Cool - that sounds good. Please don't think I'm against the idea of open data. However, it just sounds like it could end up being someting that becomes a requirement for funding without the necessary additional resources being given to scientists that allows them to actually continue acquiring new data. Personally, I'll freely admit to being a little biased in that the issue of open access to publications and peer-reviewed articles seems a much more pressing issue and something that, in a much shorter term, could materially increase the effectiveness of research.
No, I meant your comment is disingenuous. But we'll stop name calling here:)
We will never get "marketing for further funding" from openly publishing raw data. That's not a concern to the average scientist at all. We get funding by getting our data peer reviewed and published in journals and by being able to point to other scientists who are sufficiently impressed with what we do to want to collaborate with us. Bluntly, lay people are not the target for raw data. Naturally there is an obligation to share the results of reseach, especially in publicly funded areas but there are numerous ways of doing that. Frankly, I don't see the merit in just dumping raw data on the web. On the other hand, if someone were to ask me for my data and I could see that they were both genuinely interested and could actually use it then I'd have no problem sharing it (and let me be clear that academic qualifications, or lack of them, would not be a crucial point for that decision), especially if they made an effort to actually contact me to ask about it.
Please don't think I'm trying to be snotty or argumentative with this, but I also don't see how "at all" is an answer to any of my questions - could you explain?
A final problem with opening the data is that there is a host of proprietry data formats used in a lot of scientific research. To make it worse, there is also a tendancy for people to "roll their own" solution when trying to do something novel.
This is a bit of a disingenuous comment. When exactly should the data be put online? Straight away after is it acquired? Then where is the incentive for the scientists who acquired it? After the first few papers on the data are published? Then will it be relevant? Furthermore, data isn't always amenable to analysis without a good knowledge of the equipment that generated it (and not just the general class of equipment - often you need to know the quirks of the specific device). Additional documentation of these quirks would be a significant extra burden for the scientists involved. I'm not saying that no data should ever be opened to the public, nor that that task would be impossible, merely that the "make it open" mantra so popular on slashdot can often ignore the real problems involved in actual implementation.
It's even better than that - there will be a significant increase in the light scattered backwards along the beam-path, so by putting your detection apparatus beside the laser you'll get quite good sensitivity!
For solar neutrinos this would be the case. However, development of a "neutrino spectrometer", a machine that made an accurate estimate of the energy of a neutrino would allow the speed be calibrated. If a burst of neutrinos was detected from a source at a known distance, then the delay between the initial higher energy neutrinos and the arrival of later neutrinos could be measured. A source sufficiently bright (to allow a detectable flux of neutrinos at our detector) and sufficiently far away (to allow this dispersion to occur) would allow such a small velocity difference be calculated.
And for those who say it cant be done, similar effects in the x-ray spectrum allow the refractive index of intergalactic space be measured. (Or theoretically allow it to be done - this was a question on one of our physics papers, never found out whether anyone has actually done it!)
If you read more on the site you will see that these people arent planning an engine which uses antimatter as the sole form of propulsion. A slightly better description is "antimatter catalysed fusion". A relatively small amount of antimatter (for second generation engines capable of interstellar travel this would be some micrograms - still many times more than the worlds current yearly production) is used as a catalyst to initiate fusion in lithium hydride pellets (this is the same fuel used in some thermonuclear weapons). The pellets form a plasma (superheated, ionised gas) and it is this plasma which will form the reaction mass. A couple of points to note:
The relatively low amount of antimatter used means that, should something go wrong there
would be a big explosion, but not the planet devastation that some people seem to be thinking of (we are quite a bit away from strategic am weapons, but probably closer to tactical ones than most people would like to think). It would most likely resemble an unusually efficient explosion of a very large conventional rocket.
The thrust generated will be uprecedented in the use of fuel efficiently. As an example, the space shuttle main engines have a specific impulse (effectively a measure of "bang for your buck", substituting "weight of fuel" for "buck") of 452s while the test engine for an antimatter system would have a specific impulse of over 5000s!
According to sections lifted from the Privacy Policy for Napster, they will:
"We also ask you after registration if you would like Napster to scan your hard drive(s) for material that you would like to share with the Napster community. This scan, of course, is optional, and you choose which directories you would like to share with other users.....
In addition to information on your Internet connection, each time you login to one of our servers, the Napster service collects your user name, connection speed and the names and location of the files you have chosen to make available. All of this information is publicly displayed and/or available to any user of the Napster service, and may be recorded by any other user who chooses to do so, or by Napster"
In signing up for Napster, don't you agree to these conditions. If so, why the brouhaha about them scanning file names. It's not like they didn't SAY they were going to do so.
Course, if you're _only_ getting copyrighted material, then you might have a problem with this...
BTW. Just being Devil's Advocate here. Personally, I've gone out and bought more CD's after listening to the artists on MP3 that I would have without such a test-drive. When I still had broadband I regularly tried out stuff by artists and bought the stuff I liked.
Re:I'm sure this is all wrong
on
Plastic Valley?
·
· Score: 1
Um, printer cables (the ones that go to the print head from the main pcb in the printer)? Plastic and metal and pretty flexible. A big goal isn't to have a scrunchable computer, just a more durable one.
Have to agree to your point on Gallium Arsenide though - was my first reaction, I mean they only just got silicon lasing and they reckon it's the best semiconductor?!?
Maybe I'm reading him wrong, but Katz seems to be implying that writers who publish on the net somehow share a relationship with their readers which is different from those who publish purely in the print media. This simply isn't true. As an example of a shocking revelation in a book, read Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried", a book which recounts some of the author's experiences of Vietnam. In the middle of one particularly gruesome encounter the author lets the reader into a secret. I won't spoil it by telling here, but it is worth a read. Fact is, authors have been aware of their readers in this way for a long time; when I first started reading some of Wells' (spelling?) work I was somewhat unsettled by the way much of the narration formed a kind of monologue, with the protagonist directly addressing the reader. Used to more "modern" fiction, I simply hadn't encountered this before. Yet, without a trace of irony, we find people like Katz referrring to these techniques as if they are cutting edge and a product purely of the internet age. Face it Jon; the beauty of many sonnets is the way the poet uses the strict rules. We don't need "interactivity" or "bottom-up" business rules for writers to astound us and amuse us with their imagination and word-craft.
If anyone was reading the earlier story on nanotubes as heat sinks they will have seen one point that doesn't seem to be addressed here. Individual carbon nanotubes have an extremely high Young's Modulus, but as they are ony weakly bonded to each other the bulk material is relatively weak. Hence, one of the technologies necessary will be some way of cross-linking individual tubes without compromising their strength. As we are still only really working in lab (ie small) quantities of pure nanotubes, I wouldn't hold your breath too much!
Oh, and some posters are wondering what would happen if the elevator broke. The bit beneath the break will fall, with the rest lifing off and going into a different orbit (probably higher, but it's after lunch here and brain isn't fully in gear!!)
Not necessarily. I'm at college and so my computer is in my room. At night the fan keeps me awake and I turn off the computer. No matter what os I use the machine is gonna be booted once a day.
Seriously guys, it's comments like this that contribute to the belief that/.ers are all rabid zealots.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool - that sounds good. Please don't think I'm against the idea of open data. However, it just sounds like it could end up being someting that becomes a requirement for funding without the necessary additional resources being given to scientists that allows them to actually continue acquiring new data. Personally, I'll freely admit to being a little biased in that the issue of open access to publications and peer-reviewed articles seems a much more pressing issue and something that, in a much shorter term, could materially increase the effectiveness of research.
No, I meant your comment is disingenuous. But we'll stop name calling here :)
We will never get "marketing for further funding" from openly publishing raw data. That's not a concern to the average scientist at all. We get funding by getting our data peer reviewed and published in journals and by being able to point to other scientists who are sufficiently impressed with what we do to want to collaborate with us. Bluntly, lay people are not the target for raw data. Naturally there is an obligation to share the results of reseach, especially in publicly funded areas but there are numerous ways of doing that. Frankly, I don't see the merit in just dumping raw data on the web. On the other hand, if someone were to ask me for my data and I could see that they were both genuinely interested and could actually use it then I'd have no problem sharing it (and let me be clear that academic qualifications, or lack of them, would not be a crucial point for that decision), especially if they made an effort to actually contact me to ask about it.
Please don't think I'm trying to be snotty or argumentative with this, but I also don't see how "at all" is an answer to any of my questions - could you explain?
A final problem with opening the data is that there is a host of proprietry data formats used in a lot of scientific research. To make it worse, there is also a tendancy for people to "roll their own" solution when trying to do something novel.
This is a bit of a disingenuous comment. When exactly should the data be put online? Straight away after is it acquired? Then where is the incentive for the scientists who acquired it? After the first few papers on the data are published? Then will it be relevant? Furthermore, data isn't always amenable to analysis without a good knowledge of the equipment that generated it (and not just the general class of equipment - often you need to know the quirks of the specific device). Additional documentation of these quirks would be a significant extra burden for the scientists involved. I'm not saying that no data should ever be opened to the public, nor that that task would be impossible, merely that the "make it open" mantra so popular on slashdot can often ignore the real problems involved in actual implementation.
It's even better than that - there will be a significant increase in the light scattered backwards along the beam-path, so by putting your detection apparatus beside the laser you'll get quite good sensitivity!
Notice how few Irish people speak Irish from day to day?
For solar neutrinos this would be the case. However, development of a "neutrino spectrometer", a machine that made an accurate estimate of the energy of a neutrino would allow the speed be calibrated. If a burst of neutrinos was detected from a source at a known distance, then the delay between the initial higher energy neutrinos and the arrival of later neutrinos could be measured. A source sufficiently bright (to allow a detectable flux of neutrinos at our detector) and sufficiently far away (to allow this dispersion to occur) would allow such a small velocity difference be calculated. And for those who say it cant be done, similar effects in the x-ray spectrum allow the refractive index of intergalactic space be measured. (Or theoretically allow it to be done - this was a question on one of our physics papers, never found out whether anyone has actually done it!)
According to sections lifted from the Privacy Policy for Napster, they will:
"We also ask you after registration if you would like Napster to scan your hard drive(s) for material that you would like to share with the Napster community. This scan, of course, is optional, and you choose which directories you would like to share with other users.....
In addition to information on your Internet connection, each time you login to one of our servers, the Napster service collects your user name, connection speed and the names and location of the files you have chosen to make available. All of this information is publicly displayed and/or available to any user of the Napster service, and may be recorded by any other user who chooses to do so, or by Napster"
In signing up for Napster, don't you agree to these conditions. If so, why the brouhaha about them scanning file names. It's not like they didn't SAY they were going to do so.
Course, if you're _only_ getting copyrighted material, then you might have a problem with this...
BTW. Just being Devil's Advocate here. Personally, I've gone out and bought more CD's after listening to the artists on MP3 that I would have without such a test-drive. When I still had broadband I regularly tried out stuff by artists and bought the stuff I liked.
Um, printer cables (the ones that go to the print head from the main pcb in the printer)? Plastic and metal and pretty flexible. A big goal isn't to have a scrunchable computer, just a more durable one.
Have to agree to your point on Gallium Arsenide though - was my first reaction, I mean they only just got silicon lasing and they reckon it's the best semiconductor?!?
Maybe I'm reading him wrong, but Katz seems to be implying that writers who publish on the net somehow share a relationship with their readers which is different from those who publish purely in the print media. This simply isn't true. As an example of a shocking revelation in a book, read Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried", a book which recounts some of the author's experiences of Vietnam. In the middle of one particularly gruesome encounter the author lets the reader into a secret. I won't spoil it by telling here, but it is worth a read. Fact is, authors have been aware of their readers in this way for a long time; when I first started reading some of Wells' (spelling?) work I was somewhat unsettled by the way much of the narration formed a kind of monologue, with the protagonist directly addressing the reader. Used to more "modern" fiction, I simply hadn't encountered this before. Yet, without a trace of irony, we find people like Katz referrring to these techniques as if they are cutting edge and a product purely of the internet age. Face it Jon; the beauty of many sonnets is the way the poet uses the strict rules. We don't need "interactivity" or "bottom-up" business rules for writers to astound us and amuse us with their imagination and word-craft.
If anyone was reading the earlier story on nanotubes as heat sinks they will have seen one point that doesn't seem to be addressed here. Individual carbon nanotubes have an extremely high Young's Modulus, but as they are ony weakly bonded to each other the bulk material is relatively weak. Hence, one of the technologies necessary will be some way of cross-linking individual tubes without compromising their strength. As we are still only really working in lab (ie small) quantities of pure nanotubes, I wouldn't hold your breath too much!
Oh, and some posters are wondering what would happen if the elevator broke. The bit beneath the break will fall, with the rest lifing off and going into a different orbit (probably higher, but it's after lunch here and brain isn't fully in gear!!)
Not necessarily. I'm at college and so my computer is in my room. At night the fan keeps me awake and I turn off the computer. No matter what os I use the machine is gonna be booted once a day.
/.ers are all rabid zealots.
Seriously guys, it's comments like this that contribute to the belief that
I mean, if there's a decent demo out, ppl will use that.
;)
However the advantage of this scheme might be to let people try stuff and see how well it works with their hardware...
It's not as if they are gonna be making _all_ games that way. However, give it a couple of years..