I have a MSc. in Physics, and I think their concept has great merit, and they're not just presenting a concept, they're saying they've done the math and physics calculations and it works out.
In fact, on second thought it's kind of an obvious idea, and I wonder why no-one had thought of it before!
I guess it's one of those things, like ultra-short-range radar (like hand held radar that detects things 10-30 feet away), which are just off enough from the norm that when someone does think of and develop it, it can create quite a little stir. The technical solution is not obvious obvious, but clear enough and so neat and fresh that it's "novel".
BTW: Siemens is a big name, not some nobody outfit from nowhere.
If my Mom was reading their press release and all the drooling media blather on it, she'd be left with the impression that IBM had just invented something new and spectacular.
They haven't. Strained semiconductor production and use has been in the labs for *ages*. Nortel and every other company making lasers and optoelectronics components for fiber-optics systems have been using much more exotic strain-compensated quaternary (compound) semiconductor materials systems for ages. And it was all originally "discovered" in public research institutions and universisites.
All IBM has done is figured out how to work it into their current production line (which is in fact quite an accomplishment).
Let me know when AMD gets strain compensated SiGe into their CPUs. Then I'll get excited.
> He used U of U resources in a way that apparently violated their code of conduct.
Right, so this is the major issue. We haven't been given *any* of the minute facts, just some broad muddled picture, so we're all flailing around here with no information.
The devil is in the details.
All that being said, I'd put my money on "He didn't do anything so horrific that he deserves to have four years of his life thrown away, the administration is screwing him over."
> I do, however feel that the government should not be allowed copyright to its works
I strongly disagree. The government isn't some alien entity. The government IS OURS. The government represents all of us. The government is our primary expression of "the public". If "we the people" use "our" money to write software, I want "us" to retain copyright of it, for "our" benefit.
That does not include letting corporations (which operate in the interest of THEIR masters, their owners, which is only a subset of the public) derive benefit from it.
"Public domain" makes it available only to the first generation of people that touch it. It allows corporations to turn it into "Proprietary Software", which in effect means that the from that point on, the software is no longer "freely available to all".
I want publicly funded software to remain publicly available and free to all. I don't want Microsoft or any other corporate entity to swallow it and never let it see the light of day again.
I place the continuing free availability of the code that the Government funds to be a higher priority than to giving corporations a free ride.
I directly contest Balkmer's and Microsoft's viewpoint on what is "free" and "available to all". My *all* does not include corporations. Corporations are not "the people", nor do they represent "the public". They are constructs, by some of the people, for some people. They do not represent the public interest. They are merely useful in certain circumstances to provide services for the people.
I do not believe that we, the people, our government, should be obliged to give anything for free to corporations.
I think freedom means freedom for EVERYONE who EVER uses my code in any way. And to maintain that, I have to place one tiny restriction on your freedom, should you choose to use my code.
If the changes are useful, someone will clone 'em! If they can't, then the company is really adding something special; don't restrict or disincent them from doing so by forcing them to give up the rights and privacy of their proprietary addition.
Let's reverse that perverse view. If GPL code does something useful, then let the proprietary vendors clone it. If they don't, then it means it never was worth paying money for in the first place. Why the hell should I give greedy proprietary software makers get a head start using my code? If they want to charge money for it, they can write their own code, and if it's really adding something special then they'll make a profit.
There is a fundamental dichotomy between your view on freedom and the GPL's.
You think freedom means freedom just for YOU, and not the users of whatever you release based upon someone else's code. The GPL considers freedom to include the freedom of EVERYONE who EVER uses software based on GPL code.
Antimatter is not the power source, fusion is.
on
Antimatter Propulsion
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· Score: 1
> still not enough to vaporize a continent.
True, but it's still insanely dangerous. Name one industrial process where an accident can result in a minimum of a 20 kiloton explosion (same as a WWII nuke, and that's just one gram of your antimatter). No modern corporation would contemplate undertaking such a manufacturing job without labeling it as insanely dangerous.
Let's see, 140 nano-grams would equal 2.9 KG of TNT. Are they serious about getting to mars on that? I mean I know their talking about catalysis, but I didn't think it was *that* lop sided.
Then they talk about 130 micro-grams. That's around 3 tons of TNT equivalent. And that's to get to the Oort cloud.
Let's be really serious here. We're not talking about antimatter as the power source. It's just a catalyst. The massive majority of the power is going to come from a fusion reaction that simply doesn't require a 10,000 ton reactor, because they want to catalyze it with antimatter.
Tabletop accelerators - was Re:The trouble with..
on
Antimatter Propulsion
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· Score: 1
You can accelerate protons using a tabletop laser accelerator.
So the question then becomes, what is standing in the way of using these tabletop accelerators to accelerate protons to the speeds necessary to create anti-protons?
> This whole idea of Japan was so fanatical it took nukes to put sense in them, is just wrong.
We get our information on what went on from surviving members of the Japanese government and military. Where in the hell do you fruitcakes get your information????
The railway companies had to go more than an inch deep to modify the land to make it suitable for their use. So just how deep do you have to dig to go from "surface rights" to "subsurface rights"? AFAIK laying fiber-optics would be considered a "surface rights" even if they put the lines 6 feet deep, but of course not all laws and case law is reasonable, so some shady bloodsuckers have figured out that they can leach some money from the systems, whether through borken case law, bad contractual wording, or through settlements that avoid having to go to court...
I just finished reading a good book on life and politics in Japan during WWII. (Sorry, forgot the title). In the early 30's there were a few very moderate politicians attempting to make themselves heard in Japan. Then a bunch of junior military officers murdered them. Trials were held but public sentiment was TOTALLY behind the junior officers, so they ALL got off with virtually no jail time at all. For murdering high ranking politicians.
As you might expect, the remaining moderates had to be VERY careful ever afterwards, including the final months of WWII with all the hard-line military leaders strongly advocating "not one Japanese left alive to surrender". Even at the very end, the Emperor and the moderates were VERY concerned that if they played their hand too soon, military factions would murder them and seize power.
Japan certainly was a strange place back in those days. The amount of tunnel vision that conspiracy theorists must have never ceases to amaze me. We need a television series dedicated to setting up and exposing conspiricy theorists and how their warped minds operate in a vacuum even when exposed to the wind.
When I'm playing Counter-Strike and it changes to a level which I don't have, it has to be downloaded from the server.(*) Of course the server is in the middle of running a game, so it can only afford 2-5 KB/s of bandwidth. So even though I have a 100KB/s broadband connection, I'm sitting there waiting to play a game while sipping from a straw.
It seems obvious to me that it would be tons better if I could get the file in pieces from some of the other people playing. When I'm playing CS only ~ 6-10KB/s total bandwidth is used, which leaves me tons of free bandwidth to help serve such things. Of course I would have to be able to manually 'throttle' it and configure a maximum amount of bandwidth to share, but otherwise it would be tons nicer.
It has also occurred to me a long time ago that web-content could (hell should) be served in the same way, although you would have to configure a maximum amount of data to 'cache', and a maximum amount of your bandwidth to share, and allow you to 'turn off/on' the sharing, and to ask for certain content to be 'permanently' mirrored, and conversely to ask for none/only-requested content to be mirrored.
No, I don't see us subsidizing the costs of big corporations. I see us using this to allow the little guys to compete with the big guys without having to shell out for the big pipe. Heck, we could even have 'meta directories' maintained by groups/individuals/organizations of sites worth mirroring, and we would just tell our browser to 'use that meta directory' as the list of places to help mirror.
It does also promote efficiency. We don't need every site in the world to have a super huge pipe, we just need all the pipes in the world to work together to serve content.
(*) I could exit the game and try and find the level on the web and DL it manually, but with all the game-sites going under and fileplanet.com being maxed out nearly 100% of the time, it takes 10x as long to get a new/uncommon level myself as it does to sip on a straw for it.
Ok, does anyone have a tool to take a file and encode it using a real-world english-subset dictionary text file? Should be relatively simple to make. (Think UUEncode, but with real words, not characters.)
Closest thing I can find is this, which was actually in this slashdot article a while ago.
If I can't find it, I'm going to create one, just for the hell of it. (I'll need to pay attention to being able to run it on an NT box without having admin privileges.)
Whataya bet that each time they change the price, they change one little component, and so it's not "your PC", it's a different one.
He sort of saw that himself when he changed one little answer and got a completely different line of computers with different prices. It got to the point where he couldn't make heads nor tails of what was available. I'd hazard a guess that if he bought model ABC3, he'd never be able to find that exact model on their site again (without having carefully recorded all his answers)!
Personally I'd assume that the reason there is a 1.2 M checklist and a huge turnaround is that the weight restrictions are so tight that we're operating materials and systems right up against the wall of tolerances. The Shuttle is around 100 tons. If we had a technology that could lift 10,000 tons for the same cost, we could make everything much more robust, thicker, built to last more cycles, and we could thus check it less often. That's not going to happen any time soon, so what we need are new materials and systems which when operated in the same circumstances, aren't so close to their tolerances and limits.
Wow. Hope Slashdot keeps us up to date on what happens with this. I just *can't* believe there's legislation or case law which would allow his words to be used totally out of context in a court of law for charges as serious as this. WTF were the people drafting the law thinking of?
And why did he choose Canada? We might be good if you're facing the death penalty, but unless you can see some good Canadian law that would impede your extradition back to the US, I'm not so sure Canada is the best choice. (I'm Canadian, don't get me wrong, given my current information I support him fully.)
Finally, it might have been best if he had stayed in the US and fought it out in the higher appeals courts, where he could get the actual statute revoked. A law that's written in such a way as to totally ignore the context just can't be legal wrt other more basic and fundamental laws.
>I do not belive in the death penalty in any form... chances are the grown up is somehow exploiting the minor - the minor probably wouldn't even know that.
Actually that suprises me. I actually expected different. But that's more a reflection on how I initially perceived your view as extreme and over-simplistic. (As I reflect back on your posts a bit more, you may have come to your view based on the perceived futility of trying to deal with a huge amount of complexity, and I can understand that.., from one perspective it's a logical choice.)
> So why did you feel the need to slander me? And make presumptions?
Because I object very strenuously to one of your fundamental viewpoints. The viewpoint of (paraphrasing strongly) "shit is happening, shit has always happened, shit will always happen, and when you come down to it you can't really prevent shit from happening, so why care, why even bother trying to prevent it from happening?"
That's what I object to, especially when applied to people who haven't even finished growing up yet. I'm not saying I think there is a black and white super easy solution. I recognize the world is highly complex. But I think we can do better.
I'll agree with you that neither the pro/anti extermists have useful solutions. And in reflection I was probably reacting quite strongly to the fact that you were applying your view to something as tragic as a kid committing suicide.
> The kid made a choice, a serious one. I respect it, tragic as it may be. I don't question, or regret, or feel upset by it.
A 13 year old kid?
You must be one of the guys who figures that the death penalty should apply to children just as it does to adults, and that children really do have the capacity to decide for themselves whether they want to "get involved" with an adult (NAMBLA).
Exactly my point, however I thought it was so clear that I wouldn't have to add sarcasm. I guess this place is so used to trolls and strange sensibilities that it was taken at face value.
1) I walked into this store one day. They were clearly open for business. As I walked around I passed through an open door. Not long after it occurred to me that this place looked like a back room, not a display room. It even had an open safe in it. I thought that they should have kept that door closed with a sign saying 'employees only', and locked the safe. I approached the manager and pointed this out, at which point he had me arrested.
2) I walked up to my friends house the other day. The front gate was open, which is normal, so I could walk up to his door and knock. I looked to my left, and lo and behold his garage door was open. Even without going inside I could see all sorts of stuff, including the bodies hanging from the rafters. I immediately went to the police, but they said they couldn't do anything, as I was 'tresspassing'. Then they arrested me.
Doesn't utilizing 8,000 computers to accomplish something suggest to anyone (besides me) that they're doing something wrong?
Either that or they're accomplishing something unbelievably useful with dazzling speed. There are a lot of useful things take a lot of effort, and Henry Ford's mass-production-lines rule for a reason. (BTW: Did he ever get a patent on that?)
If I bragged that I had installed 8,000 D-cell flashlight batteries.. wouldn't someone suggest
that I need to reconsider using flashlight batteries?
But what if it was cheaper than all the alternatives. And I mean *way* cheaper? Don't doubt for a minute that everyone and his dog wouldn't do it.
I'm not happy with how we as a society have managed our pollution and our environmental record. Environmental damage is relatively un-accounted for in how we do things. However for non-toxic semi-normal things, there must be some relationship between the cost of doing something and how much pollution is being created in the process. Therefore if you figure out how to do it cheaper, you are likely generating less polution.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a MSc. in Physics, and I think their concept has great merit, and they're not just presenting a concept, they're saying they've done the math and physics calculations and it works out.
In fact, on second thought it's kind of an obvious idea, and I wonder why no-one had thought of it before!
I guess it's one of those things, like ultra-short-range radar (like hand held radar that detects things 10-30 feet away), which are just off enough from the norm that when someone does think of and develop it, it can create quite a little stir. The technical solution is not obvious obvious, but clear enough and so neat and fresh that it's "novel".
BTW: Siemens is a big name, not some nobody outfit from nowhere.
If my Mom was reading their press release and all the drooling media blather on it, she'd be left with the impression that IBM had just invented something new and spectacular.
They haven't. Strained semiconductor production and use has been in the labs for *ages*. Nortel and every other company making lasers and optoelectronics components for fiber-optics systems have been using much more exotic strain-compensated quaternary (compound) semiconductor materials systems for ages. And it was all originally "discovered" in public research institutions and universisites.
All IBM has done is figured out how to work it into their current production line (which is in fact quite an accomplishment).
Let me know when AMD gets strain compensated SiGe into their CPUs. Then I'll get excited.
Ummmm, you posted to the wrong story dude. (Good comment BTW)
> He used U of U resources in a way that apparently violated their code of conduct.
Right, so this is the major issue. We haven't been given *any* of the minute facts, just some broad muddled picture, so we're all flailing around here with no information.
The devil is in the details.
All that being said, I'd put my money on "He didn't do anything so horrific that he deserves to have four years of his life thrown away, the administration is screwing him over."
> I do, however feel that the government should not be allowed copyright to its works
I strongly disagree. The government isn't some alien entity. The government IS OURS. The government represents all of us. The government is our primary expression of "the public". If "we the people" use "our" money to write software, I want "us" to retain copyright of it, for "our" benefit.
That does not include letting corporations (which operate in the interest of THEIR masters, their owners, which is only a subset of the public) derive benefit from it.
"Public domain" makes it available only to the first generation of people that touch it. It allows corporations to turn it into "Proprietary Software", which in effect means that the from that point on, the software is no longer "freely available to all".
I want publicly funded software to remain publicly available and free to all. I don't want Microsoft or any other corporate entity to swallow it and never let it see the light of day again.
I place the continuing free availability of the code that the Government funds to be a higher priority than to giving corporations a free ride.
I directly contest Balkmer's and Microsoft's viewpoint on what is "free" and "available to all". My *all* does not include corporations. Corporations are not "the people", nor do they represent "the public". They are constructs, by some of the people, for some people. They do not represent the public interest. They are merely useful in certain circumstances to provide services for the people.
I do not believe that we, the people, our government, should be obliged to give anything for free to corporations.
Suck it up Microsoft.
Let me clarify:
You think freedom means freedom for just YOU.
I think freedom means freedom for EVERYONE who EVER uses my code in any way. And to maintain that, I have to place one tiny restriction on your freedom, should you choose to use my code.
If the changes are useful, someone will clone 'em! If they can't, then the company is really adding something special; don't restrict or disincent them from doing so by forcing them to give up the rights and privacy of their proprietary addition.
Let's reverse that perverse view. If GPL code does something useful, then let the proprietary vendors clone it. If they don't, then it means it never was worth paying money for in the first place. Why the hell should I give greedy proprietary software makers get a head start using my code? If they want to charge money for it, they can write their own code, and if it's really adding something special then they'll make a profit.
There is a fundamental dichotomy between your view on freedom and the GPL's.
You think freedom means freedom just for YOU, and not the users of whatever you release based upon someone else's code. The GPL considers freedom to include the freedom of EVERYONE who EVER uses software based on GPL code.
> still not enough to vaporize a continent.
True, but it's still insanely dangerous. Name one industrial process where an accident can result in a minimum of a 20 kiloton explosion (same as a WWII nuke, and that's just one gram of your antimatter). No modern corporation would contemplate undertaking such a manufacturing job without labeling it as insanely dangerous.
Let's see, 140 nano-grams would equal 2.9 KG of TNT. Are they serious about getting to mars on that? I mean I know their talking about catalysis, but I didn't think it was *that* lop sided.
Then they talk about 130 micro-grams. That's around 3 tons of TNT equivalent. And that's to get to the Oort cloud.
Let's be really serious here. We're not talking about antimatter as the power source. It's just a catalyst. The massive majority of the power is going to come from a fusion reaction that simply doesn't require a 10,000 ton reactor, because they want to catalyze it with antimatter.
You can accelerate protons using a tabletop laser accelerator.
http://www.aps.org/apsnews/1200/120007.html
So the question then becomes, what is standing in the way of using these tabletop accelerators to accelerate protons to the speeds necessary to create anti-protons?
> This whole idea of Japan was so fanatical it took nukes to put sense in them, is just wrong.
We get our information on what went on from surviving members of the Japanese government and military. Where in the hell do you fruitcakes get your information????
The railway companies had to go more than an inch deep to modify the land to make it suitable for their use. So just how deep do you have to dig to go from "surface rights" to "subsurface rights"? AFAIK laying fiber-optics would be considered a "surface rights" even if they put the lines 6 feet deep, but of course not all laws and case law is reasonable, so some shady bloodsuckers have figured out that they can leach some money from the systems, whether through borken case law, bad contractual wording, or through settlements that avoid having to go to court...
I just finished reading a good book on life and politics in Japan during WWII. (Sorry, forgot the title). In the early 30's there were a few very moderate politicians attempting to make themselves heard in Japan. Then a bunch of junior military officers murdered them. Trials were held but public sentiment was TOTALLY behind the junior officers, so they ALL got off with virtually no jail time at all. For murdering high ranking politicians.
As you might expect, the remaining moderates had to be VERY careful ever afterwards, including the final months of WWII with all the hard-line military leaders strongly advocating "not one Japanese left alive to surrender". Even at the very end, the Emperor and the moderates were VERY concerned that if they played their hand too soon, military factions would murder them and seize power.
Japan certainly was a strange place back in those days. The amount of tunnel vision that conspiracy theorists must have never ceases to amaze me. We need a television series dedicated to setting up and exposing conspiricy theorists and how their warped minds operate in a vacuum even when exposed to the wind.
How many of your elected representatives have you talked to about your problem?
Short of moving and telling the Cable/Telco why you're moving, you're only hope is to gang up on the monopolies with your neighbours.
I agree.
When I'm playing Counter-Strike and it changes to a level which I don't have, it has to be downloaded from the server.(*) Of course the server is in the middle of running a game, so it can only afford 2-5 KB/s of bandwidth. So even though I have a 100KB/s broadband connection, I'm sitting there waiting to play a game while sipping from a straw.
It seems obvious to me that it would be tons better if I could get the file in pieces from some of the other people playing. When I'm playing CS only ~ 6-10KB/s total bandwidth is used, which leaves me tons of free bandwidth to help serve such things. Of course I would have to be able to manually 'throttle' it and configure a maximum amount of bandwidth to share, but otherwise it would be tons nicer.
It has also occurred to me a long time ago that web-content could (hell should) be served in the same way, although you would have to configure a maximum amount of data to 'cache', and a maximum amount of your bandwidth to share, and allow you to 'turn off/on' the sharing, and to ask for certain content to be 'permanently' mirrored, and conversely to ask for none/only-requested content to be mirrored.
No, I don't see us subsidizing the costs of big corporations. I see us using this to allow the little guys to compete with the big guys without having to shell out for the big pipe. Heck, we could even have 'meta directories' maintained by groups/individuals/organizations of sites worth mirroring, and we would just tell our browser to 'use that meta directory' as the list of places to help mirror.
It does also promote efficiency. We don't need every site in the world to have a super huge pipe, we just need all the pipes in the world to work together to serve content.
(*) I could exit the game and try and find the level on the web and DL it manually, but with all the game-sites going under and fileplanet.com being maxed out nearly 100% of the time, it takes 10x as long to get a new/uncommon level myself as it does to sip on a straw for it.
lol!
Ok, does anyone have a tool to take a file and encode it using a real-world english-subset dictionary text file? Should be relatively simple to make. (Think UUEncode, but with real words, not characters.)
Closest thing I can find is this, which was actually in this slashdot article a while ago.
If I can't find it, I'm going to create one, just for the hell of it. (I'll need to pay attention to being able to run it on an NT box without having admin privileges.)
He sort of saw that himself when he changed one little answer and got a completely different line of computers with different prices. It got to the point where he couldn't make heads nor tails of what was available. I'd hazard a guess that if he bought model ABC3, he'd never be able to find that exact model on their site again (without having carefully recorded all his answers)!
THHHANKYOUU!! (seriously)
Personally I'd assume that the reason there is a 1.2 M checklist and a huge turnaround is that the weight restrictions are so tight that we're operating materials and systems right up against the wall of tolerances. The Shuttle is around 100 tons. If we had a technology that could lift 10,000 tons for the same cost, we could make everything much more robust, thicker, built to last more cycles, and we could thus check it less often. That's not going to happen any time soon, so what we need are new materials and systems which when operated in the same circumstances, aren't so close to their tolerances and limits.
Wow. Hope Slashdot keeps us up to date on what happens with this. I just *can't* believe there's legislation or case law which would allow his words to be used totally out of context in a court of law for charges as serious as this. WTF were the people drafting the law thinking of?
And why did he choose Canada? We might be good if you're facing the death penalty, but unless you can see some good Canadian law that would impede your extradition back to the US, I'm not so sure Canada is the best choice. (I'm Canadian, don't get me wrong, given my current information I support him fully.)
Finally, it might have been best if he had stayed in the US and fought it out in the higher appeals courts, where he could get the actual statute revoked. A law that's written in such a way as to totally ignore the context just can't be legal wrt other more basic and fundamental laws.
Actually that suprises me. I actually expected different. But that's more a reflection on how I initially perceived your view as extreme and over-simplistic. (As I reflect back on your posts a bit more, you may have come to your view based on the perceived futility of trying to deal with a huge amount of complexity, and I can understand that.., from one perspective it's a logical choice.)
> So why did you feel the need to slander me? And make presumptions?
Because I object very strenuously to one of your fundamental viewpoints. The viewpoint of (paraphrasing strongly) "shit is happening, shit has always happened, shit will always happen, and when you come down to it you can't really prevent shit from happening, so why care, why even bother trying to prevent it from happening?"
That's what I object to, especially when applied to people who haven't even finished growing up yet. I'm not saying I think there is a black and white super easy solution. I recognize the world is highly complex. But I think we can do better.
I'll agree with you that neither the pro/anti extermists have useful solutions. And in reflection I was probably reacting quite strongly to the fact that you were applying your view to something as tragic as a kid committing suicide.
A 13 year old kid?
You must be one of the guys who figures that the death penalty should apply to children just as it does to adults, and that children really do have the capacity to decide for themselves whether they want to "get involved" with an adult (NAMBLA).
(now *thats* flamebait)
Exactly my point, however I thought it was so clear that I wouldn't have to add sarcasm. I guess this place is so used to trolls and strange sensibilities that it was taken at face value.
Oh well.
1) I walked into this store one day. They were clearly open for business. As I walked around I passed through an open door. Not long after it occurred to me that this place looked like a back room, not a display room. It even had an open safe in it. I thought that they should have kept that door closed with a sign saying 'employees only', and locked the safe. I approached the manager and pointed this out, at which point he had me arrested.
2) I walked up to my friends house the other day. The front gate was open, which is normal, so I could walk up to his door and knock. I looked to my left, and lo and behold his garage door was open. Even without going inside I could see all sorts of stuff, including the bodies hanging from the rafters. I immediately went to the police, but they said they couldn't do anything, as I was 'tresspassing'. Then they arrested me.
Either that or they're accomplishing something unbelievably useful with dazzling speed. There are a lot of useful things take a lot of effort, and Henry Ford's mass-production-lines rule for a reason. (BTW: Did he ever get a patent on that?)
If I bragged that I had installed 8,000 D-cell flashlight batteries .. wouldn't someone suggest
that I need to reconsider using flashlight batteries?
But what if it was cheaper than all the alternatives. And I mean *way* cheaper? Don't doubt for a minute that everyone and his dog wouldn't do it.
I'm not happy with how we as a society have managed our pollution and our environmental record. Environmental damage is relatively un-accounted for in how we do things. However for non-toxic semi-normal things, there must be some relationship between the cost of doing something and how much pollution is being created in the process. Therefore if you figure out how to do it cheaper, you are likely generating less polution.