> The process
is pretty similar, you implant magnets in the remaining bone structure, or attach them to a titanium superstructure implanted in the bone if the defect is very large, and attach a silicon[e] prosthesis using those.
NOTICE: Under normal usage conditions, your NewFace(tm) is designed to give you and your significant other(s) many years of satisfaction. Note that in the event of suspected brain tumor requiring MRI scan for diagnosis, warranty on your NewFace(tm) is null and void.
> SGI Monitors are Sync-on-green and there are plenty of them that have dual connectors.. both 13w3 (sgi/sun connector) and HD15 (IBM PC). HD15 is also easily convertable to DB15 available on most macs (except some new ones with HD15).
<AOL>me too</AOL>
I've modded an SGI (Sony OEM) GDM20D11, sync-on-green, to run on a Sun Ultra 5 workstation with separate sync. I followed the instructions I found on Adam Kropelin's site: http://www.kroptech.com/gdm20d11mod/.
> As Big Brother starts to collate that data I expect some interesting patterns will emerge. The famous "bought incubus CD -->probable anachristDO NOT issue that speeding ticket, you'll be embarassed on court!--"
"THREAT CODE DMCA: Hasn't bought a CD in 3 years. Hasn't bought a Microsoft operating system in 5 years. Owns twelve computers and regularly buys RAM, hard drives, CPUs, motherboards. Probable DMCA violator. Hold for questioning."
(...5 seconds later...)
"EXCEPTION CODE 7337: Belay hold-for-questioning order. Deep search reveals regular purchases of blue LEDs, ball-bearing fans, spray paint, and plexiglass. Allow suspect to board aircraft, then send crew to raid suspect's residence while suspect is in transit. Objective - seize suspect's kickass modded case!"
> IIRC some of the Americans for first found them in Afghanistan also belived them to be real...
ROFLMAO -- if you can find a URL, please post it. That'd be even funnier than the Taliban thinking they were real. (And would probably the the foundation of a lot of Army jokes about the Marines;-)
> > There's only one fist that needs to be raised here, and the FBI knows exactly where to raise it. > > Best. Quote. Ever. > >
Tackhead, you just made my day:)
Much obliged...
...now if only we had a story about a spammer who called his website "swingthewoodenmallet.com";-)
> You have violated the Patriot Act by insinuating the FBI engages in anal fisting.
It's his bank account that deserves reaming by the FBI, not his bunghole.
(His bunghole can be more effectively taken care of by his cellmates anyways. Ever since J. Edgar Hoover left the business, the FBI's track record on homoeroticism has been decidedly lackluster;-)
> Heck no, I say let him take his anarchist thoughts to prison and see how many guys
doing over a nickel of time feel. *I think he will get his butt kicked every freaking day* in prison!!* (just for being a wus)
...huh? He'll have his butt "kicked"?
Lemme get this straight. You throw him into the cell with Bubba he says "Raise the fist, brother! Raise the fist!"
I can think of a lot four-letter verbs that'll describe what happens to his butt that evening. "Kick" isn't one of 'em.
(Ah, if only all skr1pt k1ddi3z could meet the same fate;-)
> Put up anarchist sites, but provide bogus info. Setup bomb-making instructions that make silly putty or something. The more sites like that that pop-up, the less likely a terrorist will discover the correct bomb-making papers. The point is to fight terrorists by making the internet a place that they can't trust... > > I wonder how the FBI would react to those kinds of sites...
Particularly seeing as how the 1960s semi-humorous "how to build a nuke" textfiles were actually found in Afghanistan, which tells you something about the odds that 11th-century minds are gonna be able to build 20th-century weapons, I thought this was a great idea.
Then I remembered what happened to the guy who set up BonsaiKitten... oops.
> How is this any different from the already-established right of some wackjob or another to publish the
Anarchist's Cookbook? Is it OK to publish bomb-making instructions on paper, but not on the web?
As you pointed out later in your post - he also defaced websites and distributed DDoS tools. That's what he's going down for. Americans are quite free to publish the Anarchist's Cookbook, Mein Kampf, or Das Kapital on their own websites.
The right to swing your fist ends at the nose of the guy you're swingin' it at. Similarly, this skript kiddie's right to raise his fist ends at the router separating his network from the rest of the world.
> So, AOL/TW retained the IP, and Infogrames just got the name...then that's another story...I thought that
Infogrames got the whole thing..
Oops. I may be wrong about it being AOL/TW's IP, then. (Infogrames, borged by Hasbro, weren't they?) I think all they did was release games that used the trademarks of the old classics, not the actual code/firmware.
So I don't know who actually owns the ROM code. (But I'll stand by my original point, which is that whoever owns the rights to the firmware has better lawyers than the collectors;-)
Yet another argument for having copyrights exist for a limited term. As in, "a hell of a lot more limited than the Sonny Bono Mouse Copyright Protection Act". IMNSHO, it should be no longer than the length currently in effect for patents, and if not renewed periodically, the works should lapse into the public domain.
> > raisethefist.com is running out of current allocated bandwidth. In just two days we have used
over 130MB of data transfer. The limit is 512MB per month. [... ] > I think it's a bad idea to link directly to his site.. We could end up costing him a lot of money in bandwidth terms.
1) L33t d00d defaces websites and acknowledges that he knew doing so was illegal.
2) L33t d00d posts denial-of-service tools on the defaced websites.
3) L33t d00d then whines about his bandwidth bills arising from the Slashdot effect.
Payback's a bitch, ain't it, skr1pt k1ddi3?
There's only one fist that needs to be raised here, and the FBI knows exactly where to raise it. And after the FBI's finished reaming out his bank account, I hope his bandwidth provider takes whatever's left.
> One can only hope that this guy has made backups of the ROMs on these boards (not likely). Maybe we should just be happy that these prototypes are saved for now.
Actually, it's extremely likely that the ROMs have been backed up. I don't know any serious collector of arcade memorabilia who doesn't have an EPROM burner. Many also have universal programmers, so GALs, PALs, FPGAs, and (of more interest to the 80s scene) bipolar PROMs are also archivable.
The problem with prototypes is that there are only a few copies in existence, and the intellectual property of Atari was borged by Warner. Warner was borged by Time. And Time-Warner was borged by AOL.
Unlike maintaining a publicly-accessible ROM archive of games where tens of thousands of copies were produced, the owner of a prototype is painfully aware that releasing the ROM images is tantamount to installing large glowing red light on one's ass, saying "AOL/TW lawyers, one credit, one play, insert quarter-million in legal fees here".
> semi-rich, mostly white, baby-boomer audience who fancy themselves
enlightened and cultured because they prefer light theatre to sit-coms (unless those sit-coms are British), pops concerts
and soft AOR rock to "crazy modern music" and MTV, Julia Child to Martha Stewart, the thoughtless pseudo-leftism of
the American university to the thoughtless pseudo-rightism of dirty blue-collar slobs, and the white-bread consumerism
of the Crate & Barrel to the white-trash consumerism of the Home Shopping Club.
Hey, Julia can cook. She's not afraid to dollop half a stick of butter and a whole head of garlic into a recipe when it's called for. Julia's mad c00x0ring sk1llz wipe the friggin' pan with Martha's.
Of course, light theatre bites just as bad as sitcoms, and even though eMpTyV doesn't play music anymore, that "light rock"... *shudder*.
Yeah, OK. You're right about most of the stereotypes of PBS viewers. But lay off Julia and the French Cuisine, man. Step the fsck back;-)
> Then why does the moon have an entirely different mineral composition?
The Moon isn't a remnant of the original impactor, it coalesced from debris thrown off after impact.
D00dz with a hell of a lot more computing power than I have have done computational fluid dynamic simulations of an off-center impact of a Mars-sized impactor on a mostly-molten proto-Earth with a bunch of silicates floating on top of a more dense core.
The most common result is that the two bodies coalesce, but with a lot of crap (particularly from the upper, silicate-enriched layers of proto-Earth) thrown into orbit.
That is, what we see today, namely an Earth with lots of metals, and a silicate-rich moon.
(This makes sense -- the competing theory to the impact theory is that the Earth and Moon formed simultaneously out of the same accumulating cloud of dust. One of the reasons this theory has been deprecated in favor of the impact theory is that it doesn't account for the mineral differences between Earth and Luna.)
> For now, no one knows whether our solar system represents a common method of formation and evolution.
True. And as for habitability, has anyone considered the importance of plate tectonics and tides for life? Or the possibility of a causal relationship between massive collisions early in a planet's existence, and extended periods where plate tectonics continues?
Compare Earth, Venus, and Mars:
Venus: Probably no massive collision early in its life. Boring world, no way for CO2 to be recycled into a big liquid water carbon sink. Looks geologically-dead.
Mars: A mostly-geologically-dead world, too small to retain much of its original heat, and, of course, no massive collision early in its life. Had liquid water once upon a time.
Earth: Smacked by a Mars-sized impactor early in its life. Debris coalesced to form huge satellite called "the Moon". Frighteningly geologically-active. Big-ass oceans sink lots of CO2. Plate tectonics keeps it underground rather than letting it vent into the air.
A sample size of "three" is pretty slim, but to my (untrained - any exogeologist-types out there care to comment?) mind, the facts that Earth got whacked and the fact that the Earth still has a thin crust (while Mars, and more interestingly, Venus, have cooled off) appear to be more than coincidence.
Bring in an exobiologist -- perhaps "tides" (think "tidal pools" are handy for forming life. Also think about the impact that tectonic activity (and life) has in recycling CO2 on Earth.
Does anyone know if Earth's core is "too hot" to be accounted for simply by heat from 4.5 billion years of radioactive decay of its initial components?
I'm speculating that the impact that created the Moon also added a metric buttload of heat to the still-forming planet's core, while simultaneously stripping the proto-Earth of some of its lighter silicates. If the impactor came from "far enough away" in the solar system, it may have brought a metric buttload of water ice with it. The result was a glob of metal-enriched rock, water, water, everywhere, a double-planet system with tides (useful for future development of life) and recycling of crustal material via plate tectonics due to the planet's thin crust.
(jumping off the deep end into wild-ass speculation now...)
Perhaps this is another reason to go to Pluto. Perhaps the Pluto/Charon system formed in a manner similar to Earth/Moon. If we found evidence that Pluto had a metallic core, and that it was warmer than could be accounted for by radioactive decay...
If we assume (or can demonstrate) that things like plate tectonics and tides are "good" for the formation of life (at least, they seem "better" than the situations on Mars and Venus that arose from the lack thereof), it'd
be nice to know that early massive impacts were common. It'd be even nicer to know that there was a correlation between such impacts and "warm" planets with lots of water.
(Sigh... still holding out for the day we see the spectrum of light reflected from a rocky planet in orbit around another star... a spectrum showing lots of oxygen that should have reacted itself away by now unless something on the planet's surface was replenishing the supply...)
> He pointed out that the very nature of orbit means that object (unless altered by unexpected impact) will eventually crash into that object which it orbits (IANAPhysicist and neither is he so I'm sure there are exceptions)
Like "Everything in orbit not affected by atmospheric drag". Meaning: Pretty much damn near everything in orbit.
> so spiraling closer to the sun (however slowly) could definitely contribute to global warming (on an exponential scale when graphed over time).
You're right about one thing, though. Neither you nor your friend is a physicist;-)
Objects in orbit around the Earth sometimes fall to earth, because they're in low enough orbits that atmospheric drag is a problem.
Other objects in orbit around Earth (like the Moon) are far enough away that there is no atmospheric drag, and they remain in orbit indefinitely. (Ignoring tidal effects.)
The Earth is most assuredly not spiralling closer to the sun. That would require that the Sun gain significant mass during its life, which Just Doesn't Happen. (Nor are we spiraling away from the Sun in any measurable fashion. Yes, the Sun loses 4000 tons of mass every second (by turning matter into energy), and that may sound like a lot of mass, but it's negligible in comparison to the total mass of the Sun.)
And as for global warming, the "ozone hole" is about an increase in ultraviolet radiation hitting the Earth, potentially causing an increase in skin cancer rates, as well as destruction of habitats such as the top few centimeters of the oceans (read: "plankton, significan portion of the food chain"). The ozone layer has nothing to do with global warming.
Your friend is also a pretty piss-poor climatologist, as well as a lousy physicist. (Though I suppose that still makes him an environmentalist;-)
Lest you think I'm slagging all environmentalists, I'm not. I'm only slagging the clueless ones.
My personal opinion is that the evidence is pretty damn clear that CFCs are responsible for the damage to the ozone layer. I don't think the evidence is anywhere near as clear that "man" is "responsible" for "global warming" -- that is, records of Earth's climate have shown temperature changes of 10-15 degrees Centigrate without human involvement, so where's the evidence that our CO2 emissions are hazardous?
To summarize my position: The ozone layer risk was/is real. Global warming is bunk. The two issues have little to do with each other. Neither issue has anything to do with orbital mechanics.
> actually the sentence is "the quick brown fox jumpS over the lazy dog."
>
Because the "ed" of jumped is unnecessary, since the "d" is in dog, and the "e" is in the and over, but the "s" of jumps isn't otherwise present.
>
But boy would the attempts at poll stuffing on this one be funny, since most poll stuffers have the spelling of your average uneducated 12-year-old.
How 'bout if you live in Europe:
Federated rats vacate West Texas! Steve evades scattered egg beaters!
Red cabbages are savage weeds! Cassette#5 reverberates! Dweeb gadgets
waste $$$ Caesar was a great deceased badass! Retarded Bart eats wet
sewage! Ferrets wear sweaters! Etcetera!
...and if you live in the US:
join my hippy union. you pin holly on johnny; i jump on you only.
in my opinion, you look plump; kill my unholy puppy.
...leading to the obvious conclusion that European touch-typing birds are more left-wing than Americans.
*rimshot*
> Blatant sarcasm aside, this is moderately interesting. Any chances we'll see a linux client?
An interesting variation would be to h4x0r a PIC in-line with a PS/2 or AT-style keyboard connector. Log the pressing of keys in hardware and display a running count on an LCD display.
In addition to knowing how many keys you'd pressed, you'd have a high probability of knowing if someone was fux0ring with your keyboard while you were away.
> I can just see those guidelines now:
>
>When marketing to a technically-inclined demographic, refrain from inserting the phrase "ALL YOUR PRIVACY ARE BELONG TO US" in the
email. It's not only distatsteful, it's downright cliche [wired.com].
And for chrissakes, if you're an ISP, make sure that when you spam your own customers, you
learn to code HTML!
I wonder if Laura Crow (whose name appears in the broken links to a local hard drive in the aforementioned spam, and she writes her HTML in the "Temporary%20Internet%20Files" directory on her local hard drive, judging from the first few lines in the comments.) is Bernie Shifman's sister?
(And how the fsck many of these spams did Earthpink send out?)
> > The sad thing was, until I finally convinced the executive VP to bring the hammer down on the project, I was forced to compose graphical HTML-ized spam emails.
> >
I hope you were at least considering putting some obvious, easily-recognized string in, say, subject, so that most people's existing filters would trash the SPAM immediately.:)
You mean like <HTML>?;-)
Actually, I think I know what happened to the bimbo in question. Or a clone of her, by the name of Laura "Boy, am I ever gonna have to eat some" Crow. She works at Earthpink. I got a pile of spam from her this morning.
I know it's from Laura, because her spam has her name in the comments as the document's creator, and I know Laura's somewhat bimbo-like because the spam had a bunch of IMG SRC tags pointing to "D:\11 12 01 Laura Crow\New
Emails\CidcoEmail_FINALJAN_020121_files\t(1).gif"
Way to go, Laura Crow! Ur 733t HTML h4x0ring sk1llz r so 733t, u h0t b@b3!
1) Spammers lie.
2) If you think a spammer's telling the truth, see Rule #1.
3) Spammers are stupid.
Rule #3 in action again.
But if you want a glimpse at the future the DMA proposes for "opt-out", look for the opt-out link in Laura's spam:
It's a Mailto: tag to "mailto:opt-out@earthlink.net?subject=Opt-out_Cidc o012202"
It doesn't opt you out of all Earthpink-generated spam. Only Laura's Cidco spam. When Earthpink wants to spam you again for another company, or even when Earthpink wants to send the next Cidco spam (hopefully coded by someone who knows how to make web bugs work, unlike our dear Laura) it'll be a different list, and a different Subject: in the opt-out request.
Doesn't that make you feel all pink and squishy inside?
> [It's an election year, and voters have had it with the DMA] Spammers and Telemarketers...."surrender must be immediate and unconditional, prepare to be boarded
or destroyed"
That'd be a great campaign slogan for a pro-privacy candidate: "If you are not with the public, you are with the telemarketers!"
> Their "do not call" lists might be scams, but the state government Do Not Call Registry does work.
And that's precisely why we're seeing the DMA tout its own do-not-call registry.
Because they're scared shitless that Congress will be deluged with complaints from citizens who've seen through the scam, and will actually do something about it.
This article about the DMA "please don't spam me" list is more of the same -- they're on the run, and they fear Congress will do to their email spamming dreams what it's threatening to do with their telemarketers by means of an FTC-mandated and government-enforced national Do Not Call registry.
Write your Congressman and tell him that you don't want the fox guarding the henhouse, and to support the FTC's anti-telemarketing proposals.
Slashdot Mirror
NOTICE: Under normal usage conditions, your NewFace(tm) is designed to give you and your significant other(s) many years of satisfaction. Note that in the event of suspected brain tumor requiring MRI scan for diagnosis, warranty on your NewFace(tm) is null and void.
<AOL>me too</AOL>
I've modded an SGI (Sony OEM) GDM20D11, sync-on-green, to run on a Sun Ultra 5 workstation with separate sync. I followed the instructions I found on Adam Kropelin's site: http://www.kroptech.com/gdm20d11mod/.
Another guy (http://perso.libertysurf.fr/lgranjon/electronique /sgi2pc.htm) has documented hacks for the GDM20D10 (Sun) and GDM20D11 (SGI) to run on a PC. It's in French, but the important information is language-independent.
Better yet...
"and membership or sponsorship in organizations which adversely affect the public's confidence in the space station or its partners. "
"THREAT CODE DMCA: Hasn't bought a CD in 3 years. Hasn't bought a Microsoft operating system in 5 years. Owns twelve computers and regularly buys RAM, hard drives, CPUs, motherboards. Probable DMCA violator. Hold for questioning."
(...5 seconds later...)
"EXCEPTION CODE 7337: Belay hold-for-questioning order. Deep search reveals regular purchases of blue LEDs, ball-bearing fans, spray paint, and plexiglass. Allow suspect to board aircraft, then send crew to raid suspect's residence while suspect is in transit. Objective - seize suspect's kickass modded case!"
ROFLMAO -- if you can find a URL, please post it. That'd be even funnier than the Taliban thinking they were real. (And would probably the the foundation of a lot of Army jokes about the Marines ;-)
>
> Best. Quote. Ever.
>
> Tackhead, you just made my day
Much obliged...
It's his bank account that deserves reaming by the FBI, not his bunghole.
(His bunghole can be more effectively taken care of by his cellmates anyways. Ever since J. Edgar Hoover left the business, the FBI's track record on homoeroticism has been decidedly lackluster ;-)
Lemme get this straight. You throw him into the cell with Bubba he says "Raise the fist, brother! Raise the fist!"
I can think of a lot four-letter verbs that'll describe what happens to his butt that evening. "Kick" isn't one of 'em.
(Ah, if only all skr1pt k1ddi3z could meet the same fate ;-)
>
> I wonder how the FBI would react to those kinds of sites...
Particularly seeing as how the 1960s semi-humorous "how to build a nuke" textfiles were actually found in Afghanistan, which tells you something about the odds that 11th-century minds are gonna be able to build 20th-century weapons, I thought this was a great idea.
Then I remembered what happened to the guy who set up BonsaiKitten... oops.
As you pointed out later in your post - he also defaced websites and distributed DDoS tools. That's what he's going down for. Americans are quite free to publish the Anarchist's Cookbook, Mein Kampf, or Das Kapital on their own websites.
The right to swing your fist ends at the nose of the guy you're swingin' it at. Similarly, this skript kiddie's right to raise his fist ends at the router separating his network from the rest of the world.
Oops. I may be wrong about it being AOL/TW's IP, then. (Infogrames, borged by Hasbro, weren't they?) I think all they did was release games that used the trademarks of the old classics, not the actual code/firmware.
So I don't know who actually owns the ROM code. (But I'll stand by my original point, which is that whoever owns the rights to the firmware has better lawyers than the collectors ;-)
Yet another argument for having copyrights exist for a limited term. As in, "a hell of a lot more limited than the Sonny Bono Mouse Copyright Protection Act". IMNSHO, it should be no longer than the length currently in effect for patents, and if not renewed periodically, the works should lapse into the public domain.
> I think it's a bad idea to link directly to his site.. We could end up costing him a lot of money in bandwidth terms.
1) L33t d00d defaces websites and acknowledges that he knew doing so was illegal.
2) L33t d00d posts denial-of-service tools on the defaced websites.
3) L33t d00d then whines about his bandwidth bills arising from the Slashdot effect.
Payback's a bitch, ain't it, skr1pt k1ddi3?
There's only one fist that needs to be raised here, and the FBI knows exactly where to raise it. And after the FBI's finished reaming out his bank account, I hope his bandwidth provider takes whatever's left.
Actually, it's extremely likely that the ROMs have been backed up. I don't know any serious collector of arcade memorabilia who doesn't have an EPROM burner. Many also have universal programmers, so GALs, PALs, FPGAs, and (of more interest to the 80s scene) bipolar PROMs are also archivable.
The problem with prototypes is that there are only a few copies in existence, and the intellectual property of Atari was borged by Warner. Warner was borged by Time. And Time-Warner was borged by AOL.
Unlike maintaining a publicly-accessible ROM archive of games where tens of thousands of copies were produced, the owner of a prototype is painfully aware that releasing the ROM images is tantamount to installing large glowing red light on one's ass, saying "AOL/TW lawyers, one credit, one play, insert quarter-million in legal fees here".
Hey, Julia can cook. She's not afraid to dollop half a stick of butter and a whole head of garlic into a recipe when it's called for. Julia's mad c00x0ring sk1llz wipe the friggin' pan with Martha's.
Of course, light theatre bites just as bad as sitcoms, and even though eMpTyV doesn't play music anymore, that "light rock"... *shudder*.
Yeah, OK. You're right about most of the stereotypes of PBS viewers. But lay off Julia and the French Cuisine, man. Step the fsck back ;-)
The Moon isn't a remnant of the original impactor, it coalesced from debris thrown off after impact.
D00dz with a hell of a lot more computing power than I have have done computational fluid dynamic simulations of an off-center impact of a Mars-sized impactor on a mostly-molten proto-Earth with a bunch of silicates floating on top of a more dense core.
The most common result is that the two bodies coalesce, but with a lot of crap (particularly from the upper, silicate-enriched layers of proto-Earth) thrown into orbit.
That is, what we see today, namely an Earth with lots of metals, and a silicate-rich moon.
(This makes sense -- the competing theory to the impact theory is that the Earth and Moon formed simultaneously out of the same accumulating cloud of dust. One of the reasons this theory has been deprecated in favor of the impact theory is that it doesn't account for the mineral differences between Earth and Luna.)
True. And as for habitability, has anyone considered the importance of plate tectonics and tides for life? Or the possibility of a causal relationship between massive collisions early in a planet's existence, and extended periods where plate tectonics continues?
Compare Earth, Venus, and Mars:
Venus: Probably no massive collision early in its life. Boring world, no way for CO2 to be recycled into a big liquid water carbon sink. Looks geologically-dead.
Mars: A mostly-geologically-dead world, too small to retain much of its original heat, and, of course, no massive collision early in its life. Had liquid water once upon a time.
Earth: Smacked by a Mars-sized impactor early in its life. Debris coalesced to form huge satellite called "the Moon". Frighteningly geologically-active. Big-ass oceans sink lots of CO2. Plate tectonics keeps it underground rather than letting it vent into the air.
A sample size of "three" is pretty slim, but to my (untrained - any exogeologist-types out there care to comment?) mind, the facts that Earth got whacked and the fact that the Earth still has a thin crust (while Mars, and more interestingly, Venus, have cooled off) appear to be more than coincidence.
Bring in an exobiologist -- perhaps "tides" (think "tidal pools" are handy for forming life. Also think about the impact that tectonic activity (and life) has in recycling CO2 on Earth.
Does anyone know if Earth's core is "too hot" to be accounted for simply by heat from 4.5 billion years of radioactive decay of its initial components?
I'm speculating that the impact that created the Moon also added a metric buttload of heat to the still-forming planet's core, while simultaneously stripping the proto-Earth of some of its lighter silicates. If the impactor came from "far enough away" in the solar system, it may have brought a metric buttload of water ice with it. The result was a glob of metal-enriched rock, water, water, everywhere, a double-planet system with tides (useful for future development of life) and recycling of crustal material via plate tectonics due to the planet's thin crust.
(jumping off the deep end into wild-ass speculation now...)
Perhaps this is another reason to go to Pluto. Perhaps the Pluto/Charon system formed in a manner similar to Earth/Moon. If we found evidence that Pluto had a metallic core, and that it was warmer than could be accounted for by radioactive decay...
If we assume (or can demonstrate) that things like plate tectonics and tides are "good" for the formation of life (at least, they seem "better" than the situations on Mars and Venus that arose from the lack thereof), it'd be nice to know that early massive impacts were common. It'd be even nicer to know that there was a correlation between such impacts and "warm" planets with lots of water.
(Sigh... still holding out for the day we see the spectrum of light reflected from a rocky planet in orbit around another star... a spectrum showing lots of oxygen that should have reacted itself away by now unless something on the planet's surface was replenishing the supply...)
If the answer here is "No"...
> 2. Will an M1 Abrams fit in an 8'x8'x20' container?
Like "Everything in orbit not affected by atmospheric drag". Meaning: Pretty much damn near everything in orbit.
> so spiraling closer to the sun (however slowly) could definitely contribute to global warming (on an exponential scale when graphed over time).
You're right about one thing, though. Neither you nor your friend is a physicist ;-)
Objects in orbit around the Earth sometimes fall to earth, because they're in low enough orbits that atmospheric drag is a problem.
Other objects in orbit around Earth (like the Moon) are far enough away that there is no atmospheric drag, and they remain in orbit indefinitely. (Ignoring tidal effects.)
The Earth is most assuredly not spiralling closer to the sun. That would require that the Sun gain significant mass during its life, which Just Doesn't Happen. (Nor are we spiraling away from the Sun in any measurable fashion. Yes, the Sun loses 4000 tons of mass every second (by turning matter into energy), and that may sound like a lot of mass, but it's negligible in comparison to the total mass of the Sun.)
And as for global warming, the "ozone hole" is about an increase in ultraviolet radiation hitting the Earth, potentially causing an increase in skin cancer rates, as well as destruction of habitats such as the top few centimeters of the oceans (read: "plankton, significan portion of the food chain"). The ozone layer has nothing to do with global warming.
Your friend is also a pretty piss-poor climatologist, as well as a lousy physicist. (Though I suppose that still makes him an environmentalist ;-)
Lest you think I'm slagging all environmentalists, I'm not. I'm only slagging the clueless ones.
My personal opinion is that the evidence is pretty damn clear that CFCs are responsible for the damage to the ozone layer. I don't think the evidence is anywhere near as clear that "man" is "responsible" for "global warming" -- that is, records of Earth's climate have shown temperature changes of 10-15 degrees Centigrate without human involvement, so where's the evidence that our CO2 emissions are hazardous?
To summarize my position: The ozone layer risk was/is real. Global warming is bunk. The two issues have little to do with each other. Neither issue has anything to do with orbital mechanics.
Reminds me of my favorite header trick: Variants of:
X-A_Mail_Client_Is_Not_A_Web_Browser: <HTML><BLINK><H1>12:00<P>
> Because the "ed" of jumped is unnecessary, since the "d" is in dog, and the "e" is in the and over, but the "s" of jumps isn't otherwise present.
> But boy would the attempts at poll stuffing on this one be funny, since most poll stuffers have the spelling of your average uneducated 12-year-old.
How 'bout if you live in Europe:
An interesting variation would be to h4x0r a PIC in-line with a PS/2 or AT-style keyboard connector. Log the pressing of keys in hardware and display a running count on an LCD display.
In addition to knowing how many keys you'd pressed, you'd have a high probability of knowing if someone was fux0ring with your keyboard while you were away.
>
>When marketing to a technically-inclined demographic, refrain from inserting the phrase "ALL YOUR PRIVACY ARE BELONG TO US" in the email. It's not only distatsteful, it's downright cliche [wired.com].
And for chrissakes, if you're an ISP, make sure that when you spam your own customers, you learn to code HTML!
I wonder if Laura Crow (whose name appears in the broken links to a local hard drive in the aforementioned spam, and she writes her HTML in the "Temporary%20Internet%20Files" directory on her local hard drive, judging from the first few lines in the comments.) is Bernie Shifman's sister?
(And how the fsck many of these spams did Earthpink send out?)
>
> I hope you were at least considering putting some obvious, easily-recognized string in, say, subject, so that most people's existing filters would trash the SPAM immediately.
You mean like <HTML>? ;-)
Actually, I think I know what happened to the bimbo in question. Or a clone of her, by the name of Laura "Boy, am I ever gonna have to eat some" Crow. She works at Earthpink. I got a pile of spam from her this morning.
I know it's from Laura, because her spam has her name in the comments as the document's creator, and I know Laura's somewhat bimbo-like because the spam had a bunch of IMG SRC tags pointing to "D:\11 12 01 Laura Crow\New Emails\CidcoEmail_FINALJAN_020121_files\t(1).gif"
Way to go, Laura Crow! Ur 733t HTML h4x0ring sk1llz r so 733t, u h0t b@b3!
A little Googling has revealed that I'm not the only one getting Laura's spam.
1) Spammers lie.
2) If you think a spammer's telling the truth, see Rule #1.
3) Spammers are stupid.
Rule #3 in action again.
But if you want a glimpse at the future the DMA proposes for "opt-out", look for the opt-out link in Laura's spam:
It's a Mailto: tag to "mailto:opt-out@earthlink.net?subject=Opt-out_Cidc o012202"
It doesn't opt you out of all Earthpink-generated spam. Only Laura's Cidco spam. When Earthpink wants to spam you again for another company, or even when Earthpink wants to send the next Cidco spam (hopefully coded by someone who knows how to make web bugs work, unlike our dear Laura) it'll be a different list, and a different Subject: in the opt-out request.
Doesn't that make you feel all pink and squishy inside?
That'd be a great campaign slogan for a pro-privacy candidate: "If you are not with the public, you are with the telemarketers!"
And that's precisely why we're seeing the DMA tout its own do-not-call registry.
Because they're scared shitless that Congress will be deluged with complaints from citizens who've seen through the scam, and will actually do something about it.
This article about the DMA "please don't spam me" list is more of the same -- they're on the run, and they fear Congress will do to their email spamming dreams what it's threatening to do with their telemarketers by means of an FTC-mandated and government-enforced national Do Not Call registry.
Write your Congressman and tell him that you don't want the fox guarding the henhouse, and to support the FTC's anti-telemarketing proposals.