I find the actual text of the decision to be suprisingly readable. It's not just a bunch of legal obscuritanism, such as I've gotten used to out of lawyers by reading too many EULAs.
I find that the justices do understand the technology pretty well. They understand the difference between web and email. They understand that you can't determine geography on the Internet.
The key to the decision seems to be that they feel that the material covers a narrow enough range of stuff that the definition of "community" is not problematic. Art, for example, would be considered to have "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors" and is therefore OK, no matter what it depicts. The CDA lacked this clause, and that's why they struck it down.
In a sense, they want to define a "national community" where the really obscene stuff can be restricted. Obscenity has long been considered to be unprotected speech, and even if they rule against COPA it won't change that. It's just that the Web for the first time gives us the opportunity to be obscene on a national scale.
Of course, now you just get off into a definition of "art". Like most law, despite pages and pages of text, at the root it seems to be up to a judgment call by a judge and/or jury as to what is acceptable. So it may well still be considered overbroad, and that is the real news today: this one attack on the law is invalid, but there are plenty of others.
If you object to the decision, I highly recommend Justice Stevens' dissent, at the tail end. He finds the explanations I gave above unconvincing, as do I.
The stable existence of N60 was confirmed jointly by the National Institute of health care materials) and Chemical Research ( NIMCR ),(russian news agency) of Industrial Science and technology, and Nissan Motor Co., ltd.
Increasingly promising lately is the potential for N60, the molecule consisting of 60 nitrogen atoms bonded in a soccer-ball shape, to be used as rocket fuel capable of generating the world's highest thrust.
Supercomputer simulation confirmed the existence of N60 as the ``nitrogen version'' of the newly emerging promising material, C60, made of 60 carbon atoms.
Although a ``considerable amount of time is required for synthesizing N60,'' its development has already begun.
NIMCR's Chief Researcher Takehiro Matsunaga, who proposed the N60 concept, says this: ``When I saw the crystalline structure of C60, I immediately sensed that the world ''s most powerful explosive could be made if the same structure could be applied to nitrogen atoms.''
NIMCR and Nissan Motor are jointly developing the next-generation rocket fuel.
The joint team has been in search of a compound capable of generating a sufficiently powerful thrust to propel heavy rockets faster and farther.
Although nitrogen exists as a stable gas, its compounds can become powerful explosives.
TNT, today's most widely used explosive, is also a nitrogen-containing compound.
Compared with oxygen and hydrogen, the atomic bonding force in nitrogen is greater, and therefore, when the bond is destroyed, larger energy is released.
In other words, if a compound can be synthesized from nitrogen atoms only, the compound can be a powerful explosive.
From that standpoint, the crystalline structure of the soccer-ball-like C60 was the ideal shape for explosive researchers.
The joint group of NIMCR and Nissan Motor computed the atomic radius and the molecular bonding energy and confirmed the existence of N60, consisting of 60 nitrogen atoms, and N70, consisting of 70 nitrogen atoms.
Furthermore, the group computed the magnitude of thrust when these molecules are used as rocket fuel.
The currently most advanced propulsion technology involving the reaction between liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen is to be used for space shuttles and the next Japanese-made large rocket H2, which is scheduled to be launched in february 1994 by the National Space Development Agency.
The technology makes use of the heat that is released when oxygen and hydrogen react.
Specific impulse, an index of a rocket ''s efficiency, for H2 is approximately 445 seconds.
By computation, the group obtained a specific impulse of approximately 550 seconds, approximately 20 percent better than the above value, for the predicted N60, despite the common knowledge that it is almost impossible to improve specific impulse by even one second with today's fuel technology.
Another advantage of N60 as rocket fuel is that it is a solid.
By applying high heat or impact, the energy accumulated in the material is released instantaneously.
The liquid fuel to be used for H2 is difficult to handle and has a potential for leaking.
It has been reported that the U.S. National Aerospace Agency has experienced more than 5000 accidents in the area of engine development.
NIMCR's Chief Researcher Takehiro Matsunaga) says, ``there is no doubt in my mind that the new nitrogen compound, if synthesized, will be the new rocket fuel.''
There seems to be no clue to the synthesis method for the compound.
It took five years for the synthesis method for C60 to be found after the computer prediction had been made for the existence of the molecule.
Actually, the carbon molecule was isolated from soot produced by the electric discharge between carbon electrodes.
In contrast with the C60 molecule, which is in the shape of a nearly perfect soccer ball, the N60 molecule predicted by the joint group has an indentation involving more than 10 nitrogen atoms.
Because of this distorted shape, N60 molecule is said to be easily destroyed and difficult to synthesize.
C60 molecule was synthesized with a systematic approach by gradually increasing the number of carbon atoms on a molecule consisting of 12 carbon atoms that was already in existence.
On the other hand, nitrogen molecules containing four, six and 20 atoms showed excessive strain in simulation tests, and their stable existence was negated.
ection Chief Katsumi Tanigaki of the Exploratory Research Department, NEC Basic Research Institute, points out that ``unless an epoch-making synthetic method is found, it will be a long road before we see the actual N60 molecule.''
He suggests that the group should ``first scheck the possibility of synthesizing a molecule consisting of carbon and nitrogen. ''
According to the super-computer simulation, N60 molecule is supposed to generate the world 's greatest explosive force.
Although a long road of synthesis is ahead, we must hope for the best for future research.
As Section Chief Katsumi Tanigaki says, we must ``go for it, as long as its existence has been predicted.''
Well, it's certainly not cheap. Random chunks are $75 for 20 grams.
Thanks for the description of it as a glass. I'd imagined that it had a texture more along the lines of a block of Jell-O (since it's a gel). Not something I'd want to put in my eyes (I'd read years ago about the possibility of making very-long-term contact lenses out of the stuff, since it could let so much oxygen through.)
Nearly every corporation I've ever seen has at least a few instances of people who should have been buying software but chose to pirate it instead. That's often by re-installing software that they already own a license to, since few licenscing schemes bother to detect that.
This is often done more for convenience than because people are making some sort of economic decision like, "MS Word is worth only $50 to me, so I'll make a second install of this one that I paid $100 for." If you go out to buy the software, you need to get money out of some budget for it, and have to justify that purchase. Even if the purchase is totally justifiable, it's usually just easier to steal it. These are people who want to get their work done.
I've never known a company to resort to getting it off warez sites, precisely because that would require some effort.
"Inexpensive" is relative. I'm sure the cost is at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. Any idea how much the Russians are charging for this? And is the Planetary Society paying for it?
While onboard the ISS, he will conduct scientific experiments for South African universities to help combat AIDS and other diseases. In particular Shuttleworth plans to do research on HIV proteins...While in space, Shuttleworth will also study the development of rat and ewe stem cells in microgravity.
I'm not a chemist, but perhaps there are various chemical reactions that are difficult to pull off in gravity. It still sounds like it's 98% "Gee, I'm in space!" and 2% real science, but I hope something useful does come out of it.
What the Hubble measured here was not the age of the universe, but the age of the oldest stars we've seen in it. Those stars were measured to be 12-13 billion years old, based on their temperature.
Different Hubble measurements, based on redshifts, figure that the universe is 13-14 billion years old.
This is good, because older calculations had suggested that the universe was actually younger than the oldest stars in it, which makes zero sense, and caused all sorts of wacky hypotheses.
Since the first stars would have formed about 1 billion years into the universe's formation, it means that we have rough agreement (to, uh, one significant figure) between two independent calculations on the age of the universe. Actually, a lot of other theories come into play here, including a very complicated model of how white dwarfs work.
So this measurement provides evidence for a whole host of theories. I love it when a plan comes together.
Although the article describes it as a "warning" signal, as far as I can tell one batch of microbes receives no antibotic at all. It seems to provide only moral support: "Hey, we're here, you can go ahead and survive."
It's not a completely ridiculous concept; bacteria do exhibit various forms of group behavior (e.g. biofilms) that these guys are seeking to work around because they're particularly tough to kill. And I'm willing to believe that these communications could be airborne as well as aqueous.
But I'd much rather see this article in Nature than from the BBC. There are all kinds of controls they should have put on the experiment (what happens if there's no air gap at all? What if you remove the barrier?). There are a vast variety of sources of experimental error in a lab.
I am not a soldier, but I find MREs wonderful for certain kinds of activity (long bike rides, a few days' camping). They're vastly preferable to freeze-dried food (which are still lighter, since they have no water, and are the only option for long-term use unless you want live off the land.)
You don't eat 'em until you're hungry, and then they're very filling, which is all you want. And they don't taste nearly as bad as the jokes I've read so far here. They're actually quite tasty. Hardly haute cuisine, but at least as good as most American fast food. That may not seem like praise, but you've seen the numbers in which people scarf that up.
The single coolest thing about them is the heater packs. They come with bags containing a sheet of some chemical which reacts with water to give off a LOT of heat (and hydrogen gas). They're capable of taking food from frozen to too-hot-to-eat in a few minutes, without building a fire. Nothing makes a cold, miserable person happier faster than hot food.
The second coolest thing is the mini-bottles of Tabasco sauce.
While the SETI At Home Project taps the idle CPUs of millions of personal computers, the worldwide lexicon enlists the help of internet users who are logged in, but not chatting. Think of this as distributed human computation.
"Distributed human computation"? Is that like using up all those spare brain cells you weren't using right now?
If you read her (not particularly technical) 1996 article, it seems that the real core of the security is precisely in the imprecision generated by the satellites:
The location signature is virtually impossible to forge at the required accuracy. This is because the GPS observations at any given time are essentially unpredictable to high precision due to subtle satellite orbit perturbations, which are unknowable in real-time, and intentional signal instabilities (dithering) imposed by the U.S. Department of Defense selective availability (SA) security policy. Further, because a signature is invalid after five milliseconds, the attacker cannot spoof the location by replaying an intercepted signature, particularly when it is bound to the message (e.g., through a checksum or digital signature). Continuous authentication provides further protection against such attacks.
In other words, they're using differential GPS to suck out the government-applied random numbers in the civilian signal and using that as the basis for crypto.
In other other words, they're just piggybacking on whatever cryptosystem the government used for obfuscating GPS signals. One which applied when the article was written but no longer holds. So it's geographically limited, and has geolocation as a side effect, but it's not the core of the cryptosystem.
Uh, sure it does. The sun is eclipsed by the moon (a solar eclipse). More often, the moon is eclipsed by the earth (a lunar eclipse).
I'm not sure if you just don't believe in solar eclipses, or if you've forgotten about the less-interesting-to-look-at lunar eclipses and misunderstanding the word "eclipsed". It is true that the sun never eclipses the moon; is that what you meant to say?
The two kinds of eclipses are actually rather different. In a solar eclipse, the moon is between us and the sun; you see the moon rather than the sun. In a lunar eclipse, the earth casts a shadow on the moon; the earth blocks the light but not the moon itself. In both cases what you're seeing is an unlit moon, one with the sun behind it and another with the sun in front but shadowed by the earth. But we call them eclipses of the sun and moon, because we name the eclipse after the bright object we would ordinarily be seeing but can't.
Yeah, I was afraid my choice of term would be confusing. What would the adjectival form of "Democratic Republic of Congo" be? I guessed "Congolese". The citizens of the United States of America are called Americans, even though there are a lot of non-USAites living in the Americas.
I guess there isn't a country-name registrar to refuse confusingly similar country names.
I received a variant of this one the other day. The difference is that instead of being Nigerian, this one is Congolese, supposedly from the widow of the late president Mobutu Sese-Seko.
The Slashdot relevance of this is that it is addressed to the email address that I use ONLY for Slashdot, which I allow to be shown but only through spam-armoring. Chinks in the armor, it appears.
You can mess about with quantum mechanics, alternative logics, and definitions of "elephant", but for the most part I think it is reasonable to assume that if there were an elephant between me and my monitor I would not be able to read the text. Since I'm replying, presumably cogently, to you, it is fair to say that I can read my monitor, and therefore there must be no elephant there.
Sagan's dragon is precisely my point. I can't prove it's not there because no set of logical rules will allow me to; the argument defines the dragon as having no mass or electric charge or participate in any other force so that it is literally undetectable. I choose to define it as "nonexistent" in the same fashion as I choose to define "the integer between 3 and 4" as nonexistent (though those really slightly different forms of non-existence; I lump the two together to make my life liveable).
The elephant, however, does not exist unless you wish to alter various definitions to the point where essentially every observer of the discussion would consider you argumentative rather than rational. Except in the completely artificial realm of mathematics, this is as close to proof as we are ever likely to get. I'm talking argumentation here, not physics.
My critique of his argument would apply if he were proposing some sort of medicine that cures all ills but won't give you the formula. His topic may lie in the realm of quantum physics, but the failure of his argument is in the realm of scientific method. Poor argumentation is a strong clue that what somebody is claiming stems from a bad motive or self-delusion.
I am concerned that NASA is funding non-falsifiable research. It is certainly true that it would be mind-blowingly neat if this experiment happened to demonstrate something that we couldn't explain.
However, suppose the experiment fails to demonstrate the sought-after effect. This does not constitute a victory for the existing models, because Podkletnov just says, "Oh, you didn't use the right superconductor," or the right temperature, or something.
There is no way to disprove his theory. That's called "non-falsifiable". Non-falsifiable theories are generally unproductive because you can never stop trying to prove them; you're caught in an infinite loop. Eventually you just lose interest, or start to apply Occam's Razor.
It does not bother me that NASA should pursue research with a low likelihood of yield when the potential benefits are high. But whenever someone posits a non-falsifiable theory you must be suspicious, because it's the mark of somebody who is trying to get you to waste time and money.
Note that "falsifiable" is different from "not easily proveable". I can't really go out and check that those points in the sky are really massive hot balls of gas. But at least theoretically it's possible, just not convenient. And I can run other tests which could disprove my hypothesis. I can prove that they're not real close, for example, by sending up a rocket ship. I can check that they happen to produce light in the same fashion that really hot things do. If these tests fail, you know that my theory is wrong.
Inventing non-falsifiable theories is easy; you just leave a variable unbound. (That's the more general, and more useful, form of saying "you can't disprove a negative." You _can_ disprove a negative; I can prove that there's no elephant between me and my monitor right now.)
Because creating non-falsifiable theories is both easier and less productive than creating real scientific theories, but make it possible to fool people into believing something they want to believe, such theories must be treated with extreme suspicion, especially when somebody has something personal to gain out of it. The theory is not necessarily wrong, but the odds decrease drastically, to the point where the probability * cost is lower than the potential value.
The potential value may be very high here, but $2.6 million is non-trivial money, even for NASA, and the probability is vanishingly small.
I, too, am careful about my email address, and use a variety of them to be able to sort out the real mail from the spam.
But I also give out my email address to my friends, many of whom are not geeks. Some of them aren't even all that close friends, but I have a responsibility for one reason or another for them to contact me. Such people have a way of "sending this news article to a friend!" or sending me birthday cards or other such spam-friendly activities.
They say that the only secure computer is the one turned off, encased in concrete, and dropped into the ocean. The only spam-free email address is the one that you never use.
My response is to use various email addresses, any of which can be turned off. Some people will lose contact with me through no fault of their own, because somebody in their circle decided that I needed to be on some mailing list. That's one cost of spam to me.
Google treats new sites as having low utlity, but that doesn't mean that Google is out of luck on new content. Google knows that certain web sites, especially web logs (like Slashdot itself) and news sites are updated very frequently, and re-indexes them more often. Thus, if you're interested in current events, Google will tend to return results on current events from "reputable" sites. (I've been unable to find a reliable reference for this; you can check out this one from DaveNet.)
This doesn't help you out if you're trying to get your new business noticed, which is something site managers care about desperately. It also doesn't help you find the new business that appeared two weeks ago that might be able to help with your problem. Sadly, it's generally the same business owners who care about that case, too, since in general somebody has already beaten you to the punch with their web site and the customer gets the problem solved, without you.
No, it's not perfect, but it solves the problems of web searchers very, very often. It may be less good for web site owners, but compared to the searchers they are in the minority.
Big "dead" lizard?
on
Megapnosaurus?
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· Score: 3, Informative
My Greek is rusty, but "dead" would be "nekros". Is he going for "apnoi", "not breathing"? As in "big not-breathing lizard?"
Well, at least it's all Greek, rather than the usual Greek-Latin mush (e.g. tyrannosaurus).
Omnia Mihi Lingua Graeca Sunt.
Patent vs. copyright
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Many people confuse patent and copyright, and in the case of intellectual property they do begin to blur.
The patent was originally intended to protect processes, usually mechanical ones, where the idea was a fairly insightful one. At least in principle you could keep your idea to yourself and still make a profit at it by building the thing yourself. That's not always practical, so patents were created to give you a legally enforceable way to limit the distribution of your idea to just the people you sell it to. The "price" of that is that it's time-limited, which is just as well because eventually somebody is going to figure it out anyway.
A copyright covers something more clearly defined, a particular sequence of letters, recording, or an image. Determining identity is relatively simple; just check the sequence of letters/notes/pixels. By contrast, an idea is kind of hazy.
But unlike a process, you _must_ reveal all of the details for your invention (i.e. your book, song, or image) to have any market value. You can't market half a book, or just the ones of a piece of software. But you can sell a ballpoint pen, say, without telling anybody what's in the ink, and it's not easy to figure out.
The cost of stealing a copyright is relatively low; just copy the book. The cost of stealing a patent, as originally conceived, is much higher: you have to manufacture something.
So they invent copyrights. Unlike a process, which can be changed and added to, a book or song more clearly belongs to its owner, so the terms are much longer. Taking a book and adding a chapter to it, or "improving" a few words and selling it, and then profiting from the sale and keeping 100% of the proceeds, would certainly seem like stealing no matter how long it was available.
Unfortunately, software works more like a process to be patented, but it's as easily stealable as a document, and you have to reveal it to make it valuable. It fits into neither category cleanly, so whenever one topic is broached on Slashdot, the other will come up.
In the end it will turn out to be its own category, I suspect, with a whole new set of compromises. The existing patent and copyright laws are already difficult to interpret; for example, how much do you have to change a manufacturing process before you can claim it's a whole new one? In software, the cost of taking somebody's idea and re-implementing it is relatively low most of the time.
There are other reasons to obfuscate software. For example, obfuscated programs can be used for cryptography. They've actually proven that a certain class of crypto algorithms don't exist (though I think that their definitions are too narrow to really make that claim; it only applies to a certain class of "efficient" programs.)
You could also use 'em for random number generators (except that you can't, since they don't exist.)
In these cases, your enemy isn't some hacker trying to figure out your program, but somebody really intent on getting your credit card number or forge your name on a contract.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the actual text of the decision to be suprisingly readable. It's not just a bunch of legal obscuritanism, such as I've gotten used to out of lawyers by reading too many EULAs.
I find that the justices do understand the technology pretty well. They understand the difference between web and email. They understand that you can't determine geography on the Internet.
The key to the decision seems to be that they feel that the material covers a narrow enough range of stuff that the definition of "community" is not problematic. Art, for example, would be considered to have "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors" and is therefore OK, no matter what it depicts. The CDA lacked this clause, and that's why they struck it down.
In a sense, they want to define a "national community" where the really obscene stuff can be restricted. Obscenity has long been considered to be unprotected speech, and even if they rule against COPA it won't change that. It's just that the Web for the first time gives us the opportunity to be obscene on a national scale.
Of course, now you just get off into a definition of "art". Like most law, despite pages and pages of text, at the root it seems to be up to a judgment call by a judge and/or jury as to what is acceptable. So it may well still be considered overbroad, and that is the real news today: this one attack on the law is invalid, but there are plenty of others.
If you object to the decision, I highly recommend Justice Stevens' dissent, at the tail end. He finds the explanations I gave above unconvincing, as do I.
The stable existence of N60 was confirmed jointly by the National Institute of health care materials) and Chemical Research ( NIMCR ),(russian news agency) of Industrial Science and technology, and Nissan Motor Co., ltd.
Increasingly promising lately is the potential for N60, the molecule consisting of 60 nitrogen atoms bonded in a soccer-ball shape, to be
used as rocket fuel capable of generating the world's highest thrust.
Supercomputer simulation confirmed the existence of N60 as the ``nitrogen version'' of the newly emerging promising material, C60, made of 60 carbon atoms.
Although a ``considerable amount of time is required for synthesizing N60,'' its development has already begun.
NIMCR's Chief Researcher Takehiro Matsunaga, who proposed the N60 concept, says this: ``When I saw the crystalline structure of C60, I immediately sensed that the world ''s most powerful explosive could be made if the same structure could be applied to nitrogen atoms.''
NIMCR and Nissan Motor are jointly developing the next-generation rocket fuel.
The joint team has been in search of a compound capable of generating a sufficiently powerful thrust to propel heavy rockets faster and
farther.
Although nitrogen exists as a stable gas, its compounds can become powerful explosives.
TNT, today's most widely used explosive, is also a
nitrogen-containing compound.
Compared with oxygen and hydrogen, the atomic bonding force in nitrogen is greater, and therefore, when the bond is destroyed, larger energy is released.
In other words, if a compound can be synthesized from nitrogen atoms only, the compound can be a powerful explosive.
From that standpoint, the crystalline structure of the soccer-ball-like C60 was the ideal shape for explosive researchers.
The joint group of NIMCR and Nissan Motor computed the atomic radius and the molecular bonding energy and confirmed the existence of N60,
consisting of 60 nitrogen atoms, and N70, consisting of 70 nitrogen atoms.
Furthermore, the group computed the magnitude of thrust when these molecules are used as rocket fuel.
The currently most advanced propulsion technology involving the reaction between liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen is to be used for space shuttles and the next Japanese-made large rocket H2, which is scheduled to be launched in february 1994 by the National Space Development Agency.
The technology makes use of the heat that is released when oxygen and hydrogen react.
Specific impulse, an index of a rocket ''s efficiency, for H2 is approximately 445 seconds.
By computation, the group obtained a specific impulse of approximately 550 seconds, approximately 20 percent better than the above value, for the predicted N60, despite the common knowledge that it is almost impossible to improve specific impulse by even one second with today's fuel technology.
Another advantage of N60 as rocket fuel is that it is a solid.
By applying high heat or impact, the energy accumulated in the material is released instantaneously.
The liquid fuel to be used for H2 is difficult to handle and has a potential for leaking.
It has been reported that the U.S. National Aerospace Agency has experienced more than 5000 accidents in the area of engine
development.
NIMCR's Chief Researcher Takehiro Matsunaga) says, ``there is no doubt in my mind that the new nitrogen compound, if synthesized, will be the new rocket fuel.''
There seems to be no clue to the synthesis method for the compound.
It took five years for the synthesis method for C60 to be found after the computer prediction had been made for the existence of the molecule.
Actually, the carbon molecule was isolated from soot produced by the electric discharge between carbon electrodes.
In contrast with the C60 molecule, which is in the shape of a nearly perfect soccer ball, the N60 molecule predicted by the joint group has an indentation involving more than 10 nitrogen atoms.
Because of this distorted shape, N60 molecule is said to be easily destroyed and difficult to synthesize.
C60 molecule was synthesized with a systematic approach by gradually increasing the number of carbon atoms on a molecule consisting of 12
carbon atoms that was already in existence.
On the other hand, nitrogen molecules containing four, six and 20 atoms showed excessive strain in simulation tests, and their stable existence was negated.
ection Chief Katsumi Tanigaki of the Exploratory Research Department, NEC Basic Research Institute, points out that ``unless an epoch-making synthetic method is found, it will be a long road before we see the actual N60 molecule.''
He suggests that the group should ``first scheck the possibility of synthesizing a molecule consisting of carbon and nitrogen. ''
According to the super-computer simulation, N60 molecule is supposed to generate the world 's greatest explosive force.
Although a long road of synthesis is ahead, we must hope for the best for future research.
As Section Chief Katsumi Tanigaki says, we must ``go for it, as long as its existence has been predicted.''
Well, it's certainly not cheap. Random chunks are $75 for 20 grams.
Thanks for the description of it as a glass. I'd imagined that it had a texture more along the lines of a block of Jell-O (since it's a gel). Not something I'd want to put in my eyes (I'd read years ago about the possibility of making very-long-term contact lenses out of the stuff, since it could let so much oxygen through.)
What I find remarkable about this substance is not so much its density as the fact that it's strong, too.
There's a great image of a block of this stuff supporting a brick 1,000 times its mass.
That strength is all compression; I don't know how it responds to shear, or tension, or if it's flexible.
Nearly every corporation I've ever seen has at least a few instances of people who should have been buying software but chose to pirate it instead. That's often by re-installing software that they already own a license to, since few licenscing schemes bother to detect that.
This is often done more for convenience than because people are making some sort of economic decision like, "MS Word is worth only $50 to me, so I'll make a second install of this one that I paid $100 for." If you go out to buy the software, you need to get money out of some budget for it, and have to justify that purchase. Even if the purchase is totally justifiable, it's usually just easier to steal it. These are people who want to get their work done.
I've never known a company to resort to getting it off warez sites, precisely because that would require some effort.
"Inexpensive" is relative. I'm sure the cost is at least hundreds of thousands of dollars. Any idea how much the Russians are charging for this? And is the Planetary Society paying for it?
According to the Space Daily article:
While onboard the ISS, he will conduct scientific experiments for South African universities to help combat AIDS and other diseases. In particular Shuttleworth plans to do research on HIV proteins...While in space, Shuttleworth will also study the development of rat and ewe stem cells in microgravity.
I'm not a chemist, but perhaps there are various chemical reactions that are difficult to pull off in gravity. It still sounds like it's 98% "Gee, I'm in space!" and 2% real science, but I hope something useful does come out of it.
What the Hubble measured here was not the age of the universe, but the age of the oldest stars we've seen in it. Those stars were measured to be 12-13 billion years old, based on their temperature.
Different Hubble measurements, based on redshifts, figure that the universe is 13-14 billion years old.
This is good, because older calculations had suggested that the universe was actually younger than the oldest stars in it, which makes zero sense, and caused all sorts of wacky hypotheses.
Since the first stars would have formed about 1 billion years into the universe's formation, it means that we have rough agreement (to, uh, one significant figure) between two independent calculations on the age of the universe. Actually, a lot of other theories come into play here, including a very complicated model of how white dwarfs work.
So this measurement provides evidence for a whole host of theories. I love it when a plan comes together.
If I could get just 1% of Slashdot readers to send me $.01, I'd be rich.
I don't know how 1% became the gold standard for things that ought to be easy, but it's become a very tiresome cliche.
Although the article describes it as a "warning" signal, as far as I can tell one batch of microbes receives no antibotic at all. It seems to provide only moral support: "Hey, we're here, you can go ahead and survive."
It's not a completely ridiculous concept; bacteria do exhibit various forms of group behavior (e.g. biofilms) that these guys are seeking to work around because they're particularly tough to kill. And I'm willing to believe that these communications could be airborne as well as aqueous.
But I'd much rather see this article in Nature than from the BBC. There are all kinds of controls they should have put on the experiment (what happens if there's no air gap at all? What if you remove the barrier?). There are a vast variety of sources of experimental error in a lab.
I am not a soldier, but I find MREs wonderful for certain kinds of activity (long bike rides, a few days' camping). They're vastly preferable to freeze-dried food (which are still lighter, since they have no water, and are the only option for long-term use unless you want live off the land.)
You don't eat 'em until you're hungry, and then they're very filling, which is all you want. And they don't taste nearly as bad as the jokes I've read so far here. They're actually quite tasty. Hardly haute cuisine, but at least as good as most American fast food. That may not seem like praise, but you've seen the numbers in which people scarf that up.
The single coolest thing about them is the heater packs. They come with bags containing a sheet of some chemical which reacts with water to give off a LOT of heat (and hydrogen gas). They're capable of taking food from frozen to too-hot-to-eat in a few minutes, without building a fire. Nothing makes a cold, miserable person happier faster than hot food.
The second coolest thing is the mini-bottles of Tabasco sauce.
It stands for "Australian dollars". Currently it's about $1.9 $A to the $US. So we're talking about $188 million (US dollars).
From the orignal source (http://picto.weblogger.com)
While the SETI At Home Project taps the idle CPUs of millions of personal computers, the worldwide lexicon enlists the help of internet users who are logged in, but not chatting. Think of this as distributed human computation.
"Distributed human computation"? Is that like using up all those spare brain cells you weren't using right now?
If you read her (not particularly technical) 1996 article, it seems that the real core of the security is precisely in the imprecision generated by the satellites:
The location signature is virtually impossible to forge at the required
accuracy. This is because the GPS observations at any given time are
essentially unpredictable to high precision due to subtle satellite
orbit perturbations, which are unknowable in real-time, and intentional
signal instabilities (dithering) imposed by the U.S. Department of
Defense selective availability (SA) security policy. Further, because a
signature is invalid after five milliseconds, the attacker cannot spoof
the location by replaying an intercepted signature, particularly when it
is bound to the message (e.g., through a checksum or digital signature).
Continuous authentication provides further protection against such
attacks.
In other words, they're using differential GPS to suck out the government-applied random numbers in the civilian signal and using that as the basis for crypto.
In other other words, they're just piggybacking on whatever cryptosystem the government used for obfuscating GPS signals. One which applied when the article was written but no longer holds. So it's geographically limited, and has geolocation as a side effect, but it's not the core of the cryptosystem.
Uh, sure it does. The sun is eclipsed by the moon (a solar eclipse). More often, the moon is eclipsed by the earth (a lunar eclipse).
I'm not sure if you just don't believe in solar eclipses, or if you've forgotten about the less-interesting-to-look-at lunar eclipses and misunderstanding the word "eclipsed". It is true that the sun never eclipses the moon; is that what you meant to say?
The two kinds of eclipses are actually rather different. In a solar eclipse, the moon is between us and the sun; you see the moon rather than the sun. In a lunar eclipse, the earth casts a shadow on the moon; the earth blocks the light but not the moon itself. In both cases what you're seeing is an unlit moon, one with the sun behind it and another with the sun in front but shadowed by the earth. But we call them eclipses of the sun and moon, because we name the eclipse after the bright object we would ordinarily be seeing but can't.
Yeah, I was afraid my choice of term would be confusing. What would the adjectival form of "Democratic Republic of Congo" be? I guessed "Congolese". The citizens of the United States of America are called Americans, even though there are a lot of non-USAites living in the Americas.
I guess there isn't a country-name registrar to refuse confusingly similar country names.
I received a variant of this one the other day. The difference is that instead of being Nigerian, this one is Congolese, supposedly from the widow of the late president Mobutu Sese-Seko.
The Slashdot relevance of this is that it is addressed to the email address that I use ONLY for Slashdot, which I allow to be shown but only through spam-armoring. Chinks in the armor, it appears.
You can mess about with quantum mechanics, alternative logics, and definitions of "elephant", but for the most part I think it is reasonable to assume that if there were an elephant between me and my monitor I would not be able to read the text. Since I'm replying, presumably cogently, to you, it is fair to say that I can read my monitor, and therefore there must be no elephant there.
Sagan's dragon is precisely my point. I can't prove it's not there because no set of logical rules will allow me to; the argument defines the dragon as having no mass or electric charge or participate in any other force so that it is literally undetectable. I choose to define it as "nonexistent" in the same fashion as I choose to define "the integer between 3 and 4" as nonexistent (though those really slightly different forms of non-existence; I lump the two together to make my life liveable).
The elephant, however, does not exist unless you wish to alter various definitions to the point where essentially every observer of the discussion would consider you argumentative rather than rational. Except in the completely artificial realm of mathematics, this is as close to proof as we are ever likely to get. I'm talking argumentation here, not physics.
My critique of his argument would apply if he were proposing some sort of medicine that cures all ills but won't give you the formula. His topic may lie in the realm of quantum physics, but the failure of his argument is in the realm of scientific method. Poor argumentation is a strong clue that what somebody is claiming stems from a bad motive or self-delusion.
I am concerned that NASA is funding non-falsifiable research. It is certainly true that it would be mind-blowingly neat if this experiment happened to demonstrate something that we couldn't explain.
However, suppose the experiment fails to demonstrate the sought-after effect. This does not constitute a victory for the existing models, because Podkletnov just says, "Oh, you didn't use the right superconductor," or the right temperature, or something.
There is no way to disprove his theory. That's called "non-falsifiable". Non-falsifiable theories are generally unproductive because you can never stop trying to prove them; you're caught in an infinite loop. Eventually you just lose interest, or start to apply Occam's Razor.
It does not bother me that NASA should pursue research with a low likelihood of yield when the potential benefits are high. But whenever someone posits a non-falsifiable theory you must be suspicious, because it's the mark of somebody who is trying to get you to waste time and money.
Note that "falsifiable" is different from "not easily proveable". I can't really go out and check that those points in the sky are really massive hot balls of gas. But at least theoretically it's possible, just not convenient. And I can run other tests which could disprove my hypothesis. I can prove that they're not real close, for example, by sending up a rocket ship. I can check that they happen to produce light in the same fashion that really hot things do. If these tests fail, you know that my theory is wrong.
Inventing non-falsifiable theories is easy; you just leave a variable unbound. (That's the more general, and more useful, form of saying "you can't disprove a negative." You _can_ disprove a negative; I can prove that there's no elephant between me and my monitor right now.)
Because creating non-falsifiable theories is both easier and less productive than creating real scientific theories, but make it possible to fool people into believing something they want to believe, such theories must be treated with extreme suspicion, especially when somebody has something personal to gain out of it. The theory is not necessarily wrong, but the odds decrease drastically, to the point where the probability * cost is lower than the potential value.
The potential value may be very high here, but $2.6 million is non-trivial money, even for NASA, and the probability is vanishingly small.
I, too, am careful about my email address, and use a variety of them to be able to sort out the real mail from the spam.
But I also give out my email address to my friends, many of whom are not geeks. Some of them aren't even all that close friends, but I have a responsibility for one reason or another for them to contact me. Such people have a way of "sending this news article to a friend!" or sending me birthday cards or other such spam-friendly activities.
They say that the only secure computer is the one turned off, encased in concrete, and dropped into the ocean. The only spam-free email address is the one that you never use.
My response is to use various email addresses, any of which can be turned off. Some people will lose contact with me through no fault of their own, because somebody in their circle decided that I needed to be on some mailing list. That's one cost of spam to me.
You're right. I was thinking "Tyrannosaurus Rex", which _is_ a Greek-Latin mush.
Google treats new sites as having low utlity, but that doesn't mean that Google is out of luck on new content. Google knows that certain web sites, especially web logs (like Slashdot itself) and news sites are updated very frequently, and re-indexes them more often. Thus, if you're interested in current events, Google will tend to return results on current events from "reputable" sites. (I've been unable to find a reliable reference for this; you can check out this one from DaveNet.)
This doesn't help you out if you're trying to get your new business noticed, which is something site managers care about desperately. It also doesn't help you find the new business that appeared two weeks ago that might be able to help with your problem. Sadly, it's generally the same business owners who care about that case, too, since in general somebody has already beaten you to the punch with their web site and the customer gets the problem solved, without you.
No, it's not perfect, but it solves the problems of web searchers very, very often. It may be less good for web site owners, but compared to the searchers they are in the minority.
My Greek is rusty, but "dead" would be "nekros". Is he going for "apnoi", "not breathing"? As in "big not-breathing lizard?"
Well, at least it's all Greek, rather than the usual Greek-Latin mush (e.g. tyrannosaurus).
Omnia Mihi Lingua Graeca Sunt.
Many people confuse patent and copyright, and in the case of intellectual property they do begin to blur.
The patent was originally intended to protect processes, usually mechanical ones, where the idea was a fairly insightful one. At least in principle you could keep your idea to yourself and still make a profit at it by building the thing yourself. That's not always practical, so patents were created to give you a legally enforceable way to limit the distribution of your idea to just the people you sell it to. The "price" of that is that it's time-limited, which is just as well because eventually somebody is going to figure it out anyway.
A copyright covers something more clearly defined, a particular sequence of letters, recording, or an image. Determining identity is relatively simple; just check the sequence of letters/notes/pixels. By contrast, an idea is kind of hazy.
But unlike a process, you _must_ reveal all of the details for your invention (i.e. your book, song, or image) to have any market value. You can't market half a book, or just the ones of a piece of software. But you can sell a ballpoint pen, say, without telling anybody what's in the ink, and it's not easy to figure out.
The cost of stealing a copyright is relatively low; just copy the book. The cost of stealing a patent, as originally conceived, is much higher: you have to manufacture something.
So they invent copyrights. Unlike a process, which can be changed and added to, a book or song more clearly belongs to its owner, so the terms are much longer. Taking a book and adding a chapter to it, or "improving" a few words and selling it, and then profiting from the sale and keeping 100% of the proceeds, would certainly seem like stealing no matter how long it was available.
Unfortunately, software works more like a process to be patented, but it's as easily stealable as a document, and you have to reveal it to make it valuable. It fits into neither category cleanly, so whenever one topic is broached on Slashdot, the other will come up.
In the end it will turn out to be its own category, I suspect, with a whole new set of compromises. The existing patent and copyright laws are already difficult to interpret; for example, how much do you have to change a manufacturing process before you can claim it's a whole new one? In software, the cost of taking somebody's idea and re-implementing it is relatively low most of the time.
There are other reasons to obfuscate software. For example, obfuscated programs can be used for cryptography. They've actually proven that a certain class of crypto algorithms don't exist (though I think that their definitions are too narrow to really make that claim; it only applies to a certain class of "efficient" programs.)
You could also use 'em for random number generators (except that you can't, since they don't exist.)
In these cases, your enemy isn't some hacker trying to figure out your program, but somebody really intent on getting your credit card number or forge your name on a contract.