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Regarding first instances of worms, in the 1970's a program called "Creeper" was created and spread across networked computers running TENEX spreading independantly of user interaction. A second program called "Reaper" was then released to find copies of the first program and delete it. See The VirusList.com and digitalcraft.org for more information.

That being said the Morris worm was the first to get serious public attention, and a paper called "The Morris worm: a fifteen-year perspective" by Orman and Streak has an interesting analysis of it. Unfortunately it (appears) only to be available through IEEE so a subscription is required to view it.

The IEEE Spectrum magazine (surely a better source for Slashdot readers) predicts that Cell will be a winner in the multimedia space, noting that already its going into TVs made by Toshiba.

They also mention Linux on page 2.

Sorry, forgot to include links:

IEEE Spectrum magazine

And the article describing NAND drives as a loser.

Sorry, forgot to include links:

IEEE Spectrum magazine

And the article describing NAND drives as a loser.

Most academic conferences I have attended are not as strict with the format of their papers. For example, the IEEE provides both LaTeX and Microsoft Word templates for their conferences: http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pubs/transaction s/stylesheets.htm Though, since this is a Linux conference I would expect them to require LaTeX formatted papers.

Who needs unlimited funding when you have such a sound methodology? :-P

Dec 05 IEEE Spectrum reports Intel Corp spent $4.778B on R&D in 2004, up 9.6% from 2003, making them the #13 R&D spender on the Spectrum top 100 list. What blows my mind is that some jackass(es) set policy that it is acceptable for the industry leader to piss away over half as much (have been seeing the figure of $2.5B) on a marketing campaign.

Other interesting numbers:
#7 Microsoft, $6.5B, down 20.5% from 2003
#11 IBM, $5.167B, up 2%
#16 Samsung Electronics, $4.529B, up 35.7%
#89 AMD, $935M, up 9.5%

See IEEE Spectrum's Top 100 table here

Enter IMlogic, a Waltham, Mass.-based IM management software provider. The company today announced IM Detector Pro, free downloadable software designed to detect and block unmanaged IM, P2P and VoIP activity.

A seven-year-old Mountain View, Calif., company, Narus Inc., has devised a way for telephone companies to detect data packets belonging to VoIP applications and block the calls. For example, now when someone in Riyadh clicks on Skype's "call" button, Narus's software, installed on the carrier's network, swoops into action. It analyzes the packets flowing across the network, notices what protocols they adhere to, and flags the call as VoIP. In most cases, it can even identify the specific software being used, such as Skype's.

"Along Interstate 5, in the heart of San Diego, you can still see the scars of that deluge; they're the remains of long trenches in the pavement dug as part of a frantic push to add more lines to the Sony facility."
See the report on sony data center that backs Everquest.

Correction: Most IEEE standards must be purchased. IEEE 802 does not.

Taking the Internet to the People

Since a web browser is a rather basic piece of software, making browser interfaces to ODF documents doesn't even technically require internet access. You could work on locally stored files through the browser. Some of those 3rd world countries didn't have persistent internet anyway, but did file up/downloads at the end of the day. ODF would work just fine for them, and a free browser interface? no problem there. FTFA, hard to say whether they would be making the "Web Portal" in the traditional sense (i.e., here's the ibm.com hosted web portal for downloading your documents), or more of a local interface (my network LAN fileserver has a portal interface for getting local files).

They spent over 105 million dollars on a software project called the "virtual case file" to support this. The project failed. IEEE Spectrum magazine has a long article that dissects the project in their September issue. Here is a link:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1455

It is an interesting and sad story.

I prefer to get my safety information from engineers, not random "experts".

And they did it using ordinary semiconductor manufacturing methods. It was in spectrum a couple months ago, you can find it here: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/1915 They're planning it for use in single-chip optical networking solutions.

We already have something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. See:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumb er=1300793
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/medical-vision/ surgery/tms.html -- most relevant to discussion, has section on visual signal injection
http://www.biomag.hus.fi/tms/
http://www.mp.uni-tuebingen.de/mp/index.php?id=94
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic _stimulation
http://pni.unibe.ch/TMS.htm

The definitive study, from The Computer Aided Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) Electronic Products and Systems Center , is "Identification of Missing or Insufficient Electrolyte Constituents in Failed Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors". CALCE actually took capacitors apart and analyzed the electrolyte.

To see if the excessive hydrogen was being produced by impurities in the capacitor foil, wavelength dispersive x-ray spectrographic (WDS) analyses of foils from a capacitor from the lot of Taiwanese capacitors known to bulge and foils from a capacitor from a lot of non-bulging Japanese capacitors were performed.

A small amount of magnesium was detected in both the Taiwanese and Japanese foils, and copper was detected in the Taiwanese foils alone (see Table 1). Ignoring the topical constituents of oxygen and carbon, the purity of the cathodic aluminum foil from the Japanese capacitor worked out to be approximately 99.1 wt%, which was within the limit set by Dapo. The purity of the cathodic aluminum foil from the Taiwanese capacitor was approximately 97.5%,which was below the minimum value stated by Dapo. The insufficient purity of the Taiwanese aluminum foil could cause gaseous hydrogen production that would not be impeded by a depolarizer, but the galvanic couples were not thought to be sufficient to account for the rapid production of hydrogen gas that was necessary to cause the relatively rapid bulging of the capacitor cans. There were other anomalies in the ion chromatographic analyses,chiefly variations in the amounts of ammonium and phosphate ions present. Ammonium ions in water form ammonium hydroxide, which is strongly basic. This raised concerns about the pH of the electrolyte in the bulging capacitors,as a review of the chemical properties of aluminum oxide - the dielectric - showed that it is slightly soluble in basic solutions (but not in acidic)[8 ]. Measuring the pH of electrolytes from capacitors from the Taiwanese lot known to bulge and from a Japanese lot that had not exhibited bulging showed that the electrolytes of the bulging lot were weakly basic (7 < pH < 8),while those of the non-bulging lot were acidic (pH 4).

And that's the cause - internal corrosion because the electrolyte has a highly acidic Ph.

http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/blr.html

> If they had something strange happen during an experiment they should have left it at that and write
> a paper called something like "Something strange happened during blah blah blah...", then describe in
> detail the setup of the experiment and the results, then wait for peer review

Have done:

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0963-0252/12/3/312

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?isn umber=27155&arnumber=1206739&count=18&index=5

http://www.edpsciences.org/10.1051/epjap:2004168

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=JAPIAU000096000006003095000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleUR L&_udi=B6TGS-47C8N0P-B&_coverDate=12%2F19%2F2002&_ alid=308918281&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_c di=5262&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1 &_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=82d2cdf37641d3ec848f 070de1f6a1d2

You are completely missing the point. The point is we know radio waves at certainly energy levels and frequencies are dangerous to living organisms. We don't know precisely what power levels at each frequency are certain to be harmless especially with long exposure. All we have are guesses.

Bull-frickin-shit. This is simply not true. Do you honestly believe that there's not one single bit of experimental data out there?
That's what you're saying and it's 100% wrong. We have a LOT more than "just guesses". We have both theoretical models and hard experimental data. That's where things like the FCC's SAR levels come from in the first place. That comment is both highly ignorant and an offense to the people who have actually taken the time to scientifically study these things.

It is a certainty the lower the power, the lower the frequency and the further you are away from a transmitter the less the risk, but you simply don't know what the consequences would be to sitting a WIMAX, 802.11 or cell phone transmitter right next to your tissue and running it for 20 years is, so don't pretend like you do know, it is naive.

I'm trying to get you to go read something on a topic you clearly know little about. Do you really think no one had ever transmitted RF energy in the 2 GHz frequency range before cellphones and wifi? That's what you're impling.

In closing all I have to say is it was not so long ago that the power that be were assuring us nicotine wasn't addictive and smoking didn't cause lung cancer.

You should not be comparing legitmate science to corporate press releases. You obviously need to work on where you get your information.

You keep making these totaly ridiculous comparisons and analogies. They make me think you aren't interested in the truth in the first place. Sure we don't know everything there is to know about the effects of exposure to microwave radiation, but the implication you're making about our lack of knowedge is provably untrue.

Here's a link to 127 PAGES of references to data on this subject. I repeat, that's not 127 references that's 127 pages of refernces.

can it still be detected as VOIP traffic at this point?

Yes. My colleague, Steven Cherry, at IEEE Spectrum, wrote about such software recently here.

Here's an article about proving software:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1454

If you read that whole issue (Sep2005 IEEE Spectrum), you'll see that the industry realizes they can't afford shitty software anymore. Finally.

If you get rid of the FCC there will be no wireless that is even remotely useable. There would be mass chaos,

There might be chaos for a short period but not for long. Chaos will rob businesses of profits and they will be forced to self regulate. Simply mass media won't be able to deal with interference from competitors. If company A were to say increase their broadcasting power this would interfer with company B's broadcasting so B would increase their transmission's power which would interfer with A and with Company C. So either they would get together to eliminate interference each causes the other or they will end up in an arms race. Aa an arms race would increase their costs while reducing income it's more likely they would cooperate to find an answer acceptable to all parties. Quite simply the FCC was started in an era where the airwaves amd communications were limited. The broadcasting technology of that tyme needed a relatively large spectrum of airwaves to broadcast without interference, however using today's tech the bandwidth needed is much more narrow. Fact is today it's the FCC and regulations that prevents or hinders broad availability of wireless broadband and other technologies. "Reason" magazine earlier this year or late last year had an article on this. And the CATO Institute had some studies on it also. You may mention these are slanted to the freemarket but the FCC is biased as well. On the technical front the "IEEE Spectrum had an article on this in the print issue earlier as well saying somwhat the same, that FCC regulations were appropriate at first but that as tech has advanced these old regulations are now hindering advancements, availability of technology.

The Silicon Solution

The Silicon Solution

It describes what I believe is the same breakthrough in considerable detail. The Big Deal is that lasers can now be made from standard CMOS silicon fab processes, meaning you can integrate the lasers and optoelectronics directly into the chip without needing radically new chip fab techniques. Really interesting stuff!

An interesting question: one which I don't know the answer to offhand. For what it's worth, the latest issue of IEEE's Spectrum magazine has a good article on the reallocation and what the end of analog TV will mean.

In the end, I doubt that municipalities will be able to get ahold of much of the allocated spectrum for this kind of use. They will get a large slice of it for their own use, but will mostly be given over to emergency bands - like 911. On the open market, I doubt that municipalities will be able to compete with the bids of larger telcos for the commercially-available pieces of the spectrum.

An interesting question: one which I don't know the answer to offhand. For what it's worth, the latest issue of IEEE's Spectrum magazine has a good article on the reallocation and what the end of analog TV will mean.

In the end, I doubt that municipalities will be able to get ahold of much of the allocated spectrum for this kind of use. They will get a large slice of it for their own use, but will mostly be given over to emergency bands - like 911. On the open market, I doubt that municipalities will be able to compete with the bids of larger telcos for the commercially-available pieces of the spectrum.

Here is a good article describing some of the problems with the current system and how it got the way it is. http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstempla te.jsp?ArticleId=i120204

I wonder how this business, and the rest of the VoIP business, will manage if/when the ISPs start filtering out and stopping or delaying the VoIP packets?

There was an article in the latest IEEE Spectrum about it:
The VoIP Backlash

Doesn't look good, IMO.

You are shifting the burden of proof and rather distorting the facts: You may only ever have seen exceptionally weak arguments, but that is not because only exceptionally weak arguments have ever been deployed - quite the converse is true*. The problem so far has instead been that no argument with even a semblance of strength for introducing software patents has ever been produced. And however weak you think any argument against the expansion of patentable subject matter is, it automatically wins unless you have a strong argument in favour of that expansion. But the expansion has occurred anyway of course, and in the face of strong arguments and strong opposition from industry and academia. That many companies, academics and individuals had to make such arguments at all illustrates the appalling state of recent policy making in this area (if you can call it policy making). Any credible economist will tell you that patent scope expansion without prior empirical and sound theoretical justification is verboten. Too bad - the damage is done and in the US it seems the fight's effectively over now, but the rest of what I want to say is appropriately Eurocentric anyway.

*
http://researchoninnovation.org/online.htm
http://www.si.umich.edu/~kahin/mip.html
http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/mirror/impact/index. en.html
http://philsalin.com/patents.html
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul05/1557
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=stor y_16-8-2005_pg5_12
http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/quotes/index.en.html

"You have to be prepared to deal with issues like why expressing a particular piece of logic in C or Ada doesn't deserve patent protection, while expressing the same logic in Verilog or VHDL, which look identical to a non-programmer should deserve that protection."

That is definitely not an issue. One does not ask whether or not some invention deserves a patent, but whether or not it is patentable subject matter at all and your example is a poor one because if the claims of a patent are directed to the expressions of logic, then they are software patent claims.

"Likewise, why a device that fits the description in a patent claim should not be protected if the implementation happens to be (even in part) carried out with an embedded processor with embedded code, even though it's not at all apparent to the outside world that there's any software involved at all."

The distinction between hardware and software is not useful and is not at all relevant to the question of whether a patent claim is a software patent claim or not. One way to discover how the distinction between software patent and non-software patent is determined (and it is not always easy) is to read the way it is expressed by Judge Peter Prescott QC in his recent CFPH decision, in which he carefully and fully interprets the EPC Article 52 exclusions. Unfortunately, Prescott's interpretation seems to me to leave a lot of room for claiming things such as image enhancement techniques derived from purely mathematical considerations, but at least compression algorithms and data manipulation and data st

Source: The Open Group's POSIX FAQ

That's a lot more intimidating.

Have you considered publications put out by folks like the ACM or IEEE?

When I was an active programmer, doing OS development and such, I used to read publications from both.

IEEE has many journals, conference proceedings, and standards.

ACM has just as much, but, IMHO, is somewhat more acedemic in slant. I'll leave the exploration of the ACM web site in your able hands.

Have you considered publications put out by folks like the ACM or IEEE?

When I was an active programmer, doing OS development and such, I used to read publications from both.

IEEE has many journals, conference proceedings, and standards.

ACM has just as much, but, IMHO, is somewhat more acedemic in slant. I'll leave the exploration of the ACM web site in your able hands.

Have you considered publications put out by folks like the ACM or IEEE?

When I was an active programmer, doing OS development and such, I used to read publications from both.

IEEE has many journals, conference proceedings, and standards.

ACM has just as much, but, IMHO, is somewhat more acedemic in slant. I'll leave the exploration of the ACM web site in your able hands.

Have you considered publications put out by folks like the ACM or IEEE?

When I was an active programmer, doing OS development and such, I used to read publications from both.

IEEE has many journals, conference proceedings, and standards.

ACM has just as much, but, IMHO, is somewhat more acedemic in slant. I'll leave the exploration of the ACM web site in your able hands.

Well, I just happened to be reading my school's EE and ECE program handbook yesterday, and it just happens to have the IEEE code of ethics in it. I don't know if he's a member of the IEEE, but it wouldn't suprise me if he is. It reads:

We, the members of the IEEE, in recognition of the importance of our technologies in affecting the quality of life throughout the world, and in accepting a personal obligation to our profession, its members and the communities we serve, do hereby commit ourselves to the highest ethical and professional conduct and agree:

1. to accept responsibility in making engineering decisions consistent with the safety, health and welfare of the public, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment;

2. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist;

3. to be honest and realistic in stating claims or estimates based on available data;

4. to reject bribery in all its forms;

5. to improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate application, and potential consequences;

6. to maintain and improve our technical competence and to undertake technological tasks for others only if qualified by training or experience, or after full disclosure of pertinent limitations;

7. to seek, accept, and offer honest criticism of technical work, to acknowledge and correct errors, and to credit properly the contributions of others;

8. to treat fairly all persons regardless of such factors as race, religion, gender, disability, age, or national origin;

9. to avoid injuring others, their property, reputation, or employment by false or malicious action;

10. to assist colleagues and co-workers in their professional development and to support them in following this code of ethics.

Approved by the IEEE Board of Directors
August 1990

The IEEE Spectrum magasine also ran a story recently on hybrids.
They focused on so-called plug-in hybrids, the modified stock hybrids such as the Prius with larger batteries, allowing them to be run on electrical power alone for, say urban conditions. Here's a link.

2) Fusion engines are very efficient and would allow not just single stage to orbit vehicles, but single stage to Mars surface and back to Earth without refueling and taking only a couple of months for the round trip.

Humans have achieved fusion of the breakeven sort: where the amount of energy output has equaled the amount of energy input required. Existing facilities should be able to actually get some net power output in the next few years, as their ability to control plasmas and "burn times" increases. The Int'l Tokomak Experimental Reactor will almost certainly be able to produce 5x the power input, and eventually 15x if all goes well. I know, the "if all goes well," sound rather hollow to me, too.

An excellent resource about the state of the art in fusion can be found in the latest edition of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, which is the first in a two-part series about the control of Tokomak plasmas.

The real problem with fusion is that the best technology we have, and can hope to have in this generation or so, is that it is big. Really, really BIG. It also requires a tremendous power input to get things going (something like a MW or two for several seconds). So, it is unlikely to ever be suitable as a replacement for rockets; at least not in our lifetimes. It is possible that it might provide a useful power and propulsion source to interplanetary craft, but that is still a bit of a pipe dream for the foreseeable future.

Fwiw...here's an Aug 2005 article by Edwards in which he estimates $6B to build the structure, plus a wild-assed guess of $4B for regulatory/political costs. Of course it's all a w.a.g. when you don't know how to make the ribbon.

Gascore seems more advanced than solid since the performance is better, but I wonder if it's really more difficult. Barring catastrophe there's no concern with radiation release, since the reaction is fully enclosed. And the design I saw had three separate safety mechanisms, each capable of shutting down the reaction in about a millisecond. I don't know enough to evaluate whether the quartz enclosure really could be kept cool enough by the exhaust gasses flowing past, but if they didn't flub the math on that, maybe it's just a better design. (Not that I would complain if someone built a good solidcore rocket of course.)

On prizes, I guess you're probably right that nobody's going to speculate on a billion dollars. It might still work out if you had a lot of smaller prizes for milestones along the way. Or, if the project can benefit a company even if it doesn't win the prize...you can end up with a working rocket after all (or whatever), even if another company beats you to it by a month.

Conversations like this make me want to break down and finally get an account here.

Maybe they should rename Slashdot to Science Digested...

What's especially amusing is that I (I'm actually the editor of the IEEE Spectrum space elevator article) submitted the original article by Edwards twice to Slashsot, once on the day of its publication, and then again when researchers announced a breakthrough in producing carbon nanotube ribbons in Science. Clearly my error was in not realising that slashdot readers would much prefer 2nd-hand references to articles 6 weeks after the fact. :)

Actually, I'm not really bitter, I understand that what works for slashdot, or any publication, on one day may not be right on another. Timing really is everything, so c'est la vie, and I'm glad the blogverse has picked up and is discussing the story. But while I have your attention, maybe I can direct you to another Spectrum story slashdot passed on in the last few weeks before it comes back from the blogverse: a colleague of mine did a stonking piece of investigative journalism into the gory details of how the FBI blew millions of dollars on the software development debacle known as the Virtual Case File.

As for it falling on a town, the lower part would fall into the ocean, possibly burning up on the way down (depending on where it was cut). But the business end, with the counterweight and way station and all that, would suddenly have its center of gravity moved up above geostationary orbit, so it would fly out into space. Of course anyone on it at the time would want to get off, and you would lose a large investment, but it is unlikely it would be the catastrophe you imagine.

The August issue of IEEE Spectrum also had a story about the space elevator. This article is available online here. Not knowing much about the space elevator, I found this article very informative.

OT, but if you're interested in the elevator, you may want to check this feature by elevator guru Brad Edwards in last month's IEEE Spectrum magazine.

This was in the August issue of the IEEE Spectrum:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug05/1690

nice article about space elevator research for those who are members.

A Hoist to the Heavens

It's not the amount of energy, it's how expensive. You need a do-or-die blast to get into Earth orbit. If you're not fighting our gravity or air resistance, you can use slower and more efficient methods and take years rather than minutes. You can use nuclear power (a no-no for Earth launches), you can even use solar. From the payload you might use rocky matter in massdriver or volatiles in a rocket.

We can't haul that kind of water anywhere in the solar system, period.

Of course not. I'm not talking about tomorrow or next week. We were discussing the economics of mining asteroids and you claimed it was pointless because we could always get it cheaper on earth. My point is that these would be more useful elsewhere. A little research turned up this article, quoting an (old) NASA study on asteroid mining. Lots of relevant stuff there, among which:

The study determined that to retrieve half the mass of a million-metric-ton asteroid, some 10,000 metric tons of materials would need to be lifted into LEO at an assumed cost of $240/kg (1977 dollars). The total cost of the mission was put at $31 billion, including R&D costs. To ship the same quantity of mined materials from Earth's surface would cost a prohibitive $663 billion.

Closer orbits are faster. p=mv. You need to accelerate to move into a closer orbit. "Check your data before you post." So don't be so patronising when you get simple physics backwards.

Speculating about mining Trans-Neptunian objects, let along moving them in bulk, for terraforming is complete science- fiction right now and will be fore the foreseeable future.

The context was a discussion about asteroid mining. As for science-fiction, this is simple physics, chemistry and engineering that could be done in a few decades with no midichlorians needed. Terraforming is far away, but space & lunar habitats are not.

This makes so much more sense

Not exactly link to the document but here's a pdf of the tutorial for this standard (sort of like an overview of what the specification covers, IMHO)
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/802_tutorials/j uly03/tutorial_1_0703.pdf

This link has been posted a billion times on slashdot already, but here it is again. 10 billion dollars for the first elevator, and roughly 3 billion apiece for the next ones. I have a feeling that construction on the space elevator will begin in the beginning of the next decade, though I'm not sure who will build it. According to this survey nanotubes are already produced in quantities of hundreds of tons, with production in all four regions with space-launch capability. Most likely we'll see two competing elevator projects, with the chinese and NASA-ESA as the competitors.

According to this plan it would need to be 100 000 km. The center of gravity would need to be in a geostationary orbit, which is ~36 000 km, the additional 64 000 km is for a 600 ton counterweight, which would include a space station.

...at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /aug05/0805spac.html
and then come back and argue your point from an educated point of view.

Sorry I have to be so blunt about it.