I agree there's not much value I can see in the goatse.cx sites etc but the very fact they exist is information in itself. It may be that somebody in 50 years would be interested in the basic statistics of how many sites covered what subjects - or may be writing a document on permissive societies and how different cultures allowed different displays of explicit images. Or maybe a technical research into advertising in subcultural sites. I don't know, you don't know. That's one of the interesting things about historical research, often things are of value for completely different reasons than they were saved.
For example, there are many books which have been preserved and while the content itself is of little value, the physical make up of the objects themselves is very exciting to bookbinders and industrial archaeologists...
it's all worth preserving
on
Net Cemetery
·
· Score: 4
There's a lot of rubbish on the net. We all know it. We know there's lots of absolute rubbish. But in the same way that that archaeologists get really excited about unearthing ancient rubbish pits and have wonderful skills at pulling together information from them to find out about real lives from history, who knows what the dead websites of today will provide for information gatherers of tomorrow?
We can't tell what the future will want to look at from our present. Right now we're not even saving the good stuff. We need to seriously think about archiving up the web for future generations. I was one of a team of four people who built Virgin Music Group's first website back in 94- 95. Did we keep any of it? did we ***! Bit of a shame really.
Ask your local archivist or archaeologist or local historian if they think anything is too small to be of use when researching the past.
The Egyptian dynasties were around a mere 3000 years ago, our earliest examples of writing less than 6000 years ago. We can't decipher those early writings. And how many of their relics still exist? where now are the cities of Akkad, Ur, Uruk?
Now add 4000 more years and work out what will be left. How many buildings or artifacts last this long? What will climatic changes and geological changes will happen to any location on the planet?
It's a great and worthy problem of our own making for people to solve. I heard the US military were looking at this problem a few years ago and came up with a symbolic language to mark out high level radiation dumps. Can anybody give me a reference to this?
It's also worth checking out the Long Now Foundation for their work on a 10,000 year clock and The Rosetta Project looking to create written artifiacts that will physically survive and be decipherable in a time period twice as long as the history of the written word so far...
What ever the solution we owe it to our future generations to sort it out. I wonder though if we're so fixed on short term plans and desires that we won't be able to dedicate the energy to making it happen. Sixty years after the nuclear age began and we're already finding that our leaders attitude towards nuclear waste is just to dump it out of sight and mind.
Hmm, lots of rich people in Europe would find Russia/ Ukraine a lot quicker and easier to get to. Very much the case for shipping the constructed launch modules as well.
Unless of course you wanted to go with the Americans. Personally, I'd prefer to go with the Russians and Ukrainians, they have a lot more experience at this space business;-)
It does seem to be part of the silly hyperbolic PR that goes on, the danger is people actually believe it. Checking http://www.spaceflightnow.com today, I see the story about the malfunctioning Canadarm2- the article exclaims "..then station program managers could order the Shoulder Pitch joint be replaced with a spare in a dramatic spacewalk by shuttle astronauts..." . Yawn. It's a space walk, it will be planned out weeks in advance, it will be methodical and routine. It's not dramatic.
I think the media surrounding all the activity going on is causing more trouble than helping by playing all this drama-queen PR hype act. Seems to be pretty prevalent in US media, though, and increasingly across the rest of the world. Anyone care to comment on why this is so? Does it actually help NASA get extra funding?
And thanks to great animation, it's one of the first movies to give us the bullets and
bombs' point-of-view, from the planes right into the ships and hangars.
"So bomb, how was it for you? good run?"
Hmmm... I think this computer animated perspective stuff has gone a bit far...Reminds me of Dark Star more than a little.
I loved the 'silly picture' - a composite of all the astronauts on the moon. But I really felt quite upset about it. Couldn't work out why.
Then it struck me, I was disconcerted by the realistic-looking image of many astronauts on the moon's surface together like that, as if they were really there. Made me realise how sad it was - I am so used to seeing photos of isolated individuals on the moon lost in the great landscape, I am just not used the concept of a dozen astronauts on the moon at once. How sad is this? 30 years later and the dreams of gradually inhabiting the moon have come to nothing, we can't conceptualise the idea of a dozen people on the moon at once. It's just beyond practicality. I am sure the guys who worked on the Apollo missions must be bitterly disappointed all their work ended up just being an expensive Cold War stunt.
Well BT have got quite a few of their internet phones in use in the UK and they seem pretty vandal-proof.
Actually there seem to be two types at least:
one with a larger colour LCD monitor (as spotted in main railway stations, e.g. Waterloo). Full web browser etc. Called the Multiphone.
a more heavy duty vandal proof version (as seen in my local neighbourhood, Hackney in East London). It's a Text and Email phone, no web access but lets you email for 20p a time (same as a local 3 minute phone call).
The large colour screened version seems pretty robust anyway, but the text and email ones round my area have smaller black and white screens, and the keyboards are raised metal keys on a metal pad like voice only telephones have. So I think you'd need some serious industrial equipment to trash them, a mere brick isn't going to do too much damage.
I think you are referring to the USA, rather than 'the world'?
In Europe the media tolerates nudity and a level of sexual display to a far greater degree in the media than in the USA. Sure, there's a lot of violence as well but expression of sexuality in terrestrial tv is considered a lot more acceptable, and I think expressions of violence are more tightly controlled. In the UK things have progressively more relaxed, as long as it is after the '9 o'clock watershed' there's a fair degree of freedom. And our neighbours in the Netherlands, France etc also seem to have a liberal attitude towards sex in the media.
But then I guess we tend to be a bit more uptight about guns and the suchlike, and their portrayal. IMHO the majority of people here consider guns to be A Bad Thing rather than a god-given as well as constitutional right to possess. (Not a flame, just an observation of very different cultural attitudes). Remember when we had somebody go into a school in Scotland (Dunblane) and shoot children the (overwhelmingly popular) decision taken was to ban all handguns of the type used, including withdrawing the UK from handgun disciplines in the Olympic Games. A very different culture from the USA.
Though actually I prefer deep fried bounty bars after my chip supper (chippy on South Bridge in Edinburgh does excellent frying, real professionals, will fry anything..)
There were quite a few studies into this sort of thing in the UK in the 80s and 90s. You'll remember we had a right wing government under Maggie Thatcher that was very keen on closing down inefficient industries, laying off huge amounts of people, putting an axe to a large amount of the UK's industrial base. Interesting thing was several studies have since shown that it would have been actually better for the country to keep those people employed inefficiently than laying off all the workers and going for ultra efficient companies (that turned out not to be much better anyway). The amount of wealth distributed by those people, passed on to secondary employment (e.g. shopkeepers, people making luxury goods for employed people, products sold to those people) far outweighed the advantages of creating massive unemployment and having more profitable companies (that mostly got sold off to overseas investors anyway).
Yup, there's proof this stuff works. Not to say it wouldn't be a great idea to work out how to keep all those folks employed and do things more efficiently, but there you go. Definitely a better starting point.
The other major ON-topic point here is that space tourism in Russia will be fulfilling exactly this role, keeping people in an ailing economy in work, keeping equipment working, providing jobs for the bright young graduates and helping develop an underfunded sector. So go for it. There's a lot of very valuable experience we can't afford to lose and if a bit of free market capitalism is required to keep it going, then so be it. Kinda funny the Russians are playing the USA at their own game, though I think the Russians have always been pragmatic.
Ok, not a flame, but a genuine, (if somewhat idle) thought. I was impressed and shocked at how much work goes on to turn round the Shuttle - 2 to 3 people working for 2 weeks to clean one window - wow, the salary bill itself must be insane for turning around the ship.
How does this compare this with the Russian Soyuz modules? I'd be interested to know the comparison of costs. Ok, so what you get is vastly different but what I mean is that the Russian space program seems to be set up like a heavy engineering factory, they knock 'em out day in day out like Ladas. They work, they go, they bang out another one. It would be fascinating to find out about how they have turned a high tech industry into another factory production line.
It would be fascinating to invite over some of the engineers working in the Russian plants to see if they could streamline some of the processes used on the Shuttle, take it down from the equivalent of tuning a high performance racing car towards a regular service of a goods truck.
I know the Shuttle is amazingly complicated but it is a complete suprise that it appears to be virtually rebuilt each time it goes up, there must be a more sustainable, long term engineering solution we can apply with 20 or years expereience behind us. I'd say the Russians would be worth bring on board for their heavy engineering rather than 'gee whizz high tech' attitude towards getting these things done (I am reminded of the old tale about NASA spending all that time and money developing zero-g pens while the Russians just gave their cosmonauts 10 cent chinograph pencils and got on with the next task... ).
Check out the work of Australian performance artist Stelarc - he's been controlling industrial robots and a third arm for many years using muscle control. Once rigged up my arm and controlled it remotely..weird sensation... He's really into the 'human body is obselete' stuff and has been looking at how he can extend the capabilities for a long time. He's got into some interesting internet based projects as well...(pingbody, evolving URL body)..
One of the best things that happened to me was going to art college aged 27.
I was originally a librarian, but then went off to do a multimedia art course.
Learnt a lot of things, learnt how to program, but the best bit was, I learnt not to be afraid of people who made out they knew what Art was (notice capital 'A'). I learnt you can say 'bollocks' to anything you don't like. Anybody who is defensive about giving away information or sharing what they know is running scared of being found out (true also of the computing world..). So don't get uptight about 'what is art' - it really doesn't matter. Hey, if you like it, that's good enough. You don't need some professor to make your mind up for you.
I guess I am saying that all the Aaron thing is actually doing is forcing people to think about their definitions of what art is, rather than pushing the boundaries of what hardware/ software can be made to do. The most you could say is they are trying to get a computer to guess what humans like and disklike.
Take a look at pictures or descriptions of the large industrialised cities of the time. They were notoriously filthy. I'm not saying that today is any better, it's just that the chemicals we use are far more insidious. But the major cities were covered in the byproducts from steam engines, industrial manufacturing processes, coal fires in people's homes. This is why Clean Air acts were passed in many places. London was terrible for its peasouper fogs and on at least one occasion in the nineteenth century Parliament had to be abandoned due to The Great Stink (smell coming off the polluted River Thames, people just pumped domestic and industrial effluents straight into it).
Well if it's about having the capability to launch your own people into space, then looks like China will be 'space power no.3'. Which will make the American military very happy because it will allow them to justify a lot of daft military spending...Of course with the breakup of the USSR you could say that the Ukraine (Energia) or Kazakhstan (Baikonur complex) are veritable space powers, though they've obviously taken the more pragmatic (sensible?) route of being involved with collaborative projects than sticking their own space ships up there just for the hell of it.
Will be interesting to see where India is in a couple of years with the new GSLV as well...
... to celebrate the anniversary?
on
Mir 2
·
· Score: 3
Well I am sure the timing of this publicity has something to do with the auspicious date - 40th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight into space.
In the UK, we're not citizens. We are subjects of the throne. The UK is a monarchy. We have people making laws that have been given that right just because some great-great ancestor happened to be a very useful thug on a battlefield (the House of Lords, hereditary peers).
Also the UK doesn't have a written constitution. Any English or Scots lawyers care to make a comment on this point?
For my part, I have mixed feelings about the fact that Britain has something like the highest density of CCTV cameras in the world. Yes, they reduce crime in some areas. But there is the other theory that they just push it elsewhere.
In the big cities you're filmed a lot. I'd feel a lot happier if there was a degree of accountability. There are private as well as public bodies filming, and while I assume there is some sort of legislation controlling the public bodies filming me (anybody care to give me a URL?) I am a lot less happy about how private security companies are held to account.
Whenever somebody mentions God and Freedom (it's got a lower case f in my dictionary) in the same breath I can never remember which flavour of fundamentalism they belong to. I get this weird image of large numbers of horsemen bearing down on me with swords drawn and flying large flags, crying 'Death to the Unbelievers'...
Internet Society IPN Special Interest Group
on
The Dot in .mars
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
I agree there's not much value I can see in the goatse.cx sites etc but the very fact they exist is information in itself. It may be that somebody in 50 years would be interested in the basic statistics of how many sites covered what subjects - or may be writing a document on permissive societies and how different cultures allowed different displays of explicit images. Or maybe a technical research into advertising in subcultural sites. I don't know, you don't know. That's one of the interesting things about historical research, often things are of value for completely different reasons than they were saved.
For example, there are many books which have been preserved and while the content itself is of little value, the physical make up of the objects themselves is very exciting to bookbinders and industrial archaeologists...
There's a lot of rubbish on the net. We all know it. We know there's lots of absolute rubbish. But in the same way that that archaeologists get really excited about unearthing ancient rubbish pits and have wonderful skills at pulling together information from them to find out about real lives from history, who knows what the dead websites of today will provide for information gatherers of tomorrow?
We can't tell what the future will want to look at from our present. Right now we're not even saving the good stuff. We need to seriously think about archiving up the web for future generations. I was one of a team of four people who built Virgin Music Group's first website back in 94- 95. Did we keep any of it? did we ***! Bit of a shame really.
Ask your local archivist or archaeologist or local historian if they think anything is too small to be of use when researching the past.
... a lot can change.
The Egyptian dynasties were around a mere 3000 years ago, our earliest examples of writing less than 6000 years ago. We can't decipher those early writings. And how many of their relics still exist? where now are the cities of Akkad, Ur, Uruk?
Now add 4000 more years and work out what will be left. How many buildings or artifacts last this long? What will climatic changes and geological changes will happen to any location on the planet?
It's a great and worthy problem of our own making for people to solve. I heard the US military were looking at this problem a few years ago and came up with a symbolic language to mark out high level radiation dumps. Can anybody give me a reference to this?
It's also worth checking out the Long Now Foundation for their work on a 10,000 year clock and The Rosetta Project looking to create written artifiacts that will physically survive and be decipherable in a time period twice as long as the history of the written word so far...
What ever the solution we owe it to our future generations to sort it out. I wonder though if we're so fixed on short term plans and desires that we won't be able to dedicate the energy to making it happen. Sixty years after the nuclear age began and we're already finding that our leaders attitude towards nuclear waste is just to dump it out of sight and mind.
Hmm, lots of rich people in Europe would find Russia/ Ukraine a lot quicker and easier to get to. Very much the case for shipping the constructed launch modules as well.
Unless of course you wanted to go with the Americans. Personally, I'd prefer to go with the Russians and Ukrainians, they have a lot more experience at this space business ;-)
Err, run that past me again dood?
You don't want the hassle of getting a passport and a visa but you are looking forward to the Washington to Tokyo shuttle...
Umm.... which Tokyo are we talking about? would it be the Japanese one?
Yeah, sounds like NASA believing its own PR...
It does seem to be part of the silly hyperbolic PR that goes on, the danger is people actually believe it. Checking http://www.spaceflightnow.com today, I see the story about the malfunctioning Canadarm2- the article exclaims "..then station program managers could order the Shoulder Pitch joint be replaced with a spare in a dramatic spacewalk by shuttle astronauts..." . Yawn. It's a space walk, it will be planned out weeks in advance, it will be methodical and routine. It's not dramatic .
I think the media surrounding all the activity going on is causing more trouble than helping by playing all this drama-queen PR hype act. Seems to be pretty prevalent in US media, though, and increasingly across the rest of the world. Anyone care to comment on why this is so? Does it actually help NASA get extra funding?
And thanks to great animation, it's one of the first movies to give us the bullets and bombs' point-of-view, from the planes right into the ships and hangars.
"So bomb, how was it for you? good run?"
Hmmm... I think this computer animated perspective stuff has gone a bit far...Reminds me of Dark Star more than a little.
I loved the 'silly picture' - a composite of all the astronauts on the moon. But I really felt quite upset about it. Couldn't work out why.
Then it struck me, I was disconcerted by the realistic-looking image of many astronauts on the moon's surface together like that, as if they were really there. Made me realise how sad it was - I am so used to seeing photos of isolated individuals on the moon lost in the great landscape, I am just not used the concept of a dozen astronauts on the moon at once. How sad is this? 30 years later and the dreams of gradually inhabiting the moon have come to nothing, we can't conceptualise the idea of a dozen people on the moon at once. It's just beyond practicality. I am sure the guys who worked on the Apollo missions must be bitterly disappointed all their work ended up just being an expensive Cold War stunt.It's a historical archive. Who knows what will be interesting for historians in a hundred years?
Well BT have got quite a few of their internet phones in use in the UK and they seem pretty vandal-proof.
Actually there seem to be two types at least:
- one with a larger colour LCD monitor (as spotted in main railway stations, e.g. Waterloo). Full web browser etc. Called the Multiphone.
- a more heavy duty vandal proof version (as seen in my local neighbourhood, Hackney in East London). It's a Text and Email phone, no web access but lets you email for 20p a time (same as a local 3 minute phone call).
The large colour screened version seems pretty robust anyway, but the text and email ones round my area have smaller black and white screens, and the keyboards are raised metal keys on a metal pad like voice only telephones have. So I think you'd need some serious industrial equipment to trash them, a mere brick isn't going to do too much damage.I think you are referring to the USA, rather than 'the world'?
In Europe the media tolerates nudity and a level of sexual display to a far greater degree in the media than in the USA. Sure, there's a lot of violence as well but expression of sexuality in terrestrial tv is considered a lot more acceptable, and I think expressions of violence are more tightly controlled. In the UK things have progressively more relaxed, as long as it is after the '9 o'clock watershed' there's a fair degree of freedom. And our neighbours in the Netherlands, France etc also seem to have a liberal attitude towards sex in the media.
But then I guess we tend to be a bit more uptight about guns and the suchlike, and their portrayal. IMHO the majority of people here consider guns to be A Bad Thing rather than a god-given as well as constitutional right to possess. (Not a flame, just an observation of very different cultural attitudes). Remember when we had somebody go into a school in Scotland (Dunblane) and shoot children the (overwhelmingly popular) decision taken was to ban all handguns of the type used, including withdrawing the UK from handgun disciplines in the Olympic Games. A very different culture from the USA.
Deep fried mars bars, what's the problem?
Though actually I prefer deep fried bounty bars after my chip supper (chippy on South Bridge in Edinburgh does excellent frying, real professionals, will fry anything..)
There were quite a few studies into this sort of thing in the UK in the 80s and 90s. You'll remember we had a right wing government under Maggie Thatcher that was very keen on closing down inefficient industries, laying off huge amounts of people, putting an axe to a large amount of the UK's industrial base. Interesting thing was several studies have since shown that it would have been actually better for the country to keep those people employed inefficiently than laying off all the workers and going for ultra efficient companies (that turned out not to be much better anyway). The amount of wealth distributed by those people, passed on to secondary employment (e.g. shopkeepers, people making luxury goods for employed people, products sold to those people) far outweighed the advantages of creating massive unemployment and having more profitable companies (that mostly got sold off to overseas investors anyway).
Yup, there's proof this stuff works. Not to say it wouldn't be a great idea to work out how to keep all those folks employed and do things more efficiently, but there you go. Definitely a better starting point.
The other major ON-topic point here is that space tourism in Russia will be fulfilling exactly this role, keeping people in an ailing economy in work, keeping equipment working, providing jobs for the bright young graduates and helping develop an underfunded sector. So go for it. There's a lot of very valuable experience we can't afford to lose and if a bit of free market capitalism is required to keep it going, then so be it. Kinda funny the Russians are playing the USA at their own game, though I think the Russians have always been pragmatic.
Ok, not a flame, but a genuine, (if somewhat idle) thought. I was impressed and shocked at how much work goes on to turn round the Shuttle - 2 to 3 people working for 2 weeks to clean one window - wow, the salary bill itself must be insane for turning around the ship.
How does this compare this with the Russian Soyuz modules? I'd be interested to know the comparison of costs. Ok, so what you get is vastly different but what I mean is that the Russian space program seems to be set up like a heavy engineering factory, they knock 'em out day in day out like Ladas. They work, they go, they bang out another one. It would be fascinating to find out about how they have turned a high tech industry into another factory production line.
It would be fascinating to invite over some of the engineers working in the Russian plants to see if they could streamline some of the processes used on the Shuttle, take it down from the equivalent of tuning a high performance racing car towards a regular service of a goods truck.
I know the Shuttle is amazingly complicated but it is a complete suprise that it appears to be virtually rebuilt each time it goes up, there must be a more sustainable, long term engineering solution we can apply with 20 or years expereience behind us. I'd say the Russians would be worth bring on board for their heavy engineering rather than 'gee whizz high tech' attitude towards getting these things done (I am reminded of the old tale about NASA spending all that time and money developing zero-g pens while the Russians just gave their cosmonauts 10 cent chinograph pencils and got on with the next task... ).
Check out the work of Australian performance artist Stelarc - he's been controlling industrial robots and a third arm for many years using muscle control. Once rigged up my arm and controlled it remotely..weird sensation... He's really into the 'human body is obselete' stuff and has been looking at how he can extend the capabilities for a long time. He's got into some interesting internet based projects as well...(pingbody, evolving URL body)..
One of the best things that happened to me was going to art college aged 27.
I was originally a librarian, but then went off to do a multimedia art course.
Learnt a lot of things, learnt how to program, but the best bit was, I learnt not to be afraid of people who made out they knew what Art was (notice capital 'A'). I learnt you can say 'bollocks' to anything you don't like. Anybody who is defensive about giving away information or sharing what they know is running scared of being found out (true also of the computing world..). So don't get uptight about 'what is art' - it really doesn't matter. Hey, if you like it, that's good enough. You don't need some professor to make your mind up for you.
I guess I am saying that all the Aaron thing is actually doing is forcing people to think about their definitions of what art is, rather than pushing the boundaries of what hardware/ software can be made to do. The most you could say is they are trying to get a computer to guess what humans like and disklike.
I mean, enough other species will keep on going. Wait a minute, probably more than are likely to survive with humans about...
Take a look at pictures or descriptions of the large industrialised cities of the time. They were notoriously filthy. I'm not saying that today is any better, it's just that the chemicals we use are far more insidious. But the major cities were covered in the byproducts from steam engines, industrial manufacturing processes, coal fires in people's homes. This is why Clean Air acts were passed in many places. London was terrible for its peasouper fogs and on at least one occasion in the nineteenth century Parliament had to be abandoned due to The Great Stink (smell coming off the polluted River Thames, people just pumped domestic and industrial effluents straight into it).
. Whether they can figure out docking in orbit is another question entirely...
- Their technology is based on tried and tested Russian technology.
- The Russians have more experience than anybody else at space docking
- Russia is in need of hard currency so I am sure the Chinese could buy the knowledge
- Even if the Russians aren't selling or the Chinese aren't buying, the Chinese aren't stupid (they've got this far...)
I'd say when rather than if.Well if it's about having the capability to launch your own people into space, then looks like China will be 'space power no.3'. Which will make the American military very happy because it will allow them to justify a lot of daft military spending...Of course with the breakup of the USSR you could say that the Ukraine (Energia) or Kazakhstan (Baikonur complex) are veritable space powers, though they've obviously taken the more pragmatic (sensible?) route of being involved with collaborative projects than sticking their own space ships up there just for the hell of it.
Will be interesting to see where India is in a couple of years with the new GSLV as well...
Well I am sure the timing of this publicity has something to do with the auspicious date - 40th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight into space.
Celebrate Yuri's Night near you!
I wonder what the atmosphere would be if the Americans had downed a Chinese surveillance plane flying off the coast of California?
Do the Chinese fly surveillance flights this close to USA?
If not, can the Americans blame the Chinese for being a bit upset?
In the UK, we're not citizens. We are subjects of the throne. The UK is a monarchy. We have people making laws that have been given that right just because some great-great ancestor happened to be a very useful thug on a battlefield (the House of Lords, hereditary peers).
Also the UK doesn't have a written constitution. Any English or Scots lawyers care to make a comment on this point?
For my part, I have mixed feelings about the fact that Britain has something like the highest density of CCTV cameras in the world. Yes, they reduce crime in some areas. But there is the other theory that they just push it elsewhere.
In the big cities you're filmed a lot. I'd feel a lot happier if there was a degree of accountability. There are private as well as public bodies filming, and while I assume there is some sort of legislation controlling the public bodies filming me (anybody care to give me a URL?) I am a lot less happy about how private security companies are held to account.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Whenever somebody mentions God and Freedom (it's got a lower case f in my dictionary) in the same breath I can never remember which flavour of fundamentalism they belong to. I get this weird image of large numbers of horsemen bearing down on me with swords drawn and flying large flags, crying 'Death to the Unbelievers'...
Also check Internet Society IPN Special Interest Group ....
Hey, why stop at Mars eh?