Oh, there are parachutes that can be used at those speeds - they have some method of allowing air to travel through them, albeit impeded, which is why the Thrust-SSC car was able to use parachutes at speeds exceeding mach 1, and why there is some value in having ejector seats capable of supporting supersonic airspeeds. You will have noticed, of course, that commentators on the Challenger disaster stuck to discussing subsonic parachutes only and essentially classed all supersonic flight as beyond the limits of what you could escape from. All mention of escape methods specifically stated that the speed the shuttle was traveling at were far too fast to use any of the methods available. This is not because supersonic ejection technology did not exist at the time (they did), or that supersonic parachutes were new (they'd been around a few decades by then), but because even the most cynical of commentators accepted that that was just too damn hairy to be remotely viable.
Parachutes and paragliders tend to be unpredictable and are not particularly safe, doubly so at speeds exceeding sound or at very low altitudes. It's unclear the designs can be improved much beyond current levels. A more rigid wing might be a viable option under circumstances where parachutes either shouldn't be used or can't be used. As such, they may well be a viable option for emergency transport.
Yes, it's an old story, but it has been a very slow news day. Actually, it's been a very slow news month!
Well, zero exists! Besides, if nothing is bigger than everything, and everything is more than something, then something is always less than nothing. Thus, the universe is in fact negative. (You can test this theory by reading the newspaper.)
I do have science textbooks published in 1750. They didn't list any supernovae, but they did attribute thunder to the ignition of sublimated gunpowder by lightning. They almost got the Northern Lights right, though. Again, they attributed it to metals that had evaporated or sublimed and some sort of electrical effect. Well, the direction was wrong, but the extension of the ideas they were familiar with - the flame test - and speculation as to how to take that knowledge and apply it to something quite unknown such as the mechanism behind the aurora, using not much more than the fact that the colours in the aurora have qualities very similar to those of the colours you'll see when applying intense heat to a metal, was pretty impressive. It was a nice piece of thinking. Wrong in key areas, but nice nonetheless.
Yes, I know the post is intended as a joke, and that some of the extrapolations done back then seem insane today, but I could easily see people back then actually writing such a letter (based on the science texts I've read from that time). Not all, some would likely have come up with more reasonable explanations - at least as close as the knowledge of the time permitted, but certainly the people of the time would have regarded such a post as a seriously proposed theory.
Much much easier solution than that. Nothing is bigger than the Universe, by definition. The Universe is everything, also by definition. It follows that everything is a subset of all that is nothing, since nothing is the bigger of the two, as already stated. This would mean that it is nothing that has evolved and that, relative to nothing, everything has remained the same. In next week's lecture, I will be explaining how black is white and demonstrate how this leads to a high mortality rate on zebra crossings.
Now, I don't expect any government to open up every door, that's just not going to happen. On the other hand, they're perfectly well aware that security through obscurity doesn't work, that any country likely to pose a serious threat has probably infiltrated every department of note, and that the only people they can reliably withhold information from are their own citizens. Let's take these files now released to the British public, for example. I can't quite see how any of these could remotely be classified as vital to national security, although I could see a plausible argument that if the government were seen to take UFOs seriously, it might unsettle the natives.
What about rogue nations? Well, I don't seriously expect to find too many rogue nations building UFOs based on some suggestions submitted to the government on how to build a spacecraft. On the other hand, there have been cases where forged documents have been found in the British National Archives - most recently dealing with Churchill. There is at least evidence of an exploitable attack vector in that case, even though it would not appear that such an exploit could be made to do anything useful.
But, yes, ultimately if the populace contains a great many paranoid, suspicious, conspiracy-theorizing individuals, it is because the governments of the world have done everything in their power to foster suspicion as to their activities. I like the House of Lords response to the theorists, which thanks them rather nicely for giving the government credit for being capable of agreement on any scale, although it then denies that this could be true. Nonetheless, there have been efforts to suppress information that would otherwise have been released - in the US, this would include content from President Reagan's diaries - and in the absence of any other information, people will naturally assume the worst.
Two memorable quotes that seem highly relevent to this discussion from a series that satirises politics so well that it is now part of the training program for British civil servants.
"Britain should always be on the side of law and justice, so long as we don't allow it to affect our foreign policy."
"It is well known that in the Foreign Office an order from the Prime Minister becomes a request from the Foreign Secretary, then a recommendation from the Minister of State, finally just a suggestion from the Ambassador. If it ever gets that far."
(Read the first as an EU guide to business policy, and the second as to why a demand from a British agency can never be a formal request.)
...have I seen this Megaminx puzzle before.... Oh yes, that's right, the US tax system. Seriously, this is wonderful. Once a problem is solved, then further work is merely optimization and refactoring. There's nothing new. Puzzles that have an algorithmic solution, but where the solution is unknown at this time, are interesting because they require discovery that is potentially within reach of anyone. Puzzles for which only a herustic definitely exists are also interesting for much the same reason. Problems with no solution, or where it is not yet possible to prove it is possible to find any solution, are interesting more because the work required might well involve whole new branches of mathematics being developed, real frontier work rather than simply filling in the gaps. Puzzles of this kind also draw people who might otherwise consider maths or science "boring" into those fields. Science outside of "profitable" fields like computer programming tend to rely on sparking the imagination of the next generation. There's no other reason to go into such a subject than the pursuit of knowledge, once you eliminate all status and monetary value.
Why would it be blocked? This specific video shows (a) that Chinese goldfish are highly intelligent, and (b) everyone getting out safely, which are perfect propoganda pieces in a disaster. I'd have thought that if video were to "leak out", the authorities would be only too happy for these to be stories of their successes. I'd be far far more interested in knowing what video footage has leaked out from areas significantly affected. It wouldn't be as much, under any circumstances, due to it being mostly rural areas (aside from one major city) and due to the fact that loss of power makes delivery of information difficult, but if you factor all that in, is what we are getting more than we'd expect, the same, or less?
Bear in mind that China isn't the only country that's restricting coverage of newsworthy events. Almost all countries - including most Western ones - also do so. Politicians are far happier about allowing coverage of disasters affecting those they don't like. The Internet will only achieve true freedom of speech when what news you can see can no longer be cynically manipulated. The problem is, the reverse seems to happen in some cases. The Internet and mass media can be used to drown out coverage, and viral techniques are just as useful for disseminating edited and fabricated evidence as they are for circulating honest reports.
Without any effective means of knowing truth from falsehood, all the Internet does is increase the volume. If you cannot differentiate between signal and noise, it is safer to assume that more volume just means more noise.
To "compute" is to calculate, yes. The gender of who "computed" would have depended on the era - by WW2, it was more secretarial, but in Greeco-Roman times, it would likely have been mainly males.
...if the same sorts of things applied to the music industry. If they were banned from the Internet for illegally distributing files, violating copyright (say, the GPL) or distributing malware, then it would seem equitable for others to suffer likewise. Strange how no such provision exists. It's ok for person/group A to violate person/group B's copyright, but not for B to violate A's. Two wrongs never make a right, but if something actually is a wrong, in and of itself, then what possible contribution is offered by allowing the more serious offender off?
Yes, I said the more serious offender. The purpose of copyright is to ensure that originators are protected against the abuses of others. Music labels are forever being sued for contract violations, although only artists who are rich enough can afford to do so. The number of poor artists who cannot sue is unknown. Given that price increases in the stores have generally not translated into royalty increases for artists, it can be assumed that the number of poor artists being stiffed by the music industry is substantial. (Most sane artists start their own label as soon as they can afford to, because running such monsterous overheads is still more profitable than continued servitude to the major operators. That should say something, given the promotional muscle of a giant and the benefits of scale efficiency.) Copyright violations, say of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" or the Bannana Boat Song, hit the headlines, but didn't hit any studio's wallet or lead to Internet access being withdrawn. Why not? Artists in Africa probably ARE starving. If artists are who matters, then why the Scrooge impersonations?
Major music and film corporations are reputed to have links with organized crime, are quoted by foreign artists and foreign directors (in the case of the movie industry) of supplying drugs and prostitutes to people considered key, and other sordid stuff. It's one thing to have liberal leanings (which I don't believe Hollywood has), it's another to be considered by outsiders as racketeers who'd supply a kid with cocaine if it meant they could earn more money.
Those accusations may be true, they might not be, but I don't expect to be seeing the FBI plough much in the way of resources there.
Well, it depends on how you define "runnable code". I would define it as any machine-level language. Anything higher level than that may be compiled into runnable code, but is not in itself runnable or, indeed, code. It is a abstraction of what is intended. There is never any guarantee that what is actually run will have anything more than a superficial relationship to the abstract description typed in by the programmer. In fact, if you move into fourth or fifth generation languages, you are absolutely guaranteed that there will be a very minimal relationship. Third generation languages are only guaranteed a relationship if there are no space or speed optimizations.
If you're more relaxed over the description of code to anything that can be directly compiled, you still run into problems with, say, Java. Java is typically run on a virtual machine, not a physical one, and most compilers that convert Java to native code do so by source-to-source compiling into a language like C or C++, and it is that that is compiled. Source-to-source compiling means that it isn't being directly compiled at all. It is a program that is logically similar that is being directly compiled, not the original.
If we allow indirect compilation, to circumvent the above problem, then we include all flowcharts, as there are flowchart-to-source compilers. We also include any abstract specification language for which a source generator exists. But these are program generators, the original instructions are not the programs, it is whatever is generated that is. The description at this point would seem to include stuff that definitely shouldn't be included. That is one reason computer science as a subject is a mess - it tries to wedge too much under too few umbrella definitions.
Cyberwarfare is nothing new. To repeat an example I keep going back to, the Internet Auditing Project, they did talk about a successful attack on their system from a US Government agency via a cracked Australian computer. This is not the same as a botnet (hence the uncertainty) but the fact that they do already exploit vulnerable machines is a pretty good indication of the line of thinking they have been going on.
But - and this is the important part - it is extremely unclear as to who the "they" are. The US Government is big, different departments have different policies and philosophies, what holds true for some branch A may not hold true for some other branch B, and so on. For example, I can't really imagine the regular US Army or Navy using a botnet. That's not, as a whole, their style. Remember, the US Navy is looking at semi-robotic next-generation Ironclads/Battleships with hundreds of missile launchers on each side. There is nothing subtle or stealthy about the Navy. Their sneers and jeers at Sweeden examining stealth ships is further evidence that these guys are about as subtle as a rocket-propelled 2x4.
Now, what about other departments? We already know that there are departments that indulge in signals intelligence, electronic and cyber warfare, covert operations, and so on. By definition, we do not know what those departments are involved in, and by definition they would be unable to tell us honestly if they were - or if they weren't. That makes it easy to be paranoid, as there is no way of testing any speculation as to what they are doing. We might know in 50 years time, some secrets may be held back for 100, some secrets may never be known (documents lost or destroyed, for example, as happened in the My Lai warcrimes investigations). Paranoia is the antitheses of rational thought, and in matters in which limited (or zero) information exist, rational thought should be of paramount importance. Insanity helps nobody, least of all yourself.
The evidence is slender, but is strongly suggestive one department already has backdoors on vulnerable boxes. After cyber-attacks elsewhere in the world, protective measures by the US will have increased, not decreased. Ethics aside, at least one military botnet under US control probably exists, as it probably does for Russia, China and probably other nations. I imagine, given the advanced education and the perceived need (it may also be a real need, but nobody acts on real needs they don't perceive as such) by Israel and India that they also have botnets. Britain's brain-drain has probably deprived it of too much talent at this point, but GCHQ and the various clandestine intelligence departments (we don't even know what departments there are - only two officially even exist, but at least one other has been officially mentioned) might have such a system in place, but more likely for intelligence purposes than for attack.
But what about the ethical standpoint? Well, ethics covers a multitude of sins, and most people have different ethics, making any kind of rational ethical argument difficult. I will stick to one point alone, then, and it's not the obvious one concerning those running the botnets. It's the ethical consideration of running an insecure machine. If you are a patriot, is it not your duty to secure your computer? If you do not, then any (and possibly every) hostile power could - and probably eventually will - run a node of the botnet on your machine. If you are a sympathizer of a foreign power, is it not your duty to secure your computer? If you do not, then your country could - and probably eventually will - run a node of a defensive botnet on your machine. If you are apolitical, then is it not your moral duty to secure your machine, so that nobody can abuse your facilities for their political purposes? If you're an anarchist, isn't it politically unacceptable to allow a government to maintain/impose order through you?
In short, it is unethical to leave your machine insecure, no matter what your political stance. No matter w
Well, one doesn't normally write the code that runs in the brain. If you have successfully built a computer-brain link, and can do so, I strongly suggest posting the plans as Open Source before Microsoft or SCO patent them.
Talking of Cardington, the R100 and R101 used a superior design to the Zepplins. The R101's chief problem was corner-cutting and beaurocracy, which led to the infamous crash. Mind you, 6 survived, which isn't bad going for plunging to the ground from a few thousand feet, having a hydrogen gas bag explode and then having a largely aluminium frame ignite. More would have survived if better materials for the frame had existed - witnesses reported that most had survived the crash landing and died in the subsequent blaze. Few modern aircraft would achieve such a survival ratio under similar circumstances.
The R100, the better design of the two, was not only the most reliable airship ever built, it was also the fastest of its time. The design, by Vickers, was originally derived from the Zepplins but the engineers found many ways to improve on the original. The result was radical, robust, capable of carrying far more, and safe. This is the design modern airship builders should start from, not the older Zepplins, and no doubt countless improvements can be made again today, perhaps leading to a still stranger design. When designing wheels for cars, we base them on the more recent succssful designs, we don't go back to examining wooden log rollers. When designing computers, we look to what works now, not what worked when ENIAC was new.
Turing's program was the one I was thinking of, but you're correct Kilburn's program (highest factor of a single integer) is older. He, along with Prof. Williams, invented the optical RAM on the computer. (True optical memory, at that, an achievement many decades ahead of its time.)
That's true enough, and it was presumably because it was well-known that Turing used it on the world's first stored-program computer - easier to spot defects in the hardware side of the logic if the software side can be trusted as correct. The program and data were both in volatile memory, and instructions were fetched via an instruction pointer rather than going on to the next piece of punch tape or going by hard-wired instructions. (Conditional branches on a pre-stored program computer must have been a bugger, especially with something as fragile and slow as punch tape.) There were known problems with the computer - invalid instructions might do anything - and although it stored 40-bit words, it could only handle the first 32 bits.
Once they rebuilt the Manchester Mk. 1 ten years ago, Alan Turing's program became the oldest program runnable without emulation. It clocks in at 60 years old, being written in 1948. The code finds the highest common factor between any two integers expressable in 32 bits. Not bad, given that the Mk. 1 had only one arithmetic operator, subtract.
I'll make it simple and borrow Asimov's ideas of describing complex ideas as a series of "laws":
First Law: All persons and societies shall be free to be free, bounded only by a mutual agreement on how freedom is divided between individals and the society they belong to.
Second Law: A person's or society's freedom shall encompass freedom from external constraints, except where this would violate the First Law.
Third Law: A person's or society's freedom shall be preserved, protected, financed and recompensed by any combination of persons or societies mutually agreed upon, except where this would violate the Second or First Law.
First Meta-Law: Percentage responsibility can never exceed percentage freedom. So freedom is divided, thus is responsibility and accountability divided.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, there are parachutes that can be used at those speeds - they have some method of allowing air to travel through them, albeit impeded, which is why the Thrust-SSC car was able to use parachutes at speeds exceeding mach 1, and why there is some value in having ejector seats capable of supporting supersonic airspeeds. You will have noticed, of course, that commentators on the Challenger disaster stuck to discussing subsonic parachutes only and essentially classed all supersonic flight as beyond the limits of what you could escape from. All mention of escape methods specifically stated that the speed the shuttle was traveling at were far too fast to use any of the methods available. This is not because supersonic ejection technology did not exist at the time (they did), or that supersonic parachutes were new (they'd been around a few decades by then), but because even the most cynical of commentators accepted that that was just too damn hairy to be remotely viable.
Yes, it's an old story, but it has been a very slow news day. Actually, it's been a very slow news month!
Well, that depends on the exchange rate at the time.
Well, zero exists! Besides, if nothing is bigger than everything, and everything is more than something, then something is always less than nothing. Thus, the universe is in fact negative. (You can test this theory by reading the newspaper.)
Yes, I know the post is intended as a joke, and that some of the extrapolations done back then seem insane today, but I could easily see people back then actually writing such a letter (based on the science texts I've read from that time). Not all, some would likely have come up with more reasonable explanations - at least as close as the knowledge of the time permitted, but certainly the people of the time would have regarded such a post as a seriously proposed theory.
Much much easier solution than that. Nothing is bigger than the Universe, by definition. The Universe is everything, also by definition. It follows that everything is a subset of all that is nothing, since nothing is the bigger of the two, as already stated. This would mean that it is nothing that has evolved and that, relative to nothing, everything has remained the same. In next week's lecture, I will be explaining how black is white and demonstrate how this leads to a high mortality rate on zebra crossings.
What about rogue nations? Well, I don't seriously expect to find too many rogue nations building UFOs based on some suggestions submitted to the government on how to build a spacecraft. On the other hand, there have been cases where forged documents have been found in the British National Archives - most recently dealing with Churchill. There is at least evidence of an exploitable attack vector in that case, even though it would not appear that such an exploit could be made to do anything useful.
But, yes, ultimately if the populace contains a great many paranoid, suspicious, conspiracy-theorizing individuals, it is because the governments of the world have done everything in their power to foster suspicion as to their activities. I like the House of Lords response to the theorists, which thanks them rather nicely for giving the government credit for being capable of agreement on any scale, although it then denies that this could be true. Nonetheless, there have been efforts to suppress information that would otherwise have been released - in the US, this would include content from President Reagan's diaries - and in the absence of any other information, people will naturally assume the worst.
"Britain should always be on the side of law and justice, so long as we don't allow it to affect our foreign policy."
"It is well known that in the Foreign Office an order from the Prime Minister becomes a request from the Foreign Secretary, then a recommendation from the Minister of State, finally just a suggestion from the Ambassador. If it ever gets that far."
(Read the first as an EU guide to business policy, and the second as to why a demand from a British agency can never be a formal request.)
...have I seen this Megaminx puzzle before.... Oh yes, that's right, the US tax system. Seriously, this is wonderful. Once a problem is solved, then further work is merely optimization and refactoring. There's nothing new. Puzzles that have an algorithmic solution, but where the solution is unknown at this time, are interesting because they require discovery that is potentially within reach of anyone. Puzzles for which only a herustic definitely exists are also interesting for much the same reason. Problems with no solution, or where it is not yet possible to prove it is possible to find any solution, are interesting more because the work required might well involve whole new branches of mathematics being developed, real frontier work rather than simply filling in the gaps. Puzzles of this kind also draw people who might otherwise consider maths or science "boring" into those fields. Science outside of "profitable" fields like computer programming tend to rely on sparking the imagination of the next generation. There's no other reason to go into such a subject than the pursuit of knowledge, once you eliminate all status and monetary value.
Bear in mind that China isn't the only country that's restricting coverage of newsworthy events. Almost all countries - including most Western ones - also do so. Politicians are far happier about allowing coverage of disasters affecting those they don't like. The Internet will only achieve true freedom of speech when what news you can see can no longer be cynically manipulated. The problem is, the reverse seems to happen in some cases. The Internet and mass media can be used to drown out coverage, and viral techniques are just as useful for disseminating edited and fabricated evidence as they are for circulating honest reports.
Without any effective means of knowing truth from falsehood, all the Internet does is increase the volume. If you cannot differentiate between signal and noise, it is safer to assume that more volume just means more noise.
To "compute" is to calculate, yes. The gender of who "computed" would have depended on the era - by WW2, it was more secretarial, but in Greeco-Roman times, it would likely have been mainly males.
Yes, I said the more serious offender. The purpose of copyright is to ensure that originators are protected against the abuses of others. Music labels are forever being sued for contract violations, although only artists who are rich enough can afford to do so. The number of poor artists who cannot sue is unknown. Given that price increases in the stores have generally not translated into royalty increases for artists, it can be assumed that the number of poor artists being stiffed by the music industry is substantial. (Most sane artists start their own label as soon as they can afford to, because running such monsterous overheads is still more profitable than continued servitude to the major operators. That should say something, given the promotional muscle of a giant and the benefits of scale efficiency.) Copyright violations, say of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" or the Bannana Boat Song, hit the headlines, but didn't hit any studio's wallet or lead to Internet access being withdrawn. Why not? Artists in Africa probably ARE starving. If artists are who matters, then why the Scrooge impersonations?
Major music and film corporations are reputed to have links with organized crime, are quoted by foreign artists and foreign directors (in the case of the movie industry) of supplying drugs and prostitutes to people considered key, and other sordid stuff. It's one thing to have liberal leanings (which I don't believe Hollywood has), it's another to be considered by outsiders as racketeers who'd supply a kid with cocaine if it meant they could earn more money.
Those accusations may be true, they might not be, but I don't expect to be seeing the FBI plough much in the way of resources there.
If you're more relaxed over the description of code to anything that can be directly compiled, you still run into problems with, say, Java. Java is typically run on a virtual machine, not a physical one, and most compilers that convert Java to native code do so by source-to-source compiling into a language like C or C++, and it is that that is compiled. Source-to-source compiling means that it isn't being directly compiled at all. It is a program that is logically similar that is being directly compiled, not the original.
If we allow indirect compilation, to circumvent the above problem, then we include all flowcharts, as there are flowchart-to-source compilers. We also include any abstract specification language for which a source generator exists. But these are program generators, the original instructions are not the programs, it is whatever is generated that is. The description at this point would seem to include stuff that definitely shouldn't be included. That is one reason computer science as a subject is a mess - it tries to wedge too much under too few umbrella definitions.
But - and this is the important part - it is extremely unclear as to who the "they" are. The US Government is big, different departments have different policies and philosophies, what holds true for some branch A may not hold true for some other branch B, and so on. For example, I can't really imagine the regular US Army or Navy using a botnet. That's not, as a whole, their style. Remember, the US Navy is looking at semi-robotic next-generation Ironclads/Battleships with hundreds of missile launchers on each side. There is nothing subtle or stealthy about the Navy. Their sneers and jeers at Sweeden examining stealth ships is further evidence that these guys are about as subtle as a rocket-propelled 2x4.
Now, what about other departments? We already know that there are departments that indulge in signals intelligence, electronic and cyber warfare, covert operations, and so on. By definition, we do not know what those departments are involved in, and by definition they would be unable to tell us honestly if they were - or if they weren't. That makes it easy to be paranoid, as there is no way of testing any speculation as to what they are doing. We might know in 50 years time, some secrets may be held back for 100, some secrets may never be known (documents lost or destroyed, for example, as happened in the My Lai warcrimes investigations). Paranoia is the antitheses of rational thought, and in matters in which limited (or zero) information exist, rational thought should be of paramount importance. Insanity helps nobody, least of all yourself.
The evidence is slender, but is strongly suggestive one department already has backdoors on vulnerable boxes. After cyber-attacks elsewhere in the world, protective measures by the US will have increased, not decreased. Ethics aside, at least one military botnet under US control probably exists, as it probably does for Russia, China and probably other nations. I imagine, given the advanced education and the perceived need (it may also be a real need, but nobody acts on real needs they don't perceive as such) by Israel and India that they also have botnets. Britain's brain-drain has probably deprived it of too much talent at this point, but GCHQ and the various clandestine intelligence departments (we don't even know what departments there are - only two officially even exist, but at least one other has been officially mentioned) might have such a system in place, but more likely for intelligence purposes than for attack.
But what about the ethical standpoint? Well, ethics covers a multitude of sins, and most people have different ethics, making any kind of rational ethical argument difficult. I will stick to one point alone, then, and it's not the obvious one concerning those running the botnets. It's the ethical consideration of running an insecure machine. If you are a patriot, is it not your duty to secure your computer? If you do not, then any (and possibly every) hostile power could - and probably eventually will - run a node of the botnet on your machine. If you are a sympathizer of a foreign power, is it not your duty to secure your computer? If you do not, then your country could - and probably eventually will - run a node of a defensive botnet on your machine. If you are apolitical, then is it not your moral duty to secure your machine, so that nobody can abuse your facilities for their political purposes? If you're an anarchist, isn't it politically unacceptable to allow a government to maintain/impose order through you?
In short, it is unethical to leave your machine insecure, no matter what your political stance. No matter w
That's a script, but the brain first has to compile that into neuron bytecode before it's actually storable or executable.
Well, one doesn't normally write the code that runs in the brain. If you have successfully built a computer-brain link, and can do so, I strongly suggest posting the plans as Open Source before Microsoft or SCO patent them.
The R100, the better design of the two, was not only the most reliable airship ever built, it was also the fastest of its time. The design, by Vickers, was originally derived from the Zepplins but the engineers found many ways to improve on the original. The result was radical, robust, capable of carrying far more, and safe. This is the design modern airship builders should start from, not the older Zepplins, and no doubt countless improvements can be made again today, perhaps leading to a still stranger design. When designing wheels for cars, we base them on the more recent succssful designs, we don't go back to examining wooden log rollers. When designing computers, we look to what works now, not what worked when ENIAC was new.
Turing's program was the one I was thinking of, but you're correct Kilburn's program (highest factor of a single integer) is older. He, along with Prof. Williams, invented the optical RAM on the computer. (True optical memory, at that, an achievement many decades ahead of its time.)
That's true enough, and it was presumably because it was well-known that Turing used it on the world's first stored-program computer - easier to spot defects in the hardware side of the logic if the software side can be trusted as correct. The program and data were both in volatile memory, and instructions were fetched via an instruction pointer rather than going on to the next piece of punch tape or going by hard-wired instructions. (Conditional branches on a pre-stored program computer must have been a bugger, especially with something as fragile and slow as punch tape.) There were known problems with the computer - invalid instructions might do anything - and although it stored 40-bit words, it could only handle the first 32 bits.
Once they rebuilt the Manchester Mk. 1 ten years ago, Alan Turing's program became the oldest program runnable without emulation. It clocks in at 60 years old, being written in 1948. The code finds the highest common factor between any two integers expressable in 32 bits. Not bad, given that the Mk. 1 had only one arithmetic operator, subtract.
They blew the special effects budget on the new Doctor Who story, "The Doctor's Daughter".
First Law: All persons and societies shall be free to be free, bounded only by a mutual agreement on how freedom is divided between individals and the society they belong to.
Second Law: A person's or society's freedom shall encompass freedom from external constraints, except where this would violate the First Law.
Third Law: A person's or society's freedom shall be preserved, protected, financed and recompensed by any combination of persons or societies mutually agreed upon, except where this would violate the Second or First Law.
First Meta-Law: Percentage responsibility can never exceed percentage freedom. So freedom is divided, thus is responsibility and accountability divided.
They wrote a fair chunk of DOS 4.0. Oh yeah, that was the one they had to pull because it didn't work...
Easy. It's from Microsoft.
Guy Fawkes tried installing similar buttons elsewhere, for civic purposes.