As long as the ocean is theoretically infinitely deep, the cargo carrying capacity is also theoretically infinite, it will simply sink until it becomes bouyant.
The structural requirements of a vacuum are much greater than helium. The entire structure goes into compression and bending when in a vacuum, meaning it will need to be extremely strong in order to resist bending. This is a bit like sucking the air out of a 2 liter pop bottle, it will collapse easily, and the pop bottle will need to be substituted with a steel canteen in order to keep its form. Unfortunately, this kind of structure is heavy, and in terms of air ships are extremely inneficient.
A regular blimp inflates, so the forces on the skin are entirely in tension, the only bending forces are caused by loads the ship is carrying and more importantly, sudden wind gusts which could tear a weak ship apart. Structurally speaking, this is vastly more efficient and completely eliminates bending due to a vacuum, and the tensile force alone in the skin is often enough to provide a stiff but flexible frame, just like a ballon once inflated keeps its shape even under tremendous strain. It is a very resiliant structure.
There are two huge problems that have always existed with airships, and fuel is not one of them. The first problem is landing the craft. They have a tendency to blow around with even slight gusts of wind, and if anything happens like a downdraft, they can get smashed into the ground. The second problem is weather related. In violent weather, the thin skin on these ships can get torn easily. The larger the craft, generally speaking, the bigger the problems. This is not to say these problems are inherently unsolvable, but why bother using zero fuel when fuel already will cost next to nothing if it uses solar power or fuel cells.
I'm just curious. The PaveLo helicopter costs $100 million, and is a good scout and can hold 12 soldiers, and the gun points out the rear where the enemy is in today's urban war. The Comanche costs $60 million, and is about equally armed and can scout but can't hold any troops. Why not use the one you know works and can carry soldiers? If you need rockets, add rockets. Who needs 'stealth' when the guy below is eyeballing you with an RPG or an Ak-74. Why not go with survivability and mini guns instead of zero radar signature? This is all the more true when the nature of combat is going to be sneaking around with special forces and lightly armed troops in urban areas where you can't used bombs or rockets. If the problem is tanks, buildings or vehicles, we have smartbombs and airplane launched missiles for them.
Although, I have to say, a large stealth helicopter that could carry troops would useful. You could fly an invisible army into the heart of the enemy. If I were trying to keep the development of such a craft secret, this is how I would do it: start a program, do the research, then cancel the program, then go into top secret production on the side. Who would know?
In my experience, most people are respectful of women online and don't discriminate. There are a few obnoxious, racist, bigots, cheaters out there, but they are a minority. I have seen clans of all sorts; black clans, white clans, kiddy clans, Texan clans, even gay clans (although they are usually trolls). But I have never met any women who would enjoy playing 6 hours a day, 7 days a week or have played 18 hours without stopping in order to perfect their skills and become the undisputed master of the world. The men also outnumber women at least 10:1 and are likely to have a much deeper talent pool of naturally gifted players. If I had to guess, women shooter fanatics are probably outnumbered 100:1, and so they aren't represented in the same way as men.
I wasn't aware of any these groups banned women from competing. If thats true they should be boycotted. I see no reason to keep women out. I suspect the real reason there aren't as many women in the top echelons of the shooter world is because there aren't many of them out there to begin with.
I don't object to the researchers being kept on. From what I have seen, the Information Awareness office that was shut down did some good work. We need 'information awareness', we need ways to automate looking through all the crap out there to find out what is useful and what isn't. The problem seems to be that some of these people seem willing to do anything to get that information, and I don't mean the researchers, I mean the spooks and the right wingers.
The irony is that this tool would be much more useful and effective if they knew which way to point it. Rather than blanketing every bit of data everywhere, why not send in spies, get a vague idea who may be involved and then focus on that group rather than wasting resources everywhere. Go from 6 billion targets to 1 million or so and your odds go way up. It may be old fashioned, but that method got us through the Cold War and I don't understand why it can't work for the 'War on Terror'(which is a misnomer but I won't get into that). We need decent human intelligence. Without decent human intelligence all of these fancy computers will be next to useless, which is our current predicament. Information is useless without knowledge.
And as for the people who are getting all freaked out by the government, especially on this geeky forum, it is the powermongers/wannabe dictators that should be afraid of us. Whenever I imagine a worst case scenario, where fascists take over, I imagine what I would do to fight back. Theoretically, I know how to shut the whole system down: communications, telephone, internet, power, transportation et cetera. Knowledge is power. But I believe that most of the people who run the national security apparatus are patriots who believe in liberty. I find it difficult to believe they would stoop to dictatorship. But if they do go too far, I'm not afraid of them, and they had better fear me. If anyone truly believs our liberty is being undermined, it is their duty to stand up and fight...anyone???
Take a 5 pound rod of steel. Get it going about 20000 mph. It will do the same damage as a small rocket. The strenght of this weapon isn't its explosive power, it is its ability to be deployed anywhere worldwide at the drop of a hat. Yo will be able to watch with your spy sattelite until the enemy comes outside, then you can drop the rod from orbit in only a few seconds. It will be a weapon that will always be on standby.
This brings up a second point, this could start an arms race. Countries like China and Russia won't like this. So they will build nukes to launch into orbit to take out our sattelites. The will build hunter killer mini sattelites to kill our sattelites. They may also build weapons similar to ours, able to strike us at any time. They may build jamming technology and put it on the world market to counter our threat.
The weaponization of space is a huge deal. Perhaps you missed it in the news, but just the other day Russia committed to building nukes which can get through our missile defense. They are already testing this system.
That was only to shoot down ICBM's. This is for active strike capability, anywhere in the world in 'seconds'. It is a sword that can be held over the entire world, ready to chop at any second.
An article against weaponization. This could well start an arms race and create an unstable environment where a 'first strike' by a weaker enemy becomes a risk.
I am not so much interested in the Hollywood vision of this, although Ice-T deserved an Oscar for his performance. What I think is interesting is to think about the limits of our brains and how this could be used to expand consciousness.
I think it would be interesting to understand how a neural interface would 'feel'. What would a process based in ones and zeros feel like? How would the brain adapt to take advantage of the new processing capability? Would we be able to project our consciousness outside of our body in some kind of digital plenum (that may not be a visual experience at all, it could be an entirely abstract experience like blind person contemplating numbers or language). Would we be enabled to 'see' new phenomena if we integrate a chip into the visual cortex (we could hook our brain up to a radio telescope and see the entire electormagnetic spectrum)? What color would ultra-violet be if it became a part of the visual spectrum or is the brain incapable of seeing a color that is as yet unimagined? What would it be like to 'smell' or 'touch' light or gravity or computer processes. Would it be possible to add entirely new senses or reasoning structures to the mind. Could we augment our perception to allow us to be cognisent of additional dimensional properties in addition to the 3 dimenstion we can see now. Would our bodies ultimately be relevant to our consciousness or could this technology allow us to be unhinged from our physical being, what would that mean for religion and philosophy? Could a person be in more than one place at once? Would it be possible to integrate two people into one or transfer one person into another, what would that do to 'individuality' and 'memory'.
Darpa is getting near zero cash for this...a few hundred thousand in a military budget of $400 billion. DARPA is providing huge value, you should look at some of the projects that DARPA has finished. There is one project that won't help with suicide bombers too, they made a networking program to link computer systems in a robust way in the event of a nuclear strike, a little thing called the INTERNET.
The air force uses them too on long missions. They call them 'go pills'. Some pilots refused to take them and were pulled from active duty. Some people say they impair judgement. If my memory serves me correctly, the pilots who bombed a Canadian training excercise were on 'go pills' at the time, basically hopped up on speed.
Page 6 -
Brain Machine Interfaces - Beyond acting on thoughts to having thoughts act.
Enhanced Human Performance - Beyond frailties of life to super physiological performance.
Lets be clear on one point. This has nothing to do with copyright. SCO is not claiming to own copyright on this code. IBM clearly owns the copyright to this code beyond a shadow of a doubt. According the their *contract*, SCO is claiming that IBM does not have rights to distribute this code because IBM wrote it originally for use with AIX. They are claiming that anything IBM ever used with AIX belongs to SCO. That is stupid beyond belief in addition to having absolutely nothing to do with copyright.
I think that within 100 years English will be the primary language of everybody.
In 100 years there may be a significant difference between 'English' and 'American'. We would do well to remember that English is the amalgamation of French, German, Latin, Greek, Celtic and other influences. It is a polyglot language. English is not preciously maintained like the French is and has significant drift. In a hundred years 'English' may be an entire class of languages.
True, they are doing research for the military, but this will trickle down to civilian applications, as the jet engine did, as micro-electronics did. Darpanet was the precursor to the Internet, originally designed as a redundant communications system that would survive a nuclear strike. Thats right, it was Darpa, not Al Gore, that invented the internet. I am a big fan of Darpa (except for the Total Information Awareness program). They do really cool stuff. If you haven't been to their web page yet, I am not sure you can call yourself a geek. They have some really cool stuff ranging from mind/machine interfaces, super soldier exoskeleton, stim-paks and "health" (almost like video game power ups for soldiers), super laser beams, and mini fuel cells. The goal of Darpa is to find 'the next big thing'.
The true killing fields type technology is done by other labs. Super computers go to the NSA; Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore and others get Nukes (no Sandia jokes allowed, THEY WILL FIND YOU and send you to Gitmo); JPL does rockets; I don't want to think about the CIA Science Directorate without wearing my tinfoil hat. US Space Command is researching orbital weaponry able to strike worldwide in seconds(don't bother going to their web page, it has been scrubbed). The people at Darpa are the dreamers, free to think up the wildest, coolest stuff that is one step short of science fiction. Scientists usually get one or 2 year fellowships to do their work and then go back to academia or wherever they came from. their budgets are tiny and based on testing theories and finding proof of concepts (like can a robot drive itself 200 miles in rugged terrain quickly). Their work is largely free of the dark side of the force! Darpa rocks! If there is any branch of the government that is 'geekcool', it is Darpa.
Thats true, it isn't cost effective yet. But I think the extraction method in the article has some promise in making it more cost effective and offers a new way to use it. And it certainly doesn't have the environmental effects crude oil does. Its not perfect, but what is? I guess I'm a bit biased being a boy from the farm.
The syntax of all mainstream programming languages is rather esoteric. Mathematicians, who feel comfortable with purely abstract syntax, spend years of intense study mastering certain skills. But unlike mathematicians, programmers are taught to think not in terms of absolute proof, but in terms of working metaphors. To understand how a system works, a programmer doesn't build a system of mathematical equations, but comes up with real-life metaphor correctness which she or he can "feel" as a human being. Programmers are "average" folks; they have to be, since programming is a profession of millions of people, many without college degrees. Esoteric software doesn't scale to millions, not in people, and not in lines of code.
In the article, her solution to error is to increase the tolerance for error, making direct mistakes unlikely or impossible because there is plenty of 'slop' in the system and you can't get a wrong answer. Theoretically, this lowers precision and increases overhead of the system. Her solution to the difficulty in understanding programming is making it so any idiot can understand it.
To make an analogy, a programmer is like a bucket. Her solution to filling a bucket (writing code) is to submerge it inside a larger pool. In that situation, any old bucket will do, the bucket will always be full when placed in a pool; but you will then have to carry the entire pool if you want it to move. The question then becomes how much you can carry, not the performance of the bucket.
She may well be right about intuitive programming, being easier to use, and that making programming more like regular language with intuitive syntax could be beneficial (more like programming a Star Trek AI computer than what we have now). But this would also shift the nature of the problem from design and architecture to performance and underlying stability issues. Any fool could write code without knowing how it worked. Some shortcuts may be appropriate in certain cases, but to rely on these kinds of methodologies in critical situations could lead to disaster and has a built in unreliability factor. If some company thinks they can buy this system and then expect bullet proof security, reliability and high performance, they are probably in for a rude awakening. They should expect 'good enough' performance, which is what they are getting already.
The only way to do exceptionally good work in a complex situation is to have the knowledge and experience for what you are doing at all levels and the ability to execute. Allowing programmers to be ignorant of how a computer works doesn't seem like a solution to me. The real problem with crappy software is companies that don't care and consumers who don't know any better.
They distill it from Corn. All around the corn belt you will see these places. Usually by a rail line in the absolute middle of nowhere. It will be a stack belching putrid white smoke next to a small/medium sized elevator and some kind of fermenting building. This is the reason most Midwestern states are getting ethanol subsidies, it is to provide a third market for farmers to send corn apart from food and animal feed. Here in the Midwest it is cheaper to burn corn than natural gas, so this could be a decent way to get clean energy.
I wonder if it is possible to write a program which creates a comparison image with some kind of reverse compiler, that takes the NT/2000code, and somehow distills it to something which can be used to check similarities and unique sequences and events, perhaps using a graphical picture, a derived fractal geometry, DNA/fingerpring like process identification. It would be effective and useful if you could audit things in multiple ways quickly and without being exposed to actual lines of code and doing so in an automated way. Ideally, this program would be administered by a neutral third party, who could do a review if anything came up by searching the patent office and verifying copyrights somehow. You could also know quickly where you might have an IP problem. In an ideal world, you could just do a Google search for things similar to what you are doing, and instantly be made aware that you were violating a patent or were stepping on a copyright.
Yah, but what if you don't contribute to Linux and are interested in looking 'for fun'. How can they track you? The FBI Carnivore system? How will they know you have the code? Answer: They can't track you 99.9% of the time. I will bet you a $1 that all major corporations already have a copy of this and are intently studying it in secret to see how it works and if there is anything they can use to sue M$. The comments alone would be interesting reading.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as the ocean is theoretically infinitely deep, the cargo carrying capacity is also theoretically infinite, it will simply sink until it becomes bouyant.
The structural requirements of a vacuum are much greater than helium. The entire structure goes into compression and bending when in a vacuum, meaning it will need to be extremely strong in order to resist bending. This is a bit like sucking the air out of a 2 liter pop bottle, it will collapse easily, and the pop bottle will need to be substituted with a steel canteen in order to keep its form. Unfortunately, this kind of structure is heavy, and in terms of air ships are extremely inneficient.
A regular blimp inflates, so the forces on the skin are entirely in tension, the only bending forces are caused by loads the ship is carrying and more importantly, sudden wind gusts which could tear a weak ship apart. Structurally speaking, this is vastly more efficient and completely eliminates bending due to a vacuum, and the tensile force alone in the skin is often enough to provide a stiff but flexible frame, just like a ballon once inflated keeps its shape even under tremendous strain. It is a very resiliant structure.
There are two huge problems that have always existed with airships, and fuel is not one of them. The first problem is landing the craft. They have a tendency to blow around with even slight gusts of wind, and if anything happens like a downdraft, they can get smashed into the ground. The second problem is weather related. In violent weather, the thin skin on these ships can get torn easily. The larger the craft, generally speaking, the bigger the problems. This is not to say these problems are inherently unsolvable, but why bother using zero fuel when fuel already will cost next to nothing if it uses solar power or fuel cells.
From the article: "Almost all attacks against our software are against the legacy systems," he said. "If you want more secure software, upgrade."
Only Microsoft finds the problems and only Microsoft forces you to upgrade to fix the problems.
Just imagine dialing 911 because someone's bleeding out on the floor and getting an advertisement asking you if you'd like to buy this number.
And just imagine the lawsuit afterwards. This protects the phone company as much as the user.
I'm just curious. The PaveLo helicopter costs $100 million, and is a good scout and can hold 12 soldiers, and the gun points out the rear where the enemy is in today's urban war. The Comanche costs $60 million, and is about equally armed and can scout but can't hold any troops. Why not use the one you know works and can carry soldiers? If you need rockets, add rockets. Who needs 'stealth' when the guy below is eyeballing you with an RPG or an Ak-74. Why not go with survivability and mini guns instead of zero radar signature? This is all the more true when the nature of combat is going to be sneaking around with special forces and lightly armed troops in urban areas where you can't used bombs or rockets. If the problem is tanks, buildings or vehicles, we have smartbombs and airplane launched missiles for them.
Although, I have to say, a large stealth helicopter that could carry troops would useful. You could fly an invisible army into the heart of the enemy. If I were trying to keep the development of such a craft secret, this is how I would do it: start a program, do the research, then cancel the program, then go into top secret production on the side. Who would know?
In my experience, most people are respectful of women online and don't discriminate. There are a few obnoxious, racist, bigots, cheaters out there, but they are a minority. I have seen clans of all sorts; black clans, white clans, kiddy clans, Texan clans, even gay clans (although they are usually trolls). But I have never met any women who would enjoy playing 6 hours a day, 7 days a week or have played 18 hours without stopping in order to perfect their skills and become the undisputed master of the world. The men also outnumber women at least 10:1 and are likely to have a much deeper talent pool of naturally gifted players. If I had to guess, women shooter fanatics are probably outnumbered 100:1, and so they aren't represented in the same way as men.
I wasn't aware of any these groups banned women from competing. If thats true they should be boycotted. I see no reason to keep women out. I suspect the real reason there aren't as many women in the top echelons of the shooter world is because there aren't many of them out there to begin with.
I don't object to the researchers being kept on. From what I have seen, the Information Awareness office that was shut down did some good work. We need 'information awareness', we need ways to automate looking through all the crap out there to find out what is useful and what isn't. The problem seems to be that some of these people seem willing to do anything to get that information, and I don't mean the researchers, I mean the spooks and the right wingers.
The irony is that this tool would be much more useful and effective if they knew which way to point it. Rather than blanketing every bit of data everywhere, why not send in spies, get a vague idea who may be involved and then focus on that group rather than wasting resources everywhere. Go from 6 billion targets to 1 million or so and your odds go way up. It may be old fashioned, but that method got us through the Cold War and I don't understand why it can't work for the 'War on Terror'(which is a misnomer but I won't get into that). We need decent human intelligence. Without decent human intelligence all of these fancy computers will be next to useless, which is our current predicament. Information is useless without knowledge.
And as for the people who are getting all freaked out by the government, especially on this geeky forum, it is the powermongers/wannabe dictators that should be afraid of us. Whenever I imagine a worst case scenario, where fascists take over, I imagine what I would do to fight back. Theoretically, I know how to shut the whole system down: communications, telephone, internet, power, transportation et cetera. Knowledge is power. But I believe that most of the people who run the national security apparatus are patriots who believe in liberty. I find it difficult to believe they would stoop to dictatorship. But if they do go too far, I'm not afraid of them, and they had better fear me. If anyone truly believs our liberty is being undermined, it is their duty to stand up and fight...anyone???
Take a 5 pound rod of steel. Get it going about 20000 mph. It will do the same damage as a small rocket. The strenght of this weapon isn't its explosive power, it is its ability to be deployed anywhere worldwide at the drop of a hat. Yo will be able to watch with your spy sattelite until the enemy comes outside, then you can drop the rod from orbit in only a few seconds. It will be a weapon that will always be on standby.
This brings up a second point, this could start an arms race. Countries like China and Russia won't like this. So they will build nukes to launch into orbit to take out our sattelites. The will build hunter killer mini sattelites to kill our sattelites. They may also build weapons similar to ours, able to strike us at any time. They may build jamming technology and put it on the world market to counter our threat.
The weaponization of space is a huge deal. Perhaps you missed it in the news, but just the other day Russia committed to building nukes which can get through our missile defense. They are already testing this system.
That was only to shoot down ICBM's. This is for active strike capability, anywhere in the world in 'seconds'. It is a sword that can be held over the entire world, ready to chop at any second.
An article against weaponization. This could well start an arms race and create an unstable environment where a 'first strike' by a weaker enemy becomes a risk.
I am not so much interested in the Hollywood vision of this, although Ice-T deserved an Oscar for his performance. What I think is interesting is to think about the limits of our brains and how this could be used to expand consciousness.
I think it would be interesting to understand how a neural interface would 'feel'. What would a process based in ones and zeros feel like? How would the brain adapt to take advantage of the new processing capability? Would we be able to project our consciousness outside of our body in some kind of digital plenum (that may not be a visual experience at all, it could be an entirely abstract experience like blind person contemplating numbers or language). Would we be enabled to 'see' new phenomena if we integrate a chip into the visual cortex (we could hook our brain up to a radio telescope and see the entire electormagnetic spectrum)? What color would ultra-violet be if it became a part of the visual spectrum or is the brain incapable of seeing a color that is as yet unimagined? What would it be like to 'smell' or 'touch' light or gravity or computer processes. Would it be possible to add entirely new senses or reasoning structures to the mind. Could we augment our perception to allow us to be cognisent of additional dimensional properties in addition to the 3 dimenstion we can see now. Would our bodies ultimately be relevant to our consciousness or could this technology allow us to be unhinged from our physical being, what would that mean for religion and philosophy? Could a person be in more than one place at once? Would it be possible to integrate two people into one or transfer one person into another, what would that do to 'individuality' and 'memory'.
Just a few questions.
Darpa is getting near zero cash for this...a few hundred thousand in a military budget of $400 billion. DARPA is providing huge value, you should look at some of the projects that DARPA has finished. There is one project that won't help with suicide bombers too, they made a networking program to link computer systems in a robust way in the event of a nuclear strike, a little thing called the INTERNET.
The wars of the future will be fought by tiny robots. It will be your job to build and maintain those robots - the Simpsons
The air force uses them too on long missions. They call them 'go pills'. Some pilots refused to take them and were pulled from active duty. Some people say they impair judgement. If my memory serves me correctly, the pilots who bombed a Canadian training excercise were on 'go pills' at the time, basically hopped up on speed.
The scary thing is that this is absolutely true. Here is a the DARPA goal summary.
New Science for National Security: Defense Sciences Office Overview
Page 6 -
Brain Machine Interfaces - Beyond acting on thoughts to having thoughts act.
Enhanced Human Performance - Beyond frailties of life to super physiological performance.
Go zerg
Lets be clear on one point. This has nothing to do with copyright. SCO is not claiming to own copyright on this code. IBM clearly owns the copyright to this code beyond a shadow of a doubt. According the their *contract*, SCO is claiming that IBM does not have rights to distribute this code because IBM wrote it originally for use with AIX. They are claiming that anything IBM ever used with AIX belongs to SCO. That is stupid beyond belief in addition to having absolutely nothing to do with copyright.
They are claiming rights on Linus?
* Copyright (C) 2002, Linus Torvalds.
This is getting stupid, especially in light of this Computerworld article. AT&T Trips Up SCO
I feel sorry for SCO. They should try viagra. Maybe it will give them the confidence they need to file their lawsuit.
The government is already on this.
New Science for National Security: Defense Sciences Office Overview
One of the the goals is to go "beyond the frailties of life to super physiological performance".
I think that within 100 years English will be the primary language of everybody.
In 100 years there may be a significant difference between 'English' and 'American'. We would do well to remember that English is the amalgamation of French, German, Latin, Greek, Celtic and other influences. It is a polyglot language. English is not preciously maintained like the French is and has significant drift. In a hundred years 'English' may be an entire class of languages.
DARPA is strictly defense
True, they are doing research for the military, but this will trickle down to civilian applications, as the jet engine did, as micro-electronics did. Darpanet was the precursor to the Internet, originally designed as a redundant communications system that would survive a nuclear strike. Thats right, it was Darpa, not Al Gore, that invented the internet. I am a big fan of Darpa (except for the Total Information Awareness program). They do really cool stuff. If you haven't been to their web page yet, I am not sure you can call yourself a geek. They have some really cool stuff ranging from mind/machine interfaces, super soldier exoskeleton, stim-paks and "health" (almost like video game power ups for soldiers), super laser beams, and mini fuel cells. The goal of Darpa is to find 'the next big thing'.
The true killing fields type technology is done by other labs. Super computers go to the NSA; Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore and others get Nukes (no Sandia jokes allowed, THEY WILL FIND YOU and send you to Gitmo); JPL does rockets; I don't want to think about the CIA Science Directorate without wearing my tinfoil hat. US Space Command is researching orbital weaponry able to strike worldwide in seconds(don't bother going to their web page, it has been scrubbed). The people at Darpa are the dreamers, free to think up the wildest, coolest stuff that is one step short of science fiction. Scientists usually get one or 2 year fellowships to do their work and then go back to academia or wherever they came from. their budgets are tiny and based on testing theories and finding proof of concepts (like can a robot drive itself 200 miles in rugged terrain quickly). Their work is largely free of the dark side of the force! Darpa rocks! If there is any branch of the government that is 'geekcool', it is Darpa.
Thats true, it isn't cost effective yet. But I think the extraction method in the article has some promise in making it more cost effective and offers a new way to use it. And it certainly doesn't have the environmental effects crude oil does. Its not perfect, but what is? I guess I'm a bit biased being a boy from the farm.
The syntax of all mainstream programming languages is rather esoteric. Mathematicians, who feel comfortable with purely abstract syntax, spend years of intense study mastering certain skills. But unlike mathematicians, programmers are taught to think not in terms of absolute proof, but in terms of working metaphors. To understand how a system works, a programmer doesn't build a system of mathematical equations, but comes up with real-life metaphor correctness which she or he can "feel" as a human being. Programmers are "average" folks; they have to be, since programming is a profession of millions of people, many without college degrees. Esoteric software doesn't scale to millions, not in people, and not in lines of code.
In the article, her solution to error is to increase the tolerance for error, making direct mistakes unlikely or impossible because there is plenty of 'slop' in the system and you can't get a wrong answer. Theoretically, this lowers precision and increases overhead of the system. Her solution to the difficulty in understanding programming is making it so any idiot can understand it.
To make an analogy, a programmer is like a bucket. Her solution to filling a bucket (writing code) is to submerge it inside a larger pool. In that situation, any old bucket will do, the bucket will always be full when placed in a pool; but you will then have to carry the entire pool if you want it to move. The question then becomes how much you can carry, not the performance of the bucket.
She may well be right about intuitive programming, being easier to use, and that making programming more like regular language with intuitive syntax could be beneficial (more like programming a Star Trek AI computer than what we have now). But this would also shift the nature of the problem from design and architecture to performance and underlying stability issues. Any fool could write code without knowing how it worked. Some shortcuts may be appropriate in certain cases, but to rely on these kinds of methodologies in critical situations could lead to disaster and has a built in unreliability factor. If some company thinks they can buy this system and then expect bullet proof security, reliability and high performance, they are probably in for a rude awakening. They should expect 'good enough' performance, which is what they are getting already.
The only way to do exceptionally good work in a complex situation is to have the knowledge and experience for what you are doing at all levels and the ability to execute. Allowing programmers to be ignorant of how a computer works doesn't seem like a solution to me. The real problem with crappy software is companies that don't care and consumers who don't know any better.
They distill it from Corn. All around the corn belt you will see these places. Usually by a rail line in the absolute middle of nowhere. It will be a stack belching putrid white smoke next to a small/medium sized elevator and some kind of fermenting building. This is the reason most Midwestern states are getting ethanol subsidies, it is to provide a third market for farmers to send corn apart from food and animal feed. Here in the Midwest it is cheaper to burn corn than natural gas, so this could be a decent way to get clean energy.
I wonder if it is possible to write a program which creates a comparison image with some kind of reverse compiler, that takes the NT/2000code, and somehow distills it to something which can be used to check similarities and unique sequences and events, perhaps using a graphical picture, a derived fractal geometry, DNA/fingerpring like process identification. It would be effective and useful if you could audit things in multiple ways quickly and without being exposed to actual lines of code and doing so in an automated way. Ideally, this program would be administered by a neutral third party, who could do a review if anything came up by searching the patent office and verifying copyrights somehow. You could also know quickly where you might have an IP problem. In an ideal world, you could just do a Google search for things similar to what you are doing, and instantly be made aware that you were violating a patent or were stepping on a copyright.
Yah, but what if you don't contribute to Linux and are interested in looking 'for fun'. How can they track you? The FBI Carnivore system? How will they know you have the code? Answer: They can't track you 99.9% of the time. I will bet you a $1 that all major corporations already have a copy of this and are intently studying it in secret to see how it works and if there is anything they can use to sue M$. The comments alone would be interesting reading.