Humbly suggest that you explore career options - WCYP? provides a good way in, there are plenty of other options too. When you find a career that inspires you, growing in your capabilities, responsibilities, rank, and salary will seem like the most natural thing in the world, and not the epic struggle it is when you're stuck in a place/career/situation you don't like.
Other suggestions: (1) Make sure you are dating, meeting people (or talking to your gf/bf/spouse if you are attached). The right partner can be a great inspiration. (2) Consider counseling. Just having someone who is paid to listen to your gripes and deep thoughts, a half hour at a time, once a week or so, can be worth a lot, and can often help us get unstuck.
This open approach looks as if it might be a success with well over 100,000 prospective students signing up to the AI course alone.
Only someone who has never, ever, ever taught a class - much less an online class - would consider the enrollment of 100k students a "success". Personally, I call it an unmitigated catastrophe...
(My awed congrats to any instructor/institution that survives such an onslaught, of course...)
The claim of equivalence between a regular inter-word space and an end-of-sentence space would be laughable if it didn't actually serve to trip sincere individuals like the poster up so often. Just pick up any book, magazine, or newspaper, and compare the length of the spaces. You will find the end-of-sentence space is longer in any typeface, and in any professional publication.
What that means for us regular joes: Two spaces, please. It will make your text more readable.
Until and unless I upload the ripped copy to the internets I've done nothing wrong.
I agree 100%. And note, no matter what RIAA/MPAA may say, no one has ever been sued - successfully or unsuccessfully - for private duplication. All of the lawsuits, on all fronts, have been over distribution and "making available".
That said, geeks take note: Bittorrent is not a private protocol, and it does fall into the "distribution" category. When you torrent copyrighted material, you are broadcasting your act of piracy to the world.
The importance of this discovery rests on its being a "neutron star", which is a particular kind of dense stellar remnant and not really much of a star at all. Neutron stars are made of pure nuclear matter, about a trillion times denser than the usual stuff, and so they serve as interesting probes of strong gravity and nuclear physics. This particular object is only the 8th member of its class of neutron stars, and possibly the closest to Earth of any neutron star. This relatively close (possible) distance, 250 to 1000 light years, also makes it interesting. There are lots of reasons to be interested in stars that are close by (our Galactic neighbors).
As you say, jd, it could be an off-axis pulsar. (Note that we did do a search for radio pulsations, and none were seen.) The "off-axis pulsar" hypothesis is what we are banking on when we say it might be the closest neutron star to Earth (250 to 1000 light years). The current record-holder is 1RXSJ1856.5-3754, at 540 light years.
None of the known radio pulsars are closer to Earth than that.
The QoS model failed for the Internet? Nay, my friend - the private sector just came up with its own good-enough solutions, building within the current network framework.
Just look at Akamai ($3.6b market cap) and the other independents that charge to provide companies with higher-quality delivery of network content.
Keep your eyes on this one, folks. What the RIAA et al. are telegraphing here is their intent to introduce copy-protected CDs into the US market in a big way over the next year (ie. holidays 2005). In order to bulldoze over consumer's objections, they will need to maintain a constant drumbeat of "piracy, piracy". At the same time they will put the squeeze on retailers to refuse return-requests from buyers who find the latest album won't play in their DVD/Car stereo/Mac computer, and who are pissed.
Long term, they will be looking to get a tax on blank media introduced through their pet Congresspeople, just as in Canada. Don't expect it will let you rip & burn to your heart's content though... it will be framed purely in terms of payback for all that consumer misbehavior.
If you actually use the iTunes music store on a regular basis, is it really worth risking your account - and possible legal action - just to get a few DRM-free songs?
Maybe so, maybe not. If you want to be safe, create a new account for your pymusique purchases (pymusique can do this, apparently) and let Apple shut that one down when the time comes.
Ah, but throwing you in jail is unlawfully depriving you of liberty, clearly against the law.
Ah, and putting conditions on your users' freedom to redistribute the software, consistent with the terms of the GPL, is clearly against the GPL.
Why insist on making this difficult? It's really quite simple. If you want to use GPL code in your business, obey the GPL. If TiVO and Linksys and IBM and Sun (and many others) can do it, so can you.
You have all the rights that the GPL gives you. They are asking you (using a stick) not to exercise them.
And that's against the GPL. It's not your right if someone can retaliate against you for exercising it. Think about free speech: "Sure, you can call the President an idiot, that's your right. But if you exercise it, the police here will throw you in jail."
But you still do have all those rights (and a few more).
They are free to grant you more rights. They are not free to restrict your GPL-approved actions in any way, shape, or form. And that includes the retaliatory measures discussed above.
Feel like I'm playing whak-a-mole today. Okay fine - insert quarter and press button to play:
By using the the materials (program, source code, documentation, etc.), you are agreeing to the restrictions imposed and the rights granted.
Bzzt! Wrong answer the first. There is no shrink-wrap or click-through license agreement presented to you when you download a GPL program or its attendant source code. By contrast there is most definitely a license that you must agree to in order to intiate your first session with MS Office.
You are not required to forego any rights as a user or consumer in order to use GPL software. You are forced to forego rights in order to use most commercial software. That is the purpose of the EULA: Accept the diminishment of your rights, and in return you get to use the software.
As to the absence of warranty, that is a disclaimer and not a license agreement, present both for GPL and commercial software.
Show me a definition of the EULA that says it CANNOT grant rights and privileges.
Bzzt! Objection: Irrelevant. As indicated by its name, the purpose of an End User License Agreement is primarily to restrict the buyer's use of the software and not to grant rights. Indeed, there are very few rights that the owner of a piece of property does not have over that property under common law. Typically you can do whatever you want with it, including resell it on Ebay. The EULA is there to (attempt to) prevent you from doing that.
Neither the GPL, nor the Creative Commons license, requires you to agree to any terms in advance of your use of the software / content at hand. Thus they fail to satisfy the definition of a EULA.
Just like any other EULA, rights are granted under certain conditions.
Bzzt! Wrong answer the third. On the contrary, just unlike any conceivable EULA the GPL is not presented to you prior to your use of the software, and has nothing to say about how you use it. On the contrary, it only applies if you choose to accept it (the GPL) as a license for redistribution. If you are not redistributing - and most users are not - then the GPL does not concern you at all.
Feel free to mod me down to (-1, Troll) if you like...
Moderators, you have your instructions. If you ask me however (-1, Willfully ignorant) should probably suffice.
Okay class, let's all repeat this sentence three times together:
The GPL is not a EULA.
The GPL is not a EULA.
The GPL is not a EULA.
If you legally download a GPL program (sourceforge, gnu.org, etc.) you can use that program. You do not have to agree to any End User License Agreement (EULA) to use that program. Exercise for the reader: Compare and constrast this freedom to use the software with the restrictions placed on the buyer/user of the current edition of Microsoft Office by that company's restrictive EULA.
If you legally download the source code to that GPL program (and by the terms of the GPL, the organization that provided you with the program must also provide you with the source code) then you can use that source code. You can read it. Print it out. Edit the source code and recompile. Intermix that GPL code with other code you have the rights to, compile, and use.
What you cannot do is redistribute any modification of that original GPL program without also distributing the source code including all of your modifications. This is the case because the GPL is a LICENSE that grants you permission to redistribute. This is a right you would not ordinarily have for any copyrighted work that you legally own. For example, just because you purchased a book legally does not mean you can make up galley proofs of that book, print them, bind them, and start selling them on a street corner. In fact, you cannot, because you do not own the copyright.
Similarly, you do not own the copyright of that GPL program that you downloaded (and its attendant source code). However, in the case of the GPL you have a license (the GPL) that allows you to redistribute the program (and even charge for it) as long as you distribute the corresponding source code with modifications. That is the quid pro quo: the GPL has granted you rights you did not have under copyright, and in return has asked you to make your contributions available.
If you want to redistribute (exercise rights granted by the GPL) without making contributions available (satisfying the terms of the GPL) then you are not in compliance and you will be slapped.
I look at this decision as decreasing the differentiation between the two types of service:
Increasing cost for IP phones, where they were competing on cost;
Mandating greater functionality for IP phones, in one of the few areas where traditional landlines had an edge
Thus for example a friend of mine with an IP phone at home has kept a minimal landline solely for the purpose of being able to dial 911.
Ultimately, by reducing the differentiation of these services, the decision is less damaging to either IP Phone providers or the Telcos than it is to the consumer - who used to be able to make a choice, less $ or better 911, but in the future will not be able to.
Sorry Charlie! The whole market just got that much less free, and that much less interesting.
my point is that you are basing your idea on assumptions that you cannot verify for the entire population of animals.
Not true. I am stating an observation regarding the generic processes of existence which should be self-evident to anyone who thinks. The preferential selection of fitter organisms is an unavoidable consequence of the very concept of fitness itself - applying equally well to computer viruses, bacteria, dinosaurs, or people - take your pick.
Feel free to take some time before responding this time. Your short responses, which dispute what I say without presenting any coherent alternative viewpoint, suggest that you are regurgitating a canned line of argument rather than wrestling with the actual issues at stake.
If you have an intellectual alternative to present, it is time you presented it.
If it's self-evident, why did it take humans tens of thousands of years to figure it out?
I think you misunderstand what I mean by "self-evident". I do not mean that the explanation itself (evolution by natural selection as an explanation of natural diversity) is obvious to anyone a priori. In fact it was a brilliant deduction at the time.
Knowing what we know now about DNA, genes, the cellular basis of sexual reproduction, and the necessary consequences for inheritance, however, the "theory of evolution" follows logically. As I said in my original post, its truth is so self-evident as to nearly make it tautological.
Put another way: The ignorance of generations past is no excuse for failing to accept self-evident truths in the present.
Why are there still so many people that don't believe it?
What scientists do is try to disprove a hypothesis, not prove one.
That is an empty distinction. The point of science is to gather evidence that bears on the truth or falsity of an important outstanding question, and then sort out the proposed answers (hypotheses) by whether they anticipate the evidence correctly or not. Call it a process of disproof if you want, but proof (in a legal or probabilistic, if not mathematical, sense) is certainly part of the process as most scientists practice it.
These new hypotheses are currently not as well supported as the dark matter/energy hypothesis, but that doesn't make them a "distraction".
They may be a distraction to researchers (Fermi: "Not even wrong") if (a) they are internally inconsistent; (b) they are poorly formulated so as to be untestable or unfalsifiable; or (c) they fail to take account of the broad range of our current knowledge of the universe (e.g., General Relativity and its role in cosmology). I'm not saying that any of these are true in this case - just that some theories really are not worth the time it takes to become acquainted with them.
More importantly, what I was trying to say is that these theories (and the papers that purportedly back them up) are a distraction to the great majority of Slashdot readers, who - as you will gather by reviewing the posts to this story - are still unfamiliar with the basic outlines of our understanding of the universe, which has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few years. You misinterpreted my closing paean to the consensus cosmology as a call to navel-gazing among the astonomy community, which truly would be silly. We are much better off formulating and testing new hypotheses - and we are! - than sitting on our laurels. Among other arguments, laurel-sitting is a very poor justification for the bright shiny new billion-dollar satellites that we want.
then you can extrapolate reasons for animals to survive, at that point you enter the realm of theory.
Umm... in what sense? Animals survive if they are well-adapted to their environment, better able than their cohorts to secure food and mates, and lucky. The luck part has no preference, but the other two mechanisms favor the fit over the unfit, quite self-evidently. There's still no theory here.
Actually, given that we understand the genetic mechanism for inheritence (which we did not in Darwin's time), I tend to think that the "theory of evolution by natural selection" is really more of a tautology these days than a theory.
If you understand what it's saying - that the more-fit preferentially survive and reproduce - it almost amounts to circular reasoning. There is literally no way that it could be wrong.
This puts it in a different class from almost every other "theory" in the sciences - certainly it is on much firmer ground than dark matter!
I love the Economist as much as the next person, but in this case the search for "controversy" badly mischaracterizes the current state of our understanding of the universe.
First claim: Analyses of the WMAP data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) show correlations with galaxy clusters that indicate the official analyses of the data are wrong. I find this highly unlikely. First, the effect of the hot gas in those galaxy clusters on the CMB is well known - it is called the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and perturbs the spectrum in a well-known way. Second, the official fits to the WMAP data use a consensus cosmology model with about 12 free parameters to fit a dataset of more than a hundred points... beautifully. Third, the consensus cosmology itself has been built up out of a huge array of other observations (supernova distances; Big Bang nucleosynthesis; the "weighing" of galaxies and galaxy clusters; the age-dating of globular clusters), all of which were pointing to the existence of dark matter (even within our own Galaxy!) long before WMAP was even launched. Fourth, modern theories of particle physics also give us good reason to expect the existence of dark matter particles, independent of any astronomical observations whatsoever. So WMAP has simply been the final nail in the coffin, and anyone who wants to overturn dark matter and dark energy has a great deal of additional work ahead of them.
Second claim: Measurements of the masses (actually, the luminosities and temperatures) of high-redshift galaxy clusters indicate a high fraction of baryonic mass, removing one of the justifications for positing dark matter. This finding is even more fishy-sounding. To understand this, realize that the group in question has deliberately chosen the most-distant and therefore hardest-to-study clusters to study, and adopted temperature-mass relationships that are calibrated in the local universe (and may not apply at these great distances) in order to find that their sample differs from the standard model predictions. Without even bothering to list all the ways in which they might be wrong, let me simply state that even if they are right there is a lot of independent support for the dark matter + dark energy picture that neither of these groups is addressing.
Rather than distract yourself by trying to figure out why the carefully constructed consensus cosmology might be wrong, then, I think it is more useful to examine the remarkable ways in which it has been proven right in the last few years. Altogether it is truly a wonder of the modern world - even if it may at some point be shown inadequate to the universe we live in.
You make some good points, and obviously, it is a crying shame to throw away $200m in instruments no matter what the justifications.
However, just the shuttle mission alone is a $500m price tag, so I don't think it's fair to say that we're "only $40m away" from anything.
Your other point, about deorbiting Hubble, is addressed in the NYT story. Basically, with all future shuttle visits to Hubble ruled out, they have committed to designing and launching a special-purpose rocket that will latch onto Hubble and safely deorbit it (crashing into the Pacific).
That's a pretty good half-article. Past the "DRM is Non-Negotiable" headline though it breaks down rapidly into complete incoherence.
Alas it's Jobs who wants to be... the first tech CEO to offer himself up for a beheading.... Jobs sounded positively happy that he was losing money on iTunes, so he could make the RIAA that little bit richer. But vanity plays havoc with even the finest minds.
Umm... what part of the term loss leader did the author fail to comprehend? Let's review the basics:
Jobs doesn't care about making money for the labels. He cares about making money for Apple.
Apple can afford to run the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), at somewhere close to break-even, because it drives sales of the very-profitable iPod, not to mention Apple computers.
Thus, the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) can fail to make money, as a distinct entity, but still be considered a very successful enterprise by Jobs, his board, and the stock market at large - with no contradictions implied.
As for the online music store competition - the hordes of me-too 99-cent wonders - the lack of iTMS profitability, and their own absence from the high-margin hardware market, bodes ill. I would guess that they and their stockholders need to be prepared for a rough ride ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
Humbly suggest that you explore career options - WCYP? provides a good way in, there are plenty of other options too. When you find a career that inspires you, growing in your capabilities, responsibilities, rank, and salary will seem like the most natural thing in the world, and not the epic struggle it is when you're stuck in a place/career/situation you don't like.
Other suggestions: (1) Make sure you are dating, meeting people (or talking to your gf/bf/spouse if you are attached). The right partner can be a great inspiration. (2) Consider counseling. Just having someone who is paid to listen to your gripes and deep thoughts, a half hour at a time, once a week or so, can be worth a lot, and can often help us get unstuck.
Good luck, let us know how you work it out.
Cheers,
renard
This open approach looks as if it might be a success with well over 100,000 prospective students signing up to the AI course alone.
Only someone who has never, ever, ever taught a class - much less an online class - would consider the enrollment of 100k students a "success". Personally, I call it an unmitigated catastrophe...
(My awed congrats to any instructor/institution that survives such an onslaught, of course...)
The claim of equivalence between a regular inter-word space and an end-of-sentence space would be laughable if it didn't actually serve to trip sincere individuals like the poster up so often. Just pick up any book, magazine, or newspaper, and compare the length of the spaces. You will find the end-of-sentence space is longer in any typeface, and in any professional publication.
What that means for us regular joes: Two spaces, please. It will make your text more readable.
Cheers,
Renard
Until and unless I upload the ripped copy to the internets I've done nothing wrong.
I agree 100%. And note, no matter what RIAA/MPAA may say, no one has ever been sued - successfully or unsuccessfully - for private duplication. All of the lawsuits, on all fronts, have been over distribution and "making available".
That said, geeks take note: Bittorrent is not a private protocol, and it does fall into the "distribution" category. When you torrent copyrighted material, you are broadcasting your act of piracy to the world.
-renard
Cheers,
renard
None of the known radio pulsars are closer to Earth than that.
Cheers,
renard / Derek Fox
Does MS really want the government trampling on that?
-renard
"Massachusetts Senator" == (Edward "Ted" Kennedy || John Kerry)
Marc Pacheco is a "Massachusetts State Senator", i.e. one of 40 members of the upper house of the bicameral Massachusetts state legislature.
Big difference.
Just look at Akamai ($3.6b market cap) and the other independents that charge to provide companies with higher-quality delivery of network content.
-renard
Long term, they will be looking to get a tax on blank media introduced through their pet Congresspeople, just as in Canada. Don't expect it will let you rip & burn to your heart's content though... it will be framed purely in terms of payback for all that consumer misbehavior.
-renard
Maybe so, maybe not. If you want to be safe, create a new account for your pymusique purchases (pymusique can do this, apparently) and let Apple shut that one down when the time comes.
Keep your regular account to yourself.
-renard
Ah, and putting conditions on your users' freedom to redistribute the software, consistent with the terms of the GPL, is clearly against the GPL.
Why insist on making this difficult? It's really quite simple. If you want to use GPL code in your business, obey the GPL. If TiVO and Linksys and IBM and Sun (and many others) can do it, so can you.
-renard
And that's against the GPL. It's not your right if someone can retaliate against you for exercising it. Think about free speech: "Sure, you can call the President an idiot, that's your right. But if you exercise it, the police here will throw you in jail."
But you still do have all those rights (and a few more).
They are free to grant you more rights. They are not free to restrict your GPL-approved actions in any way, shape, or form. And that includes the retaliatory measures discussed above.
-renard
You are not required to forego any rights as a user or consumer in order to use GPL software. You are forced to forego rights in order to use most commercial software. That is the purpose of the EULA: Accept the diminishment of your rights, and in return you get to use the software.
As to the absence of warranty, that is a disclaimer and not a license agreement, present both for GPL and commercial software.
Bzzt! Objection: Irrelevant. As indicated by its name, the purpose of an End User License Agreement is primarily to restrict the buyer's use of the software and not to grant rights. Indeed, there are very few rights that the owner of a piece of property does not have over that property under common law. Typically you can do whatever you want with it, including resell it on Ebay. The EULA is there to (attempt to) prevent you from doing that.Neither the GPL, nor the Creative Commons license, requires you to agree to any terms in advance of your use of the software / content at hand. Thus they fail to satisfy the definition of a EULA.
Bzzt! Wrong answer the third. On the contrary, just unlike any conceivable EULA the GPL is not presented to you prior to your use of the software, and has nothing to say about how you use it. On the contrary, it only applies if you choose to accept it (the GPL) as a license for redistribution. If you are not redistributing - and most users are not - then the GPL does not concern you at all. Moderators, you have your instructions. If you ask me however (-1, Willfully ignorant) should probably suffice.-renard
If you legally download the source code to that GPL program (and by the terms of the GPL, the organization that provided you with the program must also provide you with the source code) then you can use that source code. You can read it. Print it out. Edit the source code and recompile. Intermix that GPL code with other code you have the rights to, compile, and use.
What you cannot do is redistribute any modification of that original GPL program without also distributing the source code including all of your modifications. This is the case because the GPL is a LICENSE that grants you permission to redistribute. This is a right you would not ordinarily have for any copyrighted work that you legally own. For example, just because you purchased a book legally does not mean you can make up galley proofs of that book, print them, bind them, and start selling them on a street corner. In fact, you cannot, because you do not own the copyright.
Similarly, you do not own the copyright of that GPL program that you downloaded (and its attendant source code). However, in the case of the GPL you have a license (the GPL) that allows you to redistribute the program (and even charge for it) as long as you distribute the corresponding source code with modifications. That is the quid pro quo: the GPL has granted you rights you did not have under copyright, and in return has asked you to make your contributions available.
If you want to redistribute (exercise rights granted by the GPL) without making contributions available (satisfying the terms of the GPL) then you are not in compliance and you will be slapped.
Just ask Sitecom.
-renard
- Increasing cost for IP phones, where they were competing on cost;
- Mandating greater functionality for IP phones, in one of the few areas where traditional landlines had an edge
Thus for example a friend of mine with an IP phone at home has kept a minimal landline solely for the purpose of being able to dial 911.Ultimately, by reducing the differentiation of these services, the decision is less damaging to either IP Phone providers or the Telcos than it is to the consumer - who used to be able to make a choice, less $ or better 911, but in the future will not be able to.
Sorry Charlie! The whole market just got that much less free, and that much less interesting.
-renard
Not true. I am stating an observation regarding the generic processes of existence which should be self-evident to anyone who thinks. The preferential selection of fitter organisms is an unavoidable consequence of the very concept of fitness itself - applying equally well to computer viruses, bacteria, dinosaurs, or people - take your pick.
Feel free to take some time before responding this time. Your short responses, which dispute what I say without presenting any coherent alternative viewpoint, suggest that you are regurgitating a canned line of argument rather than wrestling with the actual issues at stake.
If you have an intellectual alternative to present, it is time you presented it.
-renard
I think you misunderstand what I mean by "self-evident". I do not mean that the explanation itself (evolution by natural selection as an explanation of natural diversity) is obvious to anyone a priori. In fact it was a brilliant deduction at the time.
Knowing what we know now about DNA, genes, the cellular basis of sexual reproduction, and the necessary consequences for inheritance, however, the "theory of evolution" follows logically. As I said in my original post, its truth is so self-evident as to nearly make it tautological.
Put another way: The ignorance of generations past is no excuse for failing to accept self-evident truths in the present.
Why are there still so many people that don't believe it?
No accounting for some people I guess.
-renard
Well in that case - I showed you mine, why don't you show me yours?
That is an empty distinction. The point of science is to gather evidence that bears on the truth or falsity of an important outstanding question, and then sort out the proposed answers (hypotheses) by whether they anticipate the evidence correctly or not. Call it a process of disproof if you want, but proof (in a legal or probabilistic, if not mathematical, sense) is certainly part of the process as most scientists practice it.
These new hypotheses are currently not as well supported as the dark matter/energy hypothesis, but that doesn't make them a "distraction".
They may be a distraction to researchers (Fermi: "Not even wrong") if (a) they are internally inconsistent; (b) they are poorly formulated so as to be untestable or unfalsifiable; or (c) they fail to take account of the broad range of our current knowledge of the universe (e.g., General Relativity and its role in cosmology). I'm not saying that any of these are true in this case - just that some theories really are not worth the time it takes to become acquainted with them.
More importantly, what I was trying to say is that these theories (and the papers that purportedly back them up) are a distraction to the great majority of Slashdot readers, who - as you will gather by reviewing the posts to this story - are still unfamiliar with the basic outlines of our understanding of the universe, which has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few years. You misinterpreted my closing paean to the consensus cosmology as a call to navel-gazing among the astonomy community, which truly would be silly. We are much better off formulating and testing new hypotheses - and we are! - than sitting on our laurels. Among other arguments, laurel-sitting is a very poor justification for the bright shiny new billion-dollar satellites that we want.
-renard
Umm... in what sense? Animals survive if they are well-adapted to their environment, better able than their cohorts to secure food and mates, and lucky. The luck part has no preference, but the other two mechanisms favor the fit over the unfit, quite self-evidently. There's still no theory here.
-renard
If you understand what it's saying - that the more-fit preferentially survive and reproduce - it almost amounts to circular reasoning. There is literally no way that it could be wrong.
This puts it in a different class from almost every other "theory" in the sciences - certainly it is on much firmer ground than dark matter!
-renard
First claim: Analyses of the WMAP data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) show correlations with galaxy clusters that indicate the official analyses of the data are wrong. I find this highly unlikely. First, the effect of the hot gas in those galaxy clusters on the CMB is well known - it is called the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and perturbs the spectrum in a well-known way. Second, the official fits to the WMAP data use a consensus cosmology model with about 12 free parameters to fit a dataset of more than a hundred points... beautifully. Third, the consensus cosmology itself has been built up out of a huge array of other observations (supernova distances; Big Bang nucleosynthesis; the "weighing" of galaxies and galaxy clusters; the age-dating of globular clusters), all of which were pointing to the existence of dark matter (even within our own Galaxy!) long before WMAP was even launched. Fourth, modern theories of particle physics also give us good reason to expect the existence of dark matter particles, independent of any astronomical observations whatsoever. So WMAP has simply been the final nail in the coffin, and anyone who wants to overturn dark matter and dark energy has a great deal of additional work ahead of them.
Second claim: Measurements of the masses (actually, the luminosities and temperatures) of high-redshift galaxy clusters indicate a high fraction of baryonic mass, removing one of the justifications for positing dark matter. This finding is even more fishy-sounding. To understand this, realize that the group in question has deliberately chosen the most-distant and therefore hardest-to-study clusters to study, and adopted temperature-mass relationships that are calibrated in the local universe (and may not apply at these great distances) in order to find that their sample differs from the standard model predictions. Without even bothering to list all the ways in which they might be wrong, let me simply state that even if they are right there is a lot of independent support for the dark matter + dark energy picture that neither of these groups is addressing.
Rather than distract yourself by trying to figure out why the carefully constructed consensus cosmology might be wrong, then, I think it is more useful to examine the remarkable ways in which it has been proven right in the last few years. Altogether it is truly a wonder of the modern world - even if it may at some point be shown inadequate to the universe we live in.
-renard
However, just the shuttle mission alone is a $500m price tag, so I don't think it's fair to say that we're "only $40m away" from anything.
Your other point, about deorbiting Hubble, is addressed in the NYT story. Basically, with all future shuttle visits to Hubble ruled out, they have committed to designing and launching a special-purpose rocket that will latch onto Hubble and safely deorbit it (crashing into the Pacific).
A sad, sad day, all around.
-renard
- Jobs doesn't care about making money for the labels. He cares about making money for Apple.
- Apple can afford to run the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), at somewhere close to break-even, because it drives sales of the very-profitable iPod, not to mention Apple computers.
- Thus, the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) can fail to make money, as a distinct entity, but still be considered a very successful enterprise by Jobs, his board, and the stock market at large - with no contradictions implied.
As for the online music store competition - the hordes of me-too 99-cent wonders - the lack of iTMS profitability, and their own absence from the high-margin hardware market, bodes ill. I would guess that they and their stockholders need to be prepared for a rough ride ahead.-renard