I was seven years old when Apollo XI landed on the moon. I grew up with the space race, and that was big part of what got me hooked on science and engineering. I watched every mission with absolute fascination, and dreamed endlessly about how space travel would continue to develop during my lifetime.
Now, nearly 40 years later, we've barely made progress on manned space travel. I am amazed and thrilled by the scientific successes achieved through unmanned satellites and probes. But humans haven't been further from Earth than San Diego is from Los Angeles in decades.
It's gotten to the point that I don't even want to read articles about NASA's manned space program anymore. What they're actually doing is pathetic; the aging, dangerous shuttles exist only to service ISS, and ISS exists only as a place for the shuttles to go. And NASA's plans for future moon and Mars missions are so long-term as to be meaningless; why talk about building solar power stations on eternally sunlit peaks when development of a new heavy-lift launch system is getting nowhere?
It's astonishing to me that I have gone from being thrilled with manned space travel to wincing when I read about it, but that's what has happened.
I've seen similar proposals where you just charge a nominal fixed fee for maintaining copyright -- call it $100 a year or something, enough to discourage doing it without thinking, but not enough to hurt someone who is holding IP that is truly still valuable for them. As long at you keep paying, you can keep copyright for the absurdly long current span. If you stop, the IP goes into the public domain.
I think that by itself would deal with more than half of the "stuck" IP that should be in the public domain by any reasonable standard.
I find it a huge relief that the arch-villains intent on destroying The American Way of Life(TM) don't know how to turn off their cell phones. Perhaps our defense budget can be reduced a bit next year?
The only thing we can do is teach the scientific method - in schools, at home, in conversations. It's the only weapon we've got, however small.
Of course, one big problem is that the scientific method is usually taught incorrectly. People frame it as if the scientific method explained everything about how actual scientists do actual science; there's this weird image that scientists just mechanically follow a set of steps, and science results.
In fact, of course, the scientific method is merely (though crucially) a way to apply rigorous tests to the results of intuition and imagination. Kekule dreamed that benzene was a ring; no amount of mechanical scientific-method application would have ever resulted in that golden idea. But, having had that idea, he then went into the lab and applied the scientific method to test it, to measure his confidence in the results of those tests. He published his results in a form which allowed others to reproduce his experiments, and to analyze his proposed explanation for the results of those experiments. All that is how science manages to be more than opinion.
But the interesting part, the human part, the part that gets people interested in science, is the very part that isn't subject to the scientif method. I believe it was Brecht who remarked (paraphrased from memory) that science is not a gateway to infinite wisdom, but rather a guard against infinite folly. That's the best summary of the scientific method I've ever run across.
Agreed on all points, though of course others at the time held more favorable opinions of IP law. Oddly, Franklin himself favored it more than Madison and Jefferson, despite his own proclivity for releasing his own works as "open source" contributions.
The public benefit criterion is indeed the key. As in all managed capitalism, the trick is to craft the rules so that most individuals acting in their own interests will result in a net benefit to society. Patents and copyright are not created for the purpose of benfiting creators, but they have that effect, since it is believed that creators will be encouraged in their creativity -- which is beneficial to the public at large -- if they can more easily profit from it.
It's quite a tightrope to walk, getting this kind of policy right. Currently we're face-first in the mud about two hundred yards away from the tightrope.:P
We're refering to Article I section 8, excerpt: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
In a document as brief as the Constitution, which is attempting to lay out a fundamental governmental and legal design for an entire country, that's a lot of attention paid to IP issues.
Thanks; I should have added long copyright terms to my list of what needs rethinking in current IP law. Our culture needs a public domain in order to be healthy.
My apologies; I seem to have misremembered the Franklin story. What actually happened was that a London entrepreneur got a British patent on Franklin's "open source" design, and thus (in Franklin's view) unfairly gained exclusive profits from what he intended to be a shared technology.
Interesting how little things change over the centuries.
The thing is, IP theft really does deprive owners of that IP of money. Ask Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, all of whom had to go to court to prevent IP pirates from profiting from their works...and depriving them of those same profits. IP law got careful coverage in the US Constitution for a good reason; the Framers were well aware of its benefits.
I'd readily agree that current US law has gone much too far in reducing the scope of fair use and overestimating the monetary value of piracy in civil and criminal cases. But it's not fundamentally wrong, it just needs tuning.
Even if the forward-kicked pieces picked up a lot of velocity, they'd end up in a more elliptical orbit with the same perigee -- and that perigee is still low enough to get significant atmospheric drag (which is why the whole satellite was coming down in the first place). That drag would both circularize the orbit and lower the perigee on each perigee passage, rather quickly reaching the point where those pieces would re-enter.
In fact, small pieces are more easily drag-decelerated than large ones; the ratio of surface area (controlling drag force) to mass (controlling acceleration in response to a given force) is higher.
Don't be confused by the expression "shoot down". The satellite is still very high above the Earth. The cloud of debris will continue for many orbits and alternate between daylight and nighttime every 45 minutes, like every other low-orbit satellite.
Yep, but by the time the debris orbits into the Earth's shadow, about 15 minutes after the impact if my guesstimate is right, it will be entirely dark in visible wavelengths, shining only by reflected light. At that point, the lunar eclipse hinders rather than helps things, by removing a light source. And the eclipse moves out of totality within another 15 minutes after that.
Short version: The timing relative to the lunar eclipse is pure coincidence.
Unless it's a critical part of the top secret plan to propitiate Nyarlathotep and force Great Cthulhu back into an uneasy aeons-long slumber among the cyclopean ruins of R'lyeh, the fabled city of the Old Ones, looming over the black abyssal plain that lies miles below the sparkling sunlit waters of the Pacific.
In which case, I don't want to know what's in the payload of that missile.
The thing's low enough that all of it -- intact or in pieces -- will deorbit soon (days to weeks). And actually, smaller debris deorbits faster; there's more surface area per volume (and hence per mass), so drag from the not-quite-vacuum of the upper atmosphere decelerates small pieces faster.
Since that time interval occurs during daylight hours near Hawaii, with the eclipsed moon (necessarily) below the horizon, I doubt the eclipse will have much effect on visibility.:)
Sometime around 1975, when I was about 13 years old, we were planning to visit my grandparents near Milwaukee one summer when I realized that the fabled GenCon would happen right in the middle of our visit. I managed to work out a ride to Lake Geneva for one day, a glorious day which still lives in my memory as THE GEEKIEST DAY EVAR. I won a copy of the SPI game StarForce in a raffle within moments of arriving, and it just got better from there.
So, yes: For some of us, Lake Geneva will always be the true home of GenCon.
No, millions at minimum in the Milky Way, if I'm reading the article properly. The phrase "hundreds of worlds" referred to the outskirts of our own solar system, not the Milky Way galaxy.
Simply put, machines capable of emotional understanding, and other modes of human consciousness, will make better slaves. A machine that understands my tastes, my sense of humor, my personal history, my moods, and the changing directions of my curiosity can better respond to (and anticipate) my needs. Since my needs are not rigidly logical, a rigidly logical mechanism can't meet them.
Of course, one runs up against the question of how one distinguishes between simulating and having emotions. If my robot slave appears to be upset by my disapproval of its actions, is it really upset, or is it doing a convincing job of simulating being upset to fit in better with my style of communication?
At some threshold of complexity, it becomes difficult to answer this question crisply. After all, an angry human is just a happy human with a different arrangement of brain chemicals; one can describe the difference in purely mechanistic terms, in theory -- though of course we can't yet do so in detail in practice.
Asimov's robot stories asked and answered this question in many different ways. In the end I think we'll have to decide that anything that seems conscious is conscious. But I imagine it will be a long and bumpy road between here and there.
Sufficiently bad design can justify blaming the software.
I routinely send emails to a member of my team named David. At some point a few months ago I emailed another person named David. Guess which one Outlook always autocompletes to, forcing me to arrow down to pick the correct one? I've sent a couple of (innocuous) emails to the other David when I forgot about this 'feature'.
You'd think any sensible autocomplete feature would remember your last selection for the same string, or at least make the default choice the most recently emailed match.
We used to have a 250-watt halogen floor lamp. One time a bee had gotten into the room, and I opened a window and tried to shoo it back outside. Instead, it flew over to that lamp, landed on the bulb, and sat there. I crept up to deal with it...and noticed that the bee was starting to blacken, smoke, and curl up on itself.
This entire issue seems absurd to me. There is nothing that requires me (technically or ethically) to download or view any part of any website. If I browse using Lynx, I won't see any graphical ads -- does that make Lynx, or the use of it, unethical? If I'm visually impaired and using accessibility tools to access the web, odds are I'll miss the graphical ads. Is that unethical?
Anyone can write a web client, and make it do whatever they want to render or otherwise process web content. If I want to write a client that replaces every occurrence of the word "the" with "ocelot", there's no technical or legal obstacle in my way. Similarly, if I want to strip anything that looks like an ad, that is between me and my tools.
If a website needs revenue, let it make its case to me, and I'll pay for it -- through a formal subscription, or donations -- if I agree. I've paid for web content using both subscriptions and donations. What shouldn't be done is to attempt to warp the entire technical and ethical basis of the web to help people enforce a particular rendering model just because they wrote a bad business plan.
I initially had the same objection as you, but then I realized that the "watt-hours per day" unit actually makes sense.
The rovers' solar panels only generate power during daylight, and even then the generated power varies continuously as the sun angle changes. So talking about average power production produces a misleading picture of how the power is actually delivered; in many ways, it's more useful to think about some number of watt hours being accumulated per day as a lump sum, with nights separating those lumps.
Furthermore, the generated power goes into batteries, the energy content of which can certainly be expressed in joules. But it's frequently more useful to express battery energy content in watt-hours, because you frequently want to know how long an N-watt drain can be maintained. So expressing the daily energy accumulation in watt-hours delivered to the batteries simplifies follow-on engineering calculations.
We've always been able to choose which laws to obey and which to break. I broke a law just this morning when I J-walked across the street to catch a bus. It's all a question of risk-reward calculus. Well crafted laws follow this equation:
pC * C >> (1 - pC) * B
where
pC is the probability of getting caught
C is the cost of getting caught
R is the benefit if you are not caught
>> indicates "much greater than"
So, for example, if you save a dollar each by pirating songs, but for each pirated song there is a 0.001 chance of getting sued by the RIAA and losing $1,000 for having downloaded that song, then the formula looks like
That is a false statement; the two terms are nearly equal. Such a law will have little preventive power.
Of course, the interesting cases involve risks and benefits which are harder to quantify in numeric terms; e.g., running red lights will get you to work faster, which has real value, but you risk both traffic fines and collisions, which are significant costs.
Slashdot Mirror
I was seven years old when Apollo XI landed on the moon. I grew up with the space race, and that was big part of what got me hooked on science and engineering. I watched every mission with absolute fascination, and dreamed endlessly about how space travel would continue to develop during my lifetime.
Now, nearly 40 years later, we've barely made progress on manned space travel. I am amazed and thrilled by the scientific successes achieved through unmanned satellites and probes. But humans haven't been further from Earth than San Diego is from Los Angeles in decades.
It's gotten to the point that I don't even want to read articles about NASA's manned space program anymore. What they're actually doing is pathetic; the aging, dangerous shuttles exist only to service ISS, and ISS exists only as a place for the shuttles to go. And NASA's plans for future moon and Mars missions are so long-term as to be meaningless; why talk about building solar power stations on eternally sunlit peaks when development of a new heavy-lift launch system is getting nowhere?
It's astonishing to me that I have gone from being thrilled with manned space travel to wincing when I read about it, but that's what has happened.
I've seen similar proposals where you just charge a nominal fixed fee for maintaining copyright -- call it $100 a year or something, enough to discourage doing it without thinking, but not enough to hurt someone who is holding IP that is truly still valuable for them. As long at you keep paying, you can keep copyright for the absurdly long current span. If you stop, the IP goes into the public domain.
I think that by itself would deal with more than half of the "stuck" IP that should be in the public domain by any reasonable standard.
I find it a huge relief that the arch-villains intent on destroying The American Way of Life(TM) don't know how to turn off their cell phones. Perhaps our defense budget can be reduced a bit next year?
The only thing we can do is teach the scientific method - in schools, at home, in conversations. It's the only weapon we've got, however small.
Of course, one big problem is that the scientific method is usually taught incorrectly. People frame it as if the scientific method explained everything about how actual scientists do actual science; there's this weird image that scientists just mechanically follow a set of steps, and science results.
In fact, of course, the scientific method is merely (though crucially) a way to apply rigorous tests to the results of intuition and imagination. Kekule dreamed that benzene was a ring; no amount of mechanical scientific-method application would have ever resulted in that golden idea. But, having had that idea, he then went into the lab and applied the scientific method to test it, to measure his confidence in the results of those tests. He published his results in a form which allowed others to reproduce his experiments, and to analyze his proposed explanation for the results of those experiments. All that is how science manages to be more than opinion.
But the interesting part, the human part, the part that gets people interested in science, is the very part that isn't subject to the scientif method. I believe it was Brecht who remarked (paraphrased from memory) that science is not a gateway to infinite wisdom, but rather a guard against infinite folly. That's the best summary of the scientific method I've ever run across.
What is this "sleep" of which you speak? :>
Agreed on all points, though of course others at the time held more favorable opinions of IP law. Oddly, Franklin himself favored it more than Madison and Jefferson, despite his own proclivity for releasing his own works as "open source" contributions.
:P
The public benefit criterion is indeed the key. As in all managed capitalism, the trick is to craft the rules so that most individuals acting in their own interests will result in a net benefit to society. Patents and copyright are not created for the purpose of benfiting creators, but they have that effect, since it is believed that creators will be encouraged in their creativity -- which is beneficial to the public at large -- if they can more easily profit from it.
It's quite a tightrope to walk, getting this kind of policy right. Currently we're face-first in the mud about two hundred yards away from the tightrope.
We're refering to Article I section 8, excerpt: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
In a document as brief as the Constitution, which is attempting to lay out a fundamental governmental and legal design for an entire country, that's a lot of attention paid to IP issues.
Thanks; I should have added long copyright terms to my list of what needs rethinking in current IP law. Our culture needs a public domain in order to be healthy.
My apologies; I seem to have misremembered the Franklin story. What actually happened was that a London entrepreneur got a British patent on Franklin's "open source" design, and thus (in Franklin's view) unfairly gained exclusive profits from what he intended to be a shared technology.
Interesting how little things change over the centuries.
The thing is, IP theft really does deprive owners of that IP of money. Ask Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, all of whom had to go to court to prevent IP pirates from profiting from their works...and depriving them of those same profits. IP law got careful coverage in the US Constitution for a good reason; the Framers were well aware of its benefits.
I'd readily agree that current US law has gone much too far in reducing the scope of fair use and overestimating the monetary value of piracy in civil and criminal cases. But it's not fundamentally wrong, it just needs tuning.
Even if the forward-kicked pieces picked up a lot of velocity, they'd end up in a more elliptical orbit with the same perigee -- and that perigee is still low enough to get significant atmospheric drag (which is why the whole satellite was coming down in the first place). That drag would both circularize the orbit and lower the perigee on each perigee passage, rather quickly reaching the point where those pieces would re-enter.
In fact, small pieces are more easily drag-decelerated than large ones; the ratio of surface area (controlling drag force) to mass (controlling acceleration in response to a given force) is higher.
Don't be confused by the expression "shoot down". The satellite is still very high above the Earth. The cloud of debris will continue for many orbits and alternate between daylight and nighttime every 45 minutes, like every other low-orbit satellite.
Yep, but by the time the debris orbits into the Earth's shadow, about 15 minutes after the impact if my guesstimate is right, it will be entirely dark in visible wavelengths, shining only by reflected light. At that point, the lunar eclipse hinders rather than helps things, by removing a light source. And the eclipse moves out of totality within another 15 minutes after that.
Short version: The timing relative to the lunar eclipse is pure coincidence.
Unless it's a critical part of the top secret plan to propitiate Nyarlathotep and force Great Cthulhu back into an uneasy aeons-long slumber among the cyclopean ruins of R'lyeh, the fabled city of the Old Ones, looming over the black abyssal plain that lies miles below the sparkling sunlit waters of the Pacific.
In which case, I don't want to know what's in the payload of that missile.
The thing's low enough that all of it -- intact or in pieces -- will deorbit soon (days to weeks). And actually, smaller debris deorbits faster; there's more surface area per volume (and hence per mass), so drag from the not-quite-vacuum of the upper atmosphere decelerates small pieces faster.
Since that time interval occurs during daylight hours near Hawaii, with the eclipsed moon (necessarily) below the horizon, I doubt the eclipse will have much effect on visibility. :)
Sometime around 1975, when I was about 13 years old, we were planning to visit my grandparents near Milwaukee one summer when I realized that the fabled GenCon would happen right in the middle of our visit. I managed to work out a ride to Lake Geneva for one day, a glorious day which still lives in my memory as THE GEEKIEST DAY EVAR. I won a copy of the SPI game StarForce in a raffle within moments of arriving, and it just got better from there.
So, yes: For some of us, Lake Geneva will always be the true home of GenCon.
'Hundreds of Worlds' in Milky Way
No, millions at minimum in the Milky Way, if I'm reading the article properly. The phrase "hundreds of worlds" referred to the outskirts of our own solar system, not the Milky Way galaxy.
Simply put, machines capable of emotional understanding, and other modes of human consciousness, will make better slaves. A machine that understands my tastes, my sense of humor, my personal history, my moods, and the changing directions of my curiosity can better respond to (and anticipate) my needs. Since my needs are not rigidly logical, a rigidly logical mechanism can't meet them.
Of course, one runs up against the question of how one distinguishes between simulating and having emotions. If my robot slave appears to be upset by my disapproval of its actions, is it really upset, or is it doing a convincing job of simulating being upset to fit in better with my style of communication?
At some threshold of complexity, it becomes difficult to answer this question crisply. After all, an angry human is just a happy human with a different arrangement of brain chemicals; one can describe the difference in purely mechanistic terms, in theory -- though of course we can't yet do so in detail in practice.
Asimov's robot stories asked and answered this question in many different ways. In the end I think we'll have to decide that anything that seems conscious is conscious. But I imagine it will be a long and bumpy road between here and there.
Sufficiently bad design can justify blaming the software.
I routinely send emails to a member of my team named David. At some point a few months ago I emailed another person named David. Guess which one Outlook always autocompletes to, forcing me to arrow down to pick the correct one? I've sent a couple of (innocuous) emails to the other David when I forgot about this 'feature'.
You'd think any sensible autocomplete feature would remember your last selection for the same string, or at least make the default choice the most recently emailed match.
We used to have a 250-watt halogen floor lamp. One time a bee had gotten into the room, and I opened a window and tried to shoo it back outside. Instead, it flew over to that lamp, landed on the bulb, and sat there. I crept up to deal with it...and noticed that the bee was starting to blacken, smoke, and curl up on itself.
Those bulbs are *scary* hot.
And that is indeed what it holds. What it lets go of is a different list. Caveat emptor.
This entire issue seems absurd to me. There is nothing that requires me (technically or ethically) to download or view any part of any website. If I browse using Lynx, I won't see any graphical ads -- does that make Lynx, or the use of it, unethical? If I'm visually impaired and using accessibility tools to access the web, odds are I'll miss the graphical ads. Is that unethical?
Anyone can write a web client, and make it do whatever they want to render or otherwise process web content. If I want to write a client that replaces every occurrence of the word "the" with "ocelot", there's no technical or legal obstacle in my way. Similarly, if I want to strip anything that looks like an ad, that is between me and my tools.
If a website needs revenue, let it make its case to me, and I'll pay for it -- through a formal subscription, or donations -- if I agree. I've paid for web content using both subscriptions and donations. What shouldn't be done is to attempt to warp the entire technical and ethical basis of the web to help people enforce a particular rendering model just because they wrote a bad business plan.
I initially had the same objection as you, but then I realized that the "watt-hours per day" unit actually makes sense.
The rovers' solar panels only generate power during daylight, and even then the generated power varies continuously as the sun angle changes. So talking about average power production produces a misleading picture of how the power is actually delivered; in many ways, it's more useful to think about some number of watt hours being accumulated per day as a lump sum, with nights separating those lumps.
Furthermore, the generated power goes into batteries, the energy content of which can certainly be expressed in joules. But it's frequently more useful to express battery energy content in watt-hours, because you frequently want to know how long an N-watt drain can be maintained. So expressing the daily energy accumulation in watt-hours delivered to the batteries simplifies follow-on engineering calculations.
When I say "R", I mean "B". It's a Web 3.0 thing; you wouldn't understand.
We've always been able to choose which laws to obey and which to break. I broke a law just this morning when I J-walked across the street to catch a bus. It's all a question of risk-reward calculus. Well crafted laws follow this equation:
pC * C >> (1 - pC) * B
where
pC is the probability of getting caught
C is the cost of getting caught
R is the benefit if you are not caught
>> indicates "much greater than"
So, for example, if you save a dollar each by pirating songs, but for each pirated song there is a 0.001 chance of getting sued by the RIAA and losing $1,000 for having downloaded that song, then the formula looks like
(0.001) * ($1,000.00) >> (0.999) * ($1.00)
$1.00 >> $0.999
That is a false statement; the two terms are nearly equal. Such a law will have little preventive power.
Of course, the interesting cases involve risks and benefits which are harder to quantify in numeric terms; e.g., running red lights will get you to work faster, which has real value, but you risk both traffic fines and collisions, which are significant costs.