I recently read an interview with Ray Kurzweil in a tech mag released by MIT. He turns out he was predicting many of the major technological advances of the computing age back in the 70's when the whole thing was getting started. He was only off by one year (98 vs 99) for a computer being the chess champ of the world. He postulated several other cool ideas such as scanning a person's brain into a computer via nanoprobing each neuron simultaneously via an array of nanno robots in your brain at each neuron connected by a lan and running on distributed processing. Think about it, an immortal (mostly) clone of yourself. Then you really could see how good at quake you are.;) He also had some discussion about the advancement of computers being akin to the evolution of humanity and asympotically approaching an ideal (godlike?) state which acts something like the speed of light... we'll never get there, but we can approximate it.
It is refreshing to see that the science community also reads sci-fi and can see the feasability in building something like this. As for a concern addressed in another post:
-Making "exo-droids" would be an option to preserve human life, but you lose the flexability/instant decision making capablilty of having a human on site, plus the independancy of an indivual soldier.
I think this would be a cool idea. The actual suits wouldn't have to be tremedously huge (i.e. Gundams or Mech or HERC's) but could be small units pieced together around a soldier or worker utilizing pneumatics to increase strength (or a metallic muscle fiber desgin I saw once) or simply provide more protection for dangerous tasks such as chemical spill cleanup, bomb disposal, nuclear facility maintainence, etc... The uses for such devices extend far beyond the battlefield.
Why is it that the average man can see the stupidity in what is going on here, but the scientific community is blind to it? I know it's asking a bit much to expect anyone to do research for the good of mankind or just to plain old discover new things, but this is ridiculous. Many of the above arguments cite good analogies that demonstrate the stupidity of patenting something which everybody owns. A copyright argument is at least logical, whereas the patent argument holds no water. To protect their data? Thats a lame excuse... anyone with the proper facilities can easily reproduce it, it's not that difficult, we were doing RFLP band mappings (that thing they tried to use on OJ) in high school! That's not a far cry from sequencing, it's just a matter of proper equipment. This whole things just irks me....
"What sad times are these when wandering ruffians can say NI! to old ladies at will..."
I'm glad to see that somewhere out there the school board and faculty members of a jr. high or highschool level educational inststitution are finally teaching people about computers rather than just trying to control the learning curve. Where I went to school it was more like a struggle with the powers that be to learn. Computers were seen as simply a tool (like an overpowered calculator)or a black box that came prepared for whatever mind numbing predefined task we were assigned. Any thoughts of personalizing a user profile or using a computer outside the predefined parameters of: 1) checking your email (but only your school provided email of course...) 2) finding library books (i.e. PALS) 3) using your (easily disabled)proxy-neutered Internet for research or 4) Word Processing was striclty forbidden by school code (they passed special regulations just to limit our use of school computers to nil. We had three computer labs, one full of PowerMacs, one full of Dell's, and the other Misc. Pc's in the library (only two of which had web access). Of these three clusters, the only ones available for use by students outside of class was the library cluster. To see a school that actually promotes using computers for more than just secretarial work is refreshing. If every school encouraged kids to learn how to maintain a computer and program (not just brain hashing assignments but their own programs) I think we'd all be better off. For one many of the stigmas related to computers as mysterious boxes with magical inner workings would vanish. Not to mention at least a better public awareness as a whole, and we all know it's about time for that.
Not necessarily particles, could be waves... a cosmic background of x-ray radiation has been discovered along time ago, and is currently easily observable with any x-ray teloscope. Noise comes not only as a particle, or a wave for that matter, it can come as both (i.e. light), or as neither (i.e. warps in the fabric itself and it's underliying structure or lack thereof), or something completely different
Such encryption schemes do exist where you have one set of encrypted data and multiple decryption schemes which produce different documents, the problem with them however is that the overall size of the encrypted document is significantly larger than say a standard encrypted text file. The court can subpoena the means you used to encrypt the text, and even if you give them a phony scheme, they can call upon crypto techs (ie "expert witnesses") to determine whether or not you gave them what you said. So if you use such a multi-threaded encryption program to code data, when the court asks you for the algorithm/program that encrypted the data, you better give them something that produces massive chuncks of garbage along with your actual encrypted message or a really inefficient (size wise) encryption scheme.
It's a nice system, but for $750 a pop which is rather pricey for my poor geek lifestyle, I'm going to want to run this thing portable for more than just an hour or two...
You can add NDSU too your list... The reason floated through the IT dept where I work: Regain control over the bandwith...there was a marked difference in outgoing vs. incoming and overall useage (or so we're told) though I do think that because of Napster's main use (easy access to mp3's) the ban passed much more easily and quickly than if someone proposed a ban on somthing like Spinner or some other streaming media service...
Slashdot Mirror
I recently read an interview with Ray Kurzweil in a tech mag released by MIT. He turns out he was predicting many of the major technological advances of the computing age back in the 70's when the whole thing was getting started. He was only off by one year (98 vs 99) for a computer being the chess champ of the world. He postulated several other cool ideas such as scanning a person's brain into a computer via nanoprobing each neuron simultaneously via an array of nanno robots in your brain at each neuron connected by a lan and running on distributed processing. Think about it, an immortal (mostly) clone of yourself. Then you really could see how good at quake you are. ;) He also had some discussion about the advancement of computers being akin to the evolution of humanity and asympotically approaching an ideal (godlike?) state which acts something like the speed of light... we'll never get there, but we can approximate it.
.... is my BOOMstick!"
-ParadoX-
"this
It is refreshing to see that the science community also reads sci-fi and can see the feasability in building something like this. As for a concern addressed in another post:
-Making "exo-droids" would be an option to preserve human life, but you lose the flexability/instant decision making capablilty of having a human on site, plus the independancy of an indivual soldier.
I think this would be a cool idea. The actual suits wouldn't have to be tremedously huge (i.e. Gundams or Mech or HERC's) but could be small units pieced together around a soldier or worker utilizing pneumatics to increase strength (or a metallic muscle fiber desgin I saw once) or simply provide more protection for dangerous tasks such as chemical spill cleanup, bomb disposal, nuclear facility maintainence, etc... The uses for such devices extend far beyond the battlefield.
-ParadoX-
"Ludo tuo animo!"
Why is it that the average man can see the stupidity in what is going on here, but the scientific community is blind to it? I know it's asking a bit much to expect anyone to do research for the good of mankind or just to plain old discover new things, but this is ridiculous. Many of the above arguments cite good analogies that demonstrate the stupidity of patenting something which everybody owns. A copyright argument is at least logical, whereas the patent argument holds no water. To protect their data? Thats a lame excuse... anyone with the proper facilities can easily reproduce it, it's not that difficult, we were doing RFLP band mappings (that thing they tried to use on OJ) in high school! That's not a far cry from sequencing, it's just a matter of proper equipment. This whole things just irks me....
"What sad times are these when wandering ruffians can say NI! to old ladies at will..."
-ParadoX-
I'm glad to see that somewhere out there the school board and faculty members of a jr. high or highschool level educational inststitution are finally teaching people about computers rather than just trying to control the learning curve. Where I went to school it was more like a struggle with the powers that be to learn. Computers were seen as simply a tool (like an overpowered calculator)or a black box that came prepared for whatever mind numbing predefined task we were assigned. Any thoughts of personalizing a user profile or using a computer outside the predefined parameters of: 1) checking your email (but only your school provided email of course...) 2) finding library books (i.e. PALS) 3) using your (easily disabled)proxy-neutered Internet for research or 4) Word Processing was striclty forbidden by school code (they passed special regulations just to limit our use of school computers to nil. We had three computer labs, one full of PowerMacs, one full of Dell's, and the other Misc. Pc's in the library (only two of which had web access). Of these three clusters, the only ones available for use by students outside of class was the library cluster. To see a school that actually promotes using computers for more than just secretarial work is refreshing. If every school encouraged kids to learn how to maintain a computer and program (not just brain hashing assignments but their own programs) I think we'd all be better off. For one many of the stigmas related to computers as mysterious boxes with magical inner workings would vanish. Not to mention at least a better public awareness as a whole, and we all know it's about time for that.
Not necessarily particles, could be waves... a cosmic background of x-ray radiation has been discovered along time ago, and is currently easily observable with any x-ray teloscope. Noise comes not only as a particle, or a wave for that matter, it can come as both (i.e. light), or as neither (i.e. warps in the fabric itself and it's underliying structure or lack thereof), or something completely different
Such encryption schemes do exist where you have one set of encrypted data and multiple decryption schemes which produce different documents, the problem with them however is that the overall size of the encrypted document is significantly larger than say a standard encrypted text file. The court can subpoena the means you used to encrypt the text, and even if you give them a phony scheme, they can call upon crypto techs (ie "expert witnesses") to determine whether or not you gave them what you said. So if you use such a multi-threaded encryption program to code data, when the court asks you for the algorithm/program that encrypted the data, you better give them something that produces massive chuncks of garbage along with your actual encrypted message or a really inefficient (size wise) encryption scheme.
It's a nice system, but for $750 a pop which is rather pricey for my poor geek lifestyle, I'm going to want to run this thing portable for more than just an hour or two...
I get this strange urge to yell "Remeber the Alamo!"
You can add NDSU too your list... The reason floated through the IT dept where I work: Regain control over the bandwith...there was a marked difference in outgoing vs. incoming and overall useage (or so we're told) though I do think that because of Napster's main use (easy access to mp3's) the ban passed much more easily and quickly than if someone proposed a ban on somthing like Spinner or some other streaming media service...