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wow! he's been working on this troll for 10 years! Are the trolls going to throw a party for him?

You are right, he really dumbed this one down and took out all the negative parts about his kind

His original troll

"The guy who wrote this," as you so delightfully put it, happens to be a Physics professor and a vice provost at Caltech. And if you'd read the article to the very end, you'd see that he is also a Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor. I assure you, he very much "gets it"... Maybe you should re-read the article and re-evaluate your great American education system. As a foreign TA at a good university, I know from experience that most American undergrads don't know jack about basic science. And don't get me started on horoscopes and Miss Cleo and Creationism.

That usually seems to be expanded simply as "Microsoft-transmitted disease" [1] [2], though the derivation of the term is indeed as you suggest.

So kill me if you must -- thereby putting me out of my misery as slavishly devoted to a do-or-die AI Project, but first I would like to raise the perhaps feeble argument that we human beings have a right to know exactly what we are and how we function as both minds and bodies.

As for your lead-in statement that you don't believe this project will succeed, think again, because it is not the admittedly amateurish AI source code propelling the AI Mind to success (i.e., proliferation), but rather the SourceForge/ Mind/ Docs/ Theory of Cognition that will inexorably introduce True Good Old Fashained AI (GOFAI) unless stopped by a nefarious military/government/Microsoft/_whatever_, because the Mentifex AI theory is the free, public-domain distillate of thirteen years of slavish agonizing over all possible roads to its now uniquely magisterial Theory of Mind -- and you can't stop an idea whose time has come.

If the U.S. or other military does take over an Open Source AI Mind project, they are not going to announc it to the world here on Slashdot. They are going to pick a place like Los Alamos, New Mexico, and develope the End-Of-Humanity in secret. The only way to thwart the forces of evil is to let _them_ sweat a lot about who _else_ has the plans for the Superintelligence.

NCSA is certainly an important part of this partnership, but they're neither the only part nor the lead site.

NCSA is certainly an important part of this partnership, but they're neither the only part nor the lead site.

But it's much more likely that devising the software will be a tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If so, then the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen till after the development of hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans' natural equipment.

Vinge does not require the advancement of computers to a point at which they are regarded intelligent. This is only one of several possibilities mentioned in his paper.

Other possibilities include:

• "Waking up" of computer networks.
• Humans using sophisticated HCI. (e.g. Vinge's Focused, Stephenson's Drummers)
• Genetically altered humans. (Card's Descolada?)

Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge -- available online at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html -- is the scariest and yet most inspiring document that I have ever read on Artificial Intelligence -- which is being implemented slowly but surely on SourceForge at http://mind.sourceforge.net in JavaScript for Web migration and in Forth for robots, evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards a superintelligence beyond any human IQ, as described so eerily and scarily by Vinge. It used to be that I did not like Vinge's science fiction, but right now I am thoroughly enjoying A Deepness in the Sky by Vinge.
--

Sysadmin candidates need to be asked, How prepared are you for artificial intelligence and for http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html -- the Technological Singularity as described by Vernor Vinge?

Gravity waves expand in all directions and don't dissipate in something as silly as an atmosphere or something. They can go on FOREVER! Wouldn't a really intelligent species be communicating with gravity?

OK, it's maybe a cheap plug for the LIGO project, but can you blame me?

No, really, though, we should be looking at a multitude of sources for contact with intelligent life. Besides, according to Neuromancer, we've already picked up a bunch of signals from the 70s.

Google, Hotbot, AltaVista, hTeoma -- they will all be outclassed by a truly intelligent search engine emerging eventually as the progeny of Mind.SourceForge.Net, the Open Source inevitable AI platform that evolves towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards a superintelligence beyond any human IQ. When the Singularity described at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html gets here, human minds and cyborg brains will co-wander the Web in search of information of interest to both of us symbiontically, and we will nevermore be plagues with thousand of useless, off-the-mark search results.
--

Cost of Solar Sails - $4,000,000;
Cost of clean up mission - $never revealed;
Trusting Russian Space Technology - WTF?

The Planetary Society Page
More info on Solar Sails

So if a butterfly flaps it's wings and causes a tornado on the other side of the planet -- what do millions of little huricanes in our showers every day do?

Other information on this project can be found here, here (Caltech), or here. This link to Princeton University seems to explain the project much better, at least to me.

Yes there are.

Are there also categories for systems administrators?

www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~werdna/sysadmins.html

I like your names better, but the descriptions of sysadmins in the article above are precious.

That and the fact that the picture (posted elsewhere by pyramidiot) clearly shows them using a parafoil - invented in the late 1960's if I recall correctly.

The ancient Egyptians definitely didn't have access to the theory behind these, let alone the materials necessary to build them. Could they have done it with a regular kite? Did they have kites in ancient Egypt?

I like the sand hydraulics theory myself.

If you integrate over the entire recording, this is true. But percussive sounds concentrate a large amount of high-frequency energy over short period of time. If you were to clamp a 12Khz lowpass filter on the input to your amplifier, you WOULD be able to tell the difference very easily, on almost all recordings. Percussive sounds would be distinctly muffled.

Even more interesting, sounds in the real world DO have tons of high-frequency content! 40% of the energy produced by a cymbal crash is above 20 KHz.

And high-frequency transients CAN affect your subjective experience of the music. See this for details, in particular this telling quote:

Oohashi and his colleagues recorded gamelan to a bandwidth of 60 kHz, and played back the recording to listeners through a speaker system with an extra tweeter for the range above 26 kHz. This tweeter was driven by its own amplifier, and the 26 kHz electronic crossover before the amplifier used steep filters. The experimenters found that the listeners' EEGs and their subjective ratings of the sound quality were affected by whether this "ultra-tweeter" was on or off, even though the listeners explicitly denied that the reproduced sound was affected by the ultra-tweeter, and also denied, when presented with the ultrasonics alone, that any sound at all was being played.

Interesting, eh? Despite the fact that subjects could not consciously tell the difference in an A/B test, or percieve the ultrasonics by themselves, their subjective ratings were still affected by a statistically significant amount. So blind A/B tests and hearing thresholds do not really capture all that there is to the perception of sound quality.

The 6 inch had a decent figure but I didn't know I could send it away to be vacuum aluminized, so I chemically deposited silver on it using chemicals I bought at the University of Idaho chemistry stockroom. Take my advice, it's much better to get a mirror aluminized.

I hurried a bit too much on fine grinding the 10 inch and wasn't happy with it, so I tried again with my 8 inch and was much more patient, and got excellent results from it (1/10 wave according to Chabot Amateur Telescope Maker's Workshop's Paul Zurakowski).

Grinding telescopes and being a sciency kind of guy led me to study astronomy at CalTech where I assisted CalTech astronomer Jeremy Mould in observing the the Palomar 60 inch and 200 inch telescopes - the experience of a lifetime for an amateur astronomer.

It's been about 18 years since I last worked any glass but I just bought an 8 inch plate glass kit from Dan Cassaro. You can buy Pyrex kits and optical glass (suitable for lenses) from Newport Glass.

I'm starting to write about the telescope I'm about to work on here.

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area check out the Eastbay Astronomical Society's Chabot Amateur Telescope Maker's Workshop (there's an observatory there too, it's in Oakland), Fremont Peak Observatory, which has a 30 inch reflector that's open to the public, with regular gatherings of amateurs who bring their telescopes up there, and the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers - the Sidewalk Astronomers set up telescopes on city sidewalks and introduce people to astronomy by inviting them to look through their scopes.

You can get books on astronomy, and importantly, the specifics of how to actually grind and polish a telescope from Willman-Bell and Newport Glass.

Check out this guy who made a ribbed mirror blank by cutting out a pattern from one disk of glass with a water jet and fusing it to a solid sheet in a furnace.

Visit Google's index of Amateur Telescope Making, particularly http://www.atmpage.com.

If you want to get into amateur telescope making, take advantage of an immensely valuable resource that wasn't available to me when I was a kid - subscribe to the ATM List - here's the FAQ.

Mike

We all remember using EDU the turtle on the old Apple computers. There are pay-versions of LOGO still out there. But, you can also get it for free. Some links for ya:

Turtle Tracks - A Java version released under the GPL. Requires a Java 1.1-compliant virtual machine.
MSWLogo - A windows-only version. The source is available, but I'm not sure what license it is released under.
Other logo software - This list, at the Logo Foundation's website lists commercial and free versions of logo.
rLogo - An online in-the-browser logo interpreter.

It's only good in console mode, as X has its own keyboard code, but the idea is simple and easy to implement.

:Peter

Some people have explained the nature of this episode that forced warp restriction. Clearly an environmental message, this was an episode where an alien scientist committed suicide to prove her seemingly improvable theory that warp-fields were damaging space and would eventually create sub-space rifts (AKA: holes in the ozone?). The debate was that nothing could be proven and more research would have to be done before the galaxy begin to abandon technology that support their way of life. Anyway, after the enterprise is trapped in the sub space rift created by the scientist (and their obligatory narrow escape), bans were placed restricting warp usage in heavily trafficked corridors of space. There may have been other episodes that dealt with this issue, but I saw this one last week and it is fresh in my mind.

1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes
1 megabyte = 1024 kilobytes
1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes
1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes
1 petabyte = 1024 terabytes
1 exabyte = 1024 petabytes

Data Powers of Ten

First, the maximum filesystem size that XFS can handle is 18 exabytes. Since exabyte is also the name of a brand of tape drive, it's more common to hear of people talking of 18 million terabytes.

(Aside: an intresting statistic found on this page says that as of 1995, 5 million terabytes was about enough data to store all words ever spoken by humans, ever. Cool.)

Also, XFS was never used on Cray systems. XFS made its first appearance (if I remember correctly) on IRIX 5.3 back in 1994. Other than being off by four orders of magnitude in your sizing and by ten years in your dates, I think you're exactly right. ;-)

ISTR that the technology needed to manufacture gene chips is actually much simpler than you'd believe. In particular it turned out to be possible to do it using a reprogrammed inkjet printer using the right reagents in place of the standard four colors of ink. The setup cost was still reasonably steep- something like $10,000- but not out of the range of affordability for a dedicated hobbiest. This was a big issue specifically because it brought the technology within the reach of a lot of less well funded labs, rather than just the big boys. Despite the trend of biology toward big science, there's still a lot of great work that can be done on a very tight budget.

And, of course, a lot of the upcoming work in biology is going to be computational rather than experimental. You may not believe it, but it is quite possible to generate publishable results on a home computer. There's even some real suggestion that interesting problems like protein folding are going to be solved not by brute force but by better algorithms. I recently went to the Tolman Medal talk by Bill Goddard, who claims to be able to narrow the field to about 10-20 possible folds per protein right now and may be able to get it to a single prediction soon. That's using some fairly beefy computing power, but nothing like the LottaFLOPS zillion node clusters that people are discussing building to deal with the folding problem. It's entirely possible that protein folding will be doable with a home computer in a decade.

Okay, I just read some physics on this. It makes intuitive sense, but I'm not one to always buy into intuition. Basically, the force is the combination of the force of the particles plus the force of the deflection (somewhat reduced, depending on the effectiveness of the reflecting surface). Anyway, I guess I can buy that. The web page: Tacking Solar Sails has a good description of it.

The cueball analogy works, I suppose, but here's why I didn't buy it. Take the cueball analogy down to the atomic level. The photon is the cueball, and each molecule of the sail is an object ball.

Take any of those object balls and place it mid table, in the center. Now hit it with a cueball, any side, doesn't matter exactly where. Chances are, it's deflected, right? Now repeat this a million times, and take the average of where the object ball ends up. It ends up in the middle of the table. That was my take on it.

Since the deflected photons act as a force in themselves though, that does change things. I just don't really understand how a deflected photon can provide any additional force, since the inertia appears to be transferred at impact. That's my confusion.

I would be curious to see information on these designs. Certainly with such a design one could leave the solar system (although it would take an awfully long time to get to another star...).

Google says that Drexler's "lightsail" paper is at http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Engineeri ng/Drexler-KE/MMfSSAO.html, but I'm having difficulty getting the page to load right now (try Google's cache). Anyway, Drexler writes "A 20 nm thickness of aluminium has a reflectivity approaching that of the bulk material (~ 0.9). Lightsails constructed on the multikilometre scale can have structural masses that are small compared to the reflector mass, if a suitable pure-tension structure is employed to transmit forces from the sail to the payload. At Earth's distance from the Sun, the outward acceleration of an unloaded sail using 20 nm aluminium reflectors is ~0.16 m/s^2, or ~ 14 km/s per day." The acceleration of the Sun's gravity at Earth is only 0.0059 m/sec^2, unless I slipped a decimal point.

I'm looking but haven't found any helpful info on the Halley rendezvous probe, but what you're describing sounds like the probe would slingshot around either a planet or the comet itself...

1. Thrust out and change plane to get into the plane of Halley's orbit.
2. From the top of this ellipse, thrust back to get into a very elliptical retrograde orbit.
3. Fall in toward the Sun, edge-on to minimize thrust.
4. Once past perihelion, thrust to match velocities with the comet which is just about to come by.

However, if you wanted to leave the solar system, it seems unlikely that you could get enough energy for it by slingshotting around planets...

This page has a decent visual explanation of how one might tack in a spacecraft with a solar sail. The fundamental concept is that the photons are reflected off of the sail, allowing the spacecraft to impart positive or negative delta-v to itself, thus spiralling into higher or lower orbits.

• since it's a field there obviously is no wear or tear.
• since it's generated it can be easily enlarged or reduced in size

• Abstract:
• 
  The magnetic sail, or magsail, is a field effect device which interacts with the ambient solar wind or interstellar medium over a considerable volume of space to generate drag and lift forces. Two theories describing the method of thrust generation are analyzed and data results are presented. The techniques for maintaining superconductor temperatures in interplanetary space are analyzed and low risk options presented. Comparisons are presented showing mission performance differences between currently proposed spacecraft using chemical and electric propulsion systems, and a Magsail propelled spacecraft capable of generating an average thrust of 250 Newtons at a radius of one A.U. The magsail also provides unique capabilities for interstellar missions, in that at relativistic speeds the magnetic field would ionize and deflect the interstellar medium producing a large drag force. This would make it an ideal brake for decelerating a spacecraft from relativistic speeds and then maneuvering within the target star system.

If you mean changing the Creator so that they open up in something else, try File Typer. It's a Classic app, so maybe it'll be easier in native OS 9.1 rather than the Classic environment under OS X? Anyway, just select all your images, drag them onto the file typer icon, and change the Creator to whatever you want - if you have an example file that works the way you want, use Same As...

Not sure of the exact details since my Mac is at home... Also I have no idea how file types/creators work in OS X since I haven't used it, so maybe this will be less than helpful.

I think that beats the rather insignifant magnitude of deaths caused by the destruction of one lonely little planet and a moon-sized battle station.

Please don't moderate this up...I'm quite embarassed that I knew this...

Cheers,
Ken

I also used terminal emulation software on my HP48SX calculator to replace one of the terminals and enter a command to slew the telescope - hence I claim that the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory is the world's largest and most expensive peripheral to a pocket calculator.

(JCMT next door is bigger - 15m - but has a nifty shield to prevent the sunlight problem, so they get to observe during the day. It isn't just frying the focal point that is a problem - uneven heating warps the dish beyond the fraction of a millimeter tolerence required for using the telescope.)

The current atmospheric model the group uses is about 20,000 lines of FORTRAN that has been hacked on and augmented willy nilly since 1978. And runs primarily on a DEC Alpha running OpenVMS There are no comments in it whatsoever. I'm trying to convince them that it should be re-written from scratch (maybe in a more modern language, for a more widely supported OS, with some comments...) But they (a couple of older professors) seem terrified of letting the code out of their hands, and are having trouble absorbing the idea of version control, among other things.

I'm very frustrated. They're about to get a herd of academics (none of whom has a CS background) working on code with no forethought, and I think I'll go nuts if I have to sit there and implement horrible things for them. Can anyone give me some eloquent ammunition to convince them this needs to be treated like a software engineering project - not atmospheric science?

---

The current atmospheric model the group uses is about 20,000 lines of FORTRAN that has been hacked on and augmented willy nilly since 1978. And runs primarily on a DEC Alpha running OpenVMS There are no comments in it whatsoever. I'm trying to convince them that it should be re-written from scratch (maybe in a more modern language, for a more widely supported OS, with some comments...) But they (a couple of older professors) seem terrified of letting the code out of their hands, and are having trouble absorbing the idea of version control, among other things.

I'm very frustrated. They're about to get a herd of academics (none of whom has a CS background) working on code with no forethought, and I think I'll go nuts if I have to sit there and implement horrible things for them. Can anyone give me some eloquent ammunition to convince them this needs to be treated like a software engineering project - not atmospheric science?

---

My own impressions about the development of relativity theory come from Kip Thorne's entertaining book _Black Holes & Time Warps_. It has a heavy emphasis on history for a book of its type.

Kinda shoots down your central assumption ("girls do better than boys when younger, but worse later, in education").

You can read their latest news here, if you so want.

(Yes, IAAPA)

You could use a half-QWERTY keyboard which is just the regular keyboard mirrored around the break between the t-b and y-n keys when you hold down the space bar. A patch exists for the Linux console and there is some expensive software for Windows. The nice thing about this is that you don't need new hardware. I tried this out and it is actually relatively easy to pick up.

The fuss isn't about Microsoft stopping people from pirating Microsoft software. The fuss is about this being the "thin edge of the wedge".

First, you have to "activate" your (legitimately purchased) licence in order to finish installing it on your machine. You say, "Okay... it doesn't hurt to do that."

Then, you get the .NET equivalent of Internet Explorer. This product "suggests" that you check the Microsoft Windows Update page every week. You say "Okay... sounds sensible to me."

After that, you get the latest version of IE.NET. Due to increased exploits involving unpatched Windows(tm) installations, this product forces you to use Microsoft Windows Update, otherwise you can't continue running Windows(tm). You say "Dammit! I just wanted to browse the web for a couple of minutes.".

Then when that update is done, you open Word.NET. It informs you that you have to connect to the Microsoft Product Activation site to check your licence for this week. You say "This is getting a little annoying."

On connecting to the Microsoft Product Activation site, Word.NET informs you that Microsoft Corp has changed the licencing model for Word.NET: now you have to pay $5/month to keep using Word.NET.

All the fuss is about nipping this in the bud.

Imagine if the USS Yorktown was running on Windows XP? In the middle of an intense Naval battle, the sonar system pops up a dialog box, "Sorry, your Sonar Tracking System Software licence has expired. Please connect to the Microsoft Product Activation site to up date your licence. This should only take a few minutes. [Renew Licence] [Stop Using STSS]"

I am personally of the opinion that "causal copying" is somewhat beneficial to commercial software developers - PHBs get exposure to new products at home (the copy of Microsoft Project 2000 that they borrowed from their Wife's friend's husband), and go back to work thinking, "Gee, that was cool". Two months later, that company has bought Microsoft Project 2000 and Microsoft Project Central (and its supporting software).

Basically, Windows XP will probably do stuff like check the processor you're using, serial or model numbers from your hard drives, what PCI or (shudder) ISA cards are installed, BIOS manufacturer and version number, etc. From this it'll make a "fingerprint", which gets sent off to Microsoft.

Microsoft then sends back an "activation code" - as long as you write this down somewhere, you'll be fine.

However, Microsoft doesn't define how much of your machine has to stay the same when you do an upgrade. Does my machine need a new activation code when I:

• Increase RAM?
• Swap from 72pin SIMM to 128 pin DIMM
• Install a new hard drive?
• Replace the existing hard drive?
• Over clock my processor?
• Replace the processor?
• Replace the sound card?
• Remove the network card?
• Add an extra network card?

According to Microsoft's Product Activation Fact Sheet:

"In some instances, if a user extensively overhauls a machine, reactivation will likely be required."

The thing that bugs me is - how much is "extensively"? Why is that sentence written to be intentionally vague? My guess is that Microsoft is hoping to keep Product Activation secure through obscurity. If you don't know how it works, you can't go breaking it, right?

Someone mentioned CalTech - sorry, I forgot the cid, but thank you - so I went and did a little digging. Here is a link to the CalTech Asynchronous VLSI group. Right on the page are some cogent explanations of why they believe asynchronous designs will eventually become commonplace. Further in are pointers to some good papers, and an interesting discussion of their results implementing an asynchronous version of the MIPS R3000 architecture.

Having interviewed and also know personally the people who work at ADD (asynchronous digital design), the company in pasadena that is working on asynchronous VLSI, I can tell you that there are definitely new paradigms for datapath and computation flow construction that make modern designs easy to create in asynchronous technology. The caltech AVLSI research group has succeeded in creating a MIPS core using VLSI technology, and their current work in ADD will take them even further. One of the advantages of asynchronous design is that once you create a working unit, you can plug units together without worrying about any timing issues and assuming the units are fully tested, the entire system should work out of the box. A lot of current vlsi design involves recreating a lot of structures in order to optimize for the latest architecture scheme. There's more than just Sutherland working on this, in fact some big names and some big people are interested in AVLSI technology. Asmodean / Naru Sundar

Howdy

Excellent. Say what you /. pessimists will but it's about time 'we' got going on connecting to the rest of "de galaxy":

Vernor Vinge

cheers

front

The undergrad computing cluster is a kickass computer lab thats run totally by undergrad students at Caltech. Its one of the better run labs and is the place to be for any hacker and coder. you can check it out at UGCS
also, the wallpaper that we did for the lab is impressive to say the least: wall paper

The undergrad computing cluster is a kickass computer lab thats run totally by undergrad students at Caltech. Its one of the better run labs and is the place to be for any hacker and coder. you can check it out at UGCS
also, the wallpaper that we did for the lab is impressive to say the least: wall paper

I'm sure a large part of it has to do with R&D. And dont forget the performance increase. Access times of >0.1 ms vs SCSI's lowest access time of ~8ms. And then theres the MTBF, whicah can reach upwards of 3-400% the MTBF of HDD's. Not only that, but theres diffrent types of ram they can us, and alot use non-volatile memory so the machine can be turned off, and still retain data. As for the uses of an SSD, well theres an SSD FAQ right here. And an even more in depth one (with design pictures and what not) over here .

----------------------------------

My school offers a grad-level Quantum Computing class (that of course can be taken by undergrads), Ph/CS 219, which ya may wanna check out. The page seems to have some pretty useful information, including lecture notes, homeworks, references, etc. Its prerequisites are Ph 129, a class on Mathematical Methods of Physics, which in turn has the prerequisites Ph 106 (Topics in Classical Physics), and ACM 95 (Introductory Methods of Applied Mathematics) or Ma 108 (Classical Analysis).