The first-come first-server free for all messy domain registration system does not bode well for making the internet any less complicated.
Maybe the time has come to replace it with something better. The current Domain Name Registration, DNS, and PKI architecture all rely on some trusted central authority. It is possible to design a new distributed mechanism for these services that does not require trust, and is therefore less likely to be abused:
http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL
See especially "Why use YURLS?": http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL/Why
Rudy Ruckers "White Light" a fictional account of the concept of infinity.
Rudy Rucker also has a non-fiction book about infinity that I liked more than White Light: "Infinity and the Mind, The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite"
Once the U.S. congress cut the funding for the habitaion module,...
Congress did not cut the the Hab module, The Bush Administration did. I watched the hearings when then NASA Administration Dan Goldin tried to explain the reasoning behind the the directive to Congress and they were as suprised as anyone else. Goldin's explanation was full of juicy tidbits like "The President made his budget priorities clear when he was a candidate, and the American people chose".
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (page 21) seems to agree with your leadership complaint:
"The origins of the Space Shuttle Program date to discussions on what should follow Project Apollo, the dramatic U.S. missions to the moon. NASA centered its post-Apollo plans on developing increasingly larger outposts in Earth orbit that would be launched atop Apollos immense Saturn V booster. The space agency hoped to construct a 12-person space station by 1975; subsequent stations would support 50, then 100 people. Other stations would be placed in orbit around the moon and then be constructed on the lunar surface. In parallel, NASA would develop the capability for the manned exploration of Mars. The concept of a vehicle - or Space Shuttle - to take crews and supplies to and from low-Earth orbit arose as part of this grand vision. To keep the costs of these trips to a minimum, NASA intended to develop a fully reusable vehicle.
NASAs vision of a constellation of space stations and journeying to Mars had little connection with political realities of the time. In his final year in office, President Lyndon Johnson gave highest priority to his Great Society programs and to dealing with the costs and domestic turmoil associated with the Vietnam war. Johnsons successor, President Richard Nixon, also had no appetite for another large, expensive, Apollo-like space commitment. Nixon rejected NASAs ambitions with little hesitation and directed that the agencys budget be cut as much as was politically feasible."
No, if you read the Columbia report, it specifically says Columbia "ran into" the chunk of foam 0.16 seconds after it broke off. In that time the foam had decelerated by 500+ miles per hour relative to the orbiter. "Falling" had nothing to do with the collision.
Sounds great, except why allow people other than the current rightholder to extend? For that matter, why allow anyone but the original author to extend?
The first U.S. copyright laws restricted renewals to the original author. Going back to that idea would remove some of the "property" connotations that have appeared since then.
Because it doesn't make sense that you will have to "walk around" or "fly" in some fashion inside a 3d space just because you want to open a web browser, open a spreadsheet, or do basically anything with any sort of timeliness
So you would keep your browser in your "pocket" so that you don't have to hunt it down before using it.
3D Desktops just are not usable right now.
This is not a 3D Desktop. "Desktop" was Kay's metaphor in the 70's, when Xerox wanted a better way to deal with paper. Think bigger. It's all about people collaborating. Think of this as:
- Neil Stephenson's "Multiverse", or Vernor Vinge's "Other Plane" - A multiuser "Morrowind", where everyone can create their own place in the world - A way for you to do real time voice communication with distant friends - An encrypted world-wide end-to-end peer-to-peer media distribution system - A world wide web of active objects, not just text or lame applets - A programming environment simple enough for anyone to get started, but deep enough to stick with
I've played around with an early version of Croquet, and it's much cooler than the screen shot implies. Those pictures are portals to other spaces. When you enable them, you see a new world happening in the portal. If you walk though the portal, you enter the world. You see other networked people as avatars, which by default look suspiciously like Tux the penguin. You can easily create new 3D objects, and script them to give them life.
This guy is way ahead of his time.
The version I tried had a long way to go, but if even half of it pans out, it will change everything.
Then you probably would not be interested in reading the STS-107 Press kit (http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/STS-107_PK.pdf), which has some good detail about what we expected to learn from 60 or so experiments on Columbia that you dismiss.
there was an opinion piece by a biologist yesterday... The experiments done (like what's the effect of zero-gravity on species x) test no important hypotheses and the outcome is usually not published in high profile magazines.
Many colleagues of "a biologist" would disagree. Try searching PubMed for "microgravity" or "spaceflight" for thousands of examples, and biology is not the only microgravity science discipline.
Once in a while, every scientist working in a field that could possibly have something to do with zero gravity research gets a request for ideas for experiments. They're basically begging for things to add to shuttle science missions.
That's not how it works. Like other government funded research, periodic Request For Proposals are issued. Scientists (mostly at Universities) submit proposals for experiments. These are peer reviewed to make sure the science is worthwhile. Experiments that don't require microgravity (or other resources only available in space) are eliminated. Funding is tight, and competition is high.
The important stuff (what's the effect of long term zero grav on humans) has been pretty much covered by now.
We will probably never know all "the important stuff" about science, and there is much to learn besides the long term health effects of zero-g. Microgravity science is one area where we are still taking our first steps.
Benford is correct when he says the ISS does not do much toward developing an artificial gravity environment suitable for Mars missions, but that is not its purpose. Most of the research being done on ISS is there specifically because it has little gravity. Developing "centrifugal gravity" is an (interesting) engineering problem, but not research. Some people criticize the Apollo program as great engineering but little research, a "stunt" that served little purpose beyond its entertainment value. When we decide to go to Mars (or the Moon, or LEO) to stay, it will be for the research.
It's hard to say what would have happened had brought many of these high volume, low margin products to market. As was stated in an earlier post, Xerox is a compnay that deals with low volume, high margin products.
A few years ago on the Squeak mailing list, there was a discussion about whether the switch in the 70s from expensive but powerful to cheap but limited computers was really necessary. Alan Kay posted a very interesting perspective:
(trimmed from http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak -dev/2000-May/011045.html)
>...Must early computing really start with Basic and friends and >must better things wait for the arrival of "real machines"?
Remember that BASIC on the Altair didn't do much. I don't think that a Smalltalk type system would have to be much larger if it "didn't do much". Peter Deutsch's original interactive PDP-1 LISP from the early sixties did do quite a bit and it was implemented in about 2000 instructions on a 4K (18 bit word) PDP-1. Smalltalk-72 did quite a bit and it ran quite well in about 16kb + the display memory. It would be interesting to see how well the "page long" interpreter for ST-72* would do if all that were added were a few auxillary classes.
Of course, old PARC hands would also point out that the Altair was quite irrelevant since the Alto at PARC started running two years earlier in 1973, and there were quite a few of them by 1975. All personal computers today are like the Alto, none are like the Altair. The hobbiest PC movement was kind of a red herring and dead end (and one could say that 8-bit micros and most of the software that was put on them led several generations astray from better ways to approach personal computing. Those bad defacto standards are still holding back progress).
If there was ever any hope that it would, that hope is gone now that the number of crew has been lowered -- they're being kept busy full-time now just doing what's necessary to stay alive.
The Bush Administration decision to not launch the Habitation Module has severely crippled ISS research, but it has not eliminated it.
A fair way to handle the fiasco would be to force all NASA programs to compete in the same kind of peer review that's required for NSF and DOE science.
Are you familiar with the process to apply for the opportunity to do science on ISS? It's not so different from getting an NSF or DOE grant. The investigators doing research on ISS are real scientists that do real, published, peer reviewed research.
This would have the effect of killing off the crewed space program, while steering more funding to uncrewed probes, which are what actually do the science.
Unmanned probes can do important science, but not the same kind of science that can be done on ISS. Both are important.
is this something which could be done on a specifically-built, standalone unit (or, less realistically, an experiment which could be passed from shuttle mission to shuttle mission)?
There have been some platforms like this (i.e., the Long Duration Exposure Facility), but many experiments require significant crew interaction. Making fully automated robotic experiments is (usually) harder and more expensive than doing them on the ISS.
how 'long-term' is a long-term microgravity experiment?
It depends on the experiment. Most combustion physics experiments last a few seconds (for each test run). Crystal growth and other materials science experiments can take a very long time. Fluid physics and biology experiments are usually somewhere in between.
what is the general weight (pun!) of microgravity in the list of considerations surrounding space travel?
Space travel and space research have different requirements. Microgravity is bad for space travel. It makes most people sick for their first few days and makes their bones degrade after they are up for a few months. A space vehicle built for long term travel (i.e., mission to mars) would probably rotate to generate artificial gravity. On the other hand, gravity would defeat the purpose of most space research. The primary reason for doing most experiments in space is the unique microgravity environment.
is there anything they can/could do on the ISS... that couldn't/hasn't been done on any one of the NASA/Russian orbital missions?
Yes there is. The platform required for a specific microgravity research objective is largely determined by the duration of the experiment. Ground based drop towers can provide a microgravity environment for up to 10 seconds. Aircraft flying parabolic trajectories typically provide 25 seconds. Sounding rockets can provide several minutes. The space shuttles provide a maximum of 17 days. Anything longer is usually done on the ISS. Qualitative differences between the platforms and differing requirements for crew interaction also influence the choice of platform.
... for results that could mostly be obtained from unmanned satellites
Please elaborate. What is it that you think is done on the ISS that could be done with unmanned satellites?
People like Carl Sagan and Lawrence Krauss were always quick to point out that unmanned satellites are much more cost effective for some kinds of research (like cosmology, not coincidently, their field), but that is not the sort of research that is done on ISS.
Yeh, of course it was Russia that cancelled the module which would have allowed 6 astronauts to be up there...
Score:5?. Not only is the Habitation Module that increases the crew capacity from 3 to 7 built by the U.S., it is mostly complete and ready to launch. It has been sitting in Florida since the Y2K regime change at the White House when the new president decided he had better things to spend money on than launching it.
When Congress asked (then NASA Administration) Dan Goldin why NASA was going to go along with reducing crew capabilities and gutting most research from the ISS program, he answered "It is my job to promote the administration's policies, not to defend them", and "The president made his budget priorities clear during the election, and the American people chose."
This is simply what is known as "indirection" in the industry.
No, indirection would be having a pointer to the data at the start of the tape. In this case, there was code at the start of the tape that interpreted the rest of the tape.
Alan Kay gives this as an example of an early instance of the themes later known as object oriented programming. He saw similar themes in Sketchpad, Simula, and to some extent Lisp, and wanted to explore the possibility of creating a system based completely on the idea of "objects" with internal state and code that communicate only by sending "messages". This is what is meant by "pure" object oriented programming.
I don't see how this is specifically OOP. Languages like LISP, at least, have been doing this for a long time. Indirection is *not* native to OOP.
Nobody (but you) said it is. If you are at all interested in understanding OO, track down "The Early History of Smalltalk". It's interesting. Alan Kay was very much aware of Simula and Lisp, and he gives credit where it is due (the first sentence in the paper is "Most ideas come from previous ideas.").
According to the US Copyright Office FAQ at http://www.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ1.html, "Works by the U. S. Government are not eligible for U. S. copyright protection". NASA lawyers and their Commercial Technology Office have told me that this statement definitely includes software developed by NASA.
But what does âoenot eligible for U. S. copyright protection" really mean? Is that the same as âoePublic Domainâ? The people I talked to did not have an answer.
To not allow extensions to the file format means NO NEW FEATURES can be added -- that is a ridiculous idea at best. Of course there have to be changes...
How many extensions were added to the TeX file format in the last 15 years? Is the answer zero because TeX is less "advanced" than Word?
How about DocBook? Will they have to change the XML file format when somebody wants to add a new feature?
The only reason Word has an extensible file format is to keep people on the upgrade treadmill.
The 'turning circuit' does not have to be any more complicated than 'the sensor on the left triggers the effector on the left, and the sensor on the right tiggers the effector on the right'. If the light is to the right, the sensor on the right is triggered more, so the effector on the right is triggered more, and the bug turns to the left, running away from the light.
There is an excellent book by Valentino Braitenberg called 'Vehicles - Experiements in Synthetic Psychology' that goes into all kinds of examples of simple circuits exhibiting behavior like this (behavior that we would consider somewhat intelligent if we observed it the in an animal).
Although I support the efforts of the ISS and orbital research from what I've heard there is in fact not a lot of good research they can do in weightlessness
The only reason to do space based research is because of the microgravity environment. If the experiment does not require weightlessness, then it is done on the ground.
Personally I think it says something when you're accepting experiments from junior high schools...
Personally, I think those are mostly publicity stunts to try to raise student interest in science.
Does anyone know of useful research being conducted by astronauts...
Fundamental science research is usually not considered "useful" in the sense that it has obvious immediate applications (then it would be called "technology" or "engineering"). Scientific research is all about discovering new things. Often these new things turn out to be "useful", but it's hard to know if something undiscovered is useful.
There are a few hundred links to existing space research projects here: http://microgavity.grc.nasa.gov
Note the word "unreasonable." This is a rather vague word; intentionally so.
It's not so vague if you read the whole sentence, which clearly says that reasonable search must include a valid warrant issued for a specific reason specifying a particular place/person to search:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Searching everyone in public places without a warrant is clearly unconstitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
The first-come first-server free for all messy domain registration system does not bode well for making the internet any less complicated.
Maybe the time has come to replace it with something better. The current Domain Name Registration, DNS, and PKI architecture all rely on some trusted central authority. It is possible to design a new distributed mechanism for these services that does not require trust, and is therefore less likely to be abused:
http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL
See especially "Why use YURLS?":
http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL/Why
Rudy Ruckers "White Light" a fictional account of the concept of infinity.
Rudy Rucker also has a non-fiction book about infinity that I liked more than White Light: "Infinity and the Mind, The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite"
The Alto was released in 1981, not 1972
You might be thinking of the 1981 release of the Xerox Star. The Alto was born the first week of April, 1973.
Overlapping windows came from PARC too (in 1971), although many of the PARC people preferred tiled windows for the GUI on high resolution displays.
This is all well documented in Alan Kay's "The Early History Of Smalltalk". Google will find it.
Congress did not cut the the Hab module, The Bush Administration did. I watched the hearings when then NASA Administration Dan Goldin tried to explain the reasoning behind the the directive to Congress and they were as suprised as anyone else. Goldin's explanation was full of juicy tidbits like "The President made his budget priorities clear when he was a candidate, and the American people chose".
Rip two songs from a live album that are back-to-back (i.e. the second track starts while there's crowd noise) and encode them in Ogg.
I just tried this with the v1.25 firmware and The Who - Live at Leeds. It worked great: no gaps.
Still doesn't run linux
It runs Red Hat's eCos. Is that close enough?
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (page 21) seems to agree with your leadership complaint:
"The origins of the Space Shuttle Program date to discussions on what should follow Project Apollo, the dramatic U.S. missions to the moon. NASA centered its post-Apollo plans on developing increasingly larger outposts in Earth orbit that would be launched atop Apollos immense Saturn V booster. The space agency hoped to construct a 12-person space station by 1975; subsequent stations would support 50, then 100 people. Other stations would be placed in orbit around the moon and then be constructed on the lunar surface. In parallel, NASA would develop the capability for the manned exploration of Mars. The concept of a vehicle - or Space Shuttle - to take crews and supplies to and from low-Earth orbit arose as part of this grand vision. To keep the costs of these trips to a minimum, NASA intended to develop a fully reusable vehicle.
NASAs vision of a constellation of space stations and journeying to Mars had little connection with political realities of the time. In his final year in office, President Lyndon Johnson gave highest priority to his Great Society programs and to dealing with the costs and domestic turmoil associated with the Vietnam war. Johnsons successor, President Richard Nixon, also had no appetite for another large, expensive, Apollo-like space commitment. Nixon rejected NASAs ambitions with little hesitation and directed that the agencys budget be cut as much as was politically feasible."
At 1600+ mph a chuck of foam fell down 10'...
No, if you read the Columbia report, it specifically says Columbia "ran into" the chunk of foam 0.16 seconds after it broke off. In that time the foam had decelerated by 500+ miles per hour relative to the orbiter. "Falling" had nothing to do with the collision.
Sounds great, except why allow people other than the current rightholder to extend? For that matter, why allow anyone but the original author to extend?
The first U.S. copyright laws restricted renewals to the original author. Going back to that idea would remove some of the "property" connotations that have appeared since then.
Because it doesn't make sense that you will have to "walk around" or "fly" in some fashion inside a 3d space just because you want to open a web browser, open a spreadsheet, or do basically anything with any sort of timeliness
So you would keep your browser in your "pocket" so that you don't have to hunt it down before using it.
3D Desktops just are not usable right now.
This is not a 3D Desktop. "Desktop" was Kay's metaphor in the 70's, when Xerox wanted a better way to deal with paper. Think bigger. It's all about people collaborating. Think of this as:
- Neil Stephenson's "Multiverse", or Vernor Vinge's "Other Plane"
- A multiuser "Morrowind", where everyone can create their own place in the world
- A way for you to do real time voice communication with distant friends
- An encrypted world-wide end-to-end peer-to-peer media distribution system
- A world wide web of active objects, not just text or lame applets
- A programming environment simple enough for anyone to get started, but deep enough to stick with
I've played around with an early version of Croquet, and it's much cooler than the screen shot implies. Those pictures are portals to other spaces. When you enable them, you see a new world happening in the portal. If you walk though the portal, you enter the world. You see other networked people as avatars, which by default look suspiciously like Tux the penguin. You can easily create new 3D objects, and script them to give them life.
This guy is way ahead of his time.
The version I tried had a long way to go, but if even half of it pans out, it will change everything.
Wasn't it the first mainstream compiler to include a complete DOS extender and feature full 32-bit support?
No, I think that was Zortech
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article...
... The experiments done (like what's the effect of zero-gravity on species x) test no important hypotheses and the outcome is usually not published in high profile magazines.
Then you probably would not be interested in reading the STS-107 Press kit (http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/STS-107_PK.pdf), which has some good detail about what we expected to learn from 60 or so experiments on Columbia that you dismiss.
there was an opinion piece by a biologist yesterday
Many colleagues of "a biologist" would disagree. Try searching PubMed for "microgravity" or "spaceflight" for thousands of examples, and biology is not the only microgravity science discipline.
Once in a while, every scientist working in a field that could possibly have something to do with zero gravity research gets a request for ideas for experiments. They're basically begging for things to add to shuttle science missions.
That's not how it works. Like other government funded research, periodic Request For Proposals are issued. Scientists (mostly at Universities) submit proposals for experiments. These are peer reviewed to make sure the science is worthwhile. Experiments that don't require microgravity (or other resources only available in space) are eliminated. Funding is tight, and competition is high.
The important stuff (what's the effect of long term zero grav on humans) has been pretty much covered by now.
We will probably never know all "the important stuff" about science, and there is much to learn besides the long term health effects of zero-g. Microgravity science is one area where we are still taking our first steps.
Benford is correct when he says the ISS does not do much toward developing an artificial gravity environment suitable for Mars missions, but that is not its purpose. Most of the research being done on ISS is there specifically because it has little gravity. Developing "centrifugal gravity" is an (interesting) engineering problem, but not research. Some people criticize the Apollo program as great engineering but little research, a "stunt" that served little purpose beyond its entertainment value. When we decide to go to Mars (or the Moon, or LEO) to stay, it will be for the research.
It's hard to say what would have happened had brought many of these high volume, low margin products to market. As was stated in an earlier post, Xerox is a compnay that deals with low volume, high margin products.
k -dev/2000-May/011045.html)
A few years ago on the Squeak mailing list, there was a discussion about whether the switch in the 70s from expensive but powerful to cheap but limited computers was really necessary. Alan Kay posted a very interesting perspective:
(trimmed from http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squea
>...Must early computing really start with Basic and friends and
>must better things wait for the arrival of "real machines"?
Remember that BASIC on the Altair didn't do much. I don't think that a
Smalltalk type system would have to be much larger if it "didn't do much".
Peter Deutsch's original interactive PDP-1 LISP from the early sixties did
do quite a bit and it was implemented in about 2000 instructions on a 4K
(18 bit word) PDP-1. Smalltalk-72 did quite a bit and it ran quite well in
about 16kb + the display memory. It would be interesting to see how well
the "page long" interpreter for ST-72* would do if all that were added were
a few auxillary classes.
Of course, old PARC hands would also point out that the Altair was quite
irrelevant since the Alto at PARC started running two years earlier in
1973, and there were quite a few of them by 1975. All personal computers
today are like the Alto, none are like the Altair. The hobbiest PC movement
was kind of a red herring and dead end (and one could say that 8-bit micros
and most of the software that was put on them led several generations
astray from better ways to approach personal computing. Those bad defacto
standards are still holding back progress).
The ISS has never done any science.
A negative is easy to disprove: PCS Results
If there was ever any hope that it would, that hope is gone now that the number of crew has been lowered -- they're being kept busy full-time now just doing what's necessary to stay alive.
The Bush Administration decision to not launch the Habitation Module has severely crippled ISS research, but it has not eliminated it.
A fair way to handle the fiasco would be to force all NASA programs to compete in the same kind of peer review that's required for NSF and DOE science.
Are you familiar with the process to apply for the opportunity to do science on ISS? It's not so different from getting an NSF or DOE grant. The investigators doing research on ISS are real scientists that do real, published, peer reviewed research.
This would have the effect of killing off the crewed space program, while steering more funding to uncrewed probes, which are what actually do the science.
Unmanned probes can do important science, but not the same kind of science that can be done on ISS. Both are important.
is this something which could be done on a specifically-built, standalone unit (or, less realistically, an experiment which could be passed from shuttle mission to shuttle mission)?
There have been some platforms like this (i.e., the Long Duration Exposure Facility), but many experiments require significant crew interaction. Making fully automated robotic experiments is (usually) harder and more expensive than doing them on the ISS.
how 'long-term' is a long-term microgravity experiment?
It depends on the experiment. Most combustion physics experiments last a few seconds (for each test run). Crystal growth and other materials science experiments can take a very long time. Fluid physics and biology experiments are usually somewhere in between.
what is the general weight (pun!) of microgravity in the list of considerations surrounding space travel?
Space travel and space research have different requirements. Microgravity is bad for space travel. It makes most people sick for their first few days and makes their bones degrade after they are up for a few months. A space vehicle built for long term travel (i.e., mission to mars) would probably rotate to generate artificial gravity. On the other hand, gravity would defeat the purpose of most space research. The primary reason for doing most experiments in space is the unique microgravity environment.
is there anything they can/could do on the ISS ... that couldn't/hasn't been done on any one of the NASA/Russian orbital missions?
Yes there is. The platform required for a specific microgravity research objective is largely determined by the duration of the experiment. Ground based drop towers can provide a microgravity environment for up to 10 seconds. Aircraft flying parabolic trajectories typically provide 25 seconds. Sounding rockets can provide several minutes. The space shuttles provide a maximum of 17 days. Anything longer is usually done on the ISS. Qualitative differences between the platforms and differing requirements for crew interaction also influence the choice of platform.
... for results that could mostly be obtained from unmanned satellites
Please elaborate. What is it that you think is done on the ISS that could be done with unmanned satellites?
People like Carl Sagan and Lawrence Krauss were always quick to point out that unmanned satellites are much more cost effective for some kinds of research (like cosmology, not coincidently, their field), but that is not the sort of research that is done on ISS.
Yeh, of course it was Russia that cancelled the module which would have allowed 6 astronauts to be up there...
Score:5?. Not only is the Habitation Module that increases the crew capacity from 3 to 7 built by the U.S., it is mostly complete and ready to launch. It has been sitting in Florida since the Y2K regime change at the White House when the new president decided he had better things to spend money on than launching it.
When Congress asked (then NASA Administration) Dan Goldin why NASA was going to go along with reducing crew capabilities and gutting most research from the ISS program, he answered "It is my job to promote the administration's policies, not to defend them", and "The president made his budget priorities clear during the election, and the American people chose."
The Russians had nothing to do with it.
This is simply what is known as "indirection" in the industry.
No, indirection would be having a pointer to the data at the start of the tape. In this case, there was code at the start of the tape that interpreted the rest of the tape.
Alan Kay gives this as an example of an early instance of the themes later known as object oriented programming. He saw similar themes in Sketchpad, Simula, and to some extent Lisp, and wanted to explore the possibility of creating a system based completely on the idea of "objects" with internal state and code that communicate only by sending "messages". This is what is meant by "pure" object oriented programming.
I don't see how this is specifically OOP. Languages like LISP, at least, have been doing this for a long time. Indirection is *not* native to OOP.
Nobody (but you) said it is. If you are at all interested in understanding OO, track down "The Early History of Smalltalk". It's interesting. Alan Kay was very much aware of Simula and Lisp, and he gives credit where it is due (the first sentence in the paper is "Most ideas come from previous ideas.").
...Now, however, they have the fix in IE 5.5 SP2...
Isn't IE 5.5 SP2 the "service pack" that break ALL Netscape plugins, even the ones I want?
According to the US Copyright Office FAQ at http://www.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ1.html, "Works by the U. S. Government are not eligible for U. S. copyright protection". NASA lawyers and their Commercial Technology Office have told me that this statement definitely includes software developed by NASA.
But what does âoenot eligible for U. S. copyright protection" really mean? Is that the same as âoePublic Domainâ? The people I talked to did not have an answer.
To not allow extensions to the file format means NO NEW FEATURES can be added -- that is a ridiculous idea at best. Of course there have to be changes...
How many extensions were added to the TeX file format in the last 15 years? Is the answer zero because TeX is less "advanced" than Word?
How about DocBook? Will they have to change the XML file format when somebody wants to add a new feature?
The only reason Word has an extensible file format is to keep people on the upgrade treadmill.
The 'turning circuit' does not have to be any more complicated than 'the sensor on the left triggers the effector on the left, and the sensor on the right tiggers the effector on the right'. If the light is to the right, the sensor on the right is triggered more, so the effector on the right is triggered more, and the bug turns to the left, running away from the light.
There is an excellent book by Valentino Braitenberg called 'Vehicles - Experiements in Synthetic Psychology' that goes into all kinds of examples of simple circuits exhibiting behavior like this (behavior that we would consider somewhat intelligent if we observed it the in an animal).
Although I support the efforts of the ISS and orbital research from what I've heard there is in fact not a lot of good research they can do in weightlessness
The only reason to do space based research is because of the microgravity environment. If the experiment does not require weightlessness, then it is done on the ground.
Personally I think it says something when you're accepting experiments from junior high schools...
Personally, I think those are mostly publicity stunts to try to raise student interest in science.
Does anyone know of useful research being conducted by astronauts...
Fundamental science research is usually not considered "useful" in the sense that it has obvious immediate applications (then it would be called "technology" or "engineering"). Scientific research is all about discovering new things. Often these new things turn out to be "useful", but it's hard to know if something undiscovered is useful.
There are a few hundred links to existing space research projects here: http://microgavity.grc.nasa.gov
Note the word "unreasonable." This is a rather vague word; intentionally so.
It's not so vague if you read the whole sentence, which clearly says that reasonable search must include a valid warrant issued for a specific reason specifying a particular place/person to search:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Searching everyone in public places without a warrant is clearly unconstitutional.