For the second and third class, there are already working theories of how to solve most of these problems (quantum computers, zero-point energy, wormholes, etc.)
Unfortunately quantum computing cannot solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. In fact it is uncertain whether quantum computing can solve general problems dramatically faster than classical computers. It is known that sorting and factoring can be done much more quickly, but other problems, such as parity checking and syndrome decoding (useful in error-correcting codes) cannot be sped up.
I have a feeling this is not possible to solve, but this is very difficult to prove.
In Canada, national elections are handled by a nonpartisan Federal agency, Elections Canada. Everyone across the country gets the same kind of ballot, a simple card with circles beside the names where you make your "X". No punch cards, machines, or other fancy things that can go wrong or confuse people into voting for Pat Buchanan.
It's only a coincidence that the
same party keeps winning elections. I swear!
If you want electronic voting, the best idea is probably the system used by the City of Toronto in last fall's mayoral elections -- the ballots were paper, but the counting was electronic. To vote, you filled in a region beside a candidate's name, much like those computerized multiple choice tests. All the counting was done 1 hour after polls closed, and they still had paper records to verify the results.
Not to belittle GNU -- but if the Kernel doesn't matter, then why is Stallman so desperate to take credit for / redirect credit away from Linux? And if the Kernel doesn't matter, then I guess HURD doesn't matter, either.
Whoops, the math isn't as simple as I thought. I assumed that the force of gravity is the same from the surface of Earth up to 200 km... to calculate it exactly you would have to integrate. Any other errors are left as an exercise for the reader...:-)
To transport you (70 kg) up to an altitude of 200 km would take roughly 140,000 kilojoules of energy (you do the math... first year physics stuff). However, they can't just lift you, they also have to lift a vehicle containing you. Say the vehicle weighs 500 kg for every person it can carry -- this would take rougly 1,000,000 kilojoules. If they do this electrically (which is one of the more expensive forms of energy), at 100% efficiency it would eat up roughly 300 kWh of energy. At 0.30/kWh (say), that's roughly $100.
Of course, a clever engineer would realize that every vehicle going up eventually goes down... so the vehicle on the way down could be used as a generator, feeding power to the load of a vehicle going up. Equally obviously, we're not considering the amortization of the construction cost, which would be monumental.
Why would you only rule out Alabama
when there are plenty of other country musicians to ban: Randy Travis, Garth Brooks... the list goes on. Keep space Country-Free!
It seems fair that the derivative article needs to be copylefted as well.
It seems fair, but it also seems like this would exert an undue influence on future research. If I do work based on an article, I will give citations where necessary (as is required in scientific publishing), but my work is my own, and I want to be able to distribute it however I please. I'm concerned that researchers might copyleft their work, which would force me to copyleft my work if I cite them, or use their ideas... and because my work is copyleft, subsequent works have to be copyleft, and so on, until the ultimate research is only tangentially related to the original, but still carries the same copyleft. I would probably refuse to go along with such a scheme.
Does the idea of copyleft make sense for things other than software? I'm thinking of the phrase: "Redistribute, copy, and modify, so long as your derivative work is also copyleft." If, for example, research results are published under copyleft, would that mean that any subsequent work that cites the research would also have to be copyleft? If the research were used to create a device, would the device have to be copyleft? The broad definition of "derivative work" is making me somewhat uncomfortable... I want my research to be used for any reason, anywhere, by anyone, without worrying about the implications for them.
A multi-trillion-dollar committment from the industrialized nations, complete with the political support for a project that could take centuries to implement
Propulsion technologies (large-scale solar sails, nuclear / anti-matter propulsion, etc.) and life support technologies that are currently only imagined
Orbital construction of a 10-100 thousand ton spacecraft - including shielding, centrifugal gravity, recycling, fuel... possibly more than one spacecraft, for the sake of redundancy
Extensive space infrastructure -- you might want to construct the craft from lunar materials, since it would be easier to launch
A few dozen (or more) highly skilled, highly motivated people to operate the spacecraft, are willing to assume the risks of a 20-50 year journey in an untested spacecraft,
who would be able to work together in extremely difficult conditions over decades without killing each other,
and who would be willing to never return to Earth (maybe even willing to die before seeing the destination, with only their children arriving)
Some have observed that the level of committment this would require of humanity would be like nothing ever seen before, and which would require devotion that has historically only been commanded by religious quests.
Or maybe in the past they've been payed in monopoly money?
It might as well be. Equity in stock which is not backed up by corporate value is basically counterfeit -- good only as long as nobody notices that it's not real.
Not that RedHat is a worthless company, mind you, but its stock was clearly overvalued during the Linux boom.
Scientists are allowed to patent the genes that they dicover.......this has lead to the unwillingness to share since sharing would cost them the potential money that can be made with the gene
Before you rush to place the usual blame on intellectual property, look at the results of the study. The top three reasons for witholding information were, in order:
Too much effort to comply with request;
Protecting a student's ability to publish; and
Protecting one's own ability to publish.
None of these have to do with patenting, but 2 and 3 likely have to do with self-interest in an incredibly competetive research environment. You wouldn't want to help a competing group to scoop your own research before you had a chance to completely analyze it.
Clearly, self-interest is at play here -- not an unlikely quest for riches from patenting (the odds of which are somewhat akin to playing the lottery), but the more mundane quest for tenure and grant funding.
Re:The hatches
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The reason the hatches took no less than 90 seconds to open is because NASA wanted to prevent another Liberty Bell 7 incident (MR-4) where the hatch supposedly blew off prematurely.
You're referring to explosive hatch bolts -- but modern journalists have speculated that a pad leader would not have have allowed an explosive bolt system to be armed during an apparently safe countdown test. The more serious design flaw in the hatch was the fact that it opened inward -- a tradeoff to save weight since the cabin pressure kept it closed, but which sealed the astronauts inside when the fire broke out.
Re:Incompetence
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In the case of Apollo 1, NASA was too lazy to use a proper atmosphere
In addition to being more complex, a two-gas system was shown to be dangerous in itself. In Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Murray and Cox, there is a reference to a case where a test pilot nearly died precisely due to errors made in implementing a two-gas atmosphere. It's easy to sit back and blame incompetent bureaucrats, but more often than not the engineers make design tradeoffs with no completely safe alternatives.
Re:For what it's worth, I bought a Loki game today
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
To my mind, writing software is a SERVICE, with the end result free for all to use.
Sure. But what's the difference?
Make software for me. I want to be able to use it however I like when you're done. -- OK, it'll take me three months full time to write, I'll have to hire five other guys, so that will be $100,000 for our services.
Well, I don't have $100,000. But I do have 100 friends who will also use the software. -- Great, just collect $1000 each and you will have purchased my services.
Well, I asked them all for $1000, and they said no. -- Fine. I think there are 1000 people who might want to buy the software, so I'll sell you a fraction of my services for $100 if you promise not to give copies of the software to anyone else.
Hopefully after 45 days they will open up the cafes again
If you had bothered to read the article, you would have noted that the moratorium is on the opening of new internet cafes. The kiddies are still free to play whatever games strike their fancy in the existing ones (until 8 PM on school nights, anyway).
I've found consistently better prices on the web, even recently, than I have in-store for electronic goods
There was a related
article
in the NY times this week about electronics manufacturers who inflate their list prices so that retailers can easily offer their goods at a "bargain".
Apparently, AOL hoped to capitalize on the Netscape home page, which most Netscape users left as their default when starting up their browser.
That's about the flimsiest grounds I can think of for purchasing a whole company--along with the commitment to maintain and enhance its products.
Perhaps. But as many have pointed out before, one of Netscape's biggest corporate weaknesses was that they didn't capitalize on this, which virtually guaranteed an immediate and huge subscriber base for whatever on-line service they chose to offer. The fact that Microsoft chose to build a competing browser from the ground up and give it away for free, largely to do the same thing, vindicates this strategy. Remember this was when the dot-com upswing was well underway, and everybody and their uncle was turning their site into a portal...
Have the ambitious ones come to the city to learn and take their newfound knowledge back with
them.
You expect them to go back? I'm reminded of a former resident's characterization of a town in backwoods Ontario: "It's reverse natural selection. The smart and ambitious ones move to the big city, the rest stay here and breed."
I was reading through the biography of Claude Shannon (information theory guy) and was surprised to read that he also did important research in chess-playing computers. The biographer suggested that his innovations are still in use today. Does anybody know more about this? How do you program a computer to play chess, anyway?
In addition to Xbox game
compatibility and DVD functionality, it is reported to have
TiVo/UltimateTV like PVR functionality as well as WebTV like email
and web surfing capabilities.
What about the rumored mind control capabilities?... oh, TV... never mind.
Slashdot Mirror
For the second and third class, there are already working theories of how to solve most of these problems (quantum computers, zero-point energy, wormholes, etc.)
Unfortunately quantum computing cannot solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. In fact it is uncertain whether quantum computing can solve general problems dramatically faster than classical computers. It is known that sorting and factoring can be done much more quickly, but other problems, such as parity checking and syndrome decoding (useful in error-correcting codes) cannot be sped up.
I have a feeling this is not possible to solve, but this is very difficult to prove.
You might want to read about Lyapunov exponents.It makes you as dorky as that freak whose parents bought him the calculator watch for his birthday in third grade.
That was you, wasn't it?
And let's not forget Leonardo da Vinci. In fact the Renaissance was filled with cross-disciplinary endeavours.
In Canada, national elections are handled by a nonpartisan Federal agency, Elections Canada. Everyone across the country gets the same kind of ballot, a simple card with circles beside the names where you make your "X". No punch cards, machines, or other fancy things that can go wrong or confuse people into voting for Pat Buchanan. It's only a coincidence that the same party keeps winning elections. I swear!
If you want electronic voting, the best idea is probably the system used by the City of Toronto in last fall's mayoral elections -- the ballots were paper, but the counting was electronic. To vote, you filled in a region beside a candidate's name, much like those computerized multiple choice tests. All the counting was done 1 hour after polls closed, and they still had paper records to verify the results.
Not to belittle GNU -- but if the Kernel doesn't matter, then why is Stallman so desperate to take credit for / redirect credit away from Linux? And if the Kernel doesn't matter, then I guess HURD doesn't matter, either.
Whoops, the math isn't as simple as I thought. I assumed that the force of gravity is the same from the surface of Earth up to 200 km ... to calculate it exactly you would have to integrate. Any other errors are left as an exercise for the reader ... :-)
To transport you (70 kg) up to an altitude of 200 km would take roughly 140,000 kilojoules of energy (you do the math ... first year physics stuff). However, they can't just lift you, they also have to lift a vehicle containing you. Say the vehicle weighs 500 kg for every person it can carry -- this would take rougly 1,000,000 kilojoules. If they do this electrically (which is one of the more expensive forms of energy), at 100% efficiency it would eat up roughly 300 kWh of energy. At 0.30/kWh (say), that's roughly $100.
Of course, a clever engineer would realize that every vehicle going up eventually goes down ... so the vehicle on the way down could be used as a generator, feeding power to the load of a vehicle going up. Equally obviously, we're not considering the amortization of the construction cost, which would be monumental.
Why would you only rule out Alabama when there are plenty of other country musicians to ban: Randy Travis, Garth Brooks ... the list goes on. Keep space Country-Free!
It seems fair that the derivative article needs to be copylefted as well.
It seems fair, but it also seems like this would exert an undue influence on future research. If I do work based on an article, I will give citations where necessary (as is required in scientific publishing), but my work is my own, and I want to be able to distribute it however I please. I'm concerned that researchers might copyleft their work, which would force me to copyleft my work if I cite them, or use their ideas ... and because my work is copyleft, subsequent works have to be copyleft, and so on, until the ultimate research is only tangentially related to the original, but still carries the same copyleft. I would probably refuse to go along with such a scheme.
Does the idea of copyleft make sense for things other than software? I'm thinking of the phrase: "Redistribute, copy, and modify, so long as your derivative work is also copyleft." If, for example, research results are published under copyleft, would that mean that any subsequent work that cites the research would also have to be copyleft? If the research were used to create a device, would the device have to be copyleft? The broad definition of "derivative work" is making me somewhat uncomfortable ... I want my research to be used for any reason, anywhere, by anyone, without worrying about the implications for them.
Manned interstellar spaceflight would require:
Some have observed that the level of committment this would require of humanity would be like nothing ever seen before, and which would require devotion that has historically only been commanded by religious quests.
Or maybe in the past they've been payed in monopoly money?
It might as well be. Equity in stock which is not backed up by corporate value is basically counterfeit -- good only as long as nobody notices that it's not real.
Not that RedHat is a worthless company, mind you, but its stock was clearly overvalued during the Linux boom.
Scientists are allowed to patent the genes that they dicover.......this has lead to the unwillingness to share since sharing would cost them the potential money that can be made with the gene
Before you rush to place the usual blame on intellectual property, look at the results of the study. The top three reasons for witholding information were, in order:
- Too much effort to comply with request;
- Protecting a student's ability to publish; and
- Protecting one's own ability to publish.
None of these have to do with patenting, but 2 and 3 likely have to do with self-interest in an incredibly competetive research environment. You wouldn't want to help a competing group to scoop your own research before you had a chance to completely analyze it.Clearly, self-interest is at play here -- not an unlikely quest for riches from patenting (the odds of which are somewhat akin to playing the lottery), but the more mundane quest for tenure and grant funding.
The reason the hatches took no less than 90 seconds to open is because NASA wanted to prevent another Liberty Bell 7 incident (MR-4) where the hatch supposedly blew off prematurely.
You're referring to explosive hatch bolts -- but modern journalists have speculated that a pad leader would not have have allowed an explosive bolt system to be armed during an apparently safe countdown test. The more serious design flaw in the hatch was the fact that it opened inward -- a tradeoff to save weight since the cabin pressure kept it closed, but which sealed the astronauts inside when the fire broke out.
In the case of Apollo 1, NASA was too lazy to use a proper atmosphere
In addition to being more complex, a two-gas system was shown to be dangerous in itself. In Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Murray and Cox, there is a reference to a case where a test pilot nearly died precisely due to errors made in implementing a two-gas atmosphere. It's easy to sit back and blame incompetent bureaucrats, but more often than not the engineers make design tradeoffs with no completely safe alternatives.
To my mind, writing software is a SERVICE, with the end result free for all to use.
Sure. But what's the difference?
What the hell, it's only Karma.
Hopefully after 45 days they will open up the cafes again
If you had bothered to read the article, you would have noted that the moratorium is on the opening of new internet cafes. The kiddies are still free to play whatever games strike their fancy in the existing ones (until 8 PM on school nights, anyway).
You mean like Apple? Oh, kind to its customers ... never mind.
Thanks. Who would have thought that Slashdot would be educational?
It was at Bell Labs ... but the guy who developed the Uniform Sampling Theorem was Nyquist, not Shannon.
I've found consistently better prices on the web, even recently, than I have in-store for electronic goods
There was a related article in the NY times this week about electronics manufacturers who inflate their list prices so that retailers can easily offer their goods at a "bargain".
Apparently, AOL hoped to capitalize on the Netscape home page, which most Netscape users left as their default when starting up their browser. That's about the flimsiest grounds I can think of for purchasing a whole company--along with the commitment to maintain and enhance its products.
Perhaps. But as many have pointed out before, one of Netscape's biggest corporate weaknesses was that they didn't capitalize on this, which virtually guaranteed an immediate and huge subscriber base for whatever on-line service they chose to offer. The fact that Microsoft chose to build a competing browser from the ground up and give it away for free, largely to do the same thing, vindicates this strategy. Remember this was when the dot-com upswing was well underway, and everybody and their uncle was turning their site into a portal ...
Have the ambitious ones come to the city to learn and take their newfound knowledge back with them.
You expect them to go back? I'm reminded of a former resident's characterization of a town in backwoods Ontario: "It's reverse natural selection. The smart and ambitious ones move to the big city, the rest stay here and breed."
I was reading through the biography of Claude Shannon (information theory guy) and was surprised to read that he also did important research in chess-playing computers. The biographer suggested that his innovations are still in use today. Does anybody know more about this? How do you program a computer to play chess, anyway?
In addition to Xbox game compatibility and DVD functionality, it is reported to have TiVo/UltimateTV like PVR functionality as well as WebTV like email and web surfing capabilities.
What about the rumored mind control capabilities? ... oh, TV ... never mind.