Inevitable Evolution of Explosive Growth
on
The Law of Disassembly
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Absolutely any thing that can self-replicate will be subject to the laws of evolution. So if some supposedly self-limiting replicator has any variants that can replicate faster (and pass on that variation), then that variant will become more prevalent. With each succeeding faster variant comes the potential for run-away population growth (to the limit of available resources). And any variant that can consume alternative resources (having consumed the initial set of resources ) will also become more populous. The result is the gray goo disaster that people fear.
Attempts to build in self-limiting features (replication delay clocks, kill switches, error-correcting DNA ROMs, special only-replicates with a special nutrient, etc.) will only present an obstacle to evolution, not an insurmountable barrier. You can add 9s to the probablity that gray goo won't happen, but you can never get to 100% if self-replication is permitted.
That said, you could also create a balanced nano-organism ecosystem with both predators and prey and boost human/animal/plant immune system to fight off nanoorganism attacks. (There is a reason that bacteria have never taken over the world.)
Cheaper future vs. the vicious cycle of cost
on
A Deep Space Primer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But I look forward to the day when we can develop space hardware the same incremental way we develop other things.
Absolutely! I look forward to a range of advancements such as lower cost access to space (personal fav is a space elevator), truely routine manned space operations, and better adaptive/autonomous robotic systems.
Yet I fear that the foreseeable future (next 20 years at least) will be dominated by rare and expensive space projects in which every lauch counts and every EVA-hour is carefully scripted and rehearsed.
Its a vicious loop, really. Because space is expensive, space projects are very carefully planned and executed. And because space projects are so carefully planned and executed, they are expensive.
Re: communications: Interplantary Internet
on
A Deep Space Primer
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
20 minutes to mars and back? Light speed won't cut it when we talk about going anywhere farther than the moon.
Its more than just the long delay. Interplanetary networking is quite tricky due to the limited bandwidth, line-of-sight interruptions, the need to slew expensive high-gain antennas into precise scheduled pointing directions, as well as the massive levels of latency.
Long-feedback cycles and good design
on
A Deep Space Primer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This type of careful planning and careful execution is useful for any endeavour with long or expensive feedback cycles. That includes terrestrial tasks like creating nuclear powerplants. Too many engineers have a hands-on, tweak-and-see hacker mentality, where projects like Mars rovers, nukes (and many other projects)need to work as planned right out of the box.
A former boss and engineer had a great story about his early job experience designing circuits for a guided missile. He showed his first circuit design to the boss and the boss noted all the little adjustable pots in the circuit. The boss simply said, "Are you going to fly with that missile to tweak all the pots?"
Although simulations, testing, and prototyping are great, truely great engineering just works because it was designed correctly from the beginning to just work.
so how then, would you USE account #'s or passwords..
to check my bank account balance, I must type in my acct# on their website.
this information goes to them in packets
Those packets would encrypted (or should be encrypted!) on the computer so the cable/DSL modem would not filter them. This content filtering would only catch plain-text transmissions of valuable data. I suppose it is possible that malware keyboard logger or a backdoor-using blackhatter could use an encrypted connection, but that seems like more hassle on their part than they would bother with. Anybody breaking in through a plain http, ftp, telnet, etc connection would be detected when they tried to access any honeypot files.
It would be nice if these enhanced firmware systems provided some level of content filtering on outgoign packets. A simple test would see if key passwords, financial account numbers, or a honeypot file name were in any outgoign packets. If so, the modded device would kill the outgoing packet and log the destination.
If they are going to track us, why not make it fun. We can all get together and swap RFID tags. Some mischevious shoppers in Britain do that with their Tesco loyalty cards, so why not do it with RFID to. And if one person carries multiple tags from different people, then they can make it look like an entire flock of people are at the door.
The alternative is to wrap ourselves in tin-foil. Hmmm.. I wonder is metallic clothing will soon be fashionable. Maybe that's why all those SciFi movies have people in shiny suits - they had to worry about RFID tracking.
I do wonder if Nextel's "unlimited usage" is really intended for heavy traffic. I'd bet more that few users will get nastygrams such as those discussed previously. Between listening to internet radio, downloading files, talking on a VoIP connection, and web surfing Flash sites, some users will be able to suck down full bandwidth for most of the hours of the day.
They do make boosters that send a VGA signal long distances over standard ethernet-type cabling (its not over ethernet, per se, it just uses the same Cat5 cable stock). a Google search found many examples such as these ( I have no connections or experience with any of these companies, only a similar interest in connecting a monitor to a server in the other part of my house). A KVM (or hierarchical ganged bank of KVMs) at the monitoring end would let you select the display. The only downside is price, probably $200-$300 per monitored device (depending on distance, quantity, etc.)
Do we really need these extremophiles? Only if we have no other means of obtaining novel biological and pharmcological materials.
Biological and medical science has come a long way from the "lets eat this herb and see if it does anything" mode of experimentation. Genomics, proteomics, combinatorial chemistry, and high throughput screening are all means for engineering new chemicals rather than waiting to discover some organism that happens to produce some useful compound. Advances in simulation, protein folding, in silico pharmacodynamics & pharmacokinetics mean that scientists and engineers can design new chemical species that do what we need them to do.
My point is that although these extremophiles do offer an interesting source of innovation, they are not the only means for finding cures for cancer or novel materials. Although we may have much to learn from nature, we approach the day when no longer need this haphazard ancient dataset.
Soon we will design drugs, rather than find drugs.
If the captcha contained a background of additional instructions such as "To get your free account, please type in www.free-email.com/username/captchawords", then it would prevent the porn site/ spammer from seeing the results.
First of all, any vendor TCO study is going to be completely bullshit. However, there's a glimmer of truth in the Microsoft stuff:
Whether the report is biased or not, it would behove the Linux community to respond to the report with innovation, not just scorn. For example, improving ease-of-use on admin tools could create a drop in the cost of a Linux support people. Or better File and Print features (Novell/SuSE migth be doing this) could improve TCO in that arena.
My point is that fixing these perceived areas of "Linux inferiority" would make it even harder for Microsoft to create the next version of a biased report. If Open Source is smart, they will exploit these biased marketing reports to set future development priorities and fill any perceived gaps in functionality, ease-of-use, and TCO.
You might consider using wifinder.com or wi-fihotspotlist.com to find out where your next hotspot will be. Just make sure to copy down several locations for possible next destinations -- you'd hate to get to your next spot and discover it missing and have no way to access the internet to find a hotpsot.
I suspect that privacy is an artifact of a mass-urbanized society. Prior to the 1800s, people did not have that much privacy because they did not have anonymity. In small village, everyone knows everyone's business for better or for worse. Its only after people moved to a big city that they really could have privacy and learn to value it. At the same time, mass-media culture creates a monotypic image of the norm -- every day we are bombarded with messages of how we should be young, thin, driving a hot car and have cool dry underarms.
Culture plays a big role too. I remember reading about the Netherlands and the tendency for the Dutch to leave their curtains open. Closing your curtains (seeking privacy) was actually frowned upon because it was seen as suspicious.
It would be interesting to repeat this privacy study among different people: people in other countries, in small villages, in tribal indigenous cultures, etc. That way we could assess if the desire for privacy is universal or only an artifact of the current mass-media, mass-urban civilization.
From the article: The survivability study concluded relatively modest design changes might enable future crews to survive long enough to bail out.
I'm not sure how the crew can survive by "bailing out" of a doomed orbiter during re-entry (take-off is another matter entirely). Once the orbiter drops below a certain speed, a return to orbit is impossible anda very hot descent is inevitable. This "bail out" logic sounds like surviving an elevator crash by stepping out at the first floor to me.
Unless the crew module can gracefully decelerate to less than hypersonic speeds, exiting the compartment is instant death.
If they can move the circuitry of an active panel display from glass to flexible plastic, then they should be able to put the processor on the same flex material too. Back in 2002, they put a Z80 processor on glass. That Z80 had only 13,000 transistors and this roll-up display uses 85,000 so the feature count is not out of the question (the biggest hurdle is the transistor count for RAM).
This display tech would make a great wrist-wrapping PDA gauntlet. Rather than have to hand-hold the PDA/cellphone/MP3/video player beastie, an arm-conforming design would enable handsfree display. The only decision is whether to wear the display on the top of the forearm (risking damage to the display) or wearing it on the inside of the forearm (which seems a little less comfortable).
I do hope that WiMax features more robust encryption than does WiFi with WEP. Something tells me that service providers are not going to be too concerned with interception of their customer's packets (only theft of bandwidth). And even if WiMax is "secure," I'm sure that it will include a nice backdoor for government counter-freedom operations.
The original article alludes to using WiMax in licensed bands such as 2.5 to 2.7 GHz and, while another article suggests the potential for operation in a wide range of bands from 2 to 11 GHz (and early testing in unlicensed frequencies at 5.8 GHz). This suggests that these devices will initially be available in mutually incompatible consumer versions (unlicensed spectrum) and service provider versions (licensed spectrum).
I wonder what this will do for adoption because the volume on the RF components will be fragmented across multiple bands. I also wonder if people will create WiMax variants that interfere with WiFi by operating in the same frequency space.
If I was sending an embedded control computer to another planet, I would have chosen an OS with memory protection, not VxWorks.
Actually, they might have protected memory if they use VxWorks AE RTOS/Tornado Tools 3.0. Spirit uses VxWorks, but I don't know what version they used or when they had to commit to a particular version of VxWorks.
Also, as the article mentions, memory protection adds overhead and can affect real-time performance. Hard real-time software cannot afford to have a complex layered structure and lots of conditional code that adds unpredictable delays. For that reason, many really real-time applications run very close to the hardware (for better or for worse.)
Is it quite possible that NASA engineers simply have not mastered the art and science of designing hardware and software operable in the harshest of environments?
While I would never claim that NASA is perfect, I think you underestimate the both the engineering challenge of putting a rover on Mars and the impact of more conservative, get-it-right, policies.
Interplanetary missions are the hardest of all because the engineers never get to actually test the whole device under realistic conditions. Although they can test and analyze each subsystem under a variety of simulated or near-realistic conditions, they have no way of building a test rover, putting it in interplanetary space of months, having is aerobrake into a thin atmosphere, parachute in a thin atmosphere, and crashland at high speed, and then operate all its mechanical parts under dusty low G conditions.
Second, get-it-right == conservatism == greater cost == fewer missions == less experience. The last thing NASA should do is spend more money, take more time, and do fewer missions. The only way we will really learn how to operate in space is to go into space. I'm not saying that better engineering won't help, only that more experience (unfettered by excessive conservatism) is a crucial part of learning to operate on other planets.
CNN is reporting that spirit is self-rebooting 60 times a day. NASA suspects a hardware fault that is causing the processor to detect trouble and automatically reboot.
I think we can be reasonably certain that VeriSign (a) only runs as much of an OS on their root server as is absolutely necessary, and (b) only patches it when it's thoroughly tested and approved by people who know what they're working on.
I agree that Verisign is extremely careful in exactly the ways that you suggest. But I also remember the MCI Frame Relay outage of 1999 and Therac-25 Accidents. The point is that any regime of tests and analyses will only eliminate a percentage (admittedly a high percentage) of the potential fault conditions. And if you realize that Verisign is up against the combined smarts of intentional and unintentional black hats, then you realize that it is inevitable that someone outside the trusted circle will discover and use an exploit before Verisign and the internet community can find the fault and plug it.
What I meant by avoiding monoculture is that any mission critical system would do well to avoid a single implementation of a protocol, encryption algorithm, or OS. Instead, the system should employ more than one independent approach with discrepancy detection. That way, a foe would need to simultaneously spoof or hack a system in multiple ways to create an undetectable exploit.
Nothing is foolproof, but systems that rely on a single chain of logic, algorithm, or code are especially fool hardy.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely any thing that can self-replicate will be subject to the laws of evolution. So if some supposedly self-limiting replicator has any variants that can replicate faster (and pass on that variation), then that variant will become more prevalent. With each succeeding faster variant comes the potential for run-away population growth (to the limit of available resources). And any variant that can consume alternative resources (having consumed the initial set of resources ) will also become more populous. The result is the gray goo disaster that people fear.
Attempts to build in self-limiting features (replication delay clocks, kill switches, error-correcting DNA ROMs, special only-replicates with a special nutrient, etc.) will only present an obstacle to evolution, not an insurmountable barrier. You can add 9s to the probablity that gray goo won't happen, but you can never get to 100% if self-replication is permitted.
That said, you could also create a balanced nano-organism ecosystem with both predators and prey and boost human/animal/plant immune system to fight off nanoorganism attacks. (There is a reason that bacteria have never taken over the world.)
But I look forward to the day when we can develop space hardware the same incremental way we develop other things.
Absolutely! I look forward to a range of advancements such as lower cost access to space (personal fav is a space elevator), truely routine manned space operations, and better adaptive/autonomous robotic systems.
Yet I fear that the foreseeable future (next 20 years at least) will be dominated by rare and expensive space projects in which every lauch counts and every EVA-hour is carefully scripted and rehearsed.
Its a vicious loop, really. Because space is expensive, space projects are very carefully planned and executed. And because space projects are so carefully planned and executed, they are expensive.
20 minutes to mars and back? Light speed won't cut it when we talk about going anywhere farther than the moon.
Its more than just the long delay. Interplanetary networking is quite tricky due to the limited bandwidth, line-of-sight interruptions, the need to slew expensive high-gain antennas into precise scheduled pointing directions, as well as the massive levels of latency.
This type of careful planning and careful execution is useful for any endeavour with long or expensive feedback cycles. That includes terrestrial tasks like creating nuclear powerplants. Too many engineers have a hands-on, tweak-and-see hacker mentality, where projects like Mars rovers, nukes (and many other projects)need to work as planned right out of the box.
A former boss and engineer had a great story about his early job experience designing circuits for a guided missile. He showed his first circuit design to the boss and the boss noted all the little adjustable pots in the circuit. The boss simply said, "Are you going to fly with that missile to tweak all the pots?"
Although simulations, testing, and prototyping are great, truely great engineering just works because it was designed correctly from the beginning to just work.
so how then, would you USE account #'s or passwords.. to check my bank account balance, I must type in my acct# on their website. this information goes to them in packets
Those packets would encrypted (or should be encrypted!) on the computer so the cable/DSL modem would not filter them. This content filtering would only catch plain-text transmissions of valuable data. I suppose it is possible that malware keyboard logger or a backdoor-using blackhatter could use an encrypted connection, but that seems like more hassle on their part than they would bother with. Anybody breaking in through a plain http, ftp, telnet, etc connection would be detected when they tried to access any honeypot files.
It would be nice if these enhanced firmware systems provided some level of content filtering on outgoign packets. A simple test would see if key passwords, financial account numbers, or a honeypot file name were in any outgoign packets. If so, the modded device would kill the outgoing packet and log the destination.
If they are going to track us, why not make it fun. We can all get together and swap RFID tags. Some mischevious shoppers in Britain do that with their Tesco loyalty cards, so why not do it with RFID to. And if one person carries multiple tags from different people, then they can make it look like an entire flock of people are at the door.
The alternative is to wrap ourselves in tin-foil. Hmmm.. I wonder is metallic clothing will soon be fashionable. Maybe that's why all those SciFi movies have people in shiny suits - they had to worry about RFID tracking.
I do wonder if Nextel's "unlimited usage" is really intended for heavy traffic. I'd bet more that few users will get nastygrams such as those discussed previously. Between listening to internet radio, downloading files, talking on a VoIP connection, and web surfing Flash sites, some users will be able to suck down full bandwidth for most of the hours of the day.
They do make boosters that send a VGA signal long distances over standard ethernet-type cabling (its not over ethernet, per se, it just uses the same Cat5 cable stock). a Google search found many examples such as these ( I have no connections or experience with any of these companies, only a similar interest in connecting a monitor to a server in the other part of my house). A KVM (or hierarchical ganged bank of KVMs) at the monitoring end would let you select the display. The only downside is price, probably $200-$300 per monitored device (depending on distance, quantity, etc.)
Do we really need these extremophiles? Only if we have no other means of obtaining novel biological and pharmcological materials.
Biological and medical science has come a long way from the "lets eat this herb and see if it does anything" mode of experimentation. Genomics, proteomics, combinatorial chemistry, and high throughput screening are all means for engineering new chemicals rather than waiting to discover some organism that happens to produce some useful compound. Advances in simulation, protein folding, in silico pharmacodynamics & pharmacokinetics mean that scientists and engineers can design new chemical species that do what we need them to do.
My point is that although these extremophiles do offer an interesting source of innovation, they are not the only means for finding cures for cancer or novel materials. Although we may have much to learn from nature, we approach the day when no longer need this haphazard ancient dataset.
Soon we will design drugs, rather than find drugs.
Hacking your favorite computer into a Lego (TM) case, such as this Apple Powerbook should be the real test of a master builder.
If the captcha contained a background of additional instructions such as "To get your free account, please type in www.free-email.com/username/captchawords", then it would prevent the porn site/ spammer from seeing the results.
First of all, any vendor TCO study is going to be completely bullshit. However, there's a glimmer of truth in the Microsoft stuff:
Whether the report is biased or not, it would behove the Linux community to respond to the report with innovation, not just scorn. For example, improving ease-of-use on admin tools could create a drop in the cost of a Linux support people. Or better File and Print features (Novell/SuSE migth be doing this) could improve TCO in that arena.
My point is that fixing these perceived areas of "Linux inferiority" would make it even harder for Microsoft to create the next version of a biased report. If Open Source is smart, they will exploit these biased marketing reports to set future development priorities and fill any perceived gaps in functionality, ease-of-use, and TCO.
You might consider using wifinder.com or wi-fihotspotlist.com to find out where your next hotspot will be. Just make sure to copy down several locations for possible next destinations -- you'd hate to get to your next spot and discover it missing and have no way to access the internet to find a hotpsot.
I suspect that privacy is an artifact of a mass-urbanized society. Prior to the 1800s, people did not have that much privacy because they did not have anonymity. In small village, everyone knows everyone's business for better or for worse. Its only after people moved to a big city that they really could have privacy and learn to value it. At the same time, mass-media culture creates a monotypic image of the norm -- every day we are bombarded with messages of how we should be young, thin, driving a hot car and have cool dry underarms.
Culture plays a big role too. I remember reading about the Netherlands and the tendency for the Dutch to leave their curtains open. Closing your curtains (seeking privacy) was actually frowned upon because it was seen as suspicious.
It would be interesting to repeat this privacy study among different people: people in other countries, in small villages, in tribal indigenous cultures, etc. That way we could assess if the desire for privacy is universal or only an artifact of the current mass-media, mass-urban civilization.
From the article: The survivability study concluded relatively modest design changes might enable future crews to survive long enough to bail out.
I'm not sure how the crew can survive by "bailing out" of a doomed orbiter during re-entry (take-off is another matter entirely). Once the orbiter drops below a certain speed, a return to orbit is impossible anda very hot descent is inevitable. This "bail out" logic sounds like surviving an elevator crash by stepping out at the first floor to me.
Unless the crew module can gracefully decelerate to less than hypersonic speeds, exiting the compartment is instant death.
If they can move the circuitry of an active panel display from glass to flexible plastic, then they should be able to put the processor on the same flex material too. Back in 2002, they put a Z80 processor on glass. That Z80 had only 13,000 transistors and this roll-up display uses 85,000 so the feature count is not out of the question (the biggest hurdle is the transistor count for RAM).
This display tech would make a great wrist-wrapping PDA gauntlet. Rather than have to hand-hold the PDA/cellphone/MP3/video player beastie, an arm-conforming design would enable handsfree display. The only decision is whether to wear the display on the top of the forearm (risking damage to the display) or wearing it on the inside of the forearm (which seems a little less comfortable).
Seems like this is Linux's ultimate weapon of mass destruction because:
1. The virus makes M$ operating systems look bad.
2. The DDoS attack goes after every Linux lover's most hated target, SCO.
But I do feel sorry for the people forced to used Windows by PHBs or who are novice users that don't know better than to run e-mailed executables.
I do hope that WiMax features more robust encryption than does WiFi with WEP. Something tells me that service providers are not going to be too concerned with interception of their customer's packets (only theft of bandwidth). And even if WiMax is "secure," I'm sure that it will include a nice backdoor for government counter-freedom operations.
The original article alludes to using WiMax in licensed bands such as 2.5 to 2.7 GHz and, while another article suggests the potential for operation in a wide range of bands from 2 to 11 GHz (and early testing in unlicensed frequencies at 5.8 GHz). This suggests that these devices will initially be available in mutually incompatible consumer versions (unlicensed spectrum) and service provider versions (licensed spectrum).
I wonder what this will do for adoption because the volume on the RF components will be fragmented across multiple bands. I also wonder if people will create WiMax variants that interfere with WiFi by operating in the same frequency space.
If I was sending an embedded control computer to another planet, I would have chosen an OS with memory protection, not VxWorks.
Actually, they might have protected memory if they use VxWorks AE RTOS/Tornado Tools 3.0. Spirit uses VxWorks, but I don't know what version they used or when they had to commit to a particular version of VxWorks.
Also, as the article mentions, memory protection adds overhead and can affect real-time performance. Hard real-time software cannot afford to have a complex layered structure and lots of conditional code that adds unpredictable delays. For that reason, many really real-time applications run very close to the hardware (for better or for worse.)
Is it quite possible that NASA engineers simply have not mastered the art and science of designing hardware and software operable in the harshest of environments?
While I would never claim that NASA is perfect, I think you underestimate the both the engineering challenge of putting a rover on Mars and the impact of more conservative, get-it-right, policies.
Interplanetary missions are the hardest of all because the engineers never get to actually test the whole device under realistic conditions. Although they can test and analyze each subsystem under a variety of simulated or near-realistic conditions, they have no way of building a test rover, putting it in interplanetary space of months, having is aerobrake into a thin atmosphere, parachute in a thin atmosphere, and crashland at high speed, and then operate all its mechanical parts under dusty low G conditions.
Second, get-it-right == conservatism == greater cost == fewer missions == less experience. The last thing NASA should do is spend more money, take more time, and do fewer missions. The only way we will really learn how to operate in space is to go into space. I'm not saying that better engineering won't help, only that more experience (unfettered by excessive conservatism) is a crucial part of learning to operate on other planets.
CNN is reporting that spirit is self-rebooting 60 times a day. NASA suspects a hardware fault that is causing the processor to detect trouble and automatically reboot.
I think we can be reasonably certain that VeriSign (a) only runs as much of an OS on their root server as is absolutely necessary, and (b) only patches it when it's thoroughly tested and approved by people who know what they're working on.
I agree that Verisign is extremely careful in exactly the ways that you suggest. But I also remember the MCI Frame Relay outage of 1999 and Therac-25 Accidents. The point is that any regime of tests and analyses will only eliminate a percentage (admittedly a high percentage) of the potential fault conditions. And if you realize that Verisign is up against the combined smarts of intentional and unintentional black hats, then you realize that it is inevitable that someone outside the trusted circle will discover and use an exploit before Verisign and the internet community can find the fault and plug it.
What I meant by avoiding monoculture is that any mission critical system would do well to avoid a single implementation of a protocol, encryption algorithm, or OS. Instead, the system should employ more than one independent approach with discrepancy detection. That way, a foe would need to simultaneously spoof or hack a system in multiple ways to create an undetectable exploit.
Nothing is foolproof, but systems that rely on a single chain of logic, algorithm, or code are especially fool hardy.