>and deformed birth (you can do most viability tests at 8 weeks.)
One sheep came out looking perfectly normal, but it was panting all the time. They decided it was better to euthenise it.
What about mental issues? What about subtle immune problems? The number of things that can go wrong and make the kids life hell and yet be completely undetectable are pretty scary.
With Dolly the sheep, the 'failure rate' was running at over 150:1 success.
The failure rate was mostly failures to implant, spontaneous abortions as well as some very deformed births; mostly some that died in a few days, and some that were euthanised.
If this translates into humans in the same way, for every successful clone we can expect several deformed, live, births.But there are questions as to whether Dolly is really 'successful'; the sheep is suffering from arthritis at an unusually young age for example. If you accept this as a cloning problem, then the failure rate runs at 100%.
Ignoring the ethics of successful cloning; given this deformation rate, given we do not allow euthenasia of human infants; is this really ethical right now?
No, I'm saying that for the court to conclude MS had abused their monopoly they must have a motive to do so; and their competitors products must not be 'shite' for Microsoft to have a motive.
There used to be products better than microsoft could produce; and it is entirely reasonable that these companies would have outcompeted Microsoft. But, by and large, Microsoft ruined these companies by various illegal means. Isn't "Innovation" wonderful?
I AM truly surprised. I always imagined it to be such a tiny place.
>1. We are a Continent, though we are also considered to be an island as our entire country is surrounded >by water.
Fascinating.
>2. We are not small. We have cattle ranches bigger than the state of Texas. You can comfortably fit all >of Europe in Australia. Need I go on?
Oh please do. I'm from the UK myself, and I've never heard of the size of Australia, we've had a few family friends over, half my family have been there, calendars, books, globes, maps and so forth. And they neglected to mention, and somehow I never noticed that it was such a big place too. Wow, you live and learn!
I do hope that won't cause issues for Microsoft's takeover bid.
Microsoft produced, and to some extent still produce, the worst software products I have ever used; by a very, very long way.
They only got where they are today for one reason, and one reason only: they provided the OS for the IBM PC. From there they got a gravy train they have been milking and bilking ever since.
The only thing they have needed to do to keep this gravy is to be utter bastards. It's not that people like bastards, it's just you can't stop them easily. It doesn't matter what customers want; if they have to use a PC (and a lot of companies did need to, because of other software they had to run or because other hardware didn't seem appropriate); then 90% of the time, they've HAD to use DOS or windows.
They also wrote Microsoft Office of course, but they were only able to do that by illegally tieing it to the OS...
a) IBM approach- GPL windows and keep office closed b) keep everything closed and make GPL illegal by changing the law c) find a way to crack GPL legally (find/make a hole in it that makes it unefforceable somehow; hey OJ got off first time around;-) ) d) buy Linus Torvalds/Red Hat off [perhaps they have already;-)] e) create their own Linux distro add closed source interfaces and stuff office and IE on top f) abandon the software domain and put their $30+G into other businesses g) spread out into other applications; move away from the OS h) Buy off Richard Stallman i) kill em; kill all of them (order hits on main GPL proponents) j) who cares? let's just buy a small Island somewhere instead. Australia?
"The scheme could prove bulky, so I propose that the contained medium should be made of some material that will conduct an electric charge quite well, such as metal. If this is done I suspect the guided wavefront containers could be made as small as 1/8"-1/4" in diameter. Also, there will be a certain amount of secondary leakage because of electromagnetic radiation produced by the contained signal, but making the container out of some kind of shielding matter would solve this issue."
That's neat! You should patent it!
One modification I thought of would be if rather than using just ANY electromagnetic radiation, if you aim for frequencies around 500nm or so, you might be able to use the guided wavefront material to keep it in itself! You wouldn't need any shielding, it will just reflect at the interface! It will be practically untappable! And much faster than lower frequencies! Wanna share the patent money? We're gonna be rich!
Computing has been around for more than a century. 'New' ideas take time to catch on, and so you may not be aware of them till 10 years later or so, because it can take that long to spread.
e.g. P2P is that new? Well USENET is P2P, so technically not; but still, using P2P as a way to improve download speeds might be considered to be new...
That's a total misrepresentation of what he's saying. He's saying that the UI is good enough that the price becomes more important. And he also says the UI is by no means perfect.
Depending on what you mean by new, this isn't quite true. Consider skip lists, splay trees, html, RSA, etc. many of these were invented in the last ten years or so.
Some of these are truly unique. HTML's main idea was to simplify an existing idea down; the previous hypertext idea was too complex to implement. Even spreadsheets weren't invented that long ago (15 years or so.)
I'm not so sure. If you can only think of one good way to solve something, you probably aren't trying hard enough.
Trivial example: Splay tree? Skip lists? Heaps? These all have big overlaps. Many times you can reuse or refactor code in the same system and save time... you don't even need to be optimal most of the time, and often the local optimum isn't the system optimum.
Yes, but the bit you missed was that his brother was 'new to the business'. So, it's not like the idea was super-complicated or anything. The competitors had simply got to the patent office first.
The patent office don't care whether it is obvious or not; they just write down what other people say in 'patent speak', do a few checks to see if it is already covered by another patent, and then collect their paycheck.
How do you measure obviousness anyway? What's it measured in? Measured in forest gumps or something?
You still go around the earth once a day, but the distance you travel is much greater at geosynchronous orbit than at ground level; so you need to accelerate between the ground and GEO. i.e. Angular rotation rate is being conserved, not momentum.
This means that as you climb the fiber, the fiber takes on a westward lean, as the earth tugs on you to help you speed up. So, the cowboyneal affect is real, although rather exagerated;-)
No, the theory is sound, the initial fiber would only weigh 20 tonnes, if you can achieve the necessary strength which right now we are a smidgen short of. The cable is very thin and flexes easily, so the lunar tidal forces are no problem. The paper says it would be built on an oil rig type structure on the equator, well away from dry land, so NIMBY is obviated.
Voltages? I don't think anyone knows what would happen with that, as far as I know it wasn't mentioned in the original paper either. It might be soluble. Lightning strikes could spoil your whole day that's for sure.
Ok, I admit it, I submitted the slashdot story before last on this topic, and I linked to the same paper that was mentioned in the next story, and this article is a piece on the same guy who wrote the same paper.
Technically, the bottom line is:
No we can't do this right now. The fibers aren't strong enough to do this without bankrupting the global economy. An exponentially tapering fiber can theoretically do this at any time, but it would be wayyyyyy too big and heavy to install. (e.g. a steel cable would be ~hundred meters wide at the thickest point, and >38000km long...)
For the suggested construction technique, the carbon 'rope' needs to be able to give 72.5 Gpa strength, plus safety factor (typically 2). A single fiber gives about 73 Gpa right now. So we've no safety factor at all... but:
Joining the individual fibers together- nobody has done this whilst maintaining enough of the strength. Splicing normally soaks up 15-30% of the strength, and so we're now 15-30% down on the required strength, and nobody has even managed to do splices this good with carbon fiber.
Only a little percentage off then, but this pushes the mass up incredibly when you do the maths.
Still, we're very close. 3 reasonably simple(?) breakthroughs (one to gain strength, one to splice the rope, one to actually scale up production from one 3cm fiber to trillions of 3cm fibers in a reasonable time) and we're saying 'Hi!' to the rest of the solar system.
32 bits isn't centuries; its about 45 years if Moore's law keep up, but RSA is much weaker than that in fact, so an extra 32 bit might only be 5-10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
>So goes spontaneous abortion
Some of the abortions occured unusually late IRC.
>and deformed birth (you can do most viability tests at 8 weeks.)
One sheep came out looking perfectly normal, but it was panting all the time. They decided it was better to euthenise it.
What about mental issues? What about subtle immune problems? The number of things that can go wrong and make the kids life hell and yet be completely undetectable are pretty scary.
With Dolly the sheep, the 'failure rate' was running at over 150:1 success.
The failure rate was mostly failures to implant, spontaneous abortions as well as some very deformed births; mostly some that died in a few days, and some that were euthanised.
If this translates into humans in the same way, for every successful clone we can expect several deformed, live, births.But there are questions as to whether Dolly is really 'successful'; the sheep is suffering from arthritis at an unusually young age for example. If you accept this as a cloning problem, then the failure rate runs at 100%.
Ignoring the ethics of successful cloning; given this deformation rate, given we do not allow euthenasia of human infants; is this really ethical right now?
No, I'm saying that for the court to conclude MS had abused their monopoly they must have a motive to do so; and their competitors products must not be 'shite' for Microsoft to have a motive.
"There were *many* competing products (Wordstar anyone) in all categories but they were all shite and missed the mark."
Not exactly the conclusions of the antitrust court. In fact, exactly not the conclusions.
These new world types have a bad rep in that regard. Consider Canadian Alanis Morissette's "ironic" song ;-)
;-)
I'd never noticed it with Aussies before but now you come to mention it...
"Australia is not small."
Point n'es pas?
p.s. British...
There used to be products better than microsoft could produce; and it is entirely reasonable that these companies would have outcompeted Microsoft. But, by and large, Microsoft ruined these companies by various illegal means. Isn't "Innovation" wonderful?
>Australia is not a SMALL island.
I AM truly surprised. I always imagined it to be such a tiny place.
>1. We are a Continent, though we are also considered to be an island as our entire country is surrounded
>by water.
Fascinating.
>2. We are not small. We have cattle ranches bigger than the state of Texas. You can comfortably fit all
>of Europe in Australia. Need I go on?
Oh please do. I'm from the UK myself, and I've never heard of the size of Australia, we've had a few family friends over, half my family have been there, calendars, books, globes, maps and so forth. And they neglected to mention, and somehow I never noticed that it was such a big place too. Wow, you live and learn!
I do hope that won't cause issues for Microsoft's takeover bid.
Microsoft produced, and to some extent still produce, the worst software products I have ever used; by a very, very long way.
They only got where they are today for one reason, and one reason only: they provided the OS for the IBM PC. From there they got a gravy train they have been milking and bilking ever since.
The only thing they have needed to do to keep this gravy is to be utter bastards. It's not that people like bastards, it's just you can't stop them easily. It doesn't matter what customers want; if they have to use a PC (and a lot of companies did need to, because of other software they had to run or because other hardware didn't seem appropriate); then 90% of the time, they've HAD to use DOS or windows.
They also wrote Microsoft Office of course, but they were only able to do that by illegally tieing it to the OS...
It would also mean the end of illegally tieing their OS to their apps. They won't give up that advantage in a hurry.
They'd be more likely to go the Apple route and just buy Apple.
I was going to say they won't do this, but they don't care about DOJ anymore.
There's a number of approaches:
;-) ) ;-)]
a) IBM approach- GPL windows and keep office closed
b) keep everything closed and make GPL illegal by changing the law
c) find a way to crack GPL legally (find/make a hole in it that makes it unefforceable somehow; hey OJ got off first time around
d) buy Linus Torvalds/Red Hat off [perhaps they have already
e) create their own Linux distro add closed source interfaces and stuff office and IE on top
f) abandon the software domain and put their $30+G into other businesses
g) spread out into other applications; move away from the OS
h) Buy off Richard Stallman
i) kill em; kill all of them (order hits on main GPL proponents)
j) who cares? let's just buy a small Island somewhere instead. Australia?
That certainly gets cats away from your keyboard- they get away from home altogether and never come back.
"The scheme could prove bulky, so I propose that the contained medium should be made of some material that will conduct an electric charge quite well, such as metal. If this is done I suspect the guided wavefront containers could be made as small as 1/8"-1/4" in diameter. Also, there will be a certain amount of secondary leakage because of electromagnetic radiation produced by the contained signal, but making the container out of some kind of shielding matter would solve this issue."
That's neat! You should patent it!
One modification I thought of would be if rather than using just ANY electromagnetic radiation, if you aim for frequencies around 500nm or so, you might be able to use the guided wavefront material to keep it in itself! You wouldn't need any shielding, it will just reflect at the interface! It will be practically untappable! And much faster than lower frequencies! Wanna share the patent money? We're gonna be rich!
Define 'new'. No I mean it.
Computing has been around for more than a century. 'New' ideas take time to catch on, and so you may not be aware of them till 10 years later or so, because it can take that long to spread.
e.g. P2P is that new? Well USENET is P2P, so technically not; but still, using P2P as a way to improve download speeds might be considered to be new...
That's a total misrepresentation of what he's saying. He's saying that the UI is good enough that the price becomes more important. And he also says the UI is by no means perfect.
Depending on what you mean by new, this isn't quite true. Consider skip lists, splay trees, html, RSA, etc. many of these were invented in the last ten years or so.
Some of these are truly unique. HTML's main idea was to simplify an existing idea down; the previous hypertext idea was too complex to implement.
Even spreadsheets weren't invented that long ago (15 years or so.)
I'm not so sure. If you can only think of one good way to solve something, you probably aren't trying hard enough.
Trivial example: Splay tree? Skip lists? Heaps? These all have big overlaps. Many times you can reuse or refactor code in the same system and save time... you don't even need to be optimal most of the time, and often the local optimum isn't the system optimum.
20 years might be plausible, but the actual quote is "50 years after everyone stops laughing."
;-)
I've stopped laughing by the way. So clock is ticking.
Yes, but the bit you missed was that his brother was 'new to the business'. So, it's not like the idea was super-complicated or anything. The competitors had simply got to the patent office first.
The patent office don't care whether it is obvious or not; they just write down what other people say in 'patent speak', do a few checks to see if it is already covered by another patent, and then collect their paycheck.
How do you measure obviousness anyway? What's it measured in? Measured in forest gumps or something?
> If we had a few hundred space elevators on the planet, how long would it take before we could move
> the entire mass of our planet into space?
The Earth is already in space. Amazing huh?
You still go around the earth once a day, but the distance you travel is much greater at geosynchronous orbit than at ground level; so you need to accelerate between the ground and GEO. i.e. Angular rotation rate is being conserved, not momentum.
;-)
This means that as you climb the fiber, the fiber takes on a westward lean, as the earth tugs on you to help you speed up. So, the cowboyneal affect is real, although rather exagerated
No, the theory is sound, the initial fiber would only weigh 20 tonnes, if you can achieve the necessary strength which right now we are a smidgen short of. The cable is very thin and flexes easily, so the lunar tidal forces are no problem. The paper says it would be built on an oil rig type structure on the equator, well away from dry land, so NIMBY is obviated.
Voltages? I don't think anyone knows what would happen with that, as far as I know it wasn't mentioned in the original paper either. It might be soluble. Lightning strikes could spoil your whole day that's for sure.
Ok, I admit it, I submitted the slashdot story before last on this topic, and I linked to the same paper that was mentioned in the next story, and this article is a piece on the same guy who wrote the same paper.
Technically, the bottom line is:
No we can't do this right now. The fibers aren't strong enough to do this without bankrupting the global economy. An exponentially tapering fiber can theoretically do this at any time, but it would be wayyyyyy too big and heavy to install. (e.g. a steel cable would be ~hundred meters wide at the thickest point, and >38000km long...)
For the suggested construction technique, the carbon 'rope' needs to be able to give 72.5 Gpa strength, plus safety factor (typically 2). A single fiber gives about 73 Gpa right now. So we've no safety factor at all... but:
Joining the individual fibers together- nobody has done this whilst maintaining enough of the strength. Splicing normally soaks up 15-30% of the strength, and so we're now 15-30% down on the required strength, and nobody has even managed to do splices this good with carbon fiber.
Only a little percentage off then, but this pushes the mass up incredibly when you do the maths.
Still, we're very close. 3 reasonably simple(?) breakthroughs (one to gain strength, one to splice the rope, one to actually scale up production from one 3cm fiber to trillions of 3cm fibers in a reasonable time) and we're saying 'Hi!' to the rest of the solar system.
32 bits isn't centuries; its about 45 years if Moore's law keep up, but RSA is much weaker than that in fact, so an extra 32 bit might only be 5-10 years.