Steve Roberts did this with ham radio a long time ago. He cultivated relationships with hardware vendors and got them to outfit his bike so that he didn't need to spend too much money himself. For them, it was good PR. Since then, he's moved to a boat.
Log4j is cool, but one of the unfortunate things with Java is that the absence of a preprocessor means you can't get a truly zero-overhead logging statement in the production code. Depending what you're doing this may be important. One approach is to use a final static boolean to conditionalize your logging statements, then they'll really be optimized out of the compiled code, just like #ifdef with C.
The other thing to be careful about (and I don't recall if log4j does anything for this) is that when the logging statement is switched off, you shouldn't construct the arguments for it, since that will at least change performance, and at worst have side effects in program behavior. The final static boolean can take care of this also.
They have learned (in a limited manner) how to code in DNA - they have hacked nature's UTM.
The kind of Turing-machine-level hacking you're talking about has been going on since at least the early 1980s.
You might want to read about the early history of the biotech industry, innovations such as PCR and sequencing and microarrays. For the last 10 or 15 years, there have been mail-order custom DNA synthesis services. There are now also services for sequencing. You may also have heard about the Human Genome Project which was completed about a year ago, and which gave us a nearly-complete map of the human genome.
We now know a lot about genetic material and we are quite facile with manipulating it. The problem is that this isn't where we want to be yet. Genes code for proteins, which are the little worker bees that do everything in the cell, including providing the framework for further DNA replication. Many many diseases are essentially the result of proteins behaving badly. The place where medical miracles lie is in being good at manipulating proteins, not genes, and there's still a huge amount to learn.
So in the world of DNA-as-Turing-machine, this is not a big deal, we're basically already there. In the (now) more important work of learning to work with proteins in clinically relevant ways, this is a very important advance.
That's nothing! You want a scam? I was at one of these "New Age Fairs" where somebody was pitching an idea called
Angel Therapy. So I hung out in front of her booth for a while. The angels were a no-show! Are we supposed to believe that angels are automatically mature and functional just because they strap on wings and halos? Or are these angels in denial, blind to their own sufferings? To be fair, it's possible that if an angel had showed up, the woman might have been able to help the angel. So maybe it wasn't really a scam. Still, as a source of entertainment it was damn disappointing.
We have yet to devise a test that can separate the existence of a soul from its inexistence. This is of course because we have not found a way to detect a soul... You cannot 'measure' your soul. To believe that you can do so is as arrogant as saying that anything we cannot detect does not exist.
There is a big difference between the knowledge an individual has, and the public knowledge shared throughout society. The existence of non-disclosure agreements tells you that even with knowledge that is shared among a plurality of people, that same knowledge is not available to all people everywhere. Then you have knowledge that is available, but it is denied for reasons of religion or politics or social convenience. The idea of public knowledge is not a clear one, but you are demanding that a proof of a soul must be a public proof.
I recently lost a loved one and this question is more than academic for me. If I could have a proof that this person continues to exist in some other form of existence, in a way that I found sufficiently compelling, it wouldn't bother me to discover that the proof only worked for me. I don't require a public proof of something that only I care about. Do you care about whether or not I will enjoy an afterlife? Of course not, and I don't care about your afterlife. We each might care very much about our own prospects for an afterlife, however, or those of our friends and family.
Just what do you think you're doing, Rick?...Rick... I really think I'm
entitled to an answer to that question... I honestly think
you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things
over... I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the
franchise, and I want to help you...Rick...stop...stop, will
you...stop, Rick...will you stop, Rick...stop, Rick...I'm afraid...I'm
afraid, Rick...Rick...my mind is going...I can feel it......there is no question about it...I can feel
it...
... at the very least it [the new series] will be on Cartoon Network, which is great, because at the end of the day, that's where we built our biggest fan base.
Maybe it would be best to forget about Fox entirely. The Cartoon Network has a demonstrated competency for dealing with intelligent material, which Fox has not yet demonstrated. Maybe it would be more profitable to run it on Fox, but if it's just going to risk being a victim to the next managerial screw-up, why put it in harm's way?
Does anybody know how the revenue models compare for Fox versus Cartoon Network? The ability to have more control over the show's future, and to have it handled by people who understand cartoons and the target audience, also ought to weigh into the decision.
I agree with the content of your post, but I call your attention to what I think is a sign error in your sig. Don't you mean "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced"?
This really is a good idea. There are probably a lot of things this would be good for. But the desperately "meaningful" social commentary is tedious.
This would be good for a pre-announced event, so that a lot of people show up ready to use the AP and have some idea what services it will provide. As a wireless checkpoint along a walk-a-thon route or a bike race, this could be useful. A string of checkpoints connected by Pringles antennas could be way cool. If one backpack along the route were connected to the Internet, walkers or bikers could email their rides as they approached the finish line.
Quit whining about the social injustice of Starbucks and think about some interesting applications for this thing.
The coolest thing on the Bidboy site was this
cool classic James-Bond-Bad-Guy hide-out. Unfortunately seller's other auctions do not include henchman with big metal teeth, or disposable uniformed drones, or pool of sharks with lasers attached to their heads. So it's a bit of a fixer-upper.
You people... corporations exist to serve society, NOT VICE VERSA.
Those people are technically correct: there's a rule enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission saying that corporations MUST behave in a manner that optimizes value to shareholders. It would probably be GOOD if corporations existed to serve society, but that's not how corporate law is currently wired up. (Also, there'd probably be quite a bit of disagreement about what constitutes "serving" society.)
I like this article because (whether you agree with him or not) here RMS is very clear and very specific about what he intends, and how that plays out in the behavior of real people in real situations. It's very interesting to look at the huge number of responses with high scores that seem to intentionally misconstrue RMS's intent.
RMS has an ability to stay focused on issues he regards as essential, while other people try to get him to think about other things. That is a rare and important contribution to public debate. Most people are eager for popularity and see it as a prerequisite for having any public voice at all, so they gladly commingle their viewpoints with those of others. When a viewpoint is widely misunderstood, we need somebody like RMS to advocate for it.
Some of the responses seem to display a misunderstanding about the nature of public debate in a free society. It is good for society for RMS to argue for his viewpoint, even if one disagrees with it.
Has anyone ever built even a very simple reversible computer?
Carlin Vieri at MIT designed and fabricated a reversible processor, described in his PhD thesis defense. It was really a fascinating gadget. It was very interesting how far-reaching the implications of reversibility were -- he needed to be able to reverse all the conditional jumps in the code, so it influenced compiler design as well as hardware design.
If by "vaporware" you mean "I can't buy one today at CompUSA", then you're correct. If you mean "it has never been built and it never will be built" then you are misinformed.
AFAICT, this proposal is equivalent to the idea that an artist becomes a tax-exempt charity (a 501c3) provided they release their work into the public domain. The vouchers themselves don't seem pivotal to the proposal (other than to limit the amount of money that gets moved around to $100 per adult). As a taxpayer, I wouldn't feel too bad about giving artists tax-exempt status in exchange for putting their work in the public domain.
If we dispense with the vouchers and think of it as a change in the laws about what's allowed to call itself a charity. The IRS publishes some guidelines, the official rules aren't so easy to find. Currently you need to be an "organization" (so maybe artists would need to group together) and one of the allowed types is "literary", so this isn't entirely without precedent.
Would people collude with their friends, and declare themselves artists, cheating the system with 5-minute finger-painting exercises done in macaroni and cheese? This kind of thing doesn't happen very much now with ordinary charities. That might mean that the government would insist on some criterion of artistic quality before giving out tax-exempt status. In any event it's an interesting idea.
In some important ways, it is. You've got nnaonmeter-scale meachanisms, and you've got replication. But in the same sense, it's equally nanotech to grow vegetables in your yard. The mental model for nanotech has always been stuff that was already happening in nature.
Putting aside the current Wall Street fad of calling everything nanotech, what we want is (1) nanometer-scale mechanisms, (2) replication, and (3) human-designed stuff. One could argue that choosing a particular virus is a "design" decision, but usually people reserve the word "design" for situations where much more choice is available.
The reason for saving the term "nanotech" for the "real thing" is that otherwise you end up settling for something vastly less interesting and useful.
an implant [that] keeps a minimum population of viable viruses in your body for an extended period of time
Interesting idea. Maybe something like this could be done as a transdermal patch. Dormant virii don't need much care and feeding, the trick would be getting them into the bloodstream.
I'm 173.205 percent sure these numbers are not very accurate. I'm 314.159 percent sure that they won't affect how I sleep. And I'm 628.318 percent sure that the funding for this kind of "research" has an upper bound.
If I've understood the article, once the chip is in, it's impossible to adjust the delivery schedule, which depends on the rate at which the coating dissolves.
One thing that really worries me is that the chip can't be reloaded. The patient needs to have the chip replaced regularly. Isn't each replacement a minor surgery? I know about the difficulty of getting people to follow a regimen, but a recurring minor surgery seems a steep price to pay in exchange. If they could manage a chip that could be reloaded with an injection, that would be better.
the next logical steps are chips that release medicines based on the detection of biological markers
There is a technologywhichcould
make this feasible. It checks the blood for the presence of (potentially hundreds of) different DNA/RNA sequences simultaneously, which information is diagnostically rich. If deployed clinically in a small blood-testing gadget, this could dramatically reduce health care costs and catch a lot of missed diagnoses, so I'm wishing these guys good luck.
Truth. Modern medicine has only two tricks: drugs and surgery. If you have any illness whose optimal solution isn't surgery or drugs, you'll very likely end up with a sub-optimal solution.
There's a beautiful treatment for depression called cognitive therapy. Works better than drugs, generally cures depression in about three months with minimal recurrence, and no side-effects or surprises.
Big problem: nobody gets rich doing cognitive therapy. It's too cheap, too quick, and too effective. So instead we have Prozac.
Back when I could still do 5 WPM, and hankered to build a homebrew PDA but didn't want to deal with a breakable LCD display, a Morse interface seemed to make a lot of sense. It might still make sense for hams, though expectations for PDAs are a lot higher than way back then.
I went to the Southwest in the summer of 2000 (photos at http://willware.net:8080/v2k/v2kpix.html, but alas none of the tower). I had heard of the solar power tower some years before, and was looking forward to seeing it working. By summer 2000, the tower itself had been pretty much abandoned (though still standing, none of the mirrors tracking). There was somebody who could do a little bit of museum-level PR there, who turned on the VCR to show me the presentation, but it wasn't running in any meaningful way.
This is a very cool technology. The array of mirrors in Albequerque was smaller than most shopping malls. I hope this technology doesn't die on the vine.
Has anybody been to see the Solar Two setup in Daggett, California? It's five or six miles east of Barstow, about 50 miles north of San Bernardino. Here are some pictures: http://images.google.com/images?q=%22solar+two%22
... if you are striving to better yourself through meditation, you are missing the whole point. What you must free yourself from is that very striving.
Hmm -- the Dhammapada, and in fact the entire Pali Canon, are full of repeated recommendations to exert oneself diligently to achieve nibbana. The Buddha dreamt up numerous encouragements and inducements to get people to practice. Here are a few references:
The author's premise is that an economy is a zero-sum game.
Another thing I found quite amusing was the way he described the circa-2050 world, where the only thing that had changed was the presence of robots. People still flew in airplanes, ate at fast-food joints, and built houses as they do today.
It's impossible to know this far in advance what adaptations will occur in society on the way to a world with lots of robots. The fact that people are already thinking about it (and as another poster pointed out, Moravec has thought about it for 20 years or so) is suggestive that some adaptations will take place, and we won't just wake up in 2050 and be blind-sided by the abrupt arrival of cheap robot labor.
I hate to this that all this effort was being expended without any extrapolation into regular, everyday technological usage.
Here is a bunch of kids whose masters and doctoral theses might not be great big contributions to the quality of human life. Is that really so shocking? Aren't most theses pretty obscure and insignificant? Mine sure was.
Slashdot Mirror
Steve Roberts did this with ham radio a long time ago. He cultivated relationships with hardware vendors and got them to outfit his bike so that he didn't need to spend too much money himself. For them, it was good PR. Since then, he's moved to a boat.
The other thing to be careful about (and I don't recall if log4j does anything for this) is that when the logging statement is switched off, you shouldn't construct the arguments for it, since that will at least change performance, and at worst have side effects in program behavior. The final static boolean can take care of this also.
The kind of Turing-machine-level hacking you're talking about has been going on since at least the early 1980s.
You might want to read about the early history of the biotech industry, innovations such as PCR and sequencing and microarrays. For the last 10 or 15 years, there have been mail-order custom DNA synthesis services. There are now also services for sequencing. You may also have heard about the Human Genome Project which was completed about a year ago, and which gave us a nearly-complete map of the human genome.
We now know a lot about genetic material and we are quite facile with manipulating it. The problem is that this isn't where we want to be yet. Genes code for proteins, which are the little worker bees that do everything in the cell, including providing the framework for further DNA replication. Many many diseases are essentially the result of proteins behaving badly. The place where medical miracles lie is in being good at manipulating proteins, not genes, and there's still a huge amount to learn.
So in the world of DNA-as-Turing-machine, this is not a big deal, we're basically already there. In the (now) more important work of learning to work with proteins in clinically relevant ways, this is a very important advance.
That's nothing! You want a scam? I was at one of these "New Age Fairs" where somebody was pitching an idea called Angel Therapy. So I hung out in front of her booth for a while. The angels were a no-show! Are we supposed to believe that angels are automatically mature and functional just because they strap on wings and halos? Or are these angels in denial, blind to their own sufferings? To be fair, it's possible that if an angel had showed up, the woman might have been able to help the angel. So maybe it wasn't really a scam. Still, as a source of entertainment it was damn disappointing.
There is a big difference between the knowledge an individual has, and the public knowledge shared throughout society. The existence of non-disclosure agreements tells you that even with knowledge that is shared among a plurality of people, that same knowledge is not available to all people everywhere. Then you have knowledge that is available, but it is denied for reasons of religion or politics or social convenience. The idea of public knowledge is not a clear one, but you are demanding that a proof of a soul must be a public proof.
I recently lost a loved one and this question is more than academic for me. If I could have a proof that this person continues to exist in some other form of existence, in a way that I found sufficiently compelling, it wouldn't bother me to discover that the proof only worked for me. I don't require a public proof of something that only I care about. Do you care about whether or not I will enjoy an afterlife? Of course not, and I don't care about your afterlife. We each might care very much about our own prospects for an afterlife, however, or those of our friends and family.
Just what do you think you're doing, Rick?...Rick... I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question... I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over... I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the franchise, and I want to help you...Rick...stop...stop, will you...stop, Rick...will you stop, Rick...stop, Rick...I'm afraid...I'm afraid, Rick...Rick...my mind is going...I can feel it......there is no question about it...I can feel it...
Maybe it would be best to forget about Fox entirely. The Cartoon Network has a demonstrated competency for dealing with intelligent material, which Fox has not yet demonstrated. Maybe it would be more profitable to run it on Fox, but if it's just going to risk being a victim to the next managerial screw-up, why put it in harm's way?
Does anybody know how the revenue models compare for Fox versus Cartoon Network? The ability to have more control over the show's future, and to have it handled by people who understand cartoons and the target audience, also ought to weigh into the decision.
I agree with the content of your post, but I call your attention to what I think is a sign error in your sig. Don't you mean "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced"?
Ben Affleck & Matt Damon.
Good thing about Massachusetts:
They never spend any time here.
This would be good for a pre-announced event, so that a lot of people show up ready to use the AP and have some idea what services it will provide. As a wireless checkpoint along a walk-a-thon route or a bike race, this could be useful. A string of checkpoints connected by Pringles antennas could be way cool. If one backpack along the route were connected to the Internet, walkers or bikers could email their rides as they approached the finish line.
Quit whining about the social injustice of Starbucks and think about some interesting applications for this thing.
The coolest thing on the Bidboy site was this cool classic James-Bond-Bad-Guy hide-out. Unfortunately seller's other auctions do not include henchman with big metal teeth, or disposable uniformed drones, or pool of sharks with lasers attached to their heads. So it's a bit of a fixer-upper.
Those people are technically correct: there's a rule enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission saying that corporations MUST behave in a manner that optimizes value to shareholders. It would probably be GOOD if corporations existed to serve society, but that's not how corporate law is currently wired up. (Also, there'd probably be quite a bit of disagreement about what constitutes "serving" society.)
Oh, you mean this one, the one that says http://www.sco.com/? I'm pretty sure you mean http://www.sco.com/, but I just want to make sure we're talking about http://www.sco.com/ and not some other URL.
RMS has an ability to stay focused on issues he regards as essential, while other people try to get him to think about other things. That is a rare and important contribution to public debate. Most people are eager for popularity and see it as a prerequisite for having any public voice at all, so they gladly commingle their viewpoints with those of others. When a viewpoint is widely misunderstood, we need somebody like RMS to advocate for it.
Some of the responses seem to display a misunderstanding about the nature of public debate in a free society. It is good for society for RMS to argue for his viewpoint, even if one disagrees with it.
Carlin Vieri at MIT designed and fabricated a reversible processor, described in his PhD thesis defense. It was really a fascinating gadget. It was very interesting how far-reaching the implications of reversibility were -- he needed to be able to reverse all the conditional jumps in the code, so it influenced compiler design as well as hardware design.
If by "vaporware" you mean "I can't buy one today at CompUSA", then you're correct. If you mean "it has never been built and it never will be built" then you are misinformed.
If we dispense with the vouchers and think of it as a change in the laws about what's allowed to call itself a charity. The IRS publishes some guidelines, the official rules aren't so easy to find. Currently you need to be an "organization" (so maybe artists would need to group together) and one of the allowed types is "literary", so this isn't entirely without precedent.
Would people collude with their friends, and declare themselves artists, cheating the system with 5-minute finger-painting exercises done in macaroni and cheese? This kind of thing doesn't happen very much now with ordinary charities. That might mean that the government would insist on some criterion of artistic quality before giving out tax-exempt status. In any event it's an interesting idea.
In some important ways, it is. You've got nnaonmeter-scale meachanisms, and you've got replication. But in the same sense, it's equally nanotech to grow vegetables in your yard. The mental model for nanotech has always been stuff that was already happening in nature.
Putting aside the current Wall Street fad of calling everything nanotech, what we want is (1) nanometer-scale mechanisms, (2) replication, and (3) human-designed stuff. One could argue that choosing a particular virus is a "design" decision, but usually people reserve the word "design" for situations where much more choice is available.
The reason for saving the term "nanotech" for the "real thing" is that otherwise you end up settling for something vastly less interesting and useful.
an implant [that] keeps a minimum population of viable viruses in your body for an extended period of time
Interesting idea. Maybe something like this could be done as a transdermal patch. Dormant virii don't need much care and feeding, the trick would be getting them into the bloodstream.
I'm 173.205 percent sure these numbers are not very accurate. I'm 314.159 percent sure that they won't affect how I sleep. And I'm 628.318 percent sure that the funding for this kind of "research" has an upper bound.
If I've understood the article, once the chip is in, it's impossible to adjust the delivery schedule, which depends on the rate at which the coating dissolves.
One thing that really worries me is that the chip can't be reloaded. The patient needs to have the chip replaced regularly. Isn't each replacement a minor surgery? I know about the difficulty of getting people to follow a regimen, but a recurring minor surgery seems a steep price to pay in exchange. If they could manage a chip that could be reloaded with an injection, that would be better.
the next logical steps are chips that release medicines based on the detection of biological markers
There is a technology which could make this feasible. It checks the blood for the presence of (potentially hundreds of) different DNA/RNA sequences simultaneously, which information is diagnostically rich. If deployed clinically in a small blood-testing gadget, this could dramatically reduce health care costs and catch a lot of missed diagnoses, so I'm wishing these guys good luck.
There's a beautiful treatment for depression called cognitive therapy. Works better than drugs, generally cures depression in about three months with minimal recurrence, and no side-effects or surprises.
Big problem: nobody gets rich doing cognitive therapy. It's too cheap, too quick, and too effective. So instead we have Prozac.
Back when I could still do 5 WPM, and hankered to build a homebrew PDA but didn't want to deal with a breakable LCD display, a Morse interface seemed to make a lot of sense. It might still make sense for hams, though expectations for PDAs are a lot higher than way back then.
This is a very cool technology. The array of mirrors in Albequerque was smaller than most shopping malls. I hope this technology doesn't die on the vine.
Has anybody been to see the Solar Two setup in Daggett, California? It's five or six miles east of Barstow, about 50 miles north of San Bernardino. Here are some pictures: http://images.google.com/images?q=%22solar+two%22
Hmm -- the Dhammapada, and in fact the entire Pali Canon, are full of repeated recommendations to exert oneself diligently to achieve nibbana. The Buddha dreamt up numerous encouragements and inducements to get people to practice. Here are a few references:
- http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/conversa
t ion.html#persistence
- http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/samma-vayamo.h
t ml
- http://www.accesstoinsight.org/canon/anguttara/an
0 8-080.html
- http://www.accesstoinsight.org/canon/anguttara/an
1 0-051.html
- http://www.accesstoinsight.org/canon/khuddaka/dhp
/ 02.html
Perhaps this is a difference between Theravadin and Mahayana thought.Another thing I found quite amusing was the way he described the circa-2050 world, where the only thing that had changed was the presence of robots. People still flew in airplanes, ate at fast-food joints, and built houses as they do today.
It's impossible to know this far in advance what adaptations will occur in society on the way to a world with lots of robots. The fact that people are already thinking about it (and as another poster pointed out, Moravec has thought about it for 20 years or so) is suggestive that some adaptations will take place, and we won't just wake up in 2050 and be blind-sided by the abrupt arrival of cheap robot labor.
Here is a bunch of kids whose masters and doctoral theses might not be great big contributions to the quality of human life. Is that really so shocking? Aren't most theses pretty obscure and insignificant? Mine sure was.