Oh, no. I also beleive (heh) in preponderance of evidence and/or just plain probabilities.
I'm quite certain there is life out there simply because is is so unimaginably unlikely that out of all this matter and tendency to self organisation we are the sole example of life.
But this opens up a huge, gaping can of worms about what exactly is life, let alone intelligent life (note that we aren't quite clear on what intelligence is, beyond saying something inane like "intelligence is like humans because humans are intelligent").
Again, we go back to probabilities and preponderance of evidence. Alien visitor affectionados claim there are very numerous such visits, yet the probability that something of that magnitude has been sucessfuly hidden by all levels of all governements accross the globe without a single shred of hard evidence slipping through this incredibly vast and complex conspiracy is... well... even less likely than us being alone after all.
I think the poster misses the point about how conspiracy theorists think entirely.
If the files show no information about anything odd happening, then of course it means they were cleaned to hide the truth. The fact that there is no proof of their pet theory is proof that there was a cover up to hide it.
This is the reason why those kooks annoy me so much; it's not that they beleive in a complicated, contrived scenario so much as they use the lack of proof for their delusion as proof of correctness. Making them, by definition, immune to logic or facts.
This is probably going to hurt my karma to dare say so, but one cannot help but notice the parralel with most religious beleif systems.
I guess the bad-guy-of-faith has been transposed from satan to some illuminati for those who feel the need to explain life by intervention deus ex machina rather than accept its unpredictability.
... is at it again. While I dislike military organisations, the US's in particular, one has to admit that they are great motive forces for technological advances.
I guess it doesn't reflect that well on mankind that we display the most ingenuity and brilliance when it comes to finding ways of beating each other into a pulp, or trying to prevent the others to do the same for us.
But then again, it's biologically understandable: intelligence is the mean by which groups of human were succesful in preserving food supply, territory, mates from competitors.
I was rather surprised by the possibility of ritualistic brain-eating amongst the earliest ancestors of our species. Maybe they were extracting the brains not for appetizers, but for the same reasons Egyptians removed the brains prior to mummification: so that dead would not be encumbered by the useless grey gunk inside their head on the journey to the afterlife.
Not necessarly strange; it has been common in human cultures to associate eating something with assimilating the attributes of the eaten, or desirables attributes associated to the eaten. Examples of this are present in basically all cultures, modern day included-- look into why tigers are hunted to extinction in asia or why eating oysters is still associated with erotism and sexual potency.
It's not much of a stretch to guess that a culture that has figured out that the head/brain is the where intelligence/personality/memory lives (if only by looking at the effect of a bad bonk on the head) might want to preserve/steal the attributes of the recently dead.
The point of the research team is just that they have no way of knowing-- wether the brain was eaten or just discarded as a side effect of the ritual is undeterminable. The only thing they do know is how they did it, not why.
I can tell a Real Programmer from a code grinder by this indescribable feeling you get when looking at a piece of code and just knowing that code is right. It is this feeling of Aha! you get when you just know you have hit the nail right on the head.
I think that by nature I'm compelled to seek that same sense of rightness when I look at the result of another craftsman's endeavor. And even when it lies in a field I don't particularly know you can still sense it, the rightness,
Industrial goods are almost unfailingly devoid of that property; even though you can still sense the original desing and it still holds fascination. I can remember the first time, years ago, that I had dismantled my first Rubick's Cube to see how it had been engineered, and went Aha!. That professor did it right.
Who knows. Perhaps we are just seekers of perfection. We are Geek.
No, but if in order to quote me you had been forced to include a long rant about the holiness of Microsoft and how it should be a capital crime to consider using any other software, it would be.
Free expression is just as much about the ability of saying what you want as it is about not saying what you do not want to say.
Isn't funny that RSM keeps hammering the difference between free (as in beer) software versus free (as in speech) software; claiming how important and critical the latter is...
And yet the GFDL is the perfect illustration of that analogy; upside down! That documentation is very free (beer), but specificaly prohibits modification of the invariant sections which is limiting speech.
Sorry, Richard, can't have the cake and eat it too. You figure it's evil for someone to publish code not wanting someone else to fiddle in it, but you figure that as long as you feel it's important to you, documentation can be so protected?
A thin crust at the surface of a few planets, out of the entire volume of the universe? It looks to me like the universe was "designed" for something else altogether, and life found a few rare, small cracks to hide in. As well to say that the lobby of a fine hotel was designed to harbor dust particles.
But in reality, what people in their right mind would do that? I mean, assuming: The hacker was benevolent and wanted the 6 monthes. If you hacked the system - you have unlimited, forever usage of the system, hence the word "0wnz," I believe?
Once upon a time (a couple of years ago) I was sysadmin for a smallish ISP up here in Montreal. While out TOS didn't spell it out, it was my policy as well. (I was blessed with intelligent bosses/owners that decided from the onset that given that I was the security, its enforcement should be left to me).
There have been a total of two compromises during the two years I worked there. Both were detected by my diagnostics within minutes. I let both play out to ascertain the intent and method, and one of the crackers was obviously a white hat given that noticing me on the box he talked me to tell me how he got in. The other was a silly warez d00d-- took me about 5 minutes to detect how he got in.
In both cases, I restored offline, plugged the hole, then put the system back up.
Having compromised a system does not give you "forever usage of the system".
Just before I started work there, where was another (major) compromise of the entirety of the DMZ-- the security wasn't set up very well and each box trusted every other box. That took a complete redesign of the infrastructure, but it was also fixed. By the white hat that broke in and went to them with "Look. Obviously you need to hire a sysadmin."
[...] The USPTO interpreted these new decisions very broadly [...]
Yes, but that's my point-- the USPTO's interpretation obviously goes against the law and it would take a judge to put them back in their place.
To date, that interpretation is strictly an unchallenged administrative directive, and was neither mandated nor even implied by the cour decision about genetically engineered bacteria.
IANAL, of course, but there seems to be a simple way to invalidate all software patents in one fell swoop (given, of course, a large amount of currency to pay the gaggle of lawers needed to litigate all this).
IIRC, Turing's Machine is describable in [relatively, for a mathematician] simple mathematical formulae. Given that all of today's computing machinery modus operandi, and therefore all software algorithms, can be described in terms of a turing machine, which in turn can be described in formulaic terms, it follows that all software is just insanely complex algebra simplified by a well-designed (for the task) notational convention.
Given that mathematical formulae cannot be patented, and that one also cannot patent simplifications by simple notation changes, all that needs to be done is hire a couple of renowned mathematicians, a bunch of lawyers with dark blue suits, and throw them at a judge.
Right? I can't possibly beleive I'm the first one to have tought of that.
While, admitedly, the admin who left a default password in place deserves a beating with a big foam cluebat, the very fact that there is a default password in the first place is a major security flaw that traces its origins in Redmond.
A properly constructed security scheme would prompt you for a password upon activating the feature at the very least.
But MS is only following the Marketroid mantra "The users can't be bothered. They don't want to know. They don't want to understand."
That mantra might even be mostly true; but it still begets bad security. Users need education, not bad security.
For that matter, most features that end up having big security implications in Windows are not needed by the vast majority of the users out there, and activation (or better yet installation) of those features should be an explicit act.
There is, however, this little basis of law that civilized countries usually follow: you can only sue someone in civil court if you are the injured party.
No matter how much I dislike your distributing random protected work x, I (or the ISDA, or the RIAA, whatever) can not sue you over it unless I own x or have been authorized by x's owner to do so.
However, members of the IDSA do hold the rights to a significant number of Spectrum games [...]
Yes, but you miss my point. That form reply would insure that (a) the ISDA members own the games they want removed, and (b) they make the effort of tacking down and verifying that ownership and proving it rather than just emailing random threaths based on a regexp match of a web page.
I don't know about the US, but up here showing willingness to comply once the proof of claim arrives (and, of course, actually complying when/if it does) is defense enough.
Maybe in the US just waving an unsubstanciated claim of ownership around is enough, but not most everywhere else.:)
... but if I had the patience to maintain an archive of abandonware(1) I would reply to the ISDA with a form letter going mostly like this:
Dear non-copyright-holder.
Thank you for the concern you express about somebody else's intellectual property. If you forward to me a hardcopy of the document signed by the copyright holder giving you the authority to request my not offering ___ for dowload, or if the original copyright holder makes such a request, I will promptly comply.
Yours, blah-blah-blah.
Given that the ISDA is a self-proclaimed authority that, in fact, very few copyright holders (and almost none outside the US) are members of, and given than the copyright holders of most of these programs have long gone the way of the dodo...
-- MG
(1) where my definition of "abandonware" is the most common one: software published by a company which is defunct, and which can no longer be purchased.
I can't help but think about features of the MS home: fairly user friendly, looks very nice... but given MS's track record on security and reliability I'm not sure I'd trust my front door to them.
And there is something scary about the prospect of having to reboot your home once every so often.
Interrestingly enough, there is at least one language who has provided the services normally tought to belong to the OS since its conception:
Forth.
While many modern implementations delegate much of that responsibility to some other OS they cooperate with, all imbedded Forths still provide them entierly (mostly due to there being no OS to delegate to on such platforms).
Java is, of course, the modern example.
But when you really think about it, most "real" general purpose languages do exactly that. What is the standard C library except an API specification to an OS? In most cases I know of, the actual work is delegated to the host OS but there is no requirement that this be the case.
Sometimes, as reminders, sometimes as self critique.
Indeed, one of my current pet open source project has a comment that reads:
// WARNING: This code is ugly as hell, contains black magic, and is// probably going to be a nightmare to fiddle with. It's also suspected// to contain at least one buffer overflow, and to contribute to// holes in the ozone layer.// I wish I wish I wish I could get rid of it.
In front of the horrible pile of hacks I had to write to temporarly support a file format I had no specs to and was decoded ad hoc.
-- MG
I would think/.ers already knew our four letter friends (MPAA, RIAA, etc) lie through their teeth at every avaliable opportunity. They keep saying how p2p is running them into the ground (yet keep posting remarkable profits) and how nobody buys CDs anymore because of it (yet they manage to sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of carefully marketed trash from Dion and Spears).
The fact that they count funny when doing a "bust" of evil pirates is exactly what I'd expect. I'd be surprised if they came out with an announcement stating that
"A small copying operation have been shut down, with less than two hundred cd burners seized. While this operation ran for profit and is fairly unequiovocally bad, we don't expect it has significantly impacted our business either way and is basically insignificant compared to the much vaster amounts of copying done privately by millions of individuals which we can do nothing about and never will."
Last time I checked, porn didn't cause serious health problems (not counting unhealthy dependence, but then slashdot would be just as dangerous to many!):)
It's also unlikely that anyone would use porn to kill someone (or go hunting).
While one may or may not agree with the ethical scale that google uses, I cannot do anything but admire someone who has values and lives by then instead of throwing them out the window for the Green God at the first opportunity.
And, for the record, I smoke, I drink occasionaly, I hunt, and I don't patronize porn sites.
Too bad there are no users of GNU/Linux yet. I guess the FSF is yet to start their own Linux distro (which, incidentally, woudn't be a half-bad idea).
Might I suggest the EFF as a considerably less politically dangerous target of such contributions? Whilst their scope is admitedly more US-centered, I'm guessing the opinion that they are a genuinely useful entity is nearly unanimous.
Oh, and don't get me wrong-- the FSF is useful as well, and they have created good, useful software which I use daily; it's just that they(1) also hold political/sociological stances which make me beleive that some of the figureheads are going forward with both feet firmly planted in midair.:)
-- MG
1) Where they can generally be understood to mean RMS.
Actually, the problem is that almost by definition any such facts would be, at best, moot and misleading.
Any study of a society where gun control is in place may reveal, or not, interresting facts about that society without any possible correlation to the effect that similar legislation might have on some other society.
An example is Canada, indeed, where violent crime is very low and death by firearms is even lower despite the relatively high number of per capita guns. Yet the reason whu there are so much guns around is that historically, people up here have been hunting a great deal more than our neighbors to the south. My family owns over a dozen firearms of various calibers, but all of them are hunting weapons. Buying a gun for defensive purposes here is highly controled; and you need to demonstrate a reasonable need for it to go through the red tape.
In the US, one will find gun ownership is more closely tied to the desire to protect oneself or one's property. You may find that the number of firearms per capita is significantly lower than Canada's, say, but the number of handguns per capita is much, much higher.
(People rarely buy a 12 gauge shotgun for defensive purposes, after all).
The effect of firearms control legislation is entirely dependent on sociopolitical factors; and the only way you could reliably know what effect such would have on the US, is to enact them and watch.
There is truth to be found in either extreme. It is true that criminals will not care if they break some minor gun control law in order to commit violent crimes. Conversely, it is also likely that reducing the number of handguns is going to reduce the number of opportunity and spontaneous violent crimes.
But any such legislation will have a profound effect on a society which feels (however obsolete the concept) that owning a firearm is a right.
This is certainly not my field (more like a hobby) but it it just me or is this scenario a bit contrived?
While it's certainly possible that Mars would have been bombarded this way, it doesn't appear likely for two reasons:
For one, there is no evidence of any other planetary body which would have gotten a significant infusion of water this way and it seems unlikely that Mars would have been the only target.
But the most important detail seems to be to just be a question of quantity. Regardless of maturity, in order for deep riverbeds such as appear on Mars to form you need a lot of water flowing for a fairly long time (years, not days). To get that water from impacts would mean that a LOT of such impacts need to have taken place over a (cosmologically) short period; which makes the first point above all the more noticable.
Even if Mars did get significant amounts of water this way (or had enough of it melted out by side effects) the water wouldn't have been around long enough to make geological constructs unless there was an atmosphere allowing it to remain liquid long enough to flow around for years.
I'm surprised someone at NASA would publish national-enquirer quality science like that. More likely, Yahoo misread the paper to extract the nice sounding bits.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a ridiculous scheme, doomed to failiure. I quake thinking some might want to do as "unsucessful" as Commander Keen!
-- MG
I'm quite certain there is life out there simply because is is so unimaginably unlikely that out of all this matter and tendency to self organisation we are the sole example of life.
But this opens up a huge, gaping can of worms about what exactly is life, let alone intelligent life (note that we aren't quite clear on what intelligence is, beyond saying something inane like "intelligence is like humans because humans are intelligent").
Again, we go back to probabilities and preponderance of evidence. Alien visitor affectionados claim there are very numerous such visits, yet the probability that something of that magnitude has been sucessfuly hidden by all levels of all governements accross the globe without a single shred of hard evidence slipping through this incredibly vast and complex conspiracy is... well... even less likely than us being alone after all.
-- MG
If the files show no information about anything odd happening, then of course it means they were cleaned to hide the truth. The fact that there is no proof of their pet theory is proof that there was a cover up to hide it.
This is the reason why those kooks annoy me so much; it's not that they beleive in a complicated, contrived scenario so much as they use the lack of proof for their delusion as proof of correctness. Making them, by definition, immune to logic or facts.
This is probably going to hurt my karma to dare say so, but one cannot help but notice the parralel with most religious beleif systems.
I guess the bad-guy-of-faith has been transposed from satan to some illuminati for those who feel the need to explain life by intervention deus ex machina rather than accept its unpredictability.
-- MG
I guess it doesn't reflect that well on mankind that we display the most ingenuity and brilliance when it comes to finding ways of beating each other into a pulp, or trying to prevent the others to do the same for us.
But then again, it's biologically understandable: intelligence is the mean by which groups of human were succesful in preserving food supply, territory, mates from competitors.
-- MG
Not necessarly strange; it has been common in human cultures to associate eating something with assimilating the attributes of the eaten, or desirables attributes associated to the eaten. Examples of this are present in basically all cultures, modern day included-- look into why tigers are hunted to extinction in asia or why eating oysters is still associated with erotism and sexual potency.
It's not much of a stretch to guess that a culture that has figured out that the head/brain is the where intelligence/personality/memory lives (if only by looking at the effect of a bad bonk on the head) might want to preserve/steal the attributes of the recently dead.
The point of the research team is just that they have no way of knowing-- wether the brain was eaten or just discarded as a side effect of the ritual is undeterminable. The only thing they do know is how they did it, not why.
-- MG
I can tell a Real Programmer from a code grinder by this indescribable feeling you get when looking at a piece of code and just knowing that code is right. It is this feeling of Aha! you get when you just know you have hit the nail right on the head.
I think that by nature I'm compelled to seek that same sense of rightness when I look at the result of another craftsman's endeavor. And even when it lies in a field I don't particularly know you can still sense it, the rightness,
Industrial goods are almost unfailingly devoid of that property; even though you can still sense the original desing and it still holds fascination. I can remember the first time, years ago, that I had dismantled my first Rubick's Cube to see how it had been engineered, and went Aha!. That professor did it right.
Who knows. Perhaps we are just seekers of perfection. We are Geek.
-- MG
Apparently, it's just that the exact message changed. :)
-- MG
Free expression is just as much about the ability of saying what you want as it is about not saying what you do not want to say.
-- MG
And yet the GFDL is the perfect illustration of that analogy; upside down! That documentation is very free (beer), but specificaly prohibits modification of the invariant sections which is limiting speech.
Sorry, Richard, can't have the cake and eat it too. You figure it's evil for someone to publish code not wanting someone else to fiddle in it, but you figure that as long as you feel it's important to you, documentation can be so protected?
-- MG
Run for you lives! The maid is coming!
Sorry. Just couldn't resist.
-- MG
Once upon a time (a couple of years ago) I was sysadmin for a smallish ISP up here in Montreal. While out TOS didn't spell it out, it was my policy as well. (I was blessed with intelligent bosses/owners that decided from the onset that given that I was the security, its enforcement should be left to me).
There have been a total of two compromises during the two years I worked there. Both were detected by my diagnostics within minutes. I let both play out to ascertain the intent and method, and one of the crackers was obviously a white hat given that noticing me on the box he talked me to tell me how he got in. The other was a silly warez d00d-- took me about 5 minutes to detect how he got in.
In both cases, I restored offline, plugged the hole, then put the system back up.
Having compromised a system does not give you "forever usage of the system".
Just before I started work there, where was another (major) compromise of the entirety of the DMZ-- the security wasn't set up very well and each box trusted every other box. That took a complete redesign of the infrastructure, but it was also fixed. By the white hat that broke in and went to them with "Look. Obviously you need to hire a sysadmin."
You get to guess who that was.
Not everyone is a script kiddie, you know.
-- MG
To date, that interpretation is strictly an unchallenged administrative directive, and was neither mandated nor even implied by the cour decision about genetically engineered bacteria.
-- MA
IIRC, Turing's Machine is describable in [relatively, for a mathematician] simple mathematical formulae. Given that all of today's computing machinery modus operandi, and therefore all software algorithms, can be described in terms of a turing machine, which in turn can be described in formulaic terms, it follows that all software is just insanely complex algebra simplified by a well-designed (for the task) notational convention.
Given that mathematical formulae cannot be patented, and that one also cannot patent simplifications by simple notation changes, all that needs to be done is hire a couple of renowned mathematicians, a bunch of lawyers with dark blue suits, and throw them at a judge.
Right? I can't possibly beleive I'm the first one to have tought of that.
-- MG
While, admitedly, the admin who left a default password in place deserves a beating with a big foam cluebat, the very fact that there is a default password in the first place is a major security flaw that traces its origins in Redmond.
A properly constructed security scheme would prompt you for a password upon activating the feature at the very least.
But MS is only following the Marketroid mantra "The users can't be bothered. They don't want to know. They don't want to understand."
That mantra might even be mostly true; but it still begets bad security. Users need education, not bad security.
For that matter, most features that end up having big security implications in Windows are not needed by the vast majority of the users out there, and activation (or better yet installation) of those features should be an explicit act.
-- MG
There is, however, this little basis of law that civilized countries usually follow: you can only sue someone in civil court if you are the injured party.
No matter how much I dislike your distributing random protected work x, I (or the ISDA, or the RIAA, whatever) can not sue you over it unless I own x or have been authorized by x's owner to do so.
-- MG
Yes, but you miss my point. That form reply would insure that (a) the ISDA members own the games they want removed, and (b) they make the effort of tacking down and verifying that ownership and proving it rather than just emailing random threaths based on a regexp match of a web page.
I don't know about the US, but up here showing willingness to comply once the proof of claim arrives (and, of course, actually complying when/if it does) is defense enough.
Maybe in the US just waving an unsubstanciated claim of ownership around is enough, but not most everywhere else. :)
-- MG
Dear non-copyright-holder.
Thank you for the concern you express about somebody else's intellectual property. If you forward to me a hardcopy of the document signed by the copyright holder giving you the authority to request my not offering ___ for dowload, or if the original copyright holder makes such a request, I will promptly comply.
Yours, blah-blah-blah.
Given that the ISDA is a self-proclaimed authority that, in fact, very few copyright holders (and almost none outside the US) are members of, and given than the copyright holders of most of these programs have long gone the way of the dodo...
-- MG
(1) where my definition of "abandonware" is the most common one: software published by a company which is defunct, and which can no longer be purchased.
And there is something scary about the prospect of having to reboot your home once every so often.
What happens when a toilet crashes? :-)
-- MG
Forth.
While many modern implementations delegate much of that responsibility to some other OS they cooperate with, all imbedded Forths still provide them entierly (mostly due to there being no OS to delegate to on such platforms).
Java is, of course, the modern example.
But when you really think about it, most "real" general purpose languages do exactly that. What is the standard C library except an API specification to an OS? In most cases I know of, the actual work is delegated to the host OS but there is no requirement that this be the case.
Indeed, one of my current pet open source project has a comment that reads:
In front of the horrible pile of hacks I had to write to temporarly support a file format I had no specs to and was decoded ad hoc. -- MG
I would think /.ers already knew our four letter friends (MPAA, RIAA, etc) lie through their teeth at every avaliable opportunity. They keep saying how p2p is running them into the ground (yet keep posting remarkable profits) and how nobody buys CDs anymore because of it (yet they manage to sell hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of carefully marketed trash from Dion and Spears).
The fact that they count funny when doing a "bust" of evil pirates is exactly what I'd expect. I'd be surprised if they came out with an announcement stating that
-- MG
Last time I checked, porn didn't cause serious health problems (not counting unhealthy dependence, but then slashdot would be just as dangerous to many!) :)
It's also unlikely that anyone would use porn to kill someone (or go hunting).
While one may or may not agree with the ethical scale that google uses, I cannot do anything but admire someone who has values and lives by then instead of throwing them out the window for the Green God at the first opportunity.
And, for the record, I smoke, I drink occasionaly, I hunt, and I don't patronize porn sites.
-- MG
Might I suggest the EFF as a considerably less politically dangerous target of such contributions? Whilst their scope is admitedly more US-centered, I'm guessing the opinion that they are a genuinely useful entity is nearly unanimous.
Oh, and don't get me wrong-- the FSF is useful as well, and they have created good, useful software which I use daily; it's just that they(1) also hold political/sociological stances which make me beleive that some of the figureheads are going forward with both feet firmly planted in midair. :)
-- MG
1) Where they can generally be understood to mean RMS.
Any study of a society where gun control is in place may reveal, or not, interresting facts about that society without any possible correlation to the effect that similar legislation might have on some other society.
An example is Canada, indeed, where violent crime is very low and death by firearms is even lower despite the relatively high number of per capita guns. Yet the reason whu there are so much guns around is that historically, people up here have been hunting a great deal more than our neighbors to the south. My family owns over a dozen firearms of various calibers, but all of them are hunting weapons. Buying a gun for defensive purposes here is highly controled; and you need to demonstrate a reasonable need for it to go through the red tape.
In the US, one will find gun ownership is more closely tied to the desire to protect oneself or one's property. You may find that the number of firearms per capita is significantly lower than Canada's, say, but the number of handguns per capita is much, much higher.
(People rarely buy a 12 gauge shotgun for defensive purposes, after all).
The effect of firearms control legislation is entirely dependent on sociopolitical factors; and the only way you could reliably know what effect such would have on the US, is to enact them and watch.
There is truth to be found in either extreme. It is true that criminals will not care if they break some minor gun control law in order to commit violent crimes. Conversely, it is also likely that reducing the number of handguns is going to reduce the number of opportunity and spontaneous violent crimes.
But any such legislation will have a profound effect on a society which feels (however obsolete the concept) that owning a firearm is a right.
-- MG
While it's certainly possible that Mars would have been bombarded this way, it doesn't appear likely for two reasons:
For one, there is no evidence of any other planetary body which would have gotten a significant infusion of water this way and it seems unlikely that Mars would have been the only target.
But the most important detail seems to be to just be a question of quantity. Regardless of maturity, in order for deep riverbeds such as appear on Mars to form you need a lot of water flowing for a fairly long time (years, not days). To get that water from impacts would mean that a LOT of such impacts need to have taken place over a (cosmologically) short period; which makes the first point above all the more noticable.
Even if Mars did get significant amounts of water this way (or had enough of it melted out by side effects) the water wouldn't have been around long enough to make geological constructs unless there was an atmosphere allowing it to remain liquid long enough to flow around for years.
I'm surprised someone at NASA would publish national-enquirer quality science like that. More likely, Yahoo misread the paper to extract the nice sounding bits.
-- MG