> So what? Sometimes it's very important to popularize space exploration.
What's more likely to interest kids in space?
1) $125M to buy a screen saver with a picture of Earth that could be done today with a little software and a data feed from our fleet of weather satellites?
or
2) $125M to buy a nice economy Mars probe.
(Of course, most of our cheap-o Mars probes don't arouse interest in space exploration because NASA fsckups turn them into Earth-originated meteorites leaving little craters on the Martian surface, but that's beside the point;-)
Re:This is pretty old
on
Triana Mothballed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
> The Washington Post had a story on this a while ago.
> Rhythms NetConnections Inc.
(OTC Bulletin Board: RTHMQ), a provider of broadband communication services,
...will soon no longer be a provider of broadband communication services. We're not pining for the fjords, we've passed on, joined the choir invisible...
> Wow, thats depressing, especially considering that message went through the Chinese 'everyone happy' Firewall(TM) >I wonder what this message said *before* it went through!...because the firewall was "hacked by Chinese!"
> It is an utter defeat for Bush to say, "Well, those babies are dead
anyway." It is not fundamentally different from saying this to Mengele:
>
"You Nazis have committed unspeakable acts of utter barbarity against the Jews! By the way, can we see your
research files?"
If you can find an original Pernkopf Anatomy Atlas and compare it with versions currently in print, you'll see that this is exactly what happened.
(Not addressed at you -- I'm just taking this line because it's the core assertion of those who oppose such research, and you phrased it perfectly.)
So I'll take it at face value. I'll make an argument based on the assumption (IMHO erroneous) that a single fertilized cell constitutes life.
Why must embryonic stem cell research destroy life?
They're stem cells. Undifferentiated. If you wanted to "clone" one, you'd do it the same way you made an identical twin -- wait for it to divide, and separate the two cells.
If one stem cell is a human life, why not let it divide, grab one for research, and stick the other - identical cell - back into the freezer where you got it.
(And when some fundie says "You still destroyed one life, and suspended another", ask the fundie who created the second life. Without the lab researcher separating the two cells, there would be only one embryo. Will the fundie accept that a mere lab technician can create a new life two? Or will he acknowledge that the remaining cell we put back in the freezer is every bit the "person" it was before it divided.)
> There's no reason it has to be OTA programmable; requiring that the user physically possess
the device should be a reasonable level of security.
Leaving aside the key management problem - which is the real technical/cost issue - the problem with implmenting "wired" flashability, even if key management wasn't a problem, in a "non-wired" device is gonna be marketing.
Marketing, as in "We don't think it's a big enough selling point to justify the $5.00 worth of parts to put a USB/serial port in it, and the $50K upfront cost of writing and QA-ing a flash-updater for it."
(Yes, that's Marketese for "Fuck security, if it's insecure because the protocol's weak, and not because of our negligence, the user won't blame us and will simply buy another one when the protocol is cr4cked! We save $5.00 per unit today, and probably get another sale next year when they replace it!")
> > "the idea that the Internet liberates you from geography is a myth". > > This part of the article will be a non issue once satallite internet takes off in a few years.
Owned and operated, pray tell, from citizens of where?
> It is erroneous to say that the whole of China is firewalled. Only Red China (Mainland China)
is firewalled. The democratic Republic of China (Taiwan) is not firewalled.
Doesn't seem to stop.cn domains from spamming the fuck out of me, though.
(Paranoid thought: Red China takes a permissive stance towards their open relays and clueless admins because they want the rest of the world's to firewall them too. If they can't completely stop their people from talking to our people, they'll make us do it for them...)
(Evil countermeasure: When you block mail from a.cn host, make sure the bounce message contains randomly-generated text blocks. The string "I think it's so cool you left the relay open for us to use to send messages through" wouldn't hurt either. If enough admins did this, China's open relay policy might be, uh, reconsidered...;-)
> Actually, as noted by others here, this satellite was a political project, not one that was
thought up by scientists, so it's a good thing that it was killed.
Amen.
If we want to see the earth from space 'cuz it looks k00l, we should do it ourselves.
> Star Wars has always been sci-fi space opera fluff--GREAT sci-fi space opera fluff. It's the
stuff of cheap, easy teenage male fantasy, with slimy green aliens keeping our women in
bondage fetish wear, big explosions, simple farmboys secretly being born to be galactic
heros, etc.
(You are L. Ron Hubbard, posting from Mars orbit, and still bitter about Heinlein being a better writer than you. Lord Xenu demands that you take back what you said. "Friday" was not space-opera fluff, and the aliens in it were neither slimy nor green!
> I'm sorry but did you see that last movie. Giant Red Tomatoes would be a huge improvement. I
think the petetion should be to replace Jar Jar with a Giant Red Tomato.
I know I felt like pelting the ugly motherfucker with tomatoes when I saw Episode I. (Jar Jar, not Lucas. But the title of Episode II is making me question the wisdom of that choice.)
I guess Lucas figured that if we wouldn't let him ruin Episode II with Still More Jar Jar Binks, he'd self-destruct the whole franchise by turning it into a series of 50's B-movies.
On the other hand, at the current rate of decline in the Star Wars franchise, there's hope that Episode III will be entitled "Planet of Hot Grits" and feature plenty of gratuitous wet-toga-and-jewelry shots Natalie Portman getting her hair done. Wooooooooooooo-hoooooooooooooo!
> i.e., let the user install his own crypto module if he wishes.
Flashable crypto modules. On a wireless device. How do you deliver the module without enabling 'sploits like "GET cryptoflash.ida?XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXrot13.rot13.rot13" ?;-)
> "It always would have been a violation of copyright to photocopy dozens of copies of Dougan's novel and sell them on
the street. Now, critics argue, it's as if the photocopier itself is illegal." > >
This is an argument that courts will listen to (hopefully at least). EFF lawyers, write this down. It is the perfect
analogy, as far as I can tell.
Agreed.
(And DMCA arguably goes so far as to criminalize plans for photocopiers...)
The tie-ins with Russia - the former USSR required licenses for posession of photocopiers and printing presses, with heavy fines and penalties for owners of such material - are not just ironic, but highly appropriate, given the First Amendment implications of DMCA.
> Reading in bed doesn't get in the way of hot sex.
OK, so in addition to all the other miraculous technologies, we have to add 24-bit color, to the eBook specs, otherwise we might as well stick with the printed version of the Kama Sutra;-)
> Until I can buy an ebook reader for $5, which will survive a fall from 6 meters onto cement (or being struck, repeatedly,
with a sledge hammer, for that matter) and subsequent dunking in salt water, can be folded in half or rolled into a tube,
>>that are fundamentally architected with a weak security > >
"architected"? WTF?
Calvin: "I like to verb words."
Hobbes: "What?"
Calvin: "I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when `access' was a thing? Now it's something you do . It got verbed."
Calvin: "Verbing weirds language."
Hobbes: "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding."
> I cherish the old RMS ethic: >
Xerox: You can't copy our printer driver. >
RMS: Okay, then I'll write my own printer driver, operating system, editor, and compiler. Who wants to help me? > >
But now it's just: >
RIAA: You can't copy our Britney Spears tunes. >
Slashdotters: Yes we can! All your bits are belong to us!
But what other alternative do we have when confronted with this:
Dolby: You can't copy our AC3 decoder
FreeBSD: Okay then, I'll write my own decoder.
Dolby: No, you can't do that either! (All your hardware are belong do us!)
Two wrongs may not make a right. But neither do three.
> In fact, what Gospodin Podkletnov seems to have discovered is the basis of the infinite improbability drive. >
>
As you all know, the first application of the fundamentel research, would be a prototype which causes clothes to jump
eighteen inches away from the girl wearing them, thus breaking the ice at parties...
Well, I've done the first half of that. Every time I talk to a girl at a party, not only can I get her clothes to jump 18 inches away, the rest of the girl jumps away with her!
(And better yet, I can do it with a probability approaching p=1.0. No improbability drive required, all I have to do is say "Did you see that physics article on Slashdot the other day?")
When I observed that, in response to this question, girls at parties tended to run away from me at speeds which induced relativistic red shifts, and that this wasn't generally in line with the "typical female" desire to maintain a low body weight, I said "Hey! Running away from me at 0.99c makes you thinner to someone looking at you from the side, but you still add lots of mass!"
Funny, I don't seem to get invited to those sorts of parties anymore...
Slashdot Mirror
What's more likely to interest kids in space?
1) $125M to buy a screen saver with a picture of Earth that could be done today with a little software and a data feed from our fleet of weather satellites?
or
2) $125M to buy a nice economy Mars probe.
(Of course, most of our cheap-o Mars probes don't arouse interest in space exploration because NASA fsckups turn them into Earth-originated meteorites leaving little craters on the Martian surface, but that's beside the point ;-)
So did Slashdot. Yesterday.
Frankly, If we want to see the earth from space 'cuz it looks k00l, we should do it ourselves
Amateur Satellite geeks rule. And can do it a hell of a lot cheaper than Triana.
Well, suppose we had this giant electronic speculum ;-)
>
> I've got news for them... Pulling out doesn't work either.
Hey, either way, as long as you're getting fucked ;-).
> Rhythms NetConnections Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: RTHMQ), a provider of broadband communication services,
> Wow, thats depressing, especially considering that message went through the Chinese 'everyone happy' Firewall(TM) ...because the firewall was "hacked by Chinese!"
>I wonder what this message said *before* it went through!
> "You Nazis have committed unspeakable acts of utter barbarity against the Jews! By the way, can we see your research files?"
If you can find an original Pernkopf Anatomy Atlas and compare it with versions currently in print, you'll see that this is exactly what happened.
Here's a more detailed article on the issue. It's a bioethicist's nightmare.
(Not addressed at you -- I'm just taking this line because it's the core assertion of those who oppose such research, and you phrased it perfectly.)
So I'll take it at face value. I'll make an argument based on the assumption (IMHO erroneous) that a single fertilized cell constitutes life.
Why must embryonic stem cell research destroy life?
They're stem cells. Undifferentiated. If you wanted to "clone" one, you'd do it the same way you made an identical twin -- wait for it to divide, and separate the two cells.
If one stem cell is a human life, why not let it divide, grab one for research, and stick the other - identical cell - back into the freezer where you got it.
(And when some fundie says "You still destroyed one life, and suspended another", ask the fundie who created the second life. Without the lab researcher separating the two cells, there would be only one embryo. Will the fundie accept that a mere lab technician can create a new life two? Or will he acknowledge that the remaining cell we put back in the freezer is every bit the "person" it was before it divided.)
Leaving aside the key management problem - which is the real technical/cost issue - the problem with implmenting "wired" flashability, even if key management wasn't a problem, in a "non-wired" device is gonna be marketing.
Marketing, as in "We don't think it's a big enough selling point to justify the $5.00 worth of parts to put a USB/serial port in it, and the $50K upfront cost of writing and QA-ing a flash-updater for it."
(Yes, that's Marketese for "Fuck security, if it's insecure because the protocol's weak, and not because of our negligence, the user won't blame us and will simply buy another one when the protocol is cr4cked! We save $5.00 per unit today, and probably get another sale next year when they replace it!")
>
> This part of the article will be a non issue once satallite internet takes off in a few years.
Owned and operated, pray tell, from citizens of where?
Doesn't seem to stop .cn domains from spamming the fuck out of me, though.
(Paranoid thought: Red China takes a permissive stance towards their open relays and clueless admins because they want the rest of the world's to firewall them too. If they can't completely stop their people from talking to our people, they'll make us do it for them...)
(Evil countermeasure: When you block mail from a .cn host, make sure the bounce message contains randomly-generated text blocks. The string "I think it's so cool you left the relay open for us to use to send messages through" wouldn't hurt either. If enough admins did this, China's open relay policy might be, uh, reconsidered... ;-)
Amen.
If we want to see the earth from space 'cuz it looks k00l, we should do it ourselves.
Amateur Satellite geeks rule.
Nuff said. Maddest props to the OSCAR crew.
(You are L. Ron Hubbard, posting from Mars orbit, and still bitter about Heinlein being a better writer than you. Lord Xenu demands that you take back what you said. "Friday" was not space-opera fluff, and the aliens in it were neither slimy nor green!
I know I felt like pelting the ugly motherfucker with tomatoes when I saw Episode I. (Jar Jar, not Lucas. But the title of Episode II is making me question the wisdom of that choice.)
I guess Lucas figured that if we wouldn't let him ruin Episode II with Still More Jar Jar Binks, he'd self-destruct the whole franchise by turning it into a series of 50's B-movies.
On the other hand, at the current rate of decline in the Star Wars franchise, there's hope that Episode III will be entitled "Planet of Hot Grits" and feature plenty of gratuitous wet-toga-and-jewelry shots Natalie Portman getting her hair done. Wooooooooooooo-hoooooooooooooo!
> DBZ seems a complete mockery of that. I mean, what if someone make a damn Pokemon Q3 mod?
Besides, there are probably plenty of parents of school-aged sproggen would pay good money to blast Pikachu into a mountain of gibs ;)
(Shit, I loved lobbing a stream of rockets into Barney the Dinosaur in that DOOM wad... and I don't even have kids!)
"Do not taunt happy Funimation ball Z."
Flashable crypto modules. On a wireless device. How do you deliver the module without enabling 'sploits like "GET cryptoflash.ida?XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXrot13.rot13.rot13" ? ;-)
>
> This is an argument that courts will listen to (hopefully at least). EFF lawyers, write this down. It is the perfect analogy, as far as I can tell.
Agreed.
(And DMCA arguably goes so far as to criminalize plans for photocopiers...)
The tie-ins with Russia - the former USSR required licenses for posession of photocopiers and printing presses, with heavy fines and penalties for owners of such material - are not just ironic, but highly appropriate, given the First Amendment implications of DMCA.
OK, so in addition to all the other miraculous technologies, we have to add 24-bit color, to the eBook specs, otherwise we might as well stick with the printed version of the Kama Sutra ;-)
So you bought "The Road Ahead" too, huh?
"That's not a bug, it's a feature!"
- Some luzer marketroid who thinks copy control constitutes value-add.
>
> "architected"? WTF?
Calvin: "I like to verb words."
Hobbes: "What?"
Calvin: "I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when `access' was a thing? Now it's something you do . It got verbed."
Calvin: "Verbing weirds language."
Hobbes: "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding."
> Xerox: You can't copy our printer driver.
> RMS: Okay, then I'll write my own printer driver, operating system, editor, and compiler. Who wants to help me?
>
> But now it's just:
> RIAA: You can't copy our Britney Spears tunes.
> Slashdotters: Yes we can! All your bits are belong to us!
But what other alternative do we have when confronted with this:
Dolby: You can't copy our AC3 decoder
FreeBSD: Okay then, I'll write my own decoder.
Dolby: No, you can't do that either! (All your hardware are belong do us!)
Two wrongs may not make a right. But neither do three.
>
> As you all know, the first application of the fundamentel research, would be a prototype which causes clothes to jump eighteen inches away from the girl wearing them, thus breaking the ice at parties...
Well, I've done the first half of that. Every time I talk to a girl at a party, not only can I get her clothes to jump 18 inches away, the rest of the girl jumps away with her!
(And better yet, I can do it with a probability approaching p=1.0. No improbability drive required, all I have to do is say "Did you see that physics article on Slashdot the other day?")
When I observed that, in response to this question, girls at parties tended to run away from me at speeds which induced relativistic red shifts, and that this wasn't generally in line with the "typical female" desire to maintain a low body weight, I said "Hey! Running away from me at 0.99c makes you thinner to someone looking at you from the side, but you still add lots of mass!"
Funny, I don't seem to get invited to those sorts of parties anymore...