I have seen pictures of contrails where the contrail is made up of dot shaped clouds rather than the line contrail that jet engines generate. Supposedly these contrails were generated by secret US Air Force pulse drive aircraft. After reading the Wikipedia on the Orion project, it sounds to me like a pulse drive aircraft engine might be a design similar to the Orion except obviously not using nukes. A quick google didn't turn up much more. Anybody have ideas about whether this is plausible?
I disagree with the idea that computer assisted education has not lived up to the hype. I have a four year old and a two year old and I set them up with my old Compaq desktop still running Win98, and have found a number of games/educational software that they have learned a lot from. I would recommend Living Books titles to anyone with small children. It is amazing how quickly my kids have picked up using the mouse to control the software, and I have noticed that they use words from the stories in their daily conversations. For myself, I was interested in refreshing my knowledge of calculus a couple of years ago and found that some of the free resources on the internet are quite good. If I were rich enough to be a philanthropist, I would hire experts to write textbooks in various fields, and then make those texts freely available over the WWWW.
I personally don't want to see the development of a new noble class based on the ability to pass down accumulated wealth indefinitely. If this were the case in the US, Bill Gates' knighthood would be the real deal and we would all have to bow down before him and refer to him as "Your Excellency." The estate tax is as you say the primary method that US society uses to prevent this. The framers of the Constitution had seen the evils perpetrated by the feudal/noble system and wanted to make sure that this would never happen in the United States.
Disagree..a GPS receiver is not all that expensive compared to standard avionics in private aircraft. If you're going to spend $30k or more on a plane a couple of hundred bucks for a GPS navigation system is insignificant. I would think that any pilot would want a GPS in their plane as a backup for other nav systems. I'm sure there are companies that sell digital charts that would interface with GPS avionics to let the pilot know if they enter restricted airspace. Besides, if you can't navigate your aircraft you don't belong in the pilot's seat.
The US is so far ahead of other nations in terms of military technology that it can be considered reasonable to reduce spending for a time in the interest of reducing the federal budget deficit. Our most likely enemy, China, is 30 years behind us in military technology and the two gulf wars have shown the superiority of precision weapons over masses of infantry and tanks. India, which seems to be advancing faster, appears to be doing so because they have been so far behind. There is nothing stopping everyone who takes an interest in CS research from spending their time on a topic and doing the research. Full professors at a university don't spend 100% of their time doing research, they are supposed to do some teaching as well. You could do CS research and be a ski instructor to support yourself if you wished. Besides, the tech sector is busting because of excessive investment. Granted, a lot of that investment was stupid investment, but as the tech sector consolidates people who were employed in those stupid companies or the companies who lost competitively need to find some other line of work. The military budget is booming because we are fighting a war
Not true! Here's why: The pace of innovation in computer science in the private sector, by which I mean both for profit and open source firms, is racing ahead at a faster pace than at any time in history. The US is gaining more from this than any other country. I can see why DARPA would say that they don't need to fund as much CS as in the past because they can observe what's happening in the open source community and cherry pick ideas that they think the US military can use. I find it strange that/. posters would complain about cuts in any sector of the US defense establishment, as the prevailing view here is that the US military is evil. I guess it just goes to show that computer people are just like everybody else; its ok to cut government spending as long is its not our funding. With respect to the quality of US CS students, I would say that it is just as good as that of any other country. It is just that the criteria used to select students allowed into PHD programs is fairly arbitrary. The difference of a few points on the IIT entrance exam may decide whether a US graduate program takes a US citizen or an Indian student. Foreign grads generally pay full price for their doctorates, while home grown grads are generally subsidized, so schools have a financial incentive to favor foreign grad students. Also, the quality of teaching in math and CS at the undergraduate level in US universities is abominable. Basically, you have to already know the answers or be able to learn without help. There are several reasons for this. One is that professors are hired for their ability to produce research rather than their teaching skills. Inevitably, many are lousy teachers. In addition, TA's do a significant amount of teaching and tutoring, many of whom know English as a second language. So unless you have the aptitude of Einstein or Feynman for this subject, your chances of being taught well are pretty low. Finally, I think it is comical that anyone in electronics or computer science would complain about the US military. The majority of advances in this field have been due to military funding to construct the US military as we now know it. From ICBM's to advanced radar to integrated circuits, all were funded to increase the capability of the US military. Now the whole world is benefiting.
What do you mean? The entire works of Shakespeare have been reproduced on the internet. It's rather mean of you to refer to those nice Project Gutenberg people as monkeys.
CERT reports staggering drop in internet traffic
on
Math Awareness Month
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"CERT team notices amazing drop in internet traffic this April 1, goes into panic mode until it is determined that the traffic drop is due to lack of Slashdot clickthroughs. Apparently, no one clicks on links to article posts on April "Fools Day." Meanwhile, Vegas bookies giving odds on first site to be slashdotted when normal posts resume, give 2 to 1 that it will be site linked by slashdot sometime in the last two weeks."
If Tivo actually starts showing ads while you are fast forwarding through the ads, they are doomed. This must be an act of desperation or temporary insanity. The entire point of buying their product is so you don't have to see ads! I guess we'll have to buy a box that lets you skip through the "skip through" ads. Personally, I don't mind Google type ads where the size and graphics are simple. It is popups, flash, and big squares with flashy colors that bother me. The key with Google is that the ads that they show obviously are generally related to the topic of the page you are looking at. This is a good thing. I don't want to see beer commercials when I am finding driving directions(in Texas, the map websites probably show the locations of the drive through liquor stores:)).
A conclusion one might draw from the article is that one can only study things that don't change:)...Seriously, though. The main problem that this incident shows to me is how difficult it is to kill a government program of any kind once it has been started. Since the study was driven by an act of Congress, it would have taken another bill passed through the entire legislative process to kill the study. Since the people contracted to do the study and the congressmen of whatever state the study was done in had every incentive to keep the thing going, some other group would have had to notice and start a push to get rid of this. Since it was a small budget item buried in the massive federal budget, nobody noticed it. If it had been noticed and some representative had brought the issue up in the House, the reps from the state involved would have thrown a fit. So it sticks around. It's important to know that once something is authorized by Congress, it is budgeted for every year unless it is specifically killed in a budget bill. In Bush's last budget request, the administration included a list of small programs like this one that they wanted to kill. Of course, every single item on the list had reps saying how critical it was to keep the funding. Maybe we should be spending a little more time looking at what the government is actually doing rather than talking about tinfoil hats and berating George Lucas.
A book titled "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich which is an autobiography by Mr. Rich who was head of the Lockheed group has an interesting section on the issues that Lockheed had to deal with to build the SR-71. My favorite anecdote was that they used the CIA to purchase titanium from the Soviet Union.
belongs in the scifi hall of fame now! "The X-Files" has been to TV scifi what "Amazing Stories" was to magazine scifi. The exploration of the conflict between skepticism and faith, demonstrating the use of science to solve crimes, in general consistently excellent storytelling, development of complex characters, high quality musical scoring, mixing individual stories with a lengthy unifying background plot, a healthy willingness to not take the characters and the story too seriously, are all attributes of this series that contributed to it being one of the all time greatest television series. IMO, "X-Files" is far superior to Star Trek.
What needs to happen is that all past deserving scifi creators need to be included in this hall of fame now and then add new ones as they appear. As many previous posts have suggested there are plenty of deserving candidates not in this hall as of now. Perhaps some wealthy individual could be persuaded to ante up the funds to build a building to house the expanded group. Is Scott McNealy a scifi guy? He could build a big building like Paul Allen's EMP, but plop it down in Redmond somewhere and make it tall enough that it is visible from Microsoft HQ. Anyhow, I'm glad the this is in Seattle; I'd gladly make a trip up there to see it and all the other things Seattle has to offer but you couldn't get me anywhere near Kansas.
Anyone interested in Star Wars novels should read any by Aaron Allston(Wraith Squadron, etc). He wrote several in the Rogue Squadron series. In my opinion he is the best author in the SW series. Second to him would be the guy who did the Thrawn series, Kevin Anderson? somebody or other, his name escapes me right now.
Somebody please mod parent a troll...Spielberg is the premier science fiction film maker of the last 30 years. Science fiction does not have to be based on currently accepted theories. Besides, parent's summary of Jurassic Park is absurd. The actual plot of JP was take not that far out ideas about genetic manipulation and cloning, find dinosaur dna, take said dinosaur dna and mod it so that dinosaurs can't reproduce, mathematician says you can't control nature, nature proves mathematician right by dinosaurs reproducing and running amok. The core thesis of JP involved chaos theory and the law of unintended consequences. Spielberg was able to produce an entertaing thriller that IMO was faithful to the spirit and thesis of the book, while using groundbreaking special effects to tell said story. Give me a break....
I'll tell you how a young programmer could make a name for him or her self at Google: add a script to the home page that when "I'm feeling lucky" is clicked gives the would be searcher the finger. I guarantee you wouldn't soon be forgotten.
There are plenty of things that have yet to be understood by science: sonoluminescence, electron tunneling, chaotic fluid flow...the list goes on. There was a book that came out a few years ago titled "The End of Science" which proposed that there was basically nothing new to discover. This was actually the mindset that prevailed at the end of the 19th century, right before the discovery of quantum physics. Kind of makes you wonder....
It seems to me that the rationale for constructing ever larger and more expensive high energy physics labs sooner rather than later(i.e. by diverting defense spending to pure physics) is that we're just around the corner from producing the grand unified theory and since this is the holy grail of science it is the only human activity that really matters. The reality is that simply building bigger colliders isn't going to produce a solution. An analogy that I once read that referred to studying particle physics using colliders goes as follows: it is like trying to figure out how a car works by accelerating two cars into each other and looking at the pieces that are left(we are talking about very small pieces remaining). We currently have no way of observing the behavior of subatomic particles operating in their natural environment(see Heisenberg's uncertainty principle). Also, there is a truly enormous amount of data which has been generated by older and existing colliders which has yet to be fully analyzed. It might be reasonable to not operate the existing colliders for, say, a year, and devote those dollars to paying physicists to crunch the already existing data. Given the above, I don't see maintaining high energy physics budgets for the next few years at existing levels or even with some cuts as a serious detriment to the progress of the US or the world. I'm sure that some physicists would be upset as this tips over the applecart of their plans for fame as the next Bohr or Einstein.
There was nothing wrong with the French guy; this is what science is all about. You identify a phenomenon, study it and put forth a theory to explain it. Other scientists review it and when further evidence is found your theory is either disproved or not. The problem comes when scientists continue to promote their theories in the face of a preponderance of evidence which disproves their theory or propose theories which assume phenomena which have not yet been observed. There is nothing particularly more bizarre about the concept of dark energy than concepts such as black holes or electromagnetic radiaton.
In the article, van Rossum defines a scripting language as one that lacks compile time checking. Pall includes as part of the definition the fact that in these languages memory management is handled by the interpreter.
Hobbs refers the interview reader to a whitepaper which defines scripting languages as follows:
"There is a category of programming languages which share the properties of being high-level, dynamically typed and open source. These languages have been referred to in the past by some as "scripting languages," and by others as "general-purpose programming languages". Neither moniker accurately represents the true strengths of these languages. We propose the term dynamic languages as a compact term which evokes both the technical strengths of the languages and the social strengths of their communities of contributors and users."
One statement that Pall makes is great: "As more programming is done with scripting languages, doing memory management yourself, or implementing yet another LZW-based compression library will be seen as a risky proposition when deadlines approach."
I totally agree with this; given that an interpreter manages memory decently, why reinvent the wheel? It is like building your own spark plugs from scratch when you want to do a tune up on your car.
I don't understand why any Novell owned PC would ever have had MS Office products on it. Surely WordPerfect and QuattroPro have been functional products all of these years. Since Novell had been for quite a while an opponent of MS desktop products, any employee who even submitted a purchase order with a MS Office product on it should have been fired on the spot. If they had forgotten about WP and QP, they could have bought Lotus SmartSuites....
Slashdot Mirror
Any chance you'd post that paper on the X-33 publicly? I'd be very interested in reading it.
I have seen pictures of contrails where the contrail is made up of dot shaped clouds rather than the line contrail that jet engines generate. Supposedly these contrails were generated by secret US Air Force pulse drive aircraft. After reading the Wikipedia on the Orion project, it sounds to me like a pulse drive aircraft engine might be a design similar to the Orion except obviously not using nukes. A quick google didn't turn up much more. Anybody have ideas about whether this is plausible?
I disagree with the idea that computer assisted education has not lived up to the hype. I have a four year old and a two year old and I set them up with my old Compaq desktop still running Win98, and have found a number of games/educational software that they have learned a lot from. I would recommend Living Books titles to anyone with small children. It is amazing how quickly my kids have picked up using the mouse to control the software, and I have noticed that they use words from the stories in their daily conversations.
For myself, I was interested in refreshing my knowledge of calculus a couple of years ago and found that some of the free resources on the internet are quite good.
If I were rich enough to be a philanthropist, I would hire experts to write textbooks in various fields, and then make those texts freely available over the WWWW.
I personally don't want to see the development of a new noble class based on the ability to pass down accumulated wealth indefinitely. If this were the case in the US, Bill Gates' knighthood would be the real deal and we would all have to bow down before him and refer to him as "Your Excellency." The estate tax is as you say the primary method that US society uses to prevent this. The framers of the Constitution had seen the evils perpetrated by the feudal/noble system and wanted to make sure that this would never happen in the United States.
One of the major points made by Sun Tzu in "The Art of War" could be paraphrased as "the best general is the one who wins without fighting."
Disagree..a GPS receiver is not all that expensive compared to standard avionics in private aircraft. If you're going to spend $30k or more on a plane a couple of hundred bucks for a GPS navigation system is insignificant. I would think that any pilot would want a GPS in their plane as a backup for other nav systems. I'm sure there are companies that sell digital charts that would interface with GPS avionics to let the pilot know if they enter restricted airspace. Besides, if you can't navigate your aircraft you don't belong in the pilot's seat.
The US is so far ahead of other nations in terms of military technology that it can be considered reasonable to reduce spending for a time in the interest of reducing the federal budget deficit. Our most likely enemy, China, is 30 years behind us in military technology and the two gulf wars have shown the superiority of precision weapons over masses of infantry and tanks. India, which seems to be advancing faster, appears to be doing so because they have been so far behind.
There is nothing stopping everyone who takes an interest in CS research from spending their time on a topic and doing the research. Full professors at a university don't spend 100% of their time doing research, they are supposed to do some teaching as well. You could do CS research and be a ski instructor to support yourself if you wished.
Besides, the tech sector is busting because of excessive investment. Granted, a lot of that investment was stupid investment, but as the tech sector consolidates people who were employed in those stupid companies or the companies who lost competitively need to find some other line of work.
The military budget is booming because we are fighting a war
Not true! /. posters would complain about cuts in any sector of the US defense establishment, as the prevailing view here is that the US military is evil. I guess it just goes to show that computer people are just like everybody else; its ok to cut government spending as long is its not our funding.
Here's why:
The pace of innovation in computer science in the private sector, by which I mean both for profit and open source firms, is racing ahead at a faster pace than at any time in history. The US is gaining more from this than any other country. I can see why DARPA would say that they don't need to fund as much CS as in the past because they can observe what's happening in the open source community and cherry pick ideas that they think the US military can use.
I find it strange that
With respect to the quality of US CS students, I would say that it is just as good as that of any other country. It is just that the criteria used to select students allowed into PHD programs is fairly arbitrary. The difference of a few points on the IIT entrance exam may decide whether a US graduate program takes a US citizen or an Indian student. Foreign grads generally pay full price for their doctorates, while home grown grads are generally subsidized, so schools have a financial incentive to favor foreign grad students.
Also, the quality of teaching in math and CS at the undergraduate level in US universities is abominable. Basically, you have to already know the answers or be able to learn without help. There are several reasons for this. One is that professors are hired for their ability to produce research rather than their teaching skills. Inevitably, many are lousy teachers. In addition, TA's do a significant amount of teaching and tutoring, many of whom know English as a second language. So unless you have the aptitude of Einstein or Feynman for this subject, your chances of being taught well are pretty low.
Finally, I think it is comical that anyone in electronics or computer science would complain about the US military. The majority of advances in this field have been due to military funding to
construct the US military as we now know it. From ICBM's to advanced radar to integrated circuits, all were funded to increase the capability of the US military. Now the whole world is benefiting.
What do you mean? The entire works of Shakespeare have been reproduced on the internet. It's rather mean of you to refer to those nice Project Gutenberg people as monkeys.
"CERT team notices amazing drop in internet traffic this April 1, goes into panic mode until it is determined that the traffic drop is due to lack of Slashdot clickthroughs. Apparently, no one clicks on links to article posts on April "Fools Day." Meanwhile, Vegas bookies giving odds on first site to be slashdotted when normal posts resume, give 2 to 1 that it will be site linked by slashdot sometime in the last two weeks."
If Tivo actually starts showing ads while you are fast forwarding through the ads, they are doomed. This must be an act of desperation or temporary insanity. The entire point of buying their product is so you don't have to see ads! I guess we'll have to buy a box that lets you skip through the "skip through" ads.
Personally, I don't mind Google type ads where the size and graphics are simple. It is popups, flash, and big squares with flashy colors that bother me.
The key with Google is that the ads that they show obviously are generally related to the topic of the page you are looking at. This is a good thing. I don't want to see beer commercials when I am finding driving directions(in Texas, the map websites probably show the locations of the drive through liquor stores:)).
A conclusion one might draw from the article is that one can only study things that don't change:)...Seriously, though.
The main problem that this incident shows to me is how difficult it is to kill a government program of any kind once it has been started. Since the study was driven by an act of Congress, it would have taken another bill passed through the entire legislative process to kill the study. Since the people contracted to do the study and the congressmen of whatever state the study was done in had every incentive to keep the thing going, some other group would have had to notice and start a push to get rid of this.
Since it was a small budget item buried in the massive federal budget, nobody noticed it. If it had been noticed and some representative had brought the issue up in the House, the reps from the state involved would have thrown a fit. So it sticks around.
It's important to know that once something is authorized by Congress, it is budgeted for every year unless it is specifically killed in a budget bill.
In Bush's last budget request, the administration included a list of small programs like this one that they wanted to kill. Of course, every single item on the list had reps saying how critical it was to keep the funding.
Maybe we should be spending a little more time looking at what the government is actually doing rather than talking about tinfoil hats and berating George Lucas.
Cheers...
A book titled "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich which is an autobiography by Mr. Rich who was head of the Lockheed group has an interesting section on the issues that Lockheed had to deal with to build the SR-71. My favorite anecdote was that they used the CIA to purchase titanium from the Soviet Union.
I think parent was aiming for "Funny" and not "Insightful".
belongs in the scifi hall of fame now! "The X-Files" has been to TV scifi what "Amazing Stories" was to magazine scifi. The exploration of the conflict between skepticism and faith, demonstrating the use of science to solve crimes, in general consistently excellent storytelling, development of complex characters, high quality musical scoring, mixing individual stories with a lengthy unifying background plot, a healthy willingness to not take the characters and the story too seriously, are all attributes of this series that contributed to it being one of the all time greatest television series. IMO, "X-Files" is far superior to Star Trek.
What needs to happen is that all past deserving scifi creators need to be included in this hall of fame now and then add new ones as they appear. As many previous posts have suggested there are plenty of deserving candidates not in this hall as of now.
Perhaps some wealthy individual could be persuaded to ante up the funds to build a building to house the expanded group. Is Scott McNealy a scifi guy? He could build a big building like Paul Allen's EMP, but plop it down in Redmond somewhere and make it tall enough that it is visible from Microsoft HQ.
Anyhow, I'm glad the this is in Seattle; I'd gladly make a trip up there to see it and all the other things Seattle has to offer but you couldn't get me anywhere near Kansas.
Anyone interested in Star Wars novels should read any by Aaron Allston(Wraith Squadron, etc). He wrote several in the Rogue Squadron series. In my opinion he is the best author in the SW series. Second to him would be the guy who did the Thrawn series, Kevin Anderson? somebody or other, his name escapes me right now.
Somebody please mod parent a troll...Spielberg is the premier science fiction film maker of the last 30 years. Science fiction does not have to be based on currently accepted theories. Besides, parent's summary of Jurassic Park is absurd. The actual plot of JP was take not that far out ideas about genetic manipulation and cloning, find dinosaur dna, take said dinosaur dna and mod it so that dinosaurs can't reproduce, mathematician says you can't control nature, nature proves mathematician right by dinosaurs reproducing and running amok. The core thesis of JP involved chaos theory and the law of unintended consequences.
Spielberg was able to produce an entertaing thriller that IMO was faithful to the spirit and thesis of the book, while using groundbreaking special effects to tell said story. Give me a break....
I'll tell you how a young programmer could make a name for him or her self at Google: add a script to the home page that when "I'm feeling lucky" is clicked gives the would be searcher the finger. I guarantee you wouldn't soon be forgotten.
There are plenty of things that have yet to be understood by science: sonoluminescence, electron tunneling, chaotic fluid flow...the list goes on.
There was a book that came out a few years ago titled "The End of Science" which proposed that there was basically nothing new to discover. This was actually the mindset that prevailed at the end of the 19th century, right before the discovery of quantum physics. Kind of makes you wonder....
It seems to me that the rationale for constructing ever larger and more expensive high energy physics labs sooner rather than later(i.e. by diverting defense spending to pure physics) is that we're just around the corner from producing the grand unified theory and since this is the holy grail of science it is the only human activity that really matters. The reality is that simply building bigger colliders isn't going to produce a solution. An analogy that I once read that referred to studying particle physics using colliders goes as follows: it is like trying to figure out how a car works by accelerating two cars into each other and looking at the pieces that are left(we are talking about very small pieces remaining).
We currently have no way of observing the behavior of subatomic particles operating in their natural environment(see Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).
Also, there is a truly enormous amount of data which has been generated by older and existing colliders which has yet to be fully analyzed. It might be reasonable to not operate the existing colliders for, say, a year, and devote those dollars to paying physicists to crunch the already existing data.
Given the above, I don't see maintaining high energy physics budgets for the next few years at existing levels or even with some cuts as a serious detriment to the progress of the US or the world. I'm sure that some physicists would be upset as this tips over the applecart of their plans for fame as the next Bohr or Einstein.
There was nothing wrong with the French guy; this is what science is all about. You identify a phenomenon, study it and put forth a theory to explain it. Other scientists review it and when further evidence is found your theory is either disproved or not.
The problem comes when scientists continue to promote their theories in the face of a preponderance of evidence which disproves their theory or propose theories which assume phenomena which have not yet been observed.
There is nothing particularly more bizarre about the concept of dark energy than concepts such as black holes or electromagnetic radiaton.
The interviewees in the article make this exact point.
In the article, van Rossum defines a scripting language as one that lacks compile time checking. Pall includes as part of the definition the fact that in these languages memory management is handled
by the interpreter.
Hobbs refers the interview reader to a whitepaper which defines scripting languages as follows:
"There is a category of programming languages which share the properties of being high-level, dynamically typed and open source. These languages have been referred to in the past by some
as "scripting languages," and by others as "general-purpose programming languages". Neither moniker accurately represents the true strengths of these languages. We propose the term dynamic languages as a compact term which evokes both the technical strengths of the languages and the social strengths of their communities of contributors and users."
One statement that Pall makes is great: "As more programming is done with scripting languages, doing memory management yourself, or implementing yet another LZW-based compression library will be seen as a risky proposition when deadlines approach."
I totally agree with this; given that an interpreter manages memory decently, why reinvent the wheel? It is like building your own spark plugs from scratch when you want to do a tune up on your car.
I don't understand why any Novell owned PC would ever have had MS Office products on it. Surely WordPerfect and QuattroPro have been functional products all of these years. Since Novell had been for quite a while an opponent of MS desktop products, any employee who even submitted a purchase order with a MS Office product on it should have been fired on the spot.
If they had forgotten about WP and QP, they could have bought Lotus SmartSuites....