"(7) There have been numerous commissions and study panels over the last 30 years... and additional studies to establish goals are not needed at this time.
(8) While there are significant technical and programmatic hurdles... the main hurdle to be overcome is the lack of a national commitment to such activities.
(11) While the ultimate goal of human space flight in the inner solar system is the exploration of the planet Mars, there are other important goals for exploration of the inner solar system that will advance our scientific understanding and allow the United States to develop and demonstrate capabilities that will be needed for the scientific exploration and eventual settlement of Mars."
w00t! I claim Tharsis Tholus!
"(20) Completion of the International Space Station with a full crew complement of 7 astronauts and robust research capabilities is essential if the United States is to carry out successfully a comprehensive initiative of scientific exploration of the solar system that involves human space flight."
Not so hot on this one.. again, Zubrin's proposals are passed over. Ah comprimise.
If you're not familiar with Zubrin, he made a plan 10 years ago to get to Mars with existing technology (Saturn VII), that would allow scientists months of surface time there, all for $10B:
http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/nearterm.txt
"(4) Within 20 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the development and flight demonstration of a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from low Earth orbit to and from Martian orbit, the development and deployment of a human-tended habitation and research facility on the surface of one of the moons of Mars, and the development and flight demonstration of a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from Martian orbit to the surface of Mars and back."
Again, given Zubrin's work (that he presented to Congress), this is a bummer. We'll spend a lot of time building huge spaceships, instead of getting to Mars and settling it. A lot can happen in 20 years though.. perhaps any legislation like this is good. It's especially understandable given the recent shuttle disaster.. law-makers don't stick their necks out too far.
"(1) $50,000,000 for fiscal year 2004; and (2) $200,000,000 for fiscal year 2005."
"This paper investigates means for achieving human expeditions to Mars utilizing existing or near-term technology. Both mission plans described here, Mars Direct and Semi-Direct are accomplished with tandem direct launches of payloads to Mars using the upper stages of the heavy lift booster used to lift the payloads to orbit. No on-orbit assembly of large interplanetary spacecraft is required. In situ-propellant production of CH4/O2 and H2O on the Martian surface is used to reduce return propellant and surface consumable requirements, and thus total mission mass and cost. Chemical combustion powered ground vehicles are employed to afford the surface mission with the high degree of mobility required for an effective exploration program. Data is presented showing why medium-energy conjunction class trajectories are optimal for piloted missions, and mission analysis is given showing what technologies are optimal for each of the missions primary maneuvers. The optimal crew size and composition for initial piloted Mars missions is presented, along with a proposed surface systems payload manifest. The back-up plans and abort philosophy of the mission plans are described. An end to end point design for the Semi-Direct mission using either the Russian Energia B or a U.S. Saturn VII launch vehicle is presented and options for further evolution of the point design are discussed. It is concluded that both the Mars Direct and Semi-Direct plans offer viable options for robust piloted Mars missions employing near-term technology."
"The functions of Honda's humanoid robot are defined as follows: An operational system that autonomously performs typical operations under known circumstances. If an extraordinary operation is required under unknown circumstances, the robot will be supported by an operator... [The P3, 1,600mm in height and 130kg in weight, features a computer unit, motor-drive system, battery and wireless apparatus inside the body section. This more sophisticated robot can achieve freer movement, go up and down stairs and push a vehicle.]
[Future Development will focus on]:
Further dimensional and weight reduction.
Improved dynamic performance.
Improved operability.
For items 2 and 3, it is extremely important that through the evolution of hardware we achieve physical autonomy by improving dynamic performance and adaptability to wider variations of working conditions. Also important is the pursuit of studies in artificial intelligence systems, which will provide the solution for improved autonomy."
"The Cyc product family is powered by an immense multi-contextual knowledge base and an efficient inference engine. The knowledge base is built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or "rules") designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world. For example, Cyc knows that trees are usually outdoors, that once people die they stop buying things, and that glasses of liquid should be carried rightside-up."
And of course, lots of little other things, like targeting systems, healing systems (like this article), a CNS to link these higher-level functions to the motor control systems of the robot, um.... GUNS, MISSLES, etc..
Yeah, maybe not such a good idea. Of course, if we truly believed it a bad idea, we'd work for treaties now against robotic warfare, before one of our county's governments builds these and the rest are "forced" to catch up.
That is, if it hasn't started already. Clone wars!
Here are the information fields it collects that are considered "protected personal information" and thus under special security management:
All geographic subdivisions smaller system where the HMIS application is than a state, including street address, city, county, precinct, zip code, and their equivalent geocodes.
All elements of dates (except year) directly related to an in dividual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, and date of death.
Telephone numbers.
Social Security numbers.
Medical record numbers.
Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers, including license plate numbers.
Here's a brief sense of the security checks:
The data is kept on "secure" computers.
The data is encrypted when transferred.
Hard copies must be supervised in public areas and secured when in private.
Here's a break-down of who can get access to the personal private information with varying levels of consent and knowledge by the client.
With the *consent* of the client, you can basically give the data to anyone, but it's specifically enumerated as:
Disclosure to a non-governmental entity.
Without consent, but with written or oral notification to the client:
Sharing data between localities.
Without consent, without written or oral notification to the client, the data can be shared with these entities or for the following reasons:
Administrative purposes.
Academic institutions.
Public Health officials, if they can reasonably use the information to avert "a serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of a person or the public"
Coroners
Funeral Directors
Law enforcement officials by court order as necessary.
Government authorities that monitor abuse, neglect or domestic violence, if the client is reasonably believed to be a victim of these.
National Security entities for intelligence, counter-intelligence and other activities as authorized by the National Security Act
Bodyguards of the President and other Heads of State.
I see some potential for problems here, but nothing egregious. The problems lie elsewhere. I went through the trouble of making this listing because I bet it's similar to other datamodels used in other governmental MIS systems. Which is to say, I don't much worry about my info being in this homeless database, but it's instructive nonetheless, because it's a rare example (at least for me) of what other databases like this may look like.
The real potency of DoD's TIA initiative came from the widespread existence of these minor databases. If you're not in the homeless database, you may be in the military database, or maybe in your city or county's DMV database, etc. etc.. As long as they're all separate, it's not feasible to track your information through them. TIA was envisioned as a monumental effort to cross that particular chasm, and the effects, I think, would have been terrible.
Making our government more manageable is in itself not necessarily desireable. Just making it more manageable may just make it a more tempting prize to despots, like, in my opinion, the current administration.
We have to make our government more open and more equitable as we make it more manageable to ensure the right outcome.
use dirigible technology to make it lighter than air, or even much lighter. Then, use the no-moving-parts-electro-motor to move it. Isn't the army working on something like this?
Depending on the application, you'd much rather have that extra 36MW for thrust than for just staying aloft. Then it's like a ship at sea.. always bouyant and in a safe state even if power fails.
To put this a bit in perspective, the engines of a Boeing 777 generate between 75 and 100k pounds of thrust. 2 of those equal your 36MW figure. A ship with the full 1000MW capability would have thrust equivalent to 27 777s. Not bad. Aircraft-carrier of the skies. I bet it already exists.
The standard that is aimed for is "relevant and reliable." Not much to argue with there.
But the political ramifications are great. On the one hand, exclude scientific evidence and risk ignorance of the truth. On the other hand, include scientific evidence and risk politicizing scientific knowledge.
Consider one of the examples given: pollution.
If we don't allow scientific diagnosis and treatment of the various problems associated with pollution, we'll almost surely mis-judge the relevance of pollution and possible routes to equitably manage it.
However, if we seek scientific advice for diagnosis and treatment, scientists will be increasingly be the targets of bribery. The higher the stakes, the more sure the corruption. In that scenario, you get the same bad advice, but you malign the body of the scientific establishment as well.
For evidence of this, look at the international debate on global warming. It's clear that financial interest is biasing the scientific arguments in the US policy analysis. Worse, once this debate is over, we can only assume the taste of money will remain on their tounges. It's easier to get grants for your dream research if you're owed a favor for a political performance.
Further in the future, a stronger political capacity in the sciences could lead to more fundamental changes in the organization of our society. Historically, the ability to control truth and the ability to rule have proved dangerous in solution. If the church cannot be trusted in front of God, why then scientists in front of Reason? Prudence demands keeping both separated from the State.
Artificial scarcity is becoming more and more artificial. Soon all literature, recorded music and video will fit on a cheap disk. If disk space doubles every year for the next 14, today's 120GB drive will become tomorrow's 1PB drive. The Internet Archive, by comparisson, is "only" 300TB.
At that point, the protectionism will become impossibly difficult to defend. When each person could be be given a copy of the Archive of Human Knowledge for the equivalent of 1 week's wage, the issue will resolve. There will be those societies who become enlightened, and those who wither in the greatest of dark ages.
I'll probably piss-off the red-bloded Americans here, but man, I can't wait to not drive my car. I want to have fully automated driving. I want to finish work on a Friday afternoon, go home, grab my stuff, go to my car and say "Miami Beach, Please!". I want to watch movies for a couple of hours or finish reading Dune, and when I wake up, I'm parked right at my favorite beach. Same thing for the reverse trip Sunday night and Monday mornings wouldn't be half as bad. Paint fuel-cells into that picture and it wouldn't even tweak the greens.
CMU's robotics program has been working on automated driving systems for years. When I was there I heard one of the professors had outfitted his normal home car with about $1500 of equipment and "drove" to school and back every day mostly hands-off. All based on neural-nets and some snazzy control systems.
And that was like 6 years ago. I'm sure there's wisdom in not rushing into something like this, but I also get the feeling there will be some hard lobbying against it. Like, what happens to truckers, cabbies, UPS/Fed-Ex drivers, etc. etc.? Will the (perhaps undeserved) reputation of dangerous speed-freak truckers come home to roost?
I wonder how Detroit would feel. At first, it's a shinny new feature == more margin. But beyond that, I can't help but see cars become even more commodity. All you really end up caring about is your comfort/ammenities.. there won't be as much attention to "performance".. ahhh.. Detroit will ~love~ it, BMW won't.
You could even share these kind of cars, like the Zip cars, but instead of you going to the cars, they come to you. Or perhaps just the under-carriage comes to you and connects to your personal travel cabin. Then, you pull out of the driveway and merge into a long train of like-designed cabins-on-wheels, all virtually-linked together via 802.11z. The road/car system routes you shortest-dijkstra-path to your destination and then your car parks itself once it's dropped you off. There's traffic density that would make clog up modern highways for years, but its all flow-controlled, so you go 120MpH with only inches between cars, so your trip takes half the time.
The moving sidewalk (armchair) of the future?:)
Tierra, Avida, MS - a short story
on
Digital Darwin
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Tierra was by Tom Ray, a pioneer in the AL field. It was a great idea, but failed to turn around with interesting biodiversity. You'd create creatures, they'd optimize themselves, some variants and parasites would evolve, but then things would simmer down within a few hours and you'd be in a steady state for ever.
Network Tierra was Ray's response to this. It was supposed to allow a "Cambrian explosion" of biodiversity, by providing tons of (networked computer) space for the little creatures to explode into, and then specialize, in. This led to interesting migration behavior, and one of my all-time favorite web-pages, but it too failed to spark that je ne sais quois, that spark of life.
Anyways, it did spark Avida and the Digital Life Lab at Cal Tech. Avida is essentially a deeper look at the fundamentals behind AL. In Tierra, I think the design philosophy was something like "make it look a lot like a living ecological system and the life-force will appear out of the ether", and actually, Tierra was a great leap forward beyond more mundane genetic programming a la John Koza.
Avida, on the other hand, is much more systematic in exploring the parameter space (which is large and sensitive) for setting up an AL system. This turned out to be fruitful, as Adami found that only when certain, very narrow, environmental conditions were met would the little creatures start outsmarting that Creationist boogeyman, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Turns out that Tierra didn't have spatiality (needed to be more restrictive on who could sleep with who) and mutation rates (some power law math that's way over my head) set right.
But the real punch-line to this whole story is that the direct beneficiary of these insights in Microsoft! Hah!
Microsoft was funding Adami's work because Windoze crashed too much. They were searching for a way of programming - in this case using closed instruction sets like Avida's (another deep topic) - that would be inherently robust to problems like seg faults and illegal instructions.... e.g. Adami's instruction set was engineered so that little programs (creatures) couldn't crash the Avida VM when they mutated into new, unknown programs.. or in Windoze's case, when a coder did something stoopid. It's funny that MS was researching this, since releatively low-tech solutions such as protected memory and QA take care of this. (not to mention Java;)
The big guys have been dodging this obvious solution the whole time. Ever since instant messaging took off, it was obvious everyone was capable of using challenge-response, but of course, it hits email advertisers in the pocket. This led to moves by the likes of MS to counter anti-spam legislation in California. Hopefully this move by Earthlink will start the rush.
The neat thing here isn't that you choose who to accept - because that in itself is a pain - but that the sender has to allow for the possibility that you won't, which is currently not handled well in e-mail. Once legitimate senders generally have this capability, spam filters (either complex or just a rule to reject unknowns) will become more useful, as there's then a decent way to handle a bounce. Spam be gone!
Whoever thought the new millenia had no surpises in store, that y2k was the measure of things to come, that now we wouldn't have a blade-runner future.. pshaw.
Terrorists lurk around every corner, and some even in broad daylight. They have "Free Software" T-Shirts on, and dirty bombs in their backpacks.
Did you think "we won the cold war"? Who's "we"? What's "cold war"? What's a communist? The poor Russians who could barely keep food on their tables?
Open and free? Pshaw. Lamer talk for communism. There, I've said it.
Osama bin Laden uses OpenBSD. Iraq's IT dept. contributes half of the man-coding-hours to the project. Syria and North Korea write the device drivers, thinnly masquerading for the real ICBM control systems they are. We're screwed! They've had us all along and all we could talk about was KDE vs. Gnome. How naive we were!
Stallman is the next Hussein. Dirty commie in libertarian drag.
God Bless America! Let's Roll! Support Our Troops! Down with !
I can describe a program to you, and you can write it in the programming language you know, thus programming a computer. Tomorrow, the computer type may change. Next year, the programming language may change. The program description, however, can stay the same. Consider the Sieve of Eratosthenes. That's a 2 millenia-old Natural Language Algorithm. It was written in Greek, but that's just a syntax difference. When you read the translation, the same thought process is communicated, without significant deterioration. We know this because it validates itself.. it still finds primes.
The measure of language longevity then is the how well they facilitate this process. Consider the Sieve in x86 asm. vs. C vs. Java. Which looks the most like natural language? The nice thing about Java, and OO languages in general, is that they facilitate programs that read a lot like we speak:
TodoList list = new TodoList(); list.setName("Groceries"); list.addI tem("MILK"); list.addItem("SUGAR"); list.print();
That's not perfect.. I'd much rather write this:
Make a new grocery list, put milk and sugar on it, and give me a paper copy.
And have it just work. Same for the Sieve. The closest semantics to this currently is actually bash, which is very OO:
cat > list Milk Sugar ^D
This would offend Paul of course, since shells have more "axioms" than you can shake a stick at, and they depend on crufty layers, but hey.. if you slap an NL processor on top of this and link it to a speach processor.... brb
Things are clear when you're selling guns or drugs or potent ideas, but it's hard to trace the dependencies for systematic technologies. What responsibility do you bear for selling the steel that makes the guns that kill the people? It's very easy to look at the world as a libertarian, and say that you're just responsible for your corner, and can't be held responsible for the rest. It's also easy to wax socialist and say the whole thing is our shared responsibility. I think this dichotomy is solved by the ethic of "think globally, act locally".
I don't think that is correct. The work is owned for a (not so) limited time by the creator. It is licensed to you under the terms of copyright law by default, but other contracts can be used. Copyright in the constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
"Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:
- To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
- To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
- To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
- To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
- To display the copyrighted work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and
- In the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission."
Now, you can argue that this is bad, that those lawmakers were useless, etc., but it doesn't change the law. You'd be better served putting your energies into changing the law, or coping with it, which is all I'm saying. DRM is the natural reaction to file-sharing. Better to help create it - and so make sure it's fairly applied - than pretend the law isn't what it is and that Big Media/MS don't have money and good lawyers. Of course if things get really bleak, resist.
This could be good.
on
Open Source DRM
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· Score: 5, Insightful
DRM isn't bad. Big Media/MS is bad. If DRM becomes mandated, it will be better to have an open-source implementation than not. This will reduce the plausibility of the likely MS argument that since there is no DRM on linux or mac, these systems should be excluded outright from certification.
It's like an arms race. If everyone's got it, nobody is at a disadvantage. "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer." The same is true of TIA, btw.
Maybe we're a little behind schedule and these laser guns are a tad unrealistic, but it's really good to see there's still serious effort to make the ultimate killing machine.
Gotta give it up for Honda here too. The P-series robots are pretty slow today, but I'm shouting out mad props to that R&D effort.
Of all the tech needed in our dev plan for the first terminators, the most vaporous is still the AI, but Doug Lenat's CYC project just landed $9M in Total Information Awareness money, so I guess there's hope there too.
Well, maybe we can just skip the laser guns and go Robocop-style instead. Anything to get these things on the front-lines ASAP! There's simply too many radical war-mongering people in the world to not have a Terminators fighting for our <blink>National Security</blink>.
Those companies would immediately be on/.'s most hated list. FSF does it, we throw a party.
Perhaps it will turn out well. But perhaps not. Robert Johnson sold his sould to the devil to be the best guitar player around.
These Corporate Patrons have agendas that aren't open, that will be pursued via their now substantial support of the few lawyers around who give a hoot about free software. Woe be the FSF when they need to make a choice between their conscience and dependence on private funding. Best of luck to the FSF on this.
Watch this development closely and start searching for an alternative.
If all of the chips in the system have DRM, it will cease to be open. By "open", I mean hackable. DRM is not hackable, thus neither is any important part of the system.
So, you'd need to design the system using open chips. Thankfully, there's hardware people out there who get this at Open Cores.
"To copyleft a program, we first state that it is copyrighted; then we add distribution terms, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's code or any program derived from it but only if the distribution terms are unchanged. Thus, the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable."
Copyleft, as a general method, must now be interpreted and practiced in a wide field, incorporating not only programming, but all creative disciplines. Copyleft is the opportunity to make the investment in the future plentitude of the Public Domain that the relative parasitism of Copyright threatens.
As of today, when a work is Copyrighted we know its destiny. It will be sucked dry, never allowed to enrich the very public trust that helped bring it forth. Copyright will grow stronger in proportion to the vitality of each work it consumes.
As of today, we know the only work that will thrive, that will enrich the public trust, is a work that explicitly supports the intention of the United States Constitution that Copyright is granted "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
By claiming Copyright, and then licensing your works under a license in accord with this ideal of the Constitution and Copyleft, you will help ensure a wide and deep Public Domain for our future.
There are signs that this could happen, but I'd expect only if the industry collectively drops the ball.
The end-game you described is a collective revenue loss for them, and if they gain sight of that, they'll work against it, and probably succeed in stifiling competition.
There is one very positive note in this. If there is no DRM in law, then there is always room for a full alternative, e.g. chip/software/apps/networks that are controlled by users, when and if they get their act together. This may not mean much for your average consumer, but it will preserve some cultural freedom for those interested.
It's a PR ploy. Legislation is only one route to their goal. It picked up too much flack, so I suppose they just readjusted their deals with tech vendors.
The article says:
"They said they planned to convene a meeting of senior executives to discuss technical solutions to combat the illegal copying of digital material."
i.e. they took the process underground.
This is the way decisions get made. If you want music to be free, don't give your money to organizations that make decisions like this.
For those wondering why this is getting funded, or whether rocket exhaust has significant environmental effects, I found an interesting page floating around:
http://www.earthpulse.com/haarp/background.html
some highlights:
--
Saturn V Rocket (1975)
Due to a malfunction, the Saturn V Rocket burned unusually high in the atmosphere, above 300 km. This burn produced "a large ionospheric hole" (Mendillo, M. Et al., Science p. 187, 343, 1975). The disturbance reduced the total electron content more than 60% over an area 1,000 km in radius, and lasted for several hours. It prevented all telecommunications over a large area of the Atlantic Ocean. The phenomenon was apparently caused by a reaction between the exhaust gases and ionospheric oxygen ions. The reaction emitted a 6300 A airglow. Between 1975 and 1981 NASA and the US Military began to design ways to test this new phenomena through deliberate experimentation with the ionosphere.
Orbit Maneuvering System (1981)
Part of the plan to build the SPS space platforms was the demand for reusable space shuttles, since they could not afford to keep discarding rockets. The NASA Spacelab 3 Mission of the Space Shuttle made, in 1981, "a series of passes over a network of five ground based observatories" in order to study what happened to the ionosphere when the Shuttle injected gases into it from the Orbit Maneuvering System (OMS). They discovered that they could "induce ionospheric holes" and began to experiment with holes made in the daytime, or at night over Millstone, Connecticut, and Arecibo, Puerto Rico. They experimented with the effects of "artificially induced ionospheric depletions on very low frequency wave lengths, on equatorial plasma instabilities, and on low frequency radio astronomical observations over Roberval, Quebec, Kwajelein, in the Marshall Islands and Hobart, Tasmania" (Advanced Space Research, Vo1.8, No. 1, 1988).
Innovative Shuttle Experiments (1985)
An innovative use of the Space Shuttle to perform space physics experiments in earth orbit was launched, using the OMS injections of gases to "cause a sudden depletion in the local plasma concentration, the creation of a so called ionospheric hole." This artificially induced plasma depletion can then be used to investigate other space phenomena, such as the growth of the plasma instabilities or the modification of radio propagation paths. The 47 second OMS burn of July 29, 1985, produced the largest and most long-lived ionospheric hole to date, dumping some 830 kg of exhaust into the ionosphere at sunset. A 6 second, 68 km OMS release above Connecticut in August 1985, produced an airglow which covered over 400,000 square km.
During the 1980's, rocket launches globally numbered about 500 to 600 a year, peaking at 1500 in 1989. There were many more during the Gulf War. The Shuttle is the largest of the solid fuel rockets, with twin 45 meter boosters. All solid fuel rockets release large amounts of hydrochloric acid in their exhaust, each Shuttle flight injecting about 75 tons of ozone destroying chlorine into the stratosphere. Those launched since 1992 inject even more ozone-destroying chlorine, about 187 tons, into the stratosphere (which contains the ozone layer)
It's not a contender at the Blaxxun level yet, but then again, we don't get millions of dollars for development. But of course, capital makes its own requirements.
The goal is to have an Open and Free Metaverse in Java3D that everyone can use and modify. The content will focus mainly on exploration, gaming and Sims-esque chat.
So far there is a simple solar system model which will soon be somewhat similar to what Celestia has done (it's a rad app.. check it at: http://shatters.net/celestia).
We hope to extend beyond Celestia by having live query access to the big astronomical databases.. so the solar system sim will become a universe sim, and you'll have live access to the best astro datasets around.
Turning earthward, we'll integrate GIS databases and city models from places like the USGS, vterrain.org, and openplans.org.
We also hope to integrate datasets from the lifesciences, yielding simulations of all of the Earth's ecologies, all in 3D, as accurately as possible.
The obvious problem with all of this is scale. The astronomical datasets alone are sometimes in the terabytes. Well, I've worked with some GB datasets before, and have access to a 300TB dataset, so I'm not too scared by this prospect, but the project will take some time to "get interesting".
Another problem is choosing the right architecture. We've opted for Java 3D in lieu of X3D, which if it could get off the ground would be the best choice. We'll see how X3D pans out.
If you'd like to discuss dev, post to the sourceforge page or mail me. pablo@freality.com
> It is not optimal for a virus to kill its host. > Ever. End-of-story.
Unless of course the virus (or prion.. who's counting?) is Mad Cow Disease!
It is only when the host is killed that the organism gets to propagate, because it's got to be fed to another of the same organism. Ew! Who eats this stuff?!?! uh... *cough cough.. croak*
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the highlights:
... and additional studies to establish goals are not needed at this time.
... the main hurdle to be overcome is the lack of a national commitment to such activities.
"(7) There have been numerous commissions and study panels over the last 30 years
(8) While there are significant technical and programmatic hurdles
(11) While the ultimate goal of human space flight in the inner solar system is the exploration of the planet Mars, there are other important goals for exploration of the inner solar system that will advance our scientific understanding and allow the United States to develop and demonstrate capabilities that will be needed for the scientific exploration and eventual settlement of Mars."
w00t! I claim Tharsis Tholus!
"(20) Completion of the International Space Station with a full crew complement of 7 astronauts and robust research capabilities is essential if the United States is to carry out successfully a comprehensive initiative of scientific exploration of the solar system that involves human space flight."
Not so hot on this one.. again, Zubrin's proposals are passed over. Ah comprimise.
If you're not familiar with Zubrin, he made a plan 10 years ago to get to Mars with existing technology (Saturn VII), that would allow scientists months of surface time there, all for $10B:
http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/nearterm.txt
"(4) Within 20 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the development and flight demonstration of a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from low Earth orbit to and from Martian orbit, the development and deployment of a human-tended habitation and research facility on the surface of one of the moons of Mars, and the development and flight demonstration of a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from Martian orbit to the surface of Mars and back."
Again, given Zubrin's work (that he presented to Congress), this is a bummer. We'll spend a lot of time building huge spaceships, instead of getting to Mars and settling it. A lot can happen in 20 years though.. perhaps any legislation like this is good. It's especially understandable given the recent shuttle disaster.. law-makers don't stick their necks out too far.
"(1) $50,000,000 for fiscal year 2004; and
(2) $200,000,000 for fiscal year 2005."
Now that's what I'm talkin' about.
"This paper investigates means for achieving human expeditions to Mars utilizing existing or near-term technology. Both mission plans described here, Mars Direct and Semi-Direct are accomplished with tandem direct launches of payloads to Mars using the upper stages of the heavy lift booster used to lift the payloads to orbit. No on-orbit assembly of large interplanetary spacecraft is required. In situ-propellant production of CH4/O2 and H2O on the Martian surface is used to reduce return propellant and surface consumable requirements, and thus total mission mass and cost. Chemical combustion powered ground vehicles are employed to afford the surface mission with the high degree of mobility required for an effective exploration program. Data is presented showing why medium-energy conjunction class trajectories are optimal for piloted missions, and mission analysis is given showing what technologies are optimal for each of the missions primary maneuvers. The optimal crew size and composition for initial piloted Mars missions is presented, along with a proposed surface systems payload manifest. The back-up plans and abort philosophy of the mission plans are described. An end to end point design for the Semi-Direct mission using either the Russian Energia B or a U.S. Saturn VII launch vehicle is presented and options for further evolution of the point design are discussed. It is concluded that both the Mars Direct and Semi-Direct plans offer viable options for robust piloted Mars missions employing near-term technology."
Read the whole thing here
This is from 1993!
The Case for Mars is good, but perhaps even better is Zubrin's Entering Space.
http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/nearterm.txt
The Robot: Honda
"The functions of Honda's humanoid robot are defined as follows: An operational system that autonomously performs typical operations under known circumstances. If an extraordinary operation is required under unknown circumstances, the robot will be supported by an operator... [The P3, 1,600mm in height and 130kg in weight, features a computer unit, motor-drive system, battery and wireless apparatus inside the body section. This more sophisticated robot can achieve freer movement, go up and down stairs and push a vehicle.]
[Future Development will focus on]:
For items 2 and 3, it is extremely important that through the evolution of hardware we achieve physical autonomy by improving dynamic performance and adaptability to wider variations of working conditions. Also important is the pursuit of studies in artificial intelligence systems, which will provide the solution for improved autonomy."
The Brains: CYC
"The Cyc product family is powered by an immense multi-contextual knowledge base and an efficient inference engine. The knowledge base is built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or "rules") designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world. For example, Cyc knows that trees are usually outdoors, that once people die they stop buying things, and that glasses of liquid should be carried rightside-up."
And of course, lots of little other things, like targeting systems, healing systems (like this article), a CNS to link these higher-level functions to the motor control systems of the robot, um.... GUNS, MISSLES, etc..
Yeah, maybe not such a good idea. Of course, if we truly believed it a bad idea, we'd work for treaties now against robotic warfare, before one of our county's governments builds these and the rest are "forced" to catch up.
That is, if it hasn't started already. Clone wars!
Here's a brief sense of the security checks:
Here's a break-down of who can get access to the personal private information with varying levels of consent and knowledge by the client.
I see some potential for problems here, but nothing egregious. The problems lie elsewhere. I went through the trouble of making this listing because I bet it's similar to other datamodels used in other governmental MIS systems. Which is to say, I don't much worry about my info being in this homeless database, but it's instructive nonetheless, because it's a rare example (at least for me) of what other databases like this may look like.
The real potency of DoD's TIA initiative came from the widespread existence of these minor databases. If you're not in the homeless database, you may be in the military database, or maybe in your city or county's DMV database, etc. etc.. As long as they're all separate, it's not feasible to track your information through them. TIA was envisioned as a monumental effort to cross that particular chasm, and the effects, I think, would have been terrible.
Making our government more manageable is in itself not necessarily desireable. Just making it more manageable may just make it a more tempting prize to despots, like, in my opinion, the current administration.
We have to make our government more open and more equitable as we make it more manageable to ensure the right outcome.
use dirigible technology to make it lighter than air, or even much lighter. Then, use the no-moving-parts-electro-motor to move it. Isn't the army working on something like this?
Depending on the application, you'd much rather have that extra 36MW for thrust than for just staying aloft. Then it's like a ship at sea.. always bouyant and in a safe state even if power fails.
To put this a bit in perspective, the engines of a Boeing 777 generate between 75 and 100k pounds of thrust. 2 of those equal your 36MW figure. A ship with the full 1000MW capability would have thrust equivalent to 27 777s. Not bad. Aircraft-carrier of the skies. I bet it already exists.
The standard that is aimed for is "relevant and reliable." Not much to argue with there.
But the political ramifications are great. On the one hand, exclude scientific evidence and risk ignorance of the truth. On the other hand, include scientific evidence and risk politicizing scientific knowledge.
Consider one of the examples given: pollution.
If we don't allow scientific diagnosis and treatment of the various problems associated with pollution, we'll almost surely mis-judge the relevance of pollution and possible routes to equitably manage it.
However, if we seek scientific advice for diagnosis and treatment, scientists will be increasingly be the targets of bribery. The higher the stakes, the more sure the corruption. In that scenario, you get the same bad advice, but you malign the body of the scientific establishment as well.
For evidence of this, look at the international debate on global warming. It's clear that financial interest is biasing the scientific arguments in the US policy analysis. Worse, once this debate is over, we can only assume the taste of money will remain on their tounges. It's easier to get grants for your dream research if you're owed a favor for a political performance.
Further in the future, a stronger political capacity in the sciences could lead to more fundamental changes in the organization of our society. Historically, the ability to control truth and the ability to rule have proved dangerous in solution. If the church cannot be trusted in front of God, why then scientists in front of Reason? Prudence demands keeping both separated from the State.
Artificial scarcity is becoming more and more artificial. Soon all literature, recorded music and video will fit on a cheap disk. If disk space doubles every year for the next 14, today's 120GB drive will become tomorrow's 1PB drive. The Internet Archive, by comparisson, is "only" 300TB.
At that point, the protectionism will become impossibly difficult to defend. When each person could be be given a copy of the Archive of Human Knowledge for the equivalent of 1 week's wage, the issue will resolve. There will be those societies who become enlightened, and those who wither in the greatest of dark ages.
I'll probably piss-off the red-bloded Americans here, but man, I can't wait to not drive my car. I want to have fully automated driving. I want to finish work on a Friday afternoon, go home, grab my stuff, go to my car and say "Miami Beach, Please!". I want to watch movies for a couple of hours or finish reading Dune, and when I wake up, I'm parked right at my favorite beach. Same thing for the reverse trip Sunday night and Monday mornings wouldn't be half as bad. Paint fuel-cells into that picture and it wouldn't even tweak the greens.
:)
CMU's robotics program has been working on automated driving systems for years. When I was there I heard one of the professors had outfitted his normal home car with about $1500 of equipment and "drove" to school and back every day mostly hands-off. All based on neural-nets and some snazzy control systems.
And that was like 6 years ago. I'm sure there's wisdom in not rushing into something like this, but I also get the feeling there will be some hard lobbying against it. Like, what happens to truckers, cabbies, UPS/Fed-Ex drivers, etc. etc.? Will the (perhaps undeserved) reputation of dangerous speed-freak truckers come home to roost?
I wonder how Detroit would feel. At first, it's a shinny new feature == more margin. But beyond that, I can't help but see cars become even more commodity. All you really end up caring about is your comfort/ammenities.. there won't be as much attention to "performance".. ahhh.. Detroit will ~love~ it, BMW won't.
You could even share these kind of cars, like the Zip cars, but instead of you going to the cars, they come to you. Or perhaps just the under-carriage comes to you and connects to your personal travel cabin. Then, you pull out of the driveway and merge into a long train of like-designed cabins-on-wheels, all virtually-linked together via 802.11z. The road/car system routes you shortest-dijkstra-path to your destination and then your car parks itself once it's dropped you off. There's traffic density that would make clog up modern highways for years, but its all flow-controlled, so you go 120MpH with only inches between cars, so your trip takes half the time.
The moving sidewalk (armchair) of the future?
Tierra was by Tom Ray, a pioneer in the AL field. It was a great idea, but failed to turn around with interesting biodiversity. You'd create creatures, they'd optimize themselves, some variants and parasites would evolve, but then things would simmer down within a few hours and you'd be in a steady state for ever.
;)
Network Tierra was Ray's response to this. It was supposed to allow a "Cambrian explosion" of biodiversity, by providing tons of (networked computer) space for the little creatures to explode into, and then specialize, in. This led to interesting migration behavior, and one of my all-time favorite web-pages, but it too failed to spark that je ne sais quois, that spark of life.
Anyways, it did spark Avida and the Digital Life Lab at Cal Tech. Avida is essentially a deeper look at the fundamentals behind AL. In Tierra, I think the design philosophy was something like "make it look a lot like a living ecological system and the life-force will appear out of the ether", and actually, Tierra was a great leap forward beyond more mundane genetic programming a la John Koza.
Avida, on the other hand, is much more systematic in exploring the parameter space (which is large and sensitive) for setting up an AL system. This turned out to be fruitful, as Adami found that only when certain, very narrow, environmental conditions were met would the little creatures start outsmarting that Creationist boogeyman, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Turns out that Tierra didn't have spatiality (needed to be more restrictive on who could sleep with who) and mutation rates (some power law math that's way over my head) set right.
But the real punch-line to this whole story is that the direct beneficiary of these insights in Microsoft! Hah!
Microsoft was funding Adami's work because Windoze crashed too much. They were searching for a way of programming - in this case using closed instruction sets like Avida's (another deep topic) - that would be inherently robust to problems like seg faults and illegal instructions.... e.g. Adami's instruction set was engineered so that little programs (creatures) couldn't crash the Avida VM when they mutated into new, unknown programs.. or in Windoze's case, when a coder did something stoopid. It's funny that MS was researching this, since releatively low-tech solutions such as protected memory and QA take care of this. (not to mention Java
The big guys have been dodging this obvious solution the whole time. Ever since instant messaging took off, it was obvious everyone was capable of using challenge-response, but of course, it hits email advertisers in the pocket. This led to moves by the likes of MS to counter anti-spam legislation in California. Hopefully this move by Earthlink will start the rush.
The neat thing here isn't that you choose who to accept - because that in itself is a pain - but that the sender has to allow for the possibility that you won't, which is currently not handled well in e-mail. Once legitimate senders generally have this capability, spam filters (either complex or just a rule to reject unknowns) will become more useful, as there's then a decent way to handle a bounce. Spam be gone!
Whoever thought the new millenia had no surpises in store, that y2k was the measure of things to come, that now we wouldn't have a blade-runner future.. pshaw.
Terrorists lurk around every corner, and some even in broad daylight. They have "Free Software" T-Shirts on, and dirty bombs in their backpacks.
Did you think "we won the cold war"? Who's "we"? What's "cold war"? What's a communist? The poor Russians who could barely keep food on their tables?
Open and free? Pshaw. Lamer talk for communism. There, I've said it.
Osama bin Laden uses OpenBSD. Iraq's IT dept. contributes half of the man-coding-hours to the project. Syria and North Korea write the device drivers, thinnly masquerading for the real ICBM control systems they are. We're screwed! They've had us all along and all we could talk about was KDE vs. Gnome. How naive we were!
Stallman is the next Hussein. Dirty commie in libertarian drag.
God Bless America! Let's Roll! Support Our Troops! Down with !
What's his beef with AI?
I can describe a program to you, and you can write it in the programming language you know, thus programming a computer. Tomorrow, the computer type may change. Next year, the programming language may change. The program description, however, can stay the same. Consider the Sieve of Eratosthenes. That's a 2 millenia-old Natural Language Algorithm. It was written in Greek, but that's just a syntax difference. When you read the translation, the same thought process is communicated, without significant deterioration. We know this because it validates itself.. it still finds primes.
The measure of language longevity then is the how well they facilitate this process. Consider the Sieve in x86 asm. vs. C vs. Java. Which looks the most like natural language? The nice thing about Java, and OO languages in general, is that they facilitate programs that read a lot like we speak:
That's not perfect.. I'd much rather write this:
And have it just work. Same for the Sieve. The closest semantics to this currently is actually bash, which is very OO:
This would offend Paul of course, since shells have more "axioms" than you can shake a stick at, and they depend on crufty layers, but hey.. if you slap an NL processor on top of this and link it to a speach processor.... brb
.. you have a responsibility to guide their use.
Things are clear when you're selling guns or drugs or potent ideas, but it's hard to trace the dependencies for systematic technologies. What responsibility do you bear for selling the steel that makes the guns that kill the people? It's very easy to look at the world as a libertarian, and say that you're just responsible for your corner, and can't be held responsible for the rest. It's also easy to wax socialist and say the whole thing is our shared responsibility. I think this dichotomy is solved by the ethic of "think globally, act locally".
According to copyright law it IS in fact my data.
I don't think that is correct. The work is owned for a (not so) limited time by the creator. It is licensed to you under the terms of copyright law by default, but other contracts can be used. Copyright in the constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Specifically, the US Copyright Office FAQ says:
"Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:
- To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
- To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
- To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
- To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
- To display the copyrighted work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and
- In the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission."
Now, you can argue that this is bad, that those lawmakers were useless, etc., but it doesn't change the law. You'd be better served putting your energies into changing the law, or coping with it, which is all I'm saying. DRM is the natural reaction to file-sharing. Better to help create it - and so make sure it's fairly applied - than pretend the law isn't what it is and that Big Media/MS don't have money and good lawyers. Of course if things get really bleak, resist.
DRM isn't bad. Big Media/MS is bad. If DRM becomes mandated, it will be better to have an open-source implementation than not. This will reduce the plausibility of the likely MS argument that since there is no DRM on linux or mac, these systems should be excluded outright from certification.
It's like an arms race. If everyone's got it, nobody is at a disadvantage. "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer." The same is true of TIA, btw.
Maybe we're a little behind schedule and these laser guns are a tad unrealistic, but it's really good to see there's still serious effort to make the ultimate killing machine.
Gotta give it up for Honda here too. The P-series robots are pretty slow today, but I'm shouting out mad props to that R&D effort.
Of all the tech needed in our dev plan for the first terminators, the most vaporous is still the AI, but Doug Lenat's CYC project just landed $9M in Total Information Awareness money, so I guess there's hope there too.
Well, maybe we can just skip the laser guns and go Robocop-style instead. Anything to get these things on the front-lines ASAP! There's simply too many radical war-mongering people in the world to not have a Terminators fighting for our <blink>National Security</blink>.
Imagine the same story with different actors:
/.'s most hated list. FSF does it, we throw a party.
"RIAA announces new Corporate Patronage Program."
Those companies would immediately be on
Perhaps it will turn out well. But perhaps not. Robert Johnson sold his sould to the devil to be the best guitar player around.
These Corporate Patrons have agendas that aren't open, that will be pursued via their now substantial support of the few lawyers around who give a hoot about free software. Woe be the FSF when they need to make a choice between their conscience and dependence on private funding. Best of luck to the FSF on this.
Watch this development closely and start searching for an alternative.
If all of the chips in the system have DRM, it will cease to be open. By "open", I mean hackable. DRM is not hackable, thus neither is any important part of the system.
So, you'd need to design the system using open chips. Thankfully, there's hardware people out there who get this at Open Cores.
The GNU Project FAQ says:
"Copyleft is a general method..."
"To copyleft a program, we first state that it is copyrighted; then we add distribution terms, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's code or any program derived from it but only if the distribution terms are unchanged. Thus, the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable."
Copyleft, as a general method, must now be interpreted and practiced in a wide field, incorporating not only programming, but all creative disciplines. Copyleft is the opportunity to make the investment in the future plentitude of the Public Domain that the relative parasitism of Copyright threatens.
As of today, when a work is Copyrighted we know its destiny. It will be sucked dry, never allowed to enrich the very public trust that helped bring it forth. Copyright will grow stronger in proportion to the vitality of each work it consumes.
As of today, we know the only work that will thrive, that will enrich the public trust, is a work that explicitly supports the intention of the United States Constitution that Copyright is granted "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
By claiming Copyright, and then licensing your works under a license in accord with this ideal of the Constitution and Copyleft, you will help ensure a wide and deep Public Domain for our future.
Copyleft licenses:
For software: The GNU Public License
For music: The EFF Open Audio License
There are signs that this could happen, but I'd expect only if the industry collectively drops the ball.
The end-game you described is a collective revenue loss for them, and if they gain sight of that, they'll work against it, and probably succeed in stifiling competition.
There is one very positive note in this. If there is no DRM in law, then there is always room for a full alternative, e.g. chip/software/apps/networks that are controlled by users, when and if they get their act together. This may not mean much for your average consumer, but it will preserve some cultural freedom for those interested.
It's a PR ploy. Legislation is only one route to their goal. It picked up too much flack, so I suppose they just readjusted their deals with tech vendors.
The article says:
"They said they planned to convene a meeting of senior executives to discuss technical solutions to combat the illegal copying of digital material."
i.e. they took the process underground.
This is the way decisions get made. If you want music to be free, don't give your money to organizations that make decisions like this.
For those wondering why this is getting funded, or whether rocket exhaust has significant environmental effects, I found an interesting page floating around:
http://www.earthpulse.com/haarp/background.html
some highlights:
--
Saturn V Rocket (1975)
Due to a malfunction, the Saturn V Rocket burned unusually high in the atmosphere, above 300 km. This burn produced "a large ionospheric hole" (Mendillo, M. Et al., Science p. 187, 343, 1975). The disturbance reduced the total electron content more than 60% over an area 1,000 km in radius, and lasted for several hours. It prevented all telecommunications over a large area of the Atlantic Ocean. The phenomenon was apparently caused by a reaction between the exhaust gases and ionospheric oxygen ions. The reaction emitted a 6300 A airglow. Between 1975 and 1981 NASA and the US Military began to design ways to test this new phenomena through deliberate experimentation with the ionosphere.
Orbit Maneuvering System (1981)
Part of the plan to build the SPS space platforms was the demand for reusable space shuttles, since they could not afford to keep discarding rockets. The NASA Spacelab 3 Mission of the Space Shuttle made, in 1981, "a series of passes over a network of five ground based observatories" in order to study what happened to the ionosphere when the Shuttle injected gases into it from the Orbit Maneuvering System (OMS). They discovered that they could "induce ionospheric holes" and began to experiment with holes made in the daytime, or at night over Millstone, Connecticut, and Arecibo, Puerto Rico. They experimented with the effects of "artificially induced ionospheric depletions on very low frequency wave lengths, on equatorial plasma instabilities, and on low frequency radio astronomical observations over Roberval, Quebec, Kwajelein, in the Marshall Islands and Hobart, Tasmania" (Advanced Space Research, Vo1.8, No. 1, 1988).
Innovative Shuttle Experiments (1985)
An innovative use of the Space Shuttle to perform space physics experiments in earth orbit was launched, using the OMS injections of gases to "cause a sudden depletion in the local plasma concentration, the creation of a so called ionospheric hole." This artificially induced plasma depletion can then be used to investigate other space phenomena, such as the growth of the plasma instabilities or the modification of radio propagation paths. The 47 second OMS burn of July 29, 1985, produced the largest and most long-lived ionospheric hole to date, dumping some 830 kg of exhaust into the ionosphere at sunset. A 6 second, 68 km OMS release above Connecticut in August 1985, produced an airglow which covered over 400,000 square km.
During the 1980's, rocket launches globally numbered about 500 to 600 a year, peaking at 1500 in 1989. There were many more during the Gulf War. The Shuttle is the largest of the solid fuel rockets, with twin 45 meter boosters. All solid fuel rockets release large amounts of hydrochloric acid in their exhaust, each Shuttle flight injecting about 75 tons of ozone destroying chlorine into the stratosphere. Those launched since 1992 inject even more ozone-destroying chlorine, about 187 tons, into the stratosphere (which contains the ozone layer)
Freality Metaverse Construction is at:
freality.com/warez.html
it's also a SourceForge project, at:
fmc.sf.net
It's not a contender at the Blaxxun level yet, but then again, we don't get millions of dollars for development. But of course, capital makes its own requirements.
The goal is to have an Open and Free Metaverse in Java3D that everyone can use and modify. The content will focus mainly on exploration, gaming and Sims-esque chat.
So far there is a simple solar system model which will soon be somewhat similar to what Celestia has done (it's a rad app.. check it at: http://shatters.net/celestia).
We hope to extend beyond Celestia by having live query access to the big astronomical databases.. so the solar system sim will become a universe sim, and you'll have live access to the best astro datasets around.
Turning earthward, we'll integrate GIS databases and city models from places like the USGS, vterrain.org, and openplans.org.
We also hope to integrate datasets from the lifesciences, yielding simulations of all of the Earth's ecologies, all in 3D, as accurately as possible.
The obvious problem with all of this is scale. The astronomical datasets alone are sometimes in the terabytes. Well, I've worked with some GB datasets before, and have access to a 300TB dataset, so I'm not too scared by this prospect, but the project will take some time to "get interesting".
Another problem is choosing the right architecture. We've opted for Java 3D in lieu of X3D, which if it could get off the ground would be the best choice. We'll see how X3D pans out.
If you'd like to discuss dev, post to the sourceforge page or mail me. pablo@freality.com
Cheers!
> It is not optimal for a virus to kill its host.
> Ever. End-of-story.
Unless of course the virus (or prion.. who's counting?) is Mad Cow Disease!
It is only when the host is killed that the organism gets to propagate, because it's got to be fed to another of the same organism. Ew! Who eats this stuff?!?! uh... *cough cough.. croak*