Yes, it's always been seemed, from a layman's point of view (mine), that there's this "junk" DNA that does nothing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that much of it is important.
However, it would be wrong to assume that *everything* in the body is there because it serves some purpose. There are clear cases in biology of remnant structures which don't serve any purpose in the animal's (or plant, for that matter) current environment.
Picking out the ABC as "the first digital computer" seems a little odd. It's clearly important, but it's hardly the one I'd pick out as "the first computer" if I had to nominate one. That'd probably have to still be ENIAC (first Turing-complete computer designed and used as such). But seeing that they're crediting cellphones as being invented in 1947, surely Babbage should get the credit for his designs of the Analytical engine in the 19th century?
Not to mention that Fleming shared the Nobel Prize for the "creation of penicillin" with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who actually figured out how to isolate and produce it in quantity. Fleming's contribution was noticing the effect that mould had on bacteria, but he didn't take things any further.
They got a small royalty on every burger sold. That small royalty really started to add up over the years:)
Simplification for the general public
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Web Enabled Spacecraft
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I think the point is that they're going to use TCP/IP as the basic communication protocol between the satellite and the ground. I think FTP was basically a "for-instance" they were using to describethe type of thing they would use - but, then again, there's no reason why they couldn't run an FTP server on the satellite for retrieving data (though I'd run SCP methinks...)
Conceivably, you could even control the satellite by ssh'ing into it and running various command-line apps. If you wanted to be really cute, run a web server on the satellite and make it controllable with web forms... but that strikes me as just a little over-elaborate:)
For security purposes, they mention using "standard commercial applications" to encrypt the link. Presumably that means they're running a VPN of some description. As an additional security measure, you'd presumably want to hide the thing behind a firewall and give it a non-global IP address (somewhere in the 192.168.*.*'s, presumably) so that it simply can't be reached from the wider internet, and then (if it was *really* necessary) set the firewall up so that the appropriate people can tunnel through.
Actually, it would be interesting if we could get a/. interview with one of the people behind this satellite (and grill them about their security measures). Roblimo, are you listening?
Pioneer has a plaque on it which shows the location of the Sun relative to the nearest dozen pulsars, and a diagram of the solar system with the third planet highlighted.
The odds of it ever being found are, well, pretty damn long, but the map is there.
Seeing Linda Hamilton is James Cameron's ex-wife, and they had a daughter together, I'm sure the alimony and child support constitute a pretty good living...
I'd imagine that, even if she's not super-rich, she's in a position where she could live a very comfortable lifestyle for the rest of her life without working another day.
So were the Spruce Goose, the Titanic, the NSU Ro80, and a bunch of other interesting things.
I recall a comment by an astronomer that went something like "stars are like people. You learn something from the well-behaved ones, but you get a lot more information the ones that go off the rails". The same thing can often apply to engineered structures.
It seems to me that this is a rather narrowly-focussed attempt to stop spam. Could the SMTP protocol be changed, for instance, to make life more difficult for spammers?
One idea that occurred to me was requiring the sender to do some nontrivial computation (for instance, the receiving mail server sends the product of two (large, but not RSA-large) primes, which the sender must factor and include with the message to be accepted.
Now, unfortunately, such a scheme has some problems. The huge variation in performance between machines out there means any computation substantial enough to crimp a spammer might cause grandma's 486 to become unusable for sending email. More to the point, it could greatly increase the cost of running webmail services (not to mention mailing lists). Now, the big webmail providers might be prepared to play along - they might even build some dedicated hardware for the purpose of running the protocol fast. However, there's nothing to stop spammers building exactly the same kind of hardware, enabling them to continue to send out spam by the bucketload!
So, anyway, I don't think my idea is the answer, but surely the whole area of improved mail protocol design would be worth exploring.
ISS keeps many people employed, but a lot of those bright folks could find work on other projects.
You're assuming that if the ISS was canned, all of the money would be redirected to other NASA projects. That's not necessarily the case. Tax cuts and new weapons systems (when the US's military superiority over the rest of the world is already so overwhelming to be almost ridiculous) seem to be the Republican priorities. Not to say anything would be better under the Democrats - they'd throw the money at subsidising drugs for old people.
On my quick browse through, perhaps the most interesting idea was the one on murder rates.
Basically, murder rates have remained essentially static over the past few decades, while other types of crime such as assaults have become more common. Why are murders different?
The hypothesis is that improvements in medical treatment have meant that people who would otherwise have died of injuries are now surviving, and thus the murder rate has gone down. Evidence includes the fact there was a decline in the murder rate in the years after the Vietnam War, where improvements in trauma surgery made their way back into the civilian health system.
I don't know if it's true or not, but it's certainly an interesting, plausible, and quite disturbing idea.
I'm not really up with the history, but wasn't your good friend and mine Richard Nixon largely responsible for cutting the program, amongst the other acts of bastardry committed in his name?
That's true. According to the book I've got, the CPU of CSIRAC was synchronized to the mercury delay lines, which completed a cycle in about 1 millisecond, so I suppose you could call the clock rate 1 kHz. Each instruction took either 2, 3, or 4 memory cycles to execute (the initial design had every instruction take 4 cycles, but an improved control unit design took advantage of cases where that wasn't necessary). Hence, the machine ran at about 500 instructions per second.
I wouldn't get too excited about CSIRAC's reliability. The memory in particular had a pretty high error rate, so they often ran programs twice and compared the results to make sure they got the same answer...
On one occasion, they gave a demo to an organisation called the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), but apparently a memory error occurred and the thing printed "CSIRAC welcomes the members of the IRA):)
According to my book on CSIRAC, the initial time for each instruction was 2 millisecond (which would give a "clock speed" of 500 hz), and was speed up to 1 millisecond per instruction (1000 Hz) in 1962.
Of course, by 1962 CSIRAC was years behind the state of the art.
Though CSIRAC is still basically complete, it will never be turned on again. To get it working again would require much wiring to be fixed and a whole bunch of vacuum tubes to be replaced - otherwise, it would be a huge fire risk. However, in the process, you'd destroy much of the historical value of the thing. There's not much point to turning it on again anyway. An emulator was written for it some time ago, and all the old programs that could be located have been transferred and can now be run on the emulator. Ah, the wonders of the Church-Turing thesis...
As I understand it, the music was recorded by building a replica of the sound hardware and connecting it to the emulator. People who heard the music have confirmed it sounds pretty much like the original in 1955 (IIRC, it was around that time).
Perhaps the coolest thing that they did with CSIRAC was build a HLL and compiler for it, which they called Autocoder IIRC. It looked like a cross between FORTRAN and BASIC and avoided some of the thinkos of FORTRAN, as far as I could tell.
CSIRAC is now permanently on display at the museum in Melbourne, Australia. It's the only complete, original machine of its generation in existence, and well worth a look if you come down our way. There is also a book on CSIRAC called "The Last of the first", which is a fascinating read if you can get your hands on a copy.
One of my university lecturers, Peter Thorne, got his start in computers as an operator for the machine. He met his wife there - she was a fellow computer operator!
The BSD license basically says that "Provided you acknowledge you've used our code, you can do *anything* you like with it". That includes including it in closed source apps.
is that Australian defamation laws are considerably stricter than, say, the United States. That's why Gutnick is trying to sue here rather than there.
The other point to be made here is that the High Court's ruling is not on a constitutional issue. Therefore, whilst it may not affect this case, it's quite possible that Australian laws may be passed in the future that explicitly define where something is published with regards to the internet.
Exactly how that definition *should* be worded is worthy of some discussion, also...
He wrote a couple of columns in the Australian papers after a recent shooting (guy in a university tutorial went psycho) and the consequent push to tighten laws on handguns further. His argument was that the (incremental) rises in crime over the past few years were due to the tightening of Australia's gun laws.
He didn't bother to do any research about Australian history. Urban Australians have *never* owned handguns (or long guns for that matter) en masse, and the laws on handguns were already quite restrictive (nobody can carry a concealed weapon, for instance) so attributing a rise in crime to the changes in gun laws making criminals more cocky was a complete nonsense. He also ignored the fact that around the same time a glut of heroin arrived in Oz, pretty much coinciding with the rise in crime - a far more reasonable explanation.
Doesn't give me any confidence in his supposed impartiality.
After the "joys" of a colonoscopy (particularly the preparation) one would have to say that it's something you want to put off until it's medically necessary. You'd have to be a sick puppy to have one just for the fun of it...
However, it is kind of fun coming out of the sedative-induced haze. I wanna take those drugs home with me:)
In this 1999 Salon article, there's a discussion of how some marketing droids have tried using hypnotism to figure out people's emotional responses to various brands.
Personally, I'd consider prostitution before I'd led a marketing guy anywhere near my subconcious mind...
Australia experimented with cloud seeding in the past, with mixed success. Basically, if there ain't no moisture in the atmosphere, you can dump as much silver iodide into the atmosphere as you want, but you still won't get rain.
That's why this new idea is interesting - it's an attempt to actually add moisture to the atmosphere.
I know the ISS is a multi-billion-dollar make-work scheme for NASA and the Russian space agency, and Tom Cruise's narration really annoyed me, but that movie was the most visually stunning imagery I've ever seen.
I wonder could you fit IMAX 3D cameras on the next Mars lander?:)
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However, it would be wrong to assume that *everything* in the body is there because it serves some purpose. There are clear cases in biology of remnant structures which don't serve any purpose in the animal's (or plant, for that matter) current environment.
Not to mention that Fleming shared the Nobel Prize for the "creation of penicillin" with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who actually figured out how to isolate and produce it in quantity. Fleming's contribution was noticing the effect that mould had on bacteria, but he didn't take things any further.
They got a small royalty on every burger sold. That small royalty really started to add up over the years :)
Conceivably, you could even control the satellite by ssh'ing into it and running various command-line apps. If you wanted to be really cute, run a web server on the satellite and make it controllable with web forms... but that strikes me as just a little over-elaborate :)
For security purposes, they mention using "standard commercial applications" to encrypt the link. Presumably that means they're running a VPN of some description. As an additional security measure, you'd presumably want to hide the thing behind a firewall and give it a non-global IP address (somewhere in the 192.168.*.*'s, presumably) so that it simply can't be reached from the wider internet, and then (if it was *really* necessary) set the firewall up so that the appropriate people can tunnel through.
Actually, it would be interesting if we could get a /. interview with one of the people behind this satellite (and grill them about their security measures). Roblimo, are you listening?
The odds of it ever being found are, well, pretty damn long, but the map is there.
I'd imagine that, even if she's not super-rich, she's in a position where she could live a very comfortable lifestyle for the rest of her life without working another day.
I recall a comment by an astronomer that went something like "stars are like people. You learn something from the well-behaved ones, but you get a lot more information the ones that go off the rails". The same thing can often apply to engineered structures.
One idea that occurred to me was requiring the sender to do some nontrivial computation (for instance, the receiving mail server sends the product of two (large, but not RSA-large) primes, which the sender must factor and include with the message to be accepted.
Now, unfortunately, such a scheme has some problems. The huge variation in performance between machines out there means any computation substantial enough to crimp a spammer might cause grandma's 486 to become unusable for sending email. More to the point, it could greatly increase the cost of running webmail services (not to mention mailing lists). Now, the big webmail providers might be prepared to play along - they might even build some dedicated hardware for the purpose of running the protocol fast. However, there's nothing to stop spammers building exactly the same kind of hardware, enabling them to continue to send out spam by the bucketload!
So, anyway, I don't think my idea is the answer, but surely the whole area of improved mail protocol design would be worth exploring.
You're assuming that if the ISS was canned, all of the money would be redirected to other NASA projects. That's not necessarily the case. Tax cuts and new weapons systems (when the US's military superiority over the rest of the world is already so overwhelming to be almost ridiculous) seem to be the Republican priorities. Not to say anything would be better under the Democrats - they'd throw the money at subsidising drugs for old people.
Two British parents immediately ensures that whilst you might know the rules of cricket, the skills and tactics of the game are totally beyond you...
Basically, murder rates have remained essentially static over the past few decades, while other types of crime such as assaults have become more common. Why are murders different?
The hypothesis is that improvements in medical treatment have meant that people who would otherwise have died of injuries are now surviving, and thus the murder rate has gone down. Evidence includes the fact there was a decline in the murder rate in the years after the Vietnam War, where improvements in trauma surgery made their way back into the civilian health system.
I don't know if it's true or not, but it's certainly an interesting, plausible, and quite disturbing idea.
I'm not really up with the history, but wasn't your good friend and mine Richard Nixon largely responsible for cutting the program, amongst the other acts of bastardry committed in his name?
That's true. According to the book I've got, the CPU of CSIRAC was synchronized to the mercury delay lines, which completed a cycle in about 1 millisecond, so I suppose you could call the clock rate 1 kHz. Each instruction took either 2, 3, or 4 memory cycles to execute (the initial design had every instruction take 4 cycles, but an improved control unit design took advantage of cases where that wasn't necessary). Hence, the machine ran at about 500 instructions per second.
On one occasion, they gave a demo to an organisation called the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), but apparently a memory error occurred and the thing printed "CSIRAC welcomes the members of the IRA) :)
The actual hardware is dead, but as I've said elsewhere an emulator does exist and many of the old programs have been recorded.
Of course, by 1962 CSIRAC was years behind the state of the art.
As I understand it, the music was recorded by building a replica of the sound hardware and connecting it to the emulator. People who heard the music have confirmed it sounds pretty much like the original in 1955 (IIRC, it was around that time).
Perhaps the coolest thing that they did with CSIRAC was build a HLL and compiler for it, which they called Autocoder IIRC. It looked like a cross between FORTRAN and BASIC and avoided some of the thinkos of FORTRAN, as far as I could tell.
CSIRAC is now permanently on display at the museum in Melbourne, Australia. It's the only complete, original machine of its generation in existence, and well worth a look if you come down our way. There is also a book on CSIRAC called "The Last of the first", which is a fascinating read if you can get your hands on a copy.
One of my university lecturers, Peter Thorne, got his start in computers as an operator for the machine. He met his wife there - she was a fellow computer operator!
The BSD license basically says that "Provided you acknowledge you've used our code, you can do *anything* you like with it". That includes including it in closed source apps.
The other point to be made here is that the High Court's ruling is not on a constitutional issue. Therefore, whilst it may not affect this case, it's quite possible that Australian laws may be passed in the future that explicitly define where something is published with regards to the internet.
Exactly how that definition *should* be worded is worthy of some discussion, also...
He didn't bother to do any research about Australian history. Urban Australians have *never* owned handguns (or long guns for that matter) en masse, and the laws on handguns were already quite restrictive (nobody can carry a concealed weapon, for instance) so attributing a rise in crime to the changes in gun laws making criminals more cocky was a complete nonsense. He also ignored the fact that around the same time a glut of heroin arrived in Oz, pretty much coinciding with the rise in crime - a far more reasonable explanation.
Doesn't give me any confidence in his supposed impartiality.
However, it is kind of fun coming out of the sedative-induced haze. I wanna take those drugs home with me :)
Personally, I'd consider prostitution before I'd led a marketing guy anywhere near my subconcious mind...
Both of those problems are assuming you use live actors. I think Ender's game would be much easier to make as a CG film.
That's why this new idea is interesting - it's an attempt to actually add moisture to the atmosphere.
I wonder could you fit IMAX 3D cameras on the next Mars lander? :)