Since the majority of near-surface gold is now attributed to asteroid strikes, and rocks near the surface are mostly other stuff, it seems reasonable to conclude that there must be asteroids that are extremely enriched in such ores. Actually, mining asteroids would seem unnecessary - you'd really want a very early solar system in which you still had mostly accretion disk. You're then dealing with ultra-pure dust in a gigantic centrifuge. Most of the ores of interest should concentrate in bands that can easily be selected for.
But the French and British already have reprocessing infrastructure and plenty of it. (And, for that matter, most of the reason the US has masses of extremely hazardous nuclear waste is that it hasn't been reprocessing. It's far cheaper to build a reprocessing plant than to hollow out a mountain range.) If the US hasn't put aside any money, then NASA can't even send over waste to those people with reprocessing plants to get the 238. The British government is incredibly stupid at times, but it's not going to foot the bill.
Actually, no. I side with Keynes to some extent on this. To cut deficits when in a recession, you have to increase spending (in the short term), but you should also increase taxes for the wealthy to cover the increase in spending (since resources don't vanish, a recession is ultimately a hoarding problem).
It goes without saying that the two shuttles that exploded did so during political stunts where NASA was under extreme pressure from government to play up for the cameras rather than pay attention to the engineers. I don't know enough about the situation surrounding Apollo 1, but it wouldn't surprise me if grandstanding was a factor there as well. Hmmmm, come to think of it, how many actual (non-natural) disasters haven't happened due to grandstanding? The Titantic ploughed through a known ice field in order to meet the owner's deadlines. The R101 was known to have serious design flaws (including major hydrogen leaks) but it was more important to win the race against the R100 than fix them. Even with the global warming you mentioned, pollution is a resource bought by industry that makes no profit and produces no innovation, but you'll see more people concerned with looking good on TV.
That would seem to be the common denominator. Exotheatrical theatre.
It's not even just long-term benefits. NASA does an awful lot of engineering work for American aviation (military and civilian), which has very immediate benefits for places like Boeing.
And, yes, you're absolutely right about the technological superiority thing. It's not limited to space tech - it's very debatable as to whether it would be even possible to re-import a lot of the tech jobs (such as plasma TVs, digital cameras, etc) back into the US due to the total lack of the necessary skills and experience. It's no good people whining about the problems caused by globalization if they then force both the local talent and the local jobs overseas. In the case of NASA, this would be to Europe and Russia, though to some extent India as well. The scientists want the same stuff done and if the former Soviet Union is going to be more obliging than Congress, then that money (and those scientists) won't wait on Congress. They'll go where the action is, same as everyone else.
Of course, this would not be such a catastrophe if America developed new industries and new skills to fill in the gaps every time work got exported. You can't do everything single-handed and it makes sense to export some things. Likewise, overseas markets take time to ramp up and have only finite workers with the necessary abilities. So long as you keep moving forwards, you don't lose anything by donating what is no longer practical. The catch is, you've got to move forwards for this to work.
Re-inventing the Saturn wouldn't have helped much, since the Russians could adapt Soyuz to do the same work for less. Projects like the Blended-Wing Body passenger jet NASA was working on, the turbine-assisted ramjet, or the now-abandoned hypersonic jet - these are the things that could have kept NASA ahead of the curve. In F1, the saying is that if you're not moving forwards, you're moving backwards. The current state of funding for NASA, combined with the brain-drain and transfer of funds to places more willing to venture into space, is a perfect demonstration of how this applies to every industry.
Heh! Well, here's an evaporator unit for the rain.:P
I doubt humans (in the generic sense) would go extinct, but 2.5 million years is the gap from Homo Habilis to Homo Sapien so Homo Sapien would almost certainly be extinct. Within that time frame, evolution should have taken humanity at least one, if not two, sub-species further along - maybe more. (By then, we aught to be well along the road to colonising other planets. From a total biomass perspective, there's no difference between a mass extinction and terraforming, and we know that mass extinctions on Earth are followed by massive diversification.)
As for the stock market, again it depends a bit on how concerned you are with form. Cooking has barely existed 1.9 million years. In that time, we've moved from log fires to microwave ovens. They serve a lot of the same purposes but do so in very different ways. To the point that you'd never convince an early hominid that they were the same thing at all. So, to us, yes, no matter what they have in 2.5 million years time, it will simply be too strange to relate to what we know today, but that doesn't mean they won't be able to relate it to what we know today.
Aside from the fact that the amount of plutonium involved would be so fantastically small that you couldn't detect it. (Scatter a few grams of anything over a few hundred square kilometers and the concentration really isn't that much.) You probably breath in a thousand times as much radioactive material as an entire decay-powered generator has every time you enter a city with a coal power plant. Further, most US cities have incredibly high levels of legal non-radioisotope carcinogens in the atmosphere from other sources. Besides, it certainly doesn't cost billions of dollars to make plutonium. It comes for free whenever you operate any of the older nuclear power stations.
I don't interpret it as evasion (although he's obviously free to contradict me on that). 99% of everything written about what he, and other hackers of his era did, talks about Social Engineering, getting people to reveal stuff that they'd normally consider confidential or private. I therefore interpret his answer here as "hey, you've got to think about what you're answering". Either that, or he doesn't want to be seen as endorsing a given solution given all the potential problems that might have. In either case, it wouldn't be hiding the information as much as educating you.
(Yes, it's possible that there's an element of paranoia in there, but again going back to the point that the vast majority of security issues are not technical but social, as he himself notes on the bits on malware and SSLs, I just don't see him being concerned about software that I imagine has been checked by every vulnerability scanner and static code analyzer he can lay his hands on. It's not where the problems tend to be and if he has been that thorough then it's doubtful he's that concerned over the code.)
I'm not sure you can call it a scam, per se. What it does is soak off money from the system in very small amounts but in very large quantities. It's not much difference than a bank taking all the rounding errors in calculations and transferring the surplus to themselves. It may be fractions of a penny, but multiply it by enough calculations in a day and it's likely worth a few million.
It's not really a "scam" to redirect all that to yourself. A theft, certainly. Blatant corruption without doubt. "Scam" implies others are being fooled, but here they're just having their pockets picked.
Ok, here's one option. You write N herustics and M algorithms (not the same things, guys) and you apply the following rules. (To make it easier to read, I'll use "program" to refer to any herustic or algorithm. This is assumed to cover any implementation, including neural nets, genetic algorithms, ELIZA bots, etc.)
Any fresh program is given an initial budget of a fixed amount.
A program is "taxed" (to simulate the natural-world overheads of a given form and lifestyle) per day.
Any time a program goes into the red (ie: it has "died" of starvation), it is killed off from the system.
Any time a program does better in one area than another, it forks off a copy with one instance in one domain or sub-domain, the other in the other domain or sub-domain.
If a program exceeds a certain amount of money, it forks off a copy and splits the money available between them.
Whenever a program is forked in the same domain, it is modified slightly. Forks across domains are left as-is.
All programs are run hard real-time (ie: they have an absolutely guaranteed number of CPU cycles per unit of wall-clock time).
One machine (physical or virtual) shall be responsible for some specific domain and all sub-domains within it. Transfers to a different domain equals a transfer to a different machine.
If a machine cannot add another program and maintain hard real-time guarantees, no program may be transferred in or be started via a fork within that domain.
The tax rate shall be proportional to the spare capacity on that machine (so a full machine shall have a higher tax than an empty one, reflecting the sort of resource scarcity you'd have in the real world).
A program generator can use some certain percentage of the tax collected to create fresh starting points, up to but not exceeding the number that it can afford to give the standard starting money to.
This will generate all the conditions that applied in the very early days of hominids, using the tax system to replace all of the ecological, environmental and biological factors that simply don't have a direct translation in electronic terms, and the program generator to simulate the fact that in the natural world the precursor species is also evolving and therefore throwing out new lines all the time.
I predict that, using the description you have, some measure of sentience at least one program will be achieved within 2.5 - 3.5 million years.
Different approaches are good in the long run and no approach should be abandoned (it's all good data) but to make something viable in the short term, you've got to reduce the number of efforts so that the money and the people can be put into one or two of the methods. Get it working with either, commercially, then do the same on two other methods, and so on.
High pressure short-term spectaculars aren't great for the science but they ARE great for the PR and therefore the public interest (and money). Give a whole burst of spectaculars (as happened with Hubble) and the public will crave more (as happed with Hubble), ensuring funding will continue (as happened with Hubble).
They keep adding new methods to the ones they want to try out. That's great, but when you have X amount of money divided by Y projects, you really want Y to be smaller rather than bigger.
If you just have two dies and align them vertically rather than flat on the PCB, you've got the same cooling surface as you would have with two independent chips. Beyond that, you'd need to interleave the dies with a heatsink and then you're in for all kinds of funky problems. Surely it would be better to increase the total size of the die whilst keeping the same resolution (since you're eliminating even more connections and any supporting bits and pieces and can also exploit immediately any improvements in chip design or scaling without having to redesign anything).
Sure, the straight-line distance is longer, so you won't get quite the speed improvement, but having silicon only will reduce the power consumption (and therefore heat) and will also boost reliability as you don't have fragile gold leads running from die to die.
Having a die four times as big rather than four dies that are then coupled together will reduce the total amount of wafer that can be used, so will increase cost slightly. Unless you go wafer-scale, of course. Then you have exactly the same amount of usable wafer, a memory even Microsoft would have a hard time running out of, and a price tag IBM might be able to afford every third week.
We also know that Apple has some experience in trying to pioneer handwriting technology (the Apple Newton, I think it was) and are therefore well acquainted with the challenges involved (power requirements, error rates, CPU overheads, etc). That knowledge-base has existed for Apple for a long time now. Yes, technology has progressed, but if you can squeeze N% more out of a modern CPU for the same power input then Apple can easily run the numbers to see if N% is enough.
This doesn't mean Apple will always be right. Hell, the fact that they pushed the Newton and the Lisa out into the marketplace before the products were useful is evidence that they can be mistaken. What it does mean is that they've good cause to be cautious and they've actual real-world data to work from. They may be reading the numbers wrong, but I'm confident that they're actually taking the time to read them.
(Compare that to Bill Gates' notion that the Internet was a fad. He had no experience in networking at all, he had no numbers to crunch, he made an arrogant remark without basis and it was obvious at the time that that was what it was. Networking had been emerging for longer than he'd been in computing and was on an exponential growth curve. By the time Microsoft was ready to deal with IPv4, next-generation technologies were already being developed because the sustained demand was too great. IPv6 stacks were actually being released for Windows before Microsoft's IPv4 stack was integrated - and that's even after Microsoft took most of their network code from the BSD tapes.)
A better idea would seem to be to produce a set of fake iPhone prototypes fitted with ghost peppers and an electric heater. If the phone "wanders", the area gets peppered.
I am still not convinced that this was a waste from Microsoft's point of view - there's a lot of ways to write off donations for tax purposes. Microsoft buying Novell is a problem for Unix (since Novell owns Unix), which in turn means that it could be a serious problem for the [Free|Net|Open|Dragonfly]BSD series. However, SCO failed to show in court that Linux actually contained any Unix code (despite promises to do so) and I'm inclined to feel that this would curtail Microsoft attacking Linux via the Unix copyrights.
Even if such code existed in Linux, it only exists in version 2.7, which in turn only exists in an alternative universe. This would force Microsoft to develop TARDISes, which will lead to Earth becoming Gallifrey II. (The Matrix on Gallifrey is, after all, just a very large Beowulf cluster.)
As far as I can tell from the document, that one slide is the only thing SCO had anything close to a reasonable objection to. I'm forced to agree with SCO that it was hearsay (although I'd argue that it's also probably entirely accurate), although as grstrickler notes it was only in the case because of mis-steps by SCO over the objections of the trial judge. The appeal claimed that it probably had no effect. I don't like that kind of reasoning because each piece of evidence can't really be considered independently. There are bound to be interactions in people's minds between pieces of evidence. As such, the direct impact could be immaterial in some cases. Given the nature of this case, I'd have to say that interactions between pieces of evidence were likely more important than any piece in isolation.
However, there's a difference between what I like and what the law likes. Those steeped in the law concluded that the evidence was lawful. That, ultimately, is the viewpoint that matters, not mine. 4-digit UID notwithstanding.
If I'd been in the judges' shoes, would I have decided differently? Hard to say what I'd be thinking if I were a law geek rather than a tech geek. I'm inclined to think I'd have come up with a more rigorous reason than the judges did, but would not have come to a different conclusion. That, after all, is where my concern lies - I don't think the reasoning behind the ruling on that evidence was as strong as I would have liked. The ruling itself I had no problems with.
Slashdot Mirror
*watches as the Saganarians sneak up*
Since the majority of near-surface gold is now attributed to asteroid strikes, and rocks near the surface are mostly other stuff, it seems reasonable to conclude that there must be asteroids that are extremely enriched in such ores. Actually, mining asteroids would seem unnecessary - you'd really want a very early solar system in which you still had mostly accretion disk. You're then dealing with ultra-pure dust in a gigantic centrifuge. Most of the ores of interest should concentrate in bands that can easily be selected for.
But the French and British already have reprocessing infrastructure and plenty of it. (And, for that matter, most of the reason the US has masses of extremely hazardous nuclear waste is that it hasn't been reprocessing. It's far cheaper to build a reprocessing plant than to hollow out a mountain range.) If the US hasn't put aside any money, then NASA can't even send over waste to those people with reprocessing plants to get the 238. The British government is incredibly stupid at times, but it's not going to foot the bill.
Actually, no. I side with Keynes to some extent on this. To cut deficits when in a recession, you have to increase spending (in the short term), but you should also increase taxes for the wealthy to cover the increase in spending (since resources don't vanish, a recession is ultimately a hoarding problem).
It's only Barnes & Noble eReaders in space that are the problem. Since the grandparent post mentioned energy, maybe it's a battery thing.
It goes without saying that the two shuttles that exploded did so during political stunts where NASA was under extreme pressure from government to play up for the cameras rather than pay attention to the engineers. I don't know enough about the situation surrounding Apollo 1, but it wouldn't surprise me if grandstanding was a factor there as well. Hmmmm, come to think of it, how many actual (non-natural) disasters haven't happened due to grandstanding? The Titantic ploughed through a known ice field in order to meet the owner's deadlines. The R101 was known to have serious design flaws (including major hydrogen leaks) but it was more important to win the race against the R100 than fix them. Even with the global warming you mentioned, pollution is a resource bought by industry that makes no profit and produces no innovation, but you'll see more people concerned with looking good on TV.
That would seem to be the common denominator. Exotheatrical theatre.
It's not even just long-term benefits. NASA does an awful lot of engineering work for American aviation (military and civilian), which has very immediate benefits for places like Boeing.
And, yes, you're absolutely right about the technological superiority thing. It's not limited to space tech - it's very debatable as to whether it would be even possible to re-import a lot of the tech jobs (such as plasma TVs, digital cameras, etc) back into the US due to the total lack of the necessary skills and experience. It's no good people whining about the problems caused by globalization if they then force both the local talent and the local jobs overseas. In the case of NASA, this would be to Europe and Russia, though to some extent India as well. The scientists want the same stuff done and if the former Soviet Union is going to be more obliging than Congress, then that money (and those scientists) won't wait on Congress. They'll go where the action is, same as everyone else.
Of course, this would not be such a catastrophe if America developed new industries and new skills to fill in the gaps every time work got exported. You can't do everything single-handed and it makes sense to export some things. Likewise, overseas markets take time to ramp up and have only finite workers with the necessary abilities. So long as you keep moving forwards, you don't lose anything by donating what is no longer practical. The catch is, you've got to move forwards for this to work.
Re-inventing the Saturn wouldn't have helped much, since the Russians could adapt Soyuz to do the same work for less. Projects like the Blended-Wing Body passenger jet NASA was working on, the turbine-assisted ramjet, or the now-abandoned hypersonic jet - these are the things that could have kept NASA ahead of the curve. In F1, the saying is that if you're not moving forwards, you're moving backwards. The current state of funding for NASA, combined with the brain-drain and transfer of funds to places more willing to venture into space, is a perfect demonstration of how this applies to every industry.
Heh! Well, here's an evaporator unit for the rain. :P
I doubt humans (in the generic sense) would go extinct, but 2.5 million years is the gap from Homo Habilis to Homo Sapien so Homo Sapien would almost certainly be extinct. Within that time frame, evolution should have taken humanity at least one, if not two, sub-species further along - maybe more. (By then, we aught to be well along the road to colonising other planets. From a total biomass perspective, there's no difference between a mass extinction and terraforming, and we know that mass extinctions on Earth are followed by massive diversification.)
As for the stock market, again it depends a bit on how concerned you are with form. Cooking has barely existed 1.9 million years. In that time, we've moved from log fires to microwave ovens. They serve a lot of the same purposes but do so in very different ways. To the point that you'd never convince an early hominid that they were the same thing at all. So, to us, yes, no matter what they have in 2.5 million years time, it will simply be too strange to relate to what we know today, but that doesn't mean they won't be able to relate it to what we know today.
Aside from the fact that the amount of plutonium involved would be so fantastically small that you couldn't detect it. (Scatter a few grams of anything over a few hundred square kilometers and the concentration really isn't that much.) You probably breath in a thousand times as much radioactive material as an entire decay-powered generator has every time you enter a city with a coal power plant. Further, most US cities have incredibly high levels of legal non-radioisotope carcinogens in the atmosphere from other sources. Besides, it certainly doesn't cost billions of dollars to make plutonium. It comes for free whenever you operate any of the older nuclear power stations.
I don't interpret it as evasion (although he's obviously free to contradict me on that). 99% of everything written about what he, and other hackers of his era did, talks about Social Engineering, getting people to reveal stuff that they'd normally consider confidential or private. I therefore interpret his answer here as "hey, you've got to think about what you're answering". Either that, or he doesn't want to be seen as endorsing a given solution given all the potential problems that might have. In either case, it wouldn't be hiding the information as much as educating you.
(Yes, it's possible that there's an element of paranoia in there, but again going back to the point that the vast majority of security issues are not technical but social, as he himself notes on the bits on malware and SSLs, I just don't see him being concerned about software that I imagine has been checked by every vulnerability scanner and static code analyzer he can lay his hands on. It's not where the problems tend to be and if he has been that thorough then it's doubtful he's that concerned over the code.)
I'm not sure you can call it a scam, per se. What it does is soak off money from the system in very small amounts but in very large quantities. It's not much difference than a bank taking all the rounding errors in calculations and transferring the surplus to themselves. It may be fractions of a penny, but multiply it by enough calculations in a day and it's likely worth a few million.
It's not really a "scam" to redirect all that to yourself. A theft, certainly. Blatant corruption without doubt. "Scam" implies others are being fooled, but here they're just having their pockets picked.
Ok, here's one option. You write N herustics and M algorithms (not the same things, guys) and you apply the following rules. (To make it easier to read, I'll use "program" to refer to any herustic or algorithm. This is assumed to cover any implementation, including neural nets, genetic algorithms, ELIZA bots, etc.)
This will generate all the conditions that applied in the very early days of hominids, using the tax system to replace all of the ecological, environmental and biological factors that simply don't have a direct translation in electronic terms, and the program generator to simulate the fact that in the natural world the precursor species is also evolving and therefore throwing out new lines all the time.
I predict that, using the description you have, some measure of sentience at least one program will be achieved within 2.5 - 3.5 million years.
Different approaches are good in the long run and no approach should be abandoned (it's all good data) but to make something viable in the short term, you've got to reduce the number of efforts so that the money and the people can be put into one or two of the methods. Get it working with either, commercially, then do the same on two other methods, and so on.
High pressure short-term spectaculars aren't great for the science but they ARE great for the PR and therefore the public interest (and money). Give a whole burst of spectaculars (as happened with Hubble) and the public will crave more (as happed with Hubble), ensuring funding will continue (as happened with Hubble).
They keep adding new methods to the ones they want to try out. That's great, but when you have X amount of money divided by Y projects, you really want Y to be smaller rather than bigger.
If your brain is conducting 40 times more electricity than a copper wire of comparable size, please see a doctor immediately.
If you just have two dies and align them vertically rather than flat on the PCB, you've got the same cooling surface as you would have with two independent chips. Beyond that, you'd need to interleave the dies with a heatsink and then you're in for all kinds of funky problems. Surely it would be better to increase the total size of the die whilst keeping the same resolution (since you're eliminating even more connections and any supporting bits and pieces and can also exploit immediately any improvements in chip design or scaling without having to redesign anything).
Sure, the straight-line distance is longer, so you won't get quite the speed improvement, but having silicon only will reduce the power consumption (and therefore heat) and will also boost reliability as you don't have fragile gold leads running from die to die.
Having a die four times as big rather than four dies that are then coupled together will reduce the total amount of wafer that can be used, so will increase cost slightly. Unless you go wafer-scale, of course. Then you have exactly the same amount of usable wafer, a memory even Microsoft would have a hard time running out of, and a price tag IBM might be able to afford every third week.
DIMMPLE? (DIMMs in a PiLE)
We also know that Apple has some experience in trying to pioneer handwriting technology (the Apple Newton, I think it was) and are therefore well acquainted with the challenges involved (power requirements, error rates, CPU overheads, etc). That knowledge-base has existed for Apple for a long time now. Yes, technology has progressed, but if you can squeeze N% more out of a modern CPU for the same power input then Apple can easily run the numbers to see if N% is enough.
This doesn't mean Apple will always be right. Hell, the fact that they pushed the Newton and the Lisa out into the marketplace before the products were useful is evidence that they can be mistaken. What it does mean is that they've good cause to be cautious and they've actual real-world data to work from. They may be reading the numbers wrong, but I'm confident that they're actually taking the time to read them.
(Compare that to Bill Gates' notion that the Internet was a fad. He had no experience in networking at all, he had no numbers to crunch, he made an arrogant remark without basis and it was obvious at the time that that was what it was. Networking had been emerging for longer than he'd been in computing and was on an exponential growth curve. By the time Microsoft was ready to deal with IPv4, next-generation technologies were already being developed because the sustained demand was too great. IPv6 stacks were actually being released for Windows before Microsoft's IPv4 stack was integrated - and that's even after Microsoft took most of their network code from the BSD tapes.)
A better idea would seem to be to produce a set of fake iPhone prototypes fitted with ghost peppers and an electric heater. If the phone "wanders", the area gets peppered.
Two iPhones walk into a bar...
If corporations are people, do zombies have citizenship?
I am still not convinced that this was a waste from Microsoft's point of view - there's a lot of ways to write off donations for tax purposes. Microsoft buying Novell is a problem for Unix (since Novell owns Unix), which in turn means that it could be a serious problem for the [Free|Net|Open|Dragonfly]BSD series. However, SCO failed to show in court that Linux actually contained any Unix code (despite promises to do so) and I'm inclined to feel that this would curtail Microsoft attacking Linux via the Unix copyrights.
Even if such code existed in Linux, it only exists in version 2.7, which in turn only exists in an alternative universe. This would force Microsoft to develop TARDISes, which will lead to Earth becoming Gallifrey II. (The Matrix on Gallifrey is, after all, just a very large Beowulf cluster.)
It is dead when making sequels falls out of fashion. And Hollywood will never let that happen.
Actually, it's more like a cross between Goundhog Day and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I always thought The Supremes were adequate singers but made lousy judges.
As far as I can tell from the document, that one slide is the only thing SCO had anything close to a reasonable objection to. I'm forced to agree with SCO that it was hearsay (although I'd argue that it's also probably entirely accurate), although as grstrickler notes it was only in the case because of mis-steps by SCO over the objections of the trial judge. The appeal claimed that it probably had no effect. I don't like that kind of reasoning because each piece of evidence can't really be considered independently. There are bound to be interactions in people's minds between pieces of evidence. As such, the direct impact could be immaterial in some cases. Given the nature of this case, I'd have to say that interactions between pieces of evidence were likely more important than any piece in isolation.
However, there's a difference between what I like and what the law likes. Those steeped in the law concluded that the evidence was lawful. That, ultimately, is the viewpoint that matters, not mine. 4-digit UID notwithstanding.
If I'd been in the judges' shoes, would I have decided differently? Hard to say what I'd be thinking if I were a law geek rather than a tech geek. I'm inclined to think I'd have come up with a more rigorous reason than the judges did, but would not have come to a different conclusion. That, after all, is where my concern lies - I don't think the reasoning behind the ruling on that evidence was as strong as I would have liked. The ruling itself I had no problems with.