DRPM sounds very nice, but is the drive's sound insulation (if any) tuned to cancel out the noise at varying speeds? It might be quiet at cruising speed but noisier at other speeds. That is, in the worst case, it might be great for the server room but not for a home DVR. Have you ever heard one?
"are belong to" someone else. It shouldn't be too difficult to make people sign a form that buried somewhere within is a clause that any ideas retrieved during the treatment become the property of the equipment vendor.
Your thoughts or reactions could be sold to advertisers, since it will be easier to determine what actually motivates you to buy or perks your interest.
Of course, any unapproved thoughts or reactions captured during the procedure will be reported to the appropriate agencies.
"Why didn't you smile when the picture of the Great Leader was shown?"
"The problem with the kernel is that it usually doesn't fail in a predictable way"
True, automated testing's usefulness is limited to the most directly observable problems, the vast majority of which are trivial. By the same token, that's precisely why it is of benefit to large, complicated software projects because that "vast majority" may be so vast that no one person would want to waste time menially retesting all of those things.
Thousands or millions of standard little tests can be quickly run after each patch. Ideally, then only the "interesting" test cases need to be tested by the developers, keeping things fun for them.
Did the patch break someone else's code? No? Then it can be submitted with more confidence. A lot of time can be saved just before a release with a quick but thorough sanity check.
It is of benefit to the end user as well, because the tests may quickly discover problems with a specific hardware configuration that can then be reported giving the exact test that failed. There's possibly no need for the kernel developer to reconstruct the entire configuration to reproduce the bug in many cases. No need for the user to upgrade an entire site to the new kernel (yet), knowing that there will be problems.
I'm not a total adherent of any formal methodology by any means, and I'm not recommending for anyone to read very far into the literature. I would only worry about implementing this one where it makes sense. Things that don't change very often and are common to most people (e.g. signals, sockets, memory allocation, threads, forks, etc.) should go first. Only later should constantly changing things like drivers enter the picture, lest the development team become dependent on a test system that is hard to maintain.
'I like how you denounce the use of the word Xtreme and use the word "sensual activator" in the same post with a straight face.'
Even if that's not the textbook term for it, marketing really works that way. If you can suggest another industry insider term for what is going on, then let's hear it. In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy using "sensual activator" again and again:)
Another way to look at this is that I'm simply describing the psychological borrowing of the public's mental facilities by the marketing gurus, in order to cause reactions they think are desirable. There is very little difference, conceptually, between that and sneaking onto someone else's facilities to try some interesting experiment (See, and some of the mods thought I was offtopic.)
Do you like your doughnuts Krispy? Or your beverages "Clean?" Then you have fallen for nonsensical marketing terms. (What's in there? Mud? It'd better be clean...)
Those words, like "Xtreme" are purely "sensual activators," but as terms descriptive of the object they are just nonsense.
Xtreme is a marketing tactic that attempts to raise your adrenaline level while you're reading the ad so you are more likely to remember the product as something out of the ordinary, but it really describes nothing special in most places it is used, just like "Advanced" has come to mean nothing, (other than that it is being advanced by the marketers) and so, that part of the lexicon now being polluted, marketing people have begun abandoning it and chosen a different word to pollute.
Obligatory ontopic: That being said, no, I haven't used someone else's expensive facilities for my own research. Except maybe using large meetings to ask questions to find out how clueless a department director might be about the work going on. That's about the most fun you can have...
Take the frame of a glider, the wheels of a bicycle, the engine of a car, but made of a lighter metal, the propeller from a ship and a bird's wing.
The result: the "aeroplane," a new patentable invention that the glider builders, bicyclists, automobile companies, ship builders and birds cannot charge you royalties for.
OK, so do the same with software:
Combine a piece here, a little piece there (e.g. two hashes). Suddenly nobody's patent applies to you because it looks like everyone's and no one's work at the same time.
Whatever procedure they use to "mark" the code can be used to unmark it, because it's all just modifiable information.
"Ha! There! I've written my name on the board. Now it's mine, all mine."
"Hey wait, what are you doing erasing that?"
A sufficiently hybridized program will succeed in defeating any scheme for marking it, and if they attempt to do this through almost impenetrable obfuscation then no one will want to use their hopelessly unmaintainable code anyway.
Hmmm... maybe this explains something about the apparent insecurability of some M$ code?
The other side of the coin is that an Earth vehicle can save energy by using lift to take off horizontally, because the atmosphere is thicker. A martian one will probably need to take off vertically, and won't experience lift until it reaches a much higher cruising speed. Once at that speed, it can fly a long way without as much drag, but once you want to land you have to worry about slowing down, so the device had better measure its fuel carefully or have a large wingspan that is retracted just before landing, once again vertically.
Although it sounds less practical than using the same energy for rovers, it might be OK as a proof-of-concept (or proof-of-bad-idea) for a future mission that uses the CO2 to leave orbit on a return trip.
"...they're the only people with enough sunny deserts for algea farms...".
First, do you remember the pictures of globe as seen from space,
with blues, greens, browns and yellows? Look for the sandy yellow
color in countries like Australia, China, India, Spain, Mexico, parts
of South America, and many countries in Africa. This is desert. All
of those places have desert.
Secondly, only a relatively small amount of land area is needed.
Only 15k square miles (19k km^2) for a country as large and energy
hungry as the U.S.
Thirdly, the link I mentioned recommends against building all of
the farms in one area, since extra fuel would be used up transporting
it to distant places. Many areas are sunny enough that local
production makes more sense than bringing it from a desert.
Fourthly, the colder climates can still produce the sewage
feedstock needed by the algae. They would need to transport it, but
this would be fine with major cities facing waste disposal issues.
Lastly, some species of algae grow in salt water. Guess what covers
2/3 of the Earth's surface?
I wonder if the "rest" of the world would count biodiesel against our carbon budget?
Fairly soon, "they" will be trying to use it themselves, so I don't
see why not:)
If produced in mass [sic], their cost is predicted to fall to $50,000 by 2010. The Stirling solar dishes are also easy to maintain...
On the other hand, an analysis of algal biodiesel ponds (and some other neat things) from here by Michael Briggs at the University of New Hampshire Physics Department mentions:
Ponds equivalent to their design could be built around the country, using wastewater streams (human, animal, and agricultural) as feed sources. We found that at NREL's yield rates, 15,000 square miles (3.85 million hectares) of algae ponds would be needed to replace all petroleum transportation fuels with biodiesel. At the cost of $80,000 per hectare, that would work out to roughly $308 billion to build the farms.
The operating costs (including power consumption, labor, chemicals, and fixed capital costs (taxes, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and return on investment) worked out to $12,000 per hectare. That would equate to $46.2 billion per year for all the algae farms, to yield all the oil feedstock necessary for the entire country. Compare that to the $100-150 billion the US spends each year just on purchasing crude oil from foreign countries, with all of that money leaving the US economy.
So, it looks like biodiesel requires more maintenance, but could probably be started up more quickly because the algae takes care of worrying about building itself. I like the fact though that the algae consumes CO2 from the atmosphere and cleans out wastewater.
The bill also shields "family friendly" services like ClearPlay that strip violent or sexually explicit scenes from movies. Hollywood groups say such services violate their copyrighted works by altering them without permission.
I guess they didn't want people to miss the product placement ads in the sex scenes.
I can understand if you're nervous about letting this genie out of
the bottle too soon. I'm queasy about it too.
However, I think it's plausible to say that we may someday end up
in a situation where some bad guys gain access to it anyway, and
perhaps they proliferate it to many other bad guys but the public at
large remains ignorant of it.
In the meantime, while the bad guys are scheming how to do
something (that will not come back and affect them too...), everyone
depends for their defense on a cathedral mentality, which can have
great "unity of direction" but low creativity. At some point, the
advantage of creativity outweighs the advantage of a unified command
structure.
Once things are that far gone, there is little downside to letting
the creativity of society at large become proficient and at least have
a chance to defend itself by developing its own countermeasures.
In the meantime, low risk uses do exist, such as developing a
better algae for biodiesel production. If such algae can be proven to
be harmless, what is the problem with letting the public experiment
with it?
So you think that conversion to binary prevents somebody from determining what you have?
No, not really. But the question isn't preventing making educated guesses about it, it's preventing getting definitive proof of it.
For the sake of argument, say I created a customized hybrid BSD/Linux system with some of my own code added in random places, used a custom compiler that likes to reorder code for the heck of it, obfuscated symbols and then I throw away the source. How do you prove that it was Linux and not BSD code that was used to generate a specific section? You can try to reverse engineer it,
but proving which code base it orginally came from will certainly be difficult, often full of doubts, and in some cases impossible.
Even if MS spends all of its time reverse engineering, this may simply push people to leave the x86 architecture entirely, to chips that do not run Windoze, like PowerPC. How then will they prove any damages when the "privilege" of purchasing Windoze for that architecture is not even available? (Hmm, now I know why there are so many cross-licensing agreements going on.)
OK, an 800bhp supercar is kind of interesting, but the real advance if you ask me is the in-wheel motors.
I wonder if I can install a pair of these on my car? Hmm, adding 200bhp and a longer range wouldn't be too bad. The trunk would be completely filled up with batteries though. Still, it seems like the end result would be better performing and save energy at the same time.
Maybe instead he should sell a retrofit kit with a pair of in-wheel motors, a power inverter and a few other parts so that automotive hobbyists can hybridize their existing vehicles.
What's the difference? Maybe it is their ability to find out that the product being used is actually Linux or BSD. GPL requires the source to be made available with the license. IIRC, BSD doesn't require anything. For instance:
MS: Evil user, we are suing you because you dare to use BSD on your x86 instead of Windoze, therefore depriving us of payments we would certainly otherwise have had on that hardware.
User: I'm using BSD? Not that I know of. Here's the disk: prove it.
Judge: Where is the source? Give us the source.
User: What source? I don't have it, there's only an obscure binary that may or may not be BSD. It is titled "aslkjsd". Look at the binary all you want.
MS: (talking to themselves) Now what do we do? What is this "aslkjsd" thing?
Remote controlled devices will work fine, you just need more operators and more bandwidth that way, especially once you are starting to send serious quantities of materials up. But even those should have an automated mode of operation or something so that repetitive tasks like digging don't become too tedious.
"Pick UP. Pick DOWN. Pick UP. Pick DOWN..."
Don't get me wrong, this might actually be a quicker path to energy independence than the Earth elevator, but it will take a lot more thought than worrying only about the physics problems.
It's possible that shipping large quantities of lunar raw materials to L1 will be cheaper with a cheap Lunar elevator than shipping large quantities of cheap raw materials from Earth on a relatively costly Terran elevator.
But, once you need to process any materials, you will need more complex equipment than a fleet of rovers picking up loose stones from the lunar surface, for delivery to the climber (although this may be good enough for building up a counterweight).
In order to keep from continuously launching complex processing equipment from Earth, you need to deliver a factory, initial mining equipment and rovers to the Lunar surface that can spit out more rovers, miners, cable, spare parts, factory assemblers, solar panels, smelters, factories, etc. Then, you must have people there to repair the equipment, or don't repair, just make sure to produce lots of spares. If people are there you need to worry about shielding while they're not out repairing stuff, and you would need continuing launches from Earth, the expense of which would kind of invalidate the whole point of a Lunar elevator.
So, for this to work at reasonable cost, a very complicated ecology of factories, robots and parts needs to bootstrap itself on Luna, or those things will have to be sent from Earth at high (non-elevator) expense. If anything you save the fuel of doing a powered landing on the moon for those items.
It looks like most of the work here is in developing complex robotic equipment, not so much figuring out the problems with a spool and climber setup.
If they release [part of?] the source then they should also release
their test cases as well, and then award cash prizes to whomever is
first to find and confirm input datasets that result in a new bug, by
posting it to an online forum. Of course, this would probably be most
useful for the next rover design, but may require extra work to
set up that may make the effort more expensive than doing it yourself
(in the short term). But, if even one major bug is found this way I
think the effort could easily pay for itself. Surely a metric unit
conversion error would be spotted easily this way.
Of course, this is in an Ideal World where the OS is not
platform-specific and could be run under Linux (similar to how an
instance of Linux can run under itself to allow quicker testing of
kernel patches).
From then on, outgoing communications to the rover would probably
need to be encrypted:) but it is probably just as well, as long as
they don't give out the key, the communications frequencies, the
exact location, etc.
"More interestingly, there are theories that some of the universe's fundamental dimensionless constants may have changed by a parts in a million over the last 10 billion years or so. These clocks are so accurate that they should be able to detect these changes over a year or two"
If these constants change over a year or two, they are not so fundamental right?
I see your point -- does it become circular logic when the constant you are using to measure the quality of your measurement is actually a variable introducing error into your results? Then, is the variation really from that "constant", or from the measuring equipment?
Well, I don't know (I IsNot physicist) but there may be a way to prove that some result isn't affected significantly enough by the rate of error in the "constant." Of course, to do that, you have to assume that your other constants aren't also changing... Maybe the rate of decay isn't constant either because of an as-yet undiscovered property of matter.
My own (non-canonical) theory is that there are no constants. Our short lifetimes cause us to see constants where there are only imperceptibly changing variables. Also, we are confined to making all of our measurements from a single-point in space. For all we know, in some sufficiently distant location, all of the "constants" have a different value or even vary wildly.
If something can be patented after a weary 5 seconds of focused hard, imaginative work, I imagine that a popular language 5 years from now will look like this:
Naturally, if the evidence is destroyed, there is no evidence to show that there was evidence, unless someone speaks up.
But, the trouble with this approach is that somebody always saves evidence, either through sloppiness or because something gets written in the margins of a technical manual, etc. Thus, not everything gets shredded, so that this gambit has its risks.
Even as we speak, there may be an MS employee, or former MS employee holding the key to all of this. This is pure speculation of course, but maybe the reason Novell is on this trail is because it knows such a person. Even if that person has signed all the NDA forms in the world, such a person might still be willing to come forward in exchange for some immunity.
Time to start brushing up on the Polish language, or at least to have a closer idea of how to pronounce Polish words and names:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland
The second article is a longer description of Poland along with history, maps, lots of images etc.
If software patents pass, when strong AI becomes available even thoughts (presented in patent jargon like "problem-solving heuristics in artificial neural networks: adapting techniques of the biological model") can be patented. Somebody has to draw the line somewhere, before we end up as automatons, forced to group-think all of the time.
The first one is an article with some details, the second is some artwork that explains the scramjet and the flight path.
From the looks of it, the scramjet engine doesn't appear to be a very sophisticated device. It's just a funnel that doesn't ignite the fuel until it has already reached supersonic speed.
The tricky part, if I'm guessing correctly, is building a vehicle that can withstand the 3600 degree heat of flying at Mach 10 in the upper atmosphere. It succeeded, but there was no human pilot inside of this one. I think that will be the next step: to build a craft, as small and light as possible, just to ferry crew into space, leaving cargo payloads to be sent up using a much cheaper but less safety constrained kind of lift capability.
So if the company fails, does that mean free software can begin using the patent? Or, does another company invariably sneak in and file a very similar patent (hoping the existence of prior art is not noticed) so as to prevent that from happening?
Slashdot Mirror
DRPM sounds very nice, but is the drive's sound insulation (if any) tuned to cancel out the noise at varying speeds? It might be quiet at cruising speed but noisier at other speeds. That is, in the worst case, it might be great for the server room but not for a home DVR. Have you ever heard one?
"are belong to" someone else. It shouldn't be too difficult to make people sign a form that buried somewhere within is a clause that any ideas retrieved during the treatment become the property of the equipment vendor.
Your thoughts or reactions could be sold to advertisers, since it will be easier to determine what actually motivates you to buy or perks your interest.
Of course, any unapproved thoughts or reactions captured during the procedure will be reported to the appropriate agencies.
"Why didn't you smile when the picture of the Great Leader was shown?"
"The problem with the kernel is that it usually doesn't fail in a predictable way"
True, automated testing's usefulness is limited to the most directly observable problems, the vast majority of which are trivial. By the same token, that's precisely why it is of benefit to large, complicated software projects because that "vast majority" may be so vast that no one person would want to waste time menially retesting all of those things.
Thousands or millions of standard little tests can be quickly run after each patch. Ideally, then only the "interesting" test cases need to be tested by the developers, keeping things fun for them.
Did the patch break someone else's code? No? Then it can be submitted with more confidence. A lot of time can be saved just before a release with a quick but thorough sanity check.
It is of benefit to the end user as well, because the tests may quickly discover problems with a specific hardware configuration that can then be reported giving the exact test that failed. There's possibly no need for the kernel developer to reconstruct the entire configuration to reproduce the bug in many cases. No need for the user to upgrade an entire site to the new kernel (yet), knowing that there will be problems.
I'm not a total adherent of any formal methodology by any means, and I'm not recommending for anyone to read very far into the literature. I would only worry about implementing this one where it makes sense. Things that don't change very often and are common to most people (e.g. signals, sockets, memory allocation, threads, forks, etc.) should go first. Only later should constantly changing things like drivers enter the picture, lest the development team become dependent on a test system that is hard to maintain.
'I like how you denounce the use of the word Xtreme and use the word "sensual activator" in the same post with a straight face.'
Even if that's not the textbook term for it, marketing really works that way. If you can suggest another industry insider term for what is going on, then let's hear it. In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy using "sensual activator" again and again :)
Another way to look at this is that I'm simply describing the psychological borrowing of the public's mental facilities by the marketing gurus, in order to cause reactions they think are desirable. There is very little difference, conceptually, between that and sneaking onto someone else's facilities to try some interesting experiment (See, and some of the mods thought I was offtopic.)
Do you like your doughnuts Krispy? Or your beverages "Clean?" Then you have fallen for nonsensical marketing terms. (What's in there? Mud? It'd better be clean...)
Those words, like "Xtreme" are purely "sensual activators," but as terms descriptive of the object they are just nonsense.
Xtreme is a marketing tactic that attempts to raise your adrenaline level while you're reading the ad so you are more likely to remember the product as something out of the ordinary, but it really describes nothing special in most places it is used, just like "Advanced" has come to mean nothing, (other than that it is being advanced by the marketers) and so, that part of the lexicon now being polluted, marketing people have begun abandoning it and chosen a different word to pollute.
Obligatory ontopic: That being said, no, I haven't used someone else's expensive facilities for my own research. Except maybe using large meetings to ask questions to find out how clueless a department director might be about the work going on. That's about the most fun you can have...
An analogy with the real world:
The result: the "aeroplane," a new patentable invention that the glider builders, bicyclists, automobile companies, ship builders and birds cannot charge you royalties for.
OK, so do the same with software:
Whatever procedure they use to "mark" the code can be used to unmark it, because it's all just modifiable information.
A sufficiently hybridized program will succeed in defeating any scheme for marking it, and if they attempt to do this through almost impenetrable obfuscation then no one will want to use their hopelessly unmaintainable code anyway.
Hmmm... maybe this explains something about the apparent insecurability of some M$ code?
The other side of the coin is that an Earth vehicle can save energy by using lift to take off horizontally, because the atmosphere is thicker. A martian one will probably need to take off vertically, and won't experience lift until it reaches a much higher cruising speed. Once at that speed, it can fly a long way without as much drag, but once you want to land you have to worry about slowing down, so the device had better measure its fuel carefully or have a large wingspan that is retracted just before landing, once again vertically.
Although it sounds less practical than using the same energy for rovers, it might be OK as a proof-of-concept (or proof-of-bad-idea) for a future mission that uses the CO2 to leave orbit on a return trip.
Reading the article, I fail to see how this device will produce better results than using clay to make interesting shapes.
Perhaps more detail is needed about the goop the machine uses as construction material, the level of detail possible, etc?
First, do you remember the pictures of globe as seen from space, with blues, greens, browns and yellows? Look for the sandy yellow color in countries like Australia, China, India, Spain, Mexico, parts of South America, and many countries in Africa. This is desert. All of those places have desert.
Secondly, only a relatively small amount of land area is needed. Only 15k square miles (19k km^2) for a country as large and energy hungry as the U.S.
Thirdly, the link I mentioned recommends against building all of the farms in one area, since extra fuel would be used up transporting it to distant places. Many areas are sunny enough that local production makes more sense than bringing it from a desert.
Fourthly, the colder climates can still produce the sewage feedstock needed by the algae. They would need to transport it, but this would be fine with major cities facing waste disposal issues.
Lastly, some species of algae grow in salt water. Guess what covers 2/3 of the Earth's surface?
Fairly soon, "they" will be trying to use it themselves, so I don't see why not :)
The Formidable Article claims that:
On the other hand, an analysis of algal biodiesel ponds (and some other neat things) from here by Michael Briggs at the University of New Hampshire Physics Department mentions:
So, it looks like biodiesel requires more maintenance, but could probably be started up more quickly because the algae takes care of worrying about building itself. I like the fact though that the algae consumes CO2 from the atmosphere and cleans out wastewater.
I can understand if you're nervous about letting this genie out of the bottle too soon. I'm queasy about it too.
However, I think it's plausible to say that we may someday end up in a situation where some bad guys gain access to it anyway, and perhaps they proliferate it to many other bad guys but the public at large remains ignorant of it.
In the meantime, while the bad guys are scheming how to do something (that will not come back and affect them too...), everyone depends for their defense on a cathedral mentality, which can have great "unity of direction" but low creativity. At some point, the advantage of creativity outweighs the advantage of a unified command structure.
Once things are that far gone, there is little downside to letting the creativity of society at large become proficient and at least have a chance to defend itself by developing its own countermeasures.
In the meantime, low risk uses do exist, such as developing a better algae for biodiesel production. If such algae can be proven to be harmless, what is the problem with letting the public experiment with it?
No, not really. But the question isn't preventing making educated guesses about it, it's preventing getting definitive proof of it.
For the sake of argument, say I created a customized hybrid BSD/Linux system with some of my own code added in random places, used a custom compiler that likes to reorder code for the heck of it, obfuscated symbols and then I throw away the source. How do you prove that it was Linux and not BSD code that was used to generate a specific section? You can try to reverse engineer it, but proving which code base it orginally came from will certainly be difficult, often full of doubts, and in some cases impossible.
Even if MS spends all of its time reverse engineering, this may simply push people to leave the x86 architecture entirely, to chips that do not run Windoze, like PowerPC. How then will they prove any damages when the "privilege" of purchasing Windoze for that architecture is not even available? (Hmm, now I know why there are so many cross-licensing agreements going on.)
OK, an 800bhp supercar is kind of interesting, but the real advance if you ask me is the in-wheel motors.
I wonder if I can install a pair of these on my car? Hmm, adding 200bhp and a longer range wouldn't be too bad. The trunk would be completely filled up with batteries though. Still, it seems like the end result would be better performing and save energy at the same time.
Maybe instead he should sell a retrofit kit with a pair of in-wheel motors, a power inverter and a few other parts so that automotive hobbyists can hybridize their existing vehicles.
What's the difference? Maybe it is their ability to find out that the product being used is actually Linux or BSD. GPL requires the source to be made available with the license. IIRC, BSD doesn't require anything. For instance:
MS: Evil user, we are suing you because you dare to use BSD on your x86 instead of Windoze, therefore depriving us of payments we would certainly otherwise have had on that hardware.
User: I'm using BSD? Not that I know of. Here's the disk: prove it.
Judge: Where is the source? Give us the source.
User: What source? I don't have it, there's only an obscure binary that may or may not be BSD. It is titled "aslkjsd". Look at the binary all you want.
MS: (talking to themselves) Now what do we do? What is this "aslkjsd" thing?
Remote controlled devices will work fine, you just need more operators and more bandwidth that way, especially once you are starting to send serious quantities of materials up. But even those should have an automated mode of operation or something so that repetitive tasks like digging don't become too tedious.
"Pick UP. Pick DOWN. Pick UP. Pick DOWN..."
Don't get me wrong, this might actually be a quicker path to energy independence than the Earth elevator, but it will take a lot more thought than worrying only about the physics problems.
It's possible that shipping large quantities of lunar raw materials to L1 will be cheaper with a cheap Lunar elevator than shipping large quantities of cheap raw materials from Earth on a relatively costly Terran elevator.
But, once you need to process any materials, you will need more complex equipment than a fleet of rovers picking up loose stones from the lunar surface, for delivery to the climber (although this may be good enough for building up a counterweight).
In order to keep from continuously launching complex processing equipment from Earth, you need to deliver a factory, initial mining equipment and rovers to the Lunar surface that can spit out more rovers, miners, cable, spare parts, factory assemblers, solar panels, smelters, factories, etc. Then, you must have people there to repair the equipment, or don't repair, just make sure to produce lots of spares. If people are there you need to worry about shielding while they're not out repairing stuff, and you would need continuing launches from Earth, the expense of which would kind of invalidate the whole point of a Lunar elevator.
So, for this to work at reasonable cost, a very complicated ecology of factories, robots and parts needs to bootstrap itself on Luna, or those things will have to be sent from Earth at high (non-elevator) expense. If anything you save the fuel of doing a powered landing on the moon for those items.
It looks like most of the work here is in developing complex robotic equipment, not so much figuring out the problems with a spool and climber setup.
If they release [part of?] the source then they should also release their test cases as well, and then award cash prizes to whomever is first to find and confirm input datasets that result in a new bug, by posting it to an online forum. Of course, this would probably be most useful for the next rover design, but may require extra work to set up that may make the effort more expensive than doing it yourself (in the short term). But, if even one major bug is found this way I think the effort could easily pay for itself. Surely a metric unit conversion error would be spotted easily this way.
Of course, this is in an Ideal World where the OS is not platform-specific and could be run under Linux (similar to how an instance of Linux can run under itself to allow quicker testing of kernel patches).
From then on, outgoing communications to the rover would probably need to be encrypted :) but it is probably just as well, as long as
they don't give out the key, the communications frequencies, the
exact location, etc.
I see your point -- does it become circular logic when the constant you are using to measure the quality of your measurement is actually a variable introducing error into your results? Then, is the variation really from that "constant", or from the measuring equipment?
Well, I don't know (I IsNot physicist) but there may be a way to prove that some result isn't affected significantly enough by the rate of error in the "constant." Of course, to do that, you have to assume that your other constants aren't also changing... Maybe the rate of decay isn't constant either because of an as-yet undiscovered property of matter.
My own (non-canonical) theory is that there are no constants. Our short lifetimes cause us to see constants where there are only imperceptibly changing variables. Also, we are confined to making all of our measurements from a single-point in space. For all we know, in some sufficiently distant location, all of the "constants" have a different value or even vary wildly.
If something can be patented after a weary 5 seconds of focused hard, imaginative work, I imagine that a popular language 5 years from now will look like this:
While.pay(control_structure_royalty) IsNot.pay(IsNot_royalty) Done.pay(variable_royalty)
Begin.pay(codeblock_royalty) Print "hello world".pay(null_terminated_string_royalty)
End.pay(codeblock_royalty)
(Note to investors: if your code is in the middle of the loop, you get paid more often!)
Naturally, if the evidence is destroyed, there is no evidence to show that there was evidence, unless someone speaks up.
But, the trouble with this approach is that somebody always saves evidence, either through sloppiness or because something gets written in the margins of a technical manual, etc. Thus, not everything gets shredded, so that this gambit has its risks.
Even as we speak, there may be an MS employee, or former MS employee holding the key to all of this. This is pure speculation of course, but maybe the reason Novell is on this trail is because it knows such a person. Even if that person has signed all the NDA forms in the world, such a person might still be willing to come forward in exchange for some immunity.
Time to start brushing up on the Polish language, or at least to have a closer idea of how to pronounce Polish words and names:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland
The second article is a longer description of Poland along with history, maps, lots of images etc.
If software patents pass, when strong AI becomes available even thoughts (presented in patent jargon like "problem-solving heuristics in artificial neural networks: adapting techniques of the biological model") can be patented. Somebody has to draw the line somewhere, before we end up as automatons, forced to group-think all of the time.
The article link doesn't have much in the way of interesting details, so, here are some slightly better links to hopefully raise the signal ratio:
The first one is an article with some details, the second is some artwork that explains the scramjet and the flight path.
From the looks of it, the scramjet engine doesn't appear to be a very sophisticated device. It's just a funnel that doesn't ignite the fuel until it has already reached supersonic speed.
The tricky part, if I'm guessing correctly, is building a vehicle that can withstand the 3600 degree heat of flying at Mach 10 in the upper atmosphere. It succeeded, but there was no human pilot inside of this one. I think that will be the next step: to build a craft, as small and light as possible, just to ferry crew into space, leaving cargo payloads to be sent up using a much cheaper but less safety constrained kind of lift capability.
Maybe in order to get enough lumens you were using a halogen bulb, which runs really hot?
Why not try something cooler? Specifically, has anyone tried using an LED bulb?
So if the company fails, does that mean free software can begin using the patent? Or, does another company invariably sneak in and file a very similar patent (hoping the existence of prior art is not noticed) so as to prevent that from happening?