Now, if someone could finally get fusion rockets to work, I think we could finally go someplace.
No one has been doing research on nuclear rockets for 30 years. How long will we let our fear keep our technology from advancing? We can make "bunker busters" and reactors that fit in the bed of a truck. What if some of that effort and those new developments were applied to nuclear rockets? Would they be smaller? faster? safer? You bet.
But I am skeptical about using fission for manned missions.
How long will our fear make our decisions for us? How long will we hide in the closet with the blanket over our heads awaiting the impending World War III? How can we know if a safe manned mission can be designed if our fear prevents from doing any research at all?
It is clear that nuclear power has an energy density far superior to any chemical rocket. It is clear that we will never do anything useful on the moon or mars if the only way to get there is the Saturn V.
Are they planning to do some sort of temporal correlation to tell the difference between a solar and 'man-made' neutrino at the detector?
The neutrinos from FermiLab are coming from one direction, and all have a very narrow range of energies. The solar neutrinos are coming from another direction, and have lower energies than the beam. So it should be easy to separate.
As I recall, the sun produces mostly one type of neutrino. Does the accelerator at Fermilab produce another sort?
It looks like they intend to produce mu-type neutrinos (smash a beam of protons into a target -> you get pions -> focus pions -> pions decay into muons -> muons decay into mu-type neutrinos, e-type neutrinos, and an electron). Knowing the composition of the beam, researchers will see how the composition of the beam changes when it is detected in Japan. We expect to see fewer mu-type neutrinos and more e-type neutrinos. The sun also produces both mu and e-type neutrinos.
The article says construction would have to begin by 2006, so there'll definitely be enough time for me to get out of the way.
Neutrinos interact so weakly that standing in the beamline would not cause you any harm. I have walked through the beamline of the NuTeV Experiment (while it was running). Not only that but a beam pointed at Super-K will not be a straight line, it will be more of a cone. At the surface in Japan, where the beam exits the earth, the size of the beam will be ~kilometers.
Re:How to modem accelerate as a webmaster
on
Modem Accelerators?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have been using my proxy (FilterProxy) to compress web content for me, for over a year. It *does* provide a ~5x speedup for html. You need to arrange to have the proxy running on some server with a fast net connection (i.e. upstream from your modem). The amount of time it takes to compress and uncompress the page is miniscule compared to the amount of time it takes to render it. On a modern ~500MHz or better machine, I can compress any page in <0.01s, so you really don't notice the time that it takes. If you're still on a 486 though...
Q: What does a neutrino detector actually detect?
A: The presence of funding.'
ROFL. I shall have to quote you on that.
Theorists were convinced that neutrinos would be observed jumping from tau to mu versions...whatever that means... and it's just the tech hasn't caught up to make an observation?
No, actually the tech is really simple and we've had it for decades, we just didn't know to look for it. (The tech is iron, scintillator, and photomultiplier tubes -- all things we've had since the 50's) It's just a matter of building the detectors, putting them in the right places, and pointing neutrino beams at them. (in the case of long-baseline neutrino experiments like K2K, Gran Sasso, MINOS)
There are some more exotic, interesting experiments too like AMANDA which uses antarctic ice for neutrinos to interact with, rather than piles of iron.
Is it just possible that it's a matter of technology to produce tabletop/cold fusion?
Yes, the technology to get to 10,000,000 Kelvin. Plasma physicists have been working on it for a long time.
Heat treating the metal or something?
Ummm...what? You ain't gonna get a metal to 10M Kelvin. What metal is that exactly? The experiment described takes place in bubbles of gas suspended in a liquid medium.
High temp superconducting seems to still be a alot of hit or miss experimentation.
High temp superconductors are having their problems because there is no good theory to explain how they work. So instead people try random things, and some of them work.
Why would cold fusion be so different a technology from that?
Because 10M Kelvin isn't "cold", and we have a good theory to explain fusion. We've fused things lots of times (A hydrogen bomb is a fusion device -- and like it or not, we tested many of them). We also smash protons, deuterons, and now even gold atoms (RHIC) at temperatures going far, far higher than the temperatures required for fusion. We think we understand what protons/neutrons/atoms are made of and how they interact, and we can predict with accuracy how to make them fuse.
Furthermore, if they want flash to be universally accepted, flash has to be available on EVERY SINGLE PLATFORM and for EVERY SINGLE BROWSER. This includes Linux/{PPC|Sparc|Alpha|MIPS}, Linux/StrongARM (handhelds), *BSD, webTV, Amiga, and browsers: Opera, OmniWEB, Mozilla, etc. (right now Mozilla is available for several more platforms than Flash is)
I highly doubt that I will Ever see a Linux/alpha player. If their crap becomes widely accepted they will become another M$ -- forcing everyone to use Intel because their software is only available for Intel. For this reason alone no one should use flash for a "real" website.
Does it have USB support? Can I record TV with my Matrox Marvel? It's hard enough dealing with the fact that some linux software won't compile on alpha, without having to deal with the fact that some linux software won't compile under FreeBSD.
NetBSD/FreeBSD may be great, but the fact is there is more software and more momentum behind linux.
Believe me, I've considered it. But at this point it's far more painful to reinstall my system. I've got so many hand-compiled and hand-installed things that I'd have to re-install, hand-tweaked config files, etc.
I want linux over windows because I don't want to ever have to reinstall.
Now, If I could just "convert" to debian, install packages one-by-one until I have a debian system...then I'd be interested.
My machine uses the AlphaBIOS (NT) firmware and has been running fine with linux since 10/98. You'll need MILO and a small boot partition, though as others have pointed out, flashing it with SRM might be easier. The MILO install is a bit of a pain.
The alpha is dying slowly. I've been running a homebuilt LX164 board (533MHz 21164) for almost 4 years now.
As others have pointed out the 2.4 kernel series has been painful on alpha. This is symptomatic of the fact that the alpha/linux community has died, completely. The two big alpha sites, Alphalinux (referenced in the article), and Alpha News have disappeared. I've been checking almost daily for months. In the last few months I've had a very hard time finding packages. I installed redhat 4 years ago, after a painful wrestling with the pre-release debian of the day. Now redhat 7.2 for alpha is still not out yet, despite the fact that it's been out for i386 since the beginning of October. Redhat sees the writing on the wall too. Their rawhide likewise hasn't seen a new package in a good while. Now I wish I had tried harder with Debian.
I've always hand-installed a lot of packages, but lately, since I can't find binary updates to redhat at all, I've been compiling more and more by hand. And lots of them don't compile. 64-bit cleanness is not something most programmers do by default. (hint: do not use long unless you really know what you're doing!)
It is ironic that in this day where everyone is anticipating the next great 64-bit chip (x86-64/Itanic), I am contemplating moving back to the 32-bit world, after using 64 bits for 4 years, because maintaining it is becoming a chore. DEC/Compaq/HP has really shot themselves in the foot. Between all their mergers and questionable "roadmap", they've alienated their fans, supporters, customers, employees, and even the Hewlett family. Their engineers left for AMD (and you wondered why the K7 was so much faster than the K6 -- buy Athlons!) their compiler guys and patents left for Intel (boycott Intel!), and there's little left of the original vision.
So all you tinkerers out there, I encourage you to buy up all the surplus Miata's you can find! And help the plight of Linux/Alpha and 64-bit clean code across the OSS landscape! Because 64-bit processors are going to become more prevalent, not less, and the world needs people on 64-bit machines to test stuff! (only about 5% of the packages I run into don't compile and run out of the box on alpha/linux -- but those 5% need to be fixed!) And everyone buy a USB PCI card for it too, because the current USB drivers suck! They can hang my kernel.
Oh, and an alpha makes a great firewall/router since all the script-kiddie buffer overflow hacks don't work. (all the script kiddies use buffer overflow attacks that insert x86 code onto the stack...this obviously doesn't work on alpha) A little bit of security through obscurity can help. But don't neglect real security!
Well I like the way you wish to keep things simple and straightforward. If you ever blast off and claim your own planet maybe I would consider emigrating to your Technocracy.:-)
Working on that...
I surmise that you value life highly. That's great. But you are forgetting that some don't.
Unfortunately more laws won't fix that either. Remember...outlaws don't obey the law anyway. More laws will, however, make life difficult for the rest of us in the long run. I want someone to run for president that will vow to veto any bill that does not repeal at least as many laws as it creates. Surely there is enough dead text on the books to enable this. The "winnowing" process would be useful too.
If you have a well thought out alternative to our current system which still accomplishes what patent/copyright was meant to, then I would love to hear it.
Oh, it doesn't really matter. The constitutional definition of limited monopoly granted for a limited time is just fine. The length doesn't matter. But Lessig is right in that an unlimited number of extensions to a limited time does not make a limited time. The original congress' definition of 14 years plus a 14 year extension seems just fine to me. I would favor a shorter term, because I see no reason that any person should be able to do one year's work and then live off it for the rest of their lives. That does not make a productive society.
The product cycle for books, games, etc. should make a good guideline for a proper length of copyright. Books are sold in hardcover, then paperback, then out of print...in a cycle that takes only a handful of years. Shortly thereafter they should enter the public domain. After most useful profits have been extracted. That some products can continue to be sold for an infinite time is an aberration, not the norm, and should not be considered when establishing copyright. Nobody should be able to earn profits from one work forever (even corporations!) and you could argue forever about how long they should be able to sell them, without reaching a conclusion.
Hardly a fair comparison. Neither netscape nor IE was ILLEGAL.
Sure people take the path of least resistance. That's why we have laws. The law turns paths of least resistance into paths of LOTS of resistance. I would not call any path that involves a strong probability of spending the rest of your life in prison a "path of least resistance".
My point is threefold:
We are drowning in a sea of legal code that we could never in one lifetime read all of, much less interpret and obey.
You propose outlawing desirable or neutral behavior because it has a small probability of causing REALLY bad behavior. Everything has a really small probabability to make someone murder. (read The Stranger) Therefore by your arguments (and the actions of our congress), everything will soon be outlawed.
The more legal code there is, the more corner cases, odd loopholes, ignored or unenforced pieces of code there are. This is the path to a authoritarianism through selective enforcement, and it is paved with good intentions.
It also keeps people from knocking off a copyright holder to open up his exclusive use rights to the public.
Murder is already a crime. Let us not write millions of laws outlawing things that "might lead to murder" in our perpetual fear of murder. For then we will have disallowed all human activity, because it "might lead to murder".
There's a very major arithmetic flaw in there, aside from the fact that you're ignoring half of the roots.:)
No, ignoring half the roots (should be) the only arithmetic error. Though the last step has 2 steps in it... I wanted to get to 1=0 at the end. 2=0 is obviously also a correct step, but 1=0 stands out as "obviously wrong". For that matter I could have left it as 1=-1, which is also obviously wrong, but I think fewer people would notice the.sig.;) I also thought about adding at the end "=> God exists". Or maybe "=> Bush is not a flaming moron".:)
And no, I don't work for NASA (yet).;) I'm a grad student in theoretical physics, just doing my duty to confuse the masses...
It's the sharing of the "perfect digital copies" that the industry fears.
Television incurs a substantial amount of degradation and interference in being transmitted. (even cable) Especially the crappy NTSC standard. "perfect digital copies" is a joke since the transmission medium is analog, and they're converted back to digital. (more degradation) Digital TV is degraded by the MPEG encoding process. The bandwidth required for a "perfect digital copy" would be enormous, assuming you had access to a perfect digital source...
But let's face it, how much longer are people going to be willing to watch low quality, signal degraded crap? (oh yeah...Betamax died...maybe forever then...but I digress.) People want high quality video. Recording is irrelevant to the point that people want to watch higher quality stuff. The home audio recording act (time-shifting) doesn't say that you can only time-shift your stuff if the quality is crap. Your right to time-shift applies equally well to high-quality video.
Why don't they just send us one pixel and one bit audio? Nobody will want to record it, and nobody will want to watch it...
it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films
Correct me if I'm wong, but last time I checked, "markets" were not constitutionally protected, and neither were coporate profits or business models. (unless, of course, the business model is patented)
They're trying to protect their business model through litigation, because embracing new technology is more expensive than lawyers.
Maybe they'll all be hit with frivolous lawsuit countersuits. Here's hoping, anyway.
Having started several projects and watched several others, I can tell you this with confidince: In Open Source you cannot depend on other people to write pieces for you.
In early stages, everyone wants to start his own project. Nobody wants to be a small piece of a larger project. I have tried to corral people working on similar things as me into one project, but no one is willing to give up their ideas and control in order to be a third-tier contributor to a larger project.
People will generally not contribute at all unless the current product is usable, and sufficently compelling to make them want to improve it. A half-baked idea or a half-finished client will stagnate indefinitely. One only needs look on sourceforge for the 80% of unfinished projects there. You know, the ones with no code, or a little code but not yet working.
If other people do contribute, they're not going to implement your ideas. They will implement their ideas. Almost nobody joins a project, and picks something randomly from the TODO list. In my personal pet project, I don't think anyone has ever written something that I put on my TODO list. Though I have received several contributions that I didn't think of.
So I say this to all open source developers: Look for and join another project, rather than starting your own! Open Source would go a lot farter, a lot faster, if so much effort wasn't wasted on projects that eventually dead-end. Imagine the effort that went into each of those projects went instead into larger a larger project!
On the other hand, writing a generic library is often exactly what is needed. In your case, a generic server and client library might be a good idea, but it must be sufficently generic and you'll have to give up on the idea of people implementing your kind of client. You might be surprised what it gets used for. (Software is funny that way) For instance, gstreamer seems to have given up on writing the be-all and end-all media player (a la mplayer), in favor of writing a component library for media playing. It remains to be seen whether they will be successful, but I think they will be. This route is difficult, and requires a lot of evangelism. Not everyone will agree with your design decisions, so not everyone will want to use it.
Why would WebWasher make itself identifiable on the outside? That's just silly, and asking for trouble. FilterProxy seems to get right through, and I don't see any ads on the page either.
Slashdot Mirror
No one has been doing research on nuclear rockets for 30 years. How long will we let our fear keep our technology from advancing? We can make "bunker busters" and reactors that fit in the bed of a truck. What if some of that effort and those new developments were applied to nuclear rockets? Would they be smaller? faster? safer? You bet.
How long will our fear make our decisions for us? How long will we hide in the closet with the blanket over our heads awaiting the impending World War III? How can we know if a safe manned mission can be designed if our fear prevents from doing any research at all?It is clear that nuclear power has an energy density far superior to any chemical rocket. It is clear that we will never do anything useful on the moon or mars if the only way to get there is the Saturn V.
-- Bob
--Bob
Neutrinos interact so weakly that standing in the beamline would not cause you any harm. I have walked through the beamline of the NuTeV Experiment (while it was running). Not only that but a beam pointed at Super-K will not be a straight line, it will be more of a cone. At the surface in Japan, where the beam exits the earth, the size of the beam will be ~kilometers.
-- Bob
-- Bob
correctamundo!
-- Bob
There are some more exotic, interesting experiments too like AMANDA which uses antarctic ice for neutrinos to interact with, rather than piles of iron.
Yes, the technology to get to 10,000,000 Kelvin. Plasma physicists have been working on it for a long time. Ummm...what? You ain't gonna get a metal to 10M Kelvin. What metal is that exactly? The experiment described takes place in bubbles of gas suspended in a liquid medium. High temp superconductors are having their problems because there is no good theory to explain how they work. So instead people try random things, and some of them work. Because 10M Kelvin isn't "cold", and we have a good theory to explain fusion. We've fused things lots of times (A hydrogen bomb is a fusion device -- and like it or not, we tested many of them). We also smash protons, deuterons, and now even gold atoms (RHIC) at temperatures going far, far higher than the temperatures required for fusion. We think we understand what protons/neutrons/atoms are made of and how they interact, and we can predict with accuracy how to make them fuse.-- Bob
It's the basic "proprietary standard" argument. Proprietary sucks. Go SVG. I didn't realise SVG was so close to flash...
-- Bob
I highly doubt that I will Ever see a Linux/alpha player. If their crap becomes widely accepted they will become another M$ -- forcing everyone to use Intel because their software is only available for Intel. For this reason alone no one should use flash for a "real" website.
strip tag <param name=movie value=~/\.swf/> add encloser <object>
--Bob
-- Bob
NetBSD/FreeBSD may be great, but the fact is there is more software and more momentum behind linux.
-- Bob
I want linux over windows because I don't want to ever have to reinstall.
Now, If I could just "convert" to debian, install packages one-by-one until I have a debian system...then I'd be interested.
-- Bob
-- Bob
As others have pointed out the 2.4 kernel series has been painful on alpha. This is symptomatic of the fact that the alpha/linux community has died, completely. The two big alpha sites, Alphalinux (referenced in the article), and Alpha News have disappeared. I've been checking almost daily for months. In the last few months I've had a very hard time finding packages. I installed redhat 4 years ago, after a painful wrestling with the pre-release debian of the day. Now redhat 7.2 for alpha is still not out yet, despite the fact that it's been out for i386 since the beginning of October. Redhat sees the writing on the wall too. Their rawhide likewise hasn't seen a new package in a good while. Now I wish I had tried harder with Debian.
I've always hand-installed a lot of packages, but lately, since I can't find binary updates to redhat at all, I've been compiling more and more by hand. And lots of them don't compile. 64-bit cleanness is not something most programmers do by default. (hint: do not use long unless you really know what you're doing!)
It is ironic that in this day where everyone is anticipating the next great 64-bit chip (x86-64/Itanic), I am contemplating moving back to the 32-bit world, after using 64 bits for 4 years, because maintaining it is becoming a chore. DEC/Compaq/HP has really shot themselves in the foot. Between all their mergers and questionable "roadmap", they've alienated their fans, supporters, customers, employees, and even the Hewlett family. Their engineers left for AMD (and you wondered why the K7 was so much faster than the K6 -- buy Athlons!) their compiler guys and patents left for Intel (boycott Intel!), and there's little left of the original vision.
So all you tinkerers out there, I encourage you to buy up all the surplus Miata's you can find! And help the plight of Linux/Alpha and 64-bit clean code across the OSS landscape! Because 64-bit processors are going to become more prevalent, not less, and the world needs people on 64-bit machines to test stuff! (only about 5% of the packages I run into don't compile and run out of the box on alpha/linux -- but those 5% need to be fixed!) And everyone buy a USB PCI card for it too, because the current USB drivers suck! They can hang my kernel.
Oh, and an alpha makes a great firewall/router since all the script-kiddie buffer overflow hacks don't work. (all the script kiddies use buffer overflow attacks that insert x86 code onto the stack...this obviously doesn't work on alpha) A little bit of security through obscurity can help. But don't neglect real security!
--Bob
Oh, it doesn't really matter. The constitutional definition of limited monopoly granted for a limited time is just fine. The length doesn't matter. But Lessig is right in that an unlimited number of extensions to a limited time does not make a limited time. The original congress' definition of 14 years plus a 14 year extension seems just fine to me. I would favor a shorter term, because I see no reason that any person should be able to do one year's work and then live off it for the rest of their lives. That does not make a productive society.
The product cycle for books, games, etc. should make a good guideline for a proper length of copyright. Books are sold in hardcover, then paperback, then out of print...in a cycle that takes only a handful of years. Shortly thereafter they should enter the public domain. After most useful profits have been extracted. That some products can continue to be sold for an infinite time is an aberration, not the norm, and should not be considered when establishing copyright. Nobody should be able to earn profits from one work forever (even corporations!) and you could argue forever about how long they should be able to sell them, without reaching a conclusion.
So yeah, short copyrights 'n' stuff.
-- Bob
Sure people take the path of least resistance. That's why we have laws. The law turns paths of least resistance into paths of LOTS of resistance. I would not call any path that involves a strong probability of spending the rest of your life in prison a "path of least resistance".
My point is threefold:
-- Bob
Murder is already a crime. Let us not write millions of laws outlawing things that "might lead to murder" in our perpetual fear of murder. For then we will have disallowed all human activity, because it "might lead to murder".
One principle, one law. That is enough.
--Bob
Sure has generated a lot of discussion though.
-- Bob
So the essence of the suit against PVR makers should be that PVR's are just too easy to use.
Great. Is that the stone age I see coming up over the horizon?
-- Bob
No, ignoring half the roots (should be) the only arithmetic error. Though the last step has 2 steps in it... I wanted to get to 1=0 at the end. 2=0 is obviously also a correct step, but 1=0 stands out as "obviously wrong". For that matter I could have left it as 1=-1, which is also obviously wrong, but I think fewer people would notice the .sig. ;) I also thought about adding at the end "=> God exists". Or maybe "=> Bush is not a flaming moron". :)
And no, I don't work for NASA (yet). ;) I'm a grad student in theoretical physics, just doing my duty to confuse the masses...
-- Bob
-- Bob (Jots "DirectTiVo" on his wish-list)
But let's face it, how much longer are people going to be willing to watch low quality, signal degraded crap? (oh yeah...Betamax died...maybe forever then...but I digress.) People want high quality video. Recording is irrelevant to the point that people want to watch higher quality stuff. The home audio recording act (time-shifting) doesn't say that you can only time-shift your stuff if the quality is crap. Your right to time-shift applies equally well to high-quality video.
Why don't they just send us one pixel and one bit audio? Nobody will want to record it, and nobody will want to watch it...
--Bob
Correct me if I'm wong, but last time I checked, "markets" were not constitutionally protected, and neither were coporate profits or business models. (unless, of course, the business model is patented)
They're trying to protect their business model through litigation, because embracing new technology is more expensive than lawyers.
Maybe they'll all be hit with frivolous lawsuit countersuits. Here's hoping, anyway.
--Bob
So I say this to all open source developers: Look for and join another project, rather than starting your own! Open Source would go a lot farter, a lot faster, if so much effort wasn't wasted on projects that eventually dead-end. Imagine the effort that went into each of those projects went instead into larger a larger project!
On the other hand, writing a generic library is often exactly what is needed. In your case, a generic server and client library might be a good idea, but it must be sufficently generic and you'll have to give up on the idea of people implementing your kind of client. You might be surprised what it gets used for. (Software is funny that way) For instance, gstreamer seems to have given up on writing the be-all and end-all media player (a la mplayer), in favor of writing a component library for media playing. It remains to be seen whether they will be successful, but I think they will be. This route is difficult, and requires a lot of evangelism. Not everyone will agree with your design decisions, so not everyone will want to use it.
-- Bob
--Bob