One other option the article mentioned was to point it away from the planets and the moon and send it off.
This would require using a lot of the remaining fuel for the Jupiter-escape maneuver instead of science.
Maybe it is dying anyway, but why kill it off earlier?
It doesn't have the fuel to get to another body of interest, and its sensors aren't useful at long distances (we can see some things very well from here with Hubble). That means that the decision to leave Jupiter orbit would end the science mission just as certainly and irrevocably as a crash, only sooner. --
It's about time we required that companies collecting data tell us what they're using it for, and either not use it for anything else (without getting permission) or pay a penalty for the abuse of trust. Little as I like most of Europe's legal system, their privacy regulations are enviable. Now we're closer. --
...this rock will die when the moon crashes into the surface anyway.
You mean Earth? Luna is never going to crash into Earth; it is getting farther away every year, as it acquires energy and angular momentum it saps from Earth's rotation via the tides. Long ago there were 400 days per year, compared to 365 now; days are always getting longer, though not fast enough to satisfy most geeks. --
Yeah, Shoemaker-Levy 9 should be a warning to everyone.
What Jupiter would have said if it could talk: "Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!" --
Question is then can Galileo properly do those missions?
Nope. There's no fuel for that kind of maneuvering. Now, if Galileo had something like the ion engines of Deep Space 1, it might be different. But it doesn't (ion drives weren't proven well enough to bet a big mission on them), so it can't. --
I think they should try put it into a solar orbit, so that it could be salvaged and put on display a century or two from now. The difficulty of finding a passive speck in the vastness of the Solar system notwithstanding, if you had the fuel to get Galileo out of the Jupiter system would you rather spend it saving something for a museum piece in the far future beyond the life of anyone living today, or would you rather use it to get data now? Just the pictures of the Io volcanoes are making history, and the entire world can all enjoy them now; a defunct machine in a museum only benefits those who can make the time to go see it. --
If you want to guarantee that it will not crash on Europa, there are two major courses of action: eject it from Jupiter orbit entirely, or crash it somewhere else. I strongly suspect that there isn't enough fuel remaining to escape from Jupiter orbit (if there was, they'd spend it taking more pictures of moons and getting the taxpayers' money's worth out of the machine instead). --
Why can't they just leave it up there orbitting and taking pictures? Is it running out of fuel?
Yes. It's also running out of radiation tolerance, RTG power and a number of other things. Maneuvering fuel is apparently set to run out first, but the vehicle is not going to last much longer regardless. To prevent it from contaminating Europa (and throwing off any search for life we may do there in the future), it has to be prevented from crashing there. One certain method of doing this is to crash it somewhere else. Crude, but highly effective. --
It is MS being their usual "we work with them (almost)" self, but in this case, they're not hiding anything. They just happen to use more of the spec than the reference one.
If this stuff is supposedly in the spec, why are people complaining about it being undocumented and therefore not able to be rolled into, say, Samba? --
Aside from boycotting Win2K, is there anything the open-source community can do about this?
I think we'd be boycotting W2K on general principles.
I am no lawyer, but forcing W2K clients to rely on W2K servers for authentication sounds like illegal product-tying to me. It might be worth making a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission about it. The remedy, of course, would be to force Microsoft to use the established Kerberos data fields if they are adequate to the task, and document the extensions if they are not. Packet formats are not "intellectual property" or trade secrets, they are communications which are intended to be received and understood (by the intended receiver). --
There is information available on the internet as destructive to a child's mind as crack is to the body.
Oh, hogwash. Remember, you're talking about letters on a screen here. Most of this stuff may not even be understood by young children; how can it possibly destroy them when they'd just forget it as nonsense? By the time they're old enough to understand, they're also old enough to go click on something else or just do alt-F4. If they are fascinated by it, it's no different than any other fascination they might get through a stack of magazines in someone's garage or an older friend. If parents can't handle the "problems" posed by material from the Internet, they've almost certainly failed to handle the age-old problems either. Hey, I should know. I grew up before the WWW, but I knew all about encyclopedias and reference books. You'd be surprised what you can find with a card catalog, and reference librarians don't look twice at a pre-teen in the stacks.
Can we puh-LEEEEESE drop the silly pretense that the Internet is some unique phenomenon, instead of just another way for people to talk to each other for whatever purpose? --
... we are all just little baby birds swallowing anything that comes down the pipe
Maybe you use a browser which pulls in links other than those you select, and maybe you lack any ability to evaluate, distinguish and discriminate between stuff that's good for you to read and stuff that's not. I don't. You're free to declare yourself mentally incompetent and have yourself made someone's ward, you know. --
I believe you're talking about a barrel shifter. Interestingly enough, you probably have greater need for one in your video accelerator than in your CPU proper. (Cracking RC5 on your video card, what a concept!) --
I don't know the exact requirements for earthing of the main voltage in the States, but a good solution is to have a central earthing point (guess where!) and run one earthing conductor to each room. This will protect you computers since they will have the same potential level (voltages with respect to "ground").
I would not do this unless my house wiring had no grounds. For houses that are up to the current electrical code, running a separate ground lead to each computer would create a second conductive path between those two points; one through the power wiring which is grounded at the service entrance, and another going through the network-associated wiring which is grounded who-knows-where. This is known in the lingo as a "ground loop". While it may have little or no impact normally, it could hit you in the event of a short to an equipment case; suddenly there are high currents through the ground wires, the entire network is quite a few volts away from earth potential because of the interconnections, and funny things happen. Maybe network stuff blows (though I doubt it as these networks have to be isolated to work properly, someone might have fragile stuff out there). It is best not to play with stuff that's time-tested, so don't run a second set of grounds if your wiring is already grounded. Final note, use an outlet tester to verify that the grounds are good. --
Ah, but language and cultural context are "software" issues. I can look at Hebrew or Arabic text and copy it reasonably well even though I can't understand what it says. This would allow me to preserve it even if I couldn't make use of the content myself. --
At the moment, Moore's law is the only thing that stops this problem becoming really acute.
Moore's law pertains to computing speed and not storage density, but that's not the point I wanted to make. I'd argue that the progress being made under the "laws" of Moore and others has created the problem. For thousands of years, knowledge was recorded in books. Almost everyone had the necessary equipment (eyes) to read a book. Today, the equipment to read media becomes obsolete within years. We can still read books hundreds of years old, but 1985's data tapes are being lost to us. There's a lesson here.
If technology ran into its physical limits, progress would become incremental rather than exponential. This would require that the space devoted to data storage increase more or less linearly with the amount of data, but it would have the side-effect of eliminating the need to change storage technologies. If 9-track tape hadn't become a hopelessly obsolete format due to its bulk, we'd have no problems reading those 1985 tapes (assuming the oxide or binder hadn't decayed or fused, but that's another issue). Sometimes progress, by creating a gulf between the present and the past, cuts us off from our own history.
I wonder if I could still find a PET emulator and a copy of TOKER someplace... that would be fun to put out and let people play at a party. --
I should think that a 99% destruction rate is awful! Kind of defeats the purpose of an "archive" doesn't it?
If I didn't work so hard to keep down the amount of repetitive joke-list and similar traffic I get, I could easily trash 75-90% of the total volume of the e-mail I get with no loss of information. The real problem is when there is a strong disincentive to keeping data around. For instance, corporate memos. Our hyperlitigious society is turning "documentation" into land mines for companies and individuals alike, so there is a very strong incentive to dispose of everything which is not absolutely necessary to keep. If it doesn't exist, no attorney for the plaintiff bar can subpoena it and use it to sink you under a huge verdict.
Worse yet, the labor involved with separating out the 1% of stuff that ought to be kept is going to mean a non-zero error rate; people will toss things that are still of value just because they have no time to examine them in detail. What are you going to do.... --
Slashdot Mirror
< & I just previewed this to be certain; it isn't doing it any more. (For which I am grateful.)
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It's about time we required that companies collecting data tell us what they're using it for, and either not use it for anything else (without getting permission) or pay a penalty for the abuse of trust. Little as I like most of Europe's legal system, their privacy regulations are enviable. Now we're closer.
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What Jupiter would have said if it could talk:
"Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!"
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I think they should try put it into a solar orbit, so that it could be salvaged and put on display a century or two from now. The difficulty of finding a passive speck in the vastness of the Solar system notwithstanding, if you had the fuel to get Galileo out of the Jupiter system would you rather spend it saving something for a museum piece in the far future beyond the life of anyone living today, or would you rather use it to get data now? Just the pictures of the Io volcanoes are making history, and the entire world can all enjoy them now; a defunct machine in a museum only benefits those who can make the time to go see it.
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If you want to guarantee that it will not crash on Europa, there are two major courses of action: eject it from Jupiter orbit entirely, or crash it somewhere else. I strongly suspect that there isn't enough fuel remaining to escape from Jupiter orbit (if there was, they'd spend it taking more pictures of moons and getting the taxpayers' money's worth out of the machine instead).
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I am no lawyer, but forcing W2K clients to rely on W2K servers for authentication sounds like illegal product-tying to me. It might be worth making a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission about it. The remedy, of course, would be to force Microsoft to use the established Kerberos data fields if they are adequate to the task, and document the extensions if they are not. Packet formats are not "intellectual property" or trade secrets, they are communications which are intended to be received and understood (by the intended receiver).
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You can use < to escape a less-than sign (and & to escape an ampersand). You can also post in plain text instead of HTML formatted if you want to post a code fragment.
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Some days I just don't feel like smiley-captioning things, and sometimes I regret it.
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Can we puh-LEEEEESE drop the silly pretense that the Internet is some unique phenomenon, instead of just another way for people to talk to each other for whatever purpose?
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I believe you're talking about a barrel shifter. Interestingly enough, you probably have greater need for one in your video accelerator than in your CPU proper. (Cracking RC5 on your video card, what a concept!)
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John S Montoya.
You killed my cash cow.
Prepare to try.
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True, but hydrogen cannot explode spontaneously by exothermic decomposition.
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Ah, but language and cultural context are "software" issues. I can look at Hebrew or Arabic text and copy it reasonably well even though I can't understand what it says. This would allow me to preserve it even if I couldn't make use of the content myself.
--
If technology ran into its physical limits, progress would become incremental rather than exponential. This would require that the space devoted to data storage increase more or less linearly with the amount of data, but it would have the side-effect of eliminating the need to change storage technologies. If 9-track tape hadn't become a hopelessly obsolete format due to its bulk, we'd have no problems reading those 1985 tapes (assuming the oxide or binder hadn't decayed or fused, but that's another issue). Sometimes progress, by creating a gulf between the present and the past, cuts us off from our own history.
I wonder if I could still find a PET emulator and a copy of TOKER someplace... that would be fun to put out and let people play at a party.
--
Worse yet, the labor involved with separating out the 1% of stuff that ought to be kept is going to mean a non-zero error rate; people will toss things that are still of value just because they have no time to examine them in detail. What are you going to do....
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I'll bet that the biomass generators aren't used because they can't compete with fossil methane (natural gas).
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