Have the first person who "must read it" pay $100, the second $50, then $25, $15, $15 - about $200 net after credit card processing costs. Or whatever rate they figure out will be most likely to cover their costs.
If there's no one out there that needs the article enough to pay $100, it probably wasnt worth writing. If an author thinks what they've written is important enough, they can pay the "opening cost" to get it available for free.
Finally, IEEE should encourage companies to sponsor articles - it's a cheap way to get their name embedded into the text of an article forever, winning a little goodwill from everyone who reads the article for free.
At first, I thought Stallman's use of "free" was just a disingenuous marketing term, designed to borrow the cachet of "freedom" for his particular ideal of software development.
Public domain software is truly free - GPL and other copyleft software still has restrictions.
But then I realized - what if you take "free software" to literally mean the same as is meant in the analogy:
"Free person is to Slave as Free software is to Proprietary software"
I.e. the code itself has rights! Information *truly*, anthorpomorphically, wanting/needing to be free!
Today, that seems nonsensical - but in 100 years, when we're all uploaded bits in the Matrix, it may be the principle that protects us!
IMO the ruling was wrong. Merely bringing the dog up next to the car's trunk constituted a warrantless search in itself. The officers obtained information they could not get from an inspection open to anyone.
We'll soon have pattern-recognition devices sensing and monitoring everything we do, and only "barking" when something illegal is being hidden - or so the claim will be made. We'll never hear about the many false positives, because most non-criminals will open their trunk and drop the matter when the cops find nothing.
The few who stand on principle and refuse to allow the search will be detained while a warrant is obtained, searched, and when nothing is found, further delayed and subjected to intense scrutiny to see if there is anything they've ever done wrong, in order to justify the search and punish the person for wasting the police officers' time.
We need a "privacy buffer-zone" law that says that "probable cause" requires more than an indication from an automated monitoring device. Those would not be prohibited - but could only provide information to the effect that an illegal act is suspected, with information pointing to the suspect - but no specifics (since revealing those to the police would constitute a search). Based on that, the police could start an investigation to gather information to justify a search warrant. Any direct use of sensory enhancment devices by a human being would be prohibited without a search warrant.
A lot of people are pointing out how dumb these people are.
But I feel this points to a broader issue. If ordinary people still have an assumption of privacy in their email communications, even after all this time, it's a strong indicator that such communications should be more protected. Perhaps corporations should only have access to recorded communications under court order, just as anyone else. This should be doubly true of emails originating outside the corporation.
I understand the argument "but it's their servers!" and "they're paying you" - but suppose all the telecom companies got together and decided that they'd all put a clause in their service contracts saying they reserve the right to view your emails, record your phone conversations, etc. After all, you're using their servers, and in order to use their services, you'd have to have agreed to their terms. Legal I suppose - but is it desirable?
Microsoft has lots of cash to battle patent lawsuits and pay off if it loses. Linux companies don't. All it'd take is one big successful lawsuit to ruin them. A few Linux companies get ruined, and commercial Linux is dead.
When things start to get this strange, it's a sign that a bubble is about to burst.
In this case, the bubble is probably the artificially inflated value of the US dollar - the value of the goods and services exported by the US haven't matched up to those we're importing for quite a long time - and this latest binge of buying labor and services will probably be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Soon will come the soft *pop*, followed by the idiot press weeping and wailing about double or triple digit inflation combined with stock market crash and interest rates through the roof as foreign lenders withdraw from the dollar.
Imagine the impact on your 401K of the stock market taking a 50% hit, followed by 100% inflation over a few years. Oh - and you'll still owe capital gains tax on any "profits" - even though in real value terms you've lost 75% of your principle.
The thing you're missing is that the force is spread over a much larger area. I.e between joints, the weight of the elevator is supported solely in the thin cross-section of the ribbon.
But the area between two sections of ribbon overlapped is vastly greater - so the weight/stress/force per unit area is much lower. That means that the force acting to hold any unit area of ribbon together need not be anywhere near as great.
The real question is whether the epoxied segments can narrow enough and far enough apart to avoid adding significantly to the elevator's weight, and whether the epoxied joints can withstand the conditions the elevator is exposed to over time.
The epoxy doesn't need to be as strong as the nanotubes. All that is necessary is that all the force from the lower of the two overlapped segments be transferred, over the whole overlapped length, to the top segment.
Imagine holding one hair, with a second clinging to it by electrostatic force. As long as they're overlapped "enough" to have the force between them exceed the weight of the second hair, they won't slip.
If you pull the second hair down enough that the net force between the hairs is less than the weight of the second hair, it'll pull away.
So long as the overlapped region is short relative to the un-overlapped length, the strength to weight ratio need not be greatly reduced.
So the idea of epoxying nanotube strands together isn't absurd - but it does need to be proven that enough force can be transferred in a short enough length by that method.
It's often a moot point. If you were stopped in your car, they'd have your license number. They would just ask you "Is this your car?" If you say yes, you've identified yourself. If you didn't say it is, and continued to be evasive, they would assume you'd stolen it and arrest you. Same thing if you were in your house and they came to your door. You MIGHT have been safe walking down the street on a public sidewalk, prior to this ruling.
The idea that you might be able to withhold your name if you are guilty means that remaining silent is automatically a confession - either you're guilty of something else, or you're guilty of withholding your name. The police will ALWAYS arrest you, and find some other means to identify you.
Also, since the police can arrest you for withholding your name, if you are trying to avoid being arrested for an outstanding warrant, they can hold you indefinitely - simply by asking you your name every 24 hours until you tell them (so they look up your outstanding warrants). Yep - forced self-incrimination.
My guess is that there will be a future case that gets to the supreme court, where an innocent person in a legal demonstration refuses to give their name, gets arrested, and refuses for weeks to give their name - and gets held by the police without any realistic opportunity to be set free. Then maybe the court will realize what they've done.
If we shift to email that is nothing but a link back to a content server, and delete anything that doesn't match that, we'll have a means of tracking back to a responsible party and enforcing Don't-Spam.
International spam can be filtered out by blocking email linked to servers in countries that don't enforce Don't-Spam. Also block any email that links using a straight IP address (or simply don't support that in the email linking protocol).
If an email content server can turn over the spammer who violated Don't-Spam, the spammer gets fined. If someone lets their server get hijacked for spam (or claims that is what happened), they deserve a fine.
Processors/systems need to be made less vulnerable, so that common software mistakes can't let users run their own code.
The No-Execute bit is a start. Moving all return and function pointers to a separate stack would be another improvement. Still ways to hack around that, but it's a lot harder.
It seems wasteful to require all that RAM just to get screen animation effects - but the same was thought about color displays at one time.
Would the WWW have caught on so quickly, if we hadn't had color graphics? Without color graphics, would PC games have ever really taken off? Sometimes you have to throw resources at a problem in order to break through to the next level.
If I were to guess, I'd say that the MS back-buffer/front buffer scheme might enable a useful VR work environment, and for home entertainment it may mean PCs have the resources to handle VR glasses and head and body tracking.
Still, I would have thought Microsoft might want to support 8bit application window buffers - most of the time that's all a spreadsheet or word processor needs, and the application could switch to a full color window if a photo was pasted in.
That'd let office systems be a bit cheaper or use larger virtual windows. Doing a table-lookup during the blend from app frame buffer to screen wouldn't be a huge deal, so they wouldn't sacrifice any Windowing functionality.
Of course, they'd have to have graphics code for 8 bit as well as 32bit windows - but code bloat has hardly stopped them before.
It looks like the letter is about someone "sharing" a movie for others to access is the issue addressed - NOT the original downloading, as most here seem to be assuming.
That said, I think anyone getting such a letter had better go see a lawyer before they essentially write the copyright holder a written confession.
Re:The flagship...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
2nd edition feels better for the same reason Linux feels better to those who love it - ease of use is secondary in importance to the feeling of mastering something complex - even if that complexity is un-necessary.
For a govt study of corn ethanol energy input/output, see:
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/141.pd f
It seems to show net energy gain even if only look at ethanol. But ya gotta wonder - if it's a net energy producer, why do they run the ethanol plants on fossil fuels or electricity, instead of burning ethanol?
I guess it's the subsidies they get more for selling it as a gas additive than it costs them to buy the fossil fuels needed to produce it - makes it more profitable.
OK - that's fair, maybe we needed to subsidize it to help pay for the R&D. But now that fossil fuel prices seem to be on the rise, it's time to require ethanol producers to start burning their own fuel in order to keep getting the ethanol subsidies.
> there is no current method of storing electricity with the density of current oil-based products
Hmm - well maybe if they could somehow use the electricity to chemically convert relatively high energy renewable resources - say like straw or wood - into a denser fuel - oh, say ethanol - that would sort of count as storing electricity with the density of oil-based products...
You've conflated two separate concepts - freedom, and political control.
One could, in theory, have a pure dictatorship under which people are very free EXCEPT they can't get rid of the dictator. In practice, that never works, because the dictator wants to control things.
Or, one could have a pure democracy - everyone voting on everything - that is a pure tyranny of the majority, even though everyone is "free" to take part in governing themselves.
The founder's plan was to avoid both the former and the latter, with checks and balances put in place to at least slow the decay of the system they set up. It was a good scheme - it worked well enough for about a century, passibly well for another 50 years, tolerably well for another 50 years - and seems to be heading downhill fairly rapidly of late.
All these "Wars On" (drugs, terrorism, poverty, crime, etc) are meant to justify measures that the instigators know conflict with the intent of the founders, as expressed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. No doubt they think they're doing the right thing, and their noble ends justify their oppressive means.
If government has to get involved, let it subsidize dark fiber.
The only regulation should be that in any area, there must be at least two competing data service providers per local network - if there aren't two, no one gets to provide service. Let the companies figure out between them what cross subsidies they want to apply. They'll end up providing about the same bundle of services and pricing - but if ever there's a technology improvement, they'll have the incentive and access needed to compete and increase their market share.
Plan to let rural areas go wireless - far more efficient, though generally lower capability.
In fact, immediately eliminate universal access subsidies for rural areas. Wired phone rates will shoot up, and 95% of rural voice will go cell-based within a year. Cell-based data service will probably be widely available within the same year, derived from existing data over cell technologies.
Having eliminated that political barrier, it should be that much easier to implement the rest of the plan, and decide what, if any, subsidies should go to rural areas.
Maybe we should be abandoning the ISS instead of the Hubble.
Or maybe we should put the ISS in a big plastic bag to catch all the parts before they get away and cause serious harm later.
Or maybe there should be a little autonomous dog-bot to go out and fetch the parts thrown off by the ISS - assuming you could trust dogbot not to sneak away itself.
I've come up with a clever but cheap method to make money much harder to counterfeit. I'd guarantee that no color copier or printer could duplicate it.
The only catch is that it requires use of gold or silver nearly equal in value to the money itself...
[Could it be that the government wants to reserve the right to counterfeit money to itself? Naahh - that'd cause inflation! Sigh - how fondly I remember the dime soda pop of my youth...]
The major new thing in ANKOS is that it takes seriously the proposition that CA is the mechanism underlying the laws of nature.
Others have thought that - I know I've thought it since being exposed to Conway's game of life, and I'm sure I'm not original in that. That's similar to the way school kids commonly noticed that the continents sort of fit together, long before the idea of continental drift was proposed and defended and eventually considered proven among serious scientists.
But for those who say Wolfram is contributing nothing new, I suggest you skip forward to chapter 9 - Fundamental Physics - maybe even skip to the section on space. I'm not saying he's right - just that he has developed the "CA implements nature" idea beyond the trivial.
Wolfram's main contribution, in the long run, may come from the fact that his attitude challenges theoreticians to disprove his thesis. To the extent he is correct, or to the extent that in considering his thesis theoreticians come up with something more correct, the book could in fact lead to a new kind of science.
Yeah right. This "balance is good" attitude assumes both sides of a conflict are morally equivalent. In this case, I disagree. I say the burden to provide at least some shred of convincing evidence that significant, lasting harm is possible falls on those who claim it exists.
I also say that a lot of this hand-wringing is a cover for jealousy toward those who are taking action to collect these discoveries, which some people wish would magically "belong to all mankind" - mostly those who don't have the gumption (or haven't bothered to invest in the skills) to join in the 'gold rush'.
Put ME squarely in that "extreme" camp opposed to those who claim to be fretting over unproven and likely insignificant "problems", when there are so many real problems in the world - some of which may be solved by research into the nature of these creatures.
I like this idea - make it a permanent colony right from the start.
I wonder how much less it'd cost than Zubrin's original plan, since a big part of his plan was sending two fuel-factory-return-ships. Maybe not much, since a lot of the cost is R&D. But we'd get a lot more science for the money, and each subsequent mission would build up the base faster.
If we want to get humanity permanently into space, we need to stop thinking in purely engineering and short term economic terms.
One of the reasons North America got settled relatively quickly, IMO, was that kings passed out huge chunks of land to cronies so they could set up colonies to profit by shipping goods home.
With space it's harder. Information is the main thing valuable enough to ship to earth - and the value of scientific information will decline rapidly after the first few missions to any place. (He3 may be worth shipping from the moon to earth - we'll see.) So we need to quickly bootstrap space settlement off of the value of scientific exploration, but rapidly reduce the costs of getting there and staying there.
Zubrin's plan is elegant and far cheaper up front - and does establish some infrastructure on Mars. But the cycle time of growth is very slow, not concentrated in any one location, and doesn't do much to reduce the cost of subsequent Mars missions. Maybe we'd keep that up for 10 years before deciding we weren't learning enough to bother maintaining the program. On to Titan, abandon Mars!
But if we build up a base on Luna - whatever the up front cost - it will make economic sense to maintain and expand it - initially as a much cheaper source of LOX for rockets, later for other exports supporting space exploration and settlement.
So - call it a con job if you wish (well, please don't tell the politicians), but taking the slower, more costly Moon-first approach seems more likely to get us permanently into space. I prefer to think of it as an investment in humanity's future.
Slashdot Mirror
Have the first person who "must read it" pay $100, the second $50, then $25, $15, $15 - about $200 net after credit card processing costs. Or whatever rate they figure out will be most likely to cover their costs.
If there's no one out there that needs the article enough to pay $100, it probably wasnt worth writing. If an author thinks what they've written is important enough, they can pay the "opening cost" to get it available for free.
Finally, IEEE should encourage companies to sponsor articles - it's a cheap way to get their name embedded into the text of an article forever, winning a little goodwill from everyone who reads the article for free.
At first, I thought Stallman's use of "free" was just a disingenuous marketing term, designed to borrow the cachet of "freedom" for his particular ideal of software development.
Public domain software is truly free - GPL and other copyleft software still has restrictions.
But then I realized - what if you take "free software" to literally mean the same as is meant in the analogy:
"Free person is to Slave as Free software is to Proprietary software"
I.e. the code itself has rights! Information *truly*, anthorpomorphically, wanting/needing to be free!
Today, that seems nonsensical - but in 100 years, when we're all uploaded bits in the Matrix, it may be the principle that protects us!
IMO the ruling was wrong. Merely bringing the dog up next to the car's trunk constituted a warrantless search in itself. The officers obtained information they could not get from an inspection open to anyone.
We'll soon have pattern-recognition devices sensing and monitoring everything we do, and only "barking" when something illegal is being hidden - or so the claim will be made. We'll never hear about the many false positives, because most non-criminals will open their trunk and drop the matter when the cops find nothing.
The few who stand on principle and refuse to allow the search will be detained while a warrant is obtained, searched, and when nothing is found, further delayed and subjected to intense scrutiny to see if there is anything they've ever done wrong, in order to justify the search and punish the person for wasting the police officers' time.
We need a "privacy buffer-zone" law that says that "probable cause" requires more than an indication from an automated monitoring device. Those would not be prohibited - but could only provide information to the effect that an illegal act is suspected, with information pointing to the suspect - but no specifics (since revealing those to the police would constitute a search). Based on that, the police could start an investigation to gather information to justify a search warrant. Any direct use of sensory enhancment devices by a human being would be prohibited without a search warrant.
Wow, common sense amongst the paranoia and ignorance. What are you doing here?
A lot of people are pointing out how dumb these people are.
But I feel this points to a broader issue. If ordinary people still have an assumption of privacy in their email communications, even after all this time, it's a strong indicator that such communications should be more protected. Perhaps corporations should only have access to recorded communications under court order, just as anyone else. This should be doubly true of emails originating outside the corporation.
I understand the argument "but it's their servers!" and "they're paying you" - but suppose all the telecom companies got together and decided that they'd all put a clause in their service contracts saying they reserve the right to view your emails, record your phone conversations, etc. After all, you're using their servers, and in order to use their services, you'd have to have agreed to their terms. Legal I suppose - but is it desirable?
Microsoft has lots of cash to battle patent lawsuits and pay off if it loses. Linux companies don't. All it'd take is one big successful lawsuit to ruin them. A few Linux companies get ruined, and commercial Linux is dead.
When things start to get this strange, it's a sign that a bubble is about to burst.
In this case, the bubble is probably the artificially inflated value of the US dollar - the value of the goods and services exported by the US haven't matched up to those we're importing for quite a long time - and this latest binge of buying labor and services will probably be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Soon will come the soft *pop*, followed by the idiot press weeping and wailing about double or triple digit inflation combined with stock market crash and interest rates through the roof as foreign lenders withdraw from the dollar.
Imagine the impact on your 401K of the stock market taking a 50% hit, followed by 100% inflation over a few years. Oh - and you'll still owe capital gains tax on any "profits" - even though in real value terms you've lost 75% of your principle.
The thing you're missing is that the force is spread over a much larger area. I.e between joints, the weight of the elevator is supported solely in the thin cross-section of the ribbon.
But the area between two sections of ribbon overlapped is vastly greater - so the weight/stress/force per unit area is much lower. That means that the force acting to hold any unit area of ribbon together need not be anywhere near as great.
The real question is whether the epoxied segments can narrow enough and far enough apart to avoid adding significantly to the elevator's weight, and whether the epoxied joints can withstand the conditions the elevator is exposed to over time.
The epoxy doesn't need to be as strong as the nanotubes. All that is necessary is that all the force from the lower of the two overlapped segments be transferred, over the whole overlapped length, to the top segment.
Imagine holding one hair, with a second clinging to it by electrostatic force. As long as they're overlapped "enough" to have the force between them exceed the weight of the second hair, they won't slip.
If you pull the second hair down enough that the net force between the hairs is less than the weight of the second hair, it'll pull away.
So long as the overlapped region is short relative to the un-overlapped length, the strength to weight ratio need not be greatly reduced.
So the idea of epoxying nanotube strands together isn't absurd - but it does need to be proven that enough force can be transferred in a short enough length by that method.
It's often a moot point. If you were stopped in your car, they'd have your license number. They would just ask you "Is this your car?" If you say yes, you've identified yourself. If you didn't say it is, and continued to be evasive, they would assume you'd stolen it and arrest you. Same thing if you were in your house and they came to your door. You MIGHT have been safe walking down the street on a public sidewalk, prior to this ruling.
The idea that you might be able to withhold your name if you are guilty means that remaining silent is automatically a confession - either you're guilty of something else, or you're guilty of withholding your name. The police will ALWAYS arrest you, and find some other means to identify you.
Also, since the police can arrest you for withholding your name, if you are trying to avoid being arrested for an outstanding warrant, they can hold you indefinitely - simply by asking you your name every 24 hours until you tell them (so they look up your outstanding warrants). Yep - forced self-incrimination.
My guess is that there will be a future case that gets to the supreme court, where an innocent person in a legal demonstration refuses to give their name, gets arrested, and refuses for weeks to give their name - and gets held by the police without any realistic opportunity to be set free. Then maybe the court will realize what they've done.
If we shift to email that is nothing but a link back to a content server, and delete anything that doesn't match that, we'll have a means of tracking back to a responsible party and enforcing Don't-Spam.
International spam can be filtered out by blocking email linked to servers in countries that don't enforce Don't-Spam. Also block any email that links using a straight IP address (or simply don't support that in the email linking protocol).
If an email content server can turn over the spammer who violated Don't-Spam, the spammer gets fined. If someone lets their server get hijacked for spam (or claims that is what happened), they deserve a fine.
Processors/systems need to be made less vulnerable, so that common software mistakes can't let users run their own code.
The No-Execute bit is a start. Moving all return and function pointers to a separate stack would be another improvement. Still ways to hack around that, but it's a lot harder.
It seems wasteful to require all that RAM just to get screen animation effects - but the same was thought about color displays at one time.
Would the WWW have caught on so quickly, if we hadn't had color graphics? Without color graphics, would PC games have ever really taken off? Sometimes you have to throw resources at a problem in order to break through to the next level.
If I were to guess, I'd say that the MS back-buffer/front buffer scheme might enable a useful VR work environment, and for home entertainment it may mean PCs have the resources to handle VR glasses and head and body tracking.
Still, I would have thought Microsoft might want to support 8bit application window buffers - most of the time that's all a spreadsheet or word processor needs, and the application could switch to a full color window if a photo was pasted in.
That'd let office systems be a bit cheaper or use larger virtual windows. Doing a table-lookup during the blend from app frame buffer to screen wouldn't be a huge deal, so they wouldn't sacrifice any Windowing functionality.
Of course, they'd have to have graphics code for 8 bit as well as 32bit windows - but code bloat has hardly stopped them before.
It looks like the letter is about someone "sharing" a movie for others to access is the issue addressed - NOT the original downloading, as most here seem to be assuming.
That said, I think anyone getting such a letter had better go see a lawyer before they essentially write the copyright holder a written confession.
2nd edition feels better for the same reason Linux feels better to those who love it - ease of use is secondary in importance to the feeling of mastering something complex - even if that complexity is un-necessary.
For a govt study of corn ethanol energy input/output, see:
d f
http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/141.p
It seems to show net energy gain even if only look at ethanol. But ya gotta wonder - if it's a net energy producer, why do they run the ethanol plants on fossil fuels or electricity, instead of burning ethanol?
I guess it's the subsidies they get more for selling it as a gas additive than it costs them to buy the fossil fuels needed to produce it - makes it more profitable.
OK - that's fair, maybe we needed to subsidize it to help pay for the R&D. But now that fossil fuel prices seem to be on the rise, it's time to require ethanol producers to start burning their own fuel in order to keep getting the ethanol subsidies.
> there is no current method of storing electricity with the density of current oil-based products
Hmm - well maybe if they could somehow use the electricity to chemically convert relatively high energy renewable resources - say like straw or wood - into a denser fuel - oh, say ethanol - that would sort of count as storing electricity with the density of oil-based products...
You've conflated two separate concepts - freedom, and political control.
One could, in theory, have a pure dictatorship under which people are very free EXCEPT they can't get rid of the dictator. In practice, that never works, because the dictator wants to control things.
Or, one could have a pure democracy - everyone voting on everything - that is a pure tyranny of the majority, even though everyone is "free" to take part in governing themselves.
The founder's plan was to avoid both the former and the latter, with checks and balances put in place to at least slow the decay of the system they set up. It was a good scheme - it worked well enough for about a century, passibly well for another 50 years, tolerably well for another 50 years - and seems to be heading downhill fairly rapidly of late.
All these "Wars On" (drugs, terrorism, poverty, crime, etc) are meant to justify measures that the instigators know conflict with the intent of the founders, as expressed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. No doubt they think they're doing the right thing, and their noble ends justify their oppressive means.
If government has to get involved, let it subsidize dark fiber.
The only regulation should be that in any area, there must be at least two competing data service providers per local network - if there aren't two, no one gets to provide service. Let the companies figure out between them what cross subsidies they want to apply. They'll end up providing about the same bundle of services and pricing - but if ever there's a technology improvement, they'll have the incentive and access needed to compete and increase their market share.
Plan to let rural areas go wireless - far more efficient, though generally lower capability.
In fact, immediately eliminate universal access subsidies for rural areas. Wired phone rates will shoot up, and 95% of rural voice will go cell-based within a year. Cell-based data service will probably be widely available within the same year, derived from existing data over cell technologies.
Having eliminated that political barrier, it should be that much easier to implement the rest of the plan, and decide what, if any, subsidies should go to rural areas.
Maybe we should be abandoning the ISS instead of the Hubble.
Or maybe we should put the ISS in a big plastic bag to catch all the parts before they get away and cause serious harm later.
Or maybe there should be a little autonomous dog-bot to go out and fetch the parts thrown off by the ISS - assuming you could trust dogbot not to sneak away itself.
I've come up with a clever but cheap method to make money much harder to counterfeit. I'd guarantee that no color copier or printer could duplicate it.
The only catch is that it requires use of gold or silver nearly equal in value to the money itself...
[Could it be that the government wants to reserve the right to counterfeit money to itself? Naahh - that'd cause inflation! Sigh - how fondly I remember the dime soda pop of my youth...]
The major new thing in ANKOS is that it takes seriously the proposition that CA is the mechanism underlying the laws of nature.
Others have thought that - I know I've thought it since being exposed to Conway's game of life, and I'm sure I'm not original in that. That's similar to the way school kids commonly noticed that the continents sort of fit together, long before the idea of continental drift was proposed and defended and eventually considered proven among serious scientists.
But for those who say Wolfram is contributing nothing new, I suggest you skip forward to chapter 9 - Fundamental Physics - maybe even skip to the section on space. I'm not saying he's right - just that he has developed the "CA implements nature" idea beyond the trivial.
Wolfram's main contribution, in the long run, may come from the fact that his attitude challenges theoreticians to disprove his thesis. To the extent he is correct, or to the extent that in considering his thesis theoreticians come up with something more correct, the book could in fact lead to a new kind of science.
Yeah right. This "balance is good" attitude assumes both sides of a conflict are morally equivalent. In this case, I disagree. I say the burden to provide at least some shred of convincing evidence that significant, lasting harm is possible falls on those who claim it exists.
I also say that a lot of this hand-wringing is a cover for jealousy toward those who are taking action to collect these discoveries, which some people wish would magically "belong to all mankind" - mostly those who don't have the gumption (or haven't bothered to invest in the skills) to join in the 'gold rush'.
Put ME squarely in that "extreme" camp opposed to those who claim to be fretting over unproven and likely insignificant "problems", when there are so many real problems in the world - some of which may be solved by research into the nature of these creatures.
I like this idea - make it a permanent colony right from the start.
I wonder how much less it'd cost than Zubrin's original plan, since a big part of his plan was sending two fuel-factory-return-ships. Maybe not much, since a lot of the cost is R&D. But we'd get a lot more science for the money, and each subsequent mission would build up the base faster.
If we want to get humanity permanently into space, we need to stop thinking in purely engineering and short term economic terms.
One of the reasons North America got settled relatively quickly, IMO, was that kings passed out huge chunks of land to cronies so they could set up colonies to profit by shipping goods home.
With space it's harder. Information is the main thing valuable enough to ship to earth - and the value of scientific information will decline rapidly after the first few missions to any place. (He3 may be worth shipping from the moon to earth - we'll see.) So we need to quickly bootstrap space settlement off of the value of scientific exploration, but rapidly reduce the costs of getting there and staying there.
Zubrin's plan is elegant and far cheaper up front - and does establish some infrastructure on Mars. But the cycle time of growth is very slow, not concentrated in any one location, and doesn't do much to reduce the cost of subsequent Mars missions. Maybe we'd keep that up for 10 years before deciding we weren't learning enough to bother maintaining the program. On to Titan, abandon Mars!
But if we build up a base on Luna - whatever the up front cost - it will make economic sense to maintain and expand it - initially as a much cheaper source of LOX for rockets, later for other exports supporting space exploration and settlement.
So - call it a con job if you wish (well, please don't tell the politicians), but taking the slower, more costly Moon-first approach seems more likely to get us permanently into space. I prefer to think of it as an investment in humanity's future.