Not to mention that on most 'desktop' or 'server' machines, the OS is constantly juggling hundreds or thousands of processes, so while an individual program may be single threaded, the operating system can be spread across all available processes. The hard thing is knowing, for an individual process and core, when it is worth switching context - shunting it off to wait for I/O and shoveling a different process onto that core - or just idling that core for a while. IIRC (from _long_ ago), I/O typically costs 1000 or so CPU cycles, so it's an important judgement.
It also is important for assigning a value to a package. Without a way to establish value that has an associated cost, everyone could just say the value is $1 million and UPS would be stuck with the bill. Even with this I think you still have to have some way of demonstrating the real value - you can't just pay for $1000 insurance on a bag of old confetti.
The obvious solution is to adopt the computer science - especially software - approach - pick any old words you want and repurpose them with new definitions. Use words that can be conceptually analogous a lot of the time - 'module' in software has at least a conceptual relationship with its use in other disciplines - but sprinkle in visualization or action references ('boot'), distant puns, and complete nonsequiturs. Then assume that anyone who doesn't know what you mean is a complete idiot!:)
Every discipline has its argot, but software lives in its own world.
Silicon is the next element down from Carbon, and back in the 1960s there was some research and speculation along the lines of whether a silicon-based biology could exist. It was interesting work. IIRC such a biology seemed at least reasonably plausible, but would have to live in a higher temperature - I think about 500 C? So it is at least plausible that the entire biology would be based on, essentially, silicones. Not exactly glass but maybe the 'bones' would be calcium silicate hydrate (ingredient of Portland Cement) instead of calcium carbonate. IDK if anyone has studied this since then, with our much greater understanding of physics, chemistry and biological systems.
I'm thinking that the ultimate long term solution to 'grey goo' is to include a mutation factor in the replication. Then, possibly after the grey goo kills everything else - oops, the grey goo will gradually differentiate into different species and we start evolution up again. And a few hundred million years from now, their descendants will be 'writing' papers about the 'great DNA extinction'.
1) IIRC a recent article showed that, once you get past 80 or so, the death rate per year actually declines. Of course it will still eventually catch up with you.
2) I read an SF story (back in the late 1960s?) where a method/drug had been found that provided immortality. However, it had to be given within a short time of the onset of puberty or it wouldn't work, and it had the effect of eliminating creativity. So there was a system in place to identify talented people - artists, musicians, etc. early, and give them the option - "do you want to live forever in your body, or live forever in your works?". These kids were identified early, given as much training in their field as possible, then once they were good enough (or not) to make a reasonable choice, they had the option. That would be a hard choice for me even though I don't consider myself particularly special, and I hope for nearly everybody.
3) Most people who say they want to live forever forget to mention the "in good health" part - that could be a bummer when the Genie asks for your wish. I'd also recommend "reasonable happiness and standard of living." But that might piss off the Genie.
Yep, them's the breaks. A friend of mine says that Ice Ages are God's way of saying "Next!" - wipe the slate, bring in somebody new.:) I completely disagree with the guilt-reasoning of many environmentalists. That's a matter of values, which imply a belief system. To stick strictly with the pure evolutionary model, you can not say whether what humans do is "good" or "bad" for the Earth, only whether it's successful by some practical measure. IOW, if we "destroy the Earth", by which is generally meant, "make Earth unfit for human habitation and wipe out a large number of other species in the process including ourselves", then that can be described as a bad idea, unwise and not improving our situation, but it's no more "good" or "bad" than an ice age. "Good" and "bad" imply evil, which is an alien concept to evolution. In that event we will have merely created a replacement ecosystem, which some of us may or may not live to experience but cockroaches probably will. "Next!" is the cry of Mother Nature at that point - just as She said back when the Oxygen Catastrophe eliminated the dominant life forms.
Also rubber band airplanes. Wind them up, at one point you get exactly that shape. IDK if the math of the shape was ever explored though. Oftentimes 'discoveries' are things that we, the great unwashed, saw all the time but never noticed. And that's OK - we need people who say, "That's funny..."
The fact that these things concern you constitute a very good counter-argument. It was just 500+ years ago that a law was passed in England making it illegal to strike your wife with a stick thicker than your thumb. Feudal Lords throughout Europe (or China, or India, or pretty much everywhere) thought nothing of sacrificing 1/4 of an entire population on a whim, or a perceived insult.
The whole "we're screwing the planet up" thing is a self-serving egoism. It's revisiting the "We are the Humans. We are Different from these lowly animals." The correct view, IMHO, is that we are a logical (or reasonable, if you prefer) extrapolation of the continued progress of complexity in evolution. The lowly African termite terraforms a substantial piece of real estate, radically altering the local ecosystem and constructing a mound that hosts its own internal ecosystem that is quite different. We do much the same, on a similar relative scale to our own size. We can be seen as Life creating a mechanism to allow Life to migrate off this planet to others, expanding across the solar system - after all, where we go, Life will go with us. There may be bears, grasshoppers and sharks living on exoplanets in the future, and we will have been Life's way of constructing a 'spore' to carry it across the silent dark wastes of space to new fertile ground. When that happens, the relatively minor modifications we have made to this ecosystem to provide the resources to do that will not seem so important. And in the meantime, some of the best minds have pointed out that utilizing space resources has the potential of improving the standard of living of every human by a factor of 10 within 100 years, while restoring large parts of the ecosystem due to the elimination of the need for tearing up the earth any more.
That's essentially the same argument that the early single cell creatures said about these new fangled 'organisms' - "Look at those guys! Not one of those cells could survive on its own! All they do is sit there and pulse on and off, in sequence. It's like a huge conga line. And some other cells can't even do that - all they do is act as a pipe to deliver food! If something happened to that 'organism' they'd all die in a few seconds. I'd rather be out here on my own, hunting for my own food."
The fact is that civilization has the inevitable effect of reducing the overall net 'fitness' of the typical individual to the external environment. Medicine keeps people alive who would have died at birth, straightens their teeth so they can marry and have more kids with crooked teeth, and eliminates the need to maintain strength and endurance, since we don't have to hunt for food or survive a month without it. We are trading individual fitness for group fitness.
If civilization goes, though, the genes are still there. I am confident that some folks would figure a way to survive - a year's worth of food in a coal mine might be enough for a few hundred people. The fittest for the new world would survive. Maybe they'd be riding giant cockroaches instead of horses (but only if temp, humidity, CO2 and O2 all go much higher.)
I think I'll beg to differ, at least on the first sentence, at least on a matter of scale and influence. The second one is what I would term an 'issue in progress' - we won't really know the outcome for another five or ten years. Recognize that both sides of that question are corporate, so the sparring will continue for a long time.
I first used the Internet in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as I worked at companies that had DoD or research connections. At that time it was essentially email and file transfer, and it's quite possible that without commercial creativity, it might still be stuck there. Sorry this is long and digressional, but I enjoyed writing it, so there.:)
I acquired my first domain name in 1991, before the WorldWideWeb program - the program by Tim Berners-Lee, which ran on and was inspired by the NextStep system. Every program on the NeXT was capable of incorporating any form of media, including email with video and voice snippets, etc. WorldWideWeb fit right into the other similar programs on the NeXT - his real achievement was conceiving of the HTML language, which allowed (in theory) other computer systems to support similar capabilities. NeXT itself was inspired by SmallTalk, the Xerox Alto, and lessons learned in the Macintosh. Almost all of the above was done in commercial and academic research settings. Lee's own work was somewhat outside CERN's "real" purpose, and was allowed rather than driven by CERN - the closest thing to a government that I've mentioned. So nearly all of this was work being done for mostly commercial reasons (just as IBM Labs, Xerox PARC, and ATT Labs were commercial projects), but lived on top of the fairly mundane (from our point of view, today) vision funded by DARPA to ease data transfer between big mainframes at research facilities in support of rather vague defense related goals.
IMHO, without the commercial creativity and openness to finding new ways to get an advantage by improving the Internet, SendMail would be a lot simpler because it would still only support the two or three earliest mail protocols - it's possible that not even SMTP would have been invented, to clean up the email protocol problem. Government, in the form of DARPA, took the essential step of deciding to connect things together - this is a classic infrastructure initiative. And Al Gore, bless his little heart, did sponsor the bill to allow commercial use of the Internet. Before that, from my own experience, using the net was not easy, and having an actual presence on the net was hard and expensive. Getting a connection through some other company (see the history of UseNet) took weeks, and probably money - a 56Kbit line cost IIRC over $100/month in 1981 and a T-1 (1Mbit/s) was about $1500/month unless my memory fails me, plus you had to pay whoever you were connecting to. Getting a domain name took weeks after that, and depended on one guy, Jon Postel (RIP), to update his manually maintained list.
Nearly everything you know about the modern net, every protocol commonly used, every feature you depend on, is the result of capitalist innovation, not government projects. And I think this is a good example of how government and business - and not least academia and creative individuals (often with $ in their eyes) can each do what they do best. Some folks disagree but I think government is generally pretty good at building and maintaining highways, and providing the regulatory infrastructure that allows businesses to compete evenly without a race to the unsafe and dastardly bottom. And businesses, if not _too_ large, both benefits from that and provides the creative fluidity that makes things better. (From my view of systems theory, IMHO any market where any business has control of over about 20% of the market, and all but one have less than 12% or so, is essentially frozen and non-competitive. But that's another topic.) Neither is perfect, but over time I think we continue to converge toward a better situation - and whining about the problems is one of the most important factors in pushing that progress.
I will add that their numbers look different from work I've seen before, and use a more ambitious methodology than I would use. They want to run the entire launch using the magnetic system. This has some serious issues that make it harder IMHO - not that I know much. I believe it would be much easier to justify, finance, and build a system that replaces most or all of the first stage, which is where about 90% of the mass and propellant is spent. Just getting to Mach 5 uses up to 90% of the required fuel at present. It would also eliminate the entire cost of the first stage, replacing it with the cost of electricity, plus wear and tear on the magnetic launch carrier (which could be re-used.)
This approach would not require the high 30G acceleration (which eliminates use for living things) nor the super-long 130km launch track of the MagLaunch system. It would be cheaper and easier to build. This would be a 5G to 10G system with a 50KM track, going up the Andes at the Equator to an elevation of as much over 14,000 feet as can be arranged, with a 5km/s exit velocity if I recall correctly - this would require some work to make a vehicle that could survive such high speeds at relatively low altitudes. At 14,000 feet the air pressure is about 1/2 STP, and at 28,000 it's about 1/4 but there's no satisfactory location that goes to 28,000 feet. But this is getting into highly speculative numbers.
Interesting, thanks. I wasn't aware of these folks, and I'm pretty sure the rest of my partners in Space Finance Group aren't either. We have run several successful Kickstarter projects, including for the National Space Society and The Liftport Group (Michael Laine of Liftport is one of the partners in SFG). We recently completed the rewrite of a business plan and 'pitch deck' for another space launch company. We are also working on equity funding mechanisms for space development, although we're not quite ready to 'go live' with that.
So if these folks are for real, we might be able help them get where they want to go! I'll be contacting them. If anything pans out, you'll be able to say, "I helped them get there.":)
My personal opinion:, while the more 'standard' methods like SpaceX, XCor, Virgin, Blue Origin, and the many more exotic projects like Skylon, etc. (too many to list) are important and will be essential for at least the next 10-20 years, IMHO magnetic launch technology has the best long term potential for reducing costs. I don't think the "Gen 2" version that these folks propose will happen within 100 years if ever. That level of exotic engineering requires a long, long evolution to get there. But a successful Gen 1 system is buildable "today" - by which I mean the engineering will take six to 10 years, and construction another six to 10! This is in the same funding range, again, as the LHC, or the Burj Khalifa - or the various sports-festival boondoggles of late. (These mag-launch folks estimate $20, which may be a better number - I haven't finished reading their material.) So it is in the range of the financial capability of many nations, especially if a few get together.
IIRC Brazil is spending about $6 billion by themselves to host the FIFA World Cup - imagine if they invested that $6 billion as one third of a joint venture space launch system that reduced the cost to LEO from $10K-$20K per pound to even $100 per pound. They could charge $1000 per pound and still be inundated with demand. Their investment could pay for itself in a few years and build a permanent employment base and probably hundreds of spinoff high tech industry facilities, instead of being a sunk cost for a few hours of football fun!
Let's promote the installation of a 5G-capable magnetic launcher (coilgun tech) that goes up the Andes in Ecuador! A 50 mile launcher using a tube that is evacuated of most of its air could replace most or all of the first stage of rockets going to LEO, cutting the cost of launch by 2/3. The technology and project scale are in the same ballpark / order of magnitude as the LHC, and would permanently alter the economics of space development. The last time an equivalent system was thoroughly studied was in the 1970s AFAICT, long before a number of major enabling technologies were mature enough - large superconducting magnets, various materials, control systems, etc.
In my long experience as a coder, systems architect, and manager of teams, I have found that for most programming jobs a college degree in CS just isn't necessary. In my early days, few programmers or 'software engineers' even had CS degrees - we had history majors, music majors, a few math majors, etc. Music majors tend to do quite well as they are attracted to patterns and elegance.
Especially today, web programming is rarely concerned with developing deep algorithms, rather with assembling a set of tools. So a mechanical mind may do quite nicely, and a strong desire to make sure things are correct given all possible inputs - like an accountant, a good programmer won't be satisfied unless every 'penny' is accounted for.
When hiring, I often found the CS majors as having an inflated sense of their own abilities, and a general lack of knowledge of how programming is generally done in the real world - hacking on some other schmuck's broken legacy code that nobody can figure out. And a kid who started programming in high school and just kept working at it may have five years of real experience before they get their first job, and does it because he/she can't _stop_ doing it.
The company I work for now has a chief programmer who started writing games in high school, never went to college. He's pretty good, though he needs more real world experience to see how to prevent problems - that's the hardest thing, knowing enough and gettin the habits to avoid the bugs in the first place, which is only possible AFAIK in just experience.
Once they are in the job, then I would definitely encourage, even require, continuing education - go ahead and take some classes, read the books, try things out. Then they will be learning the algorithms, the techniques, in the context of what they already know.
a) I would not say this is the worst ever - it allows random data to be viewed, which may or may not contain something valuable. There is no evidence (yet) that this was actually exploited prior to its publication. Various other breeches have resulted in proven loss of millions of identities, and near-billions in actual money. If it had been exploited very much, it would probably have been tracked down earlier.
Technically it's not the worst - it's the same as literally thousands of other exploited bugs, and just yet another example of why C should not be used for applications programming, at least without a very strong IDE to catch these kinds of problems and perhaps a macro system that forces bounds-checking, etc. 'Programming without a net' is _sometimes_ necessary for programming at the metal interface, but OpenSSL, though needing high performance, is not an example of that. It's also an example of why SW quality methods need to be followed for this kind of code, especially for a relatively new member of the programming team - and why OpenSSL and other OSS projects need our support.
b) Fortunately, the barn door seems to have been shut before much got out. We'll see, but that's the present apparent situation. There will probably be a few relatively small ongoing successful exploits on servers that don't get fixed, as usual. But this is not anything like a wholesale loss of 100 million credit card records.
c) In this case there was a failure of the open source model of 'many eyes'. But there have been thousands of such failures in proprietary software, some of which resulted in most of the really big exploits, that were invisible until the exploit was used. Here, open source at least allowed researchers to identify it before it was really exploited (as far as we know today).
Indeed. Bank managements are interested in making money, not spending it on IT. A big part of JPMorgan's present problems (and some forthcoming ones that have not hit the fan yet, according to rumor) are due to their CIO's refusal to implement required IT risk management, despite repeated warnings from their auditors. If they fail this aspect of the audit a third time, hundreds of pension funds will be required by law to provide personnel to stand behind the JPM traders and monitor their activities - or move their funds to a different bank. This will be a bad thing for JPM, and fully deserved.
NB: no, I can't provide a citation. Source was a personal discussion. I will note that one of their top risk management people just got fired, basically for bringing this up. That's the third in a row in that position.
Research back in the 1930s discovered that there's more to that verse than appears. In Hebrew, the letters are also numbers, and the number values of letters and words are often very significant to the reading. There is a 'jot' ('jot' and 'tittle' are like diacritic marks) in the original, which here means, "look deeper". So with a bit of deeper analysis, one finds that the letters there turn out to make up a fraction. I forget what the fraction is, but it's something like 31/222 or some such, and with the fraction the value is within 1% or less of pi. This is discussed in one of Chuck Missler's research texts, about that book in the Bible.
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Ahh, the good old days. This reminded me of the Motorola 6800's Halt and Catch Fire instruction. :D Tight loops can be ... interesting.
Not to mention that on most 'desktop' or 'server' machines, the OS is constantly juggling hundreds or thousands of processes, so while an individual program may be single threaded, the operating system can be spread across all available processes. The hard thing is knowing, for an individual process and core, when it is worth switching context - shunting it off to wait for I/O and shoveling a different process onto that core - or just idling that core for a while. IIRC (from _long_ ago), I/O typically costs 1000 or so CPU cycles, so it's an important judgement.
It also is important for assigning a value to a package. Without a way to establish value that has an associated cost, everyone could just say the value is $1 million and UPS would be stuck with the bill. Even with this I think you still have to have some way of demonstrating the real value - you can't just pay for $1000 insurance on a bag of old confetti.
The obvious solution is to adopt the computer science - especially software - approach - pick any old words you want and repurpose them with new definitions. Use words that can be conceptually analogous a lot of the time - 'module' in software has at least a conceptual relationship with its use in other disciplines - but sprinkle in visualization or action references ('boot'), distant puns, and complete nonsequiturs. Then assume that anyone who doesn't know what you mean is a complete idiot! :)
Every discipline has its argot, but software lives in its own world.
Silicon is the next element down from Carbon, and back in the 1960s there was some research and speculation along the lines of whether a silicon-based biology could exist. It was interesting work. IIRC such a biology seemed at least reasonably plausible, but would have to live in a higher temperature - I think about 500 C? So it is at least plausible that the entire biology would be based on, essentially, silicones. Not exactly glass but maybe the 'bones' would be calcium silicate hydrate (ingredient of Portland Cement) instead of calcium carbonate. IDK if anyone has studied this since then, with our much greater understanding of physics, chemistry and biological systems.
I'm thinking that the ultimate long term solution to 'grey goo' is to include a mutation factor in the replication. Then, possibly after the grey goo kills everything else - oops, the grey goo will gradually differentiate into different species and we start evolution up again. And a few hundred million years from now, their descendants will be 'writing' papers about the 'great DNA extinction'.
Sun Tzu would like that. ;)
It might be easier to work the deal the other way - make yourself stupid and slow, and you'll be too stupid to notice the passing of time.
You can, however, create clones of yourself and eat one of THOSE babies every day. That should do the trick.
That raises interesting ethical questions.
That reminds me of the Far Side cartoon about the polar bears, and the igloo. :D
1) IIRC a recent article showed that, once you get past 80 or so, the death rate per year actually declines. Of course it will still eventually catch up with you.
2) I read an SF story (back in the late 1960s?) where a method/drug had been found that provided immortality. However, it had to be given within a short time of the onset of puberty or it wouldn't work, and it had the effect of eliminating creativity. So there was a system in place to identify talented people - artists, musicians, etc. early, and give them the option - "do you want to live forever in your body, or live forever in your works?". These kids were identified early, given as much training in their field as possible, then once they were good enough (or not) to make a reasonable choice, they had the option. That would be a hard choice for me even though I don't consider myself particularly special, and I hope for nearly everybody.
3) Most people who say they want to live forever forget to mention the "in good health" part - that could be a bummer when the Genie asks for your wish. I'd also recommend "reasonable happiness and standard of living." But that might piss off the Genie.
Yep, them's the breaks. A friend of mine says that Ice Ages are God's way of saying "Next!" - wipe the slate, bring in somebody new. :) I completely disagree with the guilt-reasoning of many environmentalists. That's a matter of values, which imply a belief system. To stick strictly with the pure evolutionary model, you can not say whether what humans do is "good" or "bad" for the Earth, only whether it's successful by some practical measure. IOW, if we "destroy the Earth", by which is generally meant, "make Earth unfit for human habitation and wipe out a large number of other species in the process including ourselves", then that can be described as a bad idea, unwise and not improving our situation, but it's no more "good" or "bad" than an ice age. "Good" and "bad" imply evil, which is an alien concept to evolution. In that event we will have merely created a replacement ecosystem, which some of us may or may not live to experience but cockroaches probably will. "Next!" is the cry of Mother Nature at that point - just as She said back when the Oxygen Catastrophe eliminated the dominant life forms.
Closely related to ropadopology, pretending to be an idiot
Also rubber band airplanes. Wind them up, at one point you get exactly that shape. IDK if the math of the shape was ever explored though. Oftentimes 'discoveries' are things that we, the great unwashed, saw all the time but never noticed. And that's OK - we need people who say, "That's funny..."
The fact that these things concern you constitute a very good counter-argument. It was just 500+ years ago that a law was passed in England making it illegal to strike your wife with a stick thicker than your thumb. Feudal Lords throughout Europe (or China, or India, or pretty much everywhere) thought nothing of sacrificing 1/4 of an entire population on a whim, or a perceived insult.
The whole "we're screwing the planet up" thing is a self-serving egoism. It's revisiting the "We are the Humans. We are Different from these lowly animals." The correct view, IMHO, is that we are a logical (or reasonable, if you prefer) extrapolation of the continued progress of complexity in evolution. The lowly African termite terraforms a substantial piece of real estate, radically altering the local ecosystem and constructing a mound that hosts its own internal ecosystem that is quite different. We do much the same, on a similar relative scale to our own size. We can be seen as Life creating a mechanism to allow Life to migrate off this planet to others, expanding across the solar system - after all, where we go, Life will go with us. There may be bears, grasshoppers and sharks living on exoplanets in the future, and we will have been Life's way of constructing a 'spore' to carry it across the silent dark wastes of space to new fertile ground. When that happens, the relatively minor modifications we have made to this ecosystem to provide the resources to do that will not seem so important. And in the meantime, some of the best minds have pointed out that utilizing space resources has the potential of improving the standard of living of every human by a factor of 10 within 100 years, while restoring large parts of the ecosystem due to the elimination of the need for tearing up the earth any more.
That's essentially the same argument that the early single cell creatures said about these new fangled 'organisms' - "Look at those guys! Not one of those cells could survive on its own! All they do is sit there and pulse on and off, in sequence. It's like a huge conga line. And some other cells can't even do that - all they do is act as a pipe to deliver food! If something happened to that 'organism' they'd all die in a few seconds. I'd rather be out here on my own, hunting for my own food."
The fact is that civilization has the inevitable effect of reducing the overall net 'fitness' of the typical individual to the external environment. Medicine keeps people alive who would have died at birth, straightens their teeth so they can marry and have more kids with crooked teeth, and eliminates the need to maintain strength and endurance, since we don't have to hunt for food or survive a month without it. We are trading individual fitness for group fitness.
If civilization goes, though, the genes are still there. I am confident that some folks would figure a way to survive - a year's worth of food in a coal mine might be enough for a few hundred people. The fittest for the new world would survive. Maybe they'd be riding giant cockroaches instead of horses (but only if temp, humidity, CO2 and O2 all go much higher.)
Think of it as accelerated evolution. How many eyes you got? Only three? I have five! And two of them are on my shoulders! :P
I think I'll beg to differ, at least on the first sentence, at least on a matter of scale and influence. The second one is what I would term an 'issue in progress' - we won't really know the outcome for another five or ten years. Recognize that both sides of that question are corporate, so the sparring will continue for a long time.
I first used the Internet in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as I worked at companies that had DoD or research connections. At that time it was essentially email and file transfer, and it's quite possible that without commercial creativity, it might still be stuck there. Sorry this is long and digressional, but I enjoyed writing it, so there. :)
I acquired my first domain name in 1991, before the WorldWideWeb program - the program by Tim Berners-Lee, which ran on and was inspired by the NextStep system. Every program on the NeXT was capable of incorporating any form of media, including email with video and voice snippets, etc. WorldWideWeb fit right into the other similar programs on the NeXT - his real achievement was conceiving of the HTML language, which allowed (in theory) other computer systems to support similar capabilities. NeXT itself was inspired by SmallTalk, the Xerox Alto, and lessons learned in the Macintosh. Almost all of the above was done in commercial and academic research settings. Lee's own work was somewhat outside CERN's "real" purpose, and was allowed rather than driven by CERN - the closest thing to a government that I've mentioned. So nearly all of this was work being done for mostly commercial reasons (just as IBM Labs, Xerox PARC, and ATT Labs were commercial projects), but lived on top of the fairly mundane (from our point of view, today) vision funded by DARPA to ease data transfer between big mainframes at research facilities in support of rather vague defense related goals.
IMHO, without the commercial creativity and openness to finding new ways to get an advantage by improving the Internet, SendMail would be a lot simpler because it would still only support the two or three earliest mail protocols - it's possible that not even SMTP would have been invented, to clean up the email protocol problem. Government, in the form of DARPA, took the essential step of deciding to connect things together - this is a classic infrastructure initiative. And Al Gore, bless his little heart, did sponsor the bill to allow commercial use of the Internet. Before that, from my own experience, using the net was not easy, and having an actual presence on the net was hard and expensive. Getting a connection through some other company (see the history of UseNet) took weeks, and probably money - a 56Kbit line cost IIRC over $100/month in 1981 and a T-1 (1Mbit/s) was about $1500/month unless my memory fails me, plus you had to pay whoever you were connecting to. Getting a domain name took weeks after that, and depended on one guy, Jon Postel (RIP), to update his manually maintained list.
Nearly everything you know about the modern net, every protocol commonly used, every feature you depend on, is the result of capitalist innovation, not government projects. And I think this is a good example of how government and business - and not least academia and creative individuals (often with $ in their eyes) can each do what they do best. Some folks disagree but I think government is generally pretty good at building and maintaining highways, and providing the regulatory infrastructure that allows businesses to compete evenly without a race to the unsafe and dastardly bottom. And businesses, if not _too_ large, both benefits from that and provides the creative fluidity that makes things better. (From my view of systems theory, IMHO any market where any business has control of over about 20% of the market, and all but one have less than 12% or so, is essentially frozen and non-competitive. But that's another topic.) Neither is perfect, but over time I think we continue to converge toward a better situation - and whining about the problems is one of the most important factors in pushing that progress.
I will add that their numbers look different from work I've seen before, and use a more ambitious methodology than I would use. They want to run the entire launch using the magnetic system. This has some serious issues that make it harder IMHO - not that I know much. I believe it would be much easier to justify, finance, and build a system that replaces most or all of the first stage, which is where about 90% of the mass and propellant is spent. Just getting to Mach 5 uses up to 90% of the required fuel at present. It would also eliminate the entire cost of the first stage, replacing it with the cost of electricity, plus wear and tear on the magnetic launch carrier (which could be re-used.)
This approach would not require the high 30G acceleration (which eliminates use for living things) nor the super-long 130km launch track of the MagLaunch system. It would be cheaper and easier to build. This would be a 5G to 10G system with a 50KM track, going up the Andes at the Equator to an elevation of as much over 14,000 feet as can be arranged, with a 5km/s exit velocity if I recall correctly - this would require some work to make a vehicle that could survive such high speeds at relatively low altitudes. At 14,000 feet the air pressure is about 1/2 STP, and at 28,000 it's about 1/4 but there's no satisfactory location that goes to 28,000 feet. But this is getting into highly speculative numbers.
Interesting, thanks. I wasn't aware of these folks, and I'm pretty sure the rest of my partners in Space Finance Group aren't either. We have run several successful Kickstarter projects, including for the National Space Society and The Liftport Group (Michael Laine of Liftport is one of the partners in SFG). We recently completed the rewrite of a business plan and 'pitch deck' for another space launch company. We are also working on equity funding mechanisms for space development, although we're not quite ready to 'go live' with that.
So if these folks are for real, we might be able help them get where they want to go! I'll be contacting them. If anything pans out, you'll be able to say, "I helped them get there." :)
My personal opinion:, while the more 'standard' methods like SpaceX, XCor, Virgin, Blue Origin, and the many more exotic projects like Skylon, etc. (too many to list) are important and will be essential for at least the next 10-20 years, IMHO magnetic launch technology has the best long term potential for reducing costs. I don't think the "Gen 2" version that these folks propose will happen within 100 years if ever. That level of exotic engineering requires a long, long evolution to get there. But a successful Gen 1 system is buildable "today" - by which I mean the engineering will take six to 10 years, and construction another six to 10! This is in the same funding range, again, as the LHC, or the Burj Khalifa - or the various sports-festival boondoggles of late. (These mag-launch folks estimate $20, which may be a better number - I haven't finished reading their material.) So it is in the range of the financial capability of many nations, especially if a few get together.
IIRC Brazil is spending about $6 billion by themselves to host the FIFA World Cup - imagine if they invested that $6 billion as one third of a joint venture space launch system that reduced the cost to LEO from $10K-$20K per pound to even $100 per pound. They could charge $1000 per pound and still be inundated with demand. Their investment could pay for itself in a few years and build a permanent employment base and probably hundreds of spinoff high tech industry facilities, instead of being a sunk cost for a few hours of football fun!
Let's promote the installation of a 5G-capable magnetic launcher (coilgun tech) that goes up the Andes in Ecuador! A 50 mile launcher using a tube that is evacuated of most of its air could replace most or all of the first stage of rockets going to LEO, cutting the cost of launch by 2/3. The technology and project scale are in the same ballpark / order of magnitude as the LHC, and would permanently alter the economics of space development. The last time an equivalent system was thoroughly studied was in the 1970s AFAICT, long before a number of major enabling technologies were mature enough - large superconducting magnets, various materials, control systems, etc.
In my long experience as a coder, systems architect, and manager of teams, I have found that for most programming jobs a college degree in CS just isn't necessary. In my early days, few programmers or 'software engineers' even had CS degrees - we had history majors, music majors, a few math majors, etc. Music majors tend to do quite well as they are attracted to patterns and elegance.
Especially today, web programming is rarely concerned with developing deep algorithms, rather with assembling a set of tools. So a mechanical mind may do quite nicely, and a strong desire to make sure things are correct given all possible inputs - like an accountant, a good programmer won't be satisfied unless every 'penny' is accounted for.
When hiring, I often found the CS majors as having an inflated sense of their own abilities, and a general lack of knowledge of how programming is generally done in the real world - hacking on some other schmuck's broken legacy code that nobody can figure out. And a kid who started programming in high school and just kept working at it may have five years of real experience before they get their first job, and does it because he/she can't _stop_ doing it.
The company I work for now has a chief programmer who started writing games in high school, never went to college. He's pretty good, though he needs more real world experience to see how to prevent problems - that's the hardest thing, knowing enough and gettin the habits to avoid the bugs in the first place, which is only possible AFAIK in just experience.
Once they are in the job, then I would definitely encourage, even require, continuing education - go ahead and take some classes, read the books, try things out. Then they will be learning the algorithms, the techniques, in the context of what they already know.
a) I would not say this is the worst ever - it allows random data to be viewed, which may or may not contain something valuable. There is no evidence (yet) that this was actually exploited prior to its publication. Various other breeches have resulted in proven loss of millions of identities, and near-billions in actual money. If it had been exploited very much, it would probably have been tracked down earlier.
Technically it's not the worst - it's the same as literally thousands of other exploited bugs, and just yet another example of why C should not be used for applications programming, at least without a very strong IDE to catch these kinds of problems and perhaps a macro system that forces bounds-checking, etc. 'Programming without a net' is _sometimes_ necessary for programming at the metal interface, but OpenSSL, though needing high performance, is not an example of that. It's also an example of why SW quality methods need to be followed for this kind of code, especially for a relatively new member of the programming team - and why OpenSSL and other OSS projects need our support.
b) Fortunately, the barn door seems to have been shut before much got out. We'll see, but that's the present apparent situation. There will probably be a few relatively small ongoing successful exploits on servers that don't get fixed, as usual. But this is not anything like a wholesale loss of 100 million credit card records.
c) In this case there was a failure of the open source model of 'many eyes'. But there have been thousands of such failures in proprietary software, some of which resulted in most of the really big exploits, that were invisible until the exploit was used. Here, open source at least allowed researchers to identify it before it was really exploited (as far as we know today).
Indeed. Bank managements are interested in making money, not spending it on IT. A big part of JPMorgan's present problems (and some forthcoming ones that have not hit the fan yet, according to rumor) are due to their CIO's refusal to implement required IT risk management, despite repeated warnings from their auditors. If they fail this aspect of the audit a third time, hundreds of pension funds will be required by law to provide personnel to stand behind the JPM traders and monitor their activities - or move their funds to a different bank. This will be a bad thing for JPM, and fully deserved.
NB: no, I can't provide a citation. Source was a personal discussion. I will note that one of their top risk management people just got fired, basically for bringing this up. That's the third in a row in that position.
Research back in the 1930s discovered that there's more to that verse than appears. In Hebrew, the letters are also numbers, and the number values of letters and words are often very significant to the reading. There is a 'jot' ('jot' and 'tittle' are like diacritic marks) in the original, which here means, "look deeper". So with a bit of deeper analysis, one finds that the letters there turn out to make up a fraction. I forget what the fraction is, but it's something like 31/222 or some such, and with the fraction the value is within 1% or less of pi. This is discussed in one of Chuck Missler's research texts, about that book in the Bible.