I believe it was Arthur Clark who coined the term (I'm paraphrasing here), "Advanced enough technology is indistinguishable from magic".
What we're seeing here is society's reaction to computers as they become so complex that they are effectively indistinguishable from magic. How does an iPhone work? Dunno. It's a magical gizmo, though! In fact, it's a veritable sorcerer's stone! See things from a distance! Talk to people from a distance! Listen to the music of the stars! In old-school Dungeons-and-Dragons-speak, it grants the owner Clairvoyance, Minor Telepathy, and Music of the Stars. Interestingly, the iPhone is basically the same meme/myth as the Sorcerer's Stone. And the Wii? Shall we compare the Wii remote with a magic wand? All sorts of interesting parallels there. One of my favorites, though, were the talking paintings at Hogwarts. Looks just like something you might find at MIT's Media Lab, or at a Sharper Edge Bottique.
The point is... technology is getting so advanced that society (non tech folk) is starting to resort to myth, magic, and superstition to deal with it. "a scheduler is O(log N) the number of processes"? That's not only greek to the normal layperson, it's technobabble, and it borders on discussing metaphysical abstractions that one would expect from a sorcerer or wizard. And the best part of it all? For the lay person just crossing the digital divide nowdays, learning a series of commands or the basics of a scripting language is practically like learning a rote or a spell. Want to turn on a scrying device? Try opening a webbrowser and watch some online videos. Want to animate an automaton? Try turning on your roomba, or build some Lego robots. Want to create an illusion or personal reality bubble? Play some music through iTunes or log onto WorldOfWarcraft or Everquest or whatever people are logging onto nowdays.
Can't they call it "Digital Warfare" or "Internet Warfare"?
EMP devices and van-eck phreaking devices aren't necessarily either 'Digital' or 'Internet', although they would both be important tactical weapons in cyber warfare. There's an analog component to Cyberwarfare which 'cyber' refers to, whereas 'digital' and 'internet' do not. 'Cyber' originally was a term used to refers to systems and control theory, ala cybernetics. Thus, a hydroelectric dam or nuclear powerstation both have 'cyber' systems, usually comprising of both digital and analog components. Culture has co-opted the term 'cyber' to mean something along the lines of 'through the use of computers'. The armed forces are using 'cyberwarfare' to reference more of a systems theory concept than a pure-computer theory concept. They're worried about tactical nuclear EMP devices delivered in cargo container ships, van-eck phreaking operations conducted by black-op types, and a host of other devices civilians generally never hear about.
Seems to me like we're heading towards some distinctly neuromantic and ghost-in-the-shellish conflict scenarios. Makes sense, considering all the recent technology advancements. Japan is busy at work making their first Mech prototypes, MIT is busy making invisibility cloaks, Van-Eck phreaking devices have been around for ages, and the Russia mafia seems to be busy writing custom viruses. The thing to remember is that a 'cyberwar' would *not* simply be conducted by script-kiddie hackers in their moms basements. Sure, you might have to deal with botnet DDOS attacks, but that's probably the least worrisome scenario. To use the Dam floodgate scenario, consider a sneakernet type attack, where a special-ops actually *applies for a job* at said energy company which runs said Dam floodgates, and moles their way past the firewalls, so they can install a custom one-time virus. Afterwords, they get a nice million dollar bounty from the sponsoring enemy state. That's the espionage scenario. There are others. Toss in some helicopters, invisibility cloaks, van-eck phreaking devices, and emp pulse generators, and you've got yourself an arguably new class of special-ops. You might say, 'yeah, US enemies aren't ever going to get helicopters and those kind of forces onto US soil, so the US only needs to concern itself with remote attacks.' Granted, the US still has a big advantage of being relatively isolated here in North America, but I'm not so convinced. We do have embassies, consulates, and business partnerns all over the world, and most all of them have VPN connections outside the US. Networks make distances less relevant, so we could simply be attacked at one of our embassies or consulates. But I digress. The idea that I'm trying to communicate here, is that a 'cyberwar' isn't necessarily all digital, just as a computer isn't all digital (keyboards and monitors are analog). As such, there will be a sneakernet and analog element to any such 'cyberwars', which will probably involve special-ops using the latest technology to tap into networks, nab passwords, and cover their tracks, *in conjunction* with the crackers doing the cracking. All nicely laid out in neuromancer and ghost-in-the-shell. The specifics differ, but the general concept is spot on in both works. At least in my opinion.
I work at a hospital, and I'll vouch that we're already investigating body area networks. Patient monitoring, obviously, is the big one; but we're also very interested in the cost savings of a good RFID sponge count system. After each surgery procedure, some poor shlep has to count through all the sponges and make sure that the count matches up with the number used. And if we're short a sponge or two, then we have to take an x-ray of that patient to see if something was left inside of them. And if something *was*, well, obviously it needs to be removed, necessitating more surgery, and another sponge count.... We're hoping that RFID/wireless chips are going to solve this problem. Also coming down the research pipe, as I understand, are a variety of wireless enabled surgical robots that can crawl the stomach and intestines and do various repair work, and RFID/wireless enabled aneurysm clips and pacemakers to warn against putting patients into MRI fields. Obviously, all vital sign monitoring equipment is getting ready to be put on the networks, which is going to be huge, especially with our associated nursing homes and the aging baby boomer population.
Power usage settings are stored in the registry, and therefore can be controlled via the Active Directory by pushing out registry scripts, both at the computer profile and user profile levels. Windows machines *can* be controlled by Active Directory in the manner you are speaking... the trick is learning how to use Active Directory well enough to implement those changes when there isn't necessarily a nice graphical interface and a 'click here' policy object. I think what you mean to say is that they should have a nice Active Directory panel specifically for domain computer power usage policies.
Just last night, the hospitatal I work at got attacked by a virus cluster. In my 10 years of IT work, I've never seen anything like it. It focused on WindowsNT4.0 server, and when it hit, it had no less than 10 seperate trojans and viruses going on at the same time. We'd clean one server, and it would just get hit by another one. We figured out the address of the server that the infected machines were phoning home to, and the different virus types were all calling home to the same machine. It was like an infected machine would scan itself with a modified security analyzer, then phone home, and grab any viruses or trojans it could that would target the vulnerabilities identified by the security analyzer. Someone out there is operating a catalog of rootkits and trojans and viruses. Nastiest thing I've ever seen. When your company gets hit by one of these things, you'll know. The future of viruses involves malware security scanners and catalogs of viruses and trojans.
My title at work is actually 'Radiology Information Systems Manager', and I'm one of the people responsible for sending MRI images from hospital to hospital, handling video streams from telerobotic surgeries, and the like.
Surprisingly, data demands in the medical environment aren't nearly as high as you might think. We routinely route MRI images from hospital to hospital with infrared and T1 connections. Those MRI images are actually only about 10MB each. We got ourselves a 1Gb/s imaging network at our hospital, and we don't use more than 10% of that bandwidth at any time. A home video camcorder can easily out produce our imaging equipment, in terms of pure data content creation. At best, the large community hospital I work at in NYC (700 beds) has about the same data networking needs as a small or medium sized digital television studio. Granted, at the hospital, we're much more concerned with *quality* of data content rather than *quantity* of data content. All things considered, we're much more concerned with quality of service than bandwidth.
I'd expect these high bandwidth paradigms to be essential to the telecommunication companies as they need to deal with more users, and more video streams. Notice that it was developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, a company which is much more concerned with bandwidth of major pipes between cities. This will get applications in data trunk lines between major cities, with last mile fiber optics to the hospitals rated in the gigabit speeds.
This idea just doesn't seem possible. A 60,000 mile tether, strong enough to carry a satellite sitting on a robot elevator all the way up into space. And then successfully deploying the satellite off the elevator. And this would be cheaper than rockets that send satellites into orbit now?
A space elevator sounds great, it just seems far-fetched. A 100 meter test. Only 96,560,540 more meters to go.
Ah, I see that your glass is half empty. While you say "A 100 meter test. Only 96,560,540 more meters to go" implying it's impossible, we say "A 100 meter test! Only 96,560,540 more meters to go" with the idea that we're simply going to do that 100 meter test 965,600 more times. Yes, that oversimplifies things, but it's a half glass full kind of perspective.
Consider: As I understand it, the wiring in the Golden Gate Bridge, if layed end-to-end, would stretch around the globe three times over. Considering the circumfrence of the earth is something like 40,000km, that would mean that we've already built bridge structures that incorporate over 100,000km of cabling. Granted, the design of the space elevator is completely novel; but this stuff is based on modern engineering understanding.
People get the scale of this whole project wrong. The initial ribbon would need to be small and slender and thin for weight purpouses of the initial ribbon. After that's established, we would start adding mass to the space elevator, until it's a megastructure, not unlike the Golden Gate Bridge. Eventually, the dream is to create a verticle subway system of sorts. Access to space would be cheaper than rockets once the space elevator was built up to the scale of the Golden Gate Bridge or the New York City Subway System.
- "The Arithmetic of a Generation Principle for an Electronic Key Generator" - "CATNIP: Computer Analysis - Target Networks Intercept Probability" - "Chatter Patterns: A Last Resort" - "COMINT Satellites - A Space Problem" - "Computers and Advanced Weapons Systems" - "Coupon Collecting and Cryptology" - "Cranks, Nuts, and Screwballs" - "A Cryptologic Fairy Tale" - "Don't Be Too Smart" - "Earliest Applications of the Computer at NSA" - "Emergency Destruction of Documents" - "Extraterrestrial Intelligence" - "The Fallacy of the One-Time-Pad Excuse" - "GEE WHIZZER" - "The Gweeks Had a Gwoup for It" - "How to Visualize a Matrix" - "Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages" - "A Mechanical Treatment of Fibonacci Sequences" - "Q.E.D.- 2 Hours, 41 Minutes" - "SlGINT Implications of Military Oceanography" - "Some Problems and Techniques in Bookbreaking" - "Upgrading Selected US Codes and Ciphers with a Cover and Deception Capability" - "Weather: Its Role in Communications Intelligence" - "Worldwide Language Problems at NSA"
"How many "launches" per day would be required to make a space elevator economically viable? Bearing in mind that a simple tin can in space cost around 100 billion up to around 2000."
Economic feasibility studies of the space elevator show that it could be orders of magnitude less expensive than current methods of getting into space. The trick to understanding the economics of the space elevator is to view it as a reusable infrastructure. Say it costs 1 trillion dollars to build. The first ride up would cost $1T. The second ride up would cost $500B, and would readjust the cost of the first trip to $500B also. After 10 rides, the average cost would be $100 billion, after 1000 rides, average cost would be $1 billion per ride.
Now consider if we're talking about a space elevator that's riding like the New York City subway system. Imagine if we could get going at 1 trip per day, at 365 days per year... If we could keep it operational for 1 year, the average cost would be around $3 billion per trip. If it were operational for 10 years, then the average trip would only cost $300 million.
If we could run it at 10 trips per day (5 up, 5 down) for 10 years, a trip could be in the 10 to 20 million dollar range.
The point is... the longer we run it, the less expensive it becomes. I'm ball-parking and guestimating these numbers, but the analysises that I've read on the subject make it clear that, in the long run, the space elevator has the possibility of being much more economical than shuttle launches.
Try reading 'Fountains of Paradise' to understand the scale at which the space elevator is envisioned. It's not an elevator in the sense you may be thinking of. The idea is to build an initial small elevator, and then use that elevator to lift extra mass onto the elevator itself, and to build up its size until it's a megastructure. The goal isn't to build an elevator with a single shaft that can handle 10 people at a time. The goal is more like having a vertical subway system that can handle a million passengers *per day*. Think of the New York City subway system... only vertical. *Thats* the long term dream/goal of people who are into the concept of the space elevator.
actually, slow accent is one of the goals of the space elevator. instead of the challenger and columbia accidents, imagine if the astronauts had had a big red 'emergency' button that they could have pressed which would have stoped the shuttle in mid-air, while an emergency tech crew could have sent up spare parts, or gotten the astronauts to safety?
one of the design goals of the space elevator is to have sufficient tensile strength so that a shuttle car could actually *stop* and suspend on the elevator, if necessary.
as it is now, we have to hop on the top of a freakin 10 story tall liquid hydrogen/oxygen fueled *rocket* to get into orbit. doesn't sound particularly safe to me. the elevator is a design blueprint that could feasibly re-engineer the entire concept of access to space; in particular, engineer it with much improved safety procedures.
the tension on the initial cable is going to be extremely high, and this is an application where microfractures of the nanotubes will introduce unacceptable points of failure. modern ropes and wires are constructed by a weaving process, of sorts, that take shorter strands and weave them together to make a longer piece. that weaving process creates micro failure points. so, not only does the space elevator project have to create a ribbon that is at least 100 miles long, it's very likely they're going to need to make it as one continuous strand of nanotubes 100 miles long. making a dozen strands, each 10 miles long, and connecting them is likely not going to work, as the connection points won't withstand the tension that's going to be on the ribbon.
so, that's a major manufacturing problem that has to get resolved.
also, there are logistic problems out the wazoo with getting all the pieces put together properly. unlike a skyscraper, or an elevator, which exist within one basic inertial reference field, the space elevator would exist in it's own reference field. if you don't believe me, take a look at the math and try to calculate the tension of a strand of nanotubes as it extends outside the gravity well of a planet. the math is based on our previous understanding of astronautics and physics, but it definately would extend our operational knowledge into new areas, thus requiring it's own learning curve. consider the amount of time, energy, and research that was spent developing our current operational knowledge of launching spacecraft, connecting spaceships with spacestations, and the like. we would be doing all of that over again, in the context of space elevators and superstructures which extend out of the gravity well. when you dock at the one end of space elevator, what happens to the tension at the other end? operationally, how do you deal with that? operationally, what do you do with a docked spaceship when a hurricane is entering the elevator earthside location? there are a zillion operational details which need to be worked out in both the construction and operation of a space elevator.
it depends on what stage of construction the space elevator is at. the long term goal would be to build additional layers onto the elevator until it's a megastructure in every sense of the word, and it would be many times the diameter of a skyscraper. during the first 50 years or so, it would undoubtably fall apart if an airplane ran into it. after sufficient mass is added, even a 747 shouldn't really affect (in the same sense that airplanes occassionally fly into skyscrappers without knocking them down, ala 9/11...)
Actually, it's the precursor to cellular autonoma. There's a period of Alan Turrings life, that most people don't study and know about, which involves him studying a number of biological models. His 1952 paper 'On the Chemical Basis of Biological Morphogenesis' contains the foundations of what Wolfram would later go on and call 'cellular autonoma'. Go check it out, and form your own opinion. Having read both Wolfram and Turing, I have to give clear credit to Turing for coming up with the idea of cellular autonoma before Wolfram. That being said, Turing appears to have been interested in it and studying those concepts from a particularly oblique angle than how Wolfram approached them. Wolfram certainly went off and made a study of cellular autonoma unto itself. But Turing came up with the models before Wolfram; Turing just didn't call them 'cellular autonoma' and perhaps didn't view them quite as generically as Wolfram envisioned them.
The 3D model is an interesting way to put the MRI / CAT data on a computer screen (and far better than the.bmp's of a frog's organs) but what advantage (besides eye-candy) does this offer over looking at the raw MRI or CAT results?
The answer is pretty simple. Doctors have to deal with information overload, and 3D models are an effective way of managing huge amounts of data. Consider: A typical MRI exam contains 60 to 90 slices. Looking at a single 3D image is much more efficient than looking through 60 to 90 2D slices and trying to form a mental 3D image in your imagination.
I work as a PACS Administrator for a Department of Radiology at a community hospital in
NYC (PACS stands for 'Picture Archiving and Communication Systems'... I'm the network, systems, database, and applications administrator all roled into one). We have two 16 slice CT scanners and a 1.5 tesla MRI scanner... we average about 2,000 CT and MRI cases per month, and each one of those cases requires about 20 to 30 minutes of time for a radiologist to read. When you do the math, we have 4 to 6 full time radiologists on staff (at $350,000 yearly salary each), meaning that we're spending about $1.5M to $2M just on salary to get through those images.
Storage wise, each CT or MRI slice is generally 512x512 pixels, and works out to be something like 60 to 100kb, if I recall. So, a typical MRI series tends to be about 5MB or so. Different scanners average different sizes depending on how you want the images to spit out, but each series tends to range between 1 and 10 megabytes. The thing is, you might have up to a dozen series taken during your exam (those of you who have layed in an MRI scanner for an hour know what I'm talking about). A rule of thumb that I use is that an hour of our MRI scanner's time is roughly equal to 100MB of data. Each day, we generate an average of 1GB of new clinical data from our MRI scanner that has to be read by a radiologist.
So, consider it this way... each day, we have 3GB of data generated (MRI scanner and 2 CT scanners), at 365 days a year, equals a cool terabyte of clinical data each year that has to be read by the doctors. At $2M per year in doctor's salaries, we're spending approximately $1.50 to $2.00 per MB to get the cases read.
Anyhow... thought you might be interested to know some of the economics involved in reading MRI and CT results. The 3D models takes approximately 10 minutes to read, rather than 20 to 30 minutes to sort through the 2D images. The net result is that doctors who are comfortable with the 3D images can sift through 2x to 3x more cases. And because the doctors are paid on a per-read basis, that's the difference between making $350,000 per year and $700,000 per year.
All I can tell you is that when you start dealing with terabytes of MRI and CT images, they start all looking the same after awhile... and the doctors use any tricks they can to manage the data, simplify it, and process it. It's a clasic case of information overload. The 3D images help to simplify the 60 to 90 slices and to organize it into a coherent 3D object.
The other thing is that the brain has a whole section of it devoted to spatial and 3D analysis; so the 3D images allow the doctors to tap into another area of the brain when they're reading the exams... it allows them to mix up their daily workflow, think about things with a different part of their brain, and to literally get a different perspective on the clinical problem at hand.
Granted, it seems like their tweezers might be slightly more precise than Chicago's, but as far as I can tell, the article is little more than University of Bonn's press-release saying that they're playing in the same league. Granted, Chicago now has 5 years of experience patenting the process and developing applications with it.
It should be noted Chicago's method is a little more "rubic's cubish" than Bonn's "conveyor belt" setup. Coupled with what is probably a different setup for the optical trap and laser mesh, and the 5 year difference in publications, I would doubt that there would be any patent conflict and that this will wind up being a competing product.
Also, my guess is that these laser tweezers are going to play a part in the design of the first functional general nanoassemblers (of the style of Enterprise's 'replicators', not of the style of a grey goo assembler).
Kathleen Blanco should be worried about the coming hurricane season rather than wasting everyone's time with this.
Maybe she's trying to make sure that adolecent boys in her state aren't already predisposed to act on the idea of playing real-life 'grand theft auto' during the next hurricane season like they did shortly after Katrina.
I agree with you on most all accounts. What I would mention, however, is that meteorologists already do -pretty much exactly what you're describing. Weather simulations for earth effectively have to deal with everything you've just described; from chemical reactions in the atmosphere, to rotation fo the planet, to the awkward boundary conditions due to surface curvature, chaos theory, and the like. And you know what? Meteorologists will readily admit that the problem is mostly unsolvable. And furthermore, they have exactly the same numerical analysis solutions that you've described; and they have to resort to using supercomputers specifically designed to model weather simulations. If one looks at the most commonly investigated computer problems, historically, you pretty much wind up with weather, nuclear bombs, and chess.
That being said, we enjoy a good 5 days of prediction of weather patterns nowdays. I remember when I was a kid, and the computers weren't nearly as powerful, and we only had 2 or 3 days of prediction. Now we have fairly good predictions for up to 5 to 7 days.
Sure, initial parameters are different for Earth and Jupiter, although the problem isn't as intractable as you make it out to be. Societally, we have alot of collective experience modeling the types of problems you've described, and it would really only be a matter of modifying the initial parameters of our weather simulations to match those of Jupiter.
Something which I, for one, expect somebody at NASA to have done already.
Throw your OS away. The only application you need is a dedicated browser (Google will provide one soon) and an internet connection to Google. No hard drives are necessary.
And how, exactly, are you proposing that browser is going to run? And how is it going to handle hardware and device drivers? The processor, the bus, the network drivers, the network card, the video drivers, the video card. Is that browser going to be multithreaded? Are you going to be able to run more than one browser at a time? What about screensavers and the network stack?
I think you're mistaking operating system with hard drives. Not the same thing. Even with diskless computers, you still need an operating system (typically loaded from some type of flash ram) to handle the processor, the bus, the memory, and the interfaces.
I have to ask; how much is the data worth when a good part of the data is fake?
I think that myspace is a cesspool, but everyone my age has one. I'll give you a hint: They aren't in their mid thirties earning 250k+ a year.
No matter how much data you have, if it isn't true it;s worthless.
You seem to be stuck in some type of positivist thinking (at least you're not capitalizing the word 'true'); and possibly not all that familiar, actually, with data mining techniques. It would, perhaps, be a better statement to say that 'No matter how much data you have, if it isn't precise, it's worthless.' Precise, inaccurate, skewed data can reveal all sorts of patterns and relationships. Take, for instance, a scale that measures weight which is off by 10lbs. The data it tells you is not 'true', but you can certainly use it to measure if you've gained or lost weight.
Similarly, it doesn't matter at all if people use fake names, fake addresses, or whatever. If teenagers consistently enter in fake data to these websites after midnight, while 30 somethings enter fake data during working hours, you can quite reasonably conclude that the teenager demographic has different sleeping patterns than the 30 something crowd.
And lets not forget all of the statistical and mathematical tools you can use to filter out noise. From chi-square tests and standard deviations to fourier transforms and gaussian analysis... there are an endless supply of tools to filter out noise. (interesting philosophical question: is 'noise' considered true or false?)
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it was Arthur Clark who coined the term (I'm paraphrasing here), "Advanced enough technology is indistinguishable from magic".
What we're seeing here is society's reaction to computers as they become so complex that they are effectively indistinguishable from magic. How does an iPhone work? Dunno. It's a magical gizmo, though! In fact, it's a veritable sorcerer's stone! See things from a distance! Talk to people from a distance! Listen to the music of the stars! In old-school Dungeons-and-Dragons-speak, it grants the owner Clairvoyance, Minor Telepathy, and Music of the Stars. Interestingly, the iPhone is basically the same meme/myth as the Sorcerer's Stone. And the Wii? Shall we compare the Wii remote with a magic wand? All sorts of interesting parallels there. One of my favorites, though, were the talking paintings at Hogwarts. Looks just like something you might find at MIT's Media Lab, or at a Sharper Edge Bottique.
The point is... technology is getting so advanced that society (non tech folk) is starting to resort to myth, magic, and superstition to deal with it. "a scheduler is O(log N) the number of processes"? That's not only greek to the normal layperson, it's technobabble, and it borders on discussing metaphysical abstractions that one would expect from a sorcerer or wizard. And the best part of it all? For the lay person just crossing the digital divide nowdays, learning a series of commands or the basics of a scripting language is practically like learning a rote or a spell. Want to turn on a scrying device? Try opening a webbrowser and watch some online videos. Want to animate an automaton? Try turning on your roomba, or build some Lego robots. Want to create an illusion or personal reality bubble? Play some music through iTunes or log onto WorldOfWarcraft or Everquest or whatever people are logging onto nowdays.
Can't they call it "Digital Warfare" or "Internet Warfare"?
EMP devices and van-eck phreaking devices aren't necessarily either 'Digital' or 'Internet', although they would both be important tactical weapons in cyber warfare. There's an analog component to Cyberwarfare which 'cyber' refers to, whereas 'digital' and 'internet' do not. 'Cyber' originally was a term used to refers to systems and control theory, ala cybernetics. Thus, a hydroelectric dam or nuclear powerstation both have 'cyber' systems, usually comprising of both digital and analog components. Culture has co-opted the term 'cyber' to mean something along the lines of 'through the use of computers'. The armed forces are using 'cyberwarfare' to reference more of a systems theory concept than a pure-computer theory concept. They're worried about tactical nuclear EMP devices delivered in cargo container ships, van-eck phreaking operations conducted by black-op types, and a host of other devices civilians generally never hear about.
Seems to me like we're heading towards some distinctly neuromantic and ghost-in-the-shellish conflict scenarios. Makes sense, considering all the recent technology advancements. Japan is busy at work making their first Mech prototypes, MIT is busy making invisibility cloaks, Van-Eck phreaking devices have been around for ages, and the Russia mafia seems to be busy writing custom viruses. The thing to remember is that a 'cyberwar' would *not* simply be conducted by script-kiddie hackers in their moms basements. Sure, you might have to deal with botnet DDOS attacks, but that's probably the least worrisome scenario. To use the Dam floodgate scenario, consider a sneakernet type attack, where a special-ops actually *applies for a job* at said energy company which runs said Dam floodgates, and moles their way past the firewalls, so they can install a custom one-time virus. Afterwords, they get a nice million dollar bounty from the sponsoring enemy state. That's the espionage scenario. There are others. Toss in some helicopters, invisibility cloaks, van-eck phreaking devices, and emp pulse generators, and you've got yourself an arguably new class of special-ops. You might say, 'yeah, US enemies aren't ever going to get helicopters and those kind of forces onto US soil, so the US only needs to concern itself with remote attacks.' Granted, the US still has a big advantage of being relatively isolated here in North America, but I'm not so convinced. We do have embassies, consulates, and business partnerns all over the world, and most all of them have VPN connections outside the US. Networks make distances less relevant, so we could simply be attacked at one of our embassies or consulates. But I digress. The idea that I'm trying to communicate here, is that a 'cyberwar' isn't necessarily all digital, just as a computer isn't all digital (keyboards and monitors are analog). As such, there will be a sneakernet and analog element to any such 'cyberwars', which will probably involve special-ops using the latest technology to tap into networks, nab passwords, and cover their tracks, *in conjunction* with the crackers doing the cracking. All nicely laid out in neuromancer and ghost-in-the-shell. The specifics differ, but the general concept is spot on in both works. At least in my opinion.
I work at a hospital, and I'll vouch that we're already investigating body area networks. Patient monitoring, obviously, is the big one; but we're also very interested in the cost savings of a good RFID sponge count system. After each surgery procedure, some poor shlep has to count through all the sponges and make sure that the count matches up with the number used. And if we're short a sponge or two, then we have to take an x-ray of that patient to see if something was left inside of them. And if something *was*, well, obviously it needs to be removed, necessitating more surgery, and another sponge count.... We're hoping that RFID/wireless chips are going to solve this problem. Also coming down the research pipe, as I understand, are a variety of wireless enabled surgical robots that can crawl the stomach and intestines and do various repair work, and RFID/wireless enabled aneurysm clips and pacemakers to warn against putting patients into MRI fields. Obviously, all vital sign monitoring equipment is getting ready to be put on the networks, which is going to be huge, especially with our associated nursing homes and the aging baby boomer population.
Power usage settings are stored in the registry, and therefore can be controlled via the Active Directory by pushing out registry scripts, both at the computer profile and user profile levels. Windows machines *can* be controlled by Active Directory in the manner you are speaking... the trick is learning how to use Active Directory well enough to implement those changes when there isn't necessarily a nice graphical interface and a 'click here' policy object. I think what you mean to say is that they should have a nice Active Directory panel specifically for domain computer power usage policies.
Just last night, the hospitatal I work at got attacked by a virus cluster. In my 10 years of IT work, I've never seen anything like it. It focused on WindowsNT4.0 server, and when it hit, it had no less than 10 seperate trojans and viruses going on at the same time. We'd clean one server, and it would just get hit by another one. We figured out the address of the server that the infected machines were phoning home to, and the different virus types were all calling home to the same machine. It was like an infected machine would scan itself with a modified security analyzer, then phone home, and grab any viruses or trojans it could that would target the vulnerabilities identified by the security analyzer. Someone out there is operating a catalog of rootkits and trojans and viruses. Nastiest thing I've ever seen. When your company gets hit by one of these things, you'll know. The future of viruses involves malware security scanners and catalogs of viruses and trojans.
#5. They're using MS ACCESS "database"?
WTF? My blood started boiling when I read that! **Access**?????
From the looks of things, it looks like the estimators consistantly undervalued these items by either 50% or an entire order of magniture.
My title at work is actually 'Radiology Information Systems Manager', and I'm one of the people responsible for sending MRI images from hospital to hospital, handling video streams from telerobotic surgeries, and the like.
Surprisingly, data demands in the medical environment aren't nearly as high as you might think. We routinely route MRI images from hospital to hospital with infrared and T1 connections. Those MRI images are actually only about 10MB each. We got ourselves a 1Gb/s imaging network at our hospital, and we don't use more than 10% of that bandwidth at any time. A home video camcorder can easily out produce our imaging equipment, in terms of pure data content creation. At best, the large community hospital I work at in NYC (700 beds) has about the same data networking needs as a small or medium sized digital television studio. Granted, at the hospital, we're much more concerned with *quality* of data content rather than *quantity* of data content. All things considered, we're much more concerned with quality of service than bandwidth.
I'd expect these high bandwidth paradigms to be essential to the telecommunication companies as they need to deal with more users, and more video streams. Notice that it was developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, a company which is much more concerned with bandwidth of major pipes between cities. This will get applications in data trunk lines between major cities, with last mile fiber optics to the hospitals rated in the gigabit speeds.
This idea just doesn't seem possible. A 60,000 mile tether, strong enough to carry a satellite sitting on a robot elevator all the way up into space. And then successfully deploying the satellite off the elevator. And this would be cheaper than rockets that send satellites into orbit now?
A space elevator sounds great, it just seems far-fetched. A 100 meter test. Only 96,560,540 more meters to go.
Ah, I see that your glass is half empty. While you say "A 100 meter test. Only 96,560,540 more meters to go" implying it's impossible, we say "A 100 meter test! Only 96,560,540 more meters to go" with the idea that we're simply going to do that 100 meter test 965,600 more times. Yes, that oversimplifies things, but it's a half glass full kind of perspective.
Consider: As I understand it, the wiring in the Golden Gate Bridge, if layed end-to-end, would stretch around the globe three times over. Considering the circumfrence of the earth is something like 40,000km, that would mean that we've already built bridge structures that incorporate over 100,000km of cabling. Granted, the design of the space elevator is completely novel; but this stuff is based on modern engineering understanding.
People get the scale of this whole project wrong. The initial ribbon would need to be small and slender and thin for weight purpouses of the initial ribbon. After that's established, we would start adding mass to the space elevator, until it's a megastructure, not unlike the Golden Gate Bridge. Eventually, the dream is to create a verticle subway system of sorts. Access to space would be cheaper than rockets once the space elevator was built up to the scale of the Golden Gate Bridge or the New York City Subway System.
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"How many "launches" per day would be required to make a space elevator economically viable? Bearing in mind that a simple tin can in space cost around 100 billion up to around 2000." Economic feasibility studies of the space elevator show that it could be orders of magnitude less expensive than current methods of getting into space. The trick to understanding the economics of the space elevator is to view it as a reusable infrastructure. Say it costs 1 trillion dollars to build. The first ride up would cost $1T. The second ride up would cost $500B, and would readjust the cost of the first trip to $500B also. After 10 rides, the average cost would be $100 billion, after 1000 rides, average cost would be $1 billion per ride. Now consider if we're talking about a space elevator that's riding like the New York City subway system. Imagine if we could get going at 1 trip per day, at 365 days per year... If we could keep it operational for 1 year, the average cost would be around $3 billion per trip. If it were operational for 10 years, then the average trip would only cost $300 million. If we could run it at 10 trips per day (5 up, 5 down) for 10 years, a trip could be in the 10 to 20 million dollar range. The point is... the longer we run it, the less expensive it becomes. I'm ball-parking and guestimating these numbers, but the analysises that I've read on the subject make it clear that, in the long run, the space elevator has the possibility of being much more economical than shuttle launches.
Try reading 'Fountains of Paradise' to understand the scale at which the space elevator is envisioned. It's not an elevator in the sense you may be thinking of. The idea is to build an initial small elevator, and then use that elevator to lift extra mass onto the elevator itself, and to build up its size until it's a megastructure. The goal isn't to build an elevator with a single shaft that can handle 10 people at a time. The goal is more like having a vertical subway system that can handle a million passengers *per day*. Think of the New York City subway system... only vertical. *Thats* the long term dream/goal of people who are into the concept of the space elevator.
actually, slow accent is one of the goals of the space elevator. instead of the challenger and columbia accidents, imagine if the astronauts had had a big red 'emergency' button that they could have pressed which would have stoped the shuttle in mid-air, while an emergency tech crew could have sent up spare parts, or gotten the astronauts to safety? one of the design goals of the space elevator is to have sufficient tensile strength so that a shuttle car could actually *stop* and suspend on the elevator, if necessary. as it is now, we have to hop on the top of a freakin 10 story tall liquid hydrogen/oxygen fueled *rocket* to get into orbit. doesn't sound particularly safe to me. the elevator is a design blueprint that could feasibly re-engineer the entire concept of access to space; in particular, engineer it with much improved safety procedures.
the tension on the initial cable is going to be extremely high, and this is an application where microfractures of the nanotubes will introduce unacceptable points of failure. modern ropes and wires are constructed by a weaving process, of sorts, that take shorter strands and weave them together to make a longer piece. that weaving process creates micro failure points. so, not only does the space elevator project have to create a ribbon that is at least 100 miles long, it's very likely they're going to need to make it as one continuous strand of nanotubes 100 miles long. making a dozen strands, each 10 miles long, and connecting them is likely not going to work, as the connection points won't withstand the tension that's going to be on the ribbon. so, that's a major manufacturing problem that has to get resolved. also, there are logistic problems out the wazoo with getting all the pieces put together properly. unlike a skyscraper, or an elevator, which exist within one basic inertial reference field, the space elevator would exist in it's own reference field. if you don't believe me, take a look at the math and try to calculate the tension of a strand of nanotubes as it extends outside the gravity well of a planet. the math is based on our previous understanding of astronautics and physics, but it definately would extend our operational knowledge into new areas, thus requiring it's own learning curve. consider the amount of time, energy, and research that was spent developing our current operational knowledge of launching spacecraft, connecting spaceships with spacestations, and the like. we would be doing all of that over again, in the context of space elevators and superstructures which extend out of the gravity well. when you dock at the one end of space elevator, what happens to the tension at the other end? operationally, how do you deal with that? operationally, what do you do with a docked spaceship when a hurricane is entering the elevator earthside location? there are a zillion operational details which need to be worked out in both the construction and operation of a space elevator.
it depends on what stage of construction the space elevator is at. the long term goal would be to build additional layers onto the elevator until it's a megastructure in every sense of the word, and it would be many times the diameter of a skyscraper. during the first 50 years or so, it would undoubtably fall apart if an airplane ran into it. after sufficient mass is added, even a 747 shouldn't really affect (in the same sense that airplanes occassionally fly into skyscrappers without knocking them down, ala 9/11...)
cellular automata.
Actually, it's the precursor to cellular autonoma. There's a period of Alan Turrings life, that most people don't study and know about, which involves him studying a number of biological models. His 1952 paper 'On the Chemical Basis of Biological Morphogenesis' contains the foundations of what Wolfram would later go on and call 'cellular autonoma'. Go check it out, and form your own opinion. Having read both Wolfram and Turing, I have to give clear credit to Turing for coming up with the idea of cellular autonoma before Wolfram. That being said, Turing appears to have been interested in it and studying those concepts from a particularly oblique angle than how Wolfram approached them. Wolfram certainly went off and made a study of cellular autonoma unto itself. But Turing came up with the models before Wolfram; Turing just didn't call them 'cellular autonoma' and perhaps didn't view them quite as generically as Wolfram envisioned them.
The 3D model is an interesting way to put the MRI / CAT data on a computer screen (and far better than the .bmp's of a frog's organs) but what advantage (besides eye-candy) does this offer over looking at the raw MRI or CAT results?
The answer is pretty simple. Doctors have to deal with information overload, and 3D models are an effective way of managing huge amounts of data. Consider: A typical MRI exam contains 60 to 90 slices. Looking at a single 3D image is much more efficient than looking through 60 to 90 2D slices and trying to form a mental 3D image in your imagination.
I work as a PACS Administrator for a Department of Radiology at a community hospital in NYC (PACS stands for 'Picture Archiving and Communication Systems'... I'm the network, systems, database, and applications administrator all roled into one). We have two 16 slice CT scanners and a 1.5 tesla MRI scanner... we average about 2,000 CT and MRI cases per month, and each one of those cases requires about 20 to 30 minutes of time for a radiologist to read. When you do the math, we have 4 to 6 full time radiologists on staff (at $350,000 yearly salary each), meaning that we're spending about $1.5M to $2M just on salary to get through those images.
Storage wise, each CT or MRI slice is generally 512x512 pixels, and works out to be something like 60 to 100kb, if I recall. So, a typical MRI series tends to be about 5MB or so. Different scanners average different sizes depending on how you want the images to spit out, but each series tends to range between 1 and 10 megabytes. The thing is, you might have up to a dozen series taken during your exam (those of you who have layed in an MRI scanner for an hour know what I'm talking about). A rule of thumb that I use is that an hour of our MRI scanner's time is roughly equal to 100MB of data. Each day, we generate an average of 1GB of new clinical data from our MRI scanner that has to be read by a radiologist.
So, consider it this way... each day, we have 3GB of data generated (MRI scanner and 2 CT scanners), at 365 days a year, equals a cool terabyte of clinical data each year that has to be read by the doctors. At $2M per year in doctor's salaries, we're spending approximately $1.50 to $2.00 per MB to get the cases read.
Anyhow... thought you might be interested to know some of the economics involved in reading MRI and CT results. The 3D models takes approximately 10 minutes to read, rather than 20 to 30 minutes to sort through the 2D images. The net result is that doctors who are comfortable with the 3D images can sift through 2x to 3x more cases. And because the doctors are paid on a per-read basis, that's the difference between making $350,000 per year and $700,000 per year.
All I can tell you is that when you start dealing with terabytes of MRI and CT images, they start all looking the same after awhile... and the doctors use any tricks they can to manage the data, simplify it, and process it. It's a clasic case of information overload. The 3D images help to simplify the 60 to 90 slices and to organize it into a coherent 3D object.
The other thing is that the brain has a whole section of it devoted to spatial and 3D analysis; so the 3D images allow the doctors to tap into another area of the brain when they're reading the exams... it allows them to mix up their daily workflow, think about things with a different part of their brain, and to literally get a different perspective on the clinical problem at hand.
for at least 5 years.
i cal_Tweezers/
Granted, it seems like their tweezers might be slightly more precise than Chicago's, but as far as I can tell, the article is little more than University of Bonn's press-release saying that they're playing in the same league. Granted, Chicago now has 5 years of experience patenting the process and developing applications with it.
http://mrsec.uchicago.edu/Nuggets/Holographic_Opt
It should be noted Chicago's method is a little more "rubic's cubish" than Bonn's "conveyor belt" setup. Coupled with what is probably a different setup for the optical trap and laser mesh, and the 5 year difference in publications, I would doubt that there would be any patent conflict and that this will wind up being a competing product.
Also, my guess is that these laser tweezers are going to play a part in the design of the first functional general nanoassemblers (of the style of Enterprise's 'replicators', not of the style of a grey goo assembler).
*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***
Investigator: What were you doing on the 8th of June?
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Suspect: What?
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Investigator: What were you doing on the 8th of June?
*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***
Suspect: WHAT?!
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Investigator: WHAT WHERE YOU DOING ON THE 8TH OF JUNE?!
*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***
Suspect: WHAT?! I CANT HEAR YOU!!
*** CLANK *** CLANK *** CLANK ***
Investigator: WHAT WHERE YOU...
Investigator: Can you turn the noise on this thing down?
Technologist: Not really, but I'll see see what I can do.
*** THUNK *** THUNK *** THUNK ***
Investigator: What were you doing on the 8th of June?
*** THUNK *** THUNK *** THUNK ***
Suspect: WHAT?!
(those MRI scanners are *real* loud)
Kathleen Blanco should be worried about the coming hurricane season rather than wasting everyone's time with this.
Maybe she's trying to make sure that adolecent boys in her state aren't already predisposed to act on the idea of playing real-life 'grand theft auto' during the next hurricane season like they did shortly after Katrina.
rotflmao. oh my god. that was f-ing *brilliant*.
I agree with you on most all accounts. What I would mention, however, is that meteorologists already do -pretty much exactly what you're describing. Weather simulations for earth effectively have to deal with everything you've just described; from chemical reactions in the atmosphere, to rotation fo the planet, to the awkward boundary conditions due to surface curvature, chaos theory, and the like. And you know what? Meteorologists will readily admit that the problem is mostly unsolvable. And furthermore, they have exactly the same numerical analysis solutions that you've described; and they have to resort to using supercomputers specifically designed to model weather simulations. If one looks at the most commonly investigated computer problems, historically, you pretty much wind up with weather, nuclear bombs, and chess.
That being said, we enjoy a good 5 days of prediction of weather patterns nowdays. I remember when I was a kid, and the computers weren't nearly as powerful, and we only had 2 or 3 days of prediction. Now we have fairly good predictions for up to 5 to 7 days.
Sure, initial parameters are different for Earth and Jupiter, although the problem isn't as intractable as you make it out to be. Societally, we have alot of collective experience modeling the types of problems you've described, and it would really only be a matter of modifying the initial parameters of our weather simulations to match those of Jupiter.
Something which I, for one, expect somebody at NASA to have done already.
Throw your OS away. The only application you need is a dedicated browser (Google will provide one soon) and an internet connection to Google. No hard drives are necessary.
And how, exactly, are you proposing that browser is going to run? And how is it going to handle hardware and device drivers? The processor, the bus, the network drivers, the network card, the video drivers, the video card. Is that browser going to be multithreaded? Are you going to be able to run more than one browser at a time? What about screensavers and the network stack?
I think you're mistaking operating system with hard drives. Not the same thing. Even with diskless computers, you still need an operating system (typically loaded from some type of flash ram) to handle the processor, the bus, the memory, and the interfaces.
I have to ask; how much is the data worth when a good part of the data is fake?
I think that myspace is a cesspool, but everyone my age has one. I'll give you a hint: They aren't in their mid thirties earning 250k+ a year.
No matter how much data you have, if it isn't true it;s worthless.
You seem to be stuck in some type of positivist thinking (at least you're not capitalizing the word 'true'); and possibly not all that familiar, actually, with data mining techniques. It would, perhaps, be a better statement to say that 'No matter how much data you have, if it isn't precise, it's worthless.' Precise, inaccurate, skewed data can reveal all sorts of patterns and relationships. Take, for instance, a scale that measures weight which is off by 10lbs. The data it tells you is not 'true', but you can certainly use it to measure if you've gained or lost weight.
Similarly, it doesn't matter at all if people use fake names, fake addresses, or whatever. If teenagers consistently enter in fake data to these websites after midnight, while 30 somethings enter fake data during working hours, you can quite reasonably conclude that the teenager demographic has different sleeping patterns than the 30 something crowd.
And lets not forget all of the statistical and mathematical tools you can use to filter out noise. From chi-square tests and standard deviations to fourier transforms and gaussian analysis... there are an endless supply of tools to filter out noise. (interesting philosophical question: is 'noise' considered true or false?)