Diary of a Wolfeman

Satire at it’s finest, folks. Read it and weep with laughter!

Save Marriage! It’s all the homos fault …

Frizzen Sparks brought up the idea this time ’round, so we’ll bame him.

What 15 or so songs would you put on the soundtrack of your life? Most of the responses he’s had are just the top 15 or so songs for the individual; I’ll try to put them into context of what scene they should be played in. Some of these can’t really be narrowed down to one song or even one artist, but I’ll try to be brief. (Yeah, right.)

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Yahoo! News reports on this almost slam-dunk for computer users across America. The House of Representatives voted 399 to 1 to impose fines on the bastards who write and distribute spyware.

Wouldn’t you know it was a Texan Republican who voted against it.

The most egregious behaviors ascribed to the category of such software – secretly recording a person’s computer keystrokes or mouse clicks – are already illegal under U.S. wiretap and consumer protection laws.

The House proposal, known as the “Spy Act,” adds civil penalties over what has emerged as an extraordinary frustration for Internet users, whose infected computers often turn sluggish and perform unexpectedly.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Mary Bono (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., provides guidelines for technology companies that distribute software capable of most types of electronic monitoring. It requires that consumers explicitly choose to install such software and agree to the information being collected.

Not surprisingly, an investigation revealed over 60 different varieties of spyware installed on the panel’s own computers. This bill adds civil fines to the toolbox authorities have for fighting cybercrime.

Law enforcement agancies operating under a wiretap order are, of course, exempt.

BOFH: How do you deal with authority? | The Register

Too priceless. Go take the test now. I said Now!

In a great decision for dinner-hour privacy, the Supreme Court backs the ‘do-not-call’ list. A group of telemarketers tried to get the Court to declare it an unfair restriction of commercial speech, but the Supreme Court has agreed with the over 11 million people who have signed up on that list that it is merely a pre-emptive opt-out.

I’d still rather have a device that allows me to send a high-voltage current back down the line.

CNN.com reports that Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne successfully completed it’s second trip to space within two weeks and has claimed the Ansari Z Prize for 10 million dollars, ushering in a new age in privately-funded space flight.

SpaceShipOne gets a ride to the upper atmosphere strapped to the belly of it’s mothership the WhiteKnight, then releases and fires it’s own rocket to soar into space. At the end of the flight, she glides back to Earth and lands on a conventional runway.

The current craft is only capable of three passengers, but Scaled Composites will now have not only the X Prize monies, but also a deal with the Virgin Group to launch Virgin Galactic worth another $25 million to expand the project and launch commercial space tourism over the next few years.

Anyone who has watched NASA’s budget go up and down over the years will be pleased to know that space exploration is no longer strictly in the hands of government, but rather in the capable hands of visionaries and pioneers who want to get off this rockball as much as I do. At the very least, it’s in the hands of people who know there’s money to be made out there, and only the bold can cash in. Either way, we win.

In another article at CNN.com, it looks like the best use for this new technology may be an even older problem: the ISS is filling up with junk.

With no garbage pickup by shuttles for nearly two years, the international space station is looking more and more like a cluttered attic.

“Room limited,” is how the affable astronaut Mike Fincke describes it.

The problem is, shuttle deliveries and pickups won’t resume until spring, and that’s if NASA is lucky. A barrage of hurricanes and their devastating blow to NASA’s launch site may well delay the next shuttle flight, by Discovery.

So the stuff will keep piling up and up.

Considering that SpaceShipOne launches out of the desert, I think the folks over at Scaled Composites might consider looking into designing a space-faring garbage scow. While certain items can be ‘tossed’ out to burn up upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, much of the clutter consists of broken or unused equipment left over from previous experiments. Kind of like my garage, now that I think about it.

Maybe NASA should hold a rummage sale to pad the budget.

If you haven’t had a chance to catch it yet, you need to tune in to PBS for Nova’s “Beginnings” mini-series. Gone are the days of scratchy documentaries – this is a four-star production with some spectacular graphics, and the script is incredibly well-written. I’m no science slouch myself, but this series is written so that someone with a less scientific background can get just as thoroughly sucked in.

The series deals with the appearance of life in our solar system, and the possibility of life elsewhere, both within and outside of our Sol system. More specifically, the chances of finding intelligent, technological life outside our system.

Intelligent life is actually pretty common here on Earth – many aquatic species have very advanced brains, and many have said for years that dolphins have their own language. The thing is, with over 30k species alive today and hundreds of thousands of extinct species, humans are the only tool-using technological intelligence on the planet. While there may be other life forms out there, the chances of finding an intelligent species for us to talk to look pretty grim. We’re damn lucky to be here, and that luck may not have been spread out evenly.

Now, this got me thinking down another line. Many sci-fi books have had the idea of a race of ancient peoples who travelled throughout the galaxy seeding planets with life or tampering with existing life forms in order to induce intelligence. These stories always posit that the Ancients are long gone, usually for millenia before we find any trace of their existence.

Here’s the thought that crept into my head: What if we are the Ancients? Who’s to say that we won’t eventually devise some method of travelling netween the stars in search of intelligent life and come up with nothing? Faced with the enormity of knowing that we are completely alone out here, we could decide to spread the seed ourselves on every planet we come across in the hopes of eventually duplicating the results of Earth’s happy accident.

So, here’s my question to you: take the role of an Ancient for a moment and think about what kind of message you would leave behind for your ‘children’ to discover, and how you would place it. You know the maturation process is going to take millenia, so what do you leave behind to let them know that they are not alone, that at least one other has gone this way before?

Me, I’d be leaving stuff all over the place, but I’d start with something big. I figure if I can cross the gulf of space, chances are I can do pretty much anything I want to the local solar system, like screw with the rotation or orbit of a planet. I’d do something on a pretty grand scale to make the curious wonder “what’s up with that?” Take Pluto, for instance. Pluto’s eccentric orbit takes it from all the way out at the edge of the system back into the 5th orbit, leading us to believe that it just wandered into the system and got stuck. Right there, we have the possibility of a message that says interstellar travel is possible.

I wouldn’t stop there, though. I’d set it up so that the oddity would always have one side facing the planet I seeded, so there’s the “what’s on the other side?” question as well. That’s where I’d leave the important stuff, the huge obelisk of some unfathomable material laser-carved with runes and heiroglyphs depicting a star chart with “You are here!” arrows pointing at the home system’s star and another pointing to my star of origin.

Careful study (and alot of poking and prodding) would reveal the hidden cubbyhole where I left the keys to the Buick Starlark parked in the gravitational eddy located halfway between this star and the black hole that keeps Pluto in it’s odd orbit :)

So, WWTAD?