Re:If democratic and elected, not so sad after all
on
Harm From The Hague
·
· Score: 2
I think we need a world
government in place to check the power of multinationals, and to set level playing field in the
marketplace.
Corporations have been very successful at co-opting the power of the American government
for their own use. Multinational corporations are
greedy and clever. They are doubtless the most
powerful forces behind the Hague initiative.
Don't you think that they would co-opt a world
government just as quickly? Don't you suppose that
they've been drooling over the prospect of a
world government for decades in order to do
exactly this?
Before we all decide to submit to a world government that will
protect us all from run-away corporate power, we
ought to see at least one instance of this
happening on a regional or national level, under
living conditions humanity would unanimously find
suitable.
I first heard the SPS idea discussed in a talk given by Jerry Pournelle
around 1980 at MIT. My first impression was that it sounded great, and
my second was that it was potentially worrisome to be aiming microwave
beams at the ground.
Apparently, though, the risks have been pretty carefully
considered and
the conclusion is that this isn't much of a problem compared to
suntanning or eating a typical American diet. As pointed out
elsewhere, this frequency is non-ionizing and therefore does not
cause chemical reactions. It can heat you up in significant
intensities but nothing more, and the intensities under consideration
would cause only about as much heating as being outside on a hot day.
From the website cited above:
What if the beam wanders off from the rectenna? The beam can't wander
off target with a significant intensity because it needs constant
feedback from the rectenna for focusing. (A phased-array system is
necessary for successful focusing onto the rectenna at such
distances.) If it wanders off, then it immediately defocusses and
disperses to a tiny fraction of its operating intensity. It also can't
be used as a weapon for this reason. Even if it were re-engineered to
point anywhere with the same focussing, the transmitters would be
designed to operate at a relatively benign frequency (e.g., 2.45 GHz)
which would not pose a credible threat to anyone. Again, the only
thing that will significantly absorb the 2.45 GHz frequency beam is a
receiving antenna designed for it.
The only way they can enforce these fascist laws to the letter is by instituting Orwellian forms of governments around the world.
The difficulty is not with governments. At least as government is practiced in the U.S. today, it is big and conspicuous, but at this point it is only a tool of corporations. Thanks to our system of campaign financing, politicians are already paid-for corporate property by the time they arrive in office. The only issues on which the government can freely exercise a will of its own are those issues on which corporations have no preference.
A few years back, John Storrs-Hall (for many years
the moderator of sci.nanotech) was talking about
an
interesting idea that, like the space elevator,
is not very far beyond existing material science.
It is also probably more economical. The gist is an airport runway, 300 km long and at an altitude of 100 km, with a built-in linear motor that can accelerate a spacecraft. Over 80 seconds at 10 G, the craft accelerates to 8 km/sec, necessary to maintain a circular orbit. Humans (at least young healthy ones) can survive this acceleration.
Current approaches to space launch cost around $10,000 per kilogram. The space dock could allow launches for 91 cents per kilogram, dropping to 42 cents per kilogram as the construction was amortized over the first few decades of use.
You're right that a direct attempt to illegalize the GPL would
be a direct assault on copyright. But there might be thousands of
small, quiet ways to make free software development unreasonably
cumbersome.
Look at all the high school kids getting questioned and searched
on vague innuendoes these days. The battle against non-conformist
kids is a PR battle, fought well enough to make adults overlook
the possible violations of the kids' civil liberties.
In the days of fear that cryptography could be a potential shield for
child pornographers, there was a quote going around:
"Child abuse" is the root password to the Constitution. The
same idea can be applied to "public safety", "national security", or
whatever cherished value moves people in any given time.
Mount a good enough PR campaign, and civil liberties demonstrate an
astonishing degree of elasticity. M$ has the motive, means, and
opportunity to initiate such a campaign.
Stallman has
written on essentially
this topic. Spooky, interesting stuff.
From ESR's commentary:
expect Mr. Mundie to try to blur the distinctions between open-source development, use of the GPL, wholesale copyright-law violations like Napster, and outright software piracy.
This strategy occurred to me as a potential M$ move about a year ago. Nightmare scenarios came to mind of legal prohibition of free software development. M$ can certainly buy plenty of judges and lawyers; this may yet not be an impossibility.
Free software should remain legitimate (not just
legal, but a public good)
in the public perception. ESR's article is a good start, but appearing as it does in Linux Today, he's preaching to the choir. The involvement of IBM and other big companies with free software lends legitimacy, but is probably too far below the public radar to be perceived as a compelling free-speech issue.
It would be good if somebody with the connections to do so could get these distinctions clarified in more mainstream media, before M$ has a chance to codify "free software == piracy" as U.S. law.
The only 300-year-old company I can think of is the Hudson's Bay Company
Lloyd's of London is
another lovely old for-profit institution, 313 years old if this
information is to be believed. From the history page on their website:
Lloyd's began in Edward Lloyd's Thames-side coffee house in
Tower Street in the City of London.
Although the exact date of its establishment is unknown, evidence
exists that Lloyd's coffee house was well-known in London business
circles by 1688.
Lloyd himself was not involved in insurance but provided premises,
reliable shipping news and a variety of services to enable his
clientele of ships' captains, merchants and rich men to carry on their
business of insuring ships and their cargoes.
The wealthy individuals in the coffee house would each take a
share of a risk, signing their names one beneath the other on the
policy together, with the amount they agreed to cover. For this reason
they were known as 'underwriters'.
Lloyd died in 1713 but the coffee house continued to prosper as a
centre for marine insurance.
By the end of the 18th century the underwriters had elected a
committee and moved to their own premises in the Royal Exchange. Only
members of Lloyd's were allowed to accept insurance business.
The Society of Lloyd's was incorporated by Lloyd's Act 1871 which
provided the business with a sound legal basis and laid the
foundations for today's market.
By the turn of the century the traditional club of marine
underwriters had become an international market for insurance risks of
almost every type. Lloyd's pre-eminence as a world centre for
insurance had been established.
It looks like all those "imagine a Beowulf of X" wishes may not be in
vain after all. Chasing down complex causalities will benefit greatly
from molecular dynamics simulations.
This intrigued me:
Successful biological systems resist simple analysis for the very same
reason that they are successful. Every time we gain greater knowledge
of any such system we discover that it is far more complicated,
redundant, self-healing, adaptable, and resistant to "single points of
failure" than it first appeared. If the functioning of the genome were
as simple -- and therefore easily manipulated -- as the advocates of
the genome project have been implying, it would be impossibly fragile.
I'm not sure whether to agree with the author that this is a bad thing
for would-be gene therapists. For one thing, it offers a bit more of a
safety net for highly speculative treatments.
As far as figuring out causality, this is actually probably helpful.
Protein synthesis is reliable despite noise in the system. Accidental
conformational tweaks (this coil of RNA happened to be a couple
angstroms to the left, instead of to the right, and therefore failed
to bind with that site on the ribosome) are somehow rendered
insignificant in the final outcome.
From an analytical standpoint, it would be great if the
one-gene-one-protein doctrine worked. But we don't need to fear the
analytical worst case, where molecules bump and grind willy-nilly with
no discernible pattern, and the reliable production of correct
proteins is just some kind of well-balanced accident. There will be a
pattern, just not the nice simple one we hoped for.
Despite the article's analogy,
this will be an easier problem in principle than
cryptanalysis.
There is still work
worth doing here.
In fact, there will be plenty of work, and much of it will be work to which
computer geeks are well suited. Long healthy life available soon would
be preferable, but an increase in employment is way better than a poke
in the eye with a sharp stick.
There is one more good consequence of all this. Earlier, it looked
like there would certainly be a quick race to lock down the entire
genome as intellectual property in the private sector. Now that genome
information isn't so immediately profitable, it will migrate to the
public domain much more easily. And that will be good for everybody.
Unfortunately the complex causal phenomena will become patent
targets instead, but with luck that's another battle for another
decade.
It is a myth that the young learn better than the less-young.
I too have learned stuff as I've gotten older, but
that wasn't what I meant. The history of computer
science since the 40s and 50s really hasn't been
as shallow as people like to think. Somebody else's comment to the effect that "things of an essentially linguistic nature can all be learned in 21 days" is short-sighted. Go to any computer science library in any university. Look at the shelves and shelves of books, journals, and papers. Stuff on compiler design, cache performance and optimization, several hundred decades-long debates percolating under the general heading of language design, relational databases and object databases and which is better...
It's easy to forget that five decades of very smart people have dedicated their careers to advancing this whole "computer science" thing. In our current historical situation, the entire field has been flattened down to "what can I do with web browsers and servers?" in the popular mind. People start to believe that something like J2EE represents all of human thought regarding computer science, or at least, all of it that's worth preserving.
A lifespan specified only by accidents should have a
Poisson
probability distribution. The probability of your demise as a
function of time is a decreasing exponential with appropriate
scaling. While there will be an "expected" lifespan, this will be
very different from today's more bell-curve-like distribution,
with most people dying much younger and a lucky few living a very
long time, and very few people dying exactly at 600 years old.
Programming a bunch of FPGAs (essentially an ocean of gates and
flipflops) is necessarily pretty different from programming a general
purpose sequential computer. It's interesting to see Star Bridge's
thoughts on this, and why they're optimistic about this approach.
The VIVA project was initiated several years ago to bring high-level
computer language capability to FPGA programming and to take advantage
of the massively parallel capabilities of FPGAs. FPGAs are cheap to
make, much cheaper than complex microprocessors such as the Intel
Pentium III. The yield rate is higher because the deposition densities
are much more uniform for FPGAs than for microprocessors. Furthermore,
the entire chip surface can be dedicated to usable transistors, with
the potential to provide orders of magnitude more computing capability
on the same size chip.
They go on to describe a hierarchical GUI that connects functional
block to make bigger functional blocks. Somebody with years of
experience in traditional programming probably won't find their skills
translate too easily. The investment in layers of abstraction built on
traditional processors is too big ever to throw away, but this kind of a machine is a
nifty trick to have available.
The reason human drivers suck is that they are trying to remotely manipulate their bots with an incredibly low bandwidth connection (human fingers).
Look at a good pianist. I don't think the bandwidth limitation is with human hands and fingers. Radio remote controls as used in battlebots are legacy systems, designed to control model cars and kludged to control model airplanes. These applications don't involve combat and really just don't require that much bandwidth.
I also
think that microsecond reflexes are probably overkill; useful reflex time is limited by the inherent acceleration and deceleration times of the robot's parts. Even cats and mongeese get by with millisecond reflexes.
I'd like to see somebody design a battlebot where they focus on a high-bandwidth control system rather than a bad-ass weapon. (Most of the weapons end up looking pretty lame anyway.) Video cameras are cheap these days, so no reason the operator can't where a headset that gives him a robot's-eye vantagepoint. There are analog joysticks and 6DOF controllers. Bitstreams from multiple controllers could easily
be shipped over a radio channel (though it probably makes sense to keep the video stream
separate.
Yup, this port
uses Stackless Python to the best of my knowledge
(but you could get a more certain answer by going straight to Jeff Collins). Unfortunately they
haven't included the continuation module or the
microthread module. Chris Tismer
has plans eventually to move a lot of the microthread machinery to C, and maybe at that point, it will find its way into the Palm port.
In years past, it was not uncommon when building
an embedded gadget, to include a Forth interpreter as a way of interacting with the gadget for firmware development and hardware testing. That was in the bad old days of teeny processors (8-bit) and teeny memories (way less than 1 MB).
Forth is a brilliantly designed language for what it does, but it's a pain for most people to think in. The RPN notation just doesn't mesh well with most peoples' cognitive styles.
Running Python on embedded platforms as a way to interact with them will be a very big win. There are a lot of lovely things about Python in this regard: the language is learnable in less than a day, you can easily read other peoples' code, the OOP model is well-designed, and the exception handling is very well thought-out and
robust.
I am definitely hoping to have time to bring up a Python interpreter on the next embedded project I'll be working on. If I can release it publicly without violating any agreements, I will.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
After all the belly-aching, this part is particularly amusing:
Despite Linux's success in some markets, Allchin says he
isn't concerned about sales competition from the product...
"We can build a better product than Linux," he said.
"There is always something enamoring
about thinking you can get something for free."
Gotta love that kind of self-confidence. There's no problem
here for Microsoft, but the matter still needs to be discussed
in a press conference by a Microsoft executive.
The next dangerous idea here is that the very notion of
open source anything will itself come to be construed
as a crime against intellectual property. Anybody writing a
single line of code in their own home on their own time will
be presumed to be maliciously set on violating somebody's (or
more accurately some corporation's) rights, since individual
human beings have no use for source code. Just like, as Ken
Olson explained to us in years past,
there remains no market for home computers.
MS et al will lobby for the acceptance of this view, particularly
among legislators. There will be a "War on Open Source", with
all the wisdom and effectiveness of the War on Drugs. Keep an
eye out for relevant legislation.
I can't say as I'm all that
worried about it... I don't understand
what the problem is here.
They first came for the spider silk and I didn't speak up because I
wasn't a spider.
Then they came for the chitin and I didn't speak up because
I wasn't an oyster.
Then they came for the maple syrup and I didn't speak up because
I wasn't a tree.
Then they came for the raw dripping human brains
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
There will be tons of people that will grab the code and create a free-service server, and everyone will hoard to that instead of the pay servers. Why play the pay servers when the free ones are just as good??
The people running the for-pay servers can hire
professional game designers and artists, who can
make the game much more interesting and fun. The
people who run for-free servers will probably have
either too little time or too little talent to
come up with a good game. If they had the time
and talent, they'd become professional
game designers and get paid for it.
King's experiment could have worked just fine. He was making money.
The reason it failed was his arbitrary condition that a particular
percentage of those downloading must make a donation. Suppose he'd
stipulated only the total donation for each chapter, regardless
of who paid how much. Eventually, he would have gotten almost any
amount he could have asked. He is, after all, Stephen King.
The failure of The Plant was rigged.
Why? Was he trying to prove to himself (like
Hofstatder's failed 1983 lottery in Scientific American) that people
are or aren't honest, or that their honesty is an interesting thing to
try to measure? I doubt it. Here's a more cynical theory.
King has been publishing a long time. He has long-standing buddies in
the publishing industry. If direct payment over the web works, and new
artists don't need publishers any more, then those guys are going to
be feeling some pain. Maybe King rigged The Plant to
demonstrate that direct web payment can't work. If new artists believe
him, they'll never try. If it could work and nobody tries it, then new
avenues of artistic expression will be lost, and some new artists'
careers will end unnecessarily.
A lot of postings have discussed the logistical problems with
micropayments. The infrastructure isn't there yet. Audit trails.
Privacy issues. Trust over long chains. Etcetera, etcetera.
Here's an alternative. Suppose you want to pay 1/10 cent to an
artist for having listened to his MP3 or read his comic strip
or whatever. You can't really send him 1/10 cent,
but mailing a check for $10 makes sense. Use a fair random
number generator to generate a number from
1 to 10,000. If the number is 1, send the $10 check. Otherwise
just read/listen and enjoy.
If people do this en masse and don't cheat, it will work just
like micropayments without requiring any fancy new
infrastructure.
I work in C and Python. In C, I occasionally do a tiny amount of C
polymorphism using function pointers, but it's infrequent.
Python's OO model is very easy to deal with, but I find that
prematurely OO-ing my code is as bad as premature optimization. If I'm really lucky, my objects
will be useful for some later project. This is by no means
guaranteed.
Objects are great where they work, and where you have the time and
experience to tune them to perfection. The Python libraries are full
of beautifully crafted, wonderfully useful object definitions. But
that investment is large, and in many cases, doesn't make sense for
the purpose at hand. And there are problem domains for which objects
simply aren't the natural description.
The OO people say that the wrong way to reuse code is the
cut-paste-tweak method, because then you have two diverging copies
floating around. In a perfect world everything might be in a source
code repository and I could submit a change rather than spawn a
private tweak. But change submissions mean bureaucracy, if I'm working
with other people. If my tweak will never see public use, the overhead
is an unnecessary diversion.
The cited geocities page makes noise about
table-oriented programming. I remember hearing similar things in
the past, stuff like "Put the intelligence in your
data and keep your code simple". I would have liked to see a better description of TOP, perhaps a few pointers to tutorials. The guy's
own descriptions are pretty useless for quickly grokking his point.
Maybe he's only preaching to the database crowd, and I'm not supposed
to get it.
The war on drugs has made drugs more concentrated; this parallels
the phenomenon during
Prohibition where beer and wine were replaced by whiskey and other
harder liquors, with manufacturing errors leading to blindness. And
obviously it gave a firm foothold to organized crime in America. Maybe
the push for Prohibition was partly subsidized by the crime bosses of
the 1910s.
Larry Niven's fiction described wire-heading or current addiction,
where a user gets an implant that can electrically tickle a pleasure
center in his brain, powered by a wall-plug AC adaptor with a timer.
(The timer prevents death due to starvation or dehydration, which
happened in real rats on whom experiments of this sort were done.)
We could probably end the war on drugs even without legalizing any
drugs, by introducing legal/safe/cheap wire-heading. The technology
is trivial and could be productized in six months tops, if anybody
wanted to do it.
The profit motive for criminals and law enforcement would disappear,
and with it, the war on drugs.
There would be a transient massive spike in number of
addicts, and gross economic displacement in South America. The latter
could be plastered over by shifting the DEA budget into
foreign aid.
Introduction of legal/safe/cheap wire-heading would of course be
violently opposed by everybody who wins in the war on drugs: organized
crime, the DEA, big booze/tobacco, etc. So it won't happen, but it's
a fun little libertarian fantasy.
I agree that a number of these projects offer little scientific or societal benefit, so it's very gratifying to see this approach starting to be applied to the advancement of medicine.
You've listed several projects, and I know there are others, each of which has developed its own client from scratch. This seems like pointlessly duplicated effort. Much of the functionality must be the same for all the different clients, isn't it? If there were an open-source distributed computing client project, it could be developed and debugged by all these teams and be much more reliable. With a standardized client there could be an economy of MIPS, some given freely and others sold. It would considerably advance all these projects, and any future ones.
I realize there are security issues; if badly implemented, client code could present awesome opportunities for viruses. But suitable measures should prevent this: digitally signed work units, maybe verifying checksums with the server, and there are probably a dozen other possibilities.
If the nature of the problems is so diverse that there are necessarily deep fundamental differences between the various clients, then this would be a bad idea. But I'm guessing that, except for variations in needed bandwidth of peer-to-peer communication, the clients ought to look mostly pretty similar.
While we're patenting pre-existing things that
weren't invented by human beings...
What is claimed is:
1. A method for reproduction and elimination of fluid
waste comprising:
a cylindrical biological appendage enclosing a plurality of
fluid-bearing tubes;
said tubes bearing said fluids from the interior of a male
human body to its exterior;
said fluids comprising two unrelated functionalities, the
first being the removal of excess water and water-soluble
biological waste products from said male human body, the second
being to provide a medium of suspension for the transportation
of male genetic material for purposes of propogation of the
human species, as well as general recreation;
associated means to ensure rigidity of the appendage required
during conduct of the reproductive act;
generous endowment of the appendage's outer surface with nerve
endings to provide a pleasuarable experience during the
reproductive act, thereby encouraging the user's propogation of
the human species;
coordination with hands and eyes to direct the flow of said
waste fluid during the process of liquid waste elimination toward a
suitable and designated receptacle for same.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein said appendage is longer than
average.
3. The method of claim 1, wherein said appendage is shorter than
average.
4. The method of claim 1, wherein said appendage is wider than
average.
5. The method of claim 1, wherein said appendage is narrower than
average.
All persons finding themselves in possession of an appendage as
described above, however they may have acquired said appendage in
the past,
are henceforth determined to be infringing this patent. This
condition can easily be corrected by the payment of licensing fees
amounting to one U. S. dollar per day of said possession. I am
authorized to collect said payment on behalf of the patent holder.
Storrs-Hall just described a "mass driver", but one propped up on a 100km high tower for God knows what reason.
The reason is that, at that altitude, you're out of the atmosphere so you don't have to deal with air resistance.
He doesn't know anything about orbital mechanics, but just thinks you need to "point up to get into space".
You are critiquing some other proposal with which I am unfamiliar. I have heard of variations where the linear induction motor runs up the side of a mountain (perhaps this is where you got the "point up" idea) over vastly shorter distances, and clearly this is quite stupid. But obviously you didn't follow the link and you haven't read the proposal under discussion here. The platform's upper surface is horizontal; over 300 km it picks up some curvature. It is consistent with a circular low-earth orbit. Perhaps you've heard of these. They are used extensively by satellites.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations have been very successful at co-opting the power of the American government for their own use. Multinational corporations are greedy and clever. They are doubtless the most powerful forces behind the Hague initiative.
Don't you think that they would co-opt a world government just as quickly? Don't you suppose that they've been drooling over the prospect of a world government for decades in order to do exactly this?
Before we all decide to submit to a world government that will protect us all from run-away corporate power, we ought to see at least one instance of this happening on a regional or national level, under living conditions humanity would unanimously find suitable.
Apparently, though, the risks have been pretty carefully considered and the conclusion is that this isn't much of a problem compared to suntanning or eating a typical American diet. As pointed out elsewhere, this frequency is non-ionizing and therefore does not cause chemical reactions. It can heat you up in significant intensities but nothing more, and the intensities under consideration would cause only about as much heating as being outside on a hot day.
From the website cited above: What if the beam wanders off from the rectenna? The beam can't wander off target with a significant intensity because it needs constant feedback from the rectenna for focusing. (A phased-array system is necessary for successful focusing onto the rectenna at such distances.) If it wanders off, then it immediately defocusses and disperses to a tiny fraction of its operating intensity. It also can't be used as a weapon for this reason. Even if it were re-engineered to point anywhere with the same focussing, the transmitters would be designed to operate at a relatively benign frequency (e.g., 2.45 GHz) which would not pose a credible threat to anyone. Again, the only thing that will significantly absorb the 2.45 GHz frequency beam is a receiving antenna designed for it.
The difficulty is not with governments. At least as government is practiced in the U.S. today, it is big and conspicuous, but at this point it is only a tool of corporations. Thanks to our system of campaign financing, politicians are already paid-for corporate property by the time they arrive in office. The only issues on which the government can freely exercise a will of its own are those issues on which corporations have no preference.
A few years back, John Storrs-Hall (for many years the moderator of sci.nanotech) was talking about an interesting idea that, like the space elevator, is not very far beyond existing material science. It is also probably more economical. The gist is an airport runway, 300 km long and at an altitude of 100 km, with a built-in linear motor that can accelerate a spacecraft. Over 80 seconds at 10 G, the craft accelerates to 8 km/sec, necessary to maintain a circular orbit. Humans (at least young healthy ones) can survive this acceleration. Current approaches to space launch cost around $10,000 per kilogram. The space dock could allow launches for 91 cents per kilogram, dropping to 42 cents per kilogram as the construction was amortized over the first few decades of use.
In the days of fear that cryptography could be a potential shield for child pornographers, there was a quote going around: "Child abuse" is the root password to the Constitution. The same idea can be applied to "public safety", "national security", or whatever cherished value moves people in any given time.
Mount a good enough PR campaign, and civil liberties demonstrate an astonishing degree of elasticity. M$ has the motive, means, and opportunity to initiate such a campaign.
Stallman has written on essentially this topic. Spooky, interesting stuff.
This strategy occurred to me as a potential M$ move about a year ago. Nightmare scenarios came to mind of legal prohibition of free software development. M$ can certainly buy plenty of judges and lawyers; this may yet not be an impossibility.
Free software should remain legitimate (not just legal, but a public good) in the public perception. ESR's article is a good start, but appearing as it does in Linux Today, he's preaching to the choir. The involvement of IBM and other big companies with free software lends legitimacy, but is probably too far below the public radar to be perceived as a compelling free-speech issue.
It would be good if somebody with the connections to do so could get these distinctions clarified in more mainstream media, before M$ has a chance to codify "free software == piracy" as U.S. law.
Lloyd's of London is another lovely old for-profit institution, 313 years old if this information is to be believed. From the history page on their website:
This intrigued me:
I'm not sure whether to agree with the author that this is a bad thing for would-be gene therapists. For one thing, it offers a bit more of a safety net for highly speculative treatments.As far as figuring out causality, this is actually probably helpful. Protein synthesis is reliable despite noise in the system. Accidental conformational tweaks (this coil of RNA happened to be a couple angstroms to the left, instead of to the right, and therefore failed to bind with that site on the ribosome) are somehow rendered insignificant in the final outcome.
From an analytical standpoint, it would be great if the one-gene-one-protein doctrine worked. But we don't need to fear the analytical worst case, where molecules bump and grind willy-nilly with no discernible pattern, and the reliable production of correct proteins is just some kind of well-balanced accident. There will be a pattern, just not the nice simple one we hoped for. Despite the article's analogy, this will be an easier problem in principle than cryptanalysis. There is still work worth doing here.
In fact, there will be plenty of work, and much of it will be work to which computer geeks are well suited. Long healthy life available soon would be preferable, but an increase in employment is way better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
There is one more good consequence of all this. Earlier, it looked like there would certainly be a quick race to lock down the entire genome as intellectual property in the private sector. Now that genome information isn't so immediately profitable, it will migrate to the public domain much more easily. And that will be good for everybody. Unfortunately the complex causal phenomena will become patent targets instead, but with luck that's another battle for another decade.
I too have learned stuff as I've gotten older, but that wasn't what I meant. The history of computer science since the 40s and 50s really hasn't been as shallow as people like to think. Somebody else's comment to the effect that "things of an essentially linguistic nature can all be learned in 21 days" is short-sighted. Go to any computer science library in any university. Look at the shelves and shelves of books, journals, and papers. Stuff on compiler design, cache performance and optimization, several hundred decades-long debates percolating under the general heading of language design, relational databases and object databases and which is better...
It's easy to forget that five decades of very smart people have dedicated their careers to advancing this whole "computer science" thing. In our current historical situation, the entire field has been flattened down to "what can I do with web browsers and servers?" in the popular mind. People start to believe that something like J2EE represents all of human thought regarding computer science, or at least, all of it that's worth preserving.
A lifespan specified only by accidents should have a Poisson probability distribution. The probability of your demise as a function of time is a decreasing exponential with appropriate scaling. While there will be an "expected" lifespan, this will be very different from today's more bell-curve-like distribution, with most people dying much younger and a lucky few living a very long time, and very few people dying exactly at 600 years old.
Look at a good pianist. I don't think the bandwidth limitation is with human hands and fingers. Radio remote controls as used in battlebots are legacy systems, designed to control model cars and kludged to control model airplanes. These applications don't involve combat and really just don't require that much bandwidth.
I also think that microsecond reflexes are probably overkill; useful reflex time is limited by the inherent acceleration and deceleration times of the robot's parts. Even cats and mongeese get by with millisecond reflexes.
I'd like to see somebody design a battlebot where they focus on a high-bandwidth control system rather than a bad-ass weapon. (Most of the weapons end up looking pretty lame anyway.) Video cameras are cheap these days, so no reason the operator can't where a headset that gives him a robot's-eye vantagepoint. There are analog joysticks and 6DOF controllers. Bitstreams from multiple controllers could easily be shipped over a radio channel (though it probably makes sense to keep the video stream separate.
Images of the magnetite chains inside the ALH84001 meteorite and, for comparison, inside a modern magnetotactic bacterium are at:e s/magneticbacteria/bacteria.html
http://amesnews.arc.nasa.gov/releases/2001/01imag
Yup, this port uses Stackless Python to the best of my knowledge (but you could get a more certain answer by going straight to Jeff Collins). Unfortunately they haven't included the continuation module or the microthread module. Chris Tismer has plans eventually to move a lot of the microthread machinery to C, and maybe at that point, it will find its way into the Palm port.
Forth is a brilliantly designed language for what it does, but it's a pain for most people to think in. The RPN notation just doesn't mesh well with most peoples' cognitive styles.
Running Python on embedded platforms as a way to interact with them will be a very big win. There are a lot of lovely things about Python in this regard: the language is learnable in less than a day, you can easily read other peoples' code, the OOP model is well-designed, and the exception handling is very well thought-out and robust.
I am definitely hoping to have time to bring up a Python interpreter on the next embedded project I'll be working on. If I can release it publicly without violating any agreements, I will.
The next dangerous idea here is that the very notion of open source anything will itself come to be construed as a crime against intellectual property. Anybody writing a single line of code in their own home on their own time will be presumed to be maliciously set on violating somebody's (or more accurately some corporation's) rights, since individual human beings have no use for source code. Just like, as Ken Olson explained to us in years past, there remains no market for home computers.
MS et al will lobby for the acceptance of this view, particularly among legislators. There will be a "War on Open Source", with all the wisdom and effectiveness of the War on Drugs. Keep an eye out for relevant legislation.
They first came for the spider silk and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a spider.
Then they came for the chitin and I didn't speak up because I wasn't an oyster.
Then they came for the maple syrup and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a tree.
Then they came for the raw dripping human brains and by that time no one was left to speak up.
The people running the for-pay servers can hire professional game designers and artists, who can make the game much more interesting and fun. The people who run for-free servers will probably have either too little time or too little talent to come up with a good game. If they had the time and talent, they'd become professional game designers and get paid for it.
The failure of The Plant was rigged.
Why? Was he trying to prove to himself (like Hofstatder's failed 1983 lottery in Scientific American) that people are or aren't honest, or that their honesty is an interesting thing to try to measure? I doubt it. Here's a more cynical theory.
King has been publishing a long time. He has long-standing buddies in the publishing industry. If direct payment over the web works, and new artists don't need publishers any more, then those guys are going to be feeling some pain. Maybe King rigged The Plant to demonstrate that direct web payment can't work. If new artists believe him, they'll never try. If it could work and nobody tries it, then new avenues of artistic expression will be lost, and some new artists' careers will end unnecessarily.
Here's an alternative. Suppose you want to pay 1/10 cent to an artist for having listened to his MP3 or read his comic strip or whatever. You can't really send him 1/10 cent, but mailing a check for $10 makes sense. Use a fair random number generator to generate a number from 1 to 10,000. If the number is 1, send the $10 check. Otherwise just read/listen and enjoy.
If people do this en masse and don't cheat, it will work just like micropayments without requiring any fancy new infrastructure.
Objects are great where they work, and where you have the time and experience to tune them to perfection. The Python libraries are full of beautifully crafted, wonderfully useful object definitions. But that investment is large, and in many cases, doesn't make sense for the purpose at hand. And there are problem domains for which objects simply aren't the natural description.
The OO people say that the wrong way to reuse code is the cut-paste-tweak method, because then you have two diverging copies floating around. In a perfect world everything might be in a source code repository and I could submit a change rather than spawn a private tweak. But change submissions mean bureaucracy, if I'm working with other people. If my tweak will never see public use, the overhead is an unnecessary diversion.
The cited geocities page makes noise about table-oriented programming. I remember hearing similar things in the past, stuff like "Put the intelligence in your data and keep your code simple". I would have liked to see a better description of TOP, perhaps a few pointers to tutorials. The guy's own descriptions are pretty useless for quickly grokking his point. Maybe he's only preaching to the database crowd, and I'm not supposed to get it.
Larry Niven's fiction described wire-heading or current addiction, where a user gets an implant that can electrically tickle a pleasure center in his brain, powered by a wall-plug AC adaptor with a timer. (The timer prevents death due to starvation or dehydration, which happened in real rats on whom experiments of this sort were done.) We could probably end the war on drugs even without legalizing any drugs, by introducing legal/safe/cheap wire-heading. The technology is trivial and could be productized in six months tops, if anybody wanted to do it. The profit motive for criminals and law enforcement would disappear, and with it, the war on drugs.
There would be a transient massive spike in number of addicts, and gross economic displacement in South America. The latter could be plastered over by shifting the DEA budget into foreign aid. Introduction of legal/safe/cheap wire-heading would of course be violently opposed by everybody who wins in the war on drugs: organized crime, the DEA, big booze/tobacco, etc. So it won't happen, but it's a fun little libertarian fantasy.
You've listed several projects, and I know there are others, each of which has developed its own client from scratch. This seems like pointlessly duplicated effort. Much of the functionality must be the same for all the different clients, isn't it? If there were an open-source distributed computing client project, it could be developed and debugged by all these teams and be much more reliable. With a standardized client there could be an economy of MIPS, some given freely and others sold. It would considerably advance all these projects, and any future ones.
I realize there are security issues; if badly implemented, client code could present awesome opportunities for viruses. But suitable measures should prevent this: digitally signed work units, maybe verifying checksums with the server, and there are probably a dozen other possibilities.
If the nature of the problems is so diverse that there are necessarily deep fundamental differences between the various clients, then this would be a bad idea. But I'm guessing that, except for variations in needed bandwidth of peer-to-peer communication, the clients ought to look mostly pretty similar.
What is claimed is:
1. A method for reproduction and elimination of fluid waste comprising: a cylindrical biological appendage enclosing a plurality of fluid-bearing tubes; said tubes bearing said fluids from the interior of a male human body to its exterior; said fluids comprising two unrelated functionalities, the first being the removal of excess water and water-soluble biological waste products from said male human body, the second being to provide a medium of suspension for the transportation of male genetic material for purposes of propogation of the human species, as well as general recreation; associated means to ensure rigidity of the appendage required during conduct of the reproductive act; generous endowment of the appendage's outer surface with nerve endings to provide a pleasuarable experience during the reproductive act, thereby encouraging the user's propogation of the human species; coordination with hands and eyes to direct the flow of said waste fluid during the process of liquid waste elimination toward a suitable and designated receptacle for same.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein said appendage is longer than average.
3. The method of claim 1, wherein said appendage is shorter than average.
4. The method of claim 1, wherein said appendage is wider than average.
5. The method of claim 1, wherein said appendage is narrower than average.
All persons finding themselves in possession of an appendage as described above, however they may have acquired said appendage in the past, are henceforth determined to be infringing this patent. This condition can easily be corrected by the payment of licensing fees amounting to one U. S. dollar per day of said possession. I am authorized to collect said payment on behalf of the patent holder.
The reason is that, at that altitude, you're out of the atmosphere so you don't have to deal with air resistance.
He doesn't know anything about orbital mechanics, but just thinks you need to "point up to get into space".
You are critiquing some other proposal with which I am unfamiliar. I have heard of variations where the linear induction motor runs up the side of a mountain (perhaps this is where you got the "point up" idea) over vastly shorter distances, and clearly this is quite stupid. But obviously you didn't follow the link and you haven't read the proposal under discussion here. The platform's upper surface is horizontal; over 300 km it picks up some curvature. It is consistent with a circular low-earth orbit. Perhaps you've heard of these. They are used extensively by satellites.