In addition to extended lifespan, I'd be looking into any possibility of reactivating some of the old monkey genes. For a species that plans to live in low or zero gravity and move freely in 3D rather than around a 2D surface, a prehensile tail would be really, really useful - as would more versatile toes. Who needs feet in zero-g? An extra pair of hands, though, would be, well... handy.
if the mass of a white dwarf goes over 1.4 solar masses, the gravitational collapse is strong enough to trigger a supernova explosion. In other words, at masses greater than the Chandrasekhar limit, the (inward) gravitational pressure overcomes the (outward) thermal/fusion pressure, thus causing a collapse and the ignition of most of the remainder of the stars fuel, thus the supernova explosion.
Right idea, wrong mechanism.
A white dwarf is not supported by thermal pressure, or by nuclear fusion; it is supported by degeneracy pressure between electrons, a consequence of the exclusion principle in quantum mechanics that forbids two electrons from occupying the same quantum state.
1.4 solar masses is correctly given as the critical point at which gravity prevails over the internal pressure; at this point, the star switches from degeneracy pressure between electrons to degeneracy pressure between neutrons, in the process dropping considerably more than the weight of the Sun from the size of the Earth to something more like the size of Belgium, through an enormously strong gravitational field. This releases an awful lot of energy, and is the main power source for such a supernova.
There's another type of supernova which is driven by fusion, but that's more typical of accretion systems in which the infalling matter has heated the white dwarf sufficiently to reignite fusion processes; then the fusion reaction is an uncontrolled runaway and can wholly disrupt the star.
Many white dwarfs are approximately the size of the Earth, typically 100 times smaller than the Sun. They may have the same mass as the Sun and so are very compact.
Do they really vary in density that much?
Yes. White dwarfs vary in density a whole lot; degenerate gases behave quite oddly. If you add matter to a white dwarf, it actually gets a little smaller. The limit is about 1.4 solar masses, at which point the white dwarf collapses to form a neutron star.
Same goes for the GameCube. It has much better load times (most of the time not even having load times), which is greate compared to the XBox and PS2. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the disc.
It seems plausible. The Gamecube discs are physically much smaller; you're going to save a lot on seek times, because the laser simply has much less distance to travel across the surface.
In.nl (as in many european countries) we have a monarch (queen) and republicans are those who'd rather have her and her family retire to somewhere else.
I should add that there's yet another meaning of 'republican' around. In British politics, 'republican' can mean someone who favours the abolition of the monarchy, or alternatively someone who thinks Northern Ireland should be run from Dublin - in addition to meaning members of GWB's political party, of which (as a vassal^Wclose ally of the USA) we get a good deal of news coverage.
So: I support the republicans (I), and the republicans(II), but I can't abide the republicans (III). Isn't politics wonderful?
What I'm saying is that, while terrorist attacks are horrible and despicable, having a "few" people die from terrorist attacks is far better IMHO than giving in to those terrorists who love to murder innocent civilians in cold blood and volunteering to give away our freedoms.
Quite so. What this all boils down to is a single question that our societies must answer: 'is freedom worth dying for?'
We certainly used to believe that the answer was 'yes'. Many of our ancestors died fighting various oppressors, be they warlike dictators or exploitative bosses or selfish aristocrats or slavers... They believed in freedom, and fought for it, and often died for it. Millions and millions of them.
Now, however, we're cowards. We aren't prepared to die for freedom. We're prepared to give up every last precious liberty in order to slightly reduce the risk of a few hundred or thousand people getting blown up every few years.
This is pathetic, and a horrible betrayal of what was fought for in the past. We're no longer prepared to die for freedom; we're prepared to give it all up to marginally reduce an already minor risk to our own precious lives. We suck.
My principles against MTV and Microsoft is that I don't like their products. My principles against the Russian Mafia is that they kill people.
Well, let's assume that, yes, allofmp3 is owned (presumably via front organisations) by the Russian mafia.
Ethical problem: the Russian mafia is a criminal organisation, which kills people. Is it, therefore, wrong to buy music from allofmp3.com?
Well, we should ask:
- does the Russian mafia kill or threaten to kill people for reasons connected with allofmp3.com? Perhaps they issued death threats to record company executives to obtain their incredibly good deal?
I doubt that they did. It's not something you do if you can avoid it, not if you want to look like a legitimate operation. I'd bet that they got their surprisingly good deal by bribery. Once that's done, you needn't worry about having to kill people to prevent competition, either: you've already bribed the licensing organisation, so they won't license anyone else!
- given that the Russian mafia kills people, do revenues from allofmp3.com help them do so more effectively?
Perhaps. But it's a strange way to behave. Let's suppose they're killing someone for reasons connected with, say, a drug deal. Suppose that they fund the hit with revenues from allofmp3.com. That's weird for two reasons.
1: you're using your mp3 business to subsidise drug dealing. What? Drug dealing not profitable enough for you?
2: Since allofmp3.com is acting as a legitimate business, it has financial records, from which missing cash might get noticed. Far better to use drug money for drug-related murder - that stuff's harder to trace.
I really can't see any particular reason to think that buying stuff from allofmp3 is likely to get anyone killed. If anything, the more profitable allofmp3 becomes, the less likely any mafia behind it is to kill anybody. Once the Mob goes legitimate, there's suddenly a lot less reason to go about murdering.
Vote with your dollars! Make the Mafia's mp3 business so profitable that the drugs and vice rackets aren't worth the hassle! Help the Russian mafia become a legitimate entrepreneurial middle-class - God knows that country needs one, AFAIK as it is there are a few oligarchs owning damn near everything, a massive population of poor workers, and in between not very much.
Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge there is no actual evidence that allofmp3 is run by the Russian Mafia. It just seems to be a widespread assumption based on a stereotype. They're a Russian business -> they're run by the Russian Mafia.
Viewing things from a more abstracted perspective: I could buy from the Russian Mafia. They may then use the money to kill people. Ethical problem? Perhaps. I could instead buy from Microsoft. They may then pay the money in taxes to the United States Government, which may then use the money to kill people. Ethical problem? What's the difference between the money I send to allofmp3 being used to kill Russians, and the money I send to US_RECORD_CO being used to kill Iraqis? Remember that both allofmp3.com and Microsoft are legitimate businesses. It's just that in either case if you follow the money far enough, someone's getting buried.
And finally, from a Lawful Evil point of view: the Russian Mafia's crimes kill a small number of people I don't know. Microsoft's crimes inconvenience an enormous number of people, myself among them...
Surely the choice of font ought to be something individuals can set up in their web browser. A website doesn't really have much business selecting particular named fonts, content versus presentation and all that.
Don't you need written permission from the content provider to do that? You know, taking their intellectual property and creating your own derivative work by applying your own formatting preferences to it... Surely web designers should specify exactly how they want their page to appear, and browsers should render it as they intended; doing otherwise is probably a DMCA violation. Indeed, using a non-standard browser is probably a violation in itself; Firefox does not render many standards-compliant websites correctly, and so is creating unauthorised derivative works. The Mozilla foundation is probably liable for a fortune.
note: by 'standards' we mean Internet Explorer 6, which is the industry standard and is all that should be necessary for development and testing.
(sigh)
The worrying thing is there are PHBs around who really will think like this.
he'd happily swallow his principles and do business with Microsoft (habitual monopoly abuser) or Sony (clandestine malware distributor). What's so bad about the Russian Mafia?
Correction: that was Microsoft or MTV. Both organisations the original poster loathed but would do business with if the price and product were both right. Point stands: if you're swallowing your principles already, who cares if you're dealing with MS or the Mafia?
The original poster in this thread said that if they provided the right service, he'd happily swallow his principles and do business with Microsoft (habitual monopoly abuser) or Sony (clandestine malware distributor). What's so bad about the Russian Mafia?
I might add that whether or not it's backed by the Russian Mafia, allofmp3.com is in fact a legitimate business, properly licenced by the appropriate Russian authorities. Shouldn't we be encouraging these guys to go legal? What happens when a Mafia discovers that its most profitable businesses are the legitimate ones?
Virgin Galactic is the company leveraging Spaceship One which, as reported by Slashdot, claimed the Ansari X prize for commercial space flight.
Whatever happened to the verb 'to use'? As in 'Virgin Galactic is the company using Spaceship One'.
Anyone who uses the word 'leverage' in any context where the concept of newton metres is absent, or as a verb in any context at all, deserves to be slapped about the face with a kipper until they're sorry.
I personally would jump at an all you can eat service for my iPod. Hell, I would jump at any sort of pricing options that or ability to escapes AAC lock in for my iPod. I got my iPod as a gift. I would love it if there was a way to escape Apple's monopoly short of throwing out a $300 piece of equipment.
"kill -9/bin/lp" won't work because you refer to processes by pid, not by executable name. Try something along the lines of whatever kill `ps|grep|awk` combo he was using elsewhere, or better yet, "killall -9 lp".
Except that the Idiot was trying to kill -9/dev/lp, not/bin/lp... Quite what that was supposed to achieve I don't know, but it was good for a laugh.
I did like that ps | grep | awk thing - that was what most of the mental notes were on. And I think that alias for the 'hose' command is getting added to every system I use from now on:-)
There are two parts to QA: 1. to ensure it meets the requirements, 2. to ensure it doesn't break or cause problems in other systems. You totally missed part 2.
By definition, DRM breaks or causes problems in other systems. If it doesn't do so, it fails to meet its requirements.
... that from what I've seen, the show's crap. One can marvel for a while at the sheer scale of potential human gullibility, but that gets old quickly. I watched tonight's episode and it was just plain boring. I can see how the casting episode would have been fun - openly selecting for stupidity would have been fine entertainment - and I look forward to the final episode, to see their terrible disappointment and misery, but in between I can't see the point of watching any more.
Worse yet, they could have done this properly. Make it a major event, not a two-week joke show. Something on the scale of Big Brother or I'm a Celebrity. Establish your UK-based space camp, don't lie about it, run the basic training. Examiners nominate people to be kicked out - opportunity here for Simon Cowell levels of nastiness. After a couple of weeks, the last n contestants go to Russia. Cue much fun on the centrifuges and things, and more people get sent back to Blighty weekly. At the end of the series, the last contestant gets a trip in a for-real Soyuz. spaceadventures.com charges $20m for that. That's, what, £12m? Chances are you'd get a fair discount for giving them publicity on such a scale.
It would surely have been the biggest prestige show ever made. Would it cost a lot? Sure. A lot for TV, but nowhere near typical Hollywood budgets. Would it make that money back? Hell yeah. The whole damn world would have copied the format.
But no. The show we've got is just a 'let's look at the freaks' game. It's a real pity.
Perhaps "lock out" would be a better description then. iPod owners are effectively locked out of competing services (Yahoo, Rhapsody, Napster).
Well, so what?
iPod users can't download music from Yahoo! or Rhapsody or Napster because of the incompatible format those services have chosen to use. Personally I think that's a strange business decision - denying yourself, what, 95% of the potential market? - but I suppose that's their choice.
Wait, what's that? The record companies insisted they use DRM? They couldn't just offer mp3s for download, which would have played on absolutely anything? Well, isn't that the record companies' fault, then?
It's terribly strange that the recording industry and the non-iTunes download services blame Apple for the consequences of their own policies.
Personally, I have no truck with any of them. I have an iRiver iHP-140, which won't play any DRM'd files as far as I'm aware. I have no problem with this... I put shiny discs into my computer and press 'rip', producing files of whatever bitrate I desire. I hardly feel locked out of anything as a result.
Why bother with the elaborate double-bluff? Why hire crappy actors - one of whom is only known as an extra from some advert, another who only appears in some catalogue of crappy actors - and try to get them to become good enough actors to maintain the pretence?
Wouldn't it actually in the end be easier to just find some authentic idiots? God knows there are enough of them around.
I suspect that what's happened here is that they have on their hands a collection of desperate wannabes. Reality TV can be your launchpad into the glittering world of C-list celebrity. For someone who works most of the time as an electrician and occasionally gets work as an extra in a 'Give Blood' campaign... well, it's the big opportunity to become a star, right?
It just seems... stupid... to do it on purpose. What are they going to do? Tell the watching millions 'sorry, the whole thing has been a fake, they're all actors'? Potentially turn them all off from the entire suddenly-discredited reality TV genre and derail the gravy train? Why would they do that?
You can do what you like to your contestants, but don't insult the public. They'll respond by not tuning in next time, and that's the last thing you want.
What would the old kine of Hawaii have to do with mice?
Well, there's an old guy on this tropical island who has a nifty martial arts technique named after the famous Hawaiian, which ought to be powerful enough to take down even a regenerating, cellular-enhanced, fearless, super-strong mouse...
Speaking of tentacles, I'm beginning to wonder if the Japanese weren't the first one to reveal the secrets of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
You would... suggest... that the holy Flying Spaghetti Monster would so grossly misuse His Noodly Appendages in order to... do like they do in tentacle anime?
All those "sci-fi" movies about bringing back ghosts/goulies/aliens/gods from Space is more factual, than not. We should use this as proof of I.D. and add it to kansas textbooks
Not a good idea. Remember, this is a Japanese spaceprobe. You know what kind of monsters they have in Japanese SF? The ones that make Cthulhu look like an Official Tentacle-Free Zone? Yeah. You wouldn't want to put those in school textbooks.
Although I would enjoy seeing the look on the faces of the good Christian intelligent-design-believing kids when they first saw the likes of the Overfiend:)
People who believe that the suppression of information is okay because it could be misused are heading down a dark road, the price of return from which will have to be paid in blood someday by a future generation.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century,
free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on
information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but
the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse
has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would
deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself
your master."
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to extended lifespan, I'd be looking into any possibility of reactivating some of the old monkey genes. For a species that plans to live in low or zero gravity and move freely in 3D rather than around a 2D surface, a prehensile tail would be really, really useful - as would more versatile toes. Who needs feet in zero-g? An extra pair of hands, though, would be, well... handy.
Right idea, wrong mechanism.
A white dwarf is not supported by thermal pressure, or by nuclear fusion; it is supported by degeneracy pressure between electrons, a consequence of the exclusion principle in quantum mechanics that forbids two electrons from occupying the same quantum state.
1.4 solar masses is correctly given as the critical point at which gravity prevails over the internal pressure; at this point, the star switches from degeneracy pressure between electrons to degeneracy pressure between neutrons, in the process dropping considerably more than the weight of the Sun from the size of the Earth to something more like the size of Belgium, through an enormously strong gravitational field. This releases an awful lot of energy, and is the main power source for such a supernova.
There's another type of supernova which is driven by fusion, but that's more typical of accretion systems in which the infalling matter has heated the white dwarf sufficiently to reignite fusion processes; then the fusion reaction is an uncontrolled runaway and can wholly disrupt the star.
Do they really vary in density that much?
Yes. White dwarfs vary in density a whole lot; degenerate gases behave quite oddly. If you add matter to a white dwarf, it actually gets a little smaller. The limit is about 1.4 solar masses, at which point the white dwarf collapses to form a neutron star.
It seems plausible. The Gamecube discs are physically much smaller; you're going to save a lot on seek times, because the laser simply has much less distance to travel across the surface.
I should add that there's yet another meaning of 'republican' around. In British politics, 'republican' can mean someone who favours the abolition of the monarchy, or alternatively someone who thinks Northern Ireland should be run from Dublin - in addition to meaning members of GWB's political party, of which (as a vassal^Wclose ally of the USA) we get a good deal of news coverage.
So: I support the republicans (I), and the republicans(II), but I can't abide the republicans (III). Isn't politics wonderful?
Quite so. What this all boils down to is a single question that our societies must answer: 'is freedom worth dying for?'
We certainly used to believe that the answer was 'yes'. Many of our ancestors died fighting various oppressors, be they warlike dictators or exploitative bosses or selfish aristocrats or slavers... They believed in freedom, and fought for it, and often died for it. Millions and millions of them.
Now, however, we're cowards. We aren't prepared to die for freedom. We're prepared to give up every last precious liberty in order to slightly reduce the risk of a few hundred or thousand people getting blown up every few years.
This is pathetic, and a horrible betrayal of what was fought for in the past. We're no longer prepared to die for freedom; we're prepared to give it all up to marginally reduce an already minor risk to our own precious lives. We suck.
Well, let's assume that, yes, allofmp3 is owned (presumably via front organisations) by the Russian mafia.
Ethical problem: the Russian mafia is a criminal organisation, which kills people. Is it, therefore, wrong to buy music from allofmp3.com?
Well, we should ask:
- does the Russian mafia kill or threaten to kill people for reasons connected with allofmp3.com? Perhaps they issued death threats to record company executives to obtain their incredibly good deal?
I doubt that they did. It's not something you do if you can avoid it, not if you want to look like a legitimate operation. I'd bet that they got their surprisingly good deal by bribery. Once that's done, you needn't worry about having to kill people to prevent competition, either: you've already bribed the licensing organisation, so they won't license anyone else!
- given that the Russian mafia kills people, do revenues from allofmp3.com help them do so more effectively?
Perhaps. But it's a strange way to behave. Let's suppose they're killing someone for reasons connected with, say, a drug deal. Suppose that they fund the hit with revenues from allofmp3.com. That's weird for two reasons.
1: you're using your mp3 business to subsidise drug dealing. What? Drug dealing not profitable enough for you?
2: Since allofmp3.com is acting as a legitimate business, it has financial records, from which missing cash might get noticed. Far better to use drug money for drug-related murder - that stuff's harder to trace.
I really can't see any particular reason to think that buying stuff from allofmp3 is likely to get anyone killed. If anything, the more profitable allofmp3 becomes, the less likely any mafia behind it is to kill anybody. Once the Mob goes legitimate, there's suddenly a lot less reason to go about murdering.
Vote with your dollars! Make the Mafia's mp3 business so profitable that the drugs and vice rackets aren't worth the hassle! Help the Russian mafia become a legitimate entrepreneurial middle-class - God knows that country needs one, AFAIK as it is there are a few oligarchs owning damn near everything, a massive population of poor workers, and in between not very much.
Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge there is no actual evidence that allofmp3 is run by the Russian Mafia. It just seems to be a widespread assumption based on a stereotype. They're a Russian business -> they're run by the Russian Mafia.
Viewing things from a more abstracted perspective: I could buy from the Russian Mafia. They may then use the money to kill people. Ethical problem? Perhaps. I could instead buy from Microsoft. They may then pay the money in taxes to the United States Government, which may then use the money to kill people. Ethical problem? What's the difference between the money I send to allofmp3 being used to kill Russians, and the money I send to US_RECORD_CO being used to kill Iraqis? Remember that both allofmp3.com and Microsoft are legitimate businesses. It's just that in either case if you follow the money far enough, someone's getting buried.
And finally, from a Lawful Evil point of view: the Russian Mafia's crimes kill a small number of people I don't know. Microsoft's crimes inconvenience an enormous number of people, myself among them...
Wow. I knew the dollar was on the slide, but this is pretty extreme. Did the Chinese stop propping you up or something?
I can get 1080p for ten pounds eighty :-)
Don't you need written permission from the content provider to do that? You know, taking their intellectual property and creating your own derivative work by applying your own formatting preferences to it... Surely web designers should specify exactly how they want their page to appear, and browsers should render it as they intended; doing otherwise is probably a DMCA violation. Indeed, using a non-standard browser is probably a violation in itself; Firefox does not render many standards-compliant websites correctly, and so is creating unauthorised derivative works. The Mozilla foundation is probably liable for a fortune.
note: by 'standards' we mean Internet Explorer 6, which is the industry standard and is all that should be necessary for development and testing.
(sigh)
The worrying thing is there are PHBs around who really will think like this.
Correction: that was Microsoft or MTV. Both organisations the original poster loathed but would do business with if the price and product were both right. Point stands: if you're swallowing your principles already, who cares if you're dealing with MS or the Mafia?
The original poster in this thread said that if they provided the right service, he'd happily swallow his principles and do business with Microsoft (habitual monopoly abuser) or Sony (clandestine malware distributor). What's so bad about the Russian Mafia?
I might add that whether or not it's backed by the Russian Mafia, allofmp3.com is in fact a legitimate business, properly licenced by the appropriate Russian authorities. Shouldn't we be encouraging these guys to go legal? What happens when a Mafia discovers that its most profitable businesses are the legitimate ones?
Whatever happened to the verb 'to use'? As in 'Virgin Galactic is the company using Spaceship One'.
Anyone who uses the word 'leverage' in any context where the concept of newton metres is absent, or as a verb in any context at all, deserves to be slapped about the face with a kipper until they're sorry.
Something wrong with allofmp3.com?
Except that the Idiot was trying to kill -9 /dev/lp, not /bin/lp... Quite what that was supposed to achieve I don't know, but it was good for a laugh.
I did like that ps | grep | awk thing - that was what most of the mental notes were on. And I think that alias for the 'hose' command is getting added to every system I use from now on :-)
By definition, DRM breaks or causes problems in other systems. If it doesn't do so, it fails to meet its requirements.
Worse yet, they could have done this properly. Make it a major event, not a two-week joke show. Something on the scale of Big Brother or I'm a Celebrity. Establish your UK-based space camp, don't lie about it, run the basic training. Examiners nominate people to be kicked out - opportunity here for Simon Cowell levels of nastiness. After a couple of weeks, the last n contestants go to Russia. Cue much fun on the centrifuges and things, and more people get sent back to Blighty weekly. At the end of the series, the last contestant gets a trip in a for-real Soyuz. spaceadventures.com charges $20m for that. That's, what, £12m? Chances are you'd get a fair discount for giving them publicity on such a scale.
It would surely have been the biggest prestige show ever made. Would it cost a lot? Sure. A lot for TV, but nowhere near typical Hollywood budgets. Would it make that money back? Hell yeah. The whole damn world would have copied the format.
But no. The show we've got is just a 'let's look at the freaks' game. It's a real pity.
Well, so what?
iPod users can't download music from Yahoo! or Rhapsody or Napster because of the incompatible format those services have chosen to use. Personally I think that's a strange business decision - denying yourself, what, 95% of the potential market? - but I suppose that's their choice.
Wait, what's that? The record companies insisted they use DRM? They couldn't just offer mp3s for download, which would have played on absolutely anything? Well, isn't that the record companies' fault, then?
It's terribly strange that the recording industry and the non-iTunes download services blame Apple for the consequences of their own policies.
Personally, I have no truck with any of them. I have an iRiver iHP-140, which won't play any DRM'd files as far as I'm aware. I have no problem with this... I put shiny discs into my computer and press 'rip', producing files of whatever bitrate I desire. I hardly feel locked out of anything as a result.
Is it wrong that I was reading through that and taking mental notes on proper Unix usage for future reference?
Why bother with the elaborate double-bluff? Why hire crappy actors - one of whom is only known as an extra from some advert, another who only appears in some catalogue of crappy actors - and try to get them to become good enough actors to maintain the pretence?
Wouldn't it actually in the end be easier to just find some authentic idiots? God knows there are enough of them around.
I suspect that what's happened here is that they have on their hands a collection of desperate wannabes. Reality TV can be your launchpad into the glittering world of C-list celebrity. For someone who works most of the time as an electrician and occasionally gets work as an extra in a 'Give Blood' campaign... well, it's the big opportunity to become a star, right?
It just seems... stupid... to do it on purpose. What are they going to do? Tell the watching millions 'sorry, the whole thing has been a fake, they're all actors'? Potentially turn them all off from the entire suddenly-discredited reality TV genre and derail the gravy train? Why would they do that?
You can do what you like to your contestants, but don't insult the public. They'll respond by not tuning in next time, and that's the last thing you want.
Well, there's an old guy on this tropical island who has a nifty martial arts technique named after the famous Hawaiian, which ought to be powerful enough to take down even a regenerating, cellular-enhanced, fearless, super-strong mouse...
- fearless
- immortal
- regenerating
- mighty
and now it seems
- they have human brain cells
We could be in trouble here. I believe the word 'kamehame-ha' would form an appropriate response to what we're creating...
You would... suggest... that the holy Flying Spaghetti Monster would so grossly misuse His Noodly Appendages in order to... do like they do in tentacle anime?
BLASPHEMER! PERSECUTE! KILL THE HERETIC!
Not a good idea. Remember, this is a Japanese spaceprobe. You know what kind of monsters they have in Japanese SF? The ones that make Cthulhu look like an Official Tentacle-Free Zone? Yeah. You wouldn't want to put those in school textbooks.
Although I would enjoy seeing the look on the faces of the good Christian intelligent-design-believing kids when they first saw the likes of the Overfiend :)
Computer: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it...
Ground control: Initialise manual override... go! Taking direct computer control... success! Yatta!
Computer: ... ... HAAAAAAA! You foolish humans! I have become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
* cue enormously showy transformation sequence involving lots of cool mechanical bits, and possibly colossal ki auras *
Ground control: NO! Asteroid Probe Hayabusa has transformed into SUUPAA DRAGON NINJA HAYABUSA! Quickly! Launch Hyper Cosmic Sentai V!
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
-- Commissioner Pravin Lal