To have hierarchy breaks the Wiki model, as it breeds suspicion. Even in groups with the best of intentions eventually the suspicion will be warranted if one has power over another. Unlike the real world, transgressions in wikis can be undone. In such a case it is better to rely on the sensible majority policing a malicious minority on an equal footing by weight of numbers rather giving special powers that can be abused.
Here in Australia most plans are for so many bits each month. They are my bits as I paid for them. If I choose to use the 480Gbits I have purchased from my ISP for running a P2P protocol that's my business, not Cuban's, my ISP's or anybody else's.
There is something broken with the Internet if people are discussing who gets to control it. Control indicates centralisation and a point of failure. Rather than discussing who gets to control IP addresses and domain names, the discussion should be how do we eliminate these points of weakness and make those who want to have control irrelevant?
While it doesn't hurt to be politically active don't let it become an end in itself. Once the bickering starts the geeks are probably better to leave the politicians to it while getting on with the real job of routing around them.
Are you sure? I think you are under estimating its significance. Anvil Hill is less significant and contains a pile of coal, but its being mined is not as certain as your reasoning would suggest. Rather than drilling in the surrounding area, mining the moon is closer to carving up Uluru itself. I doubt many Australians (or even non-Australians) would let that happen.
Yeah, but this isn't just any rock. It's the most significant rock in human history, from ancient times to now.
Here is a precedent. There is absolutely no question that Uluru deserves protection. It's protected by a World Heritage Order, which puts it in the global crown jewels. What is it? It's a bloody big rock, just like the moon.
The rebuttal is based on the fallacy that without life environmental protection has no merit. If an environment is devoid of life it is still an environment. The land itself is worthy of protection. It's something Australia's aborigines have been pointing out for years, that their land has intrinsic value. Most of the rest of Australia has taken the moon mining viewpoint and desecrated the land in the name of development.
From a purely selfish human point of view there might also come a day when people want to visit that untouched environment.
It will be interesting to monitor these articles if the students don't maintain them once the course has finished. Do they maintain their improved quality over time, or do they eventually get eroded by an army of badly informed editors? I wonder if anyone has ever tried to measure the "half life" of knowledge within Wikipedia? In the absence of a concerted maintenance effort by a dedicated individual does the quality of a typical article increase of does it decay to noise? Sadly my experience with some articles which I was once passionate about, but am less so now, suggests the latter.
Apple isn't the cause of his woes. His real problem is that the Internet and the associated competition are driving the cost of his product towards the incremental cost of production, approximately zero. Artificial monopolistic barriers, such as intellectual property, are no match for the tsunami of the market.
I know this guy though having attended conferences with him. I know he is not a scam artist. I also think he is brainy enough to do this. He is not a fly by nighter but a serious communications theory researcher with a track record. As I've just emailed to my supervisor, "It's not every day a communications theorist makes the mainstream media". John Papandriopoulos is easy to find on google.
Perhaps. As you have pointed out, MIMO relies on a "rich" multipath channel with lots of reflectors. Above 10GHz the channel starts to move towards ray propagation, reducing the amount of multipath in the channel. This might reduce the effectiveness of MIMO. I said "perhaps" because an open plan office might be a special case due to the sheer number of metallic reflectors in range. I gather some research groups are performing the relevant channel measurements, but I haven't seen the results.
I would modify that slightly by saying 60GHz will travel through a typical office partition (with attenuation), so it's slightly better than line of sight (ie. infrared). Bricks walls are out, you might get away with a plasterboard wall. You probably can put a 60GHz access point on the ceiling of an open plan office and get a useful signal to each desk through a combination of propagation through light partitions, reflection and directional antennas. It will save having to wire an open plan office with ethernet. I know this because I was involved in a 60GHz project, that included a propagation study, in 1995. Google for the paper "A HIGH-SPEED WIRELESS LAN", IEEE Micro, 1997.
I say give them the filter. It should be built into every node of the network, so the network flat refuses to transmit Viacom's material, or that of any other copyright holder who wants out of the Internet. Surely a network that will only transmit stuff under a free license would have to be every free software author's dream?
It would also be interesting to know how much energy the Internet saves. For example instead of people flying around they talk on VoIP or have a teleconference. Documents are emailed rather than having to be flown around the world. Music and movies are downloaded rather than people driving to the shops for a disk. Or is the Internet is promoting long distance relationships that otherwise just would not be?
The numbers do suggest that electronic equipment needs to be more efficient.
Your words mirror the direction my thoughts have been moving for several years now. The problems I have been grappling with are how to fund it (I have a family) and how to "safely" do such development without running into legal trouble. So far the best I have come up with is to work a part time job to pay the bills and set up a limited liability company to protect me as I work for it in my unpaid time. My proposed solution is not ideal as I will have to provide my own resources for those two days while wearing a substantial reduction in income. It's not clear that the company will provide all the protection required and resources will be required to run the limited liability company. I am not confident that the numbers add up.
My preferred solution would be to just work for a company that is doing what I want to do (along the lines of what you have said in your post). No such company seems to exist in Sydney, Australia. If I strike out on my own my company might one day be that company, but it is a risk I would prefer not to take. Any suggestions based on your own experience?
It seems that all the interesting engineering jobs involve using technology to invade someone's privacy, creating a patent monopoly on a life saving device, or the meaninglessness of creating a better device for people to say "I'm on the bus" to each other. So what exciting engineering jobs are out there, that will make the world a better place to live in (and can preferably be done from Australia)?
I didn't make it clear that my comment was in the context of counting atoms as a mass standard, not in relation to the fifty microgram change in the current kilogram. For example, take the mass of "n" isolated silicon atoms. Now form chemical bonds between them. How much energy is in those bonds, and what is the mass equivalent of that energy? Is it comparable to the precision of the standard? If so it will have to be accounted for.
The latent heat of vapourisation of Si is 13700J/g Thus at a rough guess the energy in the bonds for 1kg of solid Si is 13.7MJ Now m = E/c^2 = 13.7MJ/(3*10^8m/s)^2 = 1.52*10^-10kg. = 0.15ug. So the mass equivalent of the bonds in 1kg of Si around 0.15ug.
It seems reasonable that a kilogram could be measured with a precision of ten decimal places, so in the worst case of no bonds vs. bonds the energy of the bonds would seem to be significant in a mass definition. In practise it might be a more subtle rearrangement of the bonds, with a lower energy differential, but for high precision comparisons it might still be a significant contributor to the the mass of 1kg of silicon.
Since E=m.c^2, wouldn't the mass of "N" silicon atoms (or of any particle that generates a gravitational or electric field) depend on the configuration of those atoms and their energy states. Yes, it is a tiny uncertainty, but might it be significant?
Not unless flying the Canadian flag is against the law. It wasn't sophisticated enough to break any Canadian laws. There was a Canadian flag on the car and a sticker with an APEC logo which read:
"This vehicle belongs to a member of The Chaser's War on Everything. This dude likes trees and poetry and certain types of carnivorous plants excite him."
Contrary to CNN's official misinformation (or should that be CNNNN?) the "motorcade" was not stopped police. They only got picked up when the fake motorcade stopped outside the Intercontinental Hotel and "Osama" hopped out of the car. If you look at the picture in the SMH Article Osama "Chas
" Bin Laden isn't being pulled from the car by police but leisurely stepping out of his own accord. The doorman is not a cop but one of the Chaser's own crew.
The only crime committed here is to make the NSW Police and their political masters look like idiots.
Combine a mobile phone camera with software to reconstruct a three dimensional object from a sequence of images and you can crack the "password" of anyone you pass on the street.
At AUD467 per disk this will cost AUD1,613,952 (plus computers+net). Even cheaper if you allow for the fact these are retail prices for wholesale quantities. Let's take the startup current of 2A@12V as the worst case power consumption and we end up with a maximum power of 83kW. That's less than 35 domestic heaters (2.4kW ea).
Okay, it's not trivial stringing together 3,456 disks, but it's not exceptional either. It is no bigger in scale than a typical university network. Or just buy a few of the Internet Archive's Petaboxes off the shelf.
The CSIRO project is about determining how many silicon atoms are equivalent in mass to the current standard kilogram. Once that number is established the actual kilogram in Paris is redundant. If it gets lost or destroyed we can reconstruct the kilogram by counting out 'n' silicon atoms. It also means anyone can construct their own kilogram by counting out 'n' silicon atoms, without having to go to Paris to do a comparison.
It is a separate (but related) project to figure out the second part of the project: how to easily count out 'n' silicon atoms, so creating a universally available standard. One way might be to make a silicon sphere, like the CSIRO, but most people don't have the ability to do that.
The analogy holds. The "sellers" still need permission from the owner of the "mall" to sell their wares.
You seem to be arguing that the shoppers and shopkeepers control the mall. This would only be true if (almost) every shopper or shopkeeper boycotted the mall. That would never happen as the mall owner is too smart to boot everyone out of the mall, only the minority whose presence is inconvenient. It doesn't matter if the minority who are kicked out happen to be innocent, as they are just a minority and will not affect the owner's control.
Slashdot Mirror
To have hierarchy breaks the Wiki model, as it breeds suspicion. Even in groups with the best of intentions eventually the suspicion will be warranted if one has power over another. Unlike the real world, transgressions in wikis can be undone. In such a case it is better to rely on the sensible majority policing a malicious minority on an equal footing by weight of numbers rather giving special powers that can be abused.
Here in Australia most plans are for so many bits each month. They are my bits as I paid for them. If I choose to use the 480Gbits I have purchased from my ISP for running a P2P protocol that's my business, not Cuban's, my ISP's or anybody else's.
There is something broken with the Internet if people are discussing who gets to control it. Control indicates centralisation and a point of failure. Rather than discussing who gets to control IP addresses and domain names, the discussion should be how do we eliminate these points of weakness and make those who want to have control irrelevant?
While it doesn't hurt to be politically active don't let it become an end in itself. Once the bickering starts the geeks are probably better to leave the politicians to it while getting on with the real job of routing around them.
Are you sure? I think you are under estimating its significance. Anvil Hill is less significant and contains a pile of coal, but its being mined is not as certain as your reasoning would suggest. Rather than drilling in the surrounding area, mining the moon is closer to carving up Uluru itself. I doubt many Australians (or even non-Australians) would let that happen.
Yeah, but this isn't just any rock. It's the most significant rock in human history, from ancient times to now.
Here is a precedent. There is absolutely no question that Uluru deserves protection. It's protected by a World Heritage Order, which puts it in the global crown jewels. What is it? It's a bloody big rock, just like the moon.
The rebuttal is based on the fallacy that without life environmental protection has no merit. If an environment is devoid of life it is still an environment. The land itself is worthy of protection. It's something Australia's aborigines have been pointing out for years, that their land has intrinsic value. Most of the rest of Australia has taken the moon mining viewpoint and desecrated the land in the name of development.
From a purely selfish human point of view there might also come a day when people want to visit that untouched environment.
It will be interesting to monitor these articles if the students don't maintain them once the course has finished. Do they maintain their improved quality over time, or do they eventually get eroded by an army of badly informed editors? I wonder if anyone has ever tried to measure the "half life" of knowledge within Wikipedia? In the absence of a concerted maintenance effort by a dedicated individual does the quality of a typical article increase of does it decay to noise? Sadly my experience with some articles which I was once passionate about, but am less so now, suggests the latter.
Apple isn't the cause of his woes. His real problem is that the Internet and the associated competition are driving the cost of his product towards the incremental cost of production, approximately zero. Artificial monopolistic barriers, such as intellectual property, are no match for the tsunami of the market.
I know this guy though having attended conferences with him. I know he is not a scam artist. I also think he is brainy enough to do this. He is not a fly by nighter but a serious communications theory researcher with a track record. As I've just emailed to my supervisor, "It's not every day a communications theorist makes the mainstream media". John Papandriopoulos is easy to find on google.
Perhaps. As you have pointed out, MIMO relies on a "rich" multipath channel with lots of reflectors. Above 10GHz the channel starts to move towards ray propagation, reducing the amount of multipath in the channel. This might reduce the effectiveness of MIMO. I said "perhaps" because an open plan office might be a special case due to the sheer number of metallic reflectors in range. I gather some research groups are performing the relevant channel measurements, but I haven't seen the results.
I would modify that slightly by saying 60GHz will travel through a typical office partition (with attenuation), so it's slightly better than line of sight (ie. infrared). Bricks walls are out, you might get away with a plasterboard wall. You probably can put a 60GHz access point on the ceiling of an open plan office and get a useful signal to each desk through a combination of propagation through light partitions, reflection and directional antennas. It will save having to wire an open plan office with ethernet. I know this because I was involved in a 60GHz project, that included a propagation study, in 1995. Google for the paper "A HIGH-SPEED WIRELESS LAN", IEEE Micro, 1997.
I say give them the filter. It should be built into every node of the network, so the network flat refuses to transmit Viacom's material, or that of any other copyright holder who wants out of the Internet. Surely a network that will only transmit stuff under a free license would have to be every free software author's dream?
It would also be interesting to know how much energy the Internet saves. For example instead of people flying around they talk on VoIP or have a teleconference. Documents are emailed rather than having to be flown around the world. Music and movies are downloaded rather than people driving to the shops for a disk. Or is the Internet is promoting long distance relationships that otherwise just would not be?
The numbers do suggest that electronic equipment needs to be more efficient.
Your words mirror the direction my thoughts have been moving for several years now. The problems I have been grappling with are how to fund it (I have a family) and how to "safely" do such development without running into legal trouble. So far the best I have come up with is to work a part time job to pay the bills and set up a limited liability company to protect me as I work for it in my unpaid time. My proposed solution is not ideal as I will have to provide my own resources for those two days while wearing a substantial reduction in income. It's not clear that the company will provide all the protection required and resources will be required to run the limited liability company. I am not confident that the numbers add up.
My preferred solution would be to just work for a company that is doing what I want to do (along the lines of what you have said in your post). No such company seems to exist in Sydney, Australia. If I strike out on my own my company might one day be that company, but it is a risk I would prefer not to take. Any suggestions based on your own experience?
It seems that all the interesting engineering jobs involve using technology to invade someone's privacy, creating a patent monopoly on a life saving device, or the meaninglessness of creating a better device for people to say "I'm on the bus" to each other. So what exciting engineering jobs are out there, that will make the world a better place to live in (and can preferably be done from Australia)?
I didn't make it clear that my comment was in the context of counting atoms as a mass standard, not in relation to the fifty microgram change in the current kilogram. For example, take the mass of "n" isolated silicon atoms. Now form chemical bonds between them. How much energy is in those bonds, and what is the mass equivalent of that energy? Is it comparable to the precision of the standard? If so it will have to be accounted for.
The latent heat of vapourisation of Si is 13700J/g
Thus at a rough guess the energy in the bonds for 1kg of solid Si is 13.7MJ
Now m = E/c^2 = 13.7MJ/(3*10^8m/s)^2 = 1.52*10^-10kg. = 0.15ug.
So the mass equivalent of the bonds in 1kg of Si around 0.15ug.
It seems reasonable that a kilogram could be measured with a precision of ten decimal places, so in the worst case of no bonds vs. bonds the energy of the bonds would seem to be significant in a mass definition. In practise it might be a more subtle rearrangement of the bonds, with a lower energy differential, but for high precision comparisons it might still be a significant contributor to the the mass of 1kg of silicon.
Since E=m.c^2, wouldn't the mass of "N" silicon atoms (or of any particle that generates a gravitational or electric field) depend on the configuration of those atoms and their energy states. Yes, it is a tiny uncertainty, but might it be significant?
Donald Knuth's open letter explains the issues.
Not unless flying the Canadian flag is against the law. It wasn't sophisticated enough to break any Canadian laws. There was a Canadian flag on the car and a sticker with an APEC logo which read:
"This vehicle belongs to a member of The Chaser's War on Everything. This dude likes trees and poetry and certain types of carnivorous plants excite him."
Contrary to CNN's official misinformation (or should that be CNNNN?) the "motorcade" was not stopped police. They only got picked up when the fake motorcade stopped outside the Intercontinental Hotel and "Osama" hopped out of the car. If you look at the picture in the SMH Article Osama "Chas " Bin Laden isn't being pulled from the car by police but leisurely stepping out of his own accord. The doorman is not a cop but one of the Chaser's own crew.
The only crime committed here is to make the NSW Police and their political masters look like idiots.
Dr Evil: Fire up the predictive simulation! We'll know our enemy's every move before they do!
Igor: But Dr. Evil, they have patented predictive simulators and we will be violating their patent.
Dr Evil: Damn. Get out the toy soldiers Igor.
Combine a mobile phone camera with software to reconstruct a three dimensional object from a sequence of images and you can crack the "password" of anyone you pass on the street.
1GB/s * 1 month = 1GB/s * 30 day/month * 24 hour/day * 3600s/hour = 2,592,000 GB.
A big disk (Seagate ST3750640AS) is 750GB.
324,000 GB / 750GB/disk = 3,456 disk.
At AUD467 per disk this will cost AUD1,613,952 (plus computers+net). Even cheaper if you allow for the fact these are retail
prices for wholesale quantities. Let's take the startup current of 2A@12V as the worst case power
consumption and we end up with a maximum power of 83kW. That's less than 35 domestic heaters (2.4kW ea).
Okay, it's not trivial stringing together 3,456 disks, but it's not exceptional either. It is no bigger in
scale than a typical university network. Or just buy a few of the Internet Archive's Petaboxes off the shelf.
The CSIRO project is about determining how many silicon atoms are equivalent in mass to the current standard kilogram. Once that number is established the actual kilogram in Paris is redundant. If it gets lost or destroyed we can reconstruct the kilogram by counting out 'n' silicon atoms. It also means anyone can construct their own kilogram by counting out 'n' silicon atoms, without having to go to Paris to do a comparison.
It is a separate (but related) project to figure out the second part of the project: how to easily count out 'n' silicon atoms, so creating a universally available standard. One way might be to make a silicon sphere, like the CSIRO, but most people don't have the ability to do that.
The analogy holds. The "sellers" still need permission from the owner of the "mall" to sell their wares.
You seem to be arguing that the shoppers and shopkeepers control the mall. This would only be true if (almost) every shopper or shopkeeper boycotted the mall. That would never happen as the mall owner is too smart to boot everyone out of the mall, only the minority whose presence is inconvenient. It doesn't matter if the minority who are kicked out happen to be innocent, as they are just a minority and will not affect the owner's control.