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Exactly right. And so maybe the convenient appliances should be the things being taxed more, in order to drive people to share resources.

What I find strange, is that very rarely, during a discussion on global warming, does anybody mention the amount of heat generated by all the end uses of the polluting/non-polluting electricity generation.

That was a bit of a mouthfull, so in simple terms, all use of electrical power generates heat.

IMHO, we should be finding more efficient ways of using the power we already have, as well as generating it more cleanly. That is why (unfortunately in my opinion) using space generated solar power can only make the situation worse, because it will add to the net amount of the suns power being trapped in our atmosphere by the (completely natural) greenhouse effect.

We have to balance our use of technology against the planets natural ability to absorb and recycle the end products (ie heat).

Just as a "for instance", take a look at a night-time satellite photo for the USA or Europe. The shape of the continents are plain from the amount of lighting. I don't believe that this has no warming effect, especially as it has been going on for a good century already.

satellite photo (apologies to fourmilab in advance)

I found a site with some hot stock tips. These are actually generated by radioactive decay- the server is interfaced to a Geiger counter. (A little applet is audibly clicking away in another browser window right now.) Those are the best random numbers in the universe because they are truly random and can be used to construct a portfolio that typically outperforms funds constructed from random numbers generated by the linear congruential method. Pseudorandom numbers are for the rubes like you and me. The insiders have the benefit of processes involving quantum mechanical randomness to guide their investment decisions.

GOOG will crash on Monday! You heard it here first.

Actually, the question is misleading. The .doc file format is documented on MSDN[1], and is just as open as PDF. The two also serve different needs. PDF is effectively a page description language, albeit one with some nice interactivity features like forms and even animations (although few people use them). The .doc format is intented for editable documents, and stores various metadata along with the content. PDF is not and doesn't.

But it does lead nicely to another file format related question. Last week, Bill Gates claimed:

But the solution that has proven consistently effective - and the one that yields the greatest success for developers today - is a strong commitment to interoperability. That means letting different kinds of applications and systems do what they do best, while agreeing on a common "contract" for how disparate systems can communicate to exchange data with one another.

Common file formats are the contract by which office applications can exchange data with each other. Given Bill's commitment to interoperability, when can we expect the Visio file format to be documented so that other diagram editors such as Dia of Kivio can interoperate with Visio, as Bill desires?

Similarly, the Exchange wire protocol is the contract by which mail clients communicate and exchange data with the MS Exchange mail server. I take it that we can look forward to documentation for that, too, so that the myriad email clients in use today can talk to an Exchange server?

Another example would be the W3C standards, the contract by which a web developer sends markup information to an end user for viewing in a browser. The rest of the world is happily using CSS to provide rich presentation of information to end users. Yet as developers, we are forced to break that contract because Microsoft's IE browser doesn't honour the contract, and our web sites don't display in the intended manner. Will MS commit to bringing IE up to scratch so that it interoperates with the rest of the world?

Will MS start making versions of Word that use standard UTF-8 character encoding, rather than a Microsoft specific one that produces output that doesn't interoperate with non-Microsoft platforms (and even, as we found out this week, with newer versions of IE, which correctly ignore the MS character set!)

Or was he merely referring to making Microsoft applications interoperable with each other, a move which reduces customer choice, and prevents them from picking the best solution available for the task because it may not interoperate correctly with existing Microsoft products?

[1] At least, it was. I don't know if that documentation has been kept up to date with the latest versions of .doc

In SpaceX's case, the reusability aspect with ocean recovery of parts means a single rocket is not going to be cycled through the entire launch operation in a day even though it is theoretically possible to do so with an ocean launch system. However, with a small fleet of vehicles, it might be feasible to get the whole system cranking out a couple of launches a week.

That's when it starts to look like an aerospace "Honda" since you start applying Deming's statistical methods to the operation.

Use the demoroniser.

You should also read about the Oh My God particle (it's real and not a joke). This proton particle travels almost as fast as light. After traveling one light year, the particle would be only 0.15 femtoseconds--46 nanometres--behind a photon that left at the same time.

Anyone seriously wanting to know more about eschatology (Us and the End of the Universe : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology) should read Tipler's Physics of Immortality.

A great read about us, AI, evolution and physics.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/tipler.html

John Walker doesn't have one (to the best of my knowledge). Maybe he got conned by Jack Sarfatti? It certainly is an interesting coincidence that the date of Walker's essay on UFO's mentioning Sarfatti is a few months after Walker had started considering support of a rocket engine developed by Roger Gregory and I.

While they're putting out the fire in whatever server they were running, you can read this,a 27-page Wired article from 1995.

Also check this, that, and the other.

So ... the trick is to use some form of plain-text encryption that doesn't appear to be anything but a somewhat long-winded normal message discussing the weather or the latest playoffs.

Something like text based steganography (demo 1, demo 2)? Slashdot has covered steganography before.

R. Stallman gets enough money and fame, alright. What about the thousands of the silent hard-working geeks toiling away for nothing? Toiling away for the "businessmen" network more easily, and "yuppies" make more money, and "party animals" to have a better sex life? The geeks gave it all away, and got nothing back. When I try to buy an apartment, nobody cares how much software I gave away. When I buy a car, nobody cares how much software I gave away. This "freedom" stuff has been going on for a while, and everyone benefitted, except for us. Take a look at The Rat and the Butterfly.

That project does sound truly heinous, but there's a Perl program called the Demoronizer which can help with those MS-Office -> HTML conversions. Even though it wouldn't help with the formatting issues, it's still a good starting point..

In order for the control-freaks of the world to keep their socio-economic power, it's in their best interest to turn the open internet into a "Secure Internet" dystopia where only "Trusted Computing" devices are permitted to communicate.

As usual, they'll spin total-accountability as a good thing necessary for combatting the evil cyber-terrahists, economic pirates, and pedophiles. But I, for one, will NEVER bow to DRM mandated by government and/or pushed by monopoly interests.

For truly random data, a Geiger counter is indeed a great device to use. John Walker has built and documented a device called "Hotbits" which he uses to generate truly random numbers.

If you were to accidentally reuse a piece of the key, the plaintext would be quite easy to recover. For more on the subject, and how the FBI knew that the Rosenbergs were guilty, see the NSA's Venona site. For an easier-to-read treatment of the subject, I strongly recommend a third party analysis, such as Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr (Yale, 1999.) In it, the authors explain why the Soviets probably re-used their one-time-pads.

What is also interesting to note is the authors' conclusion that the 'code names' the Soviet agents used actually turned out to be one of the best security measures they used. The people in the messages were identifed by a tedious procedure of compiling a list of suspects, then finding additional information that pinpointed their suspect. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were identified by their relationship to Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, in a background 'biography' sent to the KGB by their handler. There were at least 20 other moles in the Venona decrypts that were never publicly identified because the NSA could not deduce their real identity from their cover names.

You never know what you'll find ...

Here's and old entry in my reading list: We'll Return, After This Message

...the demoroniser. Be warned that you might not get anything out the other end. This guy looks like being such a waste of half a square meter of Earth's surface that even hate is overspending on him. D'ohl's unsuspected secret twin.

radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas quam quidam appetentes erraverunt a fide et inseruerunt se doloribus multis

There's alot of ways to detect atoms. Human "Seeing" is just detecting the light bouncing off/radiated by an object.
For example atomic force microscopy uses a very sharp needle and detects the force of the individual atoms.
IBM even used it to move individual atoms to spell "IBM".

I just went off and read (well, skimmed) one of your links, http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimat ur/ ... he mentions micropayments, particularly for websites; that anyone could charge for anything, and the required-to-view-it TC browser could enforce said micropayments.

I predict a new generation of internet fraud, consisting of bogus-content sites that look good enough to pay for access, so you do, only to find there's nothing there.

Such a scam could be recycled endlessly, retooling as needed to match the most-popularly-searched topic de jour. Even a few hundred thousand hits would generate significant income (probably on a par with what spammers made before filtering).

I'm sure this won't meet your standard for "evidence," but this makes a compelling argument.

This site discusses the fact that radioactive Potassium is the largest source of Beta-radiation in the body. As an earth-science undergrad I learnt that coffee is in fact too radioactive to landfill under current EU regulations.

We went on a field trip where we were supposed to use a gigier meter to determine where the bed rock changed from granite to sandstone. In fact all we could determine was which farmers used more potassium based fertilser than others. You could pick the field boundaries out in the plots but nothing useful about the geology.

Ian

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Mix the principle from this Random Lava Lamp Generator, a high speed multi-mega pixel digital and film with a suffiviently high resolution, pipe resulting image as raw key-data, and you're done...

or if you prefer "better randomness" (sic) use HotBits cesium decay generated random numbers and pipe...maybe not gigabytes of data ( (about 30 bytes per second, to be precise, sucks...but then...

Mix both obtained key with the obscure, non repetitive algorithm of your choice (a simple XOR will be enough) and you can start having pretty impressive figures...

Generating gigabytes of data is quite easy, an I agree with you that making sure they are truly random is much more difficult, but it's not really that impossible 8)

The real problem is making sure both people get the SAME timepad, the problem here being to have both people REALLY in synch when startng the capture to generate the pad...

which is another problem entirely...

Never.

Economics is about how we distribute scarce resources among unlimited needs and wants. However, information is *NOT* scarce, but you know what is? The time and effort of the creator required to forge a GOOD first instance; THAT is the naturally scarce SERVICE that we should be modeling our new payment systems around in the face of the reality of free-flowing bits.

Since artificial scarcity isn't enforcable (except in a global police state with DRM up the wazoo), the "next best" thing is getting paid upfront in escrow by distributed patrons who've seen your other stuff and want to trade their money to have more unique creations instantiated into the public domain.

--

And Fourmilab has the original novel by H. G. Wells online. It was first published in 1898 and it's still fun.

Seriously though, I saw a project mentioned on Slashdot, where a guy demonstrates how any object has a gravitational pull.

I ^H^H My son did this experiment for his science fair, and it was way cool. Basically you attempt to neutralize the effects of the Earth's pull, and you can watch small objects move toward each other! We watched two 8 pound weights move at each other, and when I moved one, the other one chases it around.

I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself. And we (er, my son) got an "A".

If you're at all interested in astronomy, you'll *love* this program!

yup! see his book list too.

We're not asking to "punish the rich." We're simply asking that the tax burden be shifted away from those with the least ability to pay. I recognize that business success isn't an evil, and the goal isn't to tax successful people out of existence. The goal is simply to provide the government with the money it needs to operate, without putting the hurt on the lower middle class.

One misconception you seem to have is that somebody might avoid making more money for fear of being pushed into a higher tax bracket. That's not the way our current tax system works. If you make $36,900 or less, you are taxed at the lowest rate of 15%. The next higher rate is 28%, but if you make $36,901, only $1 of income is taxed at the 28% mark, with the rest being taxed at the lower rate. So at no point does anyone have to fear that an increase in earnings will lead to a reduction in actual take home pay.

See http://www.fourmilab.ch/ustax/www/t26-A-1-A-I-1.ht ml for confirmation.

I've never gotten this "disincentive to produce" thing. Who wouldn't rather have 60% of $10,000,000 a year than 85% of $30,000/year? But the way blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly talk, you would think that if the tax rate is brought back up to pre-Bush levels for the top 2% of earners, they're just going to have to close up shop and start collecting welfare checks.

If I were in charge, I would add a new tax bracket: 100% tax on every dollar over $100M. The people affected would still have plenty of money to buy Lear jets and politicians.

• large file size
  
• no consistent internal structure of document
  
• need for attachements when emailing
  
• possible embedded hidden information on users
  
• difficult to author mathematical content
  
• possibility to track readers
  
• annoying autoformatting features
  
• inconsistent text export
  
• ever changing format: is it readable in 20 years?
  
• future DRM tools will lock out other platforms.
  
• unstable, when using with large documents
  

• strings word.doc|fmt >word.txt
  
• abiword
  
• openoffice
  
• demoroniser
  

While I have no doubt you have excellent grounds for this claim, would it be unreasonable to ask you to cite your source?

If you're *really* interested in the subject, go to primary sources. Just reading over Ada's most famous document creates the impression that she was recording the ideas of others.

For much more detail, you can read many other materials in Enchantress of Numbers. Amusingly, the Amazon.com review for that book complains it had no detail on "Ada's Bernoulli program"... of course it didn't, she wrote no such program.

Depending on how you interpret history, you could decide that Ada was a publicist, an inspiration, or even a programmer herself. But if she was a programmer (a big IF, in my opinion), then she still wasn't the "first programmer", for Babbage (and male friends) had written programs years before Ada met him.

Not much apparently

For those who are new to MD5: Here is one place to find the MD5 software.

This same idea was advanced by a short story called We'll Return, After This Message, by AutoDesk founder John Walker, written in 1989 and published in 1993.

I also mentioned the same general idea in my 2002 OReillyNet weblog item, SETI not through telescopes but microscopes, about how rugged microscopic messages might be the only ones to survive millions of years.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.ht ml

We'll Return, after this Message by John Walker of Fourmilab (and Speak Freely and Autocad) did a very computer-geek compatible story on the suggestion in the Slashdot blurb. It'd be worth a read if you weren't already spoiled on the ending...

It's naive because to the end user there is no difference between a box that performs a function completely electronically versus one that does the exact same thing through instructions running on a computer. It is figuring out how to do it that is the hard part. Soldering a circuit board isn't much harder than writing it in code. The intent of patents, to motivate innovation and progress by exchanging a limited monopoly for forced publication of the details, applies to algorithms as much as anything else. They take just as much time, effort, money, imagination, etc., to develop as a mechanical device. In terms of innovation and progress, the "what it does" is important to the user. The "how it works" is what is patentable.

it is far better that society maybe loses the benefits of disclosure in a few narrow fields than suffers the widespread damaging effects of general software idea patentability

See, here's where you, and a lot of people, fail in your argument. You make the assumption that allowing patents in any algorithm means all "general software ideas" are patentable. Why not change "software" in your sentence to "mechanical" or "electrical" to see how ridiculous that is.

I have yet to see anyone make a complaint about algorithms in object recognition, tracking and measuring the pose of an object, reconstructing surfaces from images, etc., etc. These things take years of research and development and require as much expertise, ingenuity, expense, creativity, and time as any other type of invention. They are not obvious or trivial, and in no sense could patenting them ever cause any of the problems people are complaining about. Nobody could ever "accidently" code them and later find out they were patented. Nobody could see them performing their functions and then run off and do the same thing, not realizing they're patented. (This would make them "obvious" by definition.) The only way to duplicate these types of algorithms is by finding a publication on how they work. I have yet to hear any sort of explanation of how these types of patents would hurt anyone. The only people that it would stop are those who are intentionally trying to copy the work. That's the same thing that "normal" patents stop, regardless of the medium the patent is in. There is no difference in reasoning between "algorithms" and other types of patents for this type of development.

A patent on a method for object recognition does not mean all object recognition is patented. The "what it does" is not the same thing as "how it works". All the complaints are about plug-ins, one-click shopping, and so on. These are not "how it works" and shouldn't be patentable. In fact, most people point out the obviousness and prior art violations of most of these patents. Then there's the "obvious" ones, such as the famous XOR patent.

It is not true that I and others are complaining only about simple or general software patents.

Yes. You are arguing about "the validity of software patentability", but you are complaining about simple and general software solutions. All of the examples I've seen so far fall into this category. The problem is, the "solution" people are suggesting doesn't fit the problem. It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

But feel free to change this record. Please explain to me how a patent on a very specify object recognition algorithm is harmful to software development or innovation. Keep in mind that your argument can't apply to other types of patents (mechanical, electronic, etc.) otherwise you are arguing against the whole concept of patents, not just "algorithm" patents.

The granting of monopoly rights is the means by which the purpose is fulfilled, not the purpose itself.

Which exactly fits what I sa

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Also, when the highest visibility ed2k link pages -- sharereactor.com and jigle.com -- were taken down a few months back, worthy whack-a-mole replacements appeared within days. The same thing would happen if suprnova.org's (BT) mirrors were somehow killed off.

The only way to really kill p2p is to kill freedom itself with police state measures like mandated DRM infesting everything you touch, and even then there are workarounds.

--

That's the plan.

"Trusted Computing" and "The Secure Internet" are double-plus ungood euphemisms for COMMAND & CONTROL (over you).

A world with 100% accountability is damn depressing. Anyone who says otherwise either hasn't seriously thought about the implications, or has, but thinks he's among the few who stands to benefit from stopping the natural freeflow of information.

--

That's the plan.

"Trusted Computing" and "The Secure Internet" are double-plus ungood euphemisms for COMMAND & CONTROL (over you).

A world with 100% accountability is damn depressing. Anyone who says otherwise either hasn't seriously thought about the implications, or has, but thinks he's among the few who stands to benefit from stopping the natural freeflow of information.

--

And here's a way to do it:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/javascrypt/

For freedom loving Americans only! Terrorists need not apply.

That's why you track all large objects in your way before embarking on your trip. Calculations can be done to find where the objects will be at what time.

Besides, space is a pretty big place. The chances for a collision with a large object are very, very small. As for micro-particles, one suggestion is to use ice for the skin of the ship. By flowing new sheets of water onto the skin of the ship, it can be constantly repaired from whatever damage travel inflicts on it. :-)

Subsisting on old open tech won't be enough to remain free.

If the fascist "Trusted Computing" plan actually becomes reality, then there'll no doubt emerge the demand for large black market for non-DRM'd (or "untrusted" in newspeak) hardware. I, for one, would asume the risk of a "drug dealer" in importing it (from freer countries) and selling it.

--

I am amazed that nobody has built an open source VoIP application

John Walker, of Autodesk fame, did, back in 1991.

He discontinued it because the increasing ubiquity of proprietary routers and firewalls made it less and less easy for the average user to open a port to use P2P applications like SpeakFreely.

Unlike Skype, SpeakFreely is entirely point-to-point (although at one time Walker set up a directory) which more or less means the caller must know the receiver's IP address. Skype automates this.

SpeakFreely allowed the use of theoretically arbitrary encryption, although I was never able to get it to work with PGP (I did get it to work with some built-in encryptions.

Sound quality was pretty good.

I'm tempted to answer your points directly, however, I think it would be better to spend my time pointing you towards the following documents, which, firstly, describe the Internet architecture, and why it was designed the way it is, and secondly, describe how NAT / overlapping address spaces break the architecture. I don't think a debate on NAT can take place until both the design of the Internet and how NAT breaks that design are understood.

• RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet - Section 2.3 "It is also generally felt that end-to-end functions can best be realised by end-to-end protocols." is the property that NAT breaks.
• RFC 1631 - The IP Network Address Translator (NAT) - even the original NAT RFC suggests limitations - from section 4. "Conclusions" - "NAT may be a good short term solution to the address depletion and scaling problems. This is because it requires very few changes and can be installed incrementally. NAT has several negative characteristics that make it inappropriate as a long term solution, and may make it inappropriate even as a short term solution. Only implementation and experimentation will determine its appropriateness."
• RFC 3022 - Traditional IP Network Address Translator (Traditional NAT) - the update to RFC1631 lists a number of limitations as well.
• RFC 2993 - Architectural Implications of NAT - a very good document, well worth reading.
• RFC 1627 - Network 10 Considered Harmful (Some Practices Shouldn't be Codified)
• Deprecating Site Local Addresses - an IPv6 oriented document, discussing "site local" addresses, and the problems they cause. They are the equivalent of IPv4 RFC1918 addresses eg. Network 10. The same problems it discusses also occur with RFC1918 addresses.
• Things that NATs break - listed just for completeness.
• The Middleware Dilemma - NAT is a form of middleware, as it does more than just forward IP packets - it maintains state within the network (see RFC1958 for why maintaining state in the network is a problem).
• The Digital Imprimatur : How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle. - The Firewalled Consumer section discusses what NAT is doing to the Internet at a higher level.

Once you've read through these documents, at least to the point of having a basic understanding of them, go through the comment I'm responding to, and look for ways as to how some of your solutions can be better and much more simply achieved via public addressing and the removal of NAT.

I'm tempted to answer your points directly, however, I think it would be better to spend my time pointing you towards the following documents, which, firstly, describe the Internet architecture, and why it was designed the way it is, and secondly, describe how NAT / overlapping address spaces break the architecture. I don't think a debate on NAT can take place until both the design of the Internet and how NAT breaks that design are understood.

• RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet - Section 2.3 "It is also generally felt that end-to-end functions can best be realised by end-to-end protocols." is the property that NAT breaks.
• RFC 1631 - The IP Network Address Translator (NAT) - even the original NAT RFC suggests limitations - from section 4. "Conclusions" - "NAT may be a good short term solution to the address depletion and scaling problems. This is because it requires very few changes and can be installed incrementally. NAT has several negative characteristics that make it inappropriate as a long term solution, and may make it inappropriate even as a short term solution. Only implementation and experimentation will determine its appropriateness."
• RFC 3022 - Traditional IP Network Address Translator (Traditional NAT) - the update to RFC1631 lists a number of limitations as well.
• RFC 2993 - Architectural Implications of NAT - a very good document, well worth reading.
• RFC 1627 - Network 10 Considered Harmful (Some Practices Shouldn't be Codified)
• Deprecating Site Local Addresses - an IPv6 oriented document, discussing "site local" addresses, and the problems they cause. They are the equivalent of IPv4 RFC1918 addresses eg. Network 10. The same problems it discusses also occur with RFC1918 addresses.
• Things that NATs break - listed just for completeness.
• The Middleware Dilemma - NAT is a form of middleware, as it does more than just forward IP packets - it maintains state within the network (see RFC1958 for why maintaining state in the network is a problem).
• The Digital Imprimatur : How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle. - The Firewalled Consumer section discusses what NAT is doing to the Internet at a higher level.

Once you've read through these documents, at least to the point of having a basic understanding of them, go through the comment I'm responding to, and look for ways as to how some of your solutions can be better and much more simply achieved via public addressing and the removal of NAT.

Go here for the base64 Windows executable. Copy and paste all the parent's jibberish into a plain text file, remove all the spaces, save it as "in.txt" or whatever. Run "base64 -d in.txt out.jpg" and behold the glory of nuclear power.

Is it just me, or does it look like the animal in that picture is getting fucked in the ass?

Anyway, judging by your username and posting history (only this one), I can only hope that you will be giving us more enjoyable base64-encoded trolls. I look forward to hearing from you in the future.

John Walker of AutoDesk fame and victim of the infamous XOR patent has had thoughts along those lines (PATO). See also these pages.