Well, right now unused TV channels in the US are just that -- unused. They don't cause the TV broadcasters any trouble. Turning over the unused channels to broadband broadcasting can have a whole lot of results and only one of them -- everything works as advertised all the time -- leaves the broadcasters as well off as they are today.
It's sort of like you've just heard that Union Carbide is applying for a zoning variance to manufacture explosives next door to your house. They claim that the building will be tasteful, the grounds gorgeous, the traffic light, noise and pollution non-existent and everything will, of course, be perfectly safe. You'd be happy about that? Not if you can spell Bhopal you wouldn't.
I'm in favor of anything that will get broadband to rural areas, but the TV broadcasters should get reasonable assurance of protection from this new service. And I sure as hell wouldn't trust the techies never to dynamically plant their broadband data transmitter on the same frequency as someone's soap opera. At the very least the data people likely need an incentive (e.g. fines) to take interference avaoidance seriously.
***IMO There is absolutely no point in having a login password for stand-alone machines as it is TRIVIAL to bypass with something as easy as a boot CD/floppy that just resets the passwords, as long as you have physical access to the box, (or just yank out the hard drive and remount somewhere else).***
Sounds right to me.
If I had mod points today, I'd mod this insightful. The one exception. Some sort of password (other than "password") might be a good idea on a machine that is publically accessible. There's no point in making it too easy for the someone just wandering through to hit Enter, then delete all the files the file manager can see.
I can't speak for the whole article because I only struggled through about half a dozen pages before I got fed up.
But I can tell you with reasonable confidence that crave.cnet.co.uk has roughly zero chance of becoming my favorite site until they clean up their web pages and put more substantive material and less junk on each page.
Can't say that I thought all that much of the content either. Not very insightful and not especially funny. I don't think this is one of those little things that get's pasted up on cubicle walls and passed around in the office mail and email.
Does that make me a vicious slashdotter hunting like a spider?
***How the hell is an END USER supposed to jump to the conclusion that OFF doesn't mean OFF.***
You, sir, have permission to design consumer devices. A lot of other people posting to this thread seem to have flunked this snap quiz in User Interface Desgin 1A.
***Ummmmm... Ya... The discussion here was in relation to George Washington being able to have become a king, but choosing not to do so. Had it instead been a man like Bush who was the victorious commander and who had the same option, I'm thinking things would have gone differently.***
I yield to no man in my contempt for that duplicitious dimwit George W Bush. Sure he'd become king. But I suspect that after a few years of his unending screwups (IMO we should all thank God that he is incompetent), he'd have been deposed and eventually the flood of immigrants would have pushed the US to someplace not much different than it ended up. Three possible exceptions.
With a monarch like Bush, Hamilton would probably not have been appointed Secretary of the Treasury, and the US finances would not have started out on a relatively sound footing.
Things might not have settled out by 1803 and there might not have been a Louisiana Purchase.
It's just barely possible that Bush would have thrown so many people in jail for various reasons that the leaderless South might have taken some other track that didn't eventually lead to civil war.
***For credit cards, some banks are proactive and offer one time use numbers. This should be a lot more widespread, so if a bad guy does grab a card number, all it will get him/her would be DECLINE messages.***
I've been meaning to look into one time numbers as using credit cards on line makes me nervous. In fact, using them at all makes me nervous since a lot of corporate data bases seem not to be as secure as they should be.
What confuses me is that getting a one time number clearly involves some sort of authentication process. Won't the dude with the keylogger be able to intercept my authentication to my credit card company and subsequently be able to generate his own one-time numbers that bill to my account?
***Anyone care to wager if it were a man like George Bush who had lead the colonies to victory rather than Washington? You think it all would have gone the same?***
In the long run, quite possibly. Canada -- which at the time of the US revolution was largely inhabited by Francophones who mistrusted George III less than they mistrusted the American colonists stayed with England and the place ended up not very different from the US.
If I understand you guys correctly, the gubmint and the jews (what happened to the freemasons?) already have stolen all our money. Why would they care about our credit card numbers?
***You being a Canadian and all it is really none of your business.***
There was a time when a lot of Americans figured that we should mind our own damn business. No more -- perhaps regretably. Back then I'd have agreed with you I think.
As long as George the Clueless, Dick Cheney and the 49 mental midgets in the senate who back those two clowns 98% of the time think it is perfectly OK to mind other country's business, we Americans really shouldn't complain about foreigners expressing a bit of distaste for our dear leader.
I suppose that it would be OK for you to criticise the Canadian Prime Minister if you want to. I'll save you the trouble of looking his name up. It is Stephen Joseph Harper. (But Harper is actually a right winger by Canadian standards, so maybe you ought to settle for saying something nasty about the weather up there or curling or Celine Dion.)
***When Microsoft improves their OS to disallow silent installation of software and other administator-level access to the system... ***
If/when they do that, then the bad guys will just run their malware from the user's account. You don't have to be root/admin to send spam. Or they will include a few privilege escalation exploits in their package. Or both.
There are good reasons for many users not to run as root, but there are problems that not running as root won't cure, and I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing is one of them.
The article mentions that the Q4Rollup exploit is used. A quick Google didn't produce a complete inventory of what is in Q4Rollup, but it wouldn't suprise me that it already includes some Windows privilege escalation stuff along with the keyloggers, spyware and rootkits. My guess is that in a few years, these malware packages will include some Mac/Linux exploits just to spread the joy to the growing number of non-Microsoft desktop users.
***Most Linux users seem to understand that it is unwise to surf while logged in as root, but at the same time they setup the Windows systems at their friends homes to do so, because "it would be too much of a hassle to use separate accounts for admin and working".***
I don't know about Vista, but I do know that in W2K setting up applications in a user account was a somewhere between a wierd and a total nightmare. Very much a matter of install, find out where the damn code went, tinker until it works. I decided right then and there that I'd had enough. I kept my own machines on Windows 9. I started learning Linux. And I ran the one XP machine I was occasionally forced by circumstance to use as admin because I just didn't have the time to fix installs so they worked from a user account. I assume that things are better now, but I don't care. For the most part, I don't do NT based Windows.
Thankfully, the Linux desktop is now pretty much ready for prime time.
Let me back you up on this. www.tinyapps.org has links to a lot of neat, unbloated DOS/Windows software. Much of it is open source that is also available for Linux and much of the remainder will run under wine without a lot of grief. I generally hit tinyapps and look around whenever I find a need for a tool and don't have a clue what it's going to be called. More often than not, there is a pretty good answer there.
***the problem i see is lawyers.. (arn't they the root of all evil? that aside)***
I'm no fan of most lawyers, but in the case of health insurance, the arithmetic doesn't work. The entire malpractice insurance industry in the US in 2000 (latest year I could find figures for) was around 7 billion dollars. Maybe it's around 10 billion today. Current healthcare expenditures in the US will run around 1.5 trillion. Even if you assume there is a substantial multiplier -- say three or five from unecessary treatments to avoid malpractice, the lawyers are only a small part of the healthcare mess.
By all means, reform malpractice insurance. And ship all the lawyers (except those fighting the numerous civil liberties transgression of Bush and Company) off to Darfur where they can try serving writs on the janjaweed. But don't expect those steps to do anything meaningful about US healthcare.
***Ironically, socialized medicine takes healthcare decisions out of individuals' hands and gives it to the government,***
Dead right. If God hadn't intended for health care decisions to be in the hands of Insurance companies, he would long since have smoted ("smoten"?, "smotified?"... "beat the crap out of") the insurance companies mightily..
For the most part, health care hasn't been in the hands of individuals in the US for about half a century.
***If automobiles were engineered like this, we could probably use half the amount of fuel we currently do. The downside is you would have to get monthly or even weekly inspections and preventative maintenance.***
And automobile companies with a lock on replacement parts (Surely, you're not going to certify just anybody's replacement brake rotor without a few years of testing). would suddenly become very profitable indeed.
***Which raises the interesting possibility that the individual intelligence of Americans may drop...***
Ya really reckon that is possible?
***And yet this is a military machine - never has the phrase seemed more appropriate - that could probably beat any nation in the world.***
Only if the bastards come out and fight like men -- which really would not be their optimum strategy. Note the US military is (once again) being picked apart piecemeal in Iraq much as the Russians were in Afghanistan. Claims to the contrary by the folks responsible for this debacle look to me like wishful thinking.
Actually, from what I can see, the US military is not especially dumb. The politicians whose direction the military must, by law and custom, follow however...
***The rich client for email is on its way out, thin clients are in.***
Not in the US... At least not until "they" do something about broadband speeds. I just switched from the Gmail browser (thin) client to Thunderbird via POP3-SMTP. I don't care what Thunderbird is a clone of. Bringing the mail down to my machine for local processing is an order of magnitude more satisfactory than trying to read the stuff while it is on the Google servers.
You are maintaining that morality can not exist in the absence of a belief in God because there in no referent for good and bad? If you think about it, you'll remember that isn't really true.
The question is -- what ancient and well known moral scheme is rooted in tradition and analysis rather than in religion.
Yes!!! That's correct... Confucianism. (There are probably other correct answers. I found Philosophy alternately tedious, baffling and boring and therefore failed to learn as much as I should have.)
***So exuse me. I'm a little bit underwhelmed at the amazing rationality of atheists and atheism, especially the ones who want to speak ill of religion.***
If you ask me, the reason that religion has a bad name in some quarters is the propensity of those who are religous to do very unpleasant things to those who disagree with them about minor points of theology.
It's really hard to take the concept of a loving God seriously when the jerk promulgating it is beating the crap out of person or persons who are not members of the right club.
You folks need to clean up your act. Then we can talk.
(But I think [yes that's an act of faith, not reason] that probably by the end of this Century. the non-believers will have their picture of the universe all neatly tied up with all the loose ends tucked in. When (OK, if) that happens, you folks will find it harder to dismiss 'rationality'.)
***Agree that NSA isn't trying to take over the world, but it is an arm of the US Department of Defense and is very capable of doing more than analyze and exploit networks.***
Their major role used to be interception of electronic communications and code breaking. I assume that they still do that.
***As far as finding Osama, NSA cannot find what's "off the grid" - their only hope is to find a reliable Chatty Cathy who knows where he's hiding.***
I very much doubt that bin Laden is actually "off the grid". He needs to talk to other fundamentalists or he is effectively dead -- at least as far as his goal of purging islam of impurity. I doubt that bin Laden is laying low out of fear for his life. He's a man with a mission.
He's there somewhere. Or he's in a center of islamic thought like Egypt where he can meet with people face to face. But I doubt that as he is around 6 foot 5inches tall, unusually skinny, and his face is well known to about a billion people --not easy to disguise him. And there are probably a number of people who know roughly where he is -- also on the grid. Problem is probably that he and his contemporaries have quit using easily tracked technology and have developed some discretion since it is apparent that sloppy communications can cause death and other inconvenient outcomes.
***If private businesses are able to over take NASA we will see more progress then just a visit tot he moon!***
A common fantasy, but it is just that, a fantasy.
In general, private businesses are effective when they have some realistic hope of making a profit. The few areas of space exploration where profit can be made -- e.g. communication satellites -- have plenty of private investment.
BTW, private investors have sometimes failed at things that would have worked. In the early 19th Century, the leaders in New York state repeatedly begged the New York financial community to fund a canal to the Great Lakes. No interest. Finally, the state built the Erie Canal themselves. It turned out to be wildly profitable even after they cut rates again and again. That canal was probably the primary force prior to the railroads a generation later in opening up the country West of the Applachians. And it fueled spectacular growth in upstate New York that turned places like Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo into major cities instead of rural county seats.
I am, by the way, no particular fan of NASA. My opinion is that they have egregiously mismanaged just about everything since Apollo. The current head -- Michael Griffin -- however looks to be a break with tradition. Maybe, he can put the place back on the tracks. He seems to be trying.
***But we will likely never have colonies on either. ***
Never is a long time.
I think a better projection is that we will never put viable colonies anywhere in space using current technologies. Not even in improved versions. Not economically feasible unless there are very, very high finacial or scientific returns to be realized from such a colony. Right now, there is no reason to believe that there will be.
But there will likely be other technologies developed in the next century. Maybe one of them will work out. When (if) the cost of getting a man or woman to the moon or Mars becomes comperable to today's cost of getting a man or woman to Antarctica, provisioning them, and getting them home, we'll see permanent colonies. When will that be? I haven't a clue.
For the short term, I'll settle for getting a few kilograms of rocks back from ten or twenty places in the solar system -- which is sort of probably within the limits of what we can do with current technology and doesn't require human assistance.
***I think the reason such spell checkers don't exist already is fairly simple -- everyone just assumes they're impossible, and doesn't try.***
I'm on your side. It seems to me that a compiler with no object output that flags syntax errors and passes comments and strings to a normal spell checker would do the job. Not a trivial thing to implement. May not too feasible with Interpreted languages and those that depend largely on run-time checks. But still, I think it could be done with C, Java etc.
***The problem: if the Chinese military can get enough control over Pentagon computers, then it doesn't really matter what their own hardware capabilities are, they'll be able to deploy some US military hardware for their own objectives.***
Not a problem. Really. Not a Problem
First of all, this is EXACTLY what the NSA routinely does wrt to Chinese, Russian, French, Israeli etc computers. Probe the things. Look for weaknesses. Extract any accessible data. Nobody thinks that the NSA is going to take over the world. The NSA apparently can't even find Osama bin Laden.
Nobody, not even the bumbling incompetents in the Bush administration, is going to put command and control for weapons systems onto the Internet. There ARE limits to human stupidity (At least I think there are).
The DOD has rules about handling classified data. There may be interesting and sensitive stuff on the computers in question, but things like the Permissive Action Link codes for US nuclear weapons are not going to be anywhere where China, Isreal, or a teenager in Bulgaria can get to them.
If you want to know what is going on in the DOD, you do not depend on hacking the computers. You get a few of your people hired as bartenders and wait staff at watering holes near the Pentagon.
China is doing quite well with a multi-decade effort to buy the United States piecemeal. Why would they imperil that and damage both the home country and the property they are acquiring by starting a war? The US may be led by fools. China is not.
***Well sure. All you have to do is bounce your laser off of those gas clouds to find out how to compensate for them.***
That's adaptive optics. 'Lucky imaging' looks to be something different. Sounds like Lucky Imaging tries to catch and merge portions of the image that occasionally, by chance, make it through the ever changing atmosphere with minimal distortion.
But I think that the answer to the original question is probably still 'No" It doesn't sound like Lucky Imaging per se is an answer to the question "How can I see objects obscured by cosmic gas clouds?"
Slashdot Mirror
It's sort of like you've just heard that Union Carbide is applying for a zoning variance to manufacture explosives next door to your house. They claim that the building will be tasteful, the grounds gorgeous, the traffic light, noise and pollution non-existent and everything will, of course, be perfectly safe. You'd be happy about that? Not if you can spell Bhopal you wouldn't.
I'm in favor of anything that will get broadband to rural areas, but the TV broadcasters should get reasonable assurance of protection from this new service. And I sure as hell wouldn't trust the techies never to dynamically plant their broadband data transmitter on the same frequency as someone's soap opera. At the very least the data people likely need an incentive (e.g. fines) to take interference avaoidance seriously.
Sounds right to me.
If I had mod points today, I'd mod this insightful. The one exception. Some sort of password (other than "password") might be a good idea on a machine that is publically accessible. There's no point in making it too easy for the someone just wandering through to hit Enter, then delete all the files the file manager can see.
But I can tell you with reasonable confidence that crave.cnet.co.uk has roughly zero chance of becoming my favorite site until they clean up their web pages and put more substantive material and less junk on each page.
Can't say that I thought all that much of the content either. Not very insightful and not especially funny. I don't think this is one of those little things that get's pasted up on cubicle walls and passed around in the office mail and email.
Does that make me a vicious slashdotter hunting like a spider?
You, sir, have permission to design consumer devices. A lot of other people posting to this thread seem to have flunked this snap quiz in User Interface Desgin 1A.
I yield to no man in my contempt for that duplicitious dimwit George W Bush. Sure he'd become king. But I suspect that after a few years of his unending screwups (IMO we should all thank God that he is incompetent), he'd have been deposed and eventually the flood of immigrants would have pushed the US to someplace not much different than it ended up. Three possible exceptions.
I've been meaning to look into one time numbers as using credit cards on line makes me nervous. In fact, using them at all makes me nervous since a lot of corporate data bases seem not to be as secure as they should be.
What confuses me is that getting a one time number clearly involves some sort of authentication process. Won't the dude with the keylogger be able to intercept my authentication to my credit card company and subsequently be able to generate his own one-time numbers that bill to my account?
In the long run, quite possibly. Canada -- which at the time of the US revolution was largely inhabited by Francophones who mistrusted George III less than they mistrusted the American colonists stayed with England and the place ended up not very different from the US.
If I understand you guys correctly, the gubmint and the jews (what happened to the freemasons?) already have stolen all our money. Why would they care about our credit card numbers?
There was a time when a lot of Americans figured that we should mind our own damn business. No more -- perhaps regretably. Back then I'd have agreed with you I think.
As long as George the Clueless, Dick Cheney and the 49 mental midgets in the senate who back those two clowns 98% of the time think it is perfectly OK to mind other country's business, we Americans really shouldn't complain about foreigners expressing a bit of distaste for our dear leader.
I suppose that it would be OK for you to criticise the Canadian Prime Minister if you want to. I'll save you the trouble of looking his name up. It is Stephen Joseph Harper. (But Harper is actually a right winger by Canadian standards, so maybe you ought to settle for saying something nasty about the weather up there or curling or Celine Dion.)
If/when they do that, then the bad guys will just run their malware from the user's account. You don't have to be root/admin to send spam. Or they will include a few privilege escalation exploits in their package. Or both.
There are good reasons for many users not to run as root, but there are problems that not running as root won't cure, and I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing is one of them.
The article mentions that the Q4Rollup exploit is used. A quick Google didn't produce a complete inventory of what is in Q4Rollup, but it wouldn't suprise me that it already includes some Windows privilege escalation stuff along with the keyloggers, spyware and rootkits. My guess is that in a few years, these malware packages will include some Mac/Linux exploits just to spread the joy to the growing number of non-Microsoft desktop users.
***Most Linux users seem to understand that it is unwise to surf while logged in as root, but at the same time they setup the Windows systems at their friends homes to do so, because "it would be too much of a hassle to use separate accounts for admin and working".***
I don't know about Vista, but I do know that in W2K setting up applications in a user account was a somewhere between a wierd and a total nightmare. Very much a matter of install, find out where the damn code went, tinker until it works. I decided right then and there that I'd had enough. I kept my own machines on Windows 9. I started learning Linux. And I ran the one XP machine I was occasionally forced by circumstance to use as admin because I just didn't have the time to fix installs so they worked from a user account. I assume that things are better now, but I don't care. For the most part, I don't do NT based Windows.
Thankfully, the Linux desktop is now pretty much ready for prime time.
Let me back you up on this. www.tinyapps.org has links to a lot of neat, unbloated DOS/Windows software. Much of it is open source that is also available for Linux and much of the remainder will run under wine without a lot of grief. I generally hit tinyapps and look around whenever I find a need for a tool and don't have a clue what it's going to be called. More often than not, there is a pretty good answer there.
I'm no fan of most lawyers, but in the case of health insurance, the arithmetic doesn't work. The entire malpractice insurance industry in the US in 2000 (latest year I could find figures for) was around 7 billion dollars. Maybe it's around 10 billion today. Current healthcare expenditures in the US will run around 1.5 trillion. Even if you assume there is a substantial multiplier -- say three or five from unecessary treatments to avoid malpractice, the lawyers are only a small part of the healthcare mess.
By all means, reform malpractice insurance. And ship all the lawyers (except those fighting the numerous civil liberties transgression of Bush and Company) off to Darfur where they can try serving writs on the janjaweed. But don't expect those steps to do anything meaningful about US healthcare.
Dead right. If God hadn't intended for health care decisions to be in the hands of Insurance companies, he would long since have smoted ("smoten"?, "smotified?" ... "beat the crap out of") the insurance companies mightily..
For the most part, health care hasn't been in the hands of individuals in the US for about half a century.
And automobile companies with a lock on replacement parts (Surely, you're not going to certify just anybody's replacement brake rotor without a few years of testing). would suddenly become very profitable indeed.
Ya really reckon that is possible?
***And yet this is a military machine - never has the phrase seemed more appropriate - that could probably beat any nation in the world.***
Only if the bastards come out and fight like men -- which really would not be their optimum strategy. Note the US military is (once again) being picked apart piecemeal in Iraq much as the Russians were in Afghanistan. Claims to the contrary by the folks responsible for this debacle look to me like wishful thinking.
Actually, from what I can see, the US military is not especially dumb. The politicians whose direction the military must, by law and custom, follow however ...
Not in the US ... At least not until "they" do something about broadband speeds. I just switched from the Gmail browser (thin) client to Thunderbird via POP3-SMTP. I don't care what Thunderbird is a clone of. Bringing the mail down to my machine for local processing is an order of magnitude more satisfactory than trying to read the stuff while it is on the Google servers.
The question is -- what ancient and well known moral scheme is rooted in tradition and analysis rather than in religion.
Yes!!! That's correct ... Confucianism. (There are probably other correct answers. I found Philosophy alternately tedious, baffling and boring and therefore failed to learn as much as I should have.)
Here's the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius
If you ask me, the reason that religion has a bad name in some quarters is the propensity of those who are religous to do very unpleasant things to those who disagree with them about minor points of theology.
It's really hard to take the concept of a loving God seriously when the jerk promulgating it is beating the crap out of person or persons who are not members of the right club.
You folks need to clean up your act. Then we can talk.
(But I think [yes that's an act of faith, not reason] that probably by the end of this Century. the non-believers will have their picture of the universe all neatly tied up with all the loose ends tucked in. When (OK, if) that happens, you folks will find it harder to dismiss 'rationality'.)
Their major role used to be interception of electronic communications and code breaking. I assume that they still do that. ***As far as finding Osama, NSA cannot find what's "off the grid" - their only hope is to find a reliable Chatty Cathy who knows where he's hiding.***
I very much doubt that bin Laden is actually "off the grid". He needs to talk to other fundamentalists or he is effectively dead -- at least as far as his goal of purging islam of impurity. I doubt that bin Laden is laying low out of fear for his life. He's a man with a mission.
He's there somewhere. Or he's in a center of islamic thought like Egypt where he can meet with people face to face. But I doubt that as he is around 6 foot 5inches tall, unusually skinny, and his face is well known to about a billion people --not easy to disguise him. And there are probably a number of people who know roughly where he is -- also on the grid. Problem is probably that he and his contemporaries have quit using easily tracked technology and have developed some discretion since it is apparent that sloppy communications can cause death and other inconvenient outcomes.
A common fantasy, but it is just that, a fantasy.
In general, private businesses are effective when they have some realistic hope of making a profit. The few areas of space exploration where profit can be made -- e.g. communication satellites -- have plenty of private investment.
BTW, private investors have sometimes failed at things that would have worked. In the early 19th Century, the leaders in New York state repeatedly begged the New York financial community to fund a canal to the Great Lakes. No interest. Finally, the state built the Erie Canal themselves. It turned out to be wildly profitable even after they cut rates again and again. That canal was probably the primary force prior to the railroads a generation later in opening up the country West of the Applachians. And it fueled spectacular growth in upstate New York that turned places like Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo into major cities instead of rural county seats.
I am, by the way, no particular fan of NASA. My opinion is that they have egregiously mismanaged just about everything since Apollo. The current head -- Michael Griffin -- however looks to be a break with tradition. Maybe, he can put the place back on the tracks. He seems to be trying.
Obvioulsy you have not encountered one of the millions of vehicles that turn on Check Engine lights for no good reason.
Never is a long time.
I think a better projection is that we will never put viable colonies anywhere in space using current technologies. Not even in improved versions. Not economically feasible unless there are very, very high finacial or scientific returns to be realized from such a colony. Right now, there is no reason to believe that there will be.
But there will likely be other technologies developed in the next century. Maybe one of them will work out. When (if) the cost of getting a man or woman to the moon or Mars becomes comperable to today's cost of getting a man or woman to Antarctica, provisioning them, and getting them home, we'll see permanent colonies. When will that be? I haven't a clue.
For the short term, I'll settle for getting a few kilograms of rocks back from ten or twenty places in the solar system -- which is sort of probably within the limits of what we can do with current technology and doesn't require human assistance.
I'm on your side. It seems to me that a compiler with no object output that flags syntax errors and passes comments and strings to a normal spell checker would do the job. Not a trivial thing to implement. May not too feasible with Interpreted languages and those that depend largely on run-time checks. But still, I think it could be done with C, Java etc.
Not a problem. Really. Not a Problem
That's adaptive optics. 'Lucky imaging' looks to be something different. Sounds like Lucky Imaging tries to catch and merge portions of the image that occasionally, by chance, make it through the ever changing atmosphere with minimal distortion.
But I think that the answer to the original question is probably still 'No" It doesn't sound like Lucky Imaging per se is an answer to the question "How can I see objects obscured by cosmic gas clouds?"