I was afraid of this kind of nonsense when the America Invents Act switched the US from "First to Invent" to "First to File" on March 16, 2013.
I guess if no one filed for a patent, *some* USPTO officers are interpreting applications preemptively as "the First to File". I'm hoping it's just a snafu, perhaps caused by the application bridging the transition between FtI to FtF.
BCG (Bacillus Calmette–Guérin, still a common base for TB vaccines today in many countries) has been a standard treatment for bladder cancer (specifically: non-muscle invasive bladder cancer) since the late 70s. As it was explained to me in medical school in the early 90s, before molecular biology was widely understood by physicians (at least not to my standards -- I was a molecular biologist before med school), it was a general stimulant of local immune response, but I always suspected it was something more specific.
The idea of a specific immunological cross-reactions has been well known in medicine for maybe 80 years. "Rheumatic fever" caused by Group A ß-hemolytic streptococci often triggers heart/valve damage because antibodies produced in response to a bacterial protein often cross-react with a structural heart protein. In this example (once called "rheumatic" heart disease or valve damage), the effects are negative. I always thought deliberately targeted cross-reactions were an obvious path for treatment investigation, and was frustrated that it never seemed to be very actively pursued.
In truth, it probably has been, many times. Some positive studies were likely published; others were equivocal or lack sufficient (statistical) power. Some failed.
As a space enthusiast, I always say "space is hard". Biology is harder. Even I forget that, mostly because a molecular biologist's first reaction is to try to think of easy ways to explore/prove their latest idea (trying hard to ignore the fact that their "quick elegant" experiment will likely take years to bear compelling evidence, due to complications) -- and a physician? Well, even we forget the truth/depth of the aphorism "it's an art as much as a science".
I'm hoping we'll be seeing a LOT more results along this line of inquiry in the coming decade, because I'm hoping we're finally ready to really explore it. We may not be, yet. Molecular simulations may not yet be at sufficient reliability, and the combinatorial math may yield too many permutations for empirical trials
Your math is right based on the summary but the article says:
"With a stable system and a turnover frequency of 360,000 moles of hydrogen per hour per mole of catalyst, the potential here is real."
Yes, but the specific numbers given would indicate 360,000 MOLECULES/hour, which makes it seem much more likely that the article itself misspoke by saying "moles" where it should have said "molecules"
Sanity check: 360,000 moles/hr per mole of catalyst = 100 moles/sec per mole of catalyst = 6x10^25 reactions/sec per molecule of catalyst. You can't get a reaction time of 1/(6x10^25) sec = 1.7x10^-26 sec for chemical reactions in our current universe (maybe in a Big Bang)
1.7x10^-26 sec is FAR less time than it takes a photon to cross the width of a proton (and a proton happens to be an H+ ion)
First, let me say that I am all in favor of this change. Relatively modest engineering changes and updates to reflect currently available electronics components may only cost pennies and can actually save manufacturers money, but all too often the manufacturers shortsightedly avoid such NREs [Non-Recurring Engineering] costs in favor of more "marketable" changes. In their defense, it is not always obvious when to do such a review: annually seems excessive/wasteful but once a decade seems too long -- and if you set a goal of once per decade, it's easy to slip to once/11 years, 15 yrs or why bother? Legislation can be a useful spur to changes that benefit both the industry and the consumer.
But having said that...
Saving $300M amounts to less than $1 per man/woman/child in the US -- and that's over 30 years! So about $0.03/yr/person Less, when you consider that US population is projected to be over 400M by 2045.
Similarly, the current US housing stock is estimated to be 135M housing units per the 2013 National Housing profile, so 6.5M homes is about 5% of current stock (ignoring 30 years of future growth" and 1 year's consumption for 6.5M homes, spread over 30 years, is about 0.167% of home usage.
As a physician, I can tell you that every US medical student I've seen had to do/learn all the basic proctology tasks/diagnoses, and residents must learn the entire general range of proctology tasks/diagnoses. While most schools don't let a student do, say, full hands-on supervised colonoscopies for liability/inexperience/billing reasons, their residency will expect them to. A proctologist (as you term a board certified internist, with further training leading to a board subspecialty as a gastroenterologist) is an expert, there are no "proctology interns".
I say this as someone who feels US medical care suffers from our excessive (sub)specialization, at the expense of trained generalists.
As abusive as I feel the med school/residency system is, this is one part I agree with: any physician SHOULD have a thorough grounding.
The make/model/package MPG figures come straight from the manufacturers, who usually don't even test production models, but pre-production engineering prototypes --engineering prototypes!-- and report that figure for as many production years as they like
According to the EPA itself: "How vehicles are tested" https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/how_tested.shtml
Each year EPA tests a random sample of maybe 10% of the base models on the market. Note: this is a much smaller number than the various "apparent models" (variants, options packages, etc.) that a consumer might feelare different cars. Aside from perhaps testing a second engine option in a given model, the EPA ignores those variants and doesn't even require tests to be conducted in successive production years because it feels "MPG probably won't change much from year to year" and "almost no options would affect indoor dynamometer results anyway -- we know it's a poor test". Aerodynamics is just one the options that significantly impact real world MPG, but won't show up on a dynamometer
Therefore MPG numbers are just a manufacturer's own claims, subject to spot-checking by the EPA. Apparently VW, Kia, and others felt the risk of spot check was small enough to ignore.
SpaceX's Dragon has already launched to orbit 8 times, including 6 full resupply missions to ISS, autonomously. It rides the Falcon-9, which has successfully reached orbit 18 times.
The manned Dragon capsule configuration (aka Dragon 2) is expected to do a demo flight in about a year. It was delayed by the accident investigation due to one faulty support spar (of which thousands had already flown) in May of this year. Falcon 9 is scheduled to return to flight in about a month, but it has a backlog of missions/payload before it can fly the Dragon 2 Demo flight, currently expected in the second half of 2016.
Yeah, we temporarily stumbled on manned space flight -- but we've done so before (e.g. after the two Shuttle disasters). It's not permanent.
Since SDMI is more a watermarking than an encryption method, I'll assume you're speaking of means to 'break' commercial audio encryption methods in general. I think you're missing the simplest method for future digital copying:
Use digital USB speakers, and tap/copy the signal. either in hardware or software.
While I am not at all sure that USB speakers will replace the soundcard/analog combination, they are likely to become too big a market share for RIAA to ignore, just like those annoying integrated sound chips that audiophiles deride, but that still manage to live in millions of budget and office systems.
True, it is possible to encrypt the signal to the speakers, and use decrypting speakers, but there is unlikely to be enough market clout to force speaker manufacturers/system integrators/buyers to adopt encrypted speakers to support SDMI. I think that we are too far along the USB audio roadmap for it to be easily diverted now
Recall, a format that doesn't catch on means lost time/money/opportunity for the RIAA, as well as the manufacturers and buyers.
No slam at you, spazmoid (I hate the decision, too), but the only "of course" here is the fact that we are moving into a genuinely new realm, and there are going to be some dislocations, as we sort things out.
In the past, you could have two identical brand names (for example) in nearby town, state, or even adjacent aisles of the grocery store (would you even notice if there was an 'Encore' brand dog food, and an 'Encore' line of TV dinners [feel free to provide you own punch lines.
In the past, boundaries were much more effective at compartmentlizing business, and the primary role of the trademark was associative -- i.e. it relied on the associational mechanisms of the brain more than the actual literal words.
On the web, we rely on literals, and any hierarchy of naming will fall short of the flexibility of the old system (any system that had more flexibility than ordinary human associative thinking would be useless because humans wouldn't be able to master it) We do not live hierarchically, we do not do business hierarchically (i.e. category-busting businesses and products will always emerge), and we do not want to be ruled by a hierarchy.
Meanwhile, the fact that there is *one web* is both a strength and a weakness. It's strengths are well known, and many of its weaknesses lie in the fact that it will require us to change our thinking. This is often a necessary price for new capabilities, but it's always a drawback from the user's view, in the short term (and we're *all* users, when it comes to the web, whether third grader or multinational)
I don't much care for this decision, and I sure wouldn't enjoy debating whether the Corinthian Sailing Club (corinthian.org) is more 'worthy' of that second level domain than the guy who lost corinthian.com.
In the future, we will see new ways of doing things, and one that I expect will become more common will be "index pages" that list, for example, many 'corinthians' and link their websites. We've had examples of this for years: until recently http://www.apc.com let you choose between the former American Power Corporation, a well-known UPS maker, or the former Alabama Power Corporation (an electric utility and management company)
While I'm as amused by the notion of revenge against the much hated market-droids who afflict our industry (with grudging acknowledgement to the fact that in contemporary society marketing seems to be necessary), the page cited in the Ambrosia quickie made me feel I was being played like a elephant's nose-flute.
I'd wager good odds that marketdroid Jason Whong either came up with the idea himself, or agreed enthusiastically when it was proposed at some undoubtedly well-lubricated strategy session -- and I bet the results warm the cockles of his marketdroid... er, whatever Marketdroids use instead of a heart.
I'd feel better about the 'penance' if Ambrosia listed all their known bugs, and the roadmap for correcting them. Instead, I found very little on this subject on their website - a few FAQs on undesirable behaviors (mostly justifying them or describing them as unavoidable, rather than offering workarounds or plans for patches)
Absent that kind of open acknowledgement of the specific problems, it's just a clorful ploy, that has nothing to do with delivering bug-free product
existing program suitable for simulating traffic?
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Grosse Pointe Quickies
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[BTW, Driver Psychology is a useful link for those who are interested in the other major component of traffic -- or simply have a friend they want to keep from killing themselves on the highway]
I used to take my friends to a cabin in Laconia, NH for Thanksgiving each year. One year, (early 80's) we brought several (Apple II) computers with us and attacked this problem, coding and discussing it as we conducted our usual festivities. The joke was that we'd win a Nobel Prize (The Peace Prize, we decided) and the undying gratitude of the Billions in the Next Millenium.
Alas, coding/modifying the digital automata took most of our time , and none of us had more than a couple of years driving experience. (Yikes, I can't believe it even ran in something like real time on a 64K machine with 191K floppies (this was before hard drives for personal computers) running on a 8/16 bit CPU at a true speed of 1/2 MHz) We never made our breakthrough -- and the hangovers on the last day of that trip made several of us repress the memory of the entire weekend.
Well, here we are, hard upon the next millenium, and I was wondering what software is out there that could implement a digital automata traffic simulator. We had notebooks full of elaborate scenarios - traffic light synchronization, types of accidents, ambulances, cars going in/out os various types of commercial parking lot entryways, etc. It was a low-res SimCity of traffic. -- much more fascinating than it sounds. (And hey, if a million late night hackers can't solve traffic, then we should go back to the single wheel and start over)
Can anyone suggest a program - perhaps Object Oriented - that would let me repeat and expand on my original experiments? I *still* drive differently because of what I learned (At last! Driver's Ed that means something!)
"Note, 'tho, that the NSA's charter is pretty darn specific. In most circumstances, they are NOT allowed to deliberately eavesdrop on an American citizen, or to arrange for any other nation to do so -- and their own FAQ reiterates this. Exceptions, if memory serves, include conversations with foreign nationals.
In theory, of course. But, in practice, all any intelligence agency needs to do to perform domestic surveillance, is apply to the special FISA court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Title 50, Chapter 36 US Code, which, last I heard, had refused exactly one request (out of tens of thousands) since 1978. FISA warrants (which, unlike regular warrants are not published or released) have skyrocketed in the past few years -- averaging ca 250/yr in the first 15 years of FISA, and over 1000/yr by the latest Congressional figures I've seen (which may not be a complete count of recent warrrants for obvious reasons).
I discussed FISA in another story recently, and I don't like to think about it too much in one day (it's too depressing, for personal reasons) so please see my earlier post on wiretaps [there's a bug in slashcode, so you may have to click the post # to see the whole thing) or do a Google search for "FISA wiretap" (no quotes).
I like the NSA (also for personal reasons), but my personal fondness for the organizations doesn't blind me to the dangers intrisic in irresponsible policy.
One of the trends that brought down the USSR was the way technology disproportionately empowered the individual in a restrictive society. In the 70's, mimeographs and xeroxes were tightly regulated as potential printing presses. Even a senior scientist seeking a reprint usually had to get it copied by a designated library officer, who kept logs. One key to the maintaining power was maintaining a disparity in capability between the KGb (e.g.) and the indivisual. But the Soviet economy would not long stand unless they freely used computers, networks, fax, xerox, and other technologies that were growing common in the West, and these tools could be (and were) used for dissent as well
In a society where technology and openness traditionally favor the individual, the balance can easily swing the other way -- it really has nowhere else to go. Overly broad powers, in actual experience yield little, and even in theory should yield very little, given practical realities.
Powers tend to be used, regardless of the target. US vs THEM is very deep in the human tribal nature, and is a common attitude in any gov't agency or business. The Geeks (individuals) led technology, but now the technology is so powerful that for many individual applications it doesn't matter if you have a P-100 or a Beowulf cluster... large organizations, however, can harness the full power of the new technology...
We need to use our Mark I jello-ware neural-nets before it's too late!
Re:Public needs to stop pretending there is no iss
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I am dismayed when my friends exclaim that the CIA will never read my email, because I am not important, nor have I done anything wrong or have something to hide.
Here are some facts and cases that every American citizen should know. I was pretty horrified that this entire area was not mentioned in yesterday's discussion of Federal monitoring (alas, I didn't have time to read it or post yesterday)
1) Since 1978, US Intelligence agencies have a special court (FISA: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) to turn to for domestic wiretaps. Each decision is reached in secret, with no published orders, opinions, or public record. Only one of the tens of thousands of requests was ever turned down. When Clinton signed Executive Order 12949 on February 9, the powers of the FISA court was greatly expanded: It now has legal authority to approve black-bag operations to authorize Department of Justice (DoJ) requests to conduct physical as well as electronic searches, without obtaining a warrant in open court, without notifying the subject, without providing an inventory of items seized. The targets need not be under suspicion of committing a crime. Here's what Federal Judge Robert W. Warren from Wisconsin, (senior panelist on the second tier FISA Court of Review) said about his duties...
On the first tier are seven federal judges, appointed to staggered seven-year terms by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Each judge takes a turn reviewing applications submitted by the attorney general. He or she sits in a sealed, vault-like chamber on the top floor of the Justice Department headquarters, where the door is always locked and guarded and the room is regularly inspected for bugs.
In the unlikely event that the first tier rejects an application, the Department of Justice can appeal to the FISA Court of Review. Should this three-member panel of judges also deny the request, it could then be heard by the Supreme Court. Those last two progressions up the judicial hierarchy have proved strictly unnecessary, however. Federal Judge Robert W. Warren from Wisconsin, senior panelist on the second tier FISA Court of Review, joked that he has not exactly been overwhelmed by the workload since his appointment in 1989.
We've never met since I've been on it, said Warren. I was sent a designation by the Chief Justice, and I asked a couple of people what in the world the court did because I had not even heard of it before I got that designation. I also had some correspondence with my brethren on the court and we've talked to each other and said, `What are we supposed to do?' and, `When is something going to happen?' Nothing ever has happened. It's an empty title as far as I am concerned at this point.
Based on the remarkable record of servility the first-string spy court has achieved on surveillance requests 15 years with only one rejection, and that one on technical grounds new requests for physical searches are unlikely to cut into the Review Court's happy schedule.
2) going down from the Federal level, wiretap abuse on landlines and wireless by state and local authorities is extremely widespread today. These wiretaps are applied without court order, with very deliberate lies on affadavits, and every other imaginable abuse of the system. A search for "illegal wiretap" will turn up links to articles listing thousands of cases Here are a few.
The LA County Public Defender's Office is appealing over 500 cases where the real or circumstantial evidence was primarily due to illegal wiretaps. The LAPD conducted thousands of illegal wiretaps each year (acknowledged in numerous state and federal reports) but get les than 100 legal wrrants every year (except 1998, when they got 328, vs 24 in first 6 mos of 1999). The corruption went all the way up to the elected District Attorney of Los Angeles, Gil Garcetti, and judge were 'informally aware' of the practice, but signed anyway. For details, see Deputy Public Defender Kathy Quant's summary article or the W.I.R.E.D Project (Wiretapping Investigation, Research, Education, and Defense), both at the LA County Public Defender's Office website.
An unnamed officer hears an unknown Hispanic man mentioning that he will be recieving a wire transfer of a substantial amount of money that day. There is no mention of drugs, even in code, as the investigators later admit. His colleagues (not linked to the illegal wiretap) invent a confidential informant ("CRI") who claims the money is drug-related, and notify local banks. When the Hispanic man goes to the bank to make a a withdrawal for the amount mentioned, the money is seized. It takes him years to get it back, though he demonstrates early on that the money is from his grandmother's estate, and was being wired so he could buy a house. This case, euphoniously named U.S. v. $265,260.32 in US currency US CV 97-4442 AHM (CWX) (A federal case - money is often 'arrested' under RICO and other laws, because money does not have civil rights) cites several other cases where equally blatant abuses have taken place (including US v $39,000 in Canadian Currency, to be fair to our northern neighbor).
Agencies even illegally bug themselves and each other, as this recent case in CT illustrates.
3)Legal wiretaps are usually not very cost-effective.
Judge Perry authorized the San Bernadino District Attorney to wiretap public pay phones in drug traffic areas for 4 months. The results:
131,202 individuals' conversations intercepted, taped, and will be kept by the DA for 10 years...
10 - Incriminating Conversations were obtained as result of violating the privacy of 131,202 people.
0 - Arrests Made. NOT ONE ARREST.
Oh, it cost San Bernadino Taxpayers over $625,000.
A similar order by Judge Czueleger ordering blanket wiretapping of LA jail pay phones for the first 6 mos of 1997 also resulted in no convictions, and cost $1,119,422.
In '98 ot '97 (don't have the Fed report with me), the states ordered roughly 1200 legal wiretaps, resulting in three arrests per wiretap, on average. Only one arrest in four was convicted, however.
These items are just the tip of the iceberg! Do a few Google searches, and you find case after case of officers and agencies wiretapping for personal gain and institutional chicanery, of forged or fraudulently obtained warrants, and massive illegal campaigns that don't even pursue current crimes, but where the recordings are stored (as in the LA cases) for possible future use.
It's uncomfortable to think about. I don't enjoy it myself. However, before we believe "1984 has come and gone, and we're safe", we have to ask ourselves... who says we're safe? The Government?
I have to say, I've always harbored concerns about the FISA courts (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), which are essentially a shadow judiciary that supposedly oversees, reviews, and approves FED intelligence wiretapping within the US. Congress has been looking into it sporadically since the 1997 wiretap report, but though they find abuses left and right, and issue sternly worded rebukes, they haven't taken any action yet.
The last I heard, the FISA court had never refused a single one of the 15,000 requests for domestic surveillance made of it, and only a tiny handful (under 10, IIRC) had even had to resubmit, and requests have been skyrocketing since 1993 (averaging about 250/yr in the 15 years from 1978-1993, but currently at 1000+/yr per Freedom of Information Act documents) Meanwhile, 'normal court' wiretap warrants have grown only several percent a year. (*)
The NY Times and other newspapers have written about the FISA system, but the Web has made me lazy (and besides, how many of you would look up a dead tree citation) so here are two URLs [Artcle I] [Article II]. You can find much more info with a G oogle Search for [FISA wiretap] (without brackets).
1) UKUSA/ECHELON is hardly 'new news'. I can recall being aware of it in '78-79 and James Bamford wrote about it in his highly regarded 1981 best-seller "The Puzzle Palace", the book that first 'revealed' the NSA to the public. (This book has been revised/reissued several times since original publication in '81) You can read one suitable chapter here. Bamford also published an edition subtitled "America's National Security Agency and its special relationship with Britain's GCHQ" -- and his books are far from the only ones in the field. I vaguely recall that the mid=70's bestseller "The Falcon and the Snowman", about the young American spies Christopher Boyce and Dalton Lee, mentioned it too, though perhaps the public didn't notice because it didn't make it into the movie (starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn, and reputed to be pretty good -- I haven't seen it)
2) In the 70's/80's, there was (and is) a pervasive attitude of denial and stubborn skepticism (both in the public and the intelligence community itself) regarding ECHELON, the NSA -- the CIA was the 'designated bad guy' in the post Watergate/Allende/Whitlaw era:
Claiming the existence of an agency with "twice the manpower and [official] budget of the CIA" prior to Bamford's book would get you labeled as a loon -- even at MIT, where the NSA actively recruited.
Among those in the US intel community who didn't work with Echelon-type intel, there was a fair degree of skepticism about the scope, value, or even continued existence of UKUSA.
3) Without meaning any criticism of France, the fact is that they have been very well aware of ECHELON for decades. Like most governments, they often use such "investigations" for public relations purposes. Does anyone really think that the French (oe anyone) conducts *genuine* intel review/investigation in the public eye like this? Or that a federal prosecutor is the best qualified to ferret out these facts?
4) (personal observation, possibly unjustified) It's always seemed to me that the SDECE is far more adept -- and interested -- in espionage than counter-espionage. I can only speculate on why that is (*if* it is), but it's beem something that I've been noticing consistently since I learned (in the late 70's) about the theft of the Concorde plans from France in the late 60's (to forestall the inevitable rejoinders: yes, I know there were some significant aerodynamic differences between the Concorde and the 'Concordski' (TU-144), but the former Soviet team leaders have admitted to using the design as a basis, they just couldn't utilize the plans properly, as they have admitted in Western interviews such as this one on the PBS show, Nova [transcript], and many earlier ones I'm not going to bother tracking down). Paradoxically, the Concordski flew before the Concord did.)
Comments, clarification, and additional details are solicited, as always.
I would like to retract my statement that Jose Bove is believed to have ordered the fatal Breton attack, and offer my personal thanks to those who corrected me on this point.
I did not set out to malign him. I simply found that Katz' article didn't tell me anything about the person he was applauding. Hence the title and initially biographical tone of my post. I simply wanted facts. After over an hour of reading French/US articles, and getting contradictory impressions, I stumbled into some shocking (seeming) facts, which seemed too noteworthy to ignore.
In the days after the April terrorist attack, Le Monde and several other media reported that "Jose Bove is being questioned by the authorities" -- but there were no corresponding headlines saying "Jose Bove seems to be cleared". Also search engines can lag 1-2 months behind content, so the few exculpatory 'minor articles' in May/June were not fully indexed
I feel paticularly embarrassed because I had a friend who was in a similar situation many years ago. I first saw it on a front page headline "Prominent Senate Intelligence [sic] aide caught with a kilo of heroine!" That was the afternoon edition, just hours after the arrest, but he was already cleared before the papers hit the street (the drugs were from a vengeful ex with whom he was 'planning a future' until he learned she was involved with drugs. They verified this with her supplier and ID'ed the anonymous tip) His arrest got headlines or was cited on the front page of many major national papers, but Follow-ups tended to get a few column-inches on page 36... eventually, if ever. That's how the media work -- and the ranking system of search engines (as well as the indexing delay) will only make this problem worse in the future -- A word to the wise.
After reading the facts presented by the other posters, I reviewed the source material for my post, and found that other statements that I relied upon may have been media sensationalism as well. Yhese had made me very skeptical of his claims of nonviolence, but after examining those incidents in some detail (which is why it's taken me so long to repond) I now have a great deal more respect for Mssr. Bove's methods, even if I do not necessasrily agree with his politics.
I apologize for my error, and especially for emphasizing it in my earlier post. I let my shock get the better of me, and in that I am no better than the media I criticize.
I realize that public retractions seem to be unpopular on Slashdot, but I think it's only right
He is a Frenchman who was born in Bordeaux in 1953, and grew up at Berkeley, as his parents studied Biochem. Back in France, he refused to do his military service and dropped out of Bordeaux University to immerse himself in various leftist political and ecological movements. In 1975 he and his wife decided to move to the country, take up sheep farming and join a local peasant movement (Confédération paysanne), which he terms 'a trade union', though I do not understand in what sense he means this) against a plan to extend an army base in southern France. He was arrested for "invading" the base during a 1976 protest, and he spent three weeks in prison. (The military project was canceled five years later, more due to the economy than nanything else
In 1998, he blew up up a silo (which belonged to the pharmaceutical firm Novartis) because it contained genetically modified corn. Here's Mssr. Bove's own statement about his actions and motives. It appears to have been written in English, or at least be an authorized translation. I haven't found a French original or variant translations.
In 1999, he became a 'national hero' (according to his supporters -- he's certainly a cult figure) for damaging an unfinished McDonalds with a bulldozer, and later organizing a massive giveaway of Roquefort cheese to protest US import restrictions. He also is known for staging 'illegal' free Roquefort and French bread picnics in front to McDonald's during the WTO protests in Seattle. Distributing the cheese was 'illegal' because it was unpasteurized. Time magazine did a piece on him
But he's not in jail for the bulldozer attack. he spent 20 days in jail for that in 1999. He calls that the greatest favor the judge could have done, due to the publicity it gave him.
On Wednesday, April 19, 2000, an attack on a McDonald's resulted in the death of a '28 year-old waitress'. Jose Bove is believed to have ordered this attack. He has always proclaimmed his movement (Confédération paysanne) to be nonviolent, but admits that violent means have been used, and often refers to the groups actions as 'combat' (same in French as English) I found a French account of the attack that you can babelfish, if necessary
I also found an 12/99 interview where he outlines his current views. He is not an ultra-liberal (in fact he denounced ultraliberalism as 'suicidal'), his personal views are a patchwork of conflicting insistence on individualism and collectivism, (which becomes harder for me to render coherently, the more I read) Politically, he opposes 'internationalization' and insists that 'each nation has a right to choose what it wants to eat' (he supports French Bans on US food, while protesting US bans on French foods)
I leave an analysis of his ideology to others -- anyone but Katz.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the privacy implications of this. 1) you an encode as much as you want during transmission, but there is currently no way to work on the data without decoding first. The main CPU (and the 'rented' progfgram) sees all your personal data, and it's not under your control 2) If you trust all commercial CPU cycle providers (I don't), what about cracked/compromised systems? But more importantly, what evidence do we have that commercial enterprises can be trusted in this fashion? Even EU privacy laws hace limited utility against a US server. 3) Consider this as well... if your apps are following you around, running on whatever machines are nearby, and those machines are programmed to configure themselves to your custom settings, then trojan/virus/macro checking becomes tougher. Each machine can only (at best) detect the known public viruses. Meanwhile that custom reporting macro your employer put in a 'petty cash' template, follows you from bar to bar, to the house of your college friend (who has had more social diseases than Don Juan's taste-tester; and eighteen misc. misdemeanor arrests for DUI, drug possession, disorderly conduct, and trolling/.) Etc. Etc. You can *know* the proper configuration on your home/office machine. An anonymous machine can't recognize what 'belongs' -- And (you heard it here first) what about a macro that is set *not* to load from the server to your home/work machine? One that effectively lives outside your door and follows you only when you're out? Sorry, I'll stick with my private hardware, running my privately owned copy of software -- and the PDA with electrical tape over the IR port
It isn't sexy and is probably cheating for those who demand strict anthropomorphism, but as a cash-strapped teen hobbyist in the 70's I found that edge detection could be done easily with a cheap IR laser diode casting a stripe at a 45 degree angle (you could probably use an IR LED, but I needed a *bright* dot, or my crappy vidicon tube setup couldn't distinguish in lighting like 'sun streaming through venetian blinds')
It didn't scan and it wasn't pivotable. (Both were planned future upgades that never got done) It was just a fixed optical element that converted tha IR laser 'dot' to a 'stripe'. It could rotate, so that the stripe could assume different angles to the vertical, but +45 and -45 were almost always adequate. The one trick is that the 'stripe' was a better discriminant when projected from near or below the level of the steps, not at head height. The video unit could be anywhere.
IR showed up nicely on the old tubes I used, but was chosen because that's all I could get ($10 a pop *surplus* for the diode alone in 1978). It did made the system look cooler to human eyes, though. A trio of different colored visible light laser stripes would've been a very distinguishable signal in high noise, but that was just a dream back then. Now you can buy color laser pointers with sets of removable holographic gratings for a few bucks. I bet a simple fixed grid holograph at 45 degrees would do the job nicely. A second at 22 degrees would be a great backup.
Subtracting successive beam off/on frames gave me all the info I needed for edge detection with monocular vision. Binocular should give you everything you need to climb stairs, I'd imagine.
Admittedly, the discontinuity detection was more processor intensive than an edge filter, but I'm sure there are more efficient algorithms than the ones I used (and there simply is no comparison between an 0.5MHz 6502 and a GHz Athlon)
The question is: would you rather be totally anthropomorphic or just get the job done?
This approach probably wouldn't work for industrial robotic assembly (which may be why Honda didn't use it). Shiny surfaces, like factory fresh metal parts, really kill the image (and 'beams bouncing everywhere' wouldn't be too kind to bystanders, unless you stuck to low power IR)
If a corporation releases a binary to 1 person outside the corporation, they must include the source with it.
In principle, I agree with you. However, while I believe that many of the so-called ambiguities in this article are not valid, this issue - 'release to specified individuals only' could be a real hotbed of controversy. Example #4 (below) is the real killer, but you need to ride the slippery slope to see how it could read in court.
For the sake of argument, let's imagine a GPLed communications program that has been modified to use a new unpublished crypto algorithm that the author doesn't want to release yet (or may never want to release). Maybe it's "security through obscurity", "NSA paranoia", or a real breakthrough -- it doesn't matter. I'll discuss two cases: a corporate modification and a 'lone hacker' modification, since different precedents will be based on different programs
1) A corporation creates this program to access its proprietary in-house system. It makes the program available to its employees, binary only. This is internal use - no source release required
2a) The corporation now supplies the program to contractors and consultants. Note: this is controlled release, but the recipients are not company employees. (Almost any internal-use program will end up being used by consultants or contractors at some time.) By your argument, this would be a mandatory source release, but I doubt a court would agree, due to the client-agent relationship and the specific need to access the internal corporate system.
2b) a private individual writes the above modified program to controll access to, say, his private anti-gov't website. He gives copies to relatives and a few close friends. Are blood, friendship, or academic ties enough to allow him to consider this 'internal use'? Unlike a corp, where individuals can be 'parts' of the 'legal person', he is dealing with 'outside' people.
The catch in 2a and 2b is limited release. Many prominent Open Source programs were 'private hacks' that grew into something useful and then released to the community. Not everyone wants to open themselves up to criticism until they are reasonably sure they have something good.
NOTE: The 'open source' provision of GPL only guarantees source to those who already have the program, not to the universe at large,
Limited Release is a slippery slope...
3a) The company makes the program available to a partner company on a project. Arguably still 'in-house' in a court's eyes
3b) The company makes the program available to a consortium (or assigns the program in its entirety to the consortium)
3c) The individual uses the cool program he wrote for personal use to do neat-o things at work (either as employee or consultant) but he uses it as a personal tool and doesn't install it permanently on their system
3d) The individual's client company insists that he install the program permanently (or sign over his rights to the program for a fair fee) on the grounds that the contract isn't fulfilled if only he can diagnose/repair the system. What rights can he sign over. if you believe he had the right to do 3c above, why can't he assign that right? Under copyright law, he can assign *all* his rights.
There are many other examples, but I'll conclude with one final-- The Horror:
4) a company writes commercial software, which it does not *sell* to the consumer, but allows them to *use* under a contract or license, either temporary or permanent, while retaining full ownership, and perhaps even the right to shut it down remotely
SOUND FAMILIAR?
Is this distribution? A loan? A limited access? "Use within a specified business relationship"?
Look, I think 90% of us would agree what it should be, but I hope you can now see how it *might* be seen after several years of precedent
The article states that this procedure is only for retinitis pigmentosa, but in the end, it is not a treatment for RP, but an early biocompatibility test. RP is only a useful physiological test bed that renders the patient blind over large areas of the retina, while leaving most of the retinal structure intact. The patient was undoubtedly a research volunteer, and was aware of all this, and should probbaly more properly be coinsdered a 'subject' (but I hate calling patients that).
As you probably recall from elementary school, there are two types of receptors in the eye. Rods handle B/W vision, are more sensitive to light, and are responsible for night and peripheral vision. Cones handle color vision, and are only found in the central areas of the visual field, especially the area of best vision in the eye, fovea centralis. (not to be confused with a nearby region of *no* vision, the macula lutea or 'blind spot' where the optic nerve enters the retina). Simple layman diagrams and links to useful concepts (but not *absolutely* accurate) can be found at: http://hyperphysics.p hy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/retina.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html Here's a good anatomical overview of the eye
RP is a group of genetic diseases which cause the rods to degenerate. about ten different mutation have been linked to forms of RP, which can be dominant, recessive, or X-linked. Initially, the patient loses their peripheral vision, beginning in a single region, then gradually spreading. The fovea centralis is the last region to be affected, if ever, because there are few rods in the fovea. It is not clear if loss of sharp central vision is due to 'pure' RP at all, since mutations in some 'RP' genes can cause macular degenerations or other retinal conditions. It appears that the loss of central vision is dependent on the individual's particular mutation.
The retina is laid out in layers, and in very different way that you might imagine. The photo sensors are in the *back* of the retina, and in front of them are several layers of neurons that allow the sensors to integrate (share info between nearby sensors, etc) and in front of that are the blood vessels a snd the neurons that go from the interneurons into the optic nerve, etc. Light passes through all these layers before hitting the rod and cone sensors. The only things that are 'behind' the sensors are the pigmented (choroid) layer, a black layer that absorbs all leftover light to keep it from bouncing around the eye; and the sclera, the tough "white of the eye" that provides support. [Slides and images] [Good slide, exlanations, links, but a bit technical]
So why use this implant in RP? Well, by prying apart the layers of the retina as described, the sensors can be placed where the cones used to be, and with a bit of luck, the overlying layers of interconnecting neurons will remain intact (they are presumably unaffected by the rod-destroying mutations, since 'cone' vision is preserved in RP) All this is done in the periphery of the eye, away from the delicate Fovea and macula. Here it can be tested, through the (largely) intact eye, without significantly affecting the patient's remaining natural vision (though there's always some risk)
This implant links into the web of interneurons in the retina, instead of having to be connected to the optic nerve as the native rods and cones do. You can see how this is easier than trying to do delicate neurosurgery on the optic nerve, and then re-training the patient's visual cortex. This is the most 'natural' process for th patient, since all position info is preserved and the preprocessing of the retina is present (ther preprocessing has two purposes: feedback to nearby sensors, which is lost in man-made sensors, and pre-processing of the visual impulses, which is preserved)
However, a low resolution 'pinhead' sensor on the periphery won't help an RP patient at all. In fact, patients sometimes find patchy remnants of peripheral vision distracting and annoying. Clearly this is not a treatment for RP but an early stage biocompatibility test for later work (that is more likely to be useful in other conditions).
Here's a review article on progress and challenges in similar subretinal implant technologies
(Disclaimer: I published some research on retinal layers as an undergrad, but that was almost 20 years ago, and before I went to medical school)
Some people have raised that the metric on the chart was Ops/sec per $1000, a fact which I myself noted on the nanotech forum. I didn't calculate out every factor because the error on the chart was clearly many more orders of magnitude than any possible correction could account for. The following are just back-of-the-envelope adjustments, but I think you'll see my point stands.
Let's adjust the figures for the Hollerith Tabulator to render it in ops/ sec per $1000, as Matrix42 and quokka70 suggest...
First off, the Hollerith tabulator was first used in the 1890 census, not during the 1910's, as the chart suggests (a *major* fudge factor). It was a mature technology after 30-40 years of use.
But let's assume they meant an 1910 model. With a chart metric of 10^(-5) ops/sec per $1000, it would have cost $100M to attain 1 op/sec -- not processing all the data for a single person, not even copying a single person's data into core memory, but one single op.
In 1915, in the middle of WWI, the total US outlay, including the military, was $746M, and total receipts were under $700M (wars tend to run at a deficit) And you're telling me they spent $100M on the Hollerith tabulator. ("but that's $100M 1999 dollars!" you cry.) Very well, at 3% annual inflation over 80 years, you get a factor of ten adjustment on dollar valuation (3% is actually generous, considering that we had some very serious devaluations, like the entire depresion era, during that time)
$10M 1915 dollars (18% of the Navy's wartime budget that year, give or take) to generate 1 op/sec, at a time when a skilled adding machine operator could calculate much faster, for a salary of a few hundred a year!
In fact, by their figures, $100 Billion - roughly MS's corporate worth today, would give them 1000 ops/sec - one millionth the power of the Athlon on the chart This would enable them to do a hefty 500 million ops/yr running 24/7 -- a whopping 5.5 ops for each of the 91 Million citizens counted in the 1910 census -- enough for two loads, an add, and two store operations per counted citizen!
In short, a $100M 1 op/sec machine would be useless (and at $10M 1915 dollars would have won the war for the Germans) The unthinkable $10B 1915 expenditure required to perform a minimal 1910 census (one-millionth of an Athlon according to that chart) would be better spent simply buying the US outright -- 13x the US government's wartime budget, foreign and domestic!
A battery of 1000 skilled adding machine operators can exceed 1000 ops/sec - and even as late as 1945, the total cost for salary and equipment would have been under $3M 1945 dollars, not 22.5 billion (=100 Bill. 1995 dollars). Incidentally, big companies did their accounting exactly this way (rooms full of adding machine clerks) back in 1945.
The numbers on the chart are messed up --very badly messed up. It's not just the Hollerith numbers. The chart claims that 1 op/sec per $1000 wasn't reached until 1950. Apparently he never looked in a hobby electronics magazine (or model railroad, or scientific American) from the first half of the century cheap home-made relay-based calculating machine projects were far from unheard of -- and did several ops/second.
Think of the codebreakers at Bletchley park. They needed to crack German Ultra messages overnight, at a time when Britain was stretched to its limit. Yet the chart claims computers cost $100,000 per op/sec at that time (and as I mentioned a single adding machine exceeds 1 op/sec) Britain didn't have the hundreds of millions of 1940 dollars to throw at Colossus
Next time try presenting some back-of-the-envelope calculations of your own. I've often found that doing this may reveal some minor errors in another person's calculations, but actually ends up confirming their overall conclusion.
The 'CPU power' chart disgusted me. If it really reflects the data in Kurzweil's book, I fear for humanity, because it was ludicrously rigged, and should have caused an outcry for such a highly regarded bestseller, yet apparently even the geeks didn't notice.
Yup, you heard me. The chart is rigged. Both with carefully selected points and with outright fabricated data.
First, point selection: Where are the mini's and mainframes and supercomputers of the 80s/90s? ("They aren't the most cost effective!" you cry) Okay, then where are the wang and other desktop (sometimes desk-sized) programmable calculators of the 60's/70's? The HP and other pocket calculators of the 70's/80's? ("They aren't the same thing," you argue, weakly.)
Second, bad data: "Fine," I say, "then do you really expect me to believe that a Hollerith tabulator took 3-30 hrs per operation? 10^(-4) to 10^(-5)ops/sec (according to the chart) = 10,000-100,000 seconds/op. In fact, there isn't a single computer capable of 1 op/sec until 1950 in the chart. Am I to believe that business spent millions on computers that were far slower than a moderately bright child using an abacus?
And how about the Apple II, the first personal computer I owned -- a 6502 used two clocks (out of phase) at roughly 1 MHz to run 500K single cycle ops/sec. I don't recall any common op codes that took more than 5-6 cycles, but there may have been one or two oddballs at 7-8 under worst case scenarios. (Most took 2-3.) Yet the Apple is listed as being roughly 30K ops/sec? (log(ops/sec) = 4.5)?
"Oh but we're talking about 64-bit adds" you argue, whipping out your abacus "...er, make that 'multiply's!"
I could invent justifications for each point on the chart, but by the time you're done, you'll realize, as I did, that the chart isn't worth the paper it's written on, and that it is utterly shocking that this hasn't been pointed out and ridiculted a million times by now.
I was doing a search for a citation for 'warranty' vs. 'guarantee' with special regard to software, and this link came up number #1. Google must've glitched a new meaning into 'software'.
I especially liked their fervent assurance that internal insertion of Curves® WILL result in severe bodily injury.
Despite what the author of the linked article suggests, even the experts he interviews agree that BXXP is intended to be a more flexible and capable alternative to HTTP, but its major use will be as an alternative to completely custom (open or proprietary) protocols for new applications, not for webserving ordinary HTML.
"Think of BXXP as HTTP on steroids," says Kris Magnusson, director of developer relations at Invisible Worlds. "People are trying to jam all kinds of things into HTTP, and it has become over- extended. BXXP won't replace HTTP for everything, but it can be used when new applications protocols are developed."
As such, it does not conflict with, or supplant HTTP-NG, or many other standards being hammered out by the IETF. It's just another tool developers and info provider may choose, depending on their needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I was afraid of this kind of nonsense when the America Invents Act switched the US from "First to Invent" to "First to File" on March 16, 2013.
I guess if no one filed for a patent, *some* USPTO officers are interpreting applications preemptively as "the First to File". I'm hoping it's just a snafu, perhaps caused by the application bridging the transition between FtI to FtF.
BCG (Bacillus Calmette–Guérin, still a common base for TB vaccines today in many countries) has been a standard treatment for bladder cancer (specifically: non-muscle invasive bladder cancer) since the late 70s. As it was explained to me in medical school in the early 90s, before molecular biology was widely understood by physicians (at least not to my standards -- I was a molecular biologist before med school), it was a general stimulant of local immune response, but I always suspected it was something more specific.
The idea of a specific immunological cross-reactions has been well known in medicine for maybe 80 years. "Rheumatic fever" caused by Group A ß-hemolytic streptococci often triggers heart/valve damage because antibodies produced in response to a bacterial protein often cross-react with a structural heart protein. In this example (once called "rheumatic" heart disease or valve damage), the effects are negative. I always thought deliberately targeted cross-reactions were an obvious path for treatment investigation, and was frustrated that it never seemed to be very actively pursued.
In truth, it probably has been, many times. Some positive studies were likely published; others were equivocal or lack sufficient (statistical) power. Some failed.
As a space enthusiast, I always say "space is hard". Biology is harder. Even I forget that, mostly because a molecular biologist's first reaction is to try to think of easy ways to explore/prove their latest idea (trying hard to ignore the fact that their "quick elegant" experiment will likely take years to bear compelling evidence, due to complications) -- and a physician? Well, even we forget the truth/depth of the aphorism "it's an art as much as a science".
I'm hoping we'll be seeing a LOT more results along this line of inquiry in the coming decade, because I'm hoping we're finally ready to really explore it. We may not be, yet. Molecular simulations may not yet be at sufficient reliability, and the combinatorial math may yield too many permutations for empirical trials
Your math is right based on the summary but the article says:
"With a stable system and a turnover frequency of 360,000 moles of hydrogen per hour per mole of catalyst, the potential here is real."
Yes, but the specific numbers given would indicate 360,000 MOLECULES/hour, which makes it seem much more likely that the article itself misspoke by saying "moles" where it should have said "molecules"
Sanity check: 360,000 moles/hr per mole of catalyst = 100 moles/sec per mole of catalyst = 6x10^25 reactions/sec per molecule of catalyst.
You can't get a reaction time of 1/(6x10^25) sec = 1.7x10^-26 sec for chemical reactions in our current universe (maybe in a Big Bang)
1.7x10^-26 sec is FAR less time than it takes a photon to cross the width of a proton (and a proton happens to be an H+ ion)
First, let me say that I am all in favor of this change. Relatively modest engineering changes and updates to reflect currently available electronics components may only cost pennies and can actually save manufacturers money, but all too often the manufacturers shortsightedly avoid such NREs [Non-Recurring Engineering] costs in favor of more "marketable" changes. In their defense, it is not always obvious when to do such a review: annually seems excessive/wasteful but once a decade seems too long -- and if you set a goal of once per decade, it's easy to slip to once/11 years, 15 yrs or why bother? Legislation can be a useful spur to changes that benefit both the industry and the consumer.
But having said that...
Saving $300M amounts to less than $1 per man/woman/child in the US -- and that's over 30 years! So about $0.03/yr/person Less, when you consider that US population is projected to be over 400M by 2045.
Similarly, the current US housing stock is estimated to be 135M housing units per the 2013 National Housing profile, so 6.5M homes is about 5% of current stock (ignoring 30 years of future growth" and 1 year's consumption for 6.5M homes, spread over 30 years, is about 0.167% of home usage.
As a physician, I can tell you that every US medical student I've seen had to do/learn all the basic proctology tasks/diagnoses, and residents must learn the entire general range of proctology tasks/diagnoses. While most schools don't let a student do, say, full hands-on supervised colonoscopies for liability/inexperience/billing reasons, their residency will expect them to. A proctologist (as you term a board certified internist, with further training leading to a board subspecialty as a gastroenterologist) is an expert, there are no "proctology interns".
I say this as someone who feels US medical care suffers from our excessive (sub)specialization, at the expense of trained generalists.
As abusive as I feel the med school/residency system is, this is one part I agree with: any physician SHOULD have a thorough grounding.
The make/model/package MPG figures come straight from the manufacturers, who usually don't even test production models, but pre-production engineering prototypes --engineering prototypes!-- and report that figure for as many production years as they like
According to the EPA itself: "How vehicles are tested" https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/how_tested.shtml
Each year EPA tests a random sample of maybe 10% of the base models on the market. Note: this is a much smaller number than the various "apparent models" (variants, options packages, etc.) that a consumer might feelare different cars. Aside from perhaps testing a second engine option in a given model, the EPA ignores those variants and doesn't even require tests to be conducted in successive production years because it feels "MPG probably won't change much from year to year" and "almost no options would affect indoor dynamometer results anyway -- we know it's a poor test". Aerodynamics is just one the options that significantly impact real world MPG, but won't show up on a dynamometer
Therefore MPG numbers are just a manufacturer's own claims, subject to spot-checking by the EPA. Apparently VW, Kia, and others felt the risk of spot check was small enough to ignore.
SpaceX's Dragon has already launched to orbit 8 times, including 6 full resupply missions to ISS, autonomously. It rides the Falcon-9, which has successfully reached orbit 18 times.
The manned Dragon capsule configuration (aka Dragon 2) is expected to do a demo flight in about a year. It was delayed by the accident investigation due to one faulty support spar (of which thousands had already flown) in May of this year. Falcon 9 is scheduled to return to flight in about a month, but it has a backlog of missions/payload before it can fly the Dragon 2 Demo flight, currently expected in the second half of 2016.
Yeah, we temporarily stumbled on manned space flight -- but we've done so before (e.g. after the two Shuttle disasters). It's not permanent.
Use digital USB speakers, and tap/copy the signal. either in hardware or software.
While I am not at all sure that USB speakers will replace the soundcard/analog combination, they are likely to become too big a market share for RIAA to ignore, just like those annoying integrated sound chips that audiophiles deride, but that still manage to live in millions of budget and office systems.
True, it is possible to encrypt the signal to the speakers, and use decrypting speakers, but there is unlikely to be enough market clout to force speaker manufacturers/system integrators/buyers to adopt encrypted speakers to support SDMI. I think that we are too far along the USB audio roadmap for it to be easily diverted now
Recall, a format that doesn't catch on means lost time/money/opportunity for the RIAA, as well as the manufacturers and buyers.
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No slam at you, spazmoid (I hate the decision, too), but the only "of course" here is the fact that we are moving into a genuinely new realm, and there are going to be some dislocations, as we sort things out.
In the past, you could have two identical brand names (for example) in nearby town, state, or even adjacent aisles of the grocery store (would you even notice if there was an 'Encore' brand dog food, and an 'Encore' line of TV dinners [feel free to provide you own punch lines.
In the past, boundaries were much more effective at compartmentlizing business, and the primary role of the trademark was associative -- i.e. it relied on the associational mechanisms of the brain more than the actual literal words.
On the web, we rely on literals, and any hierarchy of naming will fall short of the flexibility of the old system (any system that had more flexibility than ordinary human associative thinking would be useless because humans wouldn't be able to master it) We do not live hierarchically, we do not do business hierarchically (i.e. category-busting businesses and products will always emerge), and we do not want to be ruled by a hierarchy.
Meanwhile, the fact that there is *one web* is both a strength and a weakness. It's strengths are well known, and many of its weaknesses lie in the fact that it will require us to change our thinking. This is often a necessary price for new capabilities, but it's always a drawback from the user's view, in the short term (and we're *all* users, when it comes to the web, whether third grader or multinational)
I don't much care for this decision, and I sure wouldn't enjoy debating whether the Corinthian Sailing Club (corinthian.org) is more 'worthy' of that second level domain than the guy who lost corinthian.com.
In the future, we will see new ways of doing things, and one that I expect will become more common will be "index pages" that list, for example, many 'corinthians' and link their websites. We've had examples of this for years:
until recently http://www.apc.com let you choose between the former American Power Corporation, a well-known UPS maker, or the former Alabama Power Corporation (an electric utility and management company)
While I'm as amused by the notion of revenge against the much hated market-droids who afflict our industry (with grudging acknowledgement to the fact that in contemporary society marketing seems to be necessary), the page cited in the Ambrosia quickie made me feel I was being played like a elephant's nose-flute.
I'd wager good odds that marketdroid Jason Whong either came up with the idea himself, or agreed enthusiastically when it was proposed at some undoubtedly well-lubricated strategy session -- and I bet the results warm the cockles of his marketdroid... er, whatever Marketdroids use instead of a heart.
I'd feel better about the 'penance' if Ambrosia listed all their known bugs, and the roadmap for correcting them. Instead, I found very little on this subject on their website - a few FAQs on undesirable behaviors (mostly justifying them or describing them as unavoidable, rather than offering workarounds or plans for patches)
Absent that kind of open acknowledgement of the specific problems, it's just a clorful ploy, that has nothing to do with delivering bug-free product
[BTW, Driver Psychology is a useful link for those who are interested in the other major component of traffic -- or simply have a friend they want to keep from killing themselves on the highway]
I used to take my friends to a cabin in Laconia, NH for Thanksgiving each year. One year, (early 80's) we brought several (Apple II) computers with us and attacked this problem, coding and discussing it as we conducted our usual festivities. The joke was that we'd win a Nobel Prize (The Peace Prize, we decided) and the undying gratitude of the Billions in the Next Millenium.
Alas, coding/modifying the digital automata took most of our time , and none of us had more than a couple of years driving experience. (Yikes, I can't believe it even ran in something like real time on a 64K machine with 191K floppies (this was before hard drives for personal computers) running on a 8/16 bit CPU at a true speed of 1/2 MHz) We never made our breakthrough -- and the hangovers on the last day of that trip made several of us repress the memory of the entire weekend.
Well, here we are, hard upon the next millenium, and I was wondering what software is out there that could implement a digital automata traffic simulator. We had notebooks full of elaborate scenarios - traffic light synchronization, types of accidents, ambulances, cars going in/out os various types of commercial parking lot entryways, etc. It was a low-res SimCity of traffic. -- much more fascinating than it sounds. (And hey, if a million late night hackers can't solve traffic, then we should go back to the single wheel and start over)
Can anyone suggest a program - perhaps Object Oriented - that would let me repeat and expand on my original experiments? I *still* drive differently because of what I learned (At last! Driver's Ed that means something!)
"Note, 'tho, that the NSA's charter is pretty darn specific. In most circumstances, they are NOT allowed to deliberately eavesdrop on an American citizen, or to arrange for any other nation to do so -- and their own FAQ reiterates this. Exceptions, if memory serves, include conversations with foreign nationals.
In theory, of course. But, in practice, all any intelligence agency needs to do to perform domestic surveillance, is apply to the special FISA court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Title 50, Chapter 36 US Code, which, last I heard, had refused exactly one request (out of tens of thousands) since 1978. FISA warrants (which, unlike regular warrants are not published or released) have skyrocketed in the past few years -- averaging ca 250/yr in the first 15 years of FISA, and over 1000/yr by the latest Congressional figures I've seen (which may not be a complete count of recent warrrants for obvious reasons).
I discussed FISA in another story recently, and I don't like to think about it too much in one day (it's too depressing, for personal reasons) so please see my earlier post on wiretaps [there's a bug in slashcode, so you may have to click the post # to see the whole thing) or do a Google search for "FISA wiretap" (no quotes).
I like the NSA (also for personal reasons), but my personal fondness for the organizations doesn't blind me to the dangers intrisic in irresponsible policy.
One of the trends that brought down the USSR was the way technology disproportionately empowered the individual in a restrictive society. In the 70's, mimeographs and xeroxes were tightly regulated as potential printing presses. Even a senior scientist seeking a reprint usually had to get it copied by a designated library officer, who kept logs. One key to the maintaining power was maintaining a disparity in capability between the KGb (e.g.) and the indivisual. But the Soviet economy would not long stand unless they freely used computers, networks, fax, xerox, and other technologies that were growing common in the West, and these tools could be (and were) used for dissent as well
In a society where technology and openness traditionally favor the individual, the balance can easily swing the other way -- it really has nowhere else to go. Overly broad powers, in actual experience yield little, and even in theory should yield very little, given practical realities.
Powers tend to be used, regardless of the target. US vs THEM is very deep in the human tribal nature, and is a common attitude in any gov't agency or business. The Geeks (individuals) led technology, but now the technology is so powerful that for many individual applications it doesn't matter if you have a P-100 or a Beowulf cluster... large organizations, however, can harness the full power of the new technology...
We need to use our Mark I jello-ware neural-nets before it's too late!
Here are some facts and cases that every American citizen should know. I was pretty horrified that this entire area was not mentioned in yesterday's discussion of Federal monitoring (alas, I didn't have time to read it or post yesterday)
1) Since 1978, US Intelligence agencies have a special court (FISA: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) to turn to for domestic wiretaps. Each decision is reached in secret, with no published orders, opinions, or public record. Only one of the tens of thousands of requests was ever turned down. When Clinton signed Executive Order 12949 on February 9, the powers of the FISA court was greatly expanded: It now has legal authority to approve black-bag operations to authorize Department of Justice (DoJ) requests to conduct physical as well as electronic searches, without obtaining a warrant in open court, without notifying the subject, without providing an inventory of items seized. The targets need not be under suspicion of committing a crime. Here's what Federal Judge Robert W. Warren from Wisconsin, (senior panelist on the second tier FISA Court of Review) said about his duties...
2) going down from the Federal level, wiretap abuse on landlines and wireless by state and local authorities is extremely widespread today. These wiretaps are applied without court order, with very deliberate lies on affadavits, and every other imaginable abuse of the system. A search for "illegal wiretap" will turn up links to articles listing thousands of cases Here are a few.
3)Legal wiretaps are usually not very cost-effective.
These items are just the tip of the iceberg! Do a few Google searches, and you find case after case of officers and agencies wiretapping for personal gain and institutional chicanery, of forged or fraudulently obtained warrants, and massive illegal campaigns that don't even pursue current crimes, but where the recordings are stored (as in the LA cases) for possible future use.
It's uncomfortable to think about. I don't enjoy it myself. However, before we believe "1984 has come and gone, and we're safe", we have to ask ourselves... who says we're safe? The Government?
I have to say, I've always harbored concerns about the FISA courts (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), which are essentially a shadow judiciary that supposedly oversees, reviews, and approves FED intelligence wiretapping within the US. Congress has been looking into it sporadically since the 1997 wiretap report, but though they find abuses left and right, and issue sternly worded rebukes, they haven't taken any action yet.
The last I heard, the FISA court had never refused a single one of the 15,000 requests for domestic surveillance made of it, and only a tiny handful (under 10, IIRC) had even had to resubmit, and requests have been skyrocketing since 1993 (averaging about 250/yr in the 15 years from 1978-1993, but currently at 1000+/yr per Freedom of Information Act documents) Meanwhile, 'normal court' wiretap warrants have grown only several percent a year. (*)
The NY Times and other newspapers have written about the FISA system, but the Web has made me lazy (and besides, how many of you would look up a dead tree citation) so here are two URLs [Artcle I] [Article II]. You can find much more info with a G oogle Search for [FISA wiretap] (without brackets).
BTW, if you're interested in such things, you should look at the many articles on the huge increase in state wiretaps and the LA County DA's investigation of massive illegal wiretapping by the LAPD
2) In the 70's/80's, there was (and is) a pervasive attitude of denial and stubborn skepticism (both in the public and the intelligence community itself) regarding ECHELON, the NSA -- the CIA was the 'designated bad guy' in the post Watergate/Allende/Whitlaw era:
3) Without meaning any criticism of France, the fact is that they have been very well aware of ECHELON for decades. Like most governments, they often use such "investigations" for public relations purposes. Does anyone really think that the French (oe anyone) conducts *genuine* intel review/investigation in the public eye like this? Or that a federal prosecutor is the best qualified to ferret out these facts?
4) (personal observation, possibly unjustified) It's always seemed to me that the SDECE is far more adept -- and interested -- in espionage than counter-espionage. I can only speculate on why that is (*if* it is), but it's beem something that I've been noticing consistently since I learned (in the late 70's) about the theft of the Concorde plans from France in the late 60's (to forestall the inevitable rejoinders: yes, I know there were some significant aerodynamic differences between the Concorde and the 'Concordski' (TU-144), but the former Soviet team leaders have admitted to using the design as a basis, they just couldn't utilize the plans properly, as they have admitted in Western interviews such as this one on the PBS show, Nova [transcript], and many earlier ones I'm not going to bother tracking down). Paradoxically, the Concordski flew before the Concord did.)
Comments, clarification, and additional details are solicited, as always.
I would like to retract my statement that Jose Bove is believed to have ordered the fatal Breton attack, and offer my personal thanks to those who corrected me on this point.
I did not set out to malign him. I simply found that Katz' article didn't tell me anything about the person he was applauding. Hence the title and initially biographical tone of my post. I simply wanted facts. After over an hour of reading French/US articles, and getting contradictory impressions, I stumbled into some shocking (seeming) facts, which seemed too noteworthy to ignore.
In the days after the April terrorist attack, Le Monde and several other media reported that "Jose Bove is being questioned by the authorities" -- but there were no corresponding headlines saying "Jose Bove seems to be cleared". Also search engines can lag 1-2 months behind content, so the few exculpatory 'minor articles' in May/June were not fully indexed
I feel paticularly embarrassed because I had a friend who was in a similar situation many years ago. I first saw it on a front page headline "Prominent Senate Intelligence [sic] aide caught with a kilo of heroine!" That was the afternoon edition, just hours after the arrest, but he was already cleared before the papers hit the street (the drugs were from a vengeful ex with whom he was 'planning a future' until he learned she was involved with drugs. They verified this with her supplier and ID'ed the anonymous tip) His arrest got headlines or was cited on the front page of many major national papers, but Follow-ups tended to get a few column-inches on page 36... eventually, if ever. That's how the media work -- and the ranking system of search engines (as well as the indexing delay) will only make this problem worse in the future -- A word to the wise.
After reading the facts presented by the other posters, I reviewed the source material for my post, and found that other statements that I relied upon may have been media sensationalism as well. Yhese had made me very skeptical of his claims of nonviolence, but after examining those incidents in some detail (which is why it's taken me so long to repond) I now have a great deal more respect for Mssr. Bove's methods, even if I do not necessasrily agree with his politics.
I apologize for my error, and especially for emphasizing it in my earlier post. I let my shock get the better of me, and in that I am no better than the media I criticize.
I realize that public retractions seem to be unpopular on Slashdot, but I think it's only right
John, this was one of your worst articles.
Who is José Bové, and is he admirable?
He is a Frenchman who was born in Bordeaux in 1953, and grew up at Berkeley, as his parents studied Biochem. Back in France, he refused to do his military service and dropped out of Bordeaux University to immerse himself in various leftist political and ecological movements. In 1975 he and his wife decided to move to the country, take up sheep farming and join a local peasant movement (Confédération paysanne), which he terms 'a trade union', though I do not understand in what sense he means this) against a plan to extend an army base in southern France. He was arrested for "invading" the base during a 1976 protest, and he spent three weeks in prison. (The military project was canceled five years later, more due to the economy than nanything else
In 1998, he blew up up a silo (which belonged to the pharmaceutical firm Novartis) because it contained genetically modified corn. Here's Mssr. Bove's own statement about his actions and motives. It appears to have been written in English, or at least be an authorized translation. I haven't found a French original or variant translations.
In 1999, he became a 'national hero' (according to his supporters -- he's certainly a cult figure) for damaging an unfinished McDonalds with a bulldozer, and later organizing a massive giveaway of Roquefort cheese to protest US import restrictions. He also is known for staging 'illegal' free Roquefort and French bread picnics in front to McDonald's during the WTO protests in Seattle. Distributing the cheese was 'illegal' because it was unpasteurized. Time magazine did a piece on him
But he's not in jail for the bulldozer attack. he spent 20 days in jail for that in 1999. He calls that the greatest favor the judge could have done, due to the publicity it gave him.
On Wednesday, April 19, 2000, an attack on a McDonald's resulted in the death of a '28 year-old waitress'. Jose Bove is believed to have ordered this attack. He has always proclaimmed his movement (Confédération paysanne) to be nonviolent, but admits that violent means have been used, and often refers to the groups actions as 'combat' (same in French as English) I found a French account of the attack that you can babelfish, if necessary
I also found an 12/99 interview where he outlines his current views. He is not an ultra-liberal (in fact he denounced ultraliberalism as 'suicidal'), his personal views are a patchwork of conflicting insistence on individualism and collectivism, (which becomes harder for me to render coherently, the more I read) Politically, he opposes 'internationalization' and insists that 'each nation has a right to choose what it wants to eat' (he supports French Bans on US food, while protesting US bans on French foods)
I leave an analysis of his ideology to others -- anyone but Katz.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the privacy implications of this. 1) you an encode as much as you want during transmission, but there is currently no way to work on the data without decoding first. The main CPU (and the 'rented' progfgram) sees all your personal data, and it's not under your control 2) If you trust all commercial CPU cycle providers (I don't), what about cracked/compromised systems? But more importantly, what evidence do we have that commercial enterprises can be trusted in this fashion? Even EU privacy laws hace limited utility against a US server. 3) Consider this as well... if your apps are following you around, running on whatever machines are nearby, and those machines are programmed to configure themselves to your custom settings, then trojan/virus/macro checking becomes tougher. Each machine can only (at best) detect the known public viruses. Meanwhile that custom reporting macro your employer put in a 'petty cash' template, follows you from bar to bar, to the house of your college friend (who has had more social diseases than Don Juan's taste-tester; and eighteen misc. misdemeanor arrests for DUI, drug possession, disorderly conduct, and trolling /.) Etc. Etc. You can *know* the proper configuration on your home/office machine. An anonymous machine can't recognize what 'belongs' -- And (you heard it here first) what about a macro that is set *not* to load from the server to your home/work machine? One that effectively lives outside your door and follows you only when you're out? Sorry, I'll stick with my private hardware, running my privately owned copy of software -- and the PDA with electrical tape over the IR port
It isn't sexy and is probably cheating for those who demand strict anthropomorphism, but as a cash-strapped teen hobbyist in the 70's I found that edge detection could be done easily with a cheap IR laser diode casting a stripe at a 45 degree angle (you could probably use an IR LED, but I needed a *bright* dot, or my crappy vidicon tube setup couldn't distinguish in lighting like 'sun streaming through venetian blinds')
It didn't scan and it wasn't pivotable. (Both were planned future upgades that never got done) It was just a fixed optical element that converted tha IR laser 'dot' to a 'stripe'. It could rotate, so that the stripe could assume different angles to the vertical, but +45 and -45 were almost always adequate. The one trick is that the 'stripe' was a better discriminant when projected from near or below the level of the steps, not at head height. The video unit could be anywhere.
IR showed up nicely on the old tubes I used, but was chosen because that's all I could get ($10 a pop *surplus* for the diode alone in 1978). It did made the system look cooler to human eyes, though. A trio of different colored visible light laser stripes would've been a very distinguishable signal in high noise, but that was just a dream back then. Now you can buy color laser pointers with sets of removable holographic gratings for a few bucks. I bet a simple fixed grid holograph at 45 degrees would do the job nicely. A second at 22 degrees would be a great backup.
Subtracting successive beam off/on frames gave me all the info I needed for edge detection with monocular vision. Binocular should give you everything you need to climb stairs, I'd imagine.
Admittedly, the discontinuity detection was more processor intensive than an edge filter, but I'm sure there are more efficient algorithms than the ones I used (and there simply is no comparison between an 0.5MHz 6502 and a GHz Athlon)
The question is: would you rather be totally anthropomorphic or just get the job done?
This approach probably wouldn't work for industrial robotic assembly (which may be why Honda didn't use it). Shiny surfaces, like factory fresh metal parts, really kill the image (and 'beams bouncing everywhere' wouldn't be too kind to bystanders, unless you stuck to low power IR)
If a corporation releases a binary to 1 person outside the corporation, they must include the source with it.
In principle, I agree with you. However, while I believe that many of the so-called ambiguities in this article are not valid, this issue - 'release to specified individuals only' could be a real hotbed of controversy. Example #4 (below) is the real killer, but you need to ride the slippery slope to see how it could read in court.
For the sake of argument, let's imagine a GPLed communications program that has been modified to use a new unpublished crypto algorithm that the author doesn't want to release yet (or may never want to release). Maybe it's "security through obscurity", "NSA paranoia", or a real breakthrough -- it doesn't matter. I'll discuss two cases: a corporate modification and a 'lone hacker' modification, since different precedents will be based on different programs
1) A corporation creates this program to access its proprietary in-house system. It makes the program available to its employees, binary only. This is internal use - no source release required
2a) The corporation now supplies the program to contractors and consultants. Note: this is controlled release, but the recipients are not company employees. (Almost any internal-use program will end up being used by consultants or contractors at some time.) By your argument, this would be a mandatory source release, but I doubt a court would agree, due to the client-agent relationship and the specific need to access the internal corporate system.
2b) a private individual writes the above modified program to controll access to, say, his private anti-gov't website. He gives copies to relatives and a few close friends. Are blood, friendship, or academic ties enough to allow him to consider this 'internal use'? Unlike a corp, where individuals can be 'parts' of the 'legal person', he is dealing with 'outside' people.
The catch in 2a and 2b is limited release. Many prominent Open Source programs were 'private hacks' that grew into something useful and then released to the community. Not everyone wants to open themselves up to criticism until they are reasonably sure they have something good.
NOTE: The 'open source' provision of GPL only guarantees source to those who already have the program, not to the universe at large,
Limited Release is a slippery slope...
3a) The company makes the program available to a partner company on a project. Arguably still 'in-house' in a court's eyes
3b) The company makes the program available to a consortium (or assigns the program in its entirety to the consortium)
3c) The individual uses the cool program he wrote for personal use to do neat-o things at work (either as employee or consultant) but he uses it as a personal tool and doesn't install it permanently on their system
3d) The individual's client company insists that he install the program permanently (or sign over his rights to the program for a fair fee) on the grounds that the contract isn't fulfilled if only he can diagnose/repair the system. What rights can he sign over. if you believe he had the right to do 3c above, why can't he assign that right? Under copyright law, he can assign *all* his rights.
There are many other examples, but I'll conclude with one final-- The Horror:
4) a company writes commercial software, which it does not *sell* to the consumer, but allows them to *use* under a contract or license, either temporary or permanent, while retaining full ownership, and perhaps even the right to shut it down remotely
SOUND FAMILIAR?
Is this distribution? A loan? A limited access? "Use within a specified business relationship"?
Look, I think 90% of us would agree what it should be, but I hope you can now see how it *might* be seen after several years of precedent
The article states that this procedure is only for retinitis pigmentosa, but in the end, it is not a treatment for RP, but an early biocompatibility test. RP is only a useful physiological test bed that renders the patient blind over large areas of the retina, while leaving most of the retinal structure intact. The patient was undoubtedly a research volunteer, and was aware of all this, and should probbaly more properly be coinsdered a 'subject' (but I hate calling patients that).
.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html
As you probably recall from elementary school, there are two types of receptors in the eye. Rods handle B/W vision, are more sensitive to light, and are responsible for night and peripheral vision. Cones handle color vision, and are only found in the central areas of the visual field, especially the area of best vision in the eye, fovea centralis. (not to be confused with a nearby region of *no* vision, the macula lutea or 'blind spot' where the optic nerve enters the retina). Simple layman diagrams and links to useful concepts (but not *absolutely* accurate) can be found at:
http://hyperphysics.p hy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/retina.html
http://hyperphysics
Here's a good anatomical overview of the eye
RP is a group of genetic diseases which cause the rods to degenerate. about ten different mutation have been linked to forms of RP, which can be dominant, recessive, or X-linked. Initially, the patient loses their peripheral vision, beginning in a single region, then gradually spreading. The fovea centralis is the last region to be affected, if ever, because there are few rods in the fovea. It is not clear if loss of sharp central vision is due to 'pure' RP at all, since mutations in some 'RP' genes can cause macular degenerations or other retinal conditions. It appears that the loss of central vision is dependent on the individual's particular mutation.
The retina is laid out in layers, and in very different way that you might imagine. The photo sensors are in the *back* of the retina, and in front of them are several layers of neurons that allow the sensors to integrate (share info between nearby sensors, etc) and in front of that are the blood vessels a snd the neurons that go from the interneurons into the optic nerve, etc. Light passes through all these layers before hitting the rod and cone sensors. The only things that are 'behind' the sensors are the pigmented (choroid) layer, a black layer that absorbs all leftover light to keep it from bouncing around the eye; and the sclera, the tough "white of the eye" that provides support.
[Slides and images]
[Good slide, exlanations, links, but a bit technical]
So why use this implant in RP? Well, by prying apart the layers of the retina as described, the sensors can be placed where the cones used to be, and with a bit of luck, the overlying layers of interconnecting neurons will remain intact (they are presumably unaffected by the rod-destroying mutations, since 'cone' vision is preserved in RP) All this is done in the periphery of the eye, away from the delicate Fovea and macula. Here it can be tested, through the (largely) intact eye, without significantly affecting the patient's remaining natural vision (though there's always some risk)
This implant links into the web of interneurons in the retina, instead of having to be connected to the optic nerve as the native rods and cones do. You can see how this is easier than trying to do delicate neurosurgery on the optic nerve, and then re-training the patient's visual cortex. This is the most 'natural' process for th patient, since all position info is preserved and the preprocessing of the retina is present (ther preprocessing has two purposes: feedback to nearby sensors, which is lost in man-made sensors, and pre-processing of the visual impulses, which is preserved)
However, a low resolution 'pinhead' sensor on the periphery won't help an RP patient at all. In fact, patients sometimes find patchy remnants of peripheral vision distracting and annoying. Clearly this is not a treatment for RP but an early stage biocompatibility test for later work (that is more likely to be useful in other conditions).
Here's a review article on progress and challenges in similar subretinal implant technologies
(Disclaimer: I published some research on retinal layers as an undergrad, but that was almost 20 years ago, and before I went to medical school)
Some people have raised that the metric on the chart was Ops/sec per $1000, a fact which I myself noted on the nanotech forum. I didn't calculate out every factor because the error on the chart was clearly many more orders of magnitude than any possible correction could account for. The following are just back-of-the-envelope adjustments, but I think you'll see my point stands.
Let's adjust the figures for the Hollerith Tabulator to render it in ops/ sec per $1000, as Matrix42 and quokka70 suggest...
First off, the Hollerith tabulator was first used in the 1890 census, not during the 1910's, as the chart suggests (a *major* fudge factor). It was a mature technology after 30-40 years of use.
But let's assume they meant an 1910 model. With a chart metric of 10^(-5) ops/sec per $1000, it would have cost $100M to attain 1 op/sec -- not processing all the data for a single person, not even copying a single person's data into core memory, but one single op.
In 1915, in the middle of WWI, the total US outlay, including the military, was $746M, and total receipts were under $700M (wars tend to run at a deficit) And you're telling me they spent $100M on the Hollerith tabulator. ("but that's $100M 1999 dollars!" you cry.) Very well, at 3% annual inflation over 80 years, you get a factor of ten adjustment on dollar valuation (3% is actually generous, considering that we had some very serious devaluations, like the entire depresion era, during that time)
$10M 1915 dollars (18% of the Navy's wartime budget that year, give or take) to generate 1 op/sec, at a time when a skilled adding machine operator could calculate much faster, for a salary of a few hundred a year!
In fact, by their figures, $100 Billion - roughly MS's corporate worth today, would give them 1000 ops/sec - one millionth the power of the Athlon on the chart This would enable them to do a hefty 500 million ops/yr running 24/7 -- a whopping 5.5 ops for each of the 91 Million citizens counted in the 1910 census -- enough for two loads, an add, and two store operations per counted citizen!
In short, a $100M 1 op/sec machine would be useless (and at $10M 1915 dollars would have won the war for the Germans) The unthinkable $10B 1915 expenditure required to perform a minimal 1910 census (one-millionth of an Athlon according to that chart) would be better spent simply buying the US outright -- 13x the US government's wartime budget, foreign and domestic!
A battery of 1000 skilled adding machine operators can exceed 1000 ops/sec - and even as late as 1945, the total cost for salary and equipment would have been under $3M 1945 dollars, not 22.5 billion (=100 Bill. 1995 dollars). Incidentally, big companies did their accounting exactly this way (rooms full of adding machine clerks) back in 1945.
The numbers on the chart are messed up --very badly messed up. It's not just the Hollerith numbers. The chart claims that 1 op/sec per $1000 wasn't reached until 1950. Apparently he never looked in a hobby electronics magazine (or model railroad, or scientific American) from the first half of the century cheap home-made relay-based calculating machine projects were far from unheard of -- and did several ops/second.
Think of the codebreakers at Bletchley park. They needed to crack German Ultra messages overnight, at a time when Britain was stretched to its limit. Yet the chart claims computers cost $100,000 per op/sec at that time (and as I mentioned a single adding machine exceeds 1 op/sec) Britain didn't have the hundreds of millions of 1940 dollars to throw at Colossus
Next time try presenting some back-of-the-envelope calculations of your own. I've often found that doing this may reveal some minor errors in another person's calculations, but actually ends up confirming their overall conclusion.
The 'CPU power' chart disgusted me. If it really reflects the data in Kurzweil's book, I fear for humanity, because it was ludicrously rigged, and should have caused an outcry for such a highly regarded bestseller, yet apparently even the geeks didn't notice.
Yup, you heard me. The chart is rigged. Both with carefully selected points and with outright fabricated data.
First, point selection: Where are the mini's and mainframes and supercomputers of the 80s/90s? ("They aren't the most cost effective!" you cry) Okay, then where are the wang and other desktop (sometimes desk-sized) programmable calculators of the 60's/70's? The HP and other pocket calculators of the 70's/80's? ("They aren't the same thing," you argue, weakly.)
Second, bad data: "Fine," I say, "then do you really expect me to believe that a Hollerith tabulator took 3-30 hrs per operation? 10^(-4) to 10^(-5)ops/sec (according to the chart) = 10,000-100,000 seconds/op. In fact, there isn't a single computer capable of 1 op/sec until 1950 in the chart. Am I to believe that business spent millions on computers that were far slower than a moderately bright child using an abacus?
And how about the Apple II, the first personal computer I owned -- a 6502 used two clocks (out of phase) at roughly 1 MHz to run 500K single cycle ops/sec. I don't recall any common op codes that took more than 5-6 cycles, but there may have been one or two oddballs at 7-8 under worst case scenarios. (Most took 2-3.) Yet the Apple is listed as being roughly 30K ops/sec? (log(ops/sec) = 4.5)?
"Oh but we're talking about 64-bit adds" you argue, whipping out your abacus "...er, make that 'multiply's!"
I could invent justifications for each point on the chart, but by the time you're done, you'll realize, as I did, that the chart isn't worth the paper it's written on, and that it is utterly shocking that this hasn't been pointed out and ridiculted a million times by now.
3-30 hours for a single operation? C'mon!
I was doing a search for a citation for 'warranty' vs. 'guarantee' with special regard to software, and this link came up number #1. Google must've glitched a new meaning into 'software'.
I especially liked their fervent assurance that internal insertion of Curves® WILL result in severe bodily injury.
As such, it does not conflict with, or supplant HTTP-NG, or many other standards being hammered out by the IETF. It's just another tool developers and info provider may choose, depending on their needs.