Boy I wish someone would post some links of a site like Slashdot for Science Articles which has less trolls.
Anyway, this news is absolutely fabulous. Nobody has been asking though about how applicable this might be in general astronomy, for example how much of the sky could be covered with this technique, and whether anything like this effect could be created with manmade gaseous clouds.
At the very least, does anyone have a link to the original scientific draft? I am curious about how extensive these clouds are, and whether we can just "dial in" any part of the sky which is covered by such a cloud for a significant portion of the year. In particular would this be something that could be used to get images of extrasolar planets? Who cares what wavelength, the new European lunar probe is going to use X-rays to see what elements are available, maybe we can do the same with these clouds? Only problem is the targets will obviously be more than 50 light years away in this case.
I would just like to mention that Dr. David Farber of U Penn is one of the foremost promoters of privacy issues on the Internet, is a scientist, has been a presidential advisor, and is well known for mentioning the bit about how photons don't care about passports.
Anyone with some pull in Pennsylvania should give him a call. You could mention Matt Rosin sent you though it won't matter, he'll give you an honest listen and may have some good ideas about what to do.
First, I am totally against child porn, totally. However Pennsylvania's action is completely hideous and could create more problems than it solves. Consider:
Blocking sites make it impossible for Pennsylvania enforcement officers to find child porn traders in their own state, pushing them farther underground!
Misuse of secret web censorship lists is well documented. It is possible to disclose information about where these sites are without making an open advertisement. Their argument is illogical.
Their action may be unconsitutional and certainly may be moot should a Freedom Of Information Act request be made by someone with the list published anywhere on the net
It is not possible for people to use the net to identify Pennsylvania's definition of child porn should the medium itself be censored.
There is no information about whether they are making efforts to identify whether underage models are actually being used.
I am thinking about the comics sold in every convenience store in Japan that have drawings which could be construed as child porn, and use of the term "Lolita" for young-looking models. I don't want to see these myself, however what happens to people who have gotten used to this kind of titillation and when the virtual source of imagery dries up will they not be led to look for actual child porn and exploitative venues in the real world?
Likewise would this cover sites which distribute dirty stories? There must be at least one nasty child porn fantasy in there. An easy way to ban these sites, just have some fundamentalist submit a bunch of illegal stories and sue them?
Many fibers undoubtedly run through Pennsylvania, are they going to be censoring all packets at all switches? This is a neat way to start killing the Internet, let's drop every spamming country off the net.. not.
There is no information (I presume) about how to find out if your site is banned in Pennsylvania, say what if a hacker started serving child porn from your 0wned box, and there is no information about how to reinstate an IP address.
Since the point is in fact removing dangerous and illegal information from the net, in particular the underlying reason should be to protect children from dangerous exploitation, it is in society's best interest to openly maintain a database of sites accused of child pornography, which states and municipalities may use to implement censorship should they so choose.
This database would set a huge precedent and it is scary to me, but it would at least remove the idea of secret blocking lists and enable accused sites to fight back. It is possible that many people may not even know their provider is hosting these things, and they can also bring pressure on the hosting companies to police themselves.
Unless a site has been wrongly accused of hosting child pornography, or is in fact a honeypot being used for a big sting operation by the government, it is really very unlikely that publically available sites are going to be hosting this stuff, at least in the U.S. (Of course there could indeed be a list of overseas sites which have not been taken down due to different local ordinances). Therefore, it is VERY likely that Pennsylvania's secret list is not only UNLAWFUL but also FALSE in that they do not in fact have a list of child pornography websites to ban. The real threat of secret lists of unlawfully censored information sources is anathema to our society. Either something is illegal in a given territory, or it is not. They can't get away with promoting vague notions of propriety with scare tactics and secrecy. It is not even likely that they will succeed at reducing the flow of child pornography in their state.
Pennsylvania's action is also a restraint on interstate commerce in that a secret list will enable law enforcement to search any digital medium including hd,cd,dvd, cable, and wireless networks, for potentially incriminating evidence without explaining exactly what is illegal. In particular it seems likely that web caches operated by universities and companies may unwittingly hold such information, and this action opens the doors to a broad range of abuses including but not limited to corruption of interstate telecommunications.
The best in the world is the Sharp SL-C700 which just came out recently in Japan. I don't know if it was mentioned on slashdot yet. It is runs linux on xscale cpu (yes you can run servers, perl, and shells) has a reversable clamshell (display automatically becomes vertical when flipped) has freehand kanji character input, and I believe 32 MB RAM in addition to the 80MB or so which the OS unpacks into. You can add up to 512MB flash I think too, also can handle pcmcia hard drives and so on I believe. You may be able to import it, or get it through a Japanese store near you, or through a website.
www.sofmap.co.jp sells clie and an older sharp zaurus (SL-B500, cheaper and also linux, with a chicklet keyboard). I have some older clies which I dislike due to their being entirely too slow for input using normal input methods. The newer clies are nice-looking too, and at least for the older ones there are apparently ways to localize them. I'd stick with linux and as much RAM as you can get though.. the new zaurus would be perfect with a little faster cpu and an extra hundred megabytes or so of ram. Undoubtedly you can run emacs with any language you like on it.
actually it used to be about 300 bps or 30 chars per second due to extra two bits (stop/parity) at least at my house. Connected to my Apple II! I remember being freaked out by the first 1200 baud modem I saw - you couldn't read in realtime off the line so what's the point right? Then came the dawn of nibble copiers and bang zoom here we are. Anybody in high school ever taught what a nibble was? Not exactly ancient history. Though the computer couldn't do decimal numbers until I sprang for a whole new PCI card..:) the 16KB Language Card got you Applesoft and Pascal that was great.
I was enthusiastic about Groove and even recently was checking back with it to propose some projects with it. Now I won't.
I don't know how it is now, though it didn't at least in the beginning seem to be built for very large groups of collaborators (something which I myself am interested in). You couldn't use it to say, assemble thousands of pieces of information, I think.
But if you say compiled a weakened encryption algorithm into it and promoted its use by seeding it or maybe making it part of an OS, maybe even having it report back to homebase occasionally on how it is used, then yes it could be a very strong big brotherish tool, good for all kinds of law enforcement things. Think of distributed keyboard loggers.
So, my questions: 1) How can we know it ISN'T poisoned in one of these ways. Kapor has been around the block a few hundred times and I doubt he would quickly quit something so quickly.
2) How can all other collaboration software binaries be tested for poisoning if indeed the strategy has become to just poison every groupware tool around there.
3) Being paranoid as we should when we are talking about private communications and the government, we should assume that a lack of clear and detailed response from both Kapor and his equals the existence of a gag order.
4) TO CONTINUE #2 above, how can we safeguard ourselves against similarly poisoned rpms in distro cdroms/ftpsites? Should easier to use sandboxes be developed to guard against this kind of problem?
Interview with Martin Lo, author of LTool (Libration Point Mission Design Tool) talks about new cusp of using advanced mathematics in real-world engineering.
This link I gleaned and posted on Slashdot the last time we had an article about this. There are actually several interesting papers about this on the net, look for Lo in xarchiv and elsewhere I think. Downloaded a whole bunch last time.
Concrete yet light, witty and humorous short essays are necessary. Many people have little science background and do not know how to fix that later on in life. Possibly showing how statistics are often used to prove anything, or perhaps idiocies spouted by the government or evil corporations might be interesting. I doubt the War on (Iraq/North Korea/WMD/Drugs/Pot/etc) is a good target for this but Mr. Bush certainly seems to have concentric circles painted on his butt.
Not that I want to make any kind of a political statement for or against anything here, nor to beat up any religion or creed. Well not most. It is just that relatively few people seem to be able to analyze documents or to understand basic scientific realities.
It might be interesting if there was a free resource which parents could use to teach their kids and they could stay a story or lesson ahead. They could read some interesting things about astronomy or SETI and then pass on the spark of interest to their children.
Of course this would be good for computer science too, it is just that most people replace concentrated analysis with a street smartsy "I don't trust [insert your personality/company/government official here]". And computers for example are generally seen (for good reason) as big silly blobs of sometimes idiotic, and often near-obsolete, rules and responses.
So instead of understanding the basics of information technology the user is often reduced to ("it always does this.." or "I can never get it to..") and most scientific artifacts accessible in daily life have computer systems embedded in them at one layer or another.
This is bullshit. This sounds like compsci people are not expected to live in dorms or something. Who cares what the content or purpose is, these people are preparing for the future where there is even more bandwidth available and not only that, they're paying for the connection apparently. 2GB just means that you downloaded a 4-CD distro this month. How utterly bizarre.
Coming from CU class of '90, who would have died for ethernet in his room and then *did* when he saw his brother's ethernet-equipped room at Harvard Business School (a lucky lottery pick apparently). I believe CU has a responsibility to provide students the highest possible computing resources and to encourage the speedy development of alternative routes.
In related news, CU is apparently building a new nanotech lab on campus. Just exactly what I wanted to study when I was there, just a few years too soon! (I studied biochem among other things then graduated with Asian studies, and did computer stuff in my spare time).
Of course I would have been in sheer hell since not only did I have to trawl the engineering library for the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH as computer courses conflicted badly with Japanese, now I would also probably have to pay for the privilege of downloading genome sequences to my dorm. 2 gigs is totally like, not there.
As the U.S. government recently re-re-rediscovered, space is the military frontier, if you are on top you have the advantage.
As the thosands and thousands of slashdotters who must have read this story by Heinlein, for one thing you can easily use a lunar mass catapult to target points all over earth.
As someone else here also noted, there's lots of surface area for solar panels (which might even be produced in an automated fashion one day). The neat thing being that it is easy to shine that energy all right back at the side of earth facing the moon in the form of a laser or electron beam.
Next of course, China may just want something to keep its intellectuals' minds off of worldly pursuits, or they may be trying to think of a suitable statement for the millenium which is obviously far superior than the American vision (which sadly appears on the face of it to be easy these days).
Anyway who says the Chinese will build it? I don't see any of them wearing articulated space suits yet. More likely this is just a better justification to get more of that great scientific knowhow from U.S. and European countries than the one they had before. It's a lot easier to do seemingly innocuous things in space that have military potential because everyone's gotta have a little delta-v.
Very few posts and anyway nobody will ever see this.. but the posts accuse that this is scientifically unimportant.
It doesn't sound like slashdot users are all equipped to make that determination. In fact, it has no relevance whether someone ever did this before or not.
It has great use in describing creative scientific endeavor and a sense of aesthetics which is not only great for young people's education, but also may even get adults to understand one of the reasons why we should be in space.
In addition and what I find most exciting aside from the beauty of the results, is that this is similar in some ways to the recently theorized methods of using radio waves to build large structures in outer space. It is not hard to imagine for example that with some innovative chemical processing or perhaps just timely freezing water-based structures could be interesting aids in engineering. (How about putting vegetable oil on the surface of a water sphere, dyeing the oil with a metallic poweder, and throwing it out the window? or maybe fuse it with an exothermic reaction? Voila, you have a radar reflector (maybe antennas could be built this way - magnetic fields and perhaps iron filings in water to make the form. Not to mention, frothing it with air bubbles as with an ultrasonic toothbrush might make light foamy structures possible once frozen.
I thought, great now it'll be easier to avoid them (Overture) like the plague, though maybe Overture has distribution that will make the search technology completely transparent? Thinking embedded searching in things..
Google? Love em, but uneasily keep waiting for the other shoe to drop when they stop wanting to burn cash (which one would think they must be doing a lot of). When do the suits take over?
Hey, it doesn't suck for me since I didn't see the original of the dupe yet.. although now I have to look in both since there might be something new in there. We have lots of er helpful readers that doesn't mean your glib remark is construable as an apology. It's not a big one but the pattern of continual dupes makes everyone think that obvious editorial decisions are completely at odds with some aspect of the running of slashdot. Do you need human helpers? Some people might jump to help you even.
Perhaps Slashdot.org's tech crew could develop a simple system to actively prevent dupes? Like checking to see if the same url was used in a recent article? Might even be helpful with crossreferencing. Or maybe you *want* to put up a dupe because the discussion was so good last time, then you can say it in advance and less email to you. Just a couple cents.
Palladium will not: (and I quote into the cauldron..)
- Replace the Windows operating system. - Search the Internet to detect and delete pirated software, music, and movies. - Eliminate spam and software viruses. - Prevent a digital thief from gaining access to a computer in person and disabling its hardware security features.
"The goal, Microsoft officials say, is to make servers and desktop PC's that people can trust." (ha-ha)
Maybe a system that did ALL of these things would be competitive?
--
I think it's only fair these [hopefully nonexistent] publishers are forced to purchase Palladium PCs and use only Palladium-liscensed reference material for which they will pay per byte forever.
"Colleges.. would face enormous pressures to do so"
Why not instead force publishers to provide text-searchable CDs for free to legitimate book owners because of fair use laws? Safari seems pretty useful.
If every student is networked these days, I think there may be an opportunity for universities to promote a solution to a real (as opposed to hypothetical) problem which happens to appear antithetical to Gates' wet dreams.
- Students spend an awful lot of money on textbooks, and sometimes have difficulty finding them in bookstores and libraries. A significant number might jump at the chance to purchase a digital copy instead of the paper textbook.
- Searching for words in textbooks should be promoted at universities as one of the few clear merits of owning a computer in school. It would be interesting to see legally if universities, or individual students, can promote this to the point of forcing publishers to provide a free fair-use cd of searchable text with every textbook. The bookstore could hand them out when books or purchased.
- Students who have purchased second-hand books also should be able to enjoy the benefits of digital searching.
- Annotation is a second obvious merit of using a computer in school, and it's why the web was born. Students used to surfing the web will readily jump into information organized in am easy to use, interactive format. Researchers should also be able to freely access stores of annotations and digital texts.
- Also annotation as well as the ability to index and navigate by scene or timecode is very useful with film and video. This could be useful in university film, music, television, language, and science courses among others, and universities ought to be able to negotiate with publishers to create free-use zones for scholarship purposes without all this annoying crypto. If enough did it, there would be a smaller potential Palladium market.
- Schools with less funding should be able to invest in personnel and students, and (if there is a suitable alternative) ought to be able to use information technology to reduce the financial barriers. MIT has embarked on an open curriculum and more should be promoted. We need to enable people to apt-get an education and get used to it so they won't let it get taken away.
- It would be interesting to see if projects funded by national governments would be exempt from Palladium
- While MP3 sharing may very well be within the law, it is not as obvious a poster child for fair use as any of the above uses of everything from ascii text to hdtv. I think it would be very interesting to see if the open source and educational communities can relatively quickly develop something demonstrably more useful and open that Palladium, and possibly preempt it.
There was recently a discussion on the perl6 list (laugh but all your bases will belong to parrot real soon now) about what keys could be used to represent some new functions people might like to add if there were some reasonable one to three character symbols that could be made out of them. As long as they're going to change the concatenation operator anything goes right?
All which I would not have known if it were not for the wonderful summaries of the discussions on perl.com.
I'm thinking it might be useful if you could buy extra usb keyboardlets - like numeric keypads - with keys that would make your programming more powerful (otherwise you have to spell things out in english phrases). No danger of APL-ness since the system will be able to translate between the idioms effortlessly. Doubtlessly emacs scripts and something wierd for vi would be possible.
But something tells me the future of computing is going to have more to do with being able to get a heck of a lot done with a lot less typing, either because of a plethora of great snap together libraries, semi-intelligent self-programming programs, or just plain telling the thing what you mean in english (or interlingua) and having a system that will just do it.
It is not critical that we add more cryptic things to our programming prose, but I'd certainly welcome more powerful idioms and innovative input solutions that don't penalize their adopters. (I certainly will check out the Kinesis keyboard, earlier poster.. thanks.)
FYI:
this article: unicode operators, supercommas, french quotation marks.. shades of APL
With the accent it sounds more like "freed software" and maybe that's a key.
It is not free as in "you are free to make my day". It is free as in "this software code has been freed from any restrictions, to the point that no man or woman may hide it or stop it from living its life to the fullest".
Law of nature? Law of freed information!
Question 1: Does any software actually exist which has gone through a full life cycle as shared source and not demonstrated major problems e.g. with respect to security, monopoly law, cost effectiveness?
Point 2: Open source is critical to proving that software is secure in a concrete case: security of one's private machine and data. If Microsoft is only sharing source, how can it be known (without resorting to blind trust of unknown coders/governments) that the source you saw is the source that made it into the final product?
Point 3: Microsoft's shared source campaign seems defined partly in terms of an attack against open source software. How does this reconcile with open source software being highly promoted by the security experts of the majority of major companies, server operators, and governments. Is it such a good idea to distance itself from such amazingly beneficial, successful, and satisfying projects? If Microsoft believes it to be critical to do so, then would Microsoft be open to funding a free (free of cost, anonymous, with results posted publically, and run by a third party) online facility to scan software (source and object code) for violations of liscense agreements (like GPL etc.) to guarantee that no GPL code is in Windows? (After all if it is then all of Windows legally must be GPL'd..)
Just for the record, my brother in law (Dave Huber) is a pro audio engineer and runs a voiceover company called Hotwax Recording in Manhattan. His setup is completely digital, Max OS X. Most people would solve my question above with "Avid" or "Mac". I'd like to see it on "Linux".
More info about composition
on
Blacker Than Black
·
· Score: 2, Informative
More info here
mentioning composition, of which I'll quote just a part (see the article for a graph and mention of applications):
Stalagmites and craters
By examining the surface of hundreds of alloy plates under an electron microscope, NPL has discovered where previous researchers went wrong. It has developed a two-stage technique that produces the blacker black New Scientist saw emerge from the acid tank last week.
In the first stage, an object to be blackened is immersed for five hours in a solution of nickel sulphate and sodium hypophosphite. This produces a nickel and phosphorus coating containing between five and seven per cent phosphorus. Then the surface is etched with nitric acid to produce the super-black surface structure.
One of the crucial discoveries, says Brown, was how the percentage of phosphorus in the nickel coating affected the surface after etching. An electron micrograph of the surface of an alloy containing more than eight per cent phosphorus (see graphic) looks like a collection of stalagmites.
But if the phosphorus content is around six per cent the surface becomes pitted with craters. The curved craters reflect less light that the straighter-sided stalagmites, so super-black reflects about half as much light as the high-phosphorus surfaces.
Right angle
Super-black is especially effective at absorbing light that hits it at an angle. With the light source at right angles the super-black coating reflects less than 0.35 per cent. Black paint, by comparison, reflects about 2.5 per cent, or seven times as much. With the light source at an angle of 45, black paint reflects 25 times as much light as the super-black.
And.. they've been working on it for a while, here is text from their 2000 lab review pdf.
NPL Super Black
In order to make accurate
measurements in the UV, IR
and visible regions, optical
instruments and sensors
need surfaces with very low
reflectance. These black surfaces
are used as efficient radiation
detectors or may reduce stray
light in an instrument. Highly
efficient black surfaces allow
smaller, lighter instruments to
be made, which is an important
advantage in aerospace applications.
NPL has successfully developed
a very high quality optical black ]
known as NPL Super Black. The
process uses an adapted nickel
phosphorus electroless plating
technique followed by finely
controlled etching and gives
probably the blackest surface
known in the visible region.
NPL has successfully and
repeatedly produced the Super
Black coating on a small-scale
ecottage industryf basis for a
number of years. It is now for
upgrading and validating the
process for plating much larger
substrates with this high quality
optical black. The upgrade has
led to an opportunity to
collaborate with CNES, Astrium
and Sodern, the major space
contractors for the European
Space Agency, on the space
evaluation of the black. If
successful this will open up
many new opportunities for
supplying coated optics to
the aerospace industry.
I used Quicktime 4 as a porting layer to convert 7 man-years of Macintosh code to Windows 98. You can see some info and screenshots of the working application (a color pallette, and a layout for a school placement test)here.
This was a wild, unsupported, dumb, nervewracking adventure that taught me a lot about Quicktime (which has of course continued to grow and is may be a different cat with Mac OS X for all I know). When it worked well (when the libraries really existed, not just saying they were there) huge chunks of code would just start working which was also fun.
Quicktime for Windows brought a lot of the Macintosh toolbox calls, things you would think are part of the Mac OS, into Windows so you could call a huge number of them and they would work just like the Apple documentation said. I was able to use the Mac resource files after hacking some endian things and the Quicktime fonts looked much better than the Windows functions then too.
Anyway it was amazing how Quicktime appeared to be a trojan to put half the MacOS into Windows but I guess Quicktime needed it all. If it was rewritten to run on BSD maybe we could enjoy Quicktime as a programming paradigm in Linux too.
Since the software I was porting was a cross between Quark XPress and Adobe Illustrator (VXAStar, a layout program for "Shashoku" traditional analog printing press companies in Japan) it didn't need it but I even had a thing that could play movies in it. Quicktime is great because it was a whole integrated way of thinking about any kind of media, it was an API written by thoughtful people. So the API included things like knowledge about different color spaces, new audio codecs that might come out, and so on. So if your app would support Quicktime you could handle professional quality data (close to a megabyte per frame) or anything else.
I haven't done programming for Linux video or Quicktime recently either so I don't know and most likely things have changed though I still have a copy of some of heroinewarrior's first stuff:), so I don't mean to disparage anything that may be out there. But I was developing this software while in a small NLE studio, a guy who had built his own Mac-based finicky NLE suite with an external RAID array.
If you want to encode Sorenson for the web, we just need to be able to buy a Sorenson codec binary for linux.
If you want to do studio work you probably will have a standalone system which is only used for that, with maybe hard disks partitioned with big blocks. The Mac (Premiere) system I saw was immensely powerful, like a Quantum Paintbox you could do photoshop or work in other programs then render it to disk, the biggest problems were:
1) explaining to the customer what is possible, since you could do anything even just with AfterEffects, like creating clouds from nothing or rendering video in lots of layers.
2) finickiness (don't install anything else on that machine and even so it might crash sometimes.. this was an 860AV I believe),
3) you need to buy/steal a betamax deck (though we dreamed of going to DV then) and the RAID could only hold so much,
4) rendering time was quick usually but you still had to provide a couch for the customer to fall asleep on at points (when many layers were used). Also
5) You must use a very expensive, very fragile video board to get professional-quality video into the machine, just knowing all about them is a whole field of study and detective work.
6) from a project I did last year I can tell you that using tapes from unknown sources is sheer hell and inevitably involves lots of cable swapping and signal testing. If DVD regionality and PAL/SECAM encoding can be handled through software (say write a DVD at the end of the session, though most places will want Pro DV tapes or Beta.. digital betacam being almost nonexistent in Japan) then you may see studios putting Linux boxes in the corner of the room for the "just in case" when you really need it.
Now we seem to be there completely hardware-wise, but I doubt a linux software suite could be put together that could do as much yet (though maybe the film gimp would give AfterEffects a run for the money, I haven't tried it). It is completely conceivable that you could get pretty far with a few RAID arrays, a fast machine with tons of memory, and a pro DV deck. Maybe everyone is still buying avids but if analog starts working watch out!
As I'm writing this I am sitting on 20 hours of DVCAM tapes and thinking about how to get an editting system set up.. to produce a few professional-quality tapes for sale. At the moment I am thinking of getting a small pro DV deck and dumping them into a couple of hard disks first, then trying out the software mentioned in this post. If anyone has any recommendations (no special hardware, I'll just at the end either print to another DV or DVD and from there to a Beta deck at a lab) I'd be grateful.
"Commercial quality freeware".. "we intend to continue disallowing commercial uses of Parsec".
I don't get where the line is that something becomes "open source". BSD obviously is open. GPL, okay I understand copyleft. I also understand one liscense I saw where the stuff could not be used for kiddie porn-like exploitation.
But talk about viral, if someone starts hacking with it and develops their own "commercial quality" game, he is doomed to the same problem that the authors had, which is that because he can't sell it, he cannot possibly afford to compete with commercial games!
This seems to be a case of people attempting to foist misguided moral choices on other people whom they somehow still hope (many mysterious cheap hands) will acheive their dream for them. Not that I personally want to use their code, it's just confusing that there are so many "open source" liscenses out there. Hate to say it, but I'd much rather see something like Helixcode, maybe if it is commercial then a royalty can be paid the authors. And where does the line between free and commercial get drawn?
I'm sorry, it sounds like lots of fun and one day maybe I'll try playing it. But I don't get the reasoning behind releasing something to the community while maintaining restrictions on it. We all grow up, I guess these guys did. Grownups often like to get paid for their time, or at least have the illusion of free will. I think this could attract more talented programmers and game people if it didn't have the noncommercial requirement.
to whatever's been digitized. Would it be too much to ask that whatever is available, be made available in open formats? How about requesting that the search technology be made public?
For less than 10,000 dollars U.S. you can build an entire school with your name on it. And you can add solar panels, thus powering communications where there weren't any before,for just a little extra.
While it sounds inevitable that this would happen (use video games to recruit) and it's been done before (the movie was called Starfighters or some such, an interstellar race was fought by teenagers recruited through coinoperated game machines), anyway you're wrong and that much (or even a lot less) can do a world of good.
You could also do a world of good in the U.S. by funding open-source education.
If you want to buy a school in Cambodia, or assist, contact me or the address (Bernie Krisher should be listed there) on the web page.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, this news is absolutely fabulous. Nobody has been asking though about how applicable this might be in general astronomy, for example how much of the sky could be covered with this technique, and whether anything like this effect could be created with manmade gaseous clouds.
At the very least, does anyone have a link to the original scientific draft? I am curious about how extensive these clouds are, and whether we can just "dial in" any part of the sky which is covered by such a cloud for a significant portion of the year. In particular would this be something that could be used to get images of extrasolar planets? Who cares what wavelength, the new European lunar probe is going to use X-rays to see what elements are available, maybe we can do the same with these clouds? Only problem is the targets will obviously be more than 50 light years away in this case.
Anyone with some pull in Pennsylvania should give him a call. You could mention Matt Rosin sent you though it won't matter, he'll give you an honest listen and may have some good ideas about what to do.
www.sofmap.co.jp sells clie and an older sharp zaurus (SL-B500, cheaper and also linux, with a chicklet keyboard). I have some older clies which I dislike due to their being entirely too slow for input using normal input methods. The newer clies are nice-looking too, and at least for the older ones there are apparently ways to localize them. I'd stick with linux and as much RAM as you can get though.. the new zaurus would be perfect with a little faster cpu and an extra hundred megabytes or so of ram. Undoubtedly you can run emacs with any language you like on it.
I had the whole net on a cd-rom but then I mounted it on the server..
actually it used to be about 300 bps or 30 chars per second due to extra two bits (stop/parity) at least at my house. Connected to my Apple II! I remember being freaked out by the first 1200 baud modem I saw - you couldn't read in realtime off the line so what's the point right? Then came the dawn of nibble copiers and bang zoom here we are. :) the 16KB Language Card got you Applesoft and Pascal that was great.
Anybody in high school ever taught what a nibble was? Not exactly ancient history. Though the computer couldn't do decimal numbers until I sprang for a whole new PCI card..
I don't know how it is now, though it didn't at least in the beginning seem to be built for very large groups of collaborators (something which I myself am interested in). You couldn't use it to say, assemble thousands of pieces of information, I think.
But if you say compiled a weakened encryption algorithm into it and promoted its use by seeding it or maybe making it part of an OS, maybe even having it report back to homebase occasionally on how it is used, then yes it could be a very strong big brotherish tool, good for all kinds of law enforcement things. Think of distributed keyboard loggers.
So, my questions:
1) How can we know it ISN'T poisoned in one of these ways. Kapor has been around the block a few hundred times and I doubt he would quickly quit something so quickly.
2) How can all other collaboration software binaries be tested for poisoning if indeed the strategy has become to just poison every groupware tool around there.
3) Being paranoid as we should when we are talking about private communications and the government, we should assume that a lack of clear and detailed response from both Kapor and his equals the existence of a gag order.
4) TO CONTINUE #2 above, how can we safeguard ourselves against similarly poisoned rpms in distro cdroms/ftpsites? Should easier to use sandboxes be developed to guard against this kind of problem?
This link I gleaned and posted on Slashdot the last time we had an article about this. There are actually several interesting papers about this on the net, look for Lo in xarchiv and elsewhere I think. Downloaded a whole bunch last time.
Not that I want to make any kind of a political statement for or against anything here, nor to beat up any religion or creed. Well not most. It is just that relatively few people seem to be able to analyze documents or to understand basic scientific realities.
It might be interesting if there was a free resource which parents could use to teach their kids and they could stay a story or lesson ahead. They could read some interesting things about astronomy or SETI and then pass on the spark of interest to their children.
Of course this would be good for computer science too, it is just that most people replace concentrated analysis with a street smartsy "I don't trust [insert your personality/company/government official here]". And computers for example are generally seen (for good reason) as big silly blobs of sometimes idiotic, and often near-obsolete, rules and responses.
So instead of understanding the basics of information technology the user is often reduced to ("it always does this.." or "I can never get it to..") and most scientific artifacts accessible in daily life have computer systems embedded in them at one layer or another.
In related news, CU is apparently building a new nanotech lab on campus. Just exactly what I wanted to study when I was there, just a few years too soon! (I studied biochem among other things then graduated with Asian studies, and did computer stuff in my spare time).
Of course I would have been in sheer hell since not only did I have to trawl the engineering library for the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH as computer courses conflicted badly with Japanese, now I would also probably have to pay for the privilege of downloading genome sequences to my dorm. 2 gigs is totally like, not there.
As the thosands and thousands of slashdotters who must have read this story by Heinlein, for one thing you can easily use a lunar mass catapult to target points all over earth.
As someone else here also noted, there's lots of surface area for solar panels (which might even be produced in an automated fashion one day). The neat thing being that it is easy to shine that energy all right back at the side of earth facing the moon in the form of a laser or electron beam.
Next of course, China may just want something to keep its intellectuals' minds off of worldly pursuits, or they may be trying to think of a suitable statement for the millenium which is obviously far superior than the American vision (which sadly appears on the face of it to be easy these days).
Anyway who says the Chinese will build it? I don't see any of them wearing articulated space suits yet. More likely this is just a better justification to get more of that great scientific knowhow from U.S. and European countries than the one they had before. It's a lot easier to do seemingly innocuous things in space that have military potential because everyone's gotta have a little delta-v.
It doesn't sound like slashdot users are all equipped to make that determination. In fact, it has no relevance whether someone ever did this before or not.
It has great use in describing creative scientific endeavor and a sense of aesthetics which is not only great for young people's education, but also may even get adults to understand one of the reasons why we should be in space.
In addition and what I find most exciting aside from the beauty of the results, is that this is similar in some ways to the recently theorized methods of using radio waves to build large structures in outer space. It is not hard to imagine for example that with some innovative chemical processing or perhaps just timely freezing water-based structures could be interesting aids in engineering. (How about putting vegetable oil on the surface of a water sphere, dyeing the oil with a metallic poweder, and throwing it out the window? or maybe fuse it with an exothermic reaction? Voila, you have a radar reflector (maybe antennas could be built this way - magnetic fields and perhaps iron filings in water to make the form. Not to mention, frothing it with air bubbles as with an ultrasonic toothbrush might make light foamy structures possible once frozen.
cellphone Blogs YOU!!
..or In Soviet Slashdot, popup phones YOU!
oh and thanks slashp@p for that tantalizing cellphone popup. Please stop.
Google? Love em, but uneasily keep waiting for the other shoe to drop when they stop wanting to burn cash (which one would think they must be doing a lot of). When do the suits take over?
Perhaps Slashdot.org's tech crew could develop a simple system to actively prevent dupes? Like checking to see if the same url was used in a recent article? Might even be helpful with crossreferencing. Or maybe you *want* to put up a dupe because the discussion was so good last time, then you can say it in advance and less email to you. Just a couple cents.
Palladium will not: (and I quote into the cauldron..)
.. would face enormous pressures to do so"
- Replace the Windows operating system.
- Search the Internet to detect and delete pirated software, music, and movies.
- Eliminate spam and software viruses.
- Prevent a digital thief from gaining access to a computer in person and disabling its hardware security features.
"The goal, Microsoft officials say, is to make servers and desktop PC's that people can trust." (ha-ha)
Maybe a system that did ALL of these things would be competitive?
--
I think it's only fair these [hopefully nonexistent] publishers are forced to purchase Palladium PCs and use only Palladium-liscensed reference material for which they will pay per byte forever.
"Colleges
Why not instead force publishers to provide text-searchable CDs for free to legitimate book owners because of fair use laws? Safari seems pretty useful.
If every student is networked these days, I think there may be an opportunity for universities to promote a solution to a real (as opposed to hypothetical) problem which happens to appear antithetical to Gates' wet dreams.
- Students spend an awful lot of money on textbooks, and sometimes have difficulty finding them in bookstores and libraries. A significant number might jump at the chance to purchase a digital copy instead of the paper textbook.
- Searching for words in textbooks should be promoted at universities as one of the few clear merits of owning a computer in school. It would be interesting to see legally if universities, or individual students, can promote this to the point of forcing publishers to provide a free fair-use cd of searchable text with every textbook. The bookstore could hand them out when books or purchased.
- Students who have purchased second-hand books also should be able to enjoy the benefits of digital searching.
- Annotation is a second obvious merit of using a computer in school, and it's why the web was born. Students used to surfing the web will readily jump into information organized in am easy to use, interactive format. Researchers should also be able to freely access stores of annotations and digital texts.
- Also annotation as well as the ability to index and navigate by scene or timecode is very useful with film and video. This could be useful in university film, music, television, language, and science courses among others, and universities ought to be able to negotiate with publishers to create free-use zones for scholarship purposes without all this annoying crypto. If enough did it, there would be a smaller potential Palladium market.
- Schools with less funding should be able to invest in personnel and students, and (if there is a suitable alternative) ought to be able to use information technology to reduce the financial barriers. MIT has embarked on an open curriculum and more should be promoted. We need to enable people to apt-get an education and get used to it so they won't let it get taken away.
- It would be interesting to see if projects funded by national governments would be exempt from Palladium
- While MP3 sharing may very well be within the law, it is not as obvious a poster child for fair use as any of the above uses of everything from ascii text to hdtv. I think it would be very interesting to see if the open source and educational communities can relatively quickly develop something demonstrably more useful and open that Palladium, and possibly preempt it.
There was recently a discussion on the perl6 list (laugh but all your bases will belong to parrot real soon now) about what keys could be used to represent some new functions people might like to add if there were some reasonable one to three character symbols that could be made out of them. As long as they're going to change the concatenation operator anything goes right?
All which I would not have known if it were not for the wonderful summaries of the discussions on perl.com.
I'm thinking it might be useful if you could buy extra usb keyboardlets - like numeric keypads - with keys that would make your programming more powerful (otherwise you have to spell things out in english phrases). No danger of APL-ness since the system will be able to translate between the idioms effortlessly. Doubtlessly emacs scripts and something wierd for vi would be possible.
But something tells me the future of computing is going to have more to do with being able to get a heck of a lot done with a lot less typing, either because of a plethora of great snap together libraries, semi-intelligent self-programming programs, or just plain telling the thing what you mean in english (or interlingua) and having a system that will just do it. It is not critical that we add more cryptic things to our programming prose, but I'd certainly welcome more powerful idioms and innovative input solutions that don't penalize their adopters. (I certainly will check out the Kinesis keyboard, earlier poster.. thanks.)
FYI:
this article: unicode operators, supercommas, french quotation marks.. shades of APL
It is not free as in "you are free to make my day". It is free as in "this software code has been freed from any restrictions, to the point that no man or woman may hide it or stop it from living its life to the fullest".
Law of nature? Law of freed information!
Question 1: Does any software actually exist which has gone through a full life cycle as shared source and not demonstrated major problems e.g. with respect to security, monopoly law, cost effectiveness?
Point 2: Open source is critical to proving that software is secure in a concrete case: security of one's private machine and data. If Microsoft is only sharing source, how can it be known (without resorting to blind trust of unknown coders/governments) that the source you saw is the source that made it into the final product?
Point 3: Microsoft's shared source campaign seems defined partly in terms of an attack against open source software. How does this reconcile with open source software being highly promoted by the security experts of the majority of major companies, server operators, and governments. Is it such a good idea to distance itself from such amazingly beneficial, successful, and satisfying projects? If Microsoft believes it to be critical to do so, then would Microsoft be open to funding a free (free of cost, anonymous, with results posted publically, and run by a third party) online facility to scan software (source and object code) for violations of liscense agreements (like GPL etc.) to guarantee that no GPL code is in Windows? (After all if it is then all of Windows legally must be GPL'd..)
Just for the record, my brother in law (Dave Huber) is a pro audio engineer and runs a voiceover company called Hotwax Recording in Manhattan. His setup is completely digital, Max OS X. Most people would solve my question above with "Avid" or "Mac". I'd like to see it on "Linux".
NPL Super Black In order to make accurate measurements in the UV, IR and visible regions, optical instruments and sensors need surfaces with very low reflectance. These black surfaces are used as efficient radiation detectors or may reduce stray light in an instrument. Highly efficient black surfaces allow smaller, lighter instruments to be made, which is an important advantage in aerospace applications. NPL has successfully developed a very high quality optical black ] known as NPL Super Black. The process uses an adapted nickel phosphorus electroless plating technique followed by finely controlled etching and gives probably the blackest surface known in the visible region. NPL has successfully and repeatedly produced the Super Black coating on a small-scale ecottage industryf basis for a number of years. It is now for upgrading and validating the process for plating much larger substrates with this high quality optical black. The upgrade has led to an opportunity to collaborate with CNES, Astrium and Sodern, the major space contractors for the European Space Agency, on the space evaluation of the black. If successful this will open up many new opportunities for supplying coated optics to the aerospace industry.
I used Quicktime 4 as a porting layer to convert 7 man-years of Macintosh code to Windows 98. You can see some info and screenshots of the working application (a color pallette, and a layout for a school placement test)here.
This was a wild, unsupported, dumb, nervewracking adventure that taught me a lot about Quicktime (which has of course continued to grow and is may be a different cat with Mac OS X for all I know). When it worked well (when the libraries really existed, not just saying they were there) huge chunks of code would just start working which was also fun.
Quicktime for Windows brought a lot of the Macintosh toolbox calls, things you would think are part of the Mac OS, into Windows so you could call a huge number of them and they would work just like the Apple documentation said. I was able to use the Mac resource files after hacking some endian things and the Quicktime fonts looked much better than the Windows functions then too.
Anyway it was amazing how Quicktime appeared to be a trojan to put half the MacOS into Windows but I guess Quicktime needed it all. If it was rewritten to run on BSD maybe we could enjoy Quicktime as a programming paradigm in Linux too.
Since the software I was porting was a cross between Quark XPress and Adobe Illustrator (VXAStar, a layout program for "Shashoku" traditional analog printing press companies in Japan) it didn't need it but I even had a thing that could play movies in it. Quicktime is great because it was a whole integrated way of thinking about any kind of media, it was an API written by thoughtful people. So the API included things like knowledge about different color spaces, new audio codecs that might come out, and so on. So if your app would support Quicktime you could handle professional quality data (close to a megabyte per frame) or anything else.
I haven't done programming for Linux video or Quicktime recently either so I don't know and most likely things have changed though I still have a copy of some of heroinewarrior's first stuff :), so I don't mean to disparage anything that may be out there. But I was developing this software while in a small NLE studio, a guy who had built his own Mac-based finicky NLE suite with an external RAID array.
If you want to encode Sorenson for the web, we just need to be able to buy a Sorenson codec binary for linux.
If you want to do studio work you probably will have a standalone system which is only used for that, with maybe hard disks partitioned with big blocks. The Mac (Premiere) system I saw was immensely powerful, like a Quantum Paintbox you could do photoshop or work in other programs then render it to disk, the biggest problems were:
1) explaining to the customer what is possible, since you could do anything even just with AfterEffects, like creating clouds from nothing or rendering video in lots of layers.
2) finickiness (don't install anything else on that machine and even so it might crash sometimes.. this was an 860AV I believe),
3) you need to buy/steal a betamax deck (though we dreamed of going to DV then) and the RAID could only hold so much,
4) rendering time was quick usually but you still had to provide a couch for the customer to fall asleep on at points (when many layers were used). Also
5) You must use a very expensive, very fragile video board to get professional-quality video into the machine, just knowing all about them is a whole field of study and detective work.
6) from a project I did last year I can tell you that using tapes from unknown sources is sheer hell and inevitably involves lots of cable swapping and signal testing. If DVD regionality and PAL/SECAM encoding can be handled through software (say write a DVD at the end of the session, though most places will want Pro DV tapes or Beta.. digital betacam being almost nonexistent in Japan) then you may see studios putting Linux boxes in the corner of the room for the "just in case" when you really need it.
Now we seem to be there completely hardware-wise, but I doubt a linux software suite could be put together that could do as much yet (though maybe the film gimp would give AfterEffects a run for the money, I haven't tried it). It is completely conceivable that you could get pretty far with a few RAID arrays, a fast machine with tons of memory, and a pro DV deck. Maybe everyone is still buying avids but if analog starts working watch out!
As I'm writing this I am sitting on 20 hours of DVCAM tapes and thinking about how to get an editting system set up.. to produce a few professional-quality tapes for sale. At the moment I am thinking of getting a small pro DV deck and dumping them into a couple of hard disks first, then trying out the software mentioned in this post. If anyone has any recommendations (no special hardware, I'll just at the end either print to another DV or DVD and from there to a Beta deck at a lab) I'd be grateful.
Matt
I don't get where the line is that something becomes "open source". BSD obviously is open. GPL, okay I understand copyleft. I also understand one liscense I saw where the stuff could not be used for kiddie porn-like exploitation.
But talk about viral, if someone starts hacking with it and develops their own "commercial quality" game, he is doomed to the same problem that the authors had, which is that because he can't sell it, he cannot possibly afford to compete with commercial games!
This seems to be a case of people attempting to foist misguided moral choices on other people whom they somehow still hope (many mysterious cheap hands) will acheive their dream for them.
Not that I personally want to use their code, it's just confusing that there are so many "open source" liscenses out there. Hate to say it, but I'd much rather see something like Helixcode, maybe if it is commercial then a royalty can be paid the authors. And where does the line between free and commercial get drawn?
I'm sorry, it sounds like lots of fun and one day maybe I'll try playing it. But I don't get the reasoning behind releasing something to the community while maintaining restrictions on it. We all grow up, I guess these guys did. Grownups often like to get paid for their time, or at least have the illusion of free will. I think this could attract more talented programmers and game people if it didn't have the noncommercial requirement.
Can FOIA do anything like this?
The sample xml uses the Poindexters' home phone log.
(urk)
For less than 10,000 dollars U.S. you can build an entire school with your name on it. And you can add solar panels, thus powering communications where there weren't any before,for just a little extra.
While it sounds inevitable that this would happen (use video games to recruit) and it's been done before (the movie was called Starfighters or some such, an interstellar race was fought by teenagers recruited through coinoperated game machines), anyway you're wrong and that much (or even a lot less) can do a world of good.
You could also do a world of good in the U.S. by funding open-source education.
If you want to buy a school in Cambodia, or assist, contact me or the address (Bernie Krisher should be listed there) on the web page.
Disclaimer: I support this project.