This is a nice summary of what the incentives look like to the individual inventor. (BTW, I hold a SW patent myself.)
Problem is, there are plenty of large companies that are the legal equivalent of gun nuts. They like to collect offensive armament because it makes the testosterone run. Armament has always been expensive, but they are prepared (and very well able) to pay for it. So you are essentially in the IP gunrunner business.
The IP argument ought to be about how to back down from the IP Mexican standoff, not how to make money by putting more guns to more peoples' heads.
Well, I don't have a Tesla, but I have a GeForce 8800 running CUDA, NVIDIA's general programming interface for it. Their timings from the slides are XMT 63.7 sec, Opteron 113.83 for a 2kx2k matrix mult. The 8800 does a 2kx2k mat mult in 0.511 sec.
On the other hand, the 8800 is immensely painful to program because there isn't enough communication between processors; there's a 500-cycle latency to go to the on-board memory that is common to all processors. So you have to get really ingenious with your data formats and dependencies.
The best way to look at the XMT research is to say, Hey, these guys basically equalled the performance of an opteron with three fpgas at 75mhz. if you can't do better, don't carp at them.
I met Laine a couple of years ago at the International Space Development Conference. I put a number of possible objections to him and he had reasonable answers for them. I think that if there were a billion-dollar project that a shyhook could be built using his scheme -- I agree that his major problem is capital. His neat idea, the ribbon-building robots, are as much an innovation as the mission architecture of the Apollo project with lunar module and orbital rendezvous instead of landing the giant winged rocket on the Moon as in all the 50s sf.
That said, I doubt the skyhook is a good mode for space entry. It's slow, it DOESN'T give entry to LEO (where you're below the van Allen belts and can live), and it's incompatible with satellites. Given the nanomaterials, a space launch tower is a much more viable development path.
ps -- in the interest of full disclosure, the author is yours truly. But it comes reccommended with blurbs from, among others, Ray Kurzweil, Eric Raymond, and Vernor Vinge.
I've used the verticalmouse 2 for at least a year and it's been extremely useful in preventing the arthritis attacks that I get from a normal mouse. Very much worth the premium I paid for it.
[ps -- works fine with Linux, just plug it in and start clicking]
from here:
In the Philosophical Transactions (Abridged), Volume 4, 1694-1702 pp. 97-101 + 1 plate, there is an article by Stephen Gray on "Microscopical Observations and Experiments" in which Mr. Gray explains the making of a water microscope.
It's not that simple. The basic design of the SSTO as a cone-shaped capsule uses ballistic re-entry. The powered landing needs only the delta-V of terminal velocity, not orbital. We're talking on the order of 100 m/s instead of 8000 (probably more like 10k if you account for air resistance on the way up).
good backgrounder: Harry Stine's Halfway to Anywhere.
I'm ten years ahead of you and have had some trouble with arthritis. The thing that was most strongly correlated with the attacks was iron in my (private well) water. A softener with iron-control salt pellets has virtually eliminated the arthritis. Your mileage may vary, of course, if it's something else teeing off your auto-immune response... but at least have your water tested.
If you look at the time scale formula they give, it has a factor of absolute temperature in the denominator -- so you ought to be able to set up a problem and solve it (the whole idea is to compute fast!) before decoherence if you bring your ensemble down to, say, microkelvins...
(a) you don't have to, and in many cases can't, deposit single atoms -- most current proposals call for dimers or polyatomic moieties.
(b) An appropriately sized robot arm could deposit about a million molecules per second in an area 50 nanometers on a side, giving up to half a micron per second build speed -- 14 hours for a 1-inch thick laptop (using a n array of arms in parallel).
(c) but you don't deposit directly onto the product, you build subparts in converging assembly lines that put even more deposition machinery in operation in parallel.
Top product formation speed in any serious design I've seen is about a meter per second.
The "Uncanny Valley" is a neologism that expresses RK's statement. It's reasonably new in robotics research, as they've only recently gotten to the point where it can apply. See, e.g., http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html... It's just a hope, of course, that it actually comes up on the other side!
New, huh? When I took Intro Comp Sci back in 1972 we had half a semester of IBM 1130 assembly followed by half a semester of FORTRAN. IMHO, '86 assy is a rotten machine to learn (or program) on. The real classic, of course, was the DEC 10; but if I were teaching an intro course right now I might be tempted to use a PIC.
Speaking of which, is there a decent DEC 10/20 emulator out there? That might make a useful pedagogical tool...
It should be pointed out that Looking Backward was one of the most influential books in American political history (I'd put it in the same class as Common Sense, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Jungle). Note that the socialist fervor it (LB) kicked off culminated in Sinclair's EPIC crusade that Heinlein was a part of.
For all the fact that it's not much of a story, FUtL is as much of one as LB. The reason it couldn't get published is pretty obviously the sexual revolution and complete rejection of organized religion, which the country simply wouldn't put up with in 1939.
Oddly enough, HG Wells was also a sexual revolutionary and you could argue that The Shape of Things to Come (the book -- it was deleted for the movie) had a lot of the same stuff in it -- but Wells already had the established storyteller's reputation, and was English...
OK -- the big mystery of the book: The cover illustration is STRONGLY reminiscent of some other Heinlein book but I can't remember which. Anyone know?
One of the best pattern-detection and analysis systems out there is still the human visual cortex -- watch the radar for your area consistently and you'll soon start getting a feeling for what is going to happen next. Wunderground's regional is about the right size.
BTW, the long term -- total weight loss was 25, and then levelled off with no modification of the diet. I'm now at a 13% fat index and have held steady for a year. Serum lipids are better than before (particularly HDL/LDL ratio). (and I ate an entire Peking duck the day before being tested!)
I started trying this a year and a half ago, and wrote the following after the first few months. All remarks are still valid:
Alimentary, My Dear Watson
While I was on vacation in early July, I happened to read the NYTimes magazine article by Gary Taubes which opened my eyes to an extent. The import of the article was that modern dietary conventional wisdom has it pretty much backwards, and that eating a low-fat diet is actually the cause of the current obesity epidemic and a lot of heart disease and diabetes.
Getting back home and doing a flurry of research revealed that Taubes had published a similar article in in Science about a year ago. What he documents is that the notion that fat is bad for you is a political, not a scientific, result, and that the actual studies don't show it at all. Since the NIH and FDA got the bee in their bonnet about fat, they've spent more than a billion dollars trying to prove it, and failed.
Consider an "epidemiological" study of cars. Let's assume that the researchers believe that engine oil is a prime cause of engine trouble. You could quite easily take a sample that showed that there was a strong positive correlation between cars that dripped oil and ones that broke down. Then you could just as correctly show that you could prevent oil dripping by not putting any oil in at all. Bingo! The "proof" of your presumed conclusion. That's about how rigorous the basis for the antifat doctrine is.
The reality is much more complex. In fact, the famous Boehringer Mannheim metabolic pathways chart covers an entire wall in finely detailed arrows and chemical formulae. But a very simplified version goes something like this: There are three basic classes of food, called the macronutrients; they are proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Proteins and fats are essential for human life; carbohydrates are not. Carbohydrates are all converted to glucose in your bloodstream. The more you eat, the more glucose. The body reacts to glucose in the blood with insulin, which acts to cause cells to burn glucose for energy and convert it to fat to be stored.
A whole raft of hormonal imbalances can result when insulin is constantly overproduced. There seems to be some general mechanism that tries to balance anabolic and catabolic hormones. Insulin is anabolic. Too much of it for too long and the body will either overproduce catabolic hormones or underproduce the other anabolic ones.
The upshot of long-term carbohydrate consumption is a phenomenon known as "Syndrome X", so named by Gerald Reaven, MD, professor of medicine at Stanford. It's a cluster of symptoms that tend to occur together, including high blood pressure, high serum triglycerides, decreased HDL, and obesity, and marks a risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Well, go to any grocery store and look what you'll find in the so-called "heart-healthy", low-fat foods: carbohydrates. Loads of them. Remember, it doesn't matter whether it's sugar or starch, honey or whole wheat, it's all glucose to your bloodstream.
So it would seem that the arrogance and ignorance of the high priesthood of health in this country has contributed to, if not indeed largely caused, the current (real, well-documented) epidemic and of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Oh, yes, one other thing for those of you who are into life extension and know about the caloric restriction results -- one of the main physiological markers for caloric restriction is low insulin.
Well, who can believe that? I did a bunch of research, and discovered that there are more different opinions among dietary advisors than among economists. The only thing that *everybody* agreed on was that olive oil was good for you, and trans-fatty acids (margarine) was bad.
One of the more interesting subfields I ran across was the paleolithic diet. The id
Having worked as a programmer in academia, I would amend the distinction slightly -- some positions in academia are good, some are infested with weasels. Depends on the people, just like business. I've been in both (good and bad).
I'd change the distinction in the review (or maybe the book) to "being a professional isn't like being a student.
How about whitelists, nicely managed by your mail client, plus pay relays to receive mail from new people? You could set the cost threshold yourself, rather than having one flat rate. Most emailing would still be free (and most legitimate introductions could be made by mutual acquaintances). So you could afford to set the pay rate to, say, $0.30/letter or the like.
What's more, just set the system up so that the recipient gets half the fee. I'll be happy to read anything anyone wants to send if they pay me...
Slashdot Mirror
check figure 4 here.
This is a nice summary of what the incentives look like to the individual inventor. (BTW, I hold a SW patent myself.)
Problem is, there are plenty of large companies that are the legal equivalent of gun nuts. They like to collect offensive armament because it makes the testosterone run. Armament has always been expensive, but they are prepared (and very well able) to pay for it. So you are essentially in the IP gunrunner business.
The IP argument ought to be about how to back down from the IP Mexican standoff, not how to make money by putting more guns to more peoples' heads.
Well, I don't have a Tesla, but I have a GeForce 8800 running CUDA, NVIDIA's general programming interface for it. Their timings from the slides are XMT 63.7 sec, Opteron 113.83 for a 2kx2k matrix mult. The 8800 does a 2kx2k mat mult in 0.511 sec.
On the other hand, the 8800 is immensely painful to program because there isn't enough communication between processors; there's a 500-cycle latency to go to the on-board memory that is common to all processors. So you have to get really ingenious with your data formats and dependencies.
The best way to look at the XMT research is to say, Hey, these guys basically equalled the performance of an opteron with three fpgas at 75mhz. if you can't do better, don't carp at them.
That said, I doubt the skyhook is a good mode for space entry. It's slow, it DOESN'T give entry to LEO (where you're below the van Allen belts and can live), and it's incompatible with satellites. Given the nanomaterials, a space launch tower is a much more viable development path.
ps -- in the interest of full disclosure, the author is yours truly. But it comes reccommended with blurbs from, among others, Ray Kurzweil, Eric Raymond, and Vernor Vinge.
[ps -- works fine with Linux, just plug it in and start clicking]
from here: In the Philosophical Transactions (Abridged), Volume 4, 1694-1702 pp. 97-101 + 1 plate, there is an article by Stephen Gray on "Microscopical Observations and Experiments" in which Mr. Gray explains the making of a water microscope.
Cilk has been around for years, indeed it won the ICFP 1998 programming contest.
good backgrounder: Harry Stine's Halfway to Anywhere.
I'm ten years ahead of you and have had some trouble with arthritis. The thing that was most strongly correlated with the attacks was iron in my (private well) water. A softener with iron-control salt pellets has virtually eliminated the arthritis. Your mileage may vary, of course, if it's something else teeing off your auto-immune response... but at least have your water tested.
... so save those old tapes and floppys -- but best of all, core planes from a '60's vintage mainframe (you DID keep them, didn't you!)
If you look at the time scale formula they give, it has a factor of absolute temperature in the denominator -- so you ought to be able to set up a problem and solve it (the whole idea is to compute fast!) before decoherence if you bring your ensemble down to, say, microkelvins...
... for all those Linksys cards.
(b) An appropriately sized robot arm could deposit about a million molecules per second in an area 50 nanometers on a side, giving up to half a micron per second build speed -- 14 hours for a 1-inch thick laptop (using a n array of arms in parallel).
(c) but you don't deposit directly onto the product, you build subparts in converging assembly lines that put even more deposition machinery in operation in parallel.
Top product formation speed in any serious design I've seen is about a meter per second.
Go back and read Mind Children (near the end, about Hashlife) [Moravec] and Permutation City [Egan] ...
Good point -- the study we're all talking about here specifically mentioned that melatonin suppresses the effect.
The "Uncanny Valley" is a neologism that expresses RK's statement. It's reasonably new in robotics research, as they've only recently gotten to the point where it can apply. See, e.g., http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html ... It's just a hope, of course, that it actually comes up on the other side!
New, huh? When I took Intro Comp Sci back in 1972 we had half a semester of IBM 1130 assembly followed by half a semester of FORTRAN. IMHO, '86 assy is a rotten machine to learn (or program) on. The real classic, of course, was the DEC 10; but if I were teaching an intro course right now I might be tempted to use a PIC. Speaking of which, is there a decent DEC 10/20 emulator out there? That might make a useful pedagogical tool...
It should be pointed out that Looking Backward was one of the most influential books in American political history (I'd put it in the same class as Common Sense, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Jungle). Note that the socialist fervor it (LB) kicked off culminated in Sinclair's EPIC crusade that Heinlein was a part of.
For all the fact that it's not much of a story, FUtL is as much of one as LB. The reason it couldn't get published is pretty obviously the sexual revolution and complete rejection of organized religion, which the country simply wouldn't put up with in 1939.
Oddly enough, HG Wells was also a sexual revolutionary and you could argue that The Shape of Things to Come (the book -- it was deleted for the movie) had a lot of the same stuff in it -- but Wells already had the established storyteller's reputation, and was English...
OK -- the big mystery of the book: The cover illustration is STRONGLY reminiscent of some other Heinlein book but I can't remember which. Anyone know?
Josh
One of the best pattern-detection and analysis systems out there is still the human visual cortex -- watch the radar for your area consistently and you'll soon start getting a feeling for what is going to happen next. Wunderground's regional is about the right size.
"The Myth of Homeland Security" is on sale at Barnes and Noble -- reminding us that the same
things are true at the airport as on your LAN...
BTW, the long term -- total weight loss was 25,
and then levelled off with no modification of the diet. I'm now at a 13% fat index and have held steady for a year. Serum lipids are better than before (particularly HDL/LDL ratio). (and I ate an entire Peking duck the day before being tested!)
--Josh
I started trying this a year and a half ago, and
wrote the following after the first few months.
All remarks are still valid:
Alimentary, My Dear Watson
While I was on vacation in early July, I happened to read the NYTimes
magazine article by Gary Taubes which opened my eyes to an extent.
The import of the article was that modern dietary conventional wisdom
has it pretty much backwards, and that eating a low-fat diet is actually
the cause of the current obesity epidemic and a lot of heart disease
and diabetes.
Getting back home and doing a flurry of research revealed that Taubes
had published a similar article in in Science about a year ago.
What he documents is that the notion that fat is bad for you is
a political, not a scientific, result, and that the actual studies
don't show it at all. Since the NIH and FDA got the bee in their
bonnet about fat, they've spent more than a billion dollars trying
to prove it, and failed.
Consider an "epidemiological" study of cars. Let's assume that the
researchers believe that engine oil is a prime cause of engine trouble.
You could quite easily take a sample that showed that there was a
strong positive correlation between cars that dripped oil and ones
that broke down. Then you could just as correctly show that you
could prevent oil dripping by not putting any oil in at all.
Bingo! The "proof" of your presumed conclusion. That's about how
rigorous the basis for the antifat doctrine is.
The reality is much more complex. In fact, the famous Boehringer
Mannheim metabolic pathways chart covers an entire wall in finely
detailed arrows and chemical formulae. But a very simplified version
goes something like this: There are three basic classes of food,
called the macronutrients; they are proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.
Proteins and fats are essential for human life; carbohydrates are not.
Carbohydrates are all converted to glucose in your bloodstream. The
more you eat, the more glucose. The body reacts to glucose in the
blood with insulin, which acts to cause cells to burn glucose for
energy and convert it to fat to be stored.
A whole raft of hormonal imbalances can result when insulin is
constantly overproduced. There seems to be some general mechanism
that tries to balance anabolic and catabolic hormones. Insulin
is anabolic. Too much of it for too long and the body will either
overproduce catabolic hormones or underproduce the other anabolic
ones.
The upshot of long-term carbohydrate consumption is a phenomenon known
as "Syndrome X", so named by Gerald Reaven, MD, professor of medicine
at Stanford. It's a cluster of symptoms that tend to occur together,
including high blood pressure, high serum triglycerides, decreased HDL,
and obesity, and marks a risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Well, go to any grocery store and look what you'll find in the
so-called "heart-healthy", low-fat foods: carbohydrates. Loads
of them. Remember, it doesn't matter whether it's sugar or starch,
honey or whole wheat, it's all glucose to your bloodstream.
So it would seem that the arrogance and ignorance of the high
priesthood of health in this country has contributed to, if not
indeed largely caused, the current (real, well-documented) epidemic
and of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
Oh, yes, one other thing for those of you who are into life extension
and know about the caloric restriction results -- one of the main
physiological markers for caloric restriction is low insulin.
Well, who can believe that? I did a bunch of research, and discovered
that there are more different opinions among dietary advisors than
among economists. The only thing that *everybody* agreed on was that
olive oil was good for you, and trans-fatty acids (margarine) was bad.
One of the more interesting subfields I ran across was the paleolithic
diet. The id
I'd change the distinction in the review (or maybe the book) to "being a professional isn't like being a student.
What's more, just set the system up so that the recipient gets half the fee. I'll be happy to read anything anyone wants to send if they pay me...