OK. I've seen the various replies about not having to haul fuel, and that makes sense to me. However, the comment about efficiency got me thinking. All our current methods of making electricity involve turning turbines. In most cases, we do it by causing some highly exothermic reaction, boiling some water, and then using pressurized steam to turn the turbines. In comparison, the hydrogen/oxygen fuel system seems to go directly from combustion to the desired effect (mechanical force).
If we use electromagnetic drive on this thing (which does make sense to me), might not the inefficiencies of generating the necessary power to move to orbit end up canceling out the improvements we get by not schlepping fuel along?
Also, as far as energy from dragging a wire through the magnetosphere: AFAIK, a geosynchronous wire (which is what this would be) would have no velocity relative to Earth, and therefore would not have induced currents usable for energy. (Regenerative braking, OTOH, does make sense, although I believe we're not very good at getting energy from it. There'd also be the question of how you'd store the energy if we *were* good at it.)
Why exactly is it believed that such a system would reduce the cost of orbiting something? IIRC, we already recover and reuse the boosters and tanks from the Shuttle, meaning that it's mainly a matter of refueling the things and fixing the stress damage. Therefore, it seems like the main cost of getting to orbit is energy (well, that and building vehicles that don't fall apart on the way up), and my rudimentary knowledge of physics says to me that you're doing the same amount of work no matter how you get up there.
I can see an argument that the elevator might need less control/support architecture than the Shuttle, but presumably once you're up in orbit you'll need to move off the tether and remain alive for a few hours, so that equipment still needs to be hauled up. (I suppose we could also be assembling all our orbital vehicles up there, so that you just take the elevator up to a space station and hop into an orbiter which never had to be brought up from Earth, but that's a long way off...)
I've looked over the NYU and VitalBooks sites, and I see nothing indicating that the books are actually unusable after one year --- they're merely obsolete. This isn't the DiVX strategy, it's the Windows strategy.
Now, if that mandated purchase thing goes through... ick. I'm a med student, and I've given up on buying the required textbooks, because they're not useful for the course. If I want a reference, I'll go to the library, or read the online fulltext the library kindly provides.
On a side note... $600 a year for dental textbooks? And that's the *discount*? Damn! Either dental school contains a lot more info than med school, or dental profs have many more favored texts.
This makes me very happy. Out of curiousity, though, what proportion of coders are members of IEEE? I have my degree in CS, but always figured that the "right" professional organization for me was the ACM; the IEEE seemed like it was aimed more towards the hardware guys. They certainly never tried to recruit anyone from my department, whereas we occasionally got promotional bits from the ACM.
Fluorinert. Yes. It's somewhat of a different chemistry (Fluorinert is optimized for non-reactivity, this stuff is optimized for oxygen loading and biocompatibility), but I think you could probably do it. AFAIK, anything that's not electrically conductive would work fine as a liquid CPU coolant, and most organic compounds are nonconducting.
Of course, you wouldn't really *want* to do that, because this stuff will cost a lot more than a bottle of Fluorinert (since Fluorinert doesn't have to undergo medical safety testing), but I believe that you *could*.
As others have pointed out, this isn't a new idea. People have been trying for fluorocarbon-based blood substitutes since at least the 80s. So far, none have been clinically viable; they ended up costing too much, or having nasty side effects, or having no shelf life, or something along those lines.
The manufacturers claim it's perfectly safe. Of course they will. The data they've collected is probably quite solid, too. There are two obvious problems:
1) As other people have pointed out, previous attempts have turned out to be carcinogens.
2) Some really nasty side-effects only show up in a small percentage of people and don't become apparent in clinical trials. Think about Viagra. Worked great in trials. When every other man in the country takes it, some guys with heart conditions die. No way to detect that in a standard study sample. I'd be willing to bet money that there are patients who will (for whatever reason) have violent and possibly life-threatening reactions to Oxygent.
One of the neat things about this if it works, though, will be seeing how religions handle it. There are some groups (Jehovah's Witnesses come to mind) which do not accept blood transfusions because the Bible says people should not consume blood. This isn't really blood, so I'd think it should be OK, but I'm curious to see how those societies react. One could make an argument that it's "cheating", and God hates cheaters.
You have a point; I was reading something a short while ago about the city of Atlanta actually creating its own weather. Apparently, the heat it collects/emits causes clouds to form at the borders, roll on in, and drench the city.
However, as far as this thread goes, I've got two counterpoints:
1) Newly developed land generally doesn't start with reinforced concrete skyscrapers. It'll most likely begin with suburban sprawl, which last I saw was pretty vulnerable. (Remember those towns I mentioned are near me?)
2) That works now, when there's still a relatively low city density. What happens as the area of cities increases? I believe that the heat shell is able to deflect tornadoes now, but if the storm has nowhere else to go, I can see it breaking such a barrier. (I think it's reasonable to assume that city area is going to increase in the coming years. Population's still rising, and we've gotta put them *somewhere*.)
Brings up an interesting question: What happens to a species that is perfectly adapted to all environmental dangers (including other species)?
IMHO, such an animal is impossible in any form of dynamic environment. As soon as the environment changes, adaptation is no longer optimal. The animal can adapt, but adaptation will always lag environment unless the animal has perfect predictive capacity (also probably impossible).
More importantly, it's still got to deal with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Eventually, it will run out of resources or time and join the rest of us as some nice hydrogen clouds down around 1K.
Being able to control tornadoes is a wonderful thing. I came close to being killed by one when I was younger, and nearby towns have been totally wrecked by them (and I'm not even in the Midwest).
One teeny problem I see with this is the problem of balancing ecological requirements with human expansionist tendencies. If we can build something which is genuinely capable of turning off tornadoes, there are plenty of high-risk zones that will suddenly be lucrative development opportunities. They'll be developed. It will be necessary to turn off the storms in those areas to prevent massive damage to life and property.
Personally, if you gave me the option to set the "Tornadoes" flag for the planet to "No", I wouldn't do it. Although I have no proof, intution suggests that if you remove a major climate phenomenon entirely, you have the potential for seriously screwing up the whole system. Environmental scientists would scream bloody murder if such a system ever went up.
The obvious solution is to allow storms to form in unpopulated zones. Two problems exist there. One, if there's a square inch of earth that *can* be made habitable, someone will want to live there. Two, once you create the storm, you can't steer it. It might form deep in the wilderness, but move fairly quickly into a populated region. My impression from reading this is that it can only be used to stop storms before they start.
It's not at all a bad idea, I'm just really worried that it's going to be implemented/used poorly and that we're all going to get screwed over.
Obviously, Adobe doesn't give a shit about the opinion of the hacker community; in this regard, they are like most corporations. Is there any evidence (anecdotal will do) regarding how corporations treat the opinion of their stockholders (outside of annual meeting type stuff)?
See, I own a bit of Adobe stock, and it's been doing pretty well for me. If I write them a letter saying "You're being jerks and abusing IP, cut it out", that letter goes in the circular file. OTOH, if I write "You're doing things to lower the value of my investment, cut it out", I hear a vaguely implied threat that "I think that I might be able to sue you for being jerks and costing me money." Hacker opinion might not count, but the thought of a class-action suit can generally get a few mental wheels turning.
Any thoughts? I dropped an email to Investor Relations already (can't hurt), but I'm wondering if others think this might work (and would be willing to do likewise). If it might work in this case, might it work in the general case? Might it be possible to influence the companies we hate by buying stock in them and grumbling about our investment?
I suspect that the answer I'll get is "It won't work, go do something useful", but I'm curious.
And since I'm seeing a lot of replies that all boil down to "You only care about money! You greedy bastard!", allow me to repeat something from the original comment:
I don't care how much they're paying per FLOP, I refuse to speed that process along.
I care about the fact that humans are not property. It was my thought that including some stuff about "BTW, this is a big scam, 'cause they're gonna get rich off your work and you get squat" would add power to the argument; I know it would for me if I weren't entirely convinced. Clearly, this did not work. (Nonetheless, y'all are still getting scammed in multiple ways.)
your ideas are strange, for someone who has chosen to go into medicine.
I'd argue that partway. I'm not the only med student who thinks gene patents are wrong. I chose medicine because I get to actually stand by my ethics and I get to hack on neat stuff.
You advocate a lottery system for encouraging participation in large distributed networks and condemn micropayments as unfair,
Actually, that's mostly the secondary issue. Even if I could hit the big time running that code, I wouldn't, because I'd still call it a scam.
yet you consider yourself able to see through the fog of corporate greed which you claim makes all contributions of cpu cycles worthless if not counterproductive.
I fail to see what's strange here.
Companies have the right to make a profit.
Careful. At the very least, you need to append "as long as they're not harming others" to that.
Somewhere there has to be a scientist who decides whether the data which has been processed indicates progress toward a cure. We must trust that scientist to act ethically, just as we must trust our doctors to act ethically when our health is at risk.
Do you really think the scientists call the shots at a pharmcorp or a biotech firm? Scientists *never* make the big decisions. Scientists present their data, make objections, and are told to shut the hell up or be fired and blacklisted. (Well, mostly. I'll admit there are exceptions to almost all patterns.) Decisions are made by guys who wouldn't know a nuclear receptor if it walked up and bit them.
ever I am willing to take that risk, out of faith in humanity, that a scientist confronted with the option of letting his company 'discover' Cure A (the instant cancer cure) vs Cure B (the pill-a-day cure), would choose Cure A.
I would trust a scientist to do the same, but see above.
erior motives, your perspective is disturbing in that you do not believe that profit and science can ever coexist. Science is not just
Actually, that shouldn't be disturbing at all. The ultimate enemy of science is bias. The profit motive is a *very* powerful source of bias. What disturbs me is the fact that nobody else seems to notice this.
oscope. In effect, Henry Ford used science when he invented the assembly line and used increased efficiency to make quite a profitable company.
That's technology, not science. Big difference. Science asks questions. Technology simply makes tools. The two feed on each other in a constant cycle, but they are not identical.
Oh, and to the guy right below you in the comment list: yes, patents are 20 years. Now. And Mickey Mouse would be in the public domain if not for certain recent acts of Congress. If the biotech industry goes to Congress, flashes a wad of cash, and says "We need 100-year patents so that the American economy will be strong so we can contribute lots to your campaign", what do you think will happen?
You have a point. Fact remains that this would do more harm than good. There are others outside of drug companies willing to do the basic research. I'll put my faith in them.
So let me get this straight, you'd rather waste cycles
I don't see myself wasting cycles at all. Mine are going to SETI. If SETI runs out of data, I might search for Golomb rulers.
than do something that at least will help a few dying children?
Read the previous reply. The "won't you help the dying children" argument is the same one as politicians use to push censorship. These projects have zero interest in the public good.
Even though you seem resigned to the fact that only one of these "biomedical profiteers" have the means to accomplish this?
That's bullshit. Plenty of academic researchers work on automatic parallelization of code. Bioinformatics is just as hot in schools as in industry. If the NIH or the HGP or some similar organization sets up such a project, I might contribute cycles, since a nonprofit can almost be trusted to use the results properly.
Need I point out that the first distributed computing project was not from a corporation?
Even though you're not risking anything other than a few nearly worthless CPU cyles, you expect them to split the payment down the middle?
Not "middle". Obviously, I don't deserve 50%. However, I might think as high as 10% (and that's an *honest* 10%, not a 10% before creative accounting is applied) should go to the lucky person who processes the key block (or be split among those who processed multiple key blocks).
If nothing else, you should be in favor of this because the promise of Big Bucks For Doing Nothing will attract a lot more people to run clients.
As a medical student, perhaps you'd like to tell me just how many key devices and medicines have been developed without the involvement of these "biomedical profiteers"?
Very well.
Transplant surgery.
Penicillin.
Vaccination.
The concept of sterile medicine.
In those last 3, you've got nearly 90% of the power of modern medicine. All developed by individuals working pretty much for the hell of it. Now, there might be companies profiting from providing gear to achieve those things; I do not find this objectionable. If someone patented the general concept of disinfection, I'd be pretty upset.
Now how many with?
To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing currently on the market that was produced by a primarily-automated process, actually. (Disclaimer: I don't know that many of the modern drugs yet.)
this particular project is worthwhile, but I'd rather produce positive results for humanity in my lifetime than cling to some utopian notions in my dreams.
And pray tell, if it is always better to abandon utopian notions and ideals because they may not match the current reality, how do you expect things to get any better?
To put it another way: Aim for mediocrity and you'll always hit the target.
The more I think about this, the more I become convinced that it is downright unethical to assist for-profit efforts to do biomedical data mining. The information extracted will be treated in a fashion that is detrimental to humanity, both spiritually and physically.
Let's forget the money for a second. Do you really want to look around twenty years from now, see the entire genome patented and restricted in public hands (with patents having been conveniently lobbied into having a life of at least 100 years), and be able to say "I helped them do this"? I don't. If a few hypothetical kids with cancer die because I tried to prevent the declaration of humanity-as-property, I think I'll be able to sleep at night.
1) Not buying antibiotics. Spurious argument. Antibiotics took work to design. I have no problem with somebody profiting from hard work. I have no objections to the application of some kind of IP protection to the distributed client itself. Let them make their money by licensing the code. Then let the pharmcorps run a copy on every workstation in their offices. That'll get them plenty of computing power, the person who writes the simulation code gets rich, the companies find new drugs, and everyone "wins".
2) The bit about "helping the dying boy" is sarcasm. My point is that it's not the patients who really benefit from this at all, it's the corporations. (BTW, let's say they find two cures for cancer. One is permanent, and one requires a pill a day for the rest of your life. Which do you think will be manufactured? Which one do you think will be patented but never developed (or permitted to be developed by any other firm for as long as the patent holds)? Given that some people are psychologically incapable of taking a pill a day and will therefore die preventable deaths, is this ethical?)
3) And why shouldn't I get credit, or a share of the profits? If I devote my personal resources to a project and end up contributing something of massive value, why is it unfair to expect a massive return? It's not like the company will go bankrupt if they offer a small percentage, and even a small percentage of a major drug's sales is a huge sum of money (for most of us).
These companies aren't in it for the good of humanity, y'know. Many may dislike Jon Katz, but he's got one good point: ethical behavior is often directly opposed to profitable behavior, and a corporation will choose the profitable 99% of the time. If your cycles discover something that would promote health but not be sufficiently profitable to manufacture, it's going into the file cabinet, not the marketplace.
Personally, even though these guys would pay me and SETI will just suck my bandwidth, I seriously doubt you'll find one of my boxes running any of these sims. (And I'm a med student, so I've got a vested interest in finding lots of new medical miracles.)
Why, you may ask, would I want to waste time looking for nonexistent little green men instead of helping the dying boy who had cancer but is now smothering under a heap of greeting cards?
Easy. We all know exactly what's going to happen when one of the simulations shows something interesting. It'll be snapped up and patented as soon as the data block hits their servers. You? You'll get a micropayment. If you're lucky, they'll mention your name. If you're the first one ever to find something useful, you'll get publicity shots. Royalties from the patent? Yeah, right. You run these screen savers and all you're doing is helping a greedy bastard get rich. (Yes, I'm sure there are some ethical and altruistic biomedical profiteers out there, but my observation is that they're mostly just bastards.)
The IP rush in biomedicine right now is scaring me. The prevailing regulatory attitude seems to be that life in general is just another resource to be locked up and exploited. I don't care how much they're paying per FLOP, I refuse to speed that process along.
I presume you're referring to the Dobelle Institute experiment. No. Color probably cannot be hacked in. The problem isn't the code on the device as much as it is the location of the electrodes. The electrodes in that man's brain can only do one thing: produce a small bright dot in a particular location. It'd take a completely different implant array to generate colors, and when your visual field consists of ten white dots, colors probably don't help much.
"25 more to go" is right. We may now know that the brain does things via contrast (although I think that's been strongly suspected for a while), but it's a long way from there to developing accurate vision algorithms, implementing those in hardware, designing an appropriate electrode array and a protocol for implanting it, doing animal trials, and then finding humans willing to be the first adopters. (Would you really be willing to let me implant an untested-in-humans device into your brain just to move from grayscale to color? Keep in mind that if the device does something bad, it could permanently damage your vision.)
But you must admit AMD is getting the best of intel simply because intel has streched itself too far and isn't innovating any more.
You're wrong. They're still innovating. I know this for a fact, because the lab I work in at CMU has entered into a partnership with Intel to work on some pretty cutting-edge stuff. You'll notice that processors are starting to slip behind Moore's Law predictions. If this idea works, it'll get us back onto the doubling curve and maybe even beyond. Now, this is a university project which is just getting started up as some grad student's thesis, so it'll be at least a decade till it hits your motherboard, but Intel is not just doing the same old thing.
I know I'm being vague, but I can't exactly talk about the details. I don't know how much of the project (if any) is public knowledge; it's certainly not posted on our group's webpage. A few measly karma points aren't enough reward for me to risk getting in trouble for talking too much.
Re:About the word "organic"
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Plastic Lasers
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DNA is a polymer, so is collagen and both are found in the average Slashdot reader.
Point. I don't normally think of them when I think of polymers, but most biological macromolecules are indeed polymers. (I will point out, though, that most polymers with which the average person is familiar are not biological.)
Most plastics are made from petroleum, which formed from the decomposition of micro-organisms, so plastics are organic as well.
And? I believe I said that they were organic, but that they weren't normally found in living organisms, thus demonstrating that an organic is not equivalent to a biological.
Congratulations for stating the obvious. Assuming someone has had freshman high school biology, this should be pretty apparent.
Go look up the thread a few comments. Notice the people talking about lasers made from plants and biological nanotech. So much for apparent facts.
I actually didn't get given the "organic == carbon" fact until I took organic chem in college. Maybe you had it in freshman high school bio, but many people didn't.
And besides, this is Slashdot. Stating the obvious is generally necessary.
"Organic" does not mean it is made from a plant, or that it is somehow a natural material. The word "organic" is used here in the same context as "organic chemistry", and simply means that the chemicals and crystals under study contain carbon chains. Most of the molecules in living things are some kind of carbon structure with things hanging off of it; therefore, these kinds of molecules were declared the "organic" molecules. There are plenty of organic molecules which are never found in your body, though. Most plastics and polymers are organics. I suspect that the average Slashdot reader is not composed of Teflon.
(Given that this laser is based on a benzene derivative, it may be a compound one finds somewhere in nature, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
Oh? They claim part of the trouble was being hit by a DoS attack. Last I heard, Slashdot had recently set up a whole bunch of anti-DoS hardware and expanded its load-handling ability. Seems to me that would solve the load problem, though the troll problem remains.
Well, I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect. I've never checked to see exactly how restrictive my settings could get (then again, I've got most of that stuff turned off anyway).
Yes, I know that "Trusted" sites could actually not be allowed to display anything beyond plain text, and you know that, but most ordinary users don't know that (IMHO).
I recognize that my failure to use my IE zones is probably a bit of silliness on my part, but in the end it doesn't matter; once you've got a Junkbuster running, you don't need the zones. That thing has massively improved my web experience.
Slashdot Mirror
OK. I've seen the various replies about not having to haul fuel, and that makes sense to me. However, the comment about efficiency got me thinking. All our current methods of making electricity involve turning turbines. In most cases, we do it by causing some highly exothermic reaction, boiling some water, and then using pressurized steam to turn the turbines. In comparison, the hydrogen/oxygen fuel system seems to go directly from combustion to the desired effect (mechanical force).
If we use electromagnetic drive on this thing (which does make sense to me), might not the inefficiencies of generating the necessary power to move to orbit end up canceling out the improvements we get by not schlepping fuel along?
Also, as far as energy from dragging a wire through the magnetosphere: AFAIK, a geosynchronous wire (which is what this would be) would have no velocity relative to Earth, and therefore would not have induced currents usable for energy. (Regenerative braking, OTOH, does make sense, although I believe we're not very good at getting energy from it. There'd also be the question of how you'd store the energy if we *were* good at it.)
Why exactly is it believed that such a system would reduce the cost of orbiting something? IIRC, we already recover and reuse the boosters and tanks from the Shuttle, meaning that it's mainly a matter of refueling the things and fixing the stress damage. Therefore, it seems like the main cost of getting to orbit is energy (well, that and building vehicles that don't fall apart on the way up), and my rudimentary knowledge of physics says to me that you're doing the same amount of work no matter how you get up there.
I can see an argument that the elevator might need less control/support architecture than the Shuttle, but presumably once you're up in orbit you'll need to move off the tether and remain alive for a few hours, so that equipment still needs to be hauled up. (I suppose we could also be assembling all our orbital vehicles up there, so that you just take the elevator up to a space station and hop into an orbiter which never had to be brought up from Earth, but that's a long way off...)
I've looked over the NYU and VitalBooks sites, and I see nothing indicating that the books are actually unusable after one year --- they're merely obsolete. This isn't the DiVX strategy, it's the Windows strategy.
Now, if that mandated purchase thing goes through... ick. I'm a med student, and I've given up on buying the required textbooks, because they're not useful for the course. If I want a reference, I'll go to the library, or read the online fulltext the library kindly provides.
On a side note... $600 a year for dental textbooks? And that's the *discount*? Damn! Either dental school contains a lot more info than med school, or dental profs have many more favored texts.
This makes me very happy. Out of curiousity, though, what proportion of coders are members of IEEE? I have my degree in CS, but always figured that the "right" professional organization for me was the ACM; the IEEE seemed like it was aimed more towards the hardware guys. They certainly never tried to recruit anyone from my department, whereas we occasionally got promotional bits from the ACM.
Fluorinert. Yes. It's somewhat of a different chemistry (Fluorinert is optimized for non-reactivity, this stuff is optimized for oxygen loading and biocompatibility), but I think you could probably do it. AFAIK, anything that's not electrically conductive would work fine as a liquid CPU coolant, and most organic compounds are nonconducting.
Of course, you wouldn't really *want* to do that, because this stuff will cost a lot more than a bottle of Fluorinert (since Fluorinert doesn't have to undergo medical safety testing), but I believe that you *could*.
As others have pointed out, this isn't a new idea. People have been trying for fluorocarbon-based blood substitutes since at least the 80s. So far, none have been clinically viable; they ended up costing too much, or having nasty side effects, or having no shelf life, or something along those lines.
The manufacturers claim it's perfectly safe. Of course they will. The data they've collected is probably quite solid, too. There are two obvious problems:
1) As other people have pointed out, previous attempts have turned out to be carcinogens.
2) Some really nasty side-effects only show up in a small percentage of people and don't become apparent in clinical trials. Think about Viagra. Worked great in trials. When every other man in the country takes it, some guys with heart conditions die. No way to detect that in a standard study sample. I'd be willing to bet money that there are patients who will (for whatever reason) have violent and possibly life-threatening reactions to Oxygent.
One of the neat things about this if it works, though, will be seeing how religions handle it. There are some groups (Jehovah's Witnesses come to mind) which do not accept blood transfusions because the Bible says people should not consume blood. This isn't really blood, so I'd think it should be OK, but I'm curious to see how those societies react. One could make an argument that it's "cheating", and God hates cheaters.
You have a point; I was reading something a short while ago about the city of Atlanta actually creating its own weather. Apparently, the heat it collects/emits causes clouds to form at the borders, roll on in, and drench the city.
However, as far as this thread goes, I've got two counterpoints:
1) Newly developed land generally doesn't start with reinforced concrete skyscrapers. It'll most likely begin with suburban sprawl, which last I saw was pretty vulnerable. (Remember those towns I mentioned are near me?)
2) That works now, when there's still a relatively low city density. What happens as the area of cities increases? I believe that the heat shell is able to deflect tornadoes now, but if the storm has nowhere else to go, I can see it breaking such a barrier. (I think it's reasonable to assume that city area is going to increase in the coming years. Population's still rising, and we've gotta put them *somewhere*.)
Brings up an interesting question: What happens to a species that is perfectly adapted to all environmental dangers (including other species)?
IMHO, such an animal is impossible in any form of dynamic environment. As soon as the environment changes, adaptation is no longer optimal. The animal can adapt, but adaptation will always lag environment unless the animal has perfect predictive capacity (also probably impossible).
More importantly, it's still got to deal with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Eventually, it will run out of resources or time and join the rest of us as some nice hydrogen clouds down around 1K.
Being able to control tornadoes is a wonderful thing. I came close to being killed by one when I was younger, and nearby towns have been totally wrecked by them (and I'm not even in the Midwest).
One teeny problem I see with this is the problem of balancing ecological requirements with human expansionist tendencies. If we can build something which is genuinely capable of turning off tornadoes, there are plenty of high-risk zones that will suddenly be lucrative development opportunities. They'll be developed. It will be necessary to turn off the storms in those areas to prevent massive damage to life and property.
Personally, if you gave me the option to set the "Tornadoes" flag for the planet to "No", I wouldn't do it. Although I have no proof, intution suggests that if you remove a major climate phenomenon entirely, you have the potential for seriously screwing up the whole system. Environmental scientists would scream bloody murder if such a system ever went up.
The obvious solution is to allow storms to form in unpopulated zones. Two problems exist there. One, if there's a square inch of earth that *can* be made habitable, someone will want to live there. Two, once you create the storm, you can't steer it. It might form deep in the wilderness, but move fairly quickly into a populated region. My impression from reading this is that it can only be used to stop storms before they start.
It's not at all a bad idea, I'm just really worried that it's going to be implemented/used poorly and that we're all going to get screwed over.
Obviously, Adobe doesn't give a shit about the opinion of the hacker community; in this regard, they are like most corporations. Is there any evidence (anecdotal will do) regarding how corporations treat the opinion of their stockholders (outside of annual meeting type stuff)?
See, I own a bit of Adobe stock, and it's been doing pretty well for me. If I write them a letter saying "You're being jerks and abusing IP, cut it out", that letter goes in the circular file. OTOH, if I write "You're doing things to lower the value of my investment, cut it out", I hear a vaguely implied threat that "I think that I might be able to sue you for being jerks and costing me money." Hacker opinion might not count, but the thought of a class-action suit can generally get a few mental wheels turning.
Any thoughts? I dropped an email to Investor Relations already (can't hurt), but I'm wondering if others think this might work (and would be willing to do likewise). If it might work in this case, might it work in the general case? Might it be possible to influence the companies we hate by buying stock in them and grumbling about our investment?
I suspect that the answer I'll get is "It won't work, go do something useful", but I'm curious.
And since I'm seeing a lot of replies that all boil down to "You only care about money! You greedy bastard!", allow me to repeat something from the original comment:
I don't care how much they're paying per FLOP, I refuse to speed that process along.
I care about the fact that humans are not property. It was my thought that including some stuff about "BTW, this is a big scam, 'cause they're gonna get rich off your work and you get squat" would add power to the argument; I know it would for me if I weren't entirely convinced. Clearly, this did not work. (Nonetheless, y'all are still getting scammed in multiple ways.)
your ideas are strange, for someone who has chosen to go into medicine.
I'd argue that partway. I'm not the only med student who thinks gene patents are wrong. I chose medicine because I get to actually stand by my ethics and I get to hack on neat stuff.
You advocate a lottery system for encouraging participation in large distributed networks and condemn micropayments as unfair,
Actually, that's mostly the secondary issue. Even if I could hit the big time running that code, I wouldn't, because I'd still call it a scam.
yet you consider yourself able to see through the fog of corporate greed which you claim makes all contributions of cpu cycles worthless if not counterproductive.
I fail to see what's strange here.
Companies have the right to make a profit.
Careful. At the very least, you need to append "as long as they're not harming others" to that.
Somewhere there has to be a scientist who decides whether the data which has been processed indicates progress toward a cure. We must trust that scientist to act ethically, just as we must trust our doctors to act ethically when our health is at risk.
Do you really think the scientists call the shots at a pharmcorp or a biotech firm? Scientists *never* make the big decisions. Scientists present their data, make objections, and are told to shut the hell up or be fired and blacklisted. (Well, mostly. I'll admit there are exceptions to almost all patterns.) Decisions are made by guys who wouldn't know a nuclear receptor if it walked up and bit them.
ever I am willing to take that risk, out of faith in humanity, that a scientist confronted with the option of letting his company 'discover' Cure A (the instant cancer cure) vs Cure B (the pill-a-day cure), would choose Cure A.
I would trust a scientist to do the same, but see above.
erior motives, your perspective is disturbing in that you do not believe that profit and science can ever coexist. Science is not just
Actually, that shouldn't be disturbing at all. The ultimate enemy of science is bias. The profit motive is a *very* powerful source of bias. What disturbs me is the fact that nobody else seems to notice this.
oscope. In effect, Henry Ford used science when he invented the assembly line and used increased efficiency to make quite a profitable company.
That's technology, not science. Big difference. Science asks questions. Technology simply makes tools. The two feed on each other in a constant cycle, but they are not identical.
Oh, and to the guy right below you in the comment list: yes, patents are 20 years. Now. And Mickey Mouse would be in the public domain if not for certain recent acts of Congress. If the biotech industry goes to Congress, flashes a wad of cash, and says "We need 100-year patents so that the American economy will be strong so we can contribute lots to your campaign", what do you think will happen?
You have a point. Fact remains that this would do more harm than good. There are others outside of drug companies willing to do the basic research. I'll put my faith in them.
So let me get this straight, you'd rather waste cycles
I don't see myself wasting cycles at all. Mine are going to SETI. If SETI runs out of data, I might search for Golomb rulers.
than do something that at least will help a few dying children?
Read the previous reply. The "won't you help the dying children" argument is the same one as politicians use to push censorship. These projects have zero interest in the public good.
Even though you seem resigned to the fact that only one of these "biomedical profiteers" have the means to accomplish this?
That's bullshit. Plenty of academic researchers work on automatic parallelization of code. Bioinformatics is just as hot in schools as in industry. If the NIH or the HGP or some similar organization sets up such a project, I might contribute cycles, since a nonprofit can almost be trusted to use the results properly.
Need I point out that the first distributed computing project was not from a corporation?
Even though you're not risking anything other than a few nearly worthless CPU cyles, you expect them to split the payment down the middle?
Not "middle". Obviously, I don't deserve 50%. However, I might think as high as 10% (and that's an *honest* 10%, not a 10% before creative accounting is applied) should go to the lucky person who processes the key block (or be split among those who processed multiple key blocks).
If nothing else, you should be in favor of this because the promise of Big Bucks For Doing Nothing will attract a lot more people to run clients.
As a medical student, perhaps you'd like to tell me just how many key devices and medicines have been developed without the involvement of these "biomedical profiteers"?
Very well.
Transplant surgery.
Penicillin.
Vaccination.
The concept of sterile medicine.
In those last 3, you've got nearly 90% of the power of modern medicine. All developed by individuals working pretty much for the hell of it. Now, there might be companies profiting from providing gear to achieve those things; I do not find this objectionable. If someone patented the general concept of disinfection, I'd be pretty upset.
Now how many with?
To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing currently on the market that was produced by a primarily-automated process, actually. (Disclaimer: I don't know that many of the modern drugs yet.)
this particular project is worthwhile, but I'd rather produce positive results for humanity in my lifetime than cling to some utopian notions in my dreams.
And pray tell, if it is always better to abandon utopian notions and ideals because they may not match the current reality, how do you expect things to get any better?
To put it another way: Aim for mediocrity and you'll always hit the target.
The more I think about this, the more I become convinced that it is downright unethical to assist for-profit efforts to do biomedical data mining. The information extracted will be treated in a fashion that is detrimental to humanity, both spiritually and physically.
Let's forget the money for a second. Do you really want to look around twenty years from now, see the entire genome patented and restricted in public hands (with patents having been conveniently lobbied into having a life of at least 100 years), and be able to say "I helped them do this"? I don't. If a few hypothetical kids with cancer die because I tried to prevent the declaration of humanity-as-property, I think I'll be able to sleep at night.
Fine. Let's address the flamage.
1) Not buying antibiotics. Spurious argument. Antibiotics took work to design. I have no problem with somebody profiting from hard work. I have no objections to the application of some kind of IP protection to the distributed client itself. Let them make their money by licensing the code. Then let the pharmcorps run a copy on every workstation in their offices. That'll get them plenty of computing power, the person who writes the simulation code gets rich, the companies find new drugs, and everyone "wins".
2) The bit about "helping the dying boy" is sarcasm. My point is that it's not the patients who really benefit from this at all, it's the corporations. (BTW, let's say they find two cures for cancer. One is permanent, and one requires a pill a day for the rest of your life. Which do you think will be manufactured? Which one do you think will be patented but never developed (or permitted to be developed by any other firm for as long as the patent holds)? Given that some people are psychologically incapable of taking a pill a day and will therefore die preventable deaths, is this ethical?)
3) And why shouldn't I get credit, or a share of the profits? If I devote my personal resources to a project and end up contributing something of massive value, why is it unfair to expect a massive return? It's not like the company will go bankrupt if they offer a small percentage, and even a small percentage of a major drug's sales is a huge sum of money (for most of us).
These companies aren't in it for the good of humanity, y'know. Many may dislike Jon Katz, but he's got one good point: ethical behavior is often directly opposed to profitable behavior, and a corporation will choose the profitable 99% of the time. If your cycles discover something that would promote health but not be sufficiently profitable to manufacture, it's going into the file cabinet, not the marketplace.
Personally, even though these guys would pay me and SETI will just suck my bandwidth, I seriously doubt you'll find one of my boxes running any of these sims. (And I'm a med student, so I've got a vested interest in finding lots of new medical miracles.)
Why, you may ask, would I want to waste time looking for nonexistent little green men instead of helping the dying boy who had cancer but is now smothering under a heap of greeting cards?
Easy. We all know exactly what's going to happen when one of the simulations shows something interesting. It'll be snapped up and patented as soon as the data block hits their servers. You? You'll get a micropayment. If you're lucky, they'll mention your name. If you're the first one ever to find something useful, you'll get publicity shots. Royalties from the patent? Yeah, right. You run these screen savers and all you're doing is helping a greedy bastard get rich. (Yes, I'm sure there are some ethical and altruistic biomedical profiteers out there, but my observation is that they're mostly just bastards.)
The IP rush in biomedicine right now is scaring me. The prevailing regulatory attitude seems to be that life in general is just another resource to be locked up and exploited. I don't care how much they're paying per FLOP, I refuse to speed that process along.
I presume you're referring to the Dobelle Institute experiment. No. Color probably cannot be hacked in. The problem isn't the code on the device as much as it is the location of the electrodes. The electrodes in that man's brain can only do one thing: produce a small bright dot in a particular location. It'd take a completely different implant array to generate colors, and when your visual field consists of ten white dots, colors probably don't help much.
"25 more to go" is right. We may now know that the brain does things via contrast (although I think that's been strongly suspected for a while), but it's a long way from there to developing accurate vision algorithms, implementing those in hardware, designing an appropriate electrode array and a protocol for implanting it, doing animal trials, and then finding humans willing to be the first adopters. (Would you really be willing to let me implant an untested-in-humans device into your brain just to move from grayscale to color? Keep in mind that if the device does something bad, it could permanently damage your vision.)
You don't. We'll contact you if we have a use for you.
But you must admit AMD is getting the best of intel simply because intel has streched itself too far and isn't innovating any more.
You're wrong. They're still innovating. I know this for a fact, because the lab I work in at CMU has entered into a partnership with Intel to work on some pretty cutting-edge stuff. You'll notice that processors are starting to slip behind Moore's Law predictions. If this idea works, it'll get us back onto the doubling curve and maybe even beyond. Now, this is a university project which is just getting started up as some grad student's thesis, so it'll be at least a decade till it hits your motherboard, but Intel is not just doing the same old thing.
I know I'm being vague, but I can't exactly talk about the details. I don't know how much of the project (if any) is public knowledge; it's certainly not posted on our group's webpage. A few measly karma points aren't enough reward for me to risk getting in trouble for talking too much.
DNA is a polymer, so is collagen and both are found in the average Slashdot reader.
Point. I don't normally think of them when I think of polymers, but most biological macromolecules are indeed polymers. (I will point out, though, that most polymers with which the average person is familiar are not biological.)
Most plastics are made from petroleum, which formed from the decomposition of micro-organisms, so plastics are organic as well.
And? I believe I said that they were organic, but that they weren't normally found in living organisms, thus demonstrating that an organic is not equivalent to a biological.
Congratulations for stating the obvious. Assuming someone has had freshman high school biology, this should be pretty apparent.
Go look up the thread a few comments. Notice the people talking about lasers made from plants and biological nanotech. So much for apparent facts.
I actually didn't get given the "organic == carbon" fact until I took organic chem in college. Maybe you had it in freshman high school bio, but many people didn't.
And besides, this is Slashdot. Stating the obvious is generally necessary.
"Organic" does not mean it is made from a plant, or that it is somehow a natural material. The word "organic" is used here in the same context as "organic chemistry", and simply means that the chemicals and crystals under study contain carbon chains. Most of the molecules in living things are some kind of carbon structure with things hanging off of it; therefore, these kinds of molecules were declared the "organic" molecules. There are plenty of organic molecules which are never found in your body, though. Most plastics and polymers are organics. I suspect that the average Slashdot reader is not composed of Teflon.
(Given that this laser is based on a benzene derivative, it may be a compound one finds somewhere in nature, but I wouldn't bet on it.)
Oh? They claim part of the trouble was being hit by a DoS attack. Last I heard, Slashdot had recently set up a whole bunch of anti-DoS hardware and expanded its load-handling ability. Seems to me that would solve the load problem, though the troll problem remains.
If Slashdot is truly sorry about what happened, how about donating a bit of their shiny hyper-powered VA resources to temporarily host kuro5hin?
Well, I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect. I've never checked to see exactly how restrictive my settings could get (then again, I've got most of that stuff turned off anyway).
Yes, I know that "Trusted" sites could actually not be allowed to display anything beyond plain text, and you know that, but most ordinary users don't know that (IMHO).
I recognize that my failure to use my IE zones is probably a bit of silliness on my part, but in the end it doesn't matter; once you've got a Junkbuster running, you don't need the zones. That thing has massively improved my web experience.