Everyone knew it wasn't going to last, but I'm shocked at how quickly the music industry has changed their minds on on-line pricing.
Now this worries me. I fall into the "Apple's DRM isn't too bad" camp, but if the price goes up to $2.50 a track, they will lose my business. (I never buy whole albums from iTMS, so I personally don't care if the whole album price creeps up).
Apple succeeded in getting the RIAA to agree to their iTMS business model, so hopefully Steve can manage to keep prices as close to a buck a track as possible.
And FairPlay is the main reason I never signed up for the iTunes store. I have 4 PC's at home alone, and one PC at work - what, I can only play the songs I purchase on 3 of them? Sorry, but that's BS.
And the counterargument that gets made to comments like yours is that you can burn the tracks to a CD and play it anywhere. You can even re-rip it and listen to the tracks DRM free on 1,000 PCs if you have them.
The counterargument to my counterargument is that by burning & re-ripping you are losing quality, but the counterargument to this counterargument of my counterargument is that if you were enough of an audiophile to care about this, you wouldn't be buying 128K mp4s from iTMS anyway.
Go, Koji, Go (was Re:Saturn simply looks cool)
on
Titanic Saturn
·
· Score: 1
I hope I'm not the only one, but looking at those pictures made me remember how beautiful Saturn is
I agree! Actually, I have always found Saturn to be absolutely beautiful -- I have a tattoo of it on my right arm.
On an unrelated topic, I know the guy who did the X-ray shadow observations. If you asked me who among the people I know is least likely to wind up on the front page of/., I would have guessed Koji.
Dammit! I thought you were lying! Imagine my disappointment when I decoded it and found out that you gave away the punchline.
Oh well. I guess I'll go do some work now.
1) The amount of useful data produced by Hubble is worthless compared to newer infrared space telescopes. Virtually nothing is being learned from these visible light images of the edge of the universe compared to infrared and X-ray images from newer telescopes. Before saving Hubble became a political agenda, even Earth based telescopes had already surpassed it with newer optics and image processing.
How on Earth did this get modded as insightful? This is absolutely 100% wrong. Go to the Astrophysical Journal or the Astronomical Journal for the last 5 years and count how many citations have Hubble data in them compared to any other telescope and you will find that Hubble has been one of the most productive telescopes ever built.
Other telescopes can do some of the things that Hubble can do, but no telescope can do everything it can do. Yes, all of you have heard of adaptive optics. Wonderful. You know that ground-based telescopes can now make images almost as sharp as Hubble. However, if anyone would bother to actually try and understand how AO works compared to HST, you would find out that no ground-based AO system can compete with what Hubble can do on a number of fronts -- they can never detect UV radiation, the field of view is tiny, and doing precise photometry on an AO image is almost impossible.
The instrument has been used to its full capability. There is not much more to be got out of it. The recent release of the Ultra Deep Field will yield no greater insights than the original. Worse, the release of UDF data was clearly staged to garner political support.
Point 1 -- wrong. In the past few years, the oversubscription rate (time requested vs. time available) has gone *up*. Hubble observations are still incredibly valuable, and there are many good proposals in this year's queue, of which, only 1 in 10 will get the time they requested.
Point 2 -- wrong. The Ultra Deep Field was planned and began observations long before the announcement to cancel the Hubble Servicing Mission. When the program was announced, the director of STScI said he would make the data available to the community immediately after the observations were finished, and that just happened the other day. The timing was pure coincidence.
Yeah. Those images will be really useful when the next (near) extinction level asteroid impacts with the Earth.
It's interesting that all of the posts like this in the Hubble articles are now being posted by ACs. Anyway, let me point out that you are exactly wrong about this -- how do we discover the next near extinction level asteroids? By observing the sky with telescopes like Hubble. It's possible that the asteroid that you are describing was imaged by Hubble while working on the Ultra Deep Field. Sure Hubble only sees a small patch of sky, but if you point at that same patch of sky long enough, the probability that an asteroid will pass through your field of view improves. If you want to survive an asteroid impact, it is better to find them all with telescopes so that we can plan on how to deal with them, instead of saying, "Oh well, Earth is toast at some point when it gets hit, lets head to Mars".
What real, practical value does the research unique to Hubble have to the average blue-collar Homer Simpson with the attention span and patience of a fruit fly?
You asked a very good question, and it is one that every astronomer gets confronted with at one time or another. I'll give you a quote I borrowed first, and then my opinion second.
From a report by the National Science Foundation, here is a good summary of why astronomy is important in general:
The essential purpose of fundamental scientific cutting-edge research is to advance knowledge. Regardless of whether information of potential relevance to particular applications is sought at the time the research is initiated, the insights produced by the research enlarge the knowledge base on which future scientific and technological advances can draw. For example, studies of quantum mechanics in the 1920s were considered to be "pure esoterica" by many at the time--few people understood the theory. However, in the succeeding fifty years, results of this work in combination with findings and applications from other fields produced transistors, lasers, and electronic devices used today in a wide array of activities, including information processing, communications, and video imagery.
Here is my opinion, second: Astronomy research does not produce tangible results that improve your day to day life. I can point to technology spinoffs (X-ray machines at airports, CCD imaging - i.e., digital cameras) that you can attribute to astronomy, or you can argue came more directly from somewhere else (military). I could point to the fact that astronomy as an "industry" drives IT development (our storage needs are growing exponentially - check out the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and look up their daily data flow). However, what I would say is that what drives almost everyone in astronomy to do what we do is our strong desire to understand the universe AND communicate that to Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The fact is that astronomy consistently rates as the #1 or #2 science most interesting to the public (the other is paleontology). We all have a desire to understand the universe, and I have personally been thanked many times by people for explaining how our Solar System works, where we are in the Milky Way Galaxy, and how we know the Universe is expanding. It is up to the tax paying public to decide if that is worth funding (BTW, our funding is a tiny fraction of the national budget compared to cancer research, and rightfully so!).
I really don't have an axe to grind about this. If Hubble is cancelled, my job won't be affected. However, my motivation for posting on this topic frequently is to try and combat a few misconceptions, and the previous poster struck a nerve. The fact is that the tax paying public has invested billions of dollars in Hubble, and it has paid the public back by being one of the most (if not the most) productive telescopes ever built. Please check out HubbleSite and page through the immense archive of fabulous imagery (I recommend looking for the V838 Mon light echo image, the Antennae Galaxies, Stephan's Quintet and/or Seyfert's Sextet, and any of the Solar System images). I do not dispute that we should have a dialogue about the future of Hubble. We should weigh the risks of servicing it to keep it in service for another decade. My position is that if the Shuttle (or a replacement) flies, servicing Hubble is a worthwhile mission because it simply can't be replaced by ground-based telescopes, and there is no space-based telescope that will have the capability of Hubble that will fly within the next 10 years.
And, bold-text aside, how does that contradict anything I said?
What you said was that ground-based facilities, such as OWL, can outperform Hubble for the same money, especially because of the availability of AO. So, now let me switch back to bold -- THIS IS NOT TRUE. I contradicted it once, and I will contradict it again. I do not care how big of an aperture your telescope on the ground has, it will never detect any ultraviolet light. While that is not a necessity for every type of observational program, it enables a number of research programs that are IMPOSSIBLE for OWL or any other telescope we will ever build on the ground. Do you get it yet? The Hubble is capable of making important observations that can't be duplicated from the ground. If you use almost any set of objective criteria, the Hubble Space Telescope has been the most productive telescope ever built. In fact, the Ultra Deep Field observations that were just released today will probably spawn several hundred refereed journal articles and entirely new fields of endeavor, just like the original Hubble Deep Field did. The fact is that the time on the Hubble Space Telescope is oversubscribed at a rate of between 7 and 10 - 1. That means that for every hour of observing time it has available, they receive requests for 10 times more than they have to offer.
I hope OWL will be built. I'm sure it will be an amazing resource, just like the Keck telescopes, the VLT, and Gemini are now. It will be capable of some observations that Hubble is not. However, just because facilities like OWL are being built does not mean that we should abandon Hubble.
but AO renders much of the atmospheric interference moot.
Please read some of the posts by astronomers (including me) in this story and any other HST story. This is absolutely untrue. Yes, AO does allow ground-based astronomers to take high angular resolution images comparable to the quality of Hubble. However, the science that you can get from AO images does not compare to the science you can get out of Hubble images. AO is still too limited in many ways, and there is no way it will ever overcome some of the limitations. THE FACT IS THAT ULTRAVIOLET ASTRONOMY IS IMPOSSIBLE FROM THE GROUND! No AO telescope can observe in the UV, which Hubble can. This makes impossible many topics in Quasar research, interstellar and intergalactic medium research, hot star research, and a zillion other fields that I can't think of off the top of my head.
A Space Shuttle Orbiter is even harder to replace.
The astronauts inside the Orbiter are easier to replace, but harder to place at risk.
I agree absolutely. I have nothing but respect for the astronauts and was devastated by the loss of Columbia.
However, this point has nothing to do with the cacophony of posts by non-experts who feel that Hubble is an obsolete piece of junk. Can any telescope that currently exists reproduce all of the capabilities of Hubble? No.
None of the galaxies in this image seems different in color from something like Andromeda. Are these images manipulated?
Actually, if you look closely, the galaxies are all different colors. Look towards the lower right corner, and you will see an orange spiral galaxy, and then below and to the right of it, a smaller, redder one. The difference in color is because of the redshift. The most distant objects are the tiny, red pinpoints, much smaller than the large, obvious galaxies.
But has anyone else noticed that you're seeing Hubble a LOT more in the news since NASA's announcement? Methinks the scientists that operate Hubble are going for positive PR by getting lots of awesome pictures.
Actually, while I don't doubt that they are trying to maximize the PR for Hubble right now, the truth is that Hubble has been in the news this often for about a decade now. You are probably just noticing it more because of the furor over the cancellation. In fact, all of the news releases in mission history are archived at Hubblesite. The UDF took a lot of planning, and in fact was begun in November of 2002, I believe, long before the cancellation of HST announced by NASA.
Really? VLT telescope produces images as sharp as Hubble
Yes, really. You know, radio observatories have been publishing for decades images that have higher angular resolution than Hubble. In fact, the VLBA (the Very Long Baseline Array) still outperforms Hubble in terms of angular resolution. Yes, it is true that the VLT can produce images with adaptive optics that are as sharp as the Hubble's.
HOWEVER, angular resolution is not everything! Hubble gives astronomers access to areas of the electromagnetic spectrum that ground-based observatories cannot access because of the Earth's atmosphere. Also, the field of view of AO images is tiny. Read the comments to any Hubble story, and you will see this theme over and over and over again. Some of Hubble's capabilities are unique. The JWST will not duplicate many of these unique capabilities, and NO telescope on the ground or in space can duplicate some of the science made possible by Hubble.
Because thanks to adaptive optics, it is now possible to get very close to hubble's resolution with Earth-based telescopes. Thus, it is much, much cheaper to use those ground-based scopes.
Good points by Dr. Fish rebutting this, but there is one other point about AO -- it is *very* difficult to get precise photometry (measurements of the brightness of the objects in the field) from AO observations. These measurements are a necessity for most scientific studies of the area imaged.
Is that most of the images get imaged processed to death. Without Kalman filtering and deconvolution algorithms they would look lame, and these algorithms can be done to images taken from Earthbound telescopes.
For press release images, it is true that they are not all that explicit about the details of the image processing. However, you are absolutely wrong that an image of this quality could be produced by a ground-based telescope. The atmosphere blurs out the light from distant objects and blocks some kinds of light either partially or completely. Sure we apply some image processing routines to the images, but fundamentally there is more information contained in a Hubble image like this than there is in a ground-based image taken by the most powerful telescope on Earth (Keck). On the other hand, there are some things that Keck can do that Hubble can't.
I don't know why some/.'ers seem to think that Hubble is easily replaceable. It isn't. When Hubble's mission ends, some types of observations will be impossible to make with other current instruments.
Oh, come on now. Recipes were one of the first things I ever saw posted on the Internet even back when it was Arpanet.
I have a cookbook of recipes I printed out from the newsgroup rec.foods.recipes in the early 90's (I may have the exact newsgroup name slightly incorrect). It was a moderated group, and so the recipes that got posted were usually pretty high quality. I haven't googled for it, but my guess is that there is an archive somewhere of the collected USENET recipes.
I once heard a story of a woman that was eating a dessert at a restaurant and thought it was so
incredible that she just HAD to have the recipe. She asked the Chef and he at first declined but
after her continued insistance a typed sheet was delivered to the woman's table that included the
recipe and the bill. She read through the recipe and was delighted. She looked at the bill and
it was well over $500. She became infuriated and asked to see the Chef. He explained that her
bill was $100 and the cost of the receipe was $400.
Ummm.... this is one of the most famous Urban Legends of all time, usually seen as the "Neiman Marcus cookie" recipe.
The legal system might make the occasional stupid decision but in the main I think the Judge and Jury will easily be able see through SCO's nonsensical claims.
I completely agree with you, which is what I tried to make clear in my original post. However, as much as I agree with you and as much as I hope a judge and jury will see through SCO's claims, I'm not convinced that it will be as easy as we (i.e.,/.) thinks. I'm just saying that I won't be shocked if SCO manages to squeeze a favorable ruling out of some judge somewhere along the way.
One of the main reasons often given by technical people who switch to Macs (such as scientists) is that it is a Unix that can run Office.
Which is only important because we need to read the emails that contain.doc attachments sent by the 99.9% of the world that assumes that everyone can read this type of file (e.g., Deans).
Personally, I am a scientist / Mac user, and I love my powerbook because it is UNIX and it can run iTunes.
They're just asking for trouble (as the article points out) if they sue someone in a Fortune 1000 company.
I don't know -- while I agree with you and the majority of/. agrees with you, I just have this bad feeling that things aren't going to go as smoothly with all of these SCO lawsuits as we think. Look at the RIAA -- they sue a 12 year old girl and a grandmother with a Mac, and although it generates some negative press, they're still winning favorable judgements in court.
Everything happening in our country is so bass ackwards these days, I'm expecting SCO to win all of their lawsuits and then buy Diebold and RIAA with the proceeds.
Ummm... since when does lunch cost $13 at McDonalds? I haven't been in one in years, but I can't imagine that it costs much more than the $3 it used to cost for a burger & fries.
Personally, I'm going to invest my $13 in Paulaner hefeweizen.
All I can say with any degree of certainty is that HST has reached its operational life expectancy, and the fact that its replacement is not on the launch pad now cannot be laid at the feet of GWB.
What does that comment and the rest of your post have to do with what I said, which is that JWST is not a replacement for the HST? In fact, I don't see that I ever said anything about GWB in my post, or in fact in any post I've ever written!
The relevant point is that Hubble can observe in the ultraviolet, optical, and infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. JWST will be an infrared-optimized telescope. It will not have UV capabilities, and its optical performance will be mediocre.
Slashdot Mirror
Now this worries me. I fall into the "Apple's DRM isn't too bad" camp, but if the price goes up to $2.50 a track, they will lose my business. (I never buy whole albums from iTMS, so I personally don't care if the whole album price creeps up).
Apple succeeded in getting the RIAA to agree to their iTMS business model, so hopefully Steve can manage to keep prices as close to a buck a track as possible.
And the counterargument that gets made to comments like yours is that you can burn the tracks to a CD and play it anywhere. You can even re-rip it and listen to the tracks DRM free on 1,000 PCs if you have them.
The counterargument to my counterargument is that by burning & re-ripping you are losing quality, but the counterargument to this counterargument of my counterargument is that if you were enough of an audiophile to care about this, you wouldn't be buying 128K mp4s from iTMS anyway.
I agree! Actually, I have always found Saturn to be absolutely beautiful -- I have a tattoo of it on my right arm.
On an unrelated topic, I know the guy who did the X-ray shadow observations. If you asked me who among the people I know is least likely to wind up on the front page of /., I would have guessed Koji.
Dammit! I thought you were lying! Imagine my disappointment when I decoded it and found out that you gave away the punchline. Oh well. I guess I'll go do some work now.
Dark Castle - greatest game ever.
How on Earth did this get modded as insightful? This is absolutely 100% wrong. Go to the Astrophysical Journal or the Astronomical Journal for the last 5 years and count how many citations have Hubble data in them compared to any other telescope and you will find that Hubble has been one of the most productive telescopes ever built.
Other telescopes can do some of the things that Hubble can do, but no telescope can do everything it can do. Yes, all of you have heard of adaptive optics. Wonderful. You know that ground-based telescopes can now make images almost as sharp as Hubble. However, if anyone would bother to actually try and understand how AO works compared to HST, you would find out that no ground-based AO system can compete with what Hubble can do on a number of fronts -- they can never detect UV radiation, the field of view is tiny, and doing precise photometry on an AO image is almost impossible.
Point 1 -- wrong. In the past few years, the oversubscription rate (time requested vs. time available) has gone *up*. Hubble observations are still incredibly valuable, and there are many good proposals in this year's queue, of which, only 1 in 10 will get the time they requested.
Point 2 -- wrong. The Ultra Deep Field was planned and began observations long before the announcement to cancel the Hubble Servicing Mission. When the program was announced, the director of STScI said he would make the data available to the community immediately after the observations were finished, and that just happened the other day. The timing was pure coincidence.
It's interesting that all of the posts like this in the Hubble articles are now being posted by ACs. Anyway, let me point out that you are exactly wrong about this -- how do we discover the next near extinction level asteroids? By observing the sky with telescopes like Hubble. It's possible that the asteroid that you are describing was imaged by Hubble while working on the Ultra Deep Field. Sure Hubble only sees a small patch of sky, but if you point at that same patch of sky long enough, the probability that an asteroid will pass through your field of view improves. If you want to survive an asteroid impact, it is better to find them all with telescopes so that we can plan on how to deal with them, instead of saying, "Oh well, Earth is toast at some point when it gets hit, lets head to Mars".
You asked a very good question, and it is one that every astronomer gets confronted with at one time or another. I'll give you a quote I borrowed first, and then my opinion second. From a report by the National Science Foundation, here is a good summary of why astronomy is important in general:
Here is my opinion, second: Astronomy research does not produce tangible results that improve your day to day life. I can point to technology spinoffs (X-ray machines at airports, CCD imaging - i.e., digital cameras) that you can attribute to astronomy, or you can argue came more directly from somewhere else (military). I could point to the fact that astronomy as an "industry" drives IT development (our storage needs are growing exponentially - check out the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and look up their daily data flow). However, what I would say is that what drives almost everyone in astronomy to do what we do is our strong desire to understand the universe AND communicate that to Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The fact is that astronomy consistently rates as the #1 or #2 science most interesting to the public (the other is paleontology). We all have a desire to understand the universe, and I have personally been thanked many times by people for explaining how our Solar System works, where we are in the Milky Way Galaxy, and how we know the Universe is expanding. It is up to the tax paying public to decide if that is worth funding (BTW, our funding is a tiny fraction of the national budget compared to cancer research, and rightfully so!).
I really don't have an axe to grind about this. If Hubble is cancelled, my job won't be affected. However, my motivation for posting on this topic frequently is to try and combat a few misconceptions, and the previous poster struck a nerve. The fact is that the tax paying public has invested billions of dollars in Hubble, and it has paid the public back by being one of the most (if not the most) productive telescopes ever built. Please check out HubbleSite and page through the immense archive of fabulous imagery (I recommend looking for the V838 Mon light echo image, the Antennae Galaxies, Stephan's Quintet and/or Seyfert's Sextet, and any of the Solar System images). I do not dispute that we should have a dialogue about the future of Hubble. We should weigh the risks of servicing it to keep it in service for another decade. My position is that if the Shuttle (or a replacement) flies, servicing Hubble is a worthwhile mission because it simply can't be replaced by ground-based telescopes, and there is no space-based telescope that will have the capability of Hubble that will fly within the next 10 years.
What you said was that ground-based facilities, such as OWL, can outperform Hubble for the same money, especially because of the availability of AO. So, now let me switch back to bold -- THIS IS NOT TRUE. I contradicted it once, and I will contradict it again. I do not care how big of an aperture your telescope on the ground has, it will never detect any ultraviolet light. While that is not a necessity for every type of observational program, it enables a number of research programs that are IMPOSSIBLE for OWL or any other telescope we will ever build on the ground. Do you get it yet? The Hubble is capable of making important observations that can't be duplicated from the ground. If you use almost any set of objective criteria, the Hubble Space Telescope has been the most productive telescope ever built. In fact, the Ultra Deep Field observations that were just released today will probably spawn several hundred refereed journal articles and entirely new fields of endeavor, just like the original Hubble Deep Field did. The fact is that the time on the Hubble Space Telescope is oversubscribed at a rate of between 7 and 10 - 1. That means that for every hour of observing time it has available, they receive requests for 10 times more than they have to offer.
I hope OWL will be built. I'm sure it will be an amazing resource, just like the Keck telescopes, the VLT, and Gemini are now. It will be capable of some observations that Hubble is not. However, just because facilities like OWL are being built does not mean that we should abandon Hubble.
Please read some of the posts by astronomers (including me) in this story and any other HST story. This is absolutely untrue. Yes, AO does allow ground-based astronomers to take high angular resolution images comparable to the quality of Hubble. However, the science that you can get from AO images does not compare to the science you can get out of Hubble images. AO is still too limited in many ways, and there is no way it will ever overcome some of the limitations. THE FACT IS THAT ULTRAVIOLET ASTRONOMY IS IMPOSSIBLE FROM THE GROUND! No AO telescope can observe in the UV, which Hubble can. This makes impossible many topics in Quasar research, interstellar and intergalactic medium research, hot star research, and a zillion other fields that I can't think of off the top of my head.
I agree absolutely. I have nothing but respect for the astronauts and was devastated by the loss of Columbia.
However, this point has nothing to do with the cacophony of posts by non-experts who feel that Hubble is an obsolete piece of junk. Can any telescope that currently exists reproduce all of the capabilities of Hubble? No.
Actually, if you look closely, the galaxies are all different colors. Look towards the lower right corner, and you will see an orange spiral galaxy, and then below and to the right of it, a smaller, redder one. The difference in color is because of the redshift. The most distant objects are the tiny, red pinpoints, much smaller than the large, obvious galaxies.
Actually, while I don't doubt that they are trying to maximize the PR for Hubble right now, the truth is that Hubble has been in the news this often for about a decade now. You are probably just noticing it more because of the furor over the cancellation. In fact, all of the news releases in mission history are archived at Hubblesite. The UDF took a lot of planning, and in fact was begun in November of 2002, I believe, long before the cancellation of HST announced by NASA.
Yes, really. You know, radio observatories have been publishing for decades images that have higher angular resolution than Hubble. In fact, the VLBA (the Very Long Baseline Array) still outperforms Hubble in terms of angular resolution. Yes, it is true that the VLT can produce images with adaptive optics that are as sharp as the Hubble's.
HOWEVER, angular resolution is not everything! Hubble gives astronomers access to areas of the electromagnetic spectrum that ground-based observatories cannot access because of the Earth's atmosphere. Also, the field of view of AO images is tiny. Read the comments to any Hubble story, and you will see this theme over and over and over again. Some of Hubble's capabilities are unique. The JWST will not duplicate many of these unique capabilities, and NO telescope on the ground or in space can duplicate some of the science made possible by Hubble.
Good points by Dr. Fish rebutting this, but there is one other point about AO -- it is *very* difficult to get precise photometry (measurements of the brightness of the objects in the field) from AO observations. These measurements are a necessity for most scientific studies of the area imaged.
For press release images, it is true that they are not all that explicit about the details of the image processing. However, you are absolutely wrong that an image of this quality could be produced by a ground-based telescope. The atmosphere blurs out the light from distant objects and blocks some kinds of light either partially or completely. Sure we apply some image processing routines to the images, but fundamentally there is more information contained in a Hubble image like this than there is in a ground-based image taken by the most powerful telescope on Earth (Keck). On the other hand, there are some things that Keck can do that Hubble can't.
I don't know why some /.'ers seem to think that Hubble is easily replaceable. It isn't. When Hubble's mission ends, some types of observations will be impossible to make with other current instruments.
touche.
I have a cookbook of recipes I printed out from the newsgroup rec.foods.recipes in the early 90's (I may have the exact newsgroup name slightly incorrect). It was a moderated group, and so the recipes that got posted were usually pretty high quality. I haven't googled for it, but my guess is that there is an archive somewhere of the collected USENET recipes.
Ummm.... this is one of the most famous Urban Legends of all time, usually seen as the "Neiman Marcus cookie" recipe.
I completely agree with you, which is what I tried to make clear in my original post. However, as much as I agree with you and as much as I hope a judge and jury will see through SCO's claims, I'm not convinced that it will be as easy as we (i.e., /.) thinks. I'm just saying that I won't be shocked if SCO manages to squeeze a favorable ruling out of some judge somewhere along the way.
Which is only important because we need to read the emails that contain .doc attachments sent by the 99.9% of the world that assumes that everyone can read this type of file (e.g., Deans).
Personally, I am a scientist / Mac user, and I love my powerbook because it is UNIX and it can run iTunes.
I don't know -- while I agree with you and the majority of /. agrees with you, I just have this bad feeling that things aren't going to go as smoothly with all of these SCO lawsuits as we think. Look at the RIAA -- they sue a 12 year old girl and a grandmother with a Mac, and although it generates some negative press, they're still winning favorable judgements in court.
Everything happening in our country is so bass ackwards these days, I'm expecting SCO to win all of their lawsuits and then buy Diebold and RIAA with the proceeds.
Personally, I'm going to invest my $13 in Paulaner hefeweizen.
What does that comment and the rest of your post have to do with what I said, which is that JWST is not a replacement for the HST? In fact, I don't see that I ever said anything about GWB in my post, or in fact in any post I've ever written!
The relevant point is that Hubble can observe in the ultraviolet, optical, and infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. JWST will be an infrared-optimized telescope. It will not have UV capabilities, and its optical performance will be mediocre.