Not any more. The 9th District Court of Appeals ruled earlier this week that the Pledge of Alegience is unconstitutional because it violates church-state separation due to the inclusion (from the 50s, thanks to Macarthyism) of the phrase "under God."
We are, once again, godless, at least in the 9th Circuit.
Every day, diffraction gratings are created with about 1nm accuracy using macroscopic tools. My father designed one which does just that. It is not impossible to imagine, therefore, that arbitrary features could similarily be scribed.
The machines which create the diffraction gratings are called ruling engines, and, not unlike the methods used to stamp metal currency, the masters are used to make duplicates which then are used to make the work tools. Each stage can be replicated N times, so while there is a limited lifetime of the entire process, N^3 can be quite large.
Unlike silicon devices which work better when cold (especially CMOS) and are destroyed by excessive heat, tubes need to be hot to operate. While they do run hot, they do not dissipate that much heat: a 12AX7 (a common dual triode which is a good guess for the device in the photos) dissipates 3W max (filament plus max plate), a far cry from the 30W-plus a modern processor dissipates. Further, since the tubes need to be hot, the strong airflow typically found in contemporary cases is detrimental to proper operation. A cold tube just does not work.
Here's more info on methane hydrates and recent scientific examination. While there remains controversy about exactly where this methane originates (biological vs geological sources), everyone agrees that there's an insane amount of the stuff. While we might go wanting for oil some decades from now, there's plenty of hydrocarbon energy left. One of the current geological hypotheses is that the source is magma outgassing which would mean, yes, as you nearly put it, "the continents float on a layer of [hydrocarbons]."
Going off to college means, for many, real independence for the first time. So the first things you should think about including are in support of that, or, in related fashion, in support of what happens when that breaks down. Like a pre-paid phone card with a gazillion minutes on it. And, perhaps more importantly, your phone number enscribed on that phone card so that she can call an adult who is not her parent for non-judgmental advice, followed by the words "call any time of day or night." And when she does call at 3am, make sure you wake up, listen, and provide the support she needs.
As oft-mentioned in other replies, condoms. GOOD ones. And then, bone up on emergency anti-pregnancy procedures for that 3am call asking, "ohmigod Uncle Bob -- the condom broke, what do I do?"
An open account with a local taxi service so that she never, ever, ever has to worry about getting a ride home. The means to limit abuses of this are up to you.
Alcohol. The best place to learn about drinking is in the private, protected confines of your own dorm room. (Note, there are serious legality issues here which vary from state to state. Don't do something stupid and blame it on me.)
Anti-hangover remedies. My favorite is Berocca. Send a case. Ibuprofen. Send lots.
HIV home test kits (which are really home-sampling kits which you then send to a central lab for analysis). Not cheap, but she should have any guy she's thinking of having sex with tested.
*Assuming* she knows how to use basic handtools, a small toolbox with decent quality hammer, screwdrivers, and pliers is great. If she doesn't know how to use these tools, it is still a good idea, but not nearly as important. From your suggestion of lockpicks and flashlight, one might surmise she is perhaps mechanically inclined. If so, add small pocket knife, magnifying loupe, a pocket-sized set of jewlers tools. At the other end of the physical scale, a crowbar and a 3-lb sledge. A good digital multimeter (eg, Fluke 77-III or equivalent).
The person who recommended flip-flops and a shower basket was right on the money. Add some decent (and decent-sized) soap and a couple of small travel-sized bottles of her favorite shampoo and conditioner (or other toiletries).
Now, to be really *subversive*, send a set of infrared goggles, available at surplus houses everywhere. Add in works by Kant, Ionesco, Wittgenstein, Chekov and Orwell. A couple of remote listening devices. Books on how to swear in a dozen languages. Assuming she's going to college in the US, plane tickets to Europe (put those gazillion FF miles to work!). Safety pins (the most universally useful items, after knives). Fake wedding rings. Falsies (see the posting about breast implants and their universal utility). Wigs of different color or style from her normal hair. A get-out-of-jail-free card (see the phone card with your number on it, above).
But the most subversive thing you could possibly give is: encouragement.
Use a cotton swab dipped in alcohol to wipe off excess accumulation at the print holes, and follow with a dry one. Repeat until beautifully shiny clean... but keep in mind that if the print holes are clear, ink will continue to flow.
I concurr. Having been directly involved with the hiring of three system administrators in two different labs (for "directly involved" read: slogged through resumes and made the hiring recommendation to my boss), I can attest that any resume which came by without any kind of degree was automatically thrown away without a second glance. Why? Too many much better qualified people out there. Screw a bachelor's degree, two of the sysadmins we hired had PhDs!
Going to college isn't about getting trained how to do a job, it's about getting trained how to think. Ideally, if you are in a technical field, it is about getting trained how to think critically, how to solve problems, how to recognize sources of trouble, and just as important, how to recognize issues which can be ignored. While this is possible to learn without formal education, the standard yardstick for otherwise blind comparisons (which form the initial evaluations on all technical hiring decisions) is a science or engineering degree from a respected university.
If cost is a serious issue, then move to a state with low in-state tuition to establish residency and attend the state university there. Good education need not be expensive, if you are appropriately motivated.
One of the (many) hats I wear is that of scientist-looking-for-data-in-a-sea-of-noise. Given that most images on a screen don't change that often (save for gaming and related animations), or perhaps more pertinently, most images worth spying on (read: documents) are fairly static, one would have the opportunity of many, many, many presentations (each 60-100 Hz frame is a presentation) to wade through any environmental noise such as room lights, motion of people in the room (which are slow compared to the refresh rate), etc. Remember, all you need is some reasonably reflecting surface, not direct line-of-sight. I have no doubt this can readily be done from a long distance, given good optics, including from space.
The obligatory question is -- since this fellow is from LA where everyone in the art/entertainment world takes themselves FAR too seriously -- did this fellow really make a sign, or did he make a movie?
My take is that the sign is a nice side-effect of having made the movie. The original impetus might be the same in both cases, but with such high-brow video techniques (rather than a straight documentation), it sure sounds like the movie was not just intended from the start, but a major part of the finished product. After all, he had intended to wow the *art* world with a display of the *movie*. The sign, present or not at that point, was incidental, save for the additional advertising value it gave the so-called artist.
Adding my two cents here, having seen an earlier presentation by Dr. Chow -- who works for a private company with definitely closed-source style operations -- the issue of phototoxicity is severe. Dr. Chow failed to mention in his impressive presentation that the light levels required to make these artificial retinas work is toxic to the cells. And since the rods and cones are dead already, all that is left in these diseased retinas are *non*-light-sensitive cells! He admitted this during the questioning period, but strongly downplayed it. For me, the point is that there's a simple power analysis which makes it pretty clear a passive device such as Dr. Chow's will never, ever work: action potentials take a lot of energy to trigger from a non-synaptic input like an external current source, and there aren't enough photons in normal light levels to do this.
While I think the ideas he presents are elegant and show promise, they are not done in the normal light of open scientific research, and thus must be scruitinzed with higher levels of suspicion.
That would be "compression" not "tension". This style mounting is often mis-marketed as a tension setting when, indeed, the stone (often diamond) is under substantial compression.
Years ago, say in the early and mid 80s, Texas Instruments made a line of computers called Explorers, derived from the Lisp Machine of MIT AI Lab fame. The engineers at TI were pretty sharp, and had a good sense of humour, too. Upon power-up, the Explorers would go through a battery of self-tests which included (emphasis for relevance to the current story) seeking the heads of the *running* disk drives at audio frequencies to create a rising tone followed by a falling tone: whoooeep-wheeeou. I was at MIT at the time, and TI gave us a heap of these machines since they used the NuBus, which our group (Real-Time Systems , headed by Prof. Steve Ward) had invented. We were all a little suprised when we heard them make that noise, but became, in truly geeky fashion, completely impressed once we figured out how they did it!
... and what about the story that the original BSD code had a backdoor
which *almost* made it into distribution where the compiler had a hack that
would recognize when it was compiling the compiler, and would insert code
into the compiler that would then, when compiled, recognize when it was
compiling login and insert code into login that would allow a backdoor from
the login prompt. Security through obscurity, so to speak.
Finally, in some states (Massachusetts is one) for sales to consumers the CONSUMER has the option of demanding a repair, replacement or a refund.
Please provide a reference for this incredibly useful tidbit. I cannot count the number of times being able to cite the appropriate law to establish this would have been beneficial!
Funny thing about NASA. There are thousands upon millions of people, kids, teens, adults, who love Space, who love the idea of space travel. People who look at old footage of Apollo launches and get this tingling in their spine like nothing else. These people are *hungry* for what NASA can provide. These people are the astronauts and engineers of tomorrow, people who want to go forth and explore, as is evidenced by the tenor of many of the postings here.
But, NASA offers them nothing.
Sure, you can go to Kennedy Space Center (KSC), and spend hours and hours waiting in line for exhibits that are insulting to morons. If you find your self at KSC, don't bother asking any hard questions, as the staffers don't know an Atlas booster from a bottle rocket. Don't expect to see anything other than a watered down Disney version of Space; in Boston, we have a better exhibit (albeit smaller) at the local Science Museum.
Sure, you can watch NOVA. Or listen to the occasional astronaut interviews on NPR. Or join local interest groups. Or wait in line at book signings to have 15 seconds near an aged astronaut. This is not enough.
NASA is, and has been historically though the Goldin era, dropping the ball in such a fundamentally stupid way it makes me spit. When they face budgetary cutbacks, crises like the Challenger disaster, competition from ESA, Japan, India, and the like, their best friends would be a supportive public. And yet, they do not recruit the thousands and thousands of space enthusiasts.
A close friend of mine has been applying to become an astronaut for years (and made it to the interview level last cycle). She was an Aero/Astro major at MIT, and works for a company that supports space missions through contracts with NASA. She travels a good deal as part of her job, and tells me time and time again, people she meets are fascinated by the idea of space travel, but there are no resources she can direct them to. Why isn't NASA using this waiting, eager resource to their benefit?
NASA needs the public's help and support. If I were the next administrator, I'd made it a priority (after firing Boeing's incompetent ISS staff) to build positive public sentiment. The "amazing benefits to humanity" horse has been flogged to death. Why not NASA-sponsored rocketry competitions? Why not recruit college students into NASA fellowships? Why not a whole lot more visits to elementary schools? I'd eschew the encroaching commercialization, and re-present the NASA of my childhood (one where corners weren't cut, missions captured the public imagination, and astronauts were heros) to the public. Then, the pro-NASA advocation, at the grass-roots, could start.
Your idea has merit. But -- and this is a big one -- there would be a ton of design work necessary.
I've worked with galvanometrically-controlled mirrors (the kind used to make x-y projectors for laser display systems). Cool stuff. Very, very expensive for good ones, and to get a nice, clean picture, you sure would need a set of good ones. Why? Think of the simplest monochromatic case where you want to project a single LED (or laser) in a scanning path. Any slight deviations from perfectly straight lines in a regular array during the scan will appear as distortions in the image. Getting a motor to track so that a projected dot moves not only at a constant rate on a screen, but also does so without any substantive deviations is difficult. In my lab at Caltech, we spent well over $10,000 building a very similar system, although ours was for projecting static images rather than dynamic ones. The lengths you must go through to get something that is usable are remarkable.
To get decent response time (in merely 10s of ms; for video you'll need better) you need special ultra-light mirrors and big heavy motors. Speaker coils are designed to move speaker cones, not mirrors which weigh 1-2 orders of magnitude more. Also, the controllers for such things are non-trivial and must be carefully tuned for the individual load. Don't expect to slap together a 100W audio amplifier from some design book and expect it to work in this case. The loads are very different.
To get decent mechanical rigidity for such a system, you will need an optical bench, and a friendly machinist who is willing to make high-accuracy parts. You can skimp on things like the supports (we used a wooden frame), but if, for example, the two X and Y mirrors are 89.95 degrees apart instead of 90.00, you get a mixed trapezoid and parallelogram image that will need to be corrected in the decoder. We ended up using independent first-degree corrections for each axis; we should have used a two-dimensional, second-degree (parabolic) correction.
Because such things are also going to be sensitive to temperature variation (remember, everything expands when it gets hot), you will also need a heating system and nice controller for it. The gavanometer controllers we used also had a nice heating system built in that kept the motors at 40C, independent of what we were doing to them.
That said, you can probably do a crude job with
surplus equipment, as scanning mirror assemblies are often used in photocopiers, printers, and the like, but it's not the kind of thing you can do in a weekend. Getting an image that would rival a middle-of-the-road DLP/LCD projector would take a very long time and a lot of effort.
Getting spinning mechanical things to achieve the kind of accuracy to get reliable pixel-by-pixel resolution without distortion is not easy. Not impossible, but definitely not easy.
You'd bother with one of these if you had multiple tens of GB of data which need to be quickly analyzed. Admittedly, that's a niche market, but one that definitely exists. For example, in my scientific work recording neural signals we will routinely be generating 100GB of data *per day* which will need to be analyzed and digested down to perhaps 100MB for archiving. While it would be nice to keep the original 100GB of data, the sheer volume of it, and the relatively low information density precludes that. We therefore snip out the interesting bits, perform various analyses and save only the results.
A solid-state disk drive with, essentially, zero *seek* time makes this not just a more pleasant experience, but possible. (Okay, so that's an overstatement, we hadn't planned on using SS drives, but the idea does warrant examination!) Remember, there's data transfer rate as well as seek times to worry about, and, to the best of my knowledge, disk drives currently for sale do not max out the available transfer bandwidth. So, with a SS drive, we'd win on seek time and transfer rate, despite the various bus limitations.
Don't confuse a different point of view from your own with a failure to
truly answer the question.
Then, I suppose something like Bill Gates' famous gaffe is, oh, well,
merely a "different view" (Stephen (sret1@cam.ac.uk)'s words) about
mathematics:
The obvious mathematical breakthrough
would be development of an easy way to
factor large prime numbers." (Bill Gates, The
Road Ahead, Viking Penguin (1995), p. 265.)
The opinions Doug Miller presented in this interview are nothing more than
propaganda from a big company. He clearly misunderstands basic technical
issues (eg, exactly whence Linux developed, what constitutes an operating
system, how competitive Linux vs. MS operating systems are in
high-availability deployments, what the difference is between free software
and open source, etc.), but is very savvy on business models (eg, how MS
really makes its money, effective models for future revenue, what divisions
within the Linux community are important in terms of competitively
threatening MS, etc.).
Certainly, one could not expect anything of real import from such an
interview. No trade secrets, no meaningful glimpses of strategies. And we
saw none. MS has been built into a powerful corporation not because it has
ever produced good software, but because it has had a leader who knows the
business world very, very well. That confusion has lead to such assertions
as Mr. Miller's, "Microsoft has always been a customer focused company and
to satisfy customers, you need to build solutions that are competitive,"
which, while narrowly accurate, does not imply that these solutions
are meritorious in any technically relevant way. And we know that they are
not. I stand by my long-repeated claim that we, as a society, are 10 years
behind were we could be, because of Microsoft.
Personally, I'd rather not have seen this interview, and I disagree
strongly with Roblimo: this man should not command our respect, other than
being part of a company with a proven track record of success so pervasive
that the US Government felt it had gotten too big. Sadly for MS, other
companies which have achieved similar success had far different ethics
(Ever used a pre-breakup AT&T phone? High-quality and
indestructible. Ever heard of what Andrew Carnegie did with his money?
Among other things, a large series of architecturally beautiful public
libraries. Bill Gates had not given any money away before the DOJ case.),
but we fortunately live in a world where we are not forced to use their
products.
Having recently gone through a number (3) of patent applications in the
past 18 months, I can readily assure you that public disclosure in no way
directly implies public domain. As long as a patent application is filed
within 12 months (in the US) of initial public disclosure -- including
peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations -- the inventors
own all rights to the claims covered.
Don't be fooled: if a cure for cancer is discovered, Oxford and the
National Foundation for Cancer Research will own the results. Period
(depending of course, on the IP negotiations between them which we are not
privvy to). I don't know about NFCS, but Oxford will most certainly look
to profit from it, by, for example, licensing the rights to a biotech firm
who is in a position to manufacture and distribute tons of the stuff, at profit.
At MIT, the main network in the combined AI Lab and Lab for Computer
Science (housed at 545 Tech Square in Cambridge, Mass.) was for many years
defacto run by students. Hell, much of it was invented and built by
students. (I'd shudder to think about how many meters of cable I've
personally run in that building.) For years, each group did it's own IT
management, until a central group (CRS, Computational Resources Service)
was formed to take care of the more mundane things, like making sure all
the printers worked, allocating IP addresses, running cable, and the like.
Also, for many years before Project Athena started, there was SIPB, the
Student Information Processing Board, which was all student-run, and
provided the all-access computational facility for members of the campus.
Students also ran many of the large academic computational facilities, such
as the fabled EECS system (a PDP-10 which had a nasty habit of thrashing
the nights before problem sets were due) used for such courses as Software
Engineering, Introduction to Programming, etc.
And these things all ran well. Why? Because unlike some suit who went
home at 5pm, the students had a vested interest in these systems and were
available at nearly all hours. Sure there were problems, but there were
some very creative answers. And the students running these systems
understood the computational needs of the users -- because they had shared
experiences. They knew how bad it could be when the main server died
during the week before finals. They cared.
The bad part of this was that being in one of these (only sometimes paid)
positions usually carried a hefty price in terms of academic performance.
These students were essentially working full-time jobs in addition to
taking full loads.
Is there a better solution? I'm not sure. At MIT, a paid professional
staff won't be as talented as the students, won't be as dedicated, and
won't be as responsive. But the community won't be taking undue advantage
of them, either. For other institutions, a different answer might,
naturally, be more appropriate.
Sharing some viewpoints with RMS neither makes him nor you a kook. Living in his office, by which I mean having no other residence (NE43-425 at MIT, which also happens to be my old office), makes him a kook in my book.
My impressions of RMS as a kook, however, has little bearing on the quality of code he has produced -- I have used Emacs nearly every day since 1980 (starting with the original TECO implementation) -- nor the impact he has had on Computer Science. We must not forget the dissociation between a man and his work. Emacs would be great even if it were a proprietary product because it is engineered beautifully, not because it's GPLed, Open Sourced, or written in Lisp.
Slashdot Mirror
Not any more. The 9th District Court of Appeals ruled earlier this week that the Pledge of Alegience is unconstitutional because it violates church-state separation due to the inclusion (from the 50s, thanks to Macarthyism) of the phrase "under God."
We are, once again, godless, at least in the 9th Circuit.
The crackerjack engineering part of my education was from MIT. Ah is proud, ah say, proud to be an enguneer.
They're called "wires". In bundles, as you describe, they're called "cables". Fascinating things, actually.
Every day, diffraction gratings are created with about 1nm accuracy using macroscopic tools. My father designed one which does just that. It is not impossible to imagine, therefore, that arbitrary features could similarily be scribed.
The machines which create the diffraction gratings are called ruling engines, and, not unlike the methods used to stamp metal currency, the masters are used to make duplicates which then are used to make the work tools. Each stage can be replicated N times, so while there is a limited lifetime of the entire process, N^3 can be quite large.
Another question: cooling. Tubes get damn hot.
Unlike silicon devices which work better when cold (especially CMOS) and are destroyed by excessive heat, tubes need to be hot to operate. While they do run hot, they do not dissipate that much heat: a 12AX7 (a common dual triode which is a good guess for the device in the photos) dissipates 3W max (filament plus max plate), a far cry from the 30W-plus a modern processor dissipates. Further, since the tubes need to be hot, the strong airflow typically found in contemporary cases is detrimental to proper operation. A cold tube just does not work.
My two cents: this is a gimmick.
Oil CAN NOT be infinite.
Yes, true. But there's tons (in the vernacular sense) of methane just lying on the seabed.
Here's more info on methane hydrates and recent scientific examination. While there remains controversy about exactly where this methane originates (biological vs geological sources), everyone agrees that there's an insane amount of the stuff. While we might go wanting for oil some decades from now, there's plenty of hydrocarbon energy left. One of the current geological hypotheses is that the source is magma outgassing which would mean, yes, as you nearly put it, "the continents float on a layer of [hydrocarbons]."
Going off to college means, for many, real independence for the first time. So the first things you should think about including are in support of that, or, in related fashion, in support of what happens when that breaks down. Like a pre-paid phone card with a gazillion minutes on it. And, perhaps more importantly, your phone number enscribed on that phone card so that she can call an adult who is not her parent for non-judgmental advice, followed by the words "call any time of day or night." And when she does call at 3am, make sure you wake up, listen, and provide the support she needs.
As oft-mentioned in other replies, condoms. GOOD ones. And then, bone up on emergency anti-pregnancy procedures for that 3am call asking, "ohmigod Uncle Bob -- the condom broke, what do I do?"
An open account with a local taxi service so that she never, ever, ever has to worry about getting a ride home. The means to limit abuses of this are up to you.
Alcohol. The best place to learn about drinking is in the private, protected confines of your own dorm room. (Note, there are serious legality issues here which vary from state to state. Don't do something stupid and blame it on me.)
Anti-hangover remedies. My favorite is Berocca. Send a case. Ibuprofen. Send lots.
HIV home test kits (which are really home-sampling kits which you then send to a central lab for analysis). Not cheap, but she should have any guy she's thinking of having sex with tested.
*Assuming* she knows how to use basic handtools, a small toolbox with decent quality hammer, screwdrivers, and pliers is great. If she doesn't know how to use these tools, it is still a good idea, but not nearly as important. From your suggestion of lockpicks and flashlight, one might surmise she is perhaps mechanically inclined. If so, add small pocket knife, magnifying loupe, a pocket-sized set of jewlers tools. At the other end of the physical scale, a crowbar and a 3-lb sledge. A good digital multimeter (eg, Fluke 77-III or equivalent).
The person who recommended flip-flops and a shower basket was right on the money. Add some decent (and decent-sized) soap and a couple of small travel-sized bottles of her favorite shampoo and conditioner (or other toiletries).
Now, to be really *subversive*, send a set of infrared goggles, available at surplus houses everywhere. Add in works by Kant, Ionesco, Wittgenstein, Chekov and Orwell. A couple of remote listening devices. Books on how to swear in a dozen languages. Assuming she's going to college in the US, plane tickets to Europe (put those gazillion FF miles to work!). Safety pins (the most universally useful items, after knives). Fake wedding rings. Falsies (see the posting about breast implants and their universal utility). Wigs of different color or style from her normal hair. A get-out-of-jail-free card (see the phone card with your number on it, above).
But the most subversive thing you could possibly give is: encouragement.
Use a cotton swab dipped in alcohol to wipe off excess accumulation at the print holes, and follow with a dry one. Repeat until beautifully shiny clean ... but keep in mind that if the print holes are clear, ink will continue to flow.
In what way does changing a well-chosen password increase security on a non-compromised system?
I concurr. Having been directly involved with the hiring of three system administrators in two different labs (for "directly involved" read: slogged through resumes and made the hiring recommendation to my boss), I can attest that any resume which came by without any kind of degree was automatically thrown away without a second glance. Why? Too many much better qualified people out there. Screw a bachelor's degree, two of the sysadmins we hired had PhDs!
Going to college isn't about getting trained how to do a job, it's about getting trained how to think. Ideally, if you are in a technical field, it is about getting trained how to think critically, how to solve problems, how to recognize sources of trouble, and just as important, how to recognize issues which can be ignored. While this is possible to learn without formal education, the standard yardstick for otherwise blind comparisons (which form the initial evaluations on all technical hiring decisions) is a science or engineering degree from a respected university.
If cost is a serious issue, then move to a state with low in-state tuition to establish residency and attend the state university there. Good education need not be expensive, if you are appropriately motivated.
One of the (many) hats I wear is that of scientist-looking-for-data-in-a-sea-of-noise. Given that most images on a screen don't change that often (save for gaming and related animations), or perhaps more pertinently, most images worth spying on (read: documents) are fairly static, one would have the opportunity of many, many, many presentations (each 60-100 Hz frame is a presentation) to wade through any environmental noise such as room lights, motion of people in the room (which are slow compared to the refresh rate), etc. Remember, all you need is some reasonably reflecting surface, not direct line-of-sight. I have no doubt this can readily be done from a long distance, given good optics, including from space.
The obligatory question is -- since this fellow is from LA where everyone in the art/entertainment world takes themselves FAR too seriously -- did this fellow really make a sign, or did he make a movie?
My take is that the sign is a nice side-effect of having made the movie. The original impetus might be the same in both cases, but with such high-brow video techniques (rather than a straight documentation), it sure sounds like the movie was not just intended from the start, but a major part of the finished product. After all, he had intended to wow the *art* world with a display of the *movie*. The sign, present or not at that point, was incidental, save for the additional advertising value it gave the so-called artist.
But then, maybe I'm bitter from my years living in LA.
Adding my two cents here, having seen an earlier presentation by Dr. Chow -- who works for a private company with definitely closed-source style operations -- the issue of phototoxicity is severe. Dr. Chow failed to mention in his impressive presentation that the light levels required to make these artificial retinas work is toxic to the cells. And since the rods and cones are dead already, all that is left in these diseased retinas are *non*-light-sensitive cells! He admitted this during the questioning period, but strongly downplayed it. For me, the point is that there's a simple power analysis which makes it pretty clear a passive device such as Dr. Chow's will never, ever work: action potentials take a lot of energy to trigger from a non-synaptic input like an external current source, and there aren't enough photons in normal light levels to do this.
While I think the ideas he presents are elegant and show promise, they are not done in the normal light of open scientific research, and thus must be scruitinzed with higher levels of suspicion.
That would be "compression" not "tension". This
style mounting is often mis-marketed as a tension
setting when, indeed, the stone (often diamond)
is under substantial compression.
Years ago, say in the early and mid 80s, Texas Instruments made a line of computers called Explorers, derived from the Lisp Machine of MIT AI Lab fame. The engineers at TI were pretty sharp, and had a good sense of humour, too. Upon power-up, the Explorers would go through a battery of self-tests which included (emphasis for relevance to the current story) seeking the heads of the *running* disk drives at audio frequencies to create a rising tone followed by a falling tone: whoooeep-wheeeou. I was at MIT at the time, and TI gave us a heap of these machines since they used the NuBus, which our group (Real-Time Systems , headed by Prof. Steve Ward) had invented. We were all a little suprised when we heard them make that noise, but became, in truly geeky fashion, completely impressed once we figured out how they did it!
-- pz.
... and what about the story that the original BSD code had a backdoor
which *almost* made it into distribution where the compiler had a hack that
would recognize when it was compiling the compiler, and would insert code
into the compiler that would then, when compiled, recognize when it was
compiling login and insert code into login that would allow a backdoor from
the login prompt. Security through obscurity, so to speak.
Finally, in some states (Massachusetts is one) for sales to consumers the CONSUMER has the option of demanding a repair, replacement or a refund.
Please provide a reference for this incredibly useful tidbit. I cannot count the number of times being able to cite the appropriate law to establish this would have been beneficial!
- pz.
Funny thing about NASA. There are thousands upon millions of people, kids, teens, adults, who love Space, who love the idea of space travel. People who look at old footage of Apollo launches and get this tingling in their spine like nothing else. These people are *hungry* for what NASA can provide. These people are the astronauts and engineers of tomorrow, people who want to go forth and explore, as is evidenced by the tenor of many of the postings here.
But, NASA offers them nothing.
Sure, you can go to Kennedy Space Center (KSC), and spend hours and hours waiting in line for exhibits that are insulting to morons. If you find your self at KSC, don't bother asking any hard questions, as the staffers don't know an Atlas booster from a bottle rocket. Don't expect to see anything other than a watered down Disney version of Space; in Boston, we have a better exhibit (albeit smaller) at the local Science Museum.
Sure, you can watch NOVA. Or listen to the occasional astronaut interviews on NPR. Or join local interest groups. Or wait in line at book signings to have 15 seconds near an aged astronaut. This is not enough.
NASA is, and has been historically though the Goldin era, dropping the ball in such a fundamentally stupid way it makes me spit. When they face budgetary cutbacks, crises like the Challenger disaster, competition from ESA, Japan, India, and the like, their best friends would be a supportive public. And yet, they do not recruit the thousands and thousands of space enthusiasts.
A close friend of mine has been applying to become an astronaut for years (and made it to the interview level last cycle). She was an Aero/Astro major at MIT, and works for a company that supports space missions through contracts with NASA. She travels a good deal as part of her job, and tells me time and time again, people she meets are fascinated by the idea of space travel, but there are no resources she can direct them to. Why isn't NASA using this waiting, eager resource to their benefit?
NASA needs the public's help and support. If I were the next administrator, I'd made it a priority (after firing Boeing's incompetent ISS staff) to build positive public sentiment. The "amazing benefits to humanity" horse has been flogged to death. Why not NASA-sponsored rocketry competitions? Why not recruit college students into NASA fellowships? Why not a whole lot more visits to elementary schools? I'd eschew the encroaching commercialization, and re-present the NASA of my childhood (one where corners weren't cut, missions captured the public imagination, and astronauts were heros) to the public. Then, the pro-NASA advocation, at the grass-roots, could start.
-- pz.
Your idea has merit. But -- and this is a big one -- there would be a ton of design work necessary.
I've worked with galvanometrically-controlled mirrors (the kind used to make x-y projectors for laser display systems). Cool stuff. Very, very expensive for good ones, and to get a nice, clean picture, you sure would need a set of good ones. Why? Think of the simplest monochromatic case where you want to project a single LED (or laser) in a scanning path. Any slight deviations from perfectly straight lines in a regular array during the scan will appear as distortions in the image. Getting a motor to track so that a projected dot moves not only at a constant rate on a screen, but also does so without any substantive deviations is difficult. In my lab at Caltech, we spent well over $10,000 building a very similar system, although ours was for projecting static images rather than dynamic ones. The lengths you must go through to get something that is usable are remarkable.
To get decent response time (in merely 10s of ms; for video you'll need better) you need special ultra-light mirrors and big heavy motors. Speaker coils are designed to move speaker cones, not mirrors which weigh 1-2 orders of magnitude more. Also, the controllers for such things are non-trivial and must be carefully tuned for the individual load. Don't expect to slap together a 100W audio amplifier from some design book and expect it to work in this case. The loads are very different.
To get decent mechanical rigidity for such a system, you will need an optical bench, and a friendly machinist who is willing to make high-accuracy parts. You can skimp on things like the supports (we used a wooden frame), but if, for example, the two X and Y mirrors are 89.95 degrees apart instead of 90.00, you get a mixed trapezoid and parallelogram image that will need to be corrected in the decoder. We ended up using independent first-degree corrections for each axis; we should have used a two-dimensional, second-degree (parabolic) correction.
Because such things are also going to be sensitive to temperature variation (remember, everything expands when it gets hot), you will also need a heating system and nice controller for it. The gavanometer controllers we used also had a nice heating system built in that kept the motors at 40C, independent of what we were doing to them.
That said, you can probably do a crude job with
surplus equipment, as scanning mirror assemblies are often used in photocopiers, printers, and the like, but it's not the kind of thing you can do in a weekend. Getting an image that would rival a middle-of-the-road DLP/LCD projector would take a very long time and a lot of effort.
Getting spinning mechanical things to achieve the kind of accuracy to get reliable pixel-by-pixel resolution without distortion is not easy. Not impossible, but definitely not easy.
-- pz.
A solid-state disk drive with, essentially, zero *seek* time makes this not just a more pleasant experience, but possible. (Okay, so that's an overstatement, we hadn't planned on using SS drives, but the idea does warrant examination!) Remember, there's data transfer rate as well as seek times to worry about, and, to the best of my knowledge, disk drives currently for sale do not max out the available transfer bandwidth. So, with a SS drive, we'd win on seek time and transfer rate, despite the various bus limitations.
Then, I suppose something like Bill Gates' famous gaffe is, oh, well, merely a "different view" (Stephen (sret1@cam.ac.uk)'s words) about mathematics:
The opinions Doug Miller presented in this interview are nothing more than propaganda from a big company. He clearly misunderstands basic technical issues (eg, exactly whence Linux developed, what constitutes an operating system, how competitive Linux vs. MS operating systems are in high-availability deployments, what the difference is between free software and open source, etc.), but is very savvy on business models (eg, how MS really makes its money, effective models for future revenue, what divisions within the Linux community are important in terms of competitively threatening MS, etc.).
Certainly, one could not expect anything of real import from such an interview. No trade secrets, no meaningful glimpses of strategies. And we saw none. MS has been built into a powerful corporation not because it has ever produced good software, but because it has had a leader who knows the business world very, very well. That confusion has lead to such assertions as Mr. Miller's, "Microsoft has always been a customer focused company and to satisfy customers, you need to build solutions that are competitive," which, while narrowly accurate, does not imply that these solutions are meritorious in any technically relevant way. And we know that they are not. I stand by my long-repeated claim that we, as a society, are 10 years behind were we could be, because of Microsoft.
Personally, I'd rather not have seen this interview, and I disagree strongly with Roblimo: this man should not command our respect, other than being part of a company with a proven track record of success so pervasive that the US Government felt it had gotten too big. Sadly for MS, other companies which have achieved similar success had far different ethics (Ever used a pre-breakup AT&T phone? High-quality and indestructible. Ever heard of what Andrew Carnegie did with his money? Among other things, a large series of architecturally beautiful public libraries. Bill Gates had not given any money away before the DOJ case.), but we fortunately live in a world where we are not forced to use their products.
-- pz.
Don't be fooled: if a cure for cancer is discovered, Oxford and the National Foundation for Cancer Research will own the results. Period (depending of course, on the IP negotiations between them which we are not privvy to). I don't know about NFCS, but Oxford will most certainly look to profit from it, by, for example, licensing the rights to a biotech firm who is in a position to manufacture and distribute tons of the stuff, at profit.
-- pz.
Also, for many years before Project Athena started, there was SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board, which was all student-run, and provided the all-access computational facility for members of the campus. Students also ran many of the large academic computational facilities, such as the fabled EECS system (a PDP-10 which had a nasty habit of thrashing the nights before problem sets were due) used for such courses as Software Engineering, Introduction to Programming, etc.
And these things all ran well. Why? Because unlike some suit who went home at 5pm, the students had a vested interest in these systems and were available at nearly all hours. Sure there were problems, but there were some very creative answers. And the students running these systems understood the computational needs of the users -- because they had shared experiences. They knew how bad it could be when the main server died during the week before finals. They cared.
The bad part of this was that being in one of these (only sometimes paid) positions usually carried a hefty price in terms of academic performance. These students were essentially working full-time jobs in addition to taking full loads.
Is there a better solution? I'm not sure. At MIT, a paid professional staff won't be as talented as the students, won't be as dedicated, and won't be as responsive. But the community won't be taking undue advantage of them, either. For other institutions, a different answer might, naturally, be more appropriate.
- pz.
My impressions of RMS as a kook, however, has little bearing on the quality of code he has produced -- I have used Emacs nearly every day since 1980 (starting with the original TECO implementation) -- nor the impact he has had on Computer Science. We must not forget the dissociation between a man and his work. Emacs would be great even if it were a proprietary product because it is engineered beautifully, not because it's GPLed, Open Sourced, or written in Lisp.
Cheers,
- pz.