Look, the money is out there. It exists, and it won't go away.
The question is, who gets to be the custodian of that money?
If you think, if you feel, if you have any ideas in your head, if there's anything you believe in... having money and using it purposefully can bring the world just a little bit closer to the way you'd like it to be.
All the more so if you're an outspoken public figure... how can you solicit donations for a cause, and then walk away from the opportunity to make a giant donation yourself?
On a side note, I wonder how long it will be before one of the new registrars decides to go ahead and issue one-letter.com domains for, say, a million dollars apiece?
Can't... they're already registered by ICANN.
Too bad... C.com is a waste of a perfectly good domain.
It's hopeless to expect reform from within... the patent crisis is not even on the national agenda. The average person has never even heard of the issue.
The only viable medium-term strategy is containment. US-style software patents (and business model patents and other bogosity) cannot be allowed to spread to other countries. Containment efforts should therefore shift away from the US and towards other countries and cultures.
It would be very helpful, for instance, if influential Islamic clerics could examine the issue of patents on mathematical formulas and business models and determine if they are compatible with the Quran and Islamic teachings.
I'm not Muslim and have no idea... but usury and other practices are disallowed under Islamic law, so it's possible they would disallow software patents and issue a fatwa or legal opinion to that effect.
Broadly speaking, patents that cover small human ingenuities and artifices should be OK... but if the universe is the creation of God, then asserting ownership over fundamental laws of nature and mathematical formulas seems a trifle blasphemous.
A finding that software patents are un-Islamic would, in effect, permanently immunize the Islamic countries from this nonsense. It would create an invulnerable "patent haven" that would set an example for the rest of the world.
Remember, containment kept Communism in check until it collapsed under its own weight. It should work for "patent disease" as well... but it could take decades, and things will get worse before they get better.
Many students entered the Aerospace curriculum in '86/'87, and then the bottom fell out, leaving many who graduated from '88-'90 unable to find jobs, or losing the jobs they had. ... My company has over 1900 open positions. My boss spent six months trying to fill a position recently, inteviewing about 60 different people.
Don't you see the connection between the two paragraphs above?
People spend years developing highly specialized tech skills, and then the winds shift and they're left shipwrecked. Going into technology is just not an economically rational choice, especially (paradoxically) in a time of great technological change.
It's like evolution in nature: the most specialized species are the most successful... until the climate changes and they go extinct. The survivors are the generalists. Better to be a cockroach or a rat than a panda.
There are other professions out there where you're set for life... medicine, law, etc. Students aren't foolish or lazy... they just know which way the wind is blowing.
Perhaps you should tell that to all the headhunters out there who keep filling up my answering machine, despite the fact that I have not sent out a single resume in almost three years.
Headhunters harvest names and phone numbers the way spammers collect e-mail addresses. Everyone ends up on their list sooner or later, and it's no great honor. Do you really think sending or not sending resumes makes any difference? They have their methods...
And headhunters don't even care if you're suited to the job, and they're far too clueless to know one way or the other. A year after I left the profession, a headhunter tracked me down and wanted to set up an interview with a hotshot animation company just because I had a few animated GIFs on my webpage...
Taking pride in having your voice mail filled up by headhunters is like taking pride in having your e-mailbox filled up with "make money fast" offers.
Getting a call from a headhunter means nothing, and interviews are a dime a dozen. Getting a job offer to do exactly the same thing you're paid to do now is nice, but not exactly difficult in today's market.
Branching out into something new, cutting-edge, with the opportunity to learn and grow your skills... that's where it's at, that's the reason most of us became programmers in the first place. But that's where the doors start closing when you get older. Of course you keep up with new developments on your own time and initiative, but that's considered "hobby" experience... all dressed up and nowhere to go, stuck in your day job.
Why fight it? Stick a fork in yourself, you're done. Develop some business or entrepreneurial skills and get on with the rest of your life.
And even if I'm completely wrong, the bottom line is that we'll always have 10, 15, or more years of experience more than they will do.
Unfortunately, that much experience is a liability, not an asset. Might as well stick a D for dinosaur label on your forehead.
Programmers are like professional athletes: if you perform, you can make great money as a free agent. But when you hit your late 30s or early 40s, it's time to think about how you're going to make a living for the rest of your life. Keeping your skills up-to-date is only half the battle... how others perceive you matters even more.
There comes a time when you can still get hired for exactly what you're getting paid to do now, but not for something new, even if you could easily pick it up in a few weeks, or even if you already know it because you learned it in your spare time (but it's not paid, working experience). That's the time to bail.
I first read Neuromancer only many years after it had been released. By that time, the whole idea of cyberpunk had already been widely popularized and even somewhat stale. Reading Neuromancer, because it had been so widely copied, the cyberpunk ideas in Neuromancer itself seemed incredibly cliched.
I felt the same way when I saw Star Wars for the first time, in re-release on the big screen, nearly 20 years after it first came out. Stale and cliched.
But it's hard to escape this fate... the very success and acceptance of an idea makes it widespread and commonplace. What was once an astounding plot element becomes a mere premise, and authors have to push on deeper to find new magic.
There are very sharp differences in income, wealth, culture, values, language (slang), etc. between the generations. Probably more so than the divisions between ethnic groups or other social divisions. Not a problem, because generations come and go and have the good sense to die off, taking their outdated ideas with them but leaving their worldly goods behind.
But with longevity, generation gaps would harden into outright class warfare. Imagine 160 year-old boomers and 140 year-old Xers at each other's throats, forever.
If you're gonna pay x$ for a domain name, why can't you spend time putting up a decent site behind it?
Because ugly sites make more money... and anyways, many of the folks who have good domain names are just hanging on to them for the resale value.
If you send your website visitors off to Allclicks.com at 3 cents/click, you'll almost always make more money than you ever would with nice, useful content. Unfortunate, but that's just the way it is with the current economic model...
Unfortunately, there's currently no way domains from InterNIC to CoreNIC except to let the contract run out and then snap it up again when your domain goes dead. Extremely suboptimal.
And extremely dangerous. If it's a good domain, someone else will snap it up before you do.
Nope, none of the known planets orbit backwards...
All of the known planets orbit in the same sense, all have very nearly circular orbits, and all orbits are pretty much in the same plane (Pluto is an exception).
This is consistent with planets forming from a disk of matter spinning around the parent star. No way for a planet to suddenly go in the opposite direction (think conservation of angular momentum), unless it's a newcomer that was captured gravitationally, and not part of the original planetary system.
Note, rotating backwards is possible... Venus does it. And Uranus's spin is tilted close to 90 degrees.
The main problems with Pluto's status as a planet are:
The mass is too small... only 1/6 as massive as Earth's moon. When originally discovered, Pluto was thought to be massive enough to exert a gravitational pull on Neptune, but now we know that's not the case. The discovery of Charon in 1978 helped pin down the combined mass of the Pluto-Charon system (basic astronomy... in a binary system, the orbital period is related to the sum of the masses).
It's not unique... it turns out that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of Kuiper belt objects out there at roughly the same distance as Pluto, many in 3:2 resonance with Neptune's orbit (just like Pluto). The first of these was 1992 QB1 (as the name suggests, discovered in 1992).
So Pluto is just the biggest and brightest of a whole family of rock/ice "asteroids" out there beyond Neptune.
Perhaps calling Pluto a planet is just an accident of history, based on a wild over-guesstimate of its true mass. But why rock the boat? And after all, Pluto is a couple of orders of magnitude more massive than the biggest Mars-Jupiter asteroids (Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, etc).
PS, From the Nine Planets mass figures, Charon is 1/9 the mass of Pluto, not 2/3. But it's still pretty accurate to call Pluto-Charon a double planet.
Earth-Moon is really a double planet too (despite 1/80 mass ratio), if you go by visual appearance... the difference in radius is much smaller than the difference in mass (volume is proportional to radius cubed, and the Moon is less dense than Earth as well).
No need to be out of print
on
The Big U
·
· Score: 2
With new technologies it's possible to print books one copy at a time... for instance Ingram now has "Lightning Print". So why don't publishers just crank up the OCR and scan in their entire back catalog?
For hardcovers with glossy paper and pictures and high production values, it might not be feasible.... but for paperbacks, it's a no-brainer. There's no reason for paperbacks to be out of print anymore.
I memmy a while back, there was a bit of bother over a probe (Pioneer 10?) that was deccelerating far more than it ought to, and was subsequently "knocked off course" by an unknown object or force.
The deviation happened in 1992 and lasted 25 days... most likely was a Kuiper belt object.
This has nothing to do with the new hypothetical planet. Remember, it's supposed to be 1000 times farther than Pluto, while Pioneer and the Voyagers are less than twice as far as Pluto.
Dvorak is nice, but it solves yesterday's problem.
Wearable computers are coming, and we need an input method that you can use while walking down the street. The Twiddler is just a first-generation example.
We need an input device that can be used in any position (sitting, standing, lying down), and that allows rapid input of not just ASCII, but extended characters (accented letters, etc).
A truly sophisticated input device would make full use of the neuromuscular capabilities of the hand for the highest bandwidth... consider playing the violin, and try to imagine doing it on a keyboard or using a mouse. Perhaps in the future, kids will spend years learning how to use input devices (just like the violin), and will use them to do truly amazing things at very high speed.
" To show its commitment, the Air Force is investing 30 percent of its science and technology budget -- more than double its current figure -- to accelerate development of space operations vehicles, space-based radar and laser, and adaptive optics."
These calculations have been done, and the result is that the best achievable resolution is on the order of 10 centimeters. Enough to read tail numbers on airplanes, not enough to read license plates or newspapers.
Not so fast.
Astronomers have found a way to overcome the atmosphere's turbulence: adaptive optics. If I recall correctly, they shine a laser upwards to create an artificial star, and then by monitoring the twinkling of the artificial star, the telescope mirror is dynamically distorted hundreds of times per second to compensate.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, the money is out there. It exists, and it won't go away.
The question is, who gets to be the custodian of that money?
If you think, if you feel, if you have any ideas in your head, if there's anything you believe in... having money and using it purposefully can bring the world just a little bit closer to the way you'd like it to be.
All the more so if you're an outspoken public figure... how can you solicit donations for a cause, and then walk away from the opportunity to make a giant donation yourself?
The Toyota name comes from the Toyoda family.
Can't... they're already registered by ICANN.
Too bad... C.com is a waste of a perfectly good domain.
It's hopeless to expect reform from within... the patent crisis is not even on the national agenda. The average person has never even heard of the issue.
The only viable medium-term strategy is containment. US-style software patents (and business model patents and other bogosity) cannot be allowed to spread to other countries. Containment efforts should therefore shift away from the US and towards other countries and cultures.
It would be very helpful, for instance, if influential Islamic clerics could examine the issue of patents on mathematical formulas and business models and determine if they are compatible with the Quran and Islamic teachings.
I'm not Muslim and have no idea... but usury and other practices are disallowed under Islamic law, so it's possible they would disallow software patents and issue a fatwa or legal opinion to that effect.
Broadly speaking, patents that cover small human ingenuities and artifices should be OK... but if the universe is the creation of God, then asserting ownership over fundamental laws of nature and mathematical formulas seems a trifle blasphemous.
A finding that software patents are un-Islamic would, in effect, permanently immunize the Islamic countries from this nonsense. It would create an invulnerable "patent haven" that would set an example for the rest of the world.
Remember, containment kept Communism in check until it collapsed under its own weight. It should work for "patent disease" as well... but it could take decades, and things will get worse before they get better.
Send RMS to Saudi Arabia... I'm not kidding.
The Hearst Corporation has a registered trademark for What's Happening , "providing a monthly calendar of community events".
Whatshappenin.com also owns the domain whatshappening.com... and they don't seem to have US registered trademarks for either one.
Far be it from me to suggest that someone should call up Hearst (a rather large media company) and whisper a few words to their counsel.
The Hearst Corporation (HEARSTCORP-DOM)
959 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10019
Domain Name: HEARSTCORP.COM
IDNS.org has a spec for non-ASCII domain names. They have a modified version of Bind available for download.
Getting this adopted universally is nontrivial.
Actually, you can get Mathematica for Linux.
But there's no free (GNU) equivalent, as the original message pointed out...
Don't you see the connection between the two paragraphs above?
People spend years developing highly specialized tech skills, and then the winds shift and they're left shipwrecked. Going into technology is just not an economically rational choice, especially (paradoxically) in a time of great technological change.
It's like evolution in nature: the most specialized species are the most successful... until the climate changes and they go extinct. The survivors are the generalists. Better to be a cockroach or a rat than a panda.
There are other professions out there where you're set for life... medicine, law, etc. Students aren't foolish or lazy... they just know which way the wind is blowing.
Headhunters harvest names and phone numbers the way spammers collect e-mail addresses. Everyone ends up on their list sooner or later, and it's no great honor. Do you really think sending or not sending resumes makes any difference? They have their methods...
And headhunters don't even care if you're suited to the job, and they're far too clueless to know one way or the other. A year after I left the profession, a headhunter tracked me down and wanted to set up an interview with a hotshot animation company just because I had a few animated GIFs on my webpage...
Taking pride in having your voice mail filled up by headhunters is like taking pride in having your e-mailbox filled up with "make money fast" offers.
Getting a call from a headhunter means nothing, and interviews are a dime a dozen. Getting a job offer to do exactly the same thing you're paid to do now is nice, but not exactly difficult in today's market.
Branching out into something new, cutting-edge, with the opportunity to learn and grow your skills... that's where it's at, that's the reason most of us became programmers in the first place. But that's where the doors start closing when you get older. Of course you keep up with new developments on your own time and initiative, but that's considered "hobby" experience... all dressed up and nowhere to go, stuck in your day job.
Why fight it? Stick a fork in yourself, you're done. Develop some business or entrepreneurial skills and get on with the rest of your life.
If computers get that smart, then every profession will be obsolete. Except stand-up comedy and a few others...
Unfortunately, that much experience is a liability, not an asset. Might as well stick a D for dinosaur label on your forehead.
Programmers are like professional athletes: if you perform, you can make great money as a free agent. But when you hit your late 30s or early 40s, it's time to think about how you're going to make a living for the rest of your life. Keeping your skills up-to-date is only half the battle... how others perceive you matters even more.
There comes a time when you can still get hired for exactly what you're getting paid to do now, but not for something new, even if you could easily pick it up in a few weeks, or even if you already know it because you learned it in your spare time (but it's not paid, working experience). That's the time to bail.
I felt the same way when I saw Star Wars for the first time, in re-release on the big screen, nearly 20 years after it first came out. Stale and cliched.
But it's hard to escape this fate... the very success and acceptance of an idea makes it widespread and commonplace. What was once an astounding plot element becomes a mere premise, and authors have to push on deeper to find new magic.
There are very sharp differences in income, wealth, culture, values, language (slang), etc. between the generations. Probably more so than the divisions between ethnic groups or other social divisions. Not a problem, because generations come and go and have the good sense to die off, taking their outdated ideas with them but leaving their worldly goods behind.
But with longevity, generation gaps would harden into outright class warfare. Imagine 160 year-old boomers and 140 year-old Xers at each other's throats, forever.
Because ugly sites make more money... and anyways, many of the folks who have good domain names are just hanging on to them for the resale value.
If you send your website visitors off to Allclicks.com at 3 cents/click, you'll almost always make more money than you ever would with nice, useful content. Unfortunate, but that's just the way it is with the current economic model...
Check out AllWhois.com for info on how to register country-code domains.
Following their link, you can find Registration of .eg domains by the Internet Society of Egypt.
Note that many countries impose considerable restrictions on domain registrations (must be a resident or have a local business presence, etc).
And extremely dangerous. If it's a good domain, someone else will snap it up before you do.
Never let a domain expire if you want to keep it.
Nope, none of the known planets orbit backwards...
All of the known planets orbit in the same sense, all have very nearly circular orbits, and all orbits are pretty much in the same plane (Pluto is an exception).
This is consistent with planets forming from a disk of matter spinning around the parent star. No way for a planet to suddenly go in the opposite direction (think conservation of angular momentum), unless it's a newcomer that was captured gravitationally, and not part of the original planetary system.
Note, rotating backwards is possible... Venus does it. And Uranus's spin is tilted close to 90 degrees.
Check out the Nine Planets website... great for info about the solar system.
Here's the Pluto page.
The main problems with Pluto's status as a planet are:
So Pluto is just the biggest and brightest of a whole family of rock/ice "asteroids" out there beyond Neptune.
Perhaps calling Pluto a planet is just an accident of history, based on a wild over-guesstimate of its true mass. But why rock the boat? And after all, Pluto is a couple of orders of magnitude more massive than the biggest Mars-Jupiter asteroids (Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, etc).
PS, From the Nine Planets mass figures, Charon is 1/9 the mass of Pluto, not 2/3. But it's still pretty accurate to call Pluto-Charon a double planet.
Earth-Moon is really a double planet too (despite 1/80 mass ratio), if you go by visual appearance... the difference in radius is much smaller than the difference in mass (volume is proportional to radius cubed, and the Moon is less dense than Earth as well).
With new technologies it's possible to print books one copy at a time... for instance Ingram now has "Lightning Print". So why don't publishers just crank up the OCR and scan in their entire back catalog?
For hardcovers with glossy paper and pictures and high production values, it might not be feasible.... but for paperbacks, it's a no-brainer. There's no reason for paperbacks to be out of print anymore.
Here's an article about Pioneer 10 deviating off course, also from the BBC.
The deviation happened in 1992 and lasted 25 days... most likely was a Kuiper belt object.
This has nothing to do with the new hypothetical planet. Remember, it's supposed to be 1000 times farther than Pluto, while Pioneer and the Voyagers are less than twice as far as Pluto.
By the way the BBC has a great Science & Technology section... worth bookmarking and checking every day.
Dvorak is nice, but it solves yesterday's problem.
Wearable computers are coming, and we need an input method that you can use while walking down the street. The Twiddler is just a first-generation example.
We need an input device that can be used in any position (sitting, standing, lying down), and that allows rapid input of not just ASCII, but extended characters (accented letters, etc).
A truly sophisticated input device would make full use of the neuromuscular capabilities of the hand for the highest bandwidth... consider playing the violin, and try to imagine doing it on a keyboard or using a mouse. Perhaps in the future, kids will spend years learning how to use input devices (just like the violin), and will use them to do truly amazing things at very high speed.
Is the US economy currently in a "bubble", similar to Japan a decade ago?
Found the following Air Force press release on sci.space.news on Deja.com:
" To show its commitment, the Air Force is investing 30 percent of its science and technology budget -- more than double its current figure -- to accelerate development of space operations vehicles, space-based radar and laser, and adaptive optics."
Not so fast.
Astronomers have found a way to overcome the atmosphere's turbulence: adaptive optics. If I recall correctly, they shine a laser upwards to create an artificial star, and then by monitoring the twinkling of the artificial star, the telescope mirror is dynamically distorted hundreds of times per second to compensate.
Such a mirror is now in place at Mauna Kea... the resolution rivals Hubble's, at a fraction of the cost. See Gemini North Sees the Light (scroll down to "Friday, June 25"), or the media fact sheet from the Gemini Project.
See also this picture of Pluto and Charon.
Now, the question is: can adaptive optics be used in the other direction, to observe the ground from space?
Did astronomers actually invent adaptive optics, or is it just another Cold War technology spinoff? Makes you go Hmmmmm.....