Checking my math - it's hooey, of course. A lunar synchronous orbit is only a little more than twice the radius of a geosynchronous orbit. If we can build a cable 42,000 km long, we can build one 88,000 km in a lower gravity field and moving slower. Of course, if two guys can fly into lunar orbit using nothing but a single stage LEM, it isn't obvious we need a space elevator on the Moon.
The numbers for Mars might be the right trade-off. A synchronous orbit on Mars has less than half the radius as on Earth. Surface gravity is also under half, but not so low that reaching orbit is otherwise trivial. The atmosphere is down around 1% of Earth's. Of course, there is the little issue of Phobos, orbiting at lower than synchronous altitude...
The mechanical requirements for a gondola ride have been worked out already (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyway_(Disney)). Turning the cable into a loop is a clever idea that provides a route down as well as up, for instance.
As somebody else said, even if such a technology never proves practical on Earth, it certainly might be on other planets. Mars would be easier, for instance - less gravity, similar orbital period, thinner atmosphere.
The issue with building a geosynchronous elevator on the Moon is that it is tidally locked with the Earth (more or less). In effect, the Earth itself is in selenosynchronous orbit, so the cable would reach all the way back to Earth. It is even more unlikely that such a long cable could be built, but it wouldn't have to point toward the Earth, of course. There are many other moons in our solar system (http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/our_solar_system/moons_table.html) and others appear better suited for an elevator. The Galilean moons of Jupiter, for instance, or Titan around Saturn, all have rotational periods shorter than our Moon's, some just a few days.
Or around asteroids (think mining), or untethered cable structures in orbit about any of these. There are good reasons to pursue the technology even if the original concept proves unworkable when the engineering is looked at in detail. Simply failing to pursue new ideas is the only way to guarantee they'll never be realized.
A more productive conversation would result - from the point of view of everybody - if people would take the time to click on the links in the posts. They clearly distinguish between the data products used for drawing long term conclusions and the "quick look" data that are at fault here. The long term trends require careful calibration. Presumably this calibration includes comparisons with data from different sensors, different spacecraft, and perhaps even ground-based sensors and reports.
In short, this report is evidence of how carefully the facts are being checked. It supports, rather than undercuts, the long term conclusions.
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Um - this seems more useful for the pirates to use than as a defense against them. An unarmed boat would surrender even faster to a couple of badass buckeroos hovering over the deck carrying automatic weapons and grenades - and pumping a few hundred gallons a minute into the bilge.
I've never read more rank speculation - and here is some more!
Clearly we must coordinate operations with our allies. Just as clearly, however, the only reason for the ballistic missile fleets to be at sea is for them to be carrying out the same mission they have always had - serving as a deterrent. Similarly, any land-based ICBMs the nuclear powers still have on hand from when Ronald Reagan single handedly tore down the Berlin Wall, well, they are still directly or indirectly threatening other countries. Presumably most are still targeted, fueled and ready to go.
For any strategic missile sub to carry out its mission, it must travel quiet. Further, it must travel in a completely unpredictable pattern. One presumes that the Captain's orders rarely consist of specific cruising instructions. These subs are supposed to be hard to find and hard to predict once you do have a point to plot on your own chart (for instance, when the sub sailed in the first place).
The real risk here is not that there may be well-known friendly bits of ocean. The real risk is that a sub's captain would choose to make use of such on a regular basis.
Clearly the demo focuses on children's toys because that is an easy place to start.
Imagine these generalized in various ways (but without breaking the block paradigm). For instance, make them a bit larger and magnetic and the tiles could interact with smart whiteboards. Some interface would allow activating different applications.
How about a groupware UML app that would validate expressions as a work group wrestles with laying out a software architecture? Or a calc B/C app for a high school AP class? Build the periodic table into an app - each tile assumes the correct element as it is laid out. Equations builders for physics and chemistry. These are a natural for languages like LabView that already rely on a block paradigm. Diagramming sentences. Clade diagrams in evolutionary biology.
Many excellent teachers are hampered by bad whiteboard technique. This could dramatically improve cooperative instruction at all levels.
Or simply the next step in the evolution of Magnetic Poetry...
3) standardize voting technology with a paper trail
4) abolish the electoral college
5) double the number of Senators, assigning the 2nd 100 by population
6) term limits for the Supreme Court
#1 encourages third party participation. We should be more scared of single issue voters than of low information voters, hence #2. #3 is instead of my real preference for completely paper ballot technology - screw computers! The electoral college has evolved into a mechanism for the Coke and Pepsi parties to limit their ad buys to markets they deem competitive. The Senate is the most biased of the branches of government - it is atrocious that Wyoming has the same representation as California, with dozens of times as many people. My daughter was born in Wyoming and attends college in California - why should someone in Laramie have vastly more impact on decision making than someone in South Central L.A.? And finally, the key issue of every presidential election is which party gets to cram their extreme Justices down our throats for the next generation. Wouldn't it be better if the key issue was actually some question of public policy?
I had to laugh. I wrote a similar wrapper script for cdrecord. This may say more about mkisofs and the management of recordable media than it does about scripting:-)
This script (well, I broke it into the obvious separate steps of building the ISO image and dumping it to duplicate media) was orchestrated from within a Unix daemon called as a BSD lpd filter. Whatever else it does, lpd serves as a reasonable queuing manager. A humorous but pragmatic choice.
That was an evolution of a system for archiving digital imaging data onto exabyte tapes. The original tape-based system was ported after a few years from SunOS to Solaris, that is, from BSD lpd to Sys-V lpsched. I balked at repeating the port for optical media, very much due to portability issues unrelated to scripting. Scripting is the least of your worries with portability.
The digital archive has long since evolved to a system with a replicated online (hard drive based, that is) architecture. Much more portable (non-boolean, as you say), but certainly not 100%
Booting a computer is almost the definition of non-portable. Not sure what you mean by a naked box, but there are all the device drivers to load, clocks to set, file systems to mount, services to start. These are precisely the things that vary from one flavor of Unix (or Linux) to another. The script itself may be very portable, but the underlying description of the resources - or even the description of this description - will not be portable
I'm a bit at a loss for why my message has been labeled flamebait:-) These assertions seem unremarkable. Personally, I'm all for writing portable code, whether in an interpreted or compiled context. But the real challenge to portability lies in the libraries you call (the OS itself for shell scripts), not in the language you write the code in.
As usual, it comes down to use cases. Describe the useful things that are done. One might choose to write a shell script to perform some pure mathematical utility function, but this certainly isn't the usual role of such scripts. Rather, one uses a shell script when accessing files (logs, etc.) on the disk, or when opening sockets, or when spawning host level commands. Other device level access is often required, for instance, a local or UTC clock might be consulted, requiring knowledge of timezones. All of these are very dependent on whether the script is running under a BSD or Sys-V flavored OS (assuming Unix, of course), or even on micro-versioning of specific OSes.
The question of complexity is also not some challenge to find a lengthy script, but rather a statement of the inherent design-level complexity of the application.
The OTHER point everybody is missing is that wikipedia is likely to be more trustworthy on such issues than the corporate media. Some pundit asserts a completely unsubstantiated interpretation of the facts, and not only does this dominate the current news cycle as it gets repeated over-and-over by "reporters" who are too lazy to check the facts or their interpretation, and not only does the same vapid nonsense get dredged up whenever the story pops to the top of future news cycles, but it back propagates to revise what the facts were in the first place. At least wikipedia has a mechanism for attempting to make corrections - for instance, has anybody edited the page to point to this slashdot thread?
There is no such thing as the "Theory of Evolution". Rather the evidence for evolution having occurred in the past and ongoing today is vast and undeniable. The theory here is Natural Selection. The word "theory" also doesn't mean what people think it does. A theory is not a synonym for "hypothesis", but rather a complete and coherent explanation of all aspects of the available data that can be used to make predictions about the world. Natural Selection is the glue that ties our understanding of biology together. To reject Natural Selection is reject everything we know about the world around us.
They make a lot of it having only three actuators, but anybody with a LEGO Mindstorm knows that's the minimum you need. Two to provide propulsion and differential steering (or one for propulsion and one to turn the wheels) plus a third to actually do something when you get there. This applies even for robots without wheels: http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2007/12/mindstormsnxtspike.jpg
Well, the real mark of success is when the paper is recognized merely by the cite, e.g., "Shannon, 1948".
If significant metadata have to be added to whatever the web of trust technology, one suspects a successful result will more closely resemble slashdot, rather than a formal ontology. It's hard enough to get the computer scientists who are building a knowledgebase as a step toward writing their own paper to enter information into the required ontology:-)
They might be missing something in the fundamental architecture. The point of the exercise is to diminish the load on the liver to permit it to heal (at least to gain time). By tapping into the circulatory system at some point remote from the ailing organ, they are relying on matching the impedance (as it were) of the entire somatic beast. If, instead, they more closely seek to localize the interface and to mimic the equilibrium load on the natural organ, the liver may be given more of a respite.
As with other differential rate equations, if the liver can heal just a little bit faster - perhaps even if the patient on the whole becomes a little bit sicker - the net gain may be very significant.
In general, the goal must be to develop the capability of providing the full functionality of each organ in enough fidelity to freely swap artificial life support in and out at will. As such, the interfaces must be honored in full detail. It isn't enough to imitate a liver, one seeks to replicate a liver, including its natural configuration within the human system architecture.
There's no information about the interface of this device to the patient. Blood flow to the liver is rather unique (http://biology.about.com/library/organs/bldigestliver.htm), with 3/4 of its bloodflow coming from the portal vein and 1/4 from the hepatic artery. The blood mixes before being processed by the liver.
Is the device similarly fed by both arterial and venous sources? How is the pressure compensated? Where is the output reintroduced? Does the device run in parallel to the natural liver or in series? If the latter, which receives the blood first? Does it attempt to handle any of the other numerous functions of the liver such as the creation of bile or lymph?
Yes, that is a more precise description. The main point I was making, however, is that the web of trust is currently between the referees and the editors on the one hand, and the editors (forwarding the referee's comments) and the authors on the other. Fairly often referees wave anonymity, but that is their choice, not the editors. As you say, referees have to know the identity of the authors, although this knowledge can be abused.
...the real question is whether what comes after Windows will be open source.
Microsoft is likely to outlive Windows, one way or another. Future computers will not resemble current computers indefinitely, including the operating systems. Thus, Microsoft will have to attempt to lead or follow a post-Windows trend - and likely a post-Linux trend.
Obviously new OSes springing forth from Linux will remain open source. (At least, one can hope.) Will Microsoft, on the other hand, attempt to stay with a closed development model in a post-Windows world?
Any question or assertion about Windows itself is beyond boring.
There have been numerous attempts to redefine peer review to bring it into the 21st century. There will be many more after this effort.
Peer review is typically anonymous. It represents a trust relationship between the editor and the referee, not directly between the author and the reviewer. If the journal - or rather, the editor - is removed from the equation, then some new mechanism is needed. It isn't obvious that the web of trust as described fits the bill, however.
An equivalent to a distributed certificate authority already exists and is widely used as a metric. The only certification that will be believed - even from professional peers - is to demonstrate a need and desire to actually use the results of prior publications. These are denoted (and trusted) by building a chain of publications by tracing back through the references embedded in subsequent publications themselves.
They're charging $25,000 and recruiting from grad students and post-docs? I don't see any mention of scholarships to make this an opportunity based on merit. The students will either need to go into debt (even further) for this unfocused opportunity, or will need to convince some faculty sugar daddy to spend grant funds. Meanwhile, the curriculum is too general to align with very many dissertation topics in any discipline. Disruptive innovation is all well-and-good, but first you have to disrupt the educational paradigm...
This is basically the same question as Olber's paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olber's_Paradox). In an infinite universe, all lines of sight intersect the surface of a star. The brightness of a stellar photosphere is independent of distance. (It is flux that varies with the inverse square of the distance, not brightness.) The paradox is why the night sky is dark.
Similarly, an infinite universe with any finite fraction of star systems populated by sufficiently long-lived technological civilizations would result in radio waves reaching Earth from every direction. (Of course, unlike starlight, the plethora of signals would have to be disentangled.)
Just as Ted Harrison's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Robert_Harrison) explanation of Olber's Paradox relies on the finite lifetime of stars (originally a notion from Edgar Allan Poe!), so the explanation of Fermi's Paradox keys on the finite lifetime of civilizations. This is, after all, one factor in the Drake equation. The new part here is the recasting of this into a clustering analysis of overlapping light travel time spheres of influence.
1) Astronomical telescopes are designed with the fewest possible optical elements since each surface degrades the image. Such simple telescopes invert the image, http://www.grantvillegazette.com/articles/Seeing_the_Heavens. Astronomers these days will often scribble arrows on the glass of their monitors to indicate which way is North and which way is East. Some cameras even flip the images backwards, not just upside-down.
2) The Moon's orbit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon) is inclined with respect to the Earth's equator. As a result, the illumination of the terminator shifts through a large angle depending on the Moon's declination above or below the equator. Similarly, libration allows observers on Earth to see a few degrees beyond the poles or limb of the Moon.
For 400 years, surely the Moon is one of the first things everybody with a telescope has pointed it at. The difference between Galileo and those before and since is the high quality of the inferences he made from the very limited glimpses he had of the sky. Harriot will remain a footnote because the race to draw the first map is secondary to its scientific interpretation.
At the other end of the human spectrum, many people don't even realize the Moon is visible during the daytime. Their world view simply equates the daylight hours with the Sun and the nighttime hours with the Moon. Even if they do happen to notice the Moon high in the sky before sunset, not a single neuron clicks. A lot of astronomy is possible even without a telescope, cf. Tycho, whose name now graces a most beautiful crater, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/clm_usgs_14.html.
Slashdot Mirror
Checking my math - it's hooey, of course. A lunar synchronous orbit is only a little more than twice the radius of a geosynchronous orbit. If we can build a cable 42,000 km long, we can build one 88,000 km in a lower gravity field and moving slower. Of course, if two guys can fly into lunar orbit using nothing but a single stage LEM, it isn't obvious we need a space elevator on the Moon.
The numbers for Mars might be the right trade-off. A synchronous orbit on Mars has less than half the radius as on Earth. Surface gravity is also under half, but not so low that reaching orbit is otherwise trivial. The atmosphere is down around 1% of Earth's. Of course, there is the little issue of Phobos, orbiting at lower than synchronous altitude...
The mechanical requirements for a gondola ride have been worked out already (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyway_(Disney)). Turning the cable into a loop is a clever idea that provides a route down as well as up, for instance.
As somebody else said, even if such a technology never proves practical on Earth, it certainly might be on other planets. Mars would be easier, for instance - less gravity, similar orbital period, thinner atmosphere.
The issue with building a geosynchronous elevator on the Moon is that it is tidally locked with the Earth (more or less). In effect, the Earth itself is in selenosynchronous orbit, so the cable would reach all the way back to Earth. It is even more unlikely that such a long cable could be built, but it wouldn't have to point toward the Earth, of course. There are many other moons in our solar system (http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/our_solar_system/moons_table.html) and others appear better suited for an elevator. The Galilean moons of Jupiter, for instance, or Titan around Saturn, all have rotational periods shorter than our Moon's, some just a few days.
Or around asteroids (think mining), or untethered cable structures in orbit about any of these. There are good reasons to pursue the technology even if the original concept proves unworkable when the engineering is looked at in detail. Simply failing to pursue new ideas is the only way to guarantee they'll never be realized.
A more productive conversation would result - from the point of view of everybody - if people would take the time to click on the links in the posts. They clearly distinguish between the data products used for drawing long term conclusions and the "quick look" data that are at fault here. The long term trends require careful calibration. Presumably this calibration includes comparisons with data from different sensors, different spacecraft, and perhaps even ground-based sensors and reports.
In short, this report is evidence of how carefully the facts are being checked. It supports, rather than undercuts, the long term conclusions.
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Um - this seems more useful for the pirates to use than as a defense against them. An unarmed boat would surrender even faster to a couple of badass buckeroos hovering over the deck carrying automatic weapons and grenades - and pumping a few hundred gallons a minute into the bilge.
I've never read more rank speculation - and here is some more!
Clearly we must coordinate operations with our allies. Just as clearly, however, the only reason for the ballistic missile fleets to be at sea is for them to be carrying out the same mission they have always had - serving as a deterrent. Similarly, any land-based ICBMs the nuclear powers still have on hand from when Ronald Reagan single handedly tore down the Berlin Wall, well, they are still directly or indirectly threatening other countries. Presumably most are still targeted, fueled and ready to go.
For any strategic missile sub to carry out its mission, it must travel quiet. Further, it must travel in a completely unpredictable pattern. One presumes that the Captain's orders rarely consist of specific cruising instructions. These subs are supposed to be hard to find and hard to predict once you do have a point to plot on your own chart (for instance, when the sub sailed in the first place).
The real risk here is not that there may be well-known friendly bits of ocean. The real risk is that a sub's captain would choose to make use of such on a regular basis.
Clearly the demo focuses on children's toys because that is an easy place to start.
Imagine these generalized in various ways (but without breaking the block paradigm). For instance, make them a bit larger and magnetic and the tiles could interact with smart whiteboards. Some interface would allow activating different applications.
How about a groupware UML app that would validate expressions as a work group wrestles with laying out a software architecture? Or a calc B/C app for a high school AP class? Build the periodic table into an app - each tile assumes the correct element as it is laid out. Equations builders for physics and chemistry. These are a natural for languages like LabView that already rely on a block paradigm. Diagramming sentences. Clade diagrams in evolutionary biology.
Many excellent teachers are hampered by bad whiteboard technique. This could dramatically improve cooperative instruction at all levels.
Or simply the next step in the evolution of Magnetic Poetry...
...as opposed to our currently fixed elections.
1) instant run-off voting
2) require everyone to vote as in Australia
3) standardize voting technology with a paper trail
4) abolish the electoral college
5) double the number of Senators, assigning the 2nd 100 by population
6) term limits for the Supreme Court
#1 encourages third party participation. We should be more scared of single issue voters than of low information voters, hence #2. #3 is instead of my real preference for completely paper ballot technology - screw computers! The electoral college has evolved into a mechanism for the Coke and Pepsi parties to limit their ad buys to markets they deem competitive. The Senate is the most biased of the branches of government - it is atrocious that Wyoming has the same representation as California, with dozens of times as many people. My daughter was born in Wyoming and attends college in California - why should someone in Laramie have vastly more impact on decision making than someone in South Central L.A.? And finally, the key issue of every presidential election is which party gets to cram their extreme Justices down our throats for the next generation. Wouldn't it be better if the key issue was actually some question of public policy?
I had to laugh. I wrote a similar wrapper script for cdrecord. This may say more about mkisofs and the management of recordable media than it does about scripting :-)
This script (well, I broke it into the obvious separate steps of building the ISO image and dumping it to duplicate media) was orchestrated from within a Unix daemon called as a BSD lpd filter. Whatever else it does, lpd serves as a reasonable queuing manager. A humorous but pragmatic choice.
That was an evolution of a system for archiving digital imaging data onto exabyte tapes. The original tape-based system was ported after a few years from SunOS to Solaris, that is, from BSD lpd to Sys-V lpsched. I balked at repeating the port for optical media, very much due to portability issues unrelated to scripting. Scripting is the least of your worries with portability.
The digital archive has long since evolved to a system with a replicated online (hard drive based, that is) architecture. Much more portable (non-boolean, as you say), but certainly not 100%
Booting a computer is almost the definition of non-portable. Not sure what you mean by a naked box, but there are all the device drivers to load, clocks to set, file systems to mount, services to start. These are precisely the things that vary from one flavor of Unix (or Linux) to another. The script itself may be very portable, but the underlying description of the resources - or even the description of this description - will not be portable
I'm a bit at a loss for why my message has been labeled flamebait :-) These assertions seem unremarkable. Personally, I'm all for writing portable code, whether in an interpreted or compiled context. But the real challenge to portability lies in the libraries you call (the OS itself for shell scripts), not in the language you write the code in.
As usual, it comes down to use cases. Describe the useful things that are done. One might choose to write a shell script to perform some pure mathematical utility function, but this certainly isn't the usual role of such scripts. Rather, one uses a shell script when accessing files (logs, etc.) on the disk, or when opening sockets, or when spawning host level commands. Other device level access is often required, for instance, a local or UTC clock might be consulted, requiring knowledge of timezones. All of these are very dependent on whether the script is running under a BSD or Sys-V flavored OS (assuming Unix, of course), or even on micro-versioning of specific OSes.
The question of complexity is also not some challenge to find a lengthy script, but rather a statement of the inherent design-level complexity of the application.
The OTHER point everybody is missing is that wikipedia is likely to be more trustworthy on such issues than the corporate media. Some pundit asserts a completely unsubstantiated interpretation of the facts, and not only does this dominate the current news cycle as it gets repeated over-and-over by "reporters" who are too lazy to check the facts or their interpretation, and not only does the same vapid nonsense get dredged up whenever the story pops to the top of future news cycles, but it back propagates to revise what the facts were in the first place. At least wikipedia has a mechanism for attempting to make corrections - for instance, has anybody edited the page to point to this slashdot thread?
Even if a shell script is portable, the underlying OS will always fail to be for any task significantly complex to do useful work.
There is no such thing as the "Theory of Evolution". Rather the evidence for evolution having occurred in the past and ongoing today is vast and undeniable. The theory here is Natural Selection. The word "theory" also doesn't mean what people think it does. A theory is not a synonym for "hypothesis", but rather a complete and coherent explanation of all aspects of the available data that can be used to make predictions about the world. Natural Selection is the glue that ties our understanding of biology together. To reject Natural Selection is reject everything we know about the world around us.
They make a lot of it having only three actuators, but anybody with a LEGO Mindstorm knows that's the minimum you need. Two to provide propulsion and differential steering (or one for propulsion and one to turn the wheels) plus a third to actually do something when you get there. This applies even for robots without wheels: http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2007/12/mindstormsnxtspike.jpg
Well, the real mark of success is when the paper is recognized merely by the cite, e.g., "Shannon, 1948".
If significant metadata have to be added to whatever the web of trust technology, one suspects a successful result will more closely resemble slashdot, rather than a formal ontology. It's hard enough to get the computer scientists who are building a knowledgebase as a step toward writing their own paper to enter information into the required ontology :-)
Thanks for the references! Fascinating.
They might be missing something in the fundamental architecture. The point of the exercise is to diminish the load on the liver to permit it to heal (at least to gain time). By tapping into the circulatory system at some point remote from the ailing organ, they are relying on matching the impedance (as it were) of the entire somatic beast. If, instead, they more closely seek to localize the interface and to mimic the equilibrium load on the natural organ, the liver may be given more of a respite.
As with other differential rate equations, if the liver can heal just a little bit faster - perhaps even if the patient on the whole becomes a little bit sicker - the net gain may be very significant.
In general, the goal must be to develop the capability of providing the full functionality of each organ in enough fidelity to freely swap artificial life support in and out at will. As such, the interfaces must be honored in full detail. It isn't enough to imitate a liver, one seeks to replicate a liver, including its natural configuration within the human system architecture.
There's no information about the interface of this device to the patient. Blood flow to the liver is rather unique (http://biology.about.com/library/organs/bldigestliver.htm), with 3/4 of its bloodflow coming from the portal vein and 1/4 from the hepatic artery. The blood mixes before being processed by the liver.
Is the device similarly fed by both arterial and venous sources? How is the pressure compensated? Where is the output reintroduced? Does the device run in parallel to the natural liver or in series? If the latter, which receives the blood first? Does it attempt to handle any of the other numerous functions of the liver such as the creation of bile or lymph?
Yes, that is a more precise description. The main point I was making, however, is that the web of trust is currently between the referees and the editors on the one hand, and the editors (forwarding the referee's comments) and the authors on the other. Fairly often referees wave anonymity, but that is their choice, not the editors. As you say, referees have to know the identity of the authors, although this knowledge can be abused.
...the real question is whether what comes after Windows will be open source.
Microsoft is likely to outlive Windows, one way or another. Future computers will not resemble current computers indefinitely, including the operating systems. Thus, Microsoft will have to attempt to lead or follow a post-Windows trend - and likely a post-Linux trend.
Obviously new OSes springing forth from Linux will remain open source. (At least, one can hope.) Will Microsoft, on the other hand, attempt to stay with a closed development model in a post-Windows world?
Any question or assertion about Windows itself is beyond boring.
There have been numerous attempts to redefine peer review to bring it into the 21st century. There will be many more after this effort.
Peer review is typically anonymous. It represents a trust relationship between the editor and the referee, not directly between the author and the reviewer. If the journal - or rather, the editor - is removed from the equation, then some new mechanism is needed. It isn't obvious that the web of trust as described fits the bill, however.
An equivalent to a distributed certificate authority already exists and is widely used as a metric. The only certification that will be believed - even from professional peers - is to demonstrate a need and desire to actually use the results of prior publications. These are denoted (and trusted) by building a chain of publications by tracing back through the references embedded in subsequent publications themselves.
They're charging $25,000 and recruiting from grad students and post-docs? I don't see any mention of scholarships to make this an opportunity based on merit. The students will either need to go into debt (even further) for this unfocused opportunity, or will need to convince some faculty sugar daddy to spend grant funds. Meanwhile, the curriculum is too general to align with very many dissertation topics in any discipline. Disruptive innovation is all well-and-good, but first you have to disrupt the educational paradigm...
...that said, sounds like fun!
This is basically the same question as Olber's paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olber's_Paradox). In an infinite universe, all lines of sight intersect the surface of a star. The brightness of a stellar photosphere is independent of distance. (It is flux that varies with the inverse square of the distance, not brightness.) The paradox is why the night sky is dark.
Similarly, an infinite universe with any finite fraction of star systems populated by sufficiently long-lived technological civilizations would result in radio waves reaching Earth from every direction. (Of course, unlike starlight, the plethora of signals would have to be disentangled.)
Just as Ted Harrison's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Robert_Harrison) explanation of Olber's Paradox relies on the finite lifetime of stars (originally a notion from Edgar Allan Poe!), so the explanation of Fermi's Paradox keys on the finite lifetime of civilizations. This is, after all, one factor in the Drake equation. The new part here is the recasting of this into a clustering analysis of overlapping light travel time spheres of influence.
Two points:
1) Astronomical telescopes are designed with the fewest possible optical elements since each surface degrades the image. Such simple telescopes invert the image, http://www.grantvillegazette.com/articles/Seeing_the_Heavens. Astronomers these days will often scribble arrows on the glass of their monitors to indicate which way is North and which way is East. Some cameras even flip the images backwards, not just upside-down.
2) The Moon's orbit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon) is inclined with respect to the Earth's equator. As a result, the illumination of the terminator shifts through a large angle depending on the Moon's declination above or below the equator. Similarly, libration allows observers on Earth to see a few degrees beyond the poles or limb of the Moon.
For 400 years, surely the Moon is one of the first things everybody with a telescope has pointed it at. The difference between Galileo and those before and since is the high quality of the inferences he made from the very limited glimpses he had of the sky. Harriot will remain a footnote because the race to draw the first map is secondary to its scientific interpretation.
At the other end of the human spectrum, many people don't even realize the Moon is visible during the daytime. Their world view simply equates the daylight hours with the Sun and the nighttime hours with the Moon. Even if they do happen to notice the Moon high in the sky before sunset, not a single neuron clicks. A lot of astronomy is possible even without a telescope, cf. Tycho, whose name now graces a most beautiful crater, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/clm_usgs_14.html.