If you are interested in something very interesting, and perhaps even puzzling, you might want to read up on the Iraqi Dinar.
Here was a currency of a government (Saddam's) that didn't even exist, yet the currency still held up its value even with foreign trade and exchange. Although admittedly since the government that created the currency no longer existed, there is a natural scarcity that only improves with time... driving up the value of the money.
From what I understand, this money is still widely used in Iraq even today, although the current Iraqi government is trying to replace the pictures of Saddam. Most economists had guessed (based on experiences in Germany and France) that the value of the money would have simply collapsed completely, as it was a fiat currency.
I don't know if this is due to loyalists who still offer stuff of value in exchange for the currency or not, although the Dinar seems to have value even outside of the Sunni Triangle region.
As I was saying, this was but one of the reasons why the ISS is bad for science. Cost is certainly a factor, as is cross-contamination from other experiments due to the tight quarters. Even the regular "dockings" from the unmaned supply vessels and crew exchanges also cause additional problems, and of course at the moment that construction on the thing is still on-going. I could go on and on, but the ISS is a horrible science platform. There are good reasons to have the ISS, but NASA doesn't want to sell them as they would involve an even more ambitious program (like Moon, Mars, and Beyond) and that the current design of the ISS isn't set up do deal with things like an orbital assembly "drydock" that could build and prepare missions to Mars or the Moon, or serve as an orbital gateway for even unmanned missions where "live" tests of equipment could be worked on in space before it was formally deployed.
For example, imagine if astronauts could have fixed the Galileo space probe to get its dish to open up before it was pushed out of Earth orbit. When it was 2 million miles away, the controllers were stuck with it shut and couldn't bang on it to get the dish to open up. The ISS certainly could be useful in that manner to service some equipment in this fashion, and make or break some complex missions.
If Bigelow Aerospace is successful with their business and is actually able to get the modules (and transportation to them) down to a reasonable price, you will find significantly more science "modules" floating in space... including some manned experiments that would have their own private lab that doesn't have to deal with the problems of the ISS. Of course Robert Bigelow is claiming he can build something 10x the size of the ISS for 1% of the cost, but we will have to see if that really is going to happen. With actual hardware in orbit right now, and another module going up by the end of this year, this isn't as big of a pipe dream as it may have seemed in the past.
Of course the "microgravity" caused by the mass of the station itself is enough to have a significant impact on some experiments on the ISS, and is one of the reasons why some argue that it is a waste of money to even build the contraption (meaning the ISS) at least if you are going to use the science generated by the ISS as a rationale for continued funding.
About the only people who use the term "Zero G" is one particular for-profit company doing simulated "weightlessness" and media/PR types.
Other than accounting for jitter due to mechanical travel, acceleration due to changes in direction (typical for an aircraft) or raw acceleration (like in a rocket) are indistinguishable from that caused by gravity. Indeed relativistic effects caused by acceleration are also identical if you are talking about moving in a rocket or standing on a "solid" body like the Earth.
Obviously the "relative" distance and velocity are different if you are talking "true" acceleration, but that is exactly where the semantics break down. The "G" unit is a valid measurement for acceleration caused by moving toward a massive body or due to mechanical effects. Indeed when you talk about "negative G's" in aircraft, it is a a combination of acceleration vectors that include gravitational acceleration in the calculation. In space it is no different.
I just thought of something else that needs to be added to this "compiler" that I think is the real clincher here to get this kind of project going: Each "opcode" or instruction needs to be made into a discrete state of a finite state machine. Think of this as a "compiler" that would actually design a completely unique CPU with independent opcodes for each instruction, and where the instruction pointer is the same as the opcode being processed.
Or to use more EE jargon, when the state machine is in a given state, it performs the actions of the particular instruction.
I think this is one idea that might actually work out and go somewhere... I don't know of any prior art on this concept, but I've got to look around and see if there might be something like this... to directly compile a HLL (high level language) into discrete gates.
You could do this with the 7400 logic chip sets too, but a FPGA gate would simplify the process significantly.
Who says that ATM machines don't screw up? Let's just say for the sake of argument that only one tranaction out of 100 from an ATM has a mistake. The ATM prints out a receipt saying you just pulled out $20, but no money actually came out. What do you do? You contact the bank and they verify your story... and at most you are out $20 (or whatever you punched in for withdrawl). Does this kill the American banking system or increase the level of distrust of banks for most customers? Not at all.
Now what if this same problem happens with a voting machine. One ballot out of 100 is messed up and the vote is actually applied to the opposite candidate. Does this substantially change the results of the election? Absolutely. You have just put a completely different party into power during a very close election... even if no deliberate fraud was intended. Does this change the American political system on a major scale?
Frankly electronic voting is one of the toughest of the hard problems for data integrity and security that you can possibly find. And if the citizens no longer trust the voting process as a reasonable and reliable method of making changes to the government, other means must be found. And those tend to cause hardship for more than just the individuals getting kicked out of power.
The ballot box is the foundation for any sort of government that even pretends to follow democratic principles. The votes cast are the very legitimacy of who is in power, which is precisely why so many Democrats complain about the legitimacy of President Bush.... they don't think he "earned" the votes necessary to get into his office. By introducing additional questions into the legitimacy of the election process itself, you throw not just one office holder into question, but the entire government itself.
This is indeed a much harder problem... and you should note that it is lawyers that say the voting process with Dibold is safe, but computer scientists who strongly suggest otherwise. Which do you trust to understand how electronic voting equipment really works? Do you also let lawyers operate on you at your local hospital?
Of course by not requiring ID and proof of citizenship, you also disenfranchise voters by "stuffing" the ballot box with illegal aliens and other non-citzens who cast a ballot. Sure, it is a crime, but it is one that you can get away with when you don't even have a way to prove who you really are.
"Vote early... vote often"
That is another consequence of not requiring ID: There is nothing stopping you from casting your ballot in a dozen precincts all over the general location where you live... depending on the local population density. In larger more urban districts, what judge is going to know who you are from anybody else, or if you even live in that neighborhood? As long as you don't show up to the same precinct twice, you would more than likely never be caught.
And don't say that this never happens. There are no safeguards to prevent it in most states. And the courts that declare such laws requiring proof that you are who you say you are as unconstitutional encourage even more rampant voting fraud.
Mexican nationals should not have the right to vote in American elections. If they want that right, they should apply for citizenship.
Please.... this is as silly as it gets to suggest this solution, and gets to the heart of why American elections are so complicated with so much technical hardware: Marking an "X" on 100+ candidates and ballot questions is enough to completely overwhelm any voting judge in a typical American voting precinct.
My wife is an election judge, and has done the paper and pencil thing on municipal elections where there was just three options to count. Even then, it took her and the team of voting judges nearly three hours to count and verify all of the votes, particularly when one of the senior citizen judges lost track of the count three times and couldn't quite remember what the number was that she was on during the ballot count. That judge came up with four different answers for the number of votes cast, one each time she went through the stack of ballots.
And that didn't deal with trying to "judge" what candidate was actually cast for a particular ballot because the voter screwed up and voted for one candidate, tried to "scratch" it out and vote for somebody else. Or drew such a lousy "X" that you couldn't really tell who exactly they were voting for.
I support the idea of using electronically prepared ballots that are very clear on who each voter has cast their ballot for. This can also deal with the hundreds of offices from dog catcher to President of the USA that you need to vote on for each election, the school bond referendii and questions about where to build (or if to build) a dam on a nearby river. Once these paper ballots are prepared, automated systems can count the ballots to improve the accuracy of these 80+ year olds who have been volunteering for the past 60 years to work on the elections. It has only been very recently, however, that such a system was even possible to prepare a ballot that is human readable but standard enough that it could be counted in an automated manner. This is precisely why mechanical systems were set up in the past.... to overcome some of the limitations of having human couters of the ballots.
But simple paper and pen isn't going to cut it. Especially in an election with over 100 million voters casting a ballot.
While having it on paper is good, it can be better still.
As I've mentioned before when this issue is raised, computers should only be used for electronic ballot preparation. The actual ballot which you use for casting your vote should be prepared in the voting booth, and be done using OCR characters and/or a bar code (or something simple but easy for a voter to evaluate). At that point, who cares what company has actually designed the equipment for the vote processing?
You can establish standards for both document preparation as well as being able to "load" the current election data that lists all of the "official" candidates that have previously registered with the local election board, and all other ballot questions. Writing such a standard would be a generally trivial exercise, and could be easily extended to take care of unusual voting situations (like instant run-off votes or other crazy schemes to count votes).
By having such standards, anybody including a small group of hackers could develop a system for sale to their local election officials, and have some tests to verify that the software and system actually does what it is supposed to do. And more importantly, it could commoditize the election supply business instead of being locked in by one single company like Diebold. Of course Diebold could offer their equipment for sale as well at a competitive price, but that doesn't matter.
Besides, if the voter looks at the ballot and verifies that the information is correct, that is a voter certified election. And it can be recounted dozens of times and get the same results. The largest problems with elections is that voters sometimes mess up the ballot by marking beyond the lines or vote for two people when only one vote is valid. Electronic ballot preparation deals with all of those problems and more. It even helps to stop some types of voting fraud, as these prepared ballots would be easy to spot something that has been tampered with.
There is no reason why the same machines that are preparing and helping voters to cast their ballots should be used to do the counting of the votes. This also helps with the unfortunate situations where you have equipment malfunctions when a voter is in the middle of casting their ballot. They can stop, move to another machine, and perhaps start from the beginning but they have a real chance of making sure their votes actually count for something. Any partially printed ballots can be discarded, and each voter can be verified with the use of tickets or some other system to make sure they only vote once. So even if they sit and press "finished" a dozen times and have a dozen ballots prepared, the judges can accept only one of those ballots and it is up to the voter to decide which one of the ballots they made would be their actual ballot cast for that election.
If casting a ballot with a Dibold machine when you are half way through voting or worse if the machine crashes as you are finishing up your selections, you are screwed as a voter and there is a real possibility that you will become disenfranchised for that election.
In short, a paper trail, while a good start, is not the best possible option. The voter needs to be directly in control of the process of casting their vote, and not trust the reliability of some machine that is known to be tempermental.
Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel 2010, suggested that at the center of Jupiter there was enough carbon (and pressure + heat) that in theory you could have a diamond there that is literally the size of the Earth. Of course this is only raw speculation, but Haywood Floyd (in an incorporeal state) was shown this "gemstone" by the higher intelligences that built the black monolith.
Of course he was also shown life forms that lived in the atmosphere of Jupiter, but also saw that life existed on Europa... and that the Europan (is that the right term?) life had the best chance of eventually being in competition with life from the Earth, including achieving intelligence and joining with the higher life forms in their plane of existence. This is when Jupiter was transformed by these higher intelligences into a second sun, and nuclear fusion was started in the Jovian interior... hence the point of the novel. With the heat from a nuclear Jupiter, Europa was able to "thaw" and become a vast ocean world for life to evolve and flourish. And some sort of protection was put over Europa, where the message sent by the USS Discovery was "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE."
I've never heard of this explict idea, but I think you could use a "standard" compiler like GCC to do something like this.
This would be something interesting, although I would have to point out that a compiler would produce just as much bloat in circuitry that happens in opcodes. In spite of some claims that a "hand-assembled" piece of software is less efficient than something run through a compiler, I have my extreme doubts about that concept. And moving down to a hardware level, I think you could improve the efficiency yet another order of magnitude simply by having a more complete understanding of where all of the signals are coming from and going to.
Here is an interesting idea to try and follow up on this concept and narrow the focus on what would be needed to accomplish this kind of task: What would it take to produce a "compiler" that would take the basic Brainf*** commands and turn that into circuity. Assume here that the I/O is connected to an 8250 (or successor) chip, and you can define the memory using "standard" memory I/O IP modules. I've seen C to Brainf*** compilers, so this isn't so far reaching of an idea to think about here either for "real" software development. Anyway, this is one way to start to see if such a crazy concept could be put together in the first place.
There are some interesting digital evolution experiments that have involved the use of artificial life concepts (think Sim City here or something even more elaborate) and even sexual reproduction.
Type "A-life" into Google and you will get a list of some very interesting experiments along this line.
What is interesting with the a-life experiments (beyond Conway's "Life") is trying to define the concepts you mention above, including "energy", "materials", and "lifespan". When you add competition for these resources and add "mutations" (think something like Corewar but the "organism" changing opcodes instead... as an example) you do see a general trend for more and more complex "virtual organisms" appear and push out inferior organisms that don't do as efficient of a job of acquiring and maintaining these basic resources. Taking snapshots of these virtual organisms is also very interesting, and seeing what comes up when these "random" mutations do occur. Both in terms of defense against mutations (there is nearly always some that shows up) and how well these adapt to new environments.
Of course these are still limited, and to think that perhaps a microbe currently in your stomach is capable of turning into something with the capacity of comprehending Shakespeare is a remarkable concept by itself. I have a very hard time trying to imagine one of these A-life experiments somehow slipping out of their confined environment and turning loose like a network worm, infecting millions of computers and eventually gaining some sort of "intelligence" like is out of a classical science fiction novel. I'm talking like Mycroft Holmes from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Or in more technical terms, passing the AI "Turing Test" of being able to carry on a conversation and convince a computer expert that they may be human when in fact they are not.
Perhaps I should have mention that, as I am a big fan of analog computers... which I believe to be a nearly lost artform and engineering skill.
The classic example I love to use for analog computers is the firing computers for the Ohio-class batteships of the U.S. Navy. Originally built during WWII (and upgraded during the Korean War) these were some very remarkable targeting computers that had a very simple "user interface" and were deadly accurate. Made of finely machined curves that had been calculated by using slide rules and rooms of "computers" (people who made calculations with pen and paper before the days of ENIAC and modern computers), they were a marvel of mechanical engineering. And they could hit precisely a target within 200 feet of where you aimed with a range of nearly 20 miles.
When the Reagan administration decided to re-commission the Ohios for the 700 ship Navy (this is the 1980's, remember), the original targeting computer was removed and replaced with an all-digital computer.... something like a VAX if I remember right. The thought was that it used current technology and of course we can get the targets much more accurately with the new stuff.
When the guns started firing, it shook around the components of the computer so much that they could only fire the guns a few times before they had to rebuild the computer. Trying to find a suitable replacement led the recommissioning team to grab back the original firing computer that was built in the 1940's. And a few sailors who had served on board those vessels during WWII were drafted (and given the rank of CPO if they were enlisted personnel previsously) back to service to teach the current generation of sailors about this equipment and how to maintain it.
As far as other analog equipment is concerned.... I also love to old reel-to-reel magnetic tape players for the sound quality they can produce. The range of effects and even audio enhancement you can do with the analog systems is simply incredible... and something that is missing in the digital realm.
I also miss the days of analog television. I would take the snowed condition of still being able to watch my programs than the pops and squeals of digital audio, and the MPEG DCT mis-calculations that occur when the digital video stream is garbled due to transmission problems of atmospheric distortion. Even though I still get television by traditional rabbit ears on my NTSC television, nearly the rest of the television content distribution chain is digitial. If you have cable television, nearly all of it up to the converter box on your TV is now digital. Don't tell me that digital reproduction of television is always perfectly clear... it isn't. It is just that the 10% loss of signal is 10% loss of the bitstream rather than a 10% loss of power from the analog signal. Instead of having to turn up the audio "volume" control, you simply can't understand what is said or even be able to watch the jerky picture that comes in spurts and fits.
Although what you are talking about here is a very abstract mathematical bound on the extreme ends of both software and hardware.
I dare you to show a current digital system that can't be abstracted in software.... or a current software algorithm that is written and running on actual computer equipment that also can't be duplicated in hardware that would exhibit identical behavior.
As is the case here with this "evolving hardware" demonstration that was put up by these two hackers from Oslo. They are claiming that they have "brand new" hardware doing something that has been done in software for a great many years. And claiming that this is something novel. I'm suggesting otherwise. There may be some interesting concepts, but I think a detailed review of even ACM journals can find comparable concepts. A well-formed Google search may find many others.
As far as simulating a Turing machine, there are a great many Turing algorithms that can be demonstrated that do not need the "infinite" tape, but can preserve nearly all of the other aspects and requirements of a standard Turing machine except for the infinite memory. And these can be simulated as both hardware and software. A 1 petabyte Turing Machine would have plenty of space to do nearly everything that can be expected for testing all but the most elaborate algorithms. I've even seen some very interesting explorations of Turing machines that only need 1K of RAM. While not perfect, they do a very good job of at least demonstrating the basic concepts of a Turing machine that could be expanded but for the limit of available memory.
Of course I'm talking here as an engineer who is building real-world equipment rather than discussing academic concepts. I just don't see the limitations as being a major factor, and most people would understand these limitations as well. The limits of converting software to hardware generally isn't an issue of the capability of it being turned into hardware, but the cost of achieving that end. This is precisely why devices like most programmable logic chips (PLD's, FPGA's, PAL's, etc.) are being developed, because dealing with the design in software is so much easier and cheaper than implementing the design as discrete gates on silicon. And the assumed concept that if you can make the design into an FPGA, you can also create the base discrete gate layout eventually if the demand is there for that kind of part. That, however, is a very rare thing to occur.
I never said it was easy, but I have even seen it mathematically proven that any algorithm can be done in hardware, and I've duplicated most hardware into software myself, for those designs that I wanted to emulate.
This is not just a very small subset of designs. It is a matter of cost and if the engineer wants to put forth the effort to implement the whole thing in hardware. Trying to convert a 1st person shooter game like Doom into a pure TTL logic would make the game very responsive and give you screen resolution to kill for, but would it be worth the engineering effort to do that?
Race conditions and other "bugs" have other causes that may be due to ineptness on the part of the engineer, or because you havn't really thought the problem through sufficiently. Or there may be other things to look at as well. But don't tell me you can't implement in pure TTL logic something like an MPEG encoder.... which is a very complicated mathematical algorithm. I can give you part numbers for MPEG encoders if you really want them in your next design, as they are commercially available.
There is nothing that would stop you from implementing in hardware something like a neural network either... oh and those are indeed implemented in hardware. They are usually done in software mainly because of the cost involved, and you can use a general purpose computer to perform experiments on them. Other adaptive software algorithms have also been implemented on both hardware and software for some time as well. As I said, this is very old news here with this article.
I disagree. Bloggers can be considered serious, but they don't have the ability to claim instant "credibility" by being a junior reporter for some major publication. They have to instead build that reputation themselves as a serious journalist, if they care to put the time and effort that is needed to do that.
I can name a few bloggers that IMHO do an even better job of covering a particular focused topic much better than even the regular media outlets. One that comes to mind very strongly is Matt Drudge, whose website is followed by just about every other major media outlet for breaking news in Washington DC, even through they may not take his spin on things as seriously. And he is even invited into most DC press conferences if he cares to attend.
I could name some others, and those bloggers do indeed have a huge reputation and audience. Most of the best of the bloggers focus on one very narrow topic, again because they are usually one-man operations (but not always). If you have worked hard at blogging and have tried to be a reliable source of information that people who study or need to know about that topic can turn to, you will be invited to press conferences about that topic. But it takes a level of commitment that goes way beyond writing a post in a blog every six months or so. Or writing random musings about random topics that look like some sort of diary. Those kind of bloggers that do a half-hearted job of blogging certainly can't be taken seriously.
I would have to agree, however, that somebody who has just created a blog last Friday and put one or two postings certainly not be considered on the same level as somebody who has turned the blog into something nearly full time and tries to write brilliant prose that also has a huge audience.
Are you trying to say that you are only a journalist if you have a formal license to be a journalist from the government, like a doctor or lawyer?
There are perhaps some people who would suggest that this should happen (and some countries even have issued licenses for this kind of activity), but on a basic level that is huge interference on the part of governments. An alternate way to look at this is if the "journalist" has a degree in journalism (or a degree in anything) or not. There are plenty of very excellent journalists who get their job without going through the route of college graduate -> small market TV/radio/newspaper -> major media outlet journalist.
Yes, that is the more typical behavior to be "accepted" within the community of other journalists, which is exactly what this article points out.
There is nothing that is stopping somebody from getting a printing press and setting up their own "newspaper", just as you can do that with a website. The only difference is that setting up the newspapers costs quite a bit more money than the blogger website. In fact most blog sites don't even require you to know HTML any more. But in the case of somebody throwing some money together and creating a newspaper, radio or television station, all of these media outlets started somewhere. You or I can create something like this if we wanted, and give us some "legitimacy" in terms of being a journalist.
CNN, to give a very good example, started when Bill Tish used to stand in an alleyway behind the transmitter at WTBS with a paper bag over his head reading some AP wire copy for ten minutes each day at 11:30 PM.... to meet the FCC "local programming" requirements that included news coverage. I would say that in spite of these roots, CNN certainly is near the top of the food chain in terms of credibility as a news source (taking discussions of political bias between CNN vs. Fox aside).
What happens is that for anybody to be taken seriously as a journalist, you have to build a reputation. And if you "belong" to a certain organization (say a group called "The New York Times"), your efforts as a journalist also help to build the reputation of the group you work with as well. And some groups have been around for some time to have a reputation that perhaps is even undeserved because the "journalists" working for that group are in reality inferior to their predecessors who built that reputation in the first place, or that in time people forget the awful mistakes and only have nostalgia for reporters who were around over a hundred years ago.
Getting back to CNN here again, they also went through some growing pains when they got started (trying to shed the image of the unknown reporter I mentioned above) and went through some hassles trying to get a White House press pass. The first several times they applied, they were turned down nearly repeatedly, even though they clearly were at least acting like a national news agency. It gets back to the reputation thing again, and I think having the Bush White House turn down CNN for credentials would be today laughable.
That this one blogger is complaining that he didn't get credentials for something he thought was his area of expertise, he shouldn't be crying foul or "freedom of speech". He is standing in the proud tradition of other journalists who have been kicked out of similar events. It is up to that blogger to demonstrate the reputation that he has credibility necessary to be considered in the majors. Just ask Matt Drudge. He is a blogger that would rarely get thrown out of a Washington D.C. press conference any more, and it took him some time to build that reputation.
I won't go into details here, but anything that can be implemented in hardware can be done in software and the other way around too. This is a nearly ancient Electrical Engineering principle.
In the era of programmable logic chips that can alter their own logic (the patterns are stored in RAM or flash RAM for crying out loud), this isn't even that big of a revelation. Indeed, Transmeta has been doing stuff similar to this and selling it commercially for some time. They just aren't using these cool buzzwords.
And evolving architechtures is something that I know has had some serious CS research since the early 1970's and perhaps even earlier. I don't think an idea like this is even patentable based on this earlier work in this area. I bet you could find some adaptive systems that were even build specific for the oil industry, which would defeat even a narrow claim of that nature.
Where the money to be made off of this sort of technology is on Wall Street or other financial markets. I even found a web pages from a research group of adaptive systems that said essentially, "We have discontinued research along these lines and are now working with an investment firm on Wall Street. Since we have all become millionaires, we no longer need to support ourselves through this project, and any additional details would violate our NDAs." I'm not kidding here either. These guys from Norway are not thinking big enough here.
Keep in mind that there is a political objective to allowing all of these countries to gain access into the U.S. marketplace. I don't claim to agree with this philosophy (indeed, I think it is a very weak and silly concept), but it has been a major part of U.S. foreign policy since the 1960's, and some could argue since the 1930's:
To put it simply, if we open our markets and bring in commerce from other countries, those same countries won't go to war with us out of fear that they will be killing their best customers. Or another way to restate it, countries that are not engaged heavily in commerce between themselves are much more likely to go to war against each other.
I can give two huge examples that this concept goes completely out the window:
1) Japan - In 1941, the USA was Japan's largest trading partner (yes... pre WWII). While certainly they weren't "Japan, Inc." as was talked about in the 1980s, they did provide huge amounts of both investment capital into the USA, and a fairly large (in terms of dollars) amount of goods went to Japan. In fact, the Japanese Zero fighter was designed by none other than Howard Hughes, who certainly didn't worry about ITAR restrictions to send it there (although this is an argument for having ITAR restrictions on aviation). You can read about what Japan did on December 7th, 1941 in history books to see what they actually did to foster this trade relationship.
2) Cuba - This former territory of the USA went through some political upheavals and saw the rise of Fidel Castro, and a strong Cuban-Russian alliance that even to this day is still somewhat strong. Due to some attitudes about Communism and this political and military alliance with Russia, the U.S. government imposed about as hard of an embargo against trade with Cuba as exists with any country.... in spite of the fact that Cuba is only 90 miles (at one point) from U.S. soil. Instead of heavy ferry traffic between Cuba and Florida (and possibly a construction of a floating interstate highway between Florida and Cuba.... who knows?), you have Coast Guard cutters and even U.S. Navy ships that interdict traffic between the two hunks of land, and mainly rescue folks who try to cross that gap in an attempt to immigrate into the USA, following the pattern that Mexico has established in Arizona and California. Huge saber rattling has taken place on both sides of the Straights of Florida, but on a realistic level there has never been any real intention of going to war between Cuba and the USA since the 1890's.
Now it could be argued that Japan has learned its lesson from WWII, and has gone aggressively on the economic front to engage with America on that level instead of through open warfare. And the military relationship between Japan and the USA is certainly solid enough that Japan even sent soldiers (admittedly medics and other non-combat personnel) to Iraq in 2002. But in this case you can't make a clear case that the trade relationship is the cause of the peaceful relationship between Japan and the USA, or if it is a side-effect of coordial relationship.
I will say that I do agree that some caution with China in particular is warrented, as there is a systematic attempt on the part of the Chinese government to modernize their economy and build up their military capability so they are not 2nd to the USA. And this has been stated explicitly. They desire the capability of being able to defeat the U.S. Army in open unit on unit combat in the battlefield. This is something that Russia tried and failed to achieve, and no other country, including India, really has this as a major goal. If they are capable of home-built manned obital spaceflight, they certain have the capability of doing much more that may not be pleasant for Americans to acknowledge.
And as you pointed out, in China and many developing nations they don't have to abide by the same environmental and labor conditions that we take for granted in the USA. They don't have to pay $7/hr as a sort of minimum wage, OSH
China is hardly the only country in the world that could dominate maufacturing, even though they do seem to represent a huge quantity of the U.S. marketplace in terms of gross sales of consumer and industrial goods.
The fact is that there are dozens of other countries who are just as willing to take over from China, if China tries to leverage their current position in the U.S. Economy beyond just being good businessmen and offering cheap stuff. Certainly the Philippines and Indonesia are countries with large enough population bases to be able to undercut China if they can get their economic base under control and duplicate the same economic environment that currently exists in China. India is another country that could easily blow China away economically if they got their act together as well.
Or better yet, Mexico could completely dominate the U.S. market in ways that China could ever dream. Add to that some of the larger South American countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile which all have nautural resources and large populations to also take on China significantly on nearly the same products.
And in none of these countries I've mentioned here include those who already have very well established industrial bases like Japan or EU countries. So the fear of China is IMHO unfounded. You also seem to think China is a monolithic entity, when it is hardly such a case. And private investment and ownership do occur in China, where these businesses are as controlled by the Chinese government as any of the firms on Wall Street are controlled by the U.S. Government.
I'm not saying here that some concerns about the U.S. economy placing so much reliance upon China as a trading partner doesn't deserve some thought and review, but it isn't the end of the world if the current level of trade between China and America is left to continue either.
The one market that Boeing definitely has avoided at this point is the supersonic aircraft. The problem here, is that it is not cost effective with current technology and it is difficult to make fit the environmental requirements being applied by so many countries.
Boeing did get involved with the American SST effort back in the late 1960's, although it was mostly under the U.S. Government-funded project to build a competitor to the Concorde. Serious efforts to break into this market have all but failed, and the expense for building these kinds of aircraft are so high that serious objections can be raised to if it is even something most companies should even bother with. Obviously Boeing is not spending any serious research money into the concept.
Added to this is the U.S. environmental lobbying groups that were also partially successful in killing the American SST program, including putting on so many restrictions on the location and flight profile of the Concorde and other SST planes that you could count on one hand how many U.S. airports even allowed the plane to land at all. Without the USA as a customer, it effectively killed the SST as a customer. The Concorde also has the problem that the New York-London route was essentially the limit to its flight distance. Going from London to Bombay (or other cities around the world) is essentially out of the picture as they are too far away for serious consideration, and would require a further design change to achieve such a flight range, at the cost of making the plane even more expensive to operate.
And if the enviromental groups were successful in the late 1960's to change opinion and perspective of this concept, these key issues they objected to haven't really be resolved. In addition, the environmental groups are also much better organized today than they were in the 1960's as well.... something to consider if you really wanted to make such a plane.
And to ultimately top off all of these problems with a new edition of the SST, there is going to be some serious competition against companies who are going to be doing sub-orbital flights that would simply blow away any advantages of SST options. Basically, a flight from London to Sydney might take nearly a full day on conventional air transportation (19 hours non-stop), an SST could cut that in half or slightly better to say about 8 hours, and a sub-orbital flight might be 3 hours. I'm not saying that the problems of sub-orbital flight are completely solved, but groups like Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites certainly are making some significant progress in that area (not to mention other former X-Prize companies) that it is hardly an open field in trying to move in that direction. Basically, why would you spend billions of dollars in a SST system that will take nearly a decade to develop when Richard Branson will be able to fly you to the same destination much faster and for nearly the same price per passenger (as is projected by Virgin Galactic and others in the alt.space community)? Besides, the "cool" factor of being a passenger in an SST is very old fashioned compared to actually going up and into space.
Essentially, I see the window of oppotunity for a company building a cost-effective SST to essentially be closed, if it ever was economical to do in the first place. Certainly even the Concorde only broke-even on costs under a very imaginative and optimistic viewpoint.
Of course when the "Stargate Infinity" did broadcast, it was at 5:00 AM, as if anything other than infomercials are typically broadcast at that time.
My kids are huge Stargate fans, but only ended up seeing about two of these episodes, even though they would watch an animated show about paint drying. Perhaps it is just as well that this show never achieved any decent ratings and lasted for any reasonable length of time. I sometimes shut off the TV to avoid brain damage to my kids, but this wasn't one that I was too worried about myself.
It was likely a movie that shouldn't have been remade. I have an interesting story about the 1972 version that was made in Russia:
While I was at a SF convention that showed this particular version (Solaris - 1972 edition), about half way through the movie the film broke in the projector. (I was off doing some other... er... extra activities at the time and wasn't at the screning.) That isn't the worst of it.
The audience sat in the auditorium for over 20 minutes watching a blank white screen, thinking it was actually a part of the movie. The projectionist didn't even notice that there was anything wrong with the movie. And you call that riveting entertainment?
No wonder the 2002 version of the movie was a flop. Who would really want to watch it except some very hard-core SF junkies?
Contact (yes, it was less than expertly executed, but it was a scifi-as-social-commentary work, adapted from such a work of literary fiction, and funded by Hollywood. That the product may have been less than stellar is tangential to the argument TFA advances.)?
OK, it wasn't the most amazing moving in the world, but I will say that after reading the pile of garbage that the late Carl Sagan wrote in the original book, the movie was 10x better or more. If you have seen the movie but havn't read the book.... DON'T!!!! The book will ruin the movie for you. Seriously. There are a couple of very minor gems in the book that weren't in the movie, but it isn't worth the brain damage to get to them. The screen play did a much better job of presenting the key ideas of how contact with other alien species might actually take place, starting with the discovery of a source that was pulsing out the first bunch of prime numbers between 2 and 101. From that point on the movie was fun until it started to get very spiritual and bizzare near the end. Even that was tolerable.
To save you the trouble with one of the "gems" in the book not covered in the movie: Having Dr. Arroway scanning through the digits of pi in order to find "hidden" messages, including a binary coded "message" around digits 100 quadrillion, with a hint that there was stored within the transendental number instructions for another "machine" even better than the one they got from Vega. Still, in hindsight this was a stupid idea and was a good thing to leave out of the movie.
While his "popular science" books weren't too bad (I like Comets), his attempts at science fiction were simply horrid, and that is being kind. I just don't think Dr. Sagan knew how to write fiction.
That perhaps a very good SF writer (Orson Scott Card or Jerry Pournelle?) might be able to "fix" Contact to become something very interesting if it were done as a remake, I am frankly amazed at what Robert Zemeckis actually did with this story given the original source material, and from my perspective he should get top billing for authorship on the story.
What information really is released into the public domain? It certainly isn't engineering blueprints or schematics, nor does it really say how the process is supposed to actually work. If that were the case, there wouldn't be FTL (faster than light) communications and transportation systems that have been patented.
Patents are written not for engineers to figure out, but for lawyers and patent agents to see if there might not be a previous version of the idea in the files. In theory there might be enough information "for somebody skilled in the profession" to figure out what is going on, but by its very nature most patents are very broad and non-specific except for how they have to avoid conflicting with a previous patent. They aren't supposed to be, but in practice the wording has enough legalese to make it vague.
As far as making a better wiget, I guess it does spur on some sorts of innovation. The enforcement of the LZW patent with the GIF file format did spur on the development of the PNG file format. But at what cost? Had that same effort been allowed to be put into the GIF format instead, other ideas certainly could have been created and spurred more innovation along different lines. And more importantly, the format developers wouldn't have had ot "re-invent the wheel" but could have started out with an already strong specification.
I could say the same thing about an automobile company that has to somehow work around patent issues because their competitor simply won't give them the option of licensing that patent, no matter what the cost. And far too often patents are used to simply shut down a competitor completely instead.
As for software patents, for me they have no redeeming value of any kind at all. And I am somebody who has created several innovated and original algorithms that certainly would have been patentable. I don't even read through too many other people's code (too often... and as little as I can). I certainly don't go reading patent applications for software development ideas (shudder the thought!) It is not worth the effort to me other than as a scam and racketeering operation that is officially scanctioned by the U.S. Government (that would otherwise be subject to RICO laws). I know this sounds harsh, but the only thing a software patent has ever been is grief... usually after I have already shipped product only to "discover" that I might have violated some sort of patent or other. Or it has caused me to tell customers they could not have their product at the agreed upon price because software patent royalties make the cost of adding the features they wanted simply prohibitive. Software patents certainly do not every spur on any sort of innovation, but only slow down innovative development and require a lawyer for every software developer. A truly paranoid software development firm ought to have at least a one to one ratio of lawyers to developers, as anybody worthy the title of a "software engineer" would on a daily basis violate so many patents that just a code review woud be a full time job for any such lawyer. That doesn't even touch component library licensing issues, operating system API library access terms, and reviewing NDAs for working with some component vendors. I'm sure I could generate enough content to keep two or three lawyers busy on a full time basis myself. This should not be the state of the software development professions.
I really did think as you are suggesting once upon a time, that perhaps there was some small marginal value and that the terms of patents could be reduced, especially for new technology industries (think bio-tech right now, as an example).
There is absolutely nothing which patent protection can do which copyright protection can't do much better. I'm not even in favor of long copyright terms, but there is a point in having at least some sort of idea protection written into law. And to "register" a copyright doesn't require the assistance of an attorney... if you even want to go that far.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are interested in something very interesting, and perhaps even puzzling, you might want to read up on the Iraqi Dinar.
Here was a currency of a government (Saddam's) that didn't even exist, yet the currency still held up its value even with foreign trade and exchange. Although admittedly since the government that created the currency no longer existed, there is a natural scarcity that only improves with time... driving up the value of the money.
From what I understand, this money is still widely used in Iraq even today, although the current Iraqi government is trying to replace the pictures of Saddam. Most economists had guessed (based on experiences in Germany and France) that the value of the money would have simply collapsed completely, as it was a fiat currency.
I don't know if this is due to loyalists who still offer stuff of value in exchange for the currency or not, although the Dinar seems to have value even outside of the Sunni Triangle region.
As I was saying, this was but one of the reasons why the ISS is bad for science. Cost is certainly a factor, as is cross-contamination from other experiments due to the tight quarters. Even the regular "dockings" from the unmaned supply vessels and crew exchanges also cause additional problems, and of course at the moment that construction on the thing is still on-going. I could go on and on, but the ISS is a horrible science platform. There are good reasons to have the ISS, but NASA doesn't want to sell them as they would involve an even more ambitious program (like Moon, Mars, and Beyond) and that the current design of the ISS isn't set up do deal with things like an orbital assembly "drydock" that could build and prepare missions to Mars or the Moon, or serve as an orbital gateway for even unmanned missions where "live" tests of equipment could be worked on in space before it was formally deployed.
For example, imagine if astronauts could have fixed the Galileo space probe to get its dish to open up before it was pushed out of Earth orbit. When it was 2 million miles away, the controllers were stuck with it shut and couldn't bang on it to get the dish to open up. The ISS certainly could be useful in that manner to service some equipment in this fashion, and make or break some complex missions.
If Bigelow Aerospace is successful with their business and is actually able to get the modules (and transportation to them) down to a reasonable price, you will find significantly more science "modules" floating in space... including some manned experiments that would have their own private lab that doesn't have to deal with the problems of the ISS. Of course Robert Bigelow is claiming he can build something 10x the size of the ISS for 1% of the cost, but we will have to see if that really is going to happen. With actual hardware in orbit right now, and another module going up by the end of this year, this isn't as big of a pipe dream as it may have seemed in the past.
Of course the "microgravity" caused by the mass of the station itself is enough to have a significant impact on some experiments on the ISS, and is one of the reasons why some argue that it is a waste of money to even build the contraption (meaning the ISS) at least if you are going to use the science generated by the ISS as a rationale for continued funding.
About the only people who use the term "Zero G" is one particular for-profit company doing simulated "weightlessness" and media/PR types.
Other than accounting for jitter due to mechanical travel, acceleration due to changes in direction (typical for an aircraft) or raw acceleration (like in a rocket) are indistinguishable from that caused by gravity. Indeed relativistic effects caused by acceleration are also identical if you are talking about moving in a rocket or standing on a "solid" body like the Earth.
Obviously the "relative" distance and velocity are different if you are talking "true" acceleration, but that is exactly where the semantics break down. The "G" unit is a valid measurement for acceleration caused by moving toward a massive body or due to mechanical effects. Indeed when you talk about "negative G's" in aircraft, it is a a combination of acceleration vectors that include gravitational acceleration in the calculation. In space it is no different.
I just thought of something else that needs to be added to this "compiler" that I think is the real clincher here to get this kind of project going: Each "opcode" or instruction needs to be made into a discrete state of a finite state machine. Think of this as a "compiler" that would actually design a completely unique CPU with independent opcodes for each instruction, and where the instruction pointer is the same as the opcode being processed.
Or to use more EE jargon, when the state machine is in a given state, it performs the actions of the particular instruction.
I think this is one idea that might actually work out and go somewhere... I don't know of any prior art on this concept, but I've got to look around and see if there might be something like this... to directly compile a HLL (high level language) into discrete gates.
You could do this with the 7400 logic chip sets too, but a FPGA gate would simplify the process significantly.
Who says that ATM machines don't screw up? Let's just say for the sake of argument that only one tranaction out of 100 from an ATM has a mistake. The ATM prints out a receipt saying you just pulled out $20, but no money actually came out. What do you do? You contact the bank and they verify your story... and at most you are out $20 (or whatever you punched in for withdrawl). Does this kill the American banking system or increase the level of distrust of banks for most customers? Not at all.
Now what if this same problem happens with a voting machine. One ballot out of 100 is messed up and the vote is actually applied to the opposite candidate. Does this substantially change the results of the election? Absolutely. You have just put a completely different party into power during a very close election... even if no deliberate fraud was intended. Does this change the American political system on a major scale?
Frankly electronic voting is one of the toughest of the hard problems for data integrity and security that you can possibly find. And if the citizens no longer trust the voting process as a reasonable and reliable method of making changes to the government, other means must be found. And those tend to cause hardship for more than just the individuals getting kicked out of power.
The ballot box is the foundation for any sort of government that even pretends to follow democratic principles. The votes cast are the very legitimacy of who is in power, which is precisely why so many Democrats complain about the legitimacy of President Bush.... they don't think he "earned" the votes necessary to get into his office. By introducing additional questions into the legitimacy of the election process itself, you throw not just one office holder into question, but the entire government itself.
This is indeed a much harder problem... and you should note that it is lawyers that say the voting process with Dibold is safe, but computer scientists who strongly suggest otherwise. Which do you trust to understand how electronic voting equipment really works? Do you also let lawyers operate on you at your local hospital?
Of course by not requiring ID and proof of citizenship, you also disenfranchise voters by "stuffing" the ballot box with illegal aliens and other non-citzens who cast a ballot. Sure, it is a crime, but it is one that you can get away with when you don't even have a way to prove who you really are.
"Vote early... vote often"
That is another consequence of not requiring ID: There is nothing stopping you from casting your ballot in a dozen precincts all over the general location where you live... depending on the local population density. In larger more urban districts, what judge is going to know who you are from anybody else, or if you even live in that neighborhood? As long as you don't show up to the same precinct twice, you would more than likely never be caught.
And don't say that this never happens. There are no safeguards to prevent it in most states. And the courts that declare such laws requiring proof that you are who you say you are as unconstitutional encourage even more rampant voting fraud.
Mexican nationals should not have the right to vote in American elections. If they want that right, they should apply for citizenship.
Please.... this is as silly as it gets to suggest this solution, and gets to the heart of why American elections are so complicated with so much technical hardware: Marking an "X" on 100+ candidates and ballot questions is enough to completely overwhelm any voting judge in a typical American voting precinct.
My wife is an election judge, and has done the paper and pencil thing on municipal elections where there was just three options to count. Even then, it took her and the team of voting judges nearly three hours to count and verify all of the votes, particularly when one of the senior citizen judges lost track of the count three times and couldn't quite remember what the number was that she was on during the ballot count. That judge came up with four different answers for the number of votes cast, one each time she went through the stack of ballots.
And that didn't deal with trying to "judge" what candidate was actually cast for a particular ballot because the voter screwed up and voted for one candidate, tried to "scratch" it out and vote for somebody else. Or drew such a lousy "X" that you couldn't really tell who exactly they were voting for.
I support the idea of using electronically prepared ballots that are very clear on who each voter has cast their ballot for. This can also deal with the hundreds of offices from dog catcher to President of the USA that you need to vote on for each election, the school bond referendii and questions about where to build (or if to build) a dam on a nearby river. Once these paper ballots are prepared, automated systems can count the ballots to improve the accuracy of these 80+ year olds who have been volunteering for the past 60 years to work on the elections. It has only been very recently, however, that such a system was even possible to prepare a ballot that is human readable but standard enough that it could be counted in an automated manner. This is precisely why mechanical systems were set up in the past.... to overcome some of the limitations of having human couters of the ballots.
But simple paper and pen isn't going to cut it. Especially in an election with over 100 million voters casting a ballot.
While having it on paper is good, it can be better still.
As I've mentioned before when this issue is raised, computers should only be used for electronic ballot preparation. The actual ballot which you use for casting your vote should be prepared in the voting booth, and be done using OCR characters and/or a bar code (or something simple but easy for a voter to evaluate). At that point, who cares what company has actually designed the equipment for the vote processing?
You can establish standards for both document preparation as well as being able to "load" the current election data that lists all of the "official" candidates that have previously registered with the local election board, and all other ballot questions. Writing such a standard would be a generally trivial exercise, and could be easily extended to take care of unusual voting situations (like instant run-off votes or other crazy schemes to count votes).
By having such standards, anybody including a small group of hackers could develop a system for sale to their local election officials, and have some tests to verify that the software and system actually does what it is supposed to do. And more importantly, it could commoditize the election supply business instead of being locked in by one single company like Diebold. Of course Diebold could offer their equipment for sale as well at a competitive price, but that doesn't matter.
Besides, if the voter looks at the ballot and verifies that the information is correct, that is a voter certified election. And it can be recounted dozens of times and get the same results. The largest problems with elections is that voters sometimes mess up the ballot by marking beyond the lines or vote for two people when only one vote is valid. Electronic ballot preparation deals with all of those problems and more. It even helps to stop some types of voting fraud, as these prepared ballots would be easy to spot something that has been tampered with.
There is no reason why the same machines that are preparing and helping voters to cast their ballots should be used to do the counting of the votes. This also helps with the unfortunate situations where you have equipment malfunctions when a voter is in the middle of casting their ballot. They can stop, move to another machine, and perhaps start from the beginning but they have a real chance of making sure their votes actually count for something. Any partially printed ballots can be discarded, and each voter can be verified with the use of tickets or some other system to make sure they only vote once. So even if they sit and press "finished" a dozen times and have a dozen ballots prepared, the judges can accept only one of those ballots and it is up to the voter to decide which one of the ballots they made would be their actual ballot cast for that election.
If casting a ballot with a Dibold machine when you are half way through voting or worse if the machine crashes as you are finishing up your selections, you are screwed as a voter and there is a real possibility that you will become disenfranchised for that election.
In short, a paper trail, while a good start, is not the best possible option. The voter needs to be directly in control of the process of casting their vote, and not trust the reliability of some machine that is known to be tempermental.
Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel 2010, suggested that at the center of Jupiter there was enough carbon (and pressure + heat) that in theory you could have a diamond there that is literally the size of the Earth. Of course this is only raw speculation, but Haywood Floyd (in an incorporeal state) was shown this "gemstone" by the higher intelligences that built the black monolith.
Of course he was also shown life forms that lived in the atmosphere of Jupiter, but also saw that life existed on Europa... and that the Europan (is that the right term?) life had the best chance of eventually being in competition with life from the Earth, including achieving intelligence and joining with the higher life forms in their plane of existence. This is when Jupiter was transformed by these higher intelligences into a second sun, and nuclear fusion was started in the Jovian interior... hence the point of the novel. With the heat from a nuclear Jupiter, Europa was able to "thaw" and become a vast ocean world for life to evolve and flourish. And some sort of protection was put over Europa, where the message sent by the USS Discovery was "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE."
Is this the diamond you were talking about?
I've never heard of this explict idea, but I think you could use a "standard" compiler like GCC to do something like this.
This would be something interesting, although I would have to point out that a compiler would produce just as much bloat in circuitry that happens in opcodes. In spite of some claims that a "hand-assembled" piece of software is less efficient than something run through a compiler, I have my extreme doubts about that concept. And moving down to a hardware level, I think you could improve the efficiency yet another order of magnitude simply by having a more complete understanding of where all of the signals are coming from and going to.
Here is an interesting idea to try and follow up on this concept and narrow the focus on what would be needed to accomplish this kind of task: What would it take to produce a "compiler" that would take the basic Brainf*** commands and turn that into circuity. Assume here that the I/O is connected to an 8250 (or successor) chip, and you can define the memory using "standard" memory I/O IP modules. I've seen C to Brainf*** compilers, so this isn't so far reaching of an idea to think about here either for "real" software development. Anyway, this is one way to start to see if such a crazy concept could be put together in the first place.
There are some interesting digital evolution experiments that have involved the use of artificial life concepts (think Sim City here or something even more elaborate) and even sexual reproduction.
Type "A-life" into Google and you will get a list of some very interesting experiments along this line.
What is interesting with the a-life experiments (beyond Conway's "Life") is trying to define the concepts you mention above, including "energy", "materials", and "lifespan". When you add competition for these resources and add "mutations" (think something like Corewar but the "organism" changing opcodes instead... as an example) you do see a general trend for more and more complex "virtual organisms" appear and push out inferior organisms that don't do as efficient of a job of acquiring and maintaining these basic resources. Taking snapshots of these virtual organisms is also very interesting, and seeing what comes up when these "random" mutations do occur. Both in terms of defense against mutations (there is nearly always some that shows up) and how well these adapt to new environments.
Of course these are still limited, and to think that perhaps a microbe currently in your stomach is capable of turning into something with the capacity of comprehending Shakespeare is a remarkable concept by itself. I have a very hard time trying to imagine one of these A-life experiments somehow slipping out of their confined environment and turning loose like a network worm, infecting millions of computers and eventually gaining some sort of "intelligence" like is out of a classical science fiction novel. I'm talking like Mycroft Holmes from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Or in more technical terms, passing the AI "Turing Test" of being able to carry on a conversation and convince a computer expert that they may be human when in fact they are not.
Perhaps I should have mention that, as I am a big fan of analog computers... which I believe to be a nearly lost artform and engineering skill.
The classic example I love to use for analog computers is the firing computers for the Ohio-class batteships of the U.S. Navy. Originally built during WWII (and upgraded during the Korean War) these were some very remarkable targeting computers that had a very simple "user interface" and were deadly accurate. Made of finely machined curves that had been calculated by using slide rules and rooms of "computers" (people who made calculations with pen and paper before the days of ENIAC and modern computers), they were a marvel of mechanical engineering. And they could hit precisely a target within 200 feet of where you aimed with a range of nearly 20 miles.
When the Reagan administration decided to re-commission the Ohios for the 700 ship Navy (this is the 1980's, remember), the original targeting computer was removed and replaced with an all-digital computer.... something like a VAX if I remember right. The thought was that it used current technology and of course we can get the targets much more accurately with the new stuff.
When the guns started firing, it shook around the components of the computer so much that they could only fire the guns a few times before they had to rebuild the computer. Trying to find a suitable replacement led the recommissioning team to grab back the original firing computer that was built in the 1940's. And a few sailors who had served on board those vessels during WWII were drafted (and given the rank of CPO if they were enlisted personnel previsously) back to service to teach the current generation of sailors about this equipment and how to maintain it.
As far as other analog equipment is concerned.... I also love to old reel-to-reel magnetic tape players for the sound quality they can produce. The range of effects and even audio enhancement you can do with the analog systems is simply incredible... and something that is missing in the digital realm.
I also miss the days of analog television. I would take the snowed condition of still being able to watch my programs than the pops and squeals of digital audio, and the MPEG DCT mis-calculations that occur when the digital video stream is garbled due to transmission problems of atmospheric distortion. Even though I still get television by traditional rabbit ears on my NTSC television, nearly the rest of the television content distribution chain is digitial. If you have cable television, nearly all of it up to the converter box on your TV is now digital. Don't tell me that digital reproduction of television is always perfectly clear... it isn't. It is just that the 10% loss of signal is 10% loss of the bitstream rather than a 10% loss of power from the analog signal. Instead of having to turn up the audio "volume" control, you simply can't understand what is said or even be able to watch the jerky picture that comes in spurts and fits.
Although what you are talking about here is a very abstract mathematical bound on the extreme ends of both software and hardware.
I dare you to show a current digital system that can't be abstracted in software.... or a current software algorithm that is written and running on actual computer equipment that also can't be duplicated in hardware that would exhibit identical behavior.
As is the case here with this "evolving hardware" demonstration that was put up by these two hackers from Oslo. They are claiming that they have "brand new" hardware doing something that has been done in software for a great many years. And claiming that this is something novel. I'm suggesting otherwise. There may be some interesting concepts, but I think a detailed review of even ACM journals can find comparable concepts. A well-formed Google search may find many others.
As far as simulating a Turing machine, there are a great many Turing algorithms that can be demonstrated that do not need the "infinite" tape, but can preserve nearly all of the other aspects and requirements of a standard Turing machine except for the infinite memory. And these can be simulated as both hardware and software. A 1 petabyte Turing Machine would have plenty of space to do nearly everything that can be expected for testing all but the most elaborate algorithms. I've even seen some very interesting explorations of Turing machines that only need 1K of RAM. While not perfect, they do a very good job of at least demonstrating the basic concepts of a Turing machine that could be expanded but for the limit of available memory.
Of course I'm talking here as an engineer who is building real-world equipment rather than discussing academic concepts. I just don't see the limitations as being a major factor, and most people would understand these limitations as well. The limits of converting software to hardware generally isn't an issue of the capability of it being turned into hardware, but the cost of achieving that end. This is precisely why devices like most programmable logic chips (PLD's, FPGA's, PAL's, etc.) are being developed, because dealing with the design in software is so much easier and cheaper than implementing the design as discrete gates on silicon. And the assumed concept that if you can make the design into an FPGA, you can also create the base discrete gate layout eventually if the demand is there for that kind of part. That, however, is a very rare thing to occur.
I never said it was easy, but I have even seen it mathematically proven that any algorithm can be done in hardware, and I've duplicated most hardware into software myself, for those designs that I wanted to emulate.
This is not just a very small subset of designs. It is a matter of cost and if the engineer wants to put forth the effort to implement the whole thing in hardware. Trying to convert a 1st person shooter game like Doom into a pure TTL logic would make the game very responsive and give you screen resolution to kill for, but would it be worth the engineering effort to do that?
Race conditions and other "bugs" have other causes that may be due to ineptness on the part of the engineer, or because you havn't really thought the problem through sufficiently. Or there may be other things to look at as well. But don't tell me you can't implement in pure TTL logic something like an MPEG encoder.... which is a very complicated mathematical algorithm. I can give you part numbers for MPEG encoders if you really want them in your next design, as they are commercially available.
There is nothing that would stop you from implementing in hardware something like a neural network either... oh and those are indeed implemented in hardware. They are usually done in software mainly because of the cost involved, and you can use a general purpose computer to perform experiments on them. Other adaptive software algorithms have also been implemented on both hardware and software for some time as well. As I said, this is very old news here with this article.
I disagree. Bloggers can be considered serious, but they don't have the ability to claim instant "credibility" by being a junior reporter for some major publication. They have to instead build that reputation themselves as a serious journalist, if they care to put the time and effort that is needed to do that.
I can name a few bloggers that IMHO do an even better job of covering a particular focused topic much better than even the regular media outlets. One that comes to mind very strongly is Matt Drudge, whose website is followed by just about every other major media outlet for breaking news in Washington DC, even through they may not take his spin on things as seriously. And he is even invited into most DC press conferences if he cares to attend.
I could name some others, and those bloggers do indeed have a huge reputation and audience. Most of the best of the bloggers focus on one very narrow topic, again because they are usually one-man operations (but not always). If you have worked hard at blogging and have tried to be a reliable source of information that people who study or need to know about that topic can turn to, you will be invited to press conferences about that topic. But it takes a level of commitment that goes way beyond writing a post in a blog every six months or so. Or writing random musings about random topics that look like some sort of diary. Those kind of bloggers that do a half-hearted job of blogging certainly can't be taken seriously.
I would have to agree, however, that somebody who has just created a blog last Friday and put one or two postings certainly not be considered on the same level as somebody who has turned the blog into something nearly full time and tries to write brilliant prose that also has a huge audience.
Are you trying to say that you are only a journalist if you have a formal license to be a journalist from the government, like a doctor or lawyer?
There are perhaps some people who would suggest that this should happen (and some countries even have issued licenses for this kind of activity), but on a basic level that is huge interference on the part of governments. An alternate way to look at this is if the "journalist" has a degree in journalism (or a degree in anything) or not. There are plenty of very excellent journalists who get their job without going through the route of college graduate -> small market TV/radio/newspaper -> major media outlet journalist.
Yes, that is the more typical behavior to be "accepted" within the community of other journalists, which is exactly what this article points out.
There is nothing that is stopping somebody from getting a printing press and setting up their own "newspaper", just as you can do that with a website. The only difference is that setting up the newspapers costs quite a bit more money than the blogger website. In fact most blog sites don't even require you to know HTML any more. But in the case of somebody throwing some money together and creating a newspaper, radio or television station, all of these media outlets started somewhere. You or I can create something like this if we wanted, and give us some "legitimacy" in terms of being a journalist.
CNN, to give a very good example, started when Bill Tish used to stand in an alleyway behind the transmitter at WTBS with a paper bag over his head reading some AP wire copy for ten minutes each day at 11:30 PM.... to meet the FCC "local programming" requirements that included news coverage. I would say that in spite of these roots, CNN certainly is near the top of the food chain in terms of credibility as a news source (taking discussions of political bias between CNN vs. Fox aside).
What happens is that for anybody to be taken seriously as a journalist, you have to build a reputation. And if you "belong" to a certain organization (say a group called "The New York Times"), your efforts as a journalist also help to build the reputation of the group you work with as well. And some groups have been around for some time to have a reputation that perhaps is even undeserved because the "journalists" working for that group are in reality inferior to their predecessors who built that reputation in the first place, or that in time people forget the awful mistakes and only have nostalgia for reporters who were around over a hundred years ago.
Getting back to CNN here again, they also went through some growing pains when they got started (trying to shed the image of the unknown reporter I mentioned above) and went through some hassles trying to get a White House press pass. The first several times they applied, they were turned down nearly repeatedly, even though they clearly were at least acting like a national news agency. It gets back to the reputation thing again, and I think having the Bush White House turn down CNN for credentials would be today laughable.
That this one blogger is complaining that he didn't get credentials for something he thought was his area of expertise, he shouldn't be crying foul or "freedom of speech". He is standing in the proud tradition of other journalists who have been kicked out of similar events. It is up to that blogger to demonstrate the reputation that he has credibility necessary to be considered in the majors. Just ask Matt Drudge. He is a blogger that would rarely get thrown out of a Washington D.C. press conference any more, and it took him some time to build that reputation.
I won't go into details here, but anything that can be implemented in hardware can be done in software and the other way around too. This is a nearly ancient Electrical Engineering principle.
In the era of programmable logic chips that can alter their own logic (the patterns are stored in RAM or flash RAM for crying out loud), this isn't even that big of a revelation. Indeed, Transmeta has been doing stuff similar to this and selling it commercially for some time. They just aren't using these cool buzzwords.
And evolving architechtures is something that I know has had some serious CS research since the early 1970's and perhaps even earlier. I don't think an idea like this is even patentable based on this earlier work in this area. I bet you could find some adaptive systems that were even build specific for the oil industry, which would defeat even a narrow claim of that nature.
Where the money to be made off of this sort of technology is on Wall Street or other financial markets. I even found a web pages from a research group of adaptive systems that said essentially, "We have discontinued research along these lines and are now working with an investment firm on Wall Street. Since we have all become millionaires, we no longer need to support ourselves through this project, and any additional details would violate our NDAs." I'm not kidding here either. These guys from Norway are not thinking big enough here.
Keep in mind that there is a political objective to allowing all of these countries to gain access into the U.S. marketplace. I don't claim to agree with this philosophy (indeed, I think it is a very weak and silly concept), but it has been a major part of U.S. foreign policy since the 1960's, and some could argue since the 1930's:
To put it simply, if we open our markets and bring in commerce from other countries, those same countries won't go to war with us out of fear that they will be killing their best customers. Or another way to restate it, countries that are not engaged heavily in commerce between themselves are much more likely to go to war against each other.
I can give two huge examples that this concept goes completely out the window:
1) Japan - In 1941, the USA was Japan's largest trading partner (yes... pre WWII). While certainly they weren't "Japan, Inc." as was talked about in the 1980s, they did provide huge amounts of both investment capital into the USA, and a fairly large (in terms of dollars) amount of goods went to Japan. In fact, the Japanese Zero fighter was designed by none other than Howard Hughes, who certainly didn't worry about ITAR restrictions to send it there (although this is an argument for having ITAR restrictions on aviation). You can read about what Japan did on December 7th, 1941 in history books to see what they actually did to foster this trade relationship.
2) Cuba - This former territory of the USA went through some political upheavals and saw the rise of Fidel Castro, and a strong Cuban-Russian alliance that even to this day is still somewhat strong. Due to some attitudes about Communism and this political and military alliance with Russia, the U.S. government imposed about as hard of an embargo against trade with Cuba as exists with any country.... in spite of the fact that Cuba is only 90 miles (at one point) from U.S. soil. Instead of heavy ferry traffic between Cuba and Florida (and possibly a construction of a floating interstate highway between Florida and Cuba.... who knows?), you have Coast Guard cutters and even U.S. Navy ships that interdict traffic between the two hunks of land, and mainly rescue folks who try to cross that gap in an attempt to immigrate into the USA, following the pattern that Mexico has established in Arizona and California. Huge saber rattling has taken place on both sides of the Straights of Florida, but on a realistic level there has never been any real intention of going to war between Cuba and the USA since the 1890's.
Now it could be argued that Japan has learned its lesson from WWII, and has gone aggressively on the economic front to engage with America on that level instead of through open warfare. And the military relationship between Japan and the USA is certainly solid enough that Japan even sent soldiers (admittedly medics and other non-combat personnel) to Iraq in 2002. But in this case you can't make a clear case that the trade relationship is the cause of the peaceful relationship between Japan and the USA, or if it is a side-effect of coordial relationship.
I will say that I do agree that some caution with China in particular is warrented, as there is a systematic attempt on the part of the Chinese government to modernize their economy and build up their military capability so they are not 2nd to the USA. And this has been stated explicitly. They desire the capability of being able to defeat the U.S. Army in open unit on unit combat in the battlefield. This is something that Russia tried and failed to achieve, and no other country, including India, really has this as a major goal. If they are capable of home-built manned obital spaceflight, they certain have the capability of doing much more that may not be pleasant for Americans to acknowledge.
And as you pointed out, in China and many developing nations they don't have to abide by the same environmental and labor conditions that we take for granted in the USA. They don't have to pay $7/hr as a sort of minimum wage, OSH
China is hardly the only country in the world that could dominate maufacturing, even though they do seem to represent a huge quantity of the U.S. marketplace in terms of gross sales of consumer and industrial goods.
The fact is that there are dozens of other countries who are just as willing to take over from China, if China tries to leverage their current position in the U.S. Economy beyond just being good businessmen and offering cheap stuff. Certainly the Philippines and Indonesia are countries with large enough population bases to be able to undercut China if they can get their economic base under control and duplicate the same economic environment that currently exists in China. India is another country that could easily blow China away economically if they got their act together as well.
Or better yet, Mexico could completely dominate the U.S. market in ways that China could ever dream. Add to that some of the larger South American countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile which all have nautural resources and large populations to also take on China significantly on nearly the same products.
And in none of these countries I've mentioned here include those who already have very well established industrial bases like Japan or EU countries. So the fear of China is IMHO unfounded. You also seem to think China is a monolithic entity, when it is hardly such a case. And private investment and ownership do occur in China, where these businesses are as controlled by the Chinese government as any of the firms on Wall Street are controlled by the U.S. Government.
I'm not saying here that some concerns about the U.S. economy placing so much reliance upon China as a trading partner doesn't deserve some thought and review, but it isn't the end of the world if the current level of trade between China and America is left to continue either.
Boeing did get involved with the American SST effort back in the late 1960's, although it was mostly under the U.S. Government-funded project to build a competitor to the Concorde. Serious efforts to break into this market have all but failed, and the expense for building these kinds of aircraft are so high that serious objections can be raised to if it is even something most companies should even bother with. Obviously Boeing is not spending any serious research money into the concept.
Added to this is the U.S. environmental lobbying groups that were also partially successful in killing the American SST program, including putting on so many restrictions on the location and flight profile of the Concorde and other SST planes that you could count on one hand how many U.S. airports even allowed the plane to land at all. Without the USA as a customer, it effectively killed the SST as a customer. The Concorde also has the problem that the New York-London route was essentially the limit to its flight distance. Going from London to Bombay (or other cities around the world) is essentially out of the picture as they are too far away for serious consideration, and would require a further design change to achieve such a flight range, at the cost of making the plane even more expensive to operate.
And if the enviromental groups were successful in the late 1960's to change opinion and perspective of this concept, these key issues they objected to haven't really be resolved. In addition, the environmental groups are also much better organized today than they were in the 1960's as well.... something to consider if you really wanted to make such a plane.
And to ultimately top off all of these problems with a new edition of the SST, there is going to be some serious competition against companies who are going to be doing sub-orbital flights that would simply blow away any advantages of SST options. Basically, a flight from London to Sydney might take nearly a full day on conventional air transportation (19 hours non-stop), an SST could cut that in half or slightly better to say about 8 hours, and a sub-orbital flight might be 3 hours. I'm not saying that the problems of sub-orbital flight are completely solved, but groups like Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites certainly are making some significant progress in that area (not to mention other former X-Prize companies) that it is hardly an open field in trying to move in that direction. Basically, why would you spend billions of dollars in a SST system that will take nearly a decade to develop when Richard Branson will be able to fly you to the same destination much faster and for nearly the same price per passenger (as is projected by Virgin Galactic and others in the alt.space community)? Besides, the "cool" factor of being a passenger in an SST is very old fashioned compared to actually going up and into space.
Essentially, I see the window of oppotunity for a company building a cost-effective SST to essentially be closed, if it ever was economical to do in the first place. Certainly even the Concorde only broke-even on costs under a very imaginative and optimistic viewpoint.
Of course when the "Stargate Infinity" did broadcast, it was at 5:00 AM, as if anything other than infomercials are typically broadcast at that time.
My kids are huge Stargate fans, but only ended up seeing about two of these episodes, even though they would watch an animated show about paint drying. Perhaps it is just as well that this show never achieved any decent ratings and lasted for any reasonable length of time. I sometimes shut off the TV to avoid brain damage to my kids, but this wasn't one that I was too worried about myself.
It was likely a movie that shouldn't have been remade. I have an interesting story about the 1972 version that was made in Russia:
While I was at a SF convention that showed this particular version (Solaris - 1972 edition), about half way through the movie the film broke in the projector. (I was off doing some other... er... extra activities at the time and wasn't at the screning.) That isn't the worst of it.
The audience sat in the auditorium for over 20 minutes watching a blank white screen, thinking it was actually a part of the movie. The projectionist didn't even notice that there was anything wrong with the movie. And you call that riveting entertainment?
No wonder the 2002 version of the movie was a flop. Who would really want to watch it except some very hard-core SF junkies?
OK, it wasn't the most amazing moving in the world, but I will say that after reading the pile of garbage that the late Carl Sagan wrote in the original book, the movie was 10x better or more. If you have seen the movie but havn't read the book.... DON'T!!!! The book will ruin the movie for you. Seriously. There are a couple of very minor gems in the book that weren't in the movie, but it isn't worth the brain damage to get to them. The screen play did a much better job of presenting the key ideas of how contact with other alien species might actually take place, starting with the discovery of a source that was pulsing out the first bunch of prime numbers between 2 and 101. From that point on the movie was fun until it started to get very spiritual and bizzare near the end. Even that was tolerable.
To save you the trouble with one of the "gems" in the book not covered in the movie: Having Dr. Arroway scanning through the digits of pi in order to find "hidden" messages, including a binary coded "message" around digits 100 quadrillion, with a hint that there was stored within the transendental number instructions for another "machine" even better than the one they got from Vega. Still, in hindsight this was a stupid idea and was a good thing to leave out of the movie.
While his "popular science" books weren't too bad (I like Comets), his attempts at science fiction were simply horrid, and that is being kind. I just don't think Dr. Sagan knew how to write fiction.
That perhaps a very good SF writer (Orson Scott Card or Jerry Pournelle?) might be able to "fix" Contact to become something very interesting if it were done as a remake, I am frankly amazed at what Robert Zemeckis actually did with this story given the original source material, and from my perspective he should get top billing for authorship on the story.
What information really is released into the public domain? It certainly isn't engineering blueprints or schematics, nor does it really say how the process is supposed to actually work. If that were the case, there wouldn't be FTL (faster than light) communications and transportation systems that have been patented.
Patents are written not for engineers to figure out, but for lawyers and patent agents to see if there might not be a previous version of the idea in the files. In theory there might be enough information "for somebody skilled in the profession" to figure out what is going on, but by its very nature most patents are very broad and non-specific except for how they have to avoid conflicting with a previous patent. They aren't supposed to be, but in practice the wording has enough legalese to make it vague.
As far as making a better wiget, I guess it does spur on some sorts of innovation. The enforcement of the LZW patent with the GIF file format did spur on the development of the PNG file format. But at what cost? Had that same effort been allowed to be put into the GIF format instead, other ideas certainly could have been created and spurred more innovation along different lines. And more importantly, the format developers wouldn't have had ot "re-invent the wheel" but could have started out with an already strong specification.
I could say the same thing about an automobile company that has to somehow work around patent issues because their competitor simply won't give them the option of licensing that patent, no matter what the cost. And far too often patents are used to simply shut down a competitor completely instead.
As for software patents, for me they have no redeeming value of any kind at all. And I am somebody who has created several innovated and original algorithms that certainly would have been patentable. I don't even read through too many other people's code (too often... and as little as I can). I certainly don't go reading patent applications for software development ideas (shudder the thought!) It is not worth the effort to me other than as a scam and racketeering operation that is officially scanctioned by the U.S. Government (that would otherwise be subject to RICO laws). I know this sounds harsh, but the only thing a software patent has ever been is grief... usually after I have already shipped product only to "discover" that I might have violated some sort of patent or other. Or it has caused me to tell customers they could not have their product at the agreed upon price because software patent royalties make the cost of adding the features they wanted simply prohibitive. Software patents certainly do not every spur on any sort of innovation, but only slow down innovative development and require a lawyer for every software developer. A truly paranoid software development firm ought to have at least a one to one ratio of lawyers to developers, as anybody worthy the title of a "software engineer" would on a daily basis violate so many patents that just a code review woud be a full time job for any such lawyer. That doesn't even touch component library licensing issues, operating system API library access terms, and reviewing NDAs for working with some component vendors. I'm sure I could generate enough content to keep two or three lawyers busy on a full time basis myself. This should not be the state of the software development professions.
I really did think as you are suggesting once upon a time, that perhaps there was some small marginal value and that the terms of patents could be reduced, especially for new technology industries (think bio-tech right now, as an example).
There is absolutely nothing which patent protection can do which copyright protection can't do much better. I'm not even in favor of long copyright terms, but there is a point in having at least some sort of idea protection written into law. And to "register" a copyright doesn't require the assistance of an attorney... if you even want to go that far.