"In the eleventh hour, intelligence was perceived in the US Senate. Right now, as we continue to report this stunning headline, reporters are en route to discover the source of this rumor, and if it is factual, we'll bring you straight to the source. Stay tuned for more breaking news as it happens..."

This is the wrong question that keeps getting asked again and again. It's the "NASA shouldn't send men into outer space" meme that closely accompanies the "NASA should only use robotic spacecraft" meme.

This is blue-sky (well, since it's space, its probably black) research. This is the last vestige of this type of research that the United States has any investment in. the Reagan Administration axed all federal funding for this kind of ongoing research at Universities and think tanks long ago. But, since NASA had landed on the Moon, the Reagan Administration didn't want to cut this for fear they'd be hounded out of office.

But CNN correspondents breathlessly ask Astronaut after Astronaut in "exclusive" interviews, taking up precious air time, "Considering the dangers, should we really keep putting men up into outer space?"

Call me an Old Fossil, but I was there. Not once did Walter Cronkite ask the Apollo Astronauts this question. Everyone knew the answer. "Of course!" Even after the near-disaster that was Apollo 13, everyone was still just fine with the idea of going to the Moon. And we did it four more times, putting eight more men on the Moon. And we completely revolutionized our understanding of the Earth-Moon system and its origins.

When NASA pulls its head out and gets the right teams together, they can do anything. And that includes helping pull Chilean miners out of the ground. (Oh, maybe there are some scientists at NASA who know a thing or two because of all this money being thrown at these "blue sky" projects!) The only limitation is funding, and NASA's funds have been cut, sliced, diced and reduced to the point where they cannot get off the ground any more. NASA is on life support, dependent utterly on 1960s-era technology supplied by Russia. When NASA was flying things with the Shuttle, people my size could go into outer space (I stand 6'5"). Now that we're all "back to the future" with Russian space capsules, It has increased to 6'3" because Russia generously redesigned their capsules, which were limited to 5'11". Russian capsules are what our Astronauts called "Spam in the can."

Everyone here on Slashdot uses a computer for something. And I'll bet over 90% of slashdotters are using microcomputers to get on line. Microcomputers were developed based on needs by NASA to have computers that were light enough to be on a spacecraft because you couldn't fit a room-sized mainframe on an Apollo spacecraft or on the Lunar Excursion Module. So, let's see. We have this little space race thing that ends in the 1970s with NASA pouring money into little teeny solid state computing devices and you get the Apple ][ computer in 1977. And the IBM PC four years later. The last Apollo spacecraft was designed around 1967 more or less so I have to ask the naysayers what they're expecting to see in about ten years now that the ISS is complete. because everybody knows NASA science doesn't contribute to anything down here on earth.

I get absolutely disgusted and horrified when I hear and read this line of reasoning. Here we have this community on slashdot that is the beneficiary of the technology that NASA's scientists had a major hand in developing and you're discussing piddling nonsense.

Blue sky research generally takes about ten to fifteen, sometimes 20 years to result in something you hold in your hand. That's why it's called blue sky research, because it seems like you're funding a bunch of people looking up at the sky and asking why it is blue. But it always results in benefits to humanity that are incalculable. The United States is the only remaining superpower in the world. Rather than developing and maintaining stuff to kill people, we should be throwing big budgets at NASA and at other blue sky research. But, ever since Reagan took away the funding in our Universities (saying the Government is the problem), we have had none at Universities and a dwindling amount at NASA.

Slashdotters should be ashamed these questions are being asked.

I did no less than four investigative reports on how lax security used to be at US airports we would have a production assistant get a job with security with no background check or sneak contraband into a security zone. We would then interview a Congresspweson and an FAA person and they would wring their hands and agree that it was awful.

And nothing would change.

Now that we have professional security that is actually paid to care, everyone is complaining. I'm not. I get the full pat-down each time because I have a knee replacement. I point to it and politely tell the TSA person that I will set off the magnetometer. I always do the pat down. It is completely routine, I expect it and know what to do. I thank the TSA worker "for keeping us all safe." always gets a smile.

If you're going to cop an attitude, it won't be pleasant. If you don't see it as an imposition, it won't be. I am looking forward to the scanners. Maybe I won't need the pat-down. I am hoping the new technology makes everyone safer.

That is just not practical. I develop and host websites. If I need to change registrars because someone wasn't happy with their web designer and they came to me. As it is today, it can take up to 10 days to complete a registrar change.

I am using Melbourne IT as my registrar because my hosting provider works well with them. Certified mail to and from another country would take upwards of two weeks -- and all that time my client is waiting.

I completely understand the eagerness to deny spammers and malware fiends domains. But this is not the right solution for those of us who are legitimate.

I unfriended /. when every post was sent to my account in quadruplicate. Needed to stop the madness.

I suppose I'm old. And crusty.

But honestly, folks, this is a huge comeback (from the dead!)

Not too long ago, Apple's demise was being spoken of regularly by the Wall Street Journal, by the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other newspapers back when newspapers really meant something. The stock sunk to 14 dollars a share. I bought 100 shares thinking that, if you sold off the component parts of the company, you would get more than $14 per share. My target price was $35 and, like a fool, I sold shortly after the iMac came out.

But parallel to that was a triumphant Microsoft. Bill Gates still ran that company and he could speak to the software people. Microsoft could do no wrong and Steve Jobs, when he took over Apple again, had to end a lawsuit against Microsoft (over Windows 3.x) in order to get Microsoft to develop a version of Office for the Mac. Microsoft also bought up a huge tranch of Apple stock. the press lionized Gates and Microsoft. They were the juggernaut that could do no wrong, and Apple was "The Beleaguered Apple" and on its last legs.

I see positive press on Apple these days and I remember all that. And I think, "Wow, what a comeback."

I have been using SpamSieve, which works for Apple Mail, Entourage, PowerMail, Eudora, Mailsmith, Emailer, GyazMail, Outlook Express 5.0+ Yahoo Mail Plus and Thunderbird. I consider it the best $30 I have spent on email. I get very, very few false positives and it absolutely catches over 90% of all spam emails directed at my Gmail and .Mac accounts.

I think that there are legal tools to go after the spammers and, in the US, the Federal Trade Commission is going after a few of the more notable ones. But there needs to be a cultural change in the minds of everyone on the Internet for spam to end. And I don't see that is going to happen anytime soon.

Please see my earlier post for the long explanation, but:

Photoshop CS5 can. CS 4 and CS3 only see four cores, that's all they were programmed to see because that's a Carbon limitation. Since Illustrator and Final Cut Pro are also 32-bit Carbon applications, they cannot either. Final Cut Pro, when rendering as hard as it can render, only uses 4 cores and some of the plugins only see one core. Photoshop plugins (almost all of them, which have not been rewritten to Cocoa and to 64-bit) only see 4 cores.

But I'm lying, too. Photoshop CS5 sometimes doesn't use the CPU at all. CS5 will use the GPU for some of the things it does.

I think we're at the point where the software lag has truly hit us.

I have a dual Quad-core "Nehalem" Mac Pro 4,1. So far it has 16G of system RAM. I'll add another 16G on its third anniversary.

But Apple's Final Cut Pro is a 32-bit Carbon application. So it's pretty much limited to four cores and I'm not sure it's able to use the dual-mode of the Nehalem cores. A truly well-written bit of software should make my system "look" like it has 16 cores and use all of them. The most I have seen Final Cut use is four (or eight if it does take advantage of dual-mode). So I can have a render cooking away and I have four cores to spare (though I may not have much RAM).

Oh, but wait -- nobody just uses Final Cut! No, they're using plugins!

Right you are (you smarty-pants, you)! You're using plugins to make Final Cut really sing. After all, green screen work, particle effects and other effects require the work of Boris Continuum Complete, Digital Anarchy, ToolFarm and CoreMelt, not to mention others. So how many cores do they work with?

Turns out, in some cases, only one.

So you could be editing away, planning your render to take up a few hours overnight and come back to work (as I did with an earlier version of Red Giant Software's ToonIt which only used one processor core) after a cuppa joe and a splendid breakfast in the morning to see your Mac tell you, "only six more hours to go."

I really needed to kill something when I saw that.

Oh, and let's talk about Photoshop, shall we?

I did not upgrade to CS4. Adobe really stroked the Mac crowd nicely when they released a 64-bit (Vista-UGH!) version of Photoshop for Windows only, folks -- despite the fact that Apple had 64-bit built into its operating system two years before Microsoft (unless you count XP-64 which lacks drivers and now lacks any support from Microslush). Photoshop CS5 is now out and it's been done right because someone at Adobe had a nice steamin' hot cuppa Cocoa and rewrote it, like they should have when Apple told them to in 1999 (please tell me why Adobe seems so much like GM, OK?) that Carbon was transitional and that it would start getting old and crusty pretty soon.

But, as far as I can tell, all of the plugins for Photoshop are still 32-bit, so you won't be seeing any improvement in speed until they're rewritten, too.

Seems like Apple could take a cue from Adobe with Final Cut now, couldn't they.

Most of the Adobe suite, excepting Photoshop and After Effects is 32-bit Carbon. So you're not going to get Grand Central Dispatch sending stuff out to 8 cores or 16 core-lets (with Nehalem). So the 12-core Mac will have -- let's see... eight cores sitting idle most of the time? Boy, I really want one of those!

Apple needs to release these computers and these servers. The technology in these beasties is frightfully fast (I know, my Mac can run like a bat outa wherever if it's running a 64-bit application). But remember: Microsloth Word is going to want the first core and it's going to hog it. Grand Central Dispatch isn't going to get you anywhere with Dreamweaver. If you have Excel running in the background, Mathematica may stall because it's running out of RAM and resources that Microsoft Excel wants to keep.

I would imagine we're looking at another generation in software before our computers are actually unbound by the dependencies written into what we're using currently.

Oh, and I do note that the splash screens for Microsoft Excel still stay up for a long time -- even at 2.93 GHz.

OK, i'll bite (or is it byte -- naah, that's just a really good magazine I used to read that was killed).

I was working with Microsoft back in 1995 doing PR for them. Happened to go to a meeting that, maybe I should not have attended. Bunch of microserfs in attendance looking at a new product. Gates enters the room and everyone gets really excited and really quiet.

Gates asks about part of the user interface. Microserf answers. Gates proceeds to rip into him like the wrath of ghod (which he may have been to the microserfs). Calls him a total idiot, tells him his UI won't work because nobody will get it. Then turns to the rest of the room -- which cowers as one (actually, I almost flinched and I had nothing to do with the project). Then Gates brings up another aspect of the application and one guy stands up with a quavering voice and takes responsibility (blame). Gates tells him that most of what he has seen makes pretty good sense, then rips into him about part of the thing he took credit for.

I figured half the room was going to be let go and escorted off the Microsoft campus by armed guards at gunpoint (and no, you cannot empty your desks!). Gates then tells everyone that they have to be afraid, that the other software companies were going to catch up, that Microsoft was going to die horribly if they didn't get it together and think. Gates then whines about sloppy coding habits, tells them to get back to work and he'd better see a better application and soon.

Folks, Steve Ballmer is a manager-type. If he ever wrote a single line of code, it was in MSBasic as a new hire so that he could show Gates that it can be used to calculate sums and count beans. He doesn't understand, and has never understood, the people who design software. He cannot pick apart their work. And he cannot, as Gates used to, exhort them to produce better because he can do better.

I've not worked for Apple or done any projects within that company. But it's my understanding that Jobs is the same as Gates was. He has worked on design, which is a primary focus of Apple. He can rip into people who don't innovate. Jobs is not a bean counter, he's a visionary. Love him or hate him, Jobs requires something more of his people than a bean counter would and I would argue that Jobs can require that because of what he knows, which goes way beyond handling a company's balance sheet.

Where Gates lost his way was when the Internet became a phenomenon. "It's a gold-rush mentality," he said, "And the only people who are going to make money off the Internet are people who make tools for things on the Internet."

By that, I suppose he meant FrontPage and IIS servers. FP has been completely eclipsed by Dreamweaver and there are even free tools that create better websites. I do have one website on an IIS server. I uploaded an .M4V video file and it didn't work on the server. Administrator had to enable those types of files (I'll take normal Linux/Apache any day). And don't get me started on what I have to do to support Microsoft's non-W3C-compliant Internet Exploiter browser! I think they failed in that mission and that was back under Gates.

My argument is that Microsoft's decline is more due to lack of technical leadership than anything else. Ballmer was important to the company as its first manager but a tech company needs a tech guru sitting in the CEO seat, not someone who could run a division of Proctor and Gamble.

Yes, but I don't think that trips off the tongue as readily.

You're getting distracted by the example. Most people agree that pictures of naked women or men, in an artistic conceptualization, is free speech and the dividing line between that and pornography is fuzzy. I would tend to want to protect your right to pontificate about the evils you see in our government and that includes holding up signs, shouting slogans and standing up on a proverbial soapbox, holding forth on your opinions. I also think you would agree that this is free speech.

But, in certain circumstances, courts (not always the Supreme Court) have ruled that one may be arrested for standing on the side of the road with a sign that says "The President is a War Criminal." And, during the last administration there were zones along motorcade routes that had prohibitions from you holding such a sign so that the President could, possibly, if he was looking out the window at the right moment, see your sign. The ACLU had problems with this practice. And it would seem that the Bush Administration thought that the 9-11 attacks gave them the pretext to abolish the First Amendment

.

Were these attacks on our freedoms to actually have seen the light of day in a courtroom, I believe the long precedents of re-labeling "speech" a "verbal act" in SCOTUS decisions offer the path that would have been gleefully taken.

According to Wirenius, the way you ignore the First Amendment in arresting someone for speaking, exercising press freedoms and so on, is to call it a "verbal act" and not speech, which is protected.

I can see a good class-action suit here (and I'm not a lawyer) to require that Apple send all iPhone 4 owners a bumper or case for their new phone that prevents the attenuation of the signal caused by holding the phone incorrectly. That is really the fix for this issue and, were the phone sold with one or packaged with one, this would be a non-issue.

Complete disclosure here: I own the original iPhone (limited to Edge Network) and am planning to upgrade as soon as I know if there will (or definitely won't) be any competition between telcos.

My good friend, John Wirenius some time ago published a book on free speech called "First Amendment, First Principles: Verbal Acts and Freedom of Speech." The book is kind of hard-going, so unless you're interested in carefully-researched legal argument covering the subject, you're in for a slow read.

My point is this (and John makes it in detail): Immediately upon the adoption of our current Constitution here in the United States, the Supreme Court began hacking away at this First Amendment -- and with a really large axe, rather than an ice pick. There are current definitions for what one may present or do or say that consider speech a "verbal act" that may be Constitutionally limited. It is this tortured creation of an action from one's words that really defies any and all logic.

Everyone is familiar with the "limitation" on "free speech" that is described thusly:

... crying "Fire" in a crowded movie house

Something like this is, presently no problem for the Supreme Court, as saying that word in that situation is re-defined, not as "speech" but as a "verbal act," and thus, not protected by the First Amendment. So, I don't really see Elena Kagan as proposing anything different than what has been going on in the United States for 200 plus years. The definition of "Free Speech" versus "verbal act" is one that is entirely subject to interpretation of any Court, be it local, federal, a court of original jurisdiction or an appellate court.

Posted to my Facebook Page.

This is really cool -- and good info about what it takes to make an actual star in the comments that follow the parent. Sometimes Astronomy means observations over years and years.

Good job, Phil!