From samples that collect in my lawn, I assume that a local university must be running similar rover experiments in my area. So far, their most effective rover configurations seem to be:
Lawn service promotional fliers
0.5 liter plastic soda bottles
Single sheets of newspaper
Irregular chunks of styrofoam
12 oz. plastic disposable drinking cups
Plastic grocery shopping bags
I'm excited that we seem to be on the cusp of a whole new era of low-cost space exploration.
you mean like call-with-current-continuation? that's not like goto at all huh
Sure it is. It lets you warp over to another unrelated part of your program. Except it's weirder, because it lets you kind of go "backwards" in time as well by returning to an older program state (while handing the "past" program a piece of data from the "future" you're exiting). Kind of like an exception, but it can jump anywhere, not just up the stack frame.
In fact this interesting page dedicated to call/cc describes:
At its heart, call/cc is something like the goto instruction (or rather, like a label for a goto instruction); but a Grand High Exalted goto instruction.
It will never be taken seriously with a name like "KDE" and 100 apps all starting with "K."
KDE will never be taken seriously because its name is a TLA? I guess we'd better tell IBM, the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, CBS, the NFL and thousands of other organizations that they're doomed to failure because of their names.
Maybe they should all rename themselves with words with meanings like "One of a fabled race of dwarflike creatures who live underground and guard treasure hoards." Then they'll be taken seriously.
Unless it was significantly bigger than a microbe and could be seen with the relatively low-power microscope on the rover, I suppose.
I'm guessing that the rover used its robotic arm to lift up a rock, and underneath it found a bunch of those little brown bugs that curl up into a ball when startled. Those things seem to be everywhere.
I beleive (but am not sure) that this was an official 'sugestion' from IBM when the PC first came out, based on long established convention.
Which raises the question: If they saw fit to make dedicated keys for relatively obscure operations like "Print Screen" and "Scroll Lock", why didn't they think to assign one for "Help"?
All sarcasm aside, people have always preferred free to paying for something but, the creators of the copyrighted material do deserve to make a living off of their work.
That's not the reason that copyright was created. It was created to "promote useful arts and sciences". If changes in technology were to make it possible for the optimal amount of useful arts and sciences to be generated without the creators making a direct living off of controlling copies, then logic would dictate that copyright should be curtailed. Whether the creators "deserve" anything is irrelevant.
Copyright is a restriction on the freedom of the people. It was instituted as a tradeoff to generate more content. If it can be demonstrated that the content will be created anyway, then there is no need for it. So, if you wish to argue for copyrights, you need to somehow demonstrate that they increase the amount of content available to the public compared to any less intrusive system, and that the quantity and quality of the increased content outweighs the burdens and costs that the system imposes.
The fact that someone else would rather have it for free is not an adequate reason for me to give it away if I choose not to.
Conversely, the fact that you don't want to give something away for free is not in itself adequate reason to give broad and intrusive police powers to the government (and now private vigilante groups). If you don't want to give it away, you can always keep it secret. The government was given these powers so that more content would be created, the goal was not to create a personal enforcement squad for your wishes.
So if the spokes aren't visible now, maybe Saturn's magnetic field is fluctuating/less coherent than normal.
The Saturnians have taken notice that this vessel is on a trajectory to permanently enter their planetary system, with the apparent further intention of penetrating one of their moons. They have therefore diverted the entire force of the giant planet's magnetic field into charging the energy banks of their weapons systems. If the spacecraft does not alter its course soon, they will no recourse but to unleash a devestating counterattack on the inner planet that initiated hostilities.
While the details are still unclear, the government may require that up to 70% of software on Chinese computers is produced domestically.
implies that they plan to issue a general nationwide ban on too much foreign software. However, that's not what the article says. It actually says:
Officials say a new law will be announced by this summer requiring a minimum percentage of software purchased by the government be produced in China.
So we see that this policy would only apply to government purchases.
Thus, this is little different from when a corporate IT department standardizes on choosing certain software products and not others.
The U.S. federal and state governments also promote a variety of policies by placing extra conditions on their procurements and contractors.
So, while this is somewhat interesting, this doesn't look to me like as big a trade issue as a lot of posts seem to be making of it.
Innoculation assumes you already have millions of doses of an effective vaccine, which we don't yet have for most viruses with pandemic potential.
Better medical care assumes that you haven't overrun the capacity of the healthcare system. Many of the who survived SARS only did so because they were put on a respirator at a hospital. How many respirators exist on the entire planet? The number is probably only in the thousands. Once those are used up, along with stocks of antiviral medicines, infected individuals won't get much better treatment than they did in 1918.
Once an outbreak has surpassed these thresholds, probably the only things that have really improved are our communications and face mask filters. However, these improvements are offset by our current habit of having thousands of people traveling all around the globe every day, which could make a severe outbreak suddenly appear in many regions of the globe simultaneously.
It protects smaller businesses from having their ideas stolen by huge corporations.
On the contrary, huge corporations accumulate piles of patents and conspire to cross-license them to each other for cheap or for free. This protects the large corporations from new innovative competitors by locking smaller businesses out of their markets.
Quite frankly: what a colossal waste of resources.
Every once in a while you hear stories about a company running a dedicated-purpose machine with a fixed set of software for decades because it does the job it's supposed to.
For these people, the real waste of resources would be requalifying their system after an upgrade.
When a vendor provides support for crusty old architectures like VAX or HP minicomputers for years and years, people say that that's great "enterprise-level" support. When a couple of guys maintain security patches of older Linux kernels, you say it's a "waste".
Oh, you are asking, since when Anheuser-Busch sold beer? I really don't know.
According to AB's website, Anheuser got into the business in 1852, and Budweiser beer was introduced in 1876.
I took a tour of one of their large breweries many years ago. Their history is actually pretty interesting; it was one of the first nationally mass-marketed products of any kind. The story was more about how they pioneered the use of refrigerated railroad cars and distribution channels than about the beer itself. (IIRC, their style of beer, which has influenced most mass market American beers, was developed to better survive the rigors of long shipments in the 18th century.)
Once they had the distribution system established, they were able to use economies of scale to squeeze out most of the local brewers in each market. Only in the 1980s did local brewing recover after it was found that many people would indeed pay a premium for a variety of choice.
If you compare windows against all operating systems out there (your microwave is using one, your TV, your VCR, stereo, for certain your satellite receiver, etc, etc) there's no way they could even have much more than 5 - 10% of the market.
Indeed, I'm typ
ing this on my
microwave ove
n's browser rig
ht now, and th
ere's not a bund
led Microsoft app
anywhere BEEEEP
in the box. END :20
START
After all, AMD TESTIFIED IN COURT THAT THE MICROSOFT MONOPOLY WAS GOOD FOR THE INDUSTRY.
Well, in this case it was good. I'm sure if it weren't for the 800-lb gorilla Microsoft refusing to support more than one 64-bit X86 architecture, Intel would have annoyingly forked yet another extension incompatible with AMD's.
This would have significantly raised the costs of software packaging for everybody for years to come. In fact, the extra hassle would probably make for a significant decrease in the number of programs that even bothered to release 64-bit versions at all.
First they "acquired" Slackware. And then sold it off/gave it away after doing nothing with it. Then they "acquired" BSD and have done little with it. Now they have linked up with RedHat for embedded Linux tools?
This actually looks like a brilliant scheme. By the latest legal theories, each of the technologies that they aquire gives them ownership over that technology, its predecessors, its derivatives and everything that it influenced. It looks like they've already amassed an IP collection of SCOian proportions.
If they keep going at this rate, they'll soon be able to claim ownership of every computer program on the planet. We'll all have no choice but to pay up; it looks like WindRiver is going to have the last laugh.
ok, can you give firefox it's old name back? No one knows or cares about your project, but people actually give a fuck about firefox
Which old name?
It was once Netscape... until they screwed up in the market so bad that they gave up on it and released the source as:
Mozilla... until it became so bloated and overdesigned (and dangerously close to a movie company's trademark on a mutant lizard) that they had to start over as a project called:
Phoenix... which they forgot to check to see if that trademark had been used by a software company for about 20 years already, causing them to have to change it in a kneejerk reaction to:
Firebird... which they also forgot was already taken by a project that was already smart enough to not use "Phoenix". Thus causing them to switch once again to:
Firefox... which, (assuming they finally did their homework and checked on trademarks) is actually the best name since the original "Netscape".
You read way to much Sci-Fi. Scientific progress has *slowed* over the past 20 years! We've been focusing 100% of our attention on perfecting existing technologies and making things "safer" for the general populace.
Imagine yourself considering this kind of issue a little over 100 years ago. What if you were a scientist in 1890 and somebody came along and asserted that we physical laws are weirder than anyone can imagine and as a consequence it's possible to generate 1 million times as much energy from a fuel than you get from chemical combustion. Given how preposterous that would have sounded, you might have made the exact same reply. You might say: You read too much Jules Verne. We've just been focusing on safety; in fact, steam engines hardly ever explode anymore!
Just as a hypothetical example: It is very fortunate that a fission chain reaction only works in certain rare isotopes. What if someone were to discover a chain reaction based on synthetic configurations of quarks that works in ordinary matter? I don't see why we would be any less likely to discover something along those lines than some of the weird things we've already discovered.
Yep. I'm sure that will mask the various thermonuclear explosions used to redirect the rock.
There are less explosive ways to move things in space.
Speaking of which, throwing rocks at Earth would be an excellent example of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Probably the most likely candidates to attempt something like this would be a weird doomsday-obsessed religion or religious state. The MAD would be the whole appeal; they would be taking assertive steps to fulfill some prophecy.
Try going from pessimistic to pragmatic sometime.
I'm not pessimistic. My gut feel is that the odds are 50/50 that we figure out a way to escape our current physical limitations vs. destroying ourselves. I'm just extrapolating from the obvious question: If civilizations last millions of years, and if these civilizations still care about the physical world as we currently see it, then why wasn't this planet colonized by aliens eons ago? My answer: They've either died off or moved on. Yes, I believe that given enough time we would eventually destroy ourselves, but I think that there's a good chance we'll figure out how transcend our meat-based existence before that happens.
And the fact that we can see it coming years in advance will do nothing to sway fears?
Surely you've heard of stealth technology. Wrap it up in a black plastic cube.
And that the U.S. government has more technology to redirect the asteriods than anyone who gets out there to redirect the thing at us?
I'm not talking about the short term. Look at all of the shit that's gone down over the last 5000 years of history. There probably isn't going to be a "U.S. government" 10,000 years from now. Sure, the risk is low that some group or country would actually pull this off, but over the next million years or so, the risk will add up. I would argue that once this technology, is available, the annual risk from an intentional impact will be greater than that of a natural one.
At any rate, I'm actually not too worried about this scenario. The lack of success of SETI efforts indicates to me that civilization as we know it will come to an end much sooner than that. I'd guess that within the next few hundred years we'll either find a new physics phenomenon that allows an individual to intentionally or accidently destroy our little area of space/time, or we'll figure out a way to tunnel out of this overly constrictive level of reality into something better. Either way, we may not be around here long enough to worry about terraforming or asteroids.
If life can exist there, it's more than likely that similar life could exist on Venus with its very extreme environment and bountiful liquid (unlike dry Mars).
Actually, Venus is as dry as a bone. The surface is hot enough to melt lead; there isn't going to be any liquid water. The atmosphere has a "trace" of water. From the Wikipedia entry:
Venus has no magnetic field, possibly due to its slow rotation being insufficient to drive an internal dynamo of liquid iron. As a result, the solar wind impacts directly on Venus's upper atmosphere. It is thought that Venus originally had as much water as Earth, but that under the Sun's assault water vapor in the upper atmosphere was split into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen escaping into space due to its low molecular mass; the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium (a heavier isotope of hydrogen which doesn't escape as quickly) in Venus's atmosphere seems to support this theory.
We can generate enough energy to be zipping around the solar system, displacing asteroids and comets. We have even built some of the engine designs that give us that kind of power. (Although only the weaker ones have been built.) Most of the resistance to these technologies is poltical. (Don't dare mention "nuclear" as a propulsion method.
Forget about the nuclear issue. If we develop the technology to aim asteroids and comets at a planet, would then have the ability to wipe out every living thing on this planet larger than a mouse. That is going to face some political resistance, and probably with good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm excited that we seem to be on the cusp of a whole new era of low-cost space exploration.
It turned out that the secret to making this work was to use polywater as the liquid medium.
Sure it is. It lets you warp over to another unrelated part of your program. Except it's weirder, because it lets you kind of go "backwards" in time as well by returning to an older program state (while handing the "past" program a piece of data from the "future" you're exiting). Kind of like an exception, but it can jump anywhere, not just up the stack frame.
In fact this interesting page dedicated to call/cc describes:
Well, the functional language Scheme supports "continuations". These are kind of like GOTOs on acid.
KDE will never be taken seriously because its name is a TLA? I guess we'd better tell IBM, the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, CBS, the NFL and thousands of other organizations that they're doomed to failure because of their names.
Maybe they should all rename themselves with words with meanings like "One of a fabled race of dwarflike creatures who live underground and guard treasure hoards." Then they'll be taken seriously.
I'm guessing that the rover used its robotic arm to lift up a rock, and underneath it found a bunch of those little brown bugs that curl up into a ball when startled. Those things seem to be everywhere.
Since that post probably took 5 minutes to write, it has a value of $29.17. It was very generous to donate it to this discussion. Thanks.
Which raises the question: If they saw fit to make dedicated keys for relatively obscure operations like "Print Screen" and "Scroll Lock", why didn't they think to assign one for "Help"?
So you're saying that if I claimed to own the Brooklyn Bridge and tried to collect tolls from the public for using it, that would be legal?
That's not the reason that copyright was created. It was created to "promote useful arts and sciences". If changes in technology were to make it possible for the optimal amount of useful arts and sciences to be generated without the creators making a direct living off of controlling copies, then logic would dictate that copyright should be curtailed. Whether the creators "deserve" anything is irrelevant.
Copyright is a restriction on the freedom of the people. It was instituted as a tradeoff to generate more content. If it can be demonstrated that the content will be created anyway, then there is no need for it. So, if you wish to argue for copyrights, you need to somehow demonstrate that they increase the amount of content available to the public compared to any less intrusive system, and that the quantity and quality of the increased content outweighs the burdens and costs that the system imposes.
The fact that someone else would rather have it for free is not an adequate reason for me to give it away if I choose not to.
Conversely, the fact that you don't want to give something away for free is not in itself adequate reason to give broad and intrusive police powers to the government (and now private vigilante groups). If you don't want to give it away, you can always keep it secret. The government was given these powers so that more content would be created, the goal was not to create a personal enforcement squad for your wishes.
The Saturnians have taken notice that this vessel is on a trajectory to permanently enter their planetary system, with the apparent further intention of penetrating one of their moons. They have therefore diverted the entire force of the giant planet's magnetic field into charging the energy banks of their weapons systems. If the spacecraft does not alter its course soon, they will no recourse but to unleash a devestating counterattack on the inner planet that initiated hostilities.
While the details are still unclear, the government may require that up to 70% of software on Chinese computers is produced domestically.
implies that they plan to issue a general nationwide ban on too much foreign software. However, that's not what the article says. It actually says:
Officials say a new law will be announced by this summer requiring a minimum percentage of software purchased by the government be produced in China.
So we see that this policy would only apply to government purchases. Thus, this is little different from when a corporate IT department standardizes on choosing certain software products and not others.
The U.S. federal and state governments also promote a variety of policies by placing extra conditions on their procurements and contractors.
So, while this is somewhat interesting, this doesn't look to me like as big a trade issue as a lot of posts seem to be making of it.
Better medical care assumes that you haven't overrun the capacity of the healthcare system. Many of the who survived SARS only did so because they were put on a respirator at a hospital. How many respirators exist on the entire planet? The number is probably only in the thousands. Once those are used up, along with stocks of antiviral medicines, infected individuals won't get much better treatment than they did in 1918.
Once an outbreak has surpassed these thresholds, probably the only things that have really improved are our communications and face mask filters. However, these improvements are offset by our current habit of having thousands of people traveling all around the globe every day, which could make a severe outbreak suddenly appear in many regions of the globe simultaneously.
3. Release ubervirus
On the contrary, huge corporations accumulate piles of patents and conspire to cross-license them to each other for cheap or for free. This protects the large corporations from new innovative competitors by locking smaller businesses out of their markets.
Every once in a while you hear stories about a company running a dedicated-purpose machine with a fixed set of software for decades because it does the job it's supposed to.
For these people, the real waste of resources would be requalifying their system after an upgrade.
When a vendor provides support for crusty old architectures like VAX or HP minicomputers for years and years, people say that that's great "enterprise-level" support. When a couple of guys maintain security patches of older Linux kernels, you say it's a "waste".
According to AB's website, Anheuser got into the business in 1852, and Budweiser beer was introduced in 1876.
I took a tour of one of their large breweries many years ago. Their history is actually pretty interesting; it was one of the first nationally mass-marketed products of any kind. The story was more about how they pioneered the use of refrigerated railroad cars and distribution channels than about the beer itself. (IIRC, their style of beer, which has influenced most mass market American beers, was developed to better survive the rigors of long shipments in the 18th century.)
Once they had the distribution system established, they were able to use economies of scale to squeeze out most of the local brewers in each market. Only in the 1980s did local brewing recover after it was found that many people would indeed pay a premium for a variety of choice.
Indeed, I'm typ
:20
ing this on my
microwave ove
n's browser rig
ht now, and th
ere's not a bund
led Microsoft app
anywhere BEEEEP
in the box. END
START
Well, in this case it was good. I'm sure if it weren't for the 800-lb gorilla Microsoft refusing to support more than one 64-bit X86 architecture, Intel would have annoyingly forked yet another extension incompatible with AMD's.
This would have significantly raised the costs of software packaging for everybody for years to come. In fact, the extra hassle would probably make for a significant decrease in the number of programs that even bothered to release 64-bit versions at all.
This actually looks like a brilliant scheme. By the latest legal theories, each of the technologies that they aquire gives them ownership over that technology, its predecessors, its derivatives and everything that it influenced. It looks like they've already amassed an IP collection of SCOian proportions.
If they keep going at this rate, they'll soon be able to claim ownership of every computer program on the planet. We'll all have no choice but to pay up; it looks like WindRiver is going to have the last laugh.
Which old name?
It was once Netscape... until they screwed up in the market so bad that they gave up on it and released the source as:
Mozilla... until it became so bloated and overdesigned (and dangerously close to a movie company's trademark on a mutant lizard) that they had to start over as a project called:
Phoenix... which they forgot to check to see if that trademark had been used by a software company for about 20 years already, causing them to have to change it in a kneejerk reaction to:
Firebird... which they also forgot was already taken by a project that was already smart enough to not use "Phoenix". Thus causing them to switch once again to:
Firefox... which, (assuming they finally did their homework and checked on trademarks) is actually the best name since the original "Netscape".
Imagine yourself considering this kind of issue a little over 100 years ago. What if you were a scientist in 1890 and somebody came along and asserted that we physical laws are weirder than anyone can imagine and as a consequence it's possible to generate 1 million times as much energy from a fuel than you get from chemical combustion. Given how preposterous that would have sounded, you might have made the exact same reply. You might say: You read too much Jules Verne. We've just been focusing on safety; in fact, steam engines hardly ever explode anymore!
Just as a hypothetical example: It is very fortunate that a fission chain reaction only works in certain rare isotopes. What if someone were to discover a chain reaction based on synthetic configurations of quarks that works in ordinary matter? I don't see why we would be any less likely to discover something along those lines than some of the weird things we've already discovered.
Yep. I'm sure that will mask the various thermonuclear explosions used to redirect the rock.
There are less explosive ways to move things in space.
Speaking of which, throwing rocks at Earth would be an excellent example of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Probably the most likely candidates to attempt something like this would be a weird doomsday-obsessed religion or religious state. The MAD would be the whole appeal; they would be taking assertive steps to fulfill some prophecy.
Try going from pessimistic to pragmatic sometime.
I'm not pessimistic. My gut feel is that the odds are 50/50 that we figure out a way to escape our current physical limitations vs. destroying ourselves. I'm just extrapolating from the obvious question: If civilizations last millions of years, and if these civilizations still care about the physical world as we currently see it, then why wasn't this planet colonized by aliens eons ago? My answer: They've either died off or moved on. Yes, I believe that given enough time we would eventually destroy ourselves, but I think that there's a good chance we'll figure out how transcend our meat-based existence before that happens.
Surely you've heard of stealth technology. Wrap it up in a black plastic cube.
And that the U.S. government has more technology to redirect the asteriods than anyone who gets out there to redirect the thing at us?
I'm not talking about the short term. Look at all of the shit that's gone down over the last 5000 years of history. There probably isn't going to be a "U.S. government" 10,000 years from now. Sure, the risk is low that some group or country would actually pull this off, but over the next million years or so, the risk will add up. I would argue that once this technology, is available, the annual risk from an intentional impact will be greater than that of a natural one.
At any rate, I'm actually not too worried about this scenario. The lack of success of SETI efforts indicates to me that civilization as we know it will come to an end much sooner than that. I'd guess that within the next few hundred years we'll either find a new physics phenomenon that allows an individual to intentionally or accidently destroy our little area of space/time, or we'll figure out a way to tunnel out of this overly constrictive level of reality into something better. Either way, we may not be around here long enough to worry about terraforming or asteroids.
Actually, Venus is as dry as a bone. The surface is hot enough to melt lead; there isn't going to be any liquid water. The atmosphere has a "trace" of water. From the Wikipedia entry:
Forget about the nuclear issue. If we develop the technology to aim asteroids and comets at a planet, would then have the ability to wipe out every living thing on this planet larger than a mouse. That is going to face some political resistance, and probably with good reason.