From the article and video, I can't figure out what they did. I can think of several useful ways that robots might interact in a network, though.
The first one is to exchange geography. As robots move around, they build maps of their environment. Passing map data around, so that what one robot has mapped, the others can know about, is an obvious feature. DoD is probably funding that now.
Mapping can include transient features - locations of obstacles, areas of heavy traffic, locations of people, locations of movable objects. That's an obvious extension.
Then it starts to get interesting. Visual object recognition is starting to work. It will work better with databases of known objects. That's information robots can usefully share. Object identification has to be viewed as statistical, not definitive, but that's what machine learning and planning under uncertainty are for.
Robot networking may work something like Facebook "check-ins". When a robot is going someplace, a reasonable thing to do is to query for check-ins from other robots that have been there. It's going to be amusing when cleaning robots network. ("Room 432: probability of mess on floor 62%".)
Netnews, or USENET, has that property. Netnews really does interpret censorship as failure and routes around it.
That remark was originally made about USENET, during an episode in the 1980s when Stanford's IT department tried to censor "rec.humor.funny". Whenever two USENET peers connect, each gets any messages the other doesn't already have. Any messages that are censored across some links will be efficiently restored if there's any uncensored link. Even a low-bandwidth uncensored link is sufficient if the number of censored messages is small.
In the Stanford case, while the main USENET feed was censored, a few departments had machines with dial-up USENET connections. That was enough to automatically circumvent the censorship.
Something length-limited, like SMS messages, over a USENET infrastructure could be useful to have around.
In 1957, a major effort, organized by MIT, was made to revise the teaching of high school physics. This resulted in the PSSC Physics curriculum. Top physicists were involved, including Hans Bethe and I.I. Rabi, both Nobel prize winners who'd worked on the atomic bomb program.
That program focused on experiments, collecting data, analyzing it, and comparing it with theory. Here's some of the lab equipment. It's not elaborate; the original equipment was mostly wooden.
This was acknowledged to be a very good curriculum, but a lot of work for teachers. Schools seemed to have backed away from it by the early 1970s.
The big mistake was not making mobile IP devices IPv6 from the beginning. Even if they had to go through a NAT at the telco. Most of the growth is in mobile devices.
Fortunately, most mobile devices respond to updates pushed from the carrier. So mobile carriers need to be encouraged to implement that transition. Carriers are in a good position for this, since they control both ends of the air link. Some of this must be happening already.
Let's see, statutory minimum $500 damages in California for commercial use of your image without permission, times number of women in California on Facebook...
Just put up local cell phone nodes as part of the prison telephone system. Have local cells for GSM, Sprint, and Verizon. Route calls through the usual prison phone monitoring system, with the canned outgoing message "This call is from XXX prison". Sell phones in the commissary.
Prisons in urban areas might have some trouble with getting outside phones on their local cell, but most of the big prisons are in isolated areas.
Mobile robots just aren't very good yet. But progress, after decades of frustration, is now rapid. Willow Garage is making real progress. Their mobile robot can already fold towels, starting from a pile of randomly placed towels. When it can change a bed, they'll have something useful.
My guess is that the killer app for this will be a mobile robot for hotels that can clean a room and reset it for the next occupant. Give this ten years.
The 2009 effort was embarrassing. They built a low-slung vehicle powered by a steam turbine, designed to travel only in a straight line, and took it to the Bonneville Salt Flats. And they went 148mph.
That's pathetic. A sizable number of street-legal cars and motorcycles can do that. All Indy, F1, and NASCAR cars can do far better. The current land speed record for a wheel-driven vehicle is 416mph. (Jet cars running on wheels have exceeded Mach 1, but those are really aircraft flying at a very low altitude.)
I'm puzzled by the market cap of Apple being ~$0.3T... when the company never issues dividends.
Right. The value of a stock is the present value of future dividends. (Maybe adjusted for stock buybacks.)
IBM pays dividends. Microsoft pays dividends. Disney pays dividends. Companies which pay diividends historically have a higher return than those which don't. Companies in their startup phase usually don't pay dividends. Apple is an old company, now 35 years old, and well past that point.
There's investor pressure on Google to pay a dividend. Google's growth phase is over. Their stock peaked in 2007. They're a mature company. It's time to start paying the stockholders back. Especially since Google is a one-product company. (97% of Google revenue is from search ads and AdSense ads. No other Google product has ever produced significant revenue.)
Being a cool company isn't enough. If you'd bought Playboy at the IPO, and sold when Hefner took the company private last month, you'd have lost 75%. Before inflation adjustment.
That's called a "rockoon". First tried in 1949. Works OK, payload rather limited.
Back in 2004, JP Aerospace was pushing the idea of a permanent station at the edge of space which was really a balloon.They're still sending up balloons, but they're basically repeating what the USAF did in the late 1940s.
Accelerating a fragile airship to orbital velocity at the edge of the atmosphere is a fantasy. If there's enough air to get lift, there's enough air to get drag.
This claim by Google was to divert attention from the big story, which is that Google web results are full of spam, and Google's business model depends on that. When organic search works right and takes the user where they want to go, the search engine makes no money. That's what the panel at Big Think was supposed to be about. The press has picked up on this, and Google is trying to keep it from becoming the main story.
"Google makes almost a third of its money from Adsense ads. Taking those adsense spam sites off the search results will cost Google some revenue. If it is 1% of their Adsense revenue, that is $25 million a quarter or $100 million/year. That's nothing to sneeze at. The dollar amount could be much higher."
"Most likely the fixes will only be forthcoming if and when they start to lose searchers and/or people stop clicking on the ads. Which doesn't seem to be happening. According to a Media Post article this week on U.S. paid search budgets (which was quoting from the "Efficient Frontier Q4 2010 U.S. Digital Marketing Performance Report"), paid clicks on Google rose 8% year-on-year."
It's not a technical problem. Search spam can be stopped. (Blekko does it, and we (SiteTruth) do it.) Nor are third-party ads on other sites essential to running a search engine. Most of the revenue comes from ads on the search pages themselves. But Google is addicted to that extra revenue from junk AdSense pages, and has created and financed a whole ecosystem of crap.
Bing could potentially do better than Google. Bing doesn't get AdSense revenue, so they don't have Google's business model problem. Bing doesn't, though. Bing still sends users to sites full of Google AdSense ads, and their Bing Places entries have phony business entries. Bing has a web spam problem too, but it's not making them any money.
Arthur C. Clarke, who'd been pushing space travel for decades via the British Interplanetary Society and his SF works, was interviewed during the runup to one of the Apollo launches. He said "If we'd have known this was going to cost twenty billion dollars, we would have given up and gone home." Before Sputnik, space travel was a hobbyist thing.
Chemical rockets to oribt just barely work. Most of the mass is fuel. For a single-stage-to-orbit rocket, with the fuels with the best possible energy density (LOH and LOX), 97% of launch weight must be fuel. With two stages, it gets better, but not much better. So rocketry is about weight reduction, which is why everything is so fragile and failure rates are so high. If the mass ratio were better, rockets would be built with aircraft-type weight budgets and would work much more reliably. But, launching from a 1G planet, we're stuck with those numbers. That's why Richard van der Riet Wooley, Astronomer Royal in the 1950s, said "Space travel is utter bilge".
Many alternatives have been tried. Launching from an aircraft works; Pegasus is launched that way, as is the Virgin craft. But it's not a big win. Big guns? Feasible, but only for stuff that can handle a few hundred Gs, like water or air shipments.
Takeoff with a suborbital spaceplane? That was Ronald Reagan's idea in the 1980s. Ben Rich, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works and designer of the SR-71 propulsion system, decided that Lockheed wouldn't bid on that. The materials problem was too hard. "We used titanium. You know something stronger?".
Atomic rockets are feasible, and have been ground-tested. Early plans for Apollo had a nuclear powered second stage and a Nuclear Assembly Building at Canaveral. It's messy, but it would work. The cost back then was calculated as half a human life per launch from cancer, amortized over a large population. That might not stop China.
Fusion would be great if we could do fusion power. (The "helium-3" enthusiasts tend to gloss over that fact. He3 fusion is harder than Dt-Dt fusion, which we can't do either.)
Launch lasers are a neat idea, but it takes a gigawatt to launch a metric ton. That's not impossible; one could in theory have a huge collection of lasers at Mojave, and, launching late at night, could use all 6GW from Hoover Dam, plus extra power brought in from the LA area. The Apollo lunar module was about 10 metric tons. The biggest continuous laser ever built, though, produced a megawatt for 70 seconds, So we need 4 more orders of magnitude, or 10,000 such lasers, to do a launch.
I recently had this discussion with someone who's entering the X-Prize competition. He's a bright young guy with an interest in space. But he can't see any new ideas working, other than even more clever weight reduction.
We must occasionally go back and examine what people said and wrote before they achieved power. Apple, 1984:
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology - where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
One site that stayed up through all this was the Library of Alexandria, which, among other things, hosts a copy of the Internet Archive. They now have photos up of their supporters surrounding the Library to protect it.
They stayed up because they have a direct connection to the 10Gb/s FLAG, the Fiber Optic Around the Globe link. That has a cable landing at Alexandria, and the Library is tied in there, without going through a local ISP.
Date: 15-Jul-83 14:03:40-PDT From: jbn@FORD-WDL1.ARPA Subject: Outstanding TOPS-20 TCP bug remains in v5.2 To: ICCB@BBN-UNIX.ARPA, Paetzold@DEC-MARLBORO.ARPA, CLynn@BBNA.ARPA, Tappan@BBNA.ARPA<br/> Cc: MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA
For some months now, we have observed that the BBN TOPS-20 implementation of TCP does not perform the TCP close handshake properly. This problem has been documented and reported to the appropriate people as shown below.
Crispin at SU-SCORE has just installed a new TOPS-20 monitor (5.2) and this outstanding problem has NOT been fixed.
The effect of this problem is that when a system which correctly performs the handshake is talking to a noncomplying TOPS-20, and the TCP close is initiated from the non-TOPS-20 end, the non-TOPS-20 end will hang in the close and eventually time out. This tends to cause STOR operations in FTP to TOPS-20 sites to fail. It also has the annoying property for us that every time we get mail from a TOPS-20 site, our TCP logs a protocol violation.
Larson at SRI has located the defective code in TOPS-20 as shown below. The messages below are the previous ones relating to this problem.
As we at Ford Aerospace do not run any TOPS-20 systems, we do not directly have this problem, but our users who need to communicate with some of the TOPS-20 sites find this a continual annoyance. Because of the former importance of TOPS-20 in the ARPANET community, there has been an informal tradition that the TOPS-20 implementation has been considered the ``standard'' with which others were expected to interoperate. For this reason, it appears that considerable effort has been expended in some of the newer implementations (such as the 4.2BSD systems) to interoperate with TOPS-20 despite this problem. (Elaborate FTP strategies regarding data connection establishment are a means of getting around this problem).
Other implementors should be aware of this problem so that such wasted effort can be avoided.
John Nagle Ford Aerospace and Communications Corp.
This was back when Berkeley's TCP implementation was new and barely working. (Yes, kiddies, TCP/IP did not come from Berkeley.)
Ever wonder why FTP uses a different data connection port for each transfer? That's how it started.
"He's an old hippie, and he don't know what to do"
on
Do Tools Ever 'Die?'
·
· Score: 1
Kevin Kelly?
"He's an old hippie, and he don't know what to do." He spoke at TechShop recently, promoting his book "What Technology Wants". His talk was more clueless than I'd expected. Technology does have imperatives, as does capitalism, and their interaction is very important. But he doesn't go there. He mostly talked along the lines of "technology is what you didn't have as a kid". Nostalgia, in other words.
There's a solid Internet connection still open into Egypt, with substantial bandwidth. It's probably better if I don't give the details in an open forum.
The US toll industry needs to standardize on one national transponder. There's a multi-state one for trucks, but the California system pre-dates it and isn't compatible.
Does the EU have a EU-wide toll device? At least the Schengen Area should have one.
"Near-field" isn't the issue. It's that Apple wants to be a payment processor, handling payments through iTunes and skimming off part of the transaction.
We need a crackdown on payment systems run by non-banks. PayPal is generally agreed to be terrible at handling problems and acts irresponsibly with the money of others. Most of PayPal's competitors are worse. Payment systems need to be run only by companies subject to regulation as banks.
Slashdot Mirror
They have a microcell, one about the same size as everybody else's microcells. Big deal.
From the article and video, I can't figure out what they did. I can think of several useful ways that robots might interact in a network, though.
The first one is to exchange geography. As robots move around, they build maps of their environment. Passing map data around, so that what one robot has mapped, the others can know about, is an obvious feature. DoD is probably funding that now.
Mapping can include transient features - locations of obstacles, areas of heavy traffic, locations of people, locations of movable objects. That's an obvious extension.
Then it starts to get interesting. Visual object recognition is starting to work. It will work better with databases of known objects. That's information robots can usefully share. Object identification has to be viewed as statistical, not definitive, but that's what machine learning and planning under uncertainty are for.
Robot networking may work something like Facebook "check-ins". When a robot is going someplace, a reasonable thing to do is to query for check-ins from other robots that have been there. It's going to be amusing when cleaning robots network. ("Room 432: probability of mess on floor 62%".)
Netnews, or USENET, has that property. Netnews really does interpret censorship as failure and routes around it.
That remark was originally made about USENET, during an episode in the 1980s when Stanford's IT department tried to censor "rec.humor.funny". Whenever two USENET peers connect, each gets any messages the other doesn't already have. Any messages that are censored across some links will be efficiently restored if there's any uncensored link. Even a low-bandwidth uncensored link is sufficient if the number of censored messages is small.
In the Stanford case, while the main USENET feed was censored, a few departments had machines with dial-up USENET connections. That was enough to automatically circumvent the censorship.
Something length-limited, like SMS messages, over a USENET infrastructure could be useful to have around.
Just make sure that when the CEO has trouble with his laptop, he has to call the call center in Mumbai.
In 1957, a major effort, organized by MIT, was made to revise the teaching of high school physics. This resulted in the PSSC Physics curriculum. Top physicists were involved, including Hans Bethe and I.I. Rabi, both Nobel prize winners who'd worked on the atomic bomb program.
That program focused on experiments, collecting data, analyzing it, and comparing it with theory. Here's some of the lab equipment. It's not elaborate; the original equipment was mostly wooden.
This was acknowledged to be a very good curriculum, but a lot of work for teachers. Schools seemed to have backed away from it by the early 1970s.
That seems to be where things took a wrong turn.
It worked, though. It diverted attention from Microsoft's accusation that Google profits from search spam.
The big mistake was not making mobile IP devices IPv6 from the beginning. Even if they had to go through a NAT at the telco. Most of the growth is in mobile devices.
Fortunately, most mobile devices respond to updates pushed from the carrier. So mobile carriers need to be encouraged to implement that transition. Carriers are in a good position for this, since they control both ends of the air link. Some of this must be happening already.
Let's see, statutory minimum $500 damages in California for commercial use of your image without permission, times number of women in California on Facebook...
Just put up local cell phone nodes as part of the prison telephone system. Have local cells for GSM, Sprint, and Verizon. Route calls through the usual prison phone monitoring system, with the canned outgoing message "This call is from XXX prison". Sell phones in the commissary.
Prisons in urban areas might have some trouble with getting outside phones on their local cell, but most of the big prisons are in isolated areas.
Mobile robots just aren't very good yet. But progress, after decades of frustration, is now rapid. Willow Garage is making real progress. Their mobile robot can already fold towels, starting from a pile of randomly placed towels. When it can change a bed, they'll have something useful.
My guess is that the killer app for this will be a mobile robot for hotels that can clean a room and reset it for the next occupant. Give this ten years.
The 2009 effort was embarrassing. They built a low-slung vehicle powered by a steam turbine, designed to travel only in a straight line, and took it to the Bonneville Salt Flats. And they went 148mph.
That's pathetic. A sizable number of street-legal cars and motorcycles can do that. All Indy, F1, and NASCAR cars can do far better. The current land speed record for a wheel-driven vehicle is 416mph. (Jet cars running on wheels have exceeded Mach 1, but those are really aircraft flying at a very low altitude.)
Good luck with that if you should ever get popular enough to count.
Good point. That's the next big trend - video spam. Aol and Demand Media are pushing that hard. Worse, they can usually host their junk on YouTube.
I'm puzzled by the market cap of Apple being ~$0.3T ... when the company never issues dividends.
Right. The value of a stock is the present value of future dividends. (Maybe adjusted for stock buybacks.)
IBM pays dividends. Microsoft pays dividends. Disney pays dividends. Companies which pay diividends historically have a higher return than those which don't. Companies in their startup phase usually don't pay dividends. Apple is an old company, now 35 years old, and well past that point.
There's investor pressure on Google to pay a dividend. Google's growth phase is over. Their stock peaked in 2007. They're a mature company. It's time to start paying the stockholders back. Especially since Google is a one-product company. (97% of Google revenue is from search ads and AdSense ads. No other Google product has ever produced significant revenue.)
Being a cool company isn't enough. If you'd bought Playboy at the IPO, and sold when Hefner took the company private last month, you'd have lost 75%. Before inflation adjustment.
That's called a "rockoon". First tried in 1949. Works OK, payload rather limited.
Back in 2004, JP Aerospace was pushing the idea of a permanent station at the edge of space which was really a balloon.They're still sending up balloons, but they're basically repeating what the USAF did in the late 1940s.
Accelerating a fragile airship to orbital velocity at the edge of the atmosphere is a fantasy. If there's enough air to get lift, there's enough air to get drag.
"Chrome apps have an authentication and billing API that lets developers charge per access, by time or per install."
Right. Pay per view web pages.
Remember what happened last time.
This claim by Google was to divert attention from the big story, which is that Google web results are full of spam, and Google's business model depends on that. When organic search works right and takes the user where they want to go, the search engine makes no money. That's what the panel at Big Think was supposed to be about. The press has picked up on this, and Google is trying to keep it from becoming the main story.
"Google makes almost a third of its money from Adsense ads. Taking those adsense spam sites off the search results will cost Google some revenue. If it is 1% of their Adsense revenue, that is $25 million a quarter or $100 million/year. That's nothing to sneeze at. The dollar amount could be much higher."
"Most likely the fixes will only be forthcoming if and when they start to lose searchers and/or people stop clicking on the ads. Which doesn't seem to be happening. According to a Media Post article this week on U.S. paid search budgets (which was quoting from the "Efficient Frontier Q4 2010 U.S. Digital Marketing Performance Report"), paid clicks on Google rose 8% year-on-year."
It's not a technical problem. Search spam can be stopped. (Blekko does it, and we (SiteTruth) do it.) Nor are third-party ads on other sites essential to running a search engine. Most of the revenue comes from ads on the search pages themselves. But Google is addicted to that extra revenue from junk AdSense pages, and has created and financed a whole ecosystem of crap.
Bing could potentially do better than Google. Bing doesn't get AdSense revenue, so they don't have Google's business model problem. Bing doesn't, though. Bing still sends users to sites full of Google AdSense ads, and their Bing Places entries have phony business entries. Bing has a web spam problem too, but it's not making them any money.
Arthur C. Clarke, who'd been pushing space travel for decades via the British Interplanetary Society and his SF works, was interviewed during the runup to one of the Apollo launches. He said "If we'd have known this was going to cost twenty billion dollars, we would have given up and gone home." Before Sputnik, space travel was a hobbyist thing.
Chemical rockets to oribt just barely work. Most of the mass is fuel. For a single-stage-to-orbit rocket, with the fuels with the best possible energy density (LOH and LOX), 97% of launch weight must be fuel. With two stages, it gets better, but not much better. So rocketry is about weight reduction, which is why everything is so fragile and failure rates are so high. If the mass ratio were better, rockets would be built with aircraft-type weight budgets and would work much more reliably. But, launching from a 1G planet, we're stuck with those numbers. That's why Richard van der Riet Wooley, Astronomer Royal in the 1950s, said "Space travel is utter bilge".
Many alternatives have been tried. Launching from an aircraft works; Pegasus is launched that way, as is the Virgin craft. But it's not a big win. Big guns? Feasible, but only for stuff that can handle a few hundred Gs, like water or air shipments.
Takeoff with a suborbital spaceplane? That was Ronald Reagan's idea in the 1980s. Ben Rich, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works and designer of the SR-71 propulsion system, decided that Lockheed wouldn't bid on that. The materials problem was too hard. "We used titanium. You know something stronger?".
Atomic rockets are feasible, and have been ground-tested. Early plans for Apollo had a nuclear powered second stage and a Nuclear Assembly Building at Canaveral. It's messy, but it would work. The cost back then was calculated as half a human life per launch from cancer, amortized over a large population. That might not stop China.
Fusion would be great if we could do fusion power. (The "helium-3" enthusiasts tend to gloss over that fact. He3 fusion is harder than Dt-Dt fusion, which we can't do either.)
Launch lasers are a neat idea, but it takes a gigawatt to launch a metric ton. That's not impossible; one could in theory have a huge collection of lasers at Mojave, and, launching late at night, could use all 6GW from Hoover Dam, plus extra power brought in from the LA area. The Apollo lunar module was about 10 metric tons. The biggest continuous laser ever built, though, produced a megawatt for 70 seconds, So we need 4 more orders of magnitude, or 10,000 such lasers, to do a launch.
I recently had this discussion with someone who's entering the X-Prize competition. He's a bright young guy with an interest in space. But he can't see any new ideas working, other than even more clever weight reduction.
We must occasionally go back and examine what people said and wrote before they achieved power. Apple, 1984:
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology - where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
One site that stayed up through all this was the Library of Alexandria, which, among other things, hosts a copy of the Internet Archive. They now have photos up of their supporters surrounding the Library to protect it.
They stayed up because they have a direct connection to the 10Gb/s FLAG, the Fiber Optic Around the Globe link. That has a cable landing at Alexandria, and the Library is tied in there, without going through a local ISP.
The US version is supposed to ship this month. The developer kit is $149, and $179 with a JTAG interface (recommended for development.)
The production version will probably be cheaper.
Hopefully they've fixed the overheating problem they had with their previous GuruPlug.
Back in 1983, I was at "jbn@Ford-wdl1.ARPA":
This was back when Berkeley's TCP implementation was new and barely working. (Yes, kiddies, TCP/IP did not come from Berkeley.) Ever wonder why FTP uses a different data connection port for each transfer? That's how it started.
Kevin Kelly? "He's an old hippie, and he don't know what to do." He spoke at TechShop recently, promoting his book "What Technology Wants". His talk was more clueless than I'd expected. Technology does have imperatives, as does capitalism, and their interaction is very important. But he doesn't go there. He mostly talked along the lines of "technology is what you didn't have as a kid". Nostalgia, in other words.
There's a solid Internet connection still open into Egypt, with substantial bandwidth. It's probably better if I don't give the details in an open forum.
The US toll industry needs to standardize on one national transponder. There's a multi-state one for trucks, but the California system pre-dates it and isn't compatible.
Does the EU have a EU-wide toll device? At least the Schengen Area should have one.
"Near-field" isn't the issue. It's that Apple wants to be a payment processor, handling payments through iTunes and skimming off part of the transaction.
We need a crackdown on payment systems run by non-banks. PayPal is generally agreed to be terrible at handling problems and acts irresponsibly with the money of others. Most of PayPal's competitors are worse. Payment systems need to be run only by companies subject to regulation as banks.