Maybe (big maybe) he patented his idea so that it could be used and distributed freely to prevent a company from patenting it and charging licensing fees. Who knows? Certainly, none of us do.
Actually, this is a strong possibility. I don't know how JHU does it, but other universities use the patent process to keep important techniques from being locked up or from excessive profit-taking limiting its use. University employees usually have to give up their rights to exclusive patents of their work done while employed by the university -- probably Tran is in the same boat. However, this isn't necessarily a good or bad thing. An example of a Good Thing having to do with patents is probably the "PCR" (polymerase chain reaction) technique which is probably the most revolutionary procedure in molecular biology in the decade. It (rather a critical reagent) is patented, but the patent holders have ensured that it is widely available and not too costly, so researchers everywhere can have access. Yes, they make a buck -- but not too much. Perhaps a very rare example of the patent process in ideal (utopian) use. But that's just my opnion, I could be wrong... --
Tons of info on upcoming lunar eclipses, other celestial events, and complete sunrise/sunset calendars (not to mention navigational ephemeris data) are available at the way, way cool page of the Astronomical Applications Dept. of the US Naval Observatory in Washington -- truly the home of the Time Lords. --
UT is short for Universal Time, natch: for practical purposes is == to GMT. "GMT" per se doesn't exist any more, the worldwide time standard is UTC, the Universal Time Coordinate. For a copious explanation of how time is kept today, you need to see the US Naval Observatory's web pages. Those guys truly are the Time Lords... it's way cool. --
Naw, it's not slashdotted. They're just very, very, security conscious. I got back 'Forbidden: you do not have permssion to access "ads.html" on this server.' Dang, that's great! Can I enable that feature on my end? "Forbidden: you do not have permission to display ads on my browser.";) --
Does this mean we have to revise the old aphorism "Every program written at MIT expands until it can read email" to "Every program written at MIT expands until it can browse the Web" ??? s/MIT/GNU/g if you like. --
Your last line is a total non sequitur. What on earth could a grad student union do to cause more jobs to open for Physics PhDs?
I'll answer that!
As a grad student, I made about $1 over the poverty line for a family of four (which I had). And university regs kept grad student employment to 50% time (which meant no health benefits, they're all out of pocket). No savings, no 'buffer zone,' therefore no time to reorient my career, no choice but a post-doc. Which worked for me but for some of my peers it didn't. If I had been able to save some bucks, I would have had the option to stop and consider a career change. Having a union may result in the students getting paid better (or getting benefits). This will make the grad students cost more, limiting their number, which will help on most fronts (except science, of course, which does benefit from cheap student "labor"). I should point out that this labor is usually labor of love -- I wouldn't have changed anything I did, but it was pretty perilous there for a while (and still is). I envy my peers who dropped out early on to go into the high-tech industry and now earn about five times what I do... --
This is a good post, moderators! Woppened?? IMPORTANT TOPIC. It ain't just physics, we as a nation are spending oodles on educating Ph.D.s in all academic fields who then go into a job market that makes temping for Microsoft look really good. The public investment in the students is then 'lost' (this is arguable) to other fields. This pattern may be bad in the long term for science and technology development which some say fuels the long-term economic success of the whole country. Worth some debate, and I'd greatly appreciate the perspective of Dr. Lederman and his generation. --
Dr. Lederman, As someone who is very interested in science education, I'm sure you have some strong opinions on the utility of computers (and other high technology) in elementary education, which as you know is a hot topic now. Would you share your feelings on the topic and perhaps some forecasts for the future? --
Well, I read the press release, I read the homepage, and I skimmed the (82-page) tutorial, and as far as I can figure out all it is is a Java class library in which they've made it interesting and different by sed -e 's/program/service/g' and sed -e 's/"user interface"/"service contract"/g' or perhaps I missed something...But hey, I agree that it's great they're releasing it under the GPL --
However, look at the whole budget. YES, they are slamming down tax dollars at a furious rate. But, most don't hit Mars or even leave our own gravity well. Most of our tax dollars being expended by NASA are being slammed right into LockhMart and McBoeingDouglas and Rockwell, not to mention the Kremlin (I'm assuming Energiya, who need the money, aren't getting much of what we give them). The media keep repeating the cost of the lost probes, and I keep thinking, "damn those are real cheap." And don't get me started on the ratio of the earth science budget to the manned spaceflight program...
This is exactly why "faster, cheaper, better" is a good idea. The failure rate does not change, and they lose less each failure. But of course "faster cheaper better" does not apply to manned spaceflight. (n.b. I'm not flaming you, you probably agree, but I want this message to go out...) cheers... --
First of all the term "Sekte" (religious splinetr group) has as much to do with the term "Sekt" (sparkling wine) as with "Insekt" (insect)...
DoH, of course! I'd forgotten about Sekt. Left my Langenscheidt somewhere else... Okay, I want the job of being in charge of "Sekt." Not the other one. Thanks... z --
Instead of denying write permission to the file (browser might get suspicious), how about % ln -s/dev/null cookies That way they can scribble all they want, they go away happy, you just have to empty the bit bucket a bit more often. cheers... --
I'm not too sure about that article (Babelfish implied that the spokesman was the Catholic church's official in charge of sparkling wine, which I think would be a pretty cool job actually, Dominus vobiscum), but the German federal government is really serious about Scientology. If I'm not mistaken the legal sanctions being imposed against Scientology are pretty much the same as those being used to suppress Nazism... it would not surprise me if the German government goes toe-to-toe with Microsoft over this one if it proves correct. --
This maybe sucks a little bit too much bandwidth in the present Internet, but it is a nice idea for the future.
Where I live we get a whole range of Canadian stations on cable (BCTV (Vancouver), ITV (Edmonton), CTV (Toronto), and NTV (Newfoundland)): what's nice about that is because of the wide timezone spread (-3:30 to -8:00 from GMT) we have the ability to watch Star Trek (or B5 for you Babylonians) at virtually any hour of the day... --
Re:What ever happened to the Unix Pascal system?
on
FreeBSD at COMDEX
·
· Score: 1
Hey Marc,
Turbo Pascal was very cheap (around $100) in relation to its features and came with a nice doumentation. It would have been a disgrace to pirate such an offer.
Uff Da! You should have asked for the student discount! I sent a personal letter to Philippe Kahn (well, he probably never read it) and only had to pay $69.;) You know, if software had stayed as fairly priced, we wouldn't be having this great revolution that is going on now with 'Free Software' -- so it's no fair looking back through rose colored lenses.
I don't know what happened to Bill Atkinson either... thanks for the reminder! Cheers --
Re:What ever happened to the Unix Pascal system?
on
FreeBSD at COMDEX
·
· Score: 1
Ayahhh! You have hit upon a story, that is the root of so many. The UCSD pascal/p-system was ported to micros early on, and I learned how to program on an Apple II using it. Wow, it was great. I didn't realize how bad things were outside of it until later. But I digress: here is the story. When the very very first IBM PCs were emitted from Big Blue, the people who ponied up $5000 for the beast were offered two choices of OS: the state of the art UCSD p-system or a cheap and crummy disk OS with hooks to the ROM-based Basic interpreter. You had to pay something extra to get the p-system, and the other one was free. Guess which one people chose? I understand the guy who sold the cheap OS to IBM did pretty well for himself after that, what was his name? Bates? Fates? Gapes? Anyway, the UCSD p-system was licensed by a company called Pecan, and my lab at one time (1987?) had a copy to run on our 286. But Borland TurboPascal came out with their IDE around that time and it blew the p-system away in terms of performance, so we never returned to those idyllic days. I don't know what happened to Pecan or the p-system for micros after that. Arguably the first victims of the octopus from Redmond... --
Oh yeah, and then of course by that time Word will take 95 petabytes just to load if it was installed with the 'minimum install, no fonts' option... Sorry, I couldn't resist. --
I think that PT finishing and releasing Lifehouse 30 years after is way, way, cool. However, I have to point out that his first (failed) effort to finish Lifehouse resulted in Who's Next, the all time, coolest, kick-a**, best rock and roll album of all time. (So there). One can only hope for an equally successful "failure" this time... --
Use of the WWW in the US continues to grow at amazing rates. I assume that the public in the UK have embraced the Web with a similar fervor. With that in mind, what are your long-term plans for expansion of your services (and the infrastructure needed to support them)? Thanks... --
Sometime in the far future, space-based telescopes in the visual spectrum range will be able to perform very long baseline interferometry.
I didn't think about that, thanks for bringing it up. Very exciting, and not that far in the future. Might even be relevant to cryptography (which is what we're supposed to be talking about, sorry moderators, my fault).
There is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents the Hollywood fantasy of spy sats from eventually becoming true.
No, of course not, but that is like saying celestial mechanics is an exact science -- all you have to do is compute the effect of all the mass in the universe and its exact location at any time...
Atmospheric haze can be fixed by interferometry, maximum-likelihood-estimation style techniques, and the super-resolution methods.
Ok, you lost me there. I follow what you're saying about interferometry, but MLE techniques? Do you mean something like principal component or EOF analysis? And just what are the super-resolution methods? Spatial resolution, or spectral? Could be a translation thing, but these terms are not familiar to me in any context related to atmospheric optics for the purpose of remote sensing (can you guess what I do for a living?). So my curiosity is piqued (and my BS detection bit is set). I'd like to hear more. Cheers --
This was a very interesting and enjoyable session. Thanks/. and Schneier. I am none the less compelled to object to one small statement in the otherwise interesting discussion of privacy. Satellite cameras cannot and probably never will be able to read your wristwatch from orbit (unless you are standing on a celestial body like the moon). Even if you could overcome the basic optics problems (resolution of 1 mm at a distance of 100 km is about 575 nanoradians) you still have the atmosphere to contend with. Contrast Hubble Space Telescope imagery with comparable telescopes located on the Earth. Astronomers are planning clusters of widely spaced, (possibly adaptive optics) mirrors to reproduce or exceed Hubble capabilities on Earth, but it would be challenging to say the least to do this in orbit... I think your watch or even your PalmPilot display is safe from orbital surveillance for the forseeable future. --
That was wonderful to read. But I don't necessarily agree with the reviewer that Linux has a System V 'bias' -- although the rc startup system is pretty much that awful SysV kludge. Seems to me that Linux is pretty agnostic with regards to the BSD/SysV divide. --
Re:Let's interview Neal
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Hear, hear! I think Stephenson would be a great interview subject (the interviews are getting to be one of my favorite parts of/.). --
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is a strong possibility. I don't know how JHU does it, but other universities use the patent process to keep important techniques from being locked up or from excessive profit-taking limiting its use. University employees usually have to give up their rights to exclusive patents of their work done while employed by the university -- probably Tran is in the same boat. However, this isn't necessarily a good or bad thing. An example of a Good Thing having to do with patents is probably the "PCR" (polymerase chain reaction) technique which is probably the most revolutionary procedure in molecular biology in the decade. It (rather a critical reagent) is patented, but the patent holders have ensured that it is widely available and not too costly, so researchers everywhere can have access. Yes, they make a buck -- but not too much. Perhaps a very rare example of the patent process in ideal (utopian) use. But that's just my opnion, I could be wrong...
--
Tons of info on upcoming lunar eclipses, other celestial events, and complete sunrise/sunset calendars (not to mention navigational ephemeris data) are available at the way, way cool page of the Astronomical Applications Dept. of the US Naval Observatory in Washington -- truly the home of the Time Lords.
--
UT is short for Universal Time, natch: for practical purposes is == to GMT. "GMT" per se doesn't exist any more, the worldwide time standard is UTC, the Universal Time Coordinate. For a copious explanation of how time is kept today, you need to see the US Naval Observatory's web pages. Those guys truly are the Time Lords... it's way cool.
--
C'mon gang, you know it's gonna be /.'ed...
The real mysteries are going to be revealed by Nitrozac on AfterY2K!!!!!!
--
Naw, it's not slashdotted. They're just very, very, security conscious. I got back 'Forbidden: you do not have permssion to access "ads.html" on this server.' Dang, that's great! Can I enable that feature on my end? "Forbidden: you do not have permission to display ads on my browser." ;)
--
Does this mean we have to revise the old aphorism
"Every program written at MIT expands until it can read email"
to
"Every program written at MIT expands until it can browse the Web"
???
s/MIT/GNU/g if you like.
--
I'll answer that!
As a grad student, I made about $1 over the poverty line for a family of four (which I had). And university regs kept grad student employment to 50% time (which meant no health benefits, they're all out of pocket). No savings, no 'buffer zone,' therefore no time to reorient my career, no choice but a post-doc. Which worked for me but for some of my peers it didn't. If I had been able to save some bucks, I would have had the option to stop and consider a career change. Having a union may result in the students getting paid better (or getting benefits). This will make the grad students cost more, limiting their number, which will help on most fronts (except science, of course, which does benefit from cheap student "labor"). I should point out that this labor is usually labor of love -- I wouldn't have changed anything I did, but it was pretty perilous there for a while (and still is). I envy my peers who dropped out early on to go into the high-tech industry and now earn about five times what I do ...
--
This is a good post, moderators! Woppened?? IMPORTANT TOPIC. It ain't just physics, we as a nation are spending oodles on educating Ph.D.s in all academic fields who then go into a job market that makes temping for Microsoft look really good. The public investment in the students is then 'lost' (this is arguable) to other fields. This pattern may be bad in the long term for science and technology development which some say fuels the long-term economic success of the whole country. Worth some debate, and I'd greatly appreciate the perspective of Dr. Lederman and his generation.
--
Dr. Lederman, As someone who is very interested in science education, I'm sure you have some strong opinions on the utility of computers (and other high technology) in elementary education, which as you know is a hot topic now. Would you share your feelings on the topic and perhaps some forecasts for the future?
--
Well, I read the press release, I read the homepage, and I skimmed the (82-page) tutorial, and as far as I can figure out all it is is a Java class library in which they've made it interesting and different by sed -e 's/program/service/g' and sed -e 's/"user interface"/"service contract"/g' or perhaps I missed something...But hey, I agree that it's great they're releasing it under the GPL
--
This is exactly why "faster, cheaper, better" is a good idea. The failure rate does not change, and they lose less each failure. But of course "faster cheaper better" does not apply to manned spaceflight. (n.b. I'm not flaming you, you probably agree, but I want this message to go out...) cheers...
--
DoH, of course! I'd forgotten about Sekt. Left my Langenscheidt somewhere else... Okay, I want the job of being in charge of "Sekt." Not the other one. Thanks... z
--
Instead of denying write permission to the file (browser might get suspicious), how about % ln -s /dev/null cookies That way they can scribble all they want, they go away happy, you just have to empty the bit bucket a bit more often. cheers...
--
I'm not too sure about that article (Babelfish implied that the spokesman was the Catholic church's official in charge of sparkling wine, which I think would be a pretty cool job actually, Dominus vobiscum), but the German federal government is really serious about Scientology. If I'm not mistaken the legal sanctions being imposed against Scientology are pretty much the same as those being used to suppress Nazism... it would not surprise me if the German government goes toe-to-toe with Microsoft over this one if it proves correct.
--
Where I live we get a whole range of Canadian stations on cable (BCTV (Vancouver), ITV (Edmonton), CTV (Toronto), and NTV (Newfoundland)): what's nice about that is because of the wide timezone spread (-3:30 to -8:00 from GMT) we have the ability to watch Star Trek (or B5 for you Babylonians) at virtually any hour of the day...
--
Turbo Pascal was very cheap (around $100) in relation to its features and came with a nice doumentation. It would have been a disgrace to pirate such an offer.
Uff Da! You should have asked for the student discount! I sent a personal letter to Philippe Kahn (well, he probably never read it) and only had to pay $69. ;) You know, if software had stayed as fairly priced, we wouldn't be having this great revolution that is going on now with 'Free Software' -- so it's no fair looking back through rose colored lenses.
I don't know what happened to Bill Atkinson either... thanks for the reminder!
Cheers
--
Ayahhh! You have hit upon a story, that is the root of so many. The UCSD pascal/p-system was ported to micros early on, and I learned how to program on an Apple II using it. Wow, it was great. I didn't realize how bad things were outside of it until later. But I digress: here is the story. When the very very first IBM PCs were emitted from Big Blue, the people who ponied up $5000 for the beast were offered two choices of OS: the state of the art UCSD p-system or a cheap and crummy disk OS with hooks to the ROM-based Basic interpreter. You had to pay something extra to get the p-system, and the other one was free. Guess which one people chose? I understand the guy who sold the cheap OS to IBM did pretty well for himself after that, what was his name? Bates? Fates? Gapes? Anyway, the UCSD p-system was licensed by a company called Pecan, and my lab at one time (1987?) had a copy to run on our 286. But Borland TurboPascal came out with their IDE around that time and it blew the p-system away in terms of performance, so we never returned to those idyllic days. I don't know what happened to Pecan or the p-system for micros after that. Arguably the first victims of the octopus from Redmond...
--
Oh yeah, and then of course by that time Word will take 95 petabytes just to load if it was installed with the 'minimum install, no fonts' option ... Sorry, I couldn't resist.
--
I think that PT finishing and releasing Lifehouse 30 years after is way, way, cool. However, I have to point out that his first (failed) effort to finish Lifehouse resulted in Who's Next, the all time, coolest, kick-a**, best rock and roll album of all time. (So there). One can only hope for an equally successful "failure" this time...
--
Use of the WWW in the US continues to grow at amazing rates. I assume that the public in the UK have embraced the Web with a similar fervor. With that in mind, what are your long-term plans for expansion of your services (and the infrastructure needed to support them)? Thanks...
--
I didn't think about that, thanks for bringing it up. Very exciting, and not that far in the future. Might even be relevant to cryptography (which is what we're supposed to be talking about, sorry moderators, my fault).
There is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents the Hollywood fantasy of spy sats from eventually becoming true.
No, of course not, but that is like saying celestial mechanics is an exact science -- all you have to do is compute the effect of all the mass in the universe and its exact location at any time...
Atmospheric haze can be fixed by interferometry, maximum-likelihood-estimation style techniques, and the super-resolution methods.
Ok, you lost me there. I follow what you're saying about interferometry, but MLE techniques? Do you mean something like principal component or EOF analysis? And just what are the super-resolution methods? Spatial resolution, or spectral? Could be a translation thing, but these terms are not familiar to me in any context related to atmospheric optics for the purpose of remote sensing (can you guess what I do for a living?). So my curiosity is piqued (and my BS detection bit is set). I'd like to hear more. Cheers
--
OOPs: I meant 10 nanoradians. 575 nanodegrees. Blame my HP 15C.
--
This was a very interesting and enjoyable session. Thanks /. and Schneier. I am none the less compelled to object to one small statement in the otherwise interesting discussion of privacy. Satellite cameras cannot and probably never will be able to read your wristwatch from orbit (unless you are standing on a celestial body like the moon). Even if you could overcome the basic optics problems (resolution of 1 mm at a distance of 100 km is about 575 nanoradians) you still have the atmosphere to contend with. Contrast Hubble Space Telescope imagery with comparable telescopes located on the Earth. Astronomers are planning clusters of widely spaced, (possibly adaptive optics) mirrors to reproduce or exceed Hubble capabilities on Earth, but it would be challenging to say the least to do this in orbit... I think your watch or even your PalmPilot display is safe from orbital surveillance for the forseeable future.
--
That was wonderful to read. But I don't necessarily agree with the reviewer that Linux has a System V 'bias' -- although the rc startup system is pretty much that awful SysV kludge. Seems to me that Linux is pretty agnostic with regards to the BSD/SysV divide.
--
Hear, hear! I think Stephenson would be a great interview subject (the interviews are getting to be one of my favorite parts of /.).
--