The moon, while it lacks the earth's large shock-absorbing core, is a geologically quiet base upon which to build a massive telescope or array, with the entire mass of the moon insulating it from the sun's radiation, and virtually no atmosphere to distort the image.
You do know that while the moon is locked in its rotation always to face the earth, the "dark side of the moon" rotates around the moon once every four weeks or so...
And without an insulating atmosphere, the thermal stresses on your telescope as it crosses the terminator will be huge...
There's probably an easy way to avoid this problem, but it's still there.
Unless we figure out how to format information for usable presentation to the brain, or understand brain output with more bandwidth than morse code, "jacking in" won't be worth much.
The Neurophone bypasses the afferent mechanics of the middle ear, but really seems to have just stimulated the afferent mechanics of the cochlea, so it's not so much a "neuro" phone as a possible eardrum replacement. I'd put up a link, but they're mostly naff, either trying to profit from the quackery aspects of the device, or failing to understand the device when ragging on it.
Efferent studies so far involve biofeedback and using biofeedback to move a mouse. Here at are some links. But like I said, this technology is about as exciting as an omelette bar at a rodeo.
> With RF systems, you would need some tracking for any long term communications, but you could base that purely on satellite ephemeris, a much simpler problem.
You'd start the beam search using ephemerides, but RF crosslinks do use signal-strength components for feedback-based antenna steering control.
You're dead right that getting it done with lasers is several orders of magnitude more cool.
This also has the potential to tack a few more zeroes onto the accuracy of orbital position determination. Interferometry could get you sub-nanometer resolution. I can't imagine why you'd want that, but I can imagine someone else can.
I was doing this in 1988 with chicken-embryo myoblasts and chips we had made in the MOSIS program.
MOSIS was commercially donated semiconductor fab capacity normally used to fab circuits for student projects. We used it to make an array of open pads on which we placed the myoblasts (clumps of neural/muscular tissue that fired occasionally without being stimulated).
The pads were connected to a multiplexer and an amplifier fabbed on the same chip.
But we weren't the first to do that, just the first to use common silicon processes to do it. No patent for me.
Actually, that's the reason the DO-178B system is the way it is.
It's designed to indemnify the engineers, the companies, and the FAA against liability for failures.
Independent review and testing indemnifies individual engineers.
Testing and review to an FAA-approved standard indemnifies the companies.
Good-faith reduction in bug counts, and full disclosure of unrepaired bugs, indemnifies the FAA.
The trick is, certain kinds of unrepaired bugs will not get certified. Certain kinds will get certified if they are properly disclosed and documented. The company takes responsibility for those, and the FAA approves them. Those bugs are determined by review and testing not to affect the certification level of the software.
So it's important to note that certification doesn't mean bug-free, either. It just means safe enough to fly on, which is all you can ask for in the real world, where going 7 miles up in the sky in a tin sausage with a million parts and a million lines of code and all-too-human operators and fellow travellers is considered a safe thing to do.
Certified software is tested and putatively immutable, and you can always throw more testing at it if you think it needs it.
DO-178B procedures require that all software designs and implementations be reviewed and tested, the tests reviewed, and the reviews reviewed, by different engineers--or companies--wherever practicable. And it comes with different levels of certification, to allow cost reduction where lower levels of risk are involved.
--Blair
(Note to web surfers, if you want to go to yahoo.com, say, to find standards links, do not mis-type the domain as "yaho.com". Trust me on this. I also advise everyone to use Panicware's free Pop-up Stopper. This node is getting wrapped right now.)
Months ago, when load started crashing Safeweb regularly, I wrote to ask them if they were still interested in continuing to operate, and I offered to buy their business model for a dollar.
Telling event: They wrote back declining the offer.
Engineering solutions to previously impossible problems produces lasting, valuable side effects.
This has always been true.
Keep funding space and subatomic physics and Britney Spears's career. The end goal may seem to give us nothing, but the intellectual entropy they stir up in their wake are solid gold.
Anyone in their right mind relegated to maintaining ancient code should take a serious look at the requirements the code is meant to satisfy and ask for money to rewrite and replace that code, if only because the maintenance costs of both the code and the hardware will soon be prohibitive.
"Databases that can easily be in the gigabyte range" are considered micro databases these days. If Excel and VB don't have the capacity, then just about any other DBMS and GUI will.
--Blair
"Y2K won't be the last bug attributable to 'oh this shit'll never run that long...'"
The point of this being that penny-per-page will inaugurate the scam-model that any page worth viewing requires navigating several pages of contentless architecture first.
Sturgeon's law is about 2-sigma (1/22nd non-crap). The Web is probably about 3-sigma (1/333rd non-crap). The Web on 1c/p would be 6-sigma (1/1744278th non-crap).
Alternative example: Baseball-Reference.Com[yeah, there] is shareware online. It doesn't nag about donations, it just makes it clear that it accepts them, and even reports on how it goes. But the information is so thick and clean you feel dead guilty not contributing. I probably cough up more than 1c/p for it in occasional $10 PayPal impulse donations.
Maybe what's needed is a micropayment system where you can click a button on your browser if you feel the page you're viewing was worth a penny. How you'd fund that system's infrastructure I don't know.
It'd have to have an interesting security design, to prevent spoofing and camouflaged payment links (e.g., click inside the link text to pay a penny; click anywhere outside the link text and hear cha-ching.wav and you paid two pennies).
We already have the converse, where you pay if you think the page you want to go to might be interesting, and you're screwed if it isn't. But that's how sales works, and that's evolved over tens of thousands of years. So that's how the net will end up working.
Look, sunshine, the case is already absurd. Costs for airplane development are 10x-100x what the costs for similar automotive development would be. I'm pointing out that it's safe enough. You seem to want someone to argue against you, and you're not finding one. Troubling, isn't it?
>get paged in the middle of the night and have to come in at 2am to babysit a router (it happened to me several dozen times). I don't mean to imply that I am p-whipped but my wife forced me to quit that job.
What is up with that?
I got the same grief from my ex.
I mean, what's it to her? She's asleep. I'm going to work. And I'm paid hourly, so I'm getting plenty of loot to spend on her. It all spells "hero", but she acts all hurt and dissed.
My guess is it kicks in some female instinct that you're just going out to find another cave that smells like estrus, because what else would make a man not stay sleeping...
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom for your children is as important as freedom and children put together.
--Blair
Micromachining techniques are far from "perfect to the last atom or so".
They're akin to dipping easter eggs.
Actually, they're akin to dipping easter eggs in hexafluoric acid and making an educated guess as to when the shell has ablated by 2 microns.
Micromachined parts won't be perfect to the last atom until they're milled using a scanning tunnelling microscope.
--Blair
And Union Carbide will give a free bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to every child with 11 fingers in the village of Roliepolieolie, India.
--Blair
"Technical support will be charged at the usual rate."
The moon, while it lacks the earth's large shock-absorbing core, is a geologically quiet base upon which to build a massive telescope or array, with the entire mass of the moon insulating it from the sun's radiation, and virtually no atmosphere to distort the image.
You do know that while the moon is locked in its rotation always to face the earth, the "dark side of the moon" rotates around the moon once every four weeks or so...
And without an insulating atmosphere, the thermal stresses on your telescope as it crosses the terminator will be huge...
There's probably an easy way to avoid this problem, but it's still there.
--Blair
That's 40 KHz.
Your dog is going to go totally nuts every time you turn on your PDA.
--Blair
Connecting to the brain has two applications:
1. Input
2. Output
Unless we figure out how to format information for usable presentation to the brain, or understand brain output with more bandwidth than morse code, "jacking in" won't be worth much.
The Neurophone bypasses the afferent mechanics of the middle ear, but really seems to have just stimulated the afferent mechanics of the cochlea, so it's not so much a "neuro" phone as a possible eardrum replacement. I'd put up a link, but they're mostly naff, either trying to profit from the quackery aspects of the device, or failing to understand the device when ragging on it.
Experiments with occipital lobe array implants are much more promising.
Efferent studies so far involve biofeedback and using biofeedback to move a mouse. Here at are some links. But like I said, this technology is about as exciting as an omelette bar at a rodeo.
--Blair
If slashdot editors actually read slashdot:
Nerve Cells Connected to Semi-Conductors
--Blair
"I won't expect Wired editors ever to be that clueful."
> With RF systems, you would need some tracking for any long term communications, but you could base that purely on satellite ephemeris, a much simpler problem.
You'd start the beam search using ephemerides, but RF crosslinks do use signal-strength components for feedback-based antenna steering control.
You're dead right that getting it done with lasers is several orders of magnitude more cool.
This also has the potential to tack a few more zeroes onto the accuracy of orbital position determination. Interferometry could get you sub-nanometer resolution. I can't imagine why you'd want that, but I can imagine someone else can.
--Blair
I was doing this in 1988 with chicken-embryo myoblasts and chips we had made in the MOSIS program.
MOSIS was commercially donated semiconductor fab capacity normally used to fab circuits for student projects. We used it to make an array of open pads on which we placed the myoblasts (clumps of neural/muscular tissue that fired occasionally without being stimulated).
The pads were connected to a multiplexer and an amplifier fabbed on the same chip.
But we weren't the first to do that, just the first to use common silicon processes to do it. No patent for me.
--Blair
Actually, that's the reason the DO-178B system is the way it is.
It's designed to indemnify the engineers, the companies, and the FAA against liability for failures.
Independent review and testing indemnifies individual engineers.
Testing and review to an FAA-approved standard indemnifies the companies.
Good-faith reduction in bug counts, and full disclosure of unrepaired bugs, indemnifies the FAA.
The trick is, certain kinds of unrepaired bugs will not get certified. Certain kinds will get certified if they are properly disclosed and documented. The company takes responsibility for those, and the FAA approves them. Those bugs are determined by review and testing not to affect the certification level of the software.
So it's important to note that certification doesn't mean bug-free, either. It just means safe enough to fly on, which is all you can ask for in the real world, where going 7 miles up in the sky in a tin sausage with a million parts and a million lines of code and all-too-human operators and fellow travellers is considered a safe thing to do.
--Blair
A certified engineer can still make a mistake.
Certified software is tested and putatively immutable, and you can always throw more testing at it if you think it needs it.
DO-178B procedures require that all software designs and implementations be reviewed and tested, the tests reviewed, and the reviews reviewed, by different engineers--or companies--wherever practicable. And it comes with different levels of certification, to allow cost reduction where lower levels of risk are involved.
--Blair
(Note to web surfers, if you want to go to yahoo.com, say, to find standards links, do not mis-type the domain as "yaho.com". Trust me on this. I also advise everyone to use Panicware's free Pop-up Stopper. This node is getting wrapped right now.)
Long ago, when I was in school, I left half a bottle of Ballantine's Ale open on my lab desk for two years.
Absolutely nothing grew on or in it.
--Blair
"Macro Brew is Good for You."
...more self-absorbedly disconnected from computing reality...
...than Robert Cringely...
...evaluating Bill Gates' historical revisionism...
--Blair
And, once you get the joke, you realize he was incomparably brilliant.
--Blair
Blame Canada.
--Blair
"And you thought that was just a motto."
Borg, schmorg.
That little play works better in Cylon voices.
--Blair
"By your command."
Months ago, when load started crashing Safeweb regularly, I wrote to ask them if they were still interested in continuing to operate, and I offered to buy their business model for a dollar.
Telling event: They wrote back declining the offer.
That's when I knew they were doomed.
--Blair
Engineering solutions to previously impossible problems produces lasting, valuable side effects.
This has always been true.
Keep funding space and subatomic physics and Britney Spears's career. The end goal may seem to give us nothing, but the intellectual entropy they stir up in their wake are solid gold.
--Blair
The Chronicle's stuck-up staff strikes out again.
The thing that made IC great in the first place was the camp and the dialogue. We can watch French Chef reruns if we want the food to star.
As long as it's not "Let's Bowl" with food, it'll work.
--Blair
Anyone in their right mind relegated to maintaining ancient code should take a serious look at the requirements the code is meant to satisfy and ask for money to rewrite and replace that code, if only because the maintenance costs of both the code and the hardware will soon be prohibitive.
"Databases that can easily be in the gigabyte range" are considered micro databases these days. If Excel and VB don't have the capacity, then just about any other DBMS and GUI will.
--Blair
"Y2K won't be the last bug attributable to 'oh this shit'll never run that long...'"
And I spent $7.77 on a cheesesteak, fries, and a coke for lunch today.
--Blair
"And the student was enlightened."
The point of this being that penny-per-page will inaugurate the scam-model that any page worth viewing requires navigating several pages of contentless architecture first.
Sturgeon's law is about 2-sigma (1/22nd non-crap). The Web is probably about 3-sigma (1/333rd non-crap). The Web on 1c/p would be 6-sigma (1/1744278th non-crap).
Alternative example: Baseball-Reference.Com[yeah, there] is shareware online. It doesn't nag about donations, it just makes it clear that it accepts them, and even reports on how it goes. But the information is so thick and clean you feel dead guilty not contributing. I probably cough up more than 1c/p for it in occasional $10 PayPal impulse donations.
Maybe what's needed is a micropayment system where you can click a button on your browser if you feel the page you're viewing was worth a penny. How you'd fund that system's infrastructure I don't know.
It'd have to have an interesting security design, to prevent spoofing and camouflaged payment links (e.g., click inside the link text to pay a penny; click anywhere outside the link text and hear cha-ching.wav and you paid two pennies).
We already have the converse, where you pay if you think the page you want to go to might be interesting, and you're screwed if it isn't. But that's how sales works, and that's evolved over tens of thousands of years. So that's how the net will end up working.
--Blair
"My own little slashback. Cha-ching!"
If you can't get COBOL, rewrite it in VB for Excel...it'll probably be 40x more powerful...
--Blair
"The business model is probably obsolete anyway."
Look, sunshine, the case is already absurd. Costs for airplane development are 10x-100x what the costs for similar automotive development would be. I'm pointing out that it's safe enough. You seem to want someone to argue against you, and you're not finding one. Troubling, isn't it?
--Blair
>get paged in the middle of the night and have to come in at 2am to babysit a router (it happened to me several dozen times). I don't mean to imply that I am p-whipped but my wife forced me to quit that job.
What is up with that?
I got the same grief from my ex.
I mean, what's it to her? She's asleep. I'm going to work. And I'm paid hourly, so I'm getting plenty of loot to spend on her. It all spells "hero", but she acts all hurt and dissed.
My guess is it kicks in some female instinct that you're just going out to find another cave that smells like estrus, because what else would make a man not stay sleeping...
--Blair