I laugh at these guys' pathetic plan. My team has come up with my very own Russian Mars Mission plan, after listening very carefully to some guys in tinfoil hats. (People laugh at tinfoil hats, but compared to many Mars mission advocates these guys sound pretty reasonable.)
Plan is simple: fake a trip to Mars. People thought was possible back in 1969, but now we know is possible -- digital effects technology has come long way. I mean, with $3 billion we could pay animators to hand-craft every pixel of footage. It will look totally believeable.
No damage to Martian environment and no contamination of Martian life (if there is any).
All excitement that Sci-Fi fans could ever want. In fact, exploration of Mars might turn out to be exactly like the novel - no matter which novel you prefer! We can put Valentine Michael Smith up there if you like!
Problems:
What if spoilsports at JPL or NORAD use their radars and determine there is no spaceship out there? Well, that's where Russian angle comes in. We simply insist that there really is spaceship... and that JPL and NORAD guys are just issuing disinformation, in order to cover up embarrassing superiority of Russian space technology. (Hey, if this argument works for ESP and cold fusion...)
What if people insist on getting interesting scientific information back from manned Mars trip? Well... they just won't. Nobody ever talks about data from Moon missions. Instead they rhapsodize about pictures of Aldrin and Armstrong and world's most expensive golf cart. If people insist on "scientific data", we will quietly steal photos from Spirit rover web site and Photoshop in a cosmonaut or two.
What about people who want to colonize Mars in order to experience glorious new frontier? Won't they demand seats on our ship?
Well, for morality's sake, our first duty is to lecture these people sternly about what idiots they are. When this doesn't work, we can sell them seats in Mars Settlement Simulator. This is big airtight tin can containing 1000 switches and 1000 tins of Spam. Every day, "passengers" are required to flip a switch... otherwise can explodes. If passengers run out of Spam, they die of starvation. One of the switches is secretly wired to shut off can's air supply... when it is switched, passengers unexpectedly die of asphyxiation. If passengers make it through 800 days, we open up can to reveal Gobi Desert, where they are free to wander around until they get bored and decide to go home.
I figure we can get $1M each for these seats -- after all, they are very good simulation of real trip! But passengers may get mad because they don't get weightlessness for their money. Such passengers will be airlifted to secret Russian base at Sanduski where they can ride Weightlessness Simulators until they pass out.
American education has, in my lifetime, been a lot less rigorous than European or Asian education. Don't play Trivial Pursuit with a German. Don't argue about equations with a Japanese engineer. Yet most of the innovation has come from the USA.
Yeah, that's because both the German trivia master and the Japanese engineer are living in the USA and are working for innovative American companies and universities.
Or at least, they were back in the 20th century. Now the Department of Homeland Bureaucracy imposes vast amounts of red tape on foreign nationals. (Don't you dare go home to Germany for a visit - you might not be allowed back into the US.) Meanwhile, foreigners (as well as American citizens) can be imprisoned without trial. And the President has declared war on stem cell research.
I wonder which nation will become known for innovation in the 21st century?
I never knew about the use tax. I thought it applied to huge items like automobiles but not to anything else.
Then on this year's form I saw the Dreaded Line. I thought about it for a long time. I have always carefully avoided Web sites that charge taxes. But in the end I just paid the tax, for a combination of reasons:
It just wasn't all that much money.
I can't bring myself to defend the idea that my local businesses deserve to get screwed by the tax system.
I'm not some damned Randite, so I'm not about to go on a one-man idealistic crusade against taxes. I like roads, schools and libraries.
I couldn't come up with a plausible lie.
Shamefully, I did contemplate lying. But how? I mean, it's nuts to write in "zero". When your auditor asks "why zero - haven't you ever bought anything from Amazon?" what am I gonna say? "No, I live in a cave and all my books are handwritten on vellum?"
I could claim that I didn't know what I had spent. Unfortunately, I save my credit card bills, since I want to have some evidence on my side after my identity gets stolen. Even more unfortunately, I own Quicken, which can print out all my interstate transactions for the year in, like, three minutes. Oops. So not only is ignorance not a legal defense, it isn't even a believeable defense.
I thought about only paying the tax on the big-ticket items. But the difference between that and just paying everything I knew about was, say, $15. It's worth $15 to be able to go before my auditors and NOT lie.
And there are karmic benefits. I no longer refuse to walk into my local stores because I know I can pay lower taxes on the Internet, even after shipping. Instead I refuse to walk into my local stores because they charge $25 for a book that Amazon is selling for $18. I mean, I know I am supposed to support my local stores, but $7 per book?
Of course, I'm not paid the big bucks to read boring legal cases from 1937, so I'm going to have this page from the Minnesota House offices interpret this for me. I'm told that, in this case, the Supreme Court specifically decided that the use tax did not violate the Commerce Clause.... basically because it's fair to expect local and mail-order businesses to compete on the same playing field.
So. Better hire a lawyer before failing to fill out that Use Tax line on the grounds that "this 'new' tax is unconstitutional"...
I swear, I think Lucas has watched too many MST3K episodes. MST3K did "The Phantom Creeps" (an awful series of short features, with Bela Lugosi!) and "Attack of The The Eye Creatures". And they did "The Creeping Terror".
Perhaps the long-repressed portion of Lucas' subconscious that still has any taste is trying to tell us something.
...because Google will store every piece of spam exactly once. (Well, actually, their storage system is redundant so it will probably be stored a handful of times. But that's all.)
If 10,000 Gmail users receive a piece of spam, Google will index the spam (storing it 5 times for backup purposes) and each of the 10,000 users will get a tiny little index number that points to the indexed spam.
This system will be pretty efficient, because most of the email in the world is highly redundant, if only because most of it is spam.
If Google engineers cared to do so, they could also do things like break your emails into chunks and index each chunk. An identical.signature file appears at the end of every email I send. That.signature could be stored once and then referred to by a pointer. More savings.
Of course, a good question to ask is: if Google starts allowing users to flag spam for other users, how long will it be before the spammers adapt? Spammers can certainly make every piece of spam different from every other piece if they want to. They may be doing this already... I am not up to speed in the world of spam and anti-spam.
As for the free online storage... have you ever tried emailing an attachment to yourself with your web-based email? Hmmm... "store files from anywhere in the world... use a web browser to access them." Yep, sounds about right to me. Although attachments will probably be limited in size, as some people speculate, so don't try storing any feature films or anything.
Read the ARTICLE!
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Weinberg has already done the heavy lifting, so please go read his article before getting too rhapsodic about spades and rock hammers. (As if planetary geology was somehow equivalent to backyard fossil hunting.)
I can't resist pointing out that even your insanely optimistic guess -- that a human can do in a week, or even a day, what it takes Spirit and Opportunity 80 days to do -- means that a human is only 10 to 80 times more productive than a robot.
Now, pay close attention to the difference between $820 million and $900 billion. That's the difference between the (known) cost of two unmanned Mars missions and the (estimated) cost of Bush's manned one. It implies that, to get a better "ROI" from manned flight, your Young Pioneers with their rock hammers and their can-do attitudes will have to be one thousand times more productive than robots, which
don't sleep,
don't age,
don't necessarily have to invest many unproductive months in a return trip to Earth,
don't require air or water or food,
don't miss their families (or vice versa),
don't suffer from nervous breakdowns,
don't become crippled from years of low-G, and
don't inspire public outcry when they are casually abandoned in deep space after a particuarly nasty technical glitch.
I wish you luck.
No. Scratch that. If you were proposing to use your money instead of my tax dollars, I would wish you luck. As it is, I wish you would go back to watching Star Trek.
Just remember that a human scientist walking around on the surface of Mars would most likely be able to learn more about Mars than all our previous landers and rovers combined
I can't even decide which counterargument to use, there are so many.
Robot rovers get smarter and cheaper all the time. That is what Moore's Law is all about. If we took whatever money Bush proposes to throw at manned spaceflight and put it into robots, we could drive the robots around as fast as you like. We could have little robot road rallies on the Martian surface. Because there could be 10,000 of them. Miniaturize them, then launch two dozen at a time. Put the big radio for talking to Earth in the central hub, and let the little wireless-enabled bots scramble.
"No problems with the pesky airbags not retracting fully?" Um, no, there will still be problems. The good news is that a human with duct tape will be there to try to fix them. The bad news is that if the duct tape doesn't work, someone dies.
Are you aware that, despite the brilliance of NASA engineers and umpteen seasons of MacGuyver, the entire point of the movie Apollo 13 is that sometimes duct tape doesn't actually work?
What is your hurry to explore Mars? So what if it takes a week to look at a single rock? All the evidence we have to date suggests that Mars does not change on the time-scale of weeks, months or years.
One thing on Mars that might change quickly is Martian life, if there is any. Unfortunately, after humans go to Mars and start sneezing, there will most definitely be DNA on Mars, and how will we know the difference between Martian DNA and human DNA pollution?
I don't have any idea how to go to Mars efficiently, so I'm not going to bother arguing with your $20B budget... except to point out that with George W. and NASA running the show, and with NASA based largely in Texas, I wouldn't expect a lean and mean operation. For every $1 spent, you'll get 10 cents worth of spacecraft and 90 cents worth of pork.
Now let's get down to it:
There's nothing to gain from going to Mars
Let's take these one at a time.
New home for humanity.
Dude, I hate to be the first to tell you this, but humans breathe air. This means that, from a pure economic standpoint, Mars won't be settled until Antarctica is full. Since I think the planet Trantor is more fun to imagine than to actually live on, I think we'd better find a solution to the population problem that takes effect before Antarctica is full.
Unprecedented Scientific discovery
They're called "robots". You may have heard of them, since one is on Mars right now. NASA designed and launched two of them for $860M, less than the estimated cost of three shuttle flights. We could and should build a lot more of them, at very reasonable cost. They're fun, they're cheap, they work pretty well, and even if they occasionally blow up... nobody dies.
Easy access to the asteroids ($trillion apiece in ore!)
I'll bite. Which ore is this, exactly? Dilithium? Here's a homework assignment: after you realistically estimate the cost of mining an asteroid and shipping it back here, tell us which asteroidal element could be mined profitably. And please don't try and pretend that humanity hasn't invented recycling.
Tech jobs at home
I can't argue with this, I guess. Pass the pork! All I can say, though, is that you can generate gratuitous tech jobs with useful projects (zero-pollution cars?) as well as you can with useless projects.
Youngsters inspired to go into science and engineering
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Which do you think we need: more tech jobs, or more unemployed techs?
There are already plenty of inspired youngsters. They become postdocs. For every scientist with funding, there are 10 scientists working as postdocs, or accountants, or cabdrivers. Instead of spending billions of dollars trying to put spam-in-a-can where no spam has gone before, how about if we give that money to actual scientists? So we can cure diseases, or reverse-engineer the brain? Or even... build robots?
Plentiful fusion fuel (this will be important in the next 10-20 years). I could go on.
Please, do go on. I can already hear the violins, warming up to play the Star Trek theme.
I admit that Apple's DRM still sucks a little - it means you have to go through the hassle of burning a CD in order to keep your music forever. But it's nowhere near as bad as you think it is. Itunes does not lock you in to Apple.
In fact, a quick Google shows that even the need to actually burn a CD may be optional. Hee hee! Designing a DRM system really is like shovelling back the tide.
If HP tries to achieve lock-in by selling tunes that can't be burned onto plain-jane CDs (and then re-ripped into MP3) then the service will die, just like the old DIVX service died. Why else do you think Apple's DRM has this enormous loophole? It certainly isn't the RIAA's idea.
These fish may be new to the pet trade, but they have been used for years by biologists to study growth and development. Fluorescent zebrafish are excellent experimental subjects, because:
They breed like wildfire and are easy to raise in large numbers. (Imagine a big, big wall of fishtanks.)
Their embryos are a convenient size and are completely transparent - you can see every organ in their bodies.
You can watch the embryos continuously under the microscope for hours, or even days, at a time. (This is not true of, say, mouse embryos, which tend to become very unhappy once they are removed from the mother mouse.)
Of course, the fish used for science usually aren't designed to glow all over their bodies, all the time. That's fun for pets, but not very interesting. What scientists do is:
Find some protein that they think is important, like growth hormone.
Find the gene for that protein. For human genes, you can do the equivalent of a Google search through the entire human genome. If you want the equivalent gene in zebrafish, you can take advantage of the zebrafish genome archives. There are also complete genomes for mice, Drosophila (fruit flies) and other creatures that are popular with scientists.
Make a copy of the promoter for your interesting gene. (Genes, like email messages, are controlled by their headers. In genetics these headers are called "promoters". Basically, when the promoter gets activated, the cell starts to transcribe the gene and begins to produce the protein which the gene encodes.)
Attach your copied promoter to the gene for a fluorescent protein (the most popular protein is Green Fluorescent Protein, known as GFP - but there are red, cyan and yellow ones as well.)
Insert your new promoter+gene into an egg cell and grow a creature. Breed it a lot. Inbreed its offspring a lot until you have an extended family of genetically engineered creatures.
Now you have a creature which glows green or red only in the cells which are producing growth hormone. There are now dozens of strains of fish like this, each with a different promoter controlling the glow. And there are dozens of strains of mice as well.
My lab uses transgenic, fluorescent mice to study how blood vessels grow. We are trying to learn how to prevent blood vessels from growing into tumors...
I suppose you're right. This patent doesn't say "Microsoft definitely owns this obvious idea, which is as common as crabgrass."
Instead it says "if you invent a web service which appears to use this obvious idea, a big corporation can arbitrarily force you to turn your life savings into legal fees. After five years, assuming you stay out of bankruptcy court, you will know whether or not their claim has the force of law."
Imagine my relief.
And I'm not flaming Microsoft. This particular patent is just a symptom. I'm flaming the U.S. Patent Office, which seems hell-bent on insuring that the only U.S. citizens who are allowed to write software are millionaires, patent lawyers, MBAs with access to large venture funds, major corporations, and Anonymous Cowards who update their CVS trees late at night (and who live with the mortal fear that a lawyer will discover their True Name...)
Yesterday, as SCO's stock price was falling like a rock after the RedHat suit, someone suggested that it might be time to buy some SCO stock. In reply, dmaxwell wrote:
I know you're joking but from a strictly speculator point of view, it might not be a bad idea. I've been watching the SCOX price for a few months and have noticed a tendency of SCO's PR. Whenever the price drops or plateaus, you can count on yet another outrageous PR release from SCO to pump it back up.
Before the week is out, expect SCO to make some sort of apocalyptic statement in regard to RedHat. (emphasis mine)
What do you know? It's one day later, the "apocalyptic statement" has been made, and SCO's stock price is up 5% for the day! Good call!
As others have pointed out, even the Library of Congress is depressingly finite. It can't archive everything.
The Library of Congress is only one place. Libraries burn.
Finally, as it stands, the Library of Congress is a mausoleum. It's a fine tool for historians, and it may serve to protect enough of our culture that the privileged scholars of 2158 will be able to write some sort of history. But only a very few people on Earth will ever visit the Library of Congress. The average artist, musician, or writer won't go there. Neither will the average reader or listener.
The Library preserves culture in the same way that formaldehyde preserves wild birds.
This needn't be a problem. We've invented tools that let us bring the Library of Congress directly to the desk of every person in the world. But we can't, because of legal decisions like this one.
Why should the government pay for research and development of software under a license that allows Microsoft to take it, modify it (perhaps trivially, perhaps integrate it into the OS) and then sell it back to the US government and citizens for $big profits?
Because this is how government R&D has always worked.
The government pays biology researchers to discover genes. The researchers patent the genes and sell them back to the public for big profits.
The government pays medical researchers to invent drugs. The researchers patent the drugs and sell them back to the public for big profits.
The government pays electrical engineers to develop lasers. The engineers patent the lasers and sell them back to the public for big profits.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, genes, drugs and lasers only get patent protection for 17 years, after which the public gets the rights to the invention that they funded. Meanwhile, software copyrights are approximately infinite. (Ask Mr. Lessig if you need to know the details.)
Ironically, as the term of software copyright grows longer and longer, the public has more incentive to require that all government-funded software projects be released under the GPL.
The more you tighten your grip, Mr. Gates, the more Star Wars quotes will slip through my fingers.
The robotic exploration of space has been successful, educational, and fun for the whole family. Seriously. So NASA should remain in the unmanned probe business, which they're pretty good at. In fact, they should expand the unmanned program. Astronomy is Good!
On the other hand, privatizing the manned space program would be wonderful, because then I would be allowed to opt out.
Some people, including the ones who think Star Trek is a documentary, would spend billions of dollars trying to reach the mythic Final Frontier. But I wouldn't care, because none of the dollars would be mine.
People would die from launch vehicle failure, explosive decompression, radiation poisoning, lack of exercise, and accidental collisions with the millions of bits of debris that are already in near-earth orbit. But I wouldn't care, because I wouldn't be one of those people.
Astronauts would land on Luna, or Mars, or Europa, or Charon, where they would spend hours engaging in the only profitable activity I can think of -- autographing souvenir rocks. Then their companies would go bankrupt. But I wouldn't care, because I wouldn't invest time, energy, or money in frivolous tourist flights.
Well-heeled hobbyists would have a lot of fun, flying through space. That's good! I don't begrudge anyone their fun. I myself would love to fly on the space shuttle... if I could afford it. But I can't justify asking my neighbors to pay for it. There's a difference between a fun hobby and a public good. Manned space flight is a private hobby, like hang gliding, or yacht racing, or climbing Mount Everest.
The best thing about privatization: there is no for-profit company dumb enough to build a colossal white elephant like the "International" Space Station. Unfortunately, it looks as if Goldin's "privatization" plan won't kill the ISS.
I'd say that 99% of the biological disorders (OCD, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc)... are actual illnesses of the brain.
Yes, absolutely. But normalcy is also a disease of the brain, if society were to choose to call it that.
Your personality is determined by the physical condition of your brain. So personality disorders are, too. No news there.
(Of course, experience -- going to school, learning to dance, taking Prozac, being hit in the head with a two-by-four -- changes the condition of your brain. I was not born knowing Perl. If I had been, my parents would surely have tried to cure me.)
But society is what gives names to certain conditions. Society determines which conditions are "normal", which are "optionally treatable" and which "must be treated".
To pick a particularly controversial example: until the 1970s homosexuality was defined by psychologists as a disease, to be treated at all costs (electric shocks, aversion therapy, brainwashing). Today, homosexuality is considered by many to be a common variation of human personality. (Of course, there are others who still prescribe brainwashing.)
Most people would agree that extreme bipolar disorder is an illness which should be cured. Unfortunately, some of my friends have mild-to-average bipolar disorder, and they aren't sure if they should be cured or not, or at what cost.
I didn't see any mention of "curing" anyone's "disease" in the article. They're making the same point you are: personalities have ranges. "Mentally ill" is an artificial concept: a fuzzy line drawn, in this case, between people with extreme autism and people with very extreme autism.
This is banal stuff. Unless you're a psychologist, employed to sort personality types into neat and artificial categories, it's obvious. Oliver Sacks, in The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, talks about meeting his first Tourette's syndrome patient. He walked out onto the street after the interview and was startled: Tourette's syndrome was everywhere! Half the people he passed seemed to have one involuntary tic or another. Obviously, half the world is not sick. Rather, Tourette's syndrome is human nature. Only more so.
If "mentally ill" is a fuzzy concept, "mildly autistic" is completely blurry. Bill Gates shares a few characteristics with autistic people, but so does everyone. Perhaps the concept of "mild mental illness" is like the concept of "race": it has a social meaning but no scientific one, because the small differences which are meant to "define" it are lost in the noise of normal human variation.
As someone has already pointed out, this "invention" gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "Blue Screen of Death".
People may have a limited span, but I have yet to meet a computer system that has run continuously for eighty years or more. To ensure mutual longevity, it is a better idea for a human to memorize the behavior of a computer, rather than the other way around.
If only I'd patented that idea 50 years ago. I could claim to have invented the system administrator.
Slashdot Mirror
Plan is simple: fake a trip to Mars. People thought was possible back in 1969, but now we know is possible -- digital effects technology has come long way. I mean, with $3 billion we could pay animators to hand-craft every pixel of footage. It will look totally believeable.
Fake trip to Mars solves all major problems with human space flight:
Problems:
Well, for morality's sake, our first duty is to lecture these people sternly about what idiots they are. When this doesn't work, we can sell them seats in Mars Settlement Simulator. This is big airtight tin can containing 1000 switches and 1000 tins of Spam. Every day, "passengers" are required to flip a switch... otherwise can explodes. If passengers run out of Spam, they die of starvation. One of the switches is secretly wired to shut off can's air supply... when it is switched, passengers unexpectedly die of asphyxiation. If passengers make it through 800 days, we open up can to reveal Gobi Desert, where they are free to wander around until they get bored and decide to go home.
I figure we can get $1M each for these seats -- after all, they are very good simulation of real trip! But passengers may get mad because they don't get weightlessness for their money. Such passengers will be airlifted to secret Russian base at Sanduski where they can ride Weightlessness Simulators until they pass out.
Yeah, that's because both the German trivia master and the Japanese engineer are living in the USA and are working for innovative American companies and universities.
Or at least, they were back in the 20th century. Now the Department of Homeland Bureaucracy imposes vast amounts of red tape on foreign nationals. (Don't you dare go home to Germany for a visit - you might not be allowed back into the US.) Meanwhile, foreigners (as well as American citizens) can be imprisoned without trial. And the President has declared war on stem cell research.
I wonder which nation will become known for innovation in the 21st century?
Then on this year's form I saw the Dreaded Line. I thought about it for a long time. I have always carefully avoided Web sites that charge taxes. But in the end I just paid the tax, for a combination of reasons:
Shamefully, I did contemplate lying. But how? I mean, it's nuts to write in "zero". When your auditor asks "why zero - haven't you ever bought anything from Amazon?" what am I gonna say? "No, I live in a cave and all my books are handwritten on vellum?"
I could claim that I didn't know what I had spent. Unfortunately, I save my credit card bills, since I want to have some evidence on my side after my identity gets stolen. Even more unfortunately, I own Quicken, which can print out all my interstate transactions for the year in, like, three minutes. Oops. So not only is ignorance not a legal defense, it isn't even a believeable defense.
I thought about only paying the tax on the big-ticket items. But the difference between that and just paying everything I knew about was, say, $15. It's worth $15 to be able to go before my auditors and NOT lie.
And there are karmic benefits. I no longer refuse to walk into my local stores because I know I can pay lower taxes on the Internet, even after shipping. Instead I refuse to walk into my local stores because they charge $25 for a book that Amazon is selling for $18. I mean, I know I am supposed to support my local stores, but $7 per book?
IANAL, and apparently neither are many of you, because three minutes of Googling turns up Henneford v Silas Mason Co., 300 US 577 (1937).
Of course, I'm not paid the big bucks to read boring legal cases from 1937, so I'm going to have this page from the Minnesota House offices interpret this for me. I'm told that, in this case, the Supreme Court specifically decided that the use tax did not violate the Commerce Clause.... basically because it's fair to expect local and mail-order businesses to compete on the same playing field.
So. Better hire a lawyer before failing to fill out that Use Tax line on the grounds that "this 'new' tax is unconstitutional"...
I swear, I think Lucas has watched too many MST3K episodes. MST3K did "The Phantom Creeps" (an awful series of short features, with Bela Lugosi!) and "Attack of The The Eye Creatures". And they did "The Creeping Terror".
Perhaps the long-repressed portion of Lucas' subconscious that still has any taste is trying to tell us something.
...because Google will store every piece of spam exactly once. (Well, actually, their storage system is redundant so it will probably be stored a handful of times. But that's all.)
.signature file appears at the end of every email I send. That .signature could be stored once and then referred to by a pointer. More savings.
If 10,000 Gmail users receive a piece of spam, Google will index the spam (storing it 5 times for backup purposes) and each of the 10,000 users will get a tiny little index number that points to the indexed spam.
This system will be pretty efficient, because most of the email in the world is highly redundant, if only because most of it is spam.
If Google engineers cared to do so, they could also do things like break your emails into chunks and index each chunk. An identical
Of course, a good question to ask is: if Google starts allowing users to flag spam for other users, how long will it be before the spammers adapt? Spammers can certainly make every piece of spam different from every other piece if they want to. They may be doing this already... I am not up to speed in the world of spam and anti-spam.
As for the free online storage... have you ever tried emailing an attachment to yourself with your web-based email? Hmmm... "store files from anywhere in the world... use a web browser to access them." Yep, sounds about right to me. Although attachments will probably be limited in size, as some people speculate, so don't try storing any feature films or anything.
I can't resist pointing out that even your insanely optimistic guess -- that a human can do in a week, or even a day, what it takes Spirit and Opportunity 80 days to do -- means that a human is only 10 to 80 times more productive than a robot.
Now, pay close attention to the difference between $820 million and $900 billion. That's the difference between the (known) cost of two unmanned Mars missions and the (estimated) cost of Bush's manned one. It implies that, to get a better "ROI" from manned flight, your Young Pioneers with their rock hammers and their can-do attitudes will have to be one thousand times more productive than robots, which
I wish you luck.
No. Scratch that. If you were proposing to use your money instead of my tax dollars, I would wish you luck. As it is, I wish you would go back to watching Star Trek.
(I'm really angry about losing the Hubble.)
Are you aware that, despite the brilliance of NASA engineers and umpteen seasons of MacGuyver, the entire point of the movie Apollo 13 is that sometimes duct tape doesn't actually work?
Now let's get down to it:
Let's take these one at a time.Dude, I hate to be the first to tell you this, but humans breathe air. This means that, from a pure economic standpoint, Mars won't be settled until Antarctica is full. Since I think the planet Trantor is more fun to imagine than to actually live on, I think we'd better find a solution to the population problem that takes effect before Antarctica is full.
They're called "robots". You may have heard of them, since one is on Mars right now. NASA designed and launched two of them for $860M, less than the estimated cost of three shuttle flights. We could and should build a lot more of them, at very reasonable cost. They're fun, they're cheap, they work pretty well, and even if they occasionally blow up... nobody dies.
I'll bite. Which ore is this, exactly? Dilithium? Here's a homework assignment: after you realistically estimate the cost of mining an asteroid and shipping it back here, tell us which asteroidal element could be mined profitably. And please don't try and pretend that humanity hasn't invented recycling.
I can't argue with this, I guess. Pass the pork! All I can say, though, is that you can generate gratuitous tech jobs with useful projects (zero-pollution cars?) as well as you can with useless projects.
There are already plenty of inspired youngsters. They become postdocs. For every scientist with funding, there are 10 scientists working as postdocs, or accountants, or cabdrivers. Instead of spending billions of dollars trying to put spam-in-a-can where no spam has gone before, how about if we give that money to actual scientists? So we can cure diseases, or reverse-engineer the brain? Or even... build robots?
Please, do go on. I can already hear the violins, warming up to play the Star Trek theme.
"You can burn every song you download from the iTunes Music Store onto CD".
I admit that Apple's DRM still sucks a little - it means you have to go through the hassle of burning a CD in order to keep your music forever. But it's nowhere near as bad as you think it is. Itunes does not lock you in to Apple.
In fact, a quick Google shows that even the need to actually burn a CD may be optional. Hee hee! Designing a DRM system really is like shovelling back the tide.
If HP tries to achieve lock-in by selling tunes that can't be burned onto plain-jane CDs (and then re-ripped into MP3) then the service will die, just like the old DIVX service died. Why else do you think Apple's DRM has this enormous loophole? It certainly isn't the RIAA's idea.
- They breed like wildfire and are easy to raise in large numbers. (Imagine a big, big wall of fishtanks.)
- Their embryos are a convenient size and are completely transparent - you can see every organ in their bodies.
- You can watch the embryos continuously under the microscope for hours, or even days, at a time. (This is not true of, say, mouse embryos, which tend to become very unhappy once they are removed from the mother mouse.)
Of course, the fish used for science usually aren't designed to glow all over their bodies, all the time. That's fun for pets, but not very interesting. What scientists do is:- Find some protein that they think is important, like growth hormone.
- Find the gene for that protein. For human genes, you can do the equivalent of a Google search through the entire human genome. If you want the equivalent gene in zebrafish, you can take advantage of the zebrafish genome archives. There are also complete genomes for mice, Drosophila (fruit flies) and other creatures that are popular with scientists.
- Make a copy of the promoter for your interesting gene. (Genes, like email messages, are controlled by their headers. In genetics these headers are called "promoters". Basically, when the promoter gets activated, the cell starts to transcribe the gene and begins to produce the protein which the gene encodes.)
- Attach your copied promoter to the gene for a fluorescent protein (the most popular protein is Green Fluorescent Protein, known as GFP - but there are red, cyan and yellow ones as well.)
- Insert your new promoter+gene into an egg cell and grow a creature. Breed it a lot. Inbreed its offspring a lot until you have an extended family of genetically engineered creatures.
Now you have a creature which glows green or red only in the cells which are producing growth hormone. There are now dozens of strains of fish like this, each with a different promoter controlling the glow. And there are dozens of strains of mice as well.My lab uses transgenic, fluorescent mice to study how blood vessels grow. We are trying to learn how to prevent blood vessels from growing into tumors...
I suppose you're right. This patent doesn't say "Microsoft definitely owns this obvious idea, which is as common as crabgrass."
Instead it says "if you invent a web service which appears to use this obvious idea, a big corporation can arbitrarily force you to turn your life savings into legal fees. After five years, assuming you stay out of bankruptcy court, you will know whether or not their claim has the force of law."
Imagine my relief.
And I'm not flaming Microsoft. This particular patent is just a symptom. I'm flaming the U.S. Patent Office, which seems hell-bent on insuring that the only U.S. citizens who are allowed to write software are millionaires, patent lawyers, MBAs with access to large venture funds, major corporations, and Anonymous Cowards who update their CVS trees late at night (and who live with the mortal fear that a lawyer will discover their True Name...)
What do you know? It's one day later, the "apocalyptic statement" has been made, and SCO's stock price is up 5% for the day! Good call!
The Library of Congress is only one place. Libraries burn.
Finally, as it stands, the Library of Congress is a mausoleum. It's a fine tool for historians, and it may serve to protect enough of our culture that the privileged scholars of 2158 will be able to write some sort of history. But only a very few people on Earth will ever visit the Library of Congress. The average artist, musician, or writer won't go there. Neither will the average reader or listener. The Library preserves culture in the same way that formaldehyde preserves wild birds.
This needn't be a problem. We've invented tools that let us bring the Library of Congress directly to the desk of every person in the world. But we can't, because of legal decisions like this one.
"Hey, two weeks ago it was really bright at 13 o'clock, but now it's dark!"
Dude, you go chronologically... in the order they were made. IV, V, VI first. Anything else would be lame.
VADER: (in ep V)
No, *I* am your father!
LUKE:
Oh, yeah, I read that in history class.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, genes, drugs and lasers only get patent protection for 17 years, after which the public gets the rights to the invention that they funded. Meanwhile, software copyrights are approximately infinite. (Ask Mr. Lessig if you need to know the details.) Ironically, as the term of software copyright grows longer and longer, the public has more incentive to require that all government-funded software projects be released under the GPL.
The more you tighten your grip, Mr. Gates, the more Star Wars quotes will slip through my fingers.
She means to say "in late March 2000". ArsDigita had the VC money in 2000. Allen Shaheen was running the show by July 2000.
The robotic exploration of space has been successful, educational, and fun for the whole family. Seriously. So NASA should remain in the unmanned probe business, which they're pretty good at. In fact, they should expand the unmanned program. Astronomy is Good!
On the other hand, privatizing the manned space program would be wonderful, because then I would be allowed to opt out.
Some people, including the ones who think Star Trek is a documentary, would spend billions of dollars trying to reach the mythic Final Frontier. But I wouldn't care, because none of the dollars would be mine.
People would die from launch vehicle failure, explosive decompression, radiation poisoning, lack of exercise, and accidental collisions with the millions of bits of debris that are already in near-earth orbit. But I wouldn't care, because I wouldn't be one of those people.
Astronauts would land on Luna, or Mars, or Europa, or Charon, where they would spend hours engaging in the only profitable activity I can think of -- autographing souvenir rocks. Then their companies would go bankrupt. But I wouldn't care, because I wouldn't invest time, energy, or money in frivolous tourist flights.
Well-heeled hobbyists would have a lot of fun, flying through space. That's good! I don't begrudge anyone their fun. I myself would love to fly on the space shuttle... if I could afford it. But I can't justify asking my neighbors to pay for it. There's a difference between a fun hobby and a public good. Manned space flight is a private hobby, like hang gliding, or yacht racing, or climbing Mount Everest.
The best thing about privatization: there is no for-profit company dumb enough to build a colossal white elephant like the "International" Space Station. Unfortunately, it looks as if Goldin's "privatization" plan won't kill the ISS.
Yes, absolutely. But normalcy is also a disease of the brain, if society were to choose to call it that.
Your personality is determined by the physical condition of your brain. So personality disorders are, too. No news there.
(Of course, experience -- going to school, learning to dance, taking Prozac, being hit in the head with a two-by-four -- changes the condition of your brain. I was not born knowing Perl. If I had been, my parents would surely have tried to cure me.)
But society is what gives names to certain conditions. Society determines which conditions are "normal", which are "optionally treatable" and which "must be treated".
To pick a particularly controversial example: until the 1970s homosexuality was defined by psychologists as a disease, to be treated at all costs (electric shocks, aversion therapy, brainwashing). Today, homosexuality is considered by many to be a common variation of human personality. (Of course, there are others who still prescribe brainwashing.)
Most people would agree that extreme bipolar disorder is an illness which should be cured. Unfortunately, some of my friends have mild-to-average bipolar disorder, and they aren't sure if they should be cured or not, or at what cost.
I didn't see any mention of "curing" anyone's "disease" in the article. They're making the same point you are: personalities have ranges. "Mentally ill" is an artificial concept: a fuzzy line drawn, in this case, between people with extreme autism and people with very extreme autism.
This is banal stuff. Unless you're a psychologist, employed to sort personality types into neat and artificial categories, it's obvious. Oliver Sacks, in The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, talks about meeting his first Tourette's syndrome patient. He walked out onto the street after the interview and was startled: Tourette's syndrome was everywhere! Half the people he passed seemed to have one involuntary tic or another. Obviously, half the world is not sick. Rather, Tourette's syndrome is human nature. Only more so.
If "mentally ill" is a fuzzy concept, "mildly autistic" is completely blurry. Bill Gates shares a few characteristics with autistic people, but so does everyone. Perhaps the concept of "mild mental illness" is like the concept of "race": it has a social meaning but no scientific one, because the small differences which are meant to "define" it are lost in the noise of normal human variation.
As someone has already pointed out, this "invention" gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "Blue Screen of Death".
People may have a limited span, but I have yet to meet a computer system that has run continuously for eighty years or more. To ensure mutual longevity, it is a better idea for a human to memorize the behavior of a computer, rather than the other way around.
If only I'd patented that idea 50 years ago. I could claim to have invented the system administrator.
Oops.
So much for my little joke.
I tried to plug my alma mater. I really did. But that quote is devastating.