In a way I suppose the trend towards interactive online games that describe an entire world for players to interact in is kind of scary - it's taking the need for real world social interactions out of the loop. But, at the same time it can be seen as a very good thing indeed for people who either have trouble getting out and meeting people or those that aren't self-confident enough to do so.
But games like this new version of The Sims have an even stronger pull in that they are like real life in a way - characters interact in an idealised version of this world, in situations that they encounter in everyday life. Whereas you always know the difference between the real world and Brittania, the difference between the real world and the world of the Sims is a lot more hazy, and as the technology gets better it will get even hazier.
Eventually we can see a point where there is very little difference between these two worlds, and in that case what will happen? Will we see groups of people attempt to disassociate themselves from normal reality as much as possible, or will it just be another form of gaming? I suspect that there will be people for whom the lure of an idealised world will prove too much, and a new form of addiction will rise.
But in the end I don't think that these worlds will ever quite replace our own. No matter how good the programs get, nothing can ever quite match the real world, and people get bored of things quickly when the novelty wears off.
This is, well, an interesting piece, but the idea that hacking ther TiVo is something to aim at for the mass market is one that going to start a world of trouble. Sure, it should be alright if you want to hack around with your own box if you want to, but the idea that you could then market this as an "Open TiVo" solution is begging for DeCSS Mk II.
TiVo came to the market with an excellent product that people were obviously prepared to pay money for. They're not forcing their service on anyone - that much should be obvious from the large numbers of boxes they're selling every day. And yet this person wants to take their product and route around it. Do you think TiVo will let people get away with this?
It's one thing to bring out a competing product. It's another entirely to try and market a "hacked" version of a product for the sole purpose of ripping a company off. This is just the sort of thing that will give organisations like the MPAA and RIAA further ammunition for their claims that geeks are all pirates and thieves.
This decision doesn't make it law yet, merely indicates and endorsement of the idea. The final decision will be made at a conference in November where the member states will make a final ruling on software patents.
I honestly think that "The Demon-Haunted World" should be required reading in American schools. In many ways, it's quite a scary book.
There's a paper here about an experiment where students read the book and discussed it, which is pretty interesting, and a good review of the book can be found here at the SETI League.
Unfortunately it's a valid point - no piece of software ships with all of its bugs fixed, or even discovered (note that when working for software companies these two things are not synonymous). A decent testing department given a reasonable amount of time can spot many of the more obvious bugs, but for every obvious bug there will be a dozen sneaky ones which ship.
You can guarantee that it'll be the end users that'll find these bugs, and that they'll complain to whoever sold/provided them with the software. Remember, end users can be relied upon to use the software in the most convoluted, even stupid, ways, and when they're doing something in a manner the programmer didn't anticipate chances are they'll find bugs.
This is why I think that for any large software project an open database allowing customers to report bugs is essential. As long as the programmers work on clearing these lists then problems get ironed out over time, and making sure patches are freely available reduces the number of flaws in a program and makes everyone happy.
Another problem that introduces a lot of errors today is the increasing use of third-party components and applications within software projects. These introduce another point of failure, and one in which the programmers have less control over what goes on, and less knowledge about possible solutions. Even if you have the source for the component, it's still much more likely that using it will introduce problems, either in the interface between your app and the component, or in the component itself.
The solution? I don't really think there is one that can guarantee perfect reliability. The best you can do is ensure that the number of problems is kept to a minimum, and that problems that are found are quickly dealt with.
I think it's refreshing to see that it is still possible for individuals to come up with useful ideas and inventions without being part of a corporate research facility. In an age where the big money of corporations is used to hire all of the best people, we are seeing an increasing amount of projects which are merely refinements of past ideas rather than true new ideas.
People like Kamen and Dyson are often better at providing something that people want than corporations, especially when it's a product that according to accepted wisdom there isn't a market for. And it's also nice to see that Kamen isn't just out for himself, but is instead funding programs like First which are designed to get children interested in science and technology. After all, anyone who doesn't find the following quote disturbing needs to worry:
Kamen launched First several years ago when he realized that many American teenagers were unable to name a single living scientist.
kuro5hin was getting better...
on
Kuro5hin Update
·
· Score: 2
Though I liked Kuro5hin, hearing this is why I am also quite glad that Slashdot is a lot more inclusive.
It's only temporary IIRC, after a while you'll be able to post again. Remember that/. bans an IP if it gets moderated down more than 5 times in a day, and also has things like a maximum number of posts (35 every 4 hours IIRC), so it isn't all that different, just better publicised.
Kuro5hin was a bit more bland, a bit more regular because of all the norms. People felt discouraged from all the weird id-controlled ravings, and so it lost a great deal.
It was at first, but the open submissions bin seemed to change all of that as it allowed stories to be posted that weren't perhaps "news for nerds" in a strict sense. The "Poverty in America" and "Violent Britain" stories generated some huge and interesting flamewars, and some of the best kind of discussions that weblogs produce. Unfortunately, the site was attacked just when it was getting good.
But yeah, I love the crazy crap that goes on on/. every day, and a big part of the site's "character" is the trolls, the flamers, hell even the Penis Bird Guys and Vladinators...:)
When a star collapses the matter begins to implode upon a point, eventually crossing the point where the escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light and a black hole is formed. The edge of this black hole is what we call the event horizon - anything passing within the event horizon cannot ever escape. The simple solution is described by the Schwartzchild metric.
The matter however is still collapsing to a point at the centre of the black hole. According to general relativity there is nothing to stop this collapse and we end up with a point of infinite density and zero volume - a singularity.
However when you come to rotating black holes (described by the Kerr metric) there are differences. The angular momentum of a collapsing star is conserved, and this causes the black hole's event horizon to bulge out along the equitorial plane, much like the Earth has a slight bulge around its equator. Indeed, the central singularity itself forms a torus rather than a point when the black hole is rotating.
As angular momentum is increased this bulge gets bigger and the polar size of the event horizon shrinks, until eventually you are left without an event horizon at all, but just a torus-shaped singularity, which is said to be "naked".
Of course, whether a naked singularity can ever exist is an open question. There is something called the "Cosmic Censorship Principle" which states that the laws of physics will never allow a naked singularity to form, but the final answer is "we don't know".
Also of interest is that since the naked singularity would be in the shape of a torus you could theoretically pass through the centre of the torus and find yourself somewhere completely different, possibly even in another universe!
For a fairly technical intro to black holes and singularities, see this article at suite101.
I miss kuro5hin. Whilst I get a lot of the same at/. kuro5hin had a somewhat broader focus which gave rise to some incredibly interesting discussions on things like poverty, violence and the future of software. I think the open submissions idea allowed it to be less focussed on a particular them, like/. Still, both approaches have their merits and flaws, and I love both sites.
One thing that interests me is the new "rating" system that kuro5hin will be implementing, called mojo. Like moderation and karma on/. it is designed to allow good comments to be "pushed up" and spam and other crap to be hidden from view.
The difference is that mojo is based upon the ratings given on recent posts, with more recent posts counting for more than older ones. Since everyone on k5 can rate posts, this means that people consistently posting crap will end up with a low mojo and be unable to post or submit stories.
Hopefully this system will be able to cut down on the amount of noise that weblogs like/. and k5 seem to attract, and allow k5 to get back to what it was, a growing community with loyal readers.
A black hole of mass M solar masses will have a temperature of 6*10^-8 / M Kelvin, and a lifetime of 10^71 * M^3 seconds, so don't wait around for one.
Of course, for a smaller black hole these quantities become a bit more realistic - a black hole with the mass of a small mountain (say 10^11 kg) has a lifetime of less than the age of the Universe, but it does have a temperature of 10^12 Kelvin, which is roughly equal to the rest mass energy of a photon.
I don't know how relevant this is, but we just had an article (too lazy to link, sorry) about how the speed of light barrier was broken (by light, ironically). If this is true, doesn't it shoot many physics theories down the drain? And if so, how would if affect this one?
You mean this article? It wasn't really light travelling faster than light at all, merely an effect due to the fact that the pulse of light has a leading edge which travels ahead of it. When this leading edge hit the target, the entire pulse was recreated and transmitted from the other side of the caesium target.
Whilst it looked like the speed of light barrier was broken, it wasn't really, it was just a cunning effect. Whether this effect could be used to transmit information faster than light is unknown - it depends on whether this leading edge can hold information or not.
As for tachyons, well they always travel faster than light and indeed speed up as they lose energy - a tachyon with zero energy would travel at infinite speed!
... black holes also show up in superstring theory (well technically M-theory). You can use a D-brane to model the black hole, and this technique has been used to acheive a first principles calculation of the microscopic entropy of a black hole, whereas traditional techniques used fairly general arguments and a bit of hand-waving.
On a side note, string theory may suggest ways that information can escape from a black hole due to violations of locality. This is still very much open to debate though.
For more information, see here at the Cambridge University's Relativity pages.
They use gold in all of the X-ray mirrors I've heard of - it is a heavy enough atom that the innermost electrons are tightly bound and the energy from X-rays only causes a transition to a higher energy level rather than ionizing it.
This page describes the manufacture of an X-ray mirror for an ESA mission. I assume they're all fairly similar.
Actually, IIRC Cygnus X-1 was the first detected because it was part of a binary system with a supermassive star. The fact that the visible star was obviously part of a binary system and the lack of a visible partner led scientists to measure the mass of the invisible partner (calculated from the period of orbital motion) and found it to be greater than the Chandresakar limit, the limit beyond which a star will always form a black hole.
If I were you I'd have emailed them and asked about it beforehand rather than posting it to/. of all places. Chances are it's a genuine mistake from people that are used to slapping standard disclaimers and license agreements over things they do rather than a case of malicious GPL violation.
But now that it's been posted to/. Compaq are sure to be flamed into oblivion by knee-jerk GPL fanatics led by Bruce Perens. Whilst GPL violations need to be sorted out, a single polite letter is a far superior way to deal with this than a thousand angry emails. And it doesn't make the Linux community look like a bunch of die-hard zealots with the emotional maturity of a 15 year old, which is always a turn off to companies looking to move into open source and free software.
Corporate power by itself is not the problem, it's the way that it's been allowed to be abused that has caused many of the issues that we see here on/. everyday. After all, there are plenty of huge conglomerates out there that make profits day in and day out, yet we never really hear about them because they play fair.
It's only when you get companies trying to abuse the vast wealth that they possess through methods like lobbying for favourable changes in the law that corporate power becomes a problem. Because this isn't what capitalism should be about - the law should ensure a level playing field and consumer rights, not act to favour one company or group of companies above others.
If the RIAA or MPAA had fought fairly using the weapons at their disposal rather than getting un-Constitutional laws passed, we wouldn't be nearly so up in arms about it. It's not corporate power that's the problem - it's the abuse of that power through the mechanism of a government all too willing to be bribed.
After all, we've seen on/. a thousand times how disillusioned the technically skilled population is with many, many aspects of the law. Many people here advocate "civil disobediance" or even outright flouting of the law as a means of voicing their protests. Are these the people you want as judges in cases like 2600?
It also smacks of elitism that certain cases should only be allowed to be judged by an elite cabal of "tech judges". Why should a case which involves technical concepts merit its own special type of judge, one which is likely to be biased by dint of their interests and knowledge?
Sorry, but this wouldn't solve any problems - no judge could keep up with all of the advances in the various fields of computing unless they worked in them. And if they did, you could never be sure that they were unbiased. I say we keep this elitism out of the judicial system, and stick with what we know works.
This article is number 8 in a series of articles entitled "Why The War On Drugs Has Failed" published by the Ottowa Citizen in Canada. It talks about the erosion of civil liberties that the War on Drugs has caused, including things like the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act in the US and Section 462.2 in Canada which prevent free speech when it relates to drugs.
If you've got the time, the whole series is incredibly interesting and deals with the entire nature and consequences of the War on Drugs. There are plenty more articles on the subject at the Media Awareness Project.
As a resident of the greatest city in the world (/me ducks) I'm going to be following the progress of this with interest. It makes a lot of sense to be using available technology in such a way that it can simulate a broadband connection using much more portable wireless devices.
Whilst London isn't likely to suffer from a lack of broadband when it finally takes off over here, there are a lot of places where it'll be years before phone companies decide it will be worth the cost to install it. In rural areas and third world nations lacking vital infrastructure, this sort of network could provide communities with many of the advantages of broadband technology.
Slashdot Mirror
In a way I suppose the trend towards interactive online games that describe an entire world for players to interact in is kind of scary - it's taking the need for real world social interactions out of the loop. But, at the same time it can be seen as a very good thing indeed for people who either have trouble getting out and meeting people or those that aren't self-confident enough to do so.
But games like this new version of The Sims have an even stronger pull in that they are like real life in a way - characters interact in an idealised version of this world, in situations that they encounter in everyday life. Whereas you always know the difference between the real world and Brittania, the difference between the real world and the world of the Sims is a lot more hazy, and as the technology gets better it will get even hazier.
Eventually we can see a point where there is very little difference between these two worlds, and in that case what will happen? Will we see groups of people attempt to disassociate themselves from normal reality as much as possible, or will it just be another form of gaming? I suspect that there will be people for whom the lure of an idealised world will prove too much, and a new form of addiction will rise.
But in the end I don't think that these worlds will ever quite replace our own. No matter how good the programs get, nothing can ever quite match the real world, and people get bored of things quickly when the novelty wears off.
This is, well, an interesting piece, but the idea that hacking ther TiVo is something to aim at for the mass market is one that going to start a world of trouble. Sure, it should be alright if you want to hack around with your own box if you want to, but the idea that you could then market this as an "Open TiVo" solution is begging for DeCSS Mk II.
TiVo came to the market with an excellent product that people were obviously prepared to pay money for. They're not forcing their service on anyone - that much should be obvious from the large numbers of boxes they're selling every day. And yet this person wants to take their product and route around it. Do you think TiVo will let people get away with this?
It's one thing to bring out a competing product. It's another entirely to try and market a "hacked" version of a product for the sole purpose of ripping a company off. This is just the sort of thing that will give organisations like the MPAA and RIAA further ammunition for their claims that geeks are all pirates and thieves.
This decision doesn't make it law yet, merely indicates and endorsement of the idea. The final decision will be made at a conference in November where the member states will make a final ruling on software patents.
I honestly think that "The Demon-Haunted World" should be required reading in American schools. In many ways, it's quite a scary book.
There's a paper here about an experiment where students read the book and discussed it, which is pretty interesting, and a good review of the book can be found here at the SETI League.
Unfortunately it's a valid point - no piece of software ships with all of its bugs fixed, or even discovered (note that when working for software companies these two things are not synonymous). A decent testing department given a reasonable amount of time can spot many of the more obvious bugs, but for every obvious bug there will be a dozen sneaky ones which ship.
You can guarantee that it'll be the end users that'll find these bugs, and that they'll complain to whoever sold/provided them with the software. Remember, end users can be relied upon to use the software in the most convoluted, even stupid, ways, and when they're doing something in a manner the programmer didn't anticipate chances are they'll find bugs.
This is why I think that for any large software project an open database allowing customers to report bugs is essential. As long as the programmers work on clearing these lists then problems get ironed out over time, and making sure patches are freely available reduces the number of flaws in a program and makes everyone happy.
Another problem that introduces a lot of errors today is the increasing use of third-party components and applications within software projects. These introduce another point of failure, and one in which the programmers have less control over what goes on, and less knowledge about possible solutions. Even if you have the source for the component, it's still much more likely that using it will introduce problems, either in the interface between your app and the component, or in the component itself.
The solution? I don't really think there is one that can guarantee perfect reliability. The best you can do is ensure that the number of problems is kept to a minimum, and that problems that are found are quickly dealt with.
I think it's refreshing to see that it is still possible for individuals to come up with useful ideas and inventions without being part of a corporate research facility. In an age where the big money of corporations is used to hire all of the best people, we are seeing an increasing amount of projects which are merely refinements of past ideas rather than true new ideas.
People like Kamen and Dyson are often better at providing something that people want than corporations, especially when it's a product that according to accepted wisdom there isn't a market for. And it's also nice to see that Kamen isn't just out for himself, but is instead funding programs like First which are designed to get children interested in science and technology. After all, anyone who doesn't find the following quote disturbing needs to worry:
Kamen launched First several years ago when he realized that many American teenagers were unable to name a single living scientist.
Though I liked Kuro5hin, hearing this is why I am also quite glad that Slashdot is a lot more inclusive.
It's only temporary IIRC, after a while you'll be able to post again. Remember that /. bans an IP if it gets moderated down more than 5 times in a day, and also has things like a maximum number of posts (35 every 4 hours IIRC), so it isn't all that different, just better publicised.
Kuro5hin was a bit more bland, a bit more regular because of all the norms. People felt discouraged from all the weird id-controlled ravings, and so it lost a great deal.
It was at first, but the open submissions bin seemed to change all of that as it allowed stories to be posted that weren't perhaps "news for nerds" in a strict sense. The "Poverty in America" and "Violent Britain" stories generated some huge and interesting flamewars, and some of the best kind of discussions that weblogs produce. Unfortunately, the site was attacked just when it was getting good.
But yeah, I love the crazy crap that goes on on /. every day, and a big part of the site's "character" is the trolls, the flamers, hell even the Penis Bird Guys and Vladinators... :)
When a star collapses the matter begins to implode upon a point, eventually crossing the point where the escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light and a black hole is formed. The edge of this black hole is what we call the event horizon - anything passing within the event horizon cannot ever escape. The simple solution is described by the Schwartzchild metric.
The matter however is still collapsing to a point at the centre of the black hole. According to general relativity there is nothing to stop this collapse and we end up with a point of infinite density and zero volume - a singularity.
However when you come to rotating black holes (described by the Kerr metric) there are differences. The angular momentum of a collapsing star is conserved, and this causes the black hole's event horizon to bulge out along the equitorial plane, much like the Earth has a slight bulge around its equator. Indeed, the central singularity itself forms a torus rather than a point when the black hole is rotating.
As angular momentum is increased this bulge gets bigger and the polar size of the event horizon shrinks, until eventually you are left without an event horizon at all, but just a torus-shaped singularity, which is said to be "naked".
Of course, whether a naked singularity can ever exist is an open question. There is something called the "Cosmic Censorship Principle" which states that the laws of physics will never allow a naked singularity to form, but the final answer is "we don't know".
Also of interest is that since the naked singularity would be in the shape of a torus you could theoretically pass through the centre of the torus and find yourself somewhere completely different, possibly even in another universe!
For a fairly technical intro to black holes and singularities, see this article at suite101.
I miss kuro5hin. Whilst I get a lot of the same at /. kuro5hin had a somewhat broader focus which gave rise to some incredibly interesting discussions on things like poverty, violence and the future of software. I think the open submissions idea allowed it to be less focussed on a particular them, like /. Still, both approaches have their merits and flaws, and I love both sites.
One thing that interests me is the new "rating" system that kuro5hin will be implementing, called mojo. Like moderation and karma on /. it is designed to allow good comments to be "pushed up" and spam and other crap to be hidden from view.
The difference is that mojo is based upon the ratings given on recent posts, with more recent posts counting for more than older ones. Since everyone on k5 can rate posts, this means that people consistently posting crap will end up with a low mojo and be unable to post or submit stories.
Hopefully this system will be able to cut down on the amount of noise that weblogs like /. and k5 seem to attract, and allow k5 to get back to what it was, a growing community with loyal readers.
... is this new graphics card from Matrox :)
A black hole of mass M solar masses will have a temperature of 6*10^-8 / M Kelvin, and a lifetime of 10^71 * M^3 seconds, so don't wait around for one.
Of course, for a smaller black hole these quantities become a bit more realistic - a black hole with the mass of a small mountain (say 10^11 kg) has a lifetime of less than the age of the Universe, but it does have a temperature of 10^12 Kelvin, which is roughly equal to the rest mass energy of a photon.
I don't know how relevant this is, but we just had an article (too lazy to link, sorry) about how the speed of light barrier was broken (by light, ironically). If this is true, doesn't it shoot many physics theories down the drain? And if so, how would if affect this one?
You mean this article? It wasn't really light travelling faster than light at all, merely an effect due to the fact that the pulse of light has a leading edge which travels ahead of it. When this leading edge hit the target, the entire pulse was recreated and transmitted from the other side of the caesium target.
Whilst it looked like the speed of light barrier was broken, it wasn't really, it was just a cunning effect. Whether this effect could be used to transmit information faster than light is unknown - it depends on whether this leading edge can hold information or not.
As for tachyons, well they always travel faster than light and indeed speed up as they lose energy - a tachyon with zero energy would travel at infinite speed!
... black holes also show up in superstring theory (well technically M-theory). You can use a D-brane to model the black hole, and this technique has been used to acheive a first principles calculation of the microscopic entropy of a black hole, whereas traditional techniques used fairly general arguments and a bit of hand-waving.
On a side note, string theory may suggest ways that information can escape from a black hole due to violations of locality. This is still very much open to debate though.
For more information, see here at the Cambridge University's Relativity pages.
They use gold in all of the X-ray mirrors I've heard of - it is a heavy enough atom that the innermost electrons are tightly bound and the energy from X-rays only causes a transition to a higher energy level rather than ionizing it.
This page describes the manufacture of an X-ray mirror for an ESA mission. I assume they're all fairly similar.
Actually, IIRC Cygnus X-1 was the first detected because it was part of a binary system with a supermassive star. The fact that the visible star was obviously part of a binary system and the lack of a visible partner led scientists to measure the mass of the invisible partner (calculated from the period of orbital motion) and found it to be greater than the Chandresakar limit, the limit beyond which a star will always form a black hole.
If I were you I'd have emailed them and asked about it beforehand rather than posting it to /. of all places. Chances are it's a genuine mistake from people that are used to slapping standard disclaimers and license agreements over things they do rather than a case of malicious GPL violation.
But now that it's been posted to /. Compaq are sure to be flamed into oblivion by knee-jerk GPL fanatics led by Bruce Perens. Whilst GPL violations need to be sorted out, a single polite letter is a far superior way to deal with this than a thousand angry emails. And it doesn't make the Linux community look like a bunch of die-hard zealots with the emotional maturity of a 15 year old, which is always a turn off to companies looking to move into open source and free software.
Corporate power by itself is not the problem, it's the way that it's been allowed to be abused that has caused many of the issues that we see here on /. everyday. After all, there are plenty of huge conglomerates out there that make profits day in and day out, yet we never really hear about them because they play fair.
It's only when you get companies trying to abuse the vast wealth that they possess through methods like lobbying for favourable changes in the law that corporate power becomes a problem. Because this isn't what capitalism should be about - the law should ensure a level playing field and consumer rights, not act to favour one company or group of companies above others.
If the RIAA or MPAA had fought fairly using the weapons at their disposal rather than getting un-Constitutional laws passed, we wouldn't be nearly so up in arms about it. It's not corporate power that's the problem - it's the abuse of that power through the mechanism of a government all too willing to be bribed.
After all, we've seen on /. a thousand times how disillusioned the technically skilled population is with many, many aspects of the law. Many people here advocate "civil disobediance" or even outright flouting of the law as a means of voicing their protests. Are these the people you want as judges in cases like 2600?
It also smacks of elitism that certain cases should only be allowed to be judged by an elite cabal of "tech judges". Why should a case which involves technical concepts merit its own special type of judge, one which is likely to be biased by dint of their interests and knowledge?
Sorry, but this wouldn't solve any problems - no judge could keep up with all of the advances in the various fields of computing unless they worked in them. And if they did, you could never be sure that they were unbiased. I say we keep this elitism out of the judicial system, and stick with what we know works.
This article is number 8 in a series of articles entitled "Why The War On Drugs Has Failed" published by the Ottowa Citizen in Canada. It talks about the erosion of civil liberties that the War on Drugs has caused, including things like the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act in the US and Section 462.2 in Canada which prevent free speech when it relates to drugs.
If you've got the time, the whole series is incredibly interesting and deals with the entire nature and consequences of the War on Drugs. There are plenty more articles on the subject at the Media Awareness Project.
As a resident of the greatest city in the world (/me ducks) I'm going to be following the progress of this with interest. It makes a lot of sense to be using available technology in such a way that it can simulate a broadband connection using much more portable wireless devices.
Whilst London isn't likely to suffer from a lack of broadband when it finally takes off over here, there are a lot of places where it'll be years before phone companies decide it will be worth the cost to install it. In rural areas and third world nations lacking vital infrastructure, this sort of network could provide communities with many of the advantages of broadband technology.
At these sites:
A pity I missed this one, it's always nice to know what companies are planning to do, and a large percentage of game development goes on in Europe.