Well, I'm NOT much of a cosmologist. The new results confirm the Large Mixing Angle solution, which puts the first neutrino mass difference at 10^-2 eV. This means that the minimum mass of the second generation nu is 10^-2 eV, which is pretty darn small. As I understand it, this makes neutrinos a few percent of the total universal mass budget, somewhere on the same order as bright matter (i.e. stars): 5% or so. Nothing that will prove a big crunch either way. This has been known for a while.
Of course, this is only the mass _difference_. There's very little direct mass evidence, so the maxixum mass could still be up high enough to be more interesting, but it's viewed as unlikely.
Why do we want to know that the earth goes around the sun instead of vice-versa? It makes absolutely no difference to anything we do on this planet, except the ability to compute _slightly_ more accurate tide tables.
Most people, though, would say that it's better to live in knowledge of our world than ignorance of it, no matter the practical benefit.
As an ex-member of SNO (my name (N. Tagg) is on the papers) as well as a current member of MINOS (the experiment you're reffering to at Fermilab) I can say that this is simply not true; the experiments are complimentary, not exclusionary.
In fact, there is a large quantity of work going on in this field. Current experiments include KamLAND, Borexino, Opera, NuMI-MINOS, Super-Kamiokande (when they finish their repairs in a year or so), K2K (KEK to Super-K), MiniBOONE the new JHF facility, plus a bunch more I'm forgettting.
There are several reasons for all this activity. First, there are at least two different types of oscillaitions. (The naive and over-simplified theory is that there is nu-electron to nu-mu oscillation, and nu-mu to nu-tau oscillation, the first of which is seen by SNO, the second of which is seen by atmosphereic neutrinos and by the beam experiments). There may be a third mode, which implies a new variety of neutrino (nicknamed 'sterile' for various reasons).
In addition, we're looking to prove that our theory about the oscillations is correct; that they really oscillate in the way we think they do (i.e. change back and forth between flavours on a given time scale that is dependent on energy and suchlike). We want to know the exact parameters in the theory, so the theorists have some hard numbers to much on to make better overarching theories. And, there's always the possibility that something entirely new will crop up in these studies.
(A note on that last: modern neutrino detectors were born out of eariler attempts to build proton decay experiments... but the neutrinos kept getting in the way! On the 'don't beat 'em, join 'em' approach, people started looking at the neutrinos themselves with more interest.)
"Most developers agreed that in small communities you can rely on the user base to police itself. But large-scale games with tens of thousands of users logged in at any given time can't be counted on to effectively self-manage. Conclusion? Control the environment."
I would have the thought that the the correct conclusion is: "Have small communities." Current environments work on having a server of some kind, with lots and lots of people that log in. Naturally, there are a lot of dick-heads. I remember many a night spent on Bungie.net or Battle.net having fun, but many more wading through the large numbers of idiodic, foul-mouthed children determined to make everyone else miserable.
Therefore, I think that the techology would be better following the old MUD example: sell the server software for low cost (ahem: open source?) and have lots of little environments develop. MUDs aren't really in vouge anymore, but that's mainly because the technology is dated, not because it's a bad idea. Interactive fiction made the jump to the modern puzzle game; I don't see why MUD games can't make the jump to graphical multiplayer environments.
"By extending facial recognition capabilities to a wireless device, Motorola, Visionics and Wirehound have answered the demands of mobile law enforcement officers"
Yes, I have no doubt that law enforcement officers would like to know who I've just loaned my mobile phone to. But I don't really belive this is something I would like them to be able to do with my phone.
I say this even having had a mobile stolen, along with a (new) laptop (sniff!). I am aware that criminals (i.e. biker gangs in Canada) use mobiles extensively to communicate, and that spying in this way would give the "good guys" a lot more power... but I'm quite happy having their power limited.
Honestly.. who would want to pay for such a "feature"?
In fact, it is just this problem which is important when considering nuclear-anything: what happens in the worst case? For modern, well-designed, ground-based reactors this isn't so bad. (Chernoble is NOT an example of a well-designed modern reactor.) Small reactors like on Subs have the advantage that even if they do crack open, they're (a) not very big, and (b) usually aren't near populated areas.
But if you have one of these babies crack open a few miles up, you can drop radioactive fallout over a pretty impressive area. I haven't looked at the case for the motor alone, but the waste is definately a bad idea.
Even if you got it INTO space, what then? Some more useless satilites to be a hazard to future spacecraft? Or do you want to actually get it into an escape tragectory? That's not nearly so easy as getting into LEO.
And.. it's expensive. Building one-shot rockets to move nuclear waste won't move very much.. and we make a lot of it.
The next supernova is not, of course, known; they are essentially unpredicatable events. The next 'close by' supernova (i.e. detectable with neutrino observatories like SNO ) is likely to be at 10 kilo-Parsecs.. the centre of the galaxy (where most stars in our galaxy are). That is, approximately 31 000 light years.
Time scales are varied, depending on who you ask, but numbers like 20-60 years are quite common. Note that these represent 'mean time to next event', not the real time or most likely time.
Spammers make money, or hope to make money, not from actual sales resulting from spam, but from the EXPECTATION of sales resulting from spam.
Unfortunately, the capitalist society we live it is not ideal in that it is not an _informed_ society. The 'enlightened' part of 'enlightened self-interest' is not always in force.
"Duh... I bet I could make lots of sales if I spam! 100000 email addresses.. at least 1% will have to buy."
(This is probably due to people being unable to comprehend fractions smaller than 1%.)
No, it's not quite that good. By reducing the number of phototubes by 1/2, your energy resolution drops by 1/4 (1/sqrt(N)). However, your noise wall only drops by a factor of 2, so you're left with a much worse signal/noise ratio, and you have to raise your trigger threshold.
Basically, this will kill Super-K's solar neutrino project.. they likely will have to raise their thresholds by several MeV (over their current 5.5 MeV limit). However, their high-energy measurements won't be nearly so hurt; they simply will lose some reconstruction efficiency.
Oh, I forgot to mention: IceCube (and AMANDA) are not really in the same buisiness as Super-K. The really big ice experiments are looking for cosmogenic neutrinos, and very-high energy atmospheric neutrinos, not the same energy band as SK. SK in addition does a lot of work on solar neutrinos and other physics besides; the ice cube is not really in competition... although it is extremely cool. Not to say cold.
--- Nathaniel
Who has worked in Sudbury (SNO) and Minnesota (MINOS) and wants no part of AMANDA (south pole)
Although news has been sketchy, I am hopeful that they had the phototubes insured. (Any other financial cost will be small compared to the PMTs.) Even if they didn't, I think it's not too unlikely that Japan and the US will re-fund the experiment. SK has done some really amazing work, and is committed to a long-term project with KEK (the K2K long-baseline experiment). I can't imagine that they would simply dump this very productive and valuable resource. But then, who am I to predict the whims of politicians?
However, even if money is no object, timeline could be. These 20-inch PMTs are not exactly off-the-shelf items, and Hamamatsu(the company that provides them for SK and many other experiments around the world) has substantial lead times in getting their production lines up. All told, even under the best of conditions, the process could take 2 years, by which time SK will be in severe competition with a lot of other experiments: Borexino, KamLand, MINOS, etc. etc.
They MIGHT use the time to build super-duper-K.. putting a magnet in the water to look for lepton charge sign from atmospheric neutrinos, but that seems a bit farfetched and difficult.
---Nathaniel, messenger of doom
P.S. I call dibs on the SK linac when it gets scraped!
This thing collapsed just hours ago. Remember that work was being done in an underground lab. There are probably no more than 2 dozen people on site (a remote part of Japan) at one time, and they just had their detector implode. Give them some time to figure out what's going on down there. Heck, they might not really understand it for a few weeks. Science is like that.
The chain-reaction-implosion mechanism is a plausable one, but it still requires something to make it happen.. these tubes have been sitting under a lot of hydrostatic pressure (more than during the accident) for years now. Other phototube experiments have been doing similar things, none of which have ever seen this happen.
The failure mode for the tubes is likely to be leackage at the base (the back) which slowly degrades the vacuum inside... no implosion.
There was likely a large pressure change that happened all at once. I'd be looking for a rockburst: a small seizmic event in which the external rock pressure (which is very large) caused the wall to buckle and throw debris.
---Nathaniel, glad it didn't happen to HIS neutrino experiment.
Super-K is not just a hole in the ground (a "lab") but it a detector. These things are not so easily built, and each one is unique.
SNO (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, Ontario, Canada) and the Homestake mine (SD) are both interesting and useful experiments. You are referring to a recent proposal to keep Homestake operating with various new experiments and upgrades.. but these things are not replacements for SK. Each experiment is designed to look at different things. SK has done world-quality work to advance neutrino physics, and their detector is not easily replaced.
Homestake is NOT a replacement.
--Nathaniel, Neutrino Astrophysicist by day,./ and geek by lunch break
Neutrino observatories ARE there to catch supernovae, although this is not their primary reason for existance.
SNO is indeed on the case for supernovae explosions, but the fact of the matter is that one observatory simply isn't enough; because of unvavoidable detector downtimes (maintanence, calibration, equipment failures, instrumental problems, etc etc) you can't run 24/7/365 with these guys. Also important is that one really wants both detectors live: you want verification that there really IS a supernova in progress before you swing the Hubble around to look for it.
Add to that the complimentary advantages of the detectors (angular resolution and high statistics in SK, antineutrino detection and energy resolution in SNO) and you really really don't want SK going down if you're a neutrino astrophysicsist interested in supernovae.
Physics allows projectable timelines? Think again. I'm currently employed on a fairly major project (http://www-numi.fnal.gov:8875) that, when I joined, had a completion date of 2003. Now it's 2005 and counting.
Software and physics have certain similarities (not least of which being that physics requires software development). The essential point is that you don't know how long it will take to do something that you haven't done yet. If you HAVE done it, then you don't need to do it again; all software design (or experimental physics experimentation) is essentially a research endevour, although the research results aren't neccessarly of interest in themselves.
Re:Danger especially with anthrax and anitbiotics.
on
The Hypermedia Hazard
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· Score: 1
Really? Didn't know this. (Yes, I am a doctor, but in particle astrophysics, not medicine.) Still, this doesn't scare me overtly; a few people will be sick. If an virulent airborne flu virus becomes completely immune to 3rd (4th?) generation antibiotics, the death toll could be in the millions.
This is true, as far as it goes. But garbage filters work very badly if they are given insufficient evidence. I could go out and hit web sites right now that would give me evidence of things like ESP, water memory, aliens in Roswell, that the Shrub is smart, etc. Naturally, if I continued to look at other (unbiased or differently biased) sources, I could work out what's correct and what isn't.. I'm not stupid, and I don't believe that most people ARE stupid.
However, this sifting and sorting takes a lot of time. You have to find sources. You have to validate sources. (Does this person have a reputation for making stuff up? Does this organization have a conflict of interest in publishing these scientific results? Is this online community biased strongly towards Open Source?) Then you have to sit and think. If the issue is complex (and there are very few simple issues), then you need to do a lot of thinking.
Now, this is a GOOD thing, but it's not easy, and not everyone can do it for all issues. Far better that we elect groups or individuals to do that filtering for us. And why not pay them for the service? Hence.. the journalist. Not a bad idea in principle.
Too bad there are so many lousy journalistic organizations....
Danger especially with anthrax and anitbiotics.
on
The Hypermedia Hazard
·
· Score: 1
I think perhaps the scariest thing happening in the West right now is what I hear about people attempting to aquire anthrax-effective antibiotics. This is due entirely to uninformed panic.. if people really knew the implications of this, they wouldn't do it, but uniformed panic has driven many to attempting to get this medicine.
For those of you who may not know, antibiotics are very dangerous to take if you're not sick or if you fail to take them in the correct fashion. Bacteria (of all kinds, including anthrax), if not killed off by your medicine, will become bred to be resistant by successive small exposures, ensuring that the antibiotics become useless. The rate at which new antibiotics become developed is slow compared to the rate that baterial strains can become resistant if they get this kind of exposure. (Heck, it's even possible we'll lose this war if we DON'T do stupid things like taking antibiotics we don't need.)
I don't think I'd blame "Hypermedia" for this problem exclusively.. but I'm sure it must be a contributing factor.
The holographic system works, if I understand correctly, by integrating signal over many known paths, similar to a QED-style Langrangian. The number of possible paths for the sound to go must be large in order to 'encrypt' the message with sufficient complexity. One can integrate over many (i.e. an infinite) number of paths.
However, if done in net-space, you have only a small, integer number of paths.. perhaps 10 or 20 at most. This would just mean that you are breaking up your signal into 20 discrete packets that the listener can all find. Then the listener just needs to reconstruct the transmission times for all 20 paths to reconstruct the message. This might be difficult, but not impossible, if we make the necessary assumption that net-space transmission times are predictable.
Re:Paying for _community_ content?
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 1
The problem is: on average, the community content ain't worth a nickel. No one would pay you for the above editorial, I'll bet. (Not that it isn't appreciated of course.)
The fact is that some money must flow. If you don't want to pay, that's OK... just watch the big ads.
Alternatively, we could just allow/. to sell our comments to print magazines and use the proceeds to run the servers. But my bet is that it all winds up on the bargan rack of the Salvation Army store.
My question with regard to open source development is how people get rewarded. First, you need a few full-time people doing the 'benovolent dictator' job if you want a good product. Fair enough; these can be people employed by the service-sector part of the business, and get paid by support fees.
But what about everyone else who contributes? I'm not saying that every time a hacker uses 2 free hours to make the program work on his system and posts a bug fix needs financial reward, but exactly how do we ensure that these dedicated people get food? Way back when, it was the computing departments at universities and other big institutions. Now it seems to be whoever can find the time.. like students, or employees at unrelated institutions.
More and more I'm coming to the opinion that an academic model is a good one for a lot of IT work these days: we fund some public institutions that have mandates to help maintain standards, infrastructure, and good code. A bank of experts who are not answerable in terms of profitable products that fulfull a given market, but rather people who are advancing the cause of good code. Something halfway between a ministry of transportation and a university. Thoughts?
I'm an old mac user. Or was. The problem was, I want my computer for two things:
a) doing physics
b) playing games
I'll leave (b) out of it, but (a) is pretty damned important.. I need a system where I can easily compile some really monolithic, old linux libraries. I need a good FORTRAN compiler. I don't have much money.
I think that there are a lots of fields where this is true: if you're using your computer as something that manipulates numbers, there just isn't software on the Mac side. This is true for a lot of things: if your application is 10% of the market share, and you're on a Mac (10% at the best of times) your are in a measily little 1% of the total population: no support group, no sofware aimed at such a small demographic.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm NOT much of a cosmologist. The new results confirm the Large Mixing Angle solution, which puts the first neutrino mass difference at 10^-2 eV. This means that the minimum mass of the second generation nu is 10^-2 eV, which is pretty darn small. As I understand it, this makes neutrinos a few percent of the total universal mass budget, somewhere on the same order as bright matter (i.e. stars): 5% or so. Nothing that will prove a big crunch either way. This has been known for a while.
Of course, this is only the mass _difference_. There's very little direct mass evidence, so the maxixum mass could still be up high enough to be more interesting, but it's viewed as unlikely.
---Nathaniel
Why do we want to know that the earth goes around the sun instead of vice-versa? It makes absolutely no difference to anything we do on this planet, except the ability to compute _slightly_ more accurate tide tables.
Most people, though, would say that it's better to live in knowledge of our world than ignorance of it, no matter the practical benefit.
--N
As an ex-member of SNO (my name (N. Tagg) is on the papers) as well as a current member of MINOS (the experiment you're reffering to at Fermilab) I can say that this is simply not true; the experiments are complimentary, not exclusionary.
In fact, there is a large quantity of work going on in this field. Current experiments include KamLAND, Borexino, Opera, NuMI-MINOS, Super-Kamiokande (when they finish their repairs in a year or so), K2K (KEK to Super-K), MiniBOONE the new JHF facility, plus a bunch more I'm forgettting.
There are several reasons for all this activity. First, there are at least two different types of oscillaitions. (The naive and over-simplified theory is that there is nu-electron to nu-mu oscillation, and nu-mu to nu-tau oscillation, the first of which is seen by SNO, the second of which is seen by atmosphereic neutrinos and by the beam experiments). There may be a third mode, which implies a new variety of neutrino (nicknamed 'sterile' for various reasons).
In addition, we're looking to prove that our theory about the oscillations is correct; that they really oscillate in the way we think they do (i.e. change back and forth between flavours on a given time scale that is dependent on energy and suchlike). We want to know the exact parameters in the theory, so the theorists have some hard numbers to much on to make better overarching theories. And, there's always the possibility that something entirely new will crop up in these studies.
(A note on that last: modern neutrino detectors were born out of eariler attempts to build proton decay experiments... but the neutrinos kept getting in the way! On the 'don't beat 'em, join 'em' approach, people started looking at the neutrinos themselves with more interest.)
--Nathaniel, prowling his favourite topic.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to identify any work using the word "incentivise" as eloquent.
---Nathaniel
Wishing more English-speaking people spoke English
You mean, you can use the web for something other than entertainment?
./ effect works on the readers as well as the servers
--Nathaniel
who believes the
"Most developers agreed that in small communities you can rely on the user base to police itself. But large-scale games with tens of thousands of users logged in at any given time can't be counted on to effectively self-manage. Conclusion? Control the environment."
I would have the thought that the the correct conclusion is: "Have small communities." Current environments work on having a server of some kind, with lots and lots of people that log in. Naturally, there are a lot of dick-heads. I remember many a night spent on Bungie.net or Battle.net having fun, but many more wading through the large numbers of idiodic, foul-mouthed children determined to make everyone else miserable.
Therefore, I think that the techology would be better following the old MUD example: sell the server software for low cost (ahem: open source?) and have lots of little environments develop. MUDs aren't really in vouge anymore, but that's mainly because the technology is dated, not because it's a bad idea. Interactive fiction made the jump to the modern puzzle game; I don't see why MUD games can't make the jump to graphical multiplayer environments.
---Nathaniel
"By extending facial recognition capabilities to a wireless device, Motorola, Visionics and Wirehound have answered the demands of mobile law enforcement officers"
Yes, I have no doubt that law enforcement officers would like to know who I've just loaned my mobile phone to. But I don't really belive this is something I would like them to be able to do with my phone.
I say this even having had a mobile stolen, along with a (new) laptop (sniff!). I am aware that criminals (i.e. biker gangs in Canada) use mobiles extensively to communicate, and that spying in this way would give the "good guys" a lot more power... but I'm quite happy having their power limited.
Honestly.. who would want to pay for such a "feature"?
---Nathaniel
Off-topic, but here's the big objection to this:
It could blow up. Say, where Challenger did.
In fact, it is just this problem which is important when considering nuclear-anything: what happens in the worst case? For modern, well-designed, ground-based reactors this isn't so bad. (Chernoble is NOT an example of a well-designed modern reactor.) Small reactors like on Subs have the advantage that even if they do crack open, they're (a) not very big, and (b) usually aren't near populated areas.
But if you have one of these babies crack open a few miles up, you can drop radioactive fallout over a pretty impressive area. I haven't looked at the case for the motor alone, but the waste is definately a bad idea.
Even if you got it INTO space, what then? Some more useless satilites to be a hazard to future spacecraft? Or do you want to actually get it into an escape tragectory? That's not nearly so easy as getting into LEO.
And.. it's expensive. Building one-shot rockets to move nuclear waste won't move very much.. and we make a lot of it.
---Nathaniel
The next supernova is not, of course, known; they are essentially unpredicatable events. The next 'close by' supernova (i.e. detectable with neutrino observatories like SNO ) is likely to be at 10 kilo-Parsecs.. the centre of the galaxy (where most stars in our galaxy are). That is, approximately 31 000 light years.
Time scales are varied, depending on who you ask, but numbers like 20-60 years are quite common. Note that these represent 'mean time to next event', not the real time or most likely time.
Spammers make money, or hope to make money, not from actual sales resulting from spam, but from the EXPECTATION of sales resulting from spam.
Unfortunately, the capitalist society we live it is not ideal in that it is not an _informed_ society. The 'enlightened' part of 'enlightened self-interest' is not always in force.
"Duh... I bet I could make lots of sales if I spam! 100000 email addresses.. at least 1% will have to buy."
(This is probably due to people being unable to comprehend fractions smaller than 1%.)
---N
No, it's not quite that good. By reducing the number of phototubes by 1/2, your energy resolution drops by 1/4 (1/sqrt(N)). However, your noise wall only drops by a factor of 2, so you're left with a much worse signal/noise ratio, and you have to raise your trigger threshold.
Basically, this will kill Super-K's solar neutrino project.. they likely will have to raise their thresholds by several MeV (over their current 5.5 MeV limit). However, their high-energy measurements won't be nearly so hurt; they simply will lose some reconstruction efficiency.
Oh, I forgot to mention: IceCube (and AMANDA) are not really in the same buisiness as Super-K. The really big ice experiments are looking for cosmogenic neutrinos, and very-high energy atmospheric neutrinos, not the same energy band as SK. SK in addition does a lot of work on solar neutrinos and other physics besides; the ice cube is not really in competition... although it is extremely cool. Not to say cold.
--- Nathaniel
Who has worked in Sudbury (SNO) and Minnesota (MINOS) and wants no part of AMANDA (south pole)
Although news has been sketchy, I am hopeful that they had the phototubes insured. (Any other financial cost will be small compared to the PMTs.) Even if they didn't, I think it's not too unlikely that Japan and the US will re-fund the experiment. SK has done some really amazing work, and is committed to a long-term project with KEK (the K2K long-baseline experiment). I can't imagine that they would simply dump this very productive and valuable resource. But then, who am I to predict the whims of politicians?
However, even if money is no object, timeline could be. These 20-inch PMTs are not exactly off-the-shelf items, and Hamamatsu(the company that provides them for SK and many other experiments around the world) has substantial lead times in getting their production lines up. All told, even under the best of conditions, the process could take 2 years, by which time SK will be in severe competition with a lot of other experiments: Borexino, KamLand, MINOS, etc. etc.
They MIGHT use the time to build super-duper-K.. putting a magnet in the water to look for lepton charge sign from atmospheric neutrinos, but that seems a bit farfetched and difficult.
---Nathaniel, messenger of doom
P.S. I call dibs on the SK linac when it gets scraped!
This thing collapsed just hours ago. Remember that work was being done in an underground lab. There are probably no more than 2 dozen people on site (a remote part of Japan) at one time, and they just had their detector implode. Give them some time to figure out what's going on down there. Heck, they might not really understand it for a few weeks. Science is like that.
The chain-reaction-implosion mechanism is a plausable one, but it still requires something to make it happen.. these tubes have been sitting under a lot of hydrostatic pressure (more than during the accident) for years now. Other phototube experiments have been doing similar things, none of which have ever seen this happen.
The failure mode for the tubes is likely to be leackage at the base (the back) which slowly degrades the vacuum inside... no implosion.
There was likely a large pressure change that happened all at once. I'd be looking for a rockburst: a small seizmic event in which the external rock pressure (which is very large) caused the wall to buckle and throw debris.
---Nathaniel, glad it didn't happen to HIS neutrino experiment.
Super-K is not just a hole in the ground (a "lab") but it a detector. These things are not so easily built, and each one is unique.
./ and geek by lunch break
SNO (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, Ontario, Canada) and the Homestake mine (SD) are both interesting and useful experiments. You are referring to a recent proposal to keep Homestake operating with various new experiments and upgrades.. but these things are not replacements for SK. Each experiment is designed to look at different things. SK has done world-quality work to advance neutrino physics, and their detector is not easily replaced.
Homestake is NOT a replacement.
--Nathaniel, Neutrino Astrophysicist by day,
Neutrino observatories ARE there to catch supernovae, although this is not their primary reason for existance.
SNO is indeed on the case for supernovae explosions, but the fact of the matter is that one observatory simply isn't enough; because of unvavoidable detector downtimes (maintanence, calibration, equipment failures, instrumental problems, etc etc) you can't run 24/7/365 with these guys. Also important is that one really wants both detectors live: you want verification that there really IS a supernova in progress before you swing the Hubble around to look for it.
Add to that the complimentary advantages of the detectors (angular resolution and high statistics in SK, antineutrino detection and energy resolution in SNO) and you really really don't want SK going down if you're a neutrino astrophysicsist interested in supernovae.
--Nathaniel, recent PhD with SNO
Physics allows projectable timelines? Think again. I'm currently employed on a fairly major project (http://www-numi.fnal.gov:8875) that, when I joined, had a completion date of 2003. Now it's 2005 and counting.
Software and physics have certain similarities (not least of which being that physics requires software development). The essential point is that you don't know how long it will take to do something that you haven't done yet. If you HAVE done it, then you don't need to do it again; all software design (or experimental physics experimentation) is essentially a research endevour, although the research results aren't neccessarly of interest in themselves.
Really? Didn't know this. (Yes, I am a doctor, but in particle astrophysics, not medicine.) Still, this doesn't scare me overtly; a few people will be sick. If an virulent airborne flu virus becomes completely immune to 3rd (4th?) generation antibiotics, the death toll could be in the millions.
This is true, as far as it goes. But garbage filters work very badly if they are given insufficient evidence. I could go out and hit web sites right now that would give me evidence of things like ESP, water memory, aliens in Roswell, that the Shrub is smart, etc. Naturally, if I continued to look at other (unbiased or differently biased) sources, I could work out what's correct and what isn't.. I'm not stupid, and I don't believe that most people ARE stupid.
However, this sifting and sorting takes a lot of time. You have to find sources. You have to validate sources. (Does this person have a reputation for making stuff up? Does this organization have a conflict of interest in publishing these scientific results? Is this online community biased strongly towards Open Source?) Then you have to sit and think. If the issue is complex (and there are very few simple issues), then you need to do a lot of thinking.
Now, this is a GOOD thing, but it's not easy, and not everyone can do it for all issues. Far better that we elect groups or individuals to do that filtering for us. And why not pay them for the service? Hence.. the journalist. Not a bad idea in principle.
Too bad there are so many lousy journalistic organizations....
I think perhaps the scariest thing happening in the West right now is what I hear about people attempting to aquire anthrax-effective antibiotics. This is due entirely to uninformed panic.. if people really knew the implications of this, they wouldn't do it, but uniformed panic has driven many to attempting to get this medicine.
For those of you who may not know, antibiotics are very dangerous to take if you're not sick or if you fail to take them in the correct fashion. Bacteria (of all kinds, including anthrax), if not killed off by your medicine, will become bred to be resistant by successive small exposures, ensuring that the antibiotics become useless. The rate at which new antibiotics become developed is slow compared to the rate that baterial strains can become resistant if they get this kind of exposure. (Heck, it's even possible we'll lose this war if we DON'T do stupid things like taking antibiotics we don't need.)
I don't think I'd blame "Hypermedia" for this problem exclusively.. but I'm sure it must be a contributing factor.
There's more.
The holographic system works, if I understand correctly, by integrating signal over many known paths, similar to a QED-style Langrangian. The number of possible paths for the sound to go must be large in order to 'encrypt' the message with sufficient complexity. One can integrate over many (i.e. an infinite) number of paths.
However, if done in net-space, you have only a small, integer number of paths.. perhaps 10 or 20 at most. This would just mean that you are breaking up your signal into 20 discrete packets that the listener can all find. Then the listener just needs to reconstruct the transmission times for all 20 paths to reconstruct the message. This might be difficult, but not impossible, if we make the necessary assumption that net-space transmission times are predictable.
The problem is: on average, the community content ain't worth a nickel. No one would pay you for the above editorial, I'll bet. (Not that it isn't appreciated of course.)
/. to sell our comments to print magazines and use the proceeds to run the servers. But my bet is that it all winds up on the bargan rack of the Salvation Army store.
The fact is that some money must flow. If you don't want to pay, that's OK... just watch the big ads.
Alternatively, we could just allow
My question with regard to open source development is how people get rewarded. First, you need a few full-time people doing the 'benovolent dictator' job if you want a good product. Fair enough; these can be people employed by the service-sector part of the business, and get paid by support fees.
But what about everyone else who contributes? I'm not saying that every time a hacker uses 2 free hours to make the program work on his system and posts a bug fix needs financial reward, but exactly how do we ensure that these dedicated people get food? Way back when, it was the computing departments at universities and other big institutions. Now it seems to be whoever can find the time.. like students, or employees at unrelated institutions.
More and more I'm coming to the opinion that an academic model is a good one for a lot of IT work these days: we fund some public institutions that have mandates to help maintain standards, infrastructure, and good code. A bank of experts who are not answerable in terms of profitable products that fulfull a given market, but rather people who are advancing the cause of good code. Something halfway between a ministry of transportation and a university. Thoughts?
I'm an old mac user. Or was. The problem was, I want my computer for two things:
a) doing physics
b) playing games
I'll leave (b) out of it, but (a) is pretty damned important.. I need a system where I can easily compile some really monolithic, old linux libraries. I need a good FORTRAN compiler. I don't have much money.
I think that there are a lots of fields where this is true: if you're using your computer as something that manipulates numbers, there just isn't software on the Mac side. This is true for a lot of things: if your application is 10% of the market share, and you're on a Mac (10% at the best of times) your are in a measily little 1% of the total population: no support group, no sofware aimed at such a small demographic.
Not everyone drives. Not even in the motor-happy US.
If an ID card is to be had, why not base it on passports? Kill two birds with one stone.