We adjust for solar time because UTC is an astronomical timescale, not a "count of seconds since a specific time." If "computer people" want a timescale that ignores leap seconds, they can use an atomic timescale like TAI (or GPS time, which is a constant offset from TAI). But choosing to standardize the internet on UTC and then complaining it is too hard to do the programming right is a little like buying a house next door to a turkey farm and complaining about the smell.
Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., told Republicans in an Aug. 14 fund-raising letter that he is ``committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.''
Short summary: globular clusters have very little gas and dust, and no active star formation. We think that essentially all of the formation of stars took place at the same time, when the cluster was born. Planets as we know them form as their parent stars are forming.
To make the planet recently requires finding a way to make a disk of protoplanetary material recently. It is not impossible to do that -- you might imagine disrupting a star, for example. But that would produce a very small disk: the natural size scale is a stellar radius, or thousands of times smaller than the current planetary orbit. So you then have to think of a way to remove more than 99.9% of the planet's binding energy, but not 100%. You might do it with two (not just one!) close encounters with other stars, but the likelihood is tiny, and you've got to preserve the inner binary too. It starts to sound much, much harder than forming a planet early.
There might be other ways to do it -- certainly my colleagues (and I) have been working hard on new scenarios. The next few months will be interesting, as we keep trying to shoot down the early formation hypothesis.
As an author of the Science paper, I may be a bit biased, but I would suggest that the reason that it is exciting is precisely because it does verify predictions that came out of completely different observations a few years ago.
Our radio pulsar timing work showed that this system was a triple, and the mutual gravitational interactions between what you can reasonably think of as the neutron star/white dwarf orbit and the neutron star/planet orbit allowed us to measure the inclination of the neutron star/white dwarf orbit and predict the white dwarf mass. The work of Ford, Rasio, Sigurdsson, and others on theoretical modeling of the system suggested that it had to be "young" (the white dwarf formed a few hundred million years ago).
Hubble then went out and found the white dwarf, and showed that indeed, as predicted, it was both low mass and young. Classic science paradigm: predict and test. But if we were willing to live without that independent test, we could (and, actually, did) argue that we knew the mass of the planet some years ago. Now with the new test, it will be more widely accepted. And work will continue.
It is a neutron star. Evidence suggests that the radius of a neutron star is about 15 km. The fastest spinning pulsar rotates 642 times per second. That would mean the surface is moving at 20% the speed of light -- fast, but not TOO fast. This one is spinning six times slower.
Thanks. Science is a bit of a challenge to write for, because of the tight page constraints, but we do try to keep things as readable as possible.
It has been very interesting to me to watch the NASA publicity engine on this one from the inside. A press release like this is not written by the scientists who are involved. Space Telescope has professionals who do this. In general, though, they do a pretty good job. The best site may be this one, which has much more detail than the short version of the press release.
For those who want more technical detail, our 1999 paper discusses the observations that really confirmed the presence of the planet. The new paper updates this slightly with new constraints based on the white dwarf mass. Together with some work in the intervening years on explain the slight ellipticity of the neutron star/white dwarf orbit (using something called Korzoi pumping), these new results have led to the slightly smaller estimated planet mass.
PS. All of the pulsar timing analysis is done on Linux...
Re:Here's an interesting quote
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
(I posted this story a week ago and it was rejected.)
I'm surprised that copyrighted laws are news to so many people. I've been frustrated for years that while you can look up almost all of our local munciple code on line, the building code sections are not published, because they incorporate by reference material copyrighted by the standards organizations. Check your own local code websites and I bet you'll find the same thing.
This odd situation isn't new; this has been standard practice for years. But nobody really noticed until we came to expect instant internet access to government information, since all local governments have copies of the copyrighted building codes available for inspection in the office.
There are some interesting implications of this ruling for software; for example, if a government agency requires software to interoperate with a proprietary standard (e.g., Word document format)....
No, the primary author of a scholarly paper is always listed first, and authorship is generally sorted by merit.
Being the author of some scores of scholarly papers, let me assure you that there are no rules about author order, even within fields. Some particular group may have its own patterns (ie, we tend to put the lead student first), but it is usually impossible for an outsider to know for sure without asking. And I don't even know what you mean by "merit." The person who crunched the most data? The person who raised the most money? The person who pointed in the right direction and then stood out of the way? The person who spent the most nights writing code? The person who massaged the work into timeless prose? The person with the most famous/attention-getting name?
There are really only two things you should infer from an author list:
every author contributed something essential to the work described, and
every author has read and approved of the paper (unless explicit disagreements between authors are noted, as sometimes happens).
(Unfortunately, there are a number of famous cases where rule two breaks down, usually involving a senior scientist taking a share of a junior scientist's work while forgetting that they must also share the risk and blame if something goes wrong. So maybe there is only one rule.)
IANAL, but I am a professor (in the University of California system). Under federal copyright law, I own the copyright to my lectures as long as they are fixed in a tangible medium, and indeed my notes are written out and printed. True, you can't copyright facts, but the lecture as a whole is a creative work in the same way as a book, and indeed many academic books begin as a lecture series. Summaries of my lectures are clearly a derivative work. Equally clearly, students have fair use rights to make such summaries, but fair use ends before commercial distribution starts.
Now, the current situation is totally different for a teacher who does not "fix" his or her lectures in a tangible medium, since federal copyright law requires fixation for protection. What this law does is extend copyright protection to all lectures regardless of fixation. Since a student (or other listener) usually doesn't even know whether the fixation requirement has been satisfied, the legality of selling lecture notes has always been questionable. This law just clarifies the situation with a uniform policy.
P.S. Nothing in the above should be interpreted as a statement on my personal belief of what a faculty member should do with his or her copyrights. Look, I'm a great believer in the GPL, and I think giving people the right to make noncommercial copies of my lectures is just the right thing to do. But just as code authors should be allowed to decide whether to use the GPL, I should have the right to choose the terms of copying of my intellectual work.
6) Make music with some friends. Shared purchasing habits do not make for a very exciting social life, no matter what the advertising people try to tell you. Get a little person-to-person interaction going.
CDs are fun. Movies are fun. TV... (well...) But do you NEED to be entertained by some corporation? Can't we entertain ourselves?
It seems to me that there are at least two ways to challenge this. First, if the RIAA is actually a union (as another poster suggested), then right to work laws in many states may protect independent musicians. Second, as I've argued before, it seems to me that barring willing copyright holders from sharing music via Napster or similar programs is a clear violation (in the US) of the right of freedom of association guaranteed by the bill of rights.
> I bet they sell this list to their advertisers too.
Not without violating federal law. FCC regulations prohibit a company from reusing or selling phone numbers captured by Automatic Number Identification devices on 800 or 900 lines. Companies may only reuse such information to market products/services that are directly related to a product/service that you have previously purchased from them.
I manage my own email system, and together with many other sysadmins I choose to block probable spam. I have a constitutional right to associate with others who share my ideas, interests, and goals. One way that we in the anti-spam community pursue our common interest is by sharing information through the RBL list -- reporting violators to MAPS and using information reported by others. Allowing a company to prevent one sysadmin to block sharing of information with another by censoring the RBL list prevents us from banding together to pursue cooperative action. In the words of Justice Harlan in NAACP v. Alabama: It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of `liberty' assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech.
Once you decide that it is OK for a site to ban "personal spiders," where do you stop? Would I be in violation of such a policy if I use Avantgo to download a hierarchy of pages into my Palm Pilot? Where, really, do you draw the line between acceptable "browsers" and unacceptable "spiders"? How would you feel about a web site whose copyright notice bars access to anyone using a web browser other than IE5? And just where does that leave my fair use rights to copy copyrighted material for research and education? Only legal with Canon copy machines?
Most of the comments here seem to misunderstand the current tax situation, though matters aren't helped by the story's claim that purchases are now "effectively" tax free. Most states (including, for example, CA and NJ) charge use tax on goods purchased out of state. These taxes apply whether the purchases are from catalogs or over the internet. Most individuals may not pay them, but then most individuals don't stay under the speed limit either. My organization certainly calculates and remits sales tax to the state of California for all out of state purchases; to do otherwise would cause trouble when the auditors come to call.
The issue with internet taxation is whether states or other taxing entities can force out-of-state retailers to calculate and withhold the tax for them. Here the answer is clearly (at the moment) no, unless the business has a physical presence in the state (same as with catalog sales). Of course, without help from the retailer, the states have a hard time collecting tax. But just try to buy a car from a dealer in Oregon (with no tax) and import it into CA without paying CA sales tax. It doesn't matter how the sale takes place.
In my opinion, the answer, given the increasingly difficult enforcement of sales taxes, is not to change the law to put the enforcement burden on (often small) private businesses, but to eliminate sales tax in favor of a more straightforward, progressive taxation system such as income tax.
I agree wholeheartedly. But I would suggest that Larry Wall's contributions to both Perl and the open source world depend at least as much on his writing of English as his writing of code. I'm a working scientist. I use Perl. I love Perl. I use Python, Java, C, Fortran, Scheme, Awk, shell, and others I can't recall. They are all great languages. (Well, Fortran is fast.) There Is More Than One Way To Do It and There Is More Than One Language To Do It In.
What sets Perl apart are the beautiful books by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Randal Schwartz, etc., that set an early and very high standard for documentation of free software. Good writing depends on the same clear thinking that good coding requires, but individuals aren't always good at both. As demonstrated again in this article, Wall is.
I think the lasting lesson Wall has taught us is that while adequate documentation (e.g., the GNU Emacs manual) can serve the open source community itself well, documentation (and advocacy) that rises above mere adequacy can pave the way towards world domination.
There is an International Astronomical Union forum that has been convened on the topic "Designations of Stellar Companions." It has a number of astronomers from different backgrounds and countries, who are working on developing international standards. There are all sorts of conflicting goals. For example, it would be useful to have names that convey information about the physical nature of the system (e.g., A, B, C increasing outwards from the star), but usually the system is incompletely characterized at the time of discovery. But changing names as the system is more completely understood only increases the confusion. As in other fields, the IAU standardization process is incredibly tedious, and in the meantime astronomers are resorting to ad hoc designations that will lead to long-term complications maintaining "legacy names." But eventually the IAU will vote on a system, and the IAU's prestige as a standardizing body means that its decision is likely to be final.
No, it went into safe mode automatically when it lost the last gyroscope. My understanding is that since astronomical observations can't be done with two gyros, there simply wasn't provision made in the software for two-gyro manuevers. So it is incapacitated until the shuttle flight in December (which is itself being squeezed between wiring problems at one end and Y2K compliance concerns at the other).
This is a serious issue. The Space Telescope Science Institute has taken steps in the past to minimize the chance of Leonid damage to HST, orienting the aperture away from the Leonid direction. There were plans to do the same thing this year, but with the telescope in safe mode it is not possible to do the protective move. While the chances HST will be damaged are still very small, the potential loss if very high, so every bit of protection counts!
It is true that copyright law requires fixation, but I seriously doubt that many college lecturers would have any trouble meeting the (low) hurdle that the law requires. Even temporary storage in computer RAM has been sufficient to meet the fixation requirement. In almost any lecture situation, the lecturer has a prepared syllabus, lecture notes, possibly slides, and blackboards. (In intro physics courses at Princeton, we even photographed all of the blackboards.) All of these enjoy copyright protection. The analogy to MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech is flawed on two levels: the specific federal court ruling said that despite the fact that copyright was originally granted on the speech, copyright was lost only when MLK actively promoted wide use of the speech without restrictions -- and in any case the federal appeals court ruled last week that the district court had erred and returned the case for further consideration (ap story).
Fair use laws, it would seem, give a student a right to make even verbatim copies of a lecture for their own educational use. But though IANAL, I would be very surprised if the courts don't find the commercial distribution of such a clearly derivative work as detailed lecture notes to be a violation of copyright.
Ah, but gravitational radiation was much harder than gravitational lensing to understand theoretically. Eddington, for example, believed that the waves predicted by Einstein were really just an illusory effect caused by using a non-reasonable coordinate system to analyze the problem. This was a major debate that continued for nearly half a century until Bondi settled the theoretical questions within general relativity -- and then until around 1980 when the pulsar observations provided the experimental confirmation.
Despite the suggestion to the contrary in the MSNBC story, gravitational waves have already been shown to exist. Joe Taylor and Joel Weisberg and their collaborators have demonstrated, using a binary star system, that Einstein's prediction of the rate at which energy is radiated away by accelerating masses is correct to better than one half of one percent. (This was the subject of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Taylor and Hulse.) These results also prove, for example, that gravitational waves travel at the same velocity as electromagnetic waves (ie, the speed of light, or 300,000 km/s).
LIGO is an exciting project that may open a whole new field of gravitational wave astronomy and directly probe the properties of such exotic objects as black holes and neutron stars. But it will do it using well-established physical principles.
It is, perhaps, understandable when through ignorance an administrator of a small system misses a security hole that they haven't seen exploited. What I find appalling is the continued cluelessness of some so-called administrators after problems have been pointed out to them. I recently got a message from the Office of Space Science at NASA saying that their space science email list was being moved from NASA headquarters computers to an email list management service. The number one reason:
"A growing number of subscribers are not receiving the messages because their internet service providers (including WebTV and some others) are blocking e-mail sent from NASA HQ. They are blocking us because we have an 'Open Relay' on our mail server here.
This is a technical problem that cannot be fixed, according to my network people here."
Slashdot Mirror
Why adjust for solar time?
We adjust for solar time because UTC is an astronomical timescale, not a "count of seconds since a specific time." If "computer people" want a timescale that ignores leap seconds, they can use an atomic timescale like TAI (or GPS time, which is a constant offset from TAI). But choosing to standardize the internet on UTC and then complaining it is too hard to do the programming right is a little like buying a house next door to a turkey farm and complaining about the smell.
From today's Ohio Beacon Journal"
Short summary: globular clusters have very little gas and dust, and no active star formation. We think that essentially all of the formation of stars took place at the same time, when the cluster was born. Planets as we know them form as their parent stars are forming.
To make the planet recently requires finding a way to make a disk of protoplanetary material recently. It is not impossible to do that -- you might imagine disrupting a star, for example. But that would produce a very small disk: the natural size scale is a stellar radius, or thousands of times smaller than the current planetary orbit. So you then have to think of a way to remove more than 99.9% of the planet's binding energy, but not 100%. You might do it with two (not just one!) close encounters with other stars, but the likelihood is tiny, and you've got to preserve the inner binary too. It starts to sound much, much harder than forming a planet early.
There might be other ways to do it -- certainly my colleagues (and I) have been working hard on new scenarios. The next few months will be interesting, as we keep trying to shoot down the early formation hypothesis.
Wow, a cynic on slashdot.
As an author of the Science paper, I may be a bit biased, but I would suggest that the reason that it is exciting is precisely because it does verify predictions that came out of completely different observations a few years ago.
Our radio pulsar timing work showed that this system was a triple, and the mutual gravitational interactions between what you can reasonably think of as the neutron star/white dwarf orbit and the neutron star/planet orbit allowed us to measure the inclination of the neutron star/white dwarf orbit and predict the white dwarf mass. The work of Ford, Rasio, Sigurdsson, and others on theoretical modeling of the system suggested that it had to be "young" (the white dwarf formed a few hundred million years ago).
Hubble then went out and found the white dwarf, and showed that indeed, as predicted, it was both low mass and young. Classic science paradigm: predict and test. But if we were willing to live without that independent test, we could (and, actually, did) argue that we knew the mass of the planet some years ago. Now with the new test, it will be more widely accepted. And work will continue.
It is a neutron star. Evidence suggests that the radius of a neutron star is about 15 km. The fastest spinning pulsar rotates 642 times per second. That would mean the surface is moving at 20% the speed of light -- fast, but not TOO fast. This one is spinning six times slower.
Thanks. Science is a bit of a challenge to write for, because of the tight page constraints, but we do try to keep things as readable as possible.
It has been very interesting to me to watch the NASA publicity engine on this one from the inside. A press release like this is not written by the scientists who are involved. Space Telescope has professionals who do this. In general, though, they do a pretty good job. The best site may be this one, which has much more detail than the short version of the press release.
For those who want more technical detail, our 1999 paper discusses the observations that really confirmed the presence of the planet. The new paper updates this slightly with new constraints based on the white dwarf mass. Together with some work in the intervening years on explain the slight ellipticity of the neutron star/white dwarf orbit (using something called Korzoi pumping), these new results have led to the slightly smaller estimated planet mass.
PS. All of the pulsar timing analysis is done on Linux...
(I posted this story a week ago and it was rejected.)
I'm surprised that copyrighted laws are news to so many people. I've been frustrated for years that while you can look up almost all of our local munciple code on line, the building code sections are not published, because they incorporate by reference material copyrighted by the standards organizations. Check your own local code websites and I bet you'll find the same thing.
This odd situation isn't new; this has been standard practice for years. But nobody really noticed until we came to expect instant internet access to government information, since all local governments have copies of the copyrighted building codes available for inspection in the office.
There are some interesting implications of this ruling for software; for example, if a government agency requires software to interoperate with a proprietary standard (e.g., Word document format)....
Being the author of some scores of scholarly papers, let me assure you that there are no rules about author order, even within fields. Some particular group may have its own patterns (ie, we tend to put the lead student first), but it is usually impossible for an outsider to know for sure without asking. And I don't even know what you mean by "merit." The person who crunched the most data? The person who raised the most money? The person who pointed in the right direction and then stood out of the way? The person who spent the most nights writing code? The person who massaged the work into timeless prose? The person with the most famous/attention-getting name?
There are really only two things you should infer from an author list:
- every author contributed something essential to the work described, and
- every author has read and approved of the paper (unless explicit disagreements between authors are noted, as sometimes happens).
(Unfortunately, there are a number of famous cases where rule two breaks down, usually involving a senior scientist taking a share of a junior scientist's work while forgetting that they must also share the risk and blame if something goes wrong. So maybe there is only one rule.)Might as well advertise the original paper that Egan references, since I wrote it: it appeared in the Astrophysical Journal in 1995. Terr est rial Implications of Cosmological Gamma-Ray Bursts
Now, the current situation is totally different for a teacher who does not "fix" his or her lectures in a tangible medium, since federal copyright law requires fixation for protection. What this law does is extend copyright protection to all lectures regardless of fixation. Since a student (or other listener) usually doesn't even know whether the fixation requirement has been satisfied, the legality of selling lecture notes has always been questionable. This law just clarifies the situation with a uniform policy.
P.S. Nothing in the above should be interpreted as a statement on my personal belief of what a faculty member should do with his or her copyrights. Look, I'm a great believer in the GPL, and I think giving people the right to make noncommercial copies of my lectures is just the right thing to do. But just as code authors should be allowed to decide whether to use the GPL, I should have the right to choose the terms of copying of my intellectual work.
Excellent suggestions. Let me add
... (well...) But do you NEED to be entertained by some corporation? Can't we entertain ourselves?
5) go support some live musicians.
6) Make music with some friends. Shared purchasing habits do not make for a very exciting social life, no matter what the advertising people try to tell you. Get a little person-to-person interaction going.
CDs are fun. Movies are fun. TV
It seems to me that there are at least two ways to challenge this. First, if the RIAA is actually a union (as another poster suggested), then right to work laws in many states may protect independent musicians. Second, as I've argued before, it seems to me that barring willing copyright holders from sharing music via Napster or similar programs is a clear violation (in the US) of the right of freedom of association guaranteed by the bill of rights.
> I bet they sell this list to their advertisers too.
Not without violating federal law. FCC regulations prohibit a company from reusing or selling phone numbers captured by Automatic Number Identification devices on 800 or 900 lines. Companies may only reuse such information to market products/services that are directly related to a product/service that you have previously purchased from them.
I manage my own email system, and together with many other sysadmins I choose to block probable spam. I have a constitutional right to associate with others who share my ideas, interests, and goals. One way that we in the anti-spam community pursue our common interest is by sharing information through the RBL list -- reporting violators to MAPS and using information reported by others. Allowing a company to prevent one sysadmin to block sharing of information with another by censoring the RBL list prevents us from banding together to pursue cooperative action. In the words of Justice Harlan in NAACP v. Alabama: It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of `liberty' assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech.
Once you decide that it is OK for a site to ban "personal spiders," where do you stop? Would I be in violation of such a policy if I use Avantgo to download a hierarchy of pages into my Palm Pilot? Where, really, do you draw the line between acceptable "browsers" and unacceptable "spiders"? How would you feel about a web site whose copyright notice bars access to anyone using a web browser other than IE5? And just where does that leave my fair use rights to copy copyrighted material for research and education? Only legal with Canon copy machines?
The issue with internet taxation is whether states or other taxing entities can force out-of-state retailers to calculate and withhold the tax for them. Here the answer is clearly (at the moment) no, unless the business has a physical presence in the state (same as with catalog sales). Of course, without help from the retailer, the states have a hard time collecting tax. But just try to buy a car from a dealer in Oregon (with no tax) and import it into CA without paying CA sales tax. It doesn't matter how the sale takes place.
In my opinion, the answer, given the increasingly difficult enforcement of sales taxes, is not to change the law to put the enforcement burden on (often small) private businesses, but to eliminate sales tax in favor of a more straightforward, progressive taxation system such as income tax.
I agree wholeheartedly. But I would suggest that Larry Wall's contributions to both Perl and the open source world depend at least as much on his writing of English as his writing of code. I'm a working scientist. I use Perl. I love Perl. I use Python, Java, C, Fortran, Scheme, Awk, shell, and others I can't recall. They are all great languages. (Well, Fortran is fast.) There Is More Than One Way To Do It and There Is More Than One Language To Do It In.
What sets Perl apart are the beautiful books by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Randal Schwartz, etc., that set an early and very high standard for documentation of free software. Good writing depends on the same clear thinking that good coding requires, but individuals aren't always good at both. As demonstrated again in this article, Wall is.
I think the lasting lesson Wall has taught us is that while adequate documentation (e.g., the GNU Emacs manual) can serve the open source community itself well, documentation (and advocacy) that rises above mere adequacy can pave the way towards world domination.
There is an International Astronomical Union forum that has been convened on the topic "Designations of Stellar Companions." It has a number of astronomers from different backgrounds and countries, who are working on developing international standards. There are all sorts of conflicting goals. For example, it would be useful to have names that convey information about the physical nature of the system (e.g., A, B, C increasing outwards from the star), but usually the system is incompletely characterized at the time of discovery. But changing names as the system is more completely understood only increases the confusion. As in other fields, the IAU standardization process is incredibly tedious, and in the meantime astronomers are resorting to ad hoc designations that will lead to long-term complications maintaining "legacy names." But eventually the IAU will vote on a system, and the IAU's prestige as a standardizing body means that its decision is likely to be final.
No, it went into safe mode automatically when
it lost the last gyroscope. My understanding is that since astronomical observations can't be done with two gyros, there simply wasn't provision made in the software for two-gyro manuevers. So it is incapacitated until the shuttle flight in December (which is itself being squeezed between wiring problems at one end and Y2K compliance concerns at the other).
This is a serious issue. The Space Telescope Science Institute has taken steps in the past to minimize the chance of Leonid damage to HST, orienting the aperture away from the Leonid direction. There were plans to do the same thing this year, but with the telescope in safe mode it is not possible to do the protective move. While the chances HST will be damaged are still very small, the potential loss if very high, so every bit of protection counts!
Nice try, but still not right.
It is true that copyright law requires fixation, but I seriously doubt that many college lecturers would have any trouble meeting the (low) hurdle that the law requires. Even temporary storage in computer RAM has been sufficient to meet the fixation requirement. In almost any lecture situation, the lecturer has a prepared syllabus, lecture notes, possibly slides, and blackboards. (In intro physics courses at Princeton, we even photographed all of the blackboards.) All of these enjoy copyright protection. The analogy to MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech is flawed on two levels: the specific federal court ruling said that despite the fact that copyright was originally granted on the speech, copyright was lost only when MLK actively promoted wide use of the speech without restrictions -- and in any case the federal appeals court ruled last week that the district court had erred and returned the case for further consideration (ap story).
Fair use laws, it would seem, give a student a right to make even verbatim copies of a lecture for their own educational use. But though IANAL, I would be very surprised if the courts don't find the commercial distribution of such a clearly derivative work as detailed lecture notes to be a violation of copyright.
This is the LISA project, which hopes to launch in 2008: see NASA's LISA homepage.
Ah, but gravitational radiation was much harder than gravitational lensing to understand theoretically. Eddington, for example, believed that the waves predicted by Einstein were really just an illusory effect caused by using a non-reasonable coordinate system to analyze the problem. This was a major debate that continued for nearly half a century until Bondi settled the theoretical questions within general relativity -- and then until around 1980 when the pulsar observations provided the experimental confirmation.
Despite the suggestion to the contrary in the MSNBC story, gravitational waves have already been shown to exist. Joe Taylor and Joel Weisberg and their collaborators have demonstrated, using a binary star system, that Einstein's prediction of the rate at which energy is radiated away by accelerating masses is correct to better than one half of one percent. (This was the subject of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Taylor and Hulse.) These results also prove, for example, that gravitational waves travel at the same velocity as electromagnetic waves (ie, the speed of light, or 300,000 km/s).
LIGO is an exciting project that may open a whole new field of gravitational wave astronomy and directly probe the properties of such exotic objects as black holes and neutron stars. But it will do it using well-established physical principles.