Galileo's dive to destruction. The highly successful Galileo space probe will end its 14-year mission on Sunday when it plunges in to Jupiter's atmosphere.

The mission team decided last year that Galileo should end its days in a blaze of glory. With the space craft almost out of fuel and power, Nasa does not want to risk it colliding with one of Jupiter's moons.

There is a slim chance that a microbe from Earth could have hitched a ride on the probe.

If it crashed into the Jovian moon Europa this could jeopardise future attempts to search for life there.

[BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

This is Star Trek's Prime Directive at work. It's sad that such a successful mission has received a lot less attention than any of the disasters... This says a lot about the state of mind of the world now a days. Bye, bye, Galileo, and thanks for all the bits!

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Hitler at Home on the InternetThe episode is an object lesson in the topsy-turvy world of copyright and "fair use" [~] an area made far murkier by the distributive power of the Internet and the subsequent crisscrossing of international legal codes. In the United States, the posting would most likely be considered fair use, said Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "Reprinting the article now, 65 years after its original publication, strikes me as more like reporting or commenting on a news story, or fair use, than photocopying a current scientific article to save the cost of buying more magazines," she said.
[From The New York Times]

A friend said to me today: "Copyright is hard". Yes, it is...

8:26:38 AM  What do you think? ( Thoughts) Who linked? []