I have found that there are two types of computer scientists - programmers and developers. Developers work around problems, they understand the core of what is going on and can do amazing things, programmers those people who know how to program and can do a decent job but do not have a good grasp an problem solving.
My experience with academic computer science is that they are set up to mass produce programmers. This is mainly because there is a huge influx of people who are going into computer science for the money rather than because they love the material. There are still a smaller portion of people who are there because they truly love programming and I have found that those people generally have learned how to problem solve not from their classes but from other experiences. The best of the best from programming come out of the computer science department, but a majority of the people just slide by. I don't know a single person in physics programs who just slides by.
show me an on the job learner who has a practical understanding of O-notation
Actually, I know someone who took one computer science class in college, got his degree in philosophy and has a better understanding of object oriented programming than 90% of the people that I have met who are in an academic computer science program. He learned everything on the job.
When a majority of the people produced from academic computer science are programmers rather than developers. When the classes become too large to allow for special attention. When the program is pressured by industry to produce as many computer scientists the program reduces itself to producing "cookbook" programmers rather than developers.
Although I don't agree with PD's approach, I agree that both should be avoided as primary majors, minor or get an equivalent minor in them.
From my experience CS and ECE majors learn "cookbook" ways of dealing with problems. Now, there isn't anything wrong with that, but it isn't the best approach. I have found that the physics and math majors do much better in the ECE and CS courses then the ECEs and CS majors do. The reason why is because physics and math are the basis for all of engineering, so not only do you have all of the knowledge gained through the ECE and CS courses that the pure majors get but you have a fundamental understanding of what is happening. The most important difference, though, between physics/math vs ECE/CS is that physics/math teaches you to use what you have to approach problems that you have NEVER seen before, whereas the ECE/CS teaches how to approach problems that look similar to ones that you have seen before. A good analogy is learning phonics vs whole language, both technically "work" but phonics teaches how to deal with new words whereas whole language requires some outside source to teach you.
Take the courses that you are interested in, but my advice is to learn the fundamentals.
The monopoly line has been bullshit from the start.
Funny, even Microsoft isn't fighting that they are a monopoly. They are fighting the punishment of illegally using said postion as monopoly. The Government, the Courts, and even Microsoft knows that the monopoly line is not bullshit, why can't you accept it?
none of these competitors have been as good at meeting customer's needs.
I personally do not believe that Microsoft has done a good job a meeting customer needs. I believe that Microsoft has done a very impressive job of locking in customers through the use of illegal business practices. The numbers over the past couple of years support my belief. Macs came back from 1% of the market up to ~7% of the total market over the past couple of years, Linux is nearly 5% and continues to grow exponentially. Sun continues to beat estimates of growth every year. Palm OS has dominance is the hand helds, and that doesn't seem to be faltering.
Although MS has complete control over the office market, I only know one person who uses the office assistant, and I hear people complain constantly about how big it is and how expensive it is. People ask me all the time if there are alternatives to MS Office that can perfectly convert Office files.
Most people are happy with Microsoft products, but a little disgruntled by their size and wealth.
I think it would be more accurate to say that most people are happy with a unified user interface. Most of the people that I talk to are not happy with Mircosoft, even the simplist of users, because it seems to get slower and more expensive with each release, and the fact that it is still unreliable.
My experience is that so long as they recongnize the interface they don't care what runs behind it. When I set up user accounts on my Linux partition for people, and configure the account to look similar to the Win95 interface people plod along contently, and are in general happier because the thing doesn't crash on them. The funniest thing that I have found is that when my keyboard goes haywire (hardware issue with my motherboard, don't want to go into it) and stops working people sware at Microsoft, even when they KNOW that they aren't using Microsoft, it has become a habit.
People are NOT happy with Microsoft, it does not meet customer needs, and it is a monopoly. The problem is that they use their position as a monopoly to prevent alternatives from becoming viable options.
All very good questions, my thoughts on them are as follows. I know that cloning won't happen in the US first, or if it does it won't be published in anyway shape or form because it is illegal. There are US biologists working with Italians in Italy where it isn't illegal. In Japan it is legal so long as the clone is terminated after a certain period of time (I have forgotten that length of time but it is a matter of weeks or days).
Within the US, Europe and most other 1st world nations there is an ethics board that regulates scientific experiments performed on/with humans. They generally have control over who gets funded, published, and repromanded. Chances are very good that they are working on international rules on the ethics of cloning humans right now. We will see what happens when the first human is actually cloned.
Although the ethics board generally controls who can do what type of experiment on humans, the location of the experiement will be the deciding factor. So long as the US has, what I consider a rather backwards, law banning human cloning we know that the forefront of this technology will be outside the US. Although I believe that Japan's law is also somewhat backwards, I feel that they have a better understanding of how the people perceive human cloning and how to ease it into society. The baby step approach that Japan takes may be what the US needs.
I also believe that China will start to see an influx of scientists. China has the technology and resources of 1st world countries while not subscribing to the laws placed by the ethics board. If the forefront of this technology is in an area of few restrictions like China then all the US has done is shot itself in the foot because the technology will be developed but they have been excluded, and will thereby have no say in how it proceeds.
Who do we want deciding who cloning is done? A country that relies on an international ethics board, or one that is internationally renoune for its human rights abuses?
It is all fun and games until someone loses and eye. Then it is a new game, find the eye.
There are actual scientific/evolutionary ramafications of cloning (at least "perfect" cloning). I repeat what I just posted (#137 or something like that) but there some good books on the subject of human evolution, which give some good arguements about why cloning without modification, or "perfect" cloning, is bad for humanity.
Try reading the following:
Children of Prometheus by Christopher Wills.
The Red Queen by Matt Ridley.
Unfortunatly my roommate, an evolutionary psychologist, is not here to give me some more names of good books on the subject but those two, especially The Red Queen, are very good sources of information.
There are psychological issues about cloning that identical twins don't have to deal with but I don't have time to go into right now.
The idea of cloning is in itself, not a bad idea, nor an immoral one IMHO. The major problem that I see with cloning is the evolutionary implications of it. There is something known as the Red Queen scenerio in evolutionary theory, which is covered in the book The Red Queen by Matt Ridley and briefly in Children of Prometheus by Christopher Wills, which is as such: One needs to move faster just to stay in the same place. This got its name after Alice in Wonderland where Alice is running with the Red Queen so as to stay in the same place, at one point Alice asks a question, the Red Queen yells at her and then she needs to run faster to stay in the same place. This type of scenerio occurs in evolution all the time. The some of the best examples of Red Queen scenerios are viruses vs. humans. Humans, and other organisms, need to constantly evolve so as to try and stop viruses from infecting and killing us before we have the chance to reproduce. Viruses are constantly evolving so as to counter-act our modifications so that they can infect and reproduce. In areas of Africa where the sickle-cell is common, Maleria has increased its reproduction rate so as to be able to infect those with sickle-cell. There are many examples of this, the books mentioned above have some great discussions on this.
How does this effect cloning. If we make "perfect" clones then there is no modification. If there is no modification then we aren't running fast enough and we will lose the Red Queen races. The survival of any species over time requires mutation and genetic variance. So if people decide to just clone themselves and transfer their brains to new bodies they are contributing to the downfall of humanity by not allowing for genetic variance. Ergo, "perfect" clones are a bad idea in general from a scientific/evolutionary stand point.
This leaves us with "imperfect" clones. So we can let the process be somewhat sloppy so as to allow for genetic drift and mutation or we purposefully modify the clones genes to add variance. Scientifically speaking, the sloppy process is foolish, whereas the purposeful modification is not. Why, might you ask. Well, a purposeful modification, even if done to a large portion of the populous that can afford it, would not be wide spread enough to cause significant to the overall genetic variance within the human species while at the same time it would not damage it like a "perfect" clone would, if you want a good arguement and numbers read the book mentioned above called Children of Prometheus.
There are a couple problems with purposeful modification though:
Moral ramafications. When people say Eugenics we think Hitler. Eugenics was actually started within the US and the idea was used to the nth degree by Hitler. I think what Hitler did was evil in the purest sense of the word, but I do not believe that the idea of Eugenics is a bad. The problem is that the general populous is unable at this point to handle the concept maturely.
Religion. I am an athiest, I don't believe that people have souls, but 95% of humanity does believe that humans have souls. So long as it is looked upon as playing god or potentially tainting souls then the world will be squeemish about it. As history has shown, religion has a way of slowing progress through killing for god.
I agree that we need to start thinking about the cloning of humans. Within the next two years a human will be cloned. Science will not stop just because a large majority of people are unable to handle to concequences, or fundamentally disagree with the process. People will be modified within the next 50. Cosmetic genetics will arrive even through heavy protest. The best thing that we can do now is understand it, and human evolution. I mentioned two good books up above on the topic, there are many more on the subject and believe that our society should start reading them NOW so we do not make blind decessions for or against it.
The explination about laser cooling by Wind Walker is a very good one but one can only reach something like microkelvin with laser cooling. In order to cool something to an even lower state one needs to create a magnetic trap.
A magnetic trap basically consists of creating a potential energy well using magnetic fields with a "lip" at a certain energy, think of a vase. Anything with energy higher then the "lip" will be able to leave the magnetic trap, taking its energy with it. When particles collide the energy is transfered, which can have one of two effects: 1) make the energy of the two particles more equal; or 2) Increase the energy of the one with more energy and decrese the energy of the other particle. If, after the collision, the 2nd things happens AND the energy of the first particle is now higher then the "lip" it will leave the trap decreasing the total energy of the system, ie lowering the temperature. Once the system hits an equalibrium and no more, or very few, particles are leaving the system one lowers the energy of the "lip". This allows more particles to be ejected from the system, again lowering the energy and therefore the temperature of the system. Wash, rinse, repeat. After this process has been done quite a bit one releases the trap and lets what is left of the particles that have been trapped to expand rapidly. Which, if you have studied thermodynamics then you know, lowers the temperature even lower. The trick is keeping enough particles to have enough data. This technique has yet to hit a limit on how low it can go.
Right now the University of Colorado, Boulder, Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) has been able to reach temperatures lower then 900 pK (or 0.0000000009 K). From what I have been told, the coldest place in the Universe that we know about is in the JILA tower where they create the Bose-Einstein condensates.
I believe that CU Boulder has the record for ultra low temperatures.
The Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) at CU Boulder has been producing true Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) since 1997 and Fermi-Dirac digenerate gasses since 1999. I say true BEC because technically superfluid helium-4 and helium-3 exhibit some of the properties of BECs, although they can be called BECs they are do not follow all of the statical mechanics that a true BEC follows.This press release about the creation of the first true BEC mentions that they were able to get rubidium atoms to 20 billionths of a degree K, or 20 nK in 1995. They have reached much lower temperatures since then, I think a year and a half ago they had something like 900 pK. From what I was told less then 6 months ago the now much large group of atomic physicists working on BECs in the JILA tower still hold the record.
but how practical is it really. First they take off and use up several hours worth of fuel to keep the plane airborn, not to mention fuel for running the condensor. Although I am not an aerospace engineer but shouldn't the addition of a vehicle attached to the initial launch vehicle:
Significantly change the aerodynamics of the launch vehicle.
Okay, so we have to worry about how much fuel is used up trying to fuel up the orbiter. We also have to worry about the launch vehicle's aerodynamic qualities both with and without the orbiter attached. Sure, the project is getting funded decently, but would that money be better spent trying to get a launch vehicle that can also enter orbit (like the space plane that we have already spent quite a lot of money on)?
Perhaps an aerospace engineer can explain to me whether this would be workable or not.
Re:Cool but a BFT (Big F*SCKING Target)
on
Laser-equipped 747
·
· Score: 2
What would happen is this, the missile would be picked up on infra-red, I turn the plane, say, 90 degrees, shoot down missile. Yawn.
Most of your arguement is very valid, I just have to diagree with this one point quoted above. The laser system is designed to attack ballistic missles, not AAM or SAM types. Computation for ballistic missles vs missles designed to attack planes are two very different things. The path of a ballistic missle is very predictable, it is going to be parabolic and is going up, not to mention it is a VERY large target. Trying to hit something that is coming at you, which is constantly correcting so as to be able to hit, and attacking facing in such a way to give you the least amount of target it not going to be a walk in the park. According to your arguement the side of a ballistic missle going in a predetermined parabolic arc is just as easy as hitting the cone of an AAM moving in a dynamic path. I think you have been playing the humans on StarControl too much if you think it can just zap everything that tries to attack it, because it doesn't work that way.
It has an 18 second window to hit the target. My guess is that the system designed to target is so speciallized so as to be able to get that 18 second window and fire that it probably cannot cope with other targets. Fighters would be the hardest because it they knew that they were going against something like that they would take precautionary manuvering, if complex enough (which is probably not very complex), would prevent the computer from being able to predict where the plane would be, and thereby prevent it from aiming and firing. Sure, nothing moves faster than the speed of light (as a physic major I know that all to well) but there are mechanical parts used for aiming in order for it to fire, which do not move at the speed of light. And unlike a missle which corrects after launch, or gunfire where it is a near continuous volley, if you miss then you have ~18 seconds before you have another shot.
Although the USAF ECM is very good, if I was in one of these and some fighter managed to get close enough to start launching some AAMs at me I would start doing some pretty serious manuvering to not get hit. Then I would be requesting back-up asap. They aren't invincible, just as carrier groups aren't invincible. If it was being attacked I very much doubt that it would be a lone fighter, unless it was the only thing left after the escort was delt with.
For those of us who use Unix an Linux with mice that have three, or more, buttons, the third button is very useful. Just highlight something then middle click and it pastes. That on top of the, what is now standard in GUIs, ^C (or ^X) and ^V you have two clipboards. It can become very useful very quickly.
Also if you use Enlightenment then each of the three buttons displays a different menu, each equally useful.
Frankly, I have ideas for what the fourth button on my Logitec Mouseman+ should do but I just don't have the skill to implement it, yet.
Although quite a bit can be done with one mouse button I would rather just right click on something to bring up a menu rather than click, hold, and then drag in order to get the same menu with just one button. To each his/her own though.
I see that you have been reading Zubrin, he a very convincing man, I heard him speak at a Mars Society talk here on campus. Unfortunately there are several problems with just packing up and heading off to mar right now.
As one of the other replys mentioned, it takes time to build spacecraft, especially one that is supposed to make a 9 month journey. And right now it would actually take longer than that because we are not in the proper alignment with mars for the shortest possible trip.
It also takes money, and right now the government of the United States has this policy of supporting only ONE big science project. I am helping out with research in High Energy Physics, and everyone knows in that field knows that the ISS was choosen over another particle accelerator. Those were the two choices at the time.
The level of technology is not suffecient.
Currently the only reliable engines that we have are chemical fuel rockets. All of the other ideas out there whether it be plasma, solar sails, Hall-effect engines, etc... are either not ready, not properly tested, or have major problems that need to be sorted out. Plasma is one of the better ideas and it is years away. Solar sails have an interesting problem with a harmonic ripple effect on the edge of the sail which doesn't damp out in space and causes the sail to collapse. Most of the other engines would take extremely long amounts of time, like the Hall-effect. Although this nuclear engine sounds really nice, I seriously doubt that it has been properly tested.
Also we really don't have a good way of protecting the travelers from the large amounts really nasty radiation that they will have to deal with. Not only will they have to worry about the radiation while enroute, but also while on the planet. Mars does not have a magnetosphere like Earth does, nor does it have a suffeciently thick atmosphere. Both of those things are why we don't have to worry too much about solar flares completely fscking us up. Currently the best way we have to deal with radiation is lead. It will be a real pain to get enough lead up into space to protect the astronouts. Frankly the last thing we need to have is our heros coming home completelyl sterile and then dieing of cancer shortly after returning.
Living quarters are still being tested for the Mars direct plan. They have their tunafish can living quarters in Canada right now. They are always looking for help in testing it.
As mentioned before we are not in position for shortest travel time to Mars. I forgot the exact number but it is either 12 or 20 years from now. If I remember correctly almost all of the figures that are given for enroute times are calculated assuming that the Earth and Mars are in proper alignment so as to give the shortest possible time.
I want to see us go to Mars, but I don't want us to rush it. I am sure that you have taken note to the backlash that NASA took when it lost several probes in a row. Those were unmanned and they got reamed big time. Imagine what the public would do if NASA lost six astronouts while enroute to or on Mars. Chances are good that NASA would either get axed or be so horribly crippled from budget cuts that it might as well be dead. Although the technology we have currently is capable of sending manned missions to Mars, we need to do more research and more testing and patience before we can achieve a SAFE mission to Mars. I am sure we will get there, and within my lifetime. Why, because it is one of NASA's priorities. Right now they are spending most of their budget on the ISS, as you know, which IS necessary. I personally believe that having a working space station is as necessary as sending someone to another planet. Once they are done with the ISS then they can move onto providing more time and funding to the Mars project.
Funny, I remember reading (out of grim curiosity) an article several years ago from the Chronical with the headline "Russian Satalites Leaking Radiation", or something to that effect. The entire article was about how there are several former Soviet nuclear satalites in relatively high orbits that had minor breaches in the power supply and were leaking radiation into space, and how that was really bad. It is scary how ignorant of radiation people really are.
I think that the prime example of stupid radiation protests has to be the banning of the process of irradiating eggs. Before that ban there was very little worry about getting salmonella (sp?) poisoning from eating raw eggs, now I have to coddle the eggs every time. Ignorance makes it possible.
it took Microsoft about five or so years to get Windows close to what Linux is now
If my information is correct one could say it took MS 9-11 years to get to this level. Technically NT 4.0 was not supposed to have been a product when the NT timeline came up, it was a "we need this is in the market NOW so take what we have and try to stablize it." NT 3.51 was supposed to be the only steping stone, then the leap to what is now NT 5.0, err Windows 2000. But even so, the NT product started development sometime between 1989-91. Also, technically Windows 3.11 was supposed to end the DOS line, then 95, then 98, now Me.
When I was taking a Delta flight from Atlanta to Denver in 1999 we had an iteresting problem. The plane was "in line" to take off, doesn't matter what number. When it was finally our turn we creaped up the the run way then turned off onto some side area. The captain came on speakers saying something to the effect of, sorry but our computer just crashed and we cannot take off without it up, it will take another 5 minutes or so to reboot it. Let me tell you, that really inspired confidence in me.
Hey, if the deal with Microsoft and Starbucks starts to modify United Airlines it could bring a whole new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death. I can see the head lines, "The crash of the United Airlines 737 was aparently due to a Microsoft Blue Screen causing x deaths."
As a previous reply (by Zachary Kessin) to this posting mentioned, Golden rice was developed to add nutrients not found in white rice into it. All of the white rice in the world equaly distributed would not solve many of the problems that quite a few third world countries fight, known as malnutrition.
When Europe had their spheres of influence within Asia they introduced a method of husking the wild rice so that it becomes easier to harvest. The new found ability to create white rice was widely accepted because it allowed for higher production, but what they didn't know is that it strips many of the essential nutrients that the brown rice that they used to produce had. The husk of the rice contains things like beta caratine, and more importantly IRON, which is transfered into the rice if it is not husked early to produce white rice.
Golden rice causes the iron and beta caratine to accumulate within the meat of the rice rather than only on the husk. This allows farmers in third worlds to continue to produce the high volumes of rice necessary to feed their country while at the same time it prevents people from dieing of rickets or other diseases caused by malnutrition. Sure, if they did not husk the rice and went back to eating brown rice then they would not have the problem, but many of these countries try to produce as much food as possible to prevent malnureshment.
We cannot just order these countries to stop producing white rice in favor of brown rice. Nor is it feasible to redistribute the wealth in an even way. At the same time I believe that allowing corperations to run without restriction is an equally bad decision. Pure communism and pure capitalism are nice utopias that don't work.
Saying that all genetic engineering of plants should be stopped because "evil" chemical corperations use it is like saying that all atomic physics research should be halted because the government has nuclear bombs. It is rediculous and uninformed. Sure people will miss-use the technology but it doesn't mean we should ban it.
More research should be done on genetic/chemical engineering but allowing people to die because you fear technology is negligent. Preventing society from progressing because people fear technology is maladaptive.
Halting progress due to ignorance is as bad as letting it run rampent for the same reason.
I was just talking with a collegue working on Bose-Einstein condensations (BEC) and I asked what some of the uses were. Due to the way BECs work statically/quantum mechanically one can create any interferance pattern within the BEC. He said that there are people working on trying to figure out ways of using this property to replace the etching processes used today to create things like computer chips by creating a interferance pattern in the form that one wants and then laying the BEC on the matterial (there is more to it than that but you know that). This would allow for manufacture of things at the 3 atom level. Of course, as someone else mentioned, 30 Nanometers is larger than 3 atoms thick. Lattice structures of silicides are roughly between.1 and.9 nm [1].
Theoretically this is possible, now whether this is practical is a whole different ball park.
[1]V.E. Borisenko: Semi-conducting Silicides (Springer, New York): pp 3-5
If I remember correctly the original 486 chips were released as SX. The difference between the SX and DX chips was the DX had a working math co-processor integrated into the die. The original SX chips were a fluke, basically the fist attempt to integrate the co-processor didn't work right and burnt out during use. Intel purposefully destroyed the integrated co-processor on the first batch because they knew it didn't work and didn't want a huge fiasco. After they fixed the bugs they continued to produce SX chips by destroying the co-processor on a DX chip and relabeling it. They found that they could still sell the SX chips even though they weren't nearly as good, just so long as the price was low enough.
Although I think someone is working on the Y-windowing system. I think that the first release should be Y_0 (Y sub 0). Which in science is pronouced "why not."
I'm not saying that I wouldn't want force feedback when I move over something, because I do. My question relies more on, will Logitech create Linux drivers for it when it comes out? I still have yet to see full use out of my four button Logitech mouse (I don't have the skill to do what I want with it, nor the time to learn the skill), and from what I have been able to decern from their site they have no plans on porting the software they created for Win9x to Linux, or NT for that matter.
I am about to contact Logitech and request full Linux support.
Their website for contacting Logitech is here.
Although there are several other posts talking about the same stuff that I am about to discuss I feel the need to reply to this.
If anyone doubts that it was really illegal, check out the DMCA. And it was the judge's job to uphold the law.
A judges job is not only to uphold the law but to interpret the law. If a law is unjust, unconstitutional, etc... it is their job to set the precedent. Just because a law is on the books doesn't mean that it is a good law.
Sure they broke a law, a law that until now was untried in a court of law. A law that they fundementally disagreed with. Their argument is not, 'their crypto sucks, so tuff shit.' They are trying to exend open code to the relm of free speech, and therefore protected by the constitution.
They were linking to sites that had copies of some OSS that along with the legitimate uses that it was originally written for it could also be used for illegitimate uses, like copying. And yes, there were legitimate uses. The original reason the teenager over in Europe wrote this was to be able to watch the DVDs that he had bought. He didn't write it to copy DVDs, he just wanted to be able to watch that which he had bought on his Linux box.
The question of this week is: Is Linking, or even hosting, something that COULD be used for illegal purposes illegal in of itself?
NO!. Here is a link to the Anarchist Cook book, By Jolly Roger which is a published book, and now an online resource, of how to do illegal stuff. I don't think that there is one single legit use of this book but it is protected by the 1st Amendment. Heck, the Anarchist Cook Book gives information on how to KILL people, which IMHO is a much bigger problem for society than the copyright of some mega-corp. That protection has been upheld in court, and frankly I'm happy about that. According to your argument:
2600 wasn't aiding crypto research, they were distributing a tool that not only had no legal use, but its very existence was a violation of copyright laws and the DMCA. ergo they should be punished. Then the Anarchist Cook book should also be illegal. So should this post because it links to the Anarchist Cook Book, so should your post because it will have a link to my post, etc...
You are very right in saying that this is not a crypto war. It has never been a crypto war. This is a war for our rights. The DMCA is an unconstitutional law and needs to be removed.
To quote Ben Franklin (I may not get this exactly), "Those that are willing to give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither the liberty nor the safety."
If you want to give up your essential liberties so that a monopoly can keep their strangle hold on society go right ahead, just DON'T expect me to.
There are several things going on here. First of all MS is not allocating any of ITS resources to the port that was mentioned in the article, and are not admitting to directly authorizing a port to linux. They are indirectly authorizing a port by allowing another company to port its products over to the other platforms. What are they indirectly authorizing are IE and MS Media Player. This is a win-win situation for MS.
MS gets more market share of the web browser market by tapping into the Linux-Netscape area.
MS's new media format is pushed as a being more of a standard.
MS hasn't allocated any money or resources into doing this.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if MS is porting Office to Linux. Will they release it when it is done, probably not. Why? Simple, they don't need to yet. MS still has a huge portion of the office market and until they think that they are actually being challenged on that front they don't need to worry about releasing their office product over to other systems. It is still good to have an ACE up the sleeve though. If they are porting Office over right now, when something like StarOffice, or if WordPerfect makes a miracle comeback and starts to eat up their market AND they can trace the loss back to Linux, then they release the product and try to kill the competing office product. Or if the DOJ gets their way and the Surpreme Court (SC) hears the case, AND if the SC decides that they do need to be broken up then the non-OS portion of MS can release the product and make more money on OSes that compete with Windows.
It is smart for them to port. It is smarter of them to allow someone else to port for them. And it is even smarter to hold back that which could potentially hurt them until it can help them.
Actually we have had lasers that can damage, if not destroy, other countries satilites for more than a year.
There is one of these in Arizona, it was tested last year to see if it could hit a sensor so that NASA could record some info. They used the lowest setting that they knew would reach the satilite and it destroyed the sensor.
As for lasers in space. There is an international treaty that was originally constructed and signed by the US, CCCP, and China that bans laser weapons in space. So NASA could not construct a deathstar with lasers without breaking international treaty. Particle weapons and rail guns, on the other hand, I believe are still viable options.
Slashdot Mirror
I have found that there are two types of computer scientists - programmers and developers. Developers work around problems, they understand the core of what is going on and can do amazing things, programmers those people who know how to program and can do a decent job but do not have a good grasp an problem solving.
My experience with academic computer science is that they are set up to mass produce programmers. This is mainly because there is a huge influx of people who are going into computer science for the money rather than because they love the material. There are still a smaller portion of people who are there because they truly love programming and I have found that those people generally have learned how to problem solve not from their classes but from other experiences. The best of the best from programming come out of the computer science department, but a majority of the people just slide by. I don't know a single person in physics programs who just slides by.
show me an on the job learner who has a practical understanding of O-notation
Actually, I know someone who took one computer science class in college, got his degree in philosophy and has a better understanding of object oriented programming than 90% of the people that I have met who are in an academic computer science program. He learned everything on the job.
When a majority of the people produced from academic computer science are programmers rather than developers. When the classes become too large to allow for special attention. When the program is pressured by industry to produce as many computer scientists the program reduces itself to producing "cookbook" programmers rather than developers.
Although I don't agree with PD's approach, I agree that both should be avoided as primary majors, minor or get an equivalent minor in them.
From my experience CS and ECE majors learn "cookbook" ways of dealing with problems. Now, there isn't anything wrong with that, but it isn't the best approach. I have found that the physics and math majors do much better in the ECE and CS courses then the ECEs and CS majors do. The reason why is because physics and math are the basis for all of engineering, so not only do you have all of the knowledge gained through the ECE and CS courses that the pure majors get but you have a fundamental understanding of what is happening. The most important difference, though, between physics/math vs ECE/CS is that physics/math teaches you to use what you have to approach problems that you have NEVER seen before, whereas the ECE/CS teaches how to approach problems that look similar to ones that you have seen before. A good analogy is learning phonics vs whole language, both technically "work" but phonics teaches how to deal with new words whereas whole language requires some outside source to teach you.
Take the courses that you are interested in, but my advice is to learn the fundamentals.
Funny, even Microsoft isn't fighting that they are a monopoly. They are fighting the punishment of illegally using said postion as monopoly. The Government, the Courts, and even Microsoft knows that the monopoly line is not bullshit, why can't you accept it?
I personally do not believe that Microsoft has done a good job a meeting customer needs. I believe that Microsoft has done a very impressive job of locking in customers through the use of illegal business practices. The numbers over the past couple of years support my belief. Macs came back from 1% of the market up to ~7% of the total market over the past couple of years, Linux is nearly 5% and continues to grow exponentially. Sun continues to beat estimates of growth every year. Palm OS has dominance is the hand helds, and that doesn't seem to be faltering.
Although MS has complete control over the office market, I only know one person who uses the office assistant, and I hear people complain constantly about how big it is and how expensive it is. People ask me all the time if there are alternatives to MS Office that can perfectly convert Office files.
I think it would be more accurate to say that most people are happy with a unified user interface. Most of the people that I talk to are not happy with Mircosoft, even the simplist of users, because it seems to get slower and more expensive with each release, and the fact that it is still unreliable.
My experience is that so long as they recongnize the interface they don't care what runs behind it. When I set up user accounts on my Linux partition for people, and configure the account to look similar to the Win95 interface people plod along contently, and are in general happier because the thing doesn't crash on them. The funniest thing that I have found is that when my keyboard goes haywire (hardware issue with my motherboard, don't want to go into it) and stops working people sware at Microsoft, even when they KNOW that they aren't using Microsoft, it has become a habit.
People are NOT happy with Microsoft, it does not meet customer needs, and it is a monopoly. The problem is that they use their position as a monopoly to prevent alternatives from becoming viable options.
All very good questions, my thoughts on them are as follows. I know that cloning won't happen in the US first, or if it does it won't be published in anyway shape or form because it is illegal. There are US biologists working with Italians in Italy where it isn't illegal. In Japan it is legal so long as the clone is terminated after a certain period of time (I have forgotten that length of time but it is a matter of weeks or days).
Within the US, Europe and most other 1st world nations there is an ethics board that regulates scientific experiments performed on/with humans. They generally have control over who gets funded, published, and repromanded. Chances are very good that they are working on international rules on the ethics of cloning humans right now. We will see what happens when the first human is actually cloned.
Although the ethics board generally controls who can do what type of experiment on humans, the location of the experiement will be the deciding factor. So long as the US has, what I consider a rather backwards, law banning human cloning we know that the forefront of this technology will be outside the US. Although I believe that Japan's law is also somewhat backwards, I feel that they have a better understanding of how the people perceive human cloning and how to ease it into society. The baby step approach that Japan takes may be what the US needs.
I also believe that China will start to see an influx of scientists. China has the technology and resources of 1st world countries while not subscribing to the laws placed by the ethics board. If the forefront of this technology is in an area of few restrictions like China then all the US has done is shot itself in the foot because the technology will be developed but they have been excluded, and will thereby have no say in how it proceeds.
Who do we want deciding who cloning is done? A country that relies on an international ethics board, or one that is internationally renoune for its human rights abuses?
It is all fun and games until someone loses and eye. Then it is a new game, find the eye.
It is #135
There are actual scientific/evolutionary ramafications of cloning (at least "perfect" cloning). I repeat what I just posted (#137 or something like that) but there some good books on the subject of human evolution, which give some good arguements about why cloning without modification, or "perfect" cloning, is bad for humanity.
Try reading the following:
Children of Prometheus by Christopher Wills.
The Red Queen by Matt Ridley.
Unfortunatly my roommate, an evolutionary psychologist, is not here to give me some more names of good books on the subject but those two, especially The Red Queen, are very good sources of information.
There are psychological issues about cloning that identical twins don't have to deal with but I don't have time to go into right now.
How does this effect cloning. If we make "perfect" clones then there is no modification. If there is no modification then we aren't running fast enough and we will lose the Red Queen races. The survival of any species over time requires mutation and genetic variance. So if people decide to just clone themselves and transfer their brains to new bodies they are contributing to the downfall of humanity by not allowing for genetic variance. Ergo, "perfect" clones are a bad idea in general from a scientific/evolutionary stand point.
This leaves us with "imperfect" clones. So we can let the process be somewhat sloppy so as to allow for genetic drift and mutation or we purposefully modify the clones genes to add variance. Scientifically speaking, the sloppy process is foolish, whereas the purposeful modification is not. Why, might you ask. Well, a purposeful modification, even if done to a large portion of the populous that can afford it, would not be wide spread enough to cause significant to the overall genetic variance within the human species while at the same time it would not damage it like a "perfect" clone would, if you want a good arguement and numbers read the book mentioned above called Children of Prometheus.
There are a couple problems with purposeful modification though:
I agree that we need to start thinking about the cloning of humans. Within the next two years a human will be cloned. Science will not stop just because a large majority of people are unable to handle to concequences, or fundamentally disagree with the process. People will be modified within the next 50. Cosmetic genetics will arrive even through heavy protest. The best thing that we can do now is understand it, and human evolution. I mentioned two good books up above on the topic, there are many more on the subject and believe that our society should start reading them NOW so we do not make blind decessions for or against it.
The explination about laser cooling by Wind Walker is a very good one but one can only reach something like microkelvin with laser cooling. In order to cool something to an even lower state one needs to create a magnetic trap.
A magnetic trap basically consists of creating a potential energy well using magnetic fields with a "lip" at a certain energy, think of a vase. Anything with energy higher then the "lip" will be able to leave the magnetic trap, taking its energy with it. When particles collide the energy is transfered, which can have one of two effects: 1) make the energy of the two particles more equal; or 2) Increase the energy of the one with more energy and decrese the energy of the other particle. If, after the collision, the 2nd things happens AND the energy of the first particle is now higher then the "lip" it will leave the trap decreasing the total energy of the system, ie lowering the temperature. Once the system hits an equalibrium and no more, or very few, particles are leaving the system one lowers the energy of the "lip". This allows more particles to be ejected from the system, again lowering the energy and therefore the temperature of the system. Wash, rinse, repeat. After this process has been done quite a bit one releases the trap and lets what is left of the particles that have been trapped to expand rapidly. Which, if you have studied thermodynamics then you know, lowers the temperature even lower. The trick is keeping enough particles to have enough data. This technique has yet to hit a limit on how low it can go.
Right now the University of Colorado, Boulder, Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) has been able to reach temperatures lower then 900 pK (or 0.0000000009 K). From what I have been told, the coldest place in the Universe that we know about is in the JILA tower where they create the Bose-Einstein condensates.
I believe that CU Boulder has the record for ultra low temperatures.
The Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) at CU Boulder has been producing true Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) since 1997 and Fermi-Dirac digenerate gasses since 1999. I say true BEC because technically superfluid helium-4 and helium-3 exhibit some of the properties of BECs, although they can be called BECs they are do not follow all of the statical mechanics that a true BEC follows.This press release about the creation of the first true BEC mentions that they were able to get rubidium atoms to 20 billionths of a degree K, or 20 nK in 1995. They have reached much lower temperatures since then, I think a year and a half ago they had something like 900 pK. From what I was told less then 6 months ago the now much large group of atomic physicists working on BECs in the JILA tower still hold the record.
To learn more about the BEC follow this link.
Okay, so we have to worry about how much fuel is used up trying to fuel up the orbiter. We also have to worry about the launch vehicle's aerodynamic qualities both with and without the orbiter attached. Sure, the project is getting funded decently, but would that money be better spent trying to get a launch vehicle that can also enter orbit (like the space plane that we have already spent quite a lot of money on)?
Perhaps an aerospace engineer can explain to me whether this would be workable or not.
Most of your arguement is very valid, I just have to diagree with this one point quoted above. The laser system is designed to attack ballistic missles, not AAM or SAM types. Computation for ballistic missles vs missles designed to attack planes are two very different things. The path of a ballistic missle is very predictable, it is going to be parabolic and is going up, not to mention it is a VERY large target. Trying to hit something that is coming at you, which is constantly correcting so as to be able to hit, and attacking facing in such a way to give you the least amount of target it not going to be a walk in the park. According to your arguement the side of a ballistic missle going in a predetermined parabolic arc is just as easy as hitting the cone of an AAM moving in a dynamic path. I think you have been playing the humans on StarControl too much if you think it can just zap everything that tries to attack it, because it doesn't work that way.
It has an 18 second window to hit the target. My guess is that the system designed to target is so speciallized so as to be able to get that 18 second window and fire that it probably cannot cope with other targets. Fighters would be the hardest because it they knew that they were going against something like that they would take precautionary manuvering, if complex enough (which is probably not very complex), would prevent the computer from being able to predict where the plane would be, and thereby prevent it from aiming and firing. Sure, nothing moves faster than the speed of light (as a physic major I know that all to well) but there are mechanical parts used for aiming in order for it to fire, which do not move at the speed of light. And unlike a missle which corrects after launch, or gunfire where it is a near continuous volley, if you miss then you have ~18 seconds before you have another shot.
Although the USAF ECM is very good, if I was in one of these and some fighter managed to get close enough to start launching some AAMs at me I would start doing some pretty serious manuvering to not get hit. Then I would be requesting back-up asap. They aren't invincible, just as carrier groups aren't invincible. If it was being attacked I very much doubt that it would be a lone fighter, unless it was the only thing left after the escort was delt with.
1) A second clipboard.
For those of us who use Unix an Linux with mice that have three, or more, buttons, the third button is very useful. Just highlight something then middle click and it pastes. That on top of the, what is now standard in GUIs, ^C (or ^X) and ^V you have two clipboards. It can become very useful very quickly.
Also if you use Enlightenment then each of the three buttons displays a different menu, each equally useful.
Frankly, I have ideas for what the fourth button on my Logitec Mouseman+ should do but I just don't have the skill to implement it, yet.
Although quite a bit can be done with one mouse button I would rather just right click on something to bring up a menu rather than click, hold, and then drag in order to get the same menu with just one button. To each his/her own though.
I want to see us go to Mars, but I don't want us to rush it. I am sure that you have taken note to the backlash that NASA took when it lost several probes in a row. Those were unmanned and they got reamed big time. Imagine what the public would do if NASA lost six astronouts while enroute to or on Mars. Chances are good that NASA would either get axed or be so horribly crippled from budget cuts that it might as well be dead. Although the technology we have currently is capable of sending manned missions to Mars, we need to do more research and more testing and patience before we can achieve a SAFE mission to Mars. I am sure we will get there, and within my lifetime. Why, because it is one of NASA's priorities. Right now they are spending most of their budget on the ISS, as you know, which IS necessary. I personally believe that having a working space station is as necessary as sending someone to another planet. Once they are done with the ISS then they can move onto providing more time and funding to the Mars project.
Funny, I remember reading (out of grim curiosity) an article several years ago from the Chronical with the headline "Russian Satalites Leaking Radiation", or something to that effect. The entire article was about how there are several former Soviet nuclear satalites in relatively high orbits that had minor breaches in the power supply and were leaking radiation into space, and how that was really bad. It is scary how ignorant of radiation people really are.
I think that the prime example of stupid radiation protests has to be the banning of the process of irradiating eggs. Before that ban there was very little worry about getting salmonella (sp?) poisoning from eating raw eggs, now I have to coddle the eggs every time. Ignorance makes it possible.
it took Microsoft about five or so years to get Windows close to what Linux is now
If my information is correct one could say it took MS 9-11 years to get to this level. Technically NT 4.0 was not supposed to have been a product when the NT timeline came up, it was a "we need this is in the market NOW so take what we have and try to stablize it." NT 3.51 was supposed to be the only steping stone, then the leap to what is now NT 5.0, err Windows 2000. But even so, the NT product started development sometime between 1989-91. Also, technically Windows 3.11 was supposed to end the DOS line, then 95, then 98, now Me.
When I was taking a Delta flight from Atlanta to Denver in 1999 we had an iteresting problem. The plane was "in line" to take off, doesn't matter what number. When it was finally our turn we creaped up the the run way then turned off onto some side area. The captain came on speakers saying something to the effect of, sorry but our computer just crashed and we cannot take off without it up, it will take another 5 minutes or so to reboot it. Let me tell you, that really inspired confidence in me.
Hey, if the deal with Microsoft and Starbucks starts to modify United Airlines it could bring a whole new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death. I can see the head lines, "The crash of the United Airlines 737 was aparently due to a Microsoft Blue Screen causing x deaths."
As a previous reply (by Zachary Kessin) to this posting mentioned, Golden rice was developed to add nutrients not found in white rice into it. All of the white rice in the world equaly distributed would not solve many of the problems that quite a few third world countries fight, known as malnutrition.
When Europe had their spheres of influence within Asia they introduced a method of husking the wild rice so that it becomes easier to harvest. The new found ability to create white rice was widely accepted because it allowed for higher production, but what they didn't know is that it strips many of the essential nutrients that the brown rice that they used to produce had. The husk of the rice contains things like beta caratine, and more importantly IRON, which is transfered into the rice if it is not husked early to produce white rice.
Golden rice causes the iron and beta caratine to accumulate within the meat of the rice rather than only on the husk. This allows farmers in third worlds to continue to produce the high volumes of rice necessary to feed their country while at the same time it prevents people from dieing of rickets or other diseases caused by malnutrition. Sure, if they did not husk the rice and went back to eating brown rice then they would not have the problem, but many of these countries try to produce as much food as possible to prevent malnureshment.
We cannot just order these countries to stop producing white rice in favor of brown rice. Nor is it feasible to redistribute the wealth in an even way. At the same time I believe that allowing corperations to run without restriction is an equally bad decision. Pure communism and pure capitalism are nice utopias that don't work.
Saying that all genetic engineering of plants should be stopped because "evil" chemical corperations use it is like saying that all atomic physics research should be halted because the government has nuclear bombs. It is rediculous and uninformed. Sure people will miss-use the technology but it doesn't mean we should ban it.
More research should be done on genetic/chemical engineering but allowing people to die because you fear technology is negligent. Preventing society from progressing because people fear technology is maladaptive.
Halting progress due to ignorance is as bad as letting it run rampent for the same reason.
I was just talking with a collegue working on Bose-Einstein condensations (BEC) and I asked what some of the uses were. Due to the way BECs work statically/quantum mechanically one can create any interferance pattern within the BEC. He said that there are people working on trying to figure out ways of using this property to replace the etching processes used today to create things like computer chips by creating a interferance pattern in the form that one wants and then laying the BEC on the matterial (there is more to it than that but you know that). This would allow for manufacture of things at the 3 atom level. Of course, as someone else mentioned, 30 Nanometers is larger than 3 atoms thick. Lattice structures of silicides are roughly between .1 and .9 nm [1].
Theoretically this is possible, now whether this is practical is a whole different ball park.
[1]V.E. Borisenko: Semi-conducting Silicides (Springer, New York): pp 3-5
If I remember correctly the original 486 chips were released as SX. The difference between the SX and DX chips was the DX had a working math co-processor integrated into the die. The original SX chips were a fluke, basically the fist attempt to integrate the co-processor didn't work right and burnt out during use. Intel purposefully destroyed the integrated co-processor on the first batch because they knew it didn't work and didn't want a huge fiasco. After they fixed the bugs they continued to produce SX chips by destroying the co-processor on a DX chip and relabeling it. They found that they could still sell the SX chips even though they weren't nearly as good, just so long as the price was low enough.
Although I think someone is working on the Y-windowing system. I think that the first release should be Y_0 (Y sub 0). Which in science is pronouced "why not."
I'm not saying that I wouldn't want force feedback when I move over something, because I do. My question relies more on, will Logitech create Linux drivers for it when it comes out? I still have yet to see full use out of my four button Logitech mouse (I don't have the skill to do what I want with it, nor the time to learn the skill), and from what I have been able to decern from their site they have no plans on porting the software they created for Win9x to Linux, or NT for that matter.
I am about to contact Logitech and request full Linux support.
Their website for contacting Logitech is here.
Although there are several other posts talking about the same stuff that I am about to discuss I feel the need to reply to this.
If anyone doubts that it was really illegal, check out the DMCA. And it was the judge's job to uphold the law.
A judges job is not only to uphold the law but to interpret the law. If a law is unjust, unconstitutional, etc... it is their job to set the precedent. Just because a law is on the books doesn't mean that it is a good law.
Sure they broke a law, a law that until now was untried in a court of law. A law that they fundementally disagreed with. Their argument is not, 'their crypto sucks, so tuff shit.' They are trying to exend open code to the relm of free speech, and therefore protected by the constitution.
They were linking to sites that had copies of some OSS that along with the legitimate uses that it was originally written for it could also be used for illegitimate uses, like copying. And yes, there were legitimate uses. The original reason the teenager over in Europe wrote this was to be able to watch the DVDs that he had bought. He didn't write it to copy DVDs, he just wanted to be able to watch that which he had bought on his Linux box.
The question of this week is: Is Linking, or even hosting, something that COULD be used for illegal purposes illegal in of itself?
NO!. Here is a link to the Anarchist Cook book, By Jolly Roger which is a published book, and now an online resource, of how to do illegal stuff. I don't think that there is one single legit use of this book but it is protected by the 1st Amendment. Heck, the Anarchist Cook Book gives information on how to KILL people, which IMHO is a much bigger problem for society than the copyright of some mega-corp. That protection has been upheld in court, and frankly I'm happy about that. According to your argument:
2600 wasn't aiding crypto research, they were distributing a tool that not only had no legal use, but its very existence was a violation of copyright laws and the DMCA. ergo they should be punished. Then the Anarchist Cook book should also be illegal. So should this post because it links to the Anarchist Cook Book, so should your post because it will have a link to my post, etc...
You are very right in saying that this is not a crypto war. It has never been a crypto war. This is a war for our rights. The DMCA is an unconstitutional law and needs to be removed.
To quote Ben Franklin (I may not get this exactly), "Those that are willing to give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither the liberty nor the safety."
If you want to give up your essential liberties so that a monopoly can keep their strangle hold on society go right ahead, just DON'T expect me to.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if MS is porting Office to Linux. Will they release it when it is done, probably not. Why? Simple, they don't need to yet. MS still has a huge portion of the office market and until they think that they are actually being challenged on that front they don't need to worry about releasing their office product over to other systems. It is still good to have an ACE up the sleeve though. If they are porting Office over right now, when something like StarOffice, or if WordPerfect makes a miracle comeback and starts to eat up their market AND they can trace the loss back to Linux, then they release the product and try to kill the competing office product. Or if the DOJ gets their way and the Surpreme Court (SC) hears the case, AND if the SC decides that they do need to be broken up then the non-OS portion of MS can release the product and make more money on OSes that compete with Windows.
It is smart for them to port. It is smarter of them to allow someone else to port for them. And it is even smarter to hold back that which could potentially hurt them until it can help them.
I seriously doubt that the technology to produce high-power laser that is focused enough to take out 10cm metal/ceramic targets in orbit exists today.
Actually there is a ground based laser system in Arizona that can do just that. It was tested sometime last year.
How having a ground based laser system effects the treaty about not allowing laser weapons in space is something I would like to know.
Actually we have had lasers that can damage, if not destroy, other countries satilites for more than a year.
There is one of these in Arizona, it was tested last year to see if it could hit a sensor so that NASA could record some info. They used the lowest setting that they knew would reach the satilite and it destroyed the sensor.
As for lasers in space. There is an international treaty that was originally constructed and signed by the US, CCCP, and China that bans laser weapons in space. So NASA could not construct a deathstar with lasers without breaking international treaty. Particle weapons and rail guns, on the other hand, I believe are still viable options.