Simply passing anti-spam legislation isn't enough, the key issue is enforcement and ease with which one can receive damages. Junk fax laws have been on the books in the United States for a long time, but anyone who owns a personal fax machine knows that they don't amount to much -- the junk fax companies know that only the tiniest minority of people go through the machinations required to actually bring a suit in small claims court and win their US$500, so they continue doing it.
The same thing will apply for any anti-spam law. If the consumer has to go through hoops in order to collect damages, the vast majority won't, and so spammers will continue their spamming knowing that any money they lose due to lawsuits will be far down the line and will be a tiny percentage of the total amount of money they've received from companies to hawk their wares.
I simply don't think that's true. When I've found people most vocal about the "proper" use of the term hacker, it's the self-styled hackers that were the loudest.
I think it's ironic how the "hacker" community used go out of their way to emphasize the distinction between hacker (positive) and cracker (negative), but as of late seem to not bother anymore. Certain Slashdot "reporters" don't seem to bother even trying to make the distinction anymore.
That article seems to contain a number of inaccuracies. Puzzle games certainly aren't a dead genre, they've just been taken over by the shareware market (Bejeweled or Crack Attack are amazingly popular games for how boring they are). Gun controllers hardly have disappeared; PlayStation has the GunCon, and PlayStation 2 has the GunCon2. Someone's missing Point Blank or Time Crisis (or their sequels) from their libraries.
I hope it involves time travel! Or the crew going nuts! Or people not trusting each other! Or people being incompetent! Or people violating very basic rules of common sense! Or people spouting technobabble as exposition, conflict, and resolution!
Roger Ebert summed up contemporary Star Trek best (in his review of Nemesis): "Star Trek was kind of terrific once, but now it is a copy of a copy of a copy."
Port scanning is in the same grey area that most other security-inclined activities are, because it's about intent -- a port scanner can be used for good or for evil. If I'm port scanning my own machine to make sure that no unauthorized ports are bound, that's certainly a legitimate operation. So even can be applications that would otherwise be purely malicious -- it's find to run a program to gobble up memory, eat CPU, or spawn processes crazily if I'm stress testing a machine. Even password crackers can be legitimate, if I'm administering a machine and I want to make sure that no users have easy-to-find passwords.
One must beware of pure semantic changes in an attempt to make something "easier" to understand, or you end up with verbal diarrhea. Just because your goal is simplifying and you're changing big words to small ones doesn't guarantee success.
It's pretty unlikely that such a proposal will be met with much acceptance or exuberance in the astronomical community. There's no objective definition of planet (or any other of the classifications of celestial bodies) for a reason: because, quite frankly, it doesn't really matter. If you're an astronomer studying Pluto, you can study it whether or not it's called a planet. The celestial bodies don't care what they're called; the classification system we use is a man-made one. There's no reason to think it has value outside our own internal thought processes; the Universe isn't compelled to match our expectations.
That is, a planet is what the IAU says one is: nothing more, nothing less. Changing this won't have any useful effect on astronomy.
But Callisto and Ganymede are still in the radiation and ion belts. If you rule out Europe because of these, you rule out all of the Galilean satellites.
"Tidally locked" means that bodies are in a tidal resonance. Mercury, for instance, is in a 2:3 tidal resonance; its rotation period is almost exactly 2/3 its orbital period.
Resonances happen for all ratios of two small integers, not just 1:1; the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt are due to resonances with Jupiter (bodies that might be in the gaps would get periodic perturbations from Jupiter that would knock the out), and Neptune and Pluto are in an orbital resonance.
Tidal locks are only one-face when the ratio is 1:1, like the Earth-Moon system, and indeed most of the satellites in the Solar System with their primary bodies.
Probably because any other schemes would be insufficient in ensuring its stability. Photon pressure or selective absorption of neutrinos would be a countering effect, but it wouldn't be nearly enough to stop the runaway feedback loop that would occur when a Niven ring is perturbed from its balancing act. Niven rings are actively unstable -- the slightest disturbance will send them careening faster and faster off center to their ultimate doom.
Outer Limits' "Inconstant Moon" adaptation
on
Ask Larry Niven
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, I saw that Outer Limits episode when it first aired. I was pretty pleased with it, although the very end of the episode made some changes that weren't in the original story and seemed gratuitous and somewhat implausible. (For those that aren't familiar, at the end of the episode, the main character is pretty severely injured for no particular reason -- particularly considering the new world he's going to be living in, it seems pretty highly likely that the injury will be life-threatening; the original story does not have the character receiving any serious injuries at all.)
I'd be curious if Niven was aware of and authorized this change.
Note that Mercury is tidally locked to the Sun, the resonance just isn't 1:1 like the story assumed (i.e., Mercury isn't one-face to the Sun like the Moon is to Earth).
You don't need to ask Niven that. The answer is yes, and that's why he wrote The Ringworld Engineers -- to address its instability and why active attitude systems weren't immediately obvious during the first expedition.
Re:MODERATORS: This is a valid question
on
Ask Larry Niven
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· Score: 1
If Halo is a ripoff, then Banks ripped it off first in Consider Phlebas. The object in Halo isn't a Niven ring -- a ring encircling a star -- it's a Banks orbital -- a smaller ring orbiting around a star rather than encircling it.
This sounds apocryphal; what is your source for this information? There were two Soviet manned missions which resulted in four fatalities during landing: Soyuz I, where the craft survived reentry but crashed when the parachute lines became entangled (one fatality, Komarov), and Soyuz XI, where the craft landed successfully but the crew (three, Dolrovolsky, Volkov, and Patsayev) were found dead due to losing pressure during the reentry process.
What difference does it make?
on
More on Columbia
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Even if the foam hitting the wing at launch was the cause of the reentry failure, there's nothing they could have done about it, even if they had positively known that was going to cause a catastrophic failure upon reentry.
A similar event occured during Apollo XII, the second manned Moon landing. During launch, the Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning, causing a number of failures which were rapidly corrected. After they were out of the atmosphere, back at Mission Control, they pondered whether or not the lightning strike might have damaged the pyrotechnics that cause the parachute to deploy after reentry (they could hit the "chute deploy" button, but nothing would happen -- the pyros would already be burned out). Just as in the case of the Columbia, to know this information they'd need to have done an unscheduled EVA, and the additional information would have really changed nothing: If they did an about-face and reentered right then, they'd have been just as dead reentering then as they would after a successful Moon landing. So there was really no point even knowing; the knowledge would have changed nothing about the reality of the situation. (Of course, in the case of Apollo XII, the pyros were undamaged and the chutes deployed without incident.)
The point is, even if they positively knew that it was a problem, knowing and then reentering and dying isn't any different from not knowing and then reentering and dying.
Surely intergalactic space (in the voids of those "bubble" structures) would be much colder. There's radiation everywhere in space, getting the temperature down is just a question of minimizing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply passing anti-spam legislation isn't enough, the key issue is enforcement and ease with which one can receive damages. Junk fax laws have been on the books in the United States for a long time, but anyone who owns a personal fax machine knows that they don't amount to much -- the junk fax companies know that only the tiniest minority of people go through the machinations required to actually bring a suit in small claims court and win their US$500, so they continue doing it.
The same thing will apply for any anti-spam law. If the consumer has to go through hoops in order to collect damages, the vast majority won't, and so spammers will continue their spamming knowing that any money they lose due to lawsuits will be far down the line and will be a tiny percentage of the total amount of money they've received from companies to hawk their wares.
So you're conceding the point, then. The self-styled "hackers" are the ones who gave up on the so-called "proper" usage of the term.
I simply don't think that's true. When I've found people most vocal about the "proper" use of the term hacker, it's the self-styled hackers that were the loudest.
I think it's ironic how the "hacker" community used go out of their way to emphasize the distinction between hacker (positive) and cracker (negative), but as of late seem to not bother anymore. Certain Slashdot "reporters" don't seem to bother even trying to make the distinction anymore.
Looks like the popular media won this one.
That article seems to contain a number of inaccuracies. Puzzle games certainly aren't a dead genre, they've just been taken over by the shareware market (Bejeweled or Crack Attack are amazingly popular games for how boring they are). Gun controllers hardly have disappeared; PlayStation has the GunCon, and PlayStation 2 has the GunCon2. Someone's missing Point Blank or Time Crisis (or their sequels) from their libraries.
I hope it involves time travel! Or the crew going nuts! Or people not trusting each other! Or people being incompetent! Or people violating very basic rules of common sense! Or people spouting technobabble as exposition, conflict, and resolution!
Roger Ebert summed up contemporary Star Trek best (in his review of Nemesis ): "Star Trek was kind of terrific once, but now it is a copy of a copy of a copy."
Port scanning is in the same grey area that most other security-inclined activities are, because it's about intent -- a port scanner can be used for good or for evil. If I'm port scanning my own machine to make sure that no unauthorized ports are bound, that's certainly a legitimate operation. So even can be applications that would otherwise be purely malicious -- it's find to run a program to gobble up memory, eat CPU, or spawn processes crazily if I'm stress testing a machine. Even password crackers can be legitimate, if I'm administering a machine and I want to make sure that no users have easy-to-find passwords.
One must beware of pure semantic changes in an attempt to make something "easier" to understand, or you end up with verbal diarrhea. Just because your goal is simplifying and you're changing big words to small ones doesn't guarantee success.
Kind of confusing, since Neptune has a Great Dark Spot.
The Great Red Spot's real claim to fame is its longevity; it's been visible since we've had telescopes big enough to see it.
It's pretty unlikely that such a proposal will be met with much acceptance or exuberance in the astronomical community. There's no objective definition of planet (or any other of the classifications of celestial bodies) for a reason: because, quite frankly, it doesn't really matter. If you're an astronomer studying Pluto, you can study it whether or not it's called a planet. The celestial bodies don't care what they're called; the classification system we use is a man-made one. There's no reason to think it has value outside our own internal thought processes; the Universe isn't compelled to match our expectations.
That is, a planet is what the IAU says one is: nothing more, nothing less. Changing this won't have any useful effect on astronomy.
Uh, maybe computers? Not even the most visionary science fiction authors pictured how powerful, cheap, and available computing would become.
But Callisto and Ganymede are still in the radiation and ion belts. If you rule out Europe because of these, you rule out all of the Galilean satellites.
"Tidally locked" means that bodies are in a tidal resonance. Mercury, for instance, is in a 2:3 tidal resonance; its rotation period is almost exactly 2/3 its orbital period.
Resonances happen for all ratios of two small integers, not just 1:1; the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt are due to resonances with Jupiter (bodies that might be in the gaps would get periodic perturbations from Jupiter that would knock the out), and Neptune and Pluto are in an orbital resonance.
Tidal locks are only one-face when the ratio is 1:1, like the Earth-Moon system, and indeed most of the satellites in the Solar System with their primary bodies.
Probably because any other schemes would be insufficient in ensuring its stability. Photon pressure or selective absorption of neutrinos would be a countering effect, but it wouldn't be nearly enough to stop the runaway feedback loop that would occur when a Niven ring is perturbed from its balancing act. Niven rings are actively unstable -- the slightest disturbance will send them careening faster and faster off center to their ultimate doom.
Yeah, I saw that Outer Limits episode when it first aired. I was pretty pleased with it, although the very end of the episode made some changes that weren't in the original story and seemed gratuitous and somewhat implausible. (For those that aren't familiar, at the end of the episode, the main character is pretty severely injured for no particular reason -- particularly considering the new world he's going to be living in, it seems pretty highly likely that the injury will be life-threatening; the original story does not have the character receiving any serious injuries at all.)
I'd be curious if Niven was aware of and authorized this change.
Because it's not. The Kilrathi are obvously inspired by Kzinti -- they're big, intelligent cats -- but that's where the similarities end.
You can copyright works, not ideas. Chmeee as a character in Ringworld is copyrightable, but a species of intelligent cats isn't.
Note that Mercury is tidally locked to the Sun, the resonance just isn't 1:1 like the story assumed (i.e., Mercury isn't one-face to the Sun like the Moon is to Earth).
You don't need to ask Niven that. The answer is yes, and that's why he wrote The Ringworld Engineers -- to address its instability and why active attitude systems weren't immediately obvious during the first expedition.
If Halo is a ripoff, then Banks ripped it off first in Consider Phlebas. The object in Halo isn't a Niven ring -- a ring encircling a star -- it's a Banks orbital -- a smaller ring orbiting around a star rather than encircling it.
The structure in Halo was not unique to SF.
Hell of a track record for what was intended to be a 21-month mission, eh?
I think NASA officials would find the idea of being able to launch an unscheduled Shuttle "in a week" positively amusing.
This sounds apocryphal; what is your source for this information? There were two Soviet manned missions which resulted in four fatalities during landing: Soyuz I, where the craft survived reentry but crashed when the parachute lines became entangled (one fatality, Komarov), and Soyuz XI, where the craft landed successfully but the crew (three, Dolrovolsky, Volkov, and Patsayev) were found dead due to losing pressure during the reentry process.
Even if the foam hitting the wing at launch was the cause of the reentry failure, there's nothing they could have done about it, even if they had positively known that was going to cause a catastrophic failure upon reentry.
A similar event occured during Apollo XII, the second manned Moon landing. During launch, the Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning, causing a number of failures which were rapidly corrected. After they were out of the atmosphere, back at Mission Control, they pondered whether or not the lightning strike might have damaged the pyrotechnics that cause the parachute to deploy after reentry (they could hit the "chute deploy" button, but nothing would happen -- the pyros would already be burned out). Just as in the case of the Columbia, to know this information they'd need to have done an unscheduled EVA, and the additional information would have really changed nothing: If they did an about-face and reentered right then, they'd have been just as dead reentering then as they would after a successful Moon landing. So there was really no point even knowing; the knowledge would have changed nothing about the reality of the situation. (Of course, in the case of Apollo XII, the pyros were undamaged and the chutes deployed without incident.)
The point is, even if they positively knew that it was a problem, knowing and then reentering and dying isn't any different from not knowing and then reentering and dying.
Surely intergalactic space (in the voids of those "bubble" structures) would be much colder. There's radiation everywhere in space, getting the temperature down is just a question of minimizing it.
Indeed -- who really cares? So people who were taking advantage of people who can't type URLs faithfully got called on it.