The International Astronomical Union recently released a trailer for the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Here's the YouTube version:

They've got higher quality versions on their website in a mix of MPEG formats. I've taken the liberty of re-encoding their 1080p video to VC1/WMV, so that people who don't like installing 3rd party software can still watch it (yes ideally WMP should support H.264).

I'll be hosting it here, for a while it weighs in at 86MB, if it gets too much traffic I'll have to pull the download and stick it somewhere else. Please download only (right-click and save as), I doubt the server will be able to stream it.

One last thing, which I am somewhat concerned about, in the trailer itself they show "preserving the world's dark skies", sure I guess its good they mention that issue. But I think if we want to preserve astronomy we need not only preserve the dark sites we already have, we need to wipe out light pollution, hundreds of millions, if not billions of people are missing out on the night sky because they happen to live in cities or towns, or have a poorly designed street light shining over their property. We need to do much more than just preserve the dark locations we have, the damage to the next generation of astronomers and the public judging on some predictions would be immense, some I've seen for the next 15-20 years would practically wipe out astronomy in western Europe, that's a brain drain you can't afford.

Anyway aside from that, enjoy.

I came across a perfect example of the reality distortion field yesterday. I was so impressed I saved the comment for later use, I didn't think at the time to save the website it was posted on if anybody knows let me know and I'll add the URL (doesn't seem to be in Google's index yet). Anyway this was what was said:

John W - You might want to review your links before you post erroneous information. The Hack Contest had no winners on Day 1, it was only after the rules were fully relaxed did someone “break into a browser” on Vista and OSX. Gosh, when a hacker has full physical and password access to a Mac, they break in… wow, film at 11, how amazing!

This is in relation to the recent PWN to OWN contest, which I briefly wrote up about here.

He seems to be under the illusion that Windows Vista was also cracked on day two, along with OS X (which was cracked in 2 minutes). This is false.

Day one's rules were you could only remotely carry out an attack. No machines were compromised. On day two you could use user interaction on the machine, for example opening a specific website, or opening an e-mail attachment. At no point were the crackers given "full physical" access to the machine or passwords, the user on the machine could only open e-mails or web pages. Safari was compromised within 2 minutes. Windows Vista and Ubuntu both survived the day, in the end only compromised on day three with the help of 3rd party code, namely Adobe's Flash player.

Fact is, no Mac has ever been broken into from the outside, no viruses, no malware, etc. OSX is the most secure mainstream OS there is

False. I'd say it is the least secure mainstream operating system out there, all of Apple's software is plagued by security issues. Just last year a group of security researches exposed dozens of security issues in Mac OS, so many they were doing one a day for the whole month of the project.

and that’s just another reason why it’s so popular.

I wouldn't define "popular" as 2% market share. Alone it would be funny, but when there are thousands of these trolls running around its just sad.