NASA is searching for life in Congress for support of a planetary science budget, so these announcements must be taken with a big dose of sodium chloride.
Back in 1976, NASA flew the twin Viking missions to Mars, each with its own orbiter and stationary lander. All were quite successful. But at what a cost: something close to a cool billion dollars back then; that would be maybe four or five billion today. And there was another cost. To get support for the mission, NASA had to drum up expectations of finding some positive result from the life detection experiments on board and so these experiments took up most of the scientific payload at the expense of the more usual array of geophysical instruments. No life signs were found, the popular press declared a failure, and serious funding for Mars exploration dried up for nearly twenty years.
The more recent NASA probes including Pathfinder, Odyssey, Phoenix, and the twin rovers have all done extremely well and have in total produced far, far more science per dollar than did Viking. These probes have done so in part because the emphasis wasn't on life detection -- iffy at best -- but on good old geology and chemistry experiments that were guaranteed to produce lots of valuable knowledge no matter what.
Could NASA be setting itself up for another Viking-like episode with tales of possible life on Europa and Enceladus? Could life-detection instruments once again shove aside less exciting but more productive geophysical experiments? Since Congress is inhabited mostly by the scientifically illiterate, you can guess how I'll bet.
I've seen Segways up close and I think they're pretty cool. But what about the possibility of theft when you have to leave your personal transporter parked outside of a store or office? I know that the Segway HT has a somewhat secure system that prevents unauthorized starting, but what about the case of a thief just grabbing the machine and stuffing it into a van for a quick trip to the chop shop? Furthermore, it seems that the smaller transporters mention in the article would be even easier to steal.
If the bait cannot be traced, how can there be a lawsuit?
You say that "Lethal traps are not a permissible form of defense". Impermissible by your fiat? Do you think that anyone cares? If an armed guard uses his weapon on a burglar, is that also impermissible by your assertion?
While the bait is dangerous, it is dangerous only to the target or to the careless. Would you force every household to divest itself of all knives, guns, razors, and chemical cleaning products?
If we were to take your asinine "make sure that no innocent person becomes a victim" statement to its logical conclusion, then no criminal could ever be convicted if there were a one in fifty quadrillion chance that he might be innocent.
Anyway, the poison bait is only a stopgap until there are disintegration beamers controlled by intelligent robots.
Get a medium sized bottle of some well known brand of vodka. Carefully remove the cap, pour out a fourth of so of the contents and replace with good old poisonous rubbing alcohol. Reattach the cap so that the bottle looks like it had never been opened. Place the adulterated vodka so that a burglar will certainly include it in his haul. Ensure that no one in your household will accidentally imbibe.
A similar scheme could use attractive snacks and different poisons; but again, make sure that no innocent person becomes a victim.
It won't stop the burglar immediately, but it will stop him before he can victimize yet again.
Amplification: Clarke's Newspad used numeric addresses exclusively; he thought of a site address as just another variety of a phone number. In the film 2001, you can see a row of digit buttons at the bottom of each Newspad. Clarke also talked about an interactive zoom for reading where a finger touch to an abstract would enlarge and expand the text of the abstracted article -- very much like clicking a hyperlink.
Other predictions:
1) No more extra charges for long distance telephone calls; generally fulfilled within countries and economic blocs.
2) One world time zone; fulfilled for all computers as they use GMT/UTC. Not yet so for humans.
3) The "Standard Encyclopedia"; that's what Wikipedia is becoming.
4) Death of most printed newspaper by 2001; close, will likely see this soon.
5) "Meatless days" due to economic stress and population growth, even in the US; close, will likely see this soon for many people.
Let us be reminded that Clarke also wrote about the Newspad back in 1964; it appeared a couple of times in the film 2001, It was tablet computer accessing a world wide web, thirty years before it finally came to life. The only difference was that Clarke thought the URLs were numeric instead of ASCII strings.
How cool it must have been for him to see so many of his visions turn into reality!
Clarke was certainly one of the masters of SF and popular space writing; also, he was my personal favorite.
His story "How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time" about his failure to patent his geosynchronous communication satellite network concept is simultaneously sad and funny. He got everything right except he thought that the satellites needed to be crewed because of the requirements of changing burnt out vacuum tubes! Too bad the transistor was still ten years away at the time.
More than once in his writings he made the claim that he was proud to be an atheist. Somehow I hope that he wasn't disappointed being wrong and instead was pleasantly surprised.
Not the best of form to reply to one's own comment, but...
The Concorde had a pair of sisters: the US SST by Boeing and the Soviet Tu-144 by Tupolov. The former was canned after an incredible expenditure of taxpayer dollars, and the latter never made any kind of a profit. Although, the Tu-144 may have fared better if the effort hadn't been hindered by the British and French (allegedly) passing known bad technical data to Soviet industrial spies.
The point is not that a spaceplane is undesirable; the point is that we must avoid repeating historical mistakes. And unless you're absolutely sure that governments and the powerful aerospace lobbyists won't get involved, it's best to put the whole idea on the back burner.
The Concorde SST had massive government subsidies from both Britain and France and because of lack of demand still couldn't produce a decent return on investment Well, other than being a jobs program.
And yet any ticket for a near future spaceplane will likely cost a hundred times more than did a Concorde seat. Increases in fuel costs might make it even more expensive than that. And just think of the even more stringent security screening bullshit passengers will have to endure.
Summary: Show me a commercially viable SST first. Then we can talk about a spaceplane that's not a welfare program for the aerospace industry.
Consider this: SCO has a hard time right now (according to its 10-K) paying its staff including its s/w engineers. I doubt that any quality s/w engineer with a desire to avoid resume poisoning would want to work at the place. Therefore, it's unlikely that any of SCO's current or future offerings will be any more attractive than they are now, and that's not much. However, SCO will still try to push its products.
And that's where Linux developers and open source advocates can molest SCO with suit after suit because any feature that shows up in an SCO product will likely already have an existing implementation in an open source, GPL'ed program. Perhaps not an exact functional duplicate, but one close enough for grounds for a non trivial lawsuit. Certainly the grounds will be as strong as, if not stronger, than those of SCO's suit from 2003. And while the lawsuits burn away at SCO, open source proponents will conduct their own FUD campaign against any SCO product and any company that uses SCO products.
Uh, I'm fairly sure that _My 60 Memorable Games_ was ghost written by GM Larry Evans, although the selection of which games to include was made by Fischer.
As mentioned above, the problem also occurs on the iPod Touch under the Clock icon function.
Oh, and for those with Mac OS/X, the fifth generation of the iCal application still totally misses the Gregorian conversion that occurred in September 1572.
For those with Unix, type "cal 1572" into a shell and then "man cal" for an explanation.
A mailing list canary is a deliberately inserted entry with (usually) a false name but with real contact information. The contact data leads back to the security arm of the firm that compiled the list. The idea is that the canary sings every time the list is used, and this is but one mechanism to detect unauthorized access.
Maybe the DBA knew about the canary. With proper security, he shouldn't have. Or maybe the canary sang and that's how the guy got caught.
Receiving stolen property is a charge I'd like seeing brought against the direct marketers who bought or rented the list. This would be a good deterrent against shady data acquisition practices.
First, let me apologize for my sloppy typing and perhaps for an over-generalization.
I have no objection to a *moderate* amount of advertising. I also have no objection to the Loch Ness monster, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.
Let's face it: most advertisement supported sites attempt to shove a hundred times as many bits of bandwidth consuming advertisements as compared to actual news text. That, along with pop up/pop under windows, cookie madness, and tracking -- well, is it really any surprise when consumers take measures to protect themselves?
It's really simple; you stop enabling the RIAA when you stop purchasing RIAA music.
I haven't bought a single music CD since 2002, except for direct purchases from local bands. I had been buying CDs quite regularly and in large quantity since I got my first CD player in late 1983 and so I suppose I was one of the best customers.
But no more. I don't upload music and I don't download it either; I won't give the RIAA any excuse for whining about copyright infringement. But I swear that I will never spend a single penny for RIAA music no matter what the format until the monopolistic miscreants are gone.
Hey, RIAA! I've gone five years without contributing to your war fund! And I'm sure I can keep going.
Everyone else: Take the pledge and watch the greedy bastards suffer.
From nearly forty years of programming (yes, since the IBM 026 keypunch days), I can tell you with absolute certainty that the more that you do for management, the more that they will want from you. It is not your responsibility to bear all the punishment for the lack of foresight and resource allocation on their part.
Consider this: What would be the managerial response if you asked for a cost of living salary increase and that you needed it within 48 hours? Do you think that they would be willing to work day and night to make that happen?
Working in panic mode is not professional behavior, and it certainly is not conductive to good engineering practices. Furthermore, it is detrimental to long term company survival. Engineers who support continued unreasonable demands have only themselves to blame for enabling poor strategic planning by management.
When NASA says "90 days" of useful life they really mean they've planned for a full year. They won't look too bad if the spacecraft fails after a couple of months and will be seen as miracle workers when if it does survive a full year. A little spin technique picked up from Cmdr Montgomery Scott, no doubt.
That being said, kudos to the engineers and operators for keeping both of the beasties running for so long. It would have been even better if they had planned for an much extended lifetime for the rover's RAT (Rock Abrasion Tool), as each is only good for a few grinding cycles.
Given the huge costs already sunk for design, fabrication setup, testing, and training, it's obvious to all but NASA that they should have built and launched at least one more pair of rovers, possibly with some minor improvements. Furthermore, with interest in Mars from Europe, Russia, and mainland China, the latter rovers could have been produced and deployed with significant cost sharing by multiple participants.
I was a teenager back in the early microcomputer days and built one of first kit machines, an IMSAI 8080. It was great fun and more educational than any number of college course I took thereafter.
Those days are long gone now. But could something similar return? I think that the next tech revolution has already started, and it's the hacker's auto fabrication machine ("fabber").
Right now these aren't much more than 3-D printers that squeeze out plastic goop under computer control. But if the rate of progress of this field is anything like that seen with microcomputers, then small scale manufacturing will be totally changed in a few years. Who will be the Woz (and the Jobs and the Gates) of this new endeavor? Maybe they're already out there, but we just haven't heard of them yet.
Can the system predict governmental trends? I'm thinking of something like when a somewhat peaceful, balanced budget democratic republic passes some multidimensional cusp and becomes enamored of gross deficit spending, preemptive military strikes, illegal detainment, torture, and fascism in general? It sure would be nice to see this coming a few years in advance.
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NASA is searching for life in Congress for support of a planetary science budget, so these announcements must be taken with a big dose of sodium chloride.
Back in 1976, NASA flew the twin Viking missions to Mars, each with its own orbiter and stationary lander. All were quite successful. But at what a cost: something close to a cool billion dollars back then; that would be maybe four or five billion today. And there was another cost. To get support for the mission, NASA had to drum up expectations of finding some positive result from the life detection experiments on board and so these experiments took up most of the scientific payload at the expense of the more usual array of geophysical instruments. No life signs were found, the popular press declared a failure, and serious funding for Mars exploration dried up for nearly twenty years.
The more recent NASA probes including Pathfinder, Odyssey, Phoenix, and the twin rovers have all done extremely well and have in total produced far, far more science per dollar than did Viking. These probes have done so in part because the emphasis wasn't on life detection -- iffy at best -- but on good old geology and chemistry experiments that were guaranteed to produce lots of valuable knowledge no matter what.
Could NASA be setting itself up for another Viking-like episode with tales of possible life on Europa and Enceladus? Could life-detection instruments once again shove aside less exciting but more productive geophysical experiments? Since Congress is inhabited mostly by the scientifically illiterate, you can guess how I'll bet.
Somehow I was reminded of this story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8360569.stm
Tell them to take their non-compete and shove it up their ass.
I've seen Segways up close and I think they're pretty cool. But what about the possibility of theft when you have to leave your personal transporter parked outside of a store or office? I know that the Segway HT has a somewhat secure system that prevents unauthorized starting, but what about the case of a thief just grabbing the machine and stuffing it into a van for a quick trip to the chop shop? Furthermore, it seems that the smaller transporters mention in the article would be even easier to steal.
If the bait cannot be traced, how can there be a lawsuit?
You say that "Lethal traps are not a permissible form of defense". Impermissible by your fiat? Do you think that anyone cares? If an armed guard uses his weapon on a burglar, is that also impermissible by your assertion?
While the bait is dangerous, it is dangerous only to the target or to the careless. Would you force every household to divest itself of all knives, guns, razors, and chemical cleaning products?
If we were to take your asinine "make sure that no innocent person becomes a victim" statement to its logical conclusion, then no criminal could ever be convicted if there were a one in fifty quadrillion chance that he might be innocent.
Anyway, the poison bait is only a stopgap until there are disintegration beamers controlled by intelligent robots.
Get a medium sized bottle of some well known brand of vodka. Carefully remove the cap, pour out a fourth of so of the contents and replace with good old poisonous rubbing alcohol. Reattach the cap so that the bottle looks like it had never been opened. Place the adulterated vodka so that a burglar will certainly include it in his haul. Ensure that no one in your household will accidentally imbibe.
A similar scheme could use attractive snacks and different poisons; but again, make sure that no innocent person becomes a victim.
It won't stop the burglar immediately, but it will stop him before he can victimize yet again.
Too bad he hasn't been seen since early 2001.
In the future, engineers and their managers will smarten up at last, and the number of cable/connector standards will be reduced to three:
1) Optical fiber
2) Optical fiber with a copper pair for power
3) Wireless
And the number of protocols will be reduced to one:
1) IPv6
Making everything the same will make everything cheap.
Amplification: Clarke's Newspad used numeric addresses exclusively; he thought of a site address as just another variety of a phone number. In the film 2001, you can see a row of digit buttons at the bottom of each Newspad. Clarke also talked about an interactive zoom for reading where a finger touch to an abstract would enlarge and expand the text of the abstracted article -- very much like clicking a hyperlink.
Other predictions:
1) No more extra charges for long distance telephone calls; generally fulfilled within countries and economic blocs.
2) One world time zone; fulfilled for all computers as they use GMT/UTC. Not yet so for humans.
3) The "Standard Encyclopedia"; that's what Wikipedia is becoming.
4) Death of most printed newspaper by 2001; close, will likely see this soon.
5) "Meatless days" due to economic stress and population growth, even in the US; close, will likely see this soon for many people.
Let us be reminded that Clarke also wrote about the Newspad back in 1964; it appeared a couple of times in the film 2001, It was tablet computer accessing a world wide web, thirty years before it finally came to life. The only difference was that Clarke thought the URLs were numeric instead of ASCII strings.
How cool it must have been for him to see so many of his visions turn into reality!
Clarke was certainly one of the masters of SF and popular space writing; also, he was my personal favorite.
His story "How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time" about his failure to patent his geosynchronous communication satellite network concept is simultaneously sad and funny. He got everything right except he thought that the satellites needed to be crewed because of the requirements of changing burnt out vacuum tubes! Too bad the transistor was still ten years away at the time.
More than once in his writings he made the claim that he was proud to be an atheist. Somehow I hope that he wasn't disappointed being wrong and instead was pleasantly surprised.
Not the best of form to reply to one's own comment, but...
The Concorde had a pair of sisters: the US SST by Boeing and the Soviet Tu-144 by Tupolov. The former was canned after an incredible expenditure of taxpayer dollars, and the latter never made any kind of a profit. Although, the Tu-144 may have fared better if the effort hadn't been hindered by the British and French (allegedly) passing known bad technical data to Soviet industrial spies.
The point is not that a spaceplane is undesirable; the point is that we must avoid repeating historical mistakes. And unless you're absolutely sure that governments and the powerful aerospace lobbyists won't get involved, it's best to put the whole idea on the back burner.
The Concorde SST had massive government subsidies from both Britain and France and because of lack of demand still couldn't produce a decent return on investment Well, other than being a jobs program.
And yet any ticket for a near future spaceplane will likely cost a hundred times more than did a Concorde seat. Increases in fuel costs might make it even more expensive than that. And just think of the even more stringent security screening bullshit passengers will have to endure.
Summary: Show me a commercially viable SST first. Then we can talk about a spaceplane that's not a welfare program for the aerospace industry.
Consider this: SCO has a hard time right now (according to its 10-K) paying its staff including its s/w engineers. I doubt that any quality s/w engineer with a desire to avoid resume poisoning would want to work at the place. Therefore, it's unlikely that any of SCO's current or future offerings will be any more attractive than they are now, and that's not much. However, SCO will still try to push its products.
And that's where Linux developers and open source advocates can molest SCO with suit after suit because any feature that shows up in an SCO product will likely already have an existing implementation in an open source, GPL'ed program. Perhaps not an exact functional duplicate, but one close enough for grounds for a non trivial lawsuit. Certainly the grounds will be as strong as, if not stronger, than those of SCO's suit from 2003. And while the lawsuits burn away at SCO, open source proponents will conduct their own FUD campaign against any SCO product and any company that uses SCO products.
Uh, I'm fairly sure that _My 60 Memorable Games_ was ghost written by GM Larry Evans, although the selection of which games to include was made by Fischer.
As mentioned above, the problem also occurs on the iPod Touch under the Clock icon function.
Oh, and for those with Mac OS/X, the fifth generation of the iCal application still totally misses the Gregorian conversion that occurred in September 1572.
For those with Unix, type "cal 1572" into a shell and then "man cal" for an explanation.
A mailing list canary is a deliberately inserted entry with (usually) a false name but with real contact information. The contact data leads back to the security arm of the firm that compiled the list. The idea is that the canary sings every time the list is used, and this is but one mechanism to detect unauthorized access.
Maybe the DBA knew about the canary. With proper security, he shouldn't have. Or maybe the canary sang and that's how the guy got caught.
Receiving stolen property is a charge I'd like seeing brought against the direct marketers who bought or rented the list. This would be a good deterrent against shady data acquisition practices.
First, let me apologize for my sloppy typing and perhaps for an over-generalization.
I have no objection to a *moderate* amount of advertising. I also have no objection to the Loch Ness monster, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.
Let's face it: most advertisement supported sites attempt to shove a hundred times as many bits of bandwidth consuming advertisements as compared to actual news text. That, along with pop up/pop under windows, cookie madness, and tracking -- well, is it really any surprise when consumers take measures to protect themselves?
Is Murdoch counting on the proposition that WSJ readers too dumb to use ad blockers like the Fireox/Adblock Pro combination?
It's really simple; you stop enabling the RIAA when you stop purchasing RIAA music.
I haven't bought a single music CD since 2002, except for direct purchases from local bands. I had been buying CDs quite regularly and in large quantity since I got my first CD player in late 1983 and so I suppose I was one of the best customers.
But no more. I don't upload music and I don't download it either; I won't give the RIAA any excuse for whining about copyright infringement. But I swear that I will never spend a single penny for RIAA music no matter what the format until the monopolistic miscreants are gone.
Hey, RIAA! I've gone five years without contributing to your war fund! And I'm sure I can keep going.
Everyone else: Take the pledge and watch the greedy bastards suffer.
From nearly forty years of programming (yes, since the IBM 026 keypunch days), I can tell you with absolute certainty that the more that you do for management, the more that they will want from you. It is not your responsibility to bear all the punishment for the lack of foresight and resource allocation on their part.
Consider this: What would be the managerial response if you asked for a cost of living salary increase and that you needed it within 48 hours? Do you think that they would be willing to work day and night to make that happen?
Working in panic mode is not professional behavior, and it certainly is not conductive to good engineering practices. Furthermore, it is detrimental to long term company survival. Engineers who support continued unreasonable demands have only themselves to blame for enabling poor strategic planning by management.
When NASA says "90 days" of useful life they really mean they've planned for a full year. They won't look too bad if the spacecraft fails after a couple of months and will be seen as miracle workers when if it does survive a full year. A little spin technique picked up from Cmdr Montgomery Scott, no doubt.
That being said, kudos to the engineers and operators for keeping both of the beasties running for so long. It would have been even better if they had planned for an much extended lifetime for the rover's RAT (Rock Abrasion Tool), as each is only good for a few grinding cycles.
Given the huge costs already sunk for design, fabrication setup, testing, and training, it's obvious to all but NASA that they should have built and launched at least one more pair of rovers, possibly with some minor improvements. Furthermore, with interest in Mars from Europe, Russia, and mainland China, the latter rovers could have been produced and deployed with significant cost sharing by multiple participants.
I was a teenager back in the early microcomputer days and built one of first kit machines, an IMSAI 8080. It was great fun and more educational than any number of college course I took thereafter.
Those days are long gone now. But could something similar return? I think that the next tech revolution has already started, and it's the hacker's auto fabrication machine ("fabber").
Example: http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Right now these aren't much more than 3-D printers that squeeze out plastic goop under computer control. But if the rate of progress of this field is anything like that seen with microcomputers, then small scale manufacturing will be totally changed in a few years. Who will be the Woz (and the Jobs and the Gates) of this new endeavor? Maybe they're already out there, but we just haven't heard of them yet.
Can the system predict governmental trends? I'm thinking of something like when a somewhat peaceful, balanced budget democratic republic passes some multidimensional cusp and becomes enamored of gross deficit spending, preemptive military strikes, illegal detainment, torture, and fascism in general? It sure would be nice to see this coming a few years in advance.