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> when will Linux support it?

Package: ion
Version: 3.0.1~dfsg1-1
Installed-Size: 2618
Maintainer: Leo Iannacone
Architecture: amd64
Depends: libion0 (= 3.0.1~dfsg1-1), libc6 (>= 2.7), libexpat1 (>= 2.0.1)
Suggests: ion-doc
Description-en: NASA implementation of Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN)
  Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) software distribution
  is an implementation of Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN)
  architecture as described in Internet RFC 4838.
  .
  This is a suite of communication protocol implementations designed
  to support mission operation communications across an end-to-end
  interplanetary network, which might include on-board (flight) subnets,
  in-situ planetary or lunar networks, proximity links,
  deep space links, and terrestrial internets.
  .
  Included in the ION software distribution are the following packages:
    * ici (interplanetary communication infrastructure) a set of libraries
        that provide flight-software-compatible support for functions on
        which the other packages rely
    * bp (bundle protocol), an implementation of the Delay-Tolerant
        Networking (DTN) architecture's Bundle Protocol.
    * dgr (datagram retransmission), a UDP reliability system that implements
        congestion control and is designed for relatively high performance.
    * ltp (licklider transmission protocol), a DTN convergence layer for reliable
        transmission over links characterized by long or highly variable delay.
    * ams - an implementation of the CCSDS Asynchronous Message Service.
    * cfdp - a class-1 (Unacknowledged) implementation of the CCSDS File
        Delivery Protocol.
    .
    This package contains the binary files.
Homepage: https://ion.ocp.ohiou.edu/

About that, can you please clarify? I say this because google returns the following on 'Daniel Phillips':

    - a physics professor: http://www.phy.ohiou.edu/~phillips/
    - a make-up artist: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0680066/
    - a rapist (i'm not kidding): http://mssparky.com/2011/01/rapist-hides-out-in-iraq-while-working-for-us-contractor/

I wonder which one is states your IT qualifications.

May I suggest some ketchup to go with that foot?

Back on-topic: it is simple, really: Users that have IT needs, go through IT requesting services. IT staff are hired to take care of IT, they dictate how/what is used concerning IT. Users have no business running IT since neither their job nor their responsibility. That last one is the biggest factor.

how long before the home gym captures energy for your home.

Never :-)

Humans can not produce large amounts of sustained output power, even when exercising. A "healthy human" can probably push out 300W for about 20 minutes before they collapse from exhaustion. Even if you can convert all of that to electricity and store it for later use at something like 50% efficiency (which would be staggeringly high), you're only talking about 0.05kWh of usable energy. You could do much better if you were willing to exercise at much lower intensity for much much longer periods of time (but who would do that just to light a minuscule handful of light bulbs). But you're really not going to ever get usable amounts of power out of your daily exercise routine.

Excuse me for asking, but what's a wire recorder ?

In what other country can you buy a litre of petrol, drive a mile down the road at 30mph, under a 1.3m high bridge to buy a pint?

To be even more specific the Ohio U Policy states:

VII. Release of Student Records
D. The following information will be considered public, and may be published in a University publication: the student's name, address, telephone number, date and place of birth, major field of study, participation in officially recognized activities and sports, weight and height of members of athletic teams, dates of attendance, degrees and awards received, the most recent previous educational agency or institution attended by the student, and other similar information. Relative to such public or directory information, the University shall give public notice of the categories of information which shall be considered public information, and shall allow a reasonable period of time after such notice has been given for a student to inform the University that all of the information designated should not be released without the student's prior consent.

While OU isn't helping these guys out, a local lawyer is. http://www.thepost.ohiou.edu/articles/2007/05/25/n ews/20293.html Hopefully he gets somewhere and sets precedent.
And yes, it is Ohio University, not 'The University of Ohio.'

Isn't 1.4 square miles of land a bit ridiculous for 10,000 homes? I mean - that's a powerplant half the size of my hometown to power an area not even twice as big. Solar technology still has a long way to go in terms of energy density. At least with coal there are some options to make it really quite a clean, reliable process - and for now, it's also a good way to get the US off of foreign fuel sources (we have enough to power the entire country for the next 150 years easily). See these links:

Fischer-Tropsch Reactions

The Ohio Coal Research Center at Ohio University, and their biosequestration project (bacteria eats the SOx and NOx out of the emissions, down to the PPB level (PDF warning)

Coal Gasification plants are going in in Ohio and elsewhere in the country. - PDF Warning

Isn't 1.4 square miles of land a bit ridiculous for 10,000 homes? I mean - that's a powerplant half the size of my hometown to power an area not even twice as big. Solar technology still has a long way to go in terms of energy density. At least with coal there are some options to make it really quite a clean, reliable process - and for now, it's also a good way to get the US off of foreign fuel sources (we have enough to power the entire country for the next 150 years easily). See these links:

Fischer-Tropsch Reactions

The Ohio Coal Research Center at Ohio University, and their biosequestration project (bacteria eats the SOx and NOx out of the emissions, down to the PPB level (PDF warning)

Coal Gasification plants are going in in Ohio and elsewhere in the country. - PDF Warning

This mainly comes from the RIAA letters and them covering their asses, and possibly from our new CIO (we've been through several in the past 5 years). The part about using up bandwidth is complete BS to me and I have never heard one word about limiting my network usage until those letters came. OU is in the process of upgrading all the buildings to gigabit.

It's my theory that we get so many letters here because every dorm with an Ethernet jack has a world viewable IP address (no NAT and as far as I can tell it's static, mine's been the same for about 100 days). That's all great for me, but I guess the RIAA likes it too. There was an open meeting about this today at 7pm, but I had a midterm. I'll look around for a transcript or something

Lastly, a copy of the email sent to students earlier today

For a more fully-featured, impact-resistant design of such, check out this link - http://www.ent.ohiou.edu/~me470/SnrDesign05_06/me4 72/SrDProject_MainPageEPCT06.htm

a single-person transportation vehicle on reduced-petroleum-dependancy fuel methods...much less in terms of pure gas mileage, but if you poke around, you'll see they also withstood impact tests and were tested for city driving conditions (accelerations, etc.)...the vehicle on the far right had a final mpg of around 275-300 mpg.

Work with him, Democrats!

When are you people going to learn that the democrats are just as shitty as the republicans???

Isn't our concept of "chaos" just a matter of "too many variables" anyway?

Quantum physics models do state that various things happen in discrete quanta -- i.e. you either transfer a photon, or you don't -- but that doesn't mean that there is only one such quantum level of change -- different frequencies of light are photons at different energy levels, etc. (here's a calculator to find the energy of photons at a given frequency)

So when you hear someone talking about transferring half quantums of energy, they probably just have the frequency wrong... There are also, as I understand it, systems where you can jump something up two energy levels with two photons, and then emit one of a different frequency in one double-level jump (like those cards to help you see infrared led's at Radio shack, you charge them up with blue or green light, and then shine a remote control at them, and they glow visible red from the infrared pulse).

So it is possible there is a system where normally we double-jump energy levels in both directions, and there is a halfway level you can get to with the right frequency of photon; but that doesn't gut/break the model, it just means there's a very rare state that got left out of the model. Of course, there should be a corresponding gap in the overall energy of the model if that were true, as I understand it, and I don't think CQM has such gaps left in it anymore; but I suppose there could be a gap so small it's basically round-off at 6 or 7 signifigant figures. But it would be correspondingly really really really rare, so being able to provoke such a state repeatedly within your lifetime (i.e. enough to generate actual usable power) should be essentially impossible.

"$250,000 is what they demand" per song I don't understand.

The students were charged with direct copyright infringement for illegally downloading music files from the Internet, a crime punishable by fines of $250,000 and up to three years in prison, according to the RIAA Web site. They might also be held liable for statutory damages and lost profits.

Is there some relationship between /. and PhysOrg? If so, Commander Taco should be ashamed of it... PhysOrg is an eyeball tarpit, it NEVER credits the original article or provides a link back to it. Never. Not once. It might as well be dead trees...

Here's the original article at Ohio University without the PhysOrg spam.

Here is the official press release on the Ohio University website.

Here is the official press release on the Ohio University website.

Wrong.
It's spelled "Uruguay"
http://www.seorf.ohiou.edu/~ae295/frames/simpsons/ homer2.html

Charles Perrow has an excellent analysis of those type of accidents in Nuclear Plants, Petrochemical industries, Aircraft & Airways, Dams etc.

(Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, by Charles Perrow, Basic Books, NY, 1984.) http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~piccard/entropy/perrow. html

Most of these accidents and failures were not the result of lack of money or due to operator error. In this case, I doubt it was a simple as forgetting to push a button on a control panel. This is not an excuse, but a reasonable explanation for a whole range of accidents involving complex systems.

There are now several contenders in the online gaming arena. Electronic Arts (EA) has a clear lead with run-away hits like Ultima Online, The Sims and several popular sports titles. (Kessler 2004) Ultima Online has sold 1.5 million copies and boasts an average of 100,000 players online at a time. Electronic Arts isn't alone, Sony's EverQuest (EQ) has earned high acclaim as a competing MMORPG with 400,000 units sold...

Microsoft's recent release of Halo 2 was heralded as the largest first-day sales of an entertainment title ever with 125 million units sold. (ign.com 2004)

Even after MANY years of testing, a lot of the drugs that fall under the heading Nootropics have few to no side effects even when taken at massive doses. Another drug to look into after Piracetam is Vasopressin. There are several others as well. Very interesting reading.

The first part of the article deals with all the legitimate ways to move particles from point A to point B without going through the intervening space. These methods (while very, VERY far off in the future) are scientifically plausible even if they sound like they were lifted from a bad Star Trek script. The second part, of course, is full of the worst kind of pseudo-science, like telekenisis and psychic abilities. But, really, the first half of the proposal is only a waste of money because the technology involved is too far off to be useful in any reasonably timeframe.

For example, negative energy is a real phenomenon in quantum physics. It is most commonly discussed in the context of the Casimir effect. Here's an article that discusses the Casimir effect. Basically, the negative energy arises because empty space itself has a certain amount of vacuum energy, and the Casimir effect reduces these fluctuations inside two metal plates (which have to be spaced absurdly closely together and manufactured to extremely exact precision for the effect to be measureable). Because we generally say that empty space has zero energy and the space between the plates has less energy than that, the Casimir effect is regarded as a source of "negative energy". This could actually be useful (one day in the far FAR future) for opening up space-time wormholes. And, no, I'm not joking either.

Also, while "warp drive" may be an overused Trek term, it's also a (semi) legitimate topic of discussion in physics. In 1994, Dr. Miguel Alcubierre found a solution to General Relativity that seemed to allow for faster than light travel while obeying special and general relativity. What followed was a lively debate on the plausibility of the "Alcubierre Warp Drive". One of the most recent objections argued that Alcubierre's warp drive would never be able to cross lightspeed but might allow for non-Newtonion sublight travel.

ps view this demo to see how it is weird.

Shoot, that would make a good bumper sticker.

Nothing like giving the /. crowd links to click http://www.cns.ohiou.edu/napster/ Here are the details napster apparently doesn't want people seeing. Yeah, there's some top secret stuff in here alright.

Missing option: --no-oregano

Around here Domino's likes to coat the thin crust pies with oregano. I don't mind a little bit, but I like a touch of oregano on my pizza - not a touch of pizza with my oregano! Seriously, there have been times when I couldn't see the actual pizza under the oregano.

My new favorite pizza is Courtside.

My old favorite, Santora's->Sedano's has been bought out by another local and now they make it "their way"... I fear I may never taste the original stuff again. Sorry about all the rambling.

How do they do it?

with lasers

I this your wife?

You've never heard of plasma centers????

I forgot another famous one, PEnnsylvania 6-5000, and that lead me to a web site with a whole bunch of referrences, here.

I hadn't thought about it, but yeah, "Telstar" should count, in some strange way. I recall this song, and the film, way back in grade school. Wheee!

The company I work for still uses Paradox version 4.0 in a DOS window on Windows 98 to generate reports and process data. I believe Paradox is still actively developed and they're up to version 9 now.
I've actually spent a bit of time getting Paradox to run under Dosemu / FreeDOS on RedHat 9 so we can ditch the Windows machines.
Those Paradox machines just sit there all day long and churn out reports so management types can print them out on dead trees, maybe look at them once, and throw them away. Sad as it is, I suppose having a hard copy in their hands is some sort of proof that actual work is being done.
More than a couple people's lives in the office revolve around whether or not Paradox is functioning that day.

Paradox was the last W32/DOS application I had to find either a suitable Free Software replacement for, or find some way to run under Linux in order to convert our office to Open Source solutions.

If you mock the President ... then the terrorists win.

Completely offtopic, but...

Well, that's a rather small & narrow-minded view, don't you think? As a voting American, I feel that I have the freedom to mock the President whenever I want to. If we limit mockery, why not limit criticism & all political debate? By your logic, Dennis Miller is guity of aiding the enemy several times over. Howard Dean must be one of the ring-leaders himself! Off with their heads!!!!

Seriously though, you do more to aid terrorism when you buy your fiancee a diamond ring, buy some drugs for the weekend, or attempt to limit my freedom of speech with your tunnel-vision view of GW Bush. Getting elected to the presidency does not give him immunity to questions, criticisms, or even mockery from his constituents.

--Mid

Would have thought astronomers would have had a naming convention already, its a pretty "old" science. Perhaps they will adopt something like that used in biological sciences, wherein there are a number of different "codes" [1] [2] [3] by which organisms are named. These codes are currently being challenged by a new system that has many up in arms...

I think you mean Nutt, NM, the bar-cafe in the middle of nowhere. (I lived 7 miles from there, it was the nearest thing on a map)

jd, meet Phylocode, and efford to re-make the taxonomic system without meaningless, arbitrary ranks.

Genus, species, family, order - all irrelevant. If I look within a genus of animals (say, Panthera) I can see a massive amount of variation in morphology and ecology. I can look inside a whole class of worms and they all pretty much look and work exactly alike - apart from differences at the genetic and evolutionary level. The ranks are useless, and it's time to stop worrying about what fits inside a genus or a family or an order, and just work out what fits in an evolutionary sense.

I think he was of average attractiveness, although I'm not a good judge of such things in my fellow heterosexual males. He was plying his trade in bars in a college town -- that helped immensely.

That godawful-place, NM, is Nutt, NM. (It was the nearest point on a map to where I lived for 2 years, 7 miles away) Long distance phone charges out there add up fast enough that your internet college degree will end up costing as much as a real one.

In 1971-73, I worked at Saint Barnabas which had the world's largest hyperbaric facility, made by Linde. They had two 12 foot in diameter, 45 foot long chambers side by side. Each cylinder had three sub-chambers. The front of each could go to 100 PSI relative (about 225 feet of salt water equivalent). The other two chambers in each could do IIRC 60 PSI relative, but were usually only cranked to 60 feet or about 33.7 PSI relative.

Then patients had an Oxygen mask put on, and by Henry's Law the amount of gas dissolving in the bloodstream is proportional to the amount of gas in the air in the lungs. So they had 100% oxygen at 3x surface pressure, or about 15x the usual amount of oxygen in the lungs. This meant that hemoglobin was temporarily unnecessary, as the dissolved oxygen in the blood was more significant than the amount carried by hemoglobin.

This led to some amazing things. Carbon Monoxide poisoning was cured nearly instantly. Stroke victims, paralyzed on one side of their body, were wheeled in to the chamber and walked out 90 minutes later. Once an entire kidney transplant under hyperbaric conditions was done (donor and recipient each in one cylinder), the amount of surgical shock incurred was vastly reduced.

Burn victims were helped immensely, as the hypoxia/edema cycle was eliminated. Gas Gangrene, an anaerobic infection (claustridium welchi I think), was rapidly treated using this with no drugs.

But the hospital eventually tore it out - it was unused by the doctors. There were over 600 doctors on staff, but only a couple ever used it. We guessed part of the problem was it wasn't advertised in JAMA, nor was it covered in med school as a topic. Whatever the reason, it is sadly not there any more.

Ok, so far we're talking about either Charles Perrow-type normal accidents here, or we're trying to build a high reliability system and failing. However, since large, catastrophic events in unusual areas (such as space travel) draw a lot of attention, public risk perception may be higher than the actual risk. I don't know. Personally, even a catastrophic 2% "normal accident" rate is too high for my taste when it comes to space travel.

Unfortunately, as everyone who works in occupational health and safety (as I do) knows, good safety practice is expensive, and requires a lot of good safety theory and research behind it, which is also expensive. NASA has a history of having funding taken away from it, and according to recent press statements, NASA has been having trouble (of one variety or other) retaining safety personnel.

The upshot is, of course, that unless anyone doing space is willing to pay the extraordinary overhead costs of space safety, people, both on the ground and in the air, are going to keep dying.

The way the display works, I think the light would have to be reflective, not coming from the back. It appears to use the property of Iridescence.

The lighting would have to come from the side, and would reflect off the display.

One major advantage of this tech is that it should look better as the light gets brighter!

a) If an Australian broke a US law, in Australia, the Australian courts would happily agree that the USA has jurisdiction if someone actually bothered to prosecute.

Really? Do you see the Dutch being pressured to turn over drug addicts to US courts?

Maybe you mean someone committing a crime in the US and fleeing to Australia? In that case you're correct - the US and Australia have an extradition treaty, effective since 1976.

b) If a US person with money/political power broke an Australian law *and came to Australia/or while in Australia* you can bet your sweet ass that the USA would block any such attempt or our own USA-ass-kissing govt would interfere and kill off any such action.

You mean, like this?

Actually, you have it quite the reverse. Before an American murderer will be shipped back to the US, the Aussie Attorney-General must be assured that the person will not be subject to the death penalty. The US imposes no such non-reciprocal conditions on the Australians.

c) If an Australian broke an American law while in Afghanistan then the Americans will kidnap the Australian and hold him illegally without representation in a US military base.

Illegally?

According to who, pal?

Legalities are nicities that we all talk about to deal with civilian misbehavior during peacetime. During wartime (I hope I'm not shattering your worldview) groups of people systematically plot to go find groups of other people and commit what would otherwise be called first degree murder - not only without "representation", without even a trial!.

In war zones, enemy combatantants are lucky to be merely detained. In the real (third) world, they are quite often quietly and unceremoniously killed. Only first-world armies such as the US actually follow the Geneva convention.

I did system level encryption in 1978 on the mainframe VM/CMS system. Under the CMS component, which ran in a virtual machine, all I/O was done through an interface known as SVC 202 . This interface was used for modular execution of both external (a file) and internal functions. I wrote a program in assembly language which first ran in what was known as the "transient area". This program then allocated memory on a permanent basis, and copied part of itself there. That part was written in relocateable assembly code (was not hard to do in S/370 assembler). It then substituted the SVC interrupt vector with its own, and intercepted all SVC instruction traps. The intercept handler was now in control and the program did a graceful exit, but without deallocating the memory. This was similar to the DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) feature. The intercept handler checked for SVC traps being code 202. If not, it passed them on to the original SVC handler in CMS. If it was 202, then it checked for the request name for reading and writing. If that matched, it then checked to see if it was a file to be encrypted (writing) or decrypted (reading). CMS had disk letter/number combinations added to each file, and I allowed the program to be told to use either a letter (specific disk) or number (file mode) to be matched to indicate that the file was encrypted. It them modified the buffer appropriately before (writing) or after (reading) the system function completed. The net effect was the ability to have selected files, or a whole disk, encrypted. All native CMS programs, and some OS/VS/MVS emulated programs, would successfully do I/O through this encryption system. I was able to edit a Fortran program, save it, and compile it with the Fortran G compiler, and subsequently run it. I placed a call to my encryption facility in a script called "PROFILE EXEC A1" which made it run every time I logged in. It prompted me for the key, which was a string that was hashed to construct the encryption vector for the algorithm I used (which is probably terribly insecure today).

I was a student at Ohio University at the time. A group of us were "hackers" (and at times did a little cracking, too). All the disk space was partition-like slices on big (in the physical sense, about the size of a small washing machine) hard drives shared with a lot of other people. The computer center administrators could easily spy on any user's disk space. So this was used as a means to keep nosey people out. About 3 months after I started regularly using this, I was summoned to the office of the Director of Academic Affairs at the computer center. I was told by Dr. Craig Farrar that he was aware that I was encrypting my files, and that this was against computer center and university policy. He gave me a copy of the policy. He was at least an honest man, and also told me it was a brand new policy adopted specifically because I was encrypting my files. He then told me I had 2 days to unencrypt all files before the disk space would be entirely erased. I simply backed up most of them to a private tape, removed it, and unencrypted a few remaining files and deleted the rest. I never used the program again.

When the PC came out with DOS, and I learned of TSR, I thought about that program, and thought I'd like to do the same thing again. I didn't at that time because I didn't make the committment to learn x86 assembly, and didn't have a suitable C compiler at the time. So a DOS version, unfortunately, never actually happened. However, I did see among some shareware on a BBS, around 1989, a description of a program that did exactly that. Unfortunately for that program, at that time I was doing the Amiga thing. Hopefully someone can track down that program.

When I moved to Texas in 1993, I left all my old mainframe tapes (about 120 of them by then) behind. I had gotten hooked on Linux and swore to never use a mainframe again, so I had them discarded. Now I wish I had them back, because I could now run them on Linux using emulators ... after I figured out how to get stuff off those old tapes.

So frankly I'm not too surprised that people answer bullshit when they see such questions : many of the people who answered "Jedi Knight" at the religious affiliation question probably felt the government had no business knowing it, and maybe the answer was in fact a way for these people to express their disapproval.

Pretty freakin' cool man, didn't even know it existed! You should check out a program that I wrote, it might be useful for the UNIX version at least.

gutenfetch-1.1.tar.gz

It is a command line program for browsing and fetching books off of gutenberg servers. use a pipe() and you could save yourself some effort :-)

This is very true. I can't wait to break off a little bit of a Linnean holotype for a bit of DNA , ;) . This of course will provide much more data for diagnosing new species and species relationships ultimately fueling the debate on "linnean" versus "phylogenetic" nomenclature. Now if the zoological community would get off the a$ses and create/support a universal warehouse for all nomenclature.

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

And I hate to point this part out, too, but not only are we not nearly as controversial; we got there first. I'm pretty certain there's actually even a trademark on the name.

[ looks ]

Yep. 1986.

And for the anal-retentives in the audience, yeah, I think a court would accept a dilution argument, given the close association of the problem spaces.

Cheers,
-- jra
-----

Let me also clarify something that I just found out myself.

Geo-Synchronous means that the spacecraft is in a general location in the sky, but that it tends to wander in a pattern similar to a figure-8 (due to the wobble of the earth). You do require a tracking subsystem to maintain communications with that type of satellite.

Geo-Stationary means that the satellite appears to be motionless. I think that those types of satellites are controlled by ground controllers who use thrusters to keep them in an imaginary "box" in orbit.

Just wanted to clarify, and if you'd like to read for yourself, try this. (Look for section 3C).
Or this article, which cuts the legs out from underneath your whole argument.

Cheers! and I'll say again: Jeez, is it just me or did the Slashdot crowd used to be better educated than this.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.