I can only hope that their NOC has multiple fibers coming to the building and that those fibers aren't in the same trench.
The other potential source for a single-point of failure is the OS that the root server uses. If Verisign uses any kind of monoculture, they will not be as secure as we might hope. A hacker or botched OS patch could hose the thing.
The big database makers will probably include a random selection of fake entries in their databses. If your database is caught with copies of these faked entries, it proves that you did not compile the data yourself.
As far as safe level of copying of someone elses data, the original owner probably only needs to prove that they were somehow harmed by your copy, or that you took too much of their info, or that what you took constitutes too large a fraction of your work. And if you made any money on the copy, you are almost certainly infringing. At least that is my lay-person (not lawyer-person) understanding of infringement for traditional copyright.
A social network's attempts at exclusivity would seem to be at odds with scalability. Once the network exceeds some threshold then it is bound to contain mutually distrusted people connected by chain of trust. The problem is that trust is not fully transitive -- it is not true that if A trusts B and B trusts C, then A trusts C.
A more scalable approach would allow open enrollment and self-organizing clusters. Each joiner would become trusted within one or more loosely defined clusters of BOFs, while remaining untrusted or disliked by other BOFs. At a higher level, BOFs could even assign trust to other BOFs, with members partially inheriting the relative trust levels of the BOF(s) they belong to.
Membership-by-invitation creates an unfortunate hurdle to creating truely globe-spanning networks because it means you have to know someone to be permitted to know someone. Although intended to weed out the riff-raff, invitation-only policies probably do more to create obstacles for legitimate, but previously socially unconnected, potential members. A better post-joining filtration/sortation/cluster would let everyone find their respective community(s).
A truely scalable social network would admit and support gun-toting republicans, and enviro-liberal democrats, and Microsoft apologists, and Apple fanboys. A set of trust distance functions would ensure that each member stays within their respective BOF clusters.
SNIP... 8 years earlier I had my first LED watch. It Ate batteries but was the talk of the school.
My favourite watch had to be the one with a tritium capsule backlight..../SNIP
You bring back fond memories of my first digital watches -- a cheap battery-eating LED watch in the late 70s and a tritium-backlight Timex from around 1980.
I removed the tritium backlight capsule (which was plastic) and used it to read books at night while I was in the rain forest in Costa Rica. I do believe that the capsule did leak tritium very slowly because it lost more than half its brightness in less than 12 years. Fortunately, tritium emits such weak beta radiation that it is not too dangerous.
As usual, Wally World is asking others to innovate on their behalf, to their benefit, and asking the supplier to foot the bill. .
You assume that the supplier enjoys no benefits from this. But the supplier receives the same benefits as does Wal-Mart -- smoother supply chain operations with faster throughput, lower costs, and higher service quality. All that manual crosschecking of pallets and paperwork is an expensive waste of time for eveyone. If Wal-Mart saves money by automatically scanning everything that enters their premises, the supplier saves money by automatically scanning everything that leaves their premises. Its all about keeping track of stuff without spending a bunch of money.
Wal-Mart would never do this if they did not think it provided long-term cost-savings (and that includes any price increases that suppliers will be forced to pass on). Wal-Mart's mandate only forces suppliers to get off their butts and innovate. The only losers are competing retailers who refuse to adopt RFID and have to pass on the costs of their inefficiencies to consumers.
My favorite calculator watch was the Casio CFX-40 because it had a nice complement of scientific and hexadecimal functions. I was totally bummed when mine broke.:(
It would seem that documented flaws in an OS should automatically reduce the EAL rating of that OS. Otherwise the EAL process is just a paper-pushing exercise.
Currently, there are no viable means of prolonging the useful life of telecommunications satellites, resulting in the wasteful loss of valuable assets every year.
The problem is that a refueling mission would probably cost as much as a new satellite (not to mention reducing the fuel capacity of the orginal satellite by allocating precious mass budget to a refueling port and subsystems). Which is better: spending $250 million every 8 years to refuel an aging commsat (a mission that might bork the commsat anyway) or spending $250 million every 10 years to replace the commsat with a brand new one?
Until we find an ultra-cheap way to get to GEO, the commsats will continue to be replaced. Perhaps cheaper ion engines, with their high specific impulse, would enable longer-lived commsats.
Why not kill two birds with one stone (or keep two beatsies alive with one hack). Perhaps you have an ultracompact PC that needs cooling and a nice expansive fish tank that needs warming. So you build a sealed PC module that sits in the tank and makes both the fish and the CPU happy. A sealed cable runs from the tank to a breakout box. A passive convective heatsink in water could easily disappate the heat much more effectively than can air.
The rule for tank heaters is 4 W/gal, so a 200 W PC is perfect for warming a 50 gallon tank. A temperature sensor in the water would control the clock-speed -- underclocking if the fish got too hot. An occasional cleaning would keep algae from ruining the heat transfer coefficient.
Apparently they pulled this rather common scam of offering him a rediculously low amount ($10) for the domain. Then when the target flips out and says it's worth at least $xxx, they sue their asses for trying to profit off of a domain name.
I would think that the target of such a scam could defend the high value of the counteroffer in terms of the cost of rebranding (not profit). The cost of a domain name is much more than the out-of-pocket money for the registrar. Other "costs" for given up a domain name include:
1. Labor: It takes labor to change a domain name and all the materials associated with it. This include tasks such as: time spent findng a new domain name, redoing all the HTML in the site to change to a new domain; contacting all one's friends and business associates to inform them of the change; and reprinting business cards, letterhead, and marketing brochures.
2. Lost Revenues: In changing domain names (and possibly company names), some crucial business contacts become lost. When an old client tries to contact the person at their old e-mail addy, they get a bounce and figure the person is no longer available.
Although I don't know how much Mike Rowe used his domain in business, It would seem that $10k is on the low side for a true costs of a concerted rebranding effort.
I don't have the answers, but I strongly suspect they go in the direction of continuing education. A few years ago, most people couldn't spell "virus" (well, they probably still can't, but they at least know what it is.) Putting the spotlight on security holes and spam and and and for the average joe is what gets results, not locking shit down.
I agree that more computer users need to understand more about the powerful machines that they use. The current Internet's design makes it too easy for one person's maliciousness or unintentional behavior to affect all the computer they are connected to (and with the Internet, that all the computers in the world).
At the same time, we need better security tools that don't require so much education. I doubt that very many people want computer viruses or exploits on their machine. Unfortunately the current approach to security often requires that the user understand the configuraton of their machine, what all the various services & ports are for, etc. Faced with an alphabet soup of acronyms in the patch instructions, many people don't properly configure their machines. Plain english approaches would make it easy for granny to keep her computer safe without knowing the arcana of the operating system.
Just stare at the code or architecture diagram and have a recording of your computer reading the code aloud to you. By morning you should have it all debugged.
Plagarism is worse than simply deceiving the prof at some university. If someone hires these plagarists they are going to find out that they don't know crap because they faked their way through university.
Thus, any university that cares about its reputation would do well to ensure that its graduates have the knowledge and skills that the university claims they have. At some level, plagarism detectors are just a part of quality control for the education system.
Although a monoculture does incite malignant elements to concentrate their malware exploits on a single popular platofrm, a polyculture is not sufficient for security. The problem is the high fanout of the internet and the extremely low cost of communications.
High fanout occurs because every machine is conected to every other machine and so many people have such large e-mail address databases. The low cost of transmission of infectious messages means that an infected computer can readily attempt to contact a very large number of other machines. Even if only a minority of the machines are suseptible, that minority is quickly found by exploits that blast out thousands of infectious messages. This enables infections to spread far and wide in a short period of time.
At best, polyculture slows the rate of infection and bounds the extent of the infection, but cannot prevent an infection for saturating the population of susceptable computers.
Where polyculture could really provide benefits is if all computers were multi-booting with parallel alternative OS versions. If one running version of the OS got sick, the other OSes would detect the problem and fill-in for the ailing OS.
Most people are wrong in when they hear P2P, they think filesharing. A lot of games use P2P techniques to reduce latency.......
If every packet has to go through the server, you double the latency.
Although I usually do not respond to AC posts, this one is very good. There are other insanely useful applications of P2P. IM and VoIP are both obvious potential users of P2P technologies. Skype was even created by Kazaa. If P2P supporters can argue that outlawing P2P is like outlawing the telephone, then maybe Congress will back off or at least craft very narrow legislation that permits many non-problematic uses of P2P.
You raise some very good points, Eivind, the question is, will Congress buy them?
If I play devils-advocate (== Congress' advocate), this is how I would respond to your points, were I a legislative control freak (which I am not).
5: Argue that tools that can, and are infact, be used for both lawful and unlawful purposes should not themselves be illegal.
Good point. But such tools usually have some redeeming quality to them. What can p2p do besides share music files and porn?
6: Argue that general purpose computers is a tool much to useful to society to consider giving them up, or locking them away with the keys in the hands of a elite few, over an issue as trivial as some downloaded music-files.
Very true, but disabling/outlawing p2p does not prevent me from using a computer for running my business, surfing the web, corresponding by email, playing games, etc.
7: Continue to press the point that copyrigth-law is supposed to serve a *purpose*, the creation of science and the useful arts. If it ain't serving this purpose, it's unconstitutional and harmful. Retroactively extending copyrigths for works where the author is 50 years dead does nothing to stimulate science or the useful acts.
As good as this point is, I suspect that this Congressional roundtable will argue that it is out of scope.
8: Continue to point out that the music-cartel is in trouble because they're providing a service noone really needs or wants anymore. Sure, that's putting it a bit on the point, but fact is, neither I as a producer of music, nor I as a consumer have any interest in supporting those things 90% of the cash goes to when I purchase a CD.
Again, a good point but I suspect that Congress will not listen to this arguement and that making this arguement will only alienate the law makers and hasten the advent of nasty regulations.
9: Try to get politicians to understand that not everything which is *disliked* should be *illegal*. The rigth solution to the "problem" of kids looking for porn in p-2-p space and finding it is *gasp* parents who actually give a fuck. (How is p2p worse for youngsters than thehun.net by the way ? Should we shut down the www too ?)
Very true, but can we show Congress that P2P is as useful as the web in areas beside media file sharing and porn?
10: Get an actually democratic system in the US. It used to be every man one vote, these days it's more like every dollar one vote. There's more p2p users in the USA than there are people who voted for Bush....
Now this is a best idea of the bunch. Can the P2P community rally these people to create a strong special interest group? Perhaps we need a "Million File Sharers March" in Washington to show that P2P users are a political force to be reckoned with.
As much as I, personally, agree with your suggestions, I suspect that they will not further the cause of P2P with Congress (with the strong exception of option 10). The challenge for P2P is finding arguments and tactics that work within the flawed system that is Congress.
From the article, it would seem that Congress sees two problems with P2P:
1. "Illegal" distribution of copyrighted material
2. Exposure of children to pornographic materials
At this point it would behoove the P2P community to do soemthing to forestall Draconian legislation that destroys P2P. I see four options, but only 2 effective options:
1. Argue that these two "problems" don't happen (not going to work)
2. Argue that these two "problems" aren't wrong (not going to work)
3. Fix these problems themselves (probably what Congress wants)
4. Articulating the benefits of P2P (may help delay regulation while working on option 3)
I can't wait for this technology to appear in computers. HD DVD-RW will be great for backing up large IDE disks. The only thing that sucks is the 36.55 Mbps data rate. I guess I'll have to wait for 2X or 4X versions of the drive.
They also wish to use nets like these to charge people for each mile driven. And the price will vary depending on the time of day
Yes! An example is this proposed one. And car insurance by the mile exists right now. I, too, have heard of car insurance schemes that would charge different rates for driving at different times of day(but this is the only link I found on it.)
Tracking vehicles is a great way to detect traffic jams. If the vehicles moving past one sensor do not reach the next sensor in a reasonable amount of time, you know you have a problem. The linked research suggests that tracking vehicles through the network enables a faster detection time for problems (faster than waiting for the traffic to clog and backup to where the sensor is located.)
Some of the most profound discoveries in science are due to pure serindipity (ex; penicillin.)
Not so. If you research the history of Fleming, you will discover that he was deliberately looking for antibiotics, deliberately searching for new speciesof microorganism, and deliberately studying the interactions of micro-organisms. For example, he studied the interactions of different molds and bacteria by creating "germ paintings" by using different strains to create different colors. Although stories suggest that he may have "accidentally" found the mold that created penicillin, he deliberately left petri dishes uncovered in order to catch new and potentially interesting species. And it was only his years of training and his intentions to find an antibiotic that enabled him to recognize penicillin for what it was.
Although chance played a role, I would hardly call Fleming's deliberate search for new antibiotics as a serendipitous discovery. And if you really delve into the histories of other inventors, you will often find similar stories in which the inventor took very deliberate steps to create and exploit so-called serendipity.
there's also no way you could fly it in a building to destroy said building
Maglev can't crash into anything except the train station or another train. Perhaps remote control would work, assuming that terrorists could never take over or hack into the control center......
When will this robot find some interesting theory and experimental proof that qualifies it for a Nobel prize? (Or would qualify it for the prize if a human had done the same work?)
This invention demonstrates the full power of computers to mass-produce logical human thought processes. Although it may be very hard to reduce the mental processes behind creating theories and experiments to a set of algorithmic processes, once done the possibilities are endless. A robotic scientist can be mass produced for far less money and in far less time than it takes to grow a new Ph.D person.
Software is, in my opinion, a more powerful invention than was writing. While writing encodes and distributes static thoughts, software encodes and distributes the dynamic thought processes.
Slashdot Mirror
I can only hope that their NOC has multiple fibers coming to the building and that those fibers aren't in the same trench.
The other potential source for a single-point of failure is the OS that the root server uses. If Verisign uses any kind of monoculture, they will not be as secure as we might hope. A hacker or botched OS patch could hose the thing.
The big database makers will probably include a random selection of fake entries in their databses. If your database is caught with copies of these faked entries, it proves that you did not compile the data yourself.
As far as safe level of copying of someone elses data, the original owner probably only needs to prove that they were somehow harmed by your copy, or that you took too much of their info, or that what you took constitutes too large a fraction of your work. And if you made any money on the copy, you are almost certainly infringing. At least that is my lay-person (not lawyer-person) understanding of infringement for traditional copyright.
I'm surprised that Google doesn't create more plays on its own name for various functions. Besides the Froogle shopping site that could have:
Whoogle -- social networks
Oogle -- porn
Doogle -- jobs
Zoogle -- info on animals
Choogle -- food, recipes, and restaurants
A social network's attempts at exclusivity would seem to be at odds with scalability. Once the network exceeds some threshold then it is bound to contain mutually distrusted people connected by chain of trust. The problem is that trust is not fully transitive -- it is not true that if A trusts B and B trusts C, then A trusts C.
A more scalable approach would allow open enrollment and self-organizing clusters. Each joiner would become trusted within one or more loosely defined clusters of BOFs, while remaining untrusted or disliked by other BOFs. At a higher level, BOFs could even assign trust to other BOFs, with members partially inheriting the relative trust levels of the BOF(s) they belong to.
Membership-by-invitation creates an unfortunate hurdle to creating truely globe-spanning networks because it means you have to know someone to be permitted to know someone. Although intended to weed out the riff-raff, invitation-only policies probably do more to create obstacles for legitimate, but previously socially unconnected, potential members. A better post-joining filtration/sortation/cluster would let everyone find their respective community(s).
A truely scalable social network would admit and support gun-toting republicans, and enviro-liberal democrats, and Microsoft apologists, and Apple fanboys. A set of trust distance functions would ensure that each member stays within their respective BOF clusters.
SNIP... 8 years earlier I had my first LED watch. It Ate batteries but was the talk of the school.
.../SNIP
My favourite watch had to be the one with a tritium capsule backlight.
You bring back fond memories of my first digital watches -- a cheap battery-eating LED watch in the late 70s and a tritium-backlight Timex from around 1980.
I removed the tritium backlight capsule (which was plastic) and used it to read books at night while I was in the rain forest in Costa Rica. I do believe that the capsule did leak tritium very slowly because it lost more than half its brightness in less than 12 years. Fortunately, tritium emits such weak beta radiation that it is not too dangerous.
As usual, Wally World is asking others to innovate on their behalf, to their benefit, and asking the supplier to foot the bill. .
You assume that the supplier enjoys no benefits from this. But the supplier receives the same benefits as does Wal-Mart -- smoother supply chain operations with faster throughput, lower costs, and higher service quality. All that manual crosschecking of pallets and paperwork is an expensive waste of time for eveyone. If Wal-Mart saves money by automatically scanning everything that enters their premises, the supplier saves money by automatically scanning everything that leaves their premises. Its all about keeping track of stuff without spending a bunch of money.
Wal-Mart would never do this if they did not think it provided long-term cost-savings (and that includes any price increases that suppliers will be forced to pass on). Wal-Mart's mandate only forces suppliers to get off their butts and innovate. The only losers are competing retailers who refuse to adopt RFID and have to pass on the costs of their inefficiencies to consumers.
My favorite calculator watch was the Casio CFX-40 because it had a nice complement of scientific and hexadecimal functions. I was totally bummed when mine broke. :(
It would seem that documented flaws in an OS should automatically reduce the EAL rating of that OS. Otherwise the EAL process is just a paper-pushing exercise.
I wonder if more images will incorporate these anticounterfeiting circles? CD covers, web photos, and books could all incorporate this simple design.
What happens if someone puts the circle design on their webpage images? Does this prevent printing, copying, etc. web images?
Circle mania could get very interesting.
Currently, there are no viable means of prolonging the useful life of telecommunications satellites, resulting in the wasteful loss of valuable assets every year.
The problem is that a refueling mission would probably cost as much as a new satellite (not to mention reducing the fuel capacity of the orginal satellite by allocating precious mass budget to a refueling port and subsystems). Which is better: spending $250 million every 8 years to refuel an aging commsat (a mission that might bork the commsat anyway) or spending $250 million every 10 years to replace the commsat with a brand new one?
Until we find an ultra-cheap way to get to GEO, the commsats will continue to be replaced. Perhaps cheaper ion engines, with their high specific impulse, would enable longer-lived commsats.
Why not kill two birds with one stone (or keep two beatsies alive with one hack). Perhaps you have an ultracompact PC that needs cooling and a nice expansive fish tank that needs warming. So you build a sealed PC module that sits in the tank and makes both the fish and the CPU happy. A sealed cable runs from the tank to a breakout box. A passive convective heatsink in water could easily disappate the heat much more effectively than can air.
The rule for tank heaters is 4 W/gal, so a 200 W PC is perfect for warming a 50 gallon tank. A temperature sensor in the water would control the clock-speed -- underclocking if the fish got too hot. An occasional cleaning would keep algae from ruining the heat transfer coefficient.
Apparently they pulled this rather common scam of offering him a rediculously low amount ($10) for the domain. Then when the target flips out and says it's worth at least $xxx, they sue their asses for trying to profit off of a domain name.
I would think that the target of such a scam could defend the high value of the counteroffer in terms of the cost of rebranding (not profit). The cost of a domain name is much more than the out-of-pocket money for the registrar. Other "costs" for given up a domain name include:
1. Labor: It takes labor to change a domain name and all the materials associated with it. This include tasks such as: time spent findng a new domain name, redoing all the HTML in the site to change to a new domain; contacting all one's friends and business associates to inform them of the change; and reprinting business cards, letterhead, and marketing brochures.
2. Lost Revenues: In changing domain names (and possibly company names), some crucial business contacts become lost. When an old client tries to contact the person at their old e-mail addy, they get a bounce and figure the person is no longer available.
Although I don't know how much Mike Rowe used his domain in business, It would seem that $10k is on the low side for a true costs of a concerted rebranding effort.
I don't have the answers, but I strongly suspect they go in the direction of continuing education. A few years ago, most people couldn't spell "virus" (well, they probably still can't, but they at least know what it is.) Putting the spotlight on security holes and spam and and and for the average joe is what gets results, not locking shit down.
I agree that more computer users need to understand more about the powerful machines that they use. The current Internet's design makes it too easy for one person's maliciousness or unintentional behavior to affect all the computer they are connected to (and with the Internet, that all the computers in the world).
At the same time, we need better security tools that don't require so much education. I doubt that very many people want computer viruses or exploits on their machine. Unfortunately the current approach to security often requires that the user understand the configuraton of their machine, what all the various services & ports are for, etc. Faced with an alphabet soup of acronyms in the patch instructions, many people don't properly configure their machines. Plain english approaches would make it easy for granny to keep her computer safe without knowing the arcana of the operating system.
Just stare at the code or architecture diagram and have a recording of your computer reading the code aloud to you. By morning you should have it all debugged.
Plagarism is worse than simply deceiving the prof at some university. If someone hires these plagarists they are going to find out that they don't know crap because they faked their way through university.
Thus, any university that cares about its reputation would do well to ensure that its graduates have the knowledge and skills that the university claims they have. At some level, plagarism detectors are just a part of quality control for the education system.
Although a monoculture does incite malignant elements to concentrate their malware exploits on a single popular platofrm, a polyculture is not sufficient for security. The problem is the high fanout of the internet and the extremely low cost of communications.
High fanout occurs because every machine is conected to every other machine and so many people have such large e-mail address databases. The low cost of transmission of infectious messages means that an infected computer can readily attempt to contact a very large number of other machines. Even if only a minority of the machines are suseptible, that minority is quickly found by exploits that blast out thousands of infectious messages. This enables infections to spread far and wide in a short period of time.
At best, polyculture slows the rate of infection and bounds the extent of the infection, but cannot prevent an infection for saturating the population of susceptable computers.
Where polyculture could really provide benefits is if all computers were multi-booting with parallel alternative OS versions. If one running version of the OS got sick, the other OSes would detect the problem and fill-in for the ailing OS.
Most people are wrong in when they hear P2P, they think filesharing. A lot of games use P2P techniques to reduce latency. ......
If every packet has to go through the server, you double the latency.
Although I usually do not respond to AC posts, this one is very good. There are other insanely useful applications of P2P. IM and VoIP are both obvious potential users of P2P technologies. Skype was even created by Kazaa. If P2P supporters can argue that outlawing P2P is like outlawing the telephone, then maybe Congress will back off or at least craft very narrow legislation that permits many non-problematic uses of P2P.
You raise some very good points, Eivind, the question is, will Congress buy them?
If I play devils-advocate (== Congress' advocate), this is how I would respond to your points, were I a legislative control freak (which I am not).
5: Argue that tools that can, and are infact, be used for both lawful and unlawful purposes should not themselves be illegal.
Good point. But such tools usually have some redeeming quality to them. What can p2p do besides share music files and porn?
6: Argue that general purpose computers is a tool much to useful to society to consider giving them up, or locking them away with the keys in the hands of a elite few, over an issue as trivial as some downloaded music-files.
Very true, but disabling/outlawing p2p does not prevent me from using a computer for running my business, surfing the web, corresponding by email, playing games, etc.
7: Continue to press the point that copyrigth-law is supposed to serve a *purpose*, the creation of science and the useful arts. If it ain't serving this purpose, it's unconstitutional and harmful. Retroactively extending copyrigths for works where the author is 50 years dead does nothing to stimulate science or the useful acts.
As good as this point is, I suspect that this Congressional roundtable will argue that it is out of scope.
8: Continue to point out that the music-cartel is in trouble because they're providing a service noone really needs or wants anymore. Sure, that's putting it a bit on the point, but fact is, neither I as a producer of music, nor I as a consumer have any interest in supporting those things 90% of the cash goes to when I purchase a CD.
Again, a good point but I suspect that Congress will not listen to this arguement and that making this arguement will only alienate the law makers and hasten the advent of nasty regulations.
9: Try to get politicians to understand that not everything which is *disliked* should be *illegal*. The rigth solution to the "problem" of kids looking for porn in p-2-p space and finding it is *gasp* parents who actually give a fuck. (How is p2p worse for youngsters than thehun.net by the way ? Should we shut down the www too ?)
Very true, but can we show Congress that P2P is as useful as the web in areas beside media file sharing and porn?
10: Get an actually democratic system in the US. It used to be every man one vote, these days it's more like every dollar one vote. There's more p2p users in the USA than there are people who voted for Bush....
Now this is a best idea of the bunch. Can the P2P community rally these people to create a strong special interest group? Perhaps we need a "Million File Sharers March" in Washington to show that P2P users are a political force to be reckoned with.
As much as I, personally, agree with your suggestions, I suspect that they will not further the cause of P2P with Congress (with the strong exception of option 10). The challenge for P2P is finding arguments and tactics that work within the flawed system that is Congress.
From the article, it would seem that Congress sees two problems with P2P:
1. "Illegal" distribution of copyrighted material
2. Exposure of children to pornographic materials
At this point it would behoove the P2P community to do soemthing to forestall Draconian legislation that destroys P2P. I see four options, but only 2 effective options:
1. Argue that these two "problems" don't happen (not going to work)
2. Argue that these two "problems" aren't wrong (not going to work)
3. Fix these problems themselves (probably what Congress wants)
4. Articulating the benefits of P2P (may help delay regulation while working on option 3)
Any other ideas out there?
I can't wait for this technology to appear in computers. HD DVD-RW will be great for backing up large IDE disks. The only thing that sucks is the 36.55 Mbps data rate. I guess I'll have to wait for 2X or 4X versions of the drive.
They also wish to use nets like these to charge people for each mile driven. And the price will vary depending on the time of day
Yes! An example is this proposed one. And car insurance by the mile exists right now. I, too, have heard of car insurance schemes that would charge different rates for driving at different times of day(but this is the only link I found on it.)
Tracking vehicles is a great way to detect traffic jams. If the vehicles moving past one sensor do not reach the next sensor in a reasonable amount of time, you know you have a problem. The linked research suggests that tracking vehicles through the network enables a faster detection time for problems (faster than waiting for the traffic to clog and backup to where the sensor is located.)
Some of the most profound discoveries in science are due to pure serindipity (ex; penicillin.)
Not so. If you research the history of Fleming, you will discover that he was deliberately looking for antibiotics, deliberately searching for new speciesof microorganism, and deliberately studying the interactions of micro-organisms. For example, he studied the interactions of different molds and bacteria by creating "germ paintings" by using different strains to create different colors. Although stories suggest that he may have "accidentally" found the mold that created penicillin, he deliberately left petri dishes uncovered in order to catch new and potentially interesting species. And it was only his years of training and his intentions to find an antibiotic that enabled him to recognize penicillin for what it was.
Although chance played a role, I would hardly call Fleming's deliberate search for new antibiotics as a serendipitous discovery. And if you really delve into the histories of other inventors, you will often find similar stories in which the inventor took very deliberate steps to create and exploit so-called serendipity.
there's also no way you could fly it in a building to destroy said building
Maglev can't crash into anything except the train station or another train. Perhaps remote control would work, assuming that terrorists could never take over or hack into the control center......
When will this robot find some interesting theory and experimental proof that qualifies it for a Nobel prize? (Or would qualify it for the prize if a human had done the same work?)
This invention demonstrates the full power of computers to mass-produce logical human thought processes. Although it may be very hard to reduce the mental processes behind creating theories and experiments to a set of algorithmic processes, once done the possibilities are endless. A robotic scientist can be mass produced for far less money and in far less time than it takes to grow a new Ph.D person.
Software is, in my opinion, a more powerful invention than was writing. While writing encodes and distributes static thoughts, software encodes and distributes the dynamic thought processes.