build a nanocomputer... and you're no less prone to bugs and viruses
That's certainly true. A computer involves many layers of abstraction, with logic gates near the bottom and operating systems and applications near the top. The article appears to be describing an innovation at the gate level. Desirable to be sure, but it is unlikely to change the computer at an architectural level.
I might be wrong about that. I went to a talk on reversible computing, which you'd think would have relevance only at the lowest levels of abstraction. It ends up having ramifications all the way up, if you want to implement reversibility completely. (We can probably get almost all the benefit of reversibility with incomplete implementations.)
(Mildly off-topic) I had great fun with a Palm Pilot for several months, but I'm a clumsy person and I kept dropping it. USR and 3Com very graciously fixed it for free twice, but the third time I decided it was too annoying to deal with the down-time.
More recently, I saw a velcro wrist-strap thing for the Pilot. Has anybody tried this? Does it work well in real life? The idea of strapping the thing to my wrist would be appealing.
If money were dangled in front, like maybe the bounty-ware approach, we might see this happening...
This is being done, perhaps not as extensively as one might hope. The Foresight Institute is offering a series of prizes for advances in nanotechnology. Two prizes of $5000 each will be given out in 1999 for the best experimental and theoretical work respectively. There is a $250,000 prize, the Feynman Grand Prize, for anybody who can demostrate a 50-nanometer 8 bit adder and a 100-nanometer robot arm. Whoever wins the Grand Prize will have done a significant chunk of the work that would get us to a complete molecular manufacturing infrastructure.
The amount of heat that they would have to dissapate otherwise is approx. ln(2)kT PER bit lost
It turns out that people are working on this problem. I went to a talk by Carlin Vieri who is building a completely reversible microprocessor as his doctoral thesis. Fascinating stuff. In his current implementation, it runs at about a third the power of an equivalent irreversible design. Presumably when this becomes important enough that really big money is thrown at the problem, bigger gains will be possible.
how can you make a robot smaller than the smallest possible computer core?
What you call the smallest possible computer core depends on the technology you're talking about. Would you consider the 8086 to be the smallest? What about an 8-bit processor like the 6502? If you're talking about a very simple function, what about a programmable logic part, like a PAL16R6? The technology that drives down the die size and cost of DRAMs and big processors can also be applied to these simpler designs. If you look at some of the work on quantum dots, it's quite remarkable for speed, power consumption, and size. It may well give us a fundamentally better way to build silicon circuits.
Maybe you can find something better than circuits etched on silicon surfaces. Tom Knight at MIT is looking at how to get bacteria to perform useful computations, using genetic engineering methods that have become well understood. You can mail-order custom DNA sequences, graft them into cells, and get the ribosomes to synthesize the proteins you want, if you're smart enough to design proteins. Eric Drexler, generally recognized as the guy who formulated the concept of nanotech, wrote one of his early papers on the possibility of engineering proteins as a step to a more complete form of nanotechnology.
The nanotechnology literature (see Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future) talks about placing atoms at specific locations as you build up a molecular machine incrementally, in a process called mechanosynthesis. If this works (and I'm not aware of any technically sound arguments that it wouldn't), it might become possible to build almost any object whose existence doesn't violate the laws of physics. At least, it would become possible to build a lot of different things we can't build today.
how the hell do you tell them what to do?...
Biological cells are pretty small compared to today's microprocessors. A typical cell is 10 or 20 microns long, and transistors (of which you need thousands to make a microprocessor) are about half a square micron. Inside the cell, you find all kinds of fascinating, complex, coordinated activities taking place. We are understanding more about how cells work every year. So maybe we can learn to copy how all those parts know what to do.
how big are these things going to have to start out, since the first generation must contain all sets of code for all generations of nanomachines?
It probably won't work that way. It would be very hard to anticipate every possible future generation, and build it into the first one. Early nanomachines will probably have fixed programs that we can't change, but later we'll have nanomachines that we can program from the outside. The programs might be some kind of tape, like messenger RNA, and maybe the nanomachines would be like ribosomes, grabbing the starting end of the tape and then reading instructions as they move along the tape.
There is a lot of excellent information about nanotechnology at Ralph Merkle's site at Xerox PARC.
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
The two big flaws I see in the GPL are the language in clause 2, and the fact that there are so many clauses. Clause 2 talks about the conditions under which license contagion occurs. I usually have to re-read it three or four times if I'm thinking about how it applies to a case I haven't thought about before. For instance, suppose a GNU package has some C files and a makefile. I want to publish an additional C file and a few lines of modifications to the existing files. Is this a tight enough connection for license contagion to occur? I have to think pretty hard to answer that question, much harder than most other clauses.
The sheer number of clauses goes to your objection to the complexity of the definition of `freedom'. Other than clause 2, I don't find a lot of objectionable language. I can see the need for clauses to cover complications like interaction with other IP law (clause 7) or laws in other countries (clause 8). A few clauses are closer to informational than legal, like clause 9 about GPL version numbers. Generally, I share your concern (or what I take to be your concern) about the large number of clauses, but it's hard to fault specifics aside from volume, and the confusing language in clause 2.
I was just looking back over the GNU Manifesto. I think it must have been revised since the last time I saw it. I recall something to the effect that `programmers shouldn't make too much money'. That bothered me, why should RMS get to decide my salary? But I don't find that bit in the current version. Maybe it alienated enough people that it was removed.
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
What the FSF espouse is open software, not free software. They require only that software be forever open. This is not necessarily bad, of course. But it is not free to tell someone else what they can do with their lives. They do not allow it to be free in the
libre sense, nor do they require it to be free in the gratis sense either.... Free software has no restrictions on it. Period. Anything more than `do whatever you'd like with this' is no longer free... `Do as thou wilt' is free.
Intellectual property law does recognize such a status. Such works are said to be in the public domain. You might ask, why did RMS bother to invent the GPL? Why not just public-domain all his code, and advocate that others do likewise?
Unfortunately, works can be removed from the public domain. You can find something in the public domain and put your own copyright on it. This allows you (at least in principle, and with no less legal validity than the GPL) to control the conditions under which it can be copied, distributed, and modified. The GPL allows you to make your code as close to free as possible without the danger that somebody else will reclaim it and make it not-at-all free.
Depending on your point of view, license contagion is either a weakness of the GPL or an adherence to the informing principles. As a professional engineer in a proprietary-centric world, I would prefer the convenience of a license that lets me cut and paste free software into my proprietary work. Personally, I would be happy to attribute the free software, and not try to limit its freedoms for others. But perhaps my employer feels the need to control every line of code, and is willing to do some kind of nasty litigation to un-free the software I used.
RMS wants to live in a free-software-centric world, where his code is protected from any attack on its freedom. He wants the free software world to enjoy the same protection of intellectual property that the commercial world now enjoys. I think the annoying complexities you're talking about aren't due to trickery or duplicity on RMS's part. I think they were necessitated by the legal climate in which he found himself. (Why did the chicken cross the road? For tax purposes.)
Capitalism, positive-sum games
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
I recall a discussion about Positive Sum Games in the thread about ESR's new paper. It's an interesting idea to think that by giving something to someone else, the total value increases.
Capitalism is a method of cooperation, involving voluntary exchanges. Because they are voluntary, they happen only when both parties expect to benefit by them, so every voluntary exchange is a positive sum game. Right from the start, voluntary exchange refutes the assumption that value is a fixed quantity that can't be created. There is some evidence in economics that wealth is created only when exchanges are voluntary.
Capitalists are often accused of wanting to do better while everyone around them does worse. The only way I can see for that to happen is by fraud or theft. If I want to be a capitalist and live honestly, I can't expect my fortunes to improve while all my neighbors' fortunes are worsening.
A good capitalist reason to write free software (and the reason I do, when I find the time) is to share ideas that you hope will improve the quality of life for everybody. I might decide that the benefits of widely distributing an idea outweigh the benefits of selling it. Then again, some ideas seem to gain credibility by being sold rather than given away.
I'd like to make one more book recommendation, but unfortunately it's out of print. It is The Machinery of Freedom; Guide to a Radical Capitalism by the economist David D. Friedman. Portions have been posted to the web. Fascinating discussions of a lot of different areas of life where libertarian principles could be applied to advantage. Also a lot of good reasoning about why one might choose to be a libertarian. Friedman points out that there are two kinds of arguments about how social things should be done, arguments from first principles, and arguments from consequences. He gives intereseting reasons for preferring the latter, inspite of the intellectual appeal of the former.
When I first read the GNU Manifesto, it seemed to me to have a lot of Marxist-sounding stuff in it. On re-reading it years later, I see that RMS is following out logical consequences of his basic assumptions. It's not all stuff I agree with, but it has its own integrity.
It's interesting to see more economics and game theory come into play. These kinds of arguments can carry weight with people who don't feel the intuitive appeal of the open source idea. It's also good to verify any intuitive inkling with some more objective analysis.
Moral Calculations, by Laxlo Mero, is an interesting book that discusses a lot of general game theory, and in particular, a couple modes of cooperation. The classical model for thinking about cooperation (see The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod) is the prisoner's dilemma. It's a positive-sum game only if we both cooperate, but as individuals, we are always tempted to defect. A number of people have pondered what incentives could be used to encourage cooperation. Axelrod's contribution was the observation that repeating the game many times with the same opponent introduces new long-term pro-cooperation incentives.
Mero's book looked at the Golden Rule and Kant's categorical imperative. For purposes of game theory, the Golden Rule says: optimize the other guy's payoff, ignore your own. This flips the payoffs and always favors cooperation. The categorical imperative says to do whatever you would want everybody to do, if you had such legislative power. In other words, ignore the off-diagonal payoffs; again this favors cooperation.
Another mode of cooperation might be a communal rule: consider only the sums of the payoffs for each situation, never those of any individual. Adherence to this ethic is good for the community as a whole, and probably the individual practitioner in the long term. In the short term, the practitioner gets to look heroic, which involves additional payoffs.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a multi-player prisoner's dilemma. If the payoffs are increased by some constant, you end up with Raymond's Comedy of the Commons, where a cooperative few can support a large number of non-cooperators. Add to that Axelrod's long-term incentives due to recognition of others and reciprocal behavior, and that's more or less the OSS world.
A lot of posts are arguing that the Ring of Fire is a bad idea. I think it's a good idea, so here are some counterarguments.
Africa is technologically backward, and doesn't deserve the technology. We should put it somewhere more progressive, where it will be appreciated, and contribute to progress. But the more developed countries have plenty of bandwidth, and will get more as time passes. The details of financing weren't clear, but there wasn't any clear evidence that this was being done at the expense of progress in the developed countries. Even if it is, on a global scale, this really isn't that much money.
African countries have corrupt governments, which will skim the money, and the network might never even go on-line. Yes, that's a realistic danger. That risk is assumed by whoever is financing the network, and hopefully they've insured themselves against that risk.
The problems of hunger and poverty are much more important than giving Africans the opportunity to web-surf. The money should go to organizations like CARE, UNICEF, or the Red Cross. These organizations have a perfectly appropriate short-term role. But Africa can't depend on them forever. In order to thrive, Africa needs a self-sustaining economy. which will depend on the flow of information so that buyers and sellers can find each other (advertising). The free flow of information can also help to expose abuses of human rights. In 1989, the Chinese students' movement depended heavily on fax machines to pass information around.
One thing that concerns me a little is this. On the map in the article, I notice that a lot of the network taps are in one region, around Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon. Here is a map of Africa. These are already some of the wealthier, freer countries. It would be nice if there were more taps in places like Somalia and Ethiopia. Still, it's a lot better than nothing.
Dennett's idea has a lot of appeal and IMHO is probably going to turn out to be correct. Katz seemed to be invoking something akin to vitalism, and that irked me to respond.
Actually, from what I know of meme theory, its ability to predict or explain is pretty weak. I read the "Thought Contagion" book and it didn't change this impression. It would be nice to hear that it's turned into something useful.
Blackmore argues that memes account not only for the evolution of culture but also for consciousness itself.
The idea that consciousness is meme-like goes back thousands of years. Read the Heart Sutra. Don't blame Blackmore if you don't like the idea.
The fearful insistence that consciousness is special is yet another example of the desperate provincialism that insists that the Earth is flat, that the solar system is geocentric, and that humans are the final goal of evolution.
It's a great essay with a lot of well-considered points. The incentive to conceal part of one's work is worrisome. The grant-proposal model addresses some very valid concerns, and if I were trying to make a living as an OS author, I think I'd prefer it to the bounty model. It certainly offers more creative freedom.
Getting back to the incentive to conceal, would such concealment be more of a threat to the open source movement than the existence of purely proprietary software? It would mean that some valuable work would fail to be disclosed, and that's a shame. But realistically, proprietary software will continue so that is inevitable.
Maybe it's good to try several different OS development models at once, and let the controversy play itself out. The temptation to select "the right model" and discard the rest makes the presumption that people in the future will either be dumber or they'll lose the passion for free speech. Better to present them with historical empirical evidence of what worked.
It would definitely be a good thing if the grant-proposal model were pursued. Maybe the existing websites could be add a grant proposal area.
There's a deceptive notion that wealth is only passed around, never created, and that economics is therefore a zero-sum game. This is untrue. Whenever parties transact voluntarily, each expects to profit by the transaction, and that happens a lot. If economics is a positive-sum game, it's possible for one person to get wealthier without directly diminishing the wealth of others.
Suppose you're a wealthy person living among the less wealthy. You understand that economics is a positive-sum game. Assuming your wealth weren't diminished, would an improvement in their lot make your life better or worse? Better, I think. Remember that Louis XIV was the wealthiest guy for hundreds of miles around in his time, but all the wealth of Versailles couldn't buy him a flu shot or a ballpoint pen. Over-centralization of wealth does not benefit the wealthy, contrary to intuition.
If large corporations could end world hunger (and the problem is one of distribution, not food supply), they would gain a much larger customer base. They'll do it as soon as (A) the cost of doing so falls below the profit available from the larger customer base, and (B) they find out how.
I live about 40 minutes from the J.C. Penney store where this was set up, and I went to see it last night (Wednesday). Of the 4'-by-6', only a small region was used for displaying letters, maybe 1'-by-2'. The rest had no obvious function and might have been control circuitry. The thing was obviously bowed and looked flexible. The lettering was white on blue, and it changed a little slowly, like LCD displays. Contrast ratio was quite good, it was clearly visible from 50' away. It was suspended near the ceiling and I couldn't get a good close look at it.
It's admittedly quite mundane in its current role. It just flashes ads at shoppers and is functionally no more interesting than a TV screen. Letters appeared in a fixed grid, like the LCD screen of a pocket organizer, with four or five lines of text and maybe 40 characters across. But the Media Lab vision of an electronically downloadable book is very cool. I like the physical simplicity of the thing, with the rotating black/white spheres. If they need to do boring stuff with it to finance the more interesting plans, I can live with that.
Anybody got enough optics background to know if the resolution is good enough for holography? A downloadable hologram (maybe as the display for a VRML viewer) would be way wicked cool.
Anybody know what's going on with speech recognition? There are now several good, cheap speech rec packages in the commercial shrink-wrap world (at least they claim to be good, I haven't tried any of them myself) in the sub-$100 range.
Last I heard, the only open-source thing of this sort was something called 'ears'. I've never heard of anybody actually using it, which suggests it might perform underwhelmingly (tho, again, I've never tried it myself so this is just a guess).
A good OSS speech-rec program would have all kinds of uses. It would be a no-brainer for the wearable-computer people. It would be great for any PDA with a microphone. Maybe speech recognition could ease some peoples' fears of the command line, or avoid wrist injuries.
There is some relevant stuff in the FAQ for comp.speech. A web search for "speech recognition", "phoneme", and "hidden markov model" turned up a lot of interesting hits.
A USB interface would be a wonderful thing, as you point out. But what the board designers appear to be doing is relying on the strengths of the dragonball controller, to minimize chip count and cost. The dragonball has an on-chip dram controller, so they can use DRAM, and it interfaces pleasantly to flash, so they can use flash. I have a dragonball product brief handy, but not the description of the Ryerson board at the moment. The dragonball doesn't appear to have an Ethernet port, so they must be doing something special for that, probably catering to some need of their own. (Can't fault them for that! They're the ones bothering to design the board in the first place.) Maybe some future rev of the board will have a USB port. The dragonball is old enough that the future of USB may not have appeared stable at the time of its design, otherwise Motorola would have probably thrown it in. USB's rise has mostly been in the past couple of years.
Oops, sorry. But from the mailing list activity, it looks like they are a very few weeks away from actually having boards done. So it's an interesting time for this project, and probably worth reposting (even if some people get pissed off).
The idea of scripting language interpreters running on embedded controller boards is interesting, and that didn't get mentioned last time. People used to put Forth interpreters on controllers to do in-system debug and testing, but with faster CPUs and more memory, we can use more convenient and capable languages.
There was another reply to your post, from somebody who seemed to be really irate that something would be re-posted. I confess to being mystified, but I also can't understand how people can flame every tiny tweak in Slashdot administration.
at those scales nano-mechanic movement actually could be fast enough (I think) to overtake electrical impulses (unless they'd be travelling in a perfect superconductor).
Actually this isn't true. Even at the nanometer scale, mechanical disturbances (motions of atomic nuclei) move at the speed of sound, while photons and electrons move at or near the speed of light. Bonded atomic nuclei are like masses connected by springs, and the square root of the ratio of spring constant to mass (times some physical constants) gives you the speed of sound.
Electronic and photonic systems will always be faster than mechanical systems, but initially, mechanical systems may be easier to get working.
License under GPL, LGPL or BSD. Customers are given the option to buy trading cards in support of specific developers...
This is a cool idea. Cards should have denominations in units of tech support, but not cash denominations. Cash equivalencies should emerge from market pressures.
Developers might post notes on their websites, telling which cards they are looking for. If I'm doing a lot of Python work, I might mention that I'll give a large chunk of tech support in exchange for a GvR card.
Part of the appeal of this idea is that it's decentralized; one or two developers can start issuing cards without waiting for anybody else to do so. In the absence of a busy marketplace of card-trading, cards simply represent deferred tech support.
I think you missed the point. This was very good writing. But it was very deep, just like most of Katz' writing.
Sorry, this is not good writing. (It is, as somebody else pointed out, good spelling and grammar, and that's nice.) There was nothing "deep" in it. It promised depth and failed to deliver, like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
I don't mind somebody talking about remote viewing in a Slashdot article, because I trust Slashdot readers to be bright enough to take this sort of thing with a grain of salt. And like a good Stephen King story, it can be entertaining even when clearly recognized as fiction.
My disappointment is not with the mention of remote viewing, but the content of the article. The guy starts talking about consensual reality, which sounds like it ought to be an interesting and illuminating topic. He introduces a character alleged to have some kind of non-trivial insight on the topic. Do we ever find out anything about this insight? No. Are we offered any try-this-at-home experiment that might give us some tiny glimpse into this world of insight? No. The only thing we get is essentially, "the remote viewer had to rethink his views about reality, and it was a pain". Similar to a graduation speech, and about as un-helpful.
For people who spend time online and worry about losing their connection to reality, I'll make a real live useful suggestion: get a dog. You'll have to walk it every day, outdoors, and see real trees. Dogs don't truck in symbolism, and they demand a certain percentage of your attention. They will periodically remind you of your biological roots.
This kind of device does have many applications. Detailed organic chemical analysis right now requires some fairly expensive equipment (gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, and IR and UV spectrometers). If you can do useful work with a smaller, cheaper component, then it will indeed quietly revolutionize substantial parts of the medical and forensic and chemical analysis industries.
I remember hearing a couple of years ago that the Australians had built some kind of "artificial nose" (possibly Brynn Hibbert at UNSW?). There was a sound bite about its sensitivity, claiming it could detect a drop of something out of the volume of Sydney Harbor. References to this particular effort are now scarce on the web, but there are now many efforts on artificial or electronic noses. I recall that the Australian nose (and this probably applies to the current batch) could test for thousands of different substances in parallel. I think it was built with some kind of vlsi-fab-like process.
If you can cheaply and easily test blood for thousands of different substances and get rough estimates of their concentrations, you can diagnose a huge number of different medical conditions. You'd probably prick a finger instead of waving a salt shaker. But if these things can be cost-reduced, they could be used in the home.
A fantasy of mine is to see medical advances get swept into high gear as the open-source movement has done with software. When I mentioned this to somebody, he pointed out that medical advances require expensive lab equipment whereas computer science advances require only a desktop and a Linux CD. If there were cheap plentiful home blood analyzers, there could be open-source software for medical diagnosis, weight management, glucose management, etc. It might be interesting to have one's blood analyzer post results to the internet (with suitable security measures in place), where results could be compiled and analyzed for all kinds of useful data-gathering purposes. (A surprising amount of good medical advice is taken from the actuarial tables compiled by insurance companies.)
I've never paid a dime to read or post to Slashdot. Maybe people are a little intoxicated by the free software idea, but let's recall that Rob is giving something away for free. Rob has the privelige of making the rules because he did the hard work of making Slashdot work. And the current system is obviously not set in stone. Rob is quite aware that this might not be the final perfect solution.
There are lots of Usenet groups, IRC channels, chat rooms, discussion oriented web sites (including Slashdot wanna-bes), mailing lists and many other ways to communicate, both on-line and off. Slashdot is a fashionable soapbox, but by no means the only one. The sentiment that Rob is stepping on peoples' free-speech rights is silly. The First Amendment does not force the owner of a website or a printing press to turn it over to anybody who wants to talk, nor does it guarantee an attentive audience.
As has been observed countless times, anybody can see all the comments by turning down the threshold. This is not censorship, it is merely that comments are subject to a consensus rating system. The moderators can't identify one another, so the paranoid theories that "the moderators are conspiring against me" are silly. The only communication channel between moderators is to watch ratings go up and down.
There are all kinds of speculations that "anti-establishment" comments will be downgraded to ridiculous levels, and that "agreeable" comments will be upgraded equally ridiculously. I haven't seen any ratings lower than -1, nor have I seen ratings higher than 5. The hallucination that some kind of class warfare is happening here is infantile. To an intelligent person, it really clarifies the need for some kind of rating system.
what if there was an "open patent" license, sort of a PGPL that prevented the patent's use in _proprietary_ works. I'm not proposing such a license, I just want to know what other people think of the idea.
Luckily, such a thing is already available: it's a patent. A patent allows you to control how your invention is used, and to establish any licensing arrangement you like, and attempt to collect any fees you want (within limits of what the market will bear for your invention). If you hold a patent for software innovation X, you are entirely free to license it _only_ to people who will use it in non-proprietary ways, or people who will use it only in open-source software products, and collect a license fee for that privelige (thus illuminating the free beer vs. free speech distinction).
The reason you so rarely see this done is that it costs thousands of dollars to get a patent, and people who bother to spend that money are usually viewing it as an investment on which they hope to get a return. But if you consider that your time as a skilled programmer is worth thousands of dollars anyway, and you'd otherwise spend it on writing more open-source code, you might want to try this. It would be an interesting experiment in yet another OSS paradigm.
Then again, copyright is a lot cheaper, and more suitable to things that are likely to be done on a hobbyist basis. If patent protection for OSS becomes useful, maybe there could be some scheme to pool funds among many future users to cover the costs of the patent process.
Yeah, but this is an interesting development. There's a serious paucity of really feasible plans to make money for developing open source software. The reasons for favoring open source software depend largely on principles, and human beings almost inevitably translate principles as morality, and then get emotional about them. Regrettable, but the level of emotion at least keeps people engaged with the question.
(It would be nice if people could be as dispassionate about OSS principles as they are about, say, the principles of thermodynamics, like this: Yes, this is how things work, and therefore these are the actions we need to take to get what we want, and we need to know all that and act consistently with it, but we don't need to lose sleep over it.)
There are some really wonderful posts here. People are really thinking about what would happen if this became a widely-used way to finance OSS development. That's cool.
Ultimately, this being a free country, you can't control what people do (except the very crude control offered by the legal/penal system). The best thing is to argue eloquently for the ideas you think are best. People are using this as a forum to practice doing that.
Slashdot Mirror
I might be wrong about that. I went to a talk on reversible computing, which you'd think would have relevance only at the lowest levels of abstraction. It ends up having ramifications all the way up, if you want to implement reversibility completely. (We can probably get almost all the benefit of reversibility with incomplete implementations.)
More recently, I saw a velcro wrist-strap thing for the Pilot. Has anybody tried this? Does it work well in real life? The idea of strapping the thing to my wrist would be appealing.
Maybe you can find something better than circuits etched on silicon surfaces. Tom Knight at MIT is looking at how to get bacteria to perform useful computations, using genetic engineering methods that have become well understood. You can mail-order custom DNA sequences, graft them into cells, and get the ribosomes to synthesize the proteins you want, if you're smart enough to design proteins. Eric Drexler, generally recognized as the guy who formulated the concept of nanotech, wrote one of his early papers on the possibility of engineering proteins as a step to a more complete form of nanotechnology.
The nanotechnology literature (see Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future) talks about placing atoms at specific locations as you build up a molecular machine incrementally, in a process called mechanosynthesis. If this works (and I'm not aware of any technically sound arguments that it wouldn't), it might become possible to build almost any object whose existence doesn't violate the laws of physics. At least, it would become possible to build a lot of different things we can't build today.
Biological cells are pretty small compared to today's microprocessors. A typical cell is 10 or 20 microns long, and transistors (of which you need thousands to make a microprocessor) are about half a square micron. Inside the cell, you find all kinds of fascinating, complex, coordinated activities taking place. We are understanding more about how cells work every year. So maybe we can learn to copy how all those parts know what to do. It probably won't work that way. It would be very hard to anticipate every possible future generation, and build it into the first one. Early nanomachines will probably have fixed programs that we can't change, but later we'll have nanomachines that we can program from the outside. The programs might be some kind of tape, like messenger RNA, and maybe the nanomachines would be like ribosomes, grabbing the starting end of the tape and then reading instructions as they move along the tape.There is a lot of excellent information about nanotechnology at Ralph Merkle's site at Xerox PARC.
The sheer number of clauses goes to your objection to the complexity of the definition of `freedom'. Other than clause 2, I don't find a lot of objectionable language. I can see the need for clauses to cover complications like interaction with other IP law (clause 7) or laws in other countries (clause 8). A few clauses are closer to informational than legal, like clause 9 about GPL version numbers. Generally, I share your concern (or what I take to be your concern) about the large number of clauses, but it's hard to fault specifics aside from volume, and the confusing language in clause 2.
I was just looking back over the GNU Manifesto. I think it must have been revised since the last time I saw it. I recall something to the effect that `programmers shouldn't make too much money'. That bothered me, why should RMS get to decide my salary? But I don't find that bit in the current version. Maybe it alienated enough people that it was removed.
Unfortunately, works can be removed from the public domain. You can find something in the public domain and put your own copyright on it. This allows you (at least in principle, and with no less legal validity than the GPL) to control the conditions under which it can be copied, distributed, and modified. The GPL allows you to make your code as close to free as possible without the danger that somebody else will reclaim it and make it not-at-all free.
Depending on your point of view, license contagion is either a weakness of the GPL or an adherence to the informing principles. As a professional engineer in a proprietary-centric world, I would prefer the convenience of a license that lets me cut and paste free software into my proprietary work. Personally, I would be happy to attribute the free software, and not try to limit its freedoms for others. But perhaps my employer feels the need to control every line of code, and is willing to do some kind of nasty litigation to un-free the software I used.
RMS wants to live in a free-software-centric world, where his code is protected from any attack on its freedom. He wants the free software world to enjoy the same protection of intellectual property that the commercial world now enjoys. I think the annoying complexities you're talking about aren't due to trickery or duplicity on RMS's part. I think they were necessitated by the legal climate in which he found himself. (Why did the chicken cross the road? For tax purposes.)
Capitalists are often accused of wanting to do better while everyone around them does worse. The only way I can see for that to happen is by fraud or theft. If I want to be a capitalist and live honestly, I can't expect my fortunes to improve while all my neighbors' fortunes are worsening.
A good capitalist reason to write free software (and the reason I do, when I find the time) is to share ideas that you hope will improve the quality of life for everybody. I might decide that the benefits of widely distributing an idea outweigh the benefits of selling it. Then again, some ideas seem to gain credibility by being sold rather than given away.
I'd like to make one more book recommendation, but unfortunately it's out of print. It is The Machinery of Freedom; Guide to a Radical Capitalism by the economist David D. Friedman. Portions have been posted to the web. Fascinating discussions of a lot of different areas of life where libertarian principles could be applied to advantage. Also a lot of good reasoning about why one might choose to be a libertarian. Friedman points out that there are two kinds of arguments about how social things should be done, arguments from first principles, and arguments from consequences. He gives intereseting reasons for preferring the latter, inspite of the intellectual appeal of the former.
When I first read the GNU Manifesto, it seemed to me to have a lot of Marxist-sounding stuff in it. On re-reading it years later, I see that RMS is following out logical consequences of his basic assumptions. It's not all stuff I agree with, but it has its own integrity.
Moral Calculations, by Laxlo Mero, is an interesting book that discusses a lot of general game theory, and in particular, a couple modes of cooperation. The classical model for thinking about cooperation (see The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod) is the prisoner's dilemma. It's a positive-sum game only if we both cooperate, but as individuals, we are always tempted to defect. A number of people have pondered what incentives could be used to encourage cooperation. Axelrod's contribution was the observation that repeating the game many times with the same opponent introduces new long-term pro-cooperation incentives.
Mero's book looked at the Golden Rule and Kant's categorical imperative. For purposes of game theory, the Golden Rule says: optimize the other guy's payoff, ignore your own. This flips the payoffs and always favors cooperation. The categorical imperative says to do whatever you would want everybody to do, if you had such legislative power. In other words, ignore the off-diagonal payoffs; again this favors cooperation.
Another mode of cooperation might be a communal rule: consider only the sums of the payoffs for each situation, never those of any individual. Adherence to this ethic is good for the community as a whole, and probably the individual practitioner in the long term. In the short term, the practitioner gets to look heroic, which involves additional payoffs.
The Tragedy of the Commons is a multi-player prisoner's dilemma. If the payoffs are increased by some constant, you end up with Raymond's Comedy of the Commons, where a cooperative few can support a large number of non-cooperators. Add to that Axelrod's long-term incentives due to recognition of others and reciprocal behavior, and that's more or less the OSS world.
One last book recommendation, an excellent book on economics, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, by David D. Friedman.
One thing that concerns me a little is this. On the map in the article, I notice that a lot of the network taps are in one region, around Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon. Here is a map of Africa. These are already some of the wealthier, freer countries. It would be nice if there were more taps in places like Somalia and Ethiopia. Still, it's a lot better than nothing.
Actually, from what I know of meme theory, its ability to predict or explain is pretty weak. I read the "Thought Contagion" book and it didn't change this impression. It would be nice to hear that it's turned into something useful.
The fearful insistence that consciousness is special is yet another example of the desperate provincialism that insists that the Earth is flat, that the solar system is geocentric, and that humans are the final goal of evolution.
Getting back to the incentive to conceal, would such concealment be more of a threat to the open source movement than the existence of purely proprietary software? It would mean that some valuable work would fail to be disclosed, and that's a shame. But realistically, proprietary software will continue so that is inevitable.
Maybe it's good to try several different OS development models at once, and let the controversy play itself out. The temptation to select "the right model" and discard the rest makes the presumption that people in the future will either be dumber or they'll lose the passion for free speech. Better to present them with historical empirical evidence of what worked.
It would definitely be a good thing if the grant-proposal model were pursued. Maybe the existing websites could be add a grant proposal area.
Suppose you're a wealthy person living among the less wealthy. You understand that economics is a positive-sum game. Assuming your wealth weren't diminished, would an improvement in their lot make your life better or worse? Better, I think. Remember that Louis XIV was the wealthiest guy for hundreds of miles around in his time, but all the wealth of Versailles couldn't buy him a flu shot or a ballpoint pen. Over-centralization of wealth does not benefit the wealthy, contrary to intuition.
If large corporations could end world hunger (and the problem is one of distribution, not food supply), they would gain a much larger customer base. They'll do it as soon as (A) the cost of doing so falls below the profit available from the larger customer base, and (B) they find out how.
It's admittedly quite mundane in its current role. It just flashes ads at shoppers and is functionally no more interesting than a TV screen. Letters appeared in a fixed grid, like the LCD screen of a pocket organizer, with four or five lines of text and maybe 40 characters across. But the Media Lab vision of an electronically downloadable book is very cool. I like the physical simplicity of the thing, with the rotating black/white spheres. If they need to do boring stuff with it to finance the more interesting plans, I can live with that.
Anybody got enough optics background to know if the resolution is good enough for holography? A downloadable hologram (maybe as the display for a VRML viewer) would be way wicked cool.
Last I heard, the only open-source thing of this sort was something called 'ears'. I've never heard of anybody actually using it, which suggests it might perform underwhelmingly (tho, again, I've never tried it myself so this is just a guess).
A good OSS speech-rec program would have all kinds of uses. It would be a no-brainer for the wearable-computer people. It would be great for any PDA with a microphone. Maybe speech recognition could ease some peoples' fears of the command line, or avoid wrist injuries.
There is some relevant stuff in the FAQ for comp.speech. A web search for "speech recognition", "phoneme", and "hidden markov model" turned up a lot of interesting hits.
A USB interface would be a wonderful thing, as you point out. But what the board designers appear to be doing is relying on the strengths of the dragonball controller, to minimize chip count and cost. The dragonball has an on-chip dram controller, so they can use DRAM, and it interfaces pleasantly to flash, so they can use flash. I have a dragonball product brief handy, but not the description of the Ryerson board at the moment. The dragonball doesn't appear to have an Ethernet port, so they must be doing something special for that, probably catering to some need of their own. (Can't fault them for that! They're the ones bothering to design the board in the first place.) Maybe some future rev of the board will have a USB port. The dragonball is old enough that the future of USB may not have appeared stable at the time of its design, otherwise Motorola would have probably thrown it in. USB's rise has mostly been in the past couple of years.
The idea of scripting language interpreters running on embedded controller boards is interesting, and that didn't get mentioned last time. People used to put Forth interpreters on controllers to do in-system debug and testing, but with faster CPUs and more memory, we can use more convenient and capable languages.
There was another reply to your post, from somebody who seemed to be really irate that something would be re-posted. I confess to being mystified, but I also can't understand how people can flame every tiny tweak in Slashdot administration.
Electronic and photonic systems will always be faster than mechanical systems, but initially, mechanical systems may be easier to get working.
Developers might post notes on their websites, telling which cards they are looking for. If I'm doing a lot of Python work, I might mention that I'll give a large chunk of tech support in exchange for a GvR card.
Part of the appeal of this idea is that it's decentralized; one or two developers can start issuing cards without waiting for anybody else to do so. In the absence of a busy marketplace of card-trading, cards simply represent deferred tech support.
I don't mind somebody talking about remote viewing in a Slashdot article, because I trust Slashdot readers to be bright enough to take this sort of thing with a grain of salt. And like a good Stephen King story, it can be entertaining even when clearly recognized as fiction.
My disappointment is not with the mention of remote viewing, but the content of the article. The guy starts talking about consensual reality, which sounds like it ought to be an interesting and illuminating topic. He introduces a character alleged to have some kind of non-trivial insight on the topic. Do we ever find out anything about this insight? No. Are we offered any try-this-at-home experiment that might give us some tiny glimpse into this world of insight? No. The only thing we get is essentially, "the remote viewer had to rethink his views about reality, and it was a pain". Similar to a graduation speech, and about as un-helpful.
For people who spend time online and worry about losing their connection to reality, I'll make a real live useful suggestion: get a dog. You'll have to walk it every day, outdoors, and see real trees. Dogs don't truck in symbolism, and they demand a certain percentage of your attention. They will periodically remind you of your biological roots.
If you can cheaply and easily test blood for thousands of different substances and get rough estimates of their concentrations, you can diagnose a huge number of different medical conditions. You'd probably prick a finger instead of waving a salt shaker. But if these things can be cost-reduced, they could be used in the home.
A fantasy of mine is to see medical advances get swept into high gear as the open-source movement has done with software. When I mentioned this to somebody, he pointed out that medical advances require expensive lab equipment whereas computer science advances require only a desktop and a Linux CD. If there were cheap plentiful home blood analyzers, there could be open-source software for medical diagnosis, weight management, glucose management, etc. It might be interesting to have one's blood analyzer post results to the internet (with suitable security measures in place), where results could be compiled and analyzed for all kinds of useful data-gathering purposes. (A surprising amount of good medical advice is taken from the actuarial tables compiled by insurance companies.)
There are lots of Usenet groups, IRC channels, chat rooms, discussion oriented web sites (including Slashdot wanna-bes), mailing lists and many other ways to communicate, both on-line and off. Slashdot is a fashionable soapbox, but by no means the only one. The sentiment that Rob is stepping on peoples' free-speech rights is silly. The First Amendment does not force the owner of a website or a printing press to turn it over to anybody who wants to talk, nor does it guarantee an attentive audience.
As has been observed countless times, anybody can see all the comments by turning down the threshold. This is not censorship, it is merely that comments are subject to a consensus rating system. The moderators can't identify one another, so the paranoid theories that "the moderators are conspiring against me" are silly. The only communication channel between moderators is to watch ratings go up and down.
There are all kinds of speculations that "anti-establishment" comments will be downgraded to ridiculous levels, and that "agreeable" comments will be upgraded equally ridiculously. I haven't seen any ratings lower than -1, nor have I seen ratings higher than 5. The hallucination that some kind of class warfare is happening here is infantile. To an intelligent person, it really clarifies the need for some kind of rating system.
The reason you so rarely see this done is that it costs thousands of dollars to get a patent, and people who bother to spend that money are usually viewing it as an investment on which they hope to get a return. But if you consider that your time as a skilled programmer is worth thousands of dollars anyway, and you'd otherwise spend it on writing more open-source code, you might want to try this. It would be an interesting experiment in yet another OSS paradigm.
Then again, copyright is a lot cheaper, and more suitable to things that are likely to be done on a hobbyist basis. If patent protection for OSS becomes useful, maybe there could be some scheme to pool funds among many future users to cover the costs of the patent process.
(It would be nice if people could be as dispassionate about OSS principles as they are about, say, the principles of thermodynamics, like this: Yes, this is how things work, and therefore these are the actions we need to take to get what we want, and we need to know all that and act consistently with it, but we don't need to lose sleep over it.)
There are some really wonderful posts here. People are really thinking about what would happen if this became a widely-used way to finance OSS development. That's cool.
Ultimately, this being a free country, you can't control what people do (except the very crude control offered by the legal/penal system). The best thing is to argue eloquently for the ideas you think are best. People are using this as a forum to practice doing that.