Hmm, it could be that the ball lightning didn't actually pass through the outside of the plane, but formed inside the plane. Maybe lightning could vaporize silicon from the inside of one of the glass windows. The passenger windows in planes are usually covered by a pane of plastic, but it's not sealed around the edges, and, if the ball lightning works the way they've described, it should be able to pass around the plastic pane. Also, as far as aeroplanes and unusual effects of lightning go, I remember reading somewhere about fireballs that build up on the nosecones of planes flying through thunderstorms. Are those the same as ball lightning if what is being said about it is true? Where would the silicon come from on the nosecone of a jet? Is it fiberglass covered perhaps? Or could this be something different, like the electrical corona that sailors used to call St. Elmo's Fire. Well, anyway, there are still plenty of unexplained things out there to wonder about.
I fail to see how the use of this program to read DVD's constitutes a copyright violation (not piracy, since piracy means killing the crew of a ship and taking their possessions). Using it to copy the DVD's in a manner inconsistent with Fair Use would constitute a copyright violation. People buy DVD's to view them. Viewing the DVD's you have purchased is not a crime, no matter what method you use to view them. This brings to mind a display I saw in my schools library the other day of media through the ages. There was a sample of cuniform. One of papyrus with ideographs. A book from the late middle ages, etc. At the bottom of the display case were some samples of modern media. Spool to spool audio tape, computer tapes, floppies, zip disks, cds, etc. With them, was a plaque talking about how modern media, instead of being read directly, are experienced through some sort of intermediate device: tape recorder, tv/vcr, computer. I didn't think about that very much when I read it, but I'm thinking about it now. It can hardly be said that free access to information has been provided to people throughout the ages. In many places and times throughout history, certain groups of people (often majorities like the peasant classes in their entirety, sometimes persecuted minorities) have been denied, by law, the right to be allowed to know how to read. So, the use of law to try and control access to information that special interests (like the Roman Catholic church in the middle ages, or slave owners in the American South) want to protect is nothing new. Nonetheless, that kind of manipulation is something that only belongs in ages of barbarity. It would be nice if we could at least make a pretense of being civilized people in this day and age. It's not really very clear what this DeCSS fight is over. The people who started it obviously have some interest in controlling the media of information exchange. But people already have access to what's on DVD's by using a DVD player. So, unless there's some Master Plan (TM) that I don't know about, what they're after is some sort of Reign of Terror. "Look at what we do with people who try to steal the fire of the Gods! Gaze upon our works and tremble!!", yadda yadda yadda; you get the idea. They seem to want people to be afraid to go near their technology. Why? Well, I'd have to say that the leadership and legal departments of most corporation are Luddites. They lack the technical sophistication to understand that their dream of a media that can't be illegally copied, but can still be viewed by the consumer is a mythical creature. The only technological innovation that could make it possible is the Orwellian State. They don't have that, but they do have one that's willing to let itself be swayed, at least temporarily, by large corporate interests. It's not enough for them to get what they want, but they're sure making the attempt. Well anyway, to sum up. This isn't about violating someone's copyright, this is about having the ability to watch DVD's that you've purchased. The special interest groups for the big media companies object for some reason and are making legal waves because of it. What can we do? Wish I knew. There will probably be an appropriate legal defense fund to donate money to soon enough.
Java is unique in the sense that its specification is closed-- revisions, derivatives or descendant languages are not allowed.
I'm wondering how exactly they can enforce this. Sun has the trademark on the Java name, and copyrights on their implementations of the development kit and virtual machine, etc., which, along with the agreements that MS signed, is how Sun can restrict what Microsoft and other licencees do. But what's to stop someone who has no agreement with Sun and has not seen any of their source from creating their own implementation of Java, calling it PortaC++ or some such thing and then doing whatever they want with it? The article talks about Sun's copyright on the specification, but that's just the copyright on that particular document. I can see how that might be important to Sun (don't you just love it when you have to pay a fee to a standards organisation for every copy of an 'open' standard?), but copyrights don't mean a thing as far as creating an implementation of Java goes. Maybe a patent would cover something like that but the concept of a patent on Java seems ridiculous to me (of course, I'm not one of those brainiacs at the USTPO).
Actually, now that I think about it, Sun may have done the right thing here by denying the creation of a document whose copyright belongs to an organization of dubious motives (I view any standards organisation that sees the copyrights of the documents it maintains as a revenue stream to be dishonest if not actually criminal). The question of whether or not Sun has done the right thing will be answered by their next move. Are they going to keep trying to get an official, open standard for Java out there or are they going to hide in the corner gnawing on what they have so far and growling at passers by? Time will tell.
How recently was the Swedish state sterilizing the disabled? Just curious because, well within living memory, many US states have done the exact same thing to the mentally disabled, minority groups like American Indians, etc.
Of course, you've obviously haven't done enough research yourself. If you'd _read_ the article rather than just having the browser search it for key words you might have noticed that the article occupies five (I think it was five, might have been six) pages. The words "gay" and "god" were in the article.
It's not quite that easy to reverse engineer someone else's drug product these days. Certainly not by the next day. The company that does the actual research has a good head start because they already know how to manufacture the drug and have manufactured a fair amount of it already (how else would they get the drug product they use in trials?) This means that they already have their modified E. Coli or CHO (Chinese Hamster Ovary) cells or what have you, and they just have to set up manufacturing suites and grow the stuff (I'm pretty sure the vast majority of drugs are made this way these days). They might have genetically modified cows that produce the drug in their milk instead, but the same principle applies. In order to copy them, another company is going to have to develop their own modified cells or farm animals or steal them from the first company (which I'm sure happens a lot, but actual theft of physical property is a crime that goes beyond patents). The other thing you may not have even thought about is why drug companies ever bother to develop drugs to treat diseases or disorders that only affect a small number of people. These are called orphan drugs, they'll never make enough money (before patent protection runs out, anyway) to pay back the research costs involved in developing them. So, why do companies develop them? Is it out of the goodness of their hearts? Obviously not. The reason is that orphan drugs get government subsidies. Why did I bring that up? I just wanted to point out that the drug industry is _not_ running on free market principles by a long shot. It's regulated and subsidized and monitored. The point I'd like to make about the drug industry is that the money is there not matter what. Research gets done, money is made manufacturing drugs, people are employed. It's a fairly socialistic concept for this country, but the whole industry could be made into a government operation. Say what you will about government management, that _would_ bring costs down, and you could forget all about patents. Obviously, that's not going to happen, and it's probably not a great idea, but the point is that there are lots of ways the biomedical industry could be rearranged to work better than it does now without patents. The obvious problem is that you can't just say that an entire idustry would work better a different way and change it. That's why kludges like the modern patent system exist. Hmph, I'm a little tired, so I'm probably not making much sense.
I'll grant you your point that the Free/Open Source software community does not always independantly develop every patented algorithm it uses. However, your example of LZW compression isn't a very good one. Pretty much all the Free/Open Source software that uses LZW compression or decompression is designed that way specifically for the purpose of reading/writing file formats that have LZW compression designed into them. There's no other way to do it. You can't design any other algorithm that will do proper (note: proper) LZW compression that isn't functionally equivalent (and therefore the same as) LZW compression. So, how else are you going to write gif files (using compression, uncompressed is another issue) and have them be compatible with other gif applications? So, yes, not every patented algorithm that Free/Open Source software uses is independantly developed because how else would they follow standards? Of course, originally, most people didn't even know that LZW compression was patented (by two different companies), they just knew of the published algorithm. On the other hand, given the number of extremely broad patents being granted on obvious things these days it's very likely that a huge amount of software out there, Free/Open Source or not, has algorithms or techniques in it that are covered by a patent (probably several). It's also quite likely that in most of those cases the author of the software is quite unaware of this fact. In many of those cases, the devoloper came up with the ideas in the code independantly. In such cases, is it really reasonable to say that the party that came up with the idea independantly has stolen the other parties idea? Doesn't that provide a good example that the patent granted may not live up to the requirement of non-obviousness?
Sorry, forgot to mention. The reason I mentioned the parallel universe thing is that there are just a few little details of history that differ between the books. To quote from the author's notes for "3001: The Final Odyssey":
Obviously there is no way in which a series of four science-fiction novels, written over a periosf of more than thirty years of the most breathtaking developments in technology (especially in space exploration) and politics could be mutually consistent. As I wrote in the introduction to 2061, 'Just as 2010: Odyssey Two was not a direct sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, so this book is not a linear sequel to 2010. They must all be considered as variations on the same theme, involving many of the same characters and situations, but not necessarily happening in the same universe."
Oh, ok. I do remember that bit. I believe the crews of the ship that was hijacked to Europa (The Galaxy) had a fairly international crew with a large percent of them also being chinese. The ship that came to rescue them (The Universe) also had a large numnber of chinese in the crew, as well as a number of celebrities ( a movie star, the professor and Mary Anne... well, not really, actually a composor, a movie star, a bushy bearded science reporter type, a famous author...). Both ships were part of the private fleet of Sir Lawrence Tsung. I don't think the shark-like creature actually did any leaping until its death throes, but you're right about that. I've been working under the assumption that the corpse may have been fatal to the creature because of a handedness difference in the arrangement of its proteins. A number of the proteins that we use in our own bodies (I'm working under the assumption that ours are right handed, but I may have it backwards, IANAMB [I Am Not A Molecular Biologist]) are poison to us in their left-handed form. Or, it could have been a number of different things about the different biochemistries that killed it, right down to the oxygen in the air inside the bodies lungs (Europa didn't have much in the way of free oxygen, so all the life used some sort of anaerobic respiration, although it seemed to be a bit more efficient than the anaerobic processes used by earth life).
PS, can you tell that I've got my copy open right in front of me?:)
... in fact, having the computer output complete gibberish would be simplicity itself. I think what SpaceCadet was saying, however, is that it would be extremely hard to program a computer to break the rules of grammar well. In order to do that, the program would really and truly have to understand what it was writing. It seems it would be difficult to do that without somehow giving the program true consciousness. On the other hand, if you did that, then wouldn't you basically be forcing a slave to write short stories for you? Hmm, questions, questions.
Why would a computer need to be as big as the solar system to emulate a human brain with an neural net? The nuerons in the human brain aren't _that_ small. I don't see any reason why a piece of hardware smaller than the human brain couldn't handle the job since an artificial neuron could probably be made a lot smaller than a biological one (not to mention thousands of times faster). It sounds like you subscribe to the (in my opinion) slightly outlandish theory that the human brain doesn't operate at the level of its neurons, but in fact is some sort of giant quantum computer. Now, I won't deny that quantum effects could influence whether or not any particular neuron fires or not at a given moment and that those effects could spiral upwards (like a butterfly flapping its wings and influencing future weather) and influence the thoughts of the host brain. On the other hand, I disagree with the notion that such effects are some sort of magic spark of life and that the brain wouldn't function without them. I see no reason why you can't have an emulated brain with neurons whose weights are measured in discrete units that could think, visualize, imagine, plan, and feel emotions (although, obviously you'd have to come up with some way of simulating the effects of the various chemicals produced in the brain on those neurons) just like a normal brain. Sure, if you started an artificial brain and a real brain with matching neurons off in the exact same state and ran them with the exact same stimuli for a length of time you'd probably get a different ending stat in each one. Nevertheless, they would both react in a human manner (which would probably be to go insane considering that both brains are recieving exactly the same stimuli [which basically means that they're trapped in some sort of simulated universe where absolutely nothing they think or try to do affects what they sense with their five senses or where their body moves and what it does]). The only situation I can think of in which it wouldn't be possible to simulate a brain like this would be if we lived in a completely rigged universe. If the universe were designed in some way so that it only appeared as if our consciousness were originating from our brains while it's really transmitted from somewhere else, then maybe we couldn't simulate consciousness because we wouldn't be able to look at a working model. I'm not going to ask who rigged the universe, if indeed it is rigged, that way right now. That's way beyond the scope of the debate. But the same basic principle could apply to everything in the universe, even physics and mathematics could be based on principles that only "make sense" in a controlled, artificial environment. Anyway, I doubt it. Not neccessarily since I think it's impossible, mind you. It's just that, if it's true, there's nothing we could do about it anyway.
Oh yeah, about the solar system sized planet thing. Now _that_ would be an incredible trick. The engineering problems to overcome would be enourmous, even working under the assumption that this isn't a fully solid computer (where would you get all the mass?). In a planet sized computer emulating a human brain, signals travelling from one side of the computer to the other at the speed of light would take very roughly the same amount of time as an equivalent electro-chemical signal would take to cross a human brain. Scale that up to solar system size and it would take a day for the signal to make the equivalent journey. Actually, this has given me some pretty interesting ideas to toy with.
At least, according to "2061: Odyssey Three", it was the Chinese spacecraft the Tsien. They landed on Europa to refill their propellant tanks with water, a strategy designed to get them to the Discovery faster than the other vessels by allowing them to carry a smaller payload. They were extracting water from an area where there was a warm upwelling that meant that there was only a relatively thin layer of insulating ice between the liquid water and the vacuum. Some sort of large, slow, kelp like creature emerged from the water, attracted by the bright light and started to crawl up the side of the ship. The ship toppled over and the hull ruptured. One astronaut was left, and he sent a signal explaining what happened in the general direction of the Leonov with his suit radio. Anyway, that's according to "2061" but, as has been observed, the details of previous odyssey books have not always been treated as canon by the sequels. Rather, each book exists in its own parallel, but not identical, universe.
WE already know that the surface of Europa is covered in (frozen)water. We can also be pretty sure that the water covering the moon was liquid at one time in the past. Why is it so hard to believe that it might be liquid now? Sure, it may not be liquid anymore, but, on the other hand, it may be. I suppose we'll just have to wait and find out. You have a good point about the question of how planets form. Why did Europa get all the water anyway? Or, did the other moons get plenty of water as well, but it has since boiled off into space? Interesting questions.
I can understand why they are doing it too. That does not mean that I condone it. That would be like saying, "I can understand X's reasoning behind murdering Y, so I forgive X completely, no charges". It just shouldn't work that way. It's unethical to patent something obvious. The fact that they did so to grant themselves a monopoly does not improve their standing in my eyes one bit. As for Beanie Babies, it's not as if they were the first bean bag animals around. I remember bean bag snakes and lizards from years before I ever heard of Beanie Babies. True, they had a lot of imitators trying to cash in on the phenomenon, but some of those Mom & Pop shops had been selling similar toys before the craze. Even if Beanie Babies really were the first ever bean bag animals, they certainly wouldn't be worthy of a patent anyway. Simply changing the material used to stuff stuffed toys should not be considered unique enough. Maybe if they came up with a really unique way of making the toys, then the process could be patented, but that's it. It's the same way with banner ad patents. Now, I'm guilty of not having read the article very well, and I certainly haven't read the patent, so I'm not very qualified to comment on it, but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone else... The article says that the patent is described as: "Method of Delivery, Targeting, and Measuring Advertising Over Network". I can't really tell from that whether that encompasses banner ads in general, or if they're defining a very narrow system. In any case, banner adds have been around for longer than this patent. Methods of targetting advertising have been around forever, and applying them to a slightly different medium should not be patentable. As for measurement, gathering statistics about where and when, etc. banner ads were delivered by the server is hardly novel and original. So, anyway, regardless of their motivations, their actions appear to be unjustifiable (unless the scope of the patent really is much narrower than the story leads us to believe.
Fair enough I suppose. God is outside of the context we are bound to (or perhaps God could be seen as actually being the context we are bound to), so isn't limited by things like entropy. Inside that context, it seems that absolutely nothing is eternal. It is believed that even protons have a half-life and that they will all eventually decay (it's a very, very long half-life).
Um, hang on. My geology text claims an age of about 4.5 billion years for the planet. How could earth life (provided it didn't sail in from interstellar space) be older than that?
Yes, and what Masem was saying is that, using a similar process to that discussed in the article, you could take these bacteria, strip off all the stuff in their DNA that they don't need, optimize them for eating oil, and set them loose on a spill. Presumably, the bacteria that do eat oil can eat other things as well, they just happen to be able to survive on oil. They might be far better at eating oil if they were altered so that it is the only thing they eat.
I think that the shared DNA you're talking about is all stuff describing how to make various enzymes, amino acids, proteins and what have you. Stuff that all life uses. And, since human beings have much more DNA in any of their cells than most (any?) bacteria, I have to assume that you mean that 80% of the DNA found in most bacteria is also found in humans, and not the other way around. This is not, of course, particularly surprising. Bacteria are single celled organisms -- they're made of cells. Humans are multi-celled organisms -- also made of cells. So, it is not unusual that most of the DNA in a bacterium would describe how to make the various bits of a cell that don't make themselves (I'm thinking of things like mitochondria, which presumably aren't made from scratch by the DNA in the nucleus), and the various chemicals that keep the cell running. The rest of the DNA would be about specialization, throw in a plasmid (kind of like a weapons upgrade in an old video game like gradius) here and there, and you've got your complete, distinct bacterium. Meanwhile, the human cells need to do most of the same stuff that the Bacterial cells need to, plus, they need a slew of other instructions telling them how to behave relative to other cells to make tissues and organs, and how to put those together to make a complete body. So, the reason we don't see all that much variation from the basic building blocks is that they're the basic building blocks. We're very complex. We maintain homeostasis by stacking all sorts of biological factors against one another. It's kind of like a house of cards, try moving around the cards at the bottom and the whole thing collapses. So, we don't evolve new basic building blocks because when such mutations occur, they are usually fatal.
On the other hand, the body is matter. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. That matter survives the body. From my point of view, this means that if someone runs my body through a blender, what's left can't be considered my body anymore. It has then lost its vital coherence. Really, the "energy cannot be created or destroyed" explanation for why energy beings can't be killed has gotten a little tired in comic books let alone real theological discussions. Ultimately, it's about information. In this case, the information involved is the structure and organization of the matter that makes up the human body, or, if you think of the soul that way, the structure and organization of the energy that makes up the human soul. Can information be created or destroyed? Well, yes, it certainly seems that way. That's sort of what entropy is, after all.
One reason I can think of that Sega might want a back door into someone's dreamcast is so that they can run diagnostics offsite. It might save money in the long run if problems with the machine can be diagnosed by the tech support operative while you're on the phone (provided that you have a second phone line just for your Dreamcast), in some cases that would otherwise require that the machine be shipped in for repair. Possibly, the support person could update the machine's firmware remotely. That's about all I can think of. As for why they use Telnet instead of some proprietary protocol... who knows.
I wondered about that too. Not that I mean any slight to Amidala's abilities, but how does a 14 year old get elected to leader of a whole planet? Although I do believe that a person can be just as competant at fourteen as at the arbitrary age of say, eighteen. However, in most democracies, people with no prior political experience don't usually get elected to such high office. On the other hand, most leaders democratically elected to office seem to turn out to be highly corrupt. This seems to be necessary to get into the kind of position where you will be elected to high office. Maybe the people of Naboo are aware of this and elect on the principle of innocence. Anyone who has been playing at politics too long (like our good friend Palpatine, now that I think about it) is immediatly a suspect of corruption. The whole idea of the system could be to elect someone who would truly be a public servant. Maybe the candidates also have to be screened by other factors too. Maybe Amidala has a really high IQ, so she got to be a candidate for queen.
Another possibility is that Naboo is some sort of Constitutional Monarchy, and Amidala is a hereditary ruler (or, perhaps she was elected, but from a noble class of some kind). It's hardly implausable with the technology in the Star Wars universe (which, as has been pointed out, seems to be more advanced in episode I than in IV, V, and VI), that the actual decisions of the government could be put to a direct vote by the people. So, Amidala would be the chief diplomat, chairperson, what have you, and decisions would be put to population at large to vote on. Of course, any direct democracy like this would require checks and balances for individual voters to make sure that they understood the issues before being allowed to vote on them. Also, voter turnout for any given issue would need to be large enough so that, even if someone bribed thousands for their votes, it would vanish into the statistics without affecting the outcome. Anyway, there are a number of solutions that are actually quite rational given the circumstances. Or, another possibility is that Amidala (does Lucas come up with these names? It sounds like Amigdala, which is a portion of the brain and also some kind of almond based desert topping or something), who must be strong in the Force if she produces Luke, was just mind controlling all the voters. Hey, why not.
Um, didn't they hire someone else to do most of the actual work? Someone who didn't end up being a billionaire, and whose name I therefore can't remember:) Seriously, Bill Gate's credentials just aren't all that impressive. Obviously it took more than _just_ luck and connections (although he had some pretty useful connections), and the fact that he was already wealthy, but I think those played a big part. There are many, many, many people smarter than Bill Gates, lots of better business people, even quite a few people immoral enough to play the game as well as him. So, Bill Gates happened to be the one of those people in the right place at the right time with the right connections, the money, etc. It could have been someone else. Of course, the same could be said for anyone in the spotlight, even Linus. Nevertheless, Bill Gates just doesn't get my respect. Perhaps it's because, in this life, some of us get the opportunity to choose between respect and money (often we're talking a fuzzy logic choice here, not strict boolean), and Bill Gates obviously chose money, and then decided to buy respect. Not particularly good hero material there. The sad thing is that, at the moment, it seems to be working. Of course, there's always history to contend with. When the money is gone, or when he is (although, sometimes people like him set up dynasties to keep themselves fondly remembered), there's a good chance that all his image building will be for naught. History will remember the things he actually did, and what he stood for, if it remembers him. On the other hand, if he actually follows through on some of his promises, like the one to someday give away most of his money to charity, he may be able to gain respect. I don't think it would actually be considered buying respect, since one of the main reasons some of us dis-respect him is that he is greedy. On yet another hand (yes, I'm a mutant) the whole idea behind his promise is that he is going to be the worlds biggest philanthropist once he has enough money. He may even be sincere about this, but there's something childish about the notion. He's considered the world's richest man, but, until he has _enough_ money, he's only going to give away relatively paltry sums to charity for the purposes of publicity and, of course, posterity (i.e. buildings, etc. named after him or his family). From my point of view, if he's sincere, then he must think that the money is better off in his hands, for the purposes of "growing" it, than in anyone elses. If he gave it away now, there wouldn't be as much as there would be in five years, or ten years. But when is it enough? Is Bill Gates like a compulsive gambler on a lucky streak who can't bring himself to quit? Is there going to be anything left for charity, even if he is sincere? After all, his money is mostly on paper, and he can't liquidate it without destroying its value. If he does find a way to do so, the next important question is where did the money come from? Did it come from a real good that was produced and sold, or did it come from the pockets of all the people who have invested in his company? A company is _not_ a product. The stock market is about capital investment, it is _not_ a raffle or lottery where the winners prize money is made from the admission fee of all the losers (or, at least, it's not meant to be). Anyway, I'm getting way off track. It just seems to me that most of the things people respect Bill Gates for are things that he never did or hasn't done yet and may not actually do. The basis for his respect is his wealth, and there's something disturbing in the fact that his wealth outstrips his companies not inconsiderable profits. No company that I've heard of ever seems to profit from partnering with Microsoft (for long) without actually being consumed by Microsoft. And yet the respect that many have for the company (which is often tied in with respect for Bill Gates) seems to lead other companies to make the same mistakes again and again. In order to have my respect, Bill Gates would have to impress me a whole heck of a lot more than he does now. Not that having my respect is particularly important to Gates. If he has a deep need to be respected by everyone, then he'd have to be insane by now, because no one, even if that person is a paragon of virtue, gets everyone's respect.
The computers in Mir use "old" technology in order to be more reliable. Since Mir is a space station it gets exposed to a lot of radiation. The effects of radiation on computer equipment are cumulative, and the Mir has been up a long time. Computers on earth don't have to operate in such conditions. Most of the radiation hitting the processor in your pc probably comes from radiactive decay of isotopes in the metal of the computer's case. Not so in space. Ever hear of cosmic rays? A good number of these particles beat the best speeds we can get in accelerators by a long shot. So, those modern chips you're touting as the best thing since electronic sausages, with their tiny, tiny little transistore and pathways and what have you, will be shot to pieces in no time. The older technology won't last forever either, but it'll last a heck of a lot longer. It has already been observed by plenty of astronauts that their laptops develop problems distressingly fast in space. Oh, and forget sheilding. Do you have any idea how much lead you'd need? Keeping lots of replacement parts on hand is a maybe, but don't forget that the replacement parts would be exposed the the same levels of radiation. I mean, really, what did you think? Did you think that the Russians were still banging rocks together to make tools? Sorry if I was long winded. I just felt that the notion that Mir's "outdated" computers were somehow inferior or unsafe for the job at hand was a misconception that needed correcting.
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Hmm, it could be that the ball lightning didn't actually pass through the outside of the plane, but formed inside the plane. Maybe lightning could vaporize silicon from the inside of one of the glass windows. The passenger windows in planes are usually covered by a pane of plastic, but it's not sealed around the edges, and, if the ball lightning works the way they've described, it should be able to pass around the plastic pane.
Also, as far as aeroplanes and unusual effects of lightning go, I remember reading somewhere about fireballs that build up on the nosecones of planes flying through thunderstorms. Are those the same as ball lightning if what is being said about it is true? Where would the silicon come from on the nosecone of a jet? Is it fiberglass covered perhaps? Or could this be something different, like the electrical corona that sailors used to call St. Elmo's Fire. Well, anyway, there are still plenty of unexplained things out there to wonder about.
I fail to see how the use of this program to read DVD's constitutes a copyright violation (not piracy, since piracy means killing the crew of a ship and taking their possessions). Using it to copy the DVD's in a manner inconsistent with Fair Use would constitute a copyright violation. People buy DVD's to view them. Viewing the DVD's you have purchased is not a crime, no matter what method you use to view them.
This brings to mind a display I saw in my schools library the other day of media through the ages. There was a sample of cuniform. One of papyrus with ideographs. A book from the late middle ages, etc. At the bottom of the display case were some samples of modern media. Spool to spool audio tape, computer tapes, floppies, zip disks, cds, etc. With them, was a plaque talking about how modern media, instead of being read directly, are experienced through some sort of intermediate device: tape recorder, tv/vcr, computer. I didn't think about that very much when I read it, but I'm thinking about it now. It can hardly be said that free access to information has been provided to people throughout the ages. In many places and times throughout history, certain groups of people (often majorities like the peasant classes in their entirety, sometimes persecuted minorities) have been denied, by law, the right to be allowed to know how to read. So, the use of law to try and control access to information that special interests (like the Roman Catholic church in the middle ages, or slave owners in the American South) want to protect is nothing new. Nonetheless, that kind of manipulation is something that only belongs in ages of barbarity. It would be nice if we could at least make a pretense of being civilized people in this day and age.
It's not really very clear what this DeCSS fight is over. The people who started it obviously have some interest in controlling the media of information exchange. But people already have access to what's on DVD's by using a DVD player. So, unless there's some Master Plan (TM) that I don't know about, what they're after is some sort of Reign of Terror. "Look at what we do with people who try to steal the fire of the Gods! Gaze upon our works and tremble!!", yadda yadda yadda; you get the idea. They seem to want people to be afraid to go near their technology. Why? Well, I'd have to say that the leadership and legal departments of most corporation are Luddites. They lack the technical sophistication to understand that their dream of a media that can't be illegally copied, but can still be viewed by the consumer is a mythical creature. The only technological innovation that could make it possible is the Orwellian State. They don't have that, but they do have one that's willing to let itself be swayed, at least temporarily, by large corporate interests. It's not enough for them to get what they want, but they're sure making the attempt.
Well anyway, to sum up. This isn't about violating someone's copyright, this is about having the ability to watch DVD's that you've purchased. The special interest groups for the big media companies object for some reason and are making legal waves because of it. What can we do? Wish I knew. There will probably be an appropriate legal defense fund to donate money to soon enough.
Actually, now that I think about it, Sun may have done the right thing here by denying the creation of a document whose copyright belongs to an organization of dubious motives (I view any standards organisation that sees the copyrights of the documents it maintains as a revenue stream to be dishonest if not actually criminal). The question of whether or not Sun has done the right thing will be answered by their next move. Are they going to keep trying to get an official, open standard for Java out there or are they going to hide in the corner gnawing on what they have so far and growling at passers by? Time will tell.
How recently was the Swedish state sterilizing the disabled? Just curious because, well within living memory, many US states have done the exact same thing to the mentally disabled, minority groups like American Indians, etc.
Of course, you've obviously haven't done enough research yourself. If you'd _read_ the article rather than just having the browser search it for key words you might have noticed that the article occupies five (I think it was five, might have been six) pages. The words "gay" and "god" were in the article.
It's not quite that easy to reverse engineer someone else's drug product these days. Certainly not by the next day. The company that does the actual research has a good head start because they already know how to manufacture the drug and have manufactured a fair amount of it already (how else would they get the drug product they use in trials?) This means that they already have their modified E. Coli or CHO (Chinese Hamster Ovary) cells or what have you, and they just have to set up manufacturing suites and grow the stuff (I'm pretty sure the vast majority of drugs are made this way these days). They might have genetically modified cows that produce the drug in their milk instead, but the same principle applies.
In order to copy them, another company is going to have to develop their own modified cells or farm animals or steal them from the first company (which I'm sure happens a lot, but actual theft of physical property is a crime that goes beyond patents).
The other thing you may not have even thought about is why drug companies ever bother to develop drugs to treat diseases or disorders that only affect a small number of people. These are called orphan drugs, they'll never make enough money (before patent protection runs out, anyway) to pay back the research costs involved in developing them. So, why do companies develop them? Is it out of the goodness of their hearts? Obviously not. The reason is that orphan drugs get government subsidies.
Why did I bring that up? I just wanted to point out that the drug industry is _not_ running on free market principles by a long shot. It's regulated and subsidized and monitored.
The point I'd like to make about the drug industry is that the money is there not matter what. Research gets done, money is made manufacturing drugs, people are employed. It's a fairly socialistic concept for this country, but the whole industry could be made into a government operation. Say what you will about government management, that _would_ bring costs down, and you could forget all about patents. Obviously, that's not going to happen, and it's probably not a great idea, but the point is that there are lots of ways the biomedical industry could be rearranged to work better than it does now without patents. The obvious problem is that you can't just say that an entire idustry would work better a different way and change it. That's why kludges like the modern patent system exist.
Hmph, I'm a little tired, so I'm probably not making much sense.
I'll grant you your point that the Free/Open Source software community does not always independantly develop every patented algorithm it uses. However, your example of LZW compression isn't a very good one. Pretty much all the Free/Open Source software that uses LZW compression or decompression is designed that way specifically for the purpose of reading/writing file formats that have LZW compression designed into them. There's no other way to do it. You can't design any other algorithm that will do proper (note: proper) LZW compression that isn't functionally equivalent (and therefore the same as) LZW compression. So, how else are you going to write gif files (using compression, uncompressed is another issue) and have them be compatible with other gif applications?
So, yes, not every patented algorithm that Free/Open Source software uses is independantly developed because how else would they follow standards? Of course, originally, most people didn't even know that LZW compression was patented (by two different companies), they just knew of the published algorithm.
On the other hand, given the number of extremely broad patents being granted on obvious things these days it's very likely that a huge amount of software out there, Free/Open Source or not, has algorithms or techniques in it that are covered by a patent (probably several). It's also quite likely that in most of those cases the author of the software is quite unaware of this fact. In many of those cases, the devoloper came up with the ideas in the code independantly.
In such cases, is it really reasonable to say that the party that came up with the idea independantly has stolen the other parties idea? Doesn't that provide a good example that the patent granted may not live up to the requirement of non-obviousness?
So, that's all I meant by it.
Oh, ok. I do remember that bit. I believe the crews of the ship that was hijacked to Europa (The Galaxy) had a fairly international crew with a large percent of them also being chinese. The ship that came to rescue them (The Universe) also had a large numnber of chinese in the crew, as well as a number of celebrities ( a movie star, the professor and Mary Anne... well, not really, actually a composor, a movie star, a bushy bearded science reporter type, a famous author...). Both ships were part of the private fleet of Sir Lawrence Tsung.
:)
I don't think the shark-like creature actually did any leaping until its death throes, but you're right about that. I've been working under the assumption that the corpse may have been fatal to the creature because of a handedness difference in the arrangement of its proteins. A number of the proteins that we use in our own bodies (I'm working under the assumption that ours are right handed, but I may have it backwards, IANAMB [I Am Not A Molecular Biologist]) are poison to us in their left-handed form. Or, it could have been a number of different things about the different biochemistries that killed it, right down to the oxygen in the air inside the bodies lungs (Europa didn't have much in the way of free oxygen, so all the life used some sort of anaerobic respiration, although it seemed to be a bit more efficient than the anaerobic processes used by earth life).
PS, can you tell that I've got my copy open right in front of me?
... in fact, having the computer output complete gibberish would be simplicity itself. I think what SpaceCadet was saying, however, is that it would be extremely hard to program a computer to break the rules of grammar well. In order to do that, the program would really and truly have to understand what it was writing. It seems it would be difficult to do that without somehow giving the program true consciousness. On the other hand, if you did that, then wouldn't you basically be forcing a slave to write short stories for you?
Hmm, questions, questions.
Why would a computer need to be as big as the solar system to emulate a human brain with an neural net? The nuerons in the human brain aren't _that_ small. I don't see any reason why a piece of hardware smaller than the human brain couldn't handle the job since an artificial neuron could probably be made a lot smaller than a biological one (not to mention thousands of times faster).
It sounds like you subscribe to the (in my opinion) slightly outlandish theory that the human brain doesn't operate at the level of its neurons, but in fact is some sort of giant quantum computer. Now, I won't deny that quantum effects could influence whether or not any particular neuron fires or not at a given moment and that those effects could spiral upwards (like a butterfly flapping its wings and influencing future weather) and influence the thoughts of the host brain. On the other hand, I disagree with the notion that such effects are some sort of magic spark of life and that the brain wouldn't function without them. I see no reason why you can't have an emulated brain with neurons whose weights are measured in discrete units that could think, visualize, imagine, plan, and feel emotions (although, obviously you'd have to come up with some way of simulating the effects of the various chemicals produced in the brain on those neurons) just like a normal brain. Sure, if you started an artificial brain and a real brain with matching neurons off in the exact same state and ran them with the exact same stimuli for a length of time you'd probably get a different ending stat in each one. Nevertheless, they would both react in a human manner (which would probably be to go insane considering that both brains are recieving exactly the same stimuli [which basically means that they're trapped in some sort of simulated universe where absolutely nothing they think or try to do affects what they sense with their five senses or where their body moves and what it does]).
The only situation I can think of in which it wouldn't be possible to simulate a brain like this would be if we lived in a completely rigged universe. If the universe were designed in some way so that it only appeared as if our consciousness were originating from our brains while it's really transmitted from somewhere else, then maybe we couldn't simulate consciousness because we wouldn't be able to look at a working model. I'm not going to ask who rigged the universe, if indeed it is rigged, that way right now. That's way beyond the scope of the debate. But the same basic principle could apply to everything in the universe, even physics and mathematics could be based on principles that only "make sense" in a controlled, artificial environment.
Anyway, I doubt it. Not neccessarily since I think it's impossible, mind you. It's just that, if it's true, there's nothing we could do about it anyway.
Oh yeah, about the solar system sized planet thing. Now _that_ would be an incredible trick. The engineering problems to overcome would be enourmous, even working under the assumption that this isn't a fully solid computer (where would you get all the mass?). In a planet sized computer emulating a human brain, signals travelling from one side of the computer to the other at the speed of light would take very roughly the same amount of time as an equivalent electro-chemical signal would take to cross a human brain. Scale that up to solar system size and it would take a day for the signal to make the equivalent journey. Actually, this has given me some pretty interesting ideas to toy with.
At least, according to "2061: Odyssey Three", it was the Chinese spacecraft the Tsien. They landed on Europa to refill their propellant tanks with water, a strategy designed to get them to the Discovery faster than the other vessels by allowing them to carry a smaller payload. They were extracting water from an area where there was a warm upwelling that meant that there was only a relatively thin layer of insulating ice between the liquid water and the vacuum. Some sort of large, slow, kelp like creature emerged from the water, attracted by the bright light and started to crawl up the side of the ship. The ship toppled over and the hull ruptured. One astronaut was left, and he sent a signal explaining what happened in the general direction of the Leonov with his suit radio.
Anyway, that's according to "2061" but, as has been observed, the details of previous odyssey books have not always been treated as canon by the sequels. Rather, each book exists in its own parallel, but not identical, universe.
WE already know that the surface of Europa is covered in (frozen)water. We can also be pretty sure that the water covering the moon was liquid at one time in the past. Why is it so hard to believe that it might be liquid now? Sure, it may not be liquid anymore, but, on the other hand, it may be. I suppose we'll just have to wait and find out.
You have a good point about the question of how planets form. Why did Europa get all the water anyway? Or, did the other moons get plenty of water as well, but it has since boiled off into space? Interesting questions.
I can understand why they are doing it too. That does not mean that I condone it. That would be like saying, "I can understand X's reasoning behind murdering Y, so I forgive X completely, no charges". It just shouldn't work that way. It's unethical to patent something obvious. The fact that they did so to grant themselves a monopoly does not improve their standing in my eyes one bit.
As for Beanie Babies, it's not as if they were the first bean bag animals around. I remember bean bag snakes and lizards from years before I ever heard of Beanie Babies. True, they had a lot of imitators trying to cash in on the phenomenon, but some of those Mom & Pop shops had been selling similar toys before the craze. Even if Beanie Babies really were the first ever bean bag animals, they certainly wouldn't be worthy of a patent anyway. Simply changing the material used to stuff stuffed toys should not be considered unique enough. Maybe if they came up with a really unique way of making the toys, then the process could be patented, but that's it.
It's the same way with banner ad patents. Now, I'm guilty of not having read the article very well, and I certainly haven't read the patent, so I'm not very qualified to comment on it, but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone else... The article says that the patent is described as: "Method of Delivery, Targeting, and Measuring Advertising Over Network". I can't really tell from that whether that encompasses banner ads in general, or if they're defining a very narrow system. In any case, banner adds have been around for longer than this patent. Methods of targetting advertising have been around forever, and applying them to a slightly different medium should not be patentable. As for measurement, gathering statistics about where and when, etc. banner ads were delivered by the server is hardly novel and original.
So, anyway, regardless of their motivations, their actions appear to be unjustifiable (unless the scope of the patent really is much narrower than the story leads us to believe.
Fair enough I suppose. God is outside of the context we are bound to (or perhaps God could be seen as actually being the context we are bound to), so isn't limited by things like entropy. Inside that context, it seems that absolutely nothing is eternal. It is believed that even protons have a half-life and that they will all eventually decay (it's a very, very long half-life).
Um, hang on. My geology text claims an age of about 4.5 billion years for the planet. How could earth life (provided it didn't sail in from interstellar space) be older than that?
Yes, and what Masem was saying is that, using a similar process to that discussed in the article, you could take these bacteria, strip off all the stuff in their DNA that they don't need, optimize them for eating oil, and set them loose on a spill. Presumably, the bacteria that do eat oil can eat other things as well, they just happen to be able to survive on oil. They might be far better at eating oil if they were altered so that it is the only thing they eat.
Well, seeing as the oldest known rocks are believed to be about 3.96 billion years old, I don't know if I can really agree with that.
I think you may be ignoring the effects of trace amounts of oxygen over large amounts of time.
I think that the shared DNA you're talking about is all stuff describing how to make various enzymes, amino acids, proteins and what have you. Stuff that all life uses. And, since human beings have much more DNA in any of their cells than most (any?) bacteria, I have to assume that you mean that 80% of the DNA found in most bacteria is also found in humans, and not the other way around.
This is not, of course, particularly surprising. Bacteria are single celled organisms -- they're made of cells. Humans are multi-celled organisms -- also made of cells. So, it is not unusual that most of the DNA in a bacterium would describe how to make the various bits of a cell that don't make themselves (I'm thinking of things like mitochondria, which presumably aren't made from scratch by the DNA in the nucleus), and the various chemicals that keep the cell running. The rest of the DNA would be about specialization, throw in a plasmid (kind of like a weapons upgrade in an old video game like gradius) here and there, and you've got your complete, distinct bacterium. Meanwhile, the human cells need to do most of the same stuff that the Bacterial cells need to, plus, they need a slew of other instructions telling them how to behave relative to other cells to make tissues and organs, and how to put those together to make a complete body.
So, the reason we don't see all that much variation from the basic building blocks is that they're the basic building blocks. We're very complex. We maintain homeostasis by stacking all sorts of biological factors against one another. It's kind of like a house of cards, try moving around the cards at the bottom and the whole thing collapses. So, we don't evolve new basic building blocks because when such mutations occur, they are usually fatal.
On the other hand, the body is matter. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. That matter survives the body.
From my point of view, this means that if someone runs my body through a blender, what's left can't be considered my body anymore. It has then lost its vital coherence. Really, the "energy cannot be created or destroyed" explanation for why energy beings can't be killed has gotten a little tired in comic books let alone real theological discussions.
Ultimately, it's about information. In this case, the information involved is the structure and organization of the matter that makes up the human body, or, if you think of the soul that way, the structure and organization of the energy that makes up the human soul. Can information be created or destroyed? Well, yes, it certainly seems that way. That's sort of what entropy is, after all.
One reason I can think of that Sega might want a back door into someone's dreamcast is so that they can run diagnostics offsite. It might save money in the long run if problems with the machine can be diagnosed by the tech support operative while you're on the phone (provided that you have a second phone line just for your Dreamcast), in some cases that would otherwise require that the machine be shipped in for repair. Possibly, the support person could update the machine's firmware remotely.
That's about all I can think of. As for why they use Telnet instead of some proprietary protocol... who knows.
I wondered about that too. Not that I mean any slight to Amidala's abilities, but how does a 14 year old get elected to leader of a whole planet? Although I do believe that a person can be just as competant at fourteen as at the arbitrary age of say, eighteen. However, in most democracies, people with no prior political experience don't usually get elected to such high office. On the other hand, most leaders democratically elected to office seem to turn out to be highly corrupt. This seems to be necessary to get into the kind of position where you will be elected to high office. Maybe the people of Naboo are aware of this and elect on the principle of innocence. Anyone who has been playing at politics too long (like our good friend Palpatine, now that I think about it) is immediatly a suspect of corruption. The whole idea of the system could be to elect someone who would truly be a public servant. Maybe the candidates also have to be screened by other factors too. Maybe Amidala has a really high IQ, so she got to be a candidate for queen.
Another possibility is that Naboo is some sort of Constitutional Monarchy, and Amidala is a hereditary ruler (or, perhaps she was elected, but from a noble class of some kind). It's hardly implausable with the technology in the Star Wars universe (which, as has been pointed out, seems to be more advanced in episode I than in IV, V, and VI), that the actual decisions of the government could be put to a direct vote by the people. So, Amidala would be the chief diplomat, chairperson, what have you, and decisions would be put to population at large to vote on. Of course, any direct democracy like this would require checks and balances for individual voters to make sure that they understood the issues before being allowed to vote on them. Also, voter turnout for any given issue would need to be large enough so that, even if someone bribed thousands for their votes, it would vanish into the statistics without affecting the outcome. Anyway, there are a number of solutions that are actually quite rational given the circumstances.
Or, another possibility is that Amidala (does Lucas come up with these names? It sounds like Amigdala, which is a portion of the brain and also some kind of almond based desert topping or something), who must be strong in the Force if she produces Luke, was just mind controlling all the voters. Hey, why not.
Um, didn't they hire someone else to do most of the actual work? Someone who didn't end up being a billionaire, and whose name I therefore can't remember :)
Seriously, Bill Gate's credentials just aren't all that impressive. Obviously it took more than _just_ luck and connections (although he had some pretty useful connections), and the fact that he was already wealthy, but I think those played a big part. There are many, many, many people smarter than Bill Gates, lots of better business people, even quite a few people immoral enough to play the game as well as him. So, Bill Gates happened to be the one of those people in the right place at the right time with the right connections, the money, etc. It could have been someone else.
Of course, the same could be said for anyone in the spotlight, even Linus. Nevertheless, Bill Gates just doesn't get my respect. Perhaps it's because, in this life, some of us get the opportunity to choose between respect and money (often we're talking a fuzzy logic choice here, not strict boolean), and Bill Gates obviously chose money, and then decided to buy respect. Not particularly good hero material there. The sad thing is that, at the moment, it seems to be working. Of course, there's always history to contend with. When the money is gone, or when he is (although, sometimes people like him set up dynasties to keep themselves fondly remembered), there's a good chance that all his image building will be for naught. History will remember the things he actually did, and what he stood for, if it remembers him.
On the other hand, if he actually follows through on some of his promises, like the one to someday give away most of his money to charity, he may be able to gain respect. I don't think it would actually be considered buying respect, since one of the main reasons some of us dis-respect him is that he is greedy. On yet another hand (yes, I'm a mutant) the whole idea behind his promise is that he is going to be the worlds biggest philanthropist once he has enough money. He may even be sincere about this, but there's something childish about the notion. He's considered the world's richest man, but, until he has _enough_ money, he's only going to give away relatively paltry sums to charity for the purposes of publicity and, of course, posterity (i.e. buildings, etc. named after him or his family). From my point of view, if he's sincere, then he must think that the money is better off in his hands, for the purposes of "growing" it, than in anyone elses. If he gave it away now, there wouldn't be as much as there would be in five years, or ten years. But when is it enough? Is Bill Gates like a compulsive gambler on a lucky streak who can't bring himself to quit? Is there going to be anything left for charity, even if he is sincere? After all, his money is mostly on paper, and he can't liquidate it without destroying its value. If he does find a way to do so, the next important question is where did the money come from? Did it come from a real good that was produced and sold, or did it come from the pockets of all the people who have invested in his company? A company is _not_ a product. The stock market is about capital investment, it is _not_ a raffle or lottery where the winners prize money is made from the admission fee of all the losers (or, at least, it's not meant to be).
Anyway, I'm getting way off track. It just seems to me that most of the things people respect Bill Gates for are things that he never did or hasn't done yet and may not actually do. The basis for his respect is his wealth, and there's something disturbing in the fact that his wealth outstrips his companies not inconsiderable profits. No company that I've heard of ever seems to profit from partnering with Microsoft (for long) without actually being consumed by Microsoft. And yet the respect that many have for the company (which is often tied in with respect for Bill Gates) seems to lead other companies to make the same mistakes again and again.
In order to have my respect, Bill Gates would have to impress me a whole heck of a lot more than he does now. Not that having my respect is particularly important to Gates. If he has a deep need to be respected by everyone, then he'd have to be insane by now, because no one, even if that person is a paragon of virtue, gets everyone's respect.
The computers in Mir use "old" technology in order to be more reliable. Since Mir is a space station it gets exposed to a lot of radiation. The effects of radiation on computer equipment are cumulative, and the Mir has been up a long time. Computers on earth don't have to operate in such conditions. Most of the radiation hitting the processor in your pc probably comes from radiactive decay of isotopes in the metal of the computer's case. Not so in space. Ever hear of cosmic rays? A good number of these particles beat the best speeds we can get in accelerators by a long shot. So, those modern chips you're touting as the best thing since electronic sausages, with their tiny, tiny little transistore and pathways and what have you, will be shot to pieces in no time. The older technology won't last forever either, but it'll last a heck of a lot longer. It has already been observed by plenty of astronauts that their laptops develop problems distressingly fast in space.
Oh, and forget sheilding. Do you have any idea how much lead you'd need? Keeping lots of replacement parts on hand is a maybe, but don't forget that the replacement parts would be exposed the the same levels of radiation.
I mean, really, what did you think? Did you think that the Russians were still banging rocks together to make tools?
Sorry if I was long winded. I just felt that the notion that Mir's "outdated" computers were somehow inferior or unsafe for the job at hand was a misconception that needed correcting.