It's true that NASA shouldn't be firing astronauts off willy-nilly without proper regard for their safety, but the bottom line is that exploring space is a dangerous business and will probably remain that way for quite some time. If we start balking at every tiny possible threat then I don't see how we are ever going to reach the increasingly distant dream - many would argue necessity - of eventually getting off this rock.
Part of the problem is that when the last shuttle blew up the media seemed all too happy to blame NASA and fuel the public's fears regarding the dangers of space travel, rather than just reflect on the heroic and dangerous but still neccesary nature of exploration. The astronauts know it's a risky business. Obviously there is a line, and the last shuttle disaster might have crossed it (engineers warning of serious problems beforehand), but it's depressing to think that we won't allow people to take a risk for the sake of exploration anymore.
I don't know a huge amount about the US political system, but I'm fairly sure that laws that could be potentially dangerous to something are usually opposed by a relevant representative (there's never a shortage of environmentalists opposing potentially harmful laws to the environment, for example).
Why then does there seem to be a total lack of representation by people who understand the implications that laws like this could have? People who can sit there and tell the politicians what is plausible in the digital world, and what isn't? With an ever-increasing amount of digital content and digital issues really beginning to affect our rights, there's no excuse for not having a lot of resistance to this sort of law. All it would take is a few tech-savvy pollies in the right spots and laws like this WOULD be heard of.
This topic has got me a little worried. I've ripped most of my music at 320kbs AAC (.m4a) - I always assumed it was a better file format than mp3. Is this true? Will I have a whole bunch of un-playable files requiring a lengthy conversion process in five years time, or is AAC fairly future-proof?
I care. Here in Australia I have to fork out somewhere around AUD$90-100 for a new PC game (~USD$68-75). That's a fair amount of money and I always check several reviews first to make sure I'm not going to be sorely disappointed. Without good, balanced reviews my hundred bucks is in great danger of being wasted.
stupid idea anyway. The people buying the CDs are the people doing the RIGHT THING; I would say that only a small minority of those who buy/rip a CD will then bother to upload the songs to others via P2P. More importantly, these 'pirates' are going to get the songs off the CD somehow, regardless of copy protection: all copy protection is doing is putting a mild speed-bump in the way of small-time 'pirates' and pissing off the vast majority of people who are doing the right thing.
Just the other week I was nearly driven crazy by a layer of fog that had snuck in-between the two lenses of my ski goggles. It took several days of sitting them next to a heater before the problem was fixed.
Presumably this couldn't happen with totally fog-free lenses.
After reading the article I opened Word 2003 for the first time since turning on the computer today and acheived a four second startup time. I then closed it and re-opened it and got a two second startup time.
And this is on an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ processor bought about 2-3 years ago with about 160 out of 512 mb RAM free...
If you could figure out a way to get a warning system to work (as you said, it would have to be faster-than-light), then getting away probably wouldn't be much of a problem.
In any case, we can talk about it but it's essentially a problem that is completely out of our control, at least for the next few hundred years (perhaps less or more, or always). So I concur: don't worry about about it, spend your time and money (time=money?) on more useful things, like a safer car or a tinfoil hat:)
"During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.
It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.
Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'."
They missed the bit about the button in his pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that NASA shouldn't be firing astronauts off willy-nilly without proper regard for their safety, but the bottom line is that exploring space is a dangerous business and will probably remain that way for quite some time. If we start balking at every tiny possible threat then I don't see how we are ever going to reach the increasingly distant dream - many would argue necessity - of eventually getting off this rock.
Part of the problem is that when the last shuttle blew up the media seemed all too happy to blame NASA and fuel the public's fears regarding the dangers of space travel, rather than just reflect on the heroic and dangerous but still neccesary nature of exploration. The astronauts know it's a risky business. Obviously there is a line, and the last shuttle disaster might have crossed it (engineers warning of serious problems beforehand), but it's depressing to think that we won't allow people to take a risk for the sake of exploration anymore.
I don't know a huge amount about the US political system, but I'm fairly sure that laws that could be potentially dangerous to something are usually opposed by a relevant representative (there's never a shortage of environmentalists opposing potentially harmful laws to the environment, for example).
Why then does there seem to be a total lack of representation by people who understand the implications that laws like this could have? People who can sit there and tell the politicians what is plausible in the digital world, and what isn't? With an ever-increasing amount of digital content and digital issues really beginning to affect our rights, there's no excuse for not having a lot of resistance to this sort of law. All it would take is a few tech-savvy pollies in the right spots and laws like this WOULD be heard of.
This topic has got me a little worried. I've ripped most of my music at 320kbs AAC (.m4a) - I always assumed it was a better file format than mp3. Is this true? Will I have a whole bunch of un-playable files requiring a lengthy conversion process in five years time, or is AAC fairly future-proof?
I care. Here in Australia I have to fork out somewhere around AUD$90-100 for a new PC game (~USD$68-75). That's a fair amount of money and I always check several reviews first to make sure I'm not going to be sorely disappointed. Without good, balanced reviews my hundred bucks is in great danger of being wasted.
stupid idea anyway. The people buying the CDs are the people doing the RIGHT THING; I would say that only a small minority of those who buy/rip a CD will then bother to upload the songs to others via P2P. More importantly, these 'pirates' are going to get the songs off the CD somehow, regardless of copy protection: all copy protection is doing is putting a mild speed-bump in the way of small-time 'pirates' and pissing off the vast majority of people who are doing the right thing.
Just the other week I was nearly driven crazy by a layer of fog that had snuck in-between the two lenses of my ski goggles. It took several days of sitting them next to a heater before the problem was fixed. Presumably this couldn't happen with totally fog-free lenses.
After reading the article I opened Word 2003 for the first time since turning on the computer today and acheived a four second startup time. I then closed it and re-opened it and got a two second startup time.
And this is on an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ processor bought about 2-3 years ago with about 160 out of 512 mb RAM free...
Makes you wonder exactly how he was going about "taking it apart"...
If you could figure out a way to get a warning system to work (as you said, it would have to be faster-than-light), then getting away probably wouldn't be much of a problem. In any case, we can talk about it but it's essentially a problem that is completely out of our control, at least for the next few hundred years (perhaps less or more, or always). So I concur: don't worry about about it, spend your time and money (time=money?) on more useful things, like a safer car or a tinfoil hat :)
Boom! Slashdot! Does anyone have the review mirrored?
Unfortunately I cannot find this funny yet as the humorous commentary has been slashdotted.
"During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.
It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.
Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'."
They missed the bit about the button in his pocket.