I'm intrigued by the graph that compares the speed of XaraCDraw to that of GDI+ and Cairo 1.0.
Maybe this rendering engine would be useful for the desktop or other programs, spun off on its own? I always loved SGI Irix's vector based desktop with that awesome vertically oriented scroll wheel widget that would scale all icons on the desktop.
1. Recognize they will NEVER index even all significant information in the world today, because a) info growing too fast and b) we are not yet at the point that everyone is using networked data for everything.
2. Data can only be indexed as it is produced, otherwise you are fighting a losing battle with diminishing returns. It looks like 300 but it is really asymptotic approaching "when the universe cools down and we live in a big black hole".
3. Google spends money to increase recognition among public and government of the need to archive for posterity and scientific/cultural advancement. This includes legal basis for the indiscriminate archiving for society's greater good and a waveform collapse of all copyright owners' Terms of Usage and various nasty legal mechanisms mostly created by the U.S. (but did you know copyright is a criminal violation in Japan?). The money is needed to lobby other governments too, so that they increase networking and slow down copyright legislation (otherwise the U.S. government and its corporate backers will tend to continue to push foreign data laws down the throats of relatively undeveloped countries). Actually 1 billion dollars is only the beginning of what it will cost but Google is going to have to act to ensure its future.
4. Develop a tree of archival nodes (indexing all information streaming through them) from devices to communities to states. The forerunner of this will be simpler, smaller, cheaper google servers placed in music, radio, tv, print and other publishers, subsidized mainly by google, for the triple purpose of providing searchability to the companies, securing a future resource for Google to search and distribute when the copyright runs out, and creating a secure data store linked to a payment mechanism to realize on-demand sales for those companies with little sweat. Using Google will ensure low middleman charges since Google needs this stuff. Publishers will jump to offer Google rights 50 years later plus a small margin on online sales until then, in return for storing, indexing and selling now.
5. With the exception of data prior to this point, the index is done when networked data in our lives hits 100%.
6. We can approach 100% a bit faster by reducing duplication, but we will end up with massively higher storage requirements as we find new definitions of important information, such as securely storing genetic data assays every year per individual for health purposes, or storage of information on preferences concerning the just in time construction of micro- or nanoscale robots.
So how long does this take? Google has started selling servers already. They will do a heroic job until we hit the network singularity (everything we do is all together on the one net, indexed as it is produced by intelligent agents). Seems likely the network singularity and a minimal form of artificial intelligence will coincide. This says the task will be done in maybe 50 years (well between 30 and 100), and not 300.
The rest of the 300 years can be spent cross-correlating all of mankind's knowledge; actually the beginning of this is starting now but when say in the next 10-30 years actually make headway in the semantic web so that we get a yahoo-like index of all scientific and business knowledge, we will stop duplicating information, and education and business will get more efficient. It will accelerate as we learn more about ourselves and advances in computing will just barely keep up with indexing and crosscorrelating it all as we start eating up CPU cycles for things other than video games and imaginary friends. My guess is 100 years. So Google has no business talking about 300 years concerning anything except maybe plans for space travel. Their online world is going to change way too much by then! Figure that (if it is economically important) 80% of the people on the planet will have the same capabilities as Google does now in 20 years. They will only have to worry about 300 years if they keep evolving their goals higher and higher.
HBO should host old episodes on bittorrent so it can gain new converts. It seems the application is not so great for archived shows, you basically have to "follow the swarm".
Actually it would be more useful if the show could be downloaded without having to use bittorrent, come to think of it. Just convert all those IPs they are using to serving instead of disturbing.
I am pretty sure I have not bought a CD in a music store in at least 15 years, barring any instance I might have forgotten. I have bought CDs at times from individual musicians or bands performing on the street, and I recently bought in a movie theater the CD of a band that provided the sound track ("Blood or Fire" by Attack All Around, for the live-action movie "Initial D").
I made this decision when I realized in college that the CD albums were *way* too expensive. I would consider a $8 or $10 album though now.
So I listen to less music than music addicts, though I do enjoy it. I hear it on radio and TV.
Also I recently built a little perl program that serves me pages from books off my website, just for my use, to my mobile phone. I'm reading out of print books, mostly, and ones I've already bought. I tend to buy the same books more than once over the years actually and am always looking for good authors in the bookstore when I have some spending money.
So my books program, it works great. The time spent on the train when most people are staring dumbly across the train car, or maybe reading a newspaper or listening to their iPod, I spend reading a book. My program keeps track of where I left off reading any of the books I've been reading, and I figure at 0.3 cents a 128 byte packet, it is expensive compared to when I used to use my Palm, but say at the high end of acceptable. If I had a way to give one of those two dollars per book to the estate of the author I would like to.
Maybe this strategy would work with living authors too, if they didn't mind. We could keep score of who we read most and find most satisfying, and then either buy a new book from them, or buy a coupon for them next time we go to the bookstore.
Maybe we could start with book publishers and then extend a model that works to music. I think the RIAA is asking for it, and they deserve a professional job. I also liked the suggestion about tracking down dirt about the people suing that girl. It has a thrilling medieval feel to it.
From what I can tell it must be something like this complete system for monitoring on a farm (Japanese). Maspro also sells home security video monitoring systems using some of the same components it seems. The article was a bit weak and since I haven't been to CEATEC today I can't tell you for sure but I'd be quite surprised if they are enjoying a 1000% markup like all the other slashdotters expect. That, plus it will "just work" and be durable, etc. Take a look at their export catalog (click on pdf link) if you are interested in evaluating the company's offerings. (their English is a little wierd though..)
Google buys rights to digital sale, creates success stories
Google creates a huge inventory of digital print and realtime media (10 TB of text scalable to 10 PB of multimedia)
Links with bookstore chains, tv/radio stations, film distributors
With Google, world really is at your fingertips, online
Google buys Apple, now it's Google+Apple+Motorola, +Media companies, +the creators of the media who use Apples, and the world is in your iPod
Reduced version packaged in high density media, as hardware improves becomes able to package all books, film, tv/radio history in one box, like Hitchhikers' Guide. Updates over the fiber in your home at night.
Who cares about M$? Companies all use data input templates that minimize the work employees have to do and save money. Word processing is so 1900s. Live business data is what counts, dead data just wastes everybody's time. No more unused buttons and menus, MS is best known for Clippy that raunchy thing.
Of course if M$ started buying publishers now they might put a crimp in things..
Here is the relevant passage from Robert A. Heinlein's book "Friday". Been waiting a while for Google to get established and with the program.
Live music? I could punch in a concert going on live in Berkeley this evening, but a concert given ten
years ago in London, its conductor long dead, is just as "live," just as immediate, as any listed on today's program. Electrons don't care. Once data of any sort go into the net, time is frozen. All that is necessary is to
remember that all the endless riches of the past are available any time you punch for them.
Boss sent me to school at a computer terminal and I had far richer opportunities than any enjoyed by a stud
ent at Oxford or the Sorbonne or Heidelberg in any earlier year.
...
Why don't you just get acquainted with the equipment by studying anything you wish?"
There wasn't anything special about the equipment except that there were extra keys giving direct access to
several major libraries such as Harvard's and the Washington Library of the Atlantic Union and the British Museum
without going through a human or network linkupDplus the unique resource of direct access to Boss's library, the one
right beside me. I could even read his bound paper
books if I wanted to, on my terminal's screen, turning the pages from the keyboard and never taking the volume out
of its nitrogen
environment.
That morning I was speed-searching the index of the Tulane University library (one of the best in the Lone
Star Republic), looking for history of Old Vicksburg, when I stumbled onto a cross-reference to spectral types of s
tars and found myself hooked. I don't recall why there was such a cross-referral but these do occur for the most unlikely reasons.
I was still reading about the evolution of stars when Professor Perry suggested that we go to lunch.
We did but I made some notes first about types of mathematics I wanted to study. Astrophysics is fascinating - but you have to talk the language.
That afternoon I got back to Old Vicksburg and was footnoted to Show Boat, a musical play concerning that era - and then spent the rest of the day looking at and listening to Broadway musical plays from the happy days before
the North American Federation fell to pieces. Why can't they write music like that today? Those people must have had
fun! I certainly did - I played Show Boat, The Student Prince, and My Fair Lady one after the other
and noted a dozen more to play later. (This is going to school?)
...
At one time there really was a man known as "the World's Greatest Authority." I ran across him in trying to nail down one of the many silly questions that kept coming at me from odd sources. Like this: Set your terminal to "research." Punch parameters in s
Say what you like but Negroponte has been pushing this idea a lot in lots of venues, I've heard it 2-3 times I think.
The article is slashdotted but Negroponte has said repeatedly that they are going to keep the price the same and keep improving the power etc. One key IIRC was a $30 LCD.
A representative from Nigeria did say in one conference I was at that the absolute poorest don't need computers because they need firewood and the smart people leave the towns etc.
However if Negroponte gets this to work (especially if it has solar power..) it can be a massive boost to the entire world. He is not making it for the U.S. market (though possibly people living in poverty could use them), it is to solve a specific problem.
Imagine, if YOU worked on open source educational software, especially if it is with a trained teacher, you might be able help. All you people who used to run sigs about giving a man a fish, this is what you were talking about.
I think you are as wrong as the above Funny post marked Informative.
Matter cannot move faster than light as far as we know it however galaxies are the one exception in that space can expand faster than light, which will have a similar effect. And am not even a physicist..
Collaboration phase or Embrace phase? Look at M$ track record for collaboration. Either they buy you, or you are destroyed, seems to be their basic mode. Statistically it is far more likely that JBoss is going to be dead in 18 months than that they are going to be able to do any reasonable "cooperation" with Microsoft. If they can't do business with any other company, they need a new business plan; this one is not a recipe for survival.
Thanks for your comment. Not like I didn't think of the same thing though. First of all take a relatively simple phonetic alphabet like that used in Japanese. It is a 51 letter alphabet basically composed of a consonant from the (NULL, K, S, T, N, H, M, R, W) sequence plus a vowel from the (A I U E O) sequence. Counting out a few that aren't used, you still basically have a base 50 numbering system there. Like Microsoft figured out, you can use a such an alphabet to both compress coordinates and make it easier to remember with mnemonic hooks than plane base 10 coordinates. Also by providing some alternate alphabets to provide more varied mnemonic hooks I expect you could relatively easily memorize a large number of high resolution spatial coordinates without carrying a pda or piece of paper around (neither of which is as portable or survivable on a trip as your own self).
Also, what I was proposing is not what you are attacking. I propose a standard ditty everyone memorizes, where the leading syllable of each word is a navigation key (not a numerical value like 25). Say you have two ditties (songs) with 36 words each. that you know by heart. Then you can specify any 10 degree by 10 degree region on a planet with a pair of two words, one from either song.
You can also use it as a base 36 alphabet, so two words from the same song in a row would give you resolution better than 1/1000 (1/36^2).
If you wanted to talk about navigation on the surface, you could specify a grid point on the 10 degree grid with two words, then one word for the compass direction, and another word for the magnitude of the vector (distance or speed perhaps).
There are lots of variations on this of course. In particular, if you start with a well known landmark as the origin of a coordinate system and allow the first word after the landmark's name to indicate the size of the map, you can get very high resolution quickly.
For example, if you start with a center point like the tip of the flagpole at city hall and want to designate a point on a map that has a radius of 10 km, you can get down to a scale of meters or even centimeters with one or two words from each song, depending on the distance of the point from the landmark.
As it happens there is a nice ditty in Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Robert Heinlein, who says any tenderfoot scout would know it (in his day anyway).
"Mother very thoughtfully made a jelly sandwich under no protest."
The first letter of each words is the name of a planet from Mercury out, and Earth is called "Terra". There is a table of prices associated with each, for example "Thoughtfully" is $1.00, "Jelly" is $5.20 and "Protest" is $39.50. These are multiples of Earth's distance to the Sun, so it is easy to remember that Pluto is 39.5 times Earth's distance from the Sun.
In the story, our hero uses that info to pilot a ship back home. People use these kind of devices to remember figures, but they are always different ones. If there was a standard mnemonic device for planetary navigation I think it would be a very useful thing for Terra, the Moon and Mars. Incidentally, I watched NASA TV last night and they showed a map of where our new lunar program is going to try to land.. a number of points all across the lunar globe.
Recommend a mnemonic utility for travelers
on
Martian Naming Madness
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I can understand wanting to name significant places but naming pebbles has always been a bit much to me, more of a PR vehicle and maybe a bit of geek fun at JPL. Perhaps there is a bit of cultural imperialism too? Grid coordinates are fine for scientific observations.
Anyway, as soon as people live there they will probably use their own names (hopefully most of the planet will be as yet unnamed).
What I would like to suggest is that some time be put into creating a mnemonic system that would be of use to travelers or anybody else who needs to navigate the surface. Or for that matter, to allow people to talk about locations on the planet without having to contact an online database every time someone mentions a new geographical name.
There are lots of ways it could be done. For example if you pick a sequence of one or two syllable sounds to indicate moving east from 0 degrees longitude, and a similar encoding for latitude, you could easily create a name for a place that sounds and means something.
Or by tacking one such standardized sequence to the end of an existing name perhaps with the first syllable indicating compass direction (say for a route a robot takes) you could specify by name points along the route. A given sequence would have a given resolution (say 10 meters for tiny robots).
And you could have alternate homonyms for each syllable so that it is easy to say a given sequence in some language (really the sequence should be chosen so that it is easy to say in all major languages).
Also the same naming system could be used for ANY planet or for that matter, any mountain or terrestrial orienteering / geographical application. This way you could in fact practice and use a system on Earth that will serve you in good stead on Mars.
If a similar system was developed based not on geographical coordinates but to measure for instance time, temperature, depth, or even spacecraft motion or orbits, it could tie in to the above system and provide an extremely useful way to talk about land, water, and space phenomena in a unified fashion, with arbitrary precision and universal applicability, while being culture agnostic, and in particular human-centered. Using computers for so many things we tend to get stuck with too much information and make silly mistakes like whether to use Fahrenheit or Celsius. These things can kill you in space or for that matter in the ocean depths. By saying human-centered, I mean that a human can always be able to talk about a location if he or she knows such a universal naming system, and it uses the brain more efficiently. We have trouble remembering numerical strings but can relatively easily remember poetry, songs, famous quotations, where we put things in our homes, routes to get to the office, and so on.
I believe it would be a good idea to develop such a system to be eventually taught to every school child, possibly with a limited set of nouns and verbs culled from different languages, so that every person in the world can talk rationally to each other about the basics of location, time, motion, route, and so on. It also could give rise to a basic way for any person in the world to add to a universally useable database of local travel directions or a minimal language that can be used by both humans and computers.
This system would limit the unnecessary, frivolous naming being done and would allow random locations to be specified in terms of their context (from a well-known named landmark), so every major Mars landmark should have a single precise point at which it is based so that you could indicate a route from there.
You could build mnemonic strings in your head to remember a certain location, and you can build songs that help you get there. Children and adults can share in talking about features of Mars, and humans can intuitively check the coordinates used by computers as well as using speech input and sound output to talk about coordinates.
I'm probably not the first to think of this sort of
It seems that if life can be found on Titan it would be a significant change in a factor of the Drake equation that estimates how much alien life is out there.
We need to get off this rock, and every decade we lapse into introversion is a decade later that man's history of exploitation of the solar system is delayed.
The major benefits I can see are:
- ensure survival against earth killer asteroid hitting in say the next 2 centuries
- increase pressure and funding to build independent robotic mining and factories
- draw minds and effort away from fragmented religion, and towards a unified goal of conquering space
- exploit space-based power generation and develop better water extraction and conservation technologies, reducing pressures to start oil wars and water wars
- get advanced physics research off the planet's surface as soon as possible. One possibile reason for the lack of alien contact is that nature holds a booby trap (or a jackpot) that most cultures hit by accident and everything goes boom. We are already close to primordial densities in particle physics and if it is possible to use advanced space-based resources to quickly and cheaply (say with a self-organizing robotic factory) build a ring in space or on the moon that would be excellent.
- add low-noise observatories on the moon. Currently we are just starting to observe in very noisy RF bands for example.
- develop unified educational program based on integrated science and exploratory culture. A free course of study for any child on the planet, instilling a citizen of the world sense of identity, respect and practical knowledge of science, an imperative to stride beyond man's history of intolerance and enter the next phase of our civilization, develop emotional intelligence, and in general train people so that we can achieve 10 times more efficient exploitation of the world's human resources, with 10 times better health and welfare for the world, and international collaboration to develop key technologies more quickly. Sure there is more to this but obviously there is still demagoguery, genocide, famine, disaster, and demonization in the 21st century. We need to get beyond it and work together.
Many of these things can be done on the planet. But the fact is, our societies are still pretty uncivilized and we need a common project to bind politicians and peoples around the world toward the same goal. It seems that broad, continued, well funded efforts for space science and every connected area - including advances in biotech, robotics, and education for example - could be a spark that begins humanity on exponential growth and saves us from nuclear races and preoccupation with trade deficits and resource starvation. People need to have something to work towards, and we need to provide great salaries and lionize people who go into these fields and go to space.
Thanks for your lengthy post. Sorry if I was not clear enough, I have nothing against Germany per se (though my Dad, does, I should say). And I am not a huge cat lover, though I do live on a hill where 10 abandoned cats wait for handouts, which perhaps resonanted a bit. Also I am very pro-alternative energy.
What I reacted to was a very nasty sense of humor. I am glad to hear it is a hoax, but it just means that the person with the nasty sense of humor is not the kind Dr. Koch but the publisher of the newspaper.
The point I attempted to make was that making an involved project of building a cat-powered car, or in this case of reporting that such a car existed, is not exactly humor at all. In fact, and it is more to the point now that we know it is a hoax, the time taken to create this story, and manipulate people into believing it, indicates a psyche that takes pleasure in causing distress to cat lovers, and perhaps also in further polarizing sentimental people against those who aren't. (It worked I believe).
You will note that we are not up to our ears in cats, which as they exist are a 100% domesticated and bred organism. Cats are invested with love, fed, excessively pampered, they live in our homes by our choice. Not like rats. The rat-powered robot I heard of in the past was gruesome but possibly a good idea. If there was a cockroach-powered robot smart enough to catch them I'd buy a dozen. A cat-powered anything can have but one purpose, since there are not enough dead cats to make an alternative fuel. The discussion of turning cats into a liquid like gasohol was a very bad piece of work in particular. Cats don't fuel cars. They may fuel your town because they get caught up in the trash somehow, though I doubt it would be a good idea to tell kids that. The only thing cats really fuel is a sadistic pleasure of a sick mind that finds the idea funny and enjoys seeing people squirm - the more sentimental the better. In this case the only winners are the sadists, and the poor geeks who have become so robotlike that they cannot imagine why a story about a German engineer liquifying members of the household to power his car is not a terrifying person to have in the neighborhood. Well thank you and I hope you understand my viewpoint.
By the way I am a U.S. citizen but have lived in Japan a long time. The economy is still a wreck thanks to oil prices. I did not know it was the law that pets were used as cattle feed, that is grotesque and you can call me sentimental if you wish. Dead pets are undoubtedly a big problem but I think the way you treat pets shows something about a society. Unfortunately in Japan, people often let their pets out to turn wild when they move, which is why I continually make friends with cats that turn up psychologically or physically abused, by the temple next to my home. I don't feed them because I don't want to see them have kittens and perpetuate this, which happened recently. Well this was an interesting subject, NOT. Viel Vergnügen!
1. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.
Not sure if this applies, it seems pretty vague.
I think this is a very bad move, mainly since this ensures the entire next generation will have a file, (not that they don't already?) which will be accessed by people who are not yet in office or even alive now. But it could be experimented with by starting with individuals in office. It would fit on a CD.
Boy this is so horrendous. If there is karma like Heinlein believes (in which being nasty to cats is a big no-no) he is really in for it.
Not to mention clinically insane. This horrific person must have a similar mental illness to that of Hitler, in which he is driven to perform the most terrifying acts against humanity. Well that is a bit much, generally I am very against comparing anything to Hitler, but it does seem linked somehow. Perhaps really he is just a minor sadist as sadists go, and anyway he is a bit of a backwoods nerdy sadist, nothing to prey on much but his car, neighborhood cats, and of course the people reading the article everywhere. I bet he loves that.
I wonder what it is about this country that brings out the worst in the human psyche? Nothing against Germany per se but I do know (from my old German girlfriend) that there are certain pathologies about analysis and logic games that thread the society. However this is totally beyond the beyond. I mean, it is painful to even imagine and TFA to note that he has driven over 100,000 km on dead cats and garbage is breathtaking. If it was just compost he'd be a hero of course. A closet sadist and a cancer in the world, but lionized since nobody would know. Perhaps in Germany it is normal to not bury a cat but to put it in the compost? Hard to imagine.
Honestly, if you want to terrorize the least powerful and most sympathetic among us, you cannot do much worse than this. I speak of course for the young girls and everybody else who loves cats of course. Personally I like cats but they can get a little uppity. Maybe you can start to plan revenge when they get a little too close. But they do not deserve this though, they need homes and food.
Some professional should analyze the guy while he's still alive, and a tissue specimen frozen for genome sequencing (it takes a bit long now doesn't it). Perhaps one day it will provide some insight into the genetic and environmentally caused defects that lead an unsuspecting human egg to develop into this monstrosity.
Okay, if one hand is 400 grams, then two hands, scaled to backhoe size (say 10 times per dimension) would be 800 * 1000 g = an 800 kg pair. It is pretty cool to watch those one-fingered claws tearing homes apart, how about hands (with teleoperation)?
How about sending these things up next time we need to fix a satellite and saving our astronauts' radation exposure for the important stuff?
How would these fare against what deepsea diving suits use?
I believe this is defeated by Denso's QR Code which was developed in 1997. It is a 2D barcode that is typically scanned by taking a photo with your cellphone or similar handheld device, and pushing a single button. The photo is decoded by the scanner into presumably an URL, and the resulting page is accessed and displayed. Alternatively you can store arbitrary data in it to the size of the symbol, i.e. a serial number or manufacturing date. It was created in 1997 it seems. In Japan it is now common in most phones and is often seen in magazines and on billboards. I don't see how Bezos can help but be embarrassed by this sort of thing. When he started out he used to be a straightforward kind of guy..
I'm reminded of Titan, a book by Stephen Baxter I just read. It is an aching story about a manned trip to Saturn and how apathy killed the space program, and has some vivid experiences with closed biosheres, long space voyages, budget cuts and lots of kinds of disturbing but realistic personalities. If you are interested in this story read it, but not all in one go - you may get too depressed!
One good thing about space is it's a new framework. You can learn new things, you can look back at the entire Earth from one point, you can trigger advances on the ground. For example the recent discovery of the interplanetary superhighway. And tracking of asteroids is also not a bad idea. The photos this month of Enceladus and other parts outbound.
Personally I think a mission to Mars, without nuclear rocketry, is premature and a bad idea. We need fabulous control of materials, biological processes, space agriculture, robotics, space construction processes, bioelectronics and polymers, and probably a bunch of other things, which are the difference between a suicide trip and building a serious beachead with honest to goodness 21st century engineering. If we can't fire a seed at the planet from here and know it will set up a fully powered biosphere with plenty of room, air, temperature and nutrition waiting for our astronauts, it just seems a waste to send people there just yet.
Instead, why not take 10 or 100 billion bucks or so, and make this stuff a profitable business so we can get tons of highpowered people into one campus to work on these kinds of things, make it international and make obvious spinoffs to the commercial sector as well (as the above would). Make something young people can aspire to participate in, and guarantee it will continue to be funded and not be shrunk or pillaged no matter what the administration.
Also it takes less time and energy to get to the moon, so work on that too. First practice on the Earth and successfully build these things here, while identifying key areas and making a sequence of competitions for successively more advanced solutions in each area. This means we will be able to start moving out as soon as a minimal solution is found in each area and then the bar will be raised in stages.
If you consider that NASA's 2005 budget is 16 billion dollars whereas the Iraq war is costing 200 billion dollars (see calculations), you can see that it is a simple matter of the country not making space a priority. It is something like the non-financing of the levees all these years. If you set things up so that it is practically impossible to achieve goals, and instead of a scientific approach you take a cynical, smirking, thieving, political approach, well you end up with a dead space program, a dead city, much waste of human lives and toil. There really is little reason why things are the way they are, except that most people find this way the easiest, and because these things are hard for simple people to understand. They require science, funding, technical capability and longterm committment, and they require everybody else to be happy enough that the experts are left alone to do their jobs. I hope they are beginning to revise their ideas but am wondering what it takes to make a dent.
Just when things were going really well for the free software world, what with Microsoft starting to lather as governments ban Windows and SCO twirling down the drain, Linus goes out and hires a vicious spammer to supposedly protect his trademark, and now we have another dumb idea. What is it with open source people and this urge toward self-destruction? I mean, I always knew this was close to masochism but what is going on?
All these guys have to do is sit back and do nothing, or the absolute minimum. The creator of the GPL is not the main driving force anymore, it is the legions applying the GPL to their works, and the legions mandating installation of GPL software. Likewise, the Linux trademark is bizarre since it is basically a generic term already, aimed not at the kernel at all but at most everything to do with a Linux system. And the reason for trademark protection - to maintain quality and fight against abusers of the trademark - does not require the nastiness the project has so far produced.
All these guys have to do now is, shut up. Or be creative and think about something else. Making such a wildly different version of the GPL means it will stratify the world and now everybody will have to hunt down the liscense of every bit of GPL code they use to make sure they are not infecting themselves with a bad virus, when they thought they were swimming in a sea of good virus. And they will become LIABLE. And companies will forbid GPLv3 and it is likely some will forbid GPL at all since it is too hard to hunt down. This is yet another loaded gun the free software community has created, aimed at its head, put its finger on the trigger, and then said, "it's a done deal and you're dumb for saying anything against it." This is when the microscopic attention span of slashdot starts to feel scary. If you want to sue FUD mongers and fight them with trademarks, start with the guy thinking up all these viral weapons in his head, and the other idiot who published them. How much of our recent gains have been SHOT TO HELL by these major fuckups?
I was wondering if a liter of pellets would explode from flame or heat, and looking up the bound energy noted that orange juice packs twice the energy (nutritional value) per liter as these pellets. (I think simple sugar is 15% Hydrogen?)
Granted the big deal is not energy density but safety and maybe ease of use or reusability, does anyone know the energy density of say, ATP (adenosine tryphosphate)?
Technology or lack of it (really?) aside, would we not be making totally insane strides in energy efficiency if we had a tank full of ATP, or maybe just a tank of mitochondria and a keg of sugar water in the trunk? Would a gas tank of ATP be worse (explosively) than a truck full of fertilizer?
This was hysterical, I had lots of fun debunking it for myself and I'm not even an astronomer. This anti-science (or late April Fool's joke) is bad for science though.
It suggests to people that this is how science actually is conducted and reported, and therefore contributes to Intelligent Design, Scientology, and other modern pseudo-scientific religious movements (or as some of us say, tom-foolery). Or is this a narrative trying to show how ID is similarly silly?..
Anyway they are mainly linked to from UFO sites and a site that looks for wacky pseudo-scientific explanations of interesting astronomical photos.
They went a bit too far when they say: Stars are an electrical plasma discharge phenomenon. Electrical energy produces heavy elements near the surface of all stars. and they somewhere note I believe that stars are bright because they are lightbulbs strung on interstellar wires.
They finally give up with smiles with the last masterful paragraph which imperceptibly and yet oh so achingly, sexily, *glides* right from descriptions of particle physics into discussion of ancient stone circles, which finally proves their point!:)
The author is obviously sane, though perhaps at times not so due to substance abuse, has not a qualm about mixing metaphors, has a poet's sense of timing, a matador's bravado and ice-cold calculation, a bard's sense of infinite majestry, and a joke-teller's need for a punchline. Did I miss any? I think it's all there!
By the way I should note that I do use OOo when I get word or powerpoint documents to work on, but I don't make it my main editor when I'm writing notes because (well yes I like XEmacs but also because) it takes so much memory on my 128MB machine. A light text editor like Windows' Wordpad, which uses OpenDoc instead of outputting as.doc or.rtf, would be nice. Maybe it exists already?
Massachusetts agencies have until 1 January, 2007, to install applications that support the OpenDocument file formats and phase out other products.
From a Tobacco Settlement document
at the GAO, most state's fiscal years begin July 1, except Alabama and Michigan, where the fiscal year begins on October 1, and in New York, where the fiscal year begins on April 1.
I am having trouble figuring out from Google when the budget deadline is, but this would appear to imply that every Massachusetts agency will have to put in a budget request before this coming July for a related budget (i.e. hire some company to install it and train them), unless they can handle it in house (since OOo is free).
But government is not necessarily driven by a cost of $0. It seems to me that this means there is a great opportunity for open source software companies to get jobs from Massachusetts, and also for software developers.
There should be a big push to ensure that there are plenty of mature projects with easy to use GPL libraries supporting the OpenDocument format, and resources should be put into developing lots of different kinds of software that supports it. This will help ensure a diverse ecology including providers and users of these tools, open content, and increased momentum to buy into it. This could match what is called "Embrace and Extend". In Embrace and Extend [and Extinguish], as the Wiki notes, support of a given standard is announced, after the PR partial compatibility is provided, then proprietary functions get tacked on and finally widespread use of their mangled format in various products and tools makes it impossible to compete, and they own the (mangled) standard which they can then kill if they wish.
OpenOffice/OpenDocument can be marketed as superior to MS Office. It's just a matter of PR, isn't it Microsoft? And we don't even need any FUD, after all if we have SMIL in OpenDocument then we can integrate web-ready media, etc.
Perhaps a new brand could be created called "Office Plus".
Anyway, where M$ embraces and extends with proprietary and patented code, the free software community has the GPL.
And by putting more energy in to leveraging OpenOffice and OpenDocument format, including making it easy to do so, we can implement the Extend and Extinguish phase. If there are enough alternatives, including OpenOffice, reduced feature set but simpler to use software based on its code, tools such as database generated documents and fill-in forms, etc., we can build a suction to draw people away from M$ Office. There will be many alternatives even if M$ belatedly adds Import/Export for OpenDocument, by which time adding it will be even worse for Microsoft.
Personally I do contribute to debugging OOo as a user but have never gotten into its code or documentation though I should. Just imagining what it must be like has been too dauntin. But I certainly would like to be able to output reports in OOo format, and instead of CSV perhaps use OOo's Calc format for example.
As another example, I was working on workflow software that munges excel data, and thought about adding a spreadsheet input function (to wxPerl). This exists in WxWidgets, but it woul be nice if bits of OOo code found its way into there so that people could easily use OOo facilities, perhaps driven with some scripting from inside a document.
I just noticed as I was writing this that there are a bunch of perl modules on CPAN for OpenOffice for example, think I'll start there.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this rendering engine would be useful for the desktop or other programs, spun off on its own? I always loved SGI Irix's vector based desktop with that awesome vertically oriented scroll wheel widget that would scale all icons on the desktop.
1. Recognize they will NEVER index even all significant information in the world today, because a) info growing too fast and b) we are not yet at the point that everyone is using networked data for everything.
2. Data can only be indexed as it is produced, otherwise you are fighting a losing battle with diminishing returns. It looks like 300 but it is really asymptotic approaching "when the universe cools down and we live in a big black hole".
3. Google spends money to increase recognition among public and government of the need to archive for posterity and scientific/cultural advancement. This includes legal basis for the indiscriminate archiving for society's greater good and a waveform collapse of all copyright owners' Terms of Usage and various nasty legal mechanisms mostly created by the U.S. (but did you know copyright is a criminal violation in Japan?). The money is needed to lobby other governments too, so that they increase networking and slow down copyright legislation (otherwise the U.S. government and its corporate backers will tend to continue to push foreign data laws down the throats of relatively undeveloped countries). Actually 1 billion dollars is only the beginning of what it will cost but Google is going to have to act to ensure its future.
4. Develop a tree of archival nodes (indexing all information streaming through them) from devices to communities to states. The forerunner of this will be simpler, smaller, cheaper google servers placed in music, radio, tv, print and other publishers, subsidized mainly by google, for the triple purpose of providing searchability to the companies, securing a future resource for Google to search and distribute when the copyright runs out, and creating a secure data store linked to a payment mechanism to realize on-demand sales for those companies with little sweat. Using Google will ensure low middleman charges since Google needs this stuff. Publishers will jump to offer Google rights 50 years later plus a small margin on online sales until then, in return for storing, indexing and selling now.
5. With the exception of data prior to this point, the index is done when networked data in our lives hits 100%.
6. We can approach 100% a bit faster by reducing duplication, but we will end up with massively higher storage requirements as we find new definitions of important information, such as securely storing genetic data assays every year per individual for health purposes, or storage of information on preferences concerning the just in time construction of micro- or nanoscale robots.
So how long does this take? Google has started selling servers already. They will do a heroic job until we hit the network singularity (everything we do is all together on the one net, indexed as it is produced by intelligent agents). Seems likely the network singularity and a minimal form of artificial intelligence will coincide. This says the task will be done in maybe 50 years (well between 30 and 100), and not 300.
The rest of the 300 years can be spent cross-correlating all of mankind's knowledge; actually the beginning of this is starting now but when say in the next 10-30 years actually make headway in the semantic web so that we get a yahoo-like index of all scientific and business knowledge, we will stop duplicating information, and education and business will get more efficient. It will accelerate as we learn more about ourselves and advances in computing will just barely keep up with indexing and crosscorrelating it all as we start eating up CPU cycles for things other than video games and imaginary friends. My guess is 100 years. So Google has no business talking about 300 years concerning anything except maybe plans for space travel. Their online world is going to change way too much by then! Figure that (if it is economically important) 80% of the people on the planet will have the same capabilities as Google does now in 20 years. They will only have to worry about 300 years if they keep evolving their goals higher and higher.
HBO should host old episodes on bittorrent so it can gain new converts. It seems the application is not so great for archived shows, you basically have to "follow the swarm".
Actually it would be more useful if the show could be downloaded without having to use bittorrent, come to think of it. Just convert all those IPs they are using to serving instead of disturbing.
I am pretty sure I have not bought a CD in a music store in at least 15 years, barring any instance I might have forgotten. I have bought CDs at times from individual musicians or bands performing on the street, and I recently bought in a movie theater the CD of a band that provided the sound track ("Blood or Fire" by Attack All Around, for the live-action movie "Initial D").
I made this decision when I realized in college that the CD albums were *way* too expensive. I would consider a $8 or $10 album though now.
So I listen to less music than music addicts, though I do enjoy it. I hear it on radio and TV.
Also I recently built a little perl program that serves me pages from books off my website, just for my use, to my mobile phone. I'm reading out of print books, mostly, and ones I've already bought. I tend to buy the same books more than once over the years actually and am always looking for good authors in the bookstore when I have some spending money.
So my books program, it works great. The time spent on the train when most people are staring dumbly across the train car, or maybe reading a newspaper or listening to their iPod, I spend reading a book. My program keeps track of where I left off reading any of the books I've been reading, and I figure at 0.3 cents a 128 byte packet, it is expensive compared to when I used to use my Palm, but say at the high end of acceptable. If I had a way to give one of those two dollars per book to the estate of the author I would like to.
Maybe this strategy would work with living authors too, if they didn't mind. We could keep score of who we read most and find most satisfying, and then either buy a new book from them, or buy a coupon for them next time we go to the bookstore.
Maybe we could start with book publishers and then extend a model that works to music. I think the RIAA is asking for it, and they deserve a professional job. I also liked the suggestion about tracking down dirt about the people suing that girl. It has a thrilling medieval feel to it.
From what I can tell it must be something like this complete system for monitoring on a farm (Japanese). Maspro also sells home security video monitoring systems using some of the same components it seems. The article was a bit weak and since I haven't been to CEATEC today I can't tell you for sure but I'd be quite surprised if they are enjoying a 1000% markup like all the other slashdotters expect. That, plus it will "just work" and be durable, etc. Take a look at their export catalog (click on pdf link) if you are interested in evaluating the company's offerings. (their English is a little wierd though..)
Of course if M$ started buying publishers now they might put a crimp in things..
Here is the relevant passage from Robert A. Heinlein's book "Friday". Been waiting a while for Google to get established and with the program.
Say what you like but Negroponte has been pushing this idea a lot in lots of venues, I've heard it 2-3 times I think.
The article is slashdotted but Negroponte has said repeatedly that they are going to keep the price the same and keep improving the power etc. One key IIRC was a $30 LCD.
A representative from Nigeria did say in one conference I was at that the absolute poorest don't need computers because they need firewood and the smart people leave the towns etc.
However if Negroponte gets this to work (especially if it has solar power..) it can be a massive boost to the entire world. He is not making it for the U.S. market (though possibly people living in poverty could use them), it is to solve a specific problem.
Imagine, if YOU worked on open source educational software, especially if it is with a trained teacher, you might be able help. All you people who used to run sigs about giving a man a fish, this is what you were talking about.
I think you are as wrong as the above Funny post marked Informative.
Matter cannot move faster than light as far as we know it however galaxies are the one exception in that space can expand faster than light, which will have a similar effect. And am not even a physicist..
Collaboration phase or Embrace phase? Look at M$ track record for collaboration. Either they buy you, or you are destroyed, seems to be their basic mode. Statistically it is far more likely that JBoss is going to be dead in 18 months than that they are going to be able to do any reasonable "cooperation" with Microsoft. If they can't do business with any other company, they need a new business plan; this one is not a recipe for survival.
Thanks for your comment. Not like I didn't think of the same thing though. First of all take a relatively simple phonetic alphabet like that used in Japanese. It is a 51 letter alphabet basically composed of a consonant from the (NULL, K, S, T, N, H, M, R, W) sequence plus a vowel from the (A I U E O) sequence. Counting out a few that aren't used, you still basically have a base 50 numbering system there. Like Microsoft figured out, you can use a such an alphabet to both compress coordinates and make it easier to remember with mnemonic hooks than plane base 10 coordinates. Also by providing some alternate alphabets to provide more varied mnemonic hooks I expect you could relatively easily memorize a large number of high resolution spatial coordinates without carrying a pda or piece of paper around (neither of which is as portable or survivable on a trip as your own self).
Also, what I was proposing is not what you are attacking. I propose a standard ditty everyone memorizes, where the leading syllable of each word is a navigation key (not a numerical value like 25). Say you have two ditties (songs) with 36 words each. that you know by heart. Then you can specify any 10 degree by 10 degree region on a planet with a pair of two words, one from either song.
You can also use it as a base 36 alphabet, so two words from the same song in a row would give you resolution better than 1/1000 (1/36^2).
If you wanted to talk about navigation on the surface, you could specify a grid point on the 10 degree grid with two words, then one word for the compass direction, and another word for the magnitude of the vector (distance or speed perhaps).
There are lots of variations on this of course. In particular, if you start with a well known landmark as the origin of a coordinate system and allow the first word after the landmark's name to indicate the size of the map, you can get very high resolution quickly.
For example, if you start with a center point like the tip of the flagpole at city hall and want to designate a point on a map that has a radius of 10 km, you can get down to a scale of meters or even centimeters with one or two words from each song, depending on the distance of the point from the landmark.
As it happens there is a nice ditty in Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Robert Heinlein, who says any tenderfoot scout would know it (in his day anyway).
"Mother very thoughtfully made a jelly sandwich under no protest."
The first letter of each words is the name of a planet from Mercury out, and Earth is called "Terra". There is a table of prices associated with each, for example "Thoughtfully" is $1.00, "Jelly" is $5.20 and "Protest" is $39.50. These are multiples of Earth's distance to the Sun, so it is easy to remember that Pluto is 39.5 times Earth's distance from the Sun.
In the story, our hero uses that info to pilot a ship back home. People use these kind of devices to remember figures, but they are always different ones. If there was a standard mnemonic device for planetary navigation I think it would be a very useful thing for Terra, the Moon and Mars. Incidentally, I watched NASA TV last night and they showed a map of where our new lunar program is going to try to land.. a number of points all across the lunar globe.
I can understand wanting to name significant places but naming pebbles has always been a bit much to me, more of a PR vehicle and maybe a bit of geek fun at JPL. Perhaps there is a bit of cultural imperialism too? Grid coordinates are fine for scientific observations.
Anyway, as soon as people live there they will probably use their own names (hopefully most of the planet will be as yet unnamed).
What I would like to suggest is that some time be put into creating a mnemonic system that would be of use to travelers or anybody else who needs to navigate the surface. Or for that matter, to allow people to talk about locations on the planet without having to contact an online database every time someone mentions a new geographical name.
There are lots of ways it could be done. For example if you pick a sequence of one or two syllable sounds to indicate moving east from 0 degrees longitude, and a similar encoding for latitude, you could easily create a name for a place that sounds and means something.
Or by tacking one such standardized sequence to the end of an existing name perhaps with the first syllable indicating compass direction (say for a route a robot takes) you could specify by name points along the route. A given sequence would have a given resolution (say 10 meters for tiny robots).
And you could have alternate homonyms for each syllable so that it is easy to say a given sequence in some language (really the sequence should be chosen so that it is easy to say in all major languages).
Also the same naming system could be used for ANY planet or for that matter, any mountain or terrestrial orienteering / geographical application. This way you could in fact practice and use a system on Earth that will serve you in good stead on Mars.
If a similar system was developed based not on geographical coordinates but to measure for instance time, temperature, depth, or even spacecraft motion or orbits, it could tie in to the above system and provide an extremely useful way to talk about land, water, and space phenomena in a unified fashion, with arbitrary precision and universal applicability, while being culture agnostic, and in particular human-centered. Using computers for so many things we tend to get stuck with too much information and make silly mistakes like whether to use Fahrenheit or Celsius. These things can kill you in space or for that matter in the ocean depths. By saying human-centered, I mean that a human can always be able to talk about a location if he or she knows such a universal naming system, and it uses the brain more efficiently. We have trouble remembering numerical strings but can relatively easily remember poetry, songs, famous quotations, where we put things in our homes, routes to get to the office, and so on.
I believe it would be a good idea to develop such a system to be eventually taught to every school child, possibly with a limited set of nouns and verbs culled from different languages, so that every person in the world can talk rationally to each other about the basics of location, time, motion, route, and so on. It also could give rise to a basic way for any person in the world to add to a universally useable database of local travel directions or a minimal language that can be used by both humans and computers.
This system would limit the unnecessary, frivolous naming being done and would allow random locations to be specified in terms of their context (from a well-known named landmark), so every major Mars landmark should have a single precise point at which it is based so that you could indicate a route from there.
You could build mnemonic strings in your head to remember a certain location, and you can build songs that help you get there. Children and adults can share in talking about features of Mars, and humans can intuitively check the coordinates used by computers as well as using speech input and sound output to talk about coordinates.
I'm probably not the first to think of this sort of
It seems that if life can be found on Titan it would be a significant change in a factor of the Drake equation that estimates how much alien life is out there.
And down the street in Akabane, Tokyo there is a UNIX hair salon. Nice big letters and poster of a model with nice hair!
We need to get off this rock, and every decade we lapse into introversion is a decade later that man's history of exploitation of the solar system is delayed.
The major benefits I can see are:
- ensure survival against earth killer asteroid hitting in say the next 2 centuries
- increase pressure and funding to build independent robotic mining and factories
- draw minds and effort away from fragmented religion, and towards a unified goal of conquering space
- exploit space-based power generation and develop better water extraction and conservation technologies, reducing pressures to start oil wars and water wars
- get advanced physics research off the planet's surface as soon as possible. One possibile reason for the lack of alien contact is that nature holds a booby trap (or a jackpot) that most cultures hit by accident and everything goes boom. We are already close to primordial densities in particle physics and if it is possible to use advanced space-based resources to quickly and cheaply (say with a self-organizing robotic factory) build a ring in space or on the moon that would be excellent.
- add low-noise observatories on the moon. Currently we are just starting to observe in very noisy RF bands for example.
- develop unified educational program based on integrated science and exploratory culture. A free course of study for any child on the planet, instilling a citizen of the world sense of identity, respect and practical knowledge of science, an imperative to stride beyond man's history of intolerance and enter the next phase of our civilization, develop emotional intelligence, and in general train people so that we can achieve 10 times more efficient exploitation of the world's human resources, with 10 times better health and welfare for the world, and international collaboration to develop key technologies more quickly. Sure there is more to this but obviously there is still demagoguery, genocide, famine, disaster, and demonization in the 21st century. We need to get beyond it and work together.
Many of these things can be done on the planet. But the fact is, our societies are still pretty uncivilized and we need a common project to bind politicians and peoples around the world toward the same goal. It seems that broad, continued, well funded efforts for space science and every connected area - including advances in biotech, robotics, and education for example - could be a spark that begins humanity on exponential growth and saves us from nuclear races and preoccupation with trade deficits and resource starvation. People need to have something to work towards, and we need to provide great salaries and lionize people who go into these fields and go to space.
Thanks for your lengthy post. Sorry if I was not clear enough, I have nothing against Germany per se (though my Dad, does, I should say). And I am not a huge cat lover, though I do live on a hill where 10 abandoned cats wait for handouts, which perhaps resonanted a bit. Also I am very pro-alternative energy.
What I reacted to was a very nasty sense of humor. I am glad to hear it is a hoax, but it just means that the person with the nasty sense of humor is not the kind Dr. Koch but the publisher of the newspaper.
The point I attempted to make was that making an involved project of building a cat-powered car, or in this case of reporting that such a car existed, is not exactly humor at all. In fact, and it is more to the point now that we know it is a hoax, the time taken to create this story, and manipulate people into believing it, indicates a psyche that takes pleasure in causing distress to cat lovers, and perhaps also in further polarizing sentimental people against those who aren't. (It worked I believe).
You will note that we are not up to our ears in cats, which as they exist are a 100% domesticated and bred organism. Cats are invested with love, fed, excessively pampered, they live in our homes by our choice. Not like rats. The rat-powered robot I heard of in the past was gruesome but possibly a good idea. If there was a cockroach-powered robot smart enough to catch them I'd buy a dozen. A cat-powered anything can have but one purpose, since there are not enough dead cats to make an alternative fuel. The discussion of turning cats into a liquid like gasohol was a very bad piece of work in particular. Cats don't fuel cars. They may fuel your town because they get caught up in the trash somehow, though I doubt it would be a good idea to tell kids that. The only thing cats really fuel is a sadistic pleasure of a sick mind that finds the idea funny and enjoys seeing people squirm - the more sentimental the better. In this case the only winners are the sadists, and the poor geeks who have become so robotlike that they cannot imagine why a story about a German engineer liquifying members of the household to power his car is not a terrifying person to have in the neighborhood. Well thank you and I hope you understand my viewpoint.
By the way I am a U.S. citizen but have lived in Japan a long time. The economy is still a wreck thanks to oil prices. I did not know it was the law that pets were used as cattle feed, that is grotesque and you can call me sentimental if you wish. Dead pets are undoubtedly a big problem but I think the way you treat pets shows something about a society. Unfortunately in Japan, people often let their pets out to turn wild when they move, which is why I continually make friends with cats that turn up psychologically or physically abused, by the temple next to my home. I don't feed them because I don't want to see them have kittens and perpetuate this, which happened recently. Well this was an interesting subject, NOT.
Viel Vergnügen!
Article 16 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says:
1. No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.
Not sure if this applies, it seems pretty vague.
I think this is a very bad move, mainly since this ensures the entire next generation will have a file, (not that they don't already?) which will be accessed by people who are not yet in office or even alive now. But it could be experimented with by starting with individuals in office. It would fit on a CD.
Boy this is so horrendous. If there is karma like Heinlein believes (in which being nasty to cats is a big no-no) he is really in for it.
Not to mention clinically insane. This horrific person must have a similar mental illness to that of Hitler, in which he is driven to perform the most terrifying acts against humanity. Well that is a bit much, generally I am very against comparing anything to Hitler, but it does seem linked somehow. Perhaps really he is just a minor sadist as sadists go, and anyway he is a bit of a backwoods nerdy sadist, nothing to prey on much but his car, neighborhood cats, and of course the people reading the article everywhere. I bet he loves that.
I wonder what it is about this country that brings out the worst in the human psyche? Nothing against Germany per se but I do know (from my old German girlfriend) that there are certain pathologies about analysis and logic games that thread the society. However this is totally beyond the beyond. I mean, it is painful to even imagine and TFA to note that he has driven over 100,000 km on dead cats and garbage is breathtaking. If it was just compost he'd be a hero of course. A closet sadist and a cancer in the world, but lionized since nobody would know. Perhaps in Germany it is normal to not bury a cat but to put it in the compost? Hard to imagine.
Honestly, if you want to terrorize the least powerful and most sympathetic among us, you cannot do much worse than this. I speak of course for the young girls and everybody else who loves cats of course. Personally I like cats but they can get a little uppity. Maybe you can start to plan revenge when they get a little too close. But they do not deserve this though, they need homes and food.
Some professional should analyze the guy while he's still alive, and a tissue specimen frozen for genome sequencing (it takes a bit long now doesn't it). Perhaps one day it will provide some insight into the genetic and environmentally caused defects that lead an unsuspecting human egg to develop into this monstrosity.
Okay, if one hand is 400 grams, then two hands, scaled to backhoe size (say 10 times per dimension) would be 800 * 1000 g = an 800 kg pair. It is pretty cool to watch those one-fingered claws tearing homes apart, how about hands (with teleoperation)?
How about sending these things up next time we need to fix a satellite and saving our astronauts' radation exposure for the important stuff?
How would these fare against what deepsea diving suits use?
I believe this is defeated by Denso's QR Code which was developed in 1997. It is a 2D barcode that is typically scanned by taking a photo with your cellphone or similar handheld device, and pushing a single button. The photo is decoded by the scanner into presumably an URL, and the resulting page is accessed and displayed. Alternatively you can store arbitrary data in it to the size of the symbol, i.e. a serial number or manufacturing date. It was created in 1997 it seems. In Japan it is now common in most phones and is often seen in magazines and on billboards. I don't see how Bezos can help but be embarrassed by this sort of thing. When he started out he used to be a straightforward kind of guy..
I'm reminded of Titan, a book by Stephen Baxter I just read. It is an aching story about a manned trip to Saturn and how apathy killed the space program, and has some vivid experiences with closed biosheres, long space voyages, budget cuts and lots of kinds of disturbing but realistic personalities. If you are interested in this story read it, but not all in one go - you may get too depressed!
One good thing about space is it's a new framework. You can learn new things, you can look back at the entire Earth from one point, you can trigger advances on the ground. For example the recent discovery of the interplanetary superhighway. And tracking of asteroids is also not a bad idea. The photos this month of Enceladus and other parts outbound.
Personally I think a mission to Mars, without nuclear rocketry, is premature and a bad idea. We need fabulous control of materials, biological processes, space agriculture, robotics, space construction processes, bioelectronics and polymers, and probably a bunch of other things, which are the difference between a suicide trip and building a serious beachead with honest to goodness 21st century engineering. If we can't fire a seed at the planet from here and know it will set up a fully powered biosphere with plenty of room, air, temperature and nutrition waiting for our astronauts, it just seems a waste to send people there just yet.
Instead, why not take 10 or 100 billion bucks or so, and make this stuff a profitable business so we can get tons of highpowered people into one campus to work on these kinds of things, make it international and make obvious spinoffs to the commercial sector as well (as the above would). Make something young people can aspire to participate in, and guarantee it will continue to be funded and not be shrunk or pillaged no matter what the administration.
Also it takes less time and energy to get to the moon, so work on that too. First practice on the Earth and successfully build these things here, while identifying key areas and making a sequence of competitions for successively more advanced solutions in each area. This means we will be able to start moving out as soon as a minimal solution is found in each area and then the bar will be raised in stages.
If you consider that NASA's 2005 budget is 16 billion dollars whereas the Iraq war is costing 200 billion dollars (see calculations), you can see that it is a simple matter of the country not making space a priority. It is something like the non-financing of the levees all these years. If you set things up so that it is practically impossible to achieve goals, and instead of a scientific approach you take a cynical, smirking, thieving, political approach, well you end up with a dead space program, a dead city, much waste of human lives and toil. There really is little reason why things are the way they are, except that most people find this way the easiest, and because these things are hard for simple people to understand. They require science, funding, technical capability and longterm committment, and they require everybody else to be happy enough that the experts are left alone to do their jobs. I hope they are beginning to revise their ideas but am wondering what it takes to make a dent.
Just when things were going really well for the free software world, what with Microsoft starting to lather as governments ban Windows and SCO twirling down the drain, Linus goes out and hires a vicious spammer to supposedly protect his trademark, and now we have another dumb idea. What is it with open source people and this urge toward self-destruction? I mean, I always knew this was close to masochism but what is going on?
All these guys have to do is sit back and do nothing, or the absolute minimum. The creator of the GPL is not the main driving force anymore, it is the legions applying the GPL to their works, and the legions mandating installation of GPL software. Likewise, the Linux trademark is bizarre since it is basically a generic term already, aimed not at the kernel at all but at most everything to do with a Linux system. And the reason for trademark protection - to maintain quality and fight against abusers of the trademark - does not require the nastiness the project has so far produced.
All these guys have to do now is, shut up. Or be creative and think about something else. Making such a wildly different version of the GPL means it will stratify the world and now everybody will have to hunt down the liscense of every bit of GPL code they use to make sure they are not infecting themselves with a bad virus, when they thought they were swimming in a sea of good virus. And they will become LIABLE. And companies will forbid GPLv3 and it is likely some will forbid GPL at all since it is too hard to hunt down. This is yet another loaded gun the free software community has created, aimed at its head, put its finger on the trigger, and then said, "it's a done deal and you're dumb for saying anything against it." This is when the microscopic attention span of slashdot starts to feel scary. If you want to sue FUD mongers and fight them with trademarks, start with the guy thinking up all these viral weapons in his head, and the other idiot who published them. How much of our recent gains have been SHOT TO HELL by these major fuckups?
I was wondering if a liter of pellets would explode from flame or heat, and looking up the bound energy noted that orange juice packs twice the energy (nutritional value) per liter as these pellets. (I think simple sugar is 15% Hydrogen?)
Granted the big deal is not energy density but safety and maybe ease of use or reusability, does anyone know the energy density of say, ATP (adenosine tryphosphate)?
Technology or lack of it (really?) aside, would we not be making totally insane strides in energy efficiency if we had a tank full of ATP, or maybe just a tank of mitochondria and a keg of sugar water in the trunk? Would a gas tank of ATP be worse (explosively) than a truck full of fertilizer?
This was hysterical, I had lots of fun debunking it for myself and I'm not even an astronomer. This anti-science (or late April Fool's joke) is bad for science though.
:)
It suggests to people that this is how science actually is conducted and reported, and therefore contributes to Intelligent Design, Scientology, and other modern pseudo-scientific religious movements (or as some of us say, tom-foolery). Or is this a narrative trying to show how ID is similarly silly?..
Anyway they are mainly linked to from UFO sites and a site that looks for wacky pseudo-scientific explanations of interesting astronomical photos.
They went a bit too far when they say:
Stars are an electrical plasma discharge phenomenon. Electrical energy produces heavy elements near the surface of all stars.
and they somewhere note I believe that stars are bright because they are lightbulbs strung on interstellar wires.
They finally give up with smiles with the last masterful paragraph which imperceptibly and yet oh so achingly, sexily, *glides* right from descriptions of particle physics into discussion of ancient stone circles, which finally proves their point!
The author is obviously sane, though perhaps at times not so due to substance abuse, has not a qualm about mixing metaphors, has a poet's sense of timing, a matador's bravado and ice-cold calculation, a bard's sense of infinite majestry, and a joke-teller's need for a punchline. Did I miss any? I think it's all there!
By the way I should note that I do use OOo when I get word or powerpoint documents to work on, but I don't make it my main editor when I'm writing notes because (well yes I like XEmacs but also because) it takes so much memory on my 128MB machine. A light text editor like Windows' Wordpad, which uses OpenDoc instead of outputting as .doc or .rtf, would be nice. Maybe it exists already?
The article says:
Massachusetts agencies have until 1 January, 2007, to install applications that support the OpenDocument file formats and phase out other products.
From a Tobacco Settlement document
at the GAO, most state's fiscal years begin July 1, except Alabama and Michigan, where the fiscal year begins on October 1, and in New York, where the fiscal year begins on April 1.
I am having trouble figuring out from Google when the budget deadline is, but this would appear to imply that every Massachusetts agency will have to put in a budget request before this coming July for a related budget (i.e. hire some company to install it and train them), unless they can handle it in house (since OOo is free).
But government is not necessarily driven by a cost of $0. It seems to me that this means there is a great opportunity for open source software companies to get jobs from Massachusetts, and also for software developers.
There should be a big push to ensure that there are plenty of mature projects with easy to use GPL libraries supporting the OpenDocument format, and resources should be put into developing lots of different kinds of software that supports it. This will help ensure a diverse ecology including providers and users of these tools, open content, and increased momentum to buy into it. This could match what is called "Embrace and Extend". In Embrace and Extend [and Extinguish], as the Wiki notes, support of a given standard is announced, after the PR partial compatibility is provided, then proprietary functions get tacked on and finally widespread use of their mangled format in various products and tools makes it impossible to compete, and they own the (mangled) standard which they can then kill if they wish.
OpenOffice/OpenDocument can be marketed as superior to MS Office. It's just a matter of PR, isn't it Microsoft? And we don't even need any FUD, after all if we have SMIL in OpenDocument then we can integrate web-ready media, etc.
Perhaps a new brand could be created called "Office Plus".
Anyway, where M$ embraces and extends with proprietary and patented code, the free software community has the GPL.
And by putting more energy in to leveraging OpenOffice and OpenDocument format, including making it easy to do so, we can implement the Extend and Extinguish phase. If there are enough alternatives, including OpenOffice, reduced feature set but simpler to use software based on its code, tools such as database generated documents and fill-in forms, etc., we can build a suction to draw people away from M$ Office. There will be many alternatives even if M$ belatedly adds Import/Export for OpenDocument, by which time adding it will be even worse for Microsoft.
Personally I do contribute to debugging OOo as a user but have never gotten into its code or documentation though I should. Just imagining what it must be like has been too dauntin. But I certainly would like to be able to output reports in OOo format, and instead of CSV perhaps use OOo's Calc format for example.
As another example, I was working on workflow software that munges excel data, and thought about adding a spreadsheet input function (to wxPerl). This exists in WxWidgets, but it woul be nice if bits of OOo code found its way into there so that people could easily use OOo facilities, perhaps driven with some scripting from inside a document.
I just noticed as I was writing this that there are a bunch of perl modules on CPAN for OpenOffice for example, think I'll start there.