My wife was in Braidwood IL on Sunday visiting her mom, eating lunch at a restaurant along Route 66. As they ate, they saw seven or eight of the cars go by, with chase cars etc. She said they were all very aerodynamic-looking, and she wondered if they'd be picked up by high winds. Lots of windy weather out there; the previous week there'd been tornado watches next door in Indiana.
I'm from Massachusetts
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
where all this mishigas is taking place. (Fair disclosure: I don't live close to Cape Cod, but I go there some weekends in the summer sometimes.)
This disgusts me. New Englanders have been whining for wind and solar power since the 1960s, and now that it's practical, it's "unsightly".
I was particularly disappointed by Cronkite. When I was growing up, he was universally recognized as one of the good guys. Here's his quotes from the article.
''The problem really is Nimbyism,'' he admitted when I reached him by phone not long ago, ''and it bothers me a great deal that I find myself in this position. I'm all for these factories, but there must be areas that are far less valuable than this place is.'' With prodding, he suggested the deserts of California. Then, perhaps realizing that might be a tad remote to serve New England's energy needs, he added, ''Inland New England would substitute just as well.''
As we talked, his discomfort was so keen that he interrupted his thought and pleaded, ''Be kind to an old man,'' before summing up. ''We have a lot of interesting wildlife, like porpoises and whales,'' he said. ''It's a very important commercial fishing ground, and it's a marvelous boating area for recreational fishermen, for sailors. Last -- but this is not inconsequential -- it will be most unsightly for what is now open bay. Everybody will see it, anyone who wanders on the water, who has a home that faces the water.''
Something to take into account is that Cronkite is an avid sailor with a home on Cape Cod. The windmills are seven miles offshore, and spaced 1/3 to 1/2 mile apart. Speaking as somebody who's done a lot of boating, this leaves PLENTY of room for boats to move around. Maybe he thinks the rotating blades would hit the mast or the sails? Possibly, but the stakes seem bigger than recreational sailing, and people can always SAIL AROUND the wind farm. Hello, it's called GPS, and it even works in pea-soup fog.
Here in Massachusetts, the Kennedeys are revered as gods because JFK's presidency put Irish Catholics (Massachusetts' biggest demographic) on the map. RFK Jr. (nephew of JFK) has weighed in with idiocy like this:
''I am all for wind power,'' Kennedy insisted in a debate with Gordon on Boston's NPR affiliate. ''The costs . . . on the people of this region are so huge, . . . the diminishment to property values, the diminishment to marinas, to businesses. . . . People go to the Cape because they want to connect themselves with the history and the culture. They want to see the same scenes the Pilgrims saw when they landed at Plymouth Rock.''
This isn't a dignified time to be from Massachusetts.
I'm not sure what to make out of his hydrogen speech.
The White House is a fully-owned subsidiary of the oil industry, and Dubya does what they tell him to do.
Hydrogen is to Big Oil as Linux is to Microsoft. It threatens to decentralize supply and cost them their position on top. Suppose Big Oil just ignored hydrogen, what would happen? A grassroots hydrogen infrastructure would emerge. You need very little to make hydrogen, so consumers end up buying energy from Billy-Bob's Hydropower And Pancake House. To Big Oil, decentralization is death.
Big Oil can't stop hydrogen, but they can take a position at the head of the parade. See how progressive we are! We're working with the car guys to bring you a sane unified hydrogen world that makes sense! Where you won't need to worry whether impurities in Billy-Bob's hydrogen will screw up your car's fuel cells. Only a nutcase would use open-source software^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbuy locally produced hydrogen.
Watch for FUD about small hydrogen producers, like a big media circus whenever one has an accident. Also watch for legal attempts to criminalize and marginalize small-scale hydrogen production, like requirements for unreasonably expensive safety equipment. Maybe deals with car companies to make cars that don't work if they don't smell the "official additive" in the hydrogen.
One of the big problems with having a lot of reactors around is that they produce waste that takes eons to become safe. (Though I've heard of people who let their kids play with "depleted" uranium, and are in a position to be aware of any
risks involved.)
This is a perfect app for the space elevator. We run the ribbon a little past GEO. When the elevator gets to the top of the ribbon all it needs to do is let go of the waste, which then harmlessly drifts away from the Earth. We'll have to choose times when they have a clear shot to get away without looping around the Moon or other bodies, but that should be easy.
I don't see a problem with sending "orobes" to Mars
I think we'll cultivate a lot more good will if we send "oreos" to Mars. Especially double-stuff.
A space elevator wouldn't hurt either.
I used to think the space elevator was a silly idea, or at least a not-any-time-soon idea, and that we should tinker with tethers or J. Storrs-Hall's space dock idea in the nearer term. But I started reading the info (most of the technical issues are treated in essays in the "Downloads" section of the website) and it's remarkable how thoroughly this guy has considered every possible aspect or risk of the system.
We don't need a lot of new science and technology to do this. We need better nanotube manufacturing and we need an automated system that can shoot down flying garbage in LEO. Aside from that, it's just money and politics. It would mean the end of shuttle disasters, and every space activity would be 10x or 100x cheaper than it is today.
Interestingly, the space elevator guy has recently taken a position at this think tank where he says he'll have the resources to really put up a space elevator. I hope things work out for him. If he succeeds, we'll all be better off.
Sorry for the failure to appropriately curb my enthusiasm. I'll try to do better next time.
there are so many skills 'lost' in the modern 'american' lifestyle... Is this common in geekdom?
Years ago I did a yoga retreat, and learned enough of the history to discover that some millenia ago, yoga and meditation were the hot happening things that occupied the brainiest people then living, the then-equivalent of today's startups and stock options and IPOs. Interesting.
This essay describes a historical cycle that takes place in Thailand, repeating every century or two. Somebody goes out into the forest and meditates like crazy, rediscovers the Buddha's original findings, and starts a monastic forest tradition. Then the local authorities re-domesticate Buddhism, harnessing it for nationalistic and social purposes. After a few generations the forest tradition burns out, leaving behind a state-endorsed religion that discards the investigative orientation on which the forest tradition thrived. A century or so later, somebody else starts the whole thing up again.
1) Whine about it, do nothing, whine some more
As you point out, this is uninteresting.
2) Write your congress people, consumer advocate groups, and manufactureres of IP and try to educate them on the true damage that current IP laws are causing
Marginally more interesting, ultimately probably ineffective. Industries have vastly deeper pockets, and these days, government is for sale.
3) Create and support a viable alternative that will gain momentum from consumer and commercial support that eventually can replace current business models and content-creator demand
Now this struck me as really interesting. The examples you gave, however, are ones that aren't likely to have much impact. I admire the efforts of people cooking up P2P hacks and open source licenses, but I don't think it will significantly change the way business is done.
What really intrigued me, and what I didn't see in your examples, was "a viable alternative...that eventually can replace current business models". Businesses are the loci of social and political power in our society, and if they never take an interest in protecting the creative commons, it ain't gonna happen. Offering business models that serve their interests without obliterating the public noosphere would be a necessary step, I think, to the change you envision. I suspect that many businesses might be hesitant to jump on the RIAA bandwagon of "corporate profits uber alles, human freedom be damned", and might welcome an alternative if one were available.
The GPL offers pretty bleak options to the software business world: sell support and documentation. Cygnus couldn't make it work, and Red Hat isn't having much better luck. Bless them for trying, and I hope things improve, but other companies will not be lining up to enter that business niche. To the business world, there is nothing positive about P2P, besides the chance to sell computer hardware, which was going to happen anyway.
I don't have a good proposal, and I wouldn't expect you to have one either, but I think the general idea of "let's make it worth the business world's while to protect the public noosphere" is a good direction in which to head.
Thanks for asking! I love this guy's place and would like to help his business prosper, but the indirection in the sig is to avoid irritating people with blatant advertising.
Cancun
1609 Concord St
Framingham, MA 01701-3532
(508)877-8808
http://www.baloncito.com/cancun/
If you're familiar with northern Framingham, this is in the Saxonville area, across the street from the mill building. There is a description of the atmosphere of the place in the last entry of my journal.
There isn't a monolithic "software industry". Larry and Bill sell shrink-wrapped boxes. That business is not dying, it's just growing slower, but since their analysts and investors expected non-stop exponential growth, a slowdown looks like a death to them. To somebody with non-drug-induced expectations, that business looks pretty healthy.
There is other software. Your cellphone and your microwave and your laser printer all have processors in them, and somebody has to write code for them. That business (embedded systems) is also in healthy shape. Not growing by leaps and bounds, not vacuuming up every last resume or recent grad, but not about to fall over and disappear either.
There are lots of businesses and business niches that involve software development. There are even still some businesses paying people to develop websites. And for all the sufferings of unemployed sysadmins, there are still people being paid for sysadmin work out there.
Everybody got burned by the dot-bomb. For a couple of years, businesses were so hungry that they'd hire anybody who could write three lines of Perl and give them a corner office and big stock options. That was an unstable situation and there has been a backlash.
If you ask, "is the industry dying?", there will always be an authoritative idiot saying yes. The more important long-term question is, "could this kind of work hold your interest for three or four decades?", so think about that and plan accordingly.
Tom Knight and some other MIT people were
talking
about this kind of stuff in 1996-97. This was the same group interested in amorphous computing at the time. They saw it all as one big research agenda, and amorphous computing fell under the DOD funding umbrella for autonomous battlefield surveillance widgets.
These guys were poking around with some genuinely interesting ideas. Their idea was that if you relaxed the requirements on manufacturing quality, you could make nodes that were super-cheap with a modest (but today-considered-unacceptable) failure rate. They set forth a collection of programming axioms that treated a sea-of-nodes as a continuous computational "gunk". Very cool stuff.
It's great that simulations have been helpful in training our troops. But we have run into surprises, both big and small. The "small" surprises (suicide car bombers, fake surrenders, combatants in civilian clothing) should be folded back into the simulation in preparation for the next conflict. And if we can draw any inferences about other things they might invent (cf the warning of upcoming "unconventional tactics") that would be good to simulate too.
The big surprises aren't surprising with two weeks of hindsight: Iraqi civilians aren't jumping for joy at our arrival, because they got bit last time and they don't trust us to finish the job this time. Are there strategic simulations for the top brass and the administration? A good simulation can dispel your assumptions and delusions, and the planners could have benefitted from some of that a month ago.
Stupid question: Is DistribFold the same group as Folding@Home? I have been running the FAH client for a while now, on and off. I'd switch, if I had reason to think that DistribFold will accomplish more good humanitarian stuff.
"Protector" is underappreciated
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 1
The book "Protector" is chock full of beautiful ideas and images, but alas the Ringworld series attracts all the attention. There's so much to think about in Protector.
If I ran the zoo, they'd be making a Protector movie first, and THEN a Ringworld movie. Especially with all the CG stuff they can do these days -- Pstthpok would be a MUCH better use of that stuff than Jar-Jar Binks.
More a rant than a question I guess. Anyway I'll join the hundreds of people here in thanking you for many pleasant thought-filled hours in my childhood.
Yup, and there's Docbook. I've used Docbook to make nice-enough looking documents but I've never quite been able to get MathML to behave well. It seems that MathML is continuing to evolve, and some of its output looks as pretty as LaTeX now. (I think they use TeX as a step in the rendering process, so that makes sense.)
Maybe it would make sense to use Mozilla as a starting point for an open-source reader for some kind of openly-documented ebook file format.
This might argue for something like making the ebook format a gzipped collection of HTML pages. I really like how pdflatex documents look; latex2html output never looks that good. Certainly one would want an ebook to look as good as possible.
Maybe the open-source ebook reader could just accept gzipped LaTeX as input, and render the output in whatever form the (human) reader wishes.
ebook... we should have an open source reader which can be used to create books that are more compatible in content. Use this as a starting point to 'ram the message home'
This is a nice idea. These days I find myself relying more and more heavily on PDFs, because (1) electronic searching is a huge win, (2) lots fit on my laptop's hard disk, and (3) if I really want a paper copy, I can print it, or better yet, I can copy a small range of pages (which I do pretty often).
PDF is good for that, and pdflatex is wonderful, but Acroread isn't open-source. Adobe could decide to change the format some day, or get rid of the free Acroread download, etc. Something functionally equivalent to Acroread, but as open source, would be a huge win.
The big thing to do is to select or define the file format. Then it will be relatively straightforward to write progressively better readers. The file format should allow capabilities that may not be implemented in early versions of the reader, but would be desirable in the longer term.
There are "Unix philosophy" arguments to be made for using a ASCII-ish file format, or maybe a file format that's a gzip of an ASCII format. That would give lots of opportunities to write "baby readers" (e.g. text only) or do handy text-processing hacks (sed, awk, grep...).
2. Canons and other railguns must either provide a ridiculously strong acceleration or be ridiculously long and tall (Storrs-Hall seems to envision a 100km-tall, 300km-long device).
JoSH calculated he'd need 10 Gs of acceleration for 80 seconds. That sounds like a hell of a lot to me, I'm not sure I'd survive it without at least some broken bones. Maybe if you're suspended in a fluid.
I would be inclined to go with a longer track with lower acceleration. The length of the space dock is inversely proportional to the acceleration, and less acceleration is easier on both spacecraft and people.
There's plenty of room in the middle of the Pacific to make a dock just over 1000 miles long, so you'd only have an acceleration of 2G. Or it could be made longer, and with 2G you could put the craft in a more elliptical orbit with a higher perigee. In that case, once you were past the velocity for circular orbit, the track would need to hold the craft down until it got to the end.
The compelling problem that the space program should try to solve is
that launching into space is just too damn expensive. Today it costs
$5K to $10K to place one kilogram in orbit. At that price, space
tourism and colonization are completely out of the question. Using its
dying gasp of breath to dramatically lower the cost of launch would be
the noblest, most valuable thing NASA could do. From that point on,
space development would be picked up by Marriott and 3M, and political
Brownian motion would be removed from the equation.
Tethers
(
1,
2,
3
)
attached to
counterweights can be used to transfer spacecraft from one orbit to
another. The first tether has an orbit that skims the atmosphere,
where a craft catches and connects to the end of the tether. The craft
is lifted into low earth orbit and subsequent tethers help it to reach
escape velocity. Using the tethers takes energy out of the orbits of
the counterweights, some of which can be put back by using the tethers for
descent as well as launch.
J. Storrs-Hall (once moderator of sci.nanotech) envisioned a space dock, a linear
motor suspended 100 km above the ground that accelerates spacecraft to
an elliptical orbit. He computes an amortized cost of reaching low
earth orbit of 42 cents per kilogram. From the elliptical orbit, it's
a relatively small safe step to escape velocity.
A space elevator
(
1,
2
) is an excellent long-term solution. A cable is hung from a weight
in geosynchronous orbit, reaching down to the Earth's surface. The
elevator climbs the cable, carrying a craft. When it reaches GEO,
the craft detaches and spends only a little fuel getting to escape
velocity.
Tethers and the space elevator require novel materials for strong
cables, probably using carbon nanotubes. The frame to hold up the
space dock is in compression, and something we could build with
little or no advance in material science. Any of these alternatives
would be vastly cheaper and vastly safer than putting human lives
on the noses of fuel tanks subjected to unreasonable speeds and
stresses.
A space elevator is a great idea in the long term, but in the near future a better idea is J. Storrs-Hall's space dock:
http://www.imm.org/Reports/Rep016.html
Build a straight track 300 km long and put it 100 km above the ground, above almost all of the atmosphere. Make the track a linear motor. Use an elevator to get your ship up to one end of the track. Accelerate at 10 Gs for about 10 seconds. Poof, you're in orbit. Now it's relatively easy and cheap to leave orbit and go elsewhere.
When JoSH wrote up the idea in March 2000, he estimated that the price to put a kilogram in orbit would be 42 cents, once all the costs had been amortized. And the cost of working spacecraft probably shrinks a lot.
[Ham radio is dying because]
communication by itself is now ubiquitous with the arrival of the WWW, cell phones and sat. phones and so on.
This is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. The Internet has been eating amateur radio's mindshare lunch. The demographics of ham radio has been steadily moving toward the elderly end of the curve.
One of the original functions of ham radio was to provide a venue for communication innovation. I would love to see this function find its rebirth in growing 802.11 connectivity. Maybe hams can build the big Wifi blanket that everybody talks about. It would also line up with the ham charter to provide emergency communications.
What would really be interesting would be to see hams go in novel directions of radio experiments: things like antennas even more interesting than the Pringle can, and different modulation schemes... lots of interesting possibilities.
I think you've described quite well how things are likely to go.
And as you point out, the "intellectual property" dilemma will get
deeper and stupider than it already is.
I can see a few different scenarios.
Stallman scenario: Everybody has an open, widely-capable 3D printer.
There is an abundance of public-domain (or open-sourced) designs
available for daily necessities.
Any printer can make another printer.
People can sell fancy new designs, but any design eventually leaks
into the public domain.
Disney scenario: Everybody has a printer, but each printer has a
secure microcontroller that allows big design studios to SSH their
designs into your printer without you seeing the designs. The secure
microcontroller cannot be duplicated by the printer, so one printer
can't make another. The big studios jealously control their digitally-signed
designs and don't allow Joe Luser to create
designs (he doesn't have the private key to sign them, so the printer
rejects them). This dead-end lasts until a studio employee leaks
enough information to break the monopoly.
Mixed scenario: There are multiple printers out there,
some locked and some open. The design studios are madly trying to
criminalize "unauthorized" design work, and get consumers to buy
locked printers. The EFF and the Green Party try to promote open printers, but nobody can hear them in the commercial din.
I would expect that as 3D printers enter the home in large numbers,
we'll start out in the mixed scenario and then drift toward one of
the extremes. Personally I'm hoping for the Stallman scenario.
a 32 by 8 array of lamps that will display, at all times, the contents of the general-purpose regsisters... a "speed" pot... analog CPU speed meter...
Something like this could actually be very educational. I remember having gobs of fun with a KIM-1 about twenty years ago, and learning a lot. And a friend built a custom Z80 box with 16 LEDs for address and 8 more for data, and toggle switches to write his programs into SRAM, which he operated with ninja-like agility.
These days, the right way to do it would be to write a simulation with a GUI. If you really did it with hardware, people couldn't download it.
But in fairness to your original idea, the GUI would need to have an antique radio theme. For instance, I got your speed pot right here. (That's actually the face of the shortwave that sat in our kitchen throughout my childhood.)
Brin wrote arbitrary lords and chiefs did rule us for 99.44 percent of human existence... the nearly universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture.
Feudalism is a logical consequence of agriculture, but agriculture only goes back about 15,000 years. Human existence goes back something like 100,000 years, and during most of that time, we were hunter-gatherers. Brin's percentage should be 14.44.
The lives of hunter-gatherers were actually pretty sweet. A big farm demands constant work from everybody and you end up with dreary work ethics. Hunting and gathering leave a lot of free time, so you paint the insides of caves, play tunes on primitive instruments, and loaf.
We really need a literature that revels in the glories of hunter-gatherer societies. The closest we have right now are "Quest for Fire" and "Clan of the Cave Bear". Hey you authors, get to work.
Slashdot Mirror
My wife was in Braidwood IL on Sunday visiting her mom, eating lunch at a restaurant along Route 66. As they ate, they saw seven or eight of the cars go by, with chase cars etc. She said they were all very aerodynamic-looking, and she wondered if they'd be picked up by high winds. Lots of windy weather out there; the previous week there'd been tornado watches next door in Indiana.
I was particularly disappointed by Cronkite. When I was growing up, he was universally recognized as one of the good guys. Here's his quotes from the article.
Something to take into account is that Cronkite is an avid sailor with a home on Cape Cod. The windmills are seven miles offshore, and spaced 1/3 to 1/2 mile apart. Speaking as somebody who's done a lot of boating, this leaves PLENTY of room for boats to move around. Maybe he thinks the rotating blades would hit the mast or the sails? Possibly, but the stakes seem bigger than recreational sailing, and people can always SAIL AROUND the wind farm. Hello, it's called GPS, and it even works in pea-soup fog.Here in Massachusetts, the Kennedeys are revered as gods because JFK's presidency put Irish Catholics (Massachusetts' biggest demographic) on the map. RFK Jr. (nephew of JFK) has weighed in with idiocy like this:
This isn't a dignified time to be from Massachusetts.The White House is a fully-owned subsidiary of the oil industry, and Dubya does what they tell him to do.
Hydrogen is to Big Oil as Linux is to Microsoft. It threatens to decentralize supply and cost them their position on top. Suppose Big Oil just ignored hydrogen, what would happen? A grassroots hydrogen infrastructure would emerge. You need very little to make hydrogen, so consumers end up buying energy from Billy-Bob's Hydropower And Pancake House. To Big Oil, decentralization is death.
Big Oil can't stop hydrogen, but they can take a position at the head of the parade. See how progressive we are! We're working with the car guys to bring you a sane unified hydrogen world that makes sense! Where you won't need to worry whether impurities in Billy-Bob's hydrogen will screw up your car's fuel cells. Only a nutcase would use open-source software^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbuy locally produced hydrogen.
Watch for FUD about small hydrogen producers, like a big media circus whenever one has an accident. Also watch for legal attempts to criminalize and marginalize small-scale hydrogen production, like requirements for unreasonably expensive safety equipment. Maybe deals with car companies to make cars that don't work if they don't smell the "official additive" in the hydrogen.
This is a perfect app for the space elevator. We run the ribbon a little past GEO. When the elevator gets to the top of the ribbon all it needs to do is let go of the waste, which then harmlessly drifts away from the Earth. We'll have to choose times when they have a clear shot to get away without looping around the Moon or other bodies, but that should be easy.
I think we'll cultivate a lot more good will if we send "oreos" to Mars. Especially double-stuff.
A space elevator wouldn't hurt either.
I used to think the space elevator was a silly idea, or at least a not-any-time-soon idea, and that we should tinker with tethers or J. Storrs-Hall's space dock idea in the nearer term. But I started reading the info (most of the technical issues are treated in essays in the "Downloads" section of the website) and it's remarkable how thoroughly this guy has considered every possible aspect or risk of the system.
We don't need a lot of new science and technology to do this. We need better nanotube manufacturing and we need an automated system that can shoot down flying garbage in LEO. Aside from that, it's just money and politics. It would mean the end of shuttle disasters, and every space activity would be 10x or 100x cheaper than it is today.
Interestingly, the space elevator guy has recently taken a position at this think tank where he says he'll have the resources to really put up a space elevator. I hope things work out for him. If he succeeds, we'll all be better off.
Sorry for the failure to appropriately curb my enthusiasm. I'll try to do better next time.
Years ago I did a yoga retreat, and learned enough of the history to discover that some millenia ago, yoga and meditation were the hot happening things that occupied the brainiest people then living, the then-equivalent of today's startups and stock options and IPOs. Interesting.
This essay describes a historical cycle that takes place in Thailand, repeating every century or two. Somebody goes out into the forest and meditates like crazy, rediscovers the Buddha's original findings, and starts a monastic forest tradition. Then the local authorities re-domesticate Buddhism, harnessing it for nationalistic and social purposes. After a few generations the forest tradition burns out, leaving behind a state-endorsed religion that discards the investigative orientation on which the forest tradition thrived. A century or so later, somebody else starts the whole thing up again.
As you point out, this is uninteresting.
2) Write your congress people, consumer advocate groups, and manufactureres of IP and try to educate them on the true damage that current IP laws are causing
Marginally more interesting, ultimately probably ineffective. Industries have vastly deeper pockets, and these days, government is for sale.
3) Create and support a viable alternative that will gain momentum from consumer and commercial support that eventually can replace current business models and content-creator demand
Now this struck me as really interesting. The examples you gave, however, are ones that aren't likely to have much impact. I admire the efforts of people cooking up P2P hacks and open source licenses, but I don't think it will significantly change the way business is done.
What really intrigued me, and what I didn't see in your examples, was "a viable alternative...that eventually can replace current business models". Businesses are the loci of social and political power in our society, and if they never take an interest in protecting the creative commons, it ain't gonna happen. Offering business models that serve their interests without obliterating the public noosphere would be a necessary step, I think, to the change you envision. I suspect that many businesses might be hesitant to jump on the RIAA bandwagon of "corporate profits uber alles, human freedom be damned", and might welcome an alternative if one were available.
The GPL offers pretty bleak options to the software business world: sell support and documentation. Cygnus couldn't make it work, and Red Hat isn't having much better luck. Bless them for trying, and I hope things improve, but other companies will not be lining up to enter that business niche. To the business world, there is nothing positive about P2P, besides the chance to sell computer hardware, which was going to happen anyway.
I don't have a good proposal, and I wouldn't expect you to have one either, but I think the general idea of "let's make it worth the business world's while to protect the public noosphere" is a good direction in which to head.
Cancun
1609 Concord St
Framingham, MA 01701-3532
(508)877-8808
http://www.baloncito.com/cancun/
If you're familiar with northern Framingham, this is in the Saxonville area, across the street from the mill building. There is a description of the atmosphere of the place in the last entry of my journal.
There is other software. Your cellphone and your microwave and your laser printer all have processors in them, and somebody has to write code for them. That business (embedded systems) is also in healthy shape. Not growing by leaps and bounds, not vacuuming up every last resume or recent grad, but not about to fall over and disappear either.
There are lots of businesses and business niches that involve software development. There are even still some businesses paying people to develop websites. And for all the sufferings of unemployed sysadmins, there are still people being paid for sysadmin work out there.
Everybody got burned by the dot-bomb. For a couple of years, businesses were so hungry that they'd hire anybody who could write three lines of Perl and give them a corner office and big stock options. That was an unstable situation and there has been a backlash.
If you ask, "is the industry dying?", there will always be an authoritative idiot saying yes. The more important long-term question is, "could this kind of work hold your interest for three or four decades?", so think about that and plan accordingly.
These guys were poking around with some genuinely interesting ideas. Their idea was that if you relaxed the requirements on manufacturing quality, you could make nodes that were super-cheap with a modest (but today-considered-unacceptable) failure rate. They set forth a collection of programming axioms that treated a sea-of-nodes as a continuous computational "gunk". Very cool stuff.
The big surprises aren't surprising with two weeks of hindsight: Iraqi civilians aren't jumping for joy at our arrival, because they got bit last time and they don't trust us to finish the job this time. Are there strategic simulations for the top brass and the administration? A good simulation can dispel your assumptions and delusions, and the planners could have benefitted from some of that a month ago.
Stupid question: Is DistribFold the same group as Folding@Home? I have been running the FAH client for a while now, on and off. I'd switch, if I had reason to think that DistribFold will accomplish more good humanitarian stuff.
If I ran the zoo, they'd be making a Protector movie first, and THEN a Ringworld movie. Especially with all the CG stuff they can do these days -- Pstthpok would be a MUCH better use of that stuff than Jar-Jar Binks.
More a rant than a question I guess. Anyway I'll join the hundreds of people here in thanking you for many pleasant thought-filled hours in my childhood.
Yup, and there's Docbook. I've used Docbook to make nice-enough looking documents but I've never quite been able to get MathML to behave well. It seems that MathML is continuing to evolve, and some of its output looks as pretty as LaTeX now. (I think they use TeX as a step in the rendering process, so that makes sense.)
This might argue for something like making the ebook format a gzipped collection of HTML pages. I really like how pdflatex documents look; latex2html output never looks that good. Certainly one would want an ebook to look as good as possible.
Maybe the open-source ebook reader could just accept gzipped LaTeX as input, and render the output in whatever form the (human) reader wishes.
This is a nice idea. These days I find myself relying more and more heavily on PDFs, because (1) electronic searching is a huge win, (2) lots fit on my laptop's hard disk, and (3) if I really want a paper copy, I can print it, or better yet, I can copy a small range of pages (which I do pretty often).
PDF is good for that, and pdflatex is wonderful, but Acroread isn't open-source. Adobe could decide to change the format some day, or get rid of the free Acroread download, etc. Something functionally equivalent to Acroread, but as open source, would be a huge win.
The big thing to do is to select or define the file format. Then it will be relatively straightforward to write progressively better readers. The file format should allow capabilities that may not be implemented in early versions of the reader, but would be desirable in the longer term.
There are "Unix philosophy" arguments to be made for using a ASCII-ish file format, or maybe a file format that's a gzip of an ASCII format. That would give lots of opportunities to write "baby readers" (e.g. text only) or do handy text-processing hacks (sed, awk, grep...).
JoSH calculated he'd need 10 Gs of acceleration for 80 seconds. That sounds like a hell of a lot to me, I'm not sure I'd survive it without at least some broken bones. Maybe if you're suspended in a fluid.
I would be inclined to go with a longer track with lower acceleration. The length of the space dock is inversely proportional to the acceleration, and less acceleration is easier on both spacecraft and people.
There's plenty of room in the middle of the Pacific to make a dock just over 1000 miles long, so you'd only have an acceleration of 2G. Or it could be made longer, and with 2G you could put the craft in a more elliptical orbit with a higher perigee. In that case, once you were past the velocity for circular orbit, the track would need to hold the craft down until it got to the end.
Tethers ( 1, 2, 3 ) attached to counterweights can be used to transfer spacecraft from one orbit to another. The first tether has an orbit that skims the atmosphere, where a craft catches and connects to the end of the tether. The craft is lifted into low earth orbit and subsequent tethers help it to reach escape velocity. Using the tethers takes energy out of the orbits of the counterweights, some of which can be put back by using the tethers for descent as well as launch.
J. Storrs-Hall (once moderator of sci.nanotech) envisioned a space dock, a linear motor suspended 100 km above the ground that accelerates spacecraft to an elliptical orbit. He computes an amortized cost of reaching low earth orbit of 42 cents per kilogram. From the elliptical orbit, it's a relatively small safe step to escape velocity.
A space elevator ( 1, 2 ) is an excellent long-term solution. A cable is hung from a weight in geosynchronous orbit, reaching down to the Earth's surface. The elevator climbs the cable, carrying a craft. When it reaches GEO, the craft detaches and spends only a little fuel getting to escape velocity.
Tethers and the space elevator require novel materials for strong cables, probably using carbon nanotubes. The frame to hold up the space dock is in compression, and something we could build with little or no advance in material science. Any of these alternatives would be vastly cheaper and vastly safer than putting human lives on the noses of fuel tanks subjected to unreasonable speeds and stresses.
Mea culpa, I read too quickly. That's 10 Gs for 80 seconds.
Build a straight track 300 km long and put it 100 km above the ground, above almost all of the atmosphere. Make the track a linear motor. Use an elevator to get your ship up to one end of the track. Accelerate at 10 Gs for about 10 seconds. Poof, you're in orbit. Now it's relatively easy and cheap to leave orbit and go elsewhere.
When JoSH wrote up the idea in March 2000, he estimated that the price to put a kilogram in orbit would be 42 cents, once all the costs had been amortized. And the cost of working spacecraft probably shrinks a lot.
Apparently, lots of places.
This is ABSOLUTELY TRUE. The Internet has been eating amateur radio's mindshare lunch. The demographics of ham radio has been steadily moving toward the elderly end of the curve.
One of the original functions of ham radio was to provide a venue for communication innovation. I would love to see this function find its rebirth in growing 802.11 connectivity. Maybe hams can build the big Wifi blanket that everybody talks about. It would also line up with the ham charter to provide emergency communications.
What would really be interesting would be to see hams go in novel directions of radio experiments: things like antennas even more interesting than the Pringle can, and different modulation schemes... lots of interesting possibilities.
Stallman scenario: Everybody has an open, widely-capable 3D printer. There is an abundance of public-domain (or open-sourced) designs available for daily necessities. Any printer can make another printer. People can sell fancy new designs, but any design eventually leaks into the public domain.
Disney scenario: Everybody has a printer, but each printer has a secure microcontroller that allows big design studios to SSH their designs into your printer without you seeing the designs. The secure microcontroller cannot be duplicated by the printer, so one printer can't make another. The big studios jealously control their digitally-signed designs and don't allow Joe Luser to create designs (he doesn't have the private key to sign them, so the printer rejects them). This dead-end lasts until a studio employee leaks enough information to break the monopoly.
Mixed scenario: There are multiple printers out there, some locked and some open. The design studios are madly trying to criminalize "unauthorized" design work, and get consumers to buy locked printers. The EFF and the Green Party try to promote open printers, but nobody can hear them in the commercial din.
I would expect that as 3D printers enter the home in large numbers, we'll start out in the mixed scenario and then drift toward one of the extremes. Personally I'm hoping for the Stallman scenario.
Something like this could actually be very educational. I remember having gobs of fun with a KIM-1 about twenty years ago, and learning a lot. And a friend built a custom Z80 box with 16 LEDs for address and 8 more for data, and toggle switches to write his programs into SRAM, which he operated with ninja-like agility.
These days, the right way to do it would be to write a simulation with a GUI. If you really did it with hardware, people couldn't download it. But in fairness to your original idea, the GUI would need to have an antique radio theme. For instance, I got your speed pot right here. (That's actually the face of the shortwave that sat in our kitchen throughout my childhood.)
Feudalism is a logical consequence of agriculture, but agriculture only goes back about 15,000 years. Human existence goes back something like 100,000 years, and during most of that time, we were hunter-gatherers. Brin's percentage should be 14.44.
The lives of hunter-gatherers were actually pretty sweet. A big farm demands constant work from everybody and you end up with dreary work ethics. Hunting and gathering leave a lot of free time, so you paint the insides of caves, play tunes on primitive instruments, and loaf.
We really need a literature that revels in the glories of hunter-gatherer societies. The closest we have right now are "Quest for Fire" and "Clan of the Cave Bear". Hey you authors, get to work.