This is all very nice, as long as there is only one authentication protocol/thingie. Id hate to have to carry around 5 different smartkeys, to fit in the three smartkey readers in my computer, and then being unable to connect to whatever because Im constipated and the voice recognition thinks I am OBL.
I dont know if the leaking was intentional or not, but if the show is any good it will probably help the ratings. Battlestar Galactica came out first in the UK, and probably became the single most Bittorrented tv show before it aired in the US, to excelent ratings. The creator of BSG asked fans *not* to download the show, because he feared people who downloaded it wouldnt bother to watch it on TV. What really happened is, the show is excelent, and the buzz generated by all the early viewing probably helped the ratings a lot. In Brazil BSG started airing this month, and a lot of people who wouldnt otherwise even know it existed are tuning in to a semi-obscure cable channel because of early viewing.
Of course, if a show is crap P2P will probably hurt the ratings.
In a rocket there are only two ways you can increase the Delta_v (i.e., the amount of velocity change it is able to effect). You either increase the amount of fuel (but this only increases the delta_v logarithmically, as added fuel makes the rocket heavier, thereby needing yet more fuel), or you can increase the speed of the exhaust it spews behind (which increases Delta_v linearly).
Chemical rockets can have only so much exhaust velocity, and the launching vehicles (which provides the bulk of the probes D_v, unless it uses some sort of gravity assist) would have to be exponentially larger to significantly increase D_v.
Nuclear rockets can get much hotter than ordinary chemical reaction chambers, so the exhaust speed is much larger. Ion engines in all flavors proposed so far also have very high exhaust speeds, but very little thrust (so it takes a long time at modest acceleration to get a good speed going). Solar sails get rid of reaction mass altogether (unless you count reflected photons), but is not practical beyond Mars or thereabouts.
I am sorry for digressing, but I hope you find this helpful.
Much (but not all) of the 'shut up and blindly follow any orders'
attitude on the part of the Red Army came from the political
imperative of keeping down the only force that could conceivably
threaten the power of the communist party. Hence the political
officers, who could on occasion overrule the regular officers.
After the initial shock of the invasion the soldiers in
the red army became very effective, parlty because in the
desperate times with national survival at stake some of the
totalitarian bullshit was swept aside. The political officers lost
their primacy, for instance, during the 1942 nazi offensive, IIRC.
And the individual soldiers either learned to think on their own,
or got killed.
It got to a point that, when the war was
nearly over, Stalin was quite alarmed (the red army and its
commanders, e.g., Zhukov*, being very and deservingly popular),
and moved quickly to reassert the political control over the army.
____________________
* All postwar soviet leaders felt threatned by Zhukov`s popularity. After the war he was sent to a far-off command where he could pose no threat to Stalin. he was briefly back in the center of power under Khrushchev, before being kicked out of the central comitee. He made one last public apearence with Brejhnev. The response was so overwhelming (people were clapping and banging on the table, yelling his name) he was sent back to retirement almost imediatly.
And so Snyder turned to TMS, in an attempt, as he says, ''to enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.''
The human brain evolved to give us hairless monkeys a competitive advantage in prehistorcal savanna. Many of the abilities we value (like mental arithmetics) are side benefits that would be of little help in those circunstances. So in a way it makes sense that someone with a 'damaged' brain (i.e., not working as it was meant to) may be better at said abilities, even though he would be a hopeless caveman.
Its like playing X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter. There are a dozen ships whirling around, yet you know instinctively what to do to avoid being clobbered. The curious thing is that you dont think of the ships as positioned in x-y-z axis (the 'logical' way according to old scifi flics). Instead, you think instinctively in semantic terms ("the A-Wing is behind the second TF to my right, the first TF is below me"), which for humans is far more efficient. A bit like the way chess players plan their moves without considering 10^6 variations.
IMO, The first 4 X-files seasons managed to balance `mythology` arcs with one-off monster-of-the-week episodes. There was a reasonable amount of character development thorughout (with some secondary ones becoming quite interesting), and the overall mood created by the writing, photography, etc was great.
Enterprise tried, and largely failed, to achieve all this (at least up to the 3rd season, I haven't watched the later seasons yet). They tried very hard to create the sense of dread/wanderlust of space exploration, but didn't manage to come up with an interesting mythology arc, and in general lacked engaging storylines.
Most great series 'brew' their characters & story over time to achieve some distinctive flavor. Enterprise had an interesting premise, but didn't really evolve, so it remained bland and uncooked.
I don't expect to be using a DVD player 10 or even 5 years from now. I suppose we could all buy all our movies all over again when another format which does not involve shiny little discs becomes standard, or keep two players (3 counting the VCR) hooked up. But I think consumers are entitled to something better.
Gates said that he's displeased with the process of political decisions on software patents in the european union. In particular, he seems to be unhappy about the successful opposition by many european IT companies and software developers.
Thid democracy thing is really a drag. He might want to consider outsorcing to North Korea.
You are right of course, the **AA are mouthpieces, but what is going on is a debate about the future of comercial music (where wallets, lawsuits and mouseclicks talking the loudest). The RIAA is the one presenting the arguments *for* rampant and intrusive DRM, so it is reasonable to direct our 'reply' to them. In the end of the day, this isn't about being against Sony or BMG, but rather against having sone dickhead telling us what to listen, when and how.
Here in Brazil Linux lacks some of its competitive advantages. It may be free, but so is Windows...
In most cities you can literaly go to a guy in a street corner and buy a pirated copy of Windows, Office or whatever for a few reais (or a music CD or DVD if you fancy it). Some times police make a big show of aprehending & destroying some CDs, but there has been no serious (i.e., consequential) crackdown AFAIK. Most people would consider the idea of paying $$$ for XP quite bizarre, so hardly anyone owns a legal copy. M$ makes money out of business & government. I dont think they expect to ever make money out of home users; but to have an installed base, legal or otherwise, is great for leveraging Windows to business ("Everyone uses it!").
I think the main impediment is the degradation of the solar panels. They generate less and less power, and eventualy there is not enough juice to run the rover. NASA shut down some non-essential instruments to lower the energy requirements some months ago. The tires should be ok, given the speed these things are driven;-).
The Voyagers had a similar problem with their thermonuclear batteries; it got to a point where they were generating less than 100 Watts (I think), and the JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.
Cassini was indeed lounched in 1997, after many years of delay. As for nuclear energy, it is indeed nuclear-powerered, but used conventional chemical propulsion to get to Saturn.
A probe like Cassini is about the best that can be done with chemical propulsion technology. It took billions and decades, to get it there. To really explore the Solar System (with sample returns or manned missions) what we need is more efficient propulsion, as well as cheap access to low earth orbit. There have been some nice recent experimental crafts with ion engines, and of course there is the X-prize thing, but my impression is that the getting there part is often overlooked because of all the sexy and interesting things there are in the doing part.
Dont get me wrong, Cassini & Huygens are brilliant, I just wish we had invested more effort into making this sort of mission fundamentally easier.
For another NP-complete problem Adleman et al. generated a small (40) number of sequences (equivalent to one for each city in the TS problem), and let them self-assemble randomly into a much larger number (1 048 576) of candidate answers (equivalent to paths in TS). See the link in Pragones post above for details.
I suppose this can be scaled up in a a working computer so as to have some 1000 seed sequences generating all those billions and billions of sequences I so Carl Sagan-ly mentioned.
IANA Molecular Biologist, so correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me these prices apply only to specific sequences of base pairs. You can stay in the black by generating semi-random sequences. I have no idea how to solve the cross-reactive problem you mentioned, but this apparently was sorted out as well.
Thanks for the link. The DNA sorts out this NP-Hard problem by doing massively parallel classical computing in a test tube (putting Google to shame). The other cool way of solving NP stuff (like factoring large numbers) effectively is quantum computing, which is different in a pretty fundamental way (but also off-topic).
There has been some discussion about using DNA as a massively parallel computer. Suppose you encode data in a DNA sequence (input), then somehow act on it (running a program), and then read the resulting altered DNA. You have a computer, albeit somewhat slow and not terribly practical. Now imagine you start with not one but *billions* of different DNA sequences.You "run" the program over all these inputs simultaneously, and obtain billions of possible outputs. You can then use some chemical tag that binds itself to the 'correct' answer. You now have a massively parallel computer with negligible power consumption in a test tube.
This sort of DNA computer could be useful for a number of problems that involve a lot of trial and error, such as protein folding. In a paper some years ago some scientist managed to solve a traveling salesman problem using one such computer. They generated different strands corresponding to each city, and let them mix in a tube randomly to produce different candidate 'paths'. Then, they used some chemical selector (the tricky part) to eliminate the strands corresponding to invalid paths. Left in the tube were all valid paths, which could then be easily replicated using PCR.
I couldn't find the original paper, but a pretty good explanation can be found here
Yours is a good point. Holding an aussie-only PC is very unfair and patronizing. But it seems the guy who is actually sitting on the bones was not at all involved in the research (no one expected it to lead to such a groundbraking discovery). I'd like to know what the Indonesians who actualy took part think about this.
BTW, this Rokus Due Awe guy you mentioned is a co-author in both Nature papers. The first authors are Australian. I have no way of judging how fair this is.
Miraón Lahr M. Nature, 431. 1043 - 1044 (2004).
Brown P., Sutikna T., Morwood M. J., Soejono R. P., Jatmiko , Wayhu Saptomo E. & Rokus Awe Due R. Nature, 431. 1055 - 1061 (2004)..
Morwood M. J., Soejono R. P., Roberts R. G., Sutikna T., Turney C. S. M., Westaway K. E., Rink W. J., Van Den Bergh G. D., Rokus G. D., Rokus Awe Due , Hobbs D. R., Moore M. W., Bird M. I. & Fifield L. K. Nature, 431. 1087 - 1091 (2004).
"If I remember correctly, the finding of the new Hobbit species was discredited as a "dwarf" mutant of a long-discovered human ancestor. Was this discrediting discredited itself?"
Most paleontologist believe this is a new species. The bones (they aren't even fossilised!) were found by an Australian/Indonesian team that was originaly lookng for evidence of the people who first colonized Australia. Apparently a bigshot Indonesian paleontologist got pissed of by being left out (some scientific bigshots expect to get their names papers without having to actually do any work), and then...
One of Indonesia's leading palaeontologists, Professor Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University in Jakarta, has grabbed the hobbit remains and locked them away in his safe, refusing to let other scientists study them.
In addition, he rejected the widespread view that the hobbits are a separate human species, claiming they are a pygmy form of modern humans who suffered microcephaly, a disorder that produces a small brain.
The Australian scientists who dug up the bones of the hobbits, officially dubbed Homo floresiensis, have pleaded with Professor Jacob to return the bones as they may contain vital DNA clues as to their exact ancestry. The seven skeletons were found last year in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores by an Australian and Indonesian team.
You get to know/.rs by their references. We've had so far:
- H.P. Lovecraft (could also mention Cthonians, btw)
- HG Wells' the time machine (we'll all move to the basement err.. underground and forget what sunlight is like. It is happening already.
- JRR Tolkien (we'll dig too deep and wake the Balrog, that as we all know does *not* have wings.
We could also mention Zion (the Machine will track us down!), just for completeness sake.
This is not about promoting research. Most people think (with some reason that spying agencias like GCHQ are somewhat creepy. So they promote a nice and cuddly puzzle contest as if to say 'Look, we are just regular guys who like to have some fun and read other countries' diplomatic mail every now and then'.
"While this is totally true I think it is worth mentioning that it is much less resiliant than the cities with wi-fi."
I agree, a network is intrinsically more robust than a single hub. But in practice the network must provide multiple pathways of communication between each two points, or a failure in one node may split the network in two. If the floaters can be made redundant (say, 3 per city, but being able to function with 2), it should be resilient enough for most purposes.
>>I really don't think this will be all that good. First of all, I don't know a whole lot about >>satellite transmission, but I know it's a lot slower than standard internet technology.
These things will be much closer (by a factor of 1000) than satelites, so they should be competitive speedwise, and use far less power to transmit. Theyll also cover a much smaller area each, and thus allow for more bandwidth
>> someone will still have to have a physical presense sooner or later to fix something or
>> install new hardware.
Satellites dont need (or are able to receive) maintenence. nd in any case these things should be able to be floated down for repairs
>>Also, how much is this going to cost?
A lot, but far less than sattelites. My guess is that it will be comparable to a 3G mobile network.
>>Furthermore, I think the reliability will be rather low. I don't know why, but I just have a
>>bad feeling about tons of servers and equipment suspended in the air.
Well, the stratosphere is a reasonably quiet place, with no changing weather. It is far above commercial planes. I thinks they can use ionic engines for station keeping. These are reliable (years of continuous use) and low consumption.
>>I think it will be more productive, cheap, and reliable to use lots of inexpensive 802.11
>>equipment.
I think covering entire cities with wi-fi (with all ensuing basing concessions and line of sigth issues) would be more unpractical than having one or two stratospheric blimps floating above.
On the other hand, if this new AOL browser is really good, it to some extent undermines Firefox, which suposedly AOL wants to suceed. Either way, I dont see the logic behind this decision.
Slashdot Mirror
This is all very nice, as long as there is only one authentication protocol/thingie. Id hate to have to carry around 5 different smartkeys, to fit in the three smartkey readers in my computer, and then being unable to connect to whatever because Im constipated and the voice recognition thinks I am OBL.
I dont know if the leaking was intentional or not, but if the show is any good it will probably help the ratings. Battlestar Galactica came out first in the UK, and probably became the single most Bittorrented tv show before it aired in the US, to excelent ratings. The creator of BSG asked fans *not* to download the show, because he feared people who downloaded it wouldnt bother to watch it on TV. What really happened is, the show is excelent, and the buzz generated by all the early viewing probably helped the ratings a lot. In Brazil BSG started airing this month, and a lot of people who wouldnt otherwise even know it existed are tuning in to a semi-obscure cable channel because of early viewing.
Of course, if a show is crap P2P will probably hurt the ratings.
In a rocket there are only two ways you can increase the Delta_v (i.e., the amount of velocity change it is able to effect). You either increase the amount of fuel (but this only increases the delta_v logarithmically, as added fuel makes the rocket heavier, thereby needing yet more fuel), or you can increase the speed of the exhaust it spews behind (which increases Delta_v linearly).
Chemical rockets can have only so much exhaust velocity, and the launching vehicles (which provides the bulk of the probes D_v, unless it uses some sort of gravity assist) would have to be exponentially larger to significantly increase D_v.
Nuclear rockets can get much hotter than ordinary chemical reaction chambers, so the exhaust speed is much larger. Ion engines in all flavors proposed so far also have very high exhaust speeds, but very little thrust (so it takes a long time at modest acceleration to get a good speed going). Solar sails get rid of reaction mass altogether (unless you count reflected photons), but is not practical beyond Mars or thereabouts.
I am sorry for digressing, but I hope you find this helpful.
Much (but not all) of the 'shut up and blindly follow any orders' attitude on the part of the Red Army came from the political imperative of keeping down the only force that could conceivably threaten the power of the communist party. Hence the political officers, who could on occasion overrule the regular officers.
After the initial shock of the invasion the soldiers in the red army became very effective, parlty because in the desperate times with national survival at stake some of the totalitarian bullshit was swept aside. The political officers lost their primacy, for instance, during the 1942 nazi offensive, IIRC. And the individual soldiers either learned to think on their own, or got killed.
It got to a point that, when the war was nearly over, Stalin was quite alarmed (the red army and its commanders, e.g., Zhukov*, being very and deservingly popular), and moved quickly to reassert the political control over the army.
____________________
* All postwar soviet leaders felt threatned by Zhukov`s popularity. After the war he was sent to a far-off command where he could pose no threat to Stalin. he was briefly back in the center of power under Khrushchev, before being kicked out of the central comitee. He made one last public apearence with Brejhnev. The response was so overwhelming (people were clapping and banging on the table, yelling his name) he was sent back to retirement almost imediatly.
This guy makes me pround of being human ;-).
The human brain evolved to give us hairless monkeys a competitive advantage in prehistorcal savanna. Many of the abilities we value (like mental arithmetics) are side benefits that would be of little help in those circunstances. So in a way it makes sense that someone with a 'damaged' brain (i.e., not working as it was meant to) may be better at said abilities, even though he would be a hopeless caveman.
Its like playing X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter. There are a dozen ships whirling around, yet you know instinctively what to do to avoid being clobbered. The curious thing is that you dont think of the ships as positioned in x-y-z axis (the 'logical' way according to old scifi flics). Instead, you think instinctively in semantic terms ("the A-Wing is behind the second TF to my right, the first TF is below me"), which for humans is far more efficient. A bit like the way chess players plan their moves without considering 10^6 variations.
IMO, The first 4 X-files seasons managed to balance `mythology` arcs with one-off monster-of-the-week episodes. There was a reasonable amount of character development thorughout (with some secondary ones becoming quite interesting), and the overall mood created by the writing, photography, etc was great.
Enterprise tried, and largely failed, to achieve all this (at least up to the 3rd season, I haven't watched the later seasons yet). They tried very hard to create the sense of dread/wanderlust of space exploration, but didn't manage to come up with an interesting mythology arc, and in general lacked engaging storylines.
Most great series 'brew' their characters & story over time to achieve some distinctive flavor. Enterprise had an interesting premise, but didn't really evolve, so it remained bland and uncooked.
I don't expect to be using a DVD player 10 or even 5 years from now. I suppose we could all buy all our movies all over again when another format which does not involve shiny little discs becomes standard, or keep two players (3 counting the VCR) hooked up. But I think consumers are entitled to something better.
Thid democracy thing is really a drag. He might want to consider outsorcing to North Korea.
You are right of course, the **AA are mouthpieces, but what is going on is a debate about the future of comercial music (where wallets, lawsuits and mouseclicks talking the loudest). The RIAA is the one presenting the arguments *for* rampant and intrusive DRM, so it is reasonable to direct our 'reply' to them. In the end of the day, this isn't about being against Sony or BMG, but rather against having sone dickhead telling us what to listen, when and how.
IANAL, and proud of it.
Here in Brazil Linux lacks some of its competitive advantages. It may be free, but so is Windows...
In most cities you can literaly go to a guy in a street corner and buy a pirated copy of Windows, Office or whatever for a few reais (or a music CD or DVD if you fancy it). Some times police make a big show of aprehending & destroying some CDs, but there has been no serious (i.e., consequential) crackdown AFAIK. Most people would consider the idea of paying $$$ for XP quite bizarre, so hardly anyone owns a legal copy. M$ makes money out of business & government. I dont think they expect to ever make money out of home users; but to have an installed base, legal or otherwise, is great for leveraging Windows to business ("Everyone uses it!").
I think the main impediment is the degradation of the solar panels. They generate less and less power, and eventualy there is not enough juice to run the rover. NASA shut down some non-essential instruments to lower the energy requirements some months ago. The tires should be ok, given the speed these things are driven ;-).
The Voyagers had a similar problem with their thermonuclear batteries; it got to a point where they were generating less than 100 Watts (I think), and the JPL guys were (and are) doing miracles to keep the craft functional.
Cassini was indeed lounched in 1997, after many years of delay. As for nuclear energy, it is indeed nuclear-powerered, but used conventional chemical propulsion to get to Saturn.
A probe like Cassini is about the best that can be done with chemical propulsion technology. It took billions and decades, to get it there. To really explore the Solar System (with sample returns or manned missions) what we need is more efficient propulsion, as well as cheap access to low earth orbit. There have been some nice recent experimental crafts with ion engines, and of course there is the X-prize thing, but my impression is that the getting there part is often overlooked because of all the sexy and interesting things there are in the doing part.
Dont get me wrong, Cassini & Huygens are brilliant, I just wish we had invested more effort into making this sort of mission fundamentally easier.
Merry Christmas All!
For another NP-complete problem Adleman et al. generated a small (40) number of sequences (equivalent to one for each city in the TS problem), and let them self-assemble randomly into a much larger number (1 048 576) of candidate answers (equivalent to paths in TS). See the link in Pragones post above for details.
I suppose this can be scaled up in a a working computer so as to have some 1000 seed sequences generating all those billions and billions of sequences I so Carl Sagan-ly mentioned.
IANA Molecular Biologist, so correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me these prices apply only to specific sequences of base pairs. You can stay in the black by generating semi-random sequences. I have no idea how to solve the cross-reactive problem you mentioned, but this apparently was sorted out as well.
Thanks for the link. The DNA sorts out this NP-Hard problem by doing massively parallel classical computing in a test tube (putting Google to shame). The other cool way of solving NP stuff (like factoring large numbers) effectively is quantum computing, which is different in a pretty fundamental way (but also off-topic).
There has been some discussion about using DNA as a massively parallel computer. Suppose you encode data in a DNA sequence (input), then somehow act on it (running a program), and then read the resulting altered DNA. You have a computer, albeit somewhat slow and not terribly practical. Now imagine you start with not one but *billions* of different DNA sequences.You "run" the program over all these inputs simultaneously, and obtain billions of possible outputs. You can then use some chemical tag that binds itself to the 'correct' answer. You now have a massively parallel computer with negligible power consumption in a test tube.
This sort of DNA computer could be useful for a number of problems that involve a lot of trial and error, such as protein folding. In a paper some years ago some scientist managed to solve a traveling salesman problem using one such computer. They generated different strands corresponding to each city, and let them mix in a tube randomly to produce different candidate 'paths'. Then, they used some chemical selector (the tricky part) to eliminate the strands corresponding to invalid paths. Left in the tube were all valid paths, which could then be easily replicated using PCR.
I couldn't find the original paper, but a pretty good explanation can be found here
BTW, this Rokus Due Awe guy you mentioned is a co-author in both Nature papers. The first authors are Australian. I have no way of judging how fair this is.
Most paleontologist believe this is a new species. The bones (they aren't even fossilised!) were found by an Australian/Indonesian team that was originaly lookng for evidence of the people who first colonized Australia. Apparently a bigshot Indonesian paleontologist got pissed of by being left out (some scientific bigshots expect to get their names papers without having to actually do any work), and then...
You get to know /.rs by their references. We've had so far:
- H.P. Lovecraft (could also mention Cthonians, btw)
- HG Wells' the time machine (we'll all move to the basement err.. underground and forget what sunlight is like. It is happening already.
- JRR Tolkien (we'll dig too deep and wake the Balrog, that as we all know does *not* have wings.
We could also mention Zion (the Machine will track us down!), just for completeness sake.
This is not about promoting research. Most people think (with some reason that spying agencias like GCHQ are somewhat creepy. So they promote a nice and cuddly puzzle contest as if to say 'Look, we are just regular guys who like to have some fun and read other countries' diplomatic mail every now and then'.
Reminds me a bit of the CIA Homepage for Kids , but not nearly as weird.
"While this is totally true I think it is worth mentioning that it is much less resiliant than the cities with wi-fi."
I agree, a network is intrinsically more robust than a single hub. But in practice the network must provide multiple pathways of communication between each two points, or a failure in one node may split the network in two. If the floaters can be made redundant (say, 3 per city, but being able to function with 2), it should be resilient enough for most purposes.
>>I really don't think this will be all that good. First of all, I don't know a whole lot about
>>satellite transmission, but I know it's a lot slower than standard internet technology.
These things will be much closer (by a factor of 1000) than satelites, so they should be competitive speedwise, and use far less power to transmit. Theyll also cover a much smaller area each, and thus allow for more bandwidth
>> someone will still have to have a physical presense sooner or later to fix something or
>> install new hardware.
Satellites dont need (or are able to receive) maintenence. nd in any case these things should be able to be floated down for repairs
>>Also, how much is this going to cost?
A lot, but far less than sattelites. My guess is that it will be comparable to a 3G mobile network.
>>Furthermore, I think the reliability will be rather low. I don't know why, but I just have a
>>bad feeling about tons of servers and equipment suspended in the air.
Well, the stratosphere is a reasonably quiet place, with no changing weather. It is far above commercial planes. I thinks they can use ionic engines for station keeping. These are reliable (years of continuous use) and low consumption.
>>I think it will be more productive, cheap, and reliable to use lots of inexpensive 802.11
>>equipment.
I think covering entire cities with wi-fi (with all ensuing basing concessions and line of sigth issues) would be more unpractical than having one or two stratospheric blimps floating above.
On the other hand, if this new AOL browser is really good, it to some extent undermines Firefox, which suposedly AOL wants to suceed. Either way, I dont see the logic behind this decision.