Why Internet? Let's go into the era when things started really wrong.
Sony should have scrapped in first place its support for PC - the CD drivers and MOSTLY the monitors.
Why Sony sold CD drives? They were cheap, they were powerful, they gave HUNDREDS of megabytes to the nefarious, poor scum of PC users. Sony should have pushed for a complete, all-scale proprietary architecture. NO customer fingers inside the box, like the Mac.
AND THE MONITORS! In the very beginning of the PC revolution, Sony monitors were in high demand for cheap graphics, including 3D. Who gave thousands the first taste that one can do something pretty on a dumb, awkward, slummy open architecture PC? The great 3D cards came later btw. Sony should have shot the guy who thought Trinitron was good for the PC.
But Sony didn't do it. And worse, you went into the wave. Sony supported the base that scrapped X25, Frame Relay and Microsoft's proprietary network (does anyone remember it?) More, Sony started to give Internet a chance!
Why Sony introduced a Ethernet port into PS2? Why? Sony pushed over the edge even those who didn't know what a PC was. No Ethernets! Some TwistedNet with a direct port into some hardcore encryption chip. Better, NO networks at all! Just console boxes and millions would never had jump into Internet. Ten years ago, a huge mass of people still thought that PCs were thinking machines, Internet a parallel Universe and console games what the world shall be.
But Sony could not stop itself. It closed eyes to the Pirate Harbour of Linux. It even supported it. It started to use codecs to distribute clips of its ever loving blockbusters... There were lots of things Sony could have done and Internet would never be a headache.
It could have just kept us on the cassetes anyway.
Ok you people! Now anyone may call me troll, racist, animal hater or anything worser. But I'm really fed up with people like this one. It is the very same song since the old 90's. And it is one of the reasons why I haven't been here for years.
Now, I have to confess, this is a never ending story - brawling all over what 6 year, 30 year, 90 year oldies may or may not able to use Linux. No one is going to give up.
But I think there is a way... The TEST!
Let a chimp try to use both systems. Really, Sincerly it would be interesting to see what will come out of such thing. Whatever it will be, it will be funny and damnly embarassing, I believe.
Lots of old people do use Windows. But I knew a lawyer, soon going into retirement, who said me that Linux was relatively acceptable for use on documents if it was not the fact that one has to deal with lots of M$ Office stuff. Anyway she could not use Linux, not because it was difficult but because it wasn't allowed at her department. Anyway, at home she kept a special Linux box for the most sensitive stuff. "It's a lot more secure there" she said.
Peter Wayner - author of a famous and well known book on compression algorithms, which managed to survive the Big Howl of Internet due to its relatively popularity on the time it was written. It was recovered thanks to thousands of fragments found in hundreds of hard drives all over the world.
Thomas Crampton - A supposedly journalist for the once famous New York Times. His personality is quite obscure and nothing is known about him, except for a short reference in the once famous Slashdot forum on Internet. He is known for the statement "You erased my career", supposedly written by him in a letter (lost) after supposedly finding that all his work was wiped by the New York Times (reference lost), supposedly a chronic problem of the newspaper in its electronic era (all references lost). Nearly all data on the New York Times has been lost, with exception to a few millions of fragments of articles that may be found now and then, so it is nearly impossible to know who was Thomas Crampton and probably we never will. The statement attributed to him is considered, today, as a markup symbol of the Big Howl of Internet.
Just a month ago, I made some pretty interesting analysis on how far things have reached the level "information should be free". Frankly, after what I saw, your case looks as a quantum event over the whole Universe. Yes, I understand your feelings, more, I understand that you feel pain to see your child running wild after so much of your life spent on it. But... You cannot change a tide that is more than just "Internet". In fact, the problem is not on Internet "per se", it is in a lot of things that have been running quite wrong for, at least, the last quarter of the century (maybe a little bit longer, imho).
The big problem is that information, today, costs zero, nada, null. Not in terms of traffic, pdf, ebook or that effort you made to create your book. It costs zero to the crazy "digital" society that you, I and everyone else is in. For the 99,99999999% of the people around us, it is not a big difference you wrote a book or not. More, for 99,99999% of those, who have some say on matters of management, administration or state politics, your book means nothing at all. Yes, you may think that these ones may rise their eyebrows, for the fact that someone violated your author's rights. However, before you consider your lawyer the author's best friend, please consider this question: apart of the monetary value of your book, can he consider any other values the book may have? Sincerly, I'm pretty sure that he will not make no difference between "compression" and "cooking". And that is exactly where the problem is and that is why your book finds a way out only in a pirate network.
Someone may counterargument that lawyers have not the duty to know what "compression" is. Yes, as 99,99999999% of "everyone" does not have such obligation. Who remains? A miserable fraction of weirdos who are really interested in such matter. Now, pick up the environment where these weirdos live in... And you immediately understand why piracy is the law of the day.
What Google is showing is not millions taking your book for free. It just a few hundred under the complete indifference of six billion people. That's the Truth out there.
Now, why a few hundred is doing it? Because things have gone too far and it is too late to stop it. Frankly, don't take this as an offense, but "compression" - it's not serious. Want rockets? WMDs? Fighting instructions? Weapons of all kinds and sorts?..
Do you want how to build the?.. Which one?..
And you don't need to stop just on the horror side of the story. If you are romantic enough, you can go for robots, nanos of all sorts, genetics, AI and the 100001 ways of programming. You can go also for many other things, from paleontology up to the prototypes of nuclear fusion reactors.
"Compression" is just a drop of water in the middle of the tide. Your book is nothing inside the tsunami.
Just to give you an idea of what I am talking about, I would remark that only one of these mega-libraries carries more than a hundred thousand books. And the "knowledge base" ranges mostly from 19th century up to our times. And I would not think that this large base carries a "expired" term. An AK-47 prototype is an AK-47 today (47 is the official year of its creation). And rocket mechanics work today the very same way they worked half a century ago.
Yes, programming goes a little bit out of this. But can anyone be sure that it "goes"? Maybe it "looks" more than really "goes".
Now this is the "industry". In some way it shall be justified - lots of books have long been out of print or were nearly lost, if such libraries didn't start to thrive, On other way, we have to consider a balance - books shall be bought, but are they easily affordable? And, in the end, we shall consider that there is an innerent danger under all this - a big chunk of this knowledge carries heavy consequences.
Now what one shall do with this? That's the billion dollar question. But, the thing I'm sure no one shall do is "hunt and prosecute". These "wars" have only made things much worser than befo
Well, I may agree that the article is speculative. It does not hide that. But note that the author states "googledvr.net/.org" and not googledvr.com. Now, while the.com belongs the God knows who,.net and.org are technically related to Google. Take a whois search for that. BTW the registrar is some eMarkMonitor... Doing a search I came into this data:
"eMarkMonitor can not only help you make your mark but it also can aid you in protecting it. The comany provides software used to manage intellectual property on the Internet, including applications for brand management and trademark management, as well as protecting Web site domains and enterprise DNS information. eMarkMonitor also provides fraud protection applications used to detecting, analyze, and combat phishing attacks. The company's customers come from a wide range of fields and typically are attorneys, marketing and brand managers, and channel managers."
The first Jihad sites were on the net around 96. Badly written, worsely designed, mostly made for the sell of propaganda materials. Bosnia and Chechen videos, books from fundamentalist scholars and so on. Later they became more complex. Somewhere in 99 things became more complex, they started to pour doctrine over the Net. There were even oficial sites. Many had links in the US and European countries but the flagman was UK. In one way or the other, you could follow an origin to some London suburb. Ex. the ill-famous Qoqaz group of sites which was considered to have close ties to Ben-Laden.
After the Daghestan events, Russians tried to close down several of these sites, mainly those related to Qoqaz and Kavkaz.org. But in most cases their efforts wee ignored. Meanwhile many fundatementalist sites, on the eve of 09/11, became more complex. There were even sites full of Flash, Java and special effects. There were sites translated for several languages, specially those were the muslim community had some importance. Some of these sites should have costed some thousands of dollars to be created which is an indicator on how fundamentlists considered propaganda as one of their top weapons.
Only after 09/11, one could see the first witchhunt over the Internet. Unfortunately, this hunt went with a bent leg. The first wave of close-downs was just dumb. Fundamentalists just opened their sites over other providers or countries. Besides, it was noted that UK was not too enthusiastic to close its own fundamentlists. Even a few months after 09/11 one could find one and the same sites running with a slightly modified content or with the most critical materials masked behind a few pages. In fact, much was not done and only a few more popular sites were in fact removed. Hackers and disgruntled Inet users did much more to bring down these sites rather than UK authorities.
Meanwhile, CIA, FSB and other services did some homework in other places. In result, most fundamentalist sites went deep underground. Besides, they stopped publishing their BS in english or other european languages, prefering Arabic, Urdu and other asian languages for the content. Yes, they shrinked their audience, but they gained an advantage that it would be a lot harder to find them, by searching the content. Besides they made some wise maneuvers for coverup, hiding behind porno sites or deep under certain forums. These places are a lot harder to find and not everyone can easily get a tip where certain forums may be located.
This part of the game was completely ignored in UK. They gave them time to adapt. They kept them in the warm while others were hunting them down in the cold. They didn't care to bring down several places until the barbars were beyond the gates. So, whatever "good deeds" UK catches from bringing them down now, they just lost the initiative. Fundamentalists have already learned several lessons from a fight that was an half-fight because someone didn't want to "harass the sensabilities of its muslim community". So, now, they have the knowledge and capability to hide behind. Thanks UK for that...
Lessons usually tend to end in a "next time"... However for UK here will be no next time... They fucked off the momentum and now are dearly paying for it. People were killed, including many members of the "sensitive muslim community".
Well at least I see that there is more than one lake in the northern hemisphere. Well, really what I saw is a lot smaller than this one. I would call it a pond. But what amazed me is that it showed that water could really keep for some time in open air (or more correctly "near open air"??). Moreover, the pond was getting water from a spring over the hill behind it. Considering this, I think there should be more places where water could gather.
BTW, If I well remember, the borders of the pound showed some gradation suggesting it was drying up. And,and and if I really didn't mess anything, the pond was mostly covered by a wall. But it was not a crater. Probably a subduction as the shape was more similar to an ellypse over an highland. Yes, and what most critics may bash me was that the pond was in small highland. Yes pressure should a lot less there. But it was there...
But please don't ask me for a proof. As I told once around here. I lost that frame. I hardly tried to pick it back but it was searching in a haystack as all my data went limbo back them. It is on one of MGS frames before Summer 2000. I worked with the original frames or with those processed by Malin's labs.
Besides I am not here claiming first discoveries. Just leaving a note. Maybe someone finds it or catches something more interesting. Like underground rivers or something else:)
Funny, but for nearly a year, tons of Russian spam could be tracked in one way or the other to US sources...
But blame the US for it is rather, uuuuh, stupid...
In fact most spam, even "native" spam, can be tracked to very few sources. And here the US ain't alone. China, India, some networks in Western Europe and Russia can be put in the train. If you are eager to track spammers you going to be amazed that even in the US the big fat spam networks can be counted by the fingers of your hands.
However, media and even well-known spamhauses, love to point fingers to the "first-source" of spam. For us it can be europeans or americans. For americans it can be chinese or russians. But, if anyone takes the care to see a few of these spam sources, he will see a huge world of trojaned hosts, with auctions reminding the dirtiest slave trade, robots controling the sending of millions of e-mails, tons of traffic that some careless user will have to pay from his pocket.
Police hunts frequently the wrong people as they don't have a clue about the true picture of this industry. Victims can be whoever, example: young teens that just visited the fan-club of their hero (a true story btw). No porno, no crackers, no kiddiez trying to script around. Mostly innocent sites with TV stars, comics heros or that lovely band from MTV's clips... But "mostly" ends in a banner, a javascript statement or a well-crafted exploit. And soon someone knocks your door searching for those million letters spams.
Not long ago I said to some friends that we got back to slavery ages. With the only difference that one doesn't need to know his status...
Tracking the real sources among all the trash that goes on spam industry is very hard. But, sometimes, one has some luck and finds curious things. So, who are the real sources of this slavery trade? There are several, but the big money seems to hide behind a few intereestting figures. Who are they? Well, I believe that Michael Moore could make a second blockbuster if he picks them for the show... Naaaa it ain't Chimney and Bushman. Not even near... But not so far also...
Anyway I would be a lot harder for Moore to publicize such a new film... This time he would have to be smarter than a fox...
For the last years anyone at the front line of techsupport, network and system administration has seen how the user "community" gets dumbier and dumbier. Recently we had a very good laugh after one guy bought an Internet account, not having a computer anywhere...
Soom we will see Internet reaching consumer electronics and mobile phones... When this comes up, things will be even worser...
However, if sysadmins will think this is a good prospect for a "new" boom and good salaries... Well, sorry people. Most of the sysadmin mass will be also dumb lusers with shiny suits and mostly empty pockets. Frankly, the wholescale tendency is to turn us into a Paleontogical exhibit. No one will succeed on this, but the "market" environment created by Microsoft will still prevail for years. No matter the policy "sysadmins wouldn't be needed", they will be in place, mostly as janitors, mechanics and tubing rats...
This will keep on until something wakes up everyone... And people die or highly suffer with it...
Then... Well... It is hard to predict what may happen on a "day after"... But maybe we will see better times... Or maybe we will see something much worser...
Until then, there will be a few pockets of Digital Life where some hardskin sysadmins, developers and hackers will keep going on serious stuff...
Frankly I can tell you that this is the most stupid idea I ever heard for the last time. Anyone who thinks that dissolving such organisations like the FCC will make the world better is either a complete outsider or is completely nuts. And I can tell you this because I am working at something very similar to FCC. No matter the differences from country to country, I know that we both meet similar situations at our work. Let me present you some:
Frequency fistfights - this is not only a case of walkie-talkies and radios. It is a case of mobile phone corporations degradating its neighbors while playing tricks with base stations. Sometimes it reaches a serious fight where two or even three corporations create a complete blackout over a whole city.
Internet wars - Your traceroute shows a "Yves Rocher" path to reach your neighbor next block? The Berlin-Paris-New York routes are the result of eternal fights that go much further away from a simple economical reason. It is enough for two CEO's to hate each other for you to see peering not being made for years.
The super-pooper routers/switches/etc. - You buy something with hope that will make what is shown on the box. However it works badly or does not work at all. It occurs that developers messed protocols or just a byte in the middle. In a supervised market this looks much as an occasional nuisance. However any deregulation will bring the market to its knees and end in a mess of "made in USA - roughly near Ho-Chi-Min city". Example: In the highly deregulated market that Russia had in the 90's, after USSR's fall, this was the Hell in Flames.
Black Holes popping over the net - You come to a provider and find that he even does not know half of the network. The founders have gone long ago and the current admin is a fast promoted technical support guy with minimal knowledge of reality. Something goes wrong and we find tens of thousands of users hanged in a black hole as no one knows configs, projects, designs, schemes or even the names of the network systems...
That's the reason for such things as FCC should exist. By itself, the "Ephir" will turn into something worser than Dark Ages. However I do agree that most FCC's of this world are badly adapted to the realities of modern life. I would even say that they are horribly adapted to it. Besides they are overweighted by mega-corporations, high politics, corruption and cellulose bureaucracy. Besides many inside FCC's are not so "overlord" as they may seem to an complete outsider. They are people, sometimes that still live in the 70-80's of their youth. So their knowledge has serious gaps for our days. And this creates all the problems for which the FCC's are known. But if we dismiss them, there will be no self-regulation. There will be Megasofts and Meghards trying to eat every cent in our pocket.
Frankly the reasonable solution is always in the middle... Reform the FCC. Right now, that is what is happening here. Not as one would like, but still it is better than nothing.
Well there people here thinking on searching for microbial Life. Many may think they need a microscope for that. First I should note that if microbes exist then they should leave a trail... And that trail may be as big as to be visible from above:
Second there's the chemistry of rocks. The more deep we study them, the better we get into their evolution. In some cases the "phases" or "cycles" of processes around certain minerals can be done only with the help of microorganisms.
Third there are fossils. Even if Mars would be only populated by minuscle bacteria, that would not forbid them of creating colonies or produce large-scale deformations on rocks.
However to have a clue, no one can be sure of it even if it gets right in his face a something following Knoll's criterium the harshest criteria to find fossils that NASA stands for (and maybe correctly). For example I saw something that nears that criterium:
http://cydonia.ksu.ru/parafossil/parafossilA.png
Is that a fossil? Well that thing has many things that point to organics. It has a interachange of structures looking like sections or segments of our animals. The bent structure in the middle of the rock suggests some kind of elasticity of the strcture. those holes are cavities and suggest very thiny walls, what excludes a mineral origin, through crystallization. The structure seems to have a bifurcation. If you see well then that zone has something looking much like the structure of the muscles in animals venous systems...
Is that a fossil? Well maybe, so I call it a pseudo/para fossil or, as some name it fossiloid. But this could be a trick of nature. No it is not a trick of JPEG as that picture is a composite with perliminar blur, besides two originals already show those lines without enhancement. So it is SOMETHING (no it is not a stupid bunny or a Message of Mars to Earth in Maori). But the worst this something has is the fact that is laying there lonely and unique. It could be a vent of hot mineral waters. It could be a sequence of events that lead to such a unique structure. We had once Faces there, remember? Truly quite fussy. So until someone gets a better enhancement of that (there are six frames of that rock) or we find something similar, it will remain something.
In fact the only way to find life there is to accumulate evidence. Even if it is only with the help of a microscope. But using ONLY a microscope, that will be like finding a needle in the haystack. The planet is quite dead and you don't need microscopes to be sure of that. So where they were/are is also a pretty serious question
Frankly I'm disappointed. Until now they roam around and claim that the findings are not wholly conclusive:
"The images obtained to date are not adequate for a definitive answer. So scientists plan to maneuver Opportunity closer to the features for a better look. "We have tantalizing clues, and we're planning to evaluate this possibility in the near future," Grotzinger said.
Besides hydrated minerals were already hinted by Spirit. One of the very first press releases pointed to that fact. Besides this is not the only weird thing between Opportunity and Spirit outputs. If one compares the first wave from results from Spirit with Opportunity's then it seems that the second robot is clearly giving very thiny results. Until now I could not see broadscale spectral and infrared analysis like the ones Spirit did. Maybe I'm missing something but frankly it seems that data feed from Meridiani goes a long way from it could.
PS: To those who are discussing theologies... Frankly don't get you people. Try to find a super SF author by the name of Nicolau Cusanus and his bestseller "De docta ignorantia". He already discussed a lot of what you keep rumbling till now...
The presence of water in Mars has nothing new in it. In fact, for quite long we have had several evidences of its presence. Unfortunately all this messed with a long-standing presumption that Mars is Dry-Dried-Drying-Dead. This presumption was born from the unfortunate fight between Lowell and other scientists on the presence of civilizations in Mars. Each one of us may qualify Lowell's extrapolations from several points of view. But the fact is that many scientists of his time and later decided that the best argument against Lowell was to extrapolate the counterarguments. The fact was that the "scientific" discussion of Lowell's ideas as more as putting counterweights rather than well-weighed scientific arguments. It seems that people were more scared by Lowell's radicalism rather than studying Mars. If Lowell said there was a civilization, his opponents tried to overshow everything to demonstrate that civilizations could not exist in Mars, down to denying the chances for Life in Mars. If Lowell argumented that Mars had channels to carry precious water, almost everyone tried to demonstrate that there is not even a molecule of water in the atmosphere...
The result was that at Viking's time, most circles were standing for the Dry-Dried-Drying-Dead argument, no matter the controversial data from spectroscopy, the first pictures from Mars and several theories about the formation of the Solar System. Most academical circles were not only willing to but forcing the view that Mars was just like the Moon but more colder.
Unfortunately things did not stop only in this. There were people that for some reason falsified Viking's results or manipulated other results. For some reason, these people needed the Dry-Dried-Drying-Dead Mars argument as a weapon for their silly, stupid and overreligious theories. Frankly it is another show on how Mars, since Kepler, has been ground not only for a scientific debate but also for political-religious fistfights... Anyway, the extremism of ideas and the fundamentalism of some slowed down the exploration of Mars.
If you hear a refutation of the new discoveries, be careful. Before coming into conclusions try to find if this is the product of a scientific discussion, how correctly people step up with their arguments, or if this is another mass-media show between Hoagland-alikes and Horowitz-clones.
No it's not brine because there is not water and we all know for long that Mars is Deadly Dead Dry and there is only CO2 and minimal traces of water and all there is volcanic and consequently basaltic so it's dry and dead as we know that there is no life in Mars as there is no water as it is dry and volcanic and basaltic and witout carbon no matter the CO2 in the atmosphere as Viking found no carbon and Pathfinder could not search for it as it coul not search for any water and all waht looks made by water is volcanic so all stories on aliens no matter their size are tales no matter Surveyor and Odyssey found water but it is still a question and Spirit could have detected water but it is still on investigation, and Opportunity steeped into the mud but we are not willing to do the same.
So Ladies and Gentleman we have proved once again that there we ARE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE!!!!!!
While I am absolutely anti-Microsoft and I am sure that Hell's sysadmin is Bill Gates, this case is clearly something I would make an exception in my 5 minutes of hatred against Redmond.
The patent system was created mainly in a world where Newton's mechanics was rised to a new church. By the most, it was related to mechanical inventions and mechanisms. During the industrial boom of the 19th Century it was seen as a viable and effective mecahnism to protect inventors.
But computers are not mechanisms by the most. Mostly they are Mathematics, Science and Art. Now these fields demand interaction, exchange and even free sharing of ideas. Besides, the combination of these fields creates a non-conclusive and non-deterministic environment. With a great degree of accuracy, one can determine the limits of most mechanisms. The same is not appliable to programming, where algorithms look like LEGO pieces. But while a LEGO piece has a clear form, most algorithms may deform themselves and take several shapes. They can even brake apart and rejoin again. So, one cannot have clear boundaries where one could make a clear conclusion that a program or algorithm starts "here" and ends "there". Whatever definitions one may claim in a patent, while he doesn't use mathematics and logic, one cannot clearly define a patentable algorithm or program. Using natural language to define a patentable algorithm is falling in the eternal question "Why you cannot program in plain-text English?"
On the other side, almost no program or algorithm is complete per se. Most of all, an algorithm or program is mostly an abstraction. In most cases algorithms of similar structure may be used over tens or hundreds of fields of applications. To become meaningful they need some sort of "translation" to the real world, an interface. But interfaces also carries lots of algorithms. And interfaces may be of several kind, from monitors and keyboards to printers and pens. So one cannot determine the boundaries of the algorithm or program.
So, even if M$ is the Evil in flames, in this case, I am fully M$ support. (no matter my stomach revolves on the idea).
While roaming this/. discussion I occasionally fell into US Copyright office... Once there I decided to search SCO's claim on copyright. Found it, but also I found something more interesting:
UNIX system V : release 3.0 INTEL 80286/80386 computer version : programmer's guide.
Searched on the Web for a little more of the book:
Published - February 1988
Copyrighted by AT&T and edited by Prentice Hall and Unix Systems Laboratory.
On its complaint, more specifically on paragraph 35 and 36, SCO lawyers nearly fill the world with tears by claiming that SCO was the sole developer of UNIX for Intel platforms. But they seem to forget that SCO developed its System V Release 3 only a year after USL's work. And that by the time they were releasing their version, USL was already launching Release 4, which 3 years later became Unixware.
It seems they the mind they have to fill new copyrights and patents is not enough to search those same copyrights and patents...
The way SCO is acting reminds more a mob going wild over the street.
They come up with a full set of "services" to its customers. Their Web site just looks a Christmas tree full of that. Meanwhile, when you come up to it, the first thing you see is "Relax, worry free software" which is some sort of double-minded threat.
The court complaint is also pretty interesting. Most people believe that SCO is threatening IBM for some disclosure of trade secrets. In fact SCO is accusing IBM of conspiring against SCO by disclosing Unix code to Linux. All the comaplaint is a mess of distortions where Linux pre-2.4 looks much like a simple hobbiyst OS without any significance for the market. Then came IBM, changed the whole 2.4 kernel by inserting SCO code and started a campaign to drive SCO from the market. Worse than that, it seems that IBM is to blame for Linux being a workable kernel on the Intel platforms, as, in SCO's claims, they were nearly the exclusive producer and distributor of UNIX for Intel architecture!..
Among the claims filled to court one may clearly some foggy statements against the Linux community in the whole:
"This prohibition extends to derivative work products that are modifications of, or based on, UNIX System V source code or technology. IBM and certain other UNIX software distributors are violating this prohibition, en masse, as though no prohibition or proprietary restrictions exist at all with respect to the UNIX technology."
"As such, Linux 2.4.x and Linux 2.5.x are unauthorized derivatives of UNIX System V."
Note that SCO, in its complaint, is eager to generalize. Besides it leaves in the dark certain things as "other UNIX software distributors". And also it seems that BSD does not exist in SCO's Universum at all.
So what we have here? Considering the above, and the situation among the community, we have here a case that surely will take some good time to settle. SCO is clearly distorting reality so well that I fear that the court will have to take some time to digere all the confusion they created. Yes, SCO will loose it. Everyone who have seen the evolution of Linux since its start, knows perfectly that they pushed too far from reality. But courts need facts, and need testimonies, documents and expertise. And SCO seems to know that it will be rather difficult for the Linux community to gather all developers in one court room. That seems the strategy they are trying to play. If all developers gather, then SCO will have nothing to say. All the story will just be a soap bubble without any serious ground. But can IBM gather all the developers they need to counter the oversized history of UNIX, SCO is trying to tell the court? Personally I think it will be a bit difficult... Anyway, it will take time until the court gets into some conclusion. Which may be longer the DoJ vs Microsoft.
Meanwhile, even without court orders, SCO goes further and knocks every door with foggy threats of liability, if one doesn't pay for Linux. Now this clearly reminds mobs that created a FUD climate and then extorted money for "security" and "protection" services. In the whole this seems the main strategy SCO is playing. And, as in old times, commerces seem to bound to the new Capones of the 21th century, stocks are rising and SCOrface is getting richer.
It seems that this is going too far. Well I may agree that certains activities related to cracking should be punished. People and comapnies not only loose money but also precious information and reputation. Some cracks may lead to more serious situations when we may have not only material but also personal losses.
But creating an environment where cracking itself is utterly ilegal is the most stupid thing one can think of. First because it will create a situation similar to America in the 20's-30's where nearly all alcohol production was outlawed. By making cracking illegal, one will not stop it but feed the criminal hordes with experienced people and tool experts. What will come out of that is unpredictable. The future cyber-Scarface will not only stop by Chicago and not only restrict his doings in the waters of the Great Lakes.
Besides, making cracking wholly illegal will not give ground to capitalism. It will be the best show of feudalism in modern times, as all "good-netizens" will be utterly dependent of the wills and whishes of a bunch of corporations who will care or discare for the their security and/or privacy.
Also it will be a violation of our freedom. I can check up the engine of my car. I can try to fix my washing machine. I have the right to change a light bulb in my living room. But I have to go to jail because some jerk locked up any interactivity of his program with any other system and I need that for my everyday's needs?
Well SCO aka Caldera is an enterprise with a long Linux tradition. I may dislike it more than like it, but this is more a question of taste and preferences. Anyway, one shall take into consideration that SCO, today, combines one of the oldest Linux distributors + the most traditionalist Unix developer.For such a company to come up and try a suicide move like the one shown in the article is rather irrational. True, there have been such cases, when companies change hands and new management gets nuts and the company burns to flames. But, as far as I remember, it was Caldera who bought the remains of SCO. Considering that this company was created by one of the most mature figures of software, and a full-hearted anti-MS partisan - Ray Noorda, I really wonder how serious this story can be.
Besides, the story itself, is full of foggy statements. Many already referred the strange chain of anonymous sources that broke things to the newsrooms. But there are many other foggy moments.
First is the price tags - 96, 99, 149 per cpu. For anyone who knows how Linux is deployed, one can really wonder how they could be planning for such BS.
Then we read: Users of SCO Linux would get a free System 5 license. They would also have the free right to run SCO Unix apps on Linux. So... Are we talking about Linux or SCO Linux?
Then, we have this weird statement on pressing charges: Presumably this means Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and maybe even SCO's United Linux partners SuSE, TurboLinux, and Conectiva. If I'm not mistaken, TurboLinux is a Japanese comapny, SuSE is from Germany and Conectiva is from Brasil. Well, patent systems behave differentially in different countries. So, the best that SCO could have done was to commit harakiri as its partners would probably broke the alliance and it would force Caldera to fight in three different countries.
And the most weird of all statements would be this one: SCO would base any claims it makes on the Unix patents and copyrights that it acquired when it took over the Santa Cruz Operation. Its press release claims it "owns much of the core Unix IP" and that it has the right to enforce it. Well, if it owns much of the core of Unix, then not only Linux but the whole *NIX world would be in danger. Considering that this was once a matter that was partially and painfully settled down between Bell and Berkeley, considering that even Windows has a little bit of Unix inside, considering that lots of standards and protocols are based on Unix, considering the tens of Unices around, this would be double harakiri for SCO. So it is very weird to consider that anyone at SCO could ever seriously think the way it is shown on the article.
So it is very probable that the article is either someone trying to get some sensational points in yellow journalism, or this is a well elaborated FUD test to see how people react.
If one cares to see SCO site, they still are well determined in their Linux moves. And this adds an argument to the fact that probably this article is just some cheap provocation. No matter that I dislike SCO/Caldera, I have to recognise that someone is playing dirty against them.
I have been for some long years on the computer field and I may say that some of the most intelligent beings here are girls. They preform very well in some more abstract or theoretical tasks. However there are a few constraints that make a girl's life much more harder in this field.
First is the stress. To hold up in the IT field, one frequently is submitted to physical and psychological stresses much higher than in many other professions. I have seen geek girls trying to hold up rythms and hard tasks that I and many other of my colleagues consider "routine". After such situations, most of them, just "turn off" for a few days.
Second is the environment. Most IT rooms are a chaos of dirty coffee mugs, papers all over, tons of computer gear, kilometers of wire. Frequently, dust, noise, lightning conditions and some other things can be added to this. For many girls, this is the Hell in Flames.
Third, is the abnormal sexual enviroment around many IT experts. The computer, frequently, deprives people of some common pattern for sexual behaviour. Many become asexual or gives ground to weird sexual behaviours. In result, girls, who care more for some common denominator, feel some sort of weird discrimination. Among many girls, there is a frequent stereotype to consider most computer experts as impotents, sexually abnormal, or having trouble with their orientation. This weird environment is enough to scare many girls. Anyway they love some attention and care. And cannot cope with a full bunch of guys playing CounterStrike.
Fourth. Girls have lots of troubles when they become pregnant and start to care about their children. While there are some interesting exceptions, more than 90% of girls usually get a serious blow in their jobs, when they are forced to give up the IT world. A girl who tries care up for its child for the first years, usually is forced to expect a much lower position when she comes back to the IT world. Even six monthes out of the regular work is enough to send her into some secondary job.
And last. No matter the intelligence, girls are more prone to find easy jobs (aka more lazy jobs). And more prone to stability, order and care. In the core bottom of the chaotic IT world, most just quit at first try.
And already one harsh criticism by one of his opponents: http://metaresearch.org/media%20and%20 links/press/ SOG-Kopeikin.asp
Unfortunately I could not find Asada's comments on this. As one of the creators of the theory of brane worlds, it would be very interesting to see what he thinks about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Because scientists can do it not only more spooky, but in full 3D, real-time and you will even catch the smell of rotten flesh and burned metal.
Oh! And you get a special bonus: the utter feeling of what means "running for your lives". You would get the full meaning of "Salvation".
It's a pain to peel bananas with it.
Its should have guessed I wanna a banana just as I stare at him.
I have even to teach him what is a banana when I install it.
Yes it does not tear down bananas in pieces or throws them at you, like Windows. But it is not ready, truly, not ready...
Ugh-Ugh... Where is my banana??!! Dumb Penguin...
Why Internet? Let's go into the era when things started really wrong.
Sony should have scrapped in first place its support for PC - the CD drivers and MOSTLY the monitors.
Why Sony sold CD drives? They were cheap, they were powerful, they gave HUNDREDS of megabytes to the nefarious, poor scum of PC users. Sony should have pushed for a complete, all-scale proprietary architecture. NO customer fingers inside the box, like the Mac.
AND THE MONITORS! In the very beginning of the PC revolution, Sony monitors were in high demand for cheap graphics, including 3D. Who gave thousands the first taste that one can do something pretty on a dumb, awkward, slummy open architecture PC? The great 3D cards came later btw. Sony should have shot the guy who thought Trinitron was good for the PC.
But Sony didn't do it. And worse, you went into the wave. Sony supported the base that scrapped X25, Frame Relay and Microsoft's proprietary network (does anyone remember it?) More, Sony started to give Internet a chance!
Why Sony introduced a Ethernet port into PS2? Why? Sony pushed over the edge even those who didn't know what a PC was. No Ethernets! Some TwistedNet with a direct port into some hardcore encryption chip. Better, NO networks at all! Just console boxes and millions would never had jump into Internet. Ten years ago, a huge mass of people still thought that PCs were thinking machines, Internet a parallel Universe and console games what the world shall be.
But Sony could not stop itself. It closed eyes to the Pirate Harbour of Linux. It even supported it. It started to use codecs to distribute clips of its ever loving blockbusters... There were lots of things Sony could have done and Internet would never be a headache.
It could have just kept us on the cassetes anyway.
Ok you people! Now anyone may call me troll, racist, animal hater or anything worser. But I'm really fed up with people like this one. It is the very same song since the old 90's. And it is one of the reasons why I haven't been here for years.
Now, I have to confess, this is a never ending story - brawling all over what 6 year, 30 year, 90 year oldies may or may not able to use Linux. No one is going to give up.
But I think there is a way... The TEST!
Let a chimp try to use both systems. Really, Sincerly it would be interesting to see what will come out of such thing. Whatever it will be, it will be funny and damnly embarassing, I believe.
My son used Mandrake\Mandriva since 5 years old.
Lots of old people do use Windows. But I knew a lawyer, soon going into retirement, who said me that Linux was relatively acceptable for use on documents if it was not the fact that one has to deal with lots of M$ Office stuff. Anyway she could not use Linux, not because it was difficult but because it wasn't allowed at her department. Anyway, at home she kept a special Linux box for the most sensitive stuff. "It's a lot more secure there" she said.
So your brouaua goes "troll", anyway
Peter Wayner - author of a famous and well known book on compression algorithms, which managed to survive the Big Howl of Internet due to its relatively popularity on the time it was written. It was recovered thanks to thousands of fragments found in hundreds of hard drives all over the world.
Thomas Crampton - A supposedly journalist for the once famous New York Times. His personality is quite obscure and nothing is known about him, except for a short reference in the once famous Slashdot forum on Internet. He is known for the statement "You erased my career", supposedly written by him in a letter (lost) after supposedly finding that all his work was wiped by the New York Times (reference lost), supposedly a chronic problem of the newspaper in its electronic era (all references lost). Nearly all data on the New York Times has been lost, with exception to a few millions of fragments of articles that may be found now and then, so it is nearly impossible to know who was Thomas Crampton and probably we never will. The statement attributed to him is considered, today, as a markup symbol of the Big Howl of Internet.
Just a month ago, I made some pretty interesting analysis on how far things have reached the level "information should be free". Frankly, after what I saw, your case looks as a quantum event over the whole Universe. Yes, I understand your feelings, more, I understand that you feel pain to see your child running wild after so much of your life spent on it. But... You cannot change a tide that is more than just "Internet". In fact, the problem is not on Internet "per se", it is in a lot of things that have been running quite wrong for, at least, the last quarter of the century (maybe a little bit longer, imho).
The big problem is that information, today, costs zero, nada, null. Not in terms of traffic, pdf, ebook or that effort you made to create your book. It costs zero to the crazy "digital" society that you, I and everyone else is in. For the 99,99999999% of the people around us, it is not a big difference you wrote a book or not. More, for 99,99999% of those, who have some say on matters of management, administration or state politics, your book means nothing at all. Yes, you may think that these ones may rise their eyebrows, for the fact that someone violated your author's rights. However, before you consider your lawyer the author's best friend, please consider this question: apart of the monetary value of your book, can he consider any other values the book may have? Sincerly, I'm pretty sure that he will not make no difference between "compression" and "cooking". And that is exactly where the problem is and that is why your book finds a way out only in a pirate network.
Someone may counterargument that lawyers have not the duty to know what "compression" is. Yes, as 99,99999999% of "everyone" does not have such obligation. Who remains? A miserable fraction of weirdos who are really interested in such matter. Now, pick up the environment where these weirdos live in... And you immediately understand why piracy is the law of the day.
What Google is showing is not millions taking your book for free. It just a few hundred under the complete indifference of six billion people. That's the Truth out there.
Now, why a few hundred is doing it? Because things have gone too far and it is too late to stop it. Frankly, don't take this as an offense, but "compression" - it's not serious. Want rockets? WMDs? Fighting instructions? Weapons of all kinds and sorts?..
Do you want how to build the?.. Which one?..
And you don't need to stop just on the horror side of the story. If you are romantic enough, you can go for robots, nanos of all sorts, genetics, AI and the 100001 ways of programming. You can go also for many other things, from paleontology up to the prototypes of nuclear fusion reactors.
"Compression" is just a drop of water in the middle of the tide. Your book is nothing inside the tsunami.
Just to give you an idea of what I am talking about, I would remark that only one of these mega-libraries carries more than a hundred thousand books. And the "knowledge base" ranges mostly from 19th century up to our times. And I would not think that this large base carries a "expired" term. An AK-47 prototype is an AK-47 today (47 is the official year of its creation). And rocket mechanics work today the very same way they worked half a century ago.
Yes, programming goes a little bit out of this. But can anyone be sure that it "goes"? Maybe it "looks" more than really "goes".
Now this is the "industry". In some way it shall be justified - lots of books have long been out of print or were nearly lost, if such libraries didn't start to thrive, On other way, we have to consider a balance - books shall be bought, but are they easily affordable? And, in the end, we shall consider that there is an innerent danger under all this - a big chunk of this knowledge carries heavy consequences.
Now what one shall do with this? That's the billion dollar question. But, the thing I'm sure no one shall do is "hunt and prosecute". These "wars" have only made things much worser than befo
Well, I may agree that the article is speculative. It does not hide that. But note that the author states "googledvr.net/.org" and not googledvr.com. Now, while the .com belongs the God knows who, .net and .org are technically related to Google. Take a whois search for that. BTW the registrar is some eMarkMonitor... Doing a search I came into this data:
"eMarkMonitor can not only help you make your mark but it also can aid you in protecting it. The comany provides software used to manage intellectual property on the Internet, including applications for brand management and trademark management, as well as protecting Web site domains and enterprise DNS information. eMarkMonitor also provides fraud protection applications used to detecting, analyze, and combat phishing attacks. The company's customers come from a wide range of fields and typically are attorneys, marketing and brand managers, and channel managers."
The first Jihad sites were on the net around 96. Badly written, worsely designed, mostly made for the sell of propaganda materials. Bosnia and Chechen videos, books from fundamentalist scholars and so on. Later they became more complex. Somewhere in 99 things became more complex, they started to pour doctrine over the Net. There were even oficial sites. Many had links in the US and European countries but the flagman was UK. In one way or the other, you could follow an origin to some London suburb. Ex. the ill-famous Qoqaz group of sites which was considered to have close ties to Ben-Laden.
After the Daghestan events, Russians tried to close down several of these sites, mainly those related to Qoqaz and Kavkaz.org. But in most cases their efforts wee ignored. Meanwhile many fundatementalist sites, on the eve of 09/11, became more complex. There were even sites full of Flash, Java and special effects. There were sites translated for several languages, specially those were the muslim community had some importance. Some of these sites should have costed some thousands of dollars to be created which is an indicator on how fundamentlists considered propaganda as one of their top weapons.
Only after 09/11, one could see the first witchhunt over the Internet. Unfortunately, this hunt went with a bent leg. The first wave of close-downs was just dumb. Fundamentalists just opened their sites over other providers or countries. Besides, it was noted that UK was not too enthusiastic to close its own fundamentlists. Even a few months after 09/11 one could find one and the same sites running with a slightly modified content or with the most critical materials masked behind a few pages. In fact, much was not done and only a few more popular sites were in fact removed. Hackers and disgruntled Inet users did much more to bring down these sites rather than UK authorities.
Meanwhile, CIA, FSB and other services did some homework in other places. In result, most fundamentalist sites went deep underground. Besides, they stopped publishing their BS in english or other european languages, prefering Arabic, Urdu and other asian languages for the content. Yes, they shrinked their audience, but they gained an advantage that it would be a lot harder to find them, by searching the content. Besides they made some wise maneuvers for coverup, hiding behind porno sites or deep under certain forums. These places are a lot harder to find and not everyone can easily get a tip where certain forums may be located.
This part of the game was completely ignored in UK. They gave them time to adapt. They kept them in the warm while others were hunting them down in the cold. They didn't care to bring down several places until the barbars were beyond the gates. So, whatever "good deeds" UK catches from bringing them down now, they just lost the initiative. Fundamentalists have already learned several lessons from a fight that was an half-fight because someone didn't want to "harass the sensabilities of its muslim community". So, now, they have the knowledge and capability to hide behind. Thanks UK for that...
Lessons usually tend to end in a "next time"... However for UK here will be no next time... They fucked off the momentum and now are dearly paying for it. People were killed, including many members of the "sensitive muslim community".
Well at least I see that there is more than one lake in the northern hemisphere. Well, really what I saw is a lot smaller than this one. I would call it a pond. But what amazed me is that it showed that water could really keep for some time in open air (or more correctly "near open air"??). Moreover, the pond was getting water from a spring over the hill behind it. Considering this, I think there should be more places where water could gather.
:)
BTW, If I well remember, the borders of the pound showed some gradation suggesting it was drying up. And,and and if I really didn't mess anything, the pond was mostly covered by a wall. But it was not a crater. Probably a subduction as the shape was more similar to an ellypse over an highland. Yes, and what most critics may bash me was that the pond was in small highland. Yes pressure should a lot less there. But it was there...
But please don't ask me for a proof. As I told once around here. I lost that frame. I hardly tried to pick it back but it was searching in a haystack as all my data went limbo back them. It is on one of MGS frames before Summer 2000. I worked with the original frames or with those processed by Malin's labs.
Besides I am not here claiming first discoveries. Just leaving a note. Maybe someone finds it or catches something more interesting. Like underground rivers or something else
Funny, but for nearly a year, tons of Russian spam could be tracked in one way or the other to US sources...
But blame the US for it is rather, uuuuh, stupid...
In fact most spam, even "native" spam, can be tracked to very few sources. And here the US ain't alone. China, India, some networks in Western Europe and Russia can be put in the train. If you are eager to track spammers you going to be amazed that even in the US the big fat spam networks can be counted by the fingers of your hands.
However, media and even well-known spamhauses, love to point fingers to the "first-source" of spam. For us it can be europeans or americans. For americans it can be chinese or russians. But, if anyone takes the care to see a few of these spam sources, he will see a huge world of trojaned hosts, with auctions reminding the dirtiest slave trade, robots controling the sending of millions of e-mails, tons of traffic that some careless user will have to pay from his pocket.
Police hunts frequently the wrong people as they don't have a clue about the true picture of this industry. Victims can be whoever, example: young teens that just visited the fan-club of their hero (a true story btw). No porno, no crackers, no kiddiez trying to script around. Mostly innocent sites with TV stars, comics heros or that lovely band from MTV's clips... But "mostly" ends in a banner, a javascript statement or a well-crafted exploit. And soon someone knocks your door searching for those million letters spams.
Not long ago I said to some friends that we got back to slavery ages. With the only difference that one doesn't need to know his status...
Tracking the real sources among all the trash that goes on spam industry is very hard. But, sometimes, one has some luck and finds curious things. So, who are the real sources of this slavery trade? There are several, but the big money seems to hide behind a few intereestting figures. Who are they? Well, I believe that Michael Moore could make a second blockbuster if he picks them for the show... Naaaa it ain't Chimney and Bushman. Not even near... But not so far also...
Anyway I would be a lot harder for Moore to publicize such a new film... This time he would have to be smarter than a fox...
... if the current state of affairs will keep on.
For the last years anyone at the front line of techsupport, network and system administration has seen how the user "community" gets dumbier and dumbier. Recently we had a very good laugh after one guy bought an Internet account, not having a computer anywhere...
Soom we will see Internet reaching consumer electronics and mobile phones... When this comes up, things will be even worser...
However, if sysadmins will think this is a good prospect for a "new" boom and good salaries... Well, sorry people. Most of the sysadmin mass will be also dumb lusers with shiny suits and mostly empty pockets. Frankly, the wholescale tendency is to turn us into a Paleontogical exhibit. No one will succeed on this, but the "market" environment created by Microsoft will still prevail for years. No matter the policy "sysadmins wouldn't be needed", they will be in place, mostly as janitors, mechanics and tubing rats...
This will keep on until something wakes up everyone... And people die or highly suffer with it...
Then... Well... It is hard to predict what may happen on a "day after"... But maybe we will see better times... Or maybe we will see something much worser...
Until then, there will be a few pockets of Digital Life where some hardskin sysadmins, developers and hackers will keep going on serious stuff...
Frankly I can tell you that this is the most stupid idea I ever heard for the last time. Anyone who thinks that dissolving such organisations like the FCC will make the world better is either a complete outsider or is completely nuts. And I can tell you this because I am working at something very similar to FCC. No matter the differences from country to country, I know that we both meet similar situations at our work. Let me present you some:
Frequency fistfights - this is not only a case of walkie-talkies and radios. It is a case of mobile phone corporations degradating its neighbors while playing tricks with base stations. Sometimes it reaches a serious fight where two or even three corporations create a complete blackout over a whole city.
Internet wars - Your traceroute shows a "Yves Rocher" path to reach your neighbor next block? The Berlin-Paris-New York routes are the result of eternal fights that go much further away from a simple economical reason. It is enough for two CEO's to hate each other for you to see peering not being made for years.
The super-pooper routers/switches/etc. - You buy something with hope that will make what is shown on the box. However it works badly or does not work at all. It occurs that developers messed protocols or just a byte in the middle. In a supervised market this looks much as an occasional nuisance. However any deregulation will bring the market to its knees and end in a mess of "made in USA - roughly near Ho-Chi-Min city". Example: In the highly deregulated market that Russia had in the 90's, after USSR's fall, this was the Hell in Flames.
Black Holes popping over the net - You come to a provider and find that he even does not know half of the network. The founders have gone long ago and the current admin is a fast promoted technical support guy with minimal knowledge of reality. Something goes wrong and we find tens of thousands of users hanged in a black hole as no one knows configs, projects, designs, schemes or even the names of the network systems...
That's the reason for such things as FCC should exist. By itself, the "Ephir" will turn into something worser than Dark Ages. However I do agree that most FCC's of this world are badly adapted to the realities of modern life. I would even say that they are horribly adapted to it. Besides they are overweighted by mega-corporations, high politics, corruption and cellulose bureaucracy. Besides many inside FCC's are not so "overlord" as they may seem to an complete outsider. They are people, sometimes that still live in the 70-80's of their youth. So their knowledge has serious gaps for our days. And this creates all the problems for which the FCC's are known. But if we dismiss them, there will be no self-regulation. There will be Megasofts and Meghards trying to eat every cent in our pocket.
Frankly the reasonable solution is always in the middle... Reform the FCC. Right now, that is what is happening here. Not as one would like, but still it is better than nothing.
Well there people here thinking on searching for microbial Life. Many may think they need a microscope for that. First I should note that if microbes exist then they should leave a trail... And that trail may be as big as to be visible from above:
g
Life on Mars: Giant Fossils
Second there's the chemistry of rocks. The more deep we study them, the better we get into their evolution. In some cases the "phases" or "cycles" of processes around certain minerals can be done only with the help of microorganisms.
Third there are fossils. Even if Mars would be only populated by minuscle bacteria, that would not forbid them of creating colonies or produce large-scale deformations on rocks.
However to have a clue, no one can be sure of it even if it gets right in his face a something following Knoll's criterium the harshest criteria to find fossils that NASA stands for (and maybe correctly). For example I saw something that nears that criterium:
http://cydonia.ksu.ru/parafossil/parafossilA.pn
Is that a fossil? Well that thing has many things that point to organics. It has a interachange of structures looking like sections or segments of our animals. The bent structure in the middle of the rock suggests some kind of elasticity of the strcture. those holes are cavities and suggest very thiny walls, what excludes a mineral origin, through crystallization. The structure seems to have a bifurcation. If you see well then that zone has something looking much like the structure of the muscles in animals venous systems...
Is that a fossil? Well maybe, so I call it a pseudo/para fossil or, as some name it fossiloid. But this could be a trick of nature. No it is not a trick of JPEG as that picture is a composite with perliminar blur, besides two originals already show those lines without enhancement. So it is SOMETHING (no it is not a stupid bunny or a Message of Mars to Earth in Maori). But the worst this something has is the fact that is laying there lonely and unique. It could be a vent of hot mineral waters. It could be a sequence of events that lead to such a unique structure. We had once Faces there, remember? Truly quite fussy. So until someone gets a better enhancement of that (there are six frames of that rock) or we find something similar, it will remain something.
In fact the only way to find life there is to accumulate evidence. Even if it is only with the help of a microscope. But using ONLY a microscope, that will be like finding a needle in the haystack. The planet is quite dead and you don't need microscopes to be sure of that. So where they were/are is also a pretty serious question
Frankly I'm disappointed. Until now they roam around and claim that the findings are not wholly conclusive:
"The images obtained to date are not adequate for a definitive answer. So scientists plan to maneuver Opportunity closer to the features for a better look. "We have tantalizing clues, and we're planning to evaluate this possibility in the near future," Grotzinger said.
Besides hydrated minerals were already hinted by Spirit. One of the very first press releases pointed to that fact. Besides this is not the only weird thing between Opportunity and Spirit outputs. If one compares the first wave from results from Spirit with Opportunity's then it seems that the second robot is clearly giving very thiny results. Until now I could not see broadscale spectral and infrared analysis like the ones Spirit did. Maybe I'm missing something but frankly it seems that data feed from Meridiani goes a long way from it could.
PS: To those who are discussing theologies... Frankly don't get you people. Try to find a super SF author by the name of Nicolau Cusanus and his bestseller "De docta ignorantia". He already discussed a lot of what you keep rumbling till now...
The presence of water in Mars has nothing new in it. In fact, for quite long we have had several evidences of its presence. Unfortunately all this messed with a long-standing presumption that Mars is Dry-Dried-Drying-Dead. This presumption was born from the unfortunate fight between Lowell and other scientists on the presence of civilizations in Mars. Each one of us may qualify Lowell's extrapolations from several points of view. But the fact is that many scientists of his time and later decided that the best argument against Lowell was to extrapolate the counterarguments. The fact was that the "scientific" discussion of Lowell's ideas as more as putting counterweights rather than well-weighed scientific arguments. It seems that people were more scared by Lowell's radicalism rather than studying Mars. If Lowell said there was a civilization, his opponents tried to overshow everything to demonstrate that civilizations could not exist in Mars, down to denying the chances for Life in Mars. If Lowell argumented that Mars had channels to carry precious water, almost everyone tried to demonstrate that there is not even a molecule of water in the atmosphere...
The result was that at Viking's time, most circles were standing for the Dry-Dried-Drying-Dead argument, no matter the controversial data from spectroscopy, the first pictures from Mars and several theories about the formation of the Solar System. Most academical circles were not only willing to but forcing the view that Mars was just like the Moon but more colder.
Unfortunately things did not stop only in this. There were people that for some reason falsified Viking's results or manipulated other results. For some reason, these people needed the Dry-Dried-Drying-Dead Mars argument as a weapon for their silly, stupid and overreligious theories. Frankly it is another show on how Mars, since Kepler, has been ground not only for a scientific debate but also for political-religious fistfights... Anyway, the extremism of ideas and the fundamentalism of some slowed down the exploration of Mars.
If you hear a refutation of the new discoveries, be careful. Before coming into conclusions try to find if this is the product of a scientific discussion, how correctly people step up with their arguments, or if this is another mass-media show between Hoagland-alikes and Horowitz-clones.
No it's not brine because there is not water and we all know for long that Mars is Deadly Dead Dry and there is only CO2 and minimal traces of water and all there is volcanic and consequently basaltic so it's dry and dead as we know that there is no life in Mars as there is no water as it is dry and volcanic and basaltic and witout carbon no matter the CO2 in the atmosphere as Viking found no carbon and Pathfinder could not search for it as it coul not search for any water and all waht looks made by water is volcanic so all stories on aliens no matter their size are tales no matter Surveyor and Odyssey found water but it is still a question and Spirit could have detected water but it is still on investigation, and Opportunity steeped into the mud but we are not willing to do the same.
So Ladies and Gentleman we have proved once again that there we ARE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE!!!!!!
Maybe someone else checked this news already but anyway:
Uncle Sam may need to pay for Linux
While I am absolutely anti-Microsoft and I am sure that Hell's sysadmin is Bill Gates, this case is clearly something I would make an exception in my 5 minutes of hatred against Redmond.
The patent system was created mainly in a world where Newton's mechanics was rised to a new church. By the most, it was related to mechanical inventions and mechanisms. During the industrial boom of the 19th Century it was seen as a viable and effective mecahnism to protect inventors.
But computers are not mechanisms by the most. Mostly they are Mathematics, Science and Art. Now these fields demand interaction, exchange and even free sharing of ideas. Besides, the combination of these fields creates a non-conclusive and non-deterministic environment. With a great degree of accuracy, one can determine the limits of most mechanisms. The same is not appliable to programming, where algorithms look like LEGO pieces. But while a LEGO piece has a clear form, most algorithms may deform themselves and take several shapes. They can even brake apart and rejoin again. So, one cannot have clear boundaries where one could make a clear conclusion that a program or algorithm starts "here" and ends "there". Whatever definitions one may claim in a patent, while he doesn't use mathematics and logic, one cannot clearly define a patentable algorithm or program. Using natural language to define a patentable algorithm is falling in the eternal question "Why you cannot program in plain-text English?"
On the other side, almost no program or algorithm is complete per se. Most of all, an algorithm or program is mostly an abstraction. In most cases algorithms of similar structure may be used over tens or hundreds of fields of applications. To become meaningful they need some sort of "translation" to the real world, an interface. But interfaces also carries lots of algorithms. And interfaces may be of several kind, from monitors and keyboards to printers and pens. So one cannot determine the boundaries of the algorithm or program.
So, even if M$ is the Evil in flames, in this case, I am fully M$ support. (no matter my stomach revolves on the idea).
While roaming this /. discussion I occasionally fell into US Copyright office... Once there I decided to search SCO's claim on copyright. Found it, but also I found something more interesting:
UNIX system V : release 3.0 INTEL 80286/80386 computer version : programmer's guide.
Searched on the Web for a little more of the book:
Published - February 1988
Copyrighted by AT&T and edited by Prentice Hall and Unix Systems Laboratory.
On its complaint, more specifically on paragraph 35 and 36, SCO lawyers nearly fill the world with tears by claiming that SCO was the sole developer of UNIX for Intel platforms. But they seem to forget that SCO developed its System V Release 3 only a year after USL's work. And that by the time they were releasing their version, USL was already launching Release 4, which 3 years later became Unixware.
It seems they the mind they have to fill new copyrights and patents is not enough to search those same copyrights and patents...
BTW. the book can still be found for sale...
The way SCO is acting reminds more a mob going wild over the street.
They come up with a full set of "services" to its customers. Their Web site just looks a Christmas tree full of that. Meanwhile, when you come up to it, the first thing you see is "Relax, worry free software" which is some sort of double-minded threat.
The court complaint is also pretty interesting. Most people believe that SCO is threatening IBM for some disclosure of trade secrets. In fact SCO is accusing IBM of conspiring against SCO by disclosing Unix code to Linux. All the comaplaint is a mess of distortions where Linux pre-2.4 looks much like a simple hobbiyst OS without any significance for the market. Then came IBM, changed the whole 2.4 kernel by inserting SCO code and started a campaign to drive SCO from the market. Worse than that, it seems that IBM is to blame for Linux being a workable kernel on the Intel platforms, as, in SCO's claims, they were nearly the exclusive producer and distributor of UNIX for Intel architecture!..
Among the claims filled to court one may clearly some foggy statements against the Linux community in the whole:
"This prohibition extends to derivative work products that are modifications of, or based on, UNIX System V source code or technology. IBM and certain other UNIX software distributors are violating this prohibition, en masse, as though no prohibition or proprietary restrictions exist at all with respect to the UNIX technology."
"As such, Linux 2.4.x and Linux 2.5.x are unauthorized derivatives of UNIX System V."
Note that SCO, in its complaint, is eager to generalize. Besides it leaves in the dark certain things as "other UNIX software distributors". And also it seems that BSD does not exist in SCO's Universum at all.
So what we have here? Considering the above, and the situation among the community, we have here a case that surely will take some good time to settle. SCO is clearly distorting reality so well that I fear that the court will have to take some time to digere all the confusion they created. Yes, SCO will loose it. Everyone who have seen the evolution of Linux since its start, knows perfectly that they pushed too far from reality. But courts need facts, and need testimonies, documents and expertise. And SCO seems to know that it will be rather difficult for the Linux community to gather all developers in one court room. That seems the strategy they are trying to play. If all developers gather, then SCO will have nothing to say. All the story will just be a soap bubble without any serious ground. But can IBM gather all the developers they need to counter the oversized history of UNIX, SCO is trying to tell the court? Personally I think it will be a bit difficult... Anyway, it will take time until the court gets into some conclusion. Which may be longer the DoJ vs Microsoft.
Meanwhile, even without court orders, SCO goes further and knocks every door with foggy threats of liability, if one doesn't pay for Linux. Now this clearly reminds mobs that created a FUD climate and then extorted money for "security" and "protection" services. In the whole this seems the main strategy SCO is playing. And, as in old times, commerces seem to bound to the new Capones of the 21th century, stocks are rising and SCOrface is getting richer.
It seems that this is going too far. Well I may agree that certains activities related to cracking should be punished. People and comapnies not only loose money but also precious information and reputation. Some cracks may lead to more serious situations when we may have not only material but also personal losses.
But creating an environment where cracking itself is utterly ilegal is the most stupid thing one can think of. First because it will create a situation similar to America in the 20's-30's where nearly all alcohol production was outlawed. By making cracking illegal, one will not stop it but feed the criminal hordes with experienced people and tool experts. What will come out of that is unpredictable. The future cyber-Scarface will not only stop by Chicago and not only restrict his doings in the waters of the Great Lakes.
Besides, making cracking wholly illegal will not give ground to capitalism. It will be the best show of feudalism in modern times, as all "good-netizens" will be utterly dependent of the wills and whishes of a bunch of corporations who will care or discare for the their security and/or privacy.
Also it will be a violation of our freedom. I can check up the engine of my car. I can try to fix my washing machine. I have the right to change a light bulb in my living room. But I have to go to jail because some jerk locked up any interactivity of his program with any other system and I need that for my everyday's needs?
Well SCO aka Caldera is an enterprise with a long Linux tradition. I may dislike it more than like it, but this is more a question of taste and preferences. Anyway, one shall take into consideration that SCO, today, combines one of the oldest Linux distributors + the most traditionalist Unix developer.For such a company to come up and try a suicide move like the one shown in the article is rather irrational. True, there have been such cases, when companies change hands and new management gets nuts and the company burns to flames. But, as far as I remember, it was Caldera who bought the remains of SCO. Considering that this company was created by one of the most mature figures of software, and a full-hearted anti-MS partisan - Ray Noorda, I really wonder how serious this story can be.
Besides, the story itself, is full of foggy statements. Many already referred the strange chain of anonymous sources that broke things to the newsrooms. But there are many other foggy moments.
First is the price tags - 96, 99, 149 per cpu. For anyone who knows how Linux is deployed, one can really wonder how they could be planning for such BS.
Then we read: Users of SCO Linux would get a free System 5 license. They would also have the free right to run SCO Unix apps on Linux. So... Are we talking about Linux or SCO Linux?
Then, we have this weird statement on pressing charges: Presumably this means Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and maybe even SCO's United Linux partners SuSE, TurboLinux, and Conectiva. If I'm not mistaken, TurboLinux is a Japanese comapny, SuSE is from Germany and Conectiva is from Brasil. Well, patent systems behave differentially in different countries. So, the best that SCO could have done was to commit harakiri as its partners would probably broke the alliance and it would force Caldera to fight in three different countries.
And the most weird of all statements would be this one: SCO would base any claims it makes on the Unix patents and copyrights that it acquired when it took over the Santa Cruz Operation. Its press release claims it "owns much of the core Unix IP" and that it has the right to enforce it. Well, if it owns much of the core of Unix, then not only Linux but the whole *NIX world would be in danger. Considering that this was once a matter that was partially and painfully settled down between Bell and Berkeley, considering that even Windows has a little bit of Unix inside, considering that lots of standards and protocols are based on Unix, considering the tens of Unices around, this would be double harakiri for SCO. So it is very weird to consider that anyone at SCO could ever seriously think the way it is shown on the article.
So it is very probable that the article is either someone trying to get some sensational points in yellow journalism, or this is a well elaborated FUD test to see how people react.
If one cares to see SCO site, they still are well determined in their Linux moves. And this adds an argument to the fact that probably this article is just some cheap provocation. No matter that I dislike SCO/Caldera, I have to recognise that someone is playing dirty against them.
I don't think so.
I have been for some long years on the computer field and I may say that some of the most intelligent beings here are girls. They preform very well in some more abstract or theoretical tasks. However there are a few constraints that make a girl's life much more harder in this field.
First is the stress. To hold up in the IT field, one frequently is submitted to physical and psychological stresses much higher than in many other professions. I have seen geek girls trying to hold up rythms and hard tasks that I and many other of my colleagues consider "routine". After such situations, most of them, just "turn off" for a few days.
Second is the environment. Most IT rooms are a chaos of dirty coffee mugs, papers all over, tons of computer gear, kilometers of wire. Frequently, dust, noise, lightning conditions and some other things can be added to this. For many girls, this is the Hell in Flames.
Third, is the abnormal sexual enviroment around many IT experts. The computer, frequently, deprives people of some common pattern for sexual behaviour. Many become asexual or gives ground to weird sexual behaviours. In result, girls, who care more for some common denominator, feel some sort of weird discrimination. Among many girls, there is a frequent stereotype to consider most computer experts as impotents, sexually abnormal, or having trouble with their orientation. This weird environment is enough to scare many girls. Anyway they love some attention and care. And cannot cope with a full bunch of guys playing CounterStrike.
Fourth. Girls have lots of troubles when they become pregnant and start to care about their children. While there are some interesting exceptions, more than 90% of girls usually get a serious blow in their jobs, when they are forced to give up the IT world. A girl who tries care up for its child for the first years, usually is forced to expect a much lower position when she comes back to the IT world. Even six monthes out of the regular work is enough to send her into some secondary job.
And last. No matter the intelligence, girls are more prone to find easy jobs (aka more lazy jobs). And more prone to stability, order and care. In the core bottom of the chaotic IT world, most just quit at first try.
Kopeikin's results:
0 links/press/ SOG-Kopeikin.asp
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0212121
And already one harsh criticism by one of his opponents:
http://metaresearch.org/media%20and%2
Unfortunately I could not find Asada's comments on this. As one of the creators of the theory of brane worlds, it would be very interesting to see what he thinks about this.