I hope they do better than they did with Robert Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers.
I love good science fiction, and constantly wonder why it's so rare at the movies. Phillip K. Dick's stories have done better (Blade Runner). I liked Gattica, as a thought provoking and cautionary tale of technology bent by society and politics, but the Hollywood touch renders most science fiction into a festering mound of low-brow special effects poop.
Why does Hollywood usually wait until science fiction authors have died before converting their work into a movie? I have a couple of theories:
1) The author has seen other SF movie adaptations, and thus adopted the policy, "Over my dead body."
2) Hollywood wants to lessen the chances of a lawsuit based on misrepresentation, libel, etc.
Actually, the data is too unstable to suggest that linear regression could adequately predict Kerry will win. As we keep hearing, it's too close to call. But anyone believing there is an impending Bush landslide has been watching too many Fair & Balanced (TM) infomercials masquerading as Fox News.
Politically, Kerry is a strong finisher, but it's really all going to hang on the fickle mood of the American voter on 2NOV04. There will be an October Surprise (probably several) that will skew it one way or another. I do think Kerry/Edwards will have a major advantage over Bush/Cheney in the debates. Kerry and Edwards are both articulate, and the last four years have provided a lot of substantial issues to discuss. They'll do a lot better in a fact based debate instead of the emotionally charged name calling we've seen the last few months.
Most voters are already confirmed one way or another. It's the small group of undecided voters in a few undecided states that are going to decide this.
I don't see how SP2 could be faster. Microsoft added new bloat compared to SP1.
I think the reason it was faster after SP2 might be...
...and doing a clean install
Windoze gets a bad case of registry rot from installing and uninstalling software, and all that spyware in there slows things down a lot, too.
Obvious solution... I gotta see a man about a penguin.
We Need An Open Source Solution To A Closed Source
on
Apache Rejects Sender ID
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The majority of spam is now sent by zombied Windows PCs. Windows insecurity is now a large part of the spam problem.
It sure looks like Microsoft sold PC users the problem, and now they want to sell us the solution. Should we really encourage OS insecurity by paying for the fix to a problem that never should have been?
Disclaimer: I am not a SETI scientist, but I play one on my home computer.
Named SHGb02+14a, the possible alien communication has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz - one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
If the signal was some multiple of a prominent hydrogen line, I'd be more inclined to think it's ET. The hydrogen line would be a universally understood reference frequency, and a frequency that is a multiple of that frequency by a factor of 2, 3 or pi would be a frequency that wouldn't have a lot of naturally occurring interference. When the signal is the prominent hydrogen emission line, it seems a lot more likely that this is a previously unknown natural phenomenon. Some hydrogen out there is being excited by some form of naturally occurring energy. That's still not a bad discovery, and is a good example of the surrendipity that's always been at work in science, and it shows that SETI is doing *real* science, despite what SETI's detractors might argue.
The unexplained signal appears to be emanating from a point between the constellations of Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1,000 light years, and the transmission is also very faint.
That seems a bit suspicious too. It would require an enormous amount of power to broadcast a signal we could detect over that large distance. Wishing doesn't make these things true, but I'd certainly prefer a signal from a closer neighbor, so we could have a meaningful conversation.
So far, the telescope has managed to pick up the signal for only about a minute in total, which is not sufficient for astronomers to analyse it fully.
That's the problem with a fixed dish. It points where it points, and it moves as the Earth rotates. SETI gets "leftover" time on Arecibo, making it difficult to do the research they'd like to do. That should change soon when SETI has access to their new large array of dishes forming an interferometer that they can point where they want, and dwell on an area for a much longer period of time. Paul Allen may have been instrumental in creating the evil Microsoft empire (see how I worked in the mandatory/. anti-MS bias?), but he's provided adequate contrition for that sin by funding Scaled Composite's X-Prize hardware and the SETI interferometer. What a dude.
Other questions arise over the signal's frequency, which oscillates by between eight and 37 hertz a second. Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes, believes that the drift in the signal makes it "fishy".
OK. He's an optical guy. But he's never heard of Frequency Modulation (FM radio)?
Assuming it's a natural phenomenon, this might be Doppler shift? I don't know how quickly the frequency drifts, but large planets have been observed close to stars with orbital periods of a couple of days. With weird objects like black holes and neutron stars, which definitely have the power to produce signals we could detect from that far away, who knows what type of weird celestial mechanics might be involved?
This unexplained phenomenon has now attracted the attention of radio astronomers. It'll get the instrument time required to collect a lot more data, and we'll probably learn what's causing this signal fairly soon. Man, ya' gotta' love science.
Re:Change is Bad! Very Bad!
on
Disney Goes Boom!
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...people who've moved in since that time knew exactly what they were buying...a house/condo near a theme park renowned for its fireworks displays
There is a big difference between what's right, and the results of the US legal system.
Example: Small airports were built all over the country. Decades later, the land around them was made into housing developments. Then people sued to have the noisy airports restricted to the point they were no longer viable, or shut down altogether. They consistently win, because there are 100 irate homeowners vs. 30 people who want to preserve the pre-existing airport. Bye-bye airport. The ultimate irony is when the runway becomes the main street through the new subdivision that's built where the airport was, and all the subdivision streets have names like Blue Sky Place and Lindbergh Drive.
It's similar to developers leveling a beautiful stand of trees to pack as many little vinyl houses as possible into a congested suburban hell, and naming the subdivision Aspen Acres. I guess Fugly Houses Estates doesn't sound very good.
Maybe I'm getting even more cynical in my old age, but there seem to be fewer and fewer instances where Right and Reality coincide.
I wish Rio wasn't trying to be an "iPod killer" and ripping off Apple to such a large degree. Sure, Apple is good at hitting the largest segment of the market (often techno-fashionistas), but once they own that, there is a lot of room for those of us who want something else. And the laser engraving on the first 500 Rio Carbons will serve as a constant reminder that you paid 30% more to debug their beta firmware.
I'd like to see THIS digital music player:
Inexpensive and reliable 60+ GB notebook hard drive.
More battery capacity, in an inexpensive, standard, replaceable battery format.
Larger display, for my 40 something eyes.
Standard hard drive file storage, so I can mount it and drag & drop files. Works with any OS, no special music download software needed, can serve as a portable data backup or transfer device.
Support for all popular audio codecs, including MP3, Ogg, etc.
No digital rights management crap. I rip my CDs and copy them to the player. Period. I don't need the RIAA in my business every time I want to copy my CD to my portable player.
Hotswap cradle to charge the player, copy tunes and connect to external powered speakers, just like my my Karma 20.
A good built in FM transmitter so an FM car radio can be used.
Admittedly, most people want a "smaller is better" MP3 player, not the less expensive 2X sized device I'd like to have, but I think there's a market for it.
I have no use for a 5 GB player that stores 1/3 of my CD collection. I can see a use for tiny 256 MB players for people who want a couple of albums while they run, bike, commute, etc. But I'm spoiled by carrying my entire music collection. I frequently have a chance meeting with someone and play an obscure song for them, and the odds it'd be in a 256 MB device are slim. Besides, I never know what I want to hear ahead of time.
Bonus! Here's a free music download link from Tempus that I saw on/. Good stuff, reminiscent of Dave Mathews:
http://www.tempusband.com/mp3.html
I just downloaded the latest EXE version of the firmware update for my Karma 20. I had downloaded a couple before, but never did install them because I'm running Linux ("What's an EXE?").
Similar deal with the Karma 20 music download software. The supported software to download tunes is Windows software. To be fair, despite Ogg, ethernet, etc., they never claimed it was anything but a Windows device.
On the plus side, they got a Java programmer to create Rio Music Manager Lite (RMML), and because it's Java, it runs great on Linux, Mac, etc. And his support is typical of open source - email the programmer, and he fixes it in a few minutes and emails you the link to the download. Very cool.
A friend told me his coworker had a Karma that died. When powered on, it simply displayed a large message that said, "Bad Karma". That's a design engineer with a sense of humor.
I have one of the first Karma 20 units, and so far, so good. Despite my best efforts to baby the portable device with a spinning hard drive, I've dropped it four times, and a couple of those were four feet onto concrete. The hard drive only runs a couple of seconds every five minutes while it fills the RAM buffer, so a drop during HD access is rare. Hope you don't drop it on the exposed scroller wheel.
the High Court has found an implied right to political communication in the Constitution.
There is a big difference between the right to political speech and forcing someone to listen to it.
The US Congresscritters have exempted themselves from lots of weasel behavior that they outlawed for everyone else, so this sort of problem is certainly not confined to Australia.
Just be thankful you're not getting all the government you're paying for. Will Rogers
Current technology requires a 15 minute preflight and A LOT of attention to safety, but I think the point of this is that improved technology can make flying as safe as driving is today. When automobiles were invented, they were dangerous, expensive, and impractical. Now, they're almost an inalienable right.
I do agree those who have pointed out that Moller has been at the "next year" stage for a couple of decades, and isn't a serious player, despite the appearance he projects. I'd stop just short of calling it a scam, but only because I know people have an almost unlimited capacity for self delusion and guys like Moller who dream of aircars probably got a double dose of self delusion.
The energy issue is real. The FAA created a new regulatory category for the emerging powered lift vehicles, but they are very inefficient. We're going to need better energy conversion efficiency and better energy storage to make these practical. All that power in a current technology lightweight engine is a recipe for low reliability. I think cold fusion and electric motors would be an enabling technology.
The concerns about Joe Sixpack flying around are valid, too. But again, technology to the rescue. The only reason that general aviation doesn't already have easy to use 3D navigation control systems is the low volume. If enough people flew, we'd hurry up and make it a lot simpler. Even with the low demand, we're steadily inching in that direction with GPS, autopilots, "synthetic vision", etc. These technologies are all moving down into smaller planes.
BTW - Almost all of the small plane innovation in the last fifty years has been the result of experimental aviation enthusiasts. These are people who design and build planes in their garages, although it's been more kit building than designing lately. Legal issues have stifled creativity at companies that sell small planes, and have made the costs so high they have all but been driven out of the market, even with tort reform in that industry to limit liability.
One of these days we'll have flying cars, but the path will almost certainly take us through efficient electric or fuel cell cars first, and possibly we'll need fusion power or something similar to have enough energy per capita to make them viable.
Short answer: Not next year, and not ten years from now. But if we started doing some research now instead of burning every drop of oil first, aircars could be popular in 20-30 years.
I haven't seen this analogy in the many RIAA stories I've read, but given the petabytes of online RIAA discussions, this is probably not new.
Computers have made it an easy matter to scan books and redistribute them. There are high speed scanners, good optical character recognition software, and plenty of bandwidth to simply distribute an entire book as a collection of graphics instead of rendering them back into text.
But book copyrights are seldom violated in the US, and almost never violated using PC technology. Why? Readers are more law abiding than music enthusiasts? Readers are too lazy to scan a book? Or is it because people resent the record companies' graft, corruption and excessive profiteering?
The abuses of the RIAA companies are well known. They include payola (paying radio DJs and station managers cash or coccaine to play their records), addicting artists to drugs to control them, and charging $20 for a CD that costs them $1 for the plastic, paper and distribution. The only place this sort of weasel behavior is remotely close to book publishing is the textbook marketing racket, which could teach the Mafia a thing or two about profit margins and market share.
The RIAA and John Ashcroft are legally in the right on this, even if it is difficult to agree with them on general principles, and it's difficult to respect a law that protects such weasels. I'll throw my lot in with the others who say, "Vote with your wallet. Don't buy RIAA products. Lobby your favorite bands to leave RIAA companies and make it financially viable for them to do so."
Geeks continue to compare SCO and the RIAA. At first, they seem like completely different issues, but there are some definite similarities. Both have outdated business models, both are weasels who prefer to fight in court than embrace new technology and profit from it, and both are making a lot of noise right now but will soon be insignificant footnotes in the history of technology.
The intersection of the set of all people with 20 or more close friends, and the set of all people who are tech savvy enough to want to use wireless mobile devices to automate their social functions, is the null set.
Sad that we now expect "news" articles to provide opinions. What happened to journalism, where facts are reported and people form their own opinions? Are we so busy that we don't have time to think, so we select the "news" sources that tell us what we want to think about the issues?
PS - The More Cowbell MP3 is lame. I totally do not get it. It was a waste of bandwidth.
If you're concerned about security, why not burn your favorite Linux install ISO onto a stack of CDs and label them Free Windows Security Update? As long as they still "have the web", most people wouldn't know the difference, other than the lack of infections.
Deceptive? Perhaps. But they'll thank you later, when their PC isn't thrashed by every Outlook worm of the week. What're we up to now, MyDoom S? When it reaches Z, I guess they'll start numbering with AA?
Mac and Linux users are tired of having their inboxes stuffed with Outlook worms and spam from infected zombie Windows PCs. Even when you do the right thing, you still suffer from other people running Windows.
So burn a CD and mail it. Cheaper than a floppy these days.
Exactly! I do that all the time. I even have 6" X 9" envelopes to facilitate the process. I just mailed a really cool 47 MB MPG video a friend sent me of his cross country air race. Can't put that on a floppy.
That's why the CD-R is the replacement for floppies, not USB flash memory devices. Flash is pretty cool. I have 256 MB in my inexpensive digital camera so I can shoot kayaking and mountain biking video, or A LOT of pictures. But for anything you want to send, a lower cost per MB is needed than flash can provide.
Floppies are cheap enough to be disposable. Not good news for the landfill, but I can easily copy some data to a floppy, pop it in an envelope and mail it to someone. Mailing a thick USB flash key fob is awkward, and I wouldn't want to mail someone such an expensive device. Flash cards are also fairly expensive, are easy to mail, but plagued with too many incompatible formats. Someone could have a 7-in-1 flash card reader and still not be able to read a flash card I sent.
Even in a world with nice & relatively cheap flash storage devices, floppies still have their place.
And to get back on topic here, unfortunately, rotating magnetic media will still be with us for a while. The advances made in the antiquated hard drive technology are amazing. Let's hear it for clever engineers and the motivating power of competition. Rust on glass will continue to be cheaper per bit than solid state memory technologies, despite the hard drive's increased power, larger size and weight, susceptibility to shock, reliability issues inherent with that many precise moving parts, etc.
Energy is such a fundamentally important aspect of the US economy, yet the solutions seem restricted to digging up coal and drilling oil wells. Burning carbon based fuel was OK for the short haul, but there are a lot of bad consequences in the long term that are being ignored. I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but if anyone has a better theory than, "powerful oil companies don't want better energy sources", I'd sure like to hear it. I think the problem is, technology based solutions, especially renewable energy solutions, are difficult to monopolize and therefore difficult to control for profit. Anyone up for an open source energy solution?
Energy is so important that the US should richly fund a US fusion initiative AND the international initiative. As it is, the basic science looks promising, and attainable in 20-50 years if we were serious, but all we have now is the international fusion project, and they've been arguing for YEARS over where to build it. All politics, no science.
The US should also be promoting solar power. Yeah, it's diffuse, but it can make a HUGE difference in US energy imports and balance of trade. And solar power could greatly benefit from much larger scale. Imagine highly automated factories cranking out cheap and easy-to-use click-together solar panels for every roof surface. Every structure needs a roof, why not generate power at the same time?
And what about electric cars? The GM EV1 (aka Impact) was VERY popular with the people who leased them, but they were withdrawn by GM when they announced their long term hydrogen powered car initiative. To those who want cleaner and more efficient cars that don't require foreign oil, this looks like a decision to pacify people while cozying up to Big Oil, when a very good solution exists now.
The planet is going to run out of oil someday, and fairly soon given the rapid increase in consumption. We should be planning for that, and doing the research now, but we aren't. The US is in a position to lead in this initiative, but chooses to wait until the oil crisis is upon us, and then try to act. It's going to get very ugly within a decade or two. And that's frustrating when we could have solar power and very good electric cars today, and fusion power in 30 years.
I'm still trying to decide how much of the planet's energy problems are caused by plain old human short sightedness, and how much is Enron-style corporate greed and manipulation.
Note the difference in the way science seeks to solve a problem, versus the method that disappeared after the Dark Ages. Scientists have intuition, but they use that to develop a hypothesis based on a rational understanding of the real world and a thorough understanding of the relevant science (mostly physics and material science, in this case). Then, they test the hypothesis. A scientist would not say, "Foam damage sounds unlikely to me, so I think extraterrestrials shot down the shuttle with an electromagnetic pulse."
Now, clearly, my memory of events has decayed over the last year
Not being able to recall key events and facts is natural, when your head is full of alien conspiracies.
you really do need to work on your attitude
You need to work on your tenuous grasp on reality.
It's really becoming quite insulting.
What's insulting is for someone to make a lot of obviously false statements, and then expect people to believe an alien conspiracy theory.
Bad NASA management was once again the cause of the loss of an orbiter and seven crew members. Specifically, the Columbia disaster was caused by a foam strike on the left wing during takeoff, which damaged a critical insulating tile, resulting in a structural failure on re-entry. There were no evil extraterrestrials involved. That's reality, and welcome to it.
Since the video was available of the actual tile striking the wing, then this means the event happened during the very early moments of lift-off.
Well, at least you're consistent. The grainy video that shows the foam departing and striking the wing was taken by NASA's long range cameras. These are essentially large telescopes fitted with video cameras, with an effective range of many miles. Several of these video cameras are aimed at the shuttle from different points of view, looking for just this sort of thing.
That's why it's so hard for us to accept their casual dismissal when they saw a big chunk of foam that appeared to strike a fragile and critical leading edge. That dismissal probably occurred at the first level of management. Some engineers were concerned, but their concerns were quickly squelched.
The Challenger disaster was caused by a cavalier attitude about O-ring failures. It wasn't an unknown problem. Every mission had some degree of O-ring failure. NASA became comfortable with O-ring failure as a part of every mission. It was a long term action item, but it was not deemed important enough to halt the STS program.
It's like pulling the trigger three times in Russian Roulette and then deciding it's a safe game. That is not how engineers form a risk assessment. But it's apparently how NASA managers form risk assessments.
Sadly, the Columbia disaster showed the same dangerous mindset. "We've had lots of foam fall off. We replace tiles because of foam damage. It's no big deal. Engineers are always too conservative."
The more I think it over, the more impossible it seems that a small foam brick, which was essentially only dropped on the shuttle wing at very little relative speed, could have caused critical damage.
I'll try to help you understand, even though this information is readily available if you cared enough to look.
As discussed above, the foam was travelling at a very high relative velocity when it struck the wing. The velocity and size of the foam block is known to a reasonable degree of accuracy by analyzing the video a frame at a time. The velocity is simply how far the foam moved in the last frame before it struck the wing, divided by the video frame rate.
The leading edge of the wing is coated with tiles made of RCC, reinforced carbon carbon. It's there to insulate the wing from the extremely hot ionized gases that exist during re-entry. The RCC is not a structural component. The structural element is an aluminum wing spar inside the wing. When the leading edge of the wing was damaged, the aluminum wing spar was exposed to the equivalent of a large blow torch. The telemetry showed greatly elevated temperatures within the left wing during re-entry, which is the substantiating evidence that essentially proves beyond all reasonable doubt that this is what caused the Columbia disaster.
...unless one is willing to personally put in the time to examine things, you really can't expect to learn what's what.
I suggest you avoid making a superficial reading of something like the Columbia disaster, then making an exhaustive search for all the ways that an alien conspiracy could have caused it. If you really want to understand the Columbia disaster, read the real science. It's available. At least then, you can avoid the obvious mistakes, such as saying the Columbia exploded during lift-off, or the cameras that filmed the foam were mounted to the launch gantry and couldn't see very far away. Having at least the superficial facts might at least make your crackpot alien conspiracy theories a bit more credible. With such poorly researched arguments, your alien conspiracy theories are somewhere between laughable and pathetic.
Friends, family and total strangers are willing to go out of their way to ridicule me.
I really don't think air resistance would be quite as big a deal as you suggest.
Don't feel bad. A lot of people don't have a very intuitive grasp of the dynamic pressure (Q) created by supersonic flow. There is A LOT of drag on a block of foam in air as fast and dense as the SST was experiencing at that point in liftoff.
Remember; the Columbia exploded during launch, not re-entry.
Whaaa?!?
Remember, my last post where I suggested you up your dosage. I was wrong. Took too much! Took too much! You're hallucinating. When you come down, check your facts.
What exactly does it say about you that rather than look at the material, you engage instead in personal attacks.
It wasn't a personal attack. More of a reality check. I almost didn't respond, because I was fairly certain you were joking. Then I realized you probably weren't joking.
I'm usually the one arguing for relaxing dogmatic beliefs based in the status quo, examining the facts with an open mind, and formulating a fresh hypothesis that best fits the facts, instead of parroting the common belief. But you totally lost me on the EM pulse conspiracy theory with bonus points for extraterrestrials.
As someone who enjoys science fiction, I've seen A LOT of really bad cinema.
Conventional wisdom dictates that Plan 9 From Outer Space was the worst movie of all time, with honorary mention going to Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes. However, I can unequivocally state that each of these movies was akin to the works of Robert Frost compared to the Vogon poetry that was:
1) Laserblast
2) Even Dwarves Started Small
I saw both of these movies in a single week while in college. Each made me physically ill. Afterward, I suffered a six month aversion to movie theaters.
Surprisingly, I believe both have been preserved forever as DVDs. Is there no putrid tripe that isn't worthy of being made into a DVD?
This means that the relative speed of the foam when it struck could only possibly have been the same as the amount of increased velocity
What happens to a very draggy chunk of low density foam in a supersonic stream of air? It will rapidly decelerate, right?
Imagine you impale a cheap styrofoam cooler on your car's hood ornament and head out on the highway. At 70 MPH, the cooler pops off the hood ornament. What happens? Does it keep coasting along with little relative velocity with respect to the car? No. It smashes into your windshield at close to 70 MPH. Whether the car is accelerating or not has almost no effect on the outcome. It's the rapid deceleration of the foam that causes the significant relative velocity when it strikes the car. Only the relative velocity is important. Sorry the NASA engineers confused you by not suspending a block of foam motionless in the air and hurling a section of wing at it.
As for the bulk of your post, containing that half baked ranting, UFOlogy and conspiracy theories, I'd have to say you get the tin foil hat award for the rest of this century. I imagine you with your tinfoil hat, wrapped in tin foil from head to foot, in a titanium submersible on the bottom of the ocean. And the mind control waves still get through. All that trouble, and all you really need to do is...
The issue of the subscribers reading the lengthy legalese in the terms of service is certainly an issue, but the much bigger issue is the rights of those who are not customers. You don't care if Vontage records your conversations and shares them with the government, so you sign up with Vontage. But I'm a lot more serious about privacy. What happens to my right to privacy when you call me? I didn't agree to the Vontage terms of service, but my phone number is recorded along with the conversation, which is time and date stamped. That's a lot of information.
When I was in the process of taking an engineering job with a printer manufacturer seven years ago, they had the standard employee contract. I didn't sign it, and explained to my future boss (a good guy, not a PHB) that I had no trouble with the company owning any idea that I had even remotely related to printers, but it was absolutely not right that the company would own any idea I had. I was very easy going about everything else and obviously anxious to get to work. Maybe they were more desperate than they seemed, but he allowed me to cross out this entire clause and half of another one that also seemed totally stupid. We both initialled the changes and I kept a copy.
In practice it was a hollow victory because I worked there at my salaried job every waking moment for the next two years and didn't have the chance to pursue any stray ideas that fleetingly passed through my gray matter while I drove to and from work in a semi-comatose state.
I've been self employed for the last five years. I'm Starvin' Marvin, but it's better than working for The Man. (YMMV)
Slashdot Mirror
I hope they do better than they did with Robert Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers.
I love good science fiction, and constantly wonder why it's so rare at the movies. Phillip K. Dick's stories have done better (Blade Runner). I liked Gattica, as a thought provoking and cautionary tale of technology bent by society and politics, but the Hollywood touch renders most science fiction into a festering mound of low-brow special effects poop.
Why does Hollywood usually wait until science fiction authors have died before converting their work into a movie? I have a couple of theories:
1) The author has seen other SF movie adaptations, and thus adopted the policy, "Over my dead body."
2) Hollywood wants to lessen the chances of a lawsuit based on misrepresentation, libel, etc.
Linear regression calls the election for Kerry.
Actually, the data is too unstable to suggest that linear regression could adequately predict Kerry will win. As we keep hearing, it's too close to call. But anyone believing there is an impending Bush landslide has been watching too many Fair & Balanced (TM) infomercials masquerading as Fox News.
Politically, Kerry is a strong finisher, but it's really all going to hang on the fickle mood of the American voter on 2NOV04. There will be an October Surprise (probably several) that will skew it one way or another. I do think Kerry/Edwards will have a major advantage over Bush/Cheney in the debates. Kerry and Edwards are both articulate, and the last four years have provided a lot of substantial issues to discuss. They'll do a lot better in a fact based debate instead of the emotionally charged name calling we've seen the last few months.
Most voters are already confirmed one way or another. It's the small group of undecided voters in a few undecided states that are going to decide this.
Either that, or the US Supreme Court.
:^(
I don't see how SP2 could be faster. Microsoft added new bloat compared to SP1.
I think the reason it was faster after SP2 might be...
Windoze gets a bad case of registry rot from installing and uninstalling software, and all that spyware in there slows things down a lot, too.
Obvious solution... I gotta see a man about a penguin.
The majority of spam is now sent by zombied Windows PCs. Windows insecurity is now a large part of the spam problem.
It sure looks like Microsoft sold PC users the problem, and now they want to sell us the solution. Should we really encourage OS insecurity by paying for the fix to a problem that never should have been?
Disclaimer: I am not a SETI scientist, but I play one on my home computer.
Named SHGb02+14a, the possible alien communication has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz - one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
If the signal was some multiple of a prominent hydrogen line, I'd be more inclined to think it's ET. The hydrogen line would be a universally understood reference frequency, and a frequency that is a multiple of that frequency by a factor of 2, 3 or pi would be a frequency that wouldn't have a lot of naturally occurring interference. When the signal is the prominent hydrogen emission line, it seems a lot more likely that this is a previously unknown natural phenomenon. Some hydrogen out there is being excited by some form of naturally occurring energy. That's still not a bad discovery, and is a good example of the surrendipity that's always been at work in science, and it shows that SETI is doing *real* science, despite what SETI's detractors might argue.
The unexplained signal appears to be emanating from a point between the constellations of Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1,000 light years, and the transmission is also very faint.
That seems a bit suspicious too. It would require an enormous amount of power to broadcast a signal we could detect over that large distance. Wishing doesn't make these things true, but I'd certainly prefer a signal from a closer neighbor, so we could have a meaningful conversation.
So far, the telescope has managed to pick up the signal for only about a minute in total, which is not sufficient for astronomers to analyse it fully.
That's the problem with a fixed dish. It points where it points, and it moves as the Earth rotates. SETI gets "leftover" time on Arecibo, making it difficult to do the research they'd like to do. That should change soon when SETI has access to their new large array of dishes forming an interferometer that they can point where they want, and dwell on an area for a much longer period of time. Paul Allen may have been instrumental in creating the evil Microsoft empire (see how I worked in the mandatory /. anti-MS bias?), but he's provided adequate contrition for that sin by funding Scaled Composite's X-Prize hardware and the SETI interferometer. What a dude.
Other questions arise over the signal's frequency, which oscillates by between eight and 37 hertz a second. Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes, believes that the drift in the signal makes it "fishy".
OK. He's an optical guy. But he's never heard of Frequency Modulation (FM radio)?
Assuming it's a natural phenomenon, this might be Doppler shift? I don't know how quickly the frequency drifts, but large planets have been observed close to stars with orbital periods of a couple of days. With weird objects like black holes and neutron stars, which definitely have the power to produce signals we could detect from that far away, who knows what type of weird celestial mechanics might be involved?
This unexplained phenomenon has now attracted the attention of radio astronomers. It'll get the instrument time required to collect a lot more data, and we'll probably learn what's causing this signal fairly soon. Man, ya' gotta' love science.
There is a big difference between what's right, and the results of the US legal system.
Example: Small airports were built all over the country. Decades later, the land around them was made into housing developments. Then people sued to have the noisy airports restricted to the point they were no longer viable, or shut down altogether. They consistently win, because there are 100 irate homeowners vs. 30 people who want to preserve the pre-existing airport. Bye-bye airport. The ultimate irony is when the runway becomes the main street through the new subdivision that's built where the airport was, and all the subdivision streets have names like Blue Sky Place and Lindbergh Drive.
It's similar to developers leveling a beautiful stand of trees to pack as many little vinyl houses as possible into a congested suburban hell, and naming the subdivision Aspen Acres. I guess Fugly Houses Estates doesn't sound very good.
Maybe I'm getting even more cynical in my old age, but there seem to be fewer and fewer instances where Right and Reality coincide.
I'd like to see THIS digital music player:
Inexpensive and reliable 60+ GB notebook hard drive.
More battery capacity, in an inexpensive, standard, replaceable battery format.
Larger display, for my 40 something eyes.
Standard hard drive file storage, so I can mount it and drag & drop files. Works with any OS, no special music download software needed, can serve as a portable data backup or transfer device.
Support for all popular audio codecs, including MP3, Ogg, etc.
No digital rights management crap. I rip my CDs and copy them to the player. Period. I don't need the RIAA in my business every time I want to copy my CD to my portable player.
Hotswap cradle to charge the player, copy tunes and connect to external powered speakers, just like my my Karma 20.
A good built in FM transmitter so an FM car radio can be used.
Admittedly, most people want a "smaller is better" MP3 player, not the less expensive 2X sized device I'd like to have, but I think there's a market for it. I have no use for a 5 GB player that stores 1/3 of my CD collection. I can see a use for tiny 256 MB players for people who want a couple of albums while they run, bike, commute, etc. But I'm spoiled by carrying my entire music collection. I frequently have a chance meeting with someone and play an obscure song for them, and the odds it'd be in a 256 MB device are slim. Besides, I never know what I want to hear ahead of time.
Bonus! Here's a free music download link from Tempus that I saw on /. Good stuff, reminiscent of Dave Mathews:
http://www.tempusband.com/mp3.html
Similar deal with the Karma 20 music download software. The supported software to download tunes is Windows software. To be fair, despite Ogg, ethernet, etc., they never claimed it was anything but a Windows device.
On the plus side, they got a Java programmer to create Rio Music Manager Lite (RMML), and because it's Java, it runs great on Linux, Mac, etc. And his support is typical of open source - email the programmer, and he fixes it in a few minutes and emails you the link to the download. Very cool.
Boy, sounds like some bad Karma there buddy.
A friend told me his coworker had a Karma that died. When powered on, it simply displayed a large message that said, "Bad Karma". That's a design engineer with a sense of humor.
I have one of the first Karma 20 units, and so far, so good. Despite my best efforts to baby the portable device with a spinning hard drive, I've dropped it four times, and a couple of those were four feet onto concrete. The hard drive only runs a couple of seconds every five minutes while it fills the RAM buffer, so a drop during HD access is rare. Hope you don't drop it on the exposed scroller wheel.
the High Court has found an implied right to political communication in the Constitution.
There is a big difference between the right to political speech and forcing someone to listen to it.
The US Congresscritters have exempted themselves from lots of weasel behavior that they outlawed for everyone else, so this sort of problem is certainly not confined to Australia.
Just be thankful you're not getting all the government you're paying for.
Will Rogers
I do agree those who have pointed out that Moller has been at the "next year" stage for a couple of decades, and isn't a serious player, despite the appearance he projects. I'd stop just short of calling it a scam, but only because I know people have an almost unlimited capacity for self delusion and guys like Moller who dream of aircars probably got a double dose of self delusion.
The energy issue is real. The FAA created a new regulatory category for the emerging powered lift vehicles, but they are very inefficient. We're going to need better energy conversion efficiency and better energy storage to make these practical. All that power in a current technology lightweight engine is a recipe for low reliability. I think cold fusion and electric motors would be an enabling technology.
The concerns about Joe Sixpack flying around are valid, too. But again, technology to the rescue. The only reason that general aviation doesn't already have easy to use 3D navigation control systems is the low volume. If enough people flew, we'd hurry up and make it a lot simpler. Even with the low demand, we're steadily inching in that direction with GPS, autopilots, "synthetic vision", etc. These technologies are all moving down into smaller planes.
BTW - Almost all of the small plane innovation in the last fifty years has been the result of experimental aviation enthusiasts. These are people who design and build planes in their garages, although it's been more kit building than designing lately. Legal issues have stifled creativity at companies that sell small planes, and have made the costs so high they have all but been driven out of the market, even with tort reform in that industry to limit liability.
One of these days we'll have flying cars, but the path will almost certainly take us through efficient electric or fuel cell cars first, and possibly we'll need fusion power or something similar to have enough energy per capita to make them viable.
Short answer: Not next year, and not ten years from now. But if we started doing some research now instead of burning every drop of oil first, aircars could be popular in 20-30 years.
Computers have made it an easy matter to scan books and redistribute them. There are high speed scanners, good optical character recognition software, and plenty of bandwidth to simply distribute an entire book as a collection of graphics instead of rendering them back into text.
But book copyrights are seldom violated in the US, and almost never violated using PC technology. Why? Readers are more law abiding than music enthusiasts? Readers are too lazy to scan a book? Or is it because people resent the record companies' graft, corruption and excessive profiteering?
The abuses of the RIAA companies are well known. They include payola (paying radio DJs and station managers cash or coccaine to play their records), addicting artists to drugs to control them, and charging $20 for a CD that costs them $1 for the plastic, paper and distribution. The only place this sort of weasel behavior is remotely close to book publishing is the textbook marketing racket, which could teach the Mafia a thing or two about profit margins and market share.
The RIAA and John Ashcroft are legally in the right on this, even if it is difficult to agree with them on general principles, and it's difficult to respect a law that protects such weasels. I'll throw my lot in with the others who say, "Vote with your wallet. Don't buy RIAA products. Lobby your favorite bands to leave RIAA companies and make it financially viable for them to do so."
Geeks continue to compare SCO and the RIAA. At first, they seem like completely different issues, but there are some definite similarities. Both have outdated business models, both are weasels who prefer to fight in court than embrace new technology and profit from it, and both are making a lot of noise right now but will soon be insignificant footnotes in the history of technology.
Once you have 20-30 people in a group of friends
The intersection of the set of all people with 20 or more close friends, and the set of all people who are tech savvy enough to want to use wireless mobile devices to automate their social functions, is the null set.
The news article I saw held the opinion...
Sad that we now expect "news" articles to provide opinions. What happened to journalism, where facts are reported and people form their own opinions? Are we so busy that we don't have time to think, so we select the "news" sources that tell us what we want to think about the issues?
PS - The More Cowbell MP3 is lame. I totally do not get it. It was a waste of bandwidth.
If you're concerned about security, why not burn your favorite Linux install ISO onto a stack of CDs and label them Free Windows Security Update? As long as they still "have the web", most people wouldn't know the difference, other than the lack of infections.
Deceptive? Perhaps. But they'll thank you later, when their PC isn't thrashed by every Outlook worm of the week. What're we up to now, MyDoom S? When it reaches Z, I guess they'll start numbering with AA?
Mac and Linux users are tired of having their inboxes stuffed with Outlook worms and spam from infected zombie Windows PCs. Even when you do the right thing, you still suffer from other people running Windows.
So burn a CD and mail it. Cheaper than a floppy these days.
Exactly! I do that all the time. I even have 6" X 9" envelopes to facilitate the process. I just mailed a really cool 47 MB MPG video a friend sent me of his cross country air race. Can't put that on a floppy.
That's why the CD-R is the replacement for floppies, not USB flash memory devices. Flash is pretty cool. I have 256 MB in my inexpensive digital camera so I can shoot kayaking and mountain biking video, or A LOT of pictures. But for anything you want to send, a lower cost per MB is needed than flash can provide.
Even in a world with nice & relatively cheap flash storage devices, floppies still have their place.
And to get back on topic here, unfortunately, rotating magnetic media will still be with us for a while. The advances made in the antiquated hard drive technology are amazing. Let's hear it for clever engineers and the motivating power of competition. Rust on glass will continue to be cheaper per bit than solid state memory technologies, despite the hard drive's increased power, larger size and weight, susceptibility to shock, reliability issues inherent with that many precise moving parts, etc.
Energy is so important that the US should richly fund a US fusion initiative AND the international initiative. As it is, the basic science looks promising, and attainable in 20-50 years if we were serious, but all we have now is the international fusion project, and they've been arguing for YEARS over where to build it. All politics, no science.
The US should also be promoting solar power. Yeah, it's diffuse, but it can make a HUGE difference in US energy imports and balance of trade. And solar power could greatly benefit from much larger scale. Imagine highly automated factories cranking out cheap and easy-to-use click-together solar panels for every roof surface. Every structure needs a roof, why not generate power at the same time?
And what about electric cars? The GM EV1 (aka Impact) was VERY popular with the people who leased them, but they were withdrawn by GM when they announced their long term hydrogen powered car initiative. To those who want cleaner and more efficient cars that don't require foreign oil, this looks like a decision to pacify people while cozying up to Big Oil, when a very good solution exists now.
The planet is going to run out of oil someday, and fairly soon given the rapid increase in consumption. We should be planning for that, and doing the research now, but we aren't. The US is in a position to lead in this initiative, but chooses to wait until the oil crisis is upon us, and then try to act. It's going to get very ugly within a decade or two. And that's frustrating when we could have solar power and very good electric cars today, and fusion power in 30 years.
I'm still trying to decide how much of the planet's energy problems are caused by plain old human short sightedness, and how much is Enron-style corporate greed and manipulation.
Note the difference in the way science seeks to solve a problem, versus the method that disappeared after the Dark Ages. Scientists have intuition, but they use that to develop a hypothesis based on a rational understanding of the real world and a thorough understanding of the relevant science (mostly physics and material science, in this case). Then, they test the hypothesis. A scientist would not say, "Foam damage sounds unlikely to me, so I think extraterrestrials shot down the shuttle with an electromagnetic pulse."
Not being able to recall key events and facts is natural, when your head is full of alien conspiracies.
You need to work on your tenuous grasp on reality.
What's insulting is for someone to make a lot of obviously false statements, and then expect people to believe an alien conspiracy theory.
Bad NASA management was once again the cause of the loss of an orbiter and seven crew members. Specifically, the Columbia disaster was caused by a foam strike on the left wing during takeoff, which damaged a critical insulating tile, resulting in a structural failure on re-entry. There were no evil extraterrestrials involved. That's reality, and welcome to it.
Well, at least you're consistent. The grainy video that shows the foam departing and striking the wing was taken by NASA's long range cameras. These are essentially large telescopes fitted with video cameras, with an effective range of many miles. Several of these video cameras are aimed at the shuttle from different points of view, looking for just this sort of thing.
That's why it's so hard for us to accept their casual dismissal when they saw a big chunk of foam that appeared to strike a fragile and critical leading edge. That dismissal probably occurred at the first level of management. Some engineers were concerned, but their concerns were quickly squelched.
The Challenger disaster was caused by a cavalier attitude about O-ring failures. It wasn't an unknown problem. Every mission had some degree of O-ring failure. NASA became comfortable with O-ring failure as a part of every mission. It was a long term action item, but it was not deemed important enough to halt the STS program.
It's like pulling the trigger three times in Russian Roulette and then deciding it's a safe game. That is not how engineers form a risk assessment. But it's apparently how NASA managers form risk assessments.
Sadly, the Columbia disaster showed the same dangerous mindset. "We've had lots of foam fall off. We replace tiles because of foam damage. It's no big deal. Engineers are always too conservative."
I'll try to help you understand, even though this information is readily available if you cared enough to look.
As discussed above, the foam was travelling at a very high relative velocity when it struck the wing. The velocity and size of the foam block is known to a reasonable degree of accuracy by analyzing the video a frame at a time. The velocity is simply how far the foam moved in the last frame before it struck the wing, divided by the video frame rate.
The leading edge of the wing is coated with tiles made of RCC, reinforced carbon carbon. It's there to insulate the wing from the extremely hot ionized gases that exist during re-entry. The RCC is not a structural component. The structural element is an aluminum wing spar inside the wing. When the leading edge of the wing was damaged, the aluminum wing spar was exposed to the equivalent of a large blow torch. The telemetry showed greatly elevated temperatures within the left wing during re-entry, which is the substantiating evidence that essentially proves beyond all reasonable doubt that this is what caused the Columbia disaster.
I suggest you avoid making a superficial reading of something like the Columbia disaster, then making an exhaustive search for all the ways that an alien conspiracy could have caused it. If you really want to understand the Columbia disaster, read the real science. It's available. At least then, you can avoid the obvious mistakes, such as saying the Columbia exploded during lift-off, or the cameras that filmed the foam were mounted to the launch gantry and couldn't see very far away. Having at least the superficial facts might at least make your crackpot alien conspiracy theories a bit more credible. With such poorly researched arguments, your alien conspiracy theories are somewhere between laughable and pathetic.
Don't feel bad. A lot of people don't have a very intuitive grasp of the dynamic pressure (Q) created by supersonic flow. There is A LOT of drag on a block of foam in air as fast and dense as the SST was experiencing at that point in liftoff.
Whaaa?!?
Remember, my last post where I suggested you up your dosage. I was wrong. Took too much! Took too much! You're hallucinating. When you come down, check your facts.
It wasn't a personal attack. More of a reality check. I almost didn't respond, because I was fairly certain you were joking. Then I realized you probably weren't joking.
I'm usually the one arguing for relaxing dogmatic beliefs based in the status quo, examining the facts with an open mind, and formulating a fresh hypothesis that best fits the facts, instead of parroting the common belief. But you totally lost me on the EM pulse conspiracy theory with bonus points for extraterrestrials.
Conventional wisdom dictates that Plan 9 From Outer Space was the worst movie of all time, with honorary mention going to Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes. However, I can unequivocally state that each of these movies was akin to the works of Robert Frost compared to the Vogon poetry that was:
1) Laserblast
2) Even Dwarves Started Small
I saw both of these movies in a single week while in college. Each made me physically ill. Afterward, I suffered a six month aversion to movie theaters.
Surprisingly, I believe both have been preserved forever as DVDs. Is there no putrid tripe that isn't worthy of being made into a DVD?
What happens to a very draggy chunk of low density foam in a supersonic stream of air? It will rapidly decelerate, right?
Imagine you impale a cheap styrofoam cooler on your car's hood ornament and head out on the highway. At 70 MPH, the cooler pops off the hood ornament. What happens? Does it keep coasting along with little relative velocity with respect to the car? No. It smashes into your windshield at close to 70 MPH. Whether the car is accelerating or not has almost no effect on the outcome. It's the rapid deceleration of the foam that causes the significant relative velocity when it strikes the car. Only the relative velocity is important. Sorry the NASA engineers confused you by not suspending a block of foam motionless in the air and hurling a section of wing at it.
As for the bulk of your post, containing that half baked ranting, UFOlogy and conspiracy theories, I'd have to say you get the tin foil hat award for the rest of this century. I imagine you with your tinfoil hat, wrapped in tin foil from head to foot, in a titanium submersible on the bottom of the ocean. And the mind control waves still get through. All that trouble, and all you really need to do is...
UP YOUR DOSAGE.
The issue of the subscribers reading the lengthy legalese in the terms of service is certainly an issue, but the much bigger issue is the rights of those who are not customers. You don't care if Vontage records your conversations and shares them with the government, so you sign up with Vontage. But I'm a lot more serious about privacy. What happens to my right to privacy when you call me? I didn't agree to the Vontage terms of service, but my phone number is recorded along with the conversation, which is time and date stamped. That's a lot of information.
In practice it was a hollow victory because I worked there at my salaried job every waking moment for the next two years and didn't have the chance to pursue any stray ideas that fleetingly passed through my gray matter while I drove to and from work in a semi-comatose state.
I've been self employed for the last five years. I'm Starvin' Marvin, but it's better than working for The Man. (YMMV)