Katz talks about the tragedy of technology. I'm not sure quite what he's getting at, but I think it IS tragic that Wall Street has found billions of dollars to pour into cyberspace, but can't seem to find the few millions needed to make viable some of the companies REALLY looking at revolutionizing space travel.
Space.com actually has pretty good news on some of the latest companies and technologies. I think the Rotary Rocket idea is the most interesting, though I suspect they may have run into some technical issues relating to angular momentum conservation... But there's also Kistler Aerospace and many others that promise to reduce costs to orbit by a factor of 10 or more. There are 17 entrants in the X-prize $10 million race to be the first single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. NASA has some nice new ideas too, but the bureaucracy makes that agency close to useless.
Anyway, even a single $1 billion internet entrepreneur involved in this business would be a huge boost. Most of the companies are scrounging for financing at the $10 million to $100 million level - some are getting it, some are not. But there's clearly not nearly enough money being put into it yet to take full advantage of the new materials and other revolutionary ideas that are just itching to be put into space vehicle design.
The NASA dream died when the argument went around that this has no relevance to solving our "real problems" - poverty, etc. etc. Well, I think the argument Arthur Clarke made about this recently should resonate with the techies here on/.: here on Earth we're on a single planet, with no redundancy. The Earth goes "down" for very long, and we're finished. Getting into space is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for the long-term survival of humanity. And that's pretty important in my book, anyway.
VNC is great! One wonderful thing about VNC for us was it provided a solution to the following scenario:
One of our home computers happens to be plugged into a socket that is toggled by a light switch. This also happened to be the machine I liked to use (an old 486/66 laptop, 8 MB RAM) while my wife used our newer Pentium 200/64MB. Except for a while, every evening she would be doing some exercise leaning against the wall with the switch and "flick" my machine would be down, usually right in the middle of an intense game of nethack. It didn't help if I was running the nethack game rlogged in to the Pentium 200 - the rlogin session died when the power went off. But if I start a VNC server on the Pentium 200, and display it on the 486 as a client, then it doesn't matter if the machine dies, or whatever - my session is still there and I can recapture it from anywhere! VNC also does a much better job of displaying things like Netscape than running netscape itself on the 486's X server - of course on 8 MB of RAM it's close to impossible to run Netscape on the 486 itself.
The October "Physics Today" (not available online as far as I know) reported Sandia was shutting down it's fusion-related research to turn to more materials-oriented (nanostructures etc) research. I don't recall the details, but this news report may be some desperate attempt by the Z machine staff to keep the thing going. It did look very promising, but as the article says they really are still a long way from practicality. But I'd be disappointed if the approach was abandoned just because the lab got different priorities. Hope they find some funding somewhere.
IBM's techexplorer plugin does this rather well - works with Netscape and MSIE, available for Linux, AIX, SOlaris, SGI. It's pretty impressive stuff. The "introductory version", which is all that's available on the UNIX systems, is free. Not open-source though...
-- Netscape's market share among our users has hardly dropped at all. Is it only the corporate side that's dropping it? Then again, it could be because almost 50% of our users aren't on any form of Windows.
I also don't understand how this article can claim that XML support is critical when MSIE 5's support is very buggy and full of proprietary MS extensions - for example relying heavily on the ID attribute which has no special meaning in XML. If you look at the Word 2000 "XML" output you'll see it's basically bastardized HTML 4.0, full of "html:span's" and "div's" for example. Mozilla's XML support is excellent and much more standards based. If the promise of XML turns into just another proprietary MS format that only renders correctly on MS software, the W3C has lost a major, major battle here.
On my Gnome desktop clock it says "941068549" right now. If they make a day 10^5 seconds that would give us a nice extra 3.7777 hours to get our work done (ok, our/. reading) done too...
Put little dots at the 1000 day and 100 second marks and you get
Ok, technically, to a significant fraction of the speed of light. The calculation is pretty simple:
Gravitational energy of asteroid = 1/2 M v^2 where M = Volume * density. Volume = 4/3 * pi * (5 km)^3 (if the diameter is 10 km) = 5*10^11 m^3 Density = roughly 4*10^3 kg/m^3 so M = roughly 2*10^15 kg
The size of this asteroid mass is what's important - it's enormous compared to anything we can handle with any remotely available technology today.
If we can strap rockets to an asteroid like that and significantly change its orbit, we can certainly send a number of people roughly equivalent to that mass into space to fend for themselves. If each person weighs on average 100 kg and requires an extra 100 kg of luggage, that means that if we have the ability to move an asteroid that size, we also have the ability to put into space 10^13 or 10 trillion people.
We'll be populating space in the billions long before we can move asteroids around much. And Clarke's point that we need to get into space to avoid our "single point of failure" here on this planet is very very important.
The energy requirement to significantly change the orbit of a 10 km asteroid is roughly equivalent to what it takes to accelerate at least a few million people to the speed of light. Asteroids are heavy, people aren't - it's going to be a lot more energy-efficient to move the people. Plus, once we have a few hundred million people in space the population not living on earth will likely explode just as it did in the Americas from 400 or so years ago.
Exactly - slashdot users are not experts in everything, and sometimes it's worst in things they think they are qualified to comment on but aren't. For example, on the Julian Barbour "Time does not exist" story, the issues involved are in a very complex and remote field of physics (quantum cosmology) in which maybe one or two slashdot readers are actually knowledgeable, and yet the story got hundreds of comments within hours, most to the effect that Barbour was nuts (or humorous comments about never being late again). Many of these comments, based on essentially zero knowledge and off-the-cuff reasoning, were highly rated by moderators because they "sounded plausible". And the huge swarm of zero-knowledge posts overwhelmed the one or two posted a few hours later that actually had something useful to say. Slashdot is far from a perfect medium for review. It's fun nonetheless!
Actually, what he's talking about is configuration space (the space of just positions of particles, in which a quantum wave function is usually defined) not phase space (positions and momenta in classical physics, or the Wigner function in quantum physics). The argument is gone into in some depth in the "one comment" link above - basically what we think of as effects of time (motion, interactions, etc) is somehow embedded in the configuration of particles rather than existing separately.
The interesting difference here from the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (though perhaps implicit in that) is a symmetry in ambiguity between past and future. If you go with Barbour's "Now", there is no well-defined past (rather there are many past Now's that could lead to the current Now) and similarly there is no well-defined future (there are many future Now's that could come from this one). Except that still somehow involves a path through the Nows, which Barbour disavows. But somewhere you have to explain our conscious awareness of time - perhaps that's where the solipsism comes in...
But the idea of there being no unique past makes a lot of sense actually. I do find this a very interesting approach, even though I really still don't understand it.
Ahh, but the "collapse" is a typical time-oriented view of things. There is no "collapse" in Barbour's approach - that's exactly what he's trying to get away from. The Barbour approach is in some ways analogous to the many worlds approach (where the universe "forks" every time there's something that might cause a collapse) except that instead of an incomprehensibly large number of alternate universes, Barbour has an incomprehensibly large single universe of "Now's". It's sort of the same thing with just a different way of looking at it. The "many worlds" approach (due to Everett?) is a perfectly legitimate approach to quantum theory, although just as unfalsifiable as the Copenhagen "collapse" approach.
IHPP (I have a PhD in physics) so I presume I can comment here. A lot of/. people, including some physicists, seem to think this guy is a krank of some sort (of which there are many). However, his ideas are based on some of the latest approaches in quantum cosmology, which is a completely respectable field, if perhaps a bit strange (other denizens of the field being Roger Penrose, Steven Hawking, etc.) This whole issue has been debated recently on The Edge, a gathering of highly regarded scientists and philosophers on the web. In particular, I'll quote from one comment by Lee Smolin:
I realized this because I was caught in an argument between two views of time. On the one side Julian Barbour, whose ideas on understanding of space and time in relativity theory have been very influential. Nonetheless, I had been unable to agree with his thinking of the last few years, in which he has come to the conclusion that in quantum cosmology time cannot be fundamental. Time, according to him, should play no fundamental role in nature.
But although I instinctively disagree with this, I have been unable to defeat the argument that leads Julian to it. Nor has anyone else. The result is a famous problem in quantum cosmology called the problem of time-time is nowhere to be found in the fundamental equations of the theory.
We have grown so used to the concept of space-time that Einstein brought about that it seems very strange to go back to thinking of just space. But what Barbour is talking about (as far as I can tell) isn't exactly "just space", it's more the "phase space" in which every particle in the universe can potentially take up every possible position - as he says, if there are only 2 particles this gives a 1-dimensional universe, with 3 particles you have 3 dimensions, with 4 six dimensions, and in general with N > 4 you have 3 N - 6 dimensions. For a universe with 10^70 or so particles, we're talking about a 3x10^70 dimensional universe. And it's even worse than that in a sense because the number of particles is not some fixed number, but can itself be any number from 1 to infinity - and it's still worse when you get into the extra dimensions of string theory etc - a very strange space for our universe to live in!
Now how is this actually relevant to reality? Quantum cosmology is still a very speculative field - it may make some testable predictions about black holes, but I suspect there's not going to be much about it we can really experiment with for at least a few hundred, and maybe thousands of years. It's a fun area to play. What does it actually mean that "time is nowhere to be found" in the theories? It either means that what we experience as time is somehow deeply embedded in the configurations of particles in space itself (which is what Barbour seems to be trying to argue) or else it means the theory is wrong or at least incomplete. Personally I'd not be surprised if these theories, elegant as they are, are still incomplete. But it's certainly interesting to discuss the implications if they are right...
Renormalization is a very powerful technique that applies across a broad swath of physics, not just with elementary particles. The supposed "math error" is a recognition that the mathematical theories are incomplete. For example, in QED a calculation of the energy of an electron as a point charged particle gives you an infinite number - that can't be right of course because the electron does not have infinite energy or mass. An examination of where the infinity comes from reveals that it involves stuff at very small distances (and very high particle energies) - the renormalization technique is then to remove the infinity by putting in a high energy or short-distance cutoff in some physically consistent manner. Renormalization is really an augmentation of a mathematically "pretty" theory with some rules for getting practical calculations out of it - and the results are indeed very practical - QED has been verified in some instances to 1 part in 10^12 or so, better than any other basic physical theory we have.
The totally correct theory of course would not treat the electron (or photon) as a point particle but as some extended object (eg. a string). String theories in fact do resolve all these weird infinities, which is why they are so popular. Unfortunately, it's impossible to calculate just about anything practical with string theory (yet).
I'm a Long Islander too and I've kept track of the weird media hype over here. Newsday with screaming headlines about "Radiation Hazard at Brookhaven!", etc. Remember the Shoreham nuclear power plant, hounded out of town? Well, the whole project was badly mismanaged by (the former) LILCO - though maybe not for the stockholders since they made out like bandits - but the reason the thing never opened (what was it, after spending $9 billion?) was not due to any rational decision making process, but a storm of hype about evacuation plans - my goodness, this whole island practically evacuates to Manhattan every morning between 7 and 9 am, it's not like we don't have enough roads and commuter railroads here. And it's a huge island to boot - it's not called "Long Island" for nothing. Plus being close to sea level and far from bedrock makes our natural radiation dose here about as low as you can get. The whole mess seems to be orchestrated by a bunch of Hollywood ninnies who happen to have their beautiful summer homes located in the nearby pristine Hamptons, and like to take on worthy causes like being anti-radiation or anti-whaling or something in their spare time.
The real problem with Long Island's ground water is overuse and sea water encroachment. This has made most of the water underneath Brooklyn and Queens unusable. Global warming will only make this worse - if a sea level rise doesn't wipe the island entirely off the maps... Luckily we do tend to get enormous quantities of rain throughout the year, keeping the water levels high. The high rainfall also helps quickly dilute most pollutants (including the tiny quantities of radioactive stuff BNL has released) so it's still pretty safe to drink.
Our very first Linux was on a 486/66 laptop back in 1993 when the fastest big-name laptops were 486/33's or maybe/50's - this was in the days of kernel 0.99.*... Anyway, the fact that it came with standard hardware from a generic manufacturer meant everything under Linux worked fine - though we had to grab a few drivers off the net that didn't come with the standard Slackware distro. Linux was then and is now perfectly capable of handling the latest laptop hardware - as long as it doesn't include weird proprietary stuff.
It's still about might;... What I envision to be a "good" peace is one where people agree not to attack or harm each other, because inside they genuinely know and believe that's not how to survive, not how our species will survive.
Perhaps I'm a cynic, but I think what you're hoping for is sufficiently contrary to our own biological imperatives that it will never happen until our environment forces it upon us, and this kind of technology may be part of that forcing.
Technology is only a tool that can be used for good, or for evil. Like all tools, it can be controlled,...
The point of all this is that it cannot be controlled - this information will be very cheaply available, and there will be half a dozen or more of these satellites up there under completely different (private corporate) control. We've had the controlled version of these satellites and other spying techniques owned by our and other governments for years - it's nothing new that people can spy on us from above (or listen in on our phone conversations, or monitor the radio transmissions from our computer displays, etc. etc.) what's different here is that at least some of this observational power is to be commercially sold to anybody who wants it. Not what you seem to be claiming at all.
The promise offered by this technology is not truth, but voyeurism. It's like someone looking over your shoulder all the time.
Kind of like God to the old-fashioned Christian? But it's more than that - it's God plus the ability of your neighbor to ask Him what you're up to (for a fee)! Of course these satellites don't have sufficient resolution for anything truly voyeuristic - and there may be good reason to build in individual privacy concerns into this kind of technology. But transparency at the larger scale is I think an excellent idea.
And even in private lives it might be a good (though scary) thing - think how relieved we would be of certain political naughtiness if either (A) they knew they were being watched and didn't do some of the naughty things they were later caught on or (B) they knew they were being watched and couldn't lie about it for months on end until the truth came out or (C) they could buy some old pictures showing their opponents doing the exact same thing... Complete transparency would change how we live and we're probably not ready for it, but we really ought to be ready for it at the level at which these satellites work.
How do you suppose we're going to become better, more morally evolved beings? As a "bleeding-heart liberal" I'm assuming you're not suggesting a spirtual revolution, and government-imposed rules don't seem to have helped us very much. The only thing I see making much of a difference to our "moral evolution" is technology. With the internet on the one hand (much greater capabilities for intercommunication) and these satellites (transparency) on the other, we seem to be heading to a new global village-like form of society anyway.
The gun people advocate the crudest civilizing influence - direct force. These satellites simply make information available - "the pen is mightier than the sword" - seems all to the good to me.
Since other science fiction quotes came up, I'd like to mention what came to my mind reading this - Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" sequel, "Speaker for the Dead." One of the most powerful parts of that book is the story of Novinha's family, warped by lies from the start, and strangely healed by Ender publicly speaking the shameful truth. I'll never be able to justify lying for somebody's good again after reading that book. I think this "transparency" issue is much the same thing - the truth is always to the good, and more is better. Much of the same philosophy that goes into Open Source too...
Another point that may well be behind the mysterious supply/demand market forces: a lot of the way science is currently performed involves incredible drudgery. Mixing chemicals, tracking hundreds of small animals, putting together large pieces of equipment, going through tedious and complex mathematical calculations, etc. IF we had some of the things CS has been promising for years (reasonably useful robots, for example) science could be considerably more productive. Of course computers have been heavily used by scientists for years for various kinds of data analysis and computations, but I believe a lot more could be done. So maybe it makes sense that society is investing now in computer infrastructure development (including Open Source) to reap great rewards later in improved productivity both in science and other areas. But that only makes the computer infrastructure MORE important to everything in the future, and we'll continue to need more computer scientists and software engineers, and maybe still not that many scientists.
The article claims we'll need many more biotech people in five or ten years and so people should be training now? Meanwhile, I am one of hundreds of young hard science PhD's I know who have abandoned science because we were not provided anywhere near the career opportunities that could be had with our intelligence, skills and experience in other fields, from software development to investment banking and management consulting. The solution is simple - raise the salaries and make many more hard science jobs available - but of course nobody griping about this actually has the money to do that. New PhD's should be making $70-80,000 to be competitive, not $25-30,000 (or sometimes less).
And obviously the reason the money isn't there is that either the supply is too large (and so the decline in science students is a good thing) or there just isn't the demand they claim there should be. If demand does pick up in the biosciences, we still have a huge backlog of ex-scientists like myself who would be happy to jump back in if the price was right. Plus of course there are hundreds of thousands of qualified people outside this country - I really don't see what's wrong with having former Russians or Indians or Chinese people filling science jobs in this country - isn't it all to the good if we have more bright people helping things along here?
Of course I'm most familiar with the situation for PhD's; that's where the supply/demand equation has the longest time lag and so the largest imbalances are likely. If demand for Bachelor's level science graduates grows rapidly it would only take a couple of years for undergraduates to start filling those pipes again. But either way, none of these articles shows evidence of much serious analysis, it's just gloom and doom, ignoring the perfectly rational economic decisions each of us has to make in our lives.
Check out their status page - it claims 3 router failures as the source of trouble ("Network connections down due to router failure") - has somebody been cracking their routers instead of the machine itself? A router going down 3 times in one day seems way too much of a coincidence for me (they blame thunderstorms and electrical glitches - haven't they heard about UPS's?).
Maybe the 6bone is working ok, but a bunch of the proposed standards already seem kind of dated, and some parts of the proposal seem frankly dumb. Tying IPv6 addresses to link-layer addresses (and using half the 128 bits for it!) is dumb - it makes it very difficult to switch hardware around without having to wait for DNS changes to propagate, and there are plenty of other reasons to object to it too. The proposed reduction in routing tables is, I believe, mostly a sham. There may be a factor of 2 in there, but with the complexity of today's internet topology, I find it unlikely they'll cut down the size of the backbone routing tables by very much. And really, handling more routes is just a matter of more memory, and memory's cheap. The current full BGP internet routing tables contain somewhere around 100,000 address ranges - this fits comfortably in 64-128 MB of memory (even with multiple entries for each set of addresses). The handling of multi-homed sites under v6 is pretty much left up in the air - there is no good solution to real multi-homing (ie. a single site with multiple ISP's) other than an entry for the site in almost every relevant routing table - and the RFC's acknowledge this won't help much if we have more than a couple of hundred thousand multi-homed sites on the internet. And some of the proposed topology diagrams seem laughably antiquated.
Somebody really needs to study how the various parts of the proposals really match the stated goals of IPv6 given the current (and evolving) structure of the internet - it looks like the proposals are very much based on the internet of 5-10 years ago, and a lot has changed.
Here's an alternate proposal - simply prepend 96 bits to IPv4 addresses, all zero for current IPv4's, and then sell the new address space to ISP's and exchanges on a per address basis. The proposed IPv6 protocols could still to be used. And we could switch to fancy hexadecimal notation. I bet this would serve the original goals almost as well with a lot less disruption.
The idea that alien civilizations will be using radio in anything like the primitive single-frequency technology humans invented this century and are already discarding strikes me as very unlikely. Bandwidth in the air is becoming scarcer and scarcer - huge chunks of the radio spectrum are being turned over to new technologies that make much more efficient use of it through digital transmission, compression, spread spectrum, not to mention the use of encryption so only the sender and the intended receiver(s) can understand a transmission. And that's after only 100 years of radio technology - another 100 and our radio presence will probably be at most subtly indistinguishable from Earth's thermal spectrum - and no remote alien civilization would be able to tell anything from what they heard. Assuming the average civilization out there will have been around several hundred million years, a technology that lasts only 1/millionth of that time doesn't seem a likely way to find them, does it?
Given the hundred-million year time scale likely for our alien friends, they also seem unlikely to be in much of a hurry to contact us. Why bother with harmless non-space-faring cavemen who can't possibly do any galactic harm for another few millennia at least?
Still, the search is worth doing, at least at the amateur level, to reassure ourselves that we really aren't missing out on something (though undoubtedly if they're beaming anything at us it will have been something we could have detected decades before we actually do detect it).
But I'm not planning to waste my CPU cycles on the search.
What mystifies me is why so many people have to have the multiple computers at their desktop - instead of having a Windows '95 or '98 machine at each users desk you can have a single NT box, run VNC on it, have users display the NT desktop to their X window system under linux and support a dozen or more people who have occasional Word documents to process.
Or you can automate it using OLE - we have a perl/Apache-based system that allows our UNIX users (about a hundred people) to send the occasional Word documents they receive to the back-end NT machine and get a PostScript or PDF file back just by running "word2pdf" on the command line. We may even make this available public domain - it's out to some external testers on a pre-alpha basis right now.
There are better solutions than forcing everybody in the organization to have an extra computer on their desktops.
A lot of the arguments about this have assumed the typical digital on/off signal, so exabits of data per second requires a "carrier" at ridiculously high frequency. However, what little there is on their web pages suggests something more subtle, making use of the continuously variable amplitude, for example. Something like the way an AM radio signal works perhaps. Amplitudes could potentially contain an infinite quantity of information (encoded say in the decimal or binary digit sequence associated with the numerical amplitude). Obviously you have to be more subtle about it to get around attenuation and noise - and any technique they use there should be applicable to other communications mechanisms - wireless too for example - perhaps this is related to spread-specturm radio? But in principle it seems something like this could be workable...
For example, one way to get around attenuation is to send signals at two frequencies that should attenuate almost identically - then compare the two amplitudes to get your signal, rather than just looking at one of them. If they've got a way to get through transformers (and from their diagrams it looks like they make it all the way from the home through several local transformers to a substation) they've probably figured out something even more subtle...
IANA has about a billion addresses to give out
on
IP Address Shortage
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· Score: 1
Look at all the class A's IANA has NOT assigned! And all the "reserved" addresses? I suspect this is just a bit of noise-mongering to get the new ICANN (IANA's replacement) jumping. Or maybe it's when people look at those growth numbers with the internet doubling every year that they think we're going to run out shortly. But actually internet growth has slowed especially in the last year or so - check out John Quarterman's latest analysis at www.mids.org.
Slashdot Mirror
Katz talks about the tragedy of technology. I'm not sure quite what he's getting at, but I think it IS tragic that Wall Street has found billions of dollars to pour into cyberspace, but can't seem to find the few millions needed to make viable some of the companies REALLY looking at revolutionizing space travel.
/.: here on Earth we're on a single planet, with no redundancy. The Earth goes "down" for very long, and we're finished. Getting into space is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for the long-term survival of humanity. And that's pretty important in my book, anyway.
Space.com actually has pretty good news on some of the latest companies and technologies. I think the Rotary Rocket idea is the most interesting, though I suspect they may have run into some technical issues relating to angular momentum conservation... But there's also Kistler Aerospace and many others that promise to reduce costs to orbit by a factor of 10 or more. There are 17 entrants in the X-prize $10 million race to be the first single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. NASA has some nice new ideas too, but the bureaucracy makes that agency close to useless.
Anyway, even a single $1 billion internet entrepreneur involved in this business would be a huge boost. Most of the companies are scrounging for financing at the $10 million to $100 million level - some are getting it, some are not. But there's clearly not nearly enough money being put into it yet to take full advantage of the new materials and other revolutionary ideas that are just itching to be put into space vehicle design.
The NASA dream died when the argument went around that this has no relevance to solving our "real problems" - poverty, etc. etc. Well, I think the argument Arthur Clarke made about this recently should resonate with the techies here on
VNC is great! One wonderful thing about VNC for us was it provided a solution to the following scenario:
:-)
One of our home computers happens to be plugged into a socket that is toggled by a light switch. This also happened to be the machine I liked to use (an old 486/66 laptop, 8 MB RAM) while my wife used our newer Pentium 200/64MB. Except for a while, every evening she would be doing some exercise leaning against the wall with the switch and "flick" my machine would be down, usually right in the middle of an intense game of nethack. It didn't help if I was running the nethack game rlogged in to the Pentium 200 - the rlogin session died when the power went off. But if I start a VNC server on the Pentium 200, and display it on the 486 as a client, then it doesn't matter if the machine dies, or whatever - my session is still there and I can recapture it from anywhere! VNC also does a much better job of displaying things like Netscape than running netscape itself on the 486's X server - of course on 8 MB of RAM it's close to impossible to run Netscape on the 486 itself.
Anyway - go get VNC. It saved my marriage
The October "Physics Today" (not available online as far as I know) reported Sandia was shutting down it's fusion-related research to turn to more materials-oriented (nanostructures etc) research. I don't recall the details, but this news report may be some desperate attempt by the Z machine staff to keep the thing going. It did look very promising, but as the article says they really are still a long way from practicality. But I'd be disappointed if the approach was abandoned just because the lab got different priorities. Hope they find some funding somewhere.
IBM's techexplorer plugin does this rather well - works with Netscape and MSIE, available for Linux, AIX, SOlaris, SGI. It's pretty impressive stuff. The "introductory version", which is all that's available on the UNIX systems, is free. Not open-source though...
Check out:
http://ridge.aps.org/APSMITH/osstats/
-- Netscape's market share among our users has hardly dropped at all. Is it only the corporate side that's dropping it? Then again, it could be because almost 50% of our users aren't on any form of Windows.
I also don't understand how this article can claim that XML support is critical when MSIE 5's support is very buggy and full of proprietary MS extensions - for example relying heavily on the ID attribute which has no special meaning in XML. If you look at the Word 2000 "XML" output you'll see it's basically bastardized HTML 4.0, full of "html:span's" and "div's" for example. Mozilla's XML support is excellent and much more standards based. If the promise of XML turns into just another proprietary MS format that only renders correctly on MS software, the W3C has lost a major, major battle here.
On my Gnome desktop clock it says "941068549" right now. If they make a day 10^5 seconds that would give us a nice extra 3.7777 hours to get our work done (ok, our /. reading) done too...
Put little dots at the 1000 day and 100 second marks and you get
Stardate 9.410.688.31
Ok, technically, to a significant fraction of the speed of light. The calculation is pretty simple:
Gravitational energy of asteroid = 1/2 M v^2
where M = Volume * density.
Volume = 4/3 * pi * (5 km)^3 (if the diameter is 10 km) = 5*10^11 m^3
Density = roughly 4*10^3 kg/m^3
so M = roughly 2*10^15 kg
The size of this asteroid mass is what's important - it's enormous compared to anything we can handle with any remotely available technology today.
If we can strap rockets to an asteroid like that and significantly change its orbit, we can certainly send a number of people roughly equivalent to that mass into space to fend for themselves. If each person weighs on average 100 kg and requires an extra 100 kg of luggage, that means that if we have the ability to move an asteroid that size, we also have the ability to put into space 10^13 or 10 trillion people.
We'll be populating space in the billions long before we can move asteroids around much. And Clarke's point that we need to get into space to avoid our "single point of failure" here on this planet is very very important.
The energy requirement to significantly change the orbit of a 10 km asteroid is roughly equivalent to what it takes to accelerate at least a few million people to the speed of light. Asteroids are heavy, people aren't - it's going to be a lot more energy-efficient to move the people. Plus, once we have a few hundred million people in space the population not living on earth will likely explode just as it did in the Americas from 400 or so years ago.
Exactly - slashdot users are not experts in everything, and sometimes it's worst in things they think they are qualified to comment on but aren't. For example, on the Julian Barbour "Time does not exist" story, the issues involved are in a very complex and remote field of physics (quantum cosmology) in which maybe one or two slashdot readers are actually knowledgeable, and yet the story got hundreds of comments within hours, most to the effect that Barbour was nuts (or humorous comments about never being late again). Many of these comments, based on essentially zero knowledge and off-the-cuff reasoning, were highly rated by moderators because they "sounded plausible". And the huge swarm of zero-knowledge posts overwhelmed the one or two posted a few hours later that actually had something useful to say. Slashdot is far from a perfect medium for review. It's fun nonetheless!
Actually, what he's talking about is configuration space (the space of just positions of particles, in which a quantum wave function is usually defined) not phase space (positions and momenta in classical physics, or the Wigner function in quantum physics). The argument is gone into in some depth in the "one comment" link above - basically what we think of as effects of time (motion, interactions, etc) is somehow embedded in the configuration of particles rather than existing separately.
The interesting difference here from the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (though perhaps implicit in that) is a symmetry in ambiguity between past and future. If you go with Barbour's "Now", there is no well-defined past (rather there are many past Now's that could lead to the current Now) and similarly there is no well-defined future (there are many future Now's that could come from this one). Except that still somehow involves a path through the Nows, which Barbour disavows. But somewhere you have to explain our conscious awareness of time - perhaps that's where the solipsism comes in...
But the idea of there being no unique past makes a lot of sense actually. I do find this a very interesting approach, even though I really still don't understand it.
Ahh, but the "collapse" is a typical time-oriented view of things. There is no "collapse" in Barbour's approach - that's exactly what he's trying to get away from. The Barbour approach is in some ways analogous to the many worlds approach (where the universe "forks" every time there's something that might cause a collapse) except that instead of an incomprehensibly large number of alternate universes, Barbour has an incomprehensibly large single universe of "Now's". It's sort of the same thing with just a different way of looking at it. The "many worlds" approach (due to Everett?) is a perfectly legitimate approach to quantum theory, although just as unfalsifiable as the Copenhagen "collapse" approach.
We have grown so used to the concept of space-time that Einstein brought about that it seems very strange to go back to thinking of just space. But what Barbour is talking about (as far as I can tell) isn't exactly "just space", it's more the "phase space" in which every particle in the universe can potentially take up every possible position - as he says, if there are only 2 particles this gives a 1-dimensional universe, with 3 particles you have 3 dimensions, with 4 six dimensions, and in general with N > 4 you have 3 N - 6 dimensions. For a universe with 10^70 or so particles, we're talking about a 3x10^70 dimensional universe. And it's even worse than that in a sense because the number of particles is not some fixed number, but can itself be any number from 1 to infinity - and it's still worse when you get into the extra dimensions of string theory etc - a very strange space for our universe to live in!
Now how is this actually relevant to reality? Quantum cosmology is still a very speculative field - it may make some testable predictions about black holes, but I suspect there's not going to be much about it we can really experiment with for at least a few hundred, and maybe thousands of years. It's a fun area to play. What does it actually mean that "time is nowhere to be found" in the theories? It either means that what we experience as time is somehow deeply embedded in the configurations of particles in space itself (which is what Barbour seems to be trying to argue) or else it means the theory is wrong or at least incomplete. Personally I'd not be surprised if these theories, elegant as they are, are still incomplete. But it's certainly interesting to discuss the implications if they are right...
Uhh, it's a little more soundly based than that!
Renormalization is a very powerful technique that applies across a broad swath of physics, not just with elementary particles. The supposed "math error" is a recognition that the mathematical theories are incomplete. For example, in QED a calculation of the energy of an electron as a point charged particle gives you an infinite number - that can't be right of course because the electron does not have infinite energy or mass. An examination of where the infinity comes from reveals that it involves stuff at very small distances (and very high particle energies) - the renormalization technique is then to remove the infinity by putting in a high energy or short-distance cutoff in some physically consistent manner. Renormalization is really an augmentation of a mathematically "pretty" theory with some rules for getting practical calculations out of it - and the results are indeed very practical - QED has been verified in some instances to 1 part in 10^12 or so, better than any other basic physical theory we have.
The totally correct theory of course would not treat the electron (or photon) as a point particle but as some extended object (eg. a string). String theories in fact do resolve all these weird infinities, which is why they are so popular. Unfortunately, it's impossible to calculate just about anything practical with string theory (yet).
I'm a Long Islander too and I've kept track of the weird media hype over here. Newsday with screaming headlines about "Radiation Hazard at Brookhaven!",
etc. Remember the Shoreham nuclear power plant, hounded out of town? Well, the whole project was badly mismanaged by (the former) LILCO - though maybe not for the stockholders since they made out like bandits - but the reason the thing never opened (what was it, after spending $9 billion?) was not due to any rational decision making process, but a storm of hype about evacuation plans - my goodness, this whole island practically evacuates to Manhattan every morning between 7 and 9 am, it's not like we don't have enough roads and commuter railroads here. And it's a huge island to boot - it's not called "Long Island" for nothing. Plus being close to sea level and far from bedrock makes our natural radiation dose here about as low as you can get. The whole mess seems to be orchestrated by a bunch of Hollywood ninnies who happen to have their beautiful summer homes located in the nearby pristine Hamptons, and like to take on worthy causes like being anti-radiation or anti-whaling or something in their spare time.
The real problem with Long Island's ground water is overuse and sea water encroachment. This has made most of the water underneath Brooklyn and Queens unusable. Global warming will only make this worse - if a sea level rise doesn't wipe the island entirely off the maps... Luckily we do tend to get enormous quantities of rain throughout the year, keeping the water levels high. The high rainfall also helps quickly dilute most pollutants (including the tiny quantities of radioactive stuff BNL has released) so it's still pretty safe to drink.
Our very first Linux was on a 486/66 laptop back in 1993 when the fastest big-name laptops were 486/33's or maybe /50's - this was in the days of kernel 0.99.* ... Anyway, the fact that it came with standard hardware from a generic manufacturer meant everything under Linux worked fine - though we had to grab a few drivers off the net that didn't come with the standard Slackware distro. Linux was then and is now perfectly capable of handling the latest laptop hardware - as long as it doesn't include weird proprietary stuff.
It's still about might; ... What I envision to be a "good" peace is one where people agree not to attack or harm each other, because inside they genuinely know and believe that's not how to survive, not how our species will survive.
...
Perhaps I'm a cynic, but I think what you're hoping for is sufficiently contrary to our own biological imperatives that it will never happen until our environment forces it upon us, and this kind of technology may be part of that forcing.
Technology is only a tool that can be used for good, or for evil. Like all tools, it can be controlled,
The point of all this is that it cannot be controlled - this information will be very cheaply available, and there will be half a dozen or more of these satellites up there under completely different (private corporate) control. We've had the controlled version of these satellites and other spying techniques owned by our and other governments for years - it's nothing new that people can spy on us from above (or listen in on our phone conversations, or monitor the radio transmissions from our computer displays, etc. etc.) what's different here is that at least some of this observational power is to be commercially sold to anybody who wants it. Not what you seem to be claiming at all.
The promise offered by this technology is not truth, but voyeurism. It's like someone looking over your shoulder all the time.
Kind of like God to the old-fashioned Christian? But it's more than that - it's God plus the ability of your neighbor to ask Him what you're up to (for a fee)! Of course these satellites don't have sufficient resolution for anything truly voyeuristic - and there may be good reason to build in individual privacy concerns into this kind of technology. But transparency at the larger scale is I think an excellent idea.
And even in private lives it might be a good (though scary) thing - think how relieved we would be of certain political naughtiness if either (A) they knew they were being watched and didn't do some of the naughty things they were later caught on or (B) they knew they were being watched and couldn't lie about it for months on end until the truth came out or (C) they could buy some old pictures showing their opponents doing the exact same thing... Complete transparency would change how we live and we're probably not ready for it, but we really ought to be ready for it at the level at which these satellites work.
-- Arthur
How do you suppose we're going to become better, more morally evolved beings? As a "bleeding-heart liberal" I'm assuming you're not suggesting a spirtual revolution, and government-imposed rules don't seem to have helped us very much. The only thing I see making much of a difference to our "moral evolution" is technology. With the internet on the one hand (much greater capabilities for intercommunication) and these satellites (transparency) on the other, we seem to be heading to a new global village-like form of society anyway.
The gun people advocate the crudest civilizing influence - direct force. These satellites simply make information available - "the pen is mightier than the sword" - seems all to the good to me.
Since other science fiction quotes came up, I'd like to mention what came to my mind reading this - Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" sequel, "Speaker for the Dead." One of the most powerful parts of that book is the story of Novinha's family, warped by lies from the start, and strangely healed by Ender publicly speaking the shameful truth. I'll never be able to justify lying for somebody's good again after reading that book. I think this "transparency" issue is much the same thing - the truth is always to the good, and more is better. Much of the same philosophy that goes into Open Source too...
-- Arthur
Another point that may well be behind the mysterious supply/demand market forces: a lot of the way science is currently performed involves incredible drudgery. Mixing chemicals, tracking hundreds of small animals, putting together large pieces of equipment, going through tedious and complex mathematical calculations, etc. IF we had some of the things CS has been promising for years (reasonably useful robots, for example) science could be considerably more productive. Of course computers have been heavily used by scientists for years for various kinds of data analysis and computations, but I believe a lot more could be done. So maybe it makes sense that society is investing now in computer infrastructure development (including Open Source) to reap great rewards later in improved productivity both in science and other areas. But that only makes the computer infrastructure MORE important to everything in the future, and we'll continue to need more computer scientists and software engineers, and maybe still not that many scientists.
The article claims we'll need many more biotech people in five or ten years and so people should be training now? Meanwhile, I am one of hundreds of young hard science PhD's I know who have abandoned science because we were not provided anywhere near the career opportunities that could be had with our intelligence, skills and experience in other fields, from software development to investment banking and management consulting. The solution is simple - raise the salaries and make many more hard science jobs available - but of course nobody griping about this actually has the money to do that. New PhD's should be making $70-80,000 to be competitive, not $25-30,000 (or sometimes less).
And obviously the reason the money isn't there is that either the supply is too large (and so the decline in science students is a good thing) or there just isn't the demand they claim there should be. If demand does pick up in the biosciences, we still have a huge backlog of ex-scientists like myself who would be happy to jump back in if the price was right. Plus of course there are hundreds of thousands of qualified people outside this country - I really don't see what's wrong with having former Russians or Indians or Chinese people filling science jobs in this country - isn't it all to the good if we have more bright people helping things along here?
Of course I'm most familiar with the situation for PhD's; that's where the supply/demand equation has the longest time lag and so the largest imbalances are likely. If demand for Bachelor's level science graduates grows rapidly it would only take a couple of years for undergraduates to start filling those pipes again. But either way, none of these articles shows evidence of much serious analysis, it's just gloom and doom, ignoring the perfectly rational economic decisions each of us has to make in our lives.
Check out their status page - it claims 3 router failures as the source of trouble ("Network connections down due to router failure") - has somebody been cracking their routers instead of the machine itself? A router going down 3 times in one day seems way too much of a coincidence for me (they blame thunderstorms and electrical glitches - haven't they heard about UPS's?).
Maybe the 6bone is working ok, but a bunch of the proposed standards already seem kind of dated, and some parts of the proposal seem frankly dumb. Tying IPv6 addresses to link-layer addresses (and using half the 128 bits for it!) is dumb - it makes it very difficult to switch hardware around without having to wait for DNS changes to propagate, and there are plenty of other reasons to object to it too. The proposed reduction in routing tables is, I believe, mostly a sham. There may be a factor of 2 in there, but with the complexity of today's internet topology, I find it unlikely they'll cut down the size of the backbone routing tables by very much. And really, handling more routes is just a matter of more memory, and memory's cheap. The current full BGP internet routing tables contain somewhere around 100,000 address ranges - this fits comfortably in 64-128 MB of memory (even with multiple entries for each set of addresses). The handling of multi-homed sites under v6 is pretty much left up in the air - there is no good solution to real multi-homing (ie. a single site with multiple ISP's) other than an entry for the site in almost every relevant routing table - and the RFC's acknowledge this won't help much if we have more than a couple of hundred thousand multi-homed sites on the internet. And some of the proposed topology diagrams seem laughably antiquated.
Somebody really needs to study how the various parts of the proposals really match the stated goals of IPv6 given the current (and evolving) structure of the internet - it looks like the proposals are very much based on the internet of 5-10 years ago, and a lot has changed.
Here's an alternate proposal - simply prepend 96 bits to IPv4 addresses, all zero for current IPv4's, and then sell the new address space to ISP's and exchanges on a per address basis. The proposed IPv6 protocols could still to be used. And we could switch to fancy hexadecimal notation. I bet this would serve the original goals almost as well with a lot less disruption.
The idea that alien civilizations will be using radio in anything like the primitive single-frequency technology humans invented this century and are already discarding strikes me as very unlikely. Bandwidth in the air is becoming scarcer and scarcer - huge chunks of the radio spectrum are being turned over to new technologies that make much more efficient use of it through digital transmission, compression, spread spectrum, not to mention the use of encryption so only the sender and the intended receiver(s) can understand a transmission. And that's after only 100 years of radio technology - another 100 and our radio presence will probably be at most subtly indistinguishable from Earth's thermal spectrum - and no remote alien civilization would be able to tell anything from what they heard. Assuming the average civilization out there will have been around several hundred million years, a technology that lasts only 1/millionth of that time doesn't seem a likely way to find them, does it?
Given the hundred-million year time scale likely for our alien friends, they also seem unlikely to be in much of a hurry to contact us. Why bother with harmless non-space-faring cavemen who can't possibly do any galactic harm for another few millennia at least?
Still, the search is worth doing, at least at the amateur level, to reassure ourselves that we really aren't missing out on something (though undoubtedly if they're beaming anything at us it will have been something we could have detected decades before we actually do detect it).
But I'm not planning to waste my CPU cycles on the search.
What mystifies me is why so many people have to have the multiple computers at their desktop -
instead of having a Windows '95 or '98 machine at each users
desk you can have a single NT box, run VNC on it, have users display
the NT desktop to their X window system under linux and support
a dozen or more people who have occasional Word documents to process.
Or you can automate it using OLE - we have a perl/Apache-based
system that allows our UNIX users (about a hundred people)
to send the occasional Word documents they receive to the back-end
NT machine and get a PostScript or PDF file back just by running
"word2pdf" on the command line. We may even make this available
public domain - it's out to some external testers on a pre-alpha
basis right now.
There are better solutions than forcing everybody in the organization
to have an extra computer on their desktops.
A lot of the arguments about this have assumed the typical digital on/off signal, so exabits of data per second requires a "carrier" at ridiculously high frequency. However, what little there is on their web pages suggests something more subtle, making use of the continuously variable amplitude, for example. Something like the way an AM radio signal works perhaps. Amplitudes could potentially contain an infinite quantity of information (encoded say in the decimal or binary digit sequence associated with the numerical amplitude). Obviously you have to be more subtle about it to get around attenuation and noise - and any technique they use there should be applicable to other communications mechanisms - wireless too for example - perhaps this is related to spread-specturm radio? But in principle it seems something like this could be workable...
For example, one way to get around attenuation is to send signals at two frequencies that should attenuate almost identically - then compare the two amplitudes to get your signal, rather than just looking at one of them. If they've got a way to get through transformers (and from their diagrams it looks like they make it all the way from the home through several local transformers to a substation) they've probably figured out something even more subtle...
Look at all the class A's IANA has NOT assigned! And all the "reserved" addresses? I suspect this is just a bit of noise-mongering to get the new ICANN (IANA's replacement) jumping. Or maybe it's when people look at those growth numbers with the internet doubling every year that they think we're going to run out shortly. But actually internet growth has slowed especially in the last year or so - check out John Quarterman's latest analysis at www.mids.org.
-- Arthur