The trends he is making fun of are the corporatization of culture and the rise of state-sponsored religious conformity within it. Microsoft is the ultimate icon of large powerful corporations. He wasn't really referring to Microsoft per se, but for what it stands for. The fact that the head of Microsoft personally doesn't like to spend his valuable time in church is an unfortunate but irrelevant detail.
This is the kind of statement people make when they just look at a plot of points on a graph and make bland predictions without thinking through the physical reality behind the data.
Things larger than insects are easier to make than things smaller than atoms. The same trends will not necessarily apply just because silicon wasn't used in early computers.
Probability that alien broadcasts of some sort are striking the earth during the present era and are theoretically detectable: p0
Amount of radio data available for analysis in a fully comprehensive search with no limits to the computing power thrown at the problem: N bits per year
Amount of data analyzable with current computing power: r bits per year
Therefore probability of detection is p=p0*(r/N).
If r doubles, then p doubles (unless r approaches N. Therefore, assuming that r/N is small, Moore's Law says that the probability of detection doubles every 18 months. Duh. This is like saying if 20 million people download SETI@home this year instead of 10 million, the chance of detecting ET doubles. Similarly, if I buy two lottery tickets instead of one, my chance of winning the lottery doubles.
The more important term is p0. It is probably smaller than r/N.
THE RECANTATION OF GALILEO GALILEI^H^H^H^H ED FELTEN
I, Ed Felten, Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, of Princeton, aged forty-something years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Record Industry Lawyers, Inquisitors general against heretical Fair-Use and Digital Piracy throughout the whole American Republic, having before my eyes and touching with my hands, a printed copy of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, written by Corporate Lobbyists and duly ratified without question or concern by their paid Representatives in Congress -- swear that I have always believed, do now believe, and by the entertainment industry's help will for the future believe, all that is held, litigated, and proxy-legislated by the Recording Artists of America ("RIAA") and the Motion Picture Association of America ("MPAA").
But whereas -- after a threat had been legally intimated to me by these powerful Corporate Plaintiffs, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that a digital watermark may be effectively removed from a digital audio signal, and that the resulting signal shall suffer no loss of fidelity or audio quality relative to the original while yet removing the said watermark sufficiently to prevent its detection by SDMI-compliant devices, and that I may hold, defend, publish, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally, in a technical scientific journal, or at a scientific proceeding, the said doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that peer-reviewed scientific disclosure of the said doctrine was contrary to the fair provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act -- I wrote and printed a scientific paper in which I discuss this doctrine already condemned in great technical detail, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favor, without presenting any viable solution to the resulting attendant Question of how Powerful Corporations will be able to extract Payment from individual Consumers for the same song, album, or movie Many Many Times; and for this cause I have been pronounced by the Legal Office of the aforementioned Plaintiffs to be vehemently suspected of HERESY, that is to say, of having held and believed that legitimate scientific Research does not constitute criminal activity under any reasonable legal Standard, that intellectual Freedom and open scientific Debate is vital to the future of a Democracy, and that free speech as guaranteed in the Constitution is more inviolate than a fucking stupid law enacted solely to protect corporate profit margins by muzzling all those who would dare to point out any technical shortcomings in poorly conceived half-assed industry copy-protection schemes:
Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all other litigious Corporations with well-financed teams of Attorneys, this strong suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect whatsoever contrary to the said RIAA and MPAA; and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or other legitimate scientific researcher suspected of similar heresy, I will denounce him to the high-powered Legal Departments of these two corporate Entities, or to the Inquisitor and ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfill and observe in their integrity all gag orders that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by the RIAA and MPAA. And, in the event of my contravening, (which God forbid) any of these my promises, protestations, and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, general and particular, against such delinquents. So help me America, and this flag that stands for it, which I touch with my hands.
I, the said Ed Felten, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration, and recited it word for word in Pittsburgh, PA, in the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop, this twenty-sixth day of June, 2001.
I trust what you say is true. It still doesn't affect my original point that chess isn't in a good problem domain for application of neural networks in their current forms. People are not neural networks.
Human players bring intelligent knowledge to the table (accumulated by humanity over centuries, no less) about chess strategy ("strategery" as W would say) that neural networks don't incorporate well on their own. People like to think of the human brain as a sort of big neural network with 10^12 nodes but NN models are only inspired by the brain. They miss a lot of subtleties that the brain has. A neural network that big wouldn't necessarily play chess very well at all. Not by itself, anyway.
Maybe incorporating a NN into a larger algorithm with more conventional modules in it (brute force, heuristic analysis, etc.) would be interesting. A NN might be capable of assisting an overall algorithm in making thousands of small atomic decisions per move, like whether to prune individual branch searches. Humans are clearly making decisions at some points in their analyses that aren't trivially duplicated in conventional von Neumann paradigms because they're hard to define. (Too much "fuzzy math"!) Like, everybody knows you don't do things like immediately start pushing the king out into the center of the board starting on move 2. A blind brute force attack will spend time searching unpromising territory like that. (Yeah I know that's a bad example because they all use opening books but you get the point.) How do you tell a computer how to recognize a stupid looking branch? They usually build a heuristic evaluation function with lots of IF statements in it, but they tend to be brittle. It may be possible to convert the problem into many smaller subproblems of recognition, and then you might be able to apply a neural network to that. But it isn't necessarily clear how you would do it.
Yeah, I agree that this is what humans do. But that isn't quite the same aspect of human thought processing that a neural network seeks to model as an abstraction. What you're describing is more along the lines of what conventional AI tries to recreate in expert systems and rules-based processing. As you play chess and you keep playing long enough to be good at it, you develop a more and more elaborate heuristic analysis that you subconsciously apply to every move. You learn to avoid doubling pawns, you squirrel your king away, you connect your rooks, etc. You're probably conscious of most of the heuristics you're applying, but not necessarily all of them. As you get better, your heuristic evaluation of chessboard positions gets more sophisticated. Now at some point, some neural-network-style pattern recognition has to happen when you make your actual move- you have to recognize a move that looks better to you than the 30 other possible moves. But you're not simply looking at the raw images of 31 possible chessboards. You're applying a logical layer first with all these complex heuristic rules embedded in it. It isn't clear how you would prefilter a vectorized chessboard through all this rules analysis before applying it as the input to a neural network. (Well, it's probably possible, but it certainly isn't trivial.) That's why neural networks can't play chess. Conventional-style AI systems can play it decently well but AI also complements brute-force attacks and the two are much easier to combine programatically.
If you read the literature on neural networks you will find that chess and strategy games are usually cited as the stereotypical problem domain that a neural net is LEAST suited for. They're good for automation of such tasks as recognizing faces, patterns, applying rudimentary common sense in fuzzy, ill-defined situations, that kind of thing. Not problems like chess that are so well-defined and easily attacked by brute force computation. The same goes for genetic algorithms. You can usually, at least in theory, simulate any genetic algorithm with a neural network and vice versa. Neither approach works well on chess. The fuzziness and adaptability that are the prized characteristics of these systems are simply not very useful for playing chess! (Not that it might not be interesting, maybe, to try training a neural net to play chess, to see what mistakes it makes compared to a human beginner. But it wouldn't play a very decent game.)
Remember, a human grandmaster's brain operates on principles which at least served as the inspiration for neural networks. The best chess players that the entire neural paradigm can offer are not neural networks at all, but humans such as Kasparov. And these guys are now routinely beaten by conventional von-Neumann devices that simply carry out brute-force analyses of the board.
The most any analog device can hope for in a chess match against a digital computer- whether truly analog, such as a human brain, or artificial, such as a digitally simulated analog neural network- is to exploit the horizon effect (where the digital algorithm explores all branches up to N moves ahead, and remains oblivious to traps that lie waiting at N+2 moves). The horizon effect strikes digital computing paradigms rather abruptly and can become useful to you in the endgame when there's only a few pieces left on the board and it's easy to see that far ahead. But it's a rare analog processor that can even see halfway to the horizon during the middlegame. Frankly I don't see how Kasparov lasted as long as he did.
Although I don't see why matter has to be "diamond-like" once it's been determined that it is not metallic. Why can't they just compare it to glass?
The Physical Review Letters article might be worth reading but the SciAm blurb is a badly misleading popularization. People are going to think neutron stars are made of ordinary carbon diamond- which is the worst possible impression to give. It's so bad it's not even wrong! Neutron stars are far more interesting than diamonds are. You would never find anything resembling ordinary matter (atoms, nuclei, shells, etc.) in a neutron star, or even in a white dwarf.
Re:proof that homosexuality isn't genetic?
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A Map to Nowhere?
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· Score: 1
Huh?
For years homophobes have been screaming that nobody has found a "gay gene" so therefore homosexuality is not biological in origin and is best treated with a swift blow to the head with a Bible. Which is pretty stupid first of all because it's an argument from ignorance, but also because there isn't necessarily a trivial mapping between a single gene and a phenotype. Now that it's becoming clear that there wouldn't necessarily be a "gay gene" anyway, I don't see what you think your point is.
Are you going to claim next that intelligence isn't genetic? Or is that a "lifestyle choice" too?
Not if the hydrogen is generated slowly and as needed. Although methanol doesn't like being shot at either.
Re:In case you forgot your high school physics tea
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How Solar Sails Work
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· Score: 1
First of all it's F=ma.
Second, F=ma is WRONG. It is a non-relativistic equation and only applies to low velocities. The more accurate version is F=dp/dt where p is momentum, i.e. p=m*v/sqrt(1-v*v/c*c).
Physics actually considers momentum to be a quantity that is more fundamental than velocity.
Third, you implicitly seem to be confusing fundamental with primitive. Why would high-tech progress imply that we wouldn't still be using F=ma anymore? I guess I don't see what is so "amazing" about our continuing to use it. Even though it's wrong, it's still accurate enough for most human endeavors which take place at small fractions of c.
Oh give it up already. In common usage nowadays, the word "hacker" means, pretty much, "using computers for criminal activity". Most people have no idea of the former (correct) meaning of the word. Curse the credulous, stupid media and the technically illiterate public if you want, but that's how the language has evolved.
"Real" hackers get so upset about this, but it's just a frigging word. Abandon it. It's a lost cause. Call yourselves something else. This is one battle the hacker community will not win.
Anti-spam measures can either be based in legislation or in technology. From the amount of spam I get on a regular basis, I can only assume that all technological countermeasures to spam have failed miserably or else I wouldn't be getting so much. It is just too easy for spammers to foil even the most sophisticated of them, even when they are put in place by people who obviously have double the IQs of the spammers. Now politicians are generally clueless when it comes to technology, and they will inevitably enact legislative barriers to spam that will have unwanted side effects for the rest of us who have been following the rules all this time. (Witness the clueless European reaction to "cybercrime" that will make it illegal, say, for a sysadmin to run a portscanner on his own server unless he hires an expensive trained monkey with a government-issued license to do it.) But it isn't as if technological countermeasures to spam can't also have the type of unwanted side effect that people rightly fear will result from arrogant legislative action. Here's an example: Remember when the Internet was full of open mail relays? I had several mail accounts on several different servers, and I could send an email from any of them no matter where I was connecting from. Not anymore. Thanks to spammers, the days of open relays are gone. And this is a real pity, since relays are the kind of technology that are especially suited to the Internet, but that can't be used in a world full of people who like to take advantage and ruin things for everybody. Now, I can still POP my email from anywhere and read it, but if I actually need to send an email from a certain account (such as I have to do all the time with, say, an UNSUBSCRIBE request to a LISTSERV) I actually have to make a long distance phone call to the ISP just to be able to talk SMTP to its outging mail server! You all know the story. Unless your configuration is different from most people's, or you have some clout with your local sysadmin, you can't send emails from your work account unless you're at work (or dialed-in to work), and you can't send emails from your home account unless you're dialed in at home. This is something that seems to affect everybody EXCEPT spammers- they always find an open relay somewhere. And we've gotten so used to this that we think this is normal! That isn't the only side effect of technological countermeasures. If your ISP is determined to be a spamhaus, it can get the "Internet death penalty" and you are SOL. There is also a growing trend for ISPs (especially the big unresponsive ones, who view even the possibility of spam as a threat to their bottom line) to take it upon themselves to apply the death penalty- they simply block all incoming mail from certain domains and "solve" the problem before it has a chance to start. Things are already progressing to the point where the reliability of email sent from point A to B will no longer be something you can take for granted. This sort of reminds me of the way we lost the payphone to the drug dealer. Remember when payphones took incoming calls? It was great! They don't anymore, because a technological countermeasure was taken to prevent drug dealers from being able to pick up ringing payphones. There had already been legislative countermeasures in place to the drug trade, but the technological countermeasure was the first to affect all payphone users in general. My grandmother was stuck at a bus station for six hours once. I forget the details of the story, except that it involved a payphone not ringing.
(This probably isn't relevant, but in the time I wrote this, I received three spam emails.)
Northern Caucasus! Not Northern Caucasians!!! Although I'm sure they lost more than a few Caucasians too.
Still, this is a pretty impressive quote for a food product that is mostly used to fill up bomb shelters.
When I hear of 17x Jupiter size planets or other stories too amazing to be true, the simplest explanation is that they aren't.
17 Jupiter masses might sound impressive but is not very amazing. Assuming that the thing is a Jupiter-like object of metallic hydrogen with the same physical properties as the metallic hydrogen in Jupiter, then its radius is the cube root of 17 or about 2.6 Jupiter radii.
So what?
What IS amazing is that we can tell it's there at all. A scale model of the earth's surroundings, with the earth itself reduced to the size of a pea (5 mm), would have the moon about 15 cm away (diameter 1.3 mm). The sun would be the size of a beach ball (diameter 55 cm) and it would be 60 m away.
At this scale, the nearest star (Proxima Centauri, the smallest member of the Alpha Centauri triple star system) would be a grapefruit-sized object lying at a distance of 15600 km (9700 miles), somewhere in China perhaps.
So the fact that they can detect planets at all is really, really impressive. Naturally the first ones they will find will all be Jupiter-like. But there is no reason to think that all extrasolar planets are gas giants; if this solar system is at all representative of solar systems in general, there are probably as many terrestrial planets as gaseous ones.
Carl Sagan is "guilty of perpetuating this farce of searching for life using the most unlikely method possible"...? How do you figure that?
And what would you propose as a more efficient method of searching for extraterrestrial life? Running around chasing UFOs?
SETI might have a low probability of success but it is arguably not zero.
The author of the essay you're linking to at teleport.com (John T. Boatwright) has been making a fool of himself for a long time on USENET. My favorite idea of his was when he claimed through Biblical analysis that God specifically prophesized ICBM technology. It's on his web page somewhere.
The ZX81 had a 40x25 screen and the memory for this came right out of the 1024 byte RAM. They played tricks to conserve memory; the memory wasn't a flat 40x25 array of bytes, but was stored as a list of variable-length strings of character information, each row starting from the left and ending at the last non-whitespace character on the row.
They had a whole chapter on the zany stuff you could expect as the memory ran out. The sample program to demonstrate this began with this line:
Slashdot Mirror
'Nuff said.
The trends he is making fun of are the corporatization of culture and the rise of state-sponsored religious conformity within it. Microsoft is the ultimate icon of large powerful corporations. He wasn't really referring to Microsoft per se, but for what it stands for. The fact that the head of Microsoft personally doesn't like to spend his valuable time in church is an unfortunate but irrelevant detail.
This is the kind of statement people make when they just look at a plot of points on a graph and make bland predictions without thinking through the physical reality behind the data.
Things larger than insects are easier to make than things smaller than atoms. The same trends will not necessarily apply just because silicon wasn't used in early computers.
Probability that alien broadcasts of some sort are striking the earth during the present era and are theoretically detectable: p0 Amount of radio data available for analysis in a fully comprehensive search with no limits to the computing power thrown at the problem: N bits per year
Amount of data analyzable with current computing power: r bits per year
Therefore probability of detection is p=p0*(r/N).
If r doubles, then p doubles (unless r approaches N. Therefore, assuming that r/N is small, Moore's Law says that the probability of detection doubles every 18 months. Duh. This is like saying if 20 million people download SETI@home this year instead of 10 million, the chance of detecting ET doubles. Similarly, if I buy two lottery tickets instead of one, my chance of winning the lottery doubles.
The more important term is p0. It is probably smaller than r/N.
THE RECANTATION OF GALILEO GALILEI^H^H^H^H ED FELTEN
I, Ed Felten, Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, of Princeton, aged forty-something years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Record Industry Lawyers, Inquisitors general against heretical Fair-Use and Digital Piracy throughout the whole American Republic, having before my eyes and touching with my hands, a printed copy of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, written by Corporate Lobbyists and duly ratified without question or concern by their paid Representatives in Congress -- swear that I have always believed, do now believe, and by the entertainment industry's help will for the future believe, all that is held, litigated, and proxy-legislated by the Recording Artists of America ("RIAA") and the Motion Picture Association of America ("MPAA").
But whereas -- after a threat had been legally intimated to me by these powerful Corporate Plaintiffs, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that a digital watermark may be effectively removed from a digital audio signal, and that the resulting signal shall suffer no loss of fidelity or audio quality relative to the original while yet removing the said watermark sufficiently to prevent its detection by SDMI-compliant devices, and that I may hold, defend, publish, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally, in a technical scientific journal, or at a scientific proceeding, the said doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that peer-reviewed scientific disclosure of the said doctrine was contrary to the fair provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act -- I wrote and printed a scientific paper in which I discuss this doctrine already condemned in great technical detail, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favor, without presenting any viable solution to the resulting attendant Question of how Powerful Corporations will be able to extract Payment from individual Consumers for the same song, album, or movie Many Many Times; and for this cause I have been pronounced by the Legal Office of the aforementioned Plaintiffs to be vehemently suspected of HERESY, that is to say, of having held and believed that legitimate scientific Research does not constitute criminal activity under any reasonable legal Standard, that intellectual Freedom and open scientific Debate is vital to the future of a Democracy, and that free speech as guaranteed in the Constitution is more inviolate than a fucking stupid law enacted solely to protect corporate profit margins by muzzling all those who would dare to point out any technical shortcomings in poorly conceived half-assed industry copy-protection schemes:
Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all other litigious Corporations with well-financed teams of Attorneys, this strong suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect whatsoever contrary to the said RIAA and MPAA; and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or other legitimate scientific researcher suspected of similar heresy, I will denounce him to the high-powered Legal Departments of these two corporate Entities, or to the Inquisitor and ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfill and observe in their integrity all gag orders that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by the RIAA and MPAA. And, in the event of my contravening, (which God forbid) any of these my promises, protestations, and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, general and particular, against such delinquents. So help me America, and this flag that stands for it, which I touch with my hands. I, the said Ed Felten, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration, and recited it word for word in Pittsburgh, PA, in the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop, this twenty-sixth day of June, 2001.
I trust what you say is true. It still doesn't affect my original point that chess isn't in a good problem domain for application of neural networks in their current forms. People are not neural networks.
Human players bring intelligent knowledge to the table (accumulated by humanity over centuries, no less) about chess strategy ("strategery" as W would say) that neural networks don't incorporate well on their own. People like to think of the human brain as a sort of big neural network with 10^12 nodes but NN models are only inspired by the brain. They miss a lot of subtleties that the brain has. A neural network that big wouldn't necessarily play chess very well at all. Not by itself, anyway.
Maybe incorporating a NN into a larger algorithm with more conventional modules in it (brute force, heuristic analysis, etc.) would be interesting. A NN might be capable of assisting an overall algorithm in making thousands of small atomic decisions per move, like whether to prune individual branch searches. Humans are clearly making decisions at some points in their analyses that aren't trivially duplicated in conventional von Neumann paradigms because they're hard to define. (Too much "fuzzy math"!) Like, everybody knows you don't do things like immediately start pushing the king out into the center of the board starting on move 2. A blind brute force attack will spend time searching unpromising territory like that. (Yeah I know that's a bad example because they all use opening books but you get the point.) How do you tell a computer how to recognize a stupid looking branch? They usually build a heuristic evaluation function with lots of IF statements in it, but they tend to be brittle. It may be possible to convert the problem into many smaller subproblems of recognition, and then you might be able to apply a neural network to that. But it isn't necessarily clear how you would do it.
Yeah, I agree that this is what humans do. But that isn't quite the same aspect of human thought processing that a neural network seeks to model as an abstraction. What you're describing is more along the lines of what conventional AI tries to recreate in expert systems and rules-based processing. As you play chess and you keep playing long enough to be good at it, you develop a more and more elaborate heuristic analysis that you subconsciously apply to every move. You learn to avoid doubling pawns, you squirrel your king away, you connect your rooks, etc. You're probably conscious of most of the heuristics you're applying, but not necessarily all of them. As you get better, your heuristic evaluation of chessboard positions gets more sophisticated. Now at some point, some neural-network-style pattern recognition has to happen when you make your actual move- you have to recognize a move that looks better to you than the 30 other possible moves. But you're not simply looking at the raw images of 31 possible chessboards. You're applying a logical layer first with all these complex heuristic rules embedded in it. It isn't clear how you would prefilter a vectorized chessboard through all this rules analysis before applying it as the input to a neural network. (Well, it's probably possible, but it certainly isn't trivial.) That's why neural networks can't play chess. Conventional-style AI systems can play it decently well but AI also complements brute-force attacks and the two are much easier to combine programatically.
If you read the literature on neural networks you will find that chess and strategy games are usually cited as the stereotypical problem domain that a neural net is LEAST suited for. They're good for automation of such tasks as recognizing faces, patterns, applying rudimentary common sense in fuzzy, ill-defined situations, that kind of thing. Not problems like chess that are so well-defined and easily attacked by brute force computation. The same goes for genetic algorithms. You can usually, at least in theory, simulate any genetic algorithm with a neural network and vice versa. Neither approach works well on chess. The fuzziness and adaptability that are the prized characteristics of these systems are simply not very useful for playing chess! (Not that it might not be interesting, maybe, to try training a neural net to play chess, to see what mistakes it makes compared to a human beginner. But it wouldn't play a very decent game.)
Remember, a human grandmaster's brain operates on principles which at least served as the inspiration for neural networks. The best chess players that the entire neural paradigm can offer are not neural networks at all, but humans such as Kasparov. And these guys are now routinely beaten by conventional von-Neumann devices that simply carry out brute-force analyses of the board.
The most any analog device can hope for in a chess match against a digital computer- whether truly analog, such as a human brain, or artificial, such as a digitally simulated analog neural network- is to exploit the horizon effect (where the digital algorithm explores all branches up to N moves ahead, and remains oblivious to traps that lie waiting at N+2 moves). The horizon effect strikes digital computing paradigms rather abruptly and can become useful to you in the endgame when there's only a few pieces left on the board and it's easy to see that far ahead. But it's a rare analog processor that can even see halfway to the horizon during the middlegame. Frankly I don't see how Kasparov lasted as long as he did.
Although I don't see why matter has to be "diamond-like" once it's been determined that it is not metallic. Why can't they just compare it to glass?
The Physical Review Letters article might be worth reading but the SciAm blurb is a badly misleading popularization. People are going to think neutron stars are made of ordinary carbon diamond- which is the worst possible impression to give. It's so bad it's not even wrong! Neutron stars are far more interesting than diamonds are. You would never find anything resembling ordinary matter (atoms, nuclei, shells, etc.) in a neutron star, or even in a white dwarf.
Huh? For years homophobes have been screaming that nobody has found a "gay gene" so therefore homosexuality is not biological in origin and is best treated with a swift blow to the head with a Bible. Which is pretty stupid first of all because it's an argument from ignorance, but also because there isn't necessarily a trivial mapping between a single gene and a phenotype. Now that it's becoming clear that there wouldn't necessarily be a "gay gene" anyway, I don't see what you think your point is.
Are you going to claim next that intelligence isn't genetic? Or is that a "lifestyle choice" too?
Not if the hydrogen is generated slowly and as needed. Although methanol doesn't like being shot at either.
First of all it's F=ma.
Second, F=ma is WRONG. It is a non-relativistic equation and only applies to low velocities. The more accurate version is F=dp/dt where p is momentum, i.e. p=m*v/sqrt(1-v*v/c*c). Physics actually considers momentum to be a quantity that is more fundamental than velocity.
Third, you implicitly seem to be confusing fundamental with primitive. Why would high-tech progress imply that we wouldn't still be using F=ma anymore? I guess I don't see what is so "amazing" about our continuing to use it. Even though it's wrong, it's still accurate enough for most human endeavors which take place at small fractions of c.
You never heard of the "New Hackers Dictionary" by Eric S Raymond?
Oh give it up already. In common usage nowadays, the word "hacker" means, pretty much, "using computers for criminal activity". Most people have no idea of the former (correct) meaning of the word. Curse the credulous, stupid media and the technically illiterate public if you want, but that's how the language has evolved. "Real" hackers get so upset about this, but it's just a frigging word. Abandon it. It's a lost cause. Call yourselves something else. This is one battle the hacker community will not win.
Soon we're all going to have ear infections that prevent us from hearing music unless we've paid for it!
Anti-spam measures can either be based in legislation or in technology. From the amount of spam I get on a regular basis, I can only assume that all technological countermeasures to spam have failed miserably or else I wouldn't be getting so much. It is just too easy for spammers to foil even the most sophisticated of them, even when they are put in place by people who obviously have double the IQs of the spammers.
Now politicians are generally clueless when it comes to technology, and they will inevitably enact legislative barriers to spam that will have unwanted side effects for the rest of us who have been following the rules all this time. (Witness the clueless European reaction to "cybercrime" that will make it illegal, say, for a sysadmin to run a portscanner on his own server unless he hires an expensive trained monkey with a government-issued license to do it.) But it isn't as if technological countermeasures to spam can't also have the type of unwanted side effect that people rightly fear will result from arrogant legislative action.
Here's an example: Remember when the Internet was full of open mail relays? I had several mail accounts on several different servers, and I could send an email from any of them no matter where I was connecting from. Not anymore. Thanks to spammers, the days of open relays are gone. And this is a real pity, since relays are the kind of technology that are especially suited to the Internet, but that can't be used in a world full of people who like to take advantage and ruin things for everybody. Now, I can still POP my email from anywhere and read it, but if I actually need to send an email from a certain account (such as I have to do all the time with, say, an UNSUBSCRIBE request to a LISTSERV) I actually have to make a long distance phone call to the ISP just to be able to talk SMTP to its outging mail server! You all know the story. Unless your configuration is different from most people's, or you have some clout with your local sysadmin, you can't send emails from your work account unless you're at work (or dialed-in to work), and you can't send emails from your home account unless you're dialed in at home. This is something that seems to affect everybody EXCEPT spammers- they always find an open relay somewhere. And we've gotten so used to this that we think this is normal!
That isn't the only side effect of technological countermeasures. If your ISP is determined to be a spamhaus, it can get the "Internet death penalty" and you are SOL. There is also a growing trend for ISPs (especially the big unresponsive ones, who view even the possibility of spam as a threat to their bottom line) to take it upon themselves to apply the death penalty- they simply block all incoming mail from certain domains and "solve" the problem before it has a chance to start. Things are already progressing to the point where the reliability of email sent from point A to B will no longer be something you can take for granted.
This sort of reminds me of the way we lost the payphone to the drug dealer. Remember when payphones took incoming calls? It was great! They don't anymore, because a technological countermeasure was taken to prevent drug dealers from being able to pick up ringing payphones. There had already been legislative countermeasures in place to the drug trade, but the technological countermeasure was the first to affect all payphone users in general. My grandmother was stuck at a bus station for six hours once. I forget the details of the story, except that it involved a payphone not ringing.
(This probably isn't relevant, but in the time I wrote this, I received three spam emails.)
Northern Caucasus! Not Northern Caucasians!!! Although I'm sure they lost more than a few Caucasians too. Still, this is a pretty impressive quote for a food product that is mostly used to fill up bomb shelters.
When I hear of 17x Jupiter size planets or other stories too amazing to be true, the simplest explanation is that they aren't.
17 Jupiter masses might sound impressive but is not very amazing. Assuming that the thing is a Jupiter-like object of metallic hydrogen with the same physical properties as the metallic hydrogen in Jupiter, then its radius is the cube root of 17 or about 2.6 Jupiter radii.
So what?
What IS amazing is that we can tell it's there at all. A scale model of the earth's surroundings, with the earth itself reduced to the size of a pea (5 mm), would have the moon about 15 cm away (diameter 1.3 mm). The sun would be the size of a beach ball (diameter 55 cm) and it would be 60 m away.
At this scale, the nearest star (Proxima Centauri, the smallest member of the Alpha Centauri triple star system) would be a grapefruit-sized object lying at a distance of 15600 km (9700 miles), somewhere in China perhaps.
So the fact that they can detect planets at all is really, really impressive. Naturally the first ones they will find will all be Jupiter-like. But there is no reason to think that all extrasolar planets are gas giants; if this solar system is at all representative of solar systems in general, there are probably as many terrestrial planets as gaseous ones.
Carl Sagan is "guilty of perpetuating this farce of searching for life using the most unlikely method possible" ...? How do you figure that?
And what would you propose as a more efficient method of searching for extraterrestrial life? Running around chasing UFOs?
SETI might have a low probability of success but it is arguably not zero.
I remember reading that the first run of 386 chips in 1988 had to be recalled too, for some reason.
The author of the essay you're linking to at teleport.com (John T. Boatwright) has been making a fool of himself for a long time on USENET. My favorite idea of his was when he claimed through Biblical analysis that God specifically prophesized ICBM technology. It's on his web page somewhere.
The ZX81 had a 40x25 screen and the memory for this came right out of the 1024 byte RAM. They played tricks to conserve memory; the memory wasn't a flat 40x25 array of bytes, but was stored as a list of variable-length strings of character information, each row starting from the left and ending at the last non-whitespace character on the row.
They had a whole chapter on the zany stuff you could expect as the memory ran out. The sample program to demonstrate this began with this line:
10 DIM A(140)
and it was all downhill from there.