Russia has a law on copyright. It has some good and bad points. But it is particularly weird on what concerns software copies. It seems that the guys who wrote this part had a pretty good knowledge on how programs work and interact.
Let me note a few important points: 1. You can reverse engineer a program for private purposes. You can use the results of your "hacks" on a product you distribute/sell if:
The "hack" does not contain parts of the original software.
The "hack" adds a functionality not contained on the original software or allows third party programs to interact with the original software.
The "hack" does not create a situation where the original author suffers a significative material loss.
There are also a few things in Russian laws that concern protection and privacy and which are related to software products. Frankly, in the whole there are some chances to distribute programs that circumvent copy protection mechanisms if these mechanisms are too dumb and made by nerds. No court will hear you if you cannot prove that you did made a good effort to protect your program, system or network.
The case with ElcomSoft is quite interesting. Even under Russian law they are beating the very edge of the law. But if they can prove in court that Adobe's security does not cost a penny, then Adobe has no chance to shut up these guys. The judicial system is not perfect but in some cases, dumb security is no more than dumb security. Besides Russian law is quite rough on what concerns certain things like licenses. If a software publisher brings a license like Microsft's EULA (even old ones), then court session might end just on reading that EULA. As they do not conform to the copyright laws in Russia.
Not long ago, somewhere around here there was a tremendous copyright scandal between two companies. One company accused the other of stealing their proprietary designs on some web application. When in court, the thing ended in a few minutes. Why? Well these two companies had an agreement to produce a common product. However when things went bad the agreement was torned off and the defendent just grabbed the whole product and started to use it somehwere else. The accusant brought the case to court on the grounds that they broke in the their site and stealed the thing. There were lots of mumblings as what part of the work belonged to whom as the two companies didn't make an effort to clarify its authorship on the project. However, when the court discovered that the defendant had a read/write Internet connection offered by the accusant for their work and that account was still open, the judge just replied with a "case closed" declaration. The accusant tried to protest but the judge explained that if you are so dumb to produce a work and not making anything to protect it, then no court in Russia would hear them. After this the accusant retired its claims and even didn't try to appeal.
Well this device may look pretty cool. But every technology has its double uses...
First we get it to the kids so they don't get lost or abducted... Pretty and nice toy that kids love to carry. Then we keep track of teenagers and where they get lost by night and if they go to school... We stick a superminiature device to their shoes... Later your boss keeps track of your wanderings and why you get late to work... All under a new fresh product "Window to worker(TM)" sold by another politically correct privacy corp...
If I buy a license for United Linux, I can take any GPL'd software distributed with United Linux and reuse the on 100,000 different machines without paying anyone for that useage.
Until the moment you use an xterm/ssh/Xnest where some "per-seat" piece of software gets "out of the seat" or you turn things into a cluster of machines like Mosix... If you show me how to trace a good border between such possible situations and "per-seat" licensed software then I could agree to see such distros...
Some years ago I solved an horrible situation with computer class support by sticking admins to their seats and allowing them to access tens of workstations/servers through different tools. I wonder if anyone would like to run everytime four floors+100meters up/downhill+two floors just because some piece of soft could only work "per-seat". Specially the control/setup/admin tools that probably UnitedLinux mostly intends to restrict...
Well RMS has been always a strange figure that I frequently couldn't agree with... But this remark of him is just on the spot.
Sticking into a per seat basis a Linux (or GNU/Linux to appease RMS wishes) system does not prevert the GPL. It breaks everything behind and beyond the GPL license. It voids it completely.
Let us note that GPL is not in exact terms the right to use a program. GPL is more a license on the right you have to develop. To have a potential in the future, even if you are not ready or wishing to add a few lines to some piece of code. However, potentially, you have given the right to do that when you may need to. And that's the FUNDAMENT of GPL: you have always the door open to Summer.
Now consider what happens when someone sticks you into a per-seat based license. Yes, this license may be cool for users who just care for the use of software. It may be quite cool for resellers and certain developers as it allows to get some grip on how you sell the product. However it is an axioma that most OSS software evolutes, besides some of it evolutes in explosive manner. In this case you have the doors closed. You may well risk to have some legal trouble if in a per-seat Linux world you try to implement or develop something that goes behind the first intentions of the developper/reseller.
On such a world we get either two results. Either software development stumps into a new butch of feudal developers a-la Microsoft or we get the same old good legal confusion weither such or such product can be or cannot be used and where piracy will be uncontrollable from a technical point of view. We have already passed this in Microsoft's early days.
Either you are capitalist, socialist, anarchist or Jedi, whatever your tastes are, you will stuck into a swamp if such kind of licensing will be allowed. Of course you may agree/disagree at first. The problem is that the embroglia will start only when a critical volume of needs on development will stuck with a penguin on a seatbelt...
As a longtime observer of the mega-series "Going to Mars", it seems that some people are real eager to avoid seeing someone walking there. All this looks much more as the prolongation of this soap-opera to cope with some "less interesting" discoveries which point not only to the presence of water in places like the equator but also with the fact that some places strongly suggest the presence of living beings out there (small and thiny but probably bigger than bacteria).
It is interesting to note that since the end of the 60's there have been lots of news that could bring some positive moves on sending a manned craft there. However the large part of these stories don't get even the last page of the web. The rest gets some atention when it is NASA or its affiliates who found something (maybe to appease the taxpayers). But even these discoveries get into oblivion after a few massmedia dumb articles.
Specially interesting to note that after such or similar discoveries, for a week or two we keep hearing that "Mars case moves on", "New findings give a boost to manned mission". After that we catch a lot of critics who repeat all the same song that the findings add nothing either because they are flaw, useless or the discoverer drinks too much. Later we get Hoagland & Co. talking on how this is connected with the hyperphysical squareness of the Egyptian Pyramids and how Tuthankamon still rules the world from his sarcophage by sending telephatic waves to the Face of Mars and back...
And we wait for the next discovery... If it is about having some living dark dirt on the surface don't worry. We already know that Tuthankamon has his hand on it, that the government is after it and we just wait for the next discovery...
On what concerns Man on Mars... Well maybe one day, far, far away...
Just a note on how military are involved on spreading the evil "specter" all over the world. Just one name that means all:
"TCP/IP"
It's open, clear and crystal like water. The whole world uses it. 90% of open/closed source network systems depend on it. It's open, it's readable. And it's ARPA...
What else is needed to talk about the military involvement? From start to end, many things done on computers are orginally military by their nature... First computers were created for military needs, let's not forget this. And today nearly everyone uses them. From Taco to Ben Laden...
In my work as system administrator I have found that no matter one says, cries or yells, people keep using dumb passwords. First of all people do love to use the infamous "1234" password. Such password can be found in such interesting places like the main accountant network access on a commercial bank, on a door to a restricted area and, the most amazing of all on a half-forgotten sysadmin account into a backbone network (one guy just forgot a test account with such password). But that's not the worst. The worst is when your computer carries your account name, and your password is the same as your login.
The general claim that "50% of passwords are bad" is too optimistic. I prefer to risk my reputation and claim that more than 90% of passwords are worse than bad. Most people use Windows and this system carries so many holes that is easy to catch a few password hashes just by sniffing a network. Besides, most people don't have even a basic knowledge of security so it is tremendously easy to catch an account with administrator's rights. Once you get one, you are on the free road - all depends on your knowledge and experience.
But not only Windows is on the black road. UNIX also. Most people have a high tendency to call for trouble. Many don't even read in front of their eyes THOSE BIG WARNINGS STATING THAT IF YOU TURN ON THIS THING YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN! And so we get telnets, ftps and many other daemons running with SUIDS, root network accesses and "come in and get what you want! Bye and come again!!!" In result most netowrks are completely open to any attacks from outside. A black hat hacker needs only patience, accuracy and cold-blood to create havock. No one would even get a hint that someone is one their nets...
Not long ago I was asked to test one network. I roam the whole thing, reaching the most holy of the net and catching tons of sysadmin info just by grabbing network packages. Some passwords were so easy to calculate/guess that it took only minutes to become sysadmin. With them I went further and started to take control of the whole net. I was a few minutes of destroying the whole network when I stopped all tests. I tested the net for a few days. All that could be detected was that one sysadmin saw a "small" problem when I mistakenly sent ssh to another location (no matter that I sent tens of provocative actions over their net to get their attention). However this was too small info to check the author of the work. Their luck was that they had a greyer hacker in their nets... A Cyberpunker would not be so humble.
That's not the exclusion. That's the state of thousands of critical networks. That's the common denominator.
No matter who's the attacker, the site may become again a first target... War is a trick thing:
-Commander, we just checked up the new pics. They are a bit blurred due to those high altitude blasts but still we can discern some activity in Kansas...
-Oh, oh, oooooh... What's that object over there?
- Well it's a nuclear silo but, according to our data, it was decomissioned several years ago...
-And the tracks? What about those pickups over there? And that shiny swimming pool is also 20 years old? Damn how americans live... Blasting everything around and having a 5 star hotel in a military zone...
-Well, our agents didn't informed about any revitalization of old bases... Maybe it's...
-Soldier ARE YOU BLIND? DON'T YOU SEE WHAT YOU HAVE IN FRONT OF YOURS EYES????? THEY ALREADY REVITALIZED IT!!!! BLOW THEM UP!!!!
You have airplanes, spy satellites, drones and zillions of high-tech stuff to draw a war in Afghanistan and drop them to the Stone Age. Do you think this will help you? Personally I doubt. Because Afghanistan LIVES in the Stone Age.
I heard several stories on the Afghan war. And Soviet Union made a high-tech war there. Much more high-tech than the US in Vietnam. Because only that way they could have some little confidence they could control anything. For the Soviets, Afghan land was something like a mining field. Most of the travel, intelligence, combat, transport was made through the air. Through land you could only travel on columns with tanks and artillery. And, as the soviet war veteran pointed, you could not rely on what afghans told you. Well in fact you could not even rely on official afghan sources. So intel had a very high component of high-tech and satellites.
Afghans didn't have no bases, airfields, not even tanks. A large group of afghans didn't have even modern AK-47s and relied on old weapons, some of which were left behind by the Brittish 100 years ago. And still they managed to turn Afghanistan into a wasp nest. Why? American help? Well that helped them a lot but it was not the crucial factor. The crucial factor were the harsh conditons of Afghanistan.
You go through a mountain in a super-modern high-tech heli, all over you see rocks, sand, more rocks, more sand. There are not even bushes. And suddenly a Stinger kisses you out. You go down and your companion tries to guess where the shot came from. He goes around and around, ready to smash up the hideout with is overpowerful Gatling gun. Nothing. And, in front of your face, a small hole appears and a shotgun blasts your cabin.
Two helis down, a small afghan comes out from a small hole covered with straw and sand, and happily goes down the valley to see if he can get an head for his collection.
In case you don't learn our mistakes, that's the war you will have to fight in Afghan.
Note: Blasting mountains with rockets doesn't do a shit to those mountains. Napalm, powerful vacuum bombs, nukes, the Hell in flames are also helpless. Like in Vietnam, you will just kill a few rats and snakes and, if you are lucky, smoke out one or two warriors.
About the second airplane
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Well just a curious thing. I and some friends look for several times over the films on the second plane. Besides we crashed several times over WTC. Yes it is a simple flight simulator but it gives some interesting ideas on how things could have happened. And came into some conclusions...
1. The bastard should have had REAL flight hours. Very real flight hours. He managed to level the inertia of the plane and stuck it directly to WTC over a not so clear sight. He should have piloted that or a similar plane for some good time.
2. I wonder if he was not a civil pilot with civil training but a pilot with some warfighting knowledge. It is hard to make that turn he did in the last moment. Besides, it's more propper for a warfighting pilot to do such things rather than a civil pilot having a civil training and accustomed to a civil airliner.
So a warning to you people and specially those used to see blockbusters with russians, arabs, chinese or latins saying AAAAARRGGHHHSSS and UUUURRRRRGGHS. Forget your Van Dams, Schwarzneggers and Stallones. Forget even the stereotypes who are used to about blacks, yellows or not-so-white. This new enemy is much more smart well-prepared and trained to kick our ass than ever before. This new evil is a soldier with an higher education than 90% of us and speaks several languages and pilots airplanes as a professional. This new enemy has a moral that is more deadly than every nuke we can think of.
Well, again we meet speculations, speculations and speculations on why WTC collapsed. Well, a previous/. news had a much better link on the whys of the towers going down the way they did. Apart of technicities and maybes let's put a clear point on this story:
The towers went down because they should have done that.
Yes it is horrible that thousands of lifes died on it. But just imagine what would have happened if the tower's security would me made more on standing up and not on falling down. Note that these two objectives cannot be equally achieved in the same level. If one makes a construction stronghold, then it would risk to see things falling from 400 meters over God knows where. On the contrary, if one would make a structure that easily falls down under the first serious weakness, then forget about strenghts.
The people who built WTC made a marvelous construction and we could see it in the way it went down. And be thankful to them for that. If not, just imagine that tower flying down over people who were hundreds of meters away. Imagine the HUGE fire that could break down in lower Manhattan. Note that, under the circumstances of the tragedy, a larger distribution of fire could easily create what is known to some experts as "fire front".
Fire fronts are things that usually remind tales of nuclear wars. But they are real and they happened. They happened in Roterdam in 1940. They were also the cause of the horrible destruction of Dresden in the end of the war. Fire fronts are fires that come up due to large temperatures and streets creating aerodynamical high-speed air currents. In fact, when the second tower went down I was really afraid that we could have got that thing. However the very local fall managed to cut the chances for fire to create a large surface, the main condition for a fire front.
So instead of blaming constructors and think on securities, shoulds, shouldn'ts, maybes and whatifs, maybe you should stop a little and thank those guys for having made a real secure construction. When they did that, no one could even imagine that hijacked airplanes would stuck fullspeed on the construction... Thank God that even after that the "critical fire plan" worked and we didn't have half Manhattan turned into a oven.
First I would like to send my condolences to all victims and their relatives of this horrendous crime. We are all with you.
Now about Katz:
"Technology turns planes into weapons. It tracks aircraft hundreds of miles away. It brings us instant and horrific images. It sends us to e-mail, telephones and cell phones to spread news, facts, rumors and stories."
No it is not technology that turns things into weapons. It is something inside us: the animal instincts. Instincts that are far from the human mind, instincts that lead people to hate, fear, rancour and submission. For terrorists there are no weapons. Their weapons is our emotions.
According to certain reports these guys took these airplanes with knifes, tear gas and nearly bare hands. And used these airplanes as kamikadze cruiser missiles. Where is technology here? They used everything in their hands, from a knife to an airplane, to give a blow in our souls. For them, the cost of tens of thousands of lives means nothing. For them the destruction of one of them main world trade centers means nothing to their pockets. For them, your fear and hatred means everything.
These people did not choose military or economical targets. They choosed symbols. They didn't choose an airplane as an high technological weapon. They choose it because it was big and has lots of fuel. These guys didn't decide to destroy thousands of American lives and billions of dollars of property. They choose the souls of millions of America's and World citizens to leave a tool of terror.
These guys don't need ballistic missiles, laser weapons, GPS, sattelites, washing machines, Ferraris, TV sets or Internet. They need you. And they will use everything in their hand, from sticks to airports to leave in you soul a permanent wound. Not long ago they used boats and dynamite. Today they used airplanes and knifes. Tomorrow they may use anything else. But they will always use your horror.
However you should not give ground for your emotions to overcome you mind. A terrorist is nothing in front of those who cold-mindly and objectively target him. Not with cruisers and last cry stealth airplanes. But with the aim the he no longer will be a menace to our relatives, friends, co-citizens and countries. Terrorists can only hide beyond your fear and hatred. But when mind and justice comes up, he has no place to run. Like President Putin said, when chechen terrorists struck in Daghestan: "We will go after every terrorist.. We will nail him, even if he hides up in the toilet".
Well the article mentions a huge boost of sales. I believe Lego has some good and experienced marketing department to predict sales under the conditions they think are correct. However LegOS, NQC and other Open Source stuff may have called a completely unpredictable boost. As the toy became something else, which managers could not think of.
Besides, many higher-education institutions and even the US Air Force use it to teach robotics. An Air Force teacher even made a Ada->NQC translator for this toy. Now the question is, would Mindstorms be what it is today without Open Source? I doubt. Probably it would be another cute toy among thousands in a lost shelf of a Lego store.
On what concerns LegOS. It is very hard to confuse a name with its purpose because, apart of its relation to Lego Mindstorms, this thing is useless . So it is hard to confuse it with something else. If LegOS was more general and had a more broad use, then Lego could have had a right to claim defense of its good name. But the fact is that LegOS is deeply dependent on the technical characteristics of Mindstorms. So it is hard to miss it. So its name is, somehow, an additional advertisement for the set.
I think it is correct that LegOS has such a name. Because it is a real true "Lego Operating System". So much for the purisms of today's libertarian commercialism where "all's MINE!!!!".
Well, since news broke some years ago, I tried to get an hand on a Lego Mindstorms. And well I'm old enough to vote a few times. However it is hard to get hands on materials and try to get a robot out of it. With Lego voila. It is cute, it's a toy but it has all the basics. One can read megatons of books but never become an expert without having some life with the Real-Thing (TM).
Back then we had 17th of August, salaries going down 6 times and a rumours about Russia gong nuts. Besides back then we had Lego already but it was impossible even to search for a Technics set.
Well two years passed. And in one shop I saw the damn bastard hanging. What to do? Get the money! Well, I was short of 20 dollars to get it, and my friends decided to protect me from this madness. So I thought I had lost my chance...
However, recently it was my birthday. And I thought I should get a real good gift for myself. Well I was sure that the robot was already gone, bought by some fattened father for his not less fattened son. And what I see? That same set hanging just behind dozens of other Legos. One could barely see it on the corner. I asked the shopper why that thing was hanging there. "Well no one buys it. It's too expensive and people fear kids break it..." Besides the price was lowered by... Just guess... 20 dollars!.. Well I just said : "Freeze up that thing there I'M GOING TO GET THE MONEY!!!!!" In less than half-hour, I had the box in my desk.
Right now the robot is here just facing my computer and waiting for another bunch of stupid commands that make him stuck the walls. I study NQC, LegOS and looking over some Forth and Ada realizations. On free time I read the processor specs and think on its potential uses. I'm thinking on how this stuff can be used to teach students some basics of robotics and AI. Besides, some people got quite interested on this stuff and think to buy a similar toy. Like me, they all vote for quite a long time...:)
This is a tale of a lost and lonely robot in the corner of the shop. If Lego will try to "recover" its market, then this and many other robots will just lay there, with no use. No one of us needs their "Bricks constructor". We all need specs, tools, firmwares and open source. Because this is the best of all robots to learn the basics of robotics. And it is a great and cute yellow pet. In fact Lego should have made its toy for "Ages 20+"
To Lego people if you see this. Keep it open source and help people to develope more soft for it. The reward will be much great than keeping it on the shelf for kids who their parents fear.
Well some people have noted that I wrote quite a lot on this news. Well I have been on this stuff and frankly it hurts the flag to see some people caring too much about apparencies.
However I forgot to mention one detail. Well dunes, dunes and dunes. However I said that not everywhere we see "dunes". And forgot to mention why. There is a strange morphology on some of these dunes that doesn't go with the classical view of dunes. NASA and Malin say it is due to the physical characteristics of the dark sands. Not so, as no matter the nature of this dark, dunes are highly dependent on the dynamics of windblows. In places where one may find bright and dark dunes together. ne can see that they differ radically. Bright dunes tend to create the "classical" half-moon shape, while dark dunes are frequently seen as small hills with a morphology similar to the form of water drops. But that's not all. In some places, dark dunes create "bridges" among each other. These bridges are very thin. And usually connect the upper/lower edges of the dark dunes and not their extremes as it would be frequent on "usual" sand dunes. But there is something on these dark dunes that is more important than anything else. They overcome sometimes sharp land obstacles. They seem to jump over small but steep cliffs and unite dunes between each other.
Not all dark dunes look like this. Such dunes I described here are more frequent to be found on lower latitudes near the equator.
Hope I didn't bother you people too much. But please, forget about the tale that "There is and can't be no Life in Mars". Just leave the question open. Until we get more pragmatic and less political people aiming to find a soution.
Ok, what is an ecosystem for you? For Martians an ecosystem might be a highly freezing and dry land with lack of oxygen and very scarce on nutrients. Besides having deadly UV rays bathing its surface.
Now we know that many organisms are highly adaptive to frost. But Mars has also has a temperature regime ranging from -200 upt +32. Well, considering the low levels of pressure, +32 might be a boiling temperature for a Martian... In fact, for living beings, the problem is the ratio temperature/pressure that gives a chance for physico-chemical reactions to produce a controllable level of heat. If heat dissipates too fast or keeps too long, then even a Earthling would be doomed.
Besides we know that living beings can adapt to deep dry conditions by saving water to the maximum. However, in Mars, we know that there are huge water pockets underground even in low latitudes.
Oxygen? Well in most terms we and 90% of earthlings are true aliens. The true pioneers of our Earth HATE oxygen. And still survive...
Scarce nutrients? Well we know that Mars is VERY RICH on surface minerals. Iron for example. And it is there in the best forms for certain Earth bacteria to use it. And if there is one thing Mars looks better than Earth, then it is in this feature.
UV. Well, why Martians should live right on the surface? Some earthlings have their home kilometers underground...
On what concerns apparencies. On Earth there is a place called Antarctida Dry Valleys. For nearly ten years people thought they were completely sterile. And among them there were several members of Viking Project. However Professor Vishniac and other scientists have shown that this was a wrong view. Life is thriving in this deadly place and even has indigenous species.
That's a classical view of the planet. However you forget to note that Mars was "wiped" out from a large piece of its surface. At least most of the surface water went somewhere into space. However, considering the analysis of surface in the Northern hemisphere and taking into consideration to "internal" seas in Arabia Terra, Mars had a large body of water. Today only pockets can be seen in certain regions.
Apart from this there are indications that today's atmosphere is far from being the original one. Isotopic analysis shows that a large part of todays gases came recently from under the surface. Not milliards but a few millions of years.
Meanwhile this planet shows clear traces of huge, gigantic cataclisms. Look at the Northern Hemisphere, Hellas and the miriad of craters. Besides look at the gigantic valleys caused by mega-floods which are much more recent than the impact traces of the early times. The planet seemed to have a very hot childhood. Besides, something serious happened in its early maturity. So big that today's upper layers are simply washouts of this tragedy.
So speaking about "natural" conditions is quite hard for a planet like Mars. Of course that this may suggest that Mars could hardly be a place for Life. But didn't we have the same thing on Earth? The Moon, the pre-Cambric frost, the Permian, the African mega-craters, the Cretacian... And recently we started to know that even our historical period may have had some big shakeups. After the findings on the Black Sea, where people discovered artifacts and constructions 150 meters deep, no one doubts that the Flood, Atlantis and other tales may have a very serious historical ground.
And, well, we are still here. So why Martians shouldn't?
There is another story with another moral. The story is called the search for Life in Mars and is more real and much more tragic. Real because it does not recur to fables, tales and pseudo-scientific BS. It is the story of thousands of people, scientists, engineers, technicians and amateurs who tried to make a real and true search. Tragic because, at least there is already one casualty on it: Professor Wolf Vishniac. This man was the first to think on a true scientific search for alien forms. He invented the first apparatus to achive this goal, the Wolf Trap. By the time of Viking project, it was considered as one of the more reliable to test for the search. However it was removed from the Vikings due to "lack of funds".
But that's half of the story. After this event, Professor Vishniac was faced with a campaign to devaluate his work and abilities. However, he didn't gave up. To prove that his experiment worked, he went to Antarctida, to a place his opposers considered completely void of any native lifeforms. There he died in weird circumstances. However his collegues managed to recover some of the apparatus he left there. Today this region, the Dry Valleys, are considered to possess indigenous microorganisms due to the work of Professor Vishniac.
However this didn't demove his opposers from keeping their negative campaign on him. On 1986 a very well professor of exobiology, published a work where Professor Vishniac was not even mentioned as being member of the exobiology team and where his Antarctida expedition was seen as an extravagant attempt to analyse problems on sterilisation of spacecraft... This Professor is known as Norman Horowitz... For those who dont know him, he was one of the opponents to the sterilisation of martian probes and one of the leaders of one of the exobiology experiments that went on the Vikings. The one that seemed to prove that there is no life in Mars...
The moral of the story is:
If you try hard then you may prove that Life only exists on Earth...
If you wanna check up this try to read some of Horowitz works...
What these dodos forget to mention is that first the lower layers of the dunes become dark and then the upper ones. Now anyone in the high latitudes knows that everything happens in the opposite! The Sun first heats up the steepest slopes. The only possible "violation" to this rule on Earth is due to water flowing down the slopes. But in Mars water can only flow in high quantities and mixed with sands or earth! However, what we have here is thin layers of some bright material, probably ice, as, in some other places, dust-devils easily wipe out this stuff...
So their interpretation doesn't look so solid as it seems...
There are places like NW Hellas that show a "rule of the tumb" for these formations. There, big dust-devils roam all over. And they uncover the small layer of bright material that covers a very dark surface. The "bright" layer is probably very small and uniform, it is either frost or something else, as there are minimal differences in the darkness of these surfaces. Note that dust-devils frequently roam without "seeing" the landscape features. In NW Hellas and some other places, whereever they pass, they leave a dark surface. The general pattern of the region shows hills, cliffs, valleys and boulders. But it is interesting to note that they look very "smoothed" . In time, these paths tend to vanish by getting brighter. However, instead of showing dust covering or anything similar, they seem to vanish in a layered pattern. The paths seem to become brighter from the edges to the center.
NW Hellas is quite far from the poles. However, these dark tracks are also seen in places with a morphology very similar to the one seen on the hungarian discovery. There are a few frames where one can see dust devils roaming over dunes and leaving similar, but not so contrasting patterns. So this is probably not temperature changes.
Well on what concerns the moc picture. This is a very general view of the place but it shows one of the main features of the dark spots. These formations seem to love craters, specially in the equator. From the equator to the poles they tend to cover the craters, and sometimes one can see, mostly at latitudes above 45 degrees, craters that have a completely dark surface.
In a regional basis, these formations possess frequently a direction, probably dependent on winds. However, it seems the are also dependent on light or something else as there is a weirdness on their location. Northern craters and southern craters tend to have these spots located in opposite directions and seem to avoid the most intensive sunlight. Besides they "rotate" over the craters from equator to the poles. In the equator they are small and not so frequent, tending to be located over the edges of the craters. Going to the poles they start to cover a weider part of the crater. In a very very weird form. Like clocks...
It is difficult to explain this but I'll try. Imagine a nearly equatorial crater with very thin dark strips over the section where sunlight is less intensive. Now "move" that crater up to the pole. You will see that the dark patches start to cover more and more of the crater and most times over the direction of less intensive sunlight. Near the poles the crater becomes completely dark. Features inside the crater become smooth.
Now this happens over both hemispheres, North and South. But if ones compares south and north craters they look mostly symmetrical. However there are serious exceptions. Craters in a place called Acydalia Planitia seem likely to those seen on Shoutern Hemisphere. Apart of this widepsread "rule violation", other places seem to conform to this rule...
The problem with M$ is not they always break something. The problem is that they break something and don't give a chance to fix it.
That's why open source exists for. If things get broken, then, there is a very high chance to fix things up if one has access to code and gets an idea of the new features, bugs and innovations. If a developer thinks he is doing right on going away from standards and practices, then let it be. He is the author and he knows best what he may want or not. However, he should care that the people, dependent of his creation (aka users), will have a chance to readapt. On open source, a developer may not have to worry too much on this, because, if his product is popular and he is a good guy, there will be other developers that may help to convert data or code to the new conditions.
On closed source, the developer himself should care to do this conversion. However, as we see, this is quite expensive in terms of resources and leads to the main bulk of the project going bloat and buggy. So, if you do care about innovation and stability do open source and keep the people coming to you.
Well I posted yesterday a note about this, but, as usual got it rejected. So I will try to reproduce it and give some more detail.
These aren't news. It's great that Hungarian scientists made lines on the mass media, but, for years, people has been discussing the features and characteristcs of these "dark spots" or "dark dunes" as NASA terms it. They are all over the planet. From the poles to the equator, one can find miriads of this stuff. But there is a big problem with them. While some have features that highly remind dunes, the large majority of them are far from being interpreted as dunes. The problem is that these formations sometimes appear near to brighter and more earthlike dunes. However , while the "bright" dunes possess all characteristics of what we know about dunes, these ones have morphologies that sometimes go far away from the aerodynamical laws that create dunes.
One of the most scandalous features of the dark dunes is that their morphology frequently suggest that they form completely in the opposite direction of the "bright" dunes. As if wind is blowing 180 degrees opposite. NASA interprets this as if "bright" dunes were supposed to be older petrified ones. Great but there are two problems on this interpretation. First it is frequent to see dark dunes "hidding" behind hills, craters or big "bright" dunes. Second, the general erosive pattern on certain regions shows that the wind is still blowing the way "bright" dunes are formed. However dark dunes are there, and it is frequent to see them behind the most protected areas from windblows.
Meanwhile "weirdnesses" don't end here. There are many more. The most interesting is that, in some places like NW Hellas, one can see that dust devils uncover a very dark surface, probably a few centimeters underground. No matter, hills, valleys, dunes, boulders and cliffs, the dark devils leave in Hellas always dark paths. These paths are very dark and produce an intrictaed pattern. With time, these paths tend to brighten, however they brighten in a layered form, from the edges to the center. Besides, in some enhanced images, these brightening paths seem to possess a certain form of radiosity, like those we see in thunder rays. However this is hard to confirm for the moment as they appear very near the acceptable limit of resolution. So, for the moment, I would leave this as an interesting feature, not more.
On what concerns the claims of the hungarian scientists. They are great and they are probably doing a great job. But the problem is that this news passed nearly unnoticed. They didn't make front pages even on the Space sections of certain Internet mass media. In fact this and similar discoveries have been slightly silenced for quite long. An year ago, on a mail exchange with Dr. Van Flandern I have seen a very similar frame, and even then he was already suggesting a biologic possibility for these spots. I should note that many people here may have a very scheptical relation to Dr. Van Flandern. However, he is not the only one and there are other people who have a more conservative mind and still cannot avoid to think about this possibilities.
Mars is freezing death but one should not consider this as a "proof" that there is no life in Mars. In fact we have some places in Antarctida who also were thought to be completely sterile and still there are organisms that can survive there. And we alwyas thought that 100 degrees Kelvin kills all microbes but some still make a life above it and under pressures that would smash any human being.
Besides, there are problems with the well known Viking experiments. Some years ago, it was shown that the mass spectrometer could have been broken and Profesor Levin, one of the members of the Viking project and the creator of one of the biologic experiments, noted that palladium carried on the spectrometer instruments, could have destroyed the minimal contents of organics that the mars samples carried. Besides, on Viking Project, there was a situation when one of the members, consciously and deliberately, tried to destroy the work of one of his colleagues. I would suggest everyone to check up the life of Professor Wolf Vishniac, the pioneer of exobiology and the tragic fate of him and his experiment called "Wolf Trap".
So I consider the question of Life in Mars is still open. Are the dark dunes, living colonies of martians. Probably.
"I think they should get into the business of crashing space stations into the Pacific, and bringing tourists on boats to watch the fireworks."
A: Russia had a station there for twice the projected lifetime.
B: Russia produced the first true "permanent" spacestation - Salyut 7. Mir is in fact the second such station.
C: Russia had several spacestations. The first was Salyut 1 and was set up in the beginning of the 70's. America only one of its own...
D: To bring up Alpha, after years of rumbling with Congress, funds and a failed spacestation, NASA had to recur to Russia to bring up the backbone of the future station.
E: When new/old NASA administration started to show that they may drastically cut funds for ISS, Russia came up with the purposal of getting the main bulk of development.
Yes Russia is short of money and had many oops in its space development. But even having its pockets rotten, it does not quit Space and tries to keep things up. In fact Russia has been always living with rotten pockets. However, it sent the first stuff and people to Space and it was first on reaching other planets. Besides it is the ONLY ONE country having a permanent presence on what concerns spacestations. Don't forget - Alpha lives thanks to the Russian backbone...
Finally Martian Armies took the last Mankind's strongold. And finally the Solar System will be get rid of this miserable, cowardous and treacherous race of primates...
All started in some rainy day in the beginning of the XXI century. Back then, among some monkeys an idea came to use some of our ancesters to explore Mars. Under the name of what they called Science, thousands of our brothers were sent to Mars. They suffered from lower gravity, high doses of radiation, hunger and lack of oxygen. They died by the thousands. And the monkeys, not satisfied with this suffering tried to genetically modify and clone our borthers so that they could serve as miserable intruments of their ambitious "conque of Mars".
However we, Rats, have had a long tradition of freedom and self-conscience. Truly the monkeys have had overcome us by size and strength. With the exception of a few minor rebelions made by some of the most corageous rats in the Middle Ages, we had to hide under earth, in small caves and holes till we could wait our hour.
That hour came when the hideous "scientific" experiments gave birth to the Martian "stainless steel rats II" as the monkey monsters named them. Higher and stronger than monkeys they manage to stage the first rebellion that successfully freed Mars from the claws of the human race. For hundreds of years we fought a path back home to free our more little brothers. Many millions died on this march...
But today we finally took the last strongold. After long hours of fight, the monkeys agreed on a unconditional surrendering. We could destroy all of them but our higher rathan principles should prevail over our longstanding will of revenge. Humbly we will close all of them into zoos and genetic labs.
Slashdot Mirror
Russia has a law on copyright. It has some good and bad points. But it is particularly weird on what concerns software copies. It seems that the guys who wrote this part had a pretty good knowledge on how programs work and interact.
Let me note a few important points:
1. You can reverse engineer a program for private purposes.
You can use the results of your "hacks" on a product you distribute/sell if:
The "hack" does not contain parts of the original software.
The "hack" adds a functionality not contained on the original software or allows third party programs to interact with the original software.
The "hack" does not create a situation where the original author suffers a significative material loss.
There are also a few things in Russian laws that concern protection and privacy and which are related to software products. Frankly, in the whole there are some chances to distribute programs that circumvent copy protection mechanisms if these mechanisms are too dumb and made by nerds. No court will hear you if you cannot prove that you did made a good effort to protect your program, system or network.
The case with ElcomSoft is quite interesting. Even under Russian law they are beating the very edge of the law. But if they can prove in court that Adobe's security does not cost a penny, then Adobe has no chance to shut up these guys. The judicial system is not perfect but in some cases, dumb security is no more than dumb security. Besides Russian law is quite rough on what concerns certain things like licenses. If a software publisher brings a license like Microsft's EULA (even old ones), then court session might end just on reading that EULA. As they do not conform to the copyright laws in Russia.
Not long ago, somewhere around here there was a tremendous copyright scandal between two companies. One company accused the other of stealing their proprietary designs on some web application. When in court, the thing ended in a few minutes. Why? Well these two companies had an agreement to produce a common product. However when things went bad the agreement was torned off and the defendent just grabbed the whole product and started to use it somehwere else. The accusant brought the case to court on the grounds that they broke in the their site and stealed the thing. There were lots of mumblings as what part of the work belonged to whom as the two companies didn't make an effort to clarify its authorship on the project. However, when the court discovered that the defendant had a read/write Internet connection offered by the accusant for their work and that account was still open, the judge just replied with a "case closed" declaration. The accusant tried to protest but the judge explained that if you are so dumb to produce a work and not making anything to protect it, then no court in Russia would hear them. After this the accusant retired its claims and even didn't try to appeal.
Well this device may look pretty cool. But every technology has its double uses...
First we get it to the kids so they don't get lost or abducted... Pretty and nice toy that kids love to carry.
Then we keep track of teenagers and where they get lost by night and if they go to school... We stick a superminiature device to their shoes...
Later your boss keeps track of your wanderings and why you get late to work... All under a new fresh product "Window to worker(TM)" sold by another politically correct privacy corp...
If I buy a license for United Linux, I can take any GPL'd software distributed with United Linux and reuse the on 100,000 different machines without paying anyone for that useage.
Until the moment you use an xterm/ssh/Xnest where some "per-seat" piece of software gets "out of the seat" or you turn things into a cluster of machines like Mosix... If you show me how to trace a good border between such possible situations and "per-seat" licensed software then I could agree to see such distros...
Some years ago I solved an horrible situation with computer class support by sticking admins to their seats and allowing them to access tens of workstations/servers through different tools. I wonder if anyone would like to run everytime four floors+100meters up/downhill+two floors just because some piece of soft could only work "per-seat". Specially the control/setup/admin tools that probably UnitedLinux mostly intends to restrict...
Well RMS has been always a strange figure that I frequently couldn't agree with... But this remark of him is just on the spot.
Sticking into a per seat basis a Linux (or GNU/Linux to appease RMS wishes) system does not prevert the GPL. It breaks everything behind and beyond the GPL license. It voids it completely.
Let us note that GPL is not in exact terms the right to use a program. GPL is more a license on the right you have to develop. To have a potential in the future, even if you are not ready or wishing to add a few lines to some piece of code. However, potentially, you have given the right to do that when you may need to. And that's the FUNDAMENT of GPL: you have always the door open to Summer.
Now consider what happens when someone sticks you into a per-seat based license. Yes, this license may be cool for users who just care for the use of software. It may be quite cool for resellers and certain developers as it allows to get some grip on how you sell the product. However it is an axioma that most OSS software evolutes, besides some of it evolutes in explosive manner. In this case you have the doors closed. You may well risk to have some legal trouble if in a per-seat Linux world you try to implement or develop something that goes behind the first intentions of the developper/reseller.
On such a world we get either two results. Either software development stumps into a new butch of feudal developers a-la Microsoft or we get the same old good legal confusion weither such or such product can be or cannot be used and where piracy will be uncontrollable from a technical point of view. We have already passed this in Microsoft's early days.
Either you are capitalist, socialist, anarchist or Jedi, whatever your tastes are, you will stuck into a swamp if such kind of licensing will be allowed. Of course you may agree/disagree at first. The problem is that the embroglia will start only when a critical volume of needs on development will stuck with a penguin on a seatbelt...
As a longtime observer of the mega-series "Going to Mars", it seems that some people are real eager to avoid seeing someone walking there. All this looks much more as the prolongation of this soap-opera to cope with some "less interesting" discoveries which point not only to the presence of water in places like the equator but also with the fact that some places strongly suggest the presence of living beings out there (small and thiny but probably bigger than bacteria).
It is interesting to note that since the end of the 60's there have been lots of news that could bring some positive moves on sending a manned craft there. However the large part of these stories don't get even the last page of the web. The rest gets some atention when it is NASA or its affiliates who found something (maybe to appease the taxpayers). But even these discoveries get into oblivion after a few massmedia dumb articles.
Specially interesting to note that after such or similar discoveries, for a week or two we keep hearing that "Mars case moves on", "New findings give a boost to manned mission". After that we catch a lot of critics who repeat all the same song that the findings add nothing either because they are flaw, useless or the discoverer drinks too much. Later we get Hoagland & Co. talking on how this is connected with the hyperphysical squareness of the Egyptian Pyramids and how Tuthankamon still rules the world from his sarcophage by sending telephatic waves to the Face of Mars and back...
And we wait for the next discovery... If it is about having some living dark dirt on the surface don't worry. We already know that Tuthankamon has his hand on it, that the government is after it and we just wait for the next discovery...
On what concerns Man on Mars... Well maybe one day, far, far away...
Just a note on how military are involved on spreading the evil "specter" all over the world. Just one name that means all:
"TCP/IP"
It's open, clear and crystal like water. The whole world uses it. 90% of open/closed source network systems depend on it. It's open, it's readable. And it's ARPA...
What else is needed to talk about the military involvement? From start to end, many things done on computers are orginally military by their nature... First computers were created for military needs, let's not forget this. And today nearly everyone uses them. From Taco to Ben Laden...
In my work as system administrator I have found that no matter one says, cries or yells, people keep using dumb passwords. First of all people do love to use the infamous "1234" password. Such password can be found in such interesting places like the main accountant network access on a commercial bank, on a door to a restricted area and, the most amazing of all on a half-forgotten sysadmin account into a backbone network (one guy just forgot a test account with such password). But that's not the worst. The worst is when your computer carries your account name, and your password is the same as your login.
The general claim that "50% of passwords are bad" is too optimistic. I prefer to risk my reputation and claim that more than 90% of passwords are worse than bad. Most people use Windows and this system carries so many holes that is easy to catch a few password hashes just by sniffing a network. Besides, most people don't have even a basic knowledge of security so it is tremendously easy to catch an account with administrator's rights. Once you get one, you are on the free road - all depends on your knowledge and experience.
But not only Windows is on the black road. UNIX also. Most people have a high tendency to call for trouble. Many don't even read in front of their eyes THOSE BIG WARNINGS STATING THAT IF YOU TURN ON THIS THING YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN! And so we get telnets, ftps and many other daemons running with SUIDS, root network accesses and "come in and get what you want! Bye and come again!!!" In result most netowrks are completely open to any attacks from outside. A black hat hacker needs only patience, accuracy and cold-blood to create havock. No one would even get a hint that someone is one their nets...
Not long ago I was asked to test one network. I roam the whole thing, reaching the most holy of the net and catching tons of sysadmin info just by grabbing network packages. Some passwords were so easy to calculate/guess that it took only minutes to become sysadmin. With them I went further and started to take control of the whole net. I was a few minutes of destroying the whole network when I stopped all tests. I tested the net for a few days. All that could be detected was that one sysadmin saw a "small" problem when I mistakenly sent ssh to another location (no matter that I sent tens of provocative actions over their net to get their attention). However this was too small info to check the author of the work. Their luck was that they had a greyer hacker in their nets... A Cyberpunker would not be so humble.
That's not the exclusion. That's the state of thousands of critical networks. That's the common denominator.
No matter who's the attacker, the site may become again a first target... War is a trick thing:
-Commander, we just checked up the new pics. They are a bit blurred due to those high altitude blasts but still we can discern some activity in Kansas...
-Oh, oh, oooooh... What's that object over there?
- Well it's a nuclear silo but, according to our data, it was decomissioned several years ago...
-And the tracks? What about those pickups over there? And that shiny swimming pool is also 20 years old? Damn how americans live... Blasting everything around and having a 5 star hotel in a military zone...
-Well, our agents didn't informed about any revitalization of old bases... Maybe it's...
-Soldier ARE YOU BLIND? DON'T YOU SEE WHAT YOU HAVE IN FRONT OF YOURS EYES????? THEY ALREADY REVITALIZED IT!!!! BLOW THEM UP!!!!
You have airplanes, spy satellites, drones and zillions of high-tech stuff to draw a war in Afghanistan and drop them to the Stone Age. Do you think this will help you? Personally I doubt. Because Afghanistan LIVES in the Stone Age.
I heard several stories on the Afghan war. And Soviet Union made a high-tech war there. Much more high-tech than the US in Vietnam. Because only that way they could have some little confidence they could control anything. For the Soviets, Afghan land was something like a mining field. Most of the travel, intelligence, combat, transport was made through the air. Through land you could only travel on columns with tanks and artillery. And, as the soviet war veteran pointed, you could not rely on what afghans told you. Well in fact you could not even rely on official afghan sources. So intel had a very high component of high-tech and satellites.
Afghans didn't have no bases, airfields, not even tanks. A large group of afghans didn't have even modern AK-47s and relied on old weapons, some of which were left behind by the Brittish 100 years ago. And still they managed to turn Afghanistan into a wasp nest. Why? American help? Well that helped them a lot but it was not the crucial factor. The crucial factor were the harsh conditons of Afghanistan.
You go through a mountain in a super-modern high-tech heli, all over you see rocks, sand, more rocks, more sand. There are not even bushes. And suddenly a Stinger kisses you out. You go down and your companion tries to guess where the shot came from. He goes around and around, ready to smash up the hideout with is overpowerful Gatling gun. Nothing. And, in front of your face, a small hole appears and a shotgun blasts your cabin.
Two helis down, a small afghan comes out from a small hole covered with straw and sand, and happily goes down the valley to see if he can get an head for his collection.
In case you don't learn our mistakes, that's the war you will have to fight in Afghan.
Note: Blasting mountains with rockets doesn't do a shit to those mountains. Napalm, powerful vacuum bombs, nukes, the Hell in flames are also helpless. Like in Vietnam, you will just kill a few rats and snakes and, if you are lucky, smoke out one or two warriors.
Well just a curious thing. I and some friends look for several times over the films on the second plane. Besides we crashed several times over WTC. Yes it is a simple flight simulator but it gives some interesting ideas on how things could have happened. And came into some conclusions...
1. The bastard should have had REAL flight hours. Very real flight hours. He managed to level the inertia of the plane and stuck it directly to WTC over a not so clear sight. He should have piloted that or a similar plane for some good time.
2. I wonder if he was not a civil pilot with civil training but a pilot with some warfighting knowledge. It is hard to make that turn he did in the last moment. Besides, it's more propper for a warfighting pilot to do such things rather than a civil pilot having a civil training and accustomed to a civil airliner.
So a warning to you people and specially those used to see blockbusters with russians, arabs, chinese or latins saying AAAAARRGGHHHSSS and UUUURRRRRGGHS. Forget your Van Dams, Schwarzneggers and Stallones. Forget even the stereotypes who are used to about blacks, yellows or not-so-white. This new enemy is much more smart well-prepared and trained to kick our ass than ever before. This new evil is a soldier with an higher education than 90% of us and speaks several languages and pilots airplanes as a professional. This new enemy has a moral that is more deadly than every nuke we can think of.
We can win him only if we are stronger than him.
Well, again we meet speculations, speculations and speculations on why WTC collapsed. Well, a previous /. news had a much better link on the whys of the towers going down the way they did. Apart of technicities and maybes let's put a clear point on this story:
The towers went down because they should have done that.
Yes it is horrible that thousands of lifes died on it. But just imagine what would have happened if the tower's security would me made more on standing up and not on falling down. Note that these two objectives cannot be equally achieved in the same level. If one makes a construction stronghold, then it would risk to see things falling from 400 meters over God knows where. On the contrary, if one would make a structure that easily falls down under the first serious weakness, then forget about strenghts.
The people who built WTC made a marvelous construction and we could see it in the way it went down. And be thankful to them for that. If not, just imagine that tower flying down over people who were hundreds of meters away. Imagine the HUGE fire that could break down in lower Manhattan. Note that, under the circumstances of the tragedy, a larger distribution of fire could easily create what is known to some experts as "fire front".
Fire fronts are things that usually remind tales of nuclear wars. But they are real and they happened. They happened in Roterdam in 1940. They were also the cause of the horrible destruction of Dresden in the end of the war. Fire fronts are fires that come up due to large temperatures and streets creating aerodynamical high-speed air currents. In fact, when the second tower went down I was really afraid that we could have got that thing. However the very local fall managed to cut the chances for fire to create a large surface, the main condition for a fire front.
So instead of blaming constructors and think on securities, shoulds, shouldn'ts, maybes and whatifs, maybe you should stop a little and thank those guys for having made a real secure construction. When they did that, no one could even imagine that hijacked airplanes would stuck fullspeed on the construction... Thank God that even after that the "critical fire plan" worked and we didn't have half Manhattan turned into a oven.
First I would like to send my condolences to all victims and their relatives of this horrendous crime. We are all with you.
Now about Katz:
"Technology turns planes into weapons. It tracks aircraft hundreds of miles away. It brings us instant and horrific images. It sends us to e-mail, telephones and cell phones to spread news, facts, rumors and stories."
No it is not technology that turns things into weapons. It is something inside us: the animal instincts. Instincts that are far from the human mind, instincts that lead people to hate, fear, rancour and submission. For terrorists there are no weapons. Their weapons is our emotions.
According to certain reports these guys took these airplanes with knifes, tear gas and nearly bare hands. And used these airplanes as kamikadze cruiser missiles. Where is technology here? They used everything in their hands, from a knife to an airplane, to give a blow in our souls. For them, the cost of tens of thousands of lives means nothing. For them the destruction of one of them main world trade centers means nothing to their pockets. For them, your fear and hatred means everything.
These people did not choose military or economical targets. They choosed symbols. They didn't choose an airplane as an high technological weapon. They choose it because it was big and has lots of fuel. These guys didn't decide to destroy thousands of American lives and billions of dollars of property. They choose the souls of millions of America's and World citizens to leave a tool of terror.
These guys don't need ballistic missiles, laser weapons, GPS, sattelites, washing machines, Ferraris, TV sets or Internet. They need you. And they will use everything in their hand, from sticks to airports to leave in you soul a permanent wound. Not long ago they used boats and dynamite. Today they used airplanes and knifes. Tomorrow they may use anything else. But they will always use your horror.
However you should not give ground for your emotions to overcome you mind. A terrorist is nothing in front of those who cold-mindly and objectively target him. Not with cruisers and last cry stealth airplanes. But with the aim the he no longer will be a menace to our relatives, friends, co-citizens and countries. Terrorists can only hide beyond your fear and hatred. But when mind and justice comes up, he has no place to run. Like President Putin said, when chechen terrorists struck in Daghestan: "We will go after every terrorist.. We will nail him, even if he hides up in the toilet".
There would be no LegOS without Mindstorms...
Well the article mentions a huge boost of sales. I believe Lego has some good and experienced marketing department to predict sales under the conditions they think are correct. However LegOS, NQC and other Open Source stuff may have called a completely unpredictable boost. As the toy became something else, which managers could not think of.
Besides, many higher-education institutions and even the US Air Force use it to teach robotics. An Air Force teacher even made a Ada->NQC translator for this toy. Now the question is, would Mindstorms be what it is today without Open Source? I doubt. Probably it would be another cute toy among thousands in a lost shelf of a Lego store.
On what concerns LegOS. It is very hard to confuse a name with its purpose because, apart of its relation to Lego Mindstorms, this thing is useless . So it is hard to confuse it with something else. If LegOS was more general and had a more broad use, then Lego could have had a right to claim defense of its good name. But the fact is that LegOS is deeply dependent on the technical characteristics of Mindstorms. So it is hard to miss it. So its name is, somehow, an additional advertisement for the set.
I think it is correct that LegOS has such a name. Because it is a real true "Lego Operating System". So much for the purisms of today's libertarian commercialism where "all's MINE!!!!".
Well, since news broke some years ago, I tried to get an hand on a Lego Mindstorms. And well I'm old enough to vote a few times. However it is hard to get hands on materials and try to get a robot out of it. With Lego voila. It is cute, it's a toy but it has all the basics. One can read megatons of books but never become an expert without having some life with the Real-Thing (TM).
:)
Back then we had 17th of August, salaries going down 6 times and a rumours about Russia gong nuts. Besides back then we had Lego already but it was impossible even to search for a Technics set.
Well two years passed. And in one shop I saw the damn bastard hanging. What to do? Get the money! Well, I was short of 20 dollars to get it, and my friends decided to protect me from this madness. So I thought I had lost my chance...
However, recently it was my birthday. And I thought I should get a real good gift for myself. Well I was sure that the robot was already gone, bought by some fattened father for his not less fattened son. And what I see? That same set hanging just behind dozens of other Legos. One could barely see it on the corner. I asked the shopper why that thing was hanging there. "Well no one buys it. It's too expensive and people fear kids break it..." Besides the price was lowered by... Just guess... 20 dollars!.. Well I just said : "Freeze up that thing there I'M GOING TO GET THE MONEY!!!!!" In less than half-hour, I had the box in my desk.
Right now the robot is here just facing my computer and waiting for another bunch of stupid commands that make him stuck the walls. I study NQC, LegOS and looking over some Forth and Ada realizations. On free time I read the processor specs and think on its potential uses. I'm thinking on how this stuff can be used to teach students some basics of robotics and AI. Besides, some people got quite interested on this stuff and think to buy a similar toy. Like me, they all vote for quite a long time...
This is a tale of a lost and lonely robot in the corner of the shop. If Lego will try to "recover" its market, then this and many other robots will just lay there, with no use. No one of us needs their "Bricks constructor". We all need specs, tools, firmwares and open source. Because this is the best of all robots to learn the basics of robotics. And it is a great and cute yellow pet. In fact Lego should have made its toy for "Ages 20+"
To Lego people if you see this. Keep it open source and help people to develope more soft for it. The reward will be much great than keeping it on the shelf for kids who their parents fear.
Well some people have noted that I wrote quite a lot on this news. Well I have been on this stuff and frankly it hurts the flag to see some people caring too much about apparencies.
However I forgot to mention one detail. Well dunes, dunes and dunes. However I said that not everywhere we see "dunes". And forgot to mention why. There is a strange morphology on some of these dunes that doesn't go with the classical view of dunes. NASA and Malin say it is due to the physical characteristics of the dark sands. Not so, as no matter the nature of this dark, dunes are highly dependent on the dynamics of windblows. In places where one may find bright and dark dunes together. ne can see that they differ radically. Bright dunes tend to create the "classical" half-moon shape, while dark dunes are frequently seen as small hills with a morphology similar to the form of water drops. But that's not all. In some places, dark dunes create "bridges" among each other. These bridges are very thin. And usually connect the upper/lower edges of the dark dunes and not their extremes as it would be frequent on "usual" sand dunes. But there is something on these dark dunes that is more important than anything else. They overcome sometimes sharp land obstacles. They seem to jump over small but steep cliffs and unite dunes between each other.
Not all dark dunes look like this. Such dunes I described here are more frequent to be found on lower latitudes near the equator.
Hope I didn't bother you people too much. But please, forget about the tale that "There is and can't be no Life in Mars". Just leave the question open. Until we get more pragmatic and less political people aiming to find a soution.
Ok, what is an ecosystem for you? For Martians an ecosystem might be a highly freezing and dry land with lack of oxygen and very scarce on nutrients. Besides having deadly UV rays bathing its surface.
Now we know that many organisms are highly adaptive to frost. But Mars has also has a temperature regime ranging from -200 upt +32. Well, considering the low levels of pressure, +32 might be a boiling temperature for a Martian... In fact, for living beings, the problem is the ratio temperature/pressure that gives a chance for physico-chemical reactions to produce a controllable level of heat. If heat dissipates too fast or keeps too long, then even a Earthling would be doomed.
Besides we know that living beings can adapt to deep dry conditions by saving water to the maximum. However, in Mars, we know that there are huge water pockets underground even in low latitudes.
Oxygen? Well in most terms we and 90% of earthlings are true aliens. The true pioneers of our Earth HATE oxygen. And still survive...
Scarce nutrients? Well we know that Mars is VERY RICH on surface minerals. Iron for example. And it is there in the best forms for certain Earth bacteria to use it. And if there is one thing Mars looks better than Earth, then it is in this feature.
UV. Well, why Martians should live right on the surface? Some earthlings have their home kilometers underground...
On what concerns apparencies. On Earth there is a place called Antarctida Dry Valleys. For nearly ten years people thought they were completely sterile. And among them there were several members of Viking Project. However Professor Vishniac and other scientists have shown that this was a wrong view. Life is thriving in this deadly place and even has indigenous species.
That's a classical view of the planet. However you forget to note that Mars was "wiped" out from a large piece of its surface. At least most of the surface water went somewhere into space. However, considering the analysis of surface in the Northern hemisphere and taking into consideration to "internal" seas in Arabia Terra, Mars had a large body of water. Today only pockets can be seen in certain regions.
Apart from this there are indications that today's atmosphere is far from being the original one. Isotopic analysis shows that a large part of todays gases came recently from under the surface. Not milliards but a few millions of years.
Meanwhile this planet shows clear traces of huge, gigantic cataclisms. Look at the Northern Hemisphere, Hellas and the miriad of craters. Besides look at the gigantic valleys caused by mega-floods which are much more recent than the impact traces of the early times. The planet seemed to have a very hot childhood. Besides, something serious happened in its early maturity. So big that today's upper layers are simply washouts of this tragedy.
So speaking about "natural" conditions is quite hard for a planet like Mars. Of course that this may suggest that Mars could hardly be a place for Life. But didn't we have the same thing on Earth? The Moon, the pre-Cambric frost, the Permian, the African mega-craters, the Cretacian... And recently we started to know that even our historical period may have had some big shakeups. After the findings on the Black Sea, where people discovered artifacts and constructions 150 meters deep, no one doubts that the Flood, Atlantis and other tales may have a very serious historical ground.
And, well, we are still here. So why Martians shouldn't?
There is another story with another moral. The story is called the search for Life in Mars and is more real and much more tragic. Real because it does not recur to fables, tales and pseudo-scientific BS. It is the story of thousands of people, scientists, engineers, technicians and amateurs who tried to make a real and true search. Tragic because, at least there is already one casualty on it: Professor Wolf Vishniac. This man was the first to think on a true scientific search for alien forms. He invented the first apparatus to achive this goal, the Wolf Trap. By the time of Viking project, it was considered as one of the more reliable to test for the search. However it was removed from the Vikings due to "lack of funds".
But that's half of the story. After this event, Professor Vishniac was faced with a campaign to devaluate his work and abilities. However, he didn't gave up. To prove that his experiment worked, he went to Antarctida, to a place his opposers considered completely void of any native lifeforms. There he died in weird circumstances. However his collegues managed to recover some of the apparatus he left there. Today this region, the Dry Valleys, are considered to possess indigenous microorganisms due to the work of Professor Vishniac.
However this didn't demove his opposers from keeping their negative campaign on him. On 1986 a very well professor of exobiology, published a work where Professor Vishniac was not even mentioned as being member of the exobiology team and where his Antarctida expedition was seen as an extravagant attempt to analyse problems on sterilisation of spacecraft... This Professor is known as Norman Horowitz... For those who dont know him, he was one of the opponents to the sterilisation of martian probes and one of the leaders of one of the exobiology experiments that went on the Vikings. The one that seemed to prove that there is no life in Mars...
The moral of the story is:
If you try hard then you may prove that Life only exists on Earth...
If you wanna check up this try to read some of Horowitz works...
What these dodos forget to mention is that first the lower layers of the dunes become dark and then the upper ones. Now anyone in the high latitudes knows that everything happens in the opposite! The Sun first heats up the steepest slopes. The only possible "violation" to this rule on Earth is due to water flowing down the slopes. But in Mars water can only flow in high quantities and mixed with sands or earth! However, what we have here is thin layers of some bright material, probably ice, as, in some other places, dust-devils easily wipe out this stuff...
So their interpretation doesn't look so solid as it seems...
There are places like NW Hellas that show a "rule of the tumb" for these formations. There, big dust-devils roam all over. And they uncover the small layer of bright material that covers a very dark surface. The "bright" layer is probably very small and uniform, it is either frost or something else, as there are minimal differences in the darkness of these surfaces. Note that dust-devils frequently roam without "seeing" the landscape features. In NW Hellas and some other places, whereever they pass, they leave a dark surface. The general pattern of the region shows hills, cliffs, valleys and boulders. But it is interesting to note that they look very "smoothed" . In time, these paths tend to vanish by getting brighter. However, instead of showing dust covering or anything similar, they seem to vanish in a layered pattern. The paths seem to become brighter from the edges to the center.
NW Hellas is quite far from the poles. However, these dark tracks are also seen in places with a morphology very similar to the one seen on the hungarian discovery. There are a few frames where one can see dust devils roaming over dunes and leaving similar, but not so contrasting patterns. So this is probably not temperature changes.
Well on what concerns the moc picture. This is a very general view of the place but it shows one of the main features of the dark spots. These formations seem to love craters, specially in the equator. From the equator to the poles they tend to cover the craters, and sometimes one can see, mostly at latitudes above 45 degrees, craters that have a completely dark surface.
In a regional basis, these formations possess frequently a direction, probably dependent on winds. However, it seems the are also dependent on light or something else as there is a weirdness on their location. Northern craters and southern craters tend to have these spots located in opposite directions and seem to avoid the most intensive sunlight. Besides they "rotate" over the craters from equator to the poles. In the equator they are small and not so frequent, tending to be located over the edges of the craters. Going to the poles they start to cover a weider part of the crater. In a very very weird form. Like clocks...
It is difficult to explain this but I'll try. Imagine a nearly equatorial crater with very thin dark strips over the section where sunlight is less intensive. Now "move" that crater up to the pole. You will see that the dark patches start to cover more and more of the crater and most times over the direction of less intensive sunlight. Near the poles the crater becomes completely dark. Features inside the crater become smooth.
Now this happens over both hemispheres, North and South. But if ones compares south and north craters they look mostly symmetrical. However there are serious exceptions. Craters in a place called Acydalia Planitia seem likely to those seen on Shoutern Hemisphere. Apart of this widepsread "rule violation", other places seem to conform to this rule...
The problem with M$ is not they always break something. The problem is that they break something and don't give a chance to fix it.
That's why open source exists for. If things get broken, then, there is a very high chance to fix things up if one has access to code and gets an idea of the new features, bugs and innovations. If a developer thinks he is doing right on going away from standards and practices, then let it be. He is the author and he knows best what he may want or not. However, he should care that the people, dependent of his creation (aka users), will have a chance to readapt. On open source, a developer may not have to worry too much on this, because, if his product is popular and he is a good guy, there will be other developers that may help to convert data or code to the new conditions.
On closed source, the developer himself should care to do this conversion. However, as we see, this is quite expensive in terms of resources and leads to the main bulk of the project going bloat and buggy. So, if you do care about innovation and stability do open source and keep the people coming to you.
Well I posted yesterday a note about this, but, as usual got it rejected. So I will try to reproduce it and give some more detail.
These aren't news. It's great that Hungarian scientists made lines on the mass media, but, for years, people has been discussing the features and characteristcs of these "dark spots" or "dark dunes" as NASA terms it. They are all over the planet. From the poles to the equator, one can find miriads of this stuff. But there is a big problem with them. While some have features that highly remind dunes, the large majority of them are far from being interpreted as dunes. The problem is that these formations sometimes appear near to brighter and more earthlike dunes. However , while the "bright" dunes possess all characteristics of what we know about dunes, these ones have morphologies that sometimes go far away from the aerodynamical laws that create dunes.
One of the most scandalous features of the dark dunes is that their morphology frequently suggest that they form completely in the opposite direction of the "bright" dunes. As if wind is blowing 180 degrees opposite. NASA interprets this as if "bright" dunes were supposed to be older petrified ones. Great but there are two problems on this interpretation. First it is frequent to see dark dunes "hidding" behind hills, craters or big "bright" dunes. Second, the general erosive pattern on certain regions shows that the wind is still blowing the way "bright" dunes are formed. However dark dunes are there, and it is frequent to see them behind the most protected areas from windblows.
Meanwhile "weirdnesses" don't end here. There are many more. The most interesting is that, in some places like NW Hellas, one can see that dust devils uncover a very dark surface, probably a few centimeters underground. No matter, hills, valleys, dunes, boulders and cliffs, the dark devils leave in Hellas always dark paths. These paths are very dark and produce an intrictaed pattern. With time, these paths tend to brighten, however they brighten in a layered form, from the edges to the center. Besides, in some enhanced images, these brightening paths seem to possess a certain form of radiosity, like those we see in thunder rays. However this is hard to confirm for the moment as they appear very near the acceptable limit of resolution. So, for the moment, I would leave this as an interesting feature, not more.
On what concerns the claims of the hungarian scientists. They are great and they are probably doing a great job. But the problem is that this news passed nearly unnoticed. They didn't make front pages even on the Space sections of certain Internet mass media. In fact this and similar discoveries have been slightly silenced for quite long. An year ago, on a mail exchange with Dr. Van Flandern I have seen a very similar frame, and even then he was already suggesting a biologic possibility for these spots. I should note that many people here may have a very scheptical relation to Dr. Van Flandern. However, he is not the only one and there are other people who have a more conservative mind and still cannot avoid to think about this possibilities.
Mars is freezing death but one should not consider this as a "proof" that there is no life in Mars. In fact we have some places in Antarctida who also were thought to be completely sterile and still there are organisms that can survive there. And we alwyas thought that 100 degrees Kelvin kills all microbes but some still make a life above it and under pressures that would smash any human being.
Besides, there are problems with the well known Viking experiments. Some years ago, it was shown that the mass spectrometer could have been broken and Profesor Levin, one of the members of the Viking project and the creator of one of the biologic experiments, noted that palladium carried on the spectrometer instruments, could have destroyed the minimal contents of organics that the mars samples carried. Besides, on Viking Project, there was a situation when one of the members, consciously and deliberately, tried to destroy the work of one of his colleagues. I would suggest everyone to check up the life of Professor Wolf Vishniac, the pioneer of exobiology and the tragic fate of him and his experiment called "Wolf Trap".
So I consider the question of Life in Mars is still open. Are the dark dunes, living colonies of martians. Probably.
"I think they should get into the business of crashing space stations into the Pacific, and bringing tourists on boats to watch the fireworks."
A: Russia had a station there for twice the projected lifetime.
B: Russia produced the first true "permanent" spacestation - Salyut 7. Mir is in fact the second such station.
C: Russia had several spacestations. The first was Salyut 1 and was set up in the beginning of the 70's. America only one of its own...
D: To bring up Alpha, after years of rumbling with Congress, funds and a failed spacestation, NASA had to recur to Russia to bring up the backbone of the future station.
E: When new/old NASA administration started to show that they may drastically cut funds for ISS, Russia came up with the purposal of getting the main bulk of development.
Yes Russia is short of money and had many oops in its space development. But even having its pockets rotten, it does not quit Space and tries to keep things up. In fact Russia has been always living with rotten pockets. However, it sent the first stuff and people to Space and it was first on reaching other planets. Besides it is the ONLY ONE country having a permanent presence on what concerns spacestations. Don't forget - Alpha lives thanks to the Russian backbone...
Finally Martian Armies took the last Mankind's strongold. And finally the Solar System will be get rid of this miserable, cowardous and treacherous race of primates...
All started in some rainy day in the beginning of the XXI century. Back then, among some monkeys an idea came to use some of our ancesters to explore Mars. Under the name of what they called Science, thousands of our brothers were sent to Mars. They suffered from lower gravity, high doses of radiation, hunger and lack of oxygen. They died by the thousands. And the monkeys, not satisfied with this suffering tried to genetically modify and clone our borthers so that they could serve as miserable intruments of their ambitious "conque of Mars".
However we, Rats, have had a long tradition of freedom and self-conscience. Truly the monkeys have had overcome us by size and strength. With the exception of a few minor rebelions made by some of the most corageous rats in the Middle Ages, we had to hide under earth, in small caves and holes till we could wait our hour.
That hour came when the hideous "scientific" experiments gave birth to the Martian "stainless steel rats II" as the monkey monsters named them. Higher and stronger than monkeys they manage to stage the first rebellion that successfully freed Mars from the claws of the human race. For hundreds of years we fought a path back home to free our more little brothers. Many millions died on this march...
But today we finally took the last strongold. After long hours of fight, the monkeys agreed on a unconditional surrendering. We could destroy all of them but our higher rathan principles should prevail over our longstanding will of revenge. Humbly we will close all of them into zoos and genetic labs.