...the blog sites can't decide if he was 21 or 22. Most copy blindly off each other - and that includes Zdnet who should know better. Given that his work was in social networking and thus communication, I can't help but feel that he has been let down by the poor quality of communication surrounding his death.
It depends on how the courts look at trademark defense and how quickly the schools can detect infringers. If the courts rule that you made no attempt to protect your trademark, then you lose it. If you don't detect the infringers fast enough, you also lose it. The system as it stands is designed to sponge money off others.
If you don't defend a trademark, you lose it - even if you're not aware of it being used by someone else. So, I don't agree that it's the school's problem, the problem is the entire trademark system.
...there's really only one TLD because everyone has to buy the same name from all of them to protect themselves. (Especially as you lose a trademark if you don't protect it.)
AI to the extent of being able to do on-the-fly work isn't even being pursued. Strong AI, in general, has received next to no serious attention for decades. By the time anyone really addresses it, it'll be another hundred years before it reaches a usable state.
Cancer just means your radiation shielding is crap. Regardless of what the state of affairs is now, we'll have high-grade, light-enough weight shielding long before we have Strong AI. So if you want the research done sooner rather than later, that's the direction to go.
If you can have bases on Saturn, you can have bases anywhere. Doesn't matter if they need to be on a fixed surface (though there's no reason to imagine they would) - most planets, Earth included, do not have clear orbits. Asteroids with an identical orbit and rotational velocity (known as "shadow asteroids" in some sources) can be found for just about every planet in the solar system.
The more that has already been done, the more expensive the next step is going to be. That's unavoidable*. Cheap innovation exists, but it's in less and less important areas of life and the avenues for it can only decrease with time as the gaps get filled in.
*Net cost includes the cost of educating people better, ensuring better access to materials, etc. The better trained you are, the more you can do with what you have. The better access to materials is really a part of education. Kids should learn how to work with highly dangerous materials safely and should learn how to operate highly dangerous equipment safely. But both the materials and the equipment should then be unrestricted to those with the education. We don't restrict the use of electricity, because we learn how to be safe with it. The same should be true of anything else.
(The "doing more with less" is also a stupid maxim as it ignores the fact that you've an absolute limit on what you can do given a certain level of education, plus diminishing returns as you approach that limit, plus diminishing returns on what education can buy you. The proof of this is that you can't do anything with nothing, no matter how highly educated you were. It is also very selective in what it counts, so you aren't comparing apples with apples when it supposedly works. When you are comparing apples with apples, it almost never works.)
Patent trolls are a big threat, yes, but by no means the only threat. The current patent system is understaffed and undermotivated, which means fraud is likely. Again, that means spending more, not less. Excessive individualism is another threat - the most important achievements in society are collaborative achievements. America is becoming a nation that hates collaboration and that certainly threatens innovation. To be fair, most nations now have that blinkered, greedy, self-centered hatred of working with others. Solving things together is seen as "evil". Most here, I suspect, have been brainwashed into believing that their achievements are the result of the sweat from their own brow. The 80/20 Rule says that's not gonna happen. The only way to circumvent the 80/20 rule is to have the base unit be something other than individuals.
Invention - which is not the same thing as innovation - has all but ground to a halt. This is in part because invention requires extremely bright people, but it is also because inventors are seen as inferior beings. They are looked down on. And anyone bright enough to truly invent is bright enough to realize that it's social suicide to do so. The consequence of this is that those who DO actually invent are unlikely to ever see any money from their invention. As isolated individuals, they will almost certainly have neither the funding needed to go to mass production nor the contacts to do so on reasonable terms. There are exceptions, but inventing is a much higher-risk proposition than innovating and that means the exceptions are extremely far and few between.
Problematic. Not only is science unsexy, the overheads of administering such a system would seriously cripple the money available.
Now, I can see an alternative maybe working - perhaps every 10 years hold a national referendum on what the priorities should be (put your 1st, 2nd and 3rd down), where no project attaining more than some threshold score can get funding cut back (after allowing for inflation) for those ten years.
Agreed. The idea is obviously derived from angel investors and venture capitalists, but those have a motive to continue (such as pwning anything that works), aren't subject to whims of the moment and are careful about where they put money (there being a limited amount of the stuff).
Now, I'm willing to concede that there are mini projects that this sort of system will work on. DIY stuff, or maybe archiving material of some sort, but that's about the limit of its reach.
The smart people are, sadly, not the ones with money. Smart people spend too much time understanding their subject to spend time making a killing on the stockmarket. It is entirely about the rich, who didn't become rich for the benefit of others. They can sometimes be persuaded, but they see it as a tax writeoff, not as a means of benefiting humanity.
Agreed, especially on the hypersonic. But to do that, you'd need one of the higher-speed waveriders and a working scramjet. Currently, nobody has the former - NASAs projects keep getting killed - and the Australians are the only ones with the latter after NASA's project got killed. I don't see private enterprise being willing to step in and complete a technology Congress has deemed profitless. For starters, if they tried and failed, their shareholders would roast them with garlic butter precisely because Congress has deemed these technologies profitless. No CEO is willing to stick their neck out when others are busy retracting theirs.
A small base on Saturn would make controlling things like space probes and rover-type landers viable. The delay is otherwise simply too great. It makes it possible to custom-build experiments in a way that can't be done on Earth - again due to latency. It also makes it possible to rig up experiments that are too fragile to launch from Earth's gravity well.
You've got to remember, though, that outside the simpler home-use inventions, science is expensive. A single Y chromosome decode costs between $1k-$5k, depending on the quality. Identifying genetic diseases means a full genome scan, at maybe 10x the price, but you can't just examine 1 individual. To be useful, you need hundreds if not thousands of samples, plus an equal number from your control group. So you're looking at $100,000,000 just for the analysis. Most bio labs cut corners, which is why most bio labs can't tell you much that's useful.
($40,000 is, frankly, chump change for anything of significance. It would buy you 4 hours of time in a low-end particle accelerator. It is a fifth of the cost of a decent-grade MALA ground penetrating radar unit. You might be able to buy a stormchaser vehicle with it, minus any scientific equipment to go in it.)
However, if you crowdsourced a million people per project, high-end science may be doable. The problem is convincing a million people to part with their money. Remember, getting donations is merely a voluntary version of taxation and people despise taxation. The fact that it's voluntary is immaterial, it doesn't change the cost of the project, it doesn't change the outcome of the project, it certainly doesn't change the management of the project. All of those matter far more than your goodwill.
Then there's the fact that a lot of these sites that handle such stuff are run by dweebs who are infinitely worse than any government agency when it comes to filing the proper paperwork, micromanaging what projects get listed, etc. Most of these sites are reputedly run by venture capitalists who would prefer it if they could waste your money rather than their own.
I'd agree. Space is experimental and there's bugger all anything outside of geostationary with any commercial value at this time. It's an area where governments have the cash to do things that no-one else can, though if you want outside involvement then I'd suggest throwing that cash at eccentrics, inventors (though not innovators) and geeks - the people who are capable of coming up with new ideas.
The Space Shuttle could have been considerably more efficient, had the budget for it not been slashed many times over. Nuclear propulsion was entirely possible 50 years ago, but this thing called an Arms Race made it politically a no-go. Had there been a more enlightened attitude on both sides of the curtain, we'd have colonies on Saturn's moons by now, never mind Mars. Ion drives make extended-mission space probes a real possibility, but the lack of isotopes to make nuclear energy cells (due to a total lack of decent nuclear facilities in the US) means that the probes will still have propellant long after the batteries are dead.
Ok, launch systems. ARLA is a real possibility for low-mass satellites. TAR is a real possibility for larger systems. NASA is experimenting with ski-jump assisted launchers but I doubt that will go anywhere - Congress keeps slashing the budget. Blended-Wing Body aircraft could have been released by NASA by 2010, but Congress - guess what! - slashed the budget and the program was killed off.
NASA could do a hell of a lot better, but it can't do it for free. The current rocket program is a mistake - NASA is an R&D facility, a discovery facility, not a mass production facility. Multiply NASA's budget by 10 or 20, build it a dedicated reactor for producing the necessary isotopes for batteries, devolve it as a quango so it has less political interference, and you'll see what it is capable of. All without breaking a single law of physics.
I was going by the UK's standard. But because the familiar, commonly-available tools are the ones that dictate what is used, then you'd have to obviously support 72-year encryption on those tools to support countries that used longer timeframes. Regardless of what the timeframe used is (other than infinite), it has to be widely available or people will invariably cut corners and use something that cannot be held securely for the necessary length of time.
I'd argue IRS records shouldn't be kept secret forever - even allowing for the longest human lifespan ever recorded plus a little extra for modern medicine, 150 years should be plenty. That kind of data from 150 years ago would have zero harmful impact on anyone alive today but would be a goldmine for biography writers, historians and genealogists. (The chances are that even children would be dead and grand-children would be too old and independently established to care.) If you wanted to be ultra-paranoid, make it 200 years. That adds an entire generation extra in distance.
Hey, you never know. If you can program yeast cells with light, then surely you can program other sorts of cell with cello music. The Mozart Effect and all that.
Any standard form can - and should - be in a reference book. Memorizing it is stupid. Spend time understanding it, instead.
100 years of innovation sounds like a lot, but it's not 100 years worth of learning. Even with the pitiful system we have, I'd say 6 years tops. Since there is every indication that you can slash the time required by the best to about half of what it's currently taking (I'm basing this on 12-year olds getting into Oxford and Cambridge Universities - hardly high-school level), this means that those 12 year olds could then add in everything from the last 100 years in logic in another 3 years, bringing their age up to 15 by the time they get to the head of the field. As I've already said, the number of people of this calibre is in the hundreds of thousands in the US alone.
Yes, that needs to be split up since not all of those are going to be good at any specific subject. Brightness at one thing is not the same as brightness at everything. However, most of the geniuses seem to be in maths, so let's say 10% of those go into that. Can you even begin to imagine what would happen to mathematics if you added 10,000 Hilberts, Poincares and Perelmans? The last hundred years worth of discoveries would seem like kindergarden playtime in comparison to the kind of overhaul that this could create.
I am a great believer in trying for somewhere between optimized education and maximized education. I don't see the geniuses and the proteges as being excessively rare, I see them as merely being both very bright and very fortunate at the same time. But there's many people out there who are very bright. 2% of the population qualifies for Mensa. It's a small percentage, but out of 360 million, that's a lot of people. Give them fine-tuned education optimal for how they think and how they work, and they'd blow the crap out of every "genius" in the last century.
Almost anything commercial will certainly be sensitive in 20 years time and almost anything that relates to official records is absolutely guaranteed to be classified as sensitive in 20 years time. Absolutely nothing that is sensitive will be encrypted better than the common publicly-used standards available. If it's not in OpenSSL or some other widely-used library, nobody will use it.
I argued on this thread that essentially all encryption in common use should be kept to a minimum standard of safe for 50 years. However, I am considering revising that. Remember, medical records are also being shared over the Internet and medical records should be kept a hell of a lot better secure than the 50 year rule. At the very least, such records should be encrypted to be safe for 100 years AND the algorithm used should be commonly installed (because those aren't the brightest and best places when it comes to IT).
By "commonly installed", I mean it should be de-facto present on every OS/X, Linux and Windows desktop and server. A 50-year level of protection should be the default for all encrypted traffic, with lesser security optional but discouraged.
For a company to consider commercial secrets "secure", it should be aiming for around 50 years security, which is why Serpent and MARS were aiming for that sort of level during the AES contest. Government records, including census data, are also covered by a 50 year rule and should again be encrypted to that kind of standard. Highly classified material is usually put under a 100 year rule, assuming it is to ever be released at all. I'd consider a century to be adequate for most national secrets, there really can't be anything so perilous that would actually warrant more. But if you don't think 100 is enough, and obviously some governments do not, then you've got to encrypt accordingly.
Ok, so whilst most of us aren't doing anything super-secret, if even basic commercial and domestic information is supposed to be kept confidential for 50 years then no. 20 years is not too long a time frame to care. If 50 years is the law, then 50 years is the absolute minimum timeframe worth considering. (Remember, people in offices will use what's out there. So if 50 years is a legal minimum for them, 50 years has to be a practical minimum for us because we're the ones who ultimately decide what offices have available to use.)
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...the blog sites can't decide if he was 21 or 22. Most copy blindly off each other - and that includes Zdnet who should know better. Given that his work was in social networking and thus communication, I can't help but feel that he has been let down by the poor quality of communication surrounding his death.
For those unfamiliar with Stig, here he is, prior to racing cars.
It depends on how the courts look at trademark defense and how quickly the schools can detect infringers. If the courts rule that you made no attempt to protect your trademark, then you lose it. If you don't detect the infringers fast enough, you also lose it. The system as it stands is designed to sponge money off others.
If you don't defend a trademark, you lose it - even if you're not aware of it being used by someone else. So, I don't agree that it's the school's problem, the problem is the entire trademark system.
Not only is there no such thing as a free lunch, you have to pay for the menu.
...there's really only one TLD because everyone has to buy the same name from all of them to protect themselves. (Especially as you lose a trademark if you don't protect it.)
AI to the extent of being able to do on-the-fly work isn't even being pursued. Strong AI, in general, has received next to no serious attention for decades. By the time anyone really addresses it, it'll be another hundred years before it reaches a usable state.
Cancer just means your radiation shielding is crap. Regardless of what the state of affairs is now, we'll have high-grade, light-enough weight shielding long before we have Strong AI. So if you want the research done sooner rather than later, that's the direction to go.
If you can have bases on Saturn, you can have bases anywhere. Doesn't matter if they need to be on a fixed surface (though there's no reason to imagine they would) - most planets, Earth included, do not have clear orbits. Asteroids with an identical orbit and rotational velocity (known as "shadow asteroids" in some sources) can be found for just about every planet in the solar system.
The more that has already been done, the more expensive the next step is going to be. That's unavoidable*. Cheap innovation exists, but it's in less and less important areas of life and the avenues for it can only decrease with time as the gaps get filled in.
*Net cost includes the cost of educating people better, ensuring better access to materials, etc. The better trained you are, the more you can do with what you have. The better access to materials is really a part of education. Kids should learn how to work with highly dangerous materials safely and should learn how to operate highly dangerous equipment safely. But both the materials and the equipment should then be unrestricted to those with the education. We don't restrict the use of electricity, because we learn how to be safe with it. The same should be true of anything else.
(The "doing more with less" is also a stupid maxim as it ignores the fact that you've an absolute limit on what you can do given a certain level of education, plus diminishing returns as you approach that limit, plus diminishing returns on what education can buy you. The proof of this is that you can't do anything with nothing, no matter how highly educated you were. It is also very selective in what it counts, so you aren't comparing apples with apples when it supposedly works. When you are comparing apples with apples, it almost never works.)
Patent trolls are a big threat, yes, but by no means the only threat. The current patent system is understaffed and undermotivated, which means fraud is likely. Again, that means spending more, not less. Excessive individualism is another threat - the most important achievements in society are collaborative achievements. America is becoming a nation that hates collaboration and that certainly threatens innovation. To be fair, most nations now have that blinkered, greedy, self-centered hatred of working with others. Solving things together is seen as "evil". Most here, I suspect, have been brainwashed into believing that their achievements are the result of the sweat from their own brow. The 80/20 Rule says that's not gonna happen. The only way to circumvent the 80/20 rule is to have the base unit be something other than individuals.
Invention - which is not the same thing as innovation - has all but ground to a halt. This is in part because invention requires extremely bright people, but it is also because inventors are seen as inferior beings. They are looked down on. And anyone bright enough to truly invent is bright enough to realize that it's social suicide to do so. The consequence of this is that those who DO actually invent are unlikely to ever see any money from their invention. As isolated individuals, they will almost certainly have neither the funding needed to go to mass production nor the contacts to do so on reasonable terms. There are exceptions, but inventing is a much higher-risk proposition than innovating and that means the exceptions are extremely far and few between.
Problematic. Not only is science unsexy, the overheads of administering such a system would seriously cripple the money available.
Now, I can see an alternative maybe working - perhaps every 10 years hold a national referendum on what the priorities should be (put your 1st, 2nd and 3rd down), where no project attaining more than some threshold score can get funding cut back (after allowing for inflation) for those ten years.
Agreed. The idea is obviously derived from angel investors and venture capitalists, but those have a motive to continue (such as pwning anything that works), aren't subject to whims of the moment and are careful about where they put money (there being a limited amount of the stuff).
Now, I'm willing to concede that there are mini projects that this sort of system will work on. DIY stuff, or maybe archiving material of some sort, but that's about the limit of its reach.
The smart people are, sadly, not the ones with money. Smart people spend too much time understanding their subject to spend time making a killing on the stockmarket. It is entirely about the rich, who didn't become rich for the benefit of others. They can sometimes be persuaded, but they see it as a tax writeoff, not as a means of benefiting humanity.
Agreed, especially on the hypersonic. But to do that, you'd need one of the higher-speed waveriders and a working scramjet. Currently, nobody has the former - NASAs projects keep getting killed - and the Australians are the only ones with the latter after NASA's project got killed. I don't see private enterprise being willing to step in and complete a technology Congress has deemed profitless. For starters, if they tried and failed, their shareholders would roast them with garlic butter precisely because Congress has deemed these technologies profitless. No CEO is willing to stick their neck out when others are busy retracting theirs.
A small base on Saturn would make controlling things like space probes and rover-type landers viable. The delay is otherwise simply too great. It makes it possible to custom-build experiments in a way that can't be done on Earth - again due to latency. It also makes it possible to rig up experiments that are too fragile to launch from Earth's gravity well.
You've got to remember, though, that outside the simpler home-use inventions, science is expensive. A single Y chromosome decode costs between $1k-$5k, depending on the quality. Identifying genetic diseases means a full genome scan, at maybe 10x the price, but you can't just examine 1 individual. To be useful, you need hundreds if not thousands of samples, plus an equal number from your control group. So you're looking at $100,000,000 just for the analysis. Most bio labs cut corners, which is why most bio labs can't tell you much that's useful.
($40,000 is, frankly, chump change for anything of significance. It would buy you 4 hours of time in a low-end particle accelerator. It is a fifth of the cost of a decent-grade MALA ground penetrating radar unit. You might be able to buy a stormchaser vehicle with it, minus any scientific equipment to go in it.)
However, if you crowdsourced a million people per project, high-end science may be doable. The problem is convincing a million people to part with their money. Remember, getting donations is merely a voluntary version of taxation and people despise taxation. The fact that it's voluntary is immaterial, it doesn't change the cost of the project, it doesn't change the outcome of the project, it certainly doesn't change the management of the project. All of those matter far more than your goodwill.
Then there's the fact that a lot of these sites that handle such stuff are run by dweebs who are infinitely worse than any government agency when it comes to filing the proper paperwork, micromanaging what projects get listed, etc. Most of these sites are reputedly run by venture capitalists who would prefer it if they could waste your money rather than their own.
I'd agree. Space is experimental and there's bugger all anything outside of geostationary with any commercial value at this time. It's an area where governments have the cash to do things that no-one else can, though if you want outside involvement then I'd suggest throwing that cash at eccentrics, inventors (though not innovators) and geeks - the people who are capable of coming up with new ideas.
The Space Shuttle could have been considerably more efficient, had the budget for it not been slashed many times over. Nuclear propulsion was entirely possible 50 years ago, but this thing called an Arms Race made it politically a no-go. Had there been a more enlightened attitude on both sides of the curtain, we'd have colonies on Saturn's moons by now, never mind Mars. Ion drives make extended-mission space probes a real possibility, but the lack of isotopes to make nuclear energy cells (due to a total lack of decent nuclear facilities in the US) means that the probes will still have propellant long after the batteries are dead.
Ok, launch systems. ARLA is a real possibility for low-mass satellites. TAR is a real possibility for larger systems. NASA is experimenting with ski-jump assisted launchers but I doubt that will go anywhere - Congress keeps slashing the budget. Blended-Wing Body aircraft could have been released by NASA by 2010, but Congress - guess what! - slashed the budget and the program was killed off.
NASA could do a hell of a lot better, but it can't do it for free. The current rocket program is a mistake - NASA is an R&D facility, a discovery facility, not a mass production facility. Multiply NASA's budget by 10 or 20, build it a dedicated reactor for producing the necessary isotopes for batteries, devolve it as a quango so it has less political interference, and you'll see what it is capable of. All without breaking a single law of physics.
I was going by the UK's standard. But because the familiar, commonly-available tools are the ones that dictate what is used, then you'd have to obviously support 72-year encryption on those tools to support countries that used longer timeframes. Regardless of what the timeframe used is (other than infinite), it has to be widely available or people will invariably cut corners and use something that cannot be held securely for the necessary length of time.
I'd argue IRS records shouldn't be kept secret forever - even allowing for the longest human lifespan ever recorded plus a little extra for modern medicine, 150 years should be plenty. That kind of data from 150 years ago would have zero harmful impact on anyone alive today but would be a goldmine for biography writers, historians and genealogists. (The chances are that even children would be dead and grand-children would be too old and independently established to care.) If you wanted to be ultra-paranoid, make it 200 years. That adds an entire generation extra in distance.
That explains everything!
Hey, you never know. If you can program yeast cells with light, then surely you can program other sorts of cell with cello music. The Mozart Effect and all that.
It's a compound word if the two words used are element words, otherwise it's a molecule word.
Give someone a Nobel and they'll be listened to for a day. Teach someone how to Nobel and they'll be listened to for a lifetime.
Any standard form can - and should - be in a reference book. Memorizing it is stupid. Spend time understanding it, instead.
100 years of innovation sounds like a lot, but it's not 100 years worth of learning. Even with the pitiful system we have, I'd say 6 years tops. Since there is every indication that you can slash the time required by the best to about half of what it's currently taking (I'm basing this on 12-year olds getting into Oxford and Cambridge Universities - hardly high-school level), this means that those 12 year olds could then add in everything from the last 100 years in logic in another 3 years, bringing their age up to 15 by the time they get to the head of the field. As I've already said, the number of people of this calibre is in the hundreds of thousands in the US alone.
Yes, that needs to be split up since not all of those are going to be good at any specific subject. Brightness at one thing is not the same as brightness at everything. However, most of the geniuses seem to be in maths, so let's say 10% of those go into that. Can you even begin to imagine what would happen to mathematics if you added 10,000 Hilberts, Poincares and Perelmans? The last hundred years worth of discoveries would seem like kindergarden playtime in comparison to the kind of overhaul that this could create.
I am a great believer in trying for somewhere between optimized education and maximized education. I don't see the geniuses and the proteges as being excessively rare, I see them as merely being both very bright and very fortunate at the same time. But there's many people out there who are very bright. 2% of the population qualifies for Mensa. It's a small percentage, but out of 360 million, that's a lot of people. Give them fine-tuned education optimal for how they think and how they work, and they'd blow the crap out of every "genius" in the last century.
Almost anything commercial will certainly be sensitive in 20 years time and almost anything that relates to official records is absolutely guaranteed to be classified as sensitive in 20 years time. Absolutely nothing that is sensitive will be encrypted better than the common publicly-used standards available. If it's not in OpenSSL or some other widely-used library, nobody will use it.
I argued on this thread that essentially all encryption in common use should be kept to a minimum standard of safe for 50 years. However, I am considering revising that. Remember, medical records are also being shared over the Internet and medical records should be kept a hell of a lot better secure than the 50 year rule. At the very least, such records should be encrypted to be safe for 100 years AND the algorithm used should be commonly installed (because those aren't the brightest and best places when it comes to IT).
By "commonly installed", I mean it should be de-facto present on every OS/X, Linux and Windows desktop and server. A 50-year level of protection should be the default for all encrypted traffic, with lesser security optional but discouraged.
For a company to consider commercial secrets "secure", it should be aiming for around 50 years security, which is why Serpent and MARS were aiming for that sort of level during the AES contest. Government records, including census data, are also covered by a 50 year rule and should again be encrypted to that kind of standard. Highly classified material is usually put under a 100 year rule, assuming it is to ever be released at all. I'd consider a century to be adequate for most national secrets, there really can't be anything so perilous that would actually warrant more. But if you don't think 100 is enough, and obviously some governments do not, then you've got to encrypt accordingly.
Ok, so whilst most of us aren't doing anything super-secret, if even basic commercial and domestic information is supposed to be kept confidential for 50 years then no. 20 years is not too long a time frame to care. If 50 years is the law, then 50 years is the absolute minimum timeframe worth considering. (Remember, people in offices will use what's out there. So if 50 years is a legal minimum for them, 50 years has to be a practical minimum for us because we're the ones who ultimately decide what offices have available to use.)
...don't say the programming is wrong and it'll now take a chunk out of the Earth and fly it to Phobos!