This is the second completely ludicrous science article I've read at this particular website in the last few weeks. It seems like they specialize in sensationalizing marginal psychological research results into weird moralistic conclusions. Cross reference this article about how fast food is turning japanese girls into sex maniacs:
Sorry, you are mistaken. The Mainichi is a great major Japanese newspaper, unfortunately its English version has stopped appearing in printed form due to furious competition.
The Wai-Wai section which this latest sex maniac article has always been a full page section which compiled a precis of several bizarre and interesting (half of the time sex-related) articles from the weekly tabloid magazines. The word tabloid is also perhaps not appropriate; these magazines include news, essays, and a titilating slant but are not like U.S. supermarket tabloids' "Space Aliens Had My Baby" genre. Generally the articles seem not to be apocryphal, and most always good for a laugh or squeamish grimace. I recommend WaiWai (which means something like "Yeah!" or "Fun!" or "Surf's Up!" which shows another side of Japan which you might call wacky, perverse, sociologically fascinating or just "realistic", this is what Crighton never told.
I used to buy the newspaper just for this column (Sundays I believe) and a couple of columns inside the front page. A great loss right down to the cheap ink that would come off on your fingers. Thanks for finding it online for me again!
Wizardry II on my Apple II. Balls to the wall 64K (yup, I had the 16K Language Card) machine running 1.4 MHz. That took more of my hours (and according to this study my health) than any other game out there today.. except ZORK of course. I think it might have been written in Pascal..
Anyway it was great. Wonder if it will run on catakig emulator? Zork's great.
Amazing how many idiotic or joking posts get upgraded to Score: 5. Took me 15 minutes to find one or two serious posts, hope a didn't miss any other serious people below Score 5.
When would some kind of refactoring of time make sense?
Stellar navigation, a la Star Trek's Stardate 123456.2345 representation. I am not a trekkie but presumably any relativistic ship would be able to agree on what time it was in the galaxy at a given instant by observing say, some group of pulsars or some other unambiguous thing. A noble effort though the numbers are both too big (number of digits) and too small (long decimal fractions) to actually talk about time with another human.
Swatch time. Another noble effort. Since I never bought a swatch (seems fatal to this effort) I've only seen them, but it seems to try to pick a unique "hour" "minute" "second" for each moment of the 24 hour cycle, no matter where you are on Earth. The main use obviously being discussion or timing of synchronous events on a global scale. Good for all-night chat sessions and maybe teleconferences, bad for people who go to work in the morning. Actually there is a fascinating and beautiful section on Internet Time at swatch.com. Maybe it would be useful for timing emails and such.
UTC obviously what is used now for email. How come we don't use it more? Certainly lots of problems with Daylight Savings Time, Datelines, etc. A big thing is when a message was sent and when it was received. How do you sort your mail?
How about Slashdot providing a link to a time converter whenever time is noted on the site? I wouldn't mind trying to catch a live broadcast for once.
"By penetrating P2P networks such as Gnutella, Open Napster, and FastTrack, our solution can use the power of P2P against abusers, instead turning software pirates into customers"
Huh?
P2P Networks turn "pirates" into customers. Obstructing the network simply ensures that network users will never become customers of authors who have hired the obstructors.
All well-documented cases (think Baen Books for example) show that freely available works increase demand and improve artist-audience relations.
I don't see how these guys can possibly succeed. They will have to continually develop technology to beat the bleeding edge of the P2P arms race, but unlike antivirus companies which enjoy a huge market and a growing pool of evangelists, Overpeer's only cashflow will come from the RIAA and anybody who has not yet learned about the positive commercial power of P2P networks.
Yesterday I went to Networld+Interop in Tokyo. Best in 5 years easily. Wireless, Broadband, Streaming Video, it was all so huge they even rented the next building. The past President now statesman of NTT DoCoMo (most successful Japanese company, and partnered with AT&T) stood up in front of a thousand people and gave an extremely lucid presentation on the future of all this. Get this, they are DEPENDING on P2P!!
This I mention as I noticed today an interesting little socket with tape over it attached to the cash register of my local convenience store (think 7/11). The tape said, DoCoMo service starts July 16. There is already a bank machine and maybe a loan machine (the mafia got wise) in most every convenience store and now the loop is finally being closed. All we need now (maybe available next week, if not I'll sure work on it) is paying for cryptgraphic passwords at the register. Now that networks carry so much data it is hard to tell when an mp3 or divx is coming over the wire, it is just going to be very difficult to stop.
But I'm not talking about pirating. Overpeer (an oxymoron like "Big Brother" in case nobody noticed) is going to fail financially because the big boys need these P2P networks to work. Not a lot of people are making waves if it is just kiddiez and bored techies downloading a few mp3z. But P2P and open group-based data sharing is becoming important for business cooperation (think Groove), B2B (Enron was doing $1 billion/day of e-commerce transactions before they tanked), and distribution of large files and streams (think Akamai, the Perl CPAN, and FTTH - now a reality for Tokyo residents this year).
When these networks start getting used for serious data as well, Overpeer is going to be messing with the value of a network resource that real companies have a stake in.
Consider that if I already own an Eminem CD (not likely) I am completely within my fair use rights to use a digital copy of that. If I was paying for a P2P network to supply my fair-use needs, Overpeer might end up on the other end of the stick (in court).
What's needed to put the RIAA in its place (bankruptcy court) and promote music and P2P?
Use P2P for lots of legitimate data and services. For example DoCoMo phones will be used (actually are now) for ticket purchases. A P2P solution would have ensured all seats for the World Cup got sold correctly. (Hmm maybe I'll work on that one).
Build a service and liscensing scheme specifically to support P2P and fair use.
Tie unobstructed P2P networks to commercial profits.
Create a reasonable system for end-user licensing that will decriminalize fair-use music owner's P2P downloads, and not incidentally reduce the price of music.
Make commercial use of cryptographically secure, anonymous data networks with the ultimate goal of having large chunks of them hosted by giant corporate data centers.
Create hash tables which identify in realtime abusers of P2P, which is going to very soon become a critical component of the global infrastructure.
Create tangible benefits for artists who use these networks, or in some other way stop supporting the RIAA.
I'm sure you guys can think of a few more ideas. Personally I don't see Overpeer as a very good investment move do you? I'd take my money out of Overpeer and hire some guys to build on P2P instead of obstructing it.
So how about milli-lights? (Maybe I just invented it? --or is it a CG flick?) Sounds better than gigameters too.
1 milli-light = 1 mc = 0.001 c = 1 million km/sec = 0.67 million miles = 1 gigameter.
It is useful for CNN and promotion of space to the public because instead of saying "72 million km per hour" (which should be 72 gigameters/hour which abbreviated would unfortunately look like gram-meters/hour..) ..You can just say 72 milli-lights.
Everyone knows light travels at 186,282 miles per second. At least I've known that since elementary school, nearly 30 years ago.
Multiply by 3600 sec/hour and you will see that one light-hour is about 671 million miles.
So if a supernova shockwave is moving at 45 million miles an hour, that's 45/671 or about 6.7% the speed of light in a vaccuum.
It works in metric too of course.. 1 light-second is about 300,000 km/s (a third of a million km/s) 1 light-hour is then about 1000 million km/s, and 72/1000 or 7/100 gives you about 0.07c.
So next time you see a number of million kilometers per hour from CNN you can just divide it by ten and that is the percentage of the speed of light.
I think when we talk about this scale of velocity we need something better than "million miles/kilometers per second" and more tangible than a fraction of c.
I'm allergic to many old books and papers, and would much prefer to have a digital copy on a good display or possibly even printed on paper again if needed. For this reason a digital certificate which certified the existence of one owned, printed copy of a book would be useful. This would allow for fair use and (might) discourage putting things in public domain (though it is not necessarily bad for authors).
Then if you buy a used book and the book had a serial number in it you could get the digital version online. To me these digital versions would be more valuable and I would be willing to pay money for quality digital reproductions (not as much as the original book though).
I have found that short documents printed two pages to a side is also useable, though at only a single side being used, too thick and wasteful of paper.
Having read the digital versions of many books on my Palm which I had previously purchased years ago in paperback, I can attest to the utility of even a low quality display. The only problem is not getting to sleep until 4 am! Publishers should get on the bandwagon and stop being such police. A little flexibility and trust may go a long way. Personally I have only picked authors I have already read everything of years ago, and now I have rediscovered them.. and found some new authors to watch for, having given up on small bookstores until now.
I wish you could like to see a digital certificate provided with each printed book (could even be issued retroactively through a website if publishers wished..) which would
I am an xemacs person but wasted a lot of time with trying to get an NT version working. The linux version is great, the windows version may be great for you but was useless for me since Japanese language is not supported (not a development priority..).
I am trying Perl Factory which may be useless for you, since it has a Japanese interface, but it could solve some other people's problems. EditPlus is a simple editor that does some things but not everything you want.
And Komodo of course if you already are doing Visual Studio - but for programmability I'd spend more time looking at xemacs and eclipse if I were you. If you need to start now with Perl and don't need Japanese, xemacs.
Personally, this week I have been (silly me) trying to solve a little niggling problem (old gnorpm can't download new version files) and ended up having my SuSE system rendered untrustworthy, lost mail, and now have had to switch to Win98! Here's what I've seen - it is NOT SUPPORT. It is the problem of keeping up with new software in a RedHat (already?) world. How often do you see binaries that are not in RPM format? How often have you seen some hairy dependencies and backed off, decided to compile it yourself?
- RedHat is more viral than SuSE, and SuSE binaries of apps are "RedHat Package Manager" binaries, and redhat.com seems indispensable it seems to keeping up with libs needed to install them.
- I installed SuSE from CD on a laptop a couple years ago, and have found it very difficult to add new RPM-based software sometimes, especially if you miss a few iterations. This is like rpm's "this application can only install software with version number = 3" or need for yast2 for new installation. How stupid to make the one important app (yast2) you need to get SuSE software so difficult to get!
- using rpm can destroy your non-RH system insidiously. For example after installing something with RH suddenly I lose my usernames - system tells me there is no user called "root" and all file listings use user id numbers instead of names. After hunting in google and some detective work, I discover that nss-switch has been surreptitiously updated so that the default now breaks functionality (it wants to read/etc/passwd from some other source like a db I guess). Change "compat" to "files" and back in action. This took time out that I should have been spending on a project that pays the bills.
- rpm dependencies don't check for manually compiled code. fix that.
Silly me, thought that between compiling GNU software, looking at the iBiblio archives, and using rpmfind/gnorpm webfind I'd be safe. The end result is an RPM CD (no don't have/can't get yast2) telling me I have to install 400 MB of crap, half of which I already have, to just update rpm and gnorpm. Finally I compiled rpm manually and got gnorpm-static, but it still ain't enough. First time sh configure told me "Checking to see if gcc works... NO" NO!!!!! So how about somebody building and managing a real online source/binary archive that helps you get away from RH and update non-RH systems with security, peace-of-mind, and no destruction of current functionality. God-forsaken rpm hell, never should have let RedHat start rebuilding my entire machine without saying exactly what was going on.
- Very recently I have seen ultimate horror of having to stop using email on linux. I finally buckled under installing major amounts of RPMs with gnorpm so that I could do some basic things. Now gcc is broken (worked fine when compiled manually.. damn) and suddenly fetchmail is happily deleting mail off the server while refusing to save it in var/spool ! Christ! Now I am using Outlook Express on my used Win98 laptop and about to erase SuSE once and for all, and put RH in, as soon as I can back the whole bastardized thing up to a new 100GB disk, when I buy that. Not like I'm not swimming in RedHat cds. Now I am looking forward to upgrading KDE and Gnome (never enough libs and compiled parts it seems..) and being able to actually type Japanese and maybe even print on the printer 10 feet away. The reason I ended up inputting Japanese and printing on Windows is that the PJE package never built correctly on SuSE no matter how much it got fiddled with, and anyway all the other important things end up being proprietary in both distros. Fear, Doubt, and..
- RedHat has beaten TurboLinux in Japan as far as I can see. I waited 2 years for SuSE's promises to enter the market here, even talking to people I heard were going to be involved. Poof! I hate RH and like very much the SuSE distro I installed at the time. And yet, I will inevitably have to get local language support (Japanese fonts, front end processors, input dictionaries, printer drivers, etc.) from distros which have those components in Japan even if some of those are commercial parts. A recent mook (magazine book, which is how software gets around in Japan - embedded cds) had 6 or 8 linux distros and a ton of CDs in it. No SuSE. Well-known names, like Laser5, but all different. Maybe nice right after install, but are you sure you are going to be able to keep up with the world? That's how RH sells to my mind. Not the support model, it's the software update system. I now recommend RedHat to customers while hating it and most people do the same. Talk about sowing seeds of failure.
This is absolutely wonderful news. Now we need to get some models of whether orbital mirrors on the poles can create an atmosphere that will keep your skin together, and if so then how soon!
But before that - core samples at the poles! There's a lot of easy to access history and maybe some organics we should know about in there.
In the next 30 years we are going to have either an incredibly well policed and defanged world, or an awful lot of horrible politically motivated NCB disasters. And we don't have anywhere yet for the race to survive if we should make a mess with energy or nanotech research.
Best thing going for Mars is, nobody's there yet that we know of, and anyone who goes will be likely be too busy playing the only game there is -- think of a new environment and what the survival traits will be. Time to fund nuclear rockets, breakthrough propulsion, and other things fanatics don't want to hear about.
By the way you are not alone. Lots of people
are thinking they ought to be able to save money
on development with overseas teams. Just yesterday I was told about a project which is relatively large, has a very tight deadline, a somewhat tight budget, and yet still has a number of things up in the air.. the spec is not done.
The guys were talking about trying to find a Chinese team (China to Japan is like India to the U.S.) that could do it. When someone is sitting in front of them who has the experience, the time, and is willing to meet the budget. If you have a hardware factory China or better yet Taiwan is great. But NOT for an important smallish project. You'd be better off outsourcing the thing to a small shop in your neighborhood.
I have had problems with every project that involved Indians, mainly because of communications
problems and lower skill levels. There may be
great companies to work with but as far as I've
seen, bringing people in house has not been so
fantastic and involving disparate teams tends to
reduce focus on priorities. For example there is one project (I am not in charge of it but evaluating it) involving Californian and Indian teams
that is to be delivered in Japan. For some reason
it is way too late and when we ask questions instead of straight answers we just get more code. It has been like pulling teeth just to get a list of changes since the last version. Unit tests or a reasonable spec? Forget it. Documentation? Nope. Any efficiency I've seen has been totally eaten up by unscrupulous, incompetent management as far as I can see. This is one of the worse
examples and I do have to say that I have enjoyed
working with an Indian programmer in the past (who was getting paid the same as us), but there are
too many things you will assume to be reasonable
practices which people who are not immersed in the
same online/offline culture will not share. I second the recommendation that you work with Americans and Canadians if possible (if you are in the U.S.).
That said I have also heard that Bulgaria has very good and very inexpensive people.. but yet again I have never seen this team used for the most important, time sensitive things. An Indian team might be appropriate for a lot of work that doesn't need brains to build or test, has no hard deadline, and has an extra person or two on your side to manage them. This is DEFINITELY not a solution for a 4 or 5 man project. BIG MISTAKE!
If you really want to go offshore, call me. I am
a highly experienced American in Tokyo. I'd try to be competitive of course but I'll be straight forward. It is not going to seem cheap but it will save you a ton of money. I understand engineering and have also used documentation, face-to-face, and telephone meetings to solve problems that developed in large projects that involved many offices around the world. For example I was hired to solve problems in a project that included a U.S. corporation, their U.S. developer, the Australian branch and their developer, ditto for Japan and cases of where things were going wrong in Australia, China, and Germany. Obviously the problem was with the parent organization and in the end, the Japan side decided the solution was to tell them to go to hell. You need someone like me, preferably based in the U.S. if you can find him or her, who has seen the same problems over and over again. Get your boss to give that person some control over the project and fire teams quickly that don't act professionally.
I think your company has made a mistake though. It's not like you can't find good developers in the U.S. who need work. Maybe if you and the remaining programmer threaten to quit your boss might get a glimmer of understanding. It's not like you would be spending your time doing anything constructive if you get into this mess. Look for a new job!
One thing I suppose I or someone like me could do would be to coordinate development while standing between the two timezones. I just have experience in it because there are a lot of Indian programmers here and I work with lots of Americans and Canadians. But best for you to get a consultant in the U.S. who can come in from the outside and tell your boss the same thing.
If you absolutely must use a given Indian team, prepare for spending lots of money on phone calls, hotel stays (at least one person, one month), trips of a 5 person team, lost deadlines, extra documentation to make sure everything stays on track, and an extra budget for a wig since you're going to pull out all that hair. If this thread doesn't convince you and your boss, you both deserve all the trouble you get.
Also seems that we could find some strangelet sources by extending the line by which their paths intersect the surface of the earth and knowing where the earth was at the time.. Have these people tried to do so?
IANA astrophysicist, but obviously these things are given their momentum, if not in fact created, in some major stellar process like a neutron star explosion or maybe even the Big Bang.
What sort of things would you look for to try to find a source of such objects? How would they radiate or change fields through which they pass? What would a strangelet storm (tm) look like? Perhaps a wave of them would look like a gravitational field moving at relativistic speed?
What about looking in the neighborhood of our own solar system for strangelets passing through perpendicular to the ecliptic? You might think they would interact with the Sun's surface and atmosphere, and create effects in high resolution images.
I once saw a big orange missile standing on its tail, and was told Ellison kept it metaphorically aimed at his rival. Wasn't more than 3 or 4 meters long, looked cool in a Buck Rogers way but of course Microsoft could buy the real thing.
That said, The Bill's philanthropy is way too little too late and doesn't make a big dent in his net worth. A nice big number but not so much for the world's richest man. Most science fiction has such a guy funding the first moon base etc. Why does our Bill care so much about nosing into little dusty interiors when he could have his head in the clouds? Fund X Prize competitors and Nanotech startups, and try to do it without strings attached!
Feh!
How about a script which flips a coin on whether it should click the button for you or not? Until checked, the EULA contract would be in a superposition of the eigenstates that you agree or do not agree.
Set the amount that you agree to some very low number, say 1 out of 100. Unless the EULA'd program uninstalls itself as soon as it detects a "No, I do not agree" button click, the program will undoubtedly run correctly after one or two hundred iterations.
The neat thing is that every time the script is run with a positive "I agree" button click, another universe where this did not happen must be created. So on the balance nobody is agreeing to anything.
Of course since you don't know if your automoton script made the "I agree" button click, or if the EULA window just gave up or crashed after 100 or 100,000 iterations, so you are not guilty of having consciously agreed to the contract in this universe either. I think the odds of a windows program breaking from memory leak or memory error after 100,000 iterations is more likely than that I would read a EULA before clicking on it.
It would be the same thing as if an antivirus program stopped the EULA from appearing in the first place, or clicked through it before you saw it. Or maybe some spyware broke the EULA window. (hmm.. ) Windows in general is so chaotic and untrustworthy it is ridiculous to imagine a contract being upheld on it. In this universe or any other..
I don't get viruses (knock on wood) since I read in pine but I got something from the National Funeral Association and wierd content that didn't look like an obvious virus at first. I guess I was the first of many to ask their sysadmin what was up..
How quickly do you think the tubes unzip? Was that a sonic boom?
Must be some use in a nano-size reactor that heats to 700C while shooting its contents and anything on its surface into the air.
If you have two tubes next to each other unzipping into a hornlike shape simultaneously, you'd think there would be some neat shockwaves happening. Certainly something is forcing air out quickly.
Perhaps the people building this could get something out of trying two trains in Japan.
- The monorail from Shimbashi (in Tokyo near the Ginza) to Ariake (manmade peninsula with convention and amusement facilities).
This is an unmanned, beautiful monorail which loops out over the sea. Has some good handholds and soft parts you can lean on because it seems on a narrow train with lots of windows you get pushed strongly to the side when you don't expect it. Beautiful glass car in front is a great panorama.
- The newest subway built in Tokyo, opened last year: Namboku Line which runs from northern Tokyo down to fashionable Azabu. (Like the above monorail I believe) the platform is enclosed on either side by glass walls interrupted by sliding glass doors which only open when the train stops right in front of it. There are metal posts with electric eyes on them just inside where the doors retract, so that they won't try to close while someone is entering. No room also because of those posts for someone to slide outside the glass wall.
hmm, maybe too expensive for what you get out of it, hard to say. The site tells the truth about the hardware, saying it is less sensitive than ccd (low surface area sensitive to light), noisy (snow due to differences between pixels), and so on. But it might be neat to try and hook it up to your telescope if you already have one.. vcr image stacking software is available on the net. Anyone tried it?
This Earth Simulator has been in the works for a long time too, it's not like it popped into existence all of a sudden. It's supposed to simluate the weather of the entire planet. Cool!
Another computer you may be interested in is Grape-6 which is a 48 Tflop accelerator for gravitational calculations, developed at U. Tokyo for astrophysics. The creator won the Gordon Bell Award a couple years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/0206/020619nymphs .html
Sorry, you are mistaken. The Mainichi is a great major Japanese newspaper, unfortunately its English version has stopped appearing in printed form due to furious competition.
The Wai-Wai section which this latest sex maniac article has always been a full page section which compiled a precis of several bizarre and interesting (half of the time sex-related) articles from the weekly tabloid magazines. The word tabloid is also perhaps not appropriate; these magazines include news, essays, and a titilating slant but are not like U.S. supermarket tabloids' "Space Aliens Had My Baby" genre. Generally the articles seem not to be apocryphal, and most always good for a laugh or squeamish grimace. I recommend WaiWai (which means something like "Yeah!" or "Fun!" or "Surf's Up!" which shows another side of Japan which you might call wacky, perverse, sociologically fascinating or just "realistic", this is what Crighton never told.
I used to buy the newspaper just for this column (Sundays I believe) and a couple of columns inside the front page. A great loss right down to the cheap ink that would come off on your fingers. Thanks for finding it online for me again!
Fucking ROCKED!
Wizardry II on my Apple II. Balls to the wall 64K (yup, I had the 16K Language Card) machine running 1.4 MHz. That took more of my hours (and according to this study my health) than any other game out there today.. except ZORK of course. I think it might have been written in Pascal..
Anyway it was great. Wonder if it will run on catakig emulator? Zork's great.
When would some kind of refactoring of time make sense?
"By penetrating P2P networks such as Gnutella, Open Napster, and FastTrack, our solution can use the power of P2P against abusers, instead turning software pirates into customers"
Huh?
P2P Networks turn "pirates" into customers. Obstructing the network simply ensures that network users will never become customers of authors who have hired the obstructors.
All well-documented cases (think Baen Books for example) show that freely available works increase demand and improve artist-audience relations.
I don't see how these guys can possibly succeed. They will have to continually develop technology to beat the bleeding edge of the P2P arms race, but unlike antivirus companies which enjoy a huge market and a growing pool of evangelists, Overpeer's only cashflow will come from the RIAA and anybody who has not yet learned about the positive commercial power of P2P networks.
Yesterday I went to Networld+Interop in Tokyo. Best in 5 years easily. Wireless, Broadband, Streaming Video, it was all so huge they even rented the next building. The past President now statesman of NTT DoCoMo (most successful Japanese company, and partnered with AT&T) stood up in front of a thousand people and gave an extremely lucid presentation on the future of all this. Get this, they are DEPENDING on P2P!!
This I mention as I noticed today an interesting little socket with tape over it attached to the cash register of my local convenience store (think 7/11). The tape said, DoCoMo service starts July 16. There is already a bank machine and maybe a loan machine (the mafia got wise) in most every convenience store and now the loop is finally being closed. All we need now (maybe available next week, if not I'll sure work on it) is paying for cryptgraphic passwords at the register. Now that networks carry so much data it is hard to tell when an mp3 or divx is coming over the wire, it is just going to be very difficult to stop.
But I'm not talking about pirating. Overpeer (an oxymoron like "Big Brother" in case nobody noticed) is going to fail financially because the big boys need these P2P networks to work. Not a lot of people are making waves if it is just kiddiez and bored techies downloading a few mp3z. But P2P and open group-based data sharing is becoming important for business cooperation (think Groove), B2B (Enron was doing $1 billion/day of e-commerce transactions before they tanked), and distribution of large files and streams (think Akamai, the Perl CPAN, and FTTH - now a reality for Tokyo residents this year).
When these networks start getting used for serious data as well, Overpeer is going to be messing with the value of a network resource that real companies have a stake in.
Consider that if I already own an Eminem CD (not likely) I am completely within my fair use rights to use a digital copy of that. If I was paying for a P2P network to supply my fair-use needs, Overpeer might end up on the other end of the stick (in court).
What's needed to put the RIAA in its place (bankruptcy court) and promote music and P2P?
- Use P2P for lots of legitimate data and services. For example DoCoMo phones will be used (actually are now) for ticket purchases. A P2P solution would have ensured all seats for the World Cup got sold correctly. (Hmm maybe I'll work on that one).
- Build a service and liscensing scheme specifically to support P2P and fair use.
- Tie unobstructed P2P networks to commercial profits.
- Create a reasonable system for end-user licensing that will decriminalize fair-use music owner's P2P downloads, and not incidentally reduce the price of music.
- Make commercial use of cryptographically secure, anonymous data networks with the ultimate goal of having large chunks of them hosted by giant corporate data centers.
- Create hash tables which identify in realtime abusers of P2P, which is going to very soon become a critical component of the global infrastructure.
- Create tangible benefits for artists who use these networks, or in some other way stop supporting the RIAA.
I'm sure you guys can think of a few more ideas. Personally I don't see Overpeer as a very good investment move do you? I'd take my money out of Overpeer and hire some guys to build on P2P instead of obstructing it.1 milli-light = 1 mc = 0.001 c = 1 million km/sec = 0.67 million miles = 1 gigameter.
It is useful for CNN and promotion of space to the public because instead of saying "72 million km per hour" (which should be 72 gigameters/hour which abbreviated would unfortunately look like gram-meters/hour..)
..You can just say 72 milli-lights.
Multiply by 3600 sec/hour and you will see that one light-hour is about 671 million miles.
So if a supernova shockwave is moving at 45 million miles an hour, that's 45/671 or about 6.7% the speed of light in a vaccuum.
It works in metric too of course..
1 light-second is about 300,000 km/s (a third of a million km/s)
1 light-hour is then about 1000 million km/s, and 72/1000 or 7/100 gives you about 0.07c.
So next time you see a number of million kilometers per hour from CNN you can just divide it by ten and that is the percentage of the speed of light.
I think when we talk about this scale of velocity we need something better than "million miles/kilometers per second" and more tangible than a fraction of c.
I'm allergic to many old books and papers, and
would much prefer to have a digital copy on a good display or possibly even printed on paper again if needed. For this reason a digital certificate which certified the existence of one owned, printed copy of a book would be useful. This would allow for fair use and (might) discourage putting things in public domain (though it is not necessarily bad for authors).
Then if you buy a used book and the book had a serial number in it you could get the digital version online. To me these digital versions would be more valuable and I would be willing to pay money for quality digital reproductions (not as much as the original book though).
I have found that short documents printed two pages to a side is also useable, though at only a single side being used, too thick and wasteful of paper.
Having read the digital versions of many books on my Palm which I had previously purchased years ago in paperback, I can attest to the utility of even a low quality display. The only problem is not getting to sleep until 4 am! Publishers should get on the bandwagon and stop being such police. A little flexibility and trust may go a long way. Personally I have only picked authors I have already read everything of years ago, and now I have rediscovered them.. and found some new authors to watch for, having given up on small bookstores until now.
I wish you could like to see a digital certificate provided with each printed book (could even be issued retroactively through a website if publishers wished..) which would
I am trying Perl Factory which may be useless for you, since it has a Japanese interface, but it could solve some other people's problems. EditPlus is a simple editor that does some things but not everything you want.
And Komodo of course if you already are doing Visual Studio - but for programmability I'd spend more time looking at xemacs and eclipse if I were you. If you need to start now with Perl and don't need Japanese, xemacs.
Personally, this week I have been (silly me) trying to solve a little niggling problem (old gnorpm can't download new version files) and ended up having my SuSE system rendered untrustworthy, lost mail, and now have had to switch to Win98! Here's what I've seen - it is NOT SUPPORT. It is the problem of keeping up with new software in a RedHat (already?) world. How often do you see binaries that are not in RPM format? How often have you seen some hairy dependencies and backed off, decided to compile it yourself?
/etc/passwd from some other source like a db I guess). Change "compat" to "files" and back in action. This took time out that I should have been spending on a project that pays the bills.
..
- RedHat is more viral than SuSE, and SuSE
binaries of apps are "RedHat Package Manager" binaries, and redhat.com seems indispensable it seems to keeping up with libs needed to install them.
- I installed SuSE from CD on a laptop a couple years ago, and have found it very difficult to add new RPM-based software sometimes, especially if you miss a few iterations. This is like rpm's "this application can only install software with version number = 3" or need for yast2 for new installation. How stupid to make the one important app (yast2) you need to get SuSE software so difficult to get!
- using rpm can destroy your non-RH system insidiously.
For example after installing something with RH suddenly I lose my usernames - system tells me there is no user called "root" and all file listings use user id numbers instead of names. After hunting in google and some detective work, I discover that nss-switch has been surreptitiously updated so that the default now breaks functionality (it wants to read
- rpm dependencies don't check for manually compiled code. fix that.
Silly me, thought that between compiling GNU software, looking at the iBiblio archives, and using rpmfind/gnorpm webfind I'd be safe. The end result is an RPM CD (no don't have/can't get yast2) telling me I have to install 400 MB of crap, half of which I already have, to just update rpm and gnorpm. Finally I compiled rpm manually and got gnorpm-static, but it still ain't enough. First time sh configure told me "Checking to see if gcc works... NO" NO!!!!! So how about somebody building and managing a real online source/binary archive that helps you get away from RH and update non-RH systems with security, peace-of-mind, and no destruction of current functionality. God-forsaken rpm hell, never should have let RedHat start rebuilding my entire machine without saying exactly what was going on.
- Very recently I have seen ultimate horror of having to stop using email on linux.
I finally buckled under installing major amounts of RPMs with gnorpm so that I could do some basic things. Now gcc is broken (worked fine when compiled manually.. damn) and suddenly fetchmail is happily deleting mail off the server while refusing to save it in var/spool ! Christ! Now I am using Outlook Express on my used Win98 laptop and about to erase SuSE once and for all, and put RH in, as soon as I can back the whole bastardized thing up to a new 100GB disk, when I buy that. Not like I'm not swimming in RedHat cds. Now I am looking forward to upgrading KDE and Gnome (never enough libs and compiled parts it seems..) and being able to actually type Japanese and maybe even print on the printer 10 feet away. The reason I ended up inputting Japanese and printing on Windows is that the PJE package never built correctly on SuSE no matter how much it got fiddled with, and anyway all the other important things end up being proprietary in both distros. Fear, Doubt, and
- RedHat has beaten TurboLinux in Japan as far as I can see. I waited 2 years for SuSE's promises to enter the market here, even talking to people I heard were going to be involved. Poof! I hate RH and like very much the SuSE distro I installed at the time. And yet, I will inevitably have to get local language support (Japanese fonts, front end processors, input dictionaries, printer drivers, etc.) from distros which have those components in Japan even if some of those are commercial parts. A recent mook (magazine book, which is how software gets around in Japan - embedded cds) had 6 or 8 linux distros and a ton of CDs in it. No SuSE. Well-known names, like Laser5, but all different. Maybe nice right after install, but are you sure you are going to be able to keep up with the world? That's how RH sells to my mind. Not the support model, it's the software update system. I now recommend RedHat to customers while hating it and most people do the same. Talk about sowing seeds of failure.
title meant to be -> (probability approaches)
This is absolutely wonderful news. Now we need to get some models of whether orbital mirrors on the poles can create an atmosphere that will keep your skin together, and if so then how soon!
But before that - core samples at the poles! There's a lot of easy to access history and maybe some organics we should know about in there.
In the next 30 years we are going to have either an incredibly well policed and defanged world, or an awful lot of horrible politically motivated NCB disasters. And we don't have anywhere yet for the race to survive if we should make a mess with energy or nanotech research.
Best thing going for Mars is, nobody's there yet that we know of, and anyone who goes will be likely be too busy playing the only game there is -- think of a new environment and what the survival traits will be. Time to fund nuclear rockets, breakthrough propulsion, and other things fanatics don't want to hear about.
s/ship designers/scifi authors/g
The guys were talking about trying to find a Chinese team (China to Japan is like India to the U.S.) that could do it. When someone is sitting in front of them who has the experience, the time, and is willing to meet the budget. If you have a hardware factory China or better yet Taiwan is great. But NOT for an important smallish project. You'd be better off outsourcing the thing to a small shop in your neighborhood.
That said I have also heard that Bulgaria has very good and very inexpensive people.. but yet again I have never seen this team used for the most important, time sensitive things. An Indian team might be appropriate for a lot of work that doesn't need brains to build or test, has no hard deadline, and has an extra person or two on your side to manage them. This is DEFINITELY not a solution for a 4 or 5 man project. BIG MISTAKE!
If you really want to go offshore, call me. I am a highly experienced American in Tokyo. I'd try to be competitive of course but I'll be straight forward. It is not going to seem cheap but it will save you a ton of money. I understand engineering and have also used documentation, face-to-face, and telephone meetings to solve problems that developed in large projects that involved many offices around the world. For example I was hired to solve problems in a project that included a U.S. corporation, their U.S. developer, the Australian branch and their developer, ditto for Japan and cases of where things were going wrong in Australia, China, and Germany. Obviously the problem was with the parent organization and in the end, the Japan side decided the solution was to tell them to go to hell. You need someone like me, preferably based in the U.S. if you can find him or her, who has seen the same problems over and over again. Get your boss to give that person some control over the project and fire teams quickly that don't act professionally.
I think your company has made a mistake though. It's not like you can't find good developers in the U.S. who need work. Maybe if you and the remaining programmer threaten to quit your boss might get a glimmer of understanding. It's not like you would be spending your time doing anything constructive if you get into this mess. Look for a new job!
One thing I suppose I or someone like me could do would be to coordinate development while standing between the two timezones. I just have experience in it because there are a lot of Indian programmers here and I work with lots of Americans and Canadians. But best for you to get a consultant in the U.S. who can come in from the outside and tell your boss the same thing.
If you absolutely must use a given Indian team, prepare for spending lots of money on phone calls, hotel stays (at least one person, one month), trips of a 5 person team, lost deadlines, extra documentation to make sure everything stays on track, and an extra budget for a wig since you're going to pull out all that hair. If this thread doesn't convince you and your boss, you both deserve all the trouble you get.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2F news%2F2001%2F09%2F07%2Fnba07.xml
Also seems that we could find some strangelet sources by extending the line by which their paths intersect the surface of the earth and knowing where the earth was at the time.. Have these people tried to do so?
are given their momentum, if not in fact created, in some major stellar process like a neutron star explosion or maybe even the Big Bang.
What sort of things would you look for to try to find a source of such objects? How would they radiate or change fields through which they pass?
What would a strangelet storm (tm) look like? Perhaps a wave of them would look like a gravitational field moving at relativistic speed?
What about looking in the neighborhood of our own
solar system for strangelets passing through perpendicular to the ecliptic? You might think they would interact with the Sun's surface and atmosphere, and create effects in high resolution images.
There are the Spaceguard groups - take a look here.
That said, The Bill's philanthropy is way too little too late and doesn't make a big dent in his net worth. A nice big number but not so much for the world's richest man. Most science fiction has such a guy funding the first moon base etc. Why does our Bill care so much about nosing into little dusty interiors when he could have his head in the clouds? Fund X Prize competitors and Nanotech startups, and try to do it without strings attached! Feh!
Set the amount that you agree to some very low number, say 1 out of 100. Unless the EULA'd program uninstalls itself as soon as it detects a "No, I do not agree" button click, the program will undoubtedly run correctly after one or two hundred iterations.
The neat thing is that every time the script is run with a positive "I agree" button click, another universe where this did not happen must be created. So on the balance nobody is agreeing to anything.
Of course since you don't know if your automoton script made the "I agree" button click, or if the EULA window just gave up or crashed after 100 or 100,000 iterations, so you are not guilty of having consciously agreed to the contract in this universe either. I think the odds of a windows program breaking from memory leak or memory error after 100,000 iterations is more likely than that I would read a EULA before clicking on it.
It would be the same thing as if an antivirus program stopped the EULA from appearing in the first place, or clicked through it before you saw it. Or maybe some spyware broke the EULA window. (hmm.. ) Windows in general is so chaotic and untrustworthy it is ridiculous to imagine a contract being upheld on it. In this universe or any other..
I don't get viruses (knock on wood) since I read in pine but I got something from the National Funeral Association and wierd content that didn't look like an obvious virus at first. I guess I was the first of many to ask their sysadmin what was up..
Must be some use in a nano-size reactor that heats to 700C while shooting its contents and anything on its surface into the air.
If you have two tubes next to each other unzipping into a hornlike shape simultaneously, you'd think there would be some neat shockwaves happening. Certainly something is forcing air out quickly.
Perhaps the people building this could get something out of trying two trains in Japan.
- The monorail from Shimbashi (in Tokyo near the Ginza) to Ariake (manmade peninsula with convention and amusement facilities).
This is an unmanned, beautiful monorail which loops out over the sea. Has some good handholds and soft parts you can lean on because it seems on a narrow train with lots of windows you get pushed strongly to the side when you don't expect it. Beautiful glass car in front is a great panorama.
- The newest subway built in Tokyo, opened last year: Namboku Line which runs from northern Tokyo down to fashionable Azabu. (Like the above monorail I believe) the platform is enclosed on either side by glass walls interrupted by sliding glass doors which only open when the train stops right in front of it. There are metal posts with electric eyes on them just inside where the doors retract, so that they won't try to close while someone is entering. No room also because of those posts for someone to slide outside the glass wall.
hmm, maybe too expensive for what you get out of it, hard to say. The site tells the truth about the hardware, saying it is less sensitive than ccd (low surface area sensitive to light), noisy (snow due to differences between pixels), and so on. But it might be neat to try and hook it up to your telescope if you already have one.. vcr image stacking software is available on the net. Anyone tried it?
Another computer you may be interested in is Grape-6 which is a 48 Tflop accelerator for gravitational calculations, developed at U. Tokyo for astrophysics. The creator won the Gordon Bell Award a couple years ago.