I took a course on routing and flow control in grad school. I get the impression that the features that people interpret as redundancy are actually examples of distributed processing. For example, no central location keeps the entire routing tree; local nodes don't need to know the global topology; nodes must find a way to route and prevent queues from busting without relying without supervision or instruction.
That is, each IP gateway and router is expected to be co-operatively autonomous.
I also got the impression that although the potential for redundancy is included by distributing the authority, there really isn't all that much actual redundancy. For example, there are very few backbones that connect major routers across the country.
In fact, why couldn't you get this thing to power a laptop for a week? What's more, you wouldn't have to recharge; just refill with reactant and you're ready to go.
He talks about looking for the killer application that will make him go out and spend the big money on a whole new system.
One of the reasons why I have invested time and money in Linux is because it has given new life to my old and obsolete hardware. In fact this is one of the selling points that Linux people often quote. Perhaps Linux is contributing to a lack of interest in new hardware?
Actually there were space shuttle experiment in 1992 and 1996 to study the use of tethers. Look here for more. I believe at least one of these experiments ended in failure when the tether broke; both tethers and solar sails are highly susceptible to micrometeorite impacts.
NASA has also flown experimental ion propulsion technology on the Deep Space 1 mission, and has a research team at JPL investigating advanced propulsion concepts. You may have heard of a proposal for magnetic-assisted propulsion to travel to Pluto; IIRC that was one of theirs.
I don't know of any NASA attempt to use solar sails, though.
I don't wish to take anything away from the Russian space program. However, although it appears that the USSR program was flawless through the late 50's and early 60's, in fact recent documents point out that the Soviets suffered numerous failures, but were able to prevent them from becoming known.
The successful Sputnik launch occurred after 3-4 secret failures.
The Americans, on the other hand, were operating entirely under the eye of the world's press. Even though they were working up the same learning curve as the Soviets, every failure they made was a public debacle.
Another interesting (and suppressed) fact is that Gagarin ejected from his capsule and parachuted to the Earth while the capsule crashed below him.
The problem with Linux suites is that there's no lack of them in the marketplace, and none of them is in any danger of becoming a standard; users just install whatever suite they think is neat, which is an obstacle to interoperability.
Conversely, the (perhaps only?) good thing about MS Office is that any computer with Windows is likely to also have Office, so you can edit/display/transmit your files to virtually any Windows user. The most compelling example of this that I can think of is PowerPoint; if I need show someone my presentation at short notice and don't have my laptop handy, I can borrow someone else's, as long as they have Office.
I had high hopes that Corel's suite for Linux
would address this when it came out, but that seems to have died the death.
Why doesn't a major Linux distribution provider (like RedHat) specifically embrace an application suite, and ship it with their bundle? By creating such a de facto standard, much would be accomplished for interoperability and document sharing.
This device sounds a little random, like they pulled pieces of paper out of a hat - an air conditioner connected to the internet. Is there a killer app in the realm of web-enabled appliances?
I can see applications for remote monitoring and notification... as long as the security issues can be solved.
Read what it says a little closer and you see "Usually, though, food oils are combined
with diesel fuel, rather than used pure, as Benich is doing"
My point is that I'm not sure the combustion process is clean, where I use the term "clean" to mean that the combustion products are free of pollutants (such as unburned hydrocarbons). The article is silent on this point (unless I have misread it?).
The fact that the fuel is pure doesn't matter. If the bike uses the Diesel cycle, the combustion products are likely to be dirty under heavy loads (such as during accelleration).
Renewability is only one desirable trait of a fuel source. I wonder how cleanly this stuff burns, especially since (as the article states) the oil sometimes has to be combined with Diesel. I expect that hydrocarbon pollutants would be a major problem, along with possibly oxides of nitrogen, etc.
Can you imagine the majority of cars in Los Angeles (or some such city) converting to Soybean oil, and having the stench of McDonalds fries replace smog?
One exception to attorney-client privilege occurrs if the attorney and client are accomplices in the crime. Perhaps they are alleging that the attorneys had a role in the crime (which they would have if they were filing the patents)?
NASA's current exploration strategy is to seek out signs of life elsewhere in our solar system, and to pave the way for potential human landings.
Mars wins on both counts,
while neither Mercury nor Venus is likely to harbor life, and neither is hospitable enough to permit a human landing (at least in the near future).
For Venus, there's already a mountain of mapping data from the Magellan probe, which is still providing insights into Venusian surface geology. Mercury remains (surprisingly) largely unknown. There was a single Mariner mission about thirty years ago, but that left roughly half the surface unmapped. I read a proposal for a return to Mercury to complete the job, but it was likely scrapped due to budget cuts. However, AFAIK most data indicates that Mercury is essentially a copy of our own moon, and hence not very interesting.
I have the (perhaps mistaken) understanding that
peer reviewers for most journals do the work for the academic kudos, not for financial reward.
In my experience, peer reviewers are normally anonymous, and are expected to take part in the process because they themselves have benefited from it (by having their previously published articles peer reviewed).
This is already happening. Scientists (like me) routinely post electronic versions of their papers, making them freely available on their web sites. In my experience, typing the title of an arbitrary article into your favourite search engine will lead to a freely-available electronic version about 30 per cent of the time, and this proportion is increasing.
The key idea is legitimacy, which is touched on in the article... that is, a researcher needs the work to be validated and published in a recognized journal first, to verify that the work is an important contribution, before making it freely available.
As an aside, I also have concerns with an online journal being freely available, because it's not clear who will be paying the bills - advertisers? donors? At my university there is already a great hue and cry about the independence of research being corrupted by corporate interest. The high subscription fees charged by journals may make works inaccessible, but they do pay the bills (in such a way that advertising is unnecessary).
... this is already a matter of law; non-humans do not have legal standing.
A few years ago (I can't remember exactly when) a man claiming to be a Martian sued a number of federal cabinet ministers and several major corporations, including a drug store chain, for allegedly discriminating against his alien status.
The judge dismissed the case, noting that if she found that the man was indeed a Martian, he wouldn't have the ability to sue under Canadian law.
I re-ran the numbers, and I would like to make the clarification: Every boy plays hockey with probability 1. (I'm Canadian after all.)
Other than that I stand by the posted solution. The details are left as an exercise for the reader.:-)
I am a fan of Open Source, in part because of its generous nature (as the article suggests), and in part because it allows peer review and dissemination of ideas.
However, it bears pointing out that revolutions normally corrupt themselves by insisting on a certain dogmatism, rather than embracing practical reality. In the open source literature one sees very little consideration or mention of ideas such as hybrid open source, in which the source code is revealed but the owner still retains some IP control over its use. In fact such an idea is considered heretical by many open-source practitioners, who view anything other than GPL as counter-revolutionary.
Is there any room in the open-source community for licenses that are more friendly to business? I think there are.
I see ads on buses, on billboards, on vehicles, on TV, and even in the bathrooms. I'm pretty much attuned to them, and I'm willing to wait a second for them to load in order to get my content for free.
I can see a bandwidth issue where there might be an incentive for disabling ads for a fee... e.g., someone who pays $5/min to get 9600bps over INMARSAT might be willing to pay a few bucks to get the ads taken off.
StarOffice?
Make 'em learn it properly from the beginning. Nothing but text mode console, vi, elm, and sc.
When I was your age, we had to walk uphill in three feet of snow to write BASIC on an Apple II!
Slashdot Mirror
I took a course on routing and flow control in grad school. I get the impression that the features that people interpret as redundancy are actually examples of distributed processing. For example, no central location keeps the entire routing tree; local nodes don't need to know the global topology; nodes must find a way to route and prevent queues from busting without relying without supervision or instruction. That is, each IP gateway and router is expected to be co-operatively autonomous.
I also got the impression that although the potential for redundancy is included by distributing the authority, there really isn't all that much actual redundancy. For example, there are very few backbones that connect major routers across the country.
Most Laptops weigh this much.
In fact, why couldn't you get this thing to power a laptop for a week? What's more, you wouldn't have to recharge; just refill with reactant and you're ready to go.
He talks about looking for the killer application that will make him go out and spend the big money on a whole new system.
One of the reasons why I have invested time and money in Linux is because it has given new life to my old and obsolete hardware. In fact this is one of the selling points that Linux people often quote. Perhaps Linux is contributing to a lack of interest in new hardware?
Actually there were space shuttle experiment in 1992 and 1996 to study the use of tethers. Look here for more. I believe at least one of these experiments ended in failure when the tether broke; both tethers and solar sails are highly susceptible to micrometeorite impacts.
NASA has also flown experimental ion propulsion technology on the Deep Space 1 mission, and has a research team at JPL investigating advanced propulsion concepts. You may have heard of a proposal for magnetic-assisted propulsion to travel to Pluto; IIRC that was one of theirs.
I don't know of any NASA attempt to use solar sails, though.
I wonder if NASA will ever admit that we DIDN'T land on the moon.
I suspect that it would be easier to actually land on the Moon than to fake it so convincingly.
Probably less expensive too, given the number of people you would have to pay off.
I don't wish to take anything away from the Russian space program. However, although it appears that the USSR program was flawless through the late 50's and early 60's, in fact recent documents point out that the Soviets suffered numerous failures, but were able to prevent them from becoming known. The successful Sputnik launch occurred after 3-4 secret failures.
The Americans, on the other hand, were operating entirely under the eye of the world's press. Even though they were working up the same learning curve as the Soviets, every failure they made was a public debacle.
Another interesting (and suppressed) fact is that Gagarin ejected from his capsule and parachuted to the Earth while the capsule crashed below him.
Does anyone have any links, etc., specifically on how Bayesian networks apply to the paperclip app?
The problem with Linux suites is that there's no lack of them in the marketplace, and none of them is in any danger of becoming a standard; users just install whatever suite they think is neat, which is an obstacle to interoperability.
Conversely, the (perhaps only?) good thing about MS Office is that any computer with Windows is likely to also have Office, so you can edit/display/transmit your files to virtually any Windows user. The most compelling example of this that I can think of is PowerPoint; if I need show someone my presentation at short notice and don't have my laptop handy, I can borrow someone else's, as long as they have Office. I had high hopes that Corel's suite for Linux would address this when it came out, but that seems to have died the death.
Why doesn't a major Linux distribution provider (like RedHat) specifically embrace an application suite, and ship it with their bundle? By creating such a de facto standard, much would be accomplished for interoperability and document sharing.
This device sounds a little random, like they pulled pieces of paper out of a hat - an air conditioner connected to the internet. Is there a killer app in the realm of web-enabled appliances? I can see applications for remote monitoring and notification ... as long as the security issues can be solved.
Read what it says a little closer and you see "Usually, though, food oils are combined with diesel fuel, rather than used pure, as Benich is doing"
My point is that I'm not sure the combustion process is clean, where I use the term "clean" to mean that the combustion products are free of pollutants (such as unburned hydrocarbons). The article is silent on this point (unless I have misread it?).
The fact that the fuel is pure doesn't matter. If the bike uses the Diesel cycle, the combustion products are likely to be dirty under heavy loads (such as during accelleration).
Renewability is only one desirable trait of a fuel source. I wonder how cleanly this stuff burns, especially since (as the article states) the oil sometimes has to be combined with Diesel. I expect that hydrocarbon pollutants would be a major problem, along with possibly oxides of nitrogen, etc.
Can you imagine the majority of cars in Los Angeles (or some such city) converting to Soybean oil, and having the stench of McDonalds fries replace smog?
One exception to attorney-client privilege occurrs if the attorney and client are accomplices in the crime. Perhaps they are alleging that the attorneys had a role in the crime (which they would have if they were filing the patents)?
IANAL, etc.
It's neat, but at $70,000 a shot, that would pay for an awful lot of plane tickets for the guy to be actually there (as opposed to virtually there).
NASA's current exploration strategy is to seek out signs of life elsewhere in our solar system, and to pave the way for potential human landings. Mars wins on both counts, while neither Mercury nor Venus is likely to harbor life, and neither is hospitable enough to permit a human landing (at least in the near future).
For Venus, there's already a mountain of mapping data from the Magellan probe, which is still providing insights into Venusian surface geology. Mercury remains (surprisingly) largely unknown. There was a single Mariner mission about thirty years ago, but that left roughly half the surface unmapped. I read a proposal for a return to Mercury to complete the job, but it was likely scrapped due to budget cuts. However, AFAIK most data indicates that Mercury is essentially a copy of our own moon, and hence not very interesting.
I have the (perhaps mistaken) understanding that peer reviewers for most journals do the work for the academic kudos, not for financial reward.
In my experience, peer reviewers are normally anonymous, and are expected to take part in the process because they themselves have benefited from it (by having their previously published articles peer reviewed).
This is already happening. Scientists (like me) routinely post electronic versions of their papers, making them freely available on their web sites. In my experience, typing the title of an arbitrary article into your favourite search engine will lead to a freely-available electronic version about 30 per cent of the time, and this proportion is increasing.
The key idea is legitimacy, which is touched on in the article ... that is, a researcher needs the work to be validated and published in a recognized journal first, to verify that the work is an important contribution, before making it freely available.
As an aside, I also have concerns with an online journal being freely available, because it's not clear who will be paying the bills - advertisers? donors? At my university there is already a great hue and cry about the independence of research being corrupted by corporate interest. The high subscription fees charged by journals may make works inaccessible, but they do pay the bills (in such a way that advertising is unnecessary).
... this is already a matter of law; non-humans do not have legal standing.
A few years ago (I can't remember exactly when) a man claiming to be a Martian sued a number of federal cabinet ministers and several major corporations, including a drug store chain, for allegedly discriminating against his alien status.
The judge dismissed the case, noting that if she found that the man was indeed a Martian, he wouldn't have the ability to sue under Canadian law.
Does anyone else remember this?
Does this mean you can phone the satellite (for whatever reason)?
Why not use a TCP/IP like protocol for non-critical telemetry if the data rate is low on average ... whatever happened to Teledesic?
I re-ran the numbers, and I would like to make the clarification: Every boy plays hockey with probability 1. (I'm Canadian after all.) Other than that I stand by the posted solution. The details are left as an exercise for the reader. :-)
The key is that it is more likely that you stumble into a girl's room if there are two girls and one boy. This is easy to show using Bayes' rule.
Because the hockey schedule is in a common location, you get no information from it other than there is at least one boy.
I remember there was spirited debate in class over this one ...
Here's a variant on the Monty Hall problem that I got from a computer science prof, which illustrates arguments regarding Bayesian inference.
Your friend invites you to his house. You know a priori that he has three children, but you have no information on their genders.
While looking for the bathroom, you accidentally stumble into one of the children's rooms, and find that it is obviously a girl's room.
While in the kitchen, you see a schedule for a boys' hockey team.
So, you know that there is at least one boy and one girl. The question is: what is the probability that there are two boys and one girl?
I am obfuscating the answer so as to let you think about it first: floor(log(7.39))/floor(10^(0.779))
I am a fan of Open Source, in part because of its generous nature (as the article suggests), and in part because it allows peer review and dissemination of ideas.
However, it bears pointing out that revolutions normally corrupt themselves by insisting on a certain dogmatism, rather than embracing practical reality. In the open source literature one sees very little consideration or mention of ideas such as hybrid open source, in which the source code is revealed but the owner still retains some IP control over its use. In fact such an idea is considered heretical by many open-source practitioners, who view anything other than GPL as counter-revolutionary.
Is there any room in the open-source community for licenses that are more friendly to business? I think there are.
I see ads on buses, on billboards, on vehicles, on TV, and even in the bathrooms. I'm pretty much attuned to them, and I'm willing to wait a second for them to load in order to get my content for free.
I can see a bandwidth issue where there might be an incentive for disabling ads for a fee ... e.g., someone who pays $5/min to get 9600bps over INMARSAT might be willing to pay a few bucks to get the ads taken off.
StarOffice? Make 'em learn it properly from the beginning. Nothing but text mode console, vi, elm, and sc. When I was your age, we had to walk uphill in three feet of snow to write BASIC on an Apple II!