I started a web site along these lines--only had time to implement one idea so far. It's an applet that looks at the Mandelbrot set in a different way from the usual approach: http://platy.org/
Maybe Intel will respond to AMD by only releasing a 45nm extreme edition chip to start with? At the high price they won't need a lot of production. But it will serve its purpose for benchmarking butt-kicking publicity.
Is intelligent life just a brief transition to a very different form of being? Extrapolating from the history of life on Earth, non-intelligent life seems to exist in a somewhat stable state. Perhaps bacteria-like life is everywhere in the galaxy, and dinosaur-like things are pretty common which gradually evolve for many millions of years without producing human-like intelligence.
But once human-like intelligence evolves, how long does it take until there is a Technological Singularity that causes human-like life to be superseded by some sort of ultra-intelligent artificial beings (that is beings that are designed by intelligent brains, not by evolution)? Humans have only existed in modern intelligent form for about 50,000 years. And now we seem more close than far from truly understanding how our own brains work and building machines with superior intelligence which replicate the key features such as consciousness. As a sort of estimate, comparing our knowledge of neuroscience to our knowledge of physics, perhaps neuroscience is now at about the level of Newtonian mechanics. We know some key principles of how the brain works and can apply them. We know how neurons work, we know major functional areas of the brain, and we have had some success developing pharmaceuticals that tweak the operation of the brain. However there is a lot we don't know (like what is "consciousness", really?). What we need are some major revolutions in neuroscience comparable to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (with perhaps subsequent revolutions of the superstring or grand unified theory variety). It took about 200 years to get from Newton to Einstein, which is a trivial amount of time in the big scheme of things.
So could it be that human-like life usually only lasts about 50,000 years before it replaces itself with something vastly superior? If so, then we should not expect to find extraterrestrial human-like life because the window that it exists is so short. So where then are all the artificial super-beings created by extrateresstrials? Perhaps improbable though it may be, a Singularity just hasn't happened in our galaxy yet, because if it had happened then the super-beings would have rapidly converted everything into matrioshka brains or something, precluding the existence of humans. Or perhaps the super-beings quickly figured out how to slip away into some dimension of space unknown to us, and they are all having a great party there right now. Or perhaps the super-beings really are out there, but we just haven't figured out how to contact them yet.
Are you bored by legal technicalities? Would you rather be watching a 90 mph police car chase that ends in a cataclysmic crash?? Well the SCOTUS has delivered just what you want in their other big decision today: SCOTT v. HARRIS.
Yes, seriously here is the 93MB RealPlayer video: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott _v_harris.rmvb There are actually two videos of the chase back to back--the second one is better. Choice quote: "Let me have him 78, my car is already tore up!"
(I guess it is ironic that RealVideo format is probably heavily protected by patents.)
If you just want free as in beer tax software TaxACT Standard is truly free for federal returns--even the e-filing is free. I've used it for the last two years and been pleased with it. It's a crippleware business model--the Standard version gives you lots of "encouragement" to pay money for the Deluxe version. However the Standard version is quite functional and worked great for me. And some limitations of the Standard version can be worked around: only the Deluxe version allows you to save your tax return as a PDF file, but just install PDFCreator and print to it from the Standard version and you get the same result.
I like the direct form entry mode of TaxACT. It does have an interview mode too, but I never cared much for tax software interviews--they ask you a bunch of weird questions in some arbitrary sequence that is not the same order I have my papers in. I start by entering all the tax forms I received (W-2, 1099) and the tax return is 90% done. Then I just go through the 1040 line by line and fill in the rest. TaxACT links to supporting worksheets as needed.
But I am glad to see that someone is now working on free as in speech tax software.
Hmm interesting that it's almost the same in degrees Fahrenheit and kelvin.
That inspired me to figure out that: 574.5875 degrees Fahrenheit is exactly 574.5875 kelvin.
But then what happens to the papers? In physics, we have arxiv.org, which is a free electronic depository for preprints and reprints, many of which have not yet been peer reviewed or published in a peer-reviewed journal. Is NIH planning to set up the equivalent of arxiv.org themselves? It seems like they're completely ignoring the recent efforts to start up free, electronic scientific journals.
Um, NIH already has a well developed infrastructure for this: PubMed Central. The problem is that not many journals are contributing full text to it right now. NIH does provide the abstracts only for just about every medical journal article in existence, as well as lots of other stuff through Entrez .
In addition, be careful what kind of ink you use to write on CDs. Permanent markers can damage the data. There are pens from Mitsui and TDK that are specifically designed to be safe for CDs.
IANAL, but here's my wacky idea to exctract justice from SCO:
Linux users should collectively file a class action lawsuit against SCO to stop the extortion of "license fees", litigating using an open source development style. No expensive (cathedral style) legal team would be required. Instead all legal actions would be developed and decided bazaar style. A web portal would allow all class members to see all documents relevant to the lawsuit and to submit their own "patches" to legal filings under development. Elected volunteers would represent the collective will of Linux users in court.
Would many eyes make all holes in legal strategy shallow? In a drawn out war of legal attrition would a broadly distributed volunteer effort outlast an opponent that is rapidly accumulating legal costs?
My understanding is that while the U.S. court system is in practice accessible only to those with a lot of money to pay lawyers, it is in principle accessible to all citizens. This would be a test of that principle.
Slashdot Mirror
I started a web site along these lines--only had time to implement one idea so far. It's an applet that looks at the Mandelbrot set in a different way from the usual approach:
http://platy.org/
Maybe Intel will respond to AMD by only releasing a 45nm extreme edition chip to start with? At the high price they won't need a lot of production. But it will serve its purpose for benchmarking butt-kicking publicity.
Is intelligent life just a brief transition to a very different form of being? Extrapolating from the history of life on Earth, non-intelligent life seems to exist in a somewhat stable state. Perhaps bacteria-like life is everywhere in the galaxy, and dinosaur-like things are pretty common which gradually evolve for many millions of years without producing human-like intelligence.
But once human-like intelligence evolves, how long does it take until there is a Technological Singularity that causes human-like life to be superseded by some sort of ultra-intelligent artificial beings (that is beings that are designed by intelligent brains, not by evolution)? Humans have only existed in modern intelligent form for about 50,000 years. And now we seem more close than far from truly understanding how our own brains work and building machines with superior intelligence which replicate the key features such as consciousness. As a sort of estimate, comparing our knowledge of neuroscience to our knowledge of physics, perhaps neuroscience is now at about the level of Newtonian mechanics. We know some key principles of how the brain works and can apply them. We know how neurons work, we know major functional areas of the brain, and we have had some success developing pharmaceuticals that tweak the operation of the brain. However there is a lot we don't know (like what is "consciousness", really?). What we need are some major revolutions in neuroscience comparable to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (with perhaps subsequent revolutions of the superstring or grand unified theory variety). It took about 200 years to get from Newton to Einstein, which is a trivial amount of time in the big scheme of things.
So could it be that human-like life usually only lasts about 50,000 years before it replaces itself with something vastly superior? If so, then we should not expect to find extraterrestrial human-like life because the window that it exists is so short. So where then are all the artificial super-beings created by extrateresstrials? Perhaps improbable though it may be, a Singularity just hasn't happened in our galaxy yet, because if it had happened then the super-beings would have rapidly converted everything into matrioshka brains or something, precluding the existence of humans. Or perhaps the super-beings quickly figured out how to slip away into some dimension of space unknown to us, and they are all having a great party there right now. Or perhaps the super-beings really are out there, but we just haven't figured out how to contact them yet.
Are you bored by legal technicalities? Would you rather be watching a 90 mph police car chase that ends in a cataclysmic crash?? Well the SCOTUS has delivered just what you want in their other big decision today: SCOTT v. HARRIS.
Yes, seriously here is the 93MB RealPlayer video: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott _v_harris.rmvb There are actually two videos of the chase back to back--the second one is better. Choice quote: "Let me have him 78, my car is already tore up!"
(I guess it is ironic that RealVideo format is probably heavily protected by patents.)
If you want the boring legal details of the case they are here: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-16 31.pdf
And here's a news story about it: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=310057 5
If you just want free as in beer tax software TaxACT Standard is truly free for federal returns--even the e-filing is free. I've used it for the last two years and been pleased with it. It's a crippleware business model--the Standard version gives you lots of "encouragement" to pay money for the Deluxe version. However the Standard version is quite functional and worked great for me. And some limitations of the Standard version can be worked around: only the Deluxe version allows you to save your tax return as a PDF file, but just install PDFCreator and print to it from the Standard version and you get the same result.
I like the direct form entry mode of TaxACT. It does have an interview mode too, but I never cared much for tax software interviews--they ask you a bunch of weird questions in some arbitrary sequence that is not the same order I have my papers in. I start by entering all the tax forms I received (W-2, 1099) and the tax return is 90% done. Then I just go through the 1040 line by line and fill in the rest. TaxACT links to supporting worksheets as needed.
But I am glad to see that someone is now working on free as in speech tax software.
Hmm interesting that it's almost the same in degrees Fahrenheit and kelvin. That inspired me to figure out that:
574.5875 degrees Fahrenheit is exactly 574.5875 kelvin.
There will be a "Java Open Source event" webcast live at 9:30 am PST: http://www.sun.com/2006-1113/feature/index.jsp
This is one reason I think I'll stop using NVIDIA chips and start using Intel chipset graphics hardware in the future. http://intellinuxgraphics.org/
Um, NIH already has a well developed infrastructure for this: PubMed Central. The problem is that not many journals are contributing full text to it right now. NIH does provide the abstracts only for just about every medical journal article in existence, as well as lots of other stuff through Entrez .
In addition, be careful what kind of ink you use to write on CDs. Permanent markers can damage the data. There are pens from Mitsui and TDK that are specifically designed to be safe for CDs.
IANAL, but here's my wacky idea to exctract justice from SCO:
Linux users should collectively file a class action lawsuit against SCO to stop the extortion of "license fees", litigating using an open source development style. No expensive (cathedral style) legal team would be required. Instead all legal actions would be developed and decided bazaar style. A web portal would allow all class members to see all documents relevant to the lawsuit and to submit their own "patches" to legal filings under development. Elected volunteers would represent the collective will of Linux users in court.
Would many eyes make all holes in legal strategy shallow? In a drawn out war of legal attrition would a broadly distributed volunteer effort outlast an opponent that is rapidly accumulating legal costs?
My understanding is that while the U.S. court system is in practice accessible only to those with a lot of money to pay lawyers, it is in principle accessible to all citizens. This would be a test of that principle.