Right up until it was demonstrated, the scientific consensus was that heavier than air flight was impossible. A lot of scholarly work purported to 'prove' this statement. Those who promoted the notion of human flight were generally seen as crackpots, and a lot of them were crackpots. But in the end, we did achieve flight, and in a sense, the crackpots were right.
This claim triggers my bullshit alarm. You mean that scientific consensus denied the existance of birds?
Two other flaws in Kurzweil's claims: First, his view of the socio-technical aspects of technological innovation are entirely one-way. I've not seen him address the problem that such advances in power are only sustainable as long as there is a market for them. In the case of many other technologies such as the internal combustion engine, cooling systems, and aviation, advances in power and capacity tapered off due to a lack of a strong market demand.
The second flaw hinted by the first, he seems to play fast and loose with his definitions of complexity and rate of innovation.
He isn't trying to replace your PC, he's trying to explain why companies just aren't developing PC software anymore.
All the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet. (Games are one of the big exceptions, but even PC games these days have to use the Internet in some way to be commercially viable.)
Ahem. According to the Forbes piece on Ballmer currently on the newstand, Office and Windows contribute %140 of Microsoft's profits, including covering over the multi-billion dollar losses from games and internet services. Sun may not be making money on PC software, but MS certainly is.
I think where Graham gets it wrong is that with many of these applications, the client does matter. Apple's win with iTunes involved controlling both the server and the client.
I think that what he forgets is there are entire economies of creative works that don't depend on collecting the five cents in royalties on every copy. I get a grant from the government to do some research. I get a grant from a school system to design a course. I a contract to create some materials.
Nobody sees my work until I've been paid for my time. I don't care about collecting royalties because by the time anything makes it out into the world, I've moved on to the next project.
Ahem. First: IT IS A LICENSE. Just like the GPL, the MPL, the BSD license and ten thousand others. It.Is.A.License. Which means that I can release my work, explicitly tell people what they can do with it, and under what terms.
He means actual distribution. Fair use covers education, criticism, and parody. It doesn't cover "copying the book to people for promotional purposes, hacking excerpts to show the insides, or creating copies to publish."
It should also be noted that "fair use" in regards to education can be tricky and fickle. How much of a work tips the scale from "fair use" to "infringement?" It depends a lot on what type of media you are planning on using in the classroom.
The mistake in this (which I keep pointing out over and over again) is that it assumes that people who are too lazy to use hierarchial file folders as meta data for the last 25 years, will be willing to tag files with metadata for the next 25 years.
The second problem is that files have been in databases since the beginning of file systems.
That is not to say that keyword searching is not going to be a good thing for file management. Having given up on a full-text index of my home directory, I'm not convinced that it will result in less work, or more adept file management. Searching through folders is likely to be replaced by repeated attempts at "search engine fu", entering multiple keyword combinations to hit the sweet spot of 5-10 relevant hits as opposed to 100 false positives, no files at all. The task of putting files in folders is likely to be replaced by tagging files with meta-data. This will be especially important for multimedia files given that your camera has no idea if it is taking a picture of the Lincoln Memorial, or Aunt Bertha.
I won't argue that he can tell a good story but his pace and directing leaves much to be desired in the first trilogy.
Bingo. Half of the whole drama of Anakin's fall (and redeption at the end of Jedi) depends on his love for Padme. However, Anakin and Padme have all the romantic chemestry of two wet dishrags hung on the same towel. After the first love scene, I used the later love scenes to get refils on popcorn, or tried to restrain myself from audibly groaning from the bad dialog.
In the case of "droids vs clones", who really cares how many were killed on each side because more could always be wheeled on - the first trilogy turned warfare into something very sterile and remote whereas in the second trilogy we saw and felt genuine loss, whether it was an X-Wing pilot, Hoth infantryman or an Ewok.
Exactly. And is it just me, or is there something really disturbing at how casually the Jedi and Sith treat the clones and droids as disposable? There is a bit of cognitive dissonance there in that with 6 movies building up R2 and C3PO as characters with personalities and perhaps even emotion, that we see mass faceless carnage.
After 20 years of working around this problem, and we still have not figured it out yet.
Any cryptosystem that depends on the human ability to remember multiple passwords consisting of more than 8 random characters is broken. It's about time we realized this and moved on to thinking about alternatives.
One final thing to note about your idea - gravity affects electromagnetic radiation, and hence it's affecting magnetic fields. Ever heard of gravitational lensing? Ever heard the statement that the event horizon is the point after which "even light can't excape"? It's not as simple as trying to create a bigger force, as the gravity of the black hole itself would be distorting the magnetic field you are trying to create.
Actually, a subtle distinction is that gravity wouldn't be distorting the magnetic field, but the space-time through which the magnetic field travels. The basic implication of General and Special Relativity is that light always travels a straight line and a constant speed through space, (from the perspective of the photon), it's just that everything else is warped.
Assuming that you were not ripped apart by tidal forces, it might appear to work normally. However, our magnetic astronaut would be just running in place.
Imagine if you will, if the user didn't have any concept of where their files were. All they do is create them and save them. When they want a file they just search for it. The result? The computer has just become that much more simple to the every day user.
My skepticism in regards to this is that it is based on the assumption that users who balk at putting related files into a folder, will be willing to tag files with consistant keywords!
You can't get hold of the propietary, extended code for windows networking to fix the operatability problem without NDA etc. You can only guess the BSD code up to the moment of forking. After the fork point, the code has been tweaked and closed and used to build a system that tries to lock you in forever after. That's the kind of danger the GPL protects you against.
Not really. The existence of a BSD reference standard for Kerberos may have made such a fork easier to produce, but the GPL does not prevent a company from adding incompatible extensions to a protocol. A company can always start with their own clean-room implementation. Blaiming the extension of Kerberos protocol onto the license of one existing implementation rather than the predatory actions of a company that has also sought to "embrace and extend," HTML, SMTP, and SQL seems a bit odd.
Secondly, I would argue that if you look at the history of Kerberos, that the MIT license did much more good than harm. The GPL was only recently released when Kerberos was developed, and the LGPL, probably a more appropriate license did not exist. At the time, there were thousands of people using plain-text passwords transmitted over insecure networks. The MIT license permitted incorporation of Kerberos code into Solaris, AIX, and HPUX (GNU/Linux did not exist either), and clients for Macintosh and Windows. Given the need to rapidly standardize on a secure login protocol, releasing under the MIT license rather than a more restrictive license was a good choice.
I think we could use a little context here. Gorman had written an article. for the LATimes questioning the value of Google's search engine for books (as contrasted with say spending the money on a library). The position of the article is that information in context (i.e. in a book written by a researcher) is worth far less (did you mean more?) to someone doing research than a far greater quantity of facts without the organizational structure of a book.
I find this to be a very claim to argue against. For example, while I can pick up Python in a Nutshell or The Publication Manual of the APA and use it as a random-access document, I can't do the same with something like Stephen Pinker's, How the Mind Works, or Erik Larson's Devil in the White City (to pick four books visible from my desk.) Writers don't write 400 pages just for fun, they write 400 pages because it takes 400 pages to present a detalied and clear argument. If you drop a chapter here and there, you might find the conclusions incomprehensible, (or worse, think you understand the conclusions while skipping important caveats.)
I think his point about chopping up long-form works into random access paragraphs is dead on. I've recently found myself so frustrated with trying to master R from the massive number of poorly interconnected manual pages that come with that particular bit of software that I went out and bought a book that went step by step starting with basic syntax through complex data analysis. Much of the blogosphere's anti-literary attacks are not just about medium, but about genre. And honestly, print still rules for the long-form work.
Blogging proposes a very democratic model of information evaluation that any intelligent person given access to the information will be able to derive the correct conclusions quickly and easily. The classic approach argues that a guided program of study is highly advisable prior deviling into raw sources of information. In feeds in which you are an expert which approach do you think is more correct?
I don't find this to be the case at all. To start with, very few blogs offer access to primary sources. Instead, what is most typically the case is that blogs are simply collecting references to secondary or tertiary sources. The UK publishes census data, Roger Smith discoveres something interesting in census data, Roger Smith publishes in trade journal, New Scientist reads paper and gets quote from Roger Smith, 500 blogs link to New Scientist and each other swamping access to the data. Perhaps two will actually read the reviewed paper and realize that New Scientist was a bit misleading, and it's a rare year when one will actually look at the data and repeat the analysis to see if Roger Smith got it wrong. In the end, what we have is a room full of monkies gossiping about what some other monkey has said about a reporter's summary of a technical article about some actual data.
It would be different if blogs were actually about information but 99% of them are about hearsay and rumor. The problem is that blogs are a piss-poor medium for transmitting information rarely containing something better than an abstract. The dataset I'm working with runs over 1,000 pages. Even condensing that down to a summary is going to take most of the next 6 months, and I don't know yet if I'm going to have what Gorman considers important, knowledge.
About a decade ago I considered creating a parody of the WWW consisting of a large number of pages that do nothing other than link to other pages, that do nothing other than link to other content free pages. It seems the blogging community has created this for me, although instead of no content, we have an overabundance of poorly informed opinion about the opinions of other people.
What I got out of it is that the president of the ALA is afraid that his way of life and his preferred methods af acquiring information are becoming less relevant, and rather than changing the way he and his association do business, he figures he'll stand up and mock the people who are changing things in hope that others wil listen. Nice try, man.
I think that if you really believe that librarians or the author of this piece is sitting still as technology moves forward, that you are perhaps part of the problem.
What I read is a guy who is quite probably justly ticked at having been misread by a group of people who only read half of what he had to say, and who probably know less that half of what is necessary to talk about the subject. His critique of the limitations of google as a medium by which to get knowledge (as opposed to just data) is accurate, insightful, and to the point, and his characterization of the responses from people who hype blogging as the new medium is equally accurate, insightful and to the point.
1: The DWE consisted of two modules. One on Huygens, and one on Cassini. Without the activation of the Huygens module, we would have had no data for earth-based telescopes to detect.
2: The DWE carrier signal did double duty as a channel for image transmission. Not only did the receiver screw-up result in loss of DWE data, but it also resulted in the loss of 350 images as well.
3: Reception by Earth-based radio telescopes was uncertain at the time the DWE was designed. In addition, at the time the DWE was developed, it was thought that Earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect one axis of motion. The second axis of motion would have to come from the Cassini data.
As someone else pointed out. The doppler data we got on Earth depended on the working ultra-stable oscilator on Huygens. However, there are some good reasons why it would have been nice for it's twin to be working on Cassini.
1: The two USOs were designed and calibrated to operate on the same frequency with a high degree of precision. The lack of a similarly calibrated USO on Earth adds a bit of error to the measurements.
2: Signal strength and doppler shifts measured by Cassini would have been larger, probably resulting in greater precision.
3: 20 minutes of the Earth-based observation must be provided by different telescopes. Any time you change insturments, you add more error.
Of course, something is better than nothing. But it looks like the Earth-based doppler measurements are less precise by about three orders of magnitude. (1km vs. 1m error in position.) That's a heck of a loss if you wanted to know more about the winds and atmosphere.
So basically what they are saying is they should have used the space for some other experiment?
Not really. Cassini would have received a stronger signal, and the changes in relative motion between Huygens and Cassini would have resulted in larger doppler shifts. This would have improved the precision and/or accuracy of the measurements. In addition one of the features of the DWE is the fact that the two oscilators were designed and calibrated to be extremely close to each other in frequency. Without a similar matched oscilator on the ground, there is another possible source for error. For technical details you might see the actual description of the insturment package. A third problem is that 20 minutes of the doppler data is missing. Any time you have to change insturments in the middle of an experiment, you have another source of error to account for.
In addition, one of the things that is really central to science is independent confirmation of results. It is likely that doppler analysis of the ground-based telescopes would have been done anyway. But the results would have been quite a bit stronger with the missing Cassini data. The fact that we have some data about wind speed as opposed to no data is a good thing, but it certainly is not an ideal outcome.
Huygens was designed to transmit on two data channels to Cassini. Both transmitters on Huygens worked successfully. However, the receiver for channel A on Cassini wasn't turned on.
I don't think it is quite that amazing. Radio telescopes appear to have a good enough resolution to image details of radio sources in remote galaxies. Identifying the relative position of an active source in our solar system would seem to be a less complex problem.
You're right, what you are saying is bullshit. I am not using Windows, so how do I benefit? I'd have benefited if MS fixed the bugs and contributed the fixes back to the BSD community. GPL would not have allowed MS to just take without giving anything back and that's exactly the reason why Microsoft hates GPL so much.
Just as a matter of fact, it is not clear as to how much of the TCP/IP stack in Windows comes from BSD. At least some analysis suggests that a complete rewrite occured somewhere down the line.
But, the big assumption you make, and the original author makes, is that Microsoft would touch GPL code with a 10-foot pole. Lets get one thing out of the way here. Microsoft is not interested in releasing source code. If they didn't adopt a BSD stack, they would buy or create their own stack. Or have tried something similar to IBM in the early days of networking and create their own incompatible protocol.
The entire point of releasing reference implementations for a given protocol is to facilitate wide adoption. For example, it is good to look at the history of Kerberos. At the time Kerberos was finalized in 1990, linux did not exist, BSD was mired in legal problems, the GPL had not been widely adopted, the LGPL did not exist, and pretty much the entire internet relied on plain-text passwords over insecure channels. The MIT license enabled the adoption of Kerberos by dozens of vendors. The MIT license did exactily what it was supposed to do, facilitate the wide-spread adoption of a secure authentication protocol. Likewise, the BSD TCP/IP stack (which also pre-dates both Linux and the GPL) helped to facilitate the widespread adoption of TCP/IP as a networking standard over competing standards.
The counterargument is usually something as simple-minded as "but proprietary software package X does Y, which I like, and there is no free alternative". Forget theory for a moment, the countervailing free software argument is empirical. As the free software movement continues to gain momementum, the number of such examples continues to diminish....
Certainly that is the case. However, what this article is trying to address is what do you do until the this vaporware of free software becomes available? One example of this is an intelligent bibliographic citation system within OpenOffice. The current bibliographic functions for open office only work for a few citation styles, and don't work for the citation styles used by a large number of academic departments and publications. Although quite a bit of work is being spent trying to improve the OpenOffice.org bibliographic system, it is still vaporware that is quite a bit away from being implemented. Should a user who finds that this feature is something that saves hours of time in the production of manuscripts write it off as a matter of "convenience?"
Well, I don't think that you really need to do eye damage in order to be a nusance. There have been experiments at developing a laser for stopping runaway drivers by scattering a laser off the windshield rendering it impossible for the driver to see through the glare. (The laser in question seems to be a bit beefier that your cat toy pointer.)
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Right up until it was demonstrated, the scientific consensus was that heavier than air flight was impossible. A lot of scholarly work purported to 'prove' this statement. Those who promoted the notion of human flight were generally seen as crackpots, and a lot of them were crackpots. But in the end, we did achieve flight, and in a sense, the crackpots were right.
This claim triggers my bullshit alarm. You mean that scientific consensus denied the existance of birds?
Two other flaws in Kurzweil's claims:
First, his view of the socio-technical aspects of technological innovation are entirely one-way. I've not seen him address the problem that such advances in power are only sustainable as long as there is a market for them. In the case of many other technologies such as the internal combustion engine, cooling systems, and aviation, advances in power and capacity tapered off due to a lack of a strong market demand.
The second flaw hinted by the first, he seems to play fast and loose with his definitions of complexity and rate of innovation.
He isn't trying to replace your PC, he's trying to explain why companies just aren't developing PC software anymore.
All the revenue-generating applications these days are on the Internet. (Games are one of the big exceptions, but even PC games these days have to use the Internet in some way to be commercially viable.)
Ahem. According to the Forbes piece on Ballmer currently on the newstand, Office and Windows contribute %140 of Microsoft's profits, including covering over the multi-billion dollar losses from games and internet services. Sun may not be making money on PC software, but MS certainly is.
I think where Graham gets it wrong is that with many of these applications, the client does matter. Apple's win with iTunes involved controlling both the server and the client.
I think that what he forgets is there are entire economies of creative works that don't depend on collecting the five cents in royalties on every copy. I get a grant from the government to do some research. I get a grant from a school system to design a course. I a contract to create some materials.
Nobody sees my work until I've been paid for my time. I don't care about collecting royalties because by the time anything makes it out into the world, I've moved on to the next project.
Are there any theories out there regarding how genes are added or subtracted over time?
Obvious answer, yes.
And just like the boilerplate Ziff-Davis license:
He means actual distribution. Fair use covers education, criticism, and parody. It doesn't cover "copying the book to people for promotional purposes, hacking excerpts to show the insides, or creating copies to publish."
It should also be noted that "fair use" in regards to education can be tricky and fickle. How much of a work tips the scale from "fair use" to "infringement?" It depends a lot on what type of media you are planning on using in the classroom.
I thought the point of a "technological singularity" was to create a market peddlers of a new geek religion.
The mistake in this (which I keep pointing out over and over again) is that it assumes that people who are too lazy to use hierarchial file folders as meta data for the last 25 years, will be willing to tag files with metadata for the next 25 years.
The second problem is that files have been in databases since the beginning of file systems.
That is not to say that keyword searching is not going to be a good thing for file management. Having given up on a full-text index of my home directory, I'm not convinced that it will result in less work, or more adept file management. Searching through folders is likely to be replaced by repeated attempts at "search engine fu", entering multiple keyword combinations to hit the sweet spot of 5-10 relevant hits as opposed to 100 false positives, no files at all. The task of putting files in folders is likely to be replaced by tagging files with meta-data. This will be especially important for multimedia files given that your camera has no idea if it is taking a picture of the Lincoln Memorial, or Aunt Bertha.
What he said.
I won't argue that he can tell a good story but his pace and directing leaves much to be desired in the first trilogy.
Bingo. Half of the whole drama of Anakin's fall (and redeption at the end of Jedi) depends on his love for Padme. However, Anakin and Padme have all the romantic chemestry of two wet dishrags hung on the same towel. After the first love scene, I used the later love scenes to get refils on popcorn, or tried to restrain myself from audibly groaning from the bad dialog.
In the case of "droids vs clones", who really cares how many were killed on each side because more could always be wheeled on - the first trilogy turned warfare into something very sterile and remote whereas in the second trilogy we saw and felt genuine loss, whether it was an X-Wing pilot, Hoth infantryman or an Ewok.
Exactly. And is it just me, or is there something really disturbing at how casually the Jedi and Sith treat the clones and droids as disposable? There is a bit of cognitive dissonance there in that with 6 movies building up R2 and C3PO as characters with personalities and perhaps even emotion, that we see mass faceless carnage.
After 20 years of working around this problem, and we still have not figured it out yet.
Any cryptosystem that depends on the human ability to remember multiple passwords consisting of more than 8 random characters is broken. It's about time we realized this and moved on to thinking about alternatives.
Oh, I thought so. I just don't think that black holes make much sense if you don't talk about spacetime.
One final thing to note about your idea - gravity affects electromagnetic radiation, and hence it's affecting magnetic fields. Ever heard of gravitational lensing? Ever heard the statement that the event horizon is the point after which "even light can't excape"? It's not as simple as trying to create a bigger force, as the gravity of the black hole itself would be distorting the magnetic field you are trying to create.
Actually, a subtle distinction is that gravity wouldn't be distorting the magnetic field, but the space-time through which the magnetic field travels. The basic implication of General and Special Relativity is that light always travels a straight line and a constant speed through space, (from the perspective of the photon), it's just that everything else is warped.
Assuming that you were not ripped apart by tidal forces, it might appear to work normally. However, our magnetic astronaut would be just running in place.
Imagine if you will, if the user didn't have any concept of where their files were. All they do is create them and save them. When they want a file they just search for it. The result? The computer has just become that much more simple to the every day user.
My skepticism in regards to this is that it is based on the assumption that users who balk at putting related files into a folder, will be willing to tag files with consistant keywords!
You can't get hold of the propietary, extended code for windows networking to fix the operatability problem without NDA etc. You can only guess the BSD code up to the moment of forking. After the fork point, the code has been tweaked and closed and used to build a system that tries to lock you in forever after. That's the kind of danger the GPL protects you against.
Not really. The existence of a BSD reference standard for Kerberos may have made such a fork easier to produce, but the GPL does not prevent a company from adding incompatible extensions to a protocol. A company can always start with their own clean-room implementation. Blaiming the extension of Kerberos protocol onto the license of one existing implementation rather than the predatory actions of a company that has also sought to "embrace and extend," HTML, SMTP, and SQL seems a bit odd.
Secondly, I would argue that if you look at the history of Kerberos, that the MIT license did much more good than harm. The GPL was only recently released when Kerberos was developed, and the LGPL, probably a more appropriate license did not exist. At the time, there were thousands of people using plain-text passwords transmitted over insecure networks. The MIT license permitted incorporation of Kerberos code into Solaris, AIX, and HPUX (GNU/Linux did not exist either), and clients for Macintosh and Windows. Given the need to rapidly standardize on a secure login protocol, releasing under the MIT license rather than a more restrictive license was a good choice.
I think we could use a little context here. Gorman had written an article. for the LATimes questioning the value of Google's search engine for books (as contrasted with say spending the money on a library). The position of the article is that information in context (i.e. in a book written by a researcher) is worth far less (did you mean more?) to someone doing research than a far greater quantity of facts without the organizational structure of a book.
I find this to be a very claim to argue against. For example, while I can pick up Python in a Nutshell or The Publication Manual of the APA and use it as a random-access document, I can't do the same with something like Stephen Pinker's, How the Mind Works, or Erik Larson's Devil in the White City (to pick four books visible from my desk.) Writers don't write 400 pages just for fun, they write 400 pages because it takes 400 pages to present a detalied and clear argument. If you drop a chapter here and there, you might find the conclusions incomprehensible, (or worse, think you understand the conclusions while skipping important caveats.)
I think his point about chopping up long-form works into random access paragraphs is dead on. I've recently found myself so frustrated with trying to master R from the massive number of poorly interconnected manual pages that come with that particular bit of software that I went out and bought a book that went step by step starting with basic syntax through complex data analysis. Much of the blogosphere's anti-literary attacks are not just about medium, but about genre. And honestly, print still rules for the long-form work.
Blogging proposes a very democratic model of information evaluation that any intelligent person given access to the information will be able to derive the correct conclusions quickly and easily. The classic approach argues that a guided program of study is highly advisable prior deviling into raw sources of information. In feeds in which you are an expert which approach do you think is more correct?
I don't find this to be the case at all. To start with, very few blogs offer access to primary sources. Instead, what is most typically the case is that blogs are simply collecting references to secondary or tertiary sources. The UK publishes census data, Roger Smith discoveres something interesting in census data, Roger Smith publishes in trade journal, New Scientist reads paper and gets quote from Roger Smith, 500 blogs link to New Scientist and each other swamping access to the data. Perhaps two will actually read the reviewed paper and realize that New Scientist was a bit misleading, and it's a rare year when one will actually look at the data and repeat the analysis to see if Roger Smith got it wrong. In the end, what we have is a room full of monkies gossiping about what some other monkey has said about a reporter's summary of a technical article about some actual data.
It would be different if blogs were actually about information but 99% of them are about hearsay and rumor. The problem is that blogs are a piss-poor medium for transmitting information rarely containing something better than an abstract. The dataset I'm working with runs over 1,000 pages. Even condensing that down to a summary is going to take most of the next 6 months, and I don't know yet if I'm going to have what Gorman considers important, knowledge.
About a decade ago I considered creating a parody of the WWW consisting of a large number of pages that do nothing other than link to other pages, that do nothing other than link to other content free pages. It seems the blogging community has created this for me, although instead of no content, we have an overabundance of poorly informed opinion about the opinions of other people.
What I got out of it is that the president of the ALA is afraid that his way of life and his preferred methods af acquiring information are becoming less relevant, and rather than changing the way he and his association do business, he figures he'll stand up and mock the people who are changing things in hope that others wil listen. Nice try, man.
I think that if you really believe that librarians or the author of this piece is sitting still as technology moves forward, that you are perhaps part of the problem.
What I read is a guy who is quite probably justly ticked at having been misread by a group of people who only read half of what he had to say, and who probably know less that half of what is necessary to talk about the subject. His critique of the limitations of google as a medium by which to get knowledge (as opposed to just data) is accurate, insightful, and to the point, and his characterization of the responses from people who hype blogging as the new medium is equally accurate, insightful and to the point.
Perhaps you should RTFA, or perhaps even this article?.
1: The DWE consisted of two modules. One on Huygens, and one on Cassini. Without the activation of the Huygens module, we would have had no data for earth-based telescopes to detect.
2: The DWE carrier signal did double duty as a channel for image transmission. Not only did the receiver screw-up result in loss of DWE data, but it also resulted in the loss of 350 images as well.
3: Reception by Earth-based radio telescopes was uncertain at the time the DWE was designed. In addition, at the time the DWE was developed, it was thought that Earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect one axis of motion. The second axis of motion would have to come from the Cassini data.
Well...
As someone else pointed out. The doppler data we got on Earth depended on the working ultra-stable oscilator on Huygens. However, there are some good reasons why it would have been nice for it's twin to be working on Cassini.
1: The two USOs were designed and calibrated to operate on the same frequency with a high degree of precision. The lack of a similarly calibrated USO on Earth adds a bit of error to the measurements.
2: Signal strength and doppler shifts measured by Cassini would have been larger, probably resulting in greater precision.
3: 20 minutes of the Earth-based observation must be provided by different telescopes. Any time you change insturments, you add more error.
Of course, something is better than nothing. But it looks like the Earth-based doppler measurements are less precise by about three orders of magnitude. (1km vs. 1m error in position.) That's a heck of a loss if you wanted to know more about the winds and atmosphere.
So basically what they are saying is they should have used the space for some other experiment?
Not really. Cassini would have received a stronger signal, and the changes in relative motion between Huygens and Cassini would have resulted in larger doppler shifts. This would have improved the precision and/or accuracy of the measurements. In addition one of the features of the DWE is the fact that the two oscilators were designed and calibrated to be extremely close to each other in frequency. Without a similar matched oscilator on the ground, there is another possible source for error. For technical details you might see the actual description of the insturment package. A third problem is that 20 minutes of the doppler data is missing. Any time you have to change insturments in the middle of an experiment, you have another source of error to account for.
In addition, one of the things that is really central to science is independent confirmation of results. It is likely that doppler analysis of the ground-based telescopes would have been done anyway. But the results would have been quite a bit stronger with the missing Cassini data. The fact that we have some data about wind speed as opposed to no data is a good thing, but it certainly is not an ideal outcome.
From my understanding of the article:
Huygens was designed to transmit on two data channels to Cassini. Both transmitters on Huygens worked successfully. However, the receiver for channel A on Cassini wasn't turned on.
I don't think it is quite that amazing. Radio telescopes appear to have a good enough resolution to image details of radio sources in remote galaxies. Identifying the relative position of an active source in our solar system would seem to be a less complex problem.
You're right, what you are saying is bullshit. I am not using Windows, so how do I benefit? I'd have benefited if MS fixed the bugs and contributed the fixes back to the BSD community. GPL would not have allowed MS to just take without giving anything back and that's exactly the reason why Microsoft hates GPL so much.
Just as a matter of fact, it is not clear as to how much of the TCP/IP stack in Windows comes from BSD. At least some analysis suggests that a complete rewrite occured somewhere down the line.
But, the big assumption you make, and the original author makes, is that Microsoft would touch GPL code with a 10-foot pole. Lets get one thing out of the way here. Microsoft is not interested in releasing source code. If they didn't adopt a BSD stack, they would buy or create their own stack. Or have tried something similar to IBM in the early days of networking and create their own incompatible protocol.
The entire point of releasing reference implementations for a given protocol is to facilitate wide adoption. For example, it is good to look at the history of Kerberos. At the time Kerberos was finalized in 1990, linux did not exist, BSD was mired in legal problems, the GPL had not been widely adopted, the LGPL did not exist, and pretty much the entire internet relied on plain-text passwords over insecure channels. The MIT license enabled the adoption of Kerberos by dozens of vendors. The MIT license did exactily what it was supposed to do, facilitate the wide-spread adoption of a secure authentication protocol. Likewise, the BSD TCP/IP stack (which also pre-dates both Linux and the GPL) helped to facilitate the widespread adoption of TCP/IP as a networking standard over competing standards.
The counterargument is usually something as simple-minded as "but proprietary software package X does Y, which I like, and there is no free alternative". Forget theory for a moment, the countervailing free software argument is empirical. As the free software movement continues to gain momementum, the number of such examples continues to diminish....
Certainly that is the case. However, what this article is trying to address is what do you do until the this vaporware of free software becomes available? One example of this is an intelligent bibliographic citation system within OpenOffice. The current bibliographic functions for open office only work for a few citation styles, and don't work for the citation styles used by a large number of academic departments and publications. Although quite a bit of work is being spent trying to improve the OpenOffice.org bibliographic system, it is still vaporware that is quite a bit away from being implemented. Should a user who finds that this feature is something that saves hours of time in the production of manuscripts write it off as a matter of "convenience?"
Well, I don't think that you really need to do eye damage in order to be a nusance. There have been experiments at developing a laser for stopping runaway drivers by scattering a laser off the windshield rendering it impossible for the driver to see through the glare. (The laser in question seems to be a bit beefier that your cat toy pointer.)