I think that in the future AI lawyers will become an essential part of our world. The legal system is too complicated and counterintuitive for the average person to understand without undue effort. It would be nice to be able to feed a document into an expert system and get a reasonably simple explanation, or to describe a planned activity such as starting a certain kind of business and get a reliable opinion on the chance of it being legal. Such a system could keep a lot of small business people from wandering into legal minefields, and might even lighten the load on the tort system.
Off on a tangent, it's sad to see anyone substitute the term "IP" for "idea," It's sort of like tv people referring to places in the world as "destinations," as if they exist mainly from the travel industry's point of view. Ideas are not property and never have been. People only "hold" patents, trademarks and copyrights, which give them rights temporarily granted by the government. They never "own" anything, which is why people who infringe their rights aren't "stealing" anything. The distinction is important because thinking of ideas as property lets the rights-control industry play the part of the little old lady running after the purse snatcher. The ideas of ownership and theft are deeply ingrained in our culture. Everybody can identify with them. But they just don't apply.
The system discussed in the article involves a fleet of airships communicating with an array of sensors installed inside cargo containers so they can scan the contents of the containers. Over-the-horizon radar may be an interesting subject, but it's not a cheap alternative way to do this and has nothing to do with the article.
Notice that the article says the past five years, not the past year as the poster misquotes. Not to poke holes in their numbers, but here are some historical US business failure statistics randomly grabbed from Google. I have read that 80% of new businesses fail in the first 2 years, 90% if they are restaurants. So if the statistics include startups that are destined to fail naturally, it's not as significant as it sounds.
As interesting as the e-voting scandal is, I've been convinced that the US government has been hacked for years. People whose main goals in life are money and power tend to gravitate naturally toward positions of authority. They figure out how systems really work as opposed to how they are supposed to work. In our political system, people with a lot of money compete with each other to get politicians elected and influence their actions. Every president since Harry Truman has been the candidate with the most campaign money. Al Gore came close to breaking the pattern, but no cigar. Democracy in America works very well for the people who are rich enough to participate in it.
As cool as this hack is, and I personally think it is pretty cool, for my money an old 3Com Audrey makes a much better media system UI. The Audrey is a diskless "internet appliance" from a few years ago that failed in the market. Originally about $500, they are now commonly available on EBay for about $80-90. The screen is larger and you can do a lot more things with it.
The Audrey looks like a Jetsons style Etch-a-sketch. It was designed to sit on the kitchen table and do email, read the morning news, look up recipes on the Internet, stuff like that. It has has a 7" diagonal 640x480 color touch screen, wireless keyboard, some specialized buttons on the front, 2 USB ports, built in speakers, microphone and audio jack. There is no disk drive; it uses 32 Mb RAM and a 32 Mb Compact Flash card that holds the OS (QNX, an embedded microkernel).
A thriving Audrey hacking community has evolved; people have replaced the original software with things like mp3 players, a better web browser, home automation stuff, etc. I own five of them, which I use to stream music all over the house. The tiny built-in speakers are crappy but the sound card is decent, and sounds fine plugged into a stereo or boom box. My winter project is going to be to implement a home intercom system using my network of Audreys. I can't say enough good things about this cool toy!
Interesting. Nice to see some intelligent comments (also the previous long post). I have posted info about Gas Core Nuclear Reactor rockets before and the reactions are generally of the "This is nuts" calibre with no analysis.
I too wondered about the containment of the UF6. The article a buffer gas that keeps the reactant away from the inside of the quartz vessel, but it doesn't specify what the buffer gas would be. I keep looking for more information and critical assessments of what the real engineering challenges would be.
Chernobyl had nothing to do with the merits or drawbacks of nuclear rockets. The author was just injecting his own perspective about the danger levels of various things. But if you do a little arithmetic, 100 of the rockets described in the article would have to blow up in the atmosphere to release as much radioactive material as a single 1952 bomb test mentioned.
It's kind of too bad that this article has such a long preface before getting to the meat of the matter. The resistance to anything nuclear is tremendous, regardless of whether people actually think through their objections. A poorly worded sentence shouldn't be an excuse not to read enough to evaluate the idea. "Zuper-nuts" is not an evaluation.
In the one episode of Scare Tactics that I saw, they convinced a chimney cleaner that he was confronting a murderer who had stashed a decomposing body in the chimney. The poor guy was plainly terrified, and took it amazingly well when they told him it was just a setup. Had it been me, I think I would have been mad enough to break a few skulls before calming down. That one episode was enough to convince me that at least a few TV executives are completely insane.
Nuclear rockets would completely solve the supply problem for orbital stations. Before you knee-jerk on the word "nuclear" read this fascinating engineering scheme for a fully reusable Saturn-V size nuclear rocket, using a Gas Core Nuclear Reactor (GCNR) engine. It's a 12-part article, but skip the first 6 sections if you just want to know how it works. Briefly, gaseous nuclear fuel encapsulated in a light-bulb-like quartz vessel heats up to about 25,000 degrees C, emitting intense ultraviolet light that heats hydrogen flowing around the outside of the bulb. The superheated, non-radioactive hydrogen then jets out of the rocket nozzle. The nuclear fuel stays confined and nothing ever touches it.
Such a rocket could lift 2 million pounds of payload into low orbit (compared to the Shuttle's 60,000 pound capacity) and return with 2 million pounds of cargo to a powered landing rather than an unpowered glide. There is very little information about this technology on the web, but I believe the big aerospace firms are looking into GCNR as the heavy lift engine of the future.
Honorable mention should go to The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle. Highways on the Mote planet have no lanes or traffic regulations, because the inhabitants are innately good at spur-of-the-moment decisions. Pedestrians walk right through traffic and it flows smoothly around them. When real cars become intelligent enough, they will be able to drive anywhere safely, with no help from the roadway.
Instead of a highway that communicates with the car, which would mean the car could only auto-drive on intelligent highways, I would rather put the money into making the cars smart enough to drive anywhere and let the roads be dumb.
This goes along with the idea of making wheelchairs that can walk up and down stairs, and giving them out to handicapped people, rather than building freaking ramps everywhere.
We Americans have to face the fact that we no longer live in a democratic system, we live under an Oligarchy. When the movements of the big-money people produce side-effects that benefit the citizens (or "consumers" as we're now called), it's cause for celebration.
Check out this fascinating detailed design for a completely reusable Saturn-V size rocket, powered by a Gas Core Nuclear Reactor engine. The engine emits non-radioactive hydrogen propellant. The rocket described would be able to lift 1000 tons of cargo into orbit and return to a powered landing, for only 5% of today's cost per pound.
I know "nuclear" is still a dirty word, but the gas core reactor design is a completely different approach than a big pile of plutonium. Very promising in terms of power, safety and cost.
It's a long article, 14 parts, but well worth reading. Skip the first 5 or 6 sections if you just want to know how the thing works.
As long as the outdated concept of buying copies of music lives on, we will continue to fight the battle of the recording industry's rights vs everybody else's rights.
Anybody who thinks musicians make money from sales of copies of their music should read this detailed explanation of how recording contracts work. Briefly, musicians generally do not make a dime from the sales of CDs because standard recording contracts are written such that all the expenses of production, manufacturing, marketing and distribution get taken out of the musician's share of the money. So when you read that a musician gets 50 cents per CD or 10 cents per CD or whatever, that's their share BEFORE all the expenses get taken out. After the record company accountants do their job there is usually Zero actual money paid to the musician. I honestly don't know if online music sales work this way, but I can't see why they wouldn't. Record companies don't give up revenue streams to artists. They don't have to.
Working musicians make their money by performing, just like they always have, just like they did in the centuries before the recording business existed. What musicians get out of record sales is Exposure, which gets them more fame and better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether you buy music on CD or listen to it on the radio or download it, paid or not, it doesn't matter. It only matters to record companies. Keeping them in business is the only reason to pay for copies of music.
We could continue to perpetuate the pay-per-copy mentality, paying not just for the music but for the enforcement of the various damn-the-side-effects laws that have been written to protect the record industry, and to live with all those side effects on how we personally use technology. Or we could evolve to a situation where musicians simply release copies of their songs to the public to get the exposure they want without signing away any rights.
Check out this excellent article about Gas Core Nuclear Reactor (GCNR) rocket technology. A GCNR rocket would be fully reusable and would emit no nuclear waste -- only superheated, non-radioactive hydrogen. The multi-engined rocket could be designed to vent its own spent nuclear fuel during its orbit circularization burn, a routine maneuver that changes the flight path from parabolic to circular. The exhaust, travelling at 30km/sec, would escape the Earth's gravity and could easily be aimed to hit the sun. The two million pound payload capacity of such a rocket (not gross weight or fuel, payload weight) would make it highly feasible to haul up a few hundred pounds of earthbound nuclear waste per trip as incidental cargo and inject it into the exhaust.
Even if you don't believe in this particular approach (or don't want to bother to learn about it, so you have no meaningful opinion), does it really seem likely that the human race will continue to have a problem getting things off the planet for the next two hundred thousand years??? I find it ludicrous that people have spent so much time and energy dreaming up ground-based facilities to last that long.
At best any ultra-long-term ground storage plans are incredibly pessimistic, presuming that some natural or man-made global tragedy will prevent the evolution of practical, large-scale space flight. We're so close.
Just like Paramount shut down Star Drek, an unbelievably funny musical parody of Star Trek by David Rodwin. It ran for a year and a half in Seattle. No matter how funny, no matter how popular, no matter anything, it's all about money. Unfortunately, pieces of entertainment are no longer artistic works that become part of our culture. They are only "properties." We are allowed to "consume" them for as long as they're profitable, and that's all. Then they get locked away and carefully guarded in case they might someday be profitable again.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that in the future AI lawyers will become an essential part of our world. The legal system is too complicated and counterintuitive for the average person to understand without undue effort. It would be nice to be able to feed a document into an expert system and get a reasonably simple explanation, or to describe a planned activity such as starting a certain kind of business and get a reliable opinion on the chance of it being legal. Such a system could keep a lot of small business people from wandering into legal minefields, and might even lighten the load on the tort system.
Off on a tangent, it's sad to see anyone substitute the term "IP" for "idea," It's sort of like tv people referring to places in the world as "destinations," as if they exist mainly from the travel industry's point of view. Ideas are not property and never have been. People only "hold" patents, trademarks and copyrights, which give them rights temporarily granted by the government. They never "own" anything, which is why people who infringe their rights aren't "stealing" anything. The distinction is important because thinking of ideas as property lets the rights-control industry play the part of the little old lady running after the purse snatcher. The ideas of ownership and theft are deeply ingrained in our culture. Everybody can identify with them. But they just don't apply.
The system discussed in the article involves a fleet of airships communicating with an array of sensors installed inside cargo containers so they can scan the contents of the containers. Over-the-horizon radar may be an interesting subject, but it's not a cheap alternative way to do this and has nothing to do with the article.
I call it just being an asshole.
I'll still go with the old #1 from Dave Letterman: "Mob corpse de-bloater."
Notice that the article says the past five years, not the past year as the poster misquotes. Not to poke holes in their numbers, but here are some historical US business failure statistics randomly grabbed from Google. I have read that 80% of new businesses fail in the first 2 years, 90% if they are restaurants. So if the statistics include startups that are destined to fail naturally, it's not as significant as it sounds.
If you are very quiet and listen really hard, you can almost hear the Content Industry picking up the phone to call Orrin Hatch.
As interesting as the e-voting scandal is, I've been convinced that the US government has been hacked for years. People whose main goals in life are money and power tend to gravitate naturally toward positions of authority. They figure out how systems really work as opposed to how they are supposed to work. In our political system, people with a lot of money compete with each other to get politicians elected and influence their actions. Every president since Harry Truman has been the candidate with the most campaign money. Al Gore came close to breaking the pattern, but no cigar. Democracy in America works very well for the people who are rich enough to participate in it.
As cool as this hack is, and I personally think it is pretty cool, for my money an old 3Com Audrey makes a much better media system UI. The Audrey is a diskless "internet appliance" from a few years ago that failed in the market. Originally about $500, they are now commonly available on EBay for about $80-90. The screen is larger and you can do a lot more things with it.
The Audrey looks like a Jetsons style Etch-a-sketch. It was designed to sit on the kitchen table and do email, read the morning news, look up recipes on the Internet, stuff like that. It has has a 7" diagonal 640x480 color touch screen, wireless keyboard, some specialized buttons on the front, 2 USB ports, built in speakers, microphone and audio jack. There is no disk drive; it uses 32 Mb RAM and a 32 Mb Compact Flash card that holds the OS (QNX, an embedded microkernel).
A thriving Audrey hacking community has evolved; people have replaced the original software with things like mp3 players, a better web browser, home automation stuff, etc. I own five of them, which I use to stream music all over the house. The tiny built-in speakers are crappy but the sound card is decent, and sounds fine plugged into a stereo or boom box. My winter project is going to be to implement a home intercom system using my network of Audreys. I can't say enough good things about this cool toy!
Interesting. Nice to see some intelligent comments (also the previous long post). I have posted info about Gas Core Nuclear Reactor rockets before and the reactions are generally of the "This is nuts" calibre with no analysis.
I too wondered about the containment of the UF6. The article a buffer gas that keeps the reactant away from the inside of the quartz vessel, but it doesn't specify what the buffer gas would be. I keep looking for more information and critical assessments of what the real engineering challenges would be.
Chernobyl had nothing to do with the merits or drawbacks of nuclear rockets. The author was just injecting his own perspective about the danger levels of various things. But if you do a little arithmetic, 100 of the rockets described in the article would have to blow up in the atmosphere to release as much radioactive material as a single 1952 bomb test mentioned.
It's kind of too bad that this article has such a long preface before getting to the meat of the matter. The resistance to anything nuclear is tremendous, regardless of whether people actually think through their objections. A poorly worded sentence shouldn't be an excuse not to read enough to evaluate the idea. "Zuper-nuts" is not an evaluation.
In the one episode of Scare Tactics that I saw, they convinced a chimney cleaner that he was confronting a murderer who had stashed a decomposing body in the chimney. The poor guy was plainly terrified, and took it amazingly well when they told him it was just a setup. Had it been me, I think I would have been mad enough to break a few skulls before calming down. That one episode was enough to convince me that at least a few TV executives are completely insane.
In other words, you didn't look at the article and you have no meaningful opinion. Way to go!
Nuclear rockets would completely solve the supply problem for orbital stations. Before you knee-jerk on the word "nuclear" read this fascinating engineering scheme for a fully reusable Saturn-V size nuclear rocket, using a Gas Core Nuclear Reactor (GCNR) engine. It's a 12-part article, but skip the first 6 sections if you just want to know how it works. Briefly, gaseous nuclear fuel encapsulated in a light-bulb-like quartz vessel heats up to about 25,000 degrees C, emitting intense ultraviolet light that heats hydrogen flowing around the outside of the bulb. The superheated, non-radioactive hydrogen then jets out of the rocket nozzle. The nuclear fuel stays confined and nothing ever touches it.
Such a rocket could lift 2 million pounds of payload into low orbit (compared to the Shuttle's 60,000 pound capacity) and return with 2 million pounds of cargo to a powered landing rather than an unpowered glide. There is very little information about this technology on the web, but I believe the big aerospace firms are looking into GCNR as the heavy lift engine of the future.
Honorable mention should go to The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle. Highways on the Mote planet have no lanes or traffic regulations, because the inhabitants are innately good at spur-of-the-moment decisions. Pedestrians walk right through traffic and it flows smoothly around them. When real cars become intelligent enough, they will be able to drive anywhere safely, with no help from the roadway.
destroyed with the first SUV driver that's constantly swerving...
Or the first drunk, crazed or inept driver of a fuel-efficient hybrid, motorcycle, hovercar, or any sort of vehicle whatsoever.
Give up the SUV rant, it's just silly in this context.
Instead of a highway that communicates with the car, which would mean the car could only auto-drive on intelligent highways, I would rather put the money into making the cars smart enough to drive anywhere and let the roads be dumb.
This goes along with the idea of making wheelchairs that can walk up and down stairs, and giving them out to handicapped people, rather than building freaking ramps everywhere.
First technological hurdle: develop pressurized space codpiece. There are places where you just can't have everything skintight.
Indirectly, but yes.
We Americans have to face the fact that we no longer live in a democratic system, we live under an Oligarchy. When the movements of the big-money people produce side-effects that benefit the citizens (or "consumers" as we're now called), it's cause for celebration.
Check out this fascinating detailed design for a completely reusable Saturn-V size rocket, powered by a Gas Core Nuclear Reactor engine. The engine emits non-radioactive hydrogen propellant. The rocket described would be able to lift 1000 tons of cargo into orbit and return to a powered landing, for only 5% of today's cost per pound.
I know "nuclear" is still a dirty word, but the gas core reactor design is a completely different approach than a big pile of plutonium. Very promising in terms of power, safety and cost.
It's a long article, 14 parts, but well worth reading. Skip the first 5 or 6 sections if you just want to know how the thing works.
As long as the outdated concept of buying copies of music lives on, we will continue to fight the battle of the recording industry's rights vs everybody else's rights.
Anybody who thinks musicians make money from sales of copies of their music should read this detailed explanation of how recording contracts work. Briefly, musicians generally do not make a dime from the sales of CDs because standard recording contracts are written such that all the expenses of production, manufacturing, marketing and distribution get taken out of the musician's share of the money. So when you read that a musician gets 50 cents per CD or 10 cents per CD or whatever, that's their share BEFORE all the expenses get taken out. After the record company accountants do their job there is usually Zero actual money paid to the musician. I honestly don't know if online music sales work this way, but I can't see why they wouldn't. Record companies don't give up revenue streams to artists. They don't have to.
Working musicians make their money by performing, just like they always have, just like they did in the centuries before the recording business existed. What musicians get out of record sales is Exposure, which gets them more fame and better paying gigs. They get the same exposure whether you buy music on CD or listen to it on the radio or download it, paid or not, it doesn't matter. It only matters to record companies. Keeping them in business is the only reason to pay for copies of music.
We could continue to perpetuate the pay-per-copy mentality, paying not just for the music but for the enforcement of the various damn-the-side-effects laws that have been written to protect the record industry, and to live with all those side effects on how we personally use technology. Or we could evolve to a situation where musicians simply release copies of their songs to the public to get the exposure they want without signing away any rights.
Check out this excellent article about Gas Core Nuclear Reactor (GCNR) rocket technology. A GCNR rocket would be fully reusable and would emit no nuclear waste -- only superheated, non-radioactive hydrogen. The multi-engined rocket could be designed to vent its own spent nuclear fuel during its orbit circularization burn, a routine maneuver that changes the flight path from parabolic to circular. The exhaust, travelling at 30km/sec, would escape the Earth's gravity and could easily be aimed to hit the sun. The two million pound payload capacity of such a rocket (not gross weight or fuel, payload weight) would make it highly feasible to haul up a few hundred pounds of earthbound nuclear waste per trip as incidental cargo and inject it into the exhaust.
Even if you don't believe in this particular approach (or don't want to bother to learn about it, so you have no meaningful opinion), does it really seem likely that the human race will continue to have a problem getting things off the planet for the next two hundred thousand years??? I find it ludicrous that people have spent so much time and energy dreaming up ground-based facilities to last that long.
At best any ultra-long-term ground storage plans are incredibly pessimistic, presuming that some natural or man-made global tragedy will prevent the evolution of practical, large-scale space flight. We're so close.
He's more interested in football.
Many's the time hundreds of screaming, tech-savvy teenage girls have surrounded me. Usually I wake up right about then. Damn.
Just like Paramount shut down Star Drek , an unbelievably funny musical parody of Star Trek by David Rodwin. It ran for a year and a half in Seattle. No matter how funny, no matter how popular, no matter anything, it's all about money. Unfortunately, pieces of entertainment are no longer artistic works that become part of our culture. They are only "properties." We are allowed to "consume" them for as long as they're profitable, and that's all. Then they get locked away and carefully guarded in case they might someday be profitable again.