I have not yet seen the video/read the book though I would like to.
I've never been greatly for or against Al Gore
It is ironic though that nobody is challenging the part about Al Gore not belonging in the schools. IIRC he was very supportive of work by Smart Valley Inc. to wire schools with fiber.
I'm quite worried a lot of people will get the wrong idea about this movie, that it's all impossible. Of course the overthruster isn't disintegrating the matter on which it is focused, it is simply enabling a bidirectionally permeable interface to form naturally between two space harmonics.
It has been long known that spacetime has a granular quality, in fact when you get small enough everything is spin networks (you can learn more about it on Wikipedia) which can basically be thought of as a quantum of space. in other words we are all just living on particles strung on lattices (see lattice theory). But since the granularity of spacetime is at a resolution of Planck units, there is obviously an infinity of other universes that can exist between the lines as it were, made of particles strung along a lattice just out of step with our own. If you can gauge the distances correctly along this string-net and apply a constant field to shift the center of gravity of space quanta a little to one side and perfectly coincide with the spin networks on a different lattice, then voila! you can continue motion over that other dimension, which is only confusing because we use the word dimension when clearly it is simply a spacetime superimposed on our own but with a topology ordered along a geometry that is slightly out of step with ours.
This duality over the lattice may seem difficult to stomach but it will be invariably clear to anyone who has gotten used to the television version's compression of the entire x-axis into the tube's smaller aspect ratio (the ultra-cool credits scene). That, and if you can believe a key researcher is named Joan Baez.
This is what the movie is trying to illustrate when the Buckaroo's nemesis gets himself stuck halfway through a wall. That probably happened partly because they were using an inefficient energy carrier (as TFA suggests), bosons not being known in the 30s, but mostly in fact due to insufficient speed, since if you lose momentum while in the interface you would have to push against quite a lot of knots in the spin network to extricate yourself. It is a kind of rigged Hilbert space, with the knots rigged along the lattices like a ship's rigging, and it is all so intertwined you really have to push with a lot of oomph.
Hence the 700 miles per hour rocket. Obviously the characters are pushing through onto another lattice and not disintegrating the matter in front of them, because if they were destroying matter not only would things probably get quite hot, but also gravity would drag down the nose of Buckaroo's craft toward the center of the Earth! And that doesn't happen at all in fact.
We shall soon see how well the movie predicts reality with the next generation of particle accelerators. TFA only makes one terrible mistake, in that they suggest the movie is wrong about magnitudes because Buckaroo is superhumanly able to miniaturize accelerators. In fact just recently research scientist Anatoly Maksimchuk and Donald Umstadter, and another team in Europe, have been able to focus high energies with table-top devices. Certainly as higher energies are reached there will be a manifold of possibilities to study. Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.
I never used it myself but read that Plan9 had offices use a WORM drive that basically captured everything as you typed it and would let you undo basically forever one character at a time. If ZFS takes 1/3 second to do a snapshot of a 10 gig mp3 partition like the link someone posted above, how about something that would let it store my entire workflow at a very high granualarity say for 10 minutes, a day, a week. So I could undo whole paragraphs, redo the filters in photoshop or whatever.
Apparently Time Machine will have an api for applications to use. I think the time has come for people to realize that while time progresses forward in a single line (at least in this universe we share) workflow does not really. It is lots of little projects interleaved in time, and in a single project maybe you go down one path of processing and then back up and realize you should be doing something different - but were you paranoid enough to back up your file at that point you need to revert to?
Generally I am very paranoid in terms of saving lots of versions, but really the OS should handle all this. I would also like to be able to type in a label or even a short paragraph that describes what I think is a certain milestone (i.e. solved that problem, break for lunch, fixme, function x works, come back to this later). It would be saved by the OS system-wide, and could have an alarm to tell me to check if it is finished (if I say "come back in 2 hours" then it should tell me calmly in 2 hours to do so).
To me this would be such an earth-shattering advance that it would release (most) humans from the shackles of the computer and start making computers help us be more productive and smarter. This doesn't really require ZFS though it would be extra. I'm trying to imagine a world where this works in Linux but I don't know, I think Apple has a shot at it.
I don't mean to throw water on it and have never used RYZOM, but I think Second Life is planning to be GPLd one day when things cool off. Don't know how they compare.
I remembered that a hologram of a lens could act as a lens and wondered whether a computer designed hologram could create one with negative refractive index. (Not having a solid grounding in optics makes one ask such dumb questions.)
Anyway I don't know the answer but found this page which explains both holographic lenses and negative refraction and references Pendry. One of the things it states (concerning the "perfect lens" of Pendry that is possible with negative refraction materials) is:
For example, the "perfect lens," a term coined by Pendry of Imperial College in London for a slab of negative index acting as a lens, can image sources with sub-wavelength spacing with contrast at least a factor of 5 better than the equivalent near-field system with positive n.
The site is in English but has an extremely annoying setting (presumably in plone) that makes everything but the text of the articles into your local language. So if I am surfing in Japan (and I am) based on the browser locale perhaps it generates dates, whole webpages on accessibility, sitemap, etc. in Japanese. There is no way to change the language of the site yourself that is obvious. Since articles are in English it would be very useful to make everything in English. Google and some other sites do this auto-locale sensing and I absolutely hate it.
I responded more in depth to the first respondent, please see this reply. I admit that I do not have professional musical experience nor was I aware of the depth of scholarship involved. I would like to know if a score in this edition is different from that of another edition.
In other words, if the scholarship is detachable from the score itself, i.e. it is a scholarly commentary but the two scores are identical (being the notes Mozart in fact wrote), then as they say the original work is in public domain and there are no performance rights to grant. If the score is in fact materially different (different notes, etc.) then that is a different story. However it is still not a matter of performance rights, I have a feeling, but a matter of using a score in a commercial setting (if you are taking money for using that score). I find it hard to believe that scholarship will generate a new artistic work that is farther divergent from the original penned by Mozart than what is out there. Therefore, of course the idea of performance rights is ludicrous, and their claims should be of limited force.
The only argument I can see is if you lie and download a work to sell it. It concerns me that this will create a gray zone where students and teachers will have to theorize about whether they are legal or not, but as I understand it the amount of effort that went into it is very high so they want to protect their investment and potential future profits.
Thank you very much for your insight, I am open to learning. I had no idea it cost that much money to do the necessary scholarship. I suppose the basic fact of that scholarship becoming visible online in any form is fabulous, and no drm it seems to be on an honor system.
Of course you may be quite right as to who imposed the restriction. I really don't have enough experience buying sheet music for professional purposes to be qualified to say anything, having mainly bought music in small shops just for myself. However the project seems to have gotten a lot of PR as putting the music for free on the net, which it is not, and it would seem to put online Mozart into a gray area where you have to check what edition it is and if you are legal. That is the part that concerns me.
For example it can't I suppose be used on the $100 PC project for education can it? Is the line drawn when you take money for your performance? Anyway I don't mean to harangue you personally but I am curious about whether there is in fact a musical difference between this edition of a given work and other editions. That is, if you are performing a work, it seems to me that you are in fact performing the work that is in public domain I believe and not necessarily a copyrighted score, unless the score is materially different (i.e. different notes/timing) from the public domain work. It is quite confusing. Thank you also for the information about Finale.
I am not an accomplished musician though I once did some due diligence re Finale and Sibelius and am somewhat familiar with the software. As for arrangement a cat got my tongue, I meant transposition (as I have transposed for guitar, though another poster did say arrangement for his daughter, which of course is the only kind of allowed use for this online collection). As most people think things they see online are free I am perplexed as to whether this is good (teaching an honor system to be used might in the long run be very good for artists and scholars) or bad (see above).
They admit the works of Mozart are in the public domain but not the scanned images of the music. They admit $400,000 was paid to purchase the rights to the edition, which is being put online "for free" by two foundations, but they still require that anybody not accessing solely for themselves (and I would assume this includes teachers and orchestras in this too) may not use it, but instead must purchase from a "authorized" vendor. These are not nice people who from one side of their mouths say they are doing a public service while from the other side they force you to lie basically, if you want to share it with others. People who pay for the rights to publish online and say they are a foundation (perhaps with tax breaks?) however choose to manufacture this crazy idea that "Mozart's works" can mean something other than sheet music on paper. I haven't seen info about Lilypond on their site, nor that they are encouraging or allowing rearrangement. It seems more likely that some people in the organization are altruistic and others are quite nasty and warping the project. Someone should press them to put a creative commons liscense on it or just make it free. The past year was Mozart's anniversary and to commemorate it these jerks are claiming title. If they really want to share Mozart they should free the scores and pay orchestras to perform it for an online repository like one that was recently featured. Then they could get around to soliciting free translations of the site, providing scholarly info to the wikipedia, networking mozart scholars and performers, etc. I am quite skeptical of this. That said of course I'm going to check out their sheet music and compare to others when I get a chance perhaps someone more expert can actually talk about this area.
Some MS patches are made to add hard DRM (WMP10) or police liscenses (GenuineAdvantage) and maybe there are some other tinfoil-needy reasons.
MS and the next-gen DVD consortium for that matter treat the customer as a potential criminal and require the ability to disable functionality in whole or in part. In other words, "security" to these people, including Microsoft, means keeping things secured against the user.
As a real security scheme it looks quite weak and vulnerable. But engineering a way to get user's machines to spy on them and report not only compliance with security policies but also use of arbitrary applications seems quite useful both for pushing OS upgrades and conversions to Windows down people's throats and for providing ammo to content liscensing organizations. Vista will be able to tell centralized servers who you are, whether you comply with some policy, and whether you can withstand an arbitrary network attack. Doesn't sound too secure to me. Wonder how SuSE will "interoperate" with this.
Thanks for your reply, great! I appreciate your thoughts - and apologize for what I realize now is a lack of carriage returns in my message.
I was not involved in the finances but yes, the Cambodian project paid staff. However I believe some key people were donating their time to some extent. I provided website development for about 10 years, for www.northkorea.org which was to help in the famine that followed the flood they had, when it seemed there was a chance they might turn out to be sane. And I gave the same support for several Cambodia projects, including the Sihanouk Hospital - Center of Hope (telebody.com/sihanouk) which was built totally from donations and the Princess Diana land mine campaign to heal mine victims at telebody.com.diana. Also the Cambodia Daily News which doesn't have a website but I fixed computers and helped remotely. And there's the Future Light Orphanage where orphans were taught computers on donated Macs from Apple. I know they hired guards to guard the Macs used by the newspaper, and heard one guard once was killed even. And there is a project called Village Leap which literally built 200 schools in rural Cambodia, and a Malaria net drive too, and that motorcycle wlan thing moto-something which I wasn't involved in except some PR.
Since Bernie Krisher the person behind them is an MIT Media Lab fellow in Japan, he's the person to ask questions of. But I think I do know at least one doctor took time off to go to Cambodia if not for no pay then for just local pay. I don't know how it is run now, but I believe it is one of the best if not the best hospital in the country.
So I'm sorry I don't really have a lot of info for you but yes these projects are all based on getting self sufficient project running onsite with some guidance from abroad, for example Bernie clipped stories off the newswire and NY Times (with permission) for the newspaper, and they ran to him when problems came up. Since he is quite advanced in years this is not a realistic way to do things probably, to do it all yourself. I was doing it all for free, but there was a limit since I was also involved with scratching out a living for myself too. Many of my ideas were thrown out for one practical reason or another as you have to have technically proficient people involved and also decide what to do with time/money. I still think something inexpensive ought to be possible with satellite hookups though I am not knowledgeable enough about that field. I guess part of it is also that they killed most of their smart people too... the country has been a mess for a long time.
Anyway sorry, I don't mean to prolong this soapbox thing. This all started with that MOU thing and from what I've seen I'd be real surprised if someone important wasn't the owner of that net company. I know the "stubborness" I mentioned is a two edged sword I mean I've felt it too but it works real well on politician types. He had brought in a free Internet connection to a university I believe in Phnom Penh with the requirement that it be only for them and students could use it, but at one point some bureaucrat tried to get his fingers on it.. you know if it's a donation what is given can be taken away. I don't know how much thought has been given to it but if that ISP actually succeeds it will have as customers the entire population under age x and will have an opportunity to hang on to them I presume as they grow older. Maybe that is where people think they can make money off this thing.
Thanks for your detailed replies. I was probably writing mainly to all the other people on the thread who seemed to be professional doubters but I really appreciate your hard facts approach. I know things cost money, I just think that money can be minimized and that local costs should be borne by local governments and not be used to say that the $100 laptop really costs $800 or whatever. Unlimited travel meaning just paying for plane flights when needed but obviously at their discretion, they will not be flying back and forth constantly. Two internet lines of course that's not the ideal. I meant that this should be considered minimum to run the project with anything on top of that at the discretion of the local country or counties, and not be used to create a $500 surcharge that can be seen as a required line item and inflate the $100 PC to already over $600 with that one item. I suppose they could say it would cost more if you counted more than 5 years the way they are saying it. As for technically where I'm coming from, my understanding of an MIT Media Lab run Cambodian program which provided some basis for the $100 PC project is that MIT acted as a central coordination point for communications even between teachers in rural Cambodia and international net access was not the object of the project. I really think if you want to call the $100 PC $600+ because it has to be online 24x7 to the entire globe then that is a different project and not really doable in many countries even bandwidth wise. I expect a lot of what the PCs will actually be used for can be done over sneaker and mesh net with only the teachers' machines actually being online all the time for example. I'm all for giving them as much access as possible but my point is $500 Internet is crazy. If it is really needed then each school ought to have their own WLAN and that anyway is up to them, not part of the project necessarily. There can be plenty of options to make it a better project but I do not at all see it as absolutely required nor a valid way of inflating the basic price of "the $100 computer". They should at least break down the per student price of all things needed to do what they want to do (maybe they do somewhere but I haven't seen it, sorry you are better informed) and specify which parts are optional and/or the resposibility of the host country. The project we did in Cambodia made heavy use of local talent and dedicated people, and I was often told (though could not take advantage of it) I could spend as much time there as I wanted if I just went. There are plenty of local people already who know linux I have a feeling, so while trained staff are required the cost of the staff and the type of training can be focused, it's not like making a military landing what they really need are some people to show their experts how to set up systems and to teach their trainers the pedagogical side of the system. Undoubtedly there is a lot involved but TFA was singularly slanted and went out of its way to inflate the cost without asking whether this was really needed, that's all. Thank you very much for your comments. I'm not involved in the project so maybe the people who are really doing this have other ideas. But in our projects the biggest obstacle was the government itself in that they wanted a piece of the pie. We even had ideas (this goes back to like 1995) on rolling out a new telephone infrastructure (but too tightly controlled), radio repeaters (but the military fires on them.. so then the idea of a bulletproof school in a shipping container), and satellite-delivered telephone and Internet (from a company doing this in Thailand) or a line from over the Thai border.. both of these latter choices being discarded because while the Cambodians had nothing they refused to cooperate with the Thais, wanting to do it all themselves. With little electricity or telephone. So I'd like to know where the heck this company comes from that is charging $500 bucks per seat for Internet, why they are involved, and what other commercial deployment thay have on t
I can tell you this is silly. I donated a decade of time to ngo projects run by the person who created the motorcycle lan project noted by a poster above and MIT (Bernie Krisher, who is also a fellow of the MIT Media Lab, whose Negroponte made the $100 computer project).
Some of the projects involved building and staffing a hospital with telemedicine capability, starting a newspaper with real news, building 200 schools, purchasing anti-malaria nets, and others. All were done with private donations, people donating time onsite, academic institutions, corporate donations, donated computers (Apple), Internet support, continual media campaigns, and the like. However it was primarily accomplished through a combination of three key talents of one person (Bernie), which are massive stubbornness, massive heroism, and massive knowhow of how to get things done from a lifetime of experience. The stubbornness comes from focusing on just one thing to accomplish and then doing nothing but that regardless of people giving you new ideas or cynicism, just get the job done. The heroism means putting yourself in the line of fire repeatedly (to the point that he even got a stroke in North Korea from lifting a bag of donated rice). That communicates something to people and is part of why he was able to create a long list of private donors who listen to him. Video and photos of him on site and distributed by the Internet magnified the effect. The knowhow comes from him being an ace journalist and partly from a lifetime of favors he's made to other companies he could call in. The decision to devote your life to "giving something back" is profound enough to sway others. My belief is this sort of devotion is what is driving and making possible these things by Negroponte and others, though I am not myself currently involved.
I would say that on this scale of practicality and effort, the criticism of TFA are like unto a flicked sand grain bouncing off stainless steel armor. For those of you who do not believe it I would also like to provide my own quick reading of "The Bill" of TFA.
First, the costs are all in dollars. They should be what it would really cost in terms of local currency and actual costs of local people doing it. In fact, there should not be any money spent on anything preferably. If they won't provide local people to do the job for free or a minimum wage covered by their company/institution anyway they should just pick other people. They could even just pick teen and college kids, train them, let it count against graduation credits or tuition, heck there are lots of ways including making a local company. The important thing is to absolutely minimize the number of people who actually have to be paid by the organization, and these people must get other locals with the same idea, preferably free. There's a reason why Christian missionaries succeeded too you know, maybe they could go to local churches, etc. Heck make a boy scout merit badge even.
The cost of the laptop, as I understand it $100 and not a cent more. I question the $148 quoted price. The setup, $108 per laptop is utter bullshit. If anyone with two brain cells is running this thing it is a completely free, automatic or semiautomatic process. Any cost it might incur would be peanuts compared to the cost of the shipping and delivery to the location (maybe that's where the extra $48 comes from above) at any rate it is the same for all laptops in a given country at least, and it should cost $0. Also it should be done by ngo type people locally anyway or maybe some local grads over a month at local grad student pay which must be peanuts compared to grad student pay in the U.S., which is also peanuts.
Training, $27.60/yr or $138/5 yrs. I don't understand this point either. First, all documents ought to be free and part of the initial installation or downloaded free over the net, so no printed docs. Maybe a chalkboard illustration of how to turn the computer on. It should cost nothing to train kids since that is part of their educational
Incidentally I am going to take the liberty of quoting the beginning of his book The Perspex Machine, in hopes more will read it (I haven't yet myself but will too). Another data point that makes me think he belongs enthroned at slashdot if nowhere else and maybe someone else will get what he's saying too. The part before the preface is particularly neat. It strikes me this is his letter to robot minds that are bound to appear in the next 20-30 years (a la moravec?) - anyway, cheers!
The author started his research career with his head in a cardboard box. This was not a particularly auspicious start, but it was a way to do experiments to discover
how efficient human vision is. As well as the author's head, the box contained
an oscilloscope, and a key pad to record how sure he was that he could see various
patterns on the oscilloscope. It turned out that human vision is stunningly
efficient.
After doing some mathematics to work out interesting patterns, and writing
computer programs to analyse his experimental data, the author struck on the
idea of writing programs that can see for themselves. At a stroke he took his
head out of the cardboard box and has never looked back.
After a while the author realised that all computer vision programs, indeed
all possible computer programs, can be written in terms of one geometrical
structure, the perspective simplex, or perspex. The perspex links the geometry
of the physical world with the structure of computations so, to the extent that
mind is computable, the perspex provides one solution to the centuries old problem
of how mind arises in physical bodies.
Perspexes exist in a mathematical space called perspex space. Perspex space
can describe the ordinary space we live in, along with all of the physical bodies
that make up our space, and all of the minds that arise from physical objects.
Perspex space is not particularly realistic, but it provides a simple model that is accurate enough for a robot to use to describe its own mind and body.
This book explores, in uncompromising technical detail, how the perspex
can be used to build a robot with a mind, and how this informs us about our place in the world.
How does James Anderson's "nullity" differ from Douglas Adams' "a suffusion of yellow"?
Seriously though this is the sort of thing that you don't want to sneeze at, it can sound both inane and brilliant. Anderson is not such a crackpot, I found a presentation of his on optical computing and an introduction to its underlying theory called perspex algebra (
"Representing geometrical knowledge."). He seems to be a geometer stating his perspective in the first line of that presentation: "Aims: To unify projective geometry and the Turing machine".
He's a geek hero! Who knows if his nullity will end up just NaN with a British twang or the next best thing to sliced bread and i?
I was unable to hear the realaudio casts but from Book of Paragon, The Perspex Machine (Anderson mentions transreal arithmetic) and Exact Numerical Computation of the Rational General Linear Transformations (a mathematical treatise with applications to computer vision and robotics) just glancing I'd have to say the guy seems to be a real mathematician, geek and philosopher-king. I don't know if he's up there with Newton but he at least deserves an honorable mention for his wonderfully witty (and to me as yet inscrutable) naming of the Walnut Cake Theorem (see page 10 of Perspex.pdf). It seems that he was motivated to create nullity in order to make reliable advanced computers that would not barf when asked questions about the universe, and to him "Not-a-Number" is vomit. I'd say read some of his stuff before assigning him to the 9th Hell. Would like to hear what any mathematicians or other people with brain cells over the age of 12 have to think about it. It's okay if he reinvented something but it appears he is trying to make a machine that can handle infinities and other tough numerical concepts with ease, and that's worth something. Oh, that and his quantum computer looks neat.
I just glanced at the Singularity project page mentioned by an earlier poster. Wow this looks very cool. Check out this quote from an abstract.
...we have created...the application abstraction, which enables both online and offline reasoning about programs and their configuration requirements....Our design enables Singularity to learn the input/output and interprocess communication requirements of drivers without executing driver code.
Sounds like it would be useful. MS should pull a hundred people off its movie and music projects and get some of this out the door for Windows (not Vista, XP). They could say "...by Microsoft Research" when downloading the patches that give you more functionality in the OS than when you purchased it. Don't force an upgrade to Vista, make XP or 2K more useful as-is and I might imagine someone at MS is trying to do something right instead of the de rigeur warping of everything into surreal Evil. Oh the part about them buying companies and destroying them might have something to do with the perception too.
I just noticed you had posted a reply to my reply, and wanted to say thank you. Your reply is eminently clear-headed and makes a lot of sense to me, too.
Of course since then, there has risen the spectre of an OOo fork by Novell, but I'm not asking for any specific opinion about it. The first thought that popped into my head was, "Okay, they're Evil, next!" but it is still vague.
Also, they might be seen as somewhat brilliant in identifying a potential business advantage for companies trying to make a profit on OSS, in taking their own sweet time releasing a GPL version and waiting for community approval while in the meantime selling a bunch.
Anyway, we'll just have to see. Novell is another company made of lots of people and it can change as people come and go too. I also am thinking they just might have the concept of an acceptable limit of exposure and when things get too itchy they might distance themselves more from MS.
Anyway thank you very much for your insights, and I hope things turn out well, with your cool head prevailing.
It is possible this will work but I am skeptical thinking it is possible MPAA and certain large companies may try to embrace and extend the bittorrent system to make it "easier" for the end user to give them a lot of money. It could work though if prices are lower to the customer that seeds or provides significant bandwidth, and in particular if DVD libraries are cached at the ISP in such a way that non-movie traffic is not wiped out.
If done well this could usher in a way for payments to be made for ISP packages including payment for the liscensing of broad content libaries (not just movies, how about university libraries, encyclopedias, mainstream publishers, television and newspaper companies too) or for some other company to arise that will aggregate such liscenses into a package and make sure everyone gets paid. It would be very bad if only certain Hollywood studios are able to get into your wallet.
Most of the posts here talk about how things are impossible. I think it is pretty unlikely that slashdotters will be contributing bandwidth for free to morally bankrupt companies, but the idea is mainly to build a video on demand system for large swathes of users and they might not mind DRM so much. Perhaps one answer will be for someone else to build a system that does things the "right" way and Hollywood can use it too. Bittorrent is public, I'm curious about what his company has as an edge. Are they modifying the protocol for special video clients, or what? Otherwise it is still wide open and they are not going to "totally own" (dumb phrase) online movie space.
P.S. I got money from Accel Partners once for an early ISP and I was extremely dissatisfied with their level of understanding and support. They might have gotten a clue since then but Bram cannot depend on them to tell him anything about reality he will have to keep a clear eye on it himself. Still not impossible at all. For example a new mp3 phone in Japan has in all sales materials the Napster and Tower Records brands! It would be fun to see Bittorrent as a brand shown right up there with a big movie house but unless he is really delivering something valuable his lunch could get eaten real fast.
I'd like to hear what he would say about the Democracy browser that runs on the same protocol. Technically it might be perfect for him but there will be hollers if he tries to inject DRM hooks into it or recommend it for DRM'd titles! Just what is he offering?
if you need to make a map to your office or tell someone to meet you somewhere, it would be useful if you could have a google directions or mapquest style guide to getting there that actually shows you what it looks like at landmarks. But currently interfaces suck they totally do not consider anyone actually using the system, because they themselves don't know how it is to be used.
Also there is not enough data.
Finally if you had a streaming camera on you a system could compare what the camera sees to the database so you never get lost. But of course it is much cheaper and easier just to locate yourself by cellular stations, gps, etc. However these things don't sell.. they are too expensive for most North American phone users (and only sell to a limited extent in markets where people spend more on them like Japan).
What is needed is: - a common platform so you can plug things together that you purchase separately, like a gps antenna and a phone. - a cheap data plan for phones - a built in usb hub for phones (currently some have limited usb connections)
Possibly a windows ce based phone like the willcom es phone or vodaphone's phone terminals might be useful. However until manufacturers actually let users mix and match as AV component manufacturers let people buy vcrs and tvs from different companies, there will just be an unending battle of functions getting slammed into phones and users will just end up picking the ones with the most popular mix of things for the least money. This seems to be why gps phones are not as popular as phones that provide mp3 ring tones.
DoCoMo just came out with a >1 Mbps phone but as far as I can see it still is far too expensive for data, and does not seem to offer connectivity. I'd like to have a fast uplink, a nice camera, a gps, and a nice ring tone, and I wouldn't mind purchasing separate units from different manufacturers to do so. But I don't need 5 different phones and so I am skeptical about this king of street image product ever making it into mobile devices in significant quanitities.
The protein based process sounds interesting, if it is real, though it will be one choice in the future and as I understand it hydrogen is simply one energy storage technology. Since this might be a way to make hydrogen strategies cheaper it needs to be examined but the proteins will have to survive the industrial process long enough to lyse enough water to break even.
Also consider something like that aquafuel process if it is real, where they burn a carbon arc lamp under water to generate hydrocarbon fuel. You need to consider if making, delivering and burning hydrogen is going to be cheaper than that.
And while we are on the subject of biological molecules it might very well be a lot better to engineer proteins that could produce oil or even an ATP-like system instead of hydrogen. Because you want a concentrated, easy to use substance.
If you want a biological equivalent of jet fuel (well unless you want to make jet fuel itself) you could do worse than synthesize VAAM (Vespa Amino Acid Mixture) and glycogen. This is what hornets use for power and I've drunk it. Quite a kick.
I see, thank you! I will try to learn some more about supernovae and galactic evolution in the future. I see there is apparently a supernova every 50 years or so but also there is a 500 Myear cycle of mass at the center of the Milky Way reaching critical mass and producing supernovae at about 1 per year. (Our next one is in 300My). Which is perhaps why the paper only goes back 200My... before that being chaos?
He didn't say how thick the plastic sheet or "paper" was, did he? I think scotch tape stored 100GB didn't it? You just need to get enough tape. The rest's all grunt work.
The leaders of the business in April of course announced 515GB/square inch which sounds like a lot but how long does it take to read and back it up, right?
This is my second post to this thread. Here is a link to the paper mentioned in the article. It is not on Svesnmark's site I think. Also it is not the latest issue of Astronomische Nachrichten (Astronomical Notes), which is Dec. 2006. Actually he wrote two articles that seem to be the focus of the Space.com article, and both articles are published in AN's Nov. 2006 issue.
It seems we get clobbered when we pass through spiral arms, last time maybe 31 million years ago. So the idea of a static neighborhood that I mentioned in the other post is too simplistic since we appear to be moving faster than the spiral arms (else how could we cross) at any rate, even without the full papers he claims an extraordinary link to the the fossil record, using 3 Gyear fossil record and 200Myear galactic data. Obviously the key is to staying out of the arms so maybe this should be used to tune Seti searches?
The full text PDFs are not accessible to guests. Anyone have copies?
Here are the two abstracts.
Cosmic rays and the biosphere over 4 billion years H. Svensmark Center for Sun-Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark email: H. Svensmark (hsv@spacecenter.dk)
Imprint of Galactic dynamics on Earth's climate H. Svensmark Center for Sun Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, Juliane Marie Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark email: H. Svensmark (hsv@spacecenter.dk)
Honestly, independent bloggers and popular science sites may be a great way to quickly hear news, but Slashdot ought to be more focused on the technical details and the scientists figuring them out. That used to be what Slashdot was anyway.
Okay, here is the link to Henrik Svensmark, Danish Space Research Institute and his papes on Cosmic rays and Earth's Cloud Cover. He is quoted in the story.
I am providing this in self defense since I prefer to discuss intelligently with people who do not need that popular science website (which is fine on its own) to provide a link to every darned word in the article. I think it is up to the Editors to do this sort of thing to promote some you know, talk about science and technology around here.
Anyway they also link to the Fermi paradox about where are they (the aliens). But I saw it just after reading about how vortices are thought to push dolphins forward and solve Gray's paradox about how they swim so fast. It is nice how paradoxes have ways of getting resolved over time. Oh, that's alright then.
Okay, I didn't like the term cosmic rays.. Wikipedia says it covers lots of things including the helium nuclei that remained in my head. Which is a lot more than just the gamma rays from Supernovae that I thought caused extinction events.
Anyway, as some posters mention it seems likely that lots of life in the galaxy must have died back or been sterilized in high radiation eras and what we need now is some kind of chronological and spatial map of what regions were affected to that degree and when. If our local neighbors failed to survive such radiation, then our biological histories are all of approximately the same age. Perhaps having deep oceans or thick ice sheets, would have something to do with preserving that too.
Now my guess has always been that even so, the geographic scale of time we are talking about, and the comparatively very rapid industrialization and advancement of a planet once the biology reaches a critical stage (perhaps a certain number of organisims at near human level?), meant that even so it most certain that civilizations hundreds of thousands or millions of years more advanced than us must exist. My picture was always that supernovae were the killer but we had been lucky... and we need to continue to be lucky until we can spread out and shield ourselves or move to safer places for the long term.
But now, it might mean that a relatively short window of time has been available to all planets in this local region to develop life. It is not clear how many times we failed or whether other planets would have to go through all the stages we did. It seems logical to have the planetary chemistry alterations in order like we had, with vegetation, and big plant eaters. Maybe the meteor that killed them was not the only problem? Anyway it took this long to get where we are. It is possible our type of chemistry is the only one that works, since the world we have obviously came from a darwinian evolution it would appear to be a result of very high probability.
So now I am looking on the web to see if there is information about just how long the part of the galaxy we know anything about could have survived biologically intact to the present day, how far back does the current window go, and how long are windows on average. It also seems that we should look for signals from areas that got hit with high radiation far away but maybe had time to beam something at us from the other side of the galaxy - to us who would evolve in the next window... Anyway it would be interesting (if we had the data which I guess we don't maybe) to be able to plot a 4D map of garden regions that did not get totally ionized and disrupted, and to see where in our neighborhood is the oldest such area.
This would be really annoying every time I fell asleep at the keyboard. Of course it would be just like what happens whenever my thumb brushes the touch pad and switches me into Japanese input in linux.. um.
Look this is a software patent and I am not going to read TFA. There are already ways to automatically detect languages by statistical patterns and morphology, one example I know of is for example the nkf unix program, I quote the manpage:
One of the most unique facicility of nkf is the guess of the
kanji code. It currently recognizes 7-bit JIS, MS-kanji (shifted-
JIS),utf-8 and EUC. So users needn't the input kanji code specifica-
tion.
Also there are the KAKASI and CHASEN Japanese morphological analyzers. So you can convert English alphabet transliteration to Chinese character based sentences. Also the perl Jcode module does automatic recognition. And people can too, most anyone could differentiate between ASCII representations of Japanese JIS, SJIS, and EUC.
But similar ideas were out there earlier. I am not qualified to evaluate originality of the professor's work in Korean, however analysis of morphology and keyboard input streams is obvious. Also, I think it is more of a trick than an invention, since the example of Korean input someone posted is very unlike English (wierd consonant patterns) which might make it more efficient to guess between the two languages compared to a different language pair. Whatever, I do not see how this guy gets millions of dollars for something that is a neat idea but the neat part of it is just human interface design, something which is not covered by patent and has always been copied and stolen from everyone.
That said, Microsoft asked for it. They want to make software patents a high stakes game, they got it. The problems are that the Korean courts are a time bomb for other OSs, and also that every time Microsoft wins or even loses a big patent battle it just deepens the recognition by society of the validity of those battles. Unless there is more to the tech than what has been mentioned, it does sound like Microsoft was in the right. I have a feeling the courts may just be so pissed at MS that they did this to them. I'd like someone in Korea to ask the guy to release a (L)GPL library!
Slashdot Mirror
I've never been greatly for or against Al Gore
It is ironic though that nobody is challenging the part about Al Gore not belonging in the schools. IIRC he was very supportive of work by Smart Valley Inc. to wire schools with fiber.
I'm quite worried a lot of people will get the wrong idea about this movie, that it's all impossible. Of course the overthruster isn't disintegrating the matter on which it is focused, it is simply enabling a bidirectionally permeable interface to form naturally between two space harmonics.
It has been long known that spacetime has a granular quality, in fact when you get small enough everything is spin networks (you can learn more about it on Wikipedia) which can basically be thought of as a quantum of space. in other words we are all just living on particles strung on lattices (see lattice theory). But since the granularity of spacetime is at a resolution of Planck units, there is obviously an infinity of other universes that can exist between the lines as it were, made of particles strung along a lattice just out of step with our own. If you can gauge the distances correctly along this string-net and apply a constant field to shift the center of gravity of space quanta a little to one side and perfectly coincide with the spin networks on a different lattice, then voila! you can continue motion over that other dimension, which is only confusing because we use the word dimension when clearly it is simply a spacetime superimposed on our own but with a topology ordered along a geometry that is slightly out of step with ours.
This duality over the lattice may seem difficult to stomach but it will be invariably clear to anyone who has gotten used to the television version's compression of the entire x-axis into the tube's smaller aspect ratio (the ultra-cool credits scene). That, and if you can believe a key researcher is named Joan Baez.
This is what the movie is trying to illustrate when the Buckaroo's nemesis gets himself stuck halfway through a wall. That probably happened partly because they were using an inefficient energy carrier (as TFA suggests), bosons not being known in the 30s, but mostly in fact due to insufficient speed, since if you lose momentum while in the interface you would have to push against quite a lot of knots in the spin network to extricate yourself. It is a kind of rigged Hilbert space, with the knots rigged along the lattices like a ship's rigging, and it is all so intertwined you really have to push with a lot of oomph.
Hence the 700 miles per hour rocket. Obviously the characters are pushing through onto another lattice and not disintegrating the matter in front of them, because if they were destroying matter not only would things probably get quite hot, but also gravity would drag down the nose of Buckaroo's craft toward the center of the Earth! And that doesn't happen at all in fact.
We shall soon see how well the movie predicts reality with the next generation of particle accelerators. TFA only makes one terrible mistake, in that they suggest the movie is wrong about magnitudes because Buckaroo is superhumanly able to miniaturize accelerators. In fact just recently research scientist Anatoly Maksimchuk and Donald Umstadter, and another team in Europe, have been able to focus high energies with table-top devices. Certainly as higher energies are reached there will be a manifold of possibilities to study. Just remember, wherever you go, there you are.
I never used it myself but read that Plan9 had offices use a WORM drive that basically captured everything as you typed it and would let you undo basically forever one character at a time. If ZFS takes 1/3 second to do a snapshot of a 10 gig mp3 partition like the link someone posted above, how about something that would let it store my entire workflow at a very high granualarity say for 10 minutes, a day, a week. So I could undo whole paragraphs, redo the filters in photoshop or whatever.
Apparently Time Machine will have an api for applications to use. I think the time has come for people to realize that while time progresses forward in a single line (at least in this universe we share) workflow does not really. It is lots of little projects interleaved in time, and in a single project maybe you go down one path of processing and then back up and realize you should be doing something different - but were you paranoid enough to back up your file at that point you need to revert to?
Generally I am very paranoid in terms of saving lots of versions, but really the OS should handle all this. I would also like to be able to type in a label or even a short paragraph that describes what I think is a certain milestone (i.e. solved that problem, break for lunch, fixme, function x works, come back to this later). It would be saved by the OS system-wide, and could have an alarm to tell me to check if it is finished (if I say "come back in 2 hours" then it should tell me calmly in 2 hours to do so).
To me this would be such an earth-shattering advance that it would release (most) humans from the shackles of the computer and start making computers help us be more productive and smarter. This doesn't really require ZFS though it would be extra. I'm trying to imagine a world where this works in Linux but I don't know, I think Apple has a shot at it.
I don't mean to throw water on it and have never used RYZOM, but I think Second Life is planning to be GPLd one day when things cool off. Don't know how they compare.
Anyway I don't know the answer but found this page which explains both holographic lenses and negative refraction and references Pendry. One of the things it states (concerning the "perfect lens" of Pendry that is possible with negative refraction materials) is:
The site is in English but has an extremely annoying setting (presumably in plone) that makes everything but the text of the articles into your local language. So if I am surfing in Japan (and I am) based on the browser locale perhaps it generates dates, whole webpages on accessibility, sitemap, etc. in Japanese. There is no way to change the language of the site yourself that is obvious. Since articles are in English it would be very useful to make everything in English. Google and some other sites do this auto-locale sensing and I absolutely hate it.
Hi, and thanks for your comment!
I responded more in depth to the first respondent, please see this reply. I admit that I do not have professional musical experience nor was I aware of the depth of scholarship involved. I would like to know if a score in this edition is different from that of another edition.
In other words, if the scholarship is detachable from the score itself, i.e. it is a scholarly commentary but the two scores are identical (being the notes Mozart in fact wrote), then as they say the original work is in public domain and there are no performance rights to grant. If the score is in fact materially different (different notes, etc.) then that is a different story. However it is still not a matter of performance rights, I have a feeling, but a matter of using a score in a commercial setting (if you are taking money for using that score). I find it hard to believe that scholarship will generate a new artistic work that is farther divergent from the original penned by Mozart than what is out there. Therefore, of course the idea of performance rights is ludicrous, and their claims should be of limited force.
The only argument I can see is if you lie and download a work to sell it. It concerns me that this will create a gray zone where students and teachers will have to theorize about whether they are legal or not, but as I understand it the amount of effort that went into it is very high so they want to protect their investment and potential future profits.
Hello,
Thank you very much for your insight, I am open to learning. I had no idea it cost that much money to do the necessary scholarship. I suppose the basic fact of that scholarship becoming visible online in any form is fabulous, and no drm it seems to be on an honor system.
Of course you may be quite right as to who imposed the restriction. I really don't have enough experience buying sheet music for professional purposes to be qualified to say anything, having mainly bought music in small shops just for myself. However the project seems to have gotten a lot of PR as putting the music for free on the net, which it is not, and it would seem to put online Mozart into a gray area where you have to check what edition it is and if you are legal. That is the part that concerns me.
For example it can't I suppose be used on the $100 PC project for education can it? Is the line drawn when you take money for your performance? Anyway I don't mean to harangue you personally but I am curious about whether there is in fact a musical difference between this edition of a given work and other editions. That is, if you are performing a work, it seems to me that you are in fact performing the work that is in public domain I believe and not necessarily a copyrighted score, unless the score is materially different (i.e. different notes/timing) from the public domain work. It is quite confusing. Thank you also for the information about Finale.
I am not an accomplished musician though I once did some due diligence re Finale and Sibelius and am somewhat familiar with the software. As for arrangement a cat got my tongue, I meant transposition (as I have transposed for guitar, though another poster did say arrangement for his daughter, which of course is the only kind of allowed
use for this online collection). As most people think things they see online are free I am perplexed as to whether this is good (teaching an honor system to be used might in the long run be very good for artists and scholars) or bad (see above).
I appreciate your comments, thank you very much.
Matt
They admit the works of Mozart are in the public domain but not the scanned images of the music.
They admit $400,000 was paid to purchase the rights to the edition, which is being put online "for free" by two foundations, but they still require that anybody not accessing solely for themselves (and I would assume this includes teachers and orchestras in this too) may not use it, but instead must purchase from a "authorized" vendor.
These are not nice people who from one side of their mouths say they are doing a public service while from the other side they force you to lie basically, if you want to share it with others. People who pay for the rights to publish online and say they are a foundation (perhaps with tax breaks?) however choose to manufacture this crazy idea that "Mozart's works" can mean something other than sheet music on paper.
I haven't seen info about Lilypond on their site, nor that they are encouraging or allowing rearrangement. It seems more likely that some people in the organization are altruistic and others are quite nasty and warping the project.
Someone should press them to put a creative commons liscense on it or just make it free.
The past year was Mozart's anniversary and to commemorate it these jerks are claiming title. If they really want to share Mozart they should free the scores and pay orchestras to perform it for an online repository like one that was recently featured. Then they could get around to soliciting free translations of the site, providing scholarly info to the wikipedia, networking mozart scholars and performers, etc. I am quite skeptical of this. That said of course I'm going to check out their sheet music and compare to others when I get a chance perhaps someone more expert can actually talk about this area.
Some MS patches are made to add hard DRM (WMP10) or police liscenses (GenuineAdvantage) and maybe there are some other tinfoil-needy reasons.
MS and the next-gen DVD consortium for that matter treat the customer as a potential criminal and require the ability to disable functionality in whole or in part. In other words, "security" to these people, including Microsoft, means keeping things secured against the user.
As a real security scheme it looks quite weak and vulnerable. But engineering a way to get user's machines to spy on them and report not only compliance with security policies but also use of arbitrary applications seems quite useful both for pushing OS upgrades and conversions to Windows down people's throats and for providing ammo to content liscensing organizations. Vista will be able to tell centralized servers who you are, whether you comply with some policy, and whether you can withstand an arbitrary network attack. Doesn't sound too secure to me. Wonder how SuSE will "interoperate" with this.
Hi!
Thanks for your reply, great! I appreciate your thoughts - and apologize for what I realize now is a lack of carriage returns in my message.
I was not involved in the finances but yes, the Cambodian project paid staff. However I believe some key people were donating their time to some extent. I provided website development for about 10 years, for www.northkorea.org which was to help in the famine that followed the flood they had, when it seemed there was a chance they might turn out to be sane. And I gave the same support for several Cambodia projects, including the Sihanouk Hospital - Center of Hope (telebody.com/sihanouk) which was built totally from donations and the Princess Diana land mine campaign to heal mine victims at telebody.com.diana. Also the Cambodia Daily News which doesn't have a website but I fixed computers and helped remotely. And there's the Future Light Orphanage where orphans were taught computers on donated Macs from Apple. I know they hired guards to guard the Macs used by the newspaper, and heard one guard once was killed even. And there is a project called Village Leap which literally built 200 schools in rural Cambodia, and a Malaria net drive too, and that motorcycle wlan thing moto-something which I wasn't involved in except some PR.
Since Bernie Krisher the person behind them is an MIT Media Lab fellow in Japan, he's the person to ask questions of. But I think I do know at least one doctor took time off to go to Cambodia if not for no pay then for just local pay. I don't know how it is run now, but I believe it is one of the best if not the best hospital in the country.
So I'm sorry I don't really have a lot of info for you but yes these projects are all based on getting self sufficient project running onsite with some guidance from abroad, for example Bernie clipped stories off the newswire and NY Times (with permission) for the newspaper, and they ran to him when problems came up. Since he is quite advanced in years this is not a realistic way to do things probably, to do it all yourself. I was doing it all for free, but there was a limit since I was also involved with scratching out a living for myself too. Many of my ideas were thrown out for one practical reason or another as you have to have technically proficient people involved and also decide what to do with time/money. I still think something inexpensive ought to be possible with satellite hookups though I am not knowledgeable enough about that field. I guess part of it is also that they killed most of their smart people too... the country has been a mess for a long time.
Anyway sorry, I don't mean to prolong this soapbox thing. This all started with that MOU thing and from what I've seen I'd be real surprised if someone important wasn't the owner of that net company. I know the "stubborness" I mentioned is a two edged sword I mean I've felt it too but it works real well on politician types. He had brought in a free Internet connection to a university I believe in Phnom Penh with the requirement that it be only for them and students could use it, but at one point some bureaucrat tried to get his fingers on it.. you know if it's a donation what is given can be taken away. I don't know how much thought has been given to it but if that ISP actually succeeds it will have as customers the entire population under age x and will have an opportunity to hang on to them I presume as they grow older. Maybe that is where people think they can make money off this thing.
Anyway best wishes and thanks for your comments!
Matt Rosin
Thanks for your detailed replies. I was probably writing mainly to all the other people on the thread who seemed to be professional doubters but I really appreciate your hard facts approach. I know things cost money, I just think that money can be minimized and that local costs should be borne by local governments and not be used to say that the $100 laptop really costs $800 or whatever. Unlimited travel meaning just paying for plane flights when needed but obviously at their discretion, they will not be flying back and forth constantly. Two internet lines of course that's not the ideal. I meant that this should be considered minimum to run the project with anything on top of that at the discretion of the local country or counties, and not be used to create a $500 surcharge that can be seen as a required line item and inflate the $100 PC to already over $600 with that one item. I suppose they could say it would cost more if you counted more than 5 years the way they are saying it. As for technically where I'm coming from, my understanding of an MIT Media Lab run Cambodian program which provided some basis for the $100 PC project is that MIT acted as a central coordination point for communications even between teachers in rural Cambodia and international net access was not the object of the project. I really think if you want to call the $100 PC $600+ because it has to be online 24x7 to the entire globe then that is a different project and not really doable in many countries even bandwidth wise. I expect a lot of what the PCs will actually be used for can be done over sneaker and mesh net with only the teachers' machines actually being online all the time for example. I'm all for giving them as much access as possible but my point is $500 Internet is crazy. If it is really needed then each school ought to have their own WLAN and that anyway is up to them, not part of the project necessarily. There can be plenty of options to make it a better project but I do not at all see it as absolutely required nor a valid way of inflating the basic price of "the $100 computer". They should at least break down the per student price of all things needed to do what they want to do (maybe they do somewhere but I haven't seen it, sorry you are better informed) and specify which parts are optional and/or the resposibility of the host country. The project we did in Cambodia made heavy use of local talent and dedicated people, and I was often told (though could not take advantage of it) I could spend as much time there as I wanted if I just went. There are plenty of local people already who know linux I have a feeling, so while trained staff are required the cost of the staff and the type of training can be focused, it's not like making a military landing what they really need are some people to show their experts how to set up systems and to teach their trainers the pedagogical side of the system. Undoubtedly there is a lot involved but TFA was singularly slanted and went out of its way to inflate the cost without asking whether this was really needed, that's all. Thank you very much for your comments. I'm not involved in the project so maybe the people who are really doing this have other ideas. But in our projects the biggest obstacle was the government itself in that they wanted a piece of the pie. We even had ideas (this goes back to like 1995) on rolling out a new telephone infrastructure (but too tightly controlled), radio repeaters (but the military fires on them.. so then the idea of a bulletproof school in a shipping container), and satellite-delivered telephone and Internet (from a company doing this in Thailand) or a line from over the Thai border.. both of these latter choices being discarded because while the Cambodians had nothing they refused to cooperate with the Thais, wanting to do it all themselves. With little electricity or telephone. So I'd like to know where the heck this company comes from that is charging $500 bucks per seat for Internet, why they are involved, and what other commercial deployment thay have on t
Some of the projects involved building and staffing a hospital with telemedicine capability, starting a newspaper with real news, building 200 schools, purchasing anti-malaria nets, and others. All were done with private donations, people donating time onsite, academic institutions, corporate donations, donated computers (Apple), Internet support, continual media campaigns, and the like. However it was primarily accomplished through a combination of three key talents of one person (Bernie), which are massive stubbornness, massive heroism, and massive knowhow of how to get things done from a lifetime of experience. The stubbornness comes from focusing on just one thing to accomplish and then doing nothing but that regardless of people giving you new ideas or cynicism, just get the job done. The heroism means putting yourself in the line of fire repeatedly (to the point that he even got a stroke in North Korea from lifting a bag of donated rice). That communicates something to people and is part of why he was able to create a long list of private donors who listen to him. Video and photos of him on site and distributed by the Internet magnified the effect. The knowhow comes from him being an ace journalist and partly from a lifetime of favors he's made to other companies he could call in. The decision to devote your life to "giving something back" is profound enough to sway others. My belief is this sort of devotion is what is driving and making possible these things by Negroponte and others, though I am not myself currently involved.
I would say that on this scale of practicality and effort, the criticism of TFA are like unto a flicked sand grain bouncing off stainless steel armor. For those of you who do not believe it I would also like to provide my own quick reading of "The Bill" of TFA.
First, the costs are all in dollars. They should be what it would really cost in terms of local currency and actual costs of local people doing it. In fact, there should not be any money spent on anything preferably. If they won't provide local people to do the job for free or a minimum wage covered by their company/institution anyway they should just pick other people. They could even just pick teen and college kids, train them, let it count against graduation credits or tuition, heck there are lots of ways including making a local company. The important thing is to absolutely minimize the number of people who actually have to be paid by the organization, and these people must get other locals with the same idea, preferably free. There's a reason why Christian missionaries succeeded too you know, maybe they could go to local churches, etc. Heck make a boy scout merit badge even.
The cost of the laptop, as I understand it $100 and not a cent more. I question the $148 quoted price.
The setup, $108 per laptop is utter bullshit. If anyone with two brain cells is running this thing it is a completely free, automatic or semiautomatic process. Any cost it might incur would be peanuts compared to the cost of the shipping and delivery to the location (maybe that's where the extra $48 comes from above) at any rate it is the same for all laptops in a given country at least, and it should cost $0. Also it should be done by ngo type people locally anyway or maybe some local grads over a month at local grad student pay which must be peanuts compared to grad student pay in the U.S., which is also peanuts.
Training, $27.60/yr or $138/5 yrs. I don't understand this point either. First, all documents ought to be free and part of the initial installation or downloaded free over the net, so no printed docs. Maybe a chalkboard illustration of how to turn the computer on. It should cost nothing to train kids since that is part of their educational
Seriously though this is the sort of thing that you don't want to sneeze at, it can sound both inane and brilliant. Anderson is not such a crackpot, I found a presentation of his on optical computing and an introduction to its underlying theory called perspex algebra ( "Representing geometrical knowledge."). He seems to be a geometer stating his perspective in the first line of that presentation: "Aims: To unify projective geometry and the Turing machine".
He's a geek hero! Who knows if his nullity will end up just NaN with a British twang or the next best thing to sliced bread and i?
I was unable to hear the realaudio casts but from Book of Paragon, The Perspex Machine (Anderson mentions transreal arithmetic) and Exact Numerical Computation of the Rational General Linear Transformations (a mathematical treatise with applications to computer vision and robotics) just glancing I'd have to say the guy seems to be a real mathematician, geek and philosopher-king. I don't know if he's up there with Newton but he at least deserves an honorable mention for his wonderfully witty (and to me as yet inscrutable) naming of the Walnut Cake Theorem (see page 10 of Perspex.pdf). It seems that he was motivated to create nullity in order to make reliable advanced computers that would not barf when asked questions about the universe, and to him "Not-a-Number" is vomit. I'd say read some of his stuff before assigning him to the 9th Hell. Would like to hear what any mathematicians or other people with brain cells over the age of 12 have to think about it. It's okay if he reinvented something but it appears he is trying to make a machine that can handle infinities and other tough numerical concepts with ease, and that's worth something. Oh, that and his quantum computer looks neat.
Sounds like it would be useful. MS should pull a hundred people off its movie and music projects and get some of this out the door for Windows (not Vista, XP). They could say "...by Microsoft Research" when downloading the patches that give you more functionality in the OS than when you purchased it. Don't force an upgrade to Vista, make XP or 2K more useful as-is and I might imagine someone at MS is trying to do something right instead of the de rigeur warping of everything into surreal Evil. Oh the part about them buying companies and destroying them might have something to do with the perception too.
Hello again,
I just noticed you had posted a reply to my reply, and wanted to say thank you. Your reply is eminently clear-headed and makes a lot of sense to me, too.
Of course since then, there has risen the spectre of an OOo fork by Novell, but I'm not asking for any specific opinion about it. The first thought that popped into my head was, "Okay, they're Evil, next!" but it is still vague.
Also, they might be seen as somewhat brilliant in identifying a potential business advantage for companies trying to make a profit on OSS, in taking their own sweet time releasing a GPL version and waiting for community approval while in the meantime selling a bunch.
Anyway, we'll just have to see. Novell is another company made of lots of people and it can change as people come and go too. I also am thinking they just might have the concept of an acceptable limit of exposure and when things get too itchy they might distance themselves more from MS.
Anyway thank you very much for your insights, and I hope things turn out well, with your cool head prevailing.
Sincerely,
Matt Rosin
It is possible this will work but I am skeptical thinking it is possible MPAA and certain large companies may try to embrace and extend the bittorrent system to make it "easier" for the end user to give them a lot of money. It could work though if prices are lower to the customer that seeds or provides significant bandwidth, and in particular if DVD libraries are cached at the ISP in such a way that non-movie traffic is not wiped out.
If done well this could usher in a way for payments to be made for ISP packages including payment for the liscensing of broad content libaries (not just movies, how about university libraries, encyclopedias, mainstream publishers, television and newspaper companies too) or for some other company to arise that will aggregate such liscenses into a package and make sure everyone gets paid. It would be very bad if only certain Hollywood studios are able to get into your wallet.
Most of the posts here talk about how things are impossible. I think it is pretty unlikely that slashdotters will be contributing bandwidth for free to morally bankrupt companies, but the idea is mainly to build a video on demand system for large swathes of users and they might not mind DRM so much. Perhaps one answer will be for someone else to build a system that does things the "right" way and Hollywood can use it too. Bittorrent is public, I'm curious about what his company has as an edge. Are they modifying the protocol for special video clients, or what? Otherwise it is still wide open and they are not going to "totally own" (dumb phrase) online movie space.
P.S. I got money from Accel Partners once for an early ISP and I was extremely dissatisfied with their level of understanding and support. They might have gotten a clue since then but Bram cannot depend on them to tell him anything about reality he will have to keep a clear eye on it himself.
Still not impossible at all. For example a new mp3 phone in Japan has in all sales materials the Napster and Tower Records brands! It would be fun to see Bittorrent as a brand shown right up there with a big movie house but unless he is really delivering something valuable his lunch could get eaten real fast.
I'd like to hear what he would say about the Democracy browser that runs on the same protocol. Technically it might be perfect for him but there will be hollers if he tries to inject DRM hooks into it or recommend it for DRM'd titles! Just what is he offering?
if you need to make a map to your office or tell someone to meet you somewhere, it would be useful if you could have a google directions or mapquest style guide to getting there that actually shows you what it looks like at landmarks. But currently interfaces suck they totally do not consider anyone actually using the system, because they themselves don't know how it is to be used.
Also there is not enough data.
Finally if you had a streaming camera on you a system could compare what the camera sees to the database so you never get lost. But of course it is much cheaper and easier just to locate yourself by cellular stations, gps, etc. However these things don't sell.. they are too expensive for most North American phone users (and only sell to a limited extent in markets where people spend more on them like Japan).
What is needed is:
- a common platform so you can plug things together that you purchase separately, like a gps antenna and a phone.
- a cheap data plan for phones
- a built in usb hub for phones (currently some have limited usb connections)
Possibly a windows ce based phone like the willcom es phone or vodaphone's phone terminals might be useful. However until manufacturers actually let users mix and match as AV component manufacturers let people buy vcrs and tvs from different companies, there will just be an unending battle of functions getting slammed into phones and users will just end up picking the ones with the most popular mix of things for the least money. This seems to be why gps phones are not as popular as phones that provide mp3 ring tones.
DoCoMo just came out with a >1 Mbps phone but as far as I can see it still is far too expensive for data, and does not seem to offer connectivity. I'd like to have a fast uplink, a nice camera, a gps, and a nice ring tone, and I wouldn't mind purchasing separate units from different manufacturers to do so. But I don't need 5 different phones and so I am skeptical about this king of street image product ever making it into mobile devices in significant quanitities.
The protein based process sounds interesting, if it is real, though it will be one choice in the future and as I understand it hydrogen is simply one energy storage technology. Since this might be a way to make hydrogen strategies cheaper it needs to be examined but the proteins will have to survive the industrial process long enough to lyse enough water to break even.
Also consider something like that aquafuel process if it is real, where they burn a carbon arc lamp under water to generate hydrocarbon fuel. You need to consider if making, delivering and burning hydrogen is going to be cheaper than that.
And while we are on the subject of biological molecules it might very well be a lot better to engineer proteins that could produce oil or even an ATP-like system instead of hydrogen. Because you want a concentrated, easy to use substance.
If you want a biological equivalent of jet fuel (well unless you want to make jet fuel itself) you could do worse than synthesize VAAM (Vespa Amino Acid Mixture) and glycogen. This is what hornets use for power and I've drunk it. Quite a kick.
I see, thank you! I will try to learn some more about supernovae and galactic evolution in the future. I see there is apparently a supernova every 50 years or so but also there is a 500 Myear cycle of mass at the center of the Milky Way reaching critical mass and producing supernovae at about 1 per year. (Our next one is in 300My). Which is perhaps why the paper only goes back 200My... before that being chaos?
He didn't say how thick the plastic sheet or "paper" was, did he?
I think scotch tape stored 100GB didn't it? You just need to get enough tape. The rest's all grunt work.
The leaders of the business in April of course announced 515GB/square inch which sounds like a lot but how long does it take to read and back it up, right?
link
This is my second post to this thread. Here is a link to the paper mentioned in the article. It is not on Svesnmark's site I think. Also it is not the latest issue of Astronomische Nachrichten (Astronomical Notes), which is Dec. 2006. Actually he wrote two articles that seem to be the focus of the Space.com article, and both articles are published in AN's Nov. 2006 issue.
c t/113391302/ABSTRACTc t/113391301/ABSTRACT
It seems we get clobbered when we pass through spiral arms, last time maybe 31 million years ago. So the idea of a static neighborhood that I mentioned in the other post is too simplistic since we appear to be moving faster than the spiral arms (else how could we cross) at any rate, even without the full papers he claims an extraordinary link to the the fossil record, using 3 Gyear fossil record and 200Myear galactic data. Obviously the key is to staying out of the arms so maybe this should be used to tune Seti searches?
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstra
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstra
The full text PDFs are not accessible to guests. Anyone have copies?
Here are the two abstracts.
Cosmic rays and the biosphere over 4 billion years
H. Svensmark
Center for Sun-Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
email: H. Svensmark (hsv@spacecenter.dk)
Keywords
Cosmic Rays Climate Biosphere
Abstract
Variations in the flux of cosmic rays (CR) at Earth during the last 4.6 billion years are constructed from information about the star formation rate in the Milky Way and the evolution of the solar activity. The constructed CR signal is compared with variations in the Earths biological productivity as recorded in the isotope 13C, which spans more than 3 billion years. CR and fluctuations in biological productivity show a remarkable correlation and indicate that the evolution of climate and the biosphere on the Earth is closely linked to the evolution of the Milky Way. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Received: 28 May 2006; Accepted: 14 June 2006
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1002/asna.200610651 About DOI
Imprint of Galactic dynamics on Earth's climate
H. Svensmark
Center for Sun Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, Juliane Marie Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
email: H. Svensmark (hsv@spacecenter.dk)
Keywords
Galaxy: kinematics and dynamics Earth
Abstract
A connection between climate and the Solar system's motion perpendicular to the Galactic plane during the last 200 Myr years is studied. An imprint of galactic dynamics is found in a long-term record of the Earth's climate that is consistent with variations in the Solar system oscillation around the Galactic midplane. From small modulations in the oscillation frequency of Earth's climate the following features of the Galaxy along the Solar circle can be determined: 1) the mass distribution, 2) the timing of two spiral arm crossings (31 Myr and 142 Myr) 3) Spiral arm/interarm density ratio ( arm/ interarm 1.5-1.8), and finally, using current knowledge of spiral arm positions, a pattern speed of P = 13.6 ± 1.4 km s-1 kpc-1 is determined. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Received: 28 May 2006; Accepted: 26 June 2006
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1002/asna.200610650 About DOI
Okay, here is the link to
Henrik Svensmark, Danish Space Research Institute and his papes on
Cosmic rays and Earth's Cloud Cover. He is quoted in the story.
I am providing this in self defense since I prefer to discuss intelligently with people who do not need that popular science website (which is fine on its own) to provide a link to every darned word in the article. I think it is up to the Editors to do this sort of thing to promote some you know, talk about science and technology around here.
Anyway they also link to the Fermi paradox about where are they (the aliens). But I saw it just after reading about how vortices are thought to push dolphins forward and solve Gray's paradox about how they swim so fast. It is nice how paradoxes have ways of getting resolved over time. Oh, that's alright then.
Okay, I didn't like the term cosmic rays.. Wikipedia says it covers lots of things including the helium nuclei that remained in my head. Which is a lot more than just the gamma rays from Supernovae that I thought caused extinction events.
Anyway, as some posters mention it seems likely that lots of life in the galaxy must have died back or been sterilized in high radiation eras and what we need now is some kind of chronological and spatial map of what regions were affected to that degree and when. If our local neighbors failed to survive such radiation, then our biological histories are all of approximately the same age. Perhaps having deep oceans or thick ice sheets, would have something to do with preserving that too.
Now my guess has always been that even so, the geographic scale of time we are talking about, and the comparatively very rapid industrialization and advancement of a planet once the biology reaches a critical stage (perhaps a certain number of organisims at near human level?), meant that even so it most certain that civilizations hundreds of thousands or millions of years more advanced than us must exist. My picture was always that supernovae were the killer but we had been lucky... and we need to continue to be lucky until we can spread out and shield ourselves or move to safer places for the long term.
But now, it might mean that a relatively short window of time has been available to all planets in this local region to develop life. It is not clear how many times we failed or whether other planets would have to go through all the stages we did. It seems logical to have the planetary chemistry alterations in order like we had, with vegetation, and big plant eaters. Maybe the meteor that killed them was not the only problem? Anyway it took this long to get where we are. It is possible our type of chemistry is the only one that works, since the world we have obviously came from a darwinian evolution it would appear to be a result of very high probability.
So now I am looking on the web to see if there is information about just how long the part of the galaxy we know anything about could have survived biologically intact to the present day, how far back does the current window go, and how long are windows on average. It also seems that we should look for signals from areas that got hit with high radiation far away but maybe had time to beam something at us from the other side of the galaxy - to us who would evolve in the next window... Anyway it would be interesting (if we had the data which I guess we don't maybe) to be able to plot a 4D map of garden regions that did not get totally ionized and disrupted, and to see where in our neighborhood is the oldest such area.
This would be really annoying every time I fell asleep at the keyboard. Of course it would be just like what happens whenever my thumb brushes the touch pad and switches me into Japanese input in linux.. um.
Look this is a software patent and I am not going to read TFA. There are already ways to automatically detect languages by statistical patterns and morphology, one example I know of is for example the nkf unix program, I quote the manpage:
One of the most unique facicility of nkf is the guess of the
kanji code. It currently recognizes 7-bit JIS, MS-kanji (shifted-
JIS),utf-8 and EUC. So users needn't the input kanji code specifica-
tion.
Also there are the KAKASI and CHASEN Japanese morphological analyzers. So you can convert English alphabet transliteration to Chinese character based sentences. Also the perl Jcode module does automatic recognition. And people can too, most anyone could differentiate between ASCII representations of Japanese JIS, SJIS, and EUC.
But similar ideas were out there earlier. I am not qualified to evaluate originality of the professor's work in Korean, however analysis of morphology and keyboard input streams is obvious. Also, I think it is more of a trick than an invention, since the example of Korean input someone posted is very unlike English (wierd consonant patterns) which might make it more efficient to guess between the two languages compared to a different language pair. Whatever, I do not see how this guy gets millions of dollars for something that is a neat idea but the neat part of it is just human interface design, something which is not covered by patent and has always been copied and stolen from everyone.
That said, Microsoft asked for it. They want to make software patents a high stakes game, they got it. The problems are that the Korean courts are a time bomb for other OSs, and also that every time Microsoft wins or even loses a big patent battle it just deepens the recognition by society of the validity of those battles. Unless there is more to the tech than what has been mentioned, it does sound like Microsoft was in the right. I have a feeling the courts may just be so pissed at MS that they did this to them. I'd like someone in Korea to ask the guy to release a (L)GPL library!