On-line newspapers might benefit from the same kind of breakthrough brought
to on-line map websites by Google Maps.
That is to say, MapQuest, Yahoo Maps etc. -- the standard on-line maps for
years -- offered very poor map-reading experience. Navigating a region by
means of click-driven discrete re-drawings to change map centers and scales
is very unsatisfactory, compared to rolling out a large paper map. It's
reminiscent of nothing so much as peering at a mural through a keyhole.
The genius of Google Maps is that by caching map information from outside
the visible map window border, it is possible to pan/scroll continuously.
Re-scaling through that slider seems faster too, although I'm not sure
whether that's just subjective. In any event, the ability to quickly pass
through a range of centers and scales makes the on-line map reading
experience much closer to the physical version, and allows far more
information to be synthesized much more quickly.
It seems to me that some of the same ideas could be carried over to
newspapers, so as to preserve some of the more satisfactory aspects of
reading the paper edition.
For example, when I read the physical paper, I have a lot of information
available to help me decide whether I want to invest time in reading a full
article. I can read the headline, of course, but I can also quickly scan
the first couple of paragraphs, as well as any accompanying photos,
graphics, and sidebars. This can all be taken in in a few seconds,
leading to a pretty accurate assessment of whether it will be worthwhile to
read the full article.
In the on-line edition of a newspaper, on the other hand, for most articles
there is only the headline to go on, embedded in the HTML anchor tag.
The headline is often obscure. To find out what it means, you have to
click, and wait for a re-draw. The psychological threshold for reading an
article is higher (at least for me). As a result, I find that I skim the
on-line edition far more lightly than I do a physical edition.
The reform analogous to the Google Maps breakthrough would be to supply the
newspaper pages as continuously scrollable images, available at various
scales. At the largest scale, only headlines would be legible, while text
would be legible at inner zoom levels. Clicking on any article headline
would result in the individual article being served up as it is now.
Pan/scroll would allow one to cross page boundaries.
The resulting experience would be much closer to reading a physical paper,
in that much more information is presented to the reader prior to
"committing" to read a full article. I would certainly enjoy the NYT much
more in this kind of format.
If you live in a state where these laws are in preparation (Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, and
Texas), there is something constructive you can do: find out who your state reps are, write them a letter, and FAX it to their office (e-mail is not so effective, the loon barrier is too low).
I'm in Illinois, on the danger list. Here's what I wrote to my State Senator. Feel free to use any part of this text if you wish.
Dear Senator Raoul:
I am writing to request that you take action on the amendment concerning
municipal provision of communications services to Senate Bill 499. It is
very important that this amendment be prevented from becoming law.
The offensive text of the amendment reads as follows:
(c) No political subdivision of this State shall provide or
offer for sale, either to the public or to a telecommunications
provider, a telecommunications service or telecommunications
facility used to provide a telecommunications service for which
a Certificate of Service Authority is required pursuant to this
Section.
This amendment represents a spectacular example of public corruption, in
which the public interest is sacrificed to curry favor with large
telecommunications companies. These companies are determined to stamp out
municipal provision of broadband services so as to preserve the
near-monopolies they so notoriously abuse, and apparently are prepared to
lavishly endow with campaign contributions any legislators who are willing
to assist them.
Note that this draconian legislative proposal would prevent municipalities
from constructing their own broadband networks even in poor and rural
areas that are under-served by the telecom industry, and that might obtain
substantial economic benefits by investing in their own network
infrastructure.
Note also that since there are currently several other states that have
passed, or are in the process of passing similar legislation at the behest
of the telecom industry, a competitive advantage will likely flow from
those states to states that do not hog-tie their own citizens to
prevent them from building their own high-tech infrastructure at the
expense of their own tax dollars.
This piece of legislation is a scandal and an outrage. It is as if a
waste management company had bribed legislators to forbid municipalities
from building their own sewers or operating their own garbage trucks. I
intend to track this issue very closely indeed, as it is a very high
priority for me. I am certain that there are many other technology-savvy
voters in this district who feel the same way.
A related technology that could make notebook computers usable outdoors would be the real killer app, as far as I'm concerned.
It seems like a feasible variation, at least to me -- keep the mostly-black coating to absorb nuisance ambient light, but allow transmission at narrow RGB wavelengths. Then backlight it with an LED screen, with the diodes tuned to the three transmission frequency ranges.
Don't know whether it's technically possible, but if it is, I bet it's in the works already.
Some enterprising prosecutor of FBI Agent could make a name for himself, putting together a conspiracy case against this vermin.
Although spam is supposedly a felony now, it's usually hard to catch enough of these guys to make it worthwhile. But conspiracy to send spam, now you're talking better-level evidence and a larger bag. Plus lean on a few of these assholes, catch some virus writers...mmm...tasty...
If the Feds were still in the criminal prosecution business, that is (sigh)...
The probe was proposed 35 years ago, but has never had the funding until now.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
"Funding" was never a problem for this pig. It's been sitting in the middle of NASA's Office of Space Science budget for well over a decade, burning money at a rate totally out of proportion to its supposed science return, and compromising funding for other much more interesting astrophysics and space science missions in the process.
NASA OSS and the astrophysical community have repeatedly tried to get GPB cancelled, but the California Congressional delegation has kept it alive as a pork offering to Stanford, and to California's moribund aerospace industry.
The reason GPB is finally being launched is not that it is ready -- many people at NASA headquarters fully expect its systems to fail in orbit, as they repeatedly did in lab testing. It's just that it's cheaper to launch the fucking thing than to let it sit around for another decade, burning even more of the dwindling supply of cash that NASA expects to spend on actual science (as opposed to Buzz Lightyear adventures on Mars).
I only hope the perpetrators of this travesty of peer review don't attempt to inflict a "Gravity Probe C" upon us.
Don't forget packet filtering. Solaris has no native firewall -- the excellent IPF is a third-party add-on. The "out of the box" installation is almost unsecurable.
The first step is getting to Keplerian low-Earth orbit cheaply, otherwise this is all Moonshine.
NASA originally claimed that the Shuttle would do this for us. Unfortunately, it turned out that shuttle launch costs ($/pound of payload) are so high that if there were unlimited free gold in low-Earth orbit, it wouldn't pay to go get it in the shuttle.
Don't pray for NASA to lead this effort. If they tried, they could bankrupt the World.
The aerospace industry cracks me up. Nobody spins like they do.
I was on the team of a science payload that was launched on a Pegasus a few years ago. The rocket entered its intended orbit, but the batteries feeding the explosive bolts went flat, so the payload was trapped in the third stage of the rocket. Mission failed.
Orbital Sciences issued a press release stating that the launch was a "success", but that unfortunately "the payload failed to separate itself" from the booster. That pesky payload screwed up a perfect launch, you see?
Nowadays, I always read the fine print in aerospace claims of "success". Some of the most timeless examples of this "objective creep" prose are associated with claims of "successful" NMD tests.
But this one is pretty good too. A rocket flight that lasted a few tens of seconds before it "demonstrated unstable operation" and planted itself in the desert is a "success" because it wasn't totally destroyed, and because they have a few seconds of low-altitude data on a system whose entire point is optimal sea-level-to-space performance.
Note the claim that the "primary mission objective" was to get the vehicle into the air, not to actually fly it anywhere. You may rely on the fact that had the rocket actually staid on course, a much more ambitious "primary objective" would have been announced -- and met. And had it blown up on the pad, they probably could have spun that, too.
1.2 Lunar diameters is not the relevant number here. 288,000 miles is 72 Earth radii.
That means that if you draw a circle around the Earth with a radius at the distance of closest approach, the Earth's cross-sectional area fits into that circle 5,200 times.
In other words, even if someone were heaving rocks at us at distances this close or closer at a rate of one per year (a grotesque overestimate), we would expect to get hit once every five millenia or so, neglecting gravitational attraction effects (which don't contribute much).
As "near misses" go, that's not so near. The Earth isn't that big a target. This is a nice frothy story for CNN, especially the "blind side" angle, but not a great reason to start repenting sins.
The NASA guys have been studying the artifacts since 1996, and they are
now convinced enough to put their reputation on the line. These aren't
people to do that lightly.
Guys, please keep your salt handy.
First of all, "Astrobiology" is a field that NASA invented in order to
have nice stories to tell the public about life on other planets. Prior
to Dan Goldin's mandating it into existence, there was no Astrobiology
community - no meetings, no journal, nothing. It never made the critical
mass criteria that occasionally come together to create a new field of
science. Then, overnight, it became one of the biggest-ticket items in
the Office of Space Science budget.
Today, the field may be defined as the research conducted by those
scientists who have noticed the large pot of money earmarked for
Astrobiology at NASA, and have tailored their grant proposals to suit the
Research Opportunity Announcements.
"Scientists" at JSC and at other NASA centers are under a great deal of
institutional pressure to dignify this otherwise farcical field,
particularly given the gales of laughter that greeted the equally
breathless announcement about the last Mars rock with "strong supporting
evidence" for life on Mars.
Seriously guys, please remember that NASA is not a scientific agency.
They don't really care about the science - they care about spaceflight,
engineering, launch, astronautics. But not the science. It's a cultural
thing at Headquarters. Science is a bauble they often festoon themselves
with in order to justify budgets for the programs they want. But they are
completely prepared to corrupt the normal processes of science for their
own purposes.
Bottom line: the opinion of JSC researchers on the subject of that rock is
not to be taken seriously. Wait until a recognizable consensus forms
elsewhere, if that ever happpens. Personally I doubt it ever will.
Re:GNOME vs KDE Episode 19: Moderators On Crack
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
- double-clicking a taskbar icon will iconify that application. great for getting stuff out of your way.
FVWM can be configured to do this.
- right-clicking a taskbar icon gives you a menu which includes 'iconify other windows', which is really handy since I usually have like 14 Konsoles, 11 Netscapes, GAIM, XMMS, Quanta+ and StarOffice open simultaneously.
FVWM can be configured to do this.
- Alt-F2 brings up a little input field which I can use to start an app quicker than using the menus. It keeps a history too, so I can cycle through previous commands.
Xterm can do this.
- Rotating desktop wallpapers. I have a directory of about 450 hi-color psychedelic 1024x768 wallpapers, and I have KDE set to switch to a random one every 30 seconds. Keeps things interesting.
A 20-line shell script can do this.
- Right click on desktop gives you a menu which includes 'Logout'. I find that much easier to deal with than windows, which requires you to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del or click on the Start button.
Any window manager + XDM-managed server does this
So, I guess it's subtle things like that, that make me like KDE so much.
"I guess it's subtle things like the inclusion of a trigger, a handle, and a shoulder rest that make me prefer an RPG launcher to a can of bug spray for killing roaches."
One really interesting consequence of the FBI's punch list being tossed out is this: under current law, anyone who suspects that law enforcement has a pen register on their phone may conceal their call destinations by the simple expedient of making all calls on a calling card.
It is currently illegal for LEAs to obtain anything more than your calling card number from the pen register.
In order to defeat this tactic, the LEAs will be forced to apply for phone tap warrants, for which they need to meet a much more exacting legal standard than the one that applies to pen registers.
This is obviously an anomaly, and I doubt that it will stand indefinitely. But before it can be corrected, the court has made clear that the FCC and the industry must demonstrate the ability to filter out "content" information from call-relaying information in post-calling-card-number dialed digits.
Man, if I were an FCC commisioner, I'd be pretty embarrassed at the blunt language the judge used to smack down the Commission. "Lack of reasoned decisionmaking"! That's gotta hurt!
It's nice to have Bezos on board on this, but talk is cheap. AIPLA and AIPO are gearing up for a lobbying effort. In Congress, the name of the game is fee-for-service-legislation, at least on issues that don't make it onto the radar screens of most voters. As unpleasant as the prospect may be, the patent-reform effort is going to have to match the IPO lawyers dollar-for-dollar if it wants to be successful.
Looking around, I see plenty of virtuous sentiment (Bezos, O'Reilly, even Larry Ellison, apparently), but I see no evidence for a sustained industrial-scale lobbying effort - just a couple of highly publicized meetings. Where is campaign central? Which lobbying firms are being hired? How much money are Amazon, O'Reilly et al. tossing into the kitty?
These are the measures of seriousness in this game. If the "heroes" of this story don't pony up, it means that they're just sucking up to their geek customers who care about IP reform, and their efforts are unlikely to succeed.
I've been in and near NASA too, and I have to say I don't agree with your assessment. Not to say the JPL team wasn't dedicated and hard-working, but what seems to be described here is a contractor problem, not a science team problem.
There is plenty of precedent for this kind of thing. The original Hubble mirror was fucked up by Perkin Elmer, which then proceeded to shade the results of the optical tests - a fact that was not discovered until after Hubble was launched, leading to the NASA-spun "triumph" of the first repair mission.
There was a projact management failure in that case: the contractor was not properly supervised by the project scientists. It sounds like this is also what happened with MPL.
This is almost invariably catastrophic - contractors have different agendas from scientists, and once the contract is secured, they often don't want to do more than the absolute minimum necessary to fulfil it. Successful projects send scientists out to live at the contractor plant, and to read them the Riot Act on a bi-weekly basis.
The problem with encrypting everything is that you can have your key subpoenaed too. If you don't turn over that you get hefty fines (for the defendant) or you case gets forfetured. (for the prosecuter)
The only case that I am aware of in which a court attempted to compel key discovery is the Mitnick case, which is a criminal case. Is there any precedent for a court compelling key discovery in a civil case? In other words, is there any factual basis for the above-quoted claim?
If we try to do this now, under NASA's leadership, we will bankrupt the world.
I have always strongly supported space exploration, and even felt somewhat supportive of human exploration of the solar system. But I have to say that the pre-requisites for doing so in a sane manner are simply not in place. The reasons, sadly, are institutional, rather than technological.
The problem is that most of the effort expended in getting to space actually goes into attaining a Keplerian low-Earth orbit - not just getting the altitude, but changing velocity from an (non-Keplerian) orbital period of 24 hours to one of about 90 minutes, which is how fast we'd be going around if there were no atmospheric friction and we were in "orbit" a few feet above the surface of the Earth. Once in that Keplerian orbit, the energy expended to go elsewhere is not that great, comparatively speaking.
Thus the need for a specialized vehicle to get travellers into that energy state. If you could do this cheaply, with some kind of a "space truck", then the logical thing to do would be to build a space station and stage all space operations from there.
Unfortunately, we don't have a space truck. Instead, we have the Space Shuttle, which is the single most expensive way to get to space ever invented. It is conservatively estimated that shuttle launch costs range upwards of $10000 per pound of payload. Multiply that by the tons of stuff that you need to keep people alive in space, let alone allowing them to accomplish anything useful, and some pretty eye-popping numbers come up. Unsurprisingly, Shuttle operations make up a vast proportion of the cost of building the International Space Station.
The most frustrating thing about this situation, is that it was clear from the early going that the Shuttle was going to be a turkey from the point of view of its intended mission, cheap access to space. But NASA had so much invested politically in the shuttle that it actually quashed alternate launcher development throughout the seventies and eighties, for fear that it might endanger the Shuttle program.
As a result, instead of a space truck, we have a difficult and dangerous experimental vehicle with tens of thousands of failure modes, and sphincters all over the world contract whenever it is launched (I thought I was going to have a heart attack in the first few minutes of the mission that launched the Chandra Observatory).
If these clowns are the guys who are supposed to take us to Mars, it simply isn't going to happen. The technological breakthroughs to keep people alive that long in a big-damn-plastic-bubble are already going to stretch engineering and scientific ingenuity to the limit (viz. Biosphere II). The cost of doing business NASA-style will keep this project in never-never land long past 2015, in my opinion.
We tend to believe that corporations will be more efficient simply because if they aren't, they'll be driven out of buisnuess by the mechanics of the free market.
The "efficiency" of those corporations is irrelevant - the salient point is accountability. Corporations are responsible for their deeds and misdeeds to their stockholders, and to nobody else.
It may be "efficient" for Exxon to dump waste in your back yard. Doubtless their stockholders would be wholly untroubled. Regulation by the "ineffective and inefficient" Government is a citizen's only recourse and protection against the untrammelled exercise of corporate self-interest.
We are our government. It is an organization in whose operations we at least have a say - essentially, we are all stockholders. Exxon, on the other hand, simply doesn't give a shit what I think, since I don't own any of their stock.
I doubt very much that there is any kind of massive sting afoot, either internationally or in the US. The FBI has no brief to investigate the normal activities of script kiddies. It turns out that there is no Federal law forbidding one from gaining unauthorized access to an Internet host - all such laws in the US are *State* laws, which means the FBI doesn't investigate violations.
The US Code only prohibits breaking in to so-called "protected computers" (USC Title 18, Part I, Chapter 47, Section 1030), defined as follows:
(2) the term ''protected computer'' means a computer - (A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial institution or the United States Government and the conduct constituting the offense affects that use by or for the financial institution or the Government; or (B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication;
Clearly, this does not cover most of the activities of script kiddies and other such pests, most of whom attack "unprotected" computers (universities, ISPs, corporate web sites, non-US hosts, etc.). This isn't that much of a surprise, I guess --- the FBI doesn't investigate breaking-and-entering cases either, unless the burglars attack Federal property.
I suppose that State District Attorneys could be getting together to gang up on them, though. Short of Congress changing the law, I guess that's the best we can hope for.
Slashdot Mirror
On-line newspapers might benefit from the same kind of breakthrough brought to on-line map websites by Google Maps.
That is to say, MapQuest, Yahoo Maps etc. -- the standard on-line maps for years -- offered very poor map-reading experience. Navigating a region by means of click-driven discrete re-drawings to change map centers and scales is very unsatisfactory, compared to rolling out a large paper map. It's reminiscent of nothing so much as peering at a mural through a keyhole.
The genius of Google Maps is that by caching map information from outside the visible map window border, it is possible to pan/scroll continuously. Re-scaling through that slider seems faster too, although I'm not sure whether that's just subjective. In any event, the ability to quickly pass through a range of centers and scales makes the on-line map reading experience much closer to the physical version, and allows far more information to be synthesized much more quickly.
It seems to me that some of the same ideas could be carried over to newspapers, so as to preserve some of the more satisfactory aspects of reading the paper edition.
For example, when I read the physical paper, I have a lot of information available to help me decide whether I want to invest time in reading a full article. I can read the headline, of course, but I can also quickly scan the first couple of paragraphs, as well as any accompanying photos, graphics, and sidebars. This can all be taken in in a few seconds, leading to a pretty accurate assessment of whether it will be worthwhile to read the full article.
In the on-line edition of a newspaper, on the other hand, for most articles there is only the headline to go on, embedded in the HTML anchor tag. The headline is often obscure. To find out what it means, you have to click, and wait for a re-draw. The psychological threshold for reading an article is higher (at least for me). As a result, I find that I skim the on-line edition far more lightly than I do a physical edition.
The reform analogous to the Google Maps breakthrough would be to supply the newspaper pages as continuously scrollable images, available at various scales. At the largest scale, only headlines would be legible, while text would be legible at inner zoom levels. Clicking on any article headline would result in the individual article being served up as it is now. Pan/scroll would allow one to cross page boundaries.
The resulting experience would be much closer to reading a physical paper, in that much more information is presented to the reader prior to "committing" to read a full article. I would certainly enjoy the NYT much more in this kind of format.
I'm in Illinois, on the danger list. Here's what I wrote to my State Senator. Feel free to use any part of this text if you wish.
Dear Senator Raoul:
I am writing to request that you take action on the amendment concerning municipal provision of communications services to Senate Bill 499. It is very important that this amendment be prevented from becoming law. The offensive text of the amendment reads as follows:
This amendment represents a spectacular example of public corruption, in which the public interest is sacrificed to curry favor with large telecommunications companies. These companies are determined to stamp out municipal provision of broadband services so as to preserve the near-monopolies they so notoriously abuse, and apparently are prepared to lavishly endow with campaign contributions any legislators who are willing to assist them.Note that this draconian legislative proposal would prevent municipalities from constructing their own broadband networks even in poor and rural areas that are under-served by the telecom industry, and that might obtain substantial economic benefits by investing in their own network infrastructure.
Note also that since there are currently several other states that have passed, or are in the process of passing similar legislation at the behest of the telecom industry, a competitive advantage will likely flow from those states to states that do not hog-tie their own citizens to prevent them from building their own high-tech infrastructure at the expense of their own tax dollars.
This piece of legislation is a scandal and an outrage. It is as if a waste management company had bribed legislators to forbid municipalities from building their own sewers or operating their own garbage trucks. I intend to track this issue very closely indeed, as it is a very high priority for me. I am certain that there are many other technology-savvy voters in this district who feel the same way.
Best Regards etc.
Nah, I think the real explanation we lag the world is that Godless Furriners with no Family Values need more bandwidth for their porn downloads.
It seems like a feasible variation, at least to me -- keep the mostly-black coating to absorb nuisance ambient light, but allow transmission at narrow RGB wavelengths. Then backlight it with an LED screen, with the diodes tuned to the three transmission frequency ranges.
Don't know whether it's technically possible, but if it is, I bet it's in the works already.
Some enterprising prosecutor of FBI Agent could make a name for himself, putting together a conspiracy case against this vermin.
Although spam is supposedly a felony now, it's usually hard to catch enough of these guys to make it worthwhile. But conspiracy to send spam, now you're talking better-level evidence and a larger bag. Plus lean on a few of these assholes, catch some virus writers...mmm...tasty...
If the Feds were still in the criminal prosecution business, that is (sigh)...
The probe was proposed 35 years ago, but has never had the funding until now.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
"Funding" was never a problem for this pig. It's been sitting in the middle of NASA's Office of Space Science budget for well over a decade, burning money at a rate totally out of proportion to its supposed science return, and compromising funding for other much more interesting astrophysics and space science missions in the process.
NASA OSS and the astrophysical community have repeatedly tried to get GPB cancelled, but the California Congressional delegation has kept it alive as a pork offering to Stanford, and to California's moribund aerospace industry.
The reason GPB is finally being launched is not that it is ready -- many people at NASA headquarters fully expect its systems to fail in orbit, as they repeatedly did in lab testing. It's just that it's cheaper to launch the fucking thing than to let it sit around for another decade, burning even more of the dwindling supply of cash that NASA expects to spend on actual science (as opposed to Buzz Lightyear adventures on Mars).
I only hope the perpetrators of this travesty of peer review don't attempt to inflict a "Gravity Probe C" upon us.
Don't forget packet filtering. Solaris has no native firewall -- the excellent IPF is a third-party add-on. The "out of the box" installation is almost unsecurable.
The first step is getting to Keplerian low-Earth orbit cheaply, otherwise this is all Moonshine.
NASA originally claimed that the Shuttle would do this for us. Unfortunately, it turned out that shuttle launch costs ($/pound of payload) are so high that if there were unlimited free gold in low-Earth orbit, it wouldn't pay to go get it in the shuttle.
Don't pray for NASA to lead this effort. If they tried, they could bankrupt the World.
The aerospace industry cracks me up. Nobody spins like they do.
I was on the team of a science payload that was launched on a Pegasus a few years ago. The rocket entered its intended orbit, but the batteries feeding the explosive bolts went flat, so the payload was trapped in the third stage of the rocket. Mission failed.
Orbital Sciences issued a press release stating that the launch was a "success", but that unfortunately "the payload failed to separate itself" from the booster. That pesky payload screwed up a perfect launch, you see?
Nowadays, I always read the fine print in aerospace claims of "success". Some of the most timeless examples of this "objective creep" prose are associated with claims of "successful" NMD tests.
But this one is pretty good too. A rocket flight that lasted a few tens of seconds before it "demonstrated unstable operation" and planted itself in the desert is a "success" because it wasn't totally destroyed, and because they have a few seconds of low-altitude data on a system whose entire point is optimal sea-level-to-space performance.
Note the claim that the "primary mission objective" was to get the vehicle into the air, not to actually fly it anywhere. You may rely on the fact that had the rocket actually staid on course, a much more ambitious "primary objective" would have been announced -- and met. And had it blown up on the pad, they probably could have spun that, too.
1.2 Lunar diameters is not the relevant number here. 288,000 miles is 72 Earth radii.
That means that if you draw a circle around the Earth with a radius at the distance of closest approach, the Earth's cross-sectional area fits into that circle 5,200 times.
In other words, even if someone were heaving rocks at us at distances this close or closer at a rate of one per year (a grotesque overestimate), we would expect to get hit once every five millenia or so, neglecting gravitational attraction effects (which don't contribute much).
As "near misses" go, that's not so near. The Earth isn't that big a target. This is a nice frothy story for CNN, especially the "blind side" angle, but not a great reason to start repenting sins.
The NASA guys have been studying the artifacts since 1996, and they are now convinced enough to put their reputation on the line. These aren't people to do that lightly.
Guys, please keep your salt handy.
First of all, "Astrobiology" is a field that NASA invented in order to have nice stories to tell the public about life on other planets. Prior to Dan Goldin's mandating it into existence, there was no Astrobiology community - no meetings, no journal, nothing. It never made the critical mass criteria that occasionally come together to create a new field of science. Then, overnight, it became one of the biggest-ticket items in the Office of Space Science budget.
Today, the field may be defined as the research conducted by those scientists who have noticed the large pot of money earmarked for Astrobiology at NASA, and have tailored their grant proposals to suit the Research Opportunity Announcements.
"Scientists" at JSC and at other NASA centers are under a great deal of institutional pressure to dignify this otherwise farcical field, particularly given the gales of laughter that greeted the equally breathless announcement about the last Mars rock with "strong supporting evidence" for life on Mars.
Seriously guys, please remember that NASA is not a scientific agency. They don't really care about the science - they care about spaceflight, engineering, launch, astronautics. But not the science. It's a cultural thing at Headquarters. Science is a bauble they often festoon themselves with in order to justify budgets for the programs they want. But they are completely prepared to corrupt the normal processes of science for their own purposes.
Bottom line: the opinion of JSC researchers on the subject of that rock is not to be taken seriously. Wait until a recognizable consensus forms elsewhere, if that ever happpens. Personally I doubt it ever will.
- double-clicking a taskbar icon will iconify that application. great for getting stuff out of your way.
:-|
FVWM can be configured to do this.
- right-clicking a taskbar icon gives you a menu which includes 'iconify other windows', which is really handy since I usually have like 14 Konsoles, 11 Netscapes, GAIM, XMMS, Quanta+ and StarOffice open simultaneously.
FVWM can be configured to do this.
- Alt-F2 brings up a little input field which I can use to start an app quicker than using the menus. It keeps a history too, so I can cycle through previous commands.
Xterm can do this.
- Rotating desktop wallpapers. I have a directory of about 450 hi-color psychedelic 1024x768 wallpapers, and I have KDE set to switch to a random one every 30 seconds. Keeps things interesting.
A 20-line shell script can do this.
- Right click on desktop gives you a menu which includes 'Logout'. I find that much easier to deal with than windows, which requires you to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del or click on the Start button.
Any window manager + XDM-managed server does this
So, I guess it's subtle things like that, that make me like KDE so much.
"I guess it's subtle things like the inclusion of a trigger, a handle, and a shoulder rest that make me prefer an RPG launcher to a can of bug spray for killing roaches."
One really interesting consequence of the FBI's punch list being tossed out is this: under current law, anyone who suspects that law enforcement has a pen register on their phone may conceal their call destinations by the simple expedient of making all calls on a calling card. It is currently illegal for LEAs to obtain anything more than your calling card number from the pen register.
In order to defeat this tactic, the LEAs will be forced to apply for phone tap warrants, for which they need to meet a much more exacting legal standard than the one that applies to pen registers.
This is obviously an anomaly, and I doubt that it will stand indefinitely. But before it can be corrected, the court has made clear that the FCC and the industry must demonstrate the ability to filter out "content" information from call-relaying information in post-calling-card-number dialed digits.
Man, if I were an FCC commisioner, I'd be pretty embarrassed at the blunt language the judge used to smack down the Commission. "Lack of reasoned decisionmaking"! That's gotta hurt!
Er, couldn't someone use this exploit to initiate a massive DOS attack on an arbitrary target, merely by sending out 10,000 e-mail messages?
And what if lots of shithead kiddies tried this, with lots of targets?
It's nice to have Bezos on board on this, but talk is cheap. AIPLA and AIPO are gearing up for a lobbying effort. In Congress, the name of the game is fee-for-service-legislation, at least on issues that don't make it onto the radar screens of most voters. As unpleasant as the prospect may be, the patent-reform effort is going to have to match the IPO lawyers dollar-for-dollar if it wants to be successful.
Looking around, I see plenty of virtuous sentiment (Bezos, O'Reilly, even Larry Ellison, apparently), but I see no evidence for a sustained industrial-scale lobbying effort - just a couple of highly publicized meetings. Where is campaign central? Which lobbying firms are being hired? How much money are Amazon, O'Reilly et al. tossing into the kitty?
These are the measures of seriousness in this game. If the "heroes" of this story don't pony up, it means that they're just sucking up to their geek customers who care about IP reform, and their efforts are unlikely to succeed.
I've been in and near NASA too, and I have to say I don't agree with your assessment. Not to say the JPL team wasn't dedicated and hard-working, but what seems to be described here is a contractor problem, not a science team problem.
There is plenty of precedent for this kind of thing. The original Hubble mirror was fucked up by Perkin Elmer, which then proceeded to shade the results of the optical tests - a fact that was not discovered until after Hubble was launched, leading to the NASA-spun "triumph" of the first repair mission.
There was a projact management failure in that case: the contractor was not properly supervised by the project scientists. It sounds like this is also what happened with MPL.
This is almost invariably catastrophic - contractors have different agendas from scientists, and once the contract is secured, they often don't want to do more than the absolute minimum necessary to fulfil it. Successful projects send scientists out to live at the contractor plant, and to read them the Riot Act on a bi-weekly basis.
The problem with encrypting everything is that you can have your key subpoenaed too. If you don't turn over that you get hefty fines (for the defendant) or you case gets forfetured. (for the prosecuter)
The only case that I am aware of in which a court attempted to compel key discovery is the Mitnick case, which is a criminal case. Is there any precedent for a court compelling key discovery in a civil case? In other words, is there any factual basis for the above-quoted claim?
If we try to do this now, under NASA's leadership, we will bankrupt the world.
I have always strongly supported space exploration, and even felt somewhat supportive of human exploration of the solar system. But I have to say that the pre-requisites for doing so in a sane manner are simply not in place. The reasons, sadly, are institutional, rather than technological.
The problem is that most of the effort expended in getting to space actually goes into attaining a Keplerian low-Earth orbit - not just getting the altitude, but changing velocity from an (non-Keplerian) orbital period of 24 hours to one of about 90 minutes, which is how fast we'd be going around if there were no atmospheric friction and we were in "orbit" a few feet above the surface of the Earth. Once in that Keplerian orbit, the energy expended to go elsewhere is not that great, comparatively speaking.
Thus the need for a specialized vehicle to get travellers into that energy state. If you could do this cheaply, with some kind of a "space truck", then the logical thing to do would be to build a space station and stage all space operations from there.
Unfortunately, we don't have a space truck. Instead, we have the Space Shuttle, which is the single most expensive way to get to space ever invented. It is conservatively estimated that shuttle launch costs range upwards of $10000 per pound of payload. Multiply that by the tons of stuff that you need to keep people alive in space, let alone allowing them to accomplish anything useful, and some pretty eye-popping numbers come up. Unsurprisingly, Shuttle operations make up a vast proportion of the cost of building the International Space Station.
The most frustrating thing about this situation, is that it was clear from the early going that the Shuttle was going to be a turkey from the point of view of its intended mission, cheap access to space. But NASA had so much invested politically in the shuttle that it actually quashed alternate launcher development throughout the seventies and eighties, for fear that it might endanger the Shuttle program.
As a result, instead of a space truck, we have a difficult and dangerous experimental vehicle with tens of thousands of failure modes, and sphincters all over the world contract whenever it is launched (I thought I was going to have a heart attack in the first few minutes of the mission that launched the Chandra Observatory).
If these clowns are the guys who are supposed to take us to Mars, it simply isn't going to happen. The technological breakthroughs to keep people alive that long in a big-damn-plastic-bubble are already going to stretch engineering and scientific ingenuity to the limit (viz. Biosphere II). The cost of doing business NASA-style will keep this project in never-never land long past 2015, in my opinion.
We tend to believe that corporations will be more efficient simply because if they aren't, they'll be driven out of buisnuess by the mechanics of the free market.
The "efficiency" of those corporations is irrelevant - the salient point is accountability. Corporations are responsible for their deeds and misdeeds to their stockholders, and to nobody else.
It may be "efficient" for Exxon to dump waste in your back yard. Doubtless their stockholders would be wholly untroubled. Regulation by the "ineffective and inefficient" Government is a citizen's only recourse and protection against the untrammelled exercise of corporate self-interest.
We are our government. It is an organization in whose operations we at least have a say - essentially, we are all stockholders. Exxon, on the other hand, simply doesn't give a shit what I think, since I don't own any of their stock.
I doubt very much that there is any kind of massive sting afoot, either
internationally or in the US. The FBI has no brief to investigate the
normal activities of script kiddies. It turns out that there is no
Federal law forbidding one from gaining unauthorized access to an
Internet host - all such laws in the US are *State* laws, which means
the FBI doesn't investigate violations.
The US Code only prohibits breaking in to so-called "protected
computers" (USC Title 18, Part I, Chapter 47, Section 1030), defined as
follows:
(2) the term ''protected computer'' means a computer -
(A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the
United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not
exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial
institution or the United States Government and the conduct
constituting the offense affects that use by or for the
financial institution or the Government; or
(B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or
communication;
(source: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html)
Clearly, this does not cover most of the activities of script kiddies
and other such pests, most of whom attack "unprotected" computers
(universities, ISPs, corporate web sites, non-US hosts, etc.). This
isn't that much of a surprise, I guess --- the FBI doesn't investigate
breaking-and-entering cases either, unless the burglars attack Federal
property.
I suppose that State District Attorneys could be getting together to
gang up on them, though. Short of Congress changing the law, I guess
that's the best we can hope for.