Yes, you've grasped the essentials of quantum philosophy - making statements about things which can't be observed. "Superposition of states" is just a fancy way of saying we don't know (and can't know) which state it's in between interactions. It doesn't mean that reality is that way.
Unfortunately most people don't understand that everything that's not measurable is religion.
Einstein mainly objected to the idea that QM, which is a form of statistical mechanics, is proof that the universe is inherently statistical and non-deterministic. While there's no reason why it couldn't be, there's nothing in QM to sway things one way or another.
The same way a radio picks the "right" frequency out of all possible frequencies. An apparatus is set up which reinforces certain (De Broglie) wave patterns while allowing others to cancel out. When a stable wave pattern arises, the "answer" is embedded in the amplitudes at various spots.
Think of it as a very complicated resonator, which settles very quickly into a stable pattern of motion.
Excerpt from the article on lift. As I suspected, he's just popularizing the usual aerodynamics.
Almost everyone today has flown in an airplane. Many ask the simple question "what makes an airplane fly?" The answer one frequently gets is misleading and often just plain wrong. We hope that the answers provided here will clarify many misconceptions about lift and that you will adopt our explanation when explaining lift to others. We are going to show you that lift is easier to understand if one starts with Newton's laws rather than the Bernoulli principle. We will also show you that the popular explanation that most of us were taught is misleading at best and that lift is due to the wing diverting air down. Most of this diverted air is pulled down from above the wing.
Let us start by defining three descriptions of lift commonly used in textbooks and training manuals. The first we will call the Mathematical Aerodynamics Description of lift, which is used by aeronautical engineers. This description uses complex mathematics and/or computer simulations to calculate the lift of a wing. It often uses a mathematical concept called "circulation" to calculate the acceleration of the air over the wing. Circulation is a measure of the apparent rotation of the air around the wing. While useful for calculations of lift, this description does not lend themselves to an intuitive understanding of flight.
The second description we will call the Popular Description, which is based on the Bernoulli principle. The primary advantage of this description is that it is easy to understand and has been taught for many years. Because of its simplicity, it is used to describe lift in most flight training manuals. The major disadvantage is that it relies on the "principle of equal transit times", or at least on the assumption that because the air must travel farther over the top of the wing it must go faster. This description focuses on the shape of the wing and prevents one from understanding such important phenomena as inverted flight, power, ground effect, and the dependence of lift on the angle of attack of the wing.
The third description, which we are advocating here, we will call the Physical Description of lift. This description of lift is based primarily on Newton's three laws and a phenomenon called the Coanda effect. This description is uniquely useful for understanding the phenomena associated with flight. It is useful for an accurate understanding the relationships in flight, such as how power increases with load or how the stall speed increases with altitude. It is also a useful tool for making rough estimates ("back-of-the-envelope calculations") of lift. The Physical Description of lift is also of great use to a pilot who needs an intuitive understanding of how to fly the airplane.
The curved wing explanation assumes that air wants to reach the trailing edge of the wing at the same time, regardless of whether it went over or under the wing. This is not the case. The air travelling over the wing reaches the trailing edge before the air going under, and the amount of advance is determined by angle of attack, not the camber of the airfoil.
Read some of the websites referenced by other posts in this thread. They explain circulation in more detail, with wind tunnel photos.
Remember that angle of attack is measured from the stagnation point on the front of the airfoil, to the trailing edge. The bottom of a wing can be horizontal, and it can still have a positive angle of attack.
If you bring the top and bottom airstreams together at the same height that they were divided, then there's no lift. K-12 textbooks are woefully off base in explaining that.
I'm not sure what the Coanda effect is, but I believe it's just an expression of the role of viscosity in moving air around. To explain: when a fluid has no viscosity, it tends to flow very easily around sharp edges, etc. and back to its original position, say, after a wing has passed through it. When this happens, no lift, drag, or dynamic forces at all are generated - all the fun goes out of aerodynamics. However when viscosity is introduced, it puts a limit on how easily the fluid can deform to flow around objects - it restricts the velocity gradient between adjacent pieces of air, wing, etc. So when the fluid hits, say, a sharp trailing edge of a wing, it does not flow around infinitely fast and back up the other side to its previous height; it sheds off the edge at a lower point than it started, and a net force is generated.
If you think about it, this is the way just about all of us move air - we know that if we wave a hand through the air, a certain mass of air will not be able to get around the hand, and will have to be dragged or pushed along by it in some way. The same goes with a moving wing.
People have debated this on the net for years, and not without reason. The bernoulli effect got put into textbooks years ago, and everyone was convinced that a wing cross-section was some magical shape that produced lift without drag, or with little drag, and that simpler shapes, like a fan blade, simply didn't have the right stuff to hold up an honest-to-goodness airplane.
The truth is much simpler. Aircraft stay up by accelerating air downwards. The viscosity of air allows it to be pushed down by a flat object held at a positive angle of attack. Any such object will have a net difference in pressure between its top and bottom, referred to as lift (and drag). Making the wing teardrop-shaped makes the flow more laminar and reduces drag, but that's really just streamlining.
Just as many stockbrokers seem to have elaborately printed, worthless stock certificates from things like Chinese railroads, you might want to see about getting your stock issued as a certificate. It may have some aesthetic value, and if you go along with the philosophy of burdening spammers with needless administrative expenses, this is the way to go.
The same goes for worthless dot coms like pets.com. Many of these are still trading at a few cents a share.
You may also be able to get an annual report. These could be real collector's items someday.
The sender is equipped with a dog locked in a box. A radioactive atom, contained in a special measuring apparatus, has a finite probability of decaying and triggering a fatal dose of poison for the dog. Neither the sender nor, more crucially, the SPCA knows whether the dog is dead or alive when the message is sent.
The superposed live and dead dog is then passed through two slits, resulting in an interference pattern, where dead and live dogs reinforce or cancel each other out. This pattern is transmitted via fiber optics to the receiver, who is equipped with a physics book identical to the one possessed by the sender.
The receiver then passes the beam through an apparatus which contains three doors. Behind one of the doors is a goat. Behind another is a brand new car. After the receiver chooses one door, the host opens the door containing the goat.
Now the receiver guesses whether the dog is dead or alive, and if he is correct, he receives a shiny new car and a year's supply of dog food, signifying that the message has been successfully transmitted!
While this method is correct in theory, no one has yet built an apparatus using this method over long distances. However, scientists are confident that these minor details will be filled in shortly.
Finally something worthwhile in this discussion. What they don't teach in physics class is that the part beyond the equations is nothing but interpretation.
Sheldon Goldstein has published some worthwhile papers on QM. He's basically debunked a lot of the "superposition of states" crap, and proved that QM can be deterministic with the usual limits on observation. The gist of the argument is GIGO: no accurate position/momentum to start means no accurate position/momentum at the finish. We don't know the definite trajectories of any particles in the universe, so we can't measure any, since we can't put together an reliable measuring tool without this knowledge. So in fact QM does not mean that the universe is non-deterministic; it just means that we're ignorant of a range of phenomena at the quantum level. Enough said.
You can also try a wireless link to bring the signal to a secure area, and avoid the power drain of an on-board recorder. Most of them work on 12V, same as the camera. Try supercircuits.com for cheap bare-bones analog cameras and wireless links.
X10.com has a "VCR commander" that triggers a vcr record function when an event is received. I forget, but i think it's wireless in the video and possibly the trigger channel, so you could link the alarm or a motion detector to the thing and get it to trigger a home VCR.
Maybe you can trigger it from the airbag too, and avoid lengthy litigation after a crash. You'd need an on-board recorder for that, though.
Re:So where does the information come from?
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 3
At a press conference today, leaders of the worldwide recording industry announced the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), a framework to
...blah...blah...blah...
In planning for nearly a year, the initiative was announced by leading worldwide music heads, including:... Bob Daly, chairman and co-CEO, Warner Bros. and Warner Music Group; Terry Semel, chairman and co-CEO of Warner Bros. and Warner Music Group; Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America...
There are a lot of myths and urban legends regarding the right to videotape or otherwise record people in public and private situations.
Most of the cases in the US have involved invasion of privacy in some way. The only standard the courts have used is whether a reasonable person could expect privacy in a given situation. For instance, if you're dealing crack on a public street and someone tapes you doing it, there's no expectation of privacy. If you're discussing something quietly on the street with no one around, the courts have decided that you have an expectation of privacy, similar to a telephone conversation. There are grey areas around looking into people's windows or doorways, where there may be some visibility from the street.
There doesn't seem to be much difference in the law between a camera and a live observer. If you peek in windows or eavesdrop on others' conversations, it doesn't matter what means you use to do it.
Yes, it's true that MYCIN did reasonably well, but no one has ever been treated solely from a MYCIN diagnosis. The reason is simple: malpractice lawsuits. I don't think it would even be allowed to be used in conjunction with a real human due to the possibility of misuse.
AI is a great field, and we shouldn't generalize too much about the success or failure of every application. However the lessons of these experiments are clear: logic bases are very difficult to construct, and they don't tolerate mistakes well. Having a large number of people putting in their own semantic interpretations will not result in a useful corpus.
In fact I would say that one branch of AI, language parsing, would probably outperform a user-input semantic base by a large margin. For one thing, it would allow new semantic assertions to be created by "re-compiling" web pages as needed.
For instance, if you want to construct a database of businesses with their hours of operation, it would probably be easier to search web pages for patterns like "We're open from {starttime} to {endtime}" than to convince a bunch of webmasters to enter the data for you.
In the 70's and 80's, researchers spent years developing "semantic webs" to represent small domains: block stacking, physics problems, locomotive repair, and, ambitiously, medical diagnosis. These databases of facts and rules were fed through inference engines which would seek to combine them to solve problems.
Despite careful hand-tuning, none of these systems ever achieved any practical use (witness the paperclip guy). Why? Because they're too hard. Getting the data structures to make sense and behave consistently, even in a small system, is too tricky and unreliable. On the web, it's impossible. Humans have a very hard time understanding and agreeing on what data, even "unambiguous" semantic data, means.
The semantics of computer programs, expressed in an unambiguous language, are constantly going wrong, or at least beyond what is intended. The far more complex semantics of real life and the web are going to be much more difficult to manage.
Re:The scale of the German defeat was unnecessary
on
Enemy At The Gates
·
· Score: 2
IIRC, the Germans had no plan to retreat until they figured out that they were encircled, a few days after the first incursions through the German lines. Once they were encircled, retreat was not an option, and breakout and rescue attempts failed. Following that, Hitler issued his orders and promoted the trapped general to field marshal, meaning that he was supposed to kill himself, because no German field marshal had ever been taken prisoner.
My 2 cents on Stalingrad is that the Germans were good at cutting up the countryside with Blitzkrieg attacks and encirclements, but they stretched their supply lines at the same time they were convincing themselves they were invincible. They had trouble holding their supply lines, and sacrificed their tactical advantage by getting into a house-to-house battle.
It's difficult to say why they put everything into attacking the city, but one of the main reasons is that it offered a place to garrison the troops during the winter. The Russians had had some success in pushing back the first year's progress because they fought well in the winter, and German troops were very vulnerable when flushed out of shelter. The Germans needed an overwintering site that was both comfortable and defensible, and the Volga was a significant natural barrier against the Russians to the East.
When I was in Grad School there was a certain amount of folklore about books or movies that had accurate Mathematics in them. To my knowledge there is only one, a movie called "It's My Turn", about a Math professor, played by Jill Somebody. She gives an accurate proof of the Snake theorem during a lecture scene.
Maybe Springer-Verlag should start a film studio - Arnold Schwarzennegger as "The Last Topology Hero", etc.
Don't misunderstand me, I wasn't defending monolithic ORB's, or over-upholstered development environments. In fact, the original goal of my work was to break down the ORB idea into smaller, separate, manageable pieces, and assess how well our legacy stuff (a high-volume website) was fitting into the puzzle. The target architecture that seemed most practical is like your "New Model"; the layers use XML to exchange data, clients are thin (http), and manual coordination of interfaces is sufficient for most uses.
The "object layer" is a design abstraction, and I honestly haven't implemented an ORB ever. Many of the services needed to manage complicated object lifecycles can be supplied by simpler tools, like transaction managers, or cookies. The trick is to know what functionality you want, and compare alternatives.
One thing about Spam and email viruses has always perplexed me: why are they so hard to stop? Humans have no problem recognizing the problem: thousands of identical emails to everyone, whether from a single source, for spam, or to and from random users, for worms.
It's not that hard to calculate a checksum of each message body that goes through a mail or news server. Once a particular checksum value appears, say, 100 times in a short period (or in 10 newsgroups, etc.), you know you have a problem. At this point you could simply warn the user that the same message has hit X number of other people, from Y number of senders, so Joe Schmoe probably did *not* just send her a picture of his naked wife, or you could simply block that checksum until things die down.
RPC, CORBA, etc. and messaging are obviously related, but in some sense it's like comparing sockets and UDP. I was working on this conundrum a year or two ago, and eventually I decided to build a model with separate layers similar to OSI.
You have several goals that you want to serve: reliable delivery, clean interface, type checking, load balancing, crash recovery, extensibility, and so on. If you can lay out the layers so that each goal is handled at some level, without requiring much intervention at a higher level, then your architecture will work.
This breaks the system into layers where each layer has a definite scope. Messaging only cares about the life cycle of each message; call level only cares about the duration of one call/return round trip (based on a single interface), and the object level worries about more persistent things and their lifecycles.
Get a hub dynamo. The Schmidt Nabendynamo is considered to be one of the most efficient ones around; I rode a century last year with mine. Granted it was turned off, but the extra friction is about the same on or off. When it's on it gets 3W AC, and can double to 6W by changing the resistance of the load. I've gotten to where I can feel a slight resistance when it's on, but it's on the order of a percent or two of my energy output.
There are plenty of bike geeks who build electrical devices; the bikecurrent list, which served as a forum for all sorts of bike electronics on cyclery.com, recently died a dot-com death, but you can do a search on that term and find archives, or where it's moved.
Lots of digital camera manufacturers are adding modem interfaces and TCP/IP support to their cameras. Try Polaroid or Ricoh, or go to Google and search for "digital modem camera".
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you've grasped the essentials of quantum philosophy - making statements about things which can't be observed. "Superposition of states" is just a fancy way of saying we don't know (and can't know) which state it's in between interactions. It doesn't mean that reality is that way.
Unfortunately most people don't understand that everything that's not measurable is religion.
Einstein mainly objected to the idea that QM, which is a form of statistical mechanics, is proof that the universe is inherently statistical and non-deterministic. While there's no reason why it couldn't be, there's nothing in QM to sway things one way or another.
The same way a radio picks the "right" frequency out of all possible frequencies. An apparatus is set up which reinforces certain (De Broglie) wave patterns while allowing others to cancel out. When a stable wave pattern arises, the "answer" is embedded in the amplitudes at various spots.
Think of it as a very complicated resonator, which settles very quickly into a stable pattern of motion.
Almost everyone today has flown in an airplane. Many ask the simple question "what makes an airplane fly?" The answer one frequently gets is misleading and often just plain wrong. We hope that the answers provided here will clarify many misconceptions about lift and that you will adopt our explanation when explaining lift to others. We are going to show you that lift is easier to understand if one starts with Newton's laws rather than the Bernoulli principle. We will also show you that the popular explanation that most of us were taught is misleading at best and that lift is due to the wing diverting air down. Most of this diverted air is pulled down from above the wing.
Let us start by defining three descriptions of lift commonly used in textbooks and training manuals. The first we will call the Mathematical Aerodynamics Description of lift, which is used by aeronautical engineers. This description uses complex mathematics and/or computer simulations to calculate the lift of a wing. It often uses a mathematical concept called "circulation" to calculate the acceleration of the air over the wing. Circulation is a measure of the apparent rotation of the air around the wing. While useful for calculations of lift, this description does not lend themselves to an intuitive understanding of flight.
The second description we will call the Popular Description, which is based on the Bernoulli principle. The primary advantage of this description is that it is easy to understand and has been taught for many years. Because of its simplicity, it is used to describe lift in most flight training manuals. The major disadvantage is that it relies on the "principle of equal transit times", or at least on the assumption that because the air must travel farther over the top of the wing it must go faster. This description focuses on the shape of the wing and prevents one from understanding such important phenomena as inverted flight, power, ground effect, and the dependence of lift on the angle of attack of the wing.
The third description, which we are advocating here, we will call the Physical Description of lift. This description of lift is based primarily on Newton's three laws and a phenomenon called the Coanda effect. This description is uniquely useful for understanding the phenomena associated with flight. It is useful for an accurate understanding the relationships in flight, such as how power increases with load or how the stall speed increases with altitude. It is also a useful tool for making rough estimates ("back-of-the-envelope calculations") of lift. The Physical Description of lift is also of great use to a pilot who needs an intuitive understanding of how to fly the airplane.
Sorry, nope.
The curved wing explanation assumes that air wants to reach the trailing edge of the wing at the same time, regardless of whether it went over or under the wing. This is not the case. The air travelling over the wing reaches the trailing edge before the air going under, and the amount of advance is determined by angle of attack, not the camber of the airfoil.
Read some of the websites referenced by other posts in this thread. They explain circulation in more detail, with wind tunnel photos.
Remember that angle of attack is measured from the stagnation point on the front of the airfoil, to the trailing edge. The bottom of a wing can be horizontal, and it can still have a positive angle of attack.
If you bring the top and bottom airstreams together at the same height that they were divided, then there's no lift. K-12 textbooks are woefully off base in explaining that.
I'm not sure what the Coanda effect is, but I believe it's just an expression of the role of viscosity in moving air around. To explain: when a fluid has no viscosity, it tends to flow very easily around sharp edges, etc. and back to its original position, say, after a wing has passed through it. When this happens, no lift, drag, or dynamic forces at all are generated - all the fun goes out of aerodynamics. However when viscosity is introduced, it puts a limit on how easily the fluid can deform to flow around objects - it restricts the velocity gradient between adjacent pieces of air, wing, etc. So when the fluid hits, say, a sharp trailing edge of a wing, it does not flow around infinitely fast and back up the other side to its previous height; it sheds off the edge at a lower point than it started, and a net force is generated.
If you think about it, this is the way just about all of us move air - we know that if we wave a hand through the air, a certain mass of air will not be able to get around the hand, and will have to be dragged or pushed along by it in some way. The same goes with a moving wing.
People have debated this on the net for years, and not without reason. The bernoulli effect got put into textbooks years ago, and everyone was convinced that a wing cross-section was some magical shape that produced lift without drag, or with little drag, and that simpler shapes, like a fan blade, simply didn't have the right stuff to hold up an honest-to-goodness airplane.
The truth is much simpler. Aircraft stay up by accelerating air downwards. The viscosity of air allows it to be pushed down by a flat object held at a positive angle of attack. Any such object will have a net difference in pressure between its top and bottom, referred to as lift (and drag). Making the wing teardrop-shaped makes the flow more laminar and reduces drag, but that's really just streamlining.
Just as many stockbrokers seem to have elaborately printed, worthless stock certificates from things like Chinese railroads, you might want to see about getting your stock issued as a certificate. It may have some aesthetic value, and if you go along with the philosophy of burdening spammers with needless administrative expenses, this is the way to go.
The same goes for worthless dot coms like pets.com. Many of these are still trading at a few cents a share.
You may also be able to get an annual report. These could be real collector's items someday.
The sender is equipped with a dog locked in a box. A radioactive atom, contained in a special measuring apparatus, has a finite probability of decaying and triggering a fatal dose of poison for the dog. Neither the sender nor, more crucially, the SPCA knows whether the dog is dead or alive when the message is sent.
The superposed live and dead dog is then passed through two slits, resulting in an interference pattern, where dead and live dogs reinforce or cancel each other out. This pattern is transmitted via fiber optics to the receiver, who is equipped with a physics book identical to the one possessed by the sender.
The receiver then passes the beam through an apparatus which contains three doors. Behind one of the doors is a goat. Behind another is a brand new car. After the receiver chooses one door, the host opens the door containing the goat.
Now the receiver guesses whether the dog is dead or alive, and if he is correct, he receives a shiny new car and a year's supply of dog food, signifying that the message has been successfully transmitted!
While this method is correct in theory, no one has yet built an apparatus using this method over long distances. However, scientists are confident that these minor details will be filled in shortly.
Finally something worthwhile in this discussion. What they don't teach in physics class is that the part beyond the equations is nothing but interpretation.
Sheldon Goldstein has published some worthwhile papers on QM. He's basically debunked a lot of the "superposition of states" crap, and proved that QM can be deterministic with the usual limits on observation. The gist of the argument is GIGO: no accurate position/momentum to start means no accurate position/momentum at the finish. We don't know the definite trajectories of any particles in the universe, so we can't measure any, since we can't put together an reliable measuring tool without this knowledge. So in fact QM does not mean that the universe is non-deterministic; it just means that we're ignorant of a range of phenomena at the quantum level. Enough said.
You can also try a wireless link to bring the signal to a secure area, and avoid the power drain of an on-board recorder. Most of them work on 12V, same as the camera. Try supercircuits.com for cheap bare-bones analog cameras and wireless links.
X10.com has a "VCR commander" that triggers a vcr record function when an event is received. I forget, but i think it's wireless in the video and possibly the trigger channel, so you could link the alarm or a motion detector to the thing and get it to trigger a home VCR.
Maybe you can trigger it from the airbag too, and avoid lengthy litigation after a crash. You'd need an on-board recorder for that, though.
In the service packs!
From the SDMI press release
There are a lot of myths and urban legends regarding the right to videotape or otherwise record people in public and private situations.
Most of the cases in the US have involved invasion of privacy in some way. The only standard the courts have used is whether a reasonable person could expect privacy in a given situation. For instance, if you're dealing crack on a public street and someone tapes you doing it, there's no expectation of privacy. If you're discussing something quietly on the street with no one around, the courts have decided that you have an expectation of privacy, similar to a telephone conversation. There are grey areas around looking into people's windows or doorways, where there may be some visibility from the street.
There doesn't seem to be much difference in the law between a camera and a live observer. If you peek in windows or eavesdrop on others' conversations, it doesn't matter what means you use to do it.
Yes, it's true that MYCIN did reasonably well, but no one has ever been treated solely from a MYCIN diagnosis. The reason is simple: malpractice lawsuits. I don't think it would even be allowed to be used in conjunction with a real human due to the possibility of misuse.
AI is a great field, and we shouldn't generalize too much about the success or failure of every application. However the lessons of these experiments are clear: logic bases are very difficult to construct, and they don't tolerate mistakes well. Having a large number of people putting in their own semantic interpretations will not result in a useful corpus.
In fact I would say that one branch of AI, language parsing, would probably outperform a user-input semantic base by a large margin. For one thing, it would allow new semantic assertions to be created by "re-compiling" web pages as needed.
For instance, if you want to construct a database of businesses with their hours of operation, it would probably be easier to search web pages for patterns like "We're open from {starttime} to {endtime}" than to convince a bunch of webmasters to enter the data for you.
In the 70's and 80's, researchers spent years developing "semantic webs" to represent small domains: block stacking, physics problems, locomotive repair, and, ambitiously, medical diagnosis. These databases of facts and rules were fed through inference engines which would seek to combine them to solve problems.
Despite careful hand-tuning, none of these systems ever achieved any practical use (witness the paperclip guy). Why? Because they're too hard. Getting the data structures to make sense and behave consistently, even in a small system, is too tricky and unreliable. On the web, it's impossible. Humans have a very hard time understanding and agreeing on what data, even "unambiguous" semantic data, means.
The semantics of computer programs, expressed in an unambiguous language, are constantly going wrong, or at least beyond what is intended. The far more complex semantics of real life and the web are going to be much more difficult to manage.
IIRC, the Germans had no plan to retreat until they figured out that they were encircled, a few days after the first incursions through the German lines. Once they were encircled, retreat was not an option, and breakout and rescue attempts failed. Following that, Hitler issued his orders and promoted the trapped general to field marshal, meaning that he was supposed to kill himself, because no German field marshal had ever been taken prisoner.
My 2 cents on Stalingrad is that the Germans were good at cutting up the countryside with Blitzkrieg attacks and encirclements, but they stretched their supply lines at the same time they were convincing themselves they were invincible. They had trouble holding their supply lines, and sacrificed their tactical advantage by getting into a house-to-house battle.
It's difficult to say why they put everything into attacking the city, but one of the main reasons is that it offered a place to garrison the troops during the winter. The Russians had had some success in pushing back the first year's progress because they fought well in the winter, and German troops were very vulnerable when flushed out of shelter. The Germans needed an overwintering site that was both comfortable and defensible, and the Volga was a significant natural barrier against the Russians to the East.
When I was in Grad School there was a certain amount of folklore about books or movies that had accurate Mathematics in them. To my knowledge there is only one, a movie called "It's My Turn", about a Math professor, played by Jill Somebody. She gives an accurate proof of the Snake theorem during a lecture scene.
Maybe Springer-Verlag should start a film studio - Arnold Schwarzennegger as "The Last Topology Hero", etc.
Don't misunderstand me, I wasn't defending monolithic ORB's, or over-upholstered development environments. In fact, the original goal of my work was to break down the ORB idea into smaller, separate, manageable pieces, and assess how well our legacy stuff (a high-volume website) was fitting into the puzzle. The target architecture that seemed most practical is like your "New Model"; the layers use XML to exchange data, clients are thin (http), and manual coordination of interfaces is sufficient for most uses.
The "object layer" is a design abstraction, and I honestly haven't implemented an ORB ever. Many of the services needed to manage complicated object lifecycles can be supplied by simpler tools, like transaction managers, or cookies. The trick is to know what functionality you want, and compare alternatives.
One thing about Spam and email viruses has always perplexed me: why are they so hard to stop? Humans have no problem recognizing the problem: thousands of identical emails to everyone, whether from a single source, for spam, or to and from random users, for worms.
It's not that hard to calculate a checksum of each message body that goes through a mail or news server. Once a particular checksum value appears, say, 100 times in a short period (or in 10 newsgroups, etc.), you know you have a problem. At this point you could simply warn the user that the same message has hit X number of other people, from Y number of senders, so Joe Schmoe probably did *not* just send her a picture of his naked wife, or you could simply block that checksum until things die down.
Maybe there's something I'm missing here.
The ultimate weapon: a torpedo that makes your teeth fall out.
RPC, CORBA, etc. and messaging are obviously related, but in some sense it's like comparing sockets and UDP. I was working on this conundrum a year or two ago, and eventually I decided to build a model with separate layers similar to OSI.
You have several goals that you want to serve: reliable delivery, clean interface, type checking, load balancing, crash recovery, extensibility, and so on. If you can lay out the layers so that each goal is handled at some level, without requiring much intervention at a higher level, then your architecture will work.
IIRC, this is what I came up with:
object level (eg CORBA, database, web "shopping cart"):
instance/state management (new, destroy, etc.)
persistent connections/sessions/transactions/data
type definition and inheritance
interface (method) definition
call level (eg RPC):
marshalling (based on interface definition)
call/return functionality
object exception delivery (bad params, etc.)
messaging level (eg UDP, message queues):
reliable one-way delivery
performance monitoring (queue sizes, etc.)
network exceptions (eg unreachable host)
queue management - restarting, rehosting, etc.
This breaks the system into layers where each layer has a definite scope. Messaging only cares about the life cycle of each message; call level only cares about the duration of one call/return round trip (based on a single interface), and the object level worries about more persistent things and their lifecycles.
Get a hub dynamo. The Schmidt Nabendynamo is considered to be one of the most efficient ones around; I rode a century last year with mine. Granted it was turned off, but the extra friction is about the same on or off. When it's on it gets 3W AC, and can double to 6W by changing the resistance of the load. I've gotten to where I can feel a slight resistance when it's on, but it's on the order of a percent or two of my energy output.
There are plenty of bike geeks who build electrical devices; the bikecurrent list, which served as a forum for all sorts of bike electronics on cyclery.com, recently died a dot-com death, but you can do a search on that term and find archives, or where it's moved.
Lots of digital camera manufacturers are adding modem interfaces and TCP/IP support to their cameras. Try Polaroid or Ricoh, or go to Google and search for "digital modem camera".