Edison's lightbulb is a really bad example. Edison took something which was already working in a lab (wire emitting light when you send electricity through it) and made it actually useful. Before Edison it was a scientific curiousity.
That is not fundamental research, it is directed product development.
Since we are on the topic, I once chanced on an issue of "Review of Scientific Instruments" from around 1900s. I was amazed by lots of articles on many ingenious devices based on transformers, vacuum bulbs and many unlike anything I heard before. Nowadays we look back and think "Lightbulb, Fleming valve, Multiphase motor" but there was a lot of research..
The whole article was not much more than a high level review. The graphic naturally draws attention to the parameters the writer wanted to cover but he did not back up his graphic with any sort of serious textual review of what he felt were the weaknesses or advantages of the different programming language at least not in any detail.
And what he has is flawed as well. For example, he marked R as having issue with big data which is quite wrong - I routinely analyze multi-GB datasets in memory, and my databases go into TB. Of all the three languages R is the only one to have a native format (data.frame) that interfaces easily to database queries. Both Octave (Matlab) or Python have to use compound types which make addressing difficult.
Also, I found R easier to master than either Octave or Python, but this is probably because I am familiar with Lisp.
No, all fundamental discoveries are made by government. Commercial entities have never invented anything.
That is because profit is incompatible with social benefit.
We need to encourage more funding from government through taxation of corporation. Let's give government more control over corporations.
There are intermediate entities like old AT&T labs where invented transistor was invented. Note that because AT&T was a monopoly the patent was licensed for only a nominal fee. If it was a pure commercial company expect the computer revolution delayed by a decade.
About the only things that deserve patents are fundamental discoveries and drugs that are unique and cost hundreds of millions to develop and test. And even then, just provide some kind of "formula patent" that only lasts 5-6 years.
I know of very few cases when a fundamental discovery was made by a commercial company, they usually shy away from anything that takes a decade or more to develop. Usually this is funded by the goverment which is supposed to have a longer term view.
From spooky to downright disturbing, because if that is true, then the passengers of the very first viable colony expedition to another star will look back and see a super flare roast the Earth to a cinder just as soon as they are out of range.
Update: For those of you inquiring about the strength of my Hotmail password – it was a seven-letter string of lowercase letters. Not a dictionary word, but part acronym, part proper noun. It’s not the world’s strongest password, and I can feel the parental glare of Davey Winder from 200 miles away, but it wasn’t that weak, either.
Yeah, not a very strong password. What the hell was he thinking? At least mix case and have one number. Passwords I use have mixed case, numbers and symbols in it so it's not so easy to guess.
Why would a moderate strength password not be enough ? I am sure even MS rate-limits login attempts. And if someone got root to Hotmail servers you are screwed anyway.
When you transmit particles though matter, or bounce them off of a surface, do they keep their properties? I don't know much about particle physics, but I thought that when this happens, particles are being absorbed, and new particles emitted. i.e. light doesn't actually "bounce" off of a mirror, but the particle interactions within the surface of the matter that makes up the mirror give a result that makes the photon appear to bounce. If this is true, wouldn't slowing things down with fiber optic cable or mirrors break the experiment?
The situation I was wondering about it this:
Victor has been sent to a distant planet, and is supposed to relay information to earth. For simplicity sake, lets say it's a yes or no answer (this is a simplification with a single bit that could be extended to bigger messages).
The experiment described in the article is done many times in succession (lets say a million times) with Alice and Bob recording results, and victor choosing the same thing every iteration (he will entangle for all million attempts, or not for all million attempts). While Alice and Bob cannot communicate directly with Victor to see whether he has entangled or not, the first handful of observations that they make would be indistinguishable from randomness, but after several thousand iterations, wouldn't there be a significant statistical deviation towards correlation of Alice and Bob's results if Victor was entangling?
In this way, couldn't victor communicate with Alice and Bob instantaneously?
I am not sure, but I don't think there is a paradox as for Victor to have carried off the photon pair implies causal relationship.
Perhaps, this experiment is similar to one where you send the photons into the black box and can tell whether the entanglement have been destroyed or not, without anything coming out of the black box.
If you have nice and stable mirrors (or fiber) then no collapse will occur. In particular, recall that people have used kilometer-scale fiber-optic link to send entangled photons for cryptographic purposes.
If you want to be confused a bit more, look up "weak measurement";)
Isn't this basically what Linus Torvalds did with Linux? If it can be done with an OS couldn't you do it with a compiler or an interpreter? I'm not a programmer, so the likeliness of this story being true is beyond my ability to judge.
Both general GNU and Linux developers were very careful to avoid infringing copyrights and a lot of work started after the original Unix patents expired.
I'm not sure how serious you are, but I'll point out the problem at the risk of killing the joke. The issue is in step 2. Photons travel at the speed of light (by definition). Because we cannot send information faster than the speed of light, the photons arrive at Victor strictly before any message from Alice and Bob.
Just use a fiber optic cable to make them wait longer. Or bounce between mirrors in a zigzag - this way light trajectory can be long, but the spatial distance can be short.
Imagine if it had hit just a bit further west at night with clear weather. That would have resulted in a very bright flash at night and the aforementioned "rumbling and shaking" over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Now imagine that the orbital dynamics were such that this happened in 1982 instead of 2012. Then you get a bright flash and a rumble over a major metro area during the Cold War.
No worries - that meteorites show up on radar (strongly) was well-known since World War 2.
It depends on what you are interested in. For detecting the asteroid a few meters a diameter within a ball that includes the Moon you would need to scan 2e18 one cubic meter positions every seven hours or so. I assumed that it is sufficient to scan a 1-meter deep shell around Earth.
If you now assume that you need only a nanosecond to tell whether there is an asteroid in a given 1 meter cube or not (which would correspond to spending a few CPU/FPGA cycles on processing) then you need to be able to process 80000 different positions simultaneously.
This is doable with modern technology, but rather expensive - think military size budget, not NASA size budget.
It only takes a little bit of alloying metals to make most different kinds of high-grade steel. Some of those are available from asteroids or the moon quite easily. Shipping a little of some of the rarer alloying elements like chromium up is still a lot less mass than boosting everything. Nickel is the other major element of nickel-iron asteroids and it is great both on its own and in alloys. High performance steels and nickel superalloys are truly high-tech stuff - often the best materials at any price, not just on the basis of cost.
The problem is process control - you need to add the elements in just the right proportion and then have a proper temperature cycle, etc, which greatly increases complexity. With titanium it could probably be as simple as an electron beam gun heating up raw rutile with oxygen escaping and leaving pure titanium. One thing you have in space is plenty of low-quality vacuum !
There are also large quantities of platinum-group metals in some asteroids that have many, many technological uses but are just in too short supply on earth to use as much as engineers and chemists would like.
Well, you know what they say in real estate: Location, location, LOCATION.
I'm thinking they don't want to bring 'Mineral X' down to Earth unless it's in ton lots. What they want is, the materials right where they are, in space, where they will provide materials to work with in space. Yes, it could take $2.6 billion to bring a random 500 ton asteroid to lunar orbit. It would cost over 10 billion to launch that 500 tons into orbit at the current guestimated going rate of $10,000 per pound.
What can you do with 500 tons of materials in orbit? Lots of things. 500 tons of very high grade iron ore, the purity of which we haven't seen on Earth in almost a millenium, would make the basis for the frame of a decent sized space station. For comparison, the ISS at full buildout is about 37 billion plus overruns and weighs in approximately 450 tons plus about 13 billion so far in supplies etc to date. Grabbing a carbonaceous asteroid could offset some of that 13 billion on the 'next-gen' space stations, when we learn to 'convert' that carbon into foodstuffs in space.
Sure, we'd need to put a smelter assembly in orbit to refine the metals & scavange the carbon/etc from any asteroid, but add a machine shop as well, adn we can duplicate the factory complex and build out from there, at ZERO boost from Earth costs. Again, why would we want to send asteroidal material to Earth when we need it so badly in space?
I doubt that pure iron is a good choice for space station material - it is heavy and has low strength unless alloyed. What you want are some low-Z materials like aluminum or lithium. Or, you could try titanium. In fact, titanium would likely be as easy to process in vacuum as iron and titanium is one of few elements with good strength characteristics when unalloyed. It will likely be oxidized, so as a byproduct you get oxygen for fuel (and breathing).
I think if Romney were elected the unaccountable spying and intrusion would get worse. However, if Obama were re-elected, the unaccountable spying and intrusion would get worse. I suppose you're right that the partisan thing is a mere distraction. The problem is that Congress -- whether of the same or different party of the president in power -- absolutely refuses to reign in the White House. Are they lazy? Do they see the trend as a good thing? Do they not care? Has someone got the dirt on them all?
There is another possibility - this is a systemic issue and our society has run into a scalability problem. Most aspects of modern society are very technologically sophisticated - computers, cars, medicine, finance. It stands to reason that running the government is technologically sophisticated as well.
In such situation it is very difficult to make long-term decisions. We are well-familiar with the quarter to quarter mentality in the corporations - well, the same thing is true for the government, it is run but a lot of young people who are overworked and only see a few months ahead.
In such situation, the society evolves like a physical system and it is very hard to change its course. So whoever is in charge pretty much just runs around doing damage control. Hence the desire for more information and shorter response time.
Maybe the Thinkpad R61 was a unique model then...
It has a CPU socket like a desktop, you can upgrade the processor yourself as well (the socket itself is quite different from a Desktop socket, but it has one, and replacing the CPU is a relatively trivial process)
Dell's are like that as well. In fact it makes perfect sense - it would be a lot harder to offer different CPU grades if you had to swap logic boards.
I was at an AWS presentation a couple months ago, and the university's office of research gave an intro talking about their new supercomputer that has 2000 cores, only to get upstaged 10 minutes later when the Amazon guys introduced their 17000 core virtual supercomputer (#42 on the top 500 list, IIRC). There's a lot of untapped potential right now for using that infrastructure to crunch big data.
Big Data is about I/O not cores... How many GB/sec from disk can that cloud support ?
Slashdot Mirror
Edison's lightbulb is a really bad example. Edison took something which was already working in a lab (wire emitting light when you send electricity through it) and made it actually useful. Before Edison it was a scientific curiousity.
That is not fundamental research, it is directed product development.
Since we are on the topic, I once chanced on an issue of "Review of Scientific Instruments" from around 1900s. I was amazed by lots of articles on many ingenious devices based on transformers, vacuum bulbs and many unlike anything I heard before. Nowadays we look back and think "Lightbulb, Fleming valve, Multiphase motor" but there was a lot of research..
The whole article was not much more than a high level review. The graphic naturally draws attention to the parameters the writer wanted to cover but he did not back up his graphic with any sort of serious textual review of what he felt were the weaknesses or advantages of the different programming language at least not in any detail.
And what he has is flawed as well. For example, he marked R as having issue with big data which is quite wrong - I routinely analyze multi-GB datasets in memory, and my databases go into TB. Of all the three languages R is the only one to have a native format (data.frame) that interfaces easily to database queries. Both Octave (Matlab) or Python have to use compound types which make addressing difficult.
Also, I found R easier to master than either Octave or Python, but this is probably because I am familiar with Lisp.
No, all fundamental discoveries are made by government. Commercial entities have never invented anything.
That is because profit is incompatible with social benefit.
We need to encourage more funding from government through taxation of corporation. Let's give government more control over corporations.
There are intermediate entities like old AT&T labs where invented transistor was invented. Note that because AT&T was a monopoly the patent was licensed for only a nominal fee. If it was a pure commercial company expect the computer revolution delayed by a decade.
About the only things that deserve patents are fundamental discoveries and drugs that are unique and cost hundreds of millions to develop and test. And even then, just provide some kind of "formula patent" that only lasts 5-6 years.
I know of very few cases when a fundamental discovery was made by a commercial company, they usually shy away from anything that takes a decade or more to develop. Usually this is funded by the goverment which is supposed to have a longer term view.
Take a look at this: Thorlabs - pretty decent, they have optics, mechanics and some exotic stuff as well ;)
From spooky to downright disturbing, because if that is true, then the passengers of the very first viable colony expedition to another star will look back and see a super flare roast the Earth to a cinder just as soon as they are out of range.
Too complicated. We'll just get a signle Boltzmann brain.
What is "Ubuntu software center" ? apt-get ?
Sure, just pull in kubuntu packages.
Makes sense.
From the article:
Yeah, not a very strong password. What the hell was he thinking? At least mix case and have one number. Passwords I use have mixed case, numbers and symbols in it so it's not so easy to guess.
Why would a moderate strength password not be enough ? I am sure even MS rate-limits login attempts. And if someone got root to Hotmail servers you are screwed anyway.
When you transmit particles though matter, or bounce them off of a surface, do they keep their properties? I don't know much about particle physics, but I thought that when this happens, particles are being absorbed, and new particles emitted. i.e. light doesn't actually "bounce" off of a mirror, but the particle interactions within the surface of the matter that makes up the mirror give a result that makes the photon appear to bounce. If this is true, wouldn't slowing things down with fiber optic cable or mirrors break the experiment?
The situation I was wondering about it this:
Victor has been sent to a distant planet, and is supposed to relay information to earth. For simplicity sake, lets say it's a yes or no answer (this is a simplification with a single bit that could be extended to bigger messages).
The experiment described in the article is done many times in succession (lets say a million times) with Alice and Bob recording results, and victor choosing the same thing every iteration (he will entangle for all million attempts, or not for all million attempts). While Alice and Bob cannot communicate directly with Victor to see whether he has entangled or not, the first handful of observations that they make would be indistinguishable from randomness, but after several thousand iterations, wouldn't there be a significant statistical deviation towards correlation of Alice and Bob's results if Victor was entangling?
In this way, couldn't victor communicate with Alice and Bob instantaneously?
I am not sure, but I don't think there is a paradox as for Victor to have carried off the photon pair implies causal relationship.
Perhaps, this experiment is similar to one where you send the photons into the black box and can tell whether the entanglement have been destroyed or not, without anything coming out of the black box.
If you want to be confused a bit more, look up "weak measurement" ;)
Isn't this basically what Linus Torvalds did with Linux? If it can be done with an OS couldn't you do it with a compiler or an interpreter? I'm not a programmer, so the likeliness of this story being true is beyond my ability to judge.
Both general GNU and Linux developers were very careful to avoid infringing copyrights and a lot of work started after the original Unix patents expired.
I'm not sure how serious you are, but I'll point out the problem at the risk of killing the joke. The issue is in step 2. Photons travel at the speed of light (by definition). Because we cannot send information faster than the speed of light, the photons arrive at Victor strictly before any message from Alice and Bob.
Just use a fiber optic cable to make them wait longer. Or bounce between mirrors in a zigzag - this way light trajectory can be long, but the spatial distance can be short.
It hit in daylight over Reno-Tahoe.
Imagine if it had hit just a bit further west at night with clear weather. That would have resulted in a very bright flash at night and the aforementioned "rumbling and shaking" over the San Francisco Bay Area.
Now imagine that the orbital dynamics were such that this happened in 1982 instead of 2012. Then you get a bright flash and a rumble over a major metro area during the Cold War.
No worries - that meteorites show up on radar (strongly) was well-known since World War 2.
Why? It's not like we can do anything. Personally, I would not like to know that a meteor is about to slam into the earth and end life as we know it.
We can tell people to move..
If you now assume that you need only a nanosecond to tell whether there is an asteroid in a given 1 meter cube or not (which would correspond to spending a few CPU/FPGA cycles on processing) then you need to be able to process 80000 different positions simultaneously.
This is doable with modern technology, but rather expensive - think military size budget, not NASA size budget.
It only takes a little bit of alloying metals to make most different kinds of high-grade steel. Some of those are available from asteroids or the moon quite easily. Shipping a little of some of the rarer alloying elements like chromium up is still a lot less mass than boosting everything. Nickel is the other major element of nickel-iron asteroids and it is great both on its own and in alloys. High performance steels and nickel superalloys are truly high-tech stuff - often the best materials at any price, not just on the basis of cost.
The problem is process control - you need to add the elements in just the right proportion and then have a proper temperature cycle, etc, which greatly increases complexity. With titanium it could probably be as simple as an electron beam gun heating up raw rutile with oxygen escaping and leaving pure titanium. One thing you have in space is plenty of low-quality vacuum !
There are also large quantities of platinum-group metals in some asteroids that have many, many technological uses but are just in too short supply on earth to use as much as engineers and chemists would like.
I agree.
Well, you know what they say in real estate: Location, location, LOCATION. I'm thinking they don't want to bring 'Mineral X' down to Earth unless it's in ton lots. What they want is, the materials right where they are, in space, where they will provide materials to work with in space. Yes, it could take $2.6 billion to bring a random 500 ton asteroid to lunar orbit. It would cost over 10 billion to launch that 500 tons into orbit at the current guestimated going rate of $10,000 per pound. What can you do with 500 tons of materials in orbit? Lots of things. 500 tons of very high grade iron ore, the purity of which we haven't seen on Earth in almost a millenium, would make the basis for the frame of a decent sized space station. For comparison, the ISS at full buildout is about 37 billion plus overruns and weighs in approximately 450 tons plus about 13 billion so far in supplies etc to date. Grabbing a carbonaceous asteroid could offset some of that 13 billion on the 'next-gen' space stations, when we learn to 'convert' that carbon into foodstuffs in space. Sure, we'd need to put a smelter assembly in orbit to refine the metals & scavange the carbon/etc from any asteroid, but add a machine shop as well, adn we can duplicate the factory complex and build out from there, at ZERO boost from Earth costs. Again, why would we want to send asteroidal material to Earth when we need it so badly in space?
I doubt that pure iron is a good choice for space station material - it is heavy and has low strength unless alloyed. What you want are some low-Z materials like aluminum or lithium. Or, you could try titanium. In fact, titanium would likely be as easy to process in vacuum as iron and titanium is one of few elements with good strength characteristics when unalloyed. It will likely be oxidized, so as a byproduct you get oxygen for fuel (and breathing).
And gold is not the most expensive metal, Rhodium is 4x more expensive.
I think if Romney were elected the unaccountable spying and intrusion would get worse. However, if Obama were re-elected, the unaccountable spying and intrusion would get worse. I suppose you're right that the partisan thing is a mere distraction. The problem is that Congress -- whether of the same or different party of the president in power -- absolutely refuses to reign in the White House. Are they lazy? Do they see the trend as a good thing? Do they not care? Has someone got the dirt on them all?
There is another possibility - this is a systemic issue and our society has run into a scalability problem. Most aspects of modern society are very technologically sophisticated - computers, cars, medicine, finance. It stands to reason that running the government is technologically sophisticated as well.
In such situation it is very difficult to make long-term decisions. We are well-familiar with the quarter to quarter mentality in the corporations - well, the same thing is true for the government, it is run but a lot of young people who are overworked and only see a few months ahead.
In such situation, the society evolves like a physical system and it is very hard to change its course. So whoever is in charge pretty much just runs around doing damage control. Hence the desire for more information and shorter response time.
Maybe the Thinkpad R61 was a unique model then... It has a CPU socket like a desktop, you can upgrade the processor yourself as well (the socket itself is quite different from a Desktop socket, but it has one, and replacing the CPU is a relatively trivial process)
Dell's are like that as well. In fact it makes perfect sense - it would be a lot harder to offer different CPU grades if you had to swap logic boards.
Most devices that measure heart rate require a strap on your chest as well.
I was at an AWS presentation a couple months ago, and the university's office of research gave an intro talking about their new supercomputer that has 2000 cores, only to get upstaged 10 minutes later when the Amazon guys introduced their 17000 core virtual supercomputer (#42 on the top 500 list, IIRC). There's a lot of untapped potential right now for using that infrastructure to crunch big data.
Big Data is about I/O not cores... How many GB/sec from disk can that cloud support ?
Sane has pretty good scanner support... at least the last time I used it. Try it out.