Myriad. Thanks. I couldn't remember that word.
A greek myriad is 10,000 then? So a greek speaking bible transcriber wrote, "two myriads of myriads", 1700 years ago?
Would this have been the same transcriber who defined pi == 3? (The crucible used to melt the precious
metals to decorate Solomon's temple was 10 cubits
in diameter, and 30 cubits in circumference. Therefore pi == 3 -- the bible says so -- and the bible is never wrong.)
Seriously, weren't multiplication and division advanced mathematics in those days, when one had to use Roman numerals? How many people would have known how to square 10,000?
Mathematical humourist Martin Gardner wrote a spoof review of a numerological guide to the bible. This numerological guide to the bible had an appendix devoted to more recent cults. One of which was founded on the dreams god delivered to the founder. The key of which concerned the 144,000 saved
standing in a perfect square in front of Jesus. Gardner points out that 144,000 is not, in fact, a square number.;-)
This 144,000 is another translation of a large number from a bible transcribed by innumerate but pious translaters.
Michael Whiticar, one of the principal researchers, was interviewed on CBC newsworld at noon today.
In this interview he said that while there are other undersea methane hydrate ice in other parts of the world, this site is unique. If I heard him properly, its size dwarfed other sites. If I heard him properly, other sites are formed by biological activity, whereas this was due to the leaking of petroleum fractions.
Sorry to be nitpicky and offtopic, but technically it has to be a battle to be Armageddon. At the end of the world (according to the book of Revelation), there will be a "last battle" on the planes of Har-Megiddo, transliterated as Armageddon, and one of the forces will have two hundred million soldiers. These planes were the site of several previous bloody battles, so it is fitting that the last one should be there.
200,000,000? Now I am going to be nit-picky. Did you ever notice how people exagerrate to make a better story?
Ancient peoples didn't have a short-hand for numbers as large as a million. IIRC the ancient greeks only had terms to count up to 10,000.
So, I suspect a later transcriber or translator, whose piety exceeded his scholarship, or his honesty, stretched this number by many orders of magnitude.
Pious people have a bad history of mistranslating the bible in order to advance their own, short-term, secular, political agendas. See the sin of onanism. (This web-page asserts that the bible doesn't forbid masturbation. The web-page asserts that the one passage religious prudes cite actually addresses coitus interruptus.)
Slashdotter Xant has suggested I am a credulous person. Xant challenged me to prove that there was a conspiracy within the Tobacco industry to harness warning labels as a liability sheild in the inevitable damage law-suits.
Xant, here is a link to a summary of documents released by the US congressional committee on Commerce. I believe it is as close to a smoking gun as I am going to get tonight.
Others may find legislative memos of interest. For example, at a meeting of Committee of Counsels on March 31, 1983, there was a lengthy discussion of how to answer a question concerning the hypothetical repeal of the warning label. Counsels have used the warning as a defense in lawsuits to show that smokers had adequate warning. (See 2006239) Not wanting to admit they liked the defense, they decided they would answer the question that the industry has always opposed warning legislation "based upon the assumption shared by all that it wouldn't be repealed." (2000824)
Unfortunately, the links don't seem to be up tonight.
I heard about this guy in a broadcast, not in print. I am finding
it hard to track down.
Do you know how many documents there are on-line documenting the
dangers of smoking, and the conspiracy among Tobacco executives?
I've spent half an hour trying to track down the particular conspiracy
that Xant challenged me to document. I am going to keep looking.
Meanwhile here is an
article that explains how the Tobacco Industry has used the existence of warning labels to evade liablity. Here is a passage from that article:
As a direct result of the 1965 congressionally mandated "health" label on cigarette packs (which was broadened to require labels on advertisements in 1969) Congress gave the industry a unique and privileged legal status, a Teflon coating that repels all liability claims. Whether this windfall for the cigarette manufacturers was an inadvertent result of well-meaning government action or the product of industry manipulation of Congress is a matter of historical debate. In the end, however, the result has been that industry attorneys can rely on the label for their non-sequitur defense in liability suits. They argue, in essence, that, "Cigarettes are not dangerous, but if they were, which they are not, the government 'preempted' our responsibility to warn of those dangers." Put another way, the industry is saying: "Gee, we would like to tell you folks more details about the health risks of smoking, but the government took this authority away from us when they mandated the label -- so don't blame us now for not warning sufficiently."
In my article I said the implications of embedding a macro language in data files guaranteed insecurity. Slowfight suggested I was being credulous conspiracy nut. So I went searching for proof. Here is something virus expert Rob Slade wrote in in 1995.
I believe that MS took a leaf from the playbook of the Tobacco industry
There is a guy recognized as a genius in the Tobacco industry.
I read that twenty odd years ago he told other Tobacco industry
executives that, while they could afford to hire the shrewdest,
meanest, most dishonest lawyers on planet Earth, they could
only fight a rear-guard action.
Eventually, he told his colleagues, even the meanest lawyers
couldn't hold off lawsuits over the lethal effects of their
product. Once suits go to trial, everything will start to
unravel. We have no real defense. So, we need to plan ahead.
His plan? Pretend to fight against mandatory warnings, but
actually let them go ahead. Keep stalling on the trials -- so
that when the trials happen we have a defense.
"But, your honour, we have had to have health warnings on our
products for fifteen years. The claimant can't say they didn't
know our products were dangerous."
Are Microsoft executives any more ethical than Tobacco executives?
Nah.
I believe that MS planned ahead too. I believe that MS has wanted to "own" the desktop, to own our computers, all along.
Anyone could have foreseen that embedding a macro language in their data files, that was automatically executed when the file was opened, was a sure guarantee of terrible security problems.
This was not an accident. This was a design decision. They did this on purpose. I don't believe it was a mistake. I believe they knew exactly what they were doing.
I believed that they looked ahead, and planned to distribute insecure
products, so that the could harness the publics anger at
vandals, interlopers and spam artists
to justify draconian security measures
that we never wuold have agreed to otherwise.
I'd like to see Gates, Ballmer and the whole filthy crew serve serious hard time.
Intelectual property is a modern concept, invented by greedy bastards that ignore that ideas belongs to everyone.
As much as I disagree with the way the MPAA and the RIAA have handled this brave new world of technology, they are fundamentally right.
Excuse me, are you disagreeing that "intellectual property" is an invention?
Consider great artists, like Mozart, or Leonardo. How did they get rewarded for their creative efforts? They had sponsors -- patrons -- who gave them a living allowance. (This tradition continues today. Richard Stallman and Tim Berners-Lee are two of the receipients of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grants.)
Isaac Asimov wrote a great book entitled "Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science". It consists of brief biographies of the 1,000 scientist Asimov considered the most important. One of the interesting things I learned from this book was that during the middle ages, when Greek and Roman thinkers from classical times were very highly respected, some mediavel scholars would attribute their work to classical thinkers. Some of these classical thinkers were hacks. And their reverse plagiarism was an annoying source of confusion for modern scholars. But sometimes their work was unique and valuable. One of these guys made Asimov's list of the 1,000 most important scientists. IIRC he is known only as "the False Jeder".
My point? Smart people, creative people, from different cultures, had no idea of "intellectual property".
You have apparently never had something that you put serious effort into creating taken without your consent. Intellectual property is a way of quantifying that a song, or video, or picture, or peice of software exists through the expenditure of someones resources (time, money, etc..) and that expenditure should be justly compensated.
Um. I'd say that "justice" is a human invention too. Proof? Look how differently other cultures interpret justice.
Are there cultures that have never heard of justice? It wouldn't
surprise me. I know some assholes who seem to have never heard of
justice.
Who are you to claim that a song should belong to you by right.
Ah rights.
Tell me, where do rights come from? Do you believe that rights come from God? That is what the US constitution says. Well, I don't believe in God.
So far as I am concerned, what people call rights are merely conventions. If you can convince everyone else that the conventions you believe in have value to them, then you get to live in a society that respects your "rights".
If not, you have some very difficult decisions to make.
Now, I am sorry you had your ideas ripped off. I want to live in a society where
people's contributions are appreciated. But it seems to me your
arguments are circular. If I were to paraphrase your argument it seems to be
you are entitled to own your ideas because you have a right to them. Circular.
Patents, copyright. They are inventions. There is a rationale for granting patents and
copyrights to creators. Doing so is supposed to benefit society in general.
The idea behind a patent is that granting the patent holder a limited period of
time when no one else can use their idea, without a liscense or other permission,
ultimately benefits the public. The
idea is that the patent holder grants some liscenses, or gets
a limited period of time when they have a monopoly, and they make some money.
The idea is that without that money they wouldn't have come up with the idea.
Or they wouldn't have the cash to develop it. What does the public get out of it?
Well, we get to use the mature creation for free, when the patent expires. If
it is a good idea this should be good for us. And if it is a good enough idea it
is worth it to us to pay the liscense fee prior to the patent running out.
Question: If the US Patent Office was keeping this idea in mind would they be granting
patents to corporations with deep pockets who were cashing in on ideas that
already existed. Did it really benefit the public when the compression
algorithm used in the original GIF format was patented out from under us?
... Again, I'm not saying that the current actions of the RIAA are morally sound.
Morals? Another human invention, so far as I am concerned.
But having had a peice of software stolen from me in College and
billed as somebody elses work woke me up to the
fact that people pour a bit of their soul into the things they create and they
at the very least deserve to be recognized and if they so desire, compensated
for their effort. Recognize that the RIAA and MPAA are products of the industry
itself. They are trying to work in an arena they had no hand in building and
really don't have the option to just sit back and say, "fuck it, nobody get's paid
anymore." Artists and studios make a ton of money because we the people are
willing to pay it for the enjoyment of their product.
Actually, most artists don't make a ton of money. Even famous artists
have been known to get famous, and still go bankrupt. I believe both
Toni Braxton and those young gals
in TLC went bankrupt. I suggest you go back and read the articles Janis Ian
wrote that were cited here on slashdot -- or the article that Courtney Love
published about the economics of being an artist in today's music industry.
And then
there are the not famous artists. If I had a young protege who wanted to be an artist, I
would encourage them to do it because it gave them pleasure. I would encourage them to
consider whether they loved creating enough that they were willing to go into debt
to create, and if so, how deeply in debt. Most artists you or I are ever
likely to make friends with are going to be lucky if they can manage to break even.
...it's the bind-bogglingly stupid hiring practices in general.
Let me recommend Clifford Stall's "The Cuckoo's Egg". If you are not familiar with it, it is an account of the year he spent tracking down an interloper at the lab he worked at. As he tracked the interloper he realized it wasn't just some local teenager with a modem and an attitude. It was an experienced guy with a checklist. Stoll watched him use his lab's computer to try to tap into military computers and steal military secrets.
The FBI are responsible for counter-intelligence, so he phones his local FBI office.
Now Stoll first went looking for the interloper because of a 75 cent discrepancy between two different user billing and accounting packages.
The FBI guy isn't interested in the fact that Stoll seems to have discovered a spy. He asks Stoll how large a monetary loss he can document. "Um. Seventy-five cents." "Well son, call us back when it gets to half a million dollars."
Stoll's documentation of tracking the interloper was doggedly methodical and scientific. This all happened about fourteen years ago. I wonder how much more clueful the FBI is now.
Stoll did mention meeting one FBI guy who was clueful about computers. Unfortunately, he wasn't all that senior. So he couldn't always co-operate, because of stupid FBI internal politics.
Stoll's account is quite funny. Highly recommended...
So what would you say if a notable person doesn't speak english as his native language? Would you guys pull this shit with him too?
Edger Dijkstra said something like, "In my opinion the most important quality in a computer programmer is a mastery
of their native language." It is a good point. You have to understand what you are supposed to be doing. You have to be able to communicate with your colleagues. You have to be able to communicate with your boss, and your clients.
Dijkstra then added something like, "This explains the generally poor quality of American programmers." Ouch!
Seriously, Prince is not a foreigner. English is his native language. Not only is English his native Language, but he is a kind of professional communicator. His songs should be communicating something, no?
Here in Canada we have our own music channels. They have biographies of musicians. I have seen this short clip advertizing his biography a number of times where he says, "I got to a point in my career, where I could say anything".
Well, too bad. If there was someone who could give him advice, that he would listen to, I think they should tell him, "Now hold on son. Forget your financial success, and rewind your ego to the point where you actually cared enough to make an effort for people to understand you."
I mean seriously, if you're going to measure somebody's intelligence based on their shorthand (note: these aren't even typos we're talking abouthere) then wtf's the point? We're talking about the same group of people who uses email, instant messaging, IRC, and so on. Yet you're supposed to spell check everything you say?
I am not measuring his intelligence. I am measuring his ego. Sure, go ahead and be casual with spelling and grammar when you are talking with someone one on one, or in IRC or IM. But the larger your audience, and the less well you know them, the more of an effort you should make to be clear, IMO.
Well, George, doesn't Dijkstra sound like he had a big ego too? Yes. I guess he does. But Dijkstra was a computer science god. Who is going to be remembered one hundred years from now? Prince? Or Dijkstra. I sure hope it is Dijkstra.
If the asteroid is small enough you could even use the airbag to skip it off the atmosphere.
Let me see if I understand what you are suggesting here. We launch a rocket with a big balloon on board. The rocket rendevouses with the asteroid, matches trajectories, lands, and the balloon is deployed. Have I got this right so far?
Then, when the asteroid is about to enter the Earth's atmosphere, the balloon causes it, instead, to bounce off?
Do you know how fast NEO would strike the Earth? I looked this up this summer, when 2002 NT7, the 2 kilometer rock caused a scare when it was thought there was a remote chance it might strike Earth in 2019. It would have struck the Earth at 28 kilometers per second. The NEO that would have struck at the slowest velocity was still 5 kilometers per second.
I don't believe your balloon would survive an impact with the upper atmosphere at 5 km / second, even if it didn't have multiple tons of asteroid behind it.
The Tunguska event of 1908 was caused by the impact of an NEO of about 50 metres in diameter. It caused an airburst equivalent to 16 million tons of TNT. Would an asteroid that size be worth trying to divert, if we detected it with plenty of lead time?
A rock that size would mass something like 40,000 tons.
Here is another quote suggesting that the effect of airbursts are not trivial. The dust generated is more disruptive than the impact itself, if there was an impact. So, breaking the rock into pieces small enough they don't penetrate all the way to the surface may be worse than doing nothing...
What is the range of impactor sizes that might lead to... global catastrophe?... the most frequently discussed estimate of the threshold impactor diameter for globally catstrphic effects was about 2 km.... Of the various enviromental effects of a large impact, Toon [Brian Toon of NASA Ames] believes that the greatest harm would be done by the sub-micrometer dust launced into the stratosphere. The very fine dust has a long residence time, and global climate modeling studies by Covey and others (1990) imply significant drops in global temperature that would threaten agriculture worldwide.
Back when "Armageddon" was stinking up theaters nation-wide...
And what a stinker it was too. One of the groaners that bugged me about it was -- the un-named rock is spinning, right? So, suppose you know -- somehow -- that you could split it into two hemispheres? You are going to have to time the explosion just right, so the two hemispheres blow off normal to the Earth-striking trajectory.
Light the fuse at the wrong moment and all you manage to do was arrange for Earth to be struck twice, at two places, a second or two apart.
Life on earth can cope with two.25km wide asteroids much better than one.5km wide one. As the parts get smaller, it becomes a trivial problem. The earth gets hit every single day.
A number of respondents have said more or less the same thing -- that Earth is struck by small space rubble every day, with no apparent adverse effects. I have trouble with this idea.
But first, to be pedantic. If you split a.5 km berg into.25 km pieces, you get eight pieces, not two pieces. Volume increases as the cube of the radius -- you know, height, width, depth...
The total area of destruction is not, however, necessarily greater than in the case of atmospheric disruption of somewhat smaller objects, because much of the energy of the impactor is absorbed by the ground during crater formation. Thus the effects of small crater-forming events are still chiefly local.
This suggests to me that 8 x 100 megaton airbursts would be worse than one 8,000 megaton groundburst.
The article says a 10 meter rock releases a blast equivalent of 100 kiloton of TNT -- about 6 or 7 x Hiroshima. The 1908 Tunguska event, the airburst of a berg about 50 meters in diameter, released the blast effect of a 16 million tons of TNT. The fireball to seen to streak across Pennsylvania this summer was less than a meter in diameter.
A 500 meter rock, massing something like 4*10^7 tons, would not wipe the Earth of life. Nor would being struck by by 40*10^7 tons of rubble. I contend it would be a mistake to shrug off either one as trivial however.
Here is a final quote:
...Indeed, during our lifetime, there is a small but non-zero chance (very roughly 1 in 10,000) that the Earth will be struck by an object large enough to destroy food crops on a global scale and possibly end civilization as we know it (Shoemaker and others 1990).
I've been using LOTS of those four pin power connectors lately, since they're free at the junkyard.
Junkyard? Good place for them. Too loose, too tight, or just plain unreliable.
Hands-up if you have had to break out the vice-grips to get a secure enough grip to wrench one of these things from its socket.
I am not an electronics technician. But I have built a dozen or so computers over the years, and upgraded or fixed a couple of dozen more. So my experience is relatively limited. Within that limited experience I have found those stupid connectors to be, by far, the most unreliable element in PC style computers.
Cheap metal hooks are crimped on to the wires before they go into the connector. Friction is supposed to be sufficient for the hooks to hold the wires in place. But it is not sufficient.
Here is a horror story.
I had a buddy, who asked me to give him a lift to the computer store, to pick up his brand new computer. I was a bit jealous, as he bought himself a BIG tower case. It had many external bays. It was mounted on casters. It had hinged side panels to give access to the motherboard. I was a bit jealous, and I was sorry I couldn't afford one like that.
I remained jealous for about two months. But then he asked me to give him another lift back to said store, to have his hard drive replaced.
He could have carried it on his lap, on the streetcar, if he hadn't bought a the big case.
Well, the owner of the little mom-and-pop shop replaced it, or assured him it was working, three or four times over the next months.
A couple of days after dropping the computer off, I pay a visit to this shop to buy something for myself, and the owner starts to bad-mouth my buddy. His supplier charged him a restocking fee everytime he returned a drive that wasn't actually broken. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, it turned out that the first thing he did every time we brought the goldarn thing in, was take the drive out, and put it in his test system.
So, I visited my buddy, and I tested his power connectors. Sure enough, the one that kept being used to connect the hard drive was unreliable. Something had happened to the hooks meant to hold one of the wires in place. You would plug the connector in, and only three of the wires made a firm electrical connection. Any hard drive connected to that connector developed bad sectors. Presumably it was supplying intermittent power. Maybe it was arcing.
The owner/technician at the mom-and-pop computer shop never found this simple problem because he never tested the drives in situ.
But I wasn't smart enough to learn from his mistake.
I built a computer, as a favour, for someone I didn't really know, to pay off a family obligation. I used some stuff I bought used, but which I had tested. Then I got calls that it wasn't working. I thought I test that hard drive! Where did these bad sectors come from?
So I replaced it with my own hard drive, bought new, which I knew to be reliable. It developed bad sectors too. Sure enough, it too had a white power connector with a wire with crimp on hooks that didn't work.
Now it is the first thing I suspect if someone tells me their hard drive is developing bad sectors.
And even when they do provide a good electrical connection, what about the times the mechanical connection they provide is order of magnitude or two too secure?
I wish all our peripherals used the smaller power connector used on 3.5 inch floppies.
It's not that hard to mount a rail gun on an asteroid. Everything is basically floating, so you just have a drilling head on your mass accelerator (mechanically or magnetically accelerated buckets are less dependent upon asteroid composition than a railgun is).
And what if asteroids are just piles of rubble? If we are going to change its trajectory, aren't we going to have to pour in a huge amount of kinetic energy? Won't each bucketload of debris you fling off with your mass-driver send an asteroid-quake through your rock, or berg? A couple of years of asteroid quakes may shake your asteroid apart, so instead of having a pile of rubble, you have an uncontrollable cloud of rubble. What if it isn't a pile of rubble, what if it is an iron-nickel rock, but it has fault lines? Could enough asteroid-quakes totally fracture the asteroid into several chunks?
Push the nose against the asteroid and start chewing out bits to feed to your mass accelerator. Smaller accelerators on the side for attitude adjustment.
I wonder if you aren't glossing over several problems?
All asteroids that have come close enough for us to take a look at have been spinning. It is hard to imagine that they wouldn't be spinning. Were you planning to kill the asteroid's spin before you tried guiding it anywhwere? And how did you plan to do that?
Earth's escape velocity is 11 kilometre per second. But the escape velocity of an asteroid? Phobos is about the same size as an extinction class asteroid. Its escape velocity is about ten metres a second. This link says that is 26 miles per hour. Asteroid 2002 NT7, which caused a scare six weeks ago, will approach Earth in 2019 is 2 kilometers in diameter. If its density was the same as Phobos, and I have done my math right, its escape velocity would be just 2 meters per second.
IANAP, but it seems to me that nuclear charges would be the best approach. IANAP, but I wonder whether an arrangement of nuclear charges arranged across one hemisphere, and exploded more of less simultaneously, would be a better approach.
We discussed shaped charge anti-tank warheads on slashdot a couple of weeks ago. In the shaped charge warhead the shape of the explosive charge is calculated so it focuses around the non-explosive slug it is meant to accelerate.
I've wondered whether the explosive charges would have to be in contact with the surface of the asteroid to be effective. If that wouldn't be necessary then there could be a considerable saving in rocket fuel, because you wouldn't need to match velocities upon arrival. Our existing ICBMs have their MIRV buses. We would need to lift the MIRV buses to LEO, and assemble boosters, in order to send them to intercept the asteroid. So we wouldn't have to develop new technology, like Orion rockets, ion rockets, mass drivers solar sails, or giant air cushion.
Unfortunately I think it would be necessary for the charge to be in contact with the asteroid.
Might as well wait for the Hammer. The built in memory controller should to wonders for latency. Of course the 64 bit stuff will be a nice future feature to have.
Let me share a budgeting lesson from the game of Monopoly, that I feel is on-topic here.
In Monopoly, practically everyone wants to acquire Park Place and Boardwalk. Sure, when your rivals hit those properties, once they have hotels, they have to dig deep. But Those properties are expensive to buy, and expensive to develop. Whereas Baltic Avenue, and its sibling, are very cheap. Developing houses and hotels on those properties is also very cheap. And yet, when you do the math, the return on investment on those two properties is the best on the board -- better than Boardwalk.
The new machine, the cutting edge machine? You know you have to pay a premium for it. You know its value will depreciate very quickly. Its value will depreciate much more quickly than a computer built around a more mature technology.
Sure, I figure buying the latest, whiz-bang thing at premium prices, so you can have bragging rights, is a fine strategy, if you are rolling in dough. If I won the lottery, I would go right out, and buy a premium machine, with lots of memory, and 512MB of DDR.
But if you are on a budget, I don't think it is a good strategy. A lot of my baby-boomer pals hold off on buying a new computer, until they can pay for a premium, latest whiz-bang thing. When I ask them why, they say, "well, I want it to last me for five years or more. So I have to get a really powerful machine, so I won't be left too far behind."
I figure that, if you are on a budget, you should buy the technology that is a year or three behind technology's cutting edge. It is a lot more affordable. So, you can afford to replace it, or upgrade it, more frequently. I figure, on average, my computer is more up to date if I upgrade it every two years, but only to the level of last year.
My last CPU was a K6-2 500MHz. I paid about $75 CAD (about $50 USD) for it. I used it for about two years. Last week I bought a Duron 1100 for $75 CAD, and an ECS K7A motherboard, for another $75 CAD. Next year maybe I will replace my old PC133 RAM with DDR. Maybe I will get an Athlon 1400, when its price drops to $75 CAD.
No, it doesn't give me bragging rights. But, on average, I figure I am farther ahead than if I blew all my dough on a premium machine I expected would last me five years.
My buddies who buy that latest whiz-bang thing are happy with their bragging rights for the first six months, and then, if they follow their budget, they have to sit through 54 months of feeling their computer was an expensive lemon.
Might as well wait for the Hammer. The built in memory controller should to wonders for latency. Of course the 64 bit stuff will be a nice future feature to have.
Do you remember the Osborne computer? It was a very popular CP/m computer. Osborne computer grew like crazy. Osborne announced an "Osborne II" computer, and IIRC, sales dried up, as everyone waited with baited breath for the new model. Because revenue shrunk Osborne couldn't afford to finish development of the new model. Then the IBMPC came out, and his target market disappeared.
If too many people hold off purchasing an AMD now, because they want to wait for the newest, whiz-bang thing, then the possibility exists that AMD will not be able to finance the development of the K8 on time, or even that AMD will go bust.
Apparently my memory of the 1964 Picturephone is faulty, because it says here [techtv.com] that "The image only refreshed once every few seconds." That's sure not the way I remember it, but...
Have you considered that for the world's fair what they provided you was not a prototype? Have you considered that it was probably a mockup, with a real screen, camera and phone, but that the transmission was over conventional closed-circuit TV, not a conventional phone line?
I saw one at the 1967 World's Fair, and I am sure the demonstrator explicitly said the model we were looking at wasn't using a conventional phone line.
It was right next to this other amazing product we would see in the future, the touch tone phone. Visitors were invited to dial a number on the touch tone phone, while an electronic stop watch would display for them how few seconds it took to dial.
It's not like the video is always on... It is never on when you first answer the phone, and you only need to turn it on when you want to give someone your complete attention, but you can leave it off when you are busy with something else.
So, kind of like call waiting, where your conversations are worth being interrupted. The fact that the other person doesn't fire up the camera will let you know you aren't worth their full attention.
There have been some more developments around Van's Smith's review of the Bapco
benchmark's. Tom Pabt's, the owner of tomshardware.com, has written an editorial
condemning the journalistic integrity of Smith, and Kyle Bennett of hardocp.com.
Here are part 1,
part 2,
part 3,
part 4 and
part 5.
Pabst's accusation is that Smith and Bennett have both written articles where they
claimed to have discovered flaws in the benchmarks that make one manufacturer's
product look good, when they were really being coached by the that manufacturer's
rivals.
Van Smith used to work for Tom Pabst. In my opinion the quality and
utility of tomshardware.com has gone down since Van Smith departed.
And, about this fight, I would say that Dr Pabst (he is an MD) hasn't
learned the value of civility. In my opinion, in a fight like this one,
people can't really follow the details, so they base their assessment of
who is right, by looking to see who remains more civil.
This point has been made a couple of times already, but I figured it needed a thread of its own. Many of the threads in this discussion have included someone saying moving from MS Word will leave you unable to read or write files shared with the rest of the world. Any word processing program written in the last twenty years should be able to read and write rich text format files (ie.rtf files). If you have to share files with collaborators, why wouldn't you be using rich text format?
Modern word processors are bloated messes. "Creeping featurism" has run rampant. How many of your average users ever learn more than a very small percentage of their word processors features? How many of those features would never have been added if the word processor's company's business model wasn't built on selling their customers an upgrade to a "new, improved" model every couple of years?
Slashdot Mirror
Would this have been the same transcriber who defined pi == 3? (The crucible used to melt the precious metals to decorate Solomon's temple was 10 cubits in diameter, and 30 cubits in circumference. Therefore pi == 3 -- the bible says so -- and the bible is never wrong.)
Seriously, weren't multiplication and division advanced mathematics in those days, when one had to use Roman numerals? How many people would have known how to square 10,000?
Mathematical humourist Martin Gardner wrote a spoof review of a numerological guide to the bible. This numerological guide to the bible had an appendix devoted to more recent cults. One of which was founded on the dreams god delivered to the founder. The key of which concerned the 144,000 saved standing in a perfect square in front of Jesus. Gardner points out that 144,000 is not, in fact, a square number. ;-)
This 144,000 is another translation of a large number from a bible transcribed by innumerate but pious translaters.
Michael Whiticar, one of the principal researchers, was interviewed on CBC newsworld at noon today.
In this interview he said that while there are other undersea methane hydrate ice in other parts of the world, this site is unique. If I heard him properly, its size dwarfed other sites. If I heard him properly, other sites are formed by biological activity, whereas this was due to the leaking of petroleum fractions.
200,000,000? Now I am going to be nit-picky. Did you ever notice how people exagerrate to make a better story?
Ancient peoples didn't have a short-hand for numbers as large as a million. IIRC the ancient greeks only had terms to count up to 10,000.
So, I suspect a later transcriber or translator, whose piety exceeded his scholarship, or his honesty, stretched this number by many orders of magnitude.
Pious people have a bad history of mistranslating the bible in order to advance their own, short-term, secular, political agendas. See the sin of onanism . (This web-page asserts that the bible doesn't forbid masturbation. The web-page asserts that the one passage religious prudes cite actually addresses coitus interruptus.)
Xant, here is a link to a summary of documents released by the US congressional committee on Commerce. I believe it is as close to a smoking gun as I am going to get tonight.
Unfortunately, the links don't seem to be up tonight.
In my article I said the implications of embedding a macro language in data files guaranteed insecurity. Slowfight suggested I was being credulous conspiracy nut. So I went searching for proof. Here is something virus expert Rob Slade wrote in in 1995 .
Found here.
There is a guy recognized as a genius in the Tobacco industry. I read that twenty odd years ago he told other Tobacco industry executives that, while they could afford to hire the shrewdest, meanest, most dishonest lawyers on planet Earth, they could only fight a rear-guard action.
Eventually, he told his colleagues, even the meanest lawyers couldn't hold off lawsuits over the lethal effects of their product. Once suits go to trial, everything will start to unravel. We have no real defense. So, we need to plan ahead.
His plan? Pretend to fight against mandatory warnings, but actually let them go ahead. Keep stalling on the trials -- so that when the trials happen we have a defense.
"But, your honour, we have had to have health warnings on our products for fifteen years. The claimant can't say they didn't know our products were dangerous."
Are Microsoft executives any more ethical than Tobacco executives?
Nah.
I believe that MS planned ahead too. I believe that MS has wanted to "own" the desktop, to own our computers, all along.
Anyone could have foreseen that embedding a macro language in their data files, that was automatically executed when the file was opened, was a sure guarantee of terrible security problems.
This was not an accident. This was a design decision. They did this on purpose. I don't believe it was a mistake. I believe they knew exactly what they were doing.
I believed that they looked ahead, and planned to distribute insecure products, so that the could harness the publics anger at vandals, interlopers and spam artists to justify draconian security measures that we never wuold have agreed to otherwise.
I'd like to see Gates, Ballmer and the whole filthy crew serve serious hard time.
Consider great artists, like Mozart, or Leonardo. How did they get rewarded for their creative efforts? They had sponsors -- patrons -- who gave them a living allowance. (This tradition continues today. Richard Stallman and Tim Berners-Lee are two of the receipients of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grants .)
Isaac Asimov wrote a great book entitled "Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science". It consists of brief biographies of the 1,000 scientist Asimov considered the most important. One of the interesting things I learned from this book was that during the middle ages, when Greek and Roman thinkers from classical times were very highly respected, some mediavel scholars would attribute their work to classical thinkers. Some of these classical thinkers were hacks. And their reverse plagiarism was an annoying source of confusion for modern scholars. But sometimes their work was unique and valuable. One of these guys made Asimov's list of the 1,000 most important scientists. IIRC he is known only as "the False Jeder".
My point? Smart people, creative people, from different cultures, had no idea of "intellectual property".
Um. I'd say that "justice" is a human invention too. Proof? Look how differently other cultures interpret justice. Are there cultures that have never heard of justice? It wouldn't surprise me. I know some assholes who seem to have never heard of justice. Ah rightsTell me, where do rights come from? Do you believe that rights come from God? That is what the US constitution says. Well, I don't believe in God.
So far as I am concerned, what people call rights are merely conventions. If you can convince everyone else that the conventions you believe in have value to them, then you get to live in a society that respects your "rights".
If not, you have some very difficult decisions to make.
Now, I am sorry you had your ideas ripped off. I want to live in a society where people's contributions are appreciated. But it seems to me your arguments are circular. If I were to paraphrase your argument it seems to be you are entitled to own your ideas because you have a right to them. Circular.
Patents, copyright. They are inventions. There is a rationale for granting patents and copyrights to creators. Doing so is supposed to benefit society in general.
The idea behind a patent is that granting the patent holder a limited period of time when no one else can use their idea, without a liscense or other permission, ultimately benefits the public. The idea is that the patent holder grants some liscenses, or gets a limited period of time when they have a monopoly, and they make some money. The idea is that without that money they wouldn't have come up with the idea. Or they wouldn't have the cash to develop it. What does the public get out of it? Well, we get to use the mature creation for free, when the patent expires. If it is a good idea this should be good for us. And if it is a good enough idea it is worth it to us to pay the liscense fee prior to the patent running out.
Question: If the US Patent Office was keeping this idea in mind would they be granting patents to corporations with deep pockets who were cashing in on ideas that already existed. Did it really benefit the public when the compression algorithm used in the original GIF format was patented out from under us?
Morals? Another human invention, so far as I am concerned. Actually, most artists don't make a ton of money. Even famous artists have been known to get famous, and still go bankrupt. I believe both Toni Braxton and those young gals in TLC went bankrupt. I suggest you go back and read the articles Janis Ian wrote that were cited here on slashdot -- or the article that Courtney Love published about the economics of being an artist in today's music industry.And then there are the not famous artists. If I had a young protege who wanted to be an artist, I would encourage them to do it because it gave them pleasure. I would encourage them to consider whether they loved creating enough that they were willing to go into debt to create, and if so, how deeply in debt. Most artists you or I are ever likely to make friends with are going to be lucky if they can manage to break even.
Let me recommend Clifford Stall's "The Cuckoo's Egg". If you are not familiar with it, it is an account of the year he spent tracking down an interloper at the lab he worked at. As he tracked the interloper he realized it wasn't just some local teenager with a modem and an attitude. It was an experienced guy with a checklist. Stoll watched him use his lab's computer to try to tap into military computers and steal military secrets.
The FBI are responsible for counter-intelligence, so he phones his local FBI office.
Now Stoll first went looking for the interloper because of a 75 cent discrepancy between two different user billing and accounting packages.
The FBI guy isn't interested in the fact that Stoll seems to have discovered a spy. He asks Stoll how large a monetary loss he can document. "Um. Seventy-five cents." "Well son, call us back when it gets to half a million dollars."
Stoll's documentation of tracking the interloper was doggedly methodical and scientific. This all happened about fourteen years ago. I wonder how much more clueful the FBI is now.
Stoll did mention meeting one FBI guy who was clueful about computers. Unfortunately, he wasn't all that senior. So he couldn't always co-operate, because of stupid FBI internal politics.
Stoll's account is quite funny. Highly recommended...
I read this somewhere. A wiseguy said, "I saw Antonioni's 'The Passenger', and I plan to see Passenger 57, with Wesley Snipes. But I missed Passenger 2 through 56. Were they any good? Did I miss very much?
Edger Dijkstra said something like, "In my opinion the most important quality in a computer programmer is a mastery of their native language." It is a good point. You have to understand what you are supposed to be doing. You have to be able to communicate with your colleagues. You have to be able to communicate with your boss, and your clients.
Dijkstra then added something like, "This explains the generally poor quality of American programmers." Ouch!
Seriously, Prince is not a foreigner. English is his native language. Not only is English his native Language, but he is a kind of professional communicator. His songs should be communicating something, no?
Here in Canada we have our own music channels. They have biographies of musicians. I have seen this short clip advertizing his biography a number of times where he says, "I got to a point in my career, where I could say anything ".
Well, too bad. If there was someone who could give him advice, that he would listen to, I think they should tell him, "Now hold on son. Forget your financial success, and rewind your ego to the point where you actually cared enough to make an effort for people to understand you."
I am not measuring his intelligence. I am measuring his ego. Sure, go ahead and be casual with spelling and grammar when you are talking with someone one on one, or in IRC or IM. But the larger your audience, and the less well you know them, the more of an effort you should make to be clear, IMO.
Well, George, doesn't Dijkstra sound like he had a big ego too? Yes. I guess he does. But Dijkstra was a computer science god. Who is going to be remembered one hundred years from now? Prince? Or Dijkstra. I sure hope it is Dijkstra.
Let me see if I understand what you are suggesting here. We launch a rocket with a big balloon on board. The rocket rendevouses with the asteroid, matches trajectories, lands, and the balloon is deployed. Have I got this right so far?
Then, when the asteroid is about to enter the Earth's atmosphere, the balloon causes it, instead, to bounce off?
Do you know how fast NEO would strike the Earth? I looked this up this summer, when 2002 NT7, the 2 kilometer rock caused a scare when it was thought there was a remote chance it might strike Earth in 2019. It would have struck the Earth at 28 kilometers per second. The NEO that would have struck at the slowest velocity was still 5 kilometers per second.
I don't believe your balloon would survive an impact with the upper atmosphere at 5 km / second, even if it didn't have multiple tons of asteroid behind it.
The Tunguska event of 1908 was caused by the impact of an NEO of about 50 metres in diameter. It caused an airburst equivalent to 16 million tons of TNT. Would an asteroid that size be worth trying to divert, if we detected it with plenty of lead time?
A rock that size would mass something like 40,000 tons.
And what a stinker it was too. One of the groaners that bugged me about it was -- the un-named rock is spinning, right? So, suppose you know -- somehow -- that you could split it into two hemispheres? You are going to have to time the explosion just right, so the two hemispheres blow off normal to the Earth-striking trajectory.
Light the fuse at the wrong moment and all you manage to do was arrange for Earth to be struck twice, at two places, a second or two apart.
A number of respondents have said more or less the same thing -- that Earth is struck by small space rubble every day, with no apparent adverse effects. I have trouble with this idea.
But first, to be pedantic. If you split a .5 km berg into .25 km pieces, you get eight pieces, not two pieces. Volume increases as the cube of the radius -- you know, height, width, depth...
Here is a link I found in an earlier slashdot discussion to an article classifying the destruction from different sizes of impacting rocks. This passage discusses the difference in destructive effect of a rock large enough to pierce through the atmosphere, and strike the surface, and those smaller or less solid bergs that fragment in an airburst.
This suggests to me that 8 x 100 megaton airbursts would be worse than one 8,000 megaton groundburst.
The article says a 10 meter rock releases a blast equivalent of 100 kiloton of TNT -- about 6 or 7 x Hiroshima. The 1908 Tunguska event, the airburst of a berg about 50 meters in diameter, released the blast effect of a 16 million tons of TNT. The fireball to seen to streak across Pennsylvania this summer was less than a meter in diameter.
A 500 meter rock, massing something like 4*10^7 tons, would not wipe the Earth of life. Nor would being struck by by 40*10^7 tons of rubble. I contend it would be a mistake to shrug off either one as trivial however.
Here is a final quote:
Junkyard? Good place for them. Too loose, too tight, or just plain unreliable.
Hands-up if you have had to break out the vice-grips to get a secure enough grip to wrench one of these things from its socket.
I am not an electronics technician. But I have built a dozen or so computers over the years, and upgraded or fixed a couple of dozen more. So my experience is relatively limited. Within that limited experience I have found those stupid connectors to be, by far, the most unreliable element in PC style computers.
Cheap metal hooks are crimped on to the wires before they go into the connector. Friction is supposed to be sufficient for the hooks to hold the wires in place. But it is not sufficient.
Here is a horror story.
I had a buddy, who asked me to give him a lift to the computer store, to pick up his brand new computer. I was a bit jealous, as he bought himself a BIG tower case. It had many external bays. It was mounted on casters. It had hinged side panels to give access to the motherboard. I was a bit jealous, and I was sorry I couldn't afford one like that.
I remained jealous for about two months. But then he asked me to give him another lift back to said store, to have his hard drive replaced. He could have carried it on his lap, on the streetcar, if he hadn't bought a the big case.
Well, the owner of the little mom-and-pop shop replaced it, or assured him it was working, three or four times over the next months.
A couple of days after dropping the computer off, I pay a visit to this shop to buy something for myself, and the owner starts to bad-mouth my buddy. His supplier charged him a restocking fee everytime he returned a drive that wasn't actually broken. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, it turned out that the first thing he did every time we brought the goldarn thing in, was take the drive out, and put it in his test system.
So, I visited my buddy, and I tested his power connectors. Sure enough, the one that kept being used to connect the hard drive was unreliable. Something had happened to the hooks meant to hold one of the wires in place. You would plug the connector in, and only three of the wires made a firm electrical connection. Any hard drive connected to that connector developed bad sectors. Presumably it was supplying intermittent power. Maybe it was arcing.
The owner/technician at the mom-and-pop computer shop never found this simple problem because he never tested the drives in situ.
But I wasn't smart enough to learn from his mistake. I built a computer, as a favour, for someone I didn't really know, to pay off a family obligation. I used some stuff I bought used, but which I had tested. Then I got calls that it wasn't working. I thought I test that hard drive! Where did these bad sectors come from? So I replaced it with my own hard drive, bought new, which I knew to be reliable. It developed bad sectors too. Sure enough, it too had a white power connector with a wire with crimp on hooks that didn't work.
Now it is the first thing I suspect if someone tells me their hard drive is developing bad sectors.
And even when they do provide a good electrical connection, what about the times the mechanical connection they provide is order of magnitude or two too secure?
I wish all our peripherals used the smaller power connector used on 3.5 inch floppies.
And what if asteroids are just piles of rubble? If we are going to change its trajectory, aren't we going to have to pour in a huge amount of kinetic energy? Won't each bucketload of debris you fling off with your mass-driver send an asteroid-quake through your rock, or berg? A couple of years of asteroid quakes may shake your asteroid apart, so instead of having a pile of rubble, you have an uncontrollable cloud of rubble. What if it isn't a pile of rubble, what if it is an iron-nickel rock, but it has fault lines? Could enough asteroid-quakes totally fracture the asteroid into several chunks?
I wonder if you aren't glossing over several problems?
All asteroids that have come close enough for us to take a look at have been spinning. It is hard to imagine that they wouldn't be spinning. Were you planning to kill the asteroid's spin before you tried guiding it anywhwere? And how did you plan to do that?
Earth's escape velocity is 11 kilometre per second. But the escape velocity of an asteroid? Phobos is about the same size as an extinction class asteroid. Its escape velocity is about ten metres a second. This link says that is 26 miles per hour. Asteroid 2002 NT7, which caused a scare six weeks ago, will approach Earth in 2019 is 2 kilometers in diameter. If its density was the same as Phobos, and I have done my math right, its escape velocity would be just 2 meters per second.
IANAP, but it seems to me that nuclear charges would be the best approach. IANAP, but I wonder whether an arrangement of nuclear charges arranged across one hemisphere, and exploded more of less simultaneously, would be a better approach.
We discussed shaped charge anti-tank warheads on slashdot a couple of weeks ago. In the shaped charge warhead the shape of the explosive charge is calculated so it focuses around the non-explosive slug it is meant to accelerate.
I've wondered whether the explosive charges would have to be in contact with the surface of the asteroid to be effective. If that wouldn't be necessary then there could be a considerable saving in rocket fuel, because you wouldn't need to match velocities upon arrival. Our existing ICBMs have their MIRV buses. We would need to lift the MIRV buses to LEO, and assemble boosters, in order to send them to intercept the asteroid. So we wouldn't have to develop new technology, like Orion rockets, ion rockets, mass drivers solar sails, or giant air cushion.
Unfortunately I think it would be necessary for the charge to be in contact with the asteroid.
Let me share a budgeting lesson from the game of Monopoly, that I feel is on-topic here.
In Monopoly, practically everyone wants to acquire Park Place and Boardwalk. Sure, when your rivals hit those properties, once they have hotels, they have to dig deep. But Those properties are expensive to buy, and expensive to develop. Whereas Baltic Avenue, and its sibling, are very cheap. Developing houses and hotels on those properties is also very cheap. And yet, when you do the math, the return on investment on those two properties is the best on the board -- better than Boardwalk.
The new machine, the cutting edge machine? You know you have to pay a premium for it. You know its value will depreciate very quickly. Its value will depreciate much more quickly than a computer built around a more mature technology.
Sure, I figure buying the latest, whiz-bang thing at premium prices, so you can have bragging rights, is a fine strategy, if you are rolling in dough. If I won the lottery, I would go right out, and buy a premium machine, with lots of memory, and 512MB of DDR.
But if you are on a budget, I don't think it is a good strategy. A lot of my baby-boomer pals hold off on buying a new computer, until they can pay for a premium, latest whiz-bang thing. When I ask them why, they say, "well, I want it to last me for five years or more. So I have to get a really powerful machine, so I won't be left too far behind."
I figure that, if you are on a budget, you should buy the technology that is a year or three behind technology's cutting edge. It is a lot more affordable. So, you can afford to replace it, or upgrade it, more frequently. I figure, on average, my computer is more up to date if I upgrade it every two years, but only to the level of last year.
My last CPU was a K6-2 500MHz. I paid about $75 CAD (about $50 USD) for it. I used it for about two years. Last week I bought a Duron 1100 for $75 CAD, and an ECS K7A motherboard, for another $75 CAD. Next year maybe I will replace my old PC133 RAM with DDR. Maybe I will get an Athlon 1400, when its price drops to $75 CAD.
No, it doesn't give me bragging rights. But, on average, I figure I am farther ahead than if I blew all my dough on a premium machine I expected would last me five years.
My buddies who buy that latest whiz-bang thing are happy with their bragging rights for the first six months, and then, if they follow their budget, they have to sit through 54 months of feeling their computer was an expensive lemon.
Do you remember the Osborne computer? It was a very popular CP/m computer. Osborne computer grew like crazy. Osborne announced an "Osborne II" computer, and IIRC, sales dried up, as everyone waited with baited breath for the new model. Because revenue shrunk Osborne couldn't afford to finish development of the new model. Then the IBMPC came out, and his target market disappeared.
If too many people hold off purchasing an AMD now, because they want to wait for the newest, whiz-bang thing, then the possibility exists that AMD will not be able to finance the development of the K8 on time, or even that AMD will go bust.
Have you considered that for the world's fair what they provided you was not a prototype? Have you considered that it was probably a mockup, with a real screen, camera and phone, but that the transmission was over conventional closed-circuit TV, not a conventional phone line?
I saw one at the 1967 World's Fair, and I am sure the demonstrator explicitly said the model we were looking at wasn't using a conventional phone line.
It was right next to this other amazing product we would see in the future, the touch tone phone. Visitors were invited to dial a number on the touch tone phone, while an electronic stop watch would display for them how few seconds it took to dial.
So, kind of like call waiting, where your conversations are worth being interrupted. The fact that the other person doesn't fire up the camera will let you know you aren't worth their full attention .
Here are part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 and part 5 . Pabst's accusation is that Smith and Bennett have both written articles where they claimed to have discovered flaws in the benchmarks that make one manufacturer's product look good, when they were really being coached by the that manufacturer's rivals.
Here is Smith's rebuttal .
Van Smith used to work for Tom Pabst. In my opinion the quality and utility of tomshardware.com has gone down since Van Smith departed.
And, about this fight, I would say that Dr Pabst (he is an MD) hasn't learned the value of civility. In my opinion, in a fight like this one, people can't really follow the details, so they base their assessment of who is right, by looking to see who remains more civil.
I am going to guess that a momentary loss of attention caused c0ldfusion to write "solid state" memory when he or she meant "static" memory.
Modern word processors are bloated messes. "Creeping featurism" has run rampant. How many of your average users ever learn more than a very small percentage of their word processors features? How many of those features would never have been added if the word processor's company's business model wasn't built on selling their customers an upgrade to a "new, improved" model every couple of years?