The main issue is the intent of the network doing the distribution. Grokster et al were found to be illegal because they promoted lawbreaking as their primary raison d'etre -- with ads like "download the top 40 here" and other things that clearly were designed to incude infringement. Since Bittorent is content-neutral as a technology, it can't be declared illegal under MGM v. Grokster, since those who created/maintain it don't intend for its primary purposes to be infringing, and aren't encouraging infringement directly.
Go read the opinion -- it's publicly available for free, and it's really not hard to understand at all. (BTW, I copied that link straight from www.supremecourtus.gov, so it's as legit as it gets, despite what Slashdot may say about the domain.:-P)
Actually, chemical rockets can get us there in about 6 months. Go check out the Mars Society FAQ for more information, or The Case For Mars if you want lots and lots of detail.
geeks have no loyalty, and shop mainly at big box stores, and generic online merchants (tiger direct, etc).
There's a good reason for this: independent computer stores, for the most part, offer no added value, while charging a ton more than the aforementioned. Don't get me wrong, I like the little guys, and I got out of my way to buy from them whenever I find a good independent shop. The problem I have is that there's less and less places like the one I frequented in Centreville, VA (now defunct) where they did honest service and got good parts when things died, and more and more places like my now-local one in Arlington, VA where they don't even carry Ethernet cords and know less about hardware than your average A+ certified luser. Create some value for me, and I'll shop with the little guy every time.
Man, this guy really doesn't get much spam at all. Before I threw SpamAssassin on my mail server, I was getting close to 1,000 spams a day on my personal e-mail address at its height.
I saved my spam from 2001-2004, and I had over 250,000 messages for the whole period; the volume totals around 1.3GB. So dude's totals are small, if you ask me.;-P
It's been said once in this thread, but I'll say it again: we can do this faster -- i.e. in 10 years -- with the Mars Direct program, on a pretty reasonable budget (closer to $30B than the $50B mentioned elsewhere, actually). That's a snap, considering that NASA's annual budget is currently $15B -- we'd be talking about 1/5 of current funding levels (not to mention only 16% of pre-Columbia shuttle launch capacity, given 2 flights every 2 years).
Get out there and pester your Congresscritters on this. Mars in 1/3 of this time is acheivable if enough people press for it!
Re:First things first
on
GPS on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
The reason Mars is fascinating is because, while it's further away, it's a much, *much* more hospitable and useful environment than the moon. For example in terms of hospitality: since Mars has a C02 atmosphere, we can easily manufacture fuel for our return flights on the surface; we're just screwed on the Moon. In terms of usefulness, another example is that the Moon has always been dead; Mars may have had life that we can discover, either as fossilized remains or a few plucky remaining patches of bacteria.
Besides, the Moon is actually harder to get to in terms of propulsion. It takes 4.5km/s of delta-V to launch straight to Mars...but it takes 6km/s to land on the Moon, because you can't aerobrake or parachute down.
You know, when you get right down to it, computer sick days and human sick days pretty much come from the same root source: failure of proper preventative care. Us people don't go to the doctor unless we're sick, typically, because it takes up too much time out of our days to see one otherwise, and it costs too much to go when not necessary, especially with the rising costs of health isurance. By the same token, most people don't fix their computer until it breaks (and sometimes not even then) because it takes time to keep it up-to-date (yes, I know there are auto-updates on virus scanners, Windows patches, etc., but we all know those are imperfect and not necessarily widely implemented), and for those not using free software, it costs money to have an anti-virus subscription or to get a firewall (since most people don't use even MS's built-in firewall).
The real irony is that, in both cases, the benefits of cost-preventative maintenance far outweigh the costs -- in humans, we get less sick less often, and thereby lead better lives and create less upward pressure on health insurance costs; in computers, there's less downtime, and considerably less risk of some catastrophic breakdown/break-in. Too bad people can't see this, and as a result don't do preventative maintenance.
One major question anyone reading this has to ask is -- what constitutes a "legitimate need" to run a mail server (people meeting this condition are those who ISPs should open port 25 for, according to the official doc). I run my own mail server, and have since 2000; additionally, I give out accounts to any of my friends and family that want them. The reason I do this, and the reason people get accounts on my box, is the lack of (unreasonable) restriction I impose on them: no mailbox size limit, no outbound mail size limit, as many aliases as they feel like (of course, I don't run an open relay, and I'd cancel an account instantly if I found someone spamming through it). If I were forced to move to some hosted solution, I would lose a lot of features, and have to pay to boot.
So is it necessary for me to run a mail server? No, I could technically survive without my own. Would it be a travesty if I were forced to switch to cut off spammers? Hell yes!
So until they draw the line on who "needs" to run a mail server, I can't possibly support this concept (or at least the port 25 restrictions piece of it).
Except for the fact that this vision calls for extreme privatization of space, which means having these guys picked off by defense contractors is exactly what we want.
You know, you really ought to catch up on the FAQs. It's only a 6-month flight to Mars, and astronauts would be on the surface of the planet for 1.5 years -- for a total round-trip of less than you're saying it'd take one-way. Besides that, if we're smart enough to use resources on Mars -- i.e. carbon dioxide in its atmosphere to manufacture rocket fuel for the return trip -- we can pare down the amount of materials necessary for this trip greatly.
Mars today is doable. We just have to do it right.
Man, you really are misinformed. Think about it: if you send a proper human mission to Mars, where they'll be sitting on the surface for a year and a half, they're going to be able to go a lot farther and do a lot more than a bunch of wimpy little robots, whose controllers are happy if they move a few dozen meters in a day and have a mission life of over 90 days. Humans can do hundreds of times the science, and are a heck of a lot more flexible in case a surprise discovery changes mission priorities. Yes, humans cost more to send, but the return on investment is worthwhile.
You people really, really need to read The Case for Mars, or at least the FAQ I linked to.
The beauty of Mars is that you can make a bunch of stuff for your stay there and your return trip from easily obtainable surface resources. For instance, all of the return fuel can easily be generated from the CO2 in the air, given that you bring along a bit of hydrogen from Earth (which is only 5% of the total mass of that fuel). Everyone who thinks that massive infrastructure is necessary to support a Mars exploration program is flat-out wrong.
Actually, conditions being what they are on the two bodies, and technology being what it is today, it's actually *easier* to get to the surface of Mars than the surface of the Moon (from LEO, it's 4.5 km/s Delta-V for Mars vs. 6.0 km/s for the Moon), and Mars is a safer place once you're there.
Just a shameless plug really, since I wrote it, but everyone here ought to check out The Mars Society FAQ. Lots of good info on this topic, verified by Dr. Robert Zubrin himself.
Unintended Consequences
on
Weapons in Space
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Let's not forget the devastating effects of one of the first big space-related treaties: the Outer Space Treaty, which prevents any nation from laying claim to any celestial body. While it may theoretically have done us some good by preventing wars on the Moon, the negative impact is far more profound: by taking away the major incentive for a country to rush into space, i.e. resource ownership, it set the cause of space exploration back decades. Remember all of those Heinlein stories full of humans in outer space by now? They were there because the government went there, and those governments went there to *own* what they found.
Now I admit that I'm not a fan of the large-scale militarization of space...I think that would be a terrible thing, especially since we're finally getting close to a point where private citizens/enterprises can really blast into space exploration. I just would hate to see a rush on the other side of the coin from militarization that held us back as bad as the Outer Space Treaty did.
Honestly, what are the chances that an Earth microbe could survive on Io or Europa (see respondent to this post), especially in the face of competition from a native microbe that was well-adapted to the surroundings? Any microorganisms that we'd accidentally be bringing along are not extremophiles, but garden variety human-digestive-tract stuff and the like, which would die pretty quickly when exposed to the extremes of temperature, radiation, and/or chemical concentrations on either of those worlds.
Don't get me wrong, we should certainly be taking preventative measures to ensure that we don't contaminate other worlds...but I don't think it should be something that paralyzes us and stops good science from being done. The chance of actual contamination occuring is just too low to spend too much energy worrying.
I think that this is an excellent concept...I just wish that it were executed well enough that the site wasn't Slashdotted after 25 comments. I mean, damn, we're already trying to shake off the image of being a bunch of amateurs, and having a web site that can't even stand up to moderate traffic doesn't help.
Wow...the amount of anti-human hate going on in this discussion is mind-bending.
First of all, it's not as if we're about to start terraforming tomorrow. Even the most zealous of the Mars exploration types (i.e. Robert Zubrin of The Mars Society) don't think it should be done until the planet has been explored in depth.
Secondly, keep in mind that we'd really be *fixing* a planet that nature has let die here. All of our new data shows that Mars was once a very life-friendly planet, with oceans, etc.; now it's a cold, nasty place that's only getting more inhospitable as time goes on. Doesn't it make sense to reverse that process and expand the realm where life is viable?
Third, it's not like doing this would necessarily kill any life forms on Mars anyway. The process would be extremely gradual -- we're talking hundreds of years or more here -- giving microbes, etc. plenty of time to adapt. Heck, we might be giving a boost to what life there might be on Mars.
Fourth, it's not as if we've even ruined Earth anyway. People tend to forget that one solid volcanic eruption puts out more CFCs than all of human industry ever has. Environmentalists greatly overstate humanity's impact on the planet in their effort to take down industrialized society. We're not doing that poorly here, and what we've learned on Earth would certainly be applied to terraforming of Mars. Heck, the Red Planet might end up being less polluted/more natural than Earth!
So just calm down a bit and take a moment to consider some of the positives that might come with terraforming Mars. It could be a Really Good Thing.
So Many Strong Inicators...
on
Methane on Mars?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
...so little actual exploration happening now.
Seriously, I applaud the efforts of the rovers and the orbiters. They're doing a lot of good science, and we should be proud of what they've shown us. But at the same time, human explorers could do so much more, for not a heck of a lot more money (this $1 Trillion price tag that's been floating around is bad journalism at its finest). I say that all of this good news should serve as impetuous to get people on the surface of the Red Planet as soon as possible!
To all those people who worry about cross-contamination, come on...the two environments are so different, the chances that a microbe from one could survive in the other are basically nonexistent. Besides, it's been proven that unsterilized meteorites have been moving from one planet to another for several billion years now, so if cross-contamination was ever going to happen, it already would have.
At least a lunar base as a jumping off point for Mars.
Actually, I hate to break it to you, but it actually takes more delta-v to land something on the surface of the moon from LEO than to launch straight to Mars (6.0 km/s for the Moon vs. 4.5 km/s for Mars). While this seems counterintuitive at first, it makes sense once you realize that you need a bunch of delta-v to brake onto the Moon, which has no atmosphere, whereas you can aerobrake onto Mars.
You might want to check out my web site, www.marsfaqs.info, which has a bunch of info on the subject (including what will be the Mars Society FAQ, once I can finally nag Robert Zubrin into approving it.:-)
You know, video games are going the same way as radio -- more and more of the same crap, over and over and over again. No one wants to give anything new a chance, even though there's plenty of new stuff out there. The only difference is, I don't know that there's been much of a change in the corporate ownership structure in the video game industry like there has been in radio (i.e. the ClearChannel takeover). But then again, I suppose there wasn't much in the way of diversity in video game companies to start with, was there?
The saddest thing about it is, if there were ever a new game that did what, say, Legend of Zelda did back in the 80's, the company that put it out could make zillions. It's not like they'd lose much putting out crappy stuff meanwhile, either.::Sigh::...if only companies weren't so damn risk-averse, maybe society could progress a bit.
Well, while I would oppose anything that makes it easier to go after filesharers, I'd prefer a bill that lets the DOJ go after individuals over something that makes the technology itself illegal. After all, there are still a lot of legitimate uses for P2P networks, and this bill still leaves room for them.
Of course, given the pace at which laws are being passed on this subject, I'm sure it's only a matter of time until laws making P2P altogether are passed. One could only hope that the courts would throw them out based on good ol' Sony v. Betamax.
Slashdot Mirror
At least some people in the space community seem to have a sense of humor about this: the Mars Society has renamed its analog Mars research station after Colbert for a week. ;-)
The main issue is the intent of the network doing the distribution. Grokster et al were found to be illegal because they promoted lawbreaking as their primary raison d'etre -- with ads like "download the top 40 here" and other things that clearly were designed to incude infringement. Since Bittorent is content-neutral as a technology, it can't be declared illegal under MGM v. Grokster, since those who created/maintain it don't intend for its primary purposes to be infringing, and aren't encouraging infringement directly.
:-P)
Go read the opinion -- it's publicly available for free, and it's really not hard to understand at all. (BTW, I copied that link straight from www.supremecourtus.gov, so it's as legit as it gets, despite what Slashdot may say about the domain.
Actually, chemical rockets can get us there in about 6 months. Go check out the Mars Society FAQ for more information, or The Case For Mars if you want lots and lots of detail.
I've got some mirrors of raw images.
Man, this guy really doesn't get much spam at all. Before I threw SpamAssassin on my mail server, I was getting close to 1,000 spams a day on my personal e-mail address at its height. I saved my spam from 2001-2004, and I had over 250,000 messages for the whole period; the volume totals around 1.3GB. So dude's totals are small, if you ask me. ;-P
It's been said once in this thread, but I'll say it again: we can do this faster -- i.e. in 10 years -- with the Mars Direct program, on a pretty reasonable budget (closer to $30B than the $50B mentioned elsewhere, actually). That's a snap, considering that NASA's annual budget is currently $15B -- we'd be talking about 1/5 of current funding levels (not to mention only 16% of pre-Columbia shuttle launch capacity, given 2 flights every 2 years).
Get out there and pester your Congresscritters on this. Mars in 1/3 of this time is acheivable if enough people press for it!
The reason Mars is fascinating is because, while it's further away, it's a much, *much* more hospitable and useful environment than the moon. For example in terms of hospitality: since Mars has a C02 atmosphere, we can easily manufacture fuel for our return flights on the surface; we're just screwed on the Moon. In terms of usefulness, another example is that the Moon has always been dead; Mars may have had life that we can discover, either as fossilized remains or a few plucky remaining patches of bacteria.
Besides, the Moon is actually harder to get to in terms of propulsion. It takes 4.5km/s of delta-V to launch straight to Mars...but it takes 6km/s to land on the Moon, because you can't aerobrake or parachute down.
Might want to update that potentially useful link to take the typo out of the URL: InstantSSL.
You know, when you get right down to it, computer sick days and human sick days pretty much come from the same root source: failure of proper preventative care. Us people don't go to the doctor unless we're sick, typically, because it takes up too much time out of our days to see one otherwise, and it costs too much to go when not necessary, especially with the rising costs of health isurance. By the same token, most people don't fix their computer until it breaks (and sometimes not even then) because it takes time to keep it up-to-date (yes, I know there are auto-updates on virus scanners, Windows patches, etc., but we all know those are imperfect and not necessarily widely implemented), and for those not using free software, it costs money to have an anti-virus subscription or to get a firewall (since most people don't use even MS's built-in firewall).
The real irony is that, in both cases, the benefits of cost-preventative maintenance far outweigh the costs -- in humans, we get less sick less often, and thereby lead better lives and create less upward pressure on health insurance costs; in computers, there's less downtime, and considerably less risk of some catastrophic breakdown/break-in. Too bad people can't see this, and as a result don't do preventative maintenance.
One major question anyone reading this has to ask is -- what constitutes a "legitimate need" to run a mail server (people meeting this condition are those who ISPs should open port 25 for, according to the official doc). I run my own mail server, and have since 2000; additionally, I give out accounts to any of my friends and family that want them. The reason I do this, and the reason people get accounts on my box, is the lack of (unreasonable) restriction I impose on them: no mailbox size limit, no outbound mail size limit, as many aliases as they feel like (of course, I don't run an open relay, and I'd cancel an account instantly if I found someone spamming through it). If I were forced to move to some hosted solution, I would lose a lot of features, and have to pay to boot.
So is it necessary for me to run a mail server? No, I could technically survive without my own. Would it be a travesty if I were forced to switch to cut off spammers? Hell yes!
So until they draw the line on who "needs" to run a mail server, I can't possibly support this concept (or at least the port 25 restrictions piece of it).
Now let's hope that SpaceShip One and others competing for the X-Prize can get actively involved in iplementing the Moon-To-Mars Commission's recommendations, which call for a great deal of privatization and commercialization of space, particularly near Earth.
Except for the fact that this vision calls for extreme privatization of space, which means having these guys picked off by defense contractors is exactly what we want.
You know, you really ought to catch up on the FAQs. It's only a 6-month flight to Mars, and astronauts would be on the surface of the planet for 1.5 years -- for a total round-trip of less than you're saying it'd take one-way. Besides that, if we're smart enough to use resources on Mars -- i.e. carbon dioxide in its atmosphere to manufacture rocket fuel for the return trip -- we can pare down the amount of materials necessary for this trip greatly.
Mars today is doable. We just have to do it right.
Man, you really are misinformed. Think about it: if you send a proper human mission to Mars, where they'll be sitting on the surface for a year and a half, they're going to be able to go a lot farther and do a lot more than a bunch of wimpy little robots, whose controllers are happy if they move a few dozen meters in a day and have a mission life of over 90 days. Humans can do hundreds of times the science, and are a heck of a lot more flexible in case a surprise discovery changes mission priorities. Yes, humans cost more to send, but the return on investment is worthwhile.
You people really, really need to read The Case for Mars, or at least the FAQ I linked to.
The beauty of Mars is that you can make a bunch of stuff for your stay there and your return trip from easily obtainable surface resources. For instance, all of the return fuel can easily be generated from the CO2 in the air, given that you bring along a bit of hydrogen from Earth (which is only 5% of the total mass of that fuel). Everyone who thinks that massive infrastructure is necessary to support a Mars exploration program is flat-out wrong.
You should definitely check out the efforts of the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station and the Mars Desert Research Station -- a couple of Mars analog projects that are proving the feasability of a lot of the concepts involved in manned Mars missions.
Actually, conditions being what they are on the two bodies, and technology being what it is today, it's actually *easier* to get to the surface of Mars than the surface of the Moon (from LEO, it's 4.5 km/s Delta-V for Mars vs. 6.0 km/s for the Moon), and Mars is a safer place once you're there.
Just a shameless plug really, since I wrote it, but everyone here ought to check out The Mars Society FAQ. Lots of good info on this topic, verified by Dr. Robert Zubrin himself.
Let's not forget the devastating effects of one of the first big space-related treaties: the Outer Space Treaty, which prevents any nation from laying claim to any celestial body. While it may theoretically have done us some good by preventing wars on the Moon, the negative impact is far more profound: by taking away the major incentive for a country to rush into space, i.e. resource ownership, it set the cause of space exploration back decades. Remember all of those Heinlein stories full of humans in outer space by now? They were there because the government went there, and those governments went there to *own* what they found.
Now I admit that I'm not a fan of the large-scale militarization of space...I think that would be a terrible thing, especially since we're finally getting close to a point where private citizens/enterprises can really blast into space exploration. I just would hate to see a rush on the other side of the coin from militarization that held us back as bad as the Outer Space Treaty did.
Honestly, what are the chances that an Earth microbe could survive on Io or Europa (see respondent to this post), especially in the face of competition from a native microbe that was well-adapted to the surroundings? Any microorganisms that we'd accidentally be bringing along are not extremophiles, but garden variety human-digestive-tract stuff and the like, which would die pretty quickly when exposed to the extremes of temperature, radiation, and/or chemical concentrations on either of those worlds.
Don't get me wrong, we should certainly be taking preventative measures to ensure that we don't contaminate other worlds...but I don't think it should be something that paralyzes us and stops good science from being done. The chance of actual contamination occuring is just too low to spend too much energy worrying.
I think that this is an excellent concept...I just wish that it were executed well enough that the site wasn't Slashdotted after 25 comments. I mean, damn, we're already trying to shake off the image of being a bunch of amateurs, and having a web site that can't even stand up to moderate traffic doesn't help.
Wow...the amount of anti-human hate going on in this discussion is mind-bending.
First of all, it's not as if we're about to start terraforming tomorrow. Even the most zealous of the Mars exploration types (i.e. Robert Zubrin of The Mars Society) don't think it should be done until the planet has been explored in depth.
Secondly, keep in mind that we'd really be *fixing* a planet that nature has let die here. All of our new data shows that Mars was once a very life-friendly planet, with oceans, etc.; now it's a cold, nasty place that's only getting more inhospitable as time goes on. Doesn't it make sense to reverse that process and expand the realm where life is viable?
Third, it's not like doing this would necessarily kill any life forms on Mars anyway. The process would be extremely gradual -- we're talking hundreds of years or more here -- giving microbes, etc. plenty of time to adapt. Heck, we might be giving a boost to what life there might be on Mars.
Fourth, it's not as if we've even ruined Earth anyway. People tend to forget that one solid volcanic eruption puts out more CFCs than all of human industry ever has. Environmentalists greatly overstate humanity's impact on the planet in their effort to take down industrialized society. We're not doing that poorly here, and what we've learned on Earth would certainly be applied to terraforming of Mars. Heck, the Red Planet might end up being less polluted/more natural than Earth!
So just calm down a bit and take a moment to consider some of the positives that might come with terraforming Mars. It could be a Really Good Thing.
...so little actual exploration happening now.
Seriously, I applaud the efforts of the rovers and the orbiters. They're doing a lot of good science, and we should be proud of what they've shown us. But at the same time, human explorers could do so much more, for not a heck of a lot more money (this $1 Trillion price tag that's been floating around is bad journalism at its finest). I say that all of this good news should serve as impetuous to get people on the surface of the Red Planet as soon as possible!
To all those people who worry about cross-contamination, come on...the two environments are so different, the chances that a microbe from one could survive in the other are basically nonexistent. Besides, it's been proven that unsterilized meteorites have been moving from one planet to another for several billion years now, so if cross-contamination was ever going to happen, it already would have.
You might want to check out my web site, www.marsfaqs.info, which has a bunch of info on the subject (including what will be the Mars Society FAQ, once I can finally nag Robert Zubrin into approving it.
You know, video games are going the same way as radio -- more and more of the same crap, over and over and over again. No one wants to give anything new a chance, even though there's plenty of new stuff out there. The only difference is, I don't know that there's been much of a change in the corporate ownership structure in the video game industry like there has been in radio (i.e. the ClearChannel takeover). But then again, I suppose there wasn't much in the way of diversity in video game companies to start with, was there?
::Sigh::...if only companies weren't so damn risk-averse, maybe society could progress a bit.
The saddest thing about it is, if there were ever a new game that did what, say, Legend of Zelda did back in the 80's, the company that put it out could make zillions. It's not like they'd lose much putting out crappy stuff meanwhile, either.
Well, while I would oppose anything that makes it easier to go after filesharers, I'd prefer a bill that lets the DOJ go after individuals over something that makes the technology itself illegal. After all, there are still a lot of legitimate uses for P2P networks, and this bill still leaves room for them.
Of course, given the pace at which laws are being passed on this subject, I'm sure it's only a matter of time until laws making P2P altogether are passed. One could only hope that the courts would throw them out based on good ol' Sony v. Betamax.