So anyway, if all this matter is turning into energy, why didn't it just do that initially rather than go through this labourious process of creating stars, galaxies, nebulae, etc?
Energy isn't a thing that exists on its own, it's a "property" of something, often defined as "the ability to do work" - that is, how much of an effect something can have on something else.
A magnetic field can "have" energy, in that it can exert a force on charged particles for example (but that charged particle, in changing direction, emits a magnetic field in the opposite direction, effectively reducing the field's strength, as if it's removing the field's energy, for the duration that the field is influencing the particle). You can create one with an electric current in a wire (say, in a coil), and when you remove the current, the magnetic field will disappear, but the energy will have an effect on the wire and an electric current will be forced through the wire. Or, if you have a second coil of wire in the magnetic field, the energy will be used up driving an electric current in that one (that's how a transformer works).
Big bang inflation can be viewed as a similar field which collapsed, causing all the effects of expanding space and generating matter with rapid motion (temperature is defined as the average kinetic energy of the particles making up something). A particle with enough kinetic energy can cause other things to happen (by collision, or interacting through fields), such as spontaneously generating another particle or radiating electromagnetic waves, and end up with less energy as a result (the other particle's mass and motion having the rest of the energy).
The evolution of the universe is the process by which energy is being transferred from a very concentrated media to less concentrated media, "media" being matter or motion or light/radiation, and so on. But energy is only a property of that media.
Darwin isn't judged negatively because he believed in the superiority of white men either
Actually, Darwin was one of the few people who didn't believe that. In "The Descent of Man", he wrote:
There is good evidence that the art of shooting with bows and arrows has not been handed down from any common progenitor of mankind, yet as Westropp and Nilsson have remarked, the stone arrow-heads, brought from the most distant parts of the world, and manufactured at the most remote periods, are almost identical; and this fact can only be accounted for by the various races having similar inventive or mental powers.
He was kind of a contrarian, you know, going against conventional wisdom of the time. Do you know he came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection?
Interesting bit from the article, Abraham Lincoln was a racist. He just thought that, while negros were inferior to whites, they weren't so inferior that they could be treated like property. A quote by Lincoln from a debate at the time:
I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. [...] I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.
That might better support your point of judging people according to the age they lived in.
"Energy" is not a thing that exists. It is an abstract concept invented by physicists to make certain types of equations balance. Things can "have" energy in that they can be represented by one side of an equation, and have an effect on other things represented by the other side of the equation, but they are only media, such as electricity or moving matter, which have and transmit this conceptual attribute.
If you want to talk about "pure energy" (being not part of a medium transmitting this attribute), you're using a definition of "energy" that has nothing in common with any scientific use of the term. Which may make you happy, many people get satisfaction from believing in mystical energies.
This reply might be too late for anyone else to read this, but there's an alternative to the "Copenhagen Interpretation" (which refers to quantum waves as probabilities which "collapse" when observed, giving the statistical results you get). It's "pilot wave" or Bohm interpretation, described here:
At its most basic, it says that the "probability waves" are actually fields which physically pull a particle to the points of highest intensity. In this interpretation the particles always have exact position and momentum, but they are always changing due to the influence of this field, which moves around as described by quantum field theory.
In the momentum experiment, you can measure the exact location of the 100 particles, but the momentum is different because each particle is in motion within the "pilot wave". Like a marble rolling around a bowl.
It's not a widely accepted view, but might make things easier to visualise.
I've thought about that "no money" thing, and how it would work, and I think I've got some idea. In fact, we're on the way now.
Money is basically a representation of a person's past value - what they've contributed to society (approximately, there are shortcomings, accept it for now) - but it ignores future value - what they can or likely will contribute. To make up for this credit was invented. A medical student freshly graduated may have a negligable or even largely negative monitary value due to debts but a very large credit value. In other words, a medical student about to start work will have less trouble buying an expensive car than a receptionist who may have far more actual money.
In the Star Trek universe, physical goods have become cheap enough that perhaps it actually costs more to try to keep track of money than is worth. Not just from person to person, but interest, taxes, dividents, inflation projections - basically overhead that the world currently spends a few trillion on daily these days. There's vast profits to be made on skimming bits off this administration effort, so there's a lot of incentive to keep it going by bankers, investors, fund managers, and so on (and propoganda about "the profit motive" being important, though any motive for actual productivity at that point is tenuous and indirect), but there's also incentive to reduce this waste.
Credit is still a measure of "potential money", but if money becomes too expensive (the costs of managing it overcome the actual value it has), then credit could become a measure of a person's value in itself.
All bank accounts, credit accounts, and so on are only different forms of identity. Fundamentally they're all aspects of a person. One of the things mentioned in the Star Trek universe in its substitute economy is "self improvement", which makes sense then. Self improvement will increase your personal value (credit), without needing to go through the tedious steps to convert that worth to actual money. Consider many smart people who invent new things but don't have the ability, time, or desire to start a business to capitalize on it. Things like patents are another clumsy error-filled way of assigning value to a person without transferring money, in a way that allows someone else who is better at it to do the work of capitalization.
What's not specified in Star Trek is how this personal value is tracked, if not through money. Gene Roddenberry was an optimist, and felt that despite its problems humanity will become steadilly more "good", and it's reasonable at some point that a properly functioning, benign, and effective government would exist and would at that point be able to handle this sort of thing. There are problems with centralisation of control, but this would be only data management, which may work better with centralized control. For example, DNS uses a small number of root servers and a single domain name authority, and even its problems so far outweigh the alternative (remember bang paths? "...!hp!umich!csdept!netgroup!chserv!charlie"?) that even in the internet centralized control of some essential information is preferred.
So, someone wants to open up a Cajun restaurant, they ask a few people managing real estate in the area who have space available. Some of them have space, but it's too valuable for a restaurant, maybe a logistics firm or research lab could get it (Value measured how? Probably by expected demand, as in capitalism, but with much more accurate data). The owner settles on a location, and the landlord's "value" goes up immediately by the contribution to society the restaurant will produce, rather than having to wait for rent. Similarly for the furniture, supplies, staff, and so on.
Still not necessarily realistic, but I can see how it could work fictionally at least.
One thing that people note about most predictions for future technology is that they rarely come true, while the technology that actually makes a difference seems to "come out of nowhere" before it's suddenly everywhere.
The reason is that people are fixated on the new and amazing promises of technology, but the thing is that those are new and amazing simply because nobody actually does things like that in normal life. All real advances of technology are the result of changing ordinary everyday things because those are the things people do all the time, and a little improvement has a big effect.
Giant airplanes like the Boeing 747 or Airbus 380 are not world changing because they are giant flying things, they are world changing because they let people travel more effectively. People like the idea of flying as entertainment but almost nobody does routinely it for its own sake (some do in private planes or gliders), but people travel all the time. The fact that it's in the air is incidental.
But many people only see the flying, and not the travel, and think that flying is the world changing event. So they miss out when they try to predict the next world changing event. For example with computers, everyone thought the world changing event would be amazing hypercool virtual reality, but it turned out to be email. I mean, really, even if VR worked, who would have time for it beyond a few video games each week, and what would it change in your life? But how often to you communicate with someone else? Compare and contrast.
Same with robots. The world's most successful robot is a puck-shaped vacuum cleaner.
The next big technological advance will be something where you don't notice the technology. It will just spread until you wonder to yourself "I wonder what ever happened to cable television/flat tires/floppy disks?".
The advance in the state of the art for software was more rapid before patents were introduced. Granted, there are other pressures now as well, such as Microsoft, standardization, and so on, but one example is data compression - research into lossless data compression vitrually stopped once the LZW patent became a barrier. Although 50% is about the point of diminishing returns, there was ample room to improve speed, robustness against errors, and some compression improvements which were never pursued.
In the intervening period, researchers moved to other fields so that even with the patent expiry, research hasn't resumed. In addition, compression is less important now, but this only means that the benefits of compression technology were lost exactly at the point where it was important.
Basically, the software experience has shown very clearly that invention increased when the incentive is pure competition (or cooperation), and not government granted monopolies.
why don't we change the clocks permanently by a half hour?
This is essentially what Saskatchewan did, and why the province doesn't change time.
There's no reason companies can't change their business hours, though. One major company (IPSCO) has its U.S headquarters in a state with DST (Illinois), and so they simply change their Saskatchewan business hours to match.
Somehow they manage to do this without requiring the entire rest of the province to change their clocks. Amazing, isn't it?
It's more than just a bandwidth issue, it's a granularity issue. Various things have been tried, from Java applets to thin clients like you linked to, as well as Flash applets and AJAX interfaces, but I think nobody's hit the right combination of protocol and interface yet to really overcome the client/server barrier - in a way that's not ten times harder to develop than a simple desktop application.
I think the trend is there, and once someone gets it right, it will produce a technology usage transformation.
Real transforming ideas are things that come from off center, and seem silly and easily dismissed until they're inexplicably established and vital. Some examples:
Queue a file to be copied later to another computer. Why do that, when you can manually make the connection and copy it now? What's the point of adding extra automation that just delays things? Because the extra automation can be used to add routing, addressing, notification, etc. Email.
View an ordinary formatted text file (maybe a few pictures thrown in), but on another computer. That makes no sense, to rely on an unreliable and slow network connection and on the other computer to be up, when you can just copy the file (or have it emailed to you) so you can look at it whenever you want. Besides, how do you even know how to locate the file? Except the protocol for identifying and exchanging this information allows web applications, and you get the HTTP and the World Wide Web.
GUIs. Using a little wand or ball or mouse to move shapes around on a screen is okay for specialised applications, but computer data is numbers and words, which are all abstract and have no relationship to things on a screen. Besides, you'd have to give these controller gadgets to everyone in the world with a keyboard already, who wants that expense? Besides, keyboards are always more efficient because you can keep your hands in place. GUIs for real (number and word) applications existed for decades before they caught on.
Apple iPod - less capable player, relied on PC software for functionality. Well, PC software has a better interface and makes things easier overall - plus the iTunes music store.
I predict the next big thing will be something along these lines. Maybe already here, but dismissed as equally silly.
A display-neutral protocol that lets applications run on a server with the GUI on a user's screen. Not pixel-oriented bandwidth hogs like X windows or remote desktop, but something based on well established GUI components and window layout. Extensible User Interface Protocol (XUP) is a much overlooked example.
Deductive databases. A reasonable relational database with foreign key constraints means that if you select only the data and tables you want, it should be easy enough for the database to select your joins for you. It's an NP problem, but lots of caching could fix most of that. Oh, plus SQL sucks, and it's nearly criminal that people think SQL and relational database mean the same thing.
Statistical text analysis. The very beginning has started with SPAM filters and Baysian models. Spammers are starting to figure out how to fight them, but variable length Markov chains have the potential to start to glean more meaning from the text and make better decisions. This could lead to the ability to extract common concepts from phrases or sentences which are different, but mean the same thing. This would allow processing text based on chunks of meaning rather than pattern recognition - far from artificial intelligence, but opens up the possibility of a lot of new very high level applications.
There's a few thoughts. Any other things that seem trivial and with vastly overlooked potential?
If this drug were patentable then it would be worth the cost of bringing it to market, setting up factories, distributing it, and undertaking the risks if it caused harm. But it's not so the drug founders.
Is that why nobody sells non-patented things like bottled water?
No, wait I meant is that why everybody sells non-patented things like bottled water?
No, that doesn't make sense either.
Anyway, aspirin is not patented, and I see lots of it sold. It seems that if there's any profit to be made, someone will want to make it.
As far as getting you to pull spam with your model, it will just mean new methods of infection for clients. The way to force a pull is malware. Another approach would be to attack the host serving the RSS feeds.
That's true, but it makes it much harder for the spammer, which is important. In the case of malware, at least you could take responsibility for the security of your own system, whereas now you're at the mercy of others - if only one system in the world (out of millions) is owned or has an insecure open relay, spammers can use it against you.
As far as attacking the RSS host, at least the attack would be far more visible, and easily identified, and the damage would be very limited even if it weren't caught. If it's not fixed, you can stop reading from it until it is (still send mail to them to let them know). Again, it becomes far more work for the spammers for far less payoff - hopefully enough to make it no longer worthwhile for most of them.
I'm sure there will be a bunch of new problems with something like that, but I'm certain that overall it will be far better than email as it is now.
How does a series of RSS subscriptions duplicate the simplicity of having a single final destination for per-user messages?
They both have a single destination. In one, the sender copies it onto your email server. In the other, the sender copies it onto their server. When you check for email, you poll one server, or several servers in the second case. They're about the same level of complexity.
It seems that under your scheme I would have to subscribe to every user community that involves a person I wish to communicate with.
For web based messaging, you don't even have to do that now, because they got together and created OpenID. For selecting individuals to receive email from, that would be handled much like email address books work now.
Or do you have an idea about how per-user messages would be passed from community to community? That's called relaying, and is still prone to the same abuses as SMTP relaying.
No it isn't, because SNMP is a "push" model and RSS is a "pull" model. You can "push" spam, but at best you can only meekly beg users to "pull" it because they need to know who you are to poll your server.
If I trojan your machine, I can tell it to do anything it's capable of, including spamming dozens of RSS channels using the identity of the machine I compromised.
You only have access to your own RSS source. At worst, you'll spam your friends, and they'll tell you about it so you can fix it (or they won't accept any more email from you if you don't fix it).
You seem to be intentionally not following me - you're not arguing against anything I've said. And aside from that, exactly how is one competent administrator such as yourself going to stop the world's spam by properly configuring all other mail servers in the Internet? I just don't see that happening, so whether SMTP can theoretically be configured correctly doesn't help.
To recap, RSS exists, is used, is a standard, and it could be extended to provide per-user messages reliably, without the problems of SMTP which allow spam. I expect that it, or "online community" web services, will eventually replace existing email because of these advantages.
See the form above. Your "solution" falls into the "everyone needs to adopt it all at once" category.
Actually, no, it doesn't - they are parallel systems already in use. One or the other can replace email gradually, much like web forums have replaced Usenet groups (which also had terrible spam problems driving people away) - in that case, there was no sudden cutover, yet the change happened (mostly - Usenet groups still exist, but are far less important now and not as widely used).
And as I pointed out, "online community" messaging is already starting to replace many uses of email for some groups of people. That's not a "plan" or prediction, it's an observation. New things start slow, then adoption speeds up if it's worthwhile. And it's speeding up.
First of all, SMTP does not lack authentication or authorization methods.
It has them, they just don't work. For example:
Most spam gets sent through open relays and pwned boxen, so the protocol isn't the issue: the open relays and pwned boxen are.
The protocol is the problem in that it's vulnerable to things like these.
As for the rest of your post, I think you're misunderstanding what I wrote (or I mixed up some words - I'll have to go back and check). It has nothing to do with whether the sender knows the receiver received or read the mail. It's all about the receiver knowing with certainty where the mail came from. Uncertainty about that is what allows email to be abuse by spammers.
One is based on RSS (or similar, like Atom). Right now, RSS is used for what amounts to "mailing lists", by notifying the recipients there's something new, and they can pick up their copy - though it works by polling, no actual notification is sent.
One extremely important advantage of this is that you know exactly where the material is from.
I'm hoping that future versions will allow an RSS feed to be customised per user, which would basically amount to sender-hosted email, meaning a) the sender bears costs for the email, and b) the source cannot in any way be faked.
There are disadvantages, including the question of how someone can send you email for the first time. One solution is that you can "piggyback" on someone else's RSS feed for the first message (a common friend, or a well-known site like slashdot, or a blog site). This acts like an implicit filter, since you wouldn't have an RSS feed from someone you didn't trust enough to have some discretion to not spam you.
You'd no longer ask for someone's email address if you wanted to send them something, you'd give them your RSS feed.
The second scenario I see happening is based on "community sites" like MySpace or Livejournal. Most of these sites have features to let you know if someone else has a new blog post, to list friends or block enemies, various privacy levels, and so on. And among the younger users who are the target for these sites, many of them already think of email as old-fashioned (and useless because of spam), so their primary communication is through blogs and IM.
Right now, any email replacement would be limited to within a single "community", but I'd expect that at some point two or more (possibly smaller) sites would agree to exchange messages between them. If the protocol weren't open, some other site (or group) would come up with one that was. Once the exchange of messages (and friend information, etc.) became a feature attracting users, other sites would have to follow.
It would not be too much different from the growth of "OpenID", which is now used by several blog sites to identify users from outside their "community".
Once messaging is possible using a standard web protocol, it will gain the same functionality of email, but again with verified source and so no spam. It will be more centralised than an RSS type solution, but still work well enough to replace email.
I think one or the other is inevitable. Unfortunately I'm working on other things and can't try any of this myself, but maybe someone will.
Summary: Many deaths go unreported officially, so researchers used the same survey methods used to estimate deaths from natural disasters like the massive tsunami, or earthquakes in Kashmir. The methods have been used in other war zones like Bosnia, and compared to the post-conflict results, and have been shown to be fairly accurate - a little on the high side, but the actual number is within the error range. Applied to Iraq, the number of estimated deaths due to the conflict (all causes) is about 650,000, but with a wide margin of error (maybe as low as 400,000 deaths).
The contest involves opening a file - that's just begging you to take the path (to construct the output file name) and check path separator or initial character while doing so.
The trick would be to detect different Unix systems (in Java or other) without being obvious.
I think there was a very good reason for the introduction of the character of Jar-Jar, and a reason why he was almost non-existant for the next two films.
Lucas knew that these movies would show the Jedi at their peak, energy and action that made the fights in Empire and Return of the Jedi pale. And Yoda was a Jedi master.
But you can't be a Jedi Master if you are a puppet with a hand up your backside. So for the prequels, at some point, Yoda would have to be a CGI character. But being known and loved by one and all, the technique would need to be absolutely perfect, with no chance to make mistakes and learn how to do it better.
Hence, a throw-away CGI character which was unimportant and nobody needed to care about - even a clownish one so that any mistakes wouldn't be noticed.
Jar-Jar was needed as he was so that Yoda could kick ass in the second movie, then kick ass's ass in the third.
Skepticism can be stupid, if the stakes are high enough. Example:
"Those two headlights heading towards me at high speed could be a bus that will kill me, but they could be two motorcyles that will pass harmlessly on either side of me. I think I'll stand here until I know for sure."
The problem with complex applications and complex menus like Microsoft Office and Open Office is that functionality gets lost deep in the menu structure. Microsoft developers have realised this, and have tried to address it in several ways (Clippy, duplicating functionality in many unrelated, inconsistant places). Open software developers have also tried (removing options, rearranging menus without reducing their complexity), but I think all have have missed the point of GUIs.
The key breakthrough that dropdown menus provided when they were introduced was simply that all the available functions (or function categories, at least) are visible, or at lease findable, you don't need to remember any text command (like a command line) or wierd control key combinations. It greatly simplifies things, but a GUI dropdown menu is no more effective in that way than the original Lotus 1-2-3 text interface - a '/' would bring up a top screen menu, which you could select in a similar fashion with keyboard only, no mouse. In fact, it had some advantages until Microsoft added the ALT-key method for accessing GUI menus.
The fundamental problem is that when menus get too complex, the options are no longer easily visible. You now have to remember where to activate a particular function - and you're back to memorizing things instead of having them in front of you, so you're back to the idea of commands. Only the command is a series of menu clicks, instead of keystrokes or words.
The problem isn't the use of menus, but the over use of them. The entire reason for the existance of GUIs is to allow direct manipulation of objects. The opportunity for ease of use from this is still only touched upon in many ways - especially by those who don't see any farther than stuffing menus full of functionality (similarly, if you've ever looked at the configuration options of a complex open-source project like NetBeans or KDE or Gnome, you'll see huge trees of incomprehensible options, often in a uniform structure that gives you no clue as to where to find the one you're looking for - you have to read, explore, read, explore until you stumble across the one you want). That functionality should go into direct manipulation of visible objects, not menus.
For example, in a word processor, mini icons representing paragraphs could be displayed in a margin. To change properties like interparagraph spacing, indent, style or following style, you'd click on the icon to open a control panel - instead of cursor somewhere into the text, then up to the menu bar and click on Format / Paragraph / Indents and Spacing. Another icon or option lets you select the paragraph style, or edit the style (some of this is already done, with a ruler control up top, with drag-and-drop tabs - good idea). The manipulation now takes place at the paragraph you're interested in itself, not far away in some abstraft menu tree.
Direct manipulation is the most overlooked, but by far the most powerful ease-of-use tool. The Macintosh and applications that run on it, go furthest by a wide margin in using direct manipulation, which is why users consider it so vastly easier to use, yet without loss of power. This is the real magic of GUIs and key to ease of use - it's not in "simplifying options", but providing those options in an absolutely direct and intuitive fashion.
Laterally, we might be able to see ourselves with powerful enough telescopes.
No, light can orbit a black hole laterally at about twice the redius of the event horizon. A bit closer, you can get a quazi-eliptical cycle, with a crease at your end, like a peach[1], that gets deeper as you get closer to the event horizon, until the light can only escape vertically, so can't make a trip back to yourself. Within the event horizon, as you say, light can't go outward in any way, so there's no path back to yourself.
What you would see looking out would be a cone. At first, on the horizon itself, it would be 180 degrees, as light from behind you will come in from the side, and light from the side would be bent to come in from above, but as you got closer to the singularity, the cone would shrink and get narrower until just at the singularity, all light (well, radiation, well beyond gama-ray energies) would come from a single ultra-concentrated spot directly above you.
At the singularity itself, of course, the spot would be multiplied by every direction, and the entire sky would be lit.
All that assumes that black holes have no quantum structure. If they do, only half a dozen people in the world have any idea what that would be like, and even they're not too sure about it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
A magnetic field can "have" energy, in that it can exert a force on charged particles for example (but that charged particle, in changing direction, emits a magnetic field in the opposite direction, effectively reducing the field's strength, as if it's removing the field's energy, for the duration that the field is influencing the particle). You can create one with an electric current in a wire (say, in a coil), and when you remove the current, the magnetic field will disappear, but the energy will have an effect on the wire and an electric current will be forced through the wire. Or, if you have a second coil of wire in the magnetic field, the energy will be used up driving an electric current in that one (that's how a transformer works).
Big bang inflation can be viewed as a similar field which collapsed, causing all the effects of expanding space and generating matter with rapid motion (temperature is defined as the average kinetic energy of the particles making up something). A particle with enough kinetic energy can cause other things to happen (by collision, or interacting through fields), such as spontaneously generating another particle or radiating electromagnetic waves, and end up with less energy as a result (the other particle's mass and motion having the rest of the energy).
The evolution of the universe is the process by which energy is being transferred from a very concentrated media to less concentrated media, "media" being matter or motion or light/radiation, and so on. But energy is only a property of that media.
Here's an article on the topic: http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/darwin_nazism.htm
Interesting bit from the article, Abraham Lincoln was a racist. He just thought that, while negros were inferior to whites, they weren't so inferior that they could be treated like property. A quote by Lincoln from a debate at the time:
That might better support your point of judging people according to the age they lived in."Energy" is not a thing that exists. It is an abstract concept invented by physicists to make certain types of equations balance. Things can "have" energy in that they can be represented by one side of an equation, and have an effect on other things represented by the other side of the equation, but they are only media, such as electricity or moving matter, which have and transmit this conceptual attribute.
If you want to talk about "pure energy" (being not part of a medium transmitting this attribute), you're using a definition of "energy" that has nothing in common with any scientific use of the term. Which may make you happy, many people get satisfaction from believing in mystical energies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohm_interpretation
At its most basic, it says that the "probability waves" are actually fields which physically pull a particle to the points of highest intensity. In this interpretation the particles always have exact position and momentum, but they are always changing due to the influence of this field, which moves around as described by quantum field theory.
In the momentum experiment, you can measure the exact location of the 100 particles, but the momentum is different because each particle is in motion within the "pilot wave". Like a marble rolling around a bowl.
It's not a widely accepted view, but might make things easier to visualise.
Money is basically a representation of a person's past value - what they've contributed to society (approximately, there are shortcomings, accept it for now) - but it ignores future value - what they can or likely will contribute. To make up for this credit was invented. A medical student freshly graduated may have a negligable or even largely negative monitary value due to debts but a very large credit value. In other words, a medical student about to start work will have less trouble buying an expensive car than a receptionist who may have far more actual money.
In the Star Trek universe, physical goods have become cheap enough that perhaps it actually costs more to try to keep track of money than is worth. Not just from person to person, but interest, taxes, dividents, inflation projections - basically overhead that the world currently spends a few trillion on daily these days. There's vast profits to be made on skimming bits off this administration effort, so there's a lot of incentive to keep it going by bankers, investors, fund managers, and so on (and propoganda about "the profit motive" being important, though any motive for actual productivity at that point is tenuous and indirect), but there's also incentive to reduce this waste.
Credit is still a measure of "potential money", but if money becomes too expensive (the costs of managing it overcome the actual value it has), then credit could become a measure of a person's value in itself.
All bank accounts, credit accounts, and so on are only different forms of identity. Fundamentally they're all aspects of a person. One of the things mentioned in the Star Trek universe in its substitute economy is "self improvement", which makes sense then. Self improvement will increase your personal value (credit), without needing to go through the tedious steps to convert that worth to actual money. Consider many smart people who invent new things but don't have the ability, time, or desire to start a business to capitalize on it. Things like patents are another clumsy error-filled way of assigning value to a person without transferring money, in a way that allows someone else who is better at it to do the work of capitalization.
What's not specified in Star Trek is how this personal value is tracked, if not through money. Gene Roddenberry was an optimist, and felt that despite its problems humanity will become steadilly more "good", and it's reasonable at some point that a properly functioning, benign, and effective government would exist and would at that point be able to handle this sort of thing. There are problems with centralisation of control, but this would be only data management, which may work better with centralized control. For example, DNS uses a small number of root servers and a single domain name authority, and even its problems so far outweigh the alternative (remember bang paths? "...!hp!umich!csdept!netgroup!chserv!charlie"?) that even in the internet centralized control of some essential information is preferred.
So, someone wants to open up a Cajun restaurant, they ask a few people managing real estate in the area who have space available. Some of them have space, but it's too valuable for a restaurant, maybe a logistics firm or research lab could get it (Value measured how? Probably by expected demand, as in capitalism, but with much more accurate data). The owner settles on a location, and the landlord's "value" goes up immediately by the contribution to society the restaurant will produce, rather than having to wait for rent. Similarly for the furniture, supplies, staff, and so on.
Still not necessarily realistic, but I can see how it could work fictionally at least.
One thing that people note about most predictions for future technology is that they rarely come true, while the technology that actually makes a difference seems to "come out of nowhere" before it's suddenly everywhere.
The reason is that people are fixated on the new and amazing promises of technology, but the thing is that those are new and amazing simply because nobody actually does things like that in normal life. All real advances of technology are the result of changing ordinary everyday things because those are the things people do all the time, and a little improvement has a big effect.
Giant airplanes like the Boeing 747 or Airbus 380 are not world changing because they are giant flying things, they are world changing because they let people travel more effectively. People like the idea of flying as entertainment but almost nobody does routinely it for its own sake (some do in private planes or gliders), but people travel all the time. The fact that it's in the air is incidental.
But many people only see the flying, and not the travel, and think that flying is the world changing event. So they miss out when they try to predict the next world changing event. For example with computers, everyone thought the world changing event would be amazing hypercool virtual reality, but it turned out to be email. I mean, really, even if VR worked, who would have time for it beyond a few video games each week, and what would it change in your life? But how often to you communicate with someone else? Compare and contrast.
Same with robots. The world's most successful robot is a puck-shaped vacuum cleaner.
The next big technological advance will be something where you don't notice the technology. It will just spread until you wonder to yourself "I wonder what ever happened to cable television/flat tires/floppy disks?".
Try something like Extensible User Interface Protocol, or XUP: (http://www.openxup.org/).
CA is the postal code for California, and has been for a long time. FYI, I live in SK.
In the intervening period, researchers moved to other fields so that even with the patent expiry, research hasn't resumed. In addition, compression is less important now, but this only means that the benefits of compression technology were lost exactly at the point where it was important.
Basically, the software experience has shown very clearly that invention increased when the incentive is pure competition (or cooperation), and not government granted monopolies.
There's no reason companies can't change their business hours, though. One major company (IPSCO) has its U.S headquarters in a state with DST (Illinois), and so they simply change their Saskatchewan business hours to match.
Somehow they manage to do this without requiring the entire rest of the province to change their clocks. Amazing, isn't it?
Those are third party applications. They just don't run on the phone, just like they don't run on your computer, but you use them anyway.
I think the trend is there, and once someone gets it right, it will produce a technology usage transformation.
- Queue a file to be copied later to another computer. Why do that, when you can manually make the connection and copy it now? What's the point of adding extra automation that just delays things? Because the extra automation can be used to add routing, addressing, notification, etc. Email.
- View an ordinary formatted text file (maybe a few pictures thrown in), but on another computer. That makes no sense, to rely on an unreliable and slow network connection and on the other computer to be up, when you can just copy the file (or have it emailed to you) so you can look at it whenever you want. Besides, how do you even know how to locate the file? Except the protocol for identifying and exchanging this information allows web applications, and you get the HTTP and the World Wide Web.
- GUIs. Using a little wand or ball or mouse to move shapes around on a screen is okay for specialised applications, but computer data is numbers and words, which are all abstract and have no relationship to things on a screen. Besides, you'd have to give these controller gadgets to everyone in the world with a keyboard already, who wants that expense? Besides, keyboards are always more efficient because you can keep your hands in place. GUIs for real (number and word) applications existed for decades before they caught on.
- Apple iPod - less capable player, relied on PC software for functionality. Well, PC software has a better interface and makes things easier overall - plus the iTunes music store.
I predict the next big thing will be something along these lines. Maybe already here, but dismissed as equally silly.- A display-neutral protocol that lets applications run on a server with the GUI on a user's screen. Not pixel-oriented bandwidth hogs like X windows or remote desktop, but something based on well established GUI components and window layout. Extensible User Interface Protocol (XUP) is a much overlooked example.
- Deductive databases. A reasonable relational database with foreign key constraints means that if you select only the data and tables you want, it should be easy enough for the database to select your joins for you. It's an NP problem, but lots of caching could fix most of that. Oh, plus SQL sucks, and it's nearly criminal that people think SQL and relational database mean the same thing.
- Statistical text analysis. The very beginning has started with SPAM filters and Baysian models. Spammers are starting to figure out how to fight them, but variable length Markov chains have the potential to start to glean more meaning from the text and make better decisions. This could lead to the ability to extract common concepts from phrases or sentences which are different, but mean the same thing. This would allow processing text based on chunks of meaning rather than pattern recognition - far from artificial intelligence, but opens up the possibility of a lot of new very high level applications.
There's a few thoughts. Any other things that seem trivial and with vastly overlooked potential?No, wait I meant is that why everybody sells non-patented things like bottled water?
No, that doesn't make sense either.
Anyway, aspirin is not patented, and I see lots of it sold. It seems that if there's any profit to be made, someone will want to make it.
That's true, but it makes it much harder for the spammer, which is important. In the case of malware, at least you could take responsibility for the security of your own system, whereas now you're at the mercy of others - if only one system in the world (out of millions) is owned or has an insecure open relay, spammers can use it against you.
As far as attacking the RSS host, at least the attack would be far more visible, and easily identified, and the damage would be very limited even if it weren't caught. If it's not fixed, you can stop reading from it until it is (still send mail to them to let them know). Again, it becomes far more work for the spammers for far less payoff - hopefully enough to make it no longer worthwhile for most of them.
I'm sure there will be a bunch of new problems with something like that, but I'm certain that overall it will be far better than email as it is now.
You seem to be intentionally not following me - you're not arguing against anything I've said. And aside from that, exactly how is one competent administrator such as yourself going to stop the world's spam by properly configuring all other mail servers in the Internet? I just don't see that happening, so whether SMTP can theoretically be configured correctly doesn't help.
To recap, RSS exists, is used, is a standard, and it could be extended to provide per-user messages reliably, without the problems of SMTP which allow spam. I expect that it, or "online community" web services, will eventually replace existing email because of these advantages.
And as I pointed out, "online community" messaging is already starting to replace many uses of email for some groups of people. That's not a "plan" or prediction, it's an observation. New things start slow, then adoption speeds up if it's worthwhile. And it's speeding up.
It has them, they just don't work. For example: The protocol is the problem in that it's vulnerable to things like these.As for the rest of your post, I think you're misunderstanding what I wrote (or I mixed up some words - I'll have to go back and check). It has nothing to do with whether the sender knows the receiver received or read the mail. It's all about the receiver knowing with certainty where the mail came from. Uncertainty about that is what allows email to be abuse by spammers.
One is based on RSS (or similar, like Atom). Right now, RSS is used for what amounts to "mailing lists", by notifying the recipients there's something new, and they can pick up their copy - though it works by polling, no actual notification is sent.
One extremely important advantage of this is that you know exactly where the material is from.
I'm hoping that future versions will allow an RSS feed to be customised per user, which would basically amount to sender-hosted email, meaning a) the sender bears costs for the email, and b) the source cannot in any way be faked.
There are disadvantages, including the question of how someone can send you email for the first time. One solution is that you can "piggyback" on someone else's RSS feed for the first message (a common friend, or a well-known site like slashdot, or a blog site). This acts like an implicit filter, since you wouldn't have an RSS feed from someone you didn't trust enough to have some discretion to not spam you.
You'd no longer ask for someone's email address if you wanted to send them something, you'd give them your RSS feed.
The second scenario I see happening is based on "community sites" like MySpace or Livejournal. Most of these sites have features to let you know if someone else has a new blog post, to list friends or block enemies, various privacy levels, and so on. And among the younger users who are the target for these sites, many of them already think of email as old-fashioned (and useless because of spam), so their primary communication is through blogs and IM.
Right now, any email replacement would be limited to within a single "community", but I'd expect that at some point two or more (possibly smaller) sites would agree to exchange messages between them. If the protocol weren't open, some other site (or group) would come up with one that was. Once the exchange of messages (and friend information, etc.) became a feature attracting users, other sites would have to follow.
It would not be too much different from the growth of "OpenID", which is now used by several blog sites to identify users from outside their "community".
Once messaging is possible using a standard web protocol, it will gain the same functionality of email, but again with verified source and so no spam. It will be more centralised than an RSS type solution, but still work well enough to replace email.
I think one or the other is inevitable. Unfortunately I'm working on other things and can't try any of this myself, but maybe someone will.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/10/11/iraq.dea ths/
Summary: Many deaths go unreported officially, so researchers used the same survey methods used to estimate deaths from natural disasters like the massive tsunami, or earthquakes in Kashmir. The methods have been used in other war zones like Bosnia, and compared to the post-conflict results, and have been shown to be fairly accurate - a little on the high side, but the actual number is within the error range. Applied to Iraq, the number of estimated deaths due to the conflict (all causes) is about 650,000, but with a wide margin of error (maybe as low as 400,000 deaths).
The contest involves opening a file - that's just begging you to take the path (to construct the output file name) and check path separator or initial character while doing so.
The trick would be to detect different Unix systems (in Java or other) without being obvious.
I think there was a very good reason for the introduction of the character of Jar-Jar, and a reason why he was almost non-existant for the next two films.
Lucas knew that these movies would show the Jedi at their peak, energy and action that made the fights in Empire and Return of the Jedi pale. And Yoda was a Jedi master.
But you can't be a Jedi Master if you are a puppet with a hand up your backside. So for the prequels, at some point, Yoda would have to be a CGI character. But being known and loved by one and all, the technique would need to be absolutely perfect, with no chance to make mistakes and learn how to do it better.
Hence, a throw-away CGI character which was unimportant and nobody needed to care about - even a clownish one so that any mistakes wouldn't be noticed.
Jar-Jar was needed as he was so that Yoda could kick ass in the second movie, then kick ass's ass in the third.
"no, it's not stupidity, it's skepticism."
Skepticism can be stupid, if the stakes are high enough. Example:
"Those two headlights heading towards me at high speed could be a bus that will kill me, but they could be two motorcyles that will pass harmlessly on either side of me. I think I'll stand here until I know for sure."
The key breakthrough that dropdown menus provided when they were introduced was simply that all the available functions (or function categories, at least) are visible, or at lease findable, you don't need to remember any text command (like a command line) or wierd control key combinations. It greatly simplifies things, but a GUI dropdown menu is no more effective in that way than the original Lotus 1-2-3 text interface - a '/' would bring up a top screen menu, which you could select in a similar fashion with keyboard only, no mouse. In fact, it had some advantages until Microsoft added the ALT-key method for accessing GUI menus.
The fundamental problem is that when menus get too complex, the options are no longer easily visible. You now have to remember where to activate a particular function - and you're back to memorizing things instead of having them in front of you, so you're back to the idea of commands. Only the command is a series of menu clicks, instead of keystrokes or words.
The problem isn't the use of menus, but the over use of them. The entire reason for the existance of GUIs is to allow direct manipulation of objects. The opportunity for ease of use from this is still only touched upon in many ways - especially by those who don't see any farther than stuffing menus full of functionality (similarly, if you've ever looked at the configuration options of a complex open-source project like NetBeans or KDE or Gnome, you'll see huge trees of incomprehensible options, often in a uniform structure that gives you no clue as to where to find the one you're looking for - you have to read, explore, read, explore until you stumble across the one you want). That functionality should go into direct manipulation of visible objects, not menus.
For example, in a word processor, mini icons representing paragraphs could be displayed in a margin. To change properties like interparagraph spacing, indent, style or following style, you'd click on the icon to open a control panel - instead of cursor somewhere into the text, then up to the menu bar and click on Format / Paragraph / Indents and Spacing. Another icon or option lets you select the paragraph style, or edit the style (some of this is already done, with a ruler control up top, with drag-and-drop tabs - good idea). The manipulation now takes place at the paragraph you're interested in itself, not far away in some abstraft menu tree.
Direct manipulation is the most overlooked, but by far the most powerful ease-of-use tool. The Macintosh and applications that run on it, go furthest by a wide margin in using direct manipulation, which is why users consider it so vastly easier to use, yet without loss of power. This is the real magic of GUIs and key to ease of use - it's not in "simplifying options", but providing those options in an absolutely direct and intuitive fashion.
What you would see looking out would be a cone. At first, on the horizon itself, it would be 180 degrees, as light from behind you will come in from the side, and light from the side would be bent to come in from above, but as you got closer to the singularity, the cone would shrink and get narrower until just at the singularity, all light (well, radiation, well beyond gama-ray energies) would come from a single ultra-concentrated spot directly above you.
At the singularity itself, of course, the spot would be multiplied by every direction, and the entire sky would be lit.
All that assumes that black holes have no quantum structure. If they do, only half a dozen people in the world have any idea what that would be like, and even they're not too sure about it yet.
[1] Aren't you glad I didn't say butt-crack?