Very large caves...cavernous spaces. The radiation from Solar flares, Cosmic Rays, etc. means humans need a lot of shielding and that really only comes from a lot of mass between you and the vacuum. If we live on mars, moon or somewhere else, it will have to mean living underground. Earth has a magnetic field and an atmosphere that traps, deflects and degrades most high energy particles (==radiation) before they get to the ground. Other problems solved by caverns include: The moon and Mars change temperature 100C or more between day and night. Micrometeors that make a nice glow as trails at night on Earth act as a 30,000 kph BB gun on the moon. Living outside is very bad for your health.
I really want to see what a 100 meter wide, kilometer long cavern looks like from inside. The roof is 100 meters or more thick and has survived for billions of years. It should not be too hard to seal and pressurize it. The first images from a camera lowered into such a huge cavern, with the right lighting. will be stunning and will change the way we view living in space.
Many comments to this article miss the point. Think VM as in VMware not VM as in java. The Lina VM emulates an x86 processor, the VM runs X and displays bit maps in its application window. The emulation of look and feel comes out basically perfect because the VM deals with hardware, not OS calls.
Large disk drives make this possible by enabling Lina to provide an extra copy of the operating system, libraries, X, etc for each application. Maybe surprising, but this doesn't have too much overhead.
If you want to try out this technology right now, down load vmplayer (http://vmware.com/) and install one of the appliances.
The singularity can't happen because intelligence has limits. The hypothetical machine that makes itself ever smarter doesn't make sense.
Assuming intelligence is the ability to extrapolate from facts to deduce the future, then it's limited by the accuracy of the facts (garbage in, garbage out). There's no point in have ever greater powers of deduction if the facts have a lot of noise in them.
Sherlock Holmes looked powerful because Victorian society had high levels of structure and relatively less noise. It's common strategy to act crazy, illogical, stupid when in a conflict with more powerful enemies.
The butterfly effect, as an illustration of chaos, will protect us from the singularity.
Conventional TV pictures and sets have a resolution that matches the human eyeball resolution. People can see pixels about 1 arc-second in size. Take a 36" TV design for conventional TV viewing across the room and, not by coincidence, pixels subtend 1 arc-second.
If the the viewer kicks the picture into HDTV, 400-500 NTSC pixels becomes 1200-1900 on HDTV and pixel size shrinks to one third or less. The best viewing position requires 1 arc-second pixels so the viewer needs to sit at one third the distance.
Ever notice that people watching HDTV lean forward? They know there's more resolution there and subconciously want to see it. I've have HDTV and know how to use it. But unless I'm willing to sit on the floor right in front of the set, 90% of the time I don't bother.
The only HDTV that makes real sense requires that the set grow by 3:1 or 4:1 and fills the whole wall.
He thinks normal mouth baterial got into his lungs. Which can happen. Med Labs routinely ignore mouth bateria in samples. Antibiotics tailored to leave them alone. Antibiotics don't work on virii, at all. Needs old fashioned or special antibiotics. Some heart disease caused by infection. Still learning how much disease caused by infection. Doctors don't do unusual very well. Needs to get lucky with right doctor. Nothing wrong with defending yourself.
AM transmitter antennas work best when placed in locations with good ground conductivity...such as swamps and other low places. They also get placed near occupied areas (short range) and where the land doesn't cost much (like old industrial areas)
Doesn't this sound like it might correlate with pollution enough to affect the results???
Groklaw.net (IBM's Subpoenas to Analysts and Investors: Why? Why? Why?) points out that IBM's going after the network of analyists and investors, possibly because this whole SCO/Linux thing looks strikingly similar to a pump and dump scheme the Feds have already found.
Does Lyons need to appear balanced to avoid getting entangled with IBM Subpoenas?
Notice that this article spends more time than necessary on the differences between Free and Open software. If I was a SCO lawyer with MS interests at heart, I play RMS to really divide the community. It won't work, but will generate useful FUD.
Most of the highly rated replies seem seriously out of touch. (I don't have any Karma so this non-PC clarification won't hurt much.) It's always amazed me how people can get so worked up over gifts. If you don't like it DON'T USE IT!!!
BitKeeper is released as a free version for people who want to _use_ it for open source development. But not for people who want to reverse engineer it.
If you want to reverse engineer it, you have to purchase a license. (which might attempt to prevent reverse engineering...don't know).
RMS proposed a project to reverse engineer BK, and since he doesn't purchase software...it an obvious license violation. And since he doesn't develop anymore, he's asking others to violate the license.
Aside from FSF philosopy, what's the problem? Larry's offering something useful for free. In return, he gets some free testing and advertising.
Check out the LKML archive http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0210.2/0603.html
Quoting the good parts
I will re-iterate my stance on the GPL and kernel modules:
There is NOTHING in the kernel license that allows modules to be non-GPL'd.
The _only_ thing that allows for non-GPL modules is copyright law, and in particular the "derived work" issue. A vendor who distributes non-GPL modules is _not_ protected by the module inteface per se, and should feel very confident that they can show in a court of law that the code is not derived.
The module interface has NEVER been documented or meant to be a GPL barrier. The COPYING clearly states that the system call layer is such a barrier, so if you do your work in user land you're not in any way beholden to the GPL. The module interfaces are not system calls: there are system calls used to _install_ them, but the actual interfaces are not.
The original binary-only modules were for things that were pre-existing works of code, ie drivers and filesystems ported from other operating systems, which thus could clearly be argued to not be derived works, and the original limited export table also acted somewhat as a barrier to show a level of distance.
And continuing a bit later
Side note: it should be noted that legally the GPLONLY note is nothing but a strong hint and has nothing to do with the license (and only matters for the _enforcement_ of said license). The fact is:
- the kernel copyright requires the GPL for derived works anyway.
- if a company feels confident that they can prove in court that their module is not a derived work, the GPL doesn't matter _anyway_, since a copyright license at that point is meaningless and wouldn't cover the work regardless of whether we say it is GPLONLY or not.
(In other words: for provably non-derived works, whatever kernel license we choose is totally irrelevant)
So the GPLONLY is really a big red warning flag: "Danger, Will Robinson".
It doesn't have any real legal effect on th emeaning of the license itself, except in the sense that it's another way to inform users about the copyright license (think of it as a "click through" issue - GPLONLY forces you to "click through" the fact that the kernel is under the GPL and thus derived works have to be too).
Clearly "click through" _has_ been considered a legally meaningful thing, in that it voids the argument that somebody wasn't aware of the license. It doesn't change what you can or cannot do, but it has some meaning for whether it could be wilful infringement or just honest mistake.
Maybe that's because most of the 2.5 series doesn't work right, has many broken drivers, and has many discussions of file system corruption on LKML. It's understandable, because developers have started in on some very fundamental changes.
I try to run the bleeding edge and used all but a few of the 2.3 kernels. About half of 2.5.x series doesn't compile. Right now raid stuff doesn't work.
then it relays signals a short range to its neighbors...and doesn't broadcast all over the world. Spectrum at HF _is_ a scare resource because it bounces all over. But at line of sight frequencies, if radios have relaying and forwarding capability, then the total capacity grows with the density of radios.
Imagine every cellphone as repeater and network router able to forward several connections and software able to manage such a dynamic network. Then each connection only has RF signals that spread out around the path between all the routers. This means less radio signals falling on places that don't want to receive the signal.
The data sheet for the 1Z2Z vacuum tube (circa 1966) contained items like a "urinated tungsten filament" and a monode structure (one less than diode), IIRC.
If humor exists prior to the Google...can anyone laugh?
This law injects the government into internet technology through detailed definitions of privacy, sensitive vs non sensitive, etc. much like the DMCA (whatever it's called now) injects government into internet technology and definition of digital rights. Once the government gets into the habit of regulating, it won't stop. You might like government mandated privacy, now. But what happens when government changes the definition of "sensitive information", probably due to lobbying pressure.
Both these laws create a power axis between congress and lobbyists that leaves out the people in general and technologists in particular. Oppose all these laws.
Will Redhat 7.2 support reiserfs? 7.1 certainly didn't, bombed on startup. I had to wipe all the partions and drop back to ext2. Same thing with devfs...not supported.
I want the ease of use that comes with RH packaging but it would be nice if their install didn't bomb.
We all scream when Microsoft decides what's in and what's out. It will be very hard to devfs and reiserfs to succeed if RH makes it difficult.
SDR can implement the old protocols but not the new ones.
It takes complicated signal structures and protocols to pack the most information into the least bandwidth. With bandwidth getting more expensive in the FCC auctions, wireless service providers require the most effective (and complex) protocols. Basically they implement what the technology supports after very careful study...$Billions ride on getting the choice right. The most cost effective designs use bleeding edge custom ASIC's.
The performance available from custom chips far exceeds what someone can implement in a DSP or general purpose processor (or even an FPGA).
Sure you can wait 5-10 years and software will catch up. But by then, the wireless operators will have upgraded to a new protocol that software can't do.
Try searching on some error message or computer problem keywords. Most searches turn up similar question, but rarely answers. This happens so often, I've almost given up searching. Several times I've email'd the author of a similar question to ask about the solution. In turn, I've given help to several people who emailed me up to a year or more later. This is weird because the net has lots of linux and computer help sites. Maybe people don't answer because they immediately get 400 spam's?
The numbers probably don't work out because it's cheap to harden a radio or telephone network enough that the attacker has to use a very powerful device or approach very close to the target with a medium power device. Very quickly, the weapons get so large or approach so close that changing it back to blast/fragmentation produces a more militarily significant result. The attacker either has to know that the target has not hardened or has to really want to focus on electronic damage for some reason.
Studying this stuff was my job for a few months...
Three concepts for EMP shells:
1) launch a blast of microwaves toward the target just before impact. Advantages: uW can be directed forward, can penetrate small openings in the target
2) generate high freq RF just before impact. Advantages: can couple into wires and cables such as between radar dish and control van. Disadvantage: requires deploying long antenna wires.
3) directly connect to building and pulse it with MegaVolt DC or AC. Advantages: effecient connection, lots of power.
The microwave shell used an explosive to crush a magnetic field and shoot it past a coil that generated KiloVolts and 100's of KiloAmps, then a transformer stepped it up to MegaVolts and fed a klystron-like device. I saw the model for 155mm shell and nothing looked like a circuit...just some very simple shapes in metal, plastic and explosive...beautiful engineering!
The HF shell shoots wires out from the nose to form an antenna and uses the Megavolts to generate and impulse around 30 MHz
The direct connect shell shoots wire our towards the target and puts the MV directly on the wires. The Volts jumps the air gaps and penetrates to the internal wiring of the building and fries everything inside.
The article missed one of the most important threats...EMP rent-a-trucks. Load a set of large HF emp generators in the back of semi-trailer and drive it into a high density business area. The energy couples into the power and network wiring and fries all the computers.
On the subject of susceptability for HERF...The published literature varies widely. Some tests claim that 100's of Watts per square cm will create damage but others say it requires 10KW/cm2. The equipment design literature tends to assmue the threat can generate huge power. On the other hand, it's not possible to generate that much power over a wide area. The question becomes...if you need to get a 100 lb shell within 10 feet of the target...isn't it better just use high explosives?
Bottom line...these weapons will damage civilian infrastructure (business, not the phone company) but probably have little military use except to slow the adoption of high technology by increasing the number of special requirements for military systems (just what the old Soviets would want)
to qualify...I used to develop aircraft cockpit displays and used linux and OpenGL for some of them...
Color LCD's have very little reflective properties so need a backlight. In addition, a color LCD has only a few percent transmissivity. To get enough brightness to see the display in sunlight (10000 ft candles), requires extraordinary brightness and power in the backlight. Some of the "sunlight readable" display put antireflective coatings and contrast enhancing filters in front of the LCD's. That works by making the display very dark so that the weak light coming through becomes a bit visible gainst the dark background. This doesn't work very well because the user's eyes have to switch between looking at the horizon with 90% reflectivity and the display with 5% reflectivity... very fatiguing to use the image is dark on deep black.
A backlit monochrome display will have about 25% transmissivity, but still not enough to make for a low power backlight.
You really want a reflective display...like the Palm Pilot's but they have limited viewabilty, require a backlight for twighlight and night operation.
Think about the ATM's you've seen in sunlight, do you like any of them? If good technology existed for this, people would use it.
For a rugged processor, we're using the RPX series from Embedded Planet. Runs on 5V, works over a wide temperature range (-60 to +100C in our tests) and supported by Hard Hat Linux from MontaVista (powerPC based). EP has a variation with a display.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody has linked to earlier articles on Lunar and Martian Caves, so here goes. Nasa Science News Rabbit Holes , Caves in Copernicus Crater , Mars cave entrance .
Very large caves...cavernous spaces. The radiation from Solar flares, Cosmic Rays, etc. means humans need a lot of shielding and that really only comes from a lot of mass between you and the vacuum. If we live on mars, moon or somewhere else, it will have to mean living underground. Earth has a magnetic field and an atmosphere that traps, deflects and degrades most high energy particles (==radiation) before they get to the ground. Other problems solved by caverns include: The moon and Mars change temperature 100C or more between day and night. Micrometeors that make a nice glow as trails at night on Earth act as a 30,000 kph BB gun on the moon. Living outside is very bad for your health.
I really want to see what a 100 meter wide, kilometer long cavern looks like from inside. The roof is 100 meters or more thick and has survived for billions of years. It should not be too hard to seal and pressurize it. The first images from a camera lowered into such a huge cavern, with the right lighting. will be stunning and will change the way we view living in space.
Many comments to this article miss the point. Think VM as in VMware not VM as in java. The Lina VM emulates an x86 processor, the VM runs X and displays bit maps in its application window. The emulation of look and feel comes out basically perfect because the VM deals with hardware, not OS calls. Large disk drives make this possible by enabling Lina to provide an extra copy of the operating system, libraries, X, etc for each application. Maybe surprising, but this doesn't have too much overhead. If you want to try out this technology right now, down load vmplayer (http://vmware.com/) and install one of the appliances.
The singularity can't happen because intelligence has limits. The hypothetical machine that makes itself ever smarter doesn't make sense.
Assuming intelligence is the ability to extrapolate from facts to deduce the future, then it's limited by the accuracy of the facts (garbage in, garbage out). There's no point in have ever greater powers of deduction if the facts have a lot of noise in them.
Sherlock Holmes looked powerful because Victorian society had high levels of structure and relatively less noise. It's common strategy to act crazy, illogical, stupid when in a conflict with more powerful enemies.
The butterfly effect, as an illustration of chaos, will protect us from the singularity.
Conventional TV pictures and sets have a resolution that matches the human eyeball resolution. People can see pixels about 1 arc-second in size. Take a 36" TV design for conventional TV viewing across the room and, not by coincidence, pixels subtend 1 arc-second.
If the the viewer kicks the picture into HDTV, 400-500 NTSC pixels becomes 1200-1900 on HDTV and pixel size shrinks to one third or less. The best viewing position requires 1 arc-second pixels so the viewer needs to sit at one third the distance.
Ever notice that people watching HDTV lean forward? They know there's more resolution there and subconciously want to see it. I've have HDTV and know how to use it. But unless I'm willing to sit on the floor right in front of the set, 90% of the time I don't bother.
The only HDTV that makes real sense requires that the set grow by 3:1 or 4:1 and fills the whole wall.
which happened in this case because the cultured stuff coughed up.
He thinks normal mouth baterial got into his lungs.
Which can happen.
Med Labs routinely ignore mouth bateria in samples.
Antibiotics tailored to leave them alone.
Antibiotics don't work on virii, at all.
Needs old fashioned or special antibiotics.
Some heart disease caused by infection.
Still learning how much disease caused by infection.
Doctors don't do unusual very well.
Needs to get lucky with right doctor.
Nothing wrong with defending yourself.
or is that article completely incoherent? It doesn't seem to match what Andrew Morton said.
AM transmitter antennas work best when placed in locations with good ground conductivity...such as swamps and other low places. They also get placed near occupied areas (short range) and where the land doesn't cost much (like old industrial areas)
Doesn't this sound like it might correlate with pollution enough to affect the results???
I'm not sure David gets it, yet.
Groklaw.net (IBM's Subpoenas to Analysts and Investors: Why? Why? Why?) points out that IBM's going after the network of analyists and investors, possibly because this whole SCO/Linux thing looks strikingly similar to a pump and dump scheme the Feds have already found.
Does Lyons need to appear balanced to avoid getting entangled with IBM Subpoenas?
Notice that this article spends more time than necessary on the differences between Free and Open software. If I was a SCO lawyer with MS interests at heart, I play RMS to really divide the community. It won't work, but will generate useful FUD.
A Fire Upon The Deep
A Deepness in the Sky
That's all that needs saying.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/04/24/1312231.shtml ?tid=106
Most of the highly rated replies seem seriously out of touch. (I don't have any Karma so this non-PC clarification won't hurt much.) It's always amazed me how people can get so worked up over gifts. If you don't like it DON'T USE IT!!!
BitKeeper is released as a free version for people who want to _use_ it for open source development. But not for people who want to reverse engineer it.
If you want to reverse engineer it, you have to purchase a license. (which might attempt to prevent reverse engineering...don't know).
RMS proposed a project to reverse engineer BK, and since he doesn't purchase software...it an obvious license violation. And since he doesn't develop anymore, he's asking others to violate the license.
Aside from FSF philosopy, what's the problem? Larry's offering something useful for free. In return, he gets some free testing and advertising.
Quoting the good parts
And continuing a bit later
...is proportional to the mass of the bunnies...not much.
Maybe that's because most of the 2.5 series doesn't work right, has many broken drivers, and has many discussions of file system corruption on LKML. It's understandable, because developers have started in on some very fundamental changes.
I try to run the bleeding edge and used all but a few of the 2.3 kernels. About half of 2.5.x series doesn't compile. Right now raid stuff doesn't work.
then it relays signals a short range to its neighbors...and doesn't broadcast all over the world. Spectrum at HF _is_ a scare resource because it bounces all over. But at line of sight frequencies, if radios have relaying and forwarding capability, then the total capacity grows with the density of radios.
Imagine every cellphone as repeater and network router able to forward several connections and software able to manage such a dynamic network. Then each connection only has RF signals that spread out around the path between all the routers. This means less radio signals falling on places that don't want to receive the signal.
The data sheet for the 1Z2Z vacuum tube (circa 1966) contained items like a "urinated tungsten filament" and a monode structure (one less than diode), IIRC.
If humor exists prior to the Google...can anyone laugh?
This law injects the government into internet technology through detailed definitions of privacy, sensitive vs non sensitive, etc. much like the DMCA (whatever it's called now) injects government into internet technology and definition of digital rights. Once the government gets into the habit of regulating, it won't stop. You might like government mandated privacy, now. But what happens when government changes the definition of "sensitive information", probably due to lobbying pressure.
Both these laws create a power axis between congress and lobbyists that leaves out the people in general and technologists in particular. Oppose all these laws.
Will Redhat 7.2 support reiserfs? 7.1 certainly didn't, bombed on startup. I had to wipe all the partions and drop back to ext2. Same thing with devfs...not supported.
I want the ease of use that comes with RH packaging but it would be nice if their install didn't bomb.
We all scream when Microsoft decides what's in and what's out. It will be very hard to devfs and reiserfs to succeed if RH makes it difficult.
SDR can implement the old protocols but not the new ones.
It takes complicated signal structures and protocols to pack the most information into the least bandwidth. With bandwidth getting more expensive in the FCC auctions, wireless service providers require the most effective (and complex) protocols. Basically they implement what the technology supports after very careful study...$Billions ride on getting the choice right. The most cost effective designs use bleeding edge custom ASIC's.
The performance available from custom chips far exceeds what someone can implement in a DSP or general purpose processor (or even an FPGA).
Sure you can wait 5-10 years and software will catch up. But by then, the wireless operators will have upgraded to a new protocol that software can't do.
Try searching on some error message or computer problem keywords. Most searches turn up similar question, but rarely answers. This happens so often, I've almost given up searching. Several times I've email'd the author of a similar question to ask about the solution. In turn, I've given help to several people who emailed me up to a year or more later. This is weird because the net has lots of linux and computer help sites. Maybe people don't answer because they immediately get 400 spam's?
The numbers probably don't work out because it's cheap to harden a radio or telephone network enough that the attacker has to use a very powerful device or approach very close to the target with a medium power device. Very quickly, the weapons get so large or approach so close that changing it back to blast/fragmentation produces a more militarily significant result. The attacker either has to know that the target has not hardened or has to really want to focus on electronic damage for some reason.
Studying this stuff was my job for a few months...
Three concepts for EMP shells:
1) launch a blast of microwaves toward the target just before impact. Advantages: uW can be directed forward, can penetrate small openings in the target
2) generate high freq RF just before impact. Advantages: can couple into wires and cables such as between radar dish and control van. Disadvantage: requires deploying long antenna wires.
3) directly connect to building and pulse it with MegaVolt DC or AC. Advantages: effecient connection, lots of power.
The microwave shell used an explosive to crush a magnetic field and shoot it past a coil that generated KiloVolts and 100's of KiloAmps, then a transformer stepped it up to MegaVolts and fed a klystron-like device. I saw the model for 155mm shell and nothing looked like a circuit...just some very simple shapes in metal, plastic and explosive...beautiful engineering!
The HF shell shoots wires out from the nose to form an antenna and uses the Megavolts to generate and impulse around 30 MHz
The direct connect shell shoots wire our towards the target and puts the MV directly on the wires. The Volts jumps the air gaps and penetrates to the internal wiring of the building and fries everything inside.
The article missed one of the most important threats...EMP rent-a-trucks. Load a set of large HF emp generators in the back of semi-trailer and drive it into a high density business area. The energy couples into the power and network wiring and fries all the computers.
On the subject of susceptability for HERF...The published literature varies widely. Some tests claim that 100's of Watts per square cm will create damage but others say it requires 10KW/cm2. The equipment design literature tends to assmue the threat can generate huge power. On the other hand, it's not possible to generate that much power over a wide area. The question becomes...if you need to get a 100 lb shell within 10 feet of the target...isn't it better just use high explosives?
Bottom line...these weapons will damage civilian infrastructure (business, not the phone company) but probably have little military use except to slow the adoption of high technology by increasing the number of special requirements for military systems (just what the old Soviets would want)
to qualify...I used to develop aircraft cockpit displays and used linux and OpenGL for some of them...
Color LCD's have very little reflective properties so need a backlight. In addition, a color LCD has only a few percent transmissivity. To get enough brightness to see the display in sunlight (10000 ft candles), requires extraordinary brightness and power in the backlight. Some of the "sunlight readable" display put antireflective coatings and contrast enhancing filters in front of the LCD's. That works by making the display very dark so that the weak light coming through becomes a bit visible gainst the dark background. This doesn't work very well because the user's eyes have to switch between looking at the horizon with 90% reflectivity and the display with 5% reflectivity... very fatiguing to use the image is dark on deep black.
A backlit monochrome display will have about 25% transmissivity, but still not enough to make for a low power backlight.
You really want a reflective display...like the Palm Pilot's but they have limited viewabilty, require a backlight for twighlight and night operation.
Think about the ATM's you've seen in sunlight, do you like any of them? If good technology existed for this, people would use it.
For a rugged processor, we're using the RPX series from Embedded Planet. Runs on 5V, works over a wide temperature range (-60 to +100C in our tests) and supported by Hard Hat Linux from MontaVista (powerPC based). EP has a variation with a display.