Evi: desperately hoping you're in a life raft somewhere and will get to laugh your laugh at some of the kids posting here today. A great big IETF hug to you, wherever you are.
I'm in my mid 40s, already got kids, am reasonably fit, have a scientific background, and I've probably got the right sort of technical skills for such a trip. I'm half-way through a pretty successful academic career at this point in my life. In 15 years time (when such a trip might be feasible), I'll be 60. My kids will have left home, and I'll be looking forward to retirement.
Trouble is I'm not the sort of person to settle down and play golf. If, instead of retiring, I could do something really amazing with the last few years of my (productive) life, I'd jump at the opportunity. Assuming I'm still fit enough, I'd jump at the chance to go to Mars on a one-way trip. Likely it would shorten my life significantly. But I'll have already lived most of it anyway - what a way to go out!
The tough part wouldn't be missing Earth, or spending 6 months in a large can, but missing my family. Video conferencing isn't the same, especially with the time lag. But even so, I reckon I'd still go, if they gave their blessing. I think they'd probably understand, even if they weren't happy about it. Some things are just worth devoting the rest of your life to, even if it turns out to be short.
I've always found that I can take notes, or understand, but I can't do both. Back when I was a student, i generally taken almost no notes - just perhaps half a page to a page in an hours lecture - just the key points and nothing else to act as reminders later. It always worked well for me - I seemed to be the only person who actually understood stuff.
Of course, revision for exams was interesting, but it really was revision, because I didn't have enough notes to attempt to learn anything during revision. Probably fits with the article - remembering during revision was hard, but once I had remembered, I really knew it well.
One of the most difficult parts of science is knowing what questions are worth answering. Coming up with a good question - one that is worth answering and can be answered - is often the hardest part of a PhD. Younger scientists generally have more difficulty with this than older scientists - it is something that you get better at with experience and with making a good network of people you interchange ideas with.
But often younger scientists are (or rapidly become) better at the fine details when pointed in the right direction, but getting that direction in the first place is crucial. All this points to collaboration between people of different generations as being a very pretty effective way to have impact.
Interestingly, what Fukushima did show was that several pretty large explosions inside the reactor buildings didn't really cause damage to the reactor containment. So you're almost certainly right that a terrorist with a backpack bomb probably isn't actually going to cause a disaster.
Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if they shot protestors next time.
Sounds like the came very close to proving that no such hole existed - when you call ahead to tell the police not to shoot your guys, you're not proving much.
So now when the real terrorists break in, they just have to phone to warn the police that Greenpeace is breaking in?
By the time you're 20 you kinda get the plot, and it usually doesn't get any better after that.
I disagree strongly with that. I'm in my mid-40s, and so far I have to say that life has got better with each passing decade. Not necessily easier, mind you, but certainly better. My job has never been more interesting, and my kids are getting old enough to be not just fun but interesting to have deep discussions with. Perhaps most importantly, I know myself, my strengths and weaknesses better than I ever used to, I've got far more confidence than when I was younger, I'm happy with who I am, and I know how to apply myself and to work with the people around me to get stuff done.
Life is what you make of it. Whatever age you are.
The evidence from supernova 1987A seems to contradict this. Neutrinos from the supernova would have arrived years before the light if c were 0.03% faster than we measure on Earth. Instead they arrived a few hours earlier, which is to be expected, as light from the initial explosion took some time to emerge from the exploding star whereas the neutrinos did not.
A friend of mine who is a professor at a Romanian university mentioned to me that in Romania if you've a Computer Science degree and work as a programmer, you're exempt from paying income tax. No surprise that they've no shortage of smart CS graduates.
Oops, missed the transistor. That's Lilienfeld, a canadian. Shockley and the Bell labs team built some of their early transistors based on Lillienfeld's patent.
Well, the light bulb was Joseph Swan, an Englishman.
The telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci, an Italian. Alexander Graham Bell, himself, was Scottish, though he'd been in the US for four years when he did his telephony work.
The nuclear bomb, I'll give you, though of the key people on the Manhattan project, Fermi and Segre were Italian, Teller, Wigner and Szilard were Hungarian, Bohr was Danish, Frisch was Austrian, Block as Swiss, Fuchs, Peierls and Franck were German. But at least Oppenheimer, Bohm and the finance was American.
Packet Switching was independently invented by more than one person, including Donald Davies at NPL in the UK.
Many of the principles later used in TCP/IP including the basic datagram concept came from Louis Pouzin and the French CYCLADES network.
Of the original three TCP/IP implementations, one was done at University College London.
(Most of Europe then wasted a decade on the dead-end that was OSI, but history is written by the victors)
GSM was European.
The Web was European.
Skype was European.
Linux was European.
ARM is European.
I agree the successful big portal sites tend to be American - maybe related to having a large market that all speaks (almost) one language. But I just want to point out that the US does not have a monopoly on innovation.
I can also do this, though I'm better outdoors than in. I can pretty much always get north to within 45 degrees. I can also pretty much look at a map once, memorize the key features, and then mentally navigate on that map, mentally keeping the map orientated to north even if I'm travelling in some other direction. Few people I've talked to seem to do this.
I'm not convinced any of this is magnetic though. I've travelled a fair bit, and I've noticed several failure modes in my navigation ability:
In countries near the equator, I get north and south switched round fairly often.
In the southern hemisphere, until I get used to it, I consistently swap north and south.
In cities where the grid is at 45 degrees to north, I sometimes get north out by 90 degrees.
I'm not as accurate at night and indoors, though I'm still pretty good.
Because my navigation is normally so good, when I do get it wrong, I really believe my error for quite a while, which is not so great.
The north/south swap in the southern hemisphere leads me to believe that the dominant factor is to do with the position of the sun in the sky. I don't do it consciously though, and I live in London, and it still works on frequent cloudy days, so however it works, it's subtle.
The 45 degree grid shift one is strange and very disconcerting. I think what happens is my accuracy is only to the nearest 45 degrees, and I mentally orientate the grid to north. The mismatch between mental model and reality combined with my limited accuracy can cause the whole mental model to jump 90 degrees. Too much thought - should just trust the instinct.
The fact that it all still works at night and indoors could just be that I'm pretty good at dead reckoning. But maybe there is a magnetic aspect - if so it's not the dominant factor.
If there are 20,000 of these devices, they wouldn't have the bandwidth for all of them to be transmitting simultaneously. But that would be a stupid design anyway - it's not how you'd build such a device.
What you'd do is include an RFID-style receiver. You'd interrogate this from some roadside equipment (such as you'd find at tollbooths or on the approach to customs, or anywhere interesting things happen). The receiver responds with its ID, and if they want to enable that particular transmitter, they'd send back the enabling code. It would only then switch on and transmit for some limited time period.
In this way they'd be able to manage spectrum effectively, have the batteries last for years, and capture all the interesting and incriminating snippets of information as a car approaches customs.
Technically, all this is quite feasible - in fact it's really very easy with off-the-shelf technology. Whether this is what they actually did I can only speculate, but it's what I'd have built if I was tasked to do this (I wasn't, I should add).
BTW, a conference publication isn't considered a "journal" publication, and doesn't confer the same status.
This is incorrect for most of Computer Science.
Citeseer has rankings of publication venues for CS. All the top venues are conferences. BTW, the same is not true for Electronic Engineering though - in EE, journals carry more weight. This is always a bone of contention in fields that span both CS and EE.
Of course there are also plenty of useless conferences in CS, where no-one will ever read your paper, and you won't meet anyone interesting if you attend. The impact rating serve as a rough guide to where is likely to be interesting, but they're no good for new venues.
My citation count is currently around 25,000 according to Google Scholar or 7000 according to Citeseer, which uses a different methodology. So I'm probably doing something right. But I'm not in the top 100 most cited authors, so this also shows that there must be an awful lot of publications appearing somewhere. Have to assume most of those are rarely read.
Having implemented BGP, I do know how route damping works. For this particular attack, it does help, but only a bit. The paper looked into this in some detail. If you take out peerings that propagate enough routes, and do it in enough places, the per-peer per-route penalty is usually not exceeded, so relatively few routes end up being damped.
I think the paper got quite a few things wrong, but this isn't one of them.
I was quoted briefly in the New Scientist article. Here's the longer version of what I said to the reporter.
I've taken a quick look at this paper, and at the paper describing the
actual attack on BGP sessions that this paper depends on (Zhang, Mao
and Wang, 2007 (reference 74 in the paper).
For many years a number of us have speculated that it might be
possible to bring down large parts of the Internet by inducing
sufficient churn in BGP routing. In principle, it seems it might be
possible, but doing it in practice is very different. The closest
we've seen in the real world was Jan 25th 2003, when the SQL Slammer
worm spread worldwide in a matter on minutes. It affected about
75,000 computers, and then each constantly tried to infect more
victims. This causes widespread congestion, and the worldwide BGP
routing table decreased in size from about 127,000 routes to 123,000.
Some of this was probably due to congestion disrupting routing
sessions, and some might have been due to people deliberately
disconnecting to avoid further damage. In any event, the Internet
backbone survived the event unscathed, but quite a few edge sites fell
off the Internet.
The attack described in the paper supposes a larger number of
compromised computers (250,000), but the Internet has got bigger and
routers have got faster since 2003, so likely the relative traffic
levels would be similar. The attack also proposes using the targetted
attack described in Zhang, Mao and Wang, and targetting specific links
to create maximum effect. So it's reasonable to suppose that if such
an attack were successful, the impact would be greater than the
Slammer event.
So, there are two questions:
1. could you disrupt routing associations in the way described.
2. if you could, would the effects be as described in the paper.
In answer to 1: Zhang, Mao and Wang describe in their paper how to
defend against such attacks - by simply enabling prioritization of
routing traffic - something that is possible on most commercial
routers. If ISPs do this, then it seems that the attack in the paper
would be thwarted. I don't know how many ISPs do enable this, but if
such an attack were seen in the wild, I'm certain most of them would.
On 2: even if you could disrupt routing associations as described, I
doubt the Internet would behave as described. The simulations in the
paper make a lot of simplifying assumptions, which is necessary to
simulate on this scale. But in hiding all the internal topology of
ISP networks, they also hide bottlenecks that would make the attack
less effective. And the way they model routers queuing routes
internally is simply wrong - no router has a large enough queue size
to delay processing by 100 minutes, as described in the paper. As a
result I have no confidence in the predictions of how the global
routing system responds to this attack.
To be clear: nobody knows if it's possible to bring down the global
Internet routing system. The attack in the paper probably could cause
significant disruption, at least until ISPs reconfigured their
routers. But I doubt the attack would be successful in the way
described in the paper.
You're correct - I forgot about that. But isn't it 12 months from publication, not 12 months from invention? I don't know if filing a Korean patent counts as publication, or only when the Korean patent is granted.
Perhaps they filed the patent in Korea in 2003, were granted it in 2006 establishing the publication date, and filed the US patent.
Another posibility is they did also file a US patent in 2003/4, and the 2007 US patent is a continuation patent based on the 2003 material but with amended claims. That happens all the time.
But I'm not a lawyer - just successfully contested a coulple of patents in court as an expert witness.
The US patent was filed in 2007, but the priority date is 2003 because LG hold a Korean patent dated 2003. The US has a "first to invent" patent system. The priority date on LG's US patent is the invention date - 2003 - not the filing date of 2007.
Maybe LG filed the US patent in 2007 because they could already see Sony infringed. But the US patent system allows that, so long as you can prove the invention date. Screwed up it may be, but that's the law in the US.
Most other places have a "first to file" system; they wouldn't get away with this on an EU patent for example.
While I prefer to live in what passes for a democracy, sometimes it's good to be in competition with countries like China that have different ways of doing things. Once a promising technology is developed, it tends to spread everywhere. Some technologies seem to be most successfully developed under the political/economic system in the West. The Internet comes to mind. But some may be better developed under the political/economic system in China, or other places. But wherever a technology is first developed, it tends to spread if it's successful, because otherwise countries don't stay competitive.
Just because the Western system works well for a lot of things, doesn't mean it's the best system for everything. In the long run, we benefit from a bit of international competition.
I was on a flight into San Francisco about ten years back that was hit by lightning. There was a bright blue flash and bang, and all the lights in the plane went out. A few people screamed. Most of us just looked somewhat startled. About 30 seconds later, the lights came back on again, and shortly afterwards the captain made an announcement something along the lines of "I'm sure you noticed, but we got hit by lightning just now. It does happen from time to time. It did reset a few things up here, but everything is fine now." I always wondered what precisely "a few things" were, and whether everything wasn't fine a couple of minutes before.
Yes but there also was no Windowed GUI system in common use before Windows came out
Windows 1.0 came out in 1985.
It's predated by Xerox Star, the Apple Macintosh, Sun's SunView, the W Window System from Stanford, and early releases of the X indow System. Probably a bunch more too - Symbolics comes to mind. Of those, the Mac and SunView at the very least were widely used.
I don't view it the same way. I've fitted a lot in my life so far; done exciting things, been fascinating places, met incredible people, and done original research that's been cited thousands of times. And I've two great kids and a wife I love. Life is good, and I don't plan on throwing it away casually.
But I also believe that it matters less how many years you live than what you do with the time you have, however long that may be. My family may not agree of course.
Don't get me wrong; I fully expect to do something interesting and useful in my 60s and 70s, health permitting. But I don't fear death; we'll all go some day. I'd rather go out doing something that would really make a difference to how mankind sees itself, and which just might sow the seeds of a new world.
Slashdot Mirror
Evi: desperately hoping you're in a life raft somewhere and will get to laugh your laugh at some of the kids posting here today. A great big IETF hug to you, wherever you are.
Trouble is I'm not the sort of person to settle down and play golf. If, instead of retiring, I could do something really amazing with the last few years of my (productive) life, I'd jump at the opportunity. Assuming I'm still fit enough, I'd jump at the chance to go to Mars on a one-way trip. Likely it would shorten my life significantly. But I'll have already lived most of it anyway - what a way to go out!
The tough part wouldn't be missing Earth, or spending 6 months in a large can, but missing my family. Video conferencing isn't the same, especially with the time lag. But even so, I reckon I'd still go, if they gave their blessing. I think they'd probably understand, even if they weren't happy about it. Some things are just worth devoting the rest of your life to, even if it turns out to be short.
http://www.thewatchhut.co.uk/Rotary-Gents-Mechanical-Skeleton-Strap-Watch-GS02521+06.html
The same may not be true if you've recently graduated.
Of course, revision for exams was interesting, but it really was revision, because I didn't have enough notes to attempt to learn anything during revision. Probably fits with the article - remembering during revision was hard, but once I had remembered, I really knew it well.
One of the most difficult parts of science is knowing what questions are worth answering. Coming up with a good question - one that is worth answering and can be answered - is often the hardest part of a PhD. Younger scientists generally have more difficulty with this than older scientists - it is something that you get better at with experience and with making a good network of people you interchange ideas with. But often younger scientists are (or rapidly become) better at the fine details when pointed in the right direction, but getting that direction in the first place is crucial. All this points to collaboration between people of different generations as being a very pretty effective way to have impact.
Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if they shot protestors next time.
So now when the real terrorists break in, they just have to phone to warn the police that Greenpeace is breaking in?
I disagree strongly with that. I'm in my mid-40s, and so far I have to say that life has got better with each passing decade. Not necessily easier, mind you, but certainly better. My job has never been more interesting, and my kids are getting old enough to be not just fun but interesting to have deep discussions with. Perhaps most importantly, I know myself, my strengths and weaknesses better than I ever used to, I've got far more confidence than when I was younger, I'm happy with who I am, and I know how to apply myself and to work with the people around me to get stuff done.
Life is what you make of it. Whatever age you are.
The evidence from supernova 1987A seems to contradict this. Neutrinos from the supernova would have arrived years before the light if c were 0.03% faster than we measure on Earth. Instead they arrived a few hours earlier, which is to be expected, as light from the initial explosion took some time to emerge from the exploding star whereas the neutrinos did not.
A friend of mine who is a professor at a Romanian university mentioned to me that in Romania if you've a Computer Science degree and work as a programmer, you're exempt from paying income tax. No surprise that they've no shortage of smart CS graduates.
Oops, missed the transistor. That's Lilienfeld, a canadian. Shockley and the Bell labs team built some of their early transistors based on Lillienfeld's patent.
The telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci, an Italian. Alexander Graham Bell, himself, was Scottish, though he'd been in the US for four years when he did his telephony work.
Velcro is Swiss.
The nuclear bomb, I'll give you, though of the key people on the Manhattan project, Fermi and Segre were Italian, Teller, Wigner and Szilard were Hungarian, Bohr was Danish, Frisch was Austrian, Block as Swiss, Fuchs, Peierls and Franck were German. But at least Oppenheimer, Bohm and the finance was American.
Many of the principles later used in TCP/IP including the basic datagram concept came from Louis Pouzin and the French CYCLADES network.
Of the original three TCP/IP implementations, one was done at University College London.
(Most of Europe then wasted a decade on the dead-end that was OSI, but history is written by the victors)
GSM was European.
The Web was European.
Skype was European.
Linux was European.
ARM is European.
I agree the successful big portal sites tend to be American - maybe related to having a large market that all speaks (almost) one language. But I just want to point out that the US does not have a monopoly on innovation.
I'm not convinced any of this is magnetic though. I've travelled a fair bit, and I've noticed several failure modes in my navigation ability:
Because my navigation is normally so good, when I do get it wrong, I really believe my error for quite a while, which is not so great.
The north/south swap in the southern hemisphere leads me to believe that the dominant factor is to do with the position of the sun in the sky. I don't do it consciously though, and I live in London, and it still works on frequent cloudy days, so however it works, it's subtle.
The 45 degree grid shift one is strange and very disconcerting. I think what happens is my accuracy is only to the nearest 45 degrees, and I mentally orientate the grid to north. The mismatch between mental model and reality combined with my limited accuracy can cause the whole mental model to jump 90 degrees. Too much thought - should just trust the instinct.
The fact that it all still works at night and indoors could just be that I'm pretty good at dead reckoning. But maybe there is a magnetic aspect - if so it's not the dominant factor.
What you'd do is include an RFID-style receiver. You'd interrogate this from some roadside equipment (such as you'd find at tollbooths or on the approach to customs, or anywhere interesting things happen). The receiver responds with its ID, and if they want to enable that particular transmitter, they'd send back the enabling code. It would only then switch on and transmit for some limited time period.
In this way they'd be able to manage spectrum effectively, have the batteries last for years, and capture all the interesting and incriminating snippets of information as a car approaches customs.
Technically, all this is quite feasible - in fact it's really very easy with off-the-shelf technology. Whether this is what they actually did I can only speculate, but it's what I'd have built if I was tasked to do this (I wasn't, I should add).
This is incorrect for most of Computer Science.
Citeseer has rankings of publication venues for CS. All the top venues are conferences. BTW, the same is not true for Electronic Engineering though - in EE, journals carry more weight. This is always a bone of contention in fields that span both CS and EE.
Of course there are also plenty of useless conferences in CS, where no-one will ever read your paper, and you won't meet anyone interesting if you attend. The impact rating serve as a rough guide to where is likely to be interesting, but they're no good for new venues.
My citation count is currently around 25,000 according to Google Scholar or 7000 according to Citeseer, which uses a different methodology. So I'm probably doing something right. But I'm not in the top 100 most cited authors, so this also shows that there must be an awful lot of publications appearing somewhere. Have to assume most of those are rarely read.
I think the paper got quite a few things wrong, but this isn't one of them.
Another posibility is they did also file a US patent in 2003/4, and the 2007 US patent is a continuation patent based on the 2003 material but with amended claims. That happens all the time.
But I'm not a lawyer - just successfully contested a coulple of patents in court as an expert witness.
Maybe LG filed the US patent in 2007 because they could already see Sony infringed. But the US patent system allows that, so long as you can prove the invention date. Screwed up it may be, but that's the law in the US.
Most other places have a "first to file" system; they wouldn't get away with this on an EU patent for example.
Just because the Western system works well for a lot of things, doesn't mean it's the best system for everything. In the long run, we benefit from a bit of international competition.
I was on a flight into San Francisco about ten years back that was hit by lightning. There was a bright blue flash and bang, and all the lights in the plane went out. A few people screamed. Most of us just looked somewhat startled. About 30 seconds later, the lights came back on again, and shortly afterwards the captain made an announcement something along the lines of "I'm sure you noticed, but we got hit by lightning just now. It does happen from time to time. It did reset a few things up here, but everything is fine now." I always wondered what precisely "a few things" were, and whether everything wasn't fine a couple of minutes before.
Windows 1.0 came out in 1985.
It's predated by Xerox Star, the Apple Macintosh, Sun's SunView, the W Window System from Stanford, and early releases of the X indow System. Probably a bunch more too - Symbolics comes to mind. Of those, the Mac and SunView at the very least were widely used.
Microsoft, as usual, were late to the party.
But I also believe that it matters less how many years you live than what you do with the time you have, however long that may be. My family may not agree of course.
Don't get me wrong; I fully expect to do something interesting and useful in my 60s and 70s, health permitting. But I don't fear death; we'll all go some day. I'd rather go out doing something that would really make a difference to how mankind sees itself, and which just might sow the seeds of a new world.