So why hasn't [PGP] been offered as an automatic part of [email]?
Oddly enough, I'd say that a significant part of it is the chicken-and-egg problem: it's only really useful for cryptography if a lot of people have PGP (note that signing your emails using PGP shows that they're really from you, but does not actually encrypt them; for that, you need to encrypt using the public key of the recipient, and this would require most recipients to have public keys in the first place). For Joe User who hasn't heard of an IP address let alone public key encryption, you'd need some way to automatically set up PGP for him, since he certainly can't do it. and there's no economic motivation for companies to create automatic PGP stuff, since it's not really useful until more people adopt it (as I said earlier), though this is precisely why more people don't adopt it.
On a related note, if you have a PGP key and then buy a new computer, you have to either know what you're doing in order to get your private key onto the new computer, which Joe User also can't do (And if there is a way to automate this process, anyone could write a virus that would use the automated version to steal your private key), or remove your original key and create a new one, which would confuse Joe's friends when their PGP systems suddenly don't trust Joe's email any more.
Sadly, the only way that PGP will become popular is to educate the general populace so that they know as much about computers as we, the computer nerds, do. and although I don't want to admit it, this is never going to happen.
The way to show that he is, as you say, "full of shit" is not to ridicule him and compare him to the Unabomber (thank you for not bringing Hitler into this). The way to expose crackpots for what they are is to refute their theory. Show that the theory predicts that molecules can't exist, show that this "energy source" cannot actually be built, show that there is absolutely no empirical evidence for anything they have done. Until you do that, they are entitled to claim that they are not crackpots. At the moment, NASA is doing just this - they are testing the theory to see if these so-called hydrinos can actually be used as an energy source. Instead of calling this guy names, let people get on with testing his theories, and base your conclusions on them. After he is shown to be wrong, call him a crackpot, but if, by some outside chance, he turns out to be right, just accept that he was onto something big.
Mind you, he [Edison] probably deserved the patents.
From your own link: Edison's patents "were actually made by his numerous employees - Edison was frequently criticized for not sharing the credits." He claims credit for some great works, and whoever invented them was a great person (or, more likely, people). However, Edison himself was a jackass. He employed people to invent things for him, and then he stole their IP.
Feel free to mod me "off-topic," but this needed to be said.
Yes, this is wonderful. As a person who considers themself a geek, but does not know very much about Linux, I think this book could be marvelous for me. I've been wanting to switch for a while now (sadly, I'm still on XP Home). The thing that's kept me back is that I don't know how to use Linux well, and don't know what questions to ask to get better at it. I have a box running RedHat 7-or-so, but I screwed it up by changing something I apparently shouldn't have (I can't find my programs as root anymore:-P). This lack of Linux know-how has been my main reason for sticking to windows, and now hopefully, I'll be able to change that. If more people could write books like this, the world would be a pretty great place.
Problem solved right, just turn on your telomerases? wrong, cancer does that....
Actually, "turning on the telomerases" is closer to a possible solution than you claim. I wish I could find the article again (if anyone else can, please post), but I can't, so here's the summary: A group of scientists took a worm and messed with its genes so that it constantly made telomerase. The worm was supposed to have a life span of 2 weeks (this was not a garden worm, but some kind of funny roundworm or something). After 1 year, it still appeared normal and healthy. It is quite possible that telomerase will do this sort of thing to other organisms too, but there are ethical questions that need to be resolved before we do testing on humans. In response to your quip about cancer, yes, cancer cells constantly produce telomerase. This is why cancer can continue to grow and not die off (indeed, you can even get certain decades-old cancer strains in biological catalogues). However, this only keeps cancer cells from growing frail and losing important genes. The part that makes them grow and divide at a malicious rate is unrelated. This has to do with a protein called p53. p53 usually just sits around, but when a cell exhibits certain cancerous behaviors, p53 lyses (kills) it. In cancer cells, the gene that makes p53 no longer works (either it has been disabled, or it has a mutation in it that causes it to no longer make p53). This is why cancer cells are harmful - they do not stop replicating. This has almost nothing to do with telomerase. The telomerase just keeps the genes in the cancer cells (and in regular cells too) healthy. Indeed, all cells have a little telomerase in them, but not enough to completely repair the telomeres after the DNA has been copied.
Hear, hear! James Lovelock took the time to research the topic, find his facts, look at the whole picture, and then write a very elegant piece on it. Bruce Sterling's rebuttal is little more than "You're using the word 'nuclear,' so it must be bad." Lovelock even adresses this in his piece:
"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen."
Sterling, without a shred of evidence, dismisses this all. Nuclear power really is very safe and controlled - the only reason Chernobyl happened at all was that some idiot had the bright idea to turn off the control system, and then turn off the back-up control system. Other than that and 3 Mile Island (which was a remarkably similar, easily avoidable situation), I do not know of any problems with nuclear power (feel free to give me more examples; I'd like to learn. Also, if I have any facts wrong, please correct me). Sterling seems to think that power plants and bombs are the same thing, despite the difference in grades of feul, elements used, etc. This just goes to show that people can be really illogical when the word "nuclear" is used. Here's a good example of that: When MRI scans were invented, they were called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans, because that's what they are: they look at the magnetic moments of the nucleii that you are made of. But since it had the word "nuclear" in the name, no one wanted to try it out. Since then, they dropped the "nuclear" bit and called it MRI (same process, just a different name). Suddenly, everyone realizes that this is a fantastic process, and deserves Nobel prises (IIRC, 2 different ones were handed out for different aspects of the process). The bottom line is, know the facts before you reject something. Nuclear power plants are not going to blow up the world 3 times over. The worst they could do is give you cancer, which happens far more often from smoking (or, as Lovelock points out, breathing). If Sterling actually sat down and learned about the issue, I'm pretty sure he'd change his tune. I'm disappointed that this counts as "news":-P
Not necessarily. The way I read the article, a much more likely scenario is that a meteorite crashed into Mars, and some of the ejected debris crashed into Earth. Here are some choice excerpts from the article:
The high proportion of pyroxene means Bounce not only is unlike any other rock studied by Opportunity or Spirit, but also is unlike the volcanic deposits mapped extensively around Mars...
Personally, I'm inclined to think that this means that Bounce probably did not originate on Mars. It sounds like Bounce is not like any other rock on Mars.
"Some of us think (Bounce) could have been ejected from this crater," Rogers said.
Craters are formed when meteorites smash into planets/moons/etc. To get a crater, you need something that came from another part of the solar system, if not another part of the galaxy.
If Bounce came from this crater, as they hypothesize it did, then Bounce may or may not have come from another part of the galaxy, so this theory is starting to fit together well...
On a slightly related note, it should be much easier to find a meteorite on Mars than on Earth - Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, so objects are less likely to burn up upon entry into the atmosphere. This explains why Mars has many more craters on it that Earth does. Also, I've read in several places (including a mention in the above quote) that many of the rocks on Mars are quite similar to each other. Thus, any different rocks will stand out rather a lot. This makes meteorite hunting fairly simple. Consequently, it would not surprise me at all if the rovers managed to find a meteorite on Mars.
I do not profess to be at all knowledgeable about Mars geology, but any fool can see that the author of the article knows even less. Not only did they dumb the finding down for laypeople, they have even added some inconsistencies:
Bounce's chemical composition exactly matches that of a meteorite that hit the ground in Shergotty, India, on Aug. 25, 1865. A less-distinctively named shergottite, EETA79001, found in Antarctica in 1979, has a composition even closer to Bounce's.
I for one am disappointed by the lack of information in the article. Give me a real scientific article with real scientific facts, and hopefully we can then come to real, scientific conclusions. Until then, many different interpretations of this article are equally valid.
Researchers at the University of Calgary have found that nerve cells grown on a microchip can learn and memorize information which can be communicated to the brain.
While the article mentions this in the introduction, it doesn't mention this happening at all in the research. It talks about neurons communicating with each other. This is a long way from connecting this chip into a living brain in an animal that can still function.
While I agree that this is a fascinating article, we should make sure not to sensationalize it too much. Making chips that interface with actual brains in actual animals, even if they are snails, is still a long way off.
Panspermia problems?
on
Space Burial
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· Score: 3, Insightful
So here's a question: Let's say that this company launches someone's remains into orbit. 200 years later, we discover what appears to be burned organic matter floating through our solar system. How do we know if it's from this company? How do we know if it came from another planet that could have life on it? This is the same sort of reasoning that led us to crash the Galileo probe into Jupiter: so we don't contaminate other parts of space with terrestrial stuff. IMHO, this company is not thinking ahead, and making a huge mistake. What do others think (preferably others who know more about this than I do)?
Assume the system is 99.9% accurate (a gross overestimation, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt). That is to say, 99.9% of the time, it correctly identifies normal people as non-sex offenders, and 99.9% of sex offenders as bad people. Now assume they put this in a middle school with 500 students in it. At parent-teacher conferences (or, for that matter, any other time parents must enter the school), 1000 parents will show up. The machine is 99.9% accurate, so 1 of these parents will be ID'ed as a sex offender.
Conversely, what about the sex offenders? For this device to be worthwhile, at least 1 in every 1000 people to enter the school must be one. This is ludicrous. This is the same reason that so-called "terrorist detection systems" don't work at airports. Consider the following anecdote:
The following was in an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (I'm too lazy to find the article, but if you look, I'm sure it's there): There is a 65 year old white man in Minnesota who leads a perfectly normal life. However, whenever he goes to take a flight, he is stopped by security. Apparently, he has the same name as a terrorist (remember, this is a kind, old grandfatherly guy). It took him 4 flights to figure out this much, because security is not allowed to tell him why he is stopped. He contacted the Department of Homeland Security to ask to be removed from their list, because he is not a terrorist. They replied that because they are so new, there are some bugs. They have no idea when they will be fixed, and there is nothing they can do in the meantime. This guy is stuck.
This same sort of thing will happen if we put these "detectors" in schools, or anywhere else until they become much, much more accurate (read at least 99.9999%). It's things like this that make me ashamed of our current government and its supposed security measures.
You're right. All those worlds are ours, except Europa. We should attempt no landings there.
You don't read much from the scientific community, do you? We don't want to put anything man-made on Europa for fear of contaminating it with life from Earth. This was on slashdot a while back. If we did land there, and then later discovered life on Europa, we wouldn't know if it was terrestrial or not.
What is fascinating, in my opinion, is that Silbo Gomero is being used to help map the language sections of the brain. I found the abstract of a research paper on the topic, but unfortunately, can't find the paper itself. Can anyone else help me out there?
The gist of the abstract is that when a person knows Silbo and hears it spoken, the language sections of the brain turn on, but these sections do not fire in a person who does not know Silbo when they hear it. This helps separate out the true language sections from the pattern matching areas and the sound recognition parts. I for one think this is fascinating.
I'm surprised that the article said that space tourism has fizzled. Not only is the space elevator in a better position now than any other time I can think of, but what about the X-Prize? The entire race is to make a cheap, non-governmental way to get into space. The purpose of it is to make commercial space vacations viable!! Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but I expect that by the time I retire, I will be able to get a trip into space for about the same cost as a trip around the world.
I'm also having a little trouble stomaching the part about how they expected to have warp drives like in Star Trek. That is science fiction. Yes, many inventions have come out of science fiction (submarines and airplanes, to name two examples), but these designs did not break any laws of physics. Hyperspace drives do. It's not gonna happen until we have another huge, revolutionary breakthrough in physics. I don't remember anyone saying something along the lines of "50 years from now we will be able to travel at speeds faster than light. We will colonize other star systems. It'll be great!" No one was expecting this to happen soon.
2 out of the 7 ideas were crap. Not the greatest track record for an article, ne?
I'm going to have to disagree with the article on this. As a CS major at Harvey Mudd College (one of the most technology-oriented colleges in the country), I have already learned not only assembler, but how to build computers starting with transistors and wires. While this is fascinating (I have a whole new respect for anyone who writes an operating system), I don't think it is at all necessary for my future. The entire reason that grammars and parsers (For those of you who aren't really into CS, these are the things that turn Java and other high-level languages into machine code. In essence they are how a computer that only understands machine language can understand other languages as well.) were created in the first place is so that we don't need to work in assembler any more!! Yes, some people will always need to know machine language to write new OSs and new networking protocols, but most people won't ever use this: not only will secretaries, dry-cleaners, and construction workers not need to use assembler, most CS workers won't need it either. Most webmasters hate typing HTML by hand (My summer job this past year was assisting our college's webmaster. I started it typing in HTML, and the head webmaster convinced me by the end of the summer that it is more effective to use FrontPage). Game developers don't need assembler (as I recall, the source code to Half Life 2 was leaked earlier this year. It was written in C++).
It's obvious that some people will always need to understand assembler, so that they can make new operating systems, new languages (Prolog, for example, cannot be written in Java - it requires assembler), and a few other applications. Other than that, however, many industries are thriving despite not using assembler. The article cited claims that we should all need to know what goes on under the hood of the microprocessor, but does not give any justification as to why this is so. I see no reason why the majority of people in the world need to learn in order to keep up in society.
the network will become more stable and be able to handle traffic better. This also means less resources needed which translates directly into money.
This is one of the silliest things I have heard all day. As a college student, I assure you that most campus networks (the one here and the ones my CS friends at other schools talk about) are set up to handle much more traffic than they currently get. My school, for example is running 2 T3 lines, so a little filesharing is not particularly taxing on the system. Also, since it's on all the time, no one saves any money if we simply don't use it. Finally, you have got to be kidding yourself if you think that using less bandwidth (even if it did save you money) would save more than $130,000 per month. That is a lot of money - as was mentioned in a previous post, that is about $1million per year. There is no way that any school could save that much from decreased bandwidth (actually, I expect that this deal will increase bandwidth, because now the students against illegal file sharing will start downloading music too).
This is obviously just a way to get the RIAA to back off and stop bullying them. I for one cannot think of another reason why this could be reasonable or economical.
I saw Reloaded in both a regular theater and the IMAX (I, for one, liked it more than the first Matrix, but that's a different story). I must say, though, that I enjoyed it on the regular screen more - on the IMAX, everything is too big. You literally have to twist your head to look from one side of the screen to the other. All motion in the movie became blurry because there was too much detail. Just my personal opinion, but don't see it at IMAX.
I cannot agree more. Given the choice between watching another "reality" series and playing Neverwinter Nights or another suitably awesome game, there is no contest. Game sales are up because the newer games have better graphics, AI, and gameplay, but also retain the same quality of the old games. Television, on the other hand, has not had any major advances since... um... whenever they started making them in color. It's getting old, and the TV stations have all but run out of new ideas for shows. If they start playing good, entertaining shows, people will watch them. Until then, people will find other sources of entertainment, such as games.
This is absolutely correct. With the possible exception to Douglas Adams (whose work is in a completely different genre anyway), McMaster-Bujold is one of the greatest SF writers of all time. She has won 2 Nebula awards and an unprecedented 4 Hugo awards (in contrast, Asimov only got 3, and he's dead now, so he won't be getting any more). As an introduction to her work, I would like to reccomend Cordelia's Honor. It has everything a good book needs - lots of futuristic SF stuff, well developed characters, a love story, fantastic battles (it takes place during an interplanetary war), political trickery... the list goes on and on.
One of my favorite things about McMaster-Bujold is that she writes believable characters. Tolkien and Asimov have good worlds, but their individual characters are fairly flat and one-dimensional. Bujold, on the other hand, writes as though these people were real - they have fears, insecurities, hopes, dreams, and they change and mature as the characters are put into new situations.
Bottom line - if you haven't checked out Lois McMaster-Bujold, you don't know what you're missing.
If this begins to go the same way that do-not-call lists do, I doubt it will be very useful. However, I think it would be great if the government could actually implement one of these. I am the webmaster of the college I go to, and I get roughly 30 spam messages a day. However, I don't want to use a spam-filtering program like SpamPal because I can't take the risk of having it delete a false positive. I think this would be wonderful. It might even give spammers the message that we hate what they do (for some reason, they haven't figured this out yet).
If you're going for Sci-Fi, one of the greatest authors out there is named Lois McMaster Bujold. Although few people have heard of her, she has won several Hugo awards and at least one Nebula award for her wonderful science fiction. Her Vorkosigan series starts with a book called Shards of Honor, although the first two books in the series have been grouped together in a book called Cordelia's Honor. I enjoy her work because it has most things you can want in a story: war, political sneakiness, a love story, action, adventure, etc. But above all, I like Bujold because she writes about round, dynamic, believable characters. They have strengths, fears, insecurities, everything that real people have. It makes the stories more believable than most other writers (who have great stories, but characters with little or no background). Give Bujold a look - she is easily my favorite writer.
Rather than being upset about an underpowered server, I think people are more afraid of portraying the information from these sites as someone else's work. For example, I have written a script that goes to the New York Stock Exchange (by deep link), and puts stock quotes on my homepage (currently, the entire website is offline). If I tried to pass this off as a better site than the original, I could draw all of their traffic away. They do not want this.
Another possible reason to be against deep linking is that some sites put cookies on your computer from their main page (I'm pretty sure Amazon.com and Yahoo do this). If you deep link, they cannot track you and put you into their statistics.
Although I don't agree with these people, they do seem justified in trying to avoid deep linking.
I agree that there are legal and moral issues involved if we try to "steal somebody else's rain," but I don't think anyone would mind if we got rid of hurricanes. The destruction they cause is obvious, but I cannot think of anything useful that hurricanes bring. One Florida company, Dyn-O-Mat, is in the process of developing a product that can get rid of clouds, storms, and possibly even hurricanes (there is an article at Discover Magazine about it). The idea is simple, yet elegant: baby diapers are filled with stuff that absorbs several times its weight in liquid. Let's make it into a powder, put it into a storm/hurricane, and it will suck up all the rain in the storm. It then falls down into the ocean, and is neutralized by the saltwater. Poof! No more storm. Their goal is to prevent hurricanes, which, incredible as it may sound, seems likely in the next decade (assuming their product isn't toxic, etc). I'm surprised no one has mentioned this company yet, since they seem to be the most prominent weather-control project in the news lately. I think that this product, which is called Dyn-O-Storm, has much more potential than seeding clouds with dry ice (whose effectiveness, after decades of testing, is still inconclusive). The test of Dyn-O-Storm in the article says that it made a cloud completely disappear from radar within minutes. Admittedly, this is only a cloud, not even a storm. However, I think it is a very impressive step. They will try to test it on a hurricane sometime in the near future, weather permitting.:-) Does anyone know how the testing of Dyn-O-Storm is coming? It would be nice to hear when they actually try it on the hurricane.
Given the vast amount of information on the internet, it is not unlikely that while googling for a certain person, you will find someone else entirely. If you really know nothing at all about the person you're looking for (for example, if you're looking up a blind date or a job applicant), there is no way for you to know if you're reading about your person or someone else.
For example, I just did a google search for my own name, and could not find my website or, for that matter, anything else affiliated with me in the top 50 links. However, I did find a lawyer, a statistician, a food expert, a college professor, a witness testimony, a sex offender, and an author with the same name as myself. If my date is googling for me, is she supposed to think I'm the professor or the sex offender?
The chances of getting incorrect information makes googling seem far too risky in my opinion. Has anyone else had better luck finding accurate information?
A few months ago, I downloaded a program called the Pop-Up Stopper. It's free, and takes up almost no space. It also stops all regular pop-up ads. I admit that it doesn't catch all of them (some of the ones with unusual scripts running can fool it), but I'd guess it stops 9 out of every 10 ads. If you actually want a window to pop-up, all you have to do is hold down the Control key while you click on the link. It's very little hassle, and stops a lot of ads. Give it a shot!
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[The driver] may not have received no moving violations or convictions or court-ordered supervision.
I really hope that's a typo... I'm not sure how easy it would be to find someone with a prior conviction to send on the road trip.
Oddly enough, I'd say that a significant part of it is the chicken-and-egg problem: it's only really useful for cryptography if a lot of people have PGP (note that signing your emails using PGP shows that they're really from you, but does not actually encrypt them; for that, you need to encrypt using the public key of the recipient, and this would require most recipients to have public keys in the first place). For Joe User who hasn't heard of an IP address let alone public key encryption, you'd need some way to automatically set up PGP for him, since he certainly can't do it. and there's no economic motivation for companies to create automatic PGP stuff, since it's not really useful until more people adopt it (as I said earlier), though this is precisely why more people don't adopt it.
On a related note, if you have a PGP key and then buy a new computer, you have to either know what you're doing in order to get your private key onto the new computer, which Joe User also can't do (And if there is a way to automate this process, anyone could write a virus that would use the automated version to steal your private key), or remove your original key and create a new one, which would confuse Joe's friends when their PGP systems suddenly don't trust Joe's email any more.
Sadly, the only way that PGP will become popular is to educate the general populace so that they know as much about computers as we, the computer nerds, do. and although I don't want to admit it, this is never going to happen.
The way to show that he is, as you say, "full of shit" is not to ridicule him and compare him to the Unabomber (thank you for not bringing Hitler into this). The way to expose crackpots for what they are is to refute their theory. Show that the theory predicts that molecules can't exist, show that this "energy source" cannot actually be built, show that there is absolutely no empirical evidence for anything they have done. Until you do that, they are entitled to claim that they are not crackpots. At the moment, NASA is doing just this - they are testing the theory to see if these so-called hydrinos can actually be used as an energy source. Instead of calling this guy names, let people get on with testing his theories, and base your conclusions on them. After he is shown to be wrong, call him a crackpot, but if, by some outside chance, he turns out to be right, just accept that he was onto something big.
From your own link:
Edison's patents "were actually made by his numerous employees - Edison was frequently criticized for not sharing the credits." He claims credit for some great works, and whoever invented them was a great person (or, more likely, people). However, Edison himself was a jackass. He employed people to invent things for him, and then he stole their IP.
Feel free to mod me "off-topic," but this needed to be said.
Yes, this is wonderful. As a person who considers themself a geek, but does not know very much about Linux, I think this book could be marvelous for me. I've been wanting to switch for a while now (sadly, I'm still on XP Home). The thing that's kept me back is that I don't know how to use Linux well, and don't know what questions to ask to get better at it. I have a box running RedHat 7-or-so, but I screwed it up by changing something I apparently shouldn't have (I can't find my programs as root anymore :-P). This lack of Linux know-how has been my main reason for sticking to windows, and now hopefully, I'll be able to change that. If more people could write books like this, the world would be a pretty great place.
Actually, "turning on the telomerases" is closer to a possible solution than you claim. I wish I could find the article again (if anyone else can, please post), but I can't, so here's the summary: A group of scientists took a worm and messed with its genes so that it constantly made telomerase. The worm was supposed to have a life span of 2 weeks (this was not a garden worm, but some kind of funny roundworm or something). After 1 year, it still appeared normal and healthy. It is quite possible that telomerase will do this sort of thing to other organisms too, but there are ethical questions that need to be resolved before we do testing on humans.
In response to your quip about cancer, yes, cancer cells constantly produce telomerase. This is why cancer can continue to grow and not die off (indeed, you can even get certain decades-old cancer strains in biological catalogues). However, this only keeps cancer cells from growing frail and losing important genes. The part that makes them grow and divide at a malicious rate is unrelated. This has to do with a protein called p53. p53 usually just sits around, but when a cell exhibits certain cancerous behaviors, p53 lyses (kills) it. In cancer cells, the gene that makes p53 no longer works (either it has been disabled, or it has a mutation in it that causes it to no longer make p53). This is why cancer cells are harmful - they do not stop replicating. This has almost nothing to do with telomerase. The telomerase just keeps the genes in the cancer cells (and in regular cells too) healthy. Indeed, all cells have a little telomerase in them, but not enough to completely repair the telomeres after the DNA has been copied.
"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. We must stop fretting over the minute statistical risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. Nearly one third of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that all pervasive carcinogen, oxygen."
Sterling, without a shred of evidence, dismisses this all. Nuclear power really is very safe and controlled - the only reason Chernobyl happened at all was that some idiot had the bright idea to turn off the control system, and then turn off the back-up control system. Other than that and 3 Mile Island (which was a remarkably similar, easily avoidable situation), I do not know of any problems with nuclear power (feel free to give me more examples; I'd like to learn. Also, if I have any facts wrong, please correct me). Sterling seems to think that power plants and bombs are the same thing, despite the difference in grades of feul, elements used, etc. This just goes to show that people can be really illogical when the word "nuclear" is used. :-P
Here's a good example of that: When MRI scans were invented, they were called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans, because that's what they are: they look at the magnetic moments of the nucleii that you are made of. But since it had the word "nuclear" in the name, no one wanted to try it out. Since then, they dropped the "nuclear" bit and called it MRI (same process, just a different name). Suddenly, everyone realizes that this is a fantastic process, and deserves Nobel prises (IIRC, 2 different ones were handed out for different aspects of the process).
The bottom line is, know the facts before you reject something. Nuclear power plants are not going to blow up the world 3 times over. The worst they could do is give you cancer, which happens far more often from smoking (or, as Lovelock points out, breathing). If Sterling actually sat down and learned about the issue, I'm pretty sure he'd change his tune. I'm disappointed that this counts as "news"
The high proportion of pyroxene means Bounce not only is unlike any other rock studied by Opportunity or Spirit, but also is unlike the volcanic deposits mapped extensively around Mars...
Personally, I'm inclined to think that this means that Bounce probably did not originate on Mars. It sounds like Bounce is not like any other rock on Mars.
"Some of us think (Bounce) could have been ejected from this crater," Rogers said.
Craters are formed when meteorites smash into planets/moons/etc. To get a crater, you need something that came from another part of the solar system, if not another part of the galaxy. If Bounce came from this crater, as they hypothesize it did, then Bounce may or may not have come from another part of the galaxy, so this theory is starting to fit together well...
On a slightly related note, it should be much easier to find a meteorite on Mars than on Earth - Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, so objects are less likely to burn up upon entry into the atmosphere. This explains why Mars has many more craters on it that Earth does. Also, I've read in several places (including a mention in the above quote) that many of the rocks on Mars are quite similar to each other. Thus, any different rocks will stand out rather a lot. This makes meteorite hunting fairly simple. Consequently, it would not surprise me at all if the rovers managed to find a meteorite on Mars.
I do not profess to be at all knowledgeable about Mars geology, but any fool can see that the author of the article knows even less. Not only did they dumb the finding down for laypeople, they have even added some inconsistencies:
Bounce's chemical composition exactly matches that of a meteorite that hit the ground in Shergotty, India, on Aug. 25, 1865.
A less-distinctively named shergottite, EETA79001, found in Antarctica in 1979, has a composition even closer to Bounce's.
I for one am disappointed by the lack of information in the article. Give me a real scientific article with real scientific facts, and hopefully we can then come to real, scientific conclusions. Until then, many different interpretations of this article are equally valid.
Researchers at the University of Calgary have found that nerve cells grown on a microchip can learn and memorize information which can be communicated to the brain.
While the article mentions this in the introduction, it doesn't mention this happening at all in the research. It talks about neurons communicating with each other. This is a long way from connecting this chip into a living brain in an animal that can still function.
While I agree that this is a fascinating article, we should make sure not to sensationalize it too much. Making chips that interface with actual brains in actual animals, even if they are snails, is still a long way off.
So here's a question: Let's say that this company launches someone's remains into orbit. 200 years later, we discover what appears to be burned organic matter floating through our solar system. How do we know if it's from this company? How do we know if it came from another planet that could have life on it? This is the same sort of reasoning that led us to crash the Galileo probe into Jupiter: so we don't contaminate other parts of space with terrestrial stuff. IMHO, this company is not thinking ahead, and making a huge mistake. What do others think (preferably others who know more about this than I do)?
Exactly. Let's run some numbers here, shall we?
Assume the system is 99.9% accurate (a gross overestimation, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt). That is to say, 99.9% of the time, it correctly identifies normal people as non-sex offenders, and 99.9% of sex offenders as bad people. Now assume they put this in a middle school with 500 students in it. At parent-teacher conferences (or, for that matter, any other time parents must enter the school), 1000 parents will show up. The machine is 99.9% accurate, so 1 of these parents will be ID'ed as a sex offender.
Conversely, what about the sex offenders? For this device to be worthwhile, at least 1 in every 1000 people to enter the school must be one. This is ludicrous. This is the same reason that so-called "terrorist detection systems" don't work at airports. Consider the following anecdote:
The following was in an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (I'm too lazy to find the article, but if you look, I'm sure it's there): There is a 65 year old white man in Minnesota who leads a perfectly normal life. However, whenever he goes to take a flight, he is stopped by security. Apparently, he has the same name as a terrorist (remember, this is a kind, old grandfatherly guy). It took him 4 flights to figure out this much, because security is not allowed to tell him why he is stopped. He contacted the Department of Homeland Security to ask to be removed from their list, because he is not a terrorist. They replied that because they are so new, there are some bugs. They have no idea when they will be fixed, and there is nothing they can do in the meantime. This guy is stuck.
This same sort of thing will happen if we put these "detectors" in schools, or anywhere else until they become much, much more accurate (read at least 99.9999%). It's things like this that make me ashamed of our current government and its supposed security measures.
You're right. All those worlds are ours, except Europa. We should attempt no landings there.
You don't read much from the scientific community, do you? We don't want to put anything man-made on Europa for fear of contaminating it with life from Earth. This was on slashdot a while back. If we did land there, and then later discovered life on Europa, we wouldn't know if it was terrestrial or not.
What is fascinating, in my opinion, is that Silbo Gomero is being used to help map the language sections of the brain. I found the abstract of a research paper on the topic, but unfortunately, can't find the paper itself. Can anyone else help me out there?
The gist of the abstract is that when a person knows Silbo and hears it spoken, the language sections of the brain turn on, but these sections do not fire in a person who does not know Silbo when they hear it. This helps separate out the true language sections from the pattern matching areas and the sound recognition parts. I for one think this is fascinating.
I'm surprised that the article said that space tourism has fizzled. Not only is the space elevator in a better position now than any other time I can think of, but what about the X-Prize? The entire race is to make a cheap, non-governmental way to get into space. The purpose of it is to make commercial space vacations viable!! Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but I expect that by the time I retire, I will be able to get a trip into space for about the same cost as a trip around the world.
I'm also having a little trouble stomaching the part about how they expected to have warp drives like in Star Trek. That is science fiction. Yes, many inventions have come out of science fiction (submarines and airplanes, to name two examples), but these designs did not break any laws of physics. Hyperspace drives do. It's not gonna happen until we have another huge, revolutionary breakthrough in physics. I don't remember anyone saying something along the lines of "50 years from now we will be able to travel at speeds faster than light. We will colonize other star systems. It'll be great!" No one was expecting this to happen soon.
2 out of the 7 ideas were crap. Not the greatest track record for an article, ne?
I'm going to have to disagree with the article on this. As a CS major at Harvey Mudd College (one of the most technology-oriented colleges in the country), I have already learned not only assembler, but how to build computers starting with transistors and wires. While this is fascinating (I have a whole new respect for anyone who writes an operating system), I don't think it is at all necessary for my future. The entire reason that grammars and parsers (For those of you who aren't really into CS, these are the things that turn Java and other high-level languages into machine code. In essence they are how a computer that only understands machine language can understand other languages as well.) were created in the first place is so that we don't need to work in assembler any more!! Yes, some people will always need to know machine language to write new OSs and new networking protocols, but most people won't ever use this: not only will secretaries, dry-cleaners, and construction workers not need to use assembler, most CS workers won't need it either. Most webmasters hate typing HTML by hand (My summer job this past year was assisting our college's webmaster. I started it typing in HTML, and the head webmaster convinced me by the end of the summer that it is more effective to use FrontPage). Game developers don't need assembler (as I recall, the source code to Half Life 2 was leaked earlier this year. It was written in C++).
It's obvious that some people will always need to understand assembler, so that they can make new operating systems, new languages (Prolog, for example, cannot be written in Java - it requires assembler), and a few other applications. Other than that, however, many industries are thriving despite not using assembler. The article cited claims that we should all need to know what goes on under the hood of the microprocessor, but does not give any justification as to why this is so. I see no reason why the majority of people in the world need to learn in order to keep up in society.
the network will become more stable and be able to handle traffic better. This also means less resources needed which translates directly into money.
This is one of the silliest things I have heard all day. As a college student, I assure you that most campus networks (the one here and the ones my CS friends at other schools talk about) are set up to handle much more traffic than they currently get. My school, for example is running 2 T3 lines, so a little filesharing is not particularly taxing on the system. Also, since it's on all the time, no one saves any money if we simply don't use it. Finally, you have got to be kidding yourself if you think that using less bandwidth (even if it did save you money) would save more than $130,000 per month. That is a lot of money - as was mentioned in a previous post, that is about $1million per year. There is no way that any school could save that much from decreased bandwidth (actually, I expect that this deal will increase bandwidth, because now the students against illegal file sharing will start downloading music too).
This is obviously just a way to get the RIAA to back off and stop bullying them. I for one cannot think of another reason why this could be reasonable or economical.
I saw Reloaded in both a regular theater and the IMAX (I, for one, liked it more than the first Matrix, but that's a different story). I must say, though, that I enjoyed it on the regular screen more - on the IMAX, everything is too big. You literally have to twist your head to look from one side of the screen to the other. All motion in the movie became blurry because there was too much detail. Just my personal opinion, but don't see it at IMAX.
I cannot agree more. Given the choice between watching another "reality" series and playing Neverwinter Nights or another suitably awesome game, there is no contest. Game sales are up because the newer games have better graphics, AI, and gameplay, but also retain the same quality of the old games. Television, on the other hand, has not had any major advances since... um... whenever they started making them in color. It's getting old, and the TV stations have all but run out of new ideas for shows. If they start playing good, entertaining shows, people will watch them. Until then, people will find other sources of entertainment, such as games.
This is absolutely correct. With the possible exception to Douglas Adams (whose work is in a completely different genre anyway), McMaster-Bujold is one of the greatest SF writers of all time. She has won 2 Nebula awards and an unprecedented 4 Hugo awards (in contrast, Asimov only got 3, and he's dead now, so he won't be getting any more). As an introduction to her work, I would like to reccomend Cordelia's Honor. It has everything a good book needs - lots of futuristic SF stuff, well developed characters, a love story, fantastic battles (it takes place during an interplanetary war), political trickery... the list goes on and on.
One of my favorite things about McMaster-Bujold is that she writes believable characters. Tolkien and Asimov have good worlds, but their individual characters are fairly flat and one-dimensional. Bujold, on the other hand, writes as though these people were real - they have fears, insecurities, hopes, dreams, and they change and mature as the characters are put into new situations.
Bottom line - if you haven't checked out Lois McMaster-Bujold, you don't know what you're missing.
If this begins to go the same way that do-not-call lists do, I doubt it will be very useful. However, I think it would be great if the government could actually implement one of these. I am the webmaster of the college I go to, and I get roughly 30 spam messages a day. However, I don't want to use a spam-filtering program like SpamPal because I can't take the risk of having it delete a false positive. I think this would be wonderful. It might even give spammers the message that we hate what they do (for some reason, they haven't figured this out yet).
If you're going for Sci-Fi, one of the greatest authors out there is named Lois McMaster Bujold. Although few people have heard of her, she has won several Hugo awards and at least one Nebula award for her wonderful science fiction. Her Vorkosigan series starts with a book called Shards of Honor, although the first two books in the series have been grouped together in a book called Cordelia's Honor. I enjoy her work because it has most things you can want in a story: war, political sneakiness, a love story, action, adventure, etc. But above all, I like Bujold because she writes about round, dynamic, believable characters. They have strengths, fears, insecurities, everything that real people have. It makes the stories more believable than most other writers (who have great stories, but characters with little or no background). Give Bujold a look - she is easily my favorite writer.
Rather than being upset about an underpowered server, I think people are more afraid of portraying the information from these sites as someone else's work. For example, I have written a script that goes to the New York Stock Exchange (by deep link), and puts stock quotes on my homepage (currently, the entire website is offline). If I tried to pass this off as a better site than the original, I could draw all of their traffic away. They do not want this.
Another possible reason to be against deep linking is that some sites put cookies on your computer from their main page (I'm pretty sure Amazon.com and Yahoo do this). If you deep link, they cannot track you and put you into their statistics.
Although I don't agree with these people, they do seem justified in trying to avoid deep linking.
I agree that there are legal and moral issues involved if we try to "steal somebody else's rain," but I don't think anyone would mind if we got rid of hurricanes. The destruction they cause is obvious, but I cannot think of anything useful that hurricanes bring. One Florida company, Dyn-O-Mat, is in the process of developing a product that can get rid of clouds, storms, and possibly even hurricanes (there is an article at Discover Magazine about it). The idea is simple, yet elegant: baby diapers are filled with stuff that absorbs several times its weight in liquid. Let's make it into a powder, put it into a storm/hurricane, and it will suck up all the rain in the storm. It then falls down into the ocean, and is neutralized by the saltwater. Poof! No more storm. :-)
Their goal is to prevent hurricanes, which, incredible as it may sound, seems likely in the next decade (assuming their product isn't toxic, etc). I'm surprised no one has mentioned this company yet, since they seem to be the most prominent weather-control project in the news lately. I think that this product, which is called Dyn-O-Storm, has much more potential than seeding clouds with dry ice (whose effectiveness, after decades of testing, is still inconclusive). The test of Dyn-O-Storm in the article says that it made a cloud completely disappear from radar within minutes. Admittedly, this is only a cloud, not even a storm. However, I think it is a very impressive step. They will try to test it on a hurricane sometime in the near future, weather permitting.
Does anyone know how the testing of Dyn-O-Storm is coming? It would be nice to hear when they actually try it on the hurricane.
Given the vast amount of information on the internet, it is not unlikely that while googling for a certain person, you will find someone else entirely. If you really know nothing at all about the person you're looking for (for example, if you're looking up a blind date or a job applicant), there is no way for you to know if you're reading about your person or someone else.
For example, I just did a google search for my own name, and could not find my website or, for that matter, anything else affiliated with me in the top 50 links. However, I did find a lawyer, a statistician, a food expert, a college professor, a witness testimony, a sex offender, and an author with the same name as myself. If my date is googling for me, is she supposed to think I'm the professor or the sex offender?
The chances of getting incorrect information makes googling seem far too risky in my opinion. Has anyone else had better luck finding accurate information?
A few months ago, I downloaded a program called the Pop-Up Stopper. It's free, and takes up almost no space. It also stops all regular pop-up ads. I admit that it doesn't catch all of them (some of the ones with unusual scripts running can fool it), but I'd guess it stops 9 out of every 10 ads. If you actually want a window to pop-up, all you have to do is hold down the Control key while you click on the link. It's very little hassle, and stops a lot of ads. Give it a shot!