Well, what's a government? Certainly doing something like this requires an organization - but membership in that organization could be purely voluntary - and could become something of a marketing ploy perhaps - "Boycott GM - they refuse to join the Free & Open Foundation!", "Buy from Ford, proud supporters of Free & Open(TM)".
Then anybody who's a support donates 10% of profits or 1% of revenues (whichever's more) related to products that couldn't have been developed without Free&Open ides to the foundation and the foundation distributes it according to an established significance rating system. There has to be some objectivity in the system or else I agree it could be just a popularity contest. But if voluntary it's better than a government - another foundation like this could come along and do a better job.
It's not exactly a blueprint, but at a vague level I think this actually might be workable...
how do you reward inventors without allowing them to control (with threat of legal force against brigands) their Int.Prop.?
Well, we're still working on that with Open Source too. RedHat and VALinux may provide one solution. O'Reilly may provide another. Musicians sharing MP3's on the net may provide yet another. But I think there's got to be something fundamentally new in the economics to make it work. Maybe something like slashdot ratings - a recognition of the contribution by the "community" who benefits from it, with some monetary reward tied to it. Science probably ought to work that way too - science has been going with the direct government subsidy approach for a while and I think it's been corrosive.
Intellectual content has always been more limited than it seems was needed under capitalism, at least where it is treated as property to be owned. It has so much greater value when shared and unlike real property, intellectual property can be shared without any limits. Can we create a new economic system capable of achieving this? Maybe we already have?
Thinking about Bruce Sterling's recent Viridian Manifesto, it seems that we really need something new regarding intellectual property rights for the networked age. Surely the success of the open source movement in software could extend to any area of intellectual property - why not the design of hardware and processes too? Maybe we can start with Lego Mindstorm design:-) But I think it's time for a new model - something which rewards creators yes, but also which does NOT keep things secret or proprietary in such a way that the use of new creations is in any way limited. I don't know how to do this yet, but I think there's a glimmering of a more general idea in there. Lets replace patents with something better!
I don't know about one-stop banking, but we've been very happy with Security First - they have a 6% checking account, and pay your bills free (using CheckFree). If you're looking for stock or mutual funds though just about any of the big guys seems to have a significant web presence now.
You can start here. The manifesto doesn't make a whole lot of sense without the context (perhaps that makes it less of a manifesto?) - but I think what Sterling is trying to do is a kind of unification of the arts with technology. When he says there is no modern "intelligentsia" what he means is that today's influential writers and thinkers have, for the most part, not embraced science and technology. And on the other hand we techno-geeks have, for the most part, failed to learn those rhetorical, literary, and general social skills requisite for thoughtful leadership. And yet what we are doing, in creating software or new hardware "gizmos", is highly creative and close in spirit to what "artists" see as their responsibility.
Our society has some serious problems. The greenhouse effect is perhaps the one with the worst long-term possible consequences (think Venus). Technology alone can't solve the problems but it provides us with the routes the world needs to follow, IF we can persuade the rest of the world to follow along. Logical argument doesn't usually help. Economic argument may - but you have to have a sizeable market before fuel cells or what have you can be made affordable: the usual chicken and egg problem. To get over that hump you need something else - emotional power, style: we as technology experts need to work closely with people who are people experts if we expect any of our great ideas to really solve problems. That's what (I think) Sterling is getting at.
Hey, I like this one. Years are an antiquated terrestrial innovation that will be obsoleted in the next century as we settle the solar system... Personally I use the Gnome desktop clock with the "UNIX time" output setting to track time, though I wouldn't mind if it added some ".'s" to separate the major fields:
Current time: 9.469.328.39
The first field increments every 3 years, the second about every day, the third every minute and a half, and the last of course every second. The first two fields are almost the right timing for major/minor version numbering...
But as has been noted elsewhere in these threads, numbering by year or time loses the logical distinction of major versus minor changes to a piece of software - unless we believe all software from now on will only be continually backwards compatible and evolve only gradually. Yeah right.
Good thing I voted for him in the last election... (now, how many of you out there even realized you had the choice when all you ever heard about was Bill Clinton or Bob Dole?)
Of course a lot of the items I expressed no particular opinion on - however what I would have preferred would be an option to keep the status quo, without radical change either on one side or the other (for example, affirmative action - I don't want to vote for somebody who vows to never let it be changed, but on the other hand I don't want to vote for a racist either). Be that as it may, here's the scores I came up with:
Ralph Nader: 76 Bill Bradley: 69 John Hagelin: 69 Al Gore: 64 Warren Beatty: 54 John McCain: 48 Howard Phillips: 33 Donald Trump: 32 Pat Buchanan: 29 George W. Bush: 29 Steve Forbes: 27 Gary Bauer: 23 Orrin Hatch: 22 Harry Browne: 15 Alan Keyes: 10
The only surprise there (other than how poorly that moron Bush did) was John Hagelin. I'd heard of him, but couldn't remember where. The Natural Law Party platform does look like one I could support. And he's a "PhD... quantum physicist" - just like myself and the man of the century...! And he's also challenging for the Reform party nomination. Then I remembered where I'd heard of the guy - anybody remember the Maharishi International University with the bouncing transcendental meditators? Hagelin was their token physicist, and he'd previously recommended transcendental meditation as the solution to crime in Washington DC (crime was up the day they tried the experiment). More info at http://www.politics1.com/nlp.htm.
Hagelin is "director of Maharishi University of Management's Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy". He "follows the teachings of His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi". The institute publishes on the "Maharishi effect". Weird stuff. I don't want to be a religious bigot or anything, but I've got to wonder if there's some undercurrent here we should be concerned about...
How do you send a letter to a "web site"? According to paragraph 2 of the introduction:
-- despite the fact that cease and desist letters were sent to their web sites demanding that such proprietary information be taken down from their sites.
Paragraph 21 seems to be another case where our own bad manners cause us trouble:
21.Information posted on Defendants? web sites establishes that they are fully aware that, in posting or "linking" to the DeCSS program, they are wrongfully appropriating proprietary trade secrets. For example:
(a) Defendant McLaughlin explains to visitors of his site: "Mark of the scofflaw! Here's my local copy of the CSS decryption software, enjoy[;]" (b) Defendant Baugh acknowledges that "I may very well be sued?." (c) Doe defendant 14 challenges: "I have the money to go to court. Your call[;]" (d) in response to the MPA and DVD CCA?s anti-piracy efforts, including cease and desist letters, defendants Vogt, Blank, and Doe defendants 4, 9, 23 and 37 provide a "Note to the lawyers and other scum ? It was the DVD consortium that f***up, ?[;]" (e) similarly, defendant Jones explains "Listen, lawyers, and those you represent: This is none of your concern. The horse has been let out[;]" mocking the "trained weasels you call lawyers[;]" (f) Doe defendant 35 states: "F[_ _ _] da feds! ? "[h]uh? Aren?t these files legal? Oh, well, I didn?t know that!"
Is every year as fruitful as this past one? This is a really impressive list - except for the NASA crash on Mars and a couple of other setbacks. A bunch of surprises in there too: we're nearly finished the Human Genome project and somebody thinks we have twice as many genes as previously estimated? And 3 new elements were created for the first time this year? Some of the stuff seems a bit superfluous though. Pi to over 2 billion digits? And the return of cloud seeding... But generally a very very impressive list. Science has been pretty busy at the end of this millenium.
Sure the Palm isn't likely to have come out much earlier than it did, but I think something like the SunRay could have been a very early contender if there had been adequate bandwidth available to the desktop. But people thought 4800 baud was a pretty fast connection back then, so the mind-set just wasn't there. I think the technology (in the case of something like a SunRay) could have been developed pretty quickly even 20 years ago, if the networking bandwidth had been there.
With the earlier emergence of "just turn it on" devices, such as the Palm PDA from 3Com Corp.'s Palm Computing Division or Sun Microsystems Inc.'s SunRay thin client, we might have avoided vast investments in training users to administer PC operating systems. Entire software subindustries-such as multitasking shells and system management utilities-might never have come to pass. Enterprise IT managers would have been able to concentrate on business process improvement instead of being bogged down in end-user handholding.
and they attribute the reason this didn't happen to AT&T's not taking packet switching seriously enough. An interesting thought. T1 circuits have worked over regular copper for a long time now - on the other hand, I don't think routers and switches were up to the capacity demands that would have been needed to do anything close to an adequate job 20 years ago. But it's definitely an interesting thought.
and who knows if Einstein was actually wrong about God not playing dice? I think it was Max Born who later came up with a completely mechanistic (ie. not probabilistic) version of quantum mechanics, completely compatible with the Bohr-Schrodinger version, albeit requiring so-called non-local hidden variables.
What is truly remarkable about Einstein is the huge range of his early work in physics, and the extent to which he came up with things nobody had thought of before. Bose-Einstein condensation, just achieved now at the end of the century, was mainly Einstein's work, though he generously gave Bose credit. The "bosons" of particle physics derive from Bose-Einstein statistics. Einstein's formulas show up in light absorption and emission, not just the photo-electric effect: check out the theory of the laser for instance. There's an Einstein formula for the specific heat of solids that explains high-temperature behavior very well, and still describes simply and well the low-temperature behavior of "optical phonons" in solids. The many refinements to get the rest of the picture correct are really just generalizations of what Einstein did first.
What we know him for is his work in relativity, but his impact on physics was far, far greater. A truly remarkable man.
I've visited the George Marshall library in Virginia - just because we happened to be driving through and looking for tourist sites. The place left me in awe - he was a truly great and humble man. Personally I would have voted for Gandhi or Einstein, but Marshall definitely deserves a place in the top ten most important individuals of the century.
As others have noted, this sort of thing happens all the time. What can prevent it? The important thing about publication in science is that you are making your full conclusions public, that you are not retaining "secrets" about the detailed methods used for commercial purposes. You can't keep secrets and still call it science. To be accepted into the body of science, work must be first published in a way that it can be fully reviewed by any other competent scientist; second the conclusions MUST be reproducible and confirmed by others, either the details of the logic (for a theory) or the actual experimental system. Usually the confirming experiment is constructed to be different in a variety of ways to explore the boundaries of the phenomena being investigated - getting to know how nature actually behaves despite what we theorize is critically important. Finally, to be fully accepted the work must be theoretically integrated with the existing knowledge framework - just because somebody has discovered something new (like Einstein's relativity) doesn't mean the moon suddenly falls out of the sky.
Generally none of these crackpots get beyond the first stage - they have some special machine but they won't reveal some critical "secret" about its construction. Established scientists generally tell them to just come back when they're rich and famous. Pons and Fleischmann with Cold Fusion did get into stage 2, and were shot down there when nobody doing anything reasonable could reproduce their work. Mills still hasn't gotten past stage 1 here. The investors are of course being bilked. I hope he gets sued for fraud, but that hardly ever happens.
As has been pointed out before, this bears some relation to the Open Source approach: the first stage of publicly releasing your code, no secrets, is exactly like scientific publication. The second stage is where other people come in and port, tweak, add features, etc.
So the question of the hour is - do we have this problem in software? Where people come in with some great new program that will "Solve all the World's Problems (TM)" but as it is closed source and under non-disclosure etc. etc. nobody really knows whether it can do what the hypesters say. How much venture capital/stock market fever lately has gone into stuff like this? I think the two issues are actually quite closely related. Both Open Source and real Science have a common enemy: closed, proprietary, market hype-driven drivel.
Ok, I haven't seen the movie or read the book (though I've read and enjoyed many Asimovs in the past) but it seems to me quite unlikely we'll have any high-tech machines any time in the near future that regularly outlive us. How old is that machine on your desktop? Your car? Your household appliances? The only significant artificial object you frequently associate with that is likely to be older than you is your house/apartment, and even that is not a given. Humans have been dwelling in houses for thousands of years, and we still build so many new ones each year, and tear down the old. My guess is it'll be a thousand years or more before robot design stabilizes to the point where models a hundred years old are not obsolete, and by then us humans will probably be living a lot longer too.
Where you can get the source now...
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 2
Project Gutenberg just published Chromosome 22 in ASCII, and they have all 24 (23 + Y)) planned to be published by June 2000. Of course these are available in probably more useful form from the Genome Database. But hey, the source code is out there - the hacking can start!
> THAT is the problem. The compiler has striped away the usefull [symbolic] information. > How is the de-compiler going to distinguishing between a pointer to a pointer and an array of poitners? etc.
But if the machine code is the same, then the original source code COULD have been written either way; it would produce the same correct result. Does it really matter if it's an array or a pointer? If there is bounds-checking going on then that's there in the machine code one way or another. The actual "content" of a program can legitimately be viewed as just the instructions the computer has to execute: the binary machine language version. As in perl, there's always "more than one way to do it" in the source code to get the same result (or essentially the same) in machine code. Anyway, that's why I suggested this would require real artificial intelligence: it's not an easy problem. But logically it could be done. It really is close to some of the issues with natural language translation.
By the way, I've programmed in assembly language in the past, and looked at "decompiled" binary code (it's trivial to get from binary to assembly language) - it's usually pretty horrific, but sometimes quite instructive. Just about any program COULD be turned back into C, but it would probably all be one long function full of goto's, arbitrary and frequently re-used variable names. If that was released as the "open source" version would it fly?
It's unlikely Mars was ever colder. All planets start out hot from the gravitational energy of their formation, and gradually cool off over the years. I believe the record on Earth indicates the Sun was also somewhat brighter early in its history. Mars would have to have been very much colder than it is now to support liquid nitrogen or methane, the other likely candidates (liquid oxygen is very reactive and very unlikely to be seen without something weird like life to create it). The evidence looks pretty convincing - the new Mars landers should give us a lot more. Remember we've only landed on Mars 3 times up to now (the two Viking landers and the expedition with Sojourner a couple of years ago) plus a Russian lander many many years ago so there's a lot we don't know.
What I found most interesting about the article was the author's notes about how what Lions did resembles literary criticism. Of course Perl has long been advocating "literate programming" and Larry Wall has a rather interesting piece on Perl as the first postmodern computer language. But it really all started with C and UNIX.
I think we're reaching an interesting point here. Language of course was invented to communicate, and computer languages are called languages for a good reason - they are how we communicate in a deep way both with our computers and with other programmers who help maintain and develop our code. Before C (which came along with UNIX and made things like Lions' book possible) there were machine or assembly languages, which were too close to the machine to be very useable by humans. Or there were abominations like Fortran and Cobol, which generally insulted the intelligence of both the machines and the humans. C and later derivatives like Perl and Java somehow elegantly capture the essence of both machine and human ways of "thinking", and allow deep communication of meaning in relatively concise fashion. Just like a real language.
And this goes to the crux of the definition of open source itself. Binary executables are pure machine language, essentially unusable by humans, but since they contain the full "content" of a program (at least for a particular piece of hardware/configuration etc) why can't we just write good decompilers to convert machine code to source code? Maybe if our artificial intelligence efforts succeed eventually that will be possible, but until then the results of such machine translations are many times worse than the snarls babelfish and its ilk get into translating human languages... Things like variable names, the choice of loop or switch constructs, object-oriented constructs, even regular expression syntax are generally carefully chosen by the programmer for human readability and verifiability of the correctness of the instructions that the machine will carry out. What we're doing is really a new, and very interesting, form of literature... food for thought I hope!
Hydrogen isn't explosive on its own - it's quite stable. The problem is oxygen, not hydrogen - having free oxygen in our atmosphere is highly unusual (at least Earth is the only body in our solar system with it), and finding free oxygen in the atmosphere of another planet is considered one of the surest indicators of life. Oxygen's reactivity is what makes matches and burning in general so hazardous here on Earth.
NASA's "Mars Polar Lander" touches down this Friday (December 3) at 3:37 pm EST. Shortly before that it'll be releasing the two "Deep Space 2" probes to bury deeper into Mars' surface - both will be looking for water and organics, signs of life, and in the most promising part of Mars yet - the south polar area. Newsweek has an excellent cover story on this this week (by Sharon Begley, whose science reporting I greatly respect). Aside from Europa, Mars really is the mostly likely place for life in our solar system. Perhaps more likely than Europa given that Mars clearly had a liquid water ocean early in its history. The next few years should be VERY interesting in the search for extraterrestrial life!
On the question: > can't many works simply be OCR'ed?
Project Gutenberg has been using OCR for years, including some custom OCR software developed along the way. However, they care about quality too, and OCR text ALWAYS has errors, especially when you're OCR'ing something that's 75 or 100 years old, as required by the copyright laws. The major effort is usually in proofreading. However, in some cases it's just faster to re-type the text - that's what I did for the things I worked on for them. I also learned how to touch type at 90 words/minute:-) which never ceases to impress my co-workers.
If any of you have played with the E-book readers out there (Rocketbook or Softbook are the main contenders) you'll notice that 90% or so of the books they offer right now seem to be public domain ones, mostly from the Project Gutenberg collection. And that does make sense - PG is all about etexts, the E-book readers are about reading etexts... Anyway, it seems the two parties ought to get together. But unfortunately, the Ebook vendors seem to be more focused on licensing and copyright issues and making money from selling content, rather than just making and selling their hardware. Can't Dell or somebody like that get into this business and show how it ought to be done?
Anyway, if we could get a bunch of recent books out there in the public domain (or GPL of course) - either under Project Gutenberg or some other auspices - I think that would demonstrate this is a serious option for the future of reading. The technical market might be ideal - how about merging in some of the Linux Howto's and the Linux documentation project with this kind of effort? Instead of making a buck for yourself and Tim O'Reilly, how about publishing with Project Gutenberg next time? Just as with Linux and the World Wide Web, it could be a way to guarantee readership you would never get by selling the stuff.
By the way, I prepared 2 books for Project Gutenberg many years ago, and did some work on their Encyclopedia project, but I've not been keeping track for the last few years - it's definitely continued to grow and be successful. Despite Michael Hart's quirkiness, it really has come close to fulfilling the original promise (10,000 free etexts by 2000). A hearty congratulations to Michael and all the volunteers!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, what's a government? Certainly doing something like this requires an organization - but membership in that organization could be purely voluntary - and could become something of a marketing ploy perhaps - "Boycott GM - they refuse to join the Free & Open Foundation!", "Buy from Ford, proud supporters of Free & Open(TM)".
Then anybody who's a support donates 10% of profits or 1% of revenues (whichever's more) related to products that couldn't have been developed without Free&Open ides to the foundation and the foundation distributes it according to an established significance rating system. There has to be some objectivity in the system or else I agree it could be just a popularity contest. But if voluntary it's better than a government - another foundation like this could come along and do a better job.
It's not exactly a blueprint, but at a vague level I think this actually might be workable...
Arthur
Well, we're still working on that with Open Source too. RedHat and VALinux may provide one solution. O'Reilly may provide another. Musicians sharing MP3's on the net may provide yet another. But I think there's got to be something fundamentally new in the economics to make it work. Maybe something like slashdot ratings - a recognition of the contribution by the "community" who benefits from it, with some monetary reward tied to it. Science probably ought to work that way too - science has been going with the direct government subsidy approach for a while and I think it's been corrosive.
Intellectual content has always been more limited than it seems was needed under capitalism, at least where it is treated as property to be owned. It has so much greater value when shared and unlike real property, intellectual property can be shared without any limits. Can we create a new economic system capable of achieving this? Maybe we already have?
Thinking about Bruce Sterling's recent Viridian Manifesto, it seems that we really need something new regarding intellectual property rights for the networked age. Surely the success of the open source movement in software could extend to any area of intellectual property - why not the design of hardware and processes too? Maybe we can start with Lego Mindstorm design :-) But I think it's time for a new model - something which rewards creators yes, but also which does NOT keep things secret or proprietary in such a way that the use of new creations is in any way limited. I don't know how to do this yet, but I think there's a glimmering of a more general idea in there. Lets replace patents with something better!
I don't know about one-stop banking, but we've been very happy with Security First - they have a 6% checking account, and pay your bills free (using CheckFree). If you're looking for stock or mutual funds though just about any of the big guys seems to have a significant web presence now.
You can start here. The manifesto doesn't make a whole lot of sense without the context (perhaps that makes it less of a manifesto?) - but I think what Sterling is trying to do is a kind of unification of the arts with technology. When he says there is no modern "intelligentsia" what he means is that today's influential writers and thinkers have, for the most part, not embraced science and technology. And on the other hand we techno-geeks have, for the most part, failed to learn those rhetorical, literary, and general social skills requisite for thoughtful leadership. And yet what we are doing, in creating software or new hardware "gizmos", is highly creative and close in spirit to what "artists" see as their responsibility.
Our society has some serious problems. The greenhouse effect is perhaps the one with the worst long-term possible consequences (think Venus). Technology alone can't solve the problems but it provides us with the routes the world needs to follow, IF we can persuade the rest of the world to follow along. Logical argument doesn't usually help. Economic argument may - but you have to have a sizeable market before fuel cells or what have you can be made affordable: the usual chicken and egg problem. To get over that hump you need something else - emotional power, style: we as technology experts need to work closely with people who are people experts if we expect any of our great ideas to really solve problems. That's what (I think) Sterling is getting at.
Hey, I like this one. Years are an antiquated terrestrial innovation that will be obsoleted in the next century as we settle the solar system... Personally I use the Gnome desktop clock with the "UNIX time" output setting to track time, though I wouldn't mind if it added some ".'s" to separate the major fields:
Current time: 9.469.328.39
The first field increments every 3 years, the second about every day, the third every minute and a half, and the last of course every second. The first two fields are almost the right timing for major/minor version numbering...
But as has been noted elsewhere in these threads, numbering by year or time loses the logical distinction of major versus minor changes to a piece of software - unless we believe all software from now on will only be continually backwards compatible and evolve only gradually. Yeah right.
Good thing I voted for him in the last election... (now, how many of you out there even realized you had the choice when all you ever heard about was Bill Clinton or Bob Dole?)
... quantum physicist" - just like myself and the man of the century...! And he's also challenging for the Reform party nomination. Then I remembered where I'd heard of the guy - anybody remember the Maharishi International University with the bouncing transcendental meditators? Hagelin was their token physicist, and he'd previously recommended transcendental meditation as the solution to crime in Washington DC (crime was up the day they tried the experiment). More info at
Of course a lot of the items I expressed no particular opinion on - however what I would have preferred would be an option to keep the status quo, without radical change either on one side or the other (for example, affirmative action - I don't want to vote for somebody who vows to never let it be changed, but on the other hand I don't want to vote for a racist either). Be that as it may, here's the scores I came up with:
Ralph Nader: 76
Bill Bradley: 69
John Hagelin: 69
Al Gore: 64
Warren Beatty: 54
John McCain: 48
Howard Phillips: 33
Donald Trump: 32
Pat Buchanan: 29
George W. Bush: 29
Steve Forbes: 27
Gary Bauer: 23
Orrin Hatch: 22
Harry Browne: 15
Alan Keyes: 10
The only surprise there (other than how poorly that moron Bush did) was John Hagelin. I'd heard of him, but couldn't remember where. The Natural Law Party platform does look like one I could support. And he's a "PhD
http://www.politics1.com/nlp.htm.
Hagelin is "director of Maharishi University of Management's Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy". He "follows the teachings of His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi". The institute publishes on the "Maharishi effect". Weird stuff. I don't want to be a religious bigot or anything, but I've got to wonder if there's some undercurrent here we should be concerned about...
Paragraph 21 seems to be another case where our own bad manners cause us trouble:
Is every year as fruitful as this past one? This is a really impressive list - except for the NASA crash on Mars and a couple of other setbacks. A bunch of surprises in there too: we're nearly finished the Human Genome project and somebody thinks we have twice as many genes as previously estimated? And 3 new elements were created for the first time this year? Some of the stuff seems a bit superfluous though. Pi to over 2 billion digits? And the return of cloud seeding... But generally a very very impressive list. Science has been pretty busy at the end of this millenium.
Sure the Palm isn't likely to have come out much earlier than it did, but I think something like the SunRay could have been a very early contender if there had been adequate bandwidth available to the desktop. But people thought 4800 baud was a pretty fast connection back then, so the mind-set just wasn't there. I think the technology (in the case of something like a SunRay) could have been developed pretty quickly even 20 years ago, if the networking bandwidth had been there.
and they attribute the reason this didn't happen to AT&T's not taking packet switching seriously enough. An interesting thought. T1 circuits have worked over regular copper for a long time now - on the other hand, I don't think routers and switches were up to the capacity demands that would have been needed to do anything close to an adequate job 20 years ago. But it's definitely an interesting thought.
and who knows if Einstein was actually wrong about God not playing dice? I think it was Max Born who later came up with a completely mechanistic (ie. not probabilistic) version of quantum mechanics, completely compatible with the Bohr-Schrodinger version, albeit requiring so-called non-local hidden variables.
What is truly remarkable about Einstein is the huge range of his early work in physics, and the extent to which he came up with things nobody had thought of before. Bose-Einstein condensation, just achieved now at the end of the century, was mainly Einstein's work, though he generously gave Bose credit. The "bosons" of particle physics derive from Bose-Einstein statistics. Einstein's formulas show up in light absorption and emission, not just the photo-electric effect: check out the theory of the laser for instance. There's an Einstein formula for the specific heat of solids that explains high-temperature behavior very well, and still describes simply and well the low-temperature behavior of "optical phonons" in solids. The many refinements to get the rest of the picture correct are really just generalizations of what Einstein did first.
What we know him for is his work in relativity, but his impact on physics was far, far greater. A truly remarkable man.
I've visited the George Marshall library in Virginia - just because we happened to be driving through and looking for tourist sites. The place left me in awe - he was a truly great and humble man. Personally I would have voted for Gandhi or Einstein, but Marshall definitely deserves a place in the top ten most important individuals of the century.
As others have noted, this sort of thing happens all the time. What can prevent it? The important thing about publication in science is that you are making your full conclusions public, that you are not retaining "secrets" about the detailed methods used for commercial purposes. You can't keep secrets and still call it science. To be accepted into the body of science, work must be first published in a way that it can be fully reviewed by any other competent scientist; second the conclusions MUST be reproducible and confirmed by others, either the details of the logic (for a theory) or the actual experimental system. Usually the confirming experiment is constructed to be different in a variety of ways to explore the boundaries of the phenomena being investigated - getting to know how nature actually behaves despite what we theorize is critically important. Finally, to be fully accepted the work must be theoretically integrated with the existing knowledge framework - just because somebody has discovered something new (like Einstein's relativity) doesn't mean the moon suddenly falls out of the sky.
Generally none of these crackpots get beyond the first stage - they have some special machine but they won't reveal some critical "secret" about its construction. Established scientists generally tell them to just come back when they're rich and famous. Pons and Fleischmann with Cold Fusion did get into stage 2, and were shot down there when nobody doing anything reasonable could reproduce their work. Mills still hasn't gotten past stage 1 here. The investors are of course being bilked. I hope he gets sued for fraud, but that hardly ever happens.
As has been pointed out before, this bears some relation to the Open Source approach: the first stage of publicly releasing your code, no secrets, is exactly like scientific publication. The second stage is where other people come in and port, tweak, add features, etc.
So the question of the hour is - do we have this problem in software? Where people come in with some great new program that will "Solve all the World's Problems (TM)" but as it is closed source and under non-disclosure etc. etc. nobody really knows whether it can do what the hypesters say. How much venture capital/stock market fever lately has gone into stuff like this? I think the two issues are actually quite closely related. Both Open Source and real Science have a common enemy: closed, proprietary, market hype-driven drivel.
Ok, I haven't seen the movie or read the book (though I've read and enjoyed many Asimovs in the past) but it seems to me quite unlikely we'll have any high-tech machines any time in the near future that regularly outlive us. How old is that machine on your desktop? Your car? Your household appliances? The only significant artificial object you frequently associate with that is likely to be older than you is your house/apartment, and even that is not a given. Humans have been dwelling in houses for thousands of years, and we still build so many new ones each year, and tear down the old. My guess is it'll be a thousand years or more before robot design stabilizes to the point where models a hundred years old are not obsolete, and by then us humans will probably be living a lot longer too.
Project Gutenberg just published Chromosome 22 in ASCII, and they have all 24 (23 + Y)) planned to be published by June 2000. Of course these are available in probably more useful form from the Genome Database. But hey, the source code is out there - the hacking can start!
> THAT is the problem. The compiler has striped away the usefull [symbolic] information.
> How is the de-compiler going to distinguishing between a pointer to a pointer and an array of poitners? etc.
But if the machine code is the same, then the original source code COULD have been written either way; it would produce the same correct result. Does it really matter if it's an array or a pointer? If there is bounds-checking going on then that's there in the machine code one way or another. The actual "content" of a program can legitimately be viewed as just the instructions the computer has to execute: the binary machine language version. As in perl, there's always "more than one way to do it" in the source code to get the same result (or essentially the same) in machine code. Anyway, that's why I suggested this would require real artificial intelligence: it's not an easy problem. But logically it could be done. It really is close to some of the issues with natural language translation.
By the way, I've programmed in assembly language in the past, and looked at "decompiled" binary code (it's trivial to get from binary to assembly language) - it's usually pretty horrific, but sometimes quite instructive. Just about any program COULD be turned back into C, but it would probably all be one long function full of goto's, arbitrary and frequently re-used variable names. If that was released as the "open source" version would it fly?
Oops - you're right. Knuth has been at this a lot longer than Larry Wall... Though, has anything useful other than TeX ever been written in Web?
It's unlikely Mars was ever colder. All planets start out hot from the gravitational energy of their formation, and gradually cool off over the years. I believe the record on Earth indicates the Sun was also somewhat brighter early in its history. Mars would have to have been very much colder than it is now to support liquid nitrogen or methane, the other likely candidates (liquid oxygen is very reactive and very unlikely to be seen without something weird like life to create it). The evidence looks pretty convincing - the new Mars landers should give us a lot more. Remember we've only landed on Mars 3 times up to now (the two Viking landers and the expedition with Sojourner a couple of years ago) plus a Russian lander many many years ago so there's a lot we don't know.
See:
Opposite thermodynamic arrows of time
for the abstract of this paper about to be published. More articles scheduled for the same issue are available here.
I think we're reaching an interesting point here. Language of course was invented to communicate, and computer languages are called languages for a good reason - they are how we communicate in a deep way both with our computers and with other programmers who help maintain and develop our code. Before C (which came along with UNIX and made things like Lions' book possible) there were machine or assembly languages, which were too close to the machine to be very useable by humans. Or there were abominations like Fortran and Cobol, which generally insulted the intelligence of both the machines and the humans. C and later derivatives like Perl and Java somehow elegantly capture the essence of both machine and human ways of "thinking", and allow deep communication of meaning in relatively concise fashion. Just like a real language.
And this goes to the crux of the definition of open source itself. Binary executables are pure machine language, essentially unusable by humans, but since they contain the full "content" of a program (at least for a particular piece of hardware/configuration etc) why can't we just write good decompilers to convert machine code to source code? Maybe if our artificial intelligence efforts succeed eventually that will be possible, but until then the results of such machine translations are many times worse than the snarls babelfish and its ilk get into translating human languages... Things like variable names, the choice of loop or switch constructs, object-oriented constructs, even regular expression syntax are generally carefully chosen by the programmer for human readability and verifiability of the correctness of the instructions that the machine will carry out. What we're doing is really a new, and very interesting, form of literature... food for thought I hope!
Hydrogen isn't explosive on its own - it's quite stable. The problem is oxygen, not hydrogen - having free oxygen in our atmosphere is highly unusual (at least Earth is the only body in our solar system with it), and finding free oxygen in the atmosphere of another planet is considered one of the surest indicators of life. Oxygen's reactivity is what makes matches and burning in general so hazardous here on Earth.
NASA's "Mars Polar Lander" touches down this Friday (December 3) at 3:37 pm EST. Shortly before that it'll be releasing the two "Deep Space 2" probes to bury deeper into Mars' surface - both will be looking for water and organics, signs of life, and in the most promising part of Mars yet - the south polar area. Newsweek has an excellent cover story on this this week (by Sharon Begley, whose science reporting I greatly respect). Aside from Europa, Mars really is the mostly likely place for life in our solar system. Perhaps more likely than Europa given that Mars clearly had a liquid water ocean early in its history. The next few years should be VERY interesting in the search for extraterrestrial life!
Good comments.
:-) which never ceases to impress my co-workers.
On the question:
> can't many works simply be OCR'ed?
Project Gutenberg has been using OCR for years, including some custom OCR software developed along the way. However, they care about quality too, and OCR text ALWAYS has errors, especially when you're OCR'ing something that's 75 or 100 years old, as required by the copyright laws. The major effort is usually in proofreading. However, in some cases it's just faster to re-type the text - that's what I did for the things I worked on for them. I also learned how to touch type at 90 words/minute
If any of you have played with the E-book readers out there (Rocketbook or Softbook are the main contenders) you'll notice that 90% or so of the books they offer right now seem to be public domain ones, mostly from the Project Gutenberg collection. And that does make sense - PG is all about etexts, the E-book readers are about reading etexts... Anyway, it seems the two parties ought to get together. But unfortunately, the Ebook vendors seem to be more focused on licensing and copyright issues and making money from selling content, rather than just making and selling their hardware. Can't Dell or somebody like that get into this business and show how it ought to be done?
Anyway, if we could get a bunch of recent books out there in the public domain (or GPL of course) - either under Project Gutenberg or some other auspices - I think that would demonstrate this is a serious option for the future of reading. The technical market might be ideal - how about merging in some of the Linux Howto's and the Linux documentation project with this kind of effort? Instead of making a buck for yourself and Tim O'Reilly, how about publishing with Project Gutenberg next time? Just as with Linux and the World Wide Web, it could be a way to guarantee readership you would never get by selling the stuff.
By the way, I prepared 2 books for Project Gutenberg many years ago, and did some work on their Encyclopedia project, but I've not been keeping track for the last few years - it's definitely continued to grow and be successful. Despite Michael Hart's quirkiness, it really has come close to fulfilling the original promise (10,000 free etexts by 2000). A hearty congratulations to Michael and all the volunteers!