"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live forever in the cradle.". Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 -- 1935)
Ever heard of the Matthew effect? It refers to how once someone achieves a certain level of accomplishment, people will attribute things to them whenever they don't know who really came up with them. It happens with Einstein, it happens with Feynman, and it also seems to happen an awful lot with Clarke.
I wonder what George O. Smith would make of it (Google for him if you don't know who he is).
Well, what NASA needs more than anything, is low cost access to orbit. That is what the X-prize is about, but NASA could probably get more bang for their buck by having a prize for a high specific impulse rocket engine which can operate in atmosphere. Simply set a minimum thrust, maximum weight, and minimum specific impulse, and see what people come up with. Ion and plasma engines have Isp of 10,000 or higher, but can't run in atmosphere (and require power supplies). If the space shuttle had that high of an Isp, it would need a ton or two of fuel (just guessing, don't feel like doing the math at the moment).
Of course, who knows how someone would find a way to make an engine like that. However if it is something with a low cost of entry (unlike the X-prize) which every backyard inventor can work on, then you instantly have a few thousand amateur rocket scientists working for a prize of a few hundred thousand. A pretty good deal, I say.
In 1986 I saw ~my~ first Space Shuttle launch. It was my 12th birthday - January 28th. Now THAT's an awful thing to do to a kid (not to mention 7 astronauts).
Speaking as a physicist who ~has~ paid attention, I have to ask:
Pray tell how much heat is "unexplained excess heat" when the experimenter cannot tell how much energy went into binding the deuterium into the palladium matrix in the first place? You do realize that usually the deuterium is put into the palladium matrix under rather high pressure. Like, high enough pressure to rupture metal. When you have a gas being pressurized, and then later, excess energy appears, don't you think it's appropriate to wonder how much energy was used pressurizing the gas? If you'll note from the above referenced article:
"McKubre has also found that the seeming inconsistency in experimental heat production arose from differences in the amount of deuterium packed into the palladium electrode. Whenever the number of deuterium atoms loaded into the metal matched or exceeded the number of palladium atoms, excess heat was generated. Palladium loaded with slightly less deuterium produced inconsistent results, and if the deuterium level was reduced by a great amount, then no excess heat at all was produced. Deuterium loading was hard to control and limited by the strength of the metal. Unfortunately, palladium strength is difficult to predict or control, and is not improved by purification; indeed, the purest palladium ruptured at lower loadings, and the highest strength was seen only in one impure batch."
I used to lurk on sci.physics.fusion, back in the day when Dick Blue, Deiter Britz and Stephen Jones used to wrangle it out (names are from 12 years old memory, could be incorrect). The real issue is not that the scientific community refuses to look at the cold fusion community's data (they do refuse, and I'm not defending them) but rather that the cold fusion community refuses to meaningfully communicate with themselves. It's been understood for a while that deuterium binding theory is not well understood. This is a huge missing variable in the "excess energy" they are always talking about. They are exploring the amount of energy involved in deuterium binding, but at the same time they are ignoring it! The cold fusion community puts tremendous effort into proving that cold fusion is a nuclear effect, but cannot answer the simple question - how much energy did you store in your deuterium?
Ever wonder how history might be different if "Napster" had instead been named something like "The Sharing Library of the Internet"?
I think that people would have a far different reaction to a "library" being shut down than a "peer-to-peer startup company". People understand that libraries are supposed to share information - that's what they do. And generally people don't have a problem with that. It's when buzzwords like "P2P" and "piracy" become involved that people have a problem with file sharing.
Note to self: if ever making P2P applications, call them Library-something-or-other.
Ok, so this morning I drive to work from Satellite Beach, after staying up late reading "Space, the Free Market Frontier" by Edward Hudgins, and yes, I also saw the article on this in the Florida Today yesterday... and then I see this on the Slashdot frontpage.
D8F8, are you spying on me?;)
I never knew Satellite Beach had a webpage. Sadly enough, the counter told me I was visitor number 1. I suspect some mighty fine coding. For those of you who have never visited, yes, our beaches do have as many coquina rocks as the picture shows (although you can only see them like that at low tide). We do have some of the best surfers in the world though (the Hobgoods are from here, and Cocoa Beach is just up the road).
I agree that Jeb needs to get off his butt and try to court the X-prize. I'd love to see the X-prize competitors flying from Florida. However, I hope that the X-prize committee makes their decision based upon the merits of each location (New Mexico - better weather, more frontier spirit; Florida - clear launch trajectory, more space industry).
What really worries me is the attitude of the election commisioners who put these systems in place. I wrote the following letter to the local supervisor of elections:
Dear Mr. Galey,
I am writing to you as I am concerned about the recent suggestions by the Florida Secretary of State to institute the use of electronic touch-screen voting machines statewide. I do not know whether it is planned to use these machines in Brevard County, however, their use in any county has the potential to alter any statewide election. I do not believe these devices in their current form, as provided by the current vendors in the US market (such as ES&S and Diebold), are ready for use in a real election. I believe that this view is supported by the various anomalies and questionable election results which have occurred in many places where these machines have been used. I am comfortable with the scanned paper methods which I have used voting in precinct 32 in Indian Harbour Beach. My main objection to the use of these touch-screen devices has to do with the lack of independent verification methods for their results. I work for a company whose primary products are independent verification systems for cancer treatment irradiation. Whether the right amount of radiation has been delivered to a patient can be a matter of life or death. I feel that elections are also very important, and deserve similar verification.
The lack of an audit trail allowing independent verification of the systems results means that if there is a mistake, we would never know. The Florida Secretary of State believes that it is ok to proceed with the use of touch-screen devices in the November elections without attaching printers, as she opined in her recent editorial in Florida Today. I believe that this basically boils down to rushing things and hoping for the best. I do not think that the best way to avoid a reoccurrence of the voting fiasco which happened during the 2000 recount is to make it impossible to have a recount at all. Hiding a problem does not make it go away.
I do not have a problem with making elections easier and quicker using electronic systems. In fact, I am strongly for it. However, I would prefer an older, slower system which I have faith in to a new, fast one in which I do not. Until electronic touch-screen voting systems can supply a voter verified independent audit trail, I and many other voters will not trust their output.
If you have any questions, or wish to allay my fears, please feel to contact me.
This was his response:
You should have no fear, the systems are secure and well managed. Do not believe the scare tactics. FRED
Somehow, that doesn't make me feel any better. Instead of answering my objections to the unrecountability of these systems, I got a little pat on the head and a "don't worry". I realize that he's a busy guy, but when I ask why I shouldn't worry, and am told, "just don't worry about it", I worry more.
I have now written my state and federal representatives about this. I suggest you do the same. Until people like Mr. Galey realize that lots of people are actually worried, they can get away with patting a few of us on the head and sending us on our way.
While I agree with you that some of the language ("Bio-Medical Cartel" etc.) is perhaps hyperbolic and inflammatory, I can see how there is a natural interest in combining these subjects into a single conference. Essentially they are all about what one might call 'stealing from the commons', or privatizing public property or rights, esp. with regards to intellectual property and rights. That is what NYFU are arguing, whether it is the right of a person to control what happens on a PC they own, or the IP land grab which has occured as a result of copyright extension.
Saying that they should be dealt with as separate subjects is like saying that the founding fathers should have held separate conferences for each of the amendments in the Bill of Rights: "Well, I can see how a well regulated militia might be necessary, but we shouldn't muddy that with the issue of the soveriegn quartering soldiers in our houses".
TSA are the biggest bunch of idiots I have ever seen. The nail clipper thing is ridiculous, and shows just how little they care about actual security.
Do you think anyone at TSA has really thought about what they are doing? Let's see, why do people bomb planes and buses (as opposed to say, flower shops)... it's a lot of people in a small space, where they are all strangers travelling through. It's a high density area which is easy to infiltrate. Have you ever stood in line for an hour or two waiting to get through airport security? Who needs to bomb a plane anymore - when someone could just as easily bomb the line of people waiting to get through security? There's more people in the line waiting to get through the metal detectors than there are on a 747. Of course, all of this is motivated by the whole, "well, you don't want another 9/11 to happen, do you?". Which completely ignores the fact that 9/11 could only happen because the passengers did not fight (witness the flight that crashed in Virginia). People ~will~ fight next time (witness the shoe-bomber incident).
C'mon, if I can figure this out, don't you think the terrorists can? TSA is making security worse, not better.
In modern systems, where IMRT (intensity modulated radiation therapy) is used, the medical physicist in charge is supposed to verify each field delivered. This tests both the treatment planning software, as well as the accelerator, collimator leaves, etc. Often this is done using film, however, time saving electronic devices (basically diode arrays) are used by those who can afford them. Of course, the verification system has its own software, which requires verification also. Luckily the verification software is fairly simple, relative to the treatment planning and accelerator control systems.
Re:well, yeah, but so can not having software
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 1
Of course, the best way to avoid having problems like the Therac and Panamanian incidents are having independent QA and verification systems, like these. In fact, there is an entire professional association association whose members spend most of their time attempting to prevent such events.
I strongly suspect it is. I have corresponded with Dr. Crowell on the subject of open source/free textbooks before, and I must say that he is the most visible proponent of free textbooks around today. He has written his own free physics textbook, so he walks the walk as well as talking the talk.
10 years from now we might be looking at Dr. Crowell as the 'Linus of textbooks'.
Please check out the Wikibooks site (cited above in another post) if you are interested in contributing to the movement.
Re:90% of everything is crap
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 1
I hardly think that when Sturgeon said what he said, he was trying to create a 'law'. I think he was trying to make the point that yes, there is a lot of crap in sci-fi, but there is a lot of crap in other fields of literature, and in other fields of human endeavour. To follow your example, someone might say "Lots of German Reislings are crap". But then, according to 'Sturgeon's Law', lots of wine from other places of other types might be crap too. That doesn't mean that the good wines are crappy, just that their origin or type doesn't determine their crappiness. The reason this is relevant to our current discussion is that Sturgeon was making a point about sci-fi not being crap just by being sci-fi (which was the perception back then, and in some quarters, still is).
All the above discussion about what sci-fi sucks and doesn't suck reminds me of an old quote by Theodore Sturgeon (if you don't know who he is, read more sci-fi).
Someone asked him if it bothered him that 90% of science fiction was crap. He responded "No. 90% of ~everything~ is crap".
I wondered about the "200 million hits/day" figure, which sounded kind of low to me. So I tried to find the original data citation. I may be lame, but I am having trouble finding it on searchenginewatch.com. Perhaps they got their data from hitwise.com (25 million tracked) or comScore.com (1.5 million tracked), in the Ratings & Reviews section. The USA today article makes it sound like google gets only 200 million searches a day! Anyone who isn't busy have time to look into this suspect figure? I think we may have another case of a reporter citing something he read in a newsletter without understanding what the numbers actually mean.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go irradiate something.
Excellent thesis, Cynthia. I will not presume to link it here; I will leave that to you. I have serious doubts about the ability of Public Key Crypto to provide panaceas for PETs in the future, as I frankly expect all which are less than NP complete to be cracked within the next decade or so. I don't know what the ramifications of this will be for our internet society - but I do know that the need for privacy will not be any less than it is now. In the end, technologies are only tools which societies use when they make their choices; some technologies just make the proper choices easier.
I have also noticed a cost/benefit ratio associated with posting ones personal accomplishments on slashdot. I gave up my 'slashdot anonymity' when I posted a patent. And I didn't even get modded up for it!
I doubt that it is the declarative statements which make the judges feel that the software is patentable. The majority of the overly broad software patents I have heard about cover essentially GUI functions. I have never heard of a software patent which is basically a 'math' function rather than a 'usability' function (of course, they could be out there). I think that the reasoning in the judge (or patent examiner)'s mind goes something like:
This is basically adding a button which does 'X'
If this were a machine, adding a button which does 'X' would make it patentable
Therefore, this must be a patentable application
The problem with this chain of reasoning is that the computer (which was patented in a zillion different ways back in the day) and the operating software already allows change of functions implicitly. That's what they do! Thus allowing patents on specific implementations of GUI's or application interfaces is equivalent to allowing someone to patent the use of a standard swiss army knife with the blade and the corkscrew out at the same time. Someone needs to point out that it's already prior art. The dumb thing is that it needs to be pointed out again, and again, and again...
I have noticed a tendency among younger folk of non-cluelessness among AOL users. I don't know if this is because AOL has services which are useful to clueful teens, or simply because younger folk have had the internet as a part of their lives more so than the older AOLers. Either way, hey if it works for you, who are we to criticize?
But what you may not know (or remember) is that there is a history of AOL being 'the gateway drug to the internet'. Countless people have used AOL long enough to get a clue, then dropped them in favor of services which met their more sophisticated needs. I was a college freshman during the September that never ended. People would assume that I knew all kinds of things about the internet that I didn't, simply because I had a address that ended in.edu instead of aol.com. Everyone on the internet was pissed off at the AOLers, a feeling which still resonates to this day. AOL still thinks of themselves as "The Easy Way to get onto the Internet", so people still think of them as "The Idiots way to get onto the Internet".
Good luck at UF in the fall. Who knows what your September will be remembered for? (With condolences to the incoming class of '01).
According to this article, the iraqi state oil marketing agency imports their gas from Turkey for 98 cents a gallon.
Someone earlier commented on the cost of bringing coals to Newcastle.
Of course, you know that Schlumberger is the major global competitor to Halliburton. Why didn't they get to bid on the delivery? Maybe it has something to do with their Paris headquarters...
In the grand tradition of "It came over the wire service", Slashdot posts an article about a contest that has been going on since 1997. IIRC, I bookmarked http://www.certicom.com/research/ch2.html last january (I'm not sure because I have changed computers since then). Its been long enough that Certicom has changed their website too.
ECC is interesting, although I am not 100% sure that it is as relatively strong as Certicom claims. Elliptic curves are similar to the discrete log method, which can be shown to be approximately as strong as RSA (factoring). I am not an expert in Elliptic curves, so I can't speak as to whether there are any 'shortcuts' which would reduce the problem to a discrete log one, but if so, then the ECC would be no stronger than RSA. Elliptic curves, by the way, are the same branch of mathematics which brought us the proof of Fermat's last theorem.
I ought to point out that there ~are~ some effects which could result in a 'reactionless engine', such as the one mentioned in the paper by Dr. Jack Wisdom of MIT in Science, "Swimming in Spacetime: Motion by Cyclic Changes in Body Shape", Science 2003 299: 1865-1869. This is very different from the naive suggestion above. However, this effect is far to small for practical use (on the order of femtometers per cyclic modulation). Also, such an effect isn't really 'reactionless', rather it pushes back on the object producing the gravitational field.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent post is quite correct.
Please Mod parent up, Insightful. I used all my mod points yesterday.
"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live
forever in the cradle.". Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 -- 1935)
Ever heard of the Matthew effect? It refers to how once someone achieves a certain level of accomplishment, people will attribute things to them whenever they don't know who really came up with them. It happens with Einstein, it happens with Feynman, and it also seems to happen an awful lot with Clarke.
I wonder what George O. Smith would make of it (Google for him if you don't know who he is).
Well, what NASA needs more than anything, is low cost access to orbit. That is what the X-prize is about, but NASA could probably get more bang for their buck by having a prize for a high specific impulse rocket engine which can operate in atmosphere. Simply set a minimum thrust, maximum weight, and minimum specific impulse, and see what people come up with. Ion and plasma engines have Isp of 10,000 or higher, but can't run in atmosphere (and require power supplies). If the space shuttle had that high of an Isp, it would need a ton or two of fuel (just guessing, don't feel like doing the math at the moment).
Of course, who knows how someone would find a way to make an engine like that. However if it is something with a low cost of entry (unlike the X-prize) which every backyard inventor can work on, then you instantly have a few thousand amateur rocket scientists working for a prize of a few hundred thousand. A pretty good deal, I say.
In 1986 I saw ~my~ first Space Shuttle launch. It was my 12th birthday - January 28th. Now THAT's an awful thing to do to a kid (not to mention 7 astronauts).
Speaking as a physicist who ~has~ paid attention, I have to ask:
Pray tell how much heat is "unexplained excess heat" when the experimenter cannot tell how much energy went into binding the deuterium into the palladium matrix in the first place? You do realize that usually the deuterium is put into the palladium matrix under rather high pressure. Like, high enough pressure to rupture metal. When you have a gas being pressurized, and then later, excess energy appears, don't you think it's appropriate to wonder how much energy was used pressurizing the gas? If you'll note from the above referenced article:
"McKubre has also found that the seeming inconsistency in experimental heat production arose from differences in the amount of deuterium packed into the palladium electrode. Whenever the number of deuterium atoms loaded into the metal matched or exceeded the number of palladium atoms, excess heat was generated. Palladium loaded with slightly less deuterium produced inconsistent results, and if the deuterium level was reduced by a great amount, then no excess heat at all was produced. Deuterium loading was hard to control and limited by the strength of the metal. Unfortunately, palladium strength is difficult to predict or control, and is not improved by purification; indeed, the purest palladium ruptured at lower loadings, and the highest strength was seen only in one impure batch."
I used to lurk on sci.physics.fusion, back in the day when Dick Blue, Deiter Britz and Stephen Jones used to wrangle it out (names are from 12 years old memory, could be incorrect). The real issue is not that the scientific community refuses to look at the cold fusion community's data (they do refuse, and I'm not defending them) but rather that the cold fusion community refuses to meaningfully communicate with themselves. It's been understood for a while that deuterium binding theory is not well understood. This is a huge missing variable in the "excess energy" they are always talking about. They are exploring the amount of energy involved in deuterium binding, but at the same time they are ignoring it! The cold fusion community puts tremendous effort into proving that cold fusion is a nuclear effect, but cannot answer the simple question - how much energy did you store in your deuterium?
...And double bonus points for figuring it out from decoding the name of the demi-god "Zagig Yragerne"! (from Castle Greyhawk)
Ever wonder how history might be different if "Napster" had instead been named something like "The Sharing Library of the Internet"?
I think that people would have a far different reaction to a "library" being shut down than a "peer-to-peer startup company". People understand that libraries are supposed to share information - that's what they do. And generally people don't have a problem with that. It's when buzzwords like "P2P" and "piracy" become involved that people have a problem with file sharing.
Note to self: if ever making P2P applications, call them Library-something-or-other.
Unlikely, unless we have some really sci-fi breakthroughs, considering he died almost 2 years ago:
Bob Forward 1932-2002
Requiescat in Pace, Bob.
I wish he could have had a chance to see this paper published: Swimming in Spacetime (I'd post the original article, but you have to pay to see it)
I think he would have found it most interesting.
Thanks for the link. Of course, the first thing I used it for is to post a link to a satellite pic of Reason's editorial offices to Slashdot...
Reason
I wonder if this what the cover of the boss' copy looks like...
Ok, so this morning I drive to work from Satellite Beach, after staying up late reading "Space, the Free Market Frontier" by Edward Hudgins, and yes, I also saw the article on this in the Florida Today yesterday... and then I see this on the Slashdot frontpage.
;)
D8F8, are you spying on me?
I never knew Satellite Beach had a webpage. Sadly enough, the counter told me I was visitor number 1. I suspect some mighty fine coding. For those of you who have never visited, yes, our beaches do have as many coquina rocks as the picture shows (although you can only see them like that at low tide). We do have some of the best surfers in the world though (the Hobgoods are from here, and Cocoa Beach is just up the road).
I agree that Jeb needs to get off his butt and try to court the X-prize. I'd love to see the X-prize competitors flying from Florida. However, I hope that the X-prize committee makes their decision based upon the merits of each location (New Mexico - better weather, more frontier spirit; Florida - clear launch trajectory, more space industry).
What really worries me is the attitude of the election commisioners who put these systems in place. I wrote the following letter to the local supervisor of elections:
Dear Mr. Galey,
I am writing to you as I am concerned about the recent suggestions by the Florida Secretary of State to institute the use of electronic touch-screen voting machines statewide. I do not know whether it is planned to use these machines in Brevard County, however, their use in any county has the potential to alter any statewide election. I do not believe these devices in their current form, as provided by the current vendors in the US market (such as ES&S and Diebold), are ready for use in a real election. I believe that this view is supported by the various anomalies and questionable election results which have occurred in many places where these machines have been used. I am comfortable with the scanned paper methods which I have used voting in precinct 32 in Indian Harbour Beach. My main objection to the use of these touch-screen devices has to do with the lack of independent verification methods for their results. I work for a company whose primary products are independent verification systems for cancer treatment irradiation. Whether the right amount of radiation has been delivered to a patient can be a matter of life or death. I feel that elections are also very important, and deserve similar verification.
The lack of an audit trail allowing independent verification of the systems results means that if there is a mistake, we would never know. The Florida Secretary of State believes that it is ok to proceed with the use of touch-screen devices in the November elections without attaching printers, as she opined in her recent editorial in Florida Today. I believe that this basically boils down to rushing things and hoping for the best. I do not think that the best way to avoid a reoccurrence of the voting fiasco which happened during the 2000 recount is to make it impossible to have a recount at all. Hiding a problem does not make it go away.
I do not have a problem with making elections easier and quicker using electronic systems. In fact, I am strongly for it. However, I would prefer an older, slower system which I have faith in to a new, fast one in which I do not. Until electronic touch-screen voting systems can supply a voter verified independent audit trail, I and many other voters will not trust their output.
If you have any questions, or wish to allay my fears, please feel to contact me.
This was his response:
You should have no fear, the systems are secure and well managed. Do not believe the scare tactics. FRED
Somehow, that doesn't make me feel any better. Instead of answering my objections to the unrecountability of these systems, I got a little pat on the head and a "don't worry". I realize that he's a busy guy, but when I ask why I shouldn't worry, and am told, "just don't worry about it", I worry more.
I have now written my state and federal representatives about this. I suggest you do the same. Until people like Mr. Galey realize that lots of people are actually worried, they can get away with patting a few of us on the head and sending us on our way.
While I agree with you that some of the language ("Bio-Medical Cartel" etc.) is perhaps hyperbolic and inflammatory, I can see how there is a natural interest in combining these subjects into a single conference. Essentially they are all about what one might call 'stealing from the commons', or privatizing public property or rights, esp. with regards to intellectual property and rights. That is what NYFU are arguing, whether it is the right of a person to control what happens on a PC they own, or the IP land grab which has occured as a result of copyright extension.
Saying that they should be dealt with as separate subjects is like saying that the founding fathers should have held separate conferences for each of the amendments in the Bill of Rights:
"Well, I can see how a well regulated militia might be necessary, but we shouldn't muddy that with the issue of the soveriegn quartering soldiers in our houses".
TSA are the biggest bunch of idiots I have ever seen. The nail clipper thing is ridiculous, and shows just how little they care about actual security.
Do you think anyone at TSA has really thought about what they are doing? Let's see, why do people bomb planes and buses (as opposed to say, flower shops)... it's a lot of people in a small space, where they are all strangers travelling through. It's a high density area which is easy to infiltrate. Have you ever stood in line for an hour or two waiting to get through airport security? Who needs to bomb a plane anymore - when someone could just as easily bomb the line of people waiting to get through security? There's more people in the line waiting to get through the metal detectors than there are on a 747. Of course, all of this is motivated by the whole, "well, you don't want another 9/11 to happen, do you?". Which completely ignores the fact that 9/11 could only happen because the passengers did not fight (witness the flight that crashed in Virginia). People ~will~ fight next time (witness the shoe-bomber incident).
C'mon, if I can figure this out, don't you think the terrorists can? TSA is making security worse, not better.
In modern systems, where IMRT (intensity modulated radiation therapy) is used, the medical physicist in charge is supposed to verify each field delivered. This tests both the treatment planning software, as well as the accelerator, collimator leaves, etc. Often this is done using film, however, time saving electronic devices (basically diode arrays) are used by those who can afford them. Of course, the verification system has its own software, which requires verification also. Luckily the verification software is fairly simple, relative to the treatment planning and accelerator control systems.
Of course, the best way to avoid having problems like the Therac and Panamanian incidents are having independent QA and verification systems, like these. In fact, there is an entire professional association association whose members spend most of their time attempting to prevent such events.
I strongly suspect it is. I have corresponded with Dr. Crowell on the subject of open source/free textbooks before, and I must say that he is the most visible proponent of free textbooks around today. He has written his own free physics textbook, so he walks the walk as well as talking the talk.
10 years from now we might be looking at Dr. Crowell as the 'Linus of textbooks'.
Please check out the Wikibooks site (cited above in another post) if you are interested in contributing to the movement.
I hardly think that when Sturgeon said what he said, he was trying to create a 'law'. I think he was trying to make the point that yes, there is a lot of crap in sci-fi, but there is a lot of crap in other fields of literature, and in other fields of human endeavour. To follow your example, someone might say "Lots of German Reislings are crap". But then, according to 'Sturgeon's Law', lots of wine from other places of other types might be crap too. That doesn't mean that the good wines are crappy, just that their origin or type doesn't determine their crappiness. The reason this is relevant to our current discussion is that Sturgeon was making a point about sci-fi not being crap just by being sci-fi (which was the perception back then, and in some quarters, still is).
All the above discussion about what sci-fi sucks and doesn't suck reminds me of an old quote by Theodore Sturgeon (if you don't know who he is, read more sci-fi).
Someone asked him if it bothered him that 90% of science fiction was crap. He responded "No. 90% of ~everything~ is crap".
I wondered about the "200 million hits/day" figure, which sounded kind of low to me. So I tried to find the original data citation. I may be lame, but I am having trouble finding it on searchenginewatch.com. Perhaps they got their data from hitwise.com (25 million tracked) or comScore.com (1.5 million tracked), in the Ratings & Reviews section. The USA today article makes it sound like google gets only 200 million searches a day! Anyone who isn't busy have time to look into this suspect figure? I think we may have another case of a reporter citing something he read in a newsletter without understanding what the numbers actually mean.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go irradiate something.
Excellent thesis, Cynthia. I will not presume to link it here; I will leave that to you. I have serious doubts about the ability of Public Key Crypto to provide panaceas for PETs in the future, as I frankly expect all which are less than NP complete to be cracked within the next decade or so. I don't know what the ramifications of this will be for our internet society - but I do know that the need for privacy will not be any less than it is now. In the end, technologies are only tools which societies use when they make their choices; some technologies just make the proper choices easier.
I have also noticed a cost/benefit ratio associated with posting ones personal accomplishments on slashdot. I gave up my 'slashdot anonymity' when I posted a patent. And I didn't even get modded up for it!
I doubt that it is the declarative statements which make the judges feel that the software is patentable. The majority of the overly broad software patents I have heard about cover essentially GUI functions. I have never heard of a software patent which is basically a 'math' function rather than a 'usability' function (of course, they could be out there). I think that the reasoning in the judge (or patent examiner)'s mind goes something like:
This is basically adding a button which does 'X'
If this were a machine, adding a button which does 'X' would make it patentable
Therefore, this must be a patentable application
The problem with this chain of reasoning is that the computer (which was patented in a zillion different ways back in the day) and the operating software already allows change of functions implicitly. That's what they do! Thus allowing patents on specific implementations of GUI's or application interfaces is equivalent to allowing someone to patent the use of a standard swiss army knife with the blade and the corkscrew out at the same time. Someone needs to point out that it's already prior art. The dumb thing is that it needs to be pointed out again, and again, and again...
Hi Eric,
.edu instead of aol.com. Everyone on the internet was pissed off at the AOLers, a feeling which still resonates to this day. AOL still thinks of themselves as "The Easy Way to get onto the Internet", so people still think of them as "The Idiots way to get onto the Internet".
I have noticed a tendency among younger folk of non-cluelessness among AOL users. I don't know if this is because AOL has services which are useful to clueful teens, or simply because younger folk have had the internet as a part of their lives more so than the older AOLers. Either way, hey if it works for you, who are we to criticize?
But what you may not know (or remember) is that there is a history of AOL being 'the gateway drug to the internet'. Countless people have used AOL long enough to get a clue, then dropped them in favor of services which met their more sophisticated needs. I was a college freshman during the September that never ended. People would assume that I knew all kinds of things about the internet that I didn't, simply because I had a address that ended in
Good luck at UF in the fall. Who knows what your September will be remembered for? (With condolences to the incoming class of '01).
According to this article, the iraqi state oil marketing agency imports their gas from Turkey for 98 cents a gallon.
Someone earlier commented on the cost of bringing coals to Newcastle.
Of course, you know that Schlumberger is the major global competitor to Halliburton. Why didn't they get to bid on the delivery? Maybe it has something to do with their Paris headquarters...
In the grand tradition of "It came over the wire service", Slashdot posts an article about a contest that has been going on since 1997. IIRC, I bookmarked http://www.certicom.com/research/ch2.html last january (I'm not sure because I have changed computers since then). Its been long enough that Certicom has changed their website too.
ECC is interesting, although I am not 100% sure that it is as relatively strong as Certicom claims. Elliptic curves are similar to the discrete log method, which can be shown to be approximately as strong as RSA (factoring). I am not an expert in Elliptic curves, so I can't speak as to whether there are any 'shortcuts' which would reduce the problem to a discrete log one, but if so, then the ECC would be no stronger than RSA. Elliptic curves, by the way, are the same branch of mathematics which brought us the proof of Fermat's last theorem.
I ought to point out that there ~are~ some effects which could result in a 'reactionless engine', such as the one mentioned in the paper by Dr. Jack Wisdom of MIT in Science, "Swimming in Spacetime: Motion by Cyclic Changes in Body Shape", Science 2003 299: 1865-1869. This is very different from the naive suggestion above. However, this effect is far to small for practical use (on the order of femtometers per cyclic modulation). Also, such an effect isn't really 'reactionless', rather it pushes back on the object producing the gravitational field.