularized by analyzing why Japan was kicking US butt in terms of product cycles)... it is not, nor can it be, the absolute solution, but it may well be a valuable signpost on the way to consistent goal-meeting.
I'm sure that AO was employed for space-based spying long before it was used for astronomy. Defense and Intelligence (in the US) get a lot more money than astronomy, after all, so this research probably fell out of classified work of spy satellites.
However, AO may or may not be practical for general purpose spying. I'm not sure if you could do it "on the fly" easily enough or if you would need to be set up above a single, stationary target for a longish time. It would still be very useful for seeing specifics of troop movements and tracking materials, but probably has significant limitations.
It is important to note that this does cause some distortions in the final image, but astronomers are used to these distortions and can recognize them easily enough. It certainly is confusing to someone not versed in optics though... it seems SO wrong ;-)
You are right and wrong. The problem is that AO (adaptive optics) has changed the game significantly. You still want to NOT have an atmosphere in your way, ideally, but with AO you can compensate for it enough that you can build and maintain scopes (like OWL) with far less resources than it would take to build and maintain one in space, and still get acceptable results in terms of the science (not just pretty
pictures). Ground-based AO-scopes can get better imaging today than Hubble can for nearly any target, and especially for very close targets (e.g. looking for planetary systems in nearby stars).
All of this is as it has been explained to me by an astronomer friend... IANAA.
I run a gnutella client (just pulled down Fedora 1.0 with it much faster than any single ftp server would have been able... the torrent-like download chunking is a great feature), and I imagine that neilsen would conclude that that is the majority of my "activity". But, most of that traffic is routine communications that are part of gnutella's infrastructure, not "activity" of any sort... there is no good way to tell activity from passive chatter. Even a web browser left on a page with auto-reload can be active for hours or days without user intervention...
You are using your own definition of core here. XFree defined core as a certain set of people. What they have found recently is that the "core" was not in fact at the core of development of XFree, and that those who were were better capable of filling that role. Grats to XFree for having the stones to make that call. THAT is probably the best example of what open source has going for it that proprietary software does not. GCC continues, but companies and steering commities have come and gone. Mozilla continues, but Netscape has come and gone and gone.... Open source endures.