There are many different forms of nuclear propulsion. One example is using a reactor to provide electrical energy to power a plasma propulsion system. This is how the VASIMR system works (adastrarocket.com). Another technique is to use microscopic pellets of fissile material and electron beams to compress the pellets to critical density to produce fission, to heat a very small reaction mass (e.g., water or hydrogen) to a very high temperature, generating a large impulse from very little reaction mass. The electron beam system for this is about the size of a refrigerator: the beam energies required are very achievable. This approach has the advantage that it can generate a very high thrust for a long period. The only technical challenge is controlling the plasma, but the VASIMR systems shows that that is possible. A third, widely popularized method, is to explode atomic bombs behind a very large ablative plate. This is the least feasible technique, yet somehow it has remained in the public discussion and has been depicted in several movies (e.g., Deep Impact). Other techniques, which have been used since the 60s, include nuclear batteries to power an ion engine, using small but continuous trust.
The pellet implosion technique is the most promising, but it can only be used beyond the atmosphere because it releases radioactivity. However, for an interplanetary vehicle that is boarded from orbit, this is not a problem.
Fusion is an exciting possibility, but it is far off, and it is not needed to achieve interplanetary travel.
I agree with you. I think that the space station was essentially a program championed by the aerospace contractors to keep the gravy train rolling after the Apollo program was canceled. The ISS was a huge waste of money. Big, inefficient projects to create things that had already been invented during Apollo. The Space Shuttle was a similar waste of money.
Instead of spending money on these mundane things, NASA should have been pushing the envelope in new propulsion systems. Yet, almost all of that research got canceled during the 70s. Now it is reviving, after we have lost 40 years.
You make a good point. Perhaps there is a way to separate education and research.
But let's remember that the benefit to a university of having leading edge researchers is that they can teach graduate students who want to study under someone prominent. Further, the notoriety and credibility associated with having prominent researchers - as well as prolific and smart graduate students - enhances the appeal of the university for both research as well as advanced instruction.
Perhaps undergraduate education is appropriate for wikipedia-ization. For graduate studies, it am less inclined to think so.
Universities that sponsor research provide a more important function than teaching. Fundamental research is not done well by private industry. Throughout history the arts and the sciences have always needed benefactors. This is still true today. A professor in a science is paid to perform research with no known benefit. Such research is extremely important, because fundamental research seldom has a known benefit. However, eventually benefits become apparent, much later. Private industry does not like to sponsor fundamental research for this reason because the ROI is unclear. That leaves universities with NSF grants. A wikipedia-like university would not be able to pay scientist professors, since the assumption is that work would be volunteer. Then who would pay for the salaries of these highly skilled people as well as the research labs?
I remember leafing through the book "The Science of Star Trek", and thinking that the author simply did not have much imagination. For example, the author assumed that a "transporter" would have to "scan" all of one's atoms, in the way that a fax machine scans a piece of paper. Yet, if teleportation is possible, it probably does not involve scanning: it probably involves some kind of quantum entanglement mechanism - and even that assumption is based on the very limited understanding that we have today of how things work and what the universe is made of.
The fact is, the universe's fabric is so bizarre that we probably cannot imagine how a future race might be able to travel near the speed of light, or at it - or perhaps even beyond it. Going from one place to another might not even involve "travel" as we think of it.
So to dismiss anything at this point is pointless.
However, the point about the vastness of the solar system - and the space between solar systems at that - is very well taken. It is beyond comprehension.
Perhaps when it becomes possible to traverse these distances in some manner, humans will no longer exist in their current form; perhaps we will have long since merged with machines and become something so different from what we are today that we cannot even imagine it.
If a Windows machine had 48 cores, 47 of them would be running viruses, spyware, and anti-virus/anti-spyware software and one would be running the user's applications.
I had a NeXT color work station w/ a 21 inch monitor, surfing the web with omniweb browser. It was slow, running with 12 megs of ram. For $205 dollars I purchased a 4 meg ram stick through BestBuy and went to 16 megs of ram. Golly was that fast! NeXT Step 3.2 was a more elegant Desk top than OS X. I have a Mac Book running 10.5.8 with two gigs of Ram and I am not a geek by any stretch, yet that NextStep 3.2 graphical user interface was marvelous. The best!!
This brings up an interesting point: How large was Next Step? And how large is today's OS X? And what do we really get for all that? And how fast was the Next CPU? And how fast is the CPU in today's Mac? And do we see that increase in actual, tangible performance for the user? If not, why not?
But who decides this? A court? A police officer? A judge? Or Verizon and Google?
Under these rules, the Pentagon Papers could not have been published on the Internet.
And under these rules, the ISP is free to decide is something violates copyright; yet, it is widely documented how publishers (including media companies) falsely claim copyright. For example, works that are in the public domain are routinely published in books with a copyright claim in the front. Media companies (or their telco partners) cannot be allowed the power to decide what can flow on the conduits of communication.
The decision to stop content must be made through due process.
The network management issue is a complex one, because spam is content. I think for spam filtering an exception can be made because the overwhelming majority of customers do not want spam. But other than that, any filtering or throttling of content must be clearly explained and treated with great concern. Policies for throttling should be fair and not favor certain content providers.
And the agreement states that "lawful" content will not be interfered with.
But who decides what is "lawful"?
Is this an invitation for the ISPs to take on a police role?
Is it a way for big telco and the media companies they have merged with to decide that someone's content might be unlawful, because it is politically subversive - only because it questions government policies that the telco and media companies support?
ISPs should not be in the business of deciding what is lawful content and what is not. I hope the agreement does not presume that they will be in that business. That is a job for the police and the courts. ISPs should only act on legitimate police requests (i.e., those with warrants or some other transparent or traceable due process) and court orders.
It is pretty clear from the comments here that everyone in this forum is aware that cables have become a scam, in which the vendors manage to charge a fortune for a couple of wires by patenting and branding the format and then getting the equipment manufacturers to specify that format. A 6 foot cable of any kind should cost a few bucks, tops. It is nothing short of criminal that the de facto cartel on these things forces us to pay ten times that.
Maybe there should be an open source effort to define and promote a cable standard?
For safety-critical software, there indeed should be a required certification regime for reliability. In the security field there is, for example, the Common Criteria. Security is one aspect of reliability (not the other way around).
For too long, we have lived without any way of knowing how much effort has been put into making a system reliable. For a phone app this might not matter, but for a pacemaker it does matter.
Apple is the company that created this situation for mobile devices. Prior to the iPhone, the mobile handset market was very stagnant, just like the PC market.
I am not an Apple fanboy saying that Apple is great; but Apple sees the end user as their customer. Before Apple entered the handset market and shook it up, handset makers saw the carriers as their customer, the same way that Microsoft and Intel see the OEMs as their customers.
You are right that an automated brain surgeon would be patentable.
But such an automated system (machine) would have to be far more than a merely programming of the "steps". A brain surgeon has skill. Such skill is not automatablbe by simply programming the steps. Surgery takes judgment, experience, true knowledge, and coordination. Such a machine would be revolutionary.
The requirement that a process not merely be an automation of steps means that, for example, one should not be able to patent the process of sorting a set of names. On the other hand, a special machine that is expressly designed for that purpose would be patentable. The gray area is whether a programmed general purpose machine is such a special purpose machine. I would think not, because in a programmed general purpose machine (i.e., an ordinary computer) the uniqueness is only in its programming, which is a mere coding of the algorithm of sorting, which is not patentable.
This has been reaffirmed in some recent court cases (e.g., the widely reported Bilski case, which is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court), yet the Patent Office continues to issue these inappropriate patents.
From the excerpt that you provided, their "method" sounds an awful lot like an algorithm to me, and algorithm's are not patentable. So perhaps there should be a class action against all business method patents, since many of them - perhaps all? - might constitute algorithms.
Perhaps business method patents are a sham, because they are simply too easy to come up with. As such, as a class, I think that they do not meet the requirement for non-obviousness.
Exactly. It is non-trivial to implement such automation. And therefore the mere idea should not be sufficient for a patent. The Patent Office is allowing companies to patent these "mere ideas".
I wonder if it would be possible to mount a class action lawsuit against the Patent Office, listing a volume of inappropriate software patents, and challenging them all based on the same allegation of incorrect application of patent case law. The plaintiffs could be the industry of software authors who are prevented from using the "methods" in these specious patents.
I agree. When I encounter Flash on a website, I generally leave.
One of the reasons is that I use NoScript (a Firefox add-on). I have it configured to prevent Flash by default. The reason I do this is because of all of the security risks associated with Flash. I also don't like the fact that Flash maintains its own cookies - and I never can remember where they are or how to get rid of them, so I just avoid Flash.
Flash - and plugins in general - operate outside of the security model of the browser. From my standpoint, the risk is not worth the advantage unless the website has a very compelling application. If it is merely an informational site then I am not going to enable Flash just to see it - unless something very compelling took me there to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many different forms of nuclear propulsion. One example is using a reactor to provide electrical energy to power a plasma propulsion system. This is how the VASIMR system works (adastrarocket.com). Another technique is to use microscopic pellets of fissile material and electron beams to compress the pellets to critical density to produce fission, to heat a very small reaction mass (e.g., water or hydrogen) to a very high temperature, generating a large impulse from very little reaction mass. The electron beam system for this is about the size of a refrigerator: the beam energies required are very achievable. This approach has the advantage that it can generate a very high thrust for a long period. The only technical challenge is controlling the plasma, but the VASIMR systems shows that that is possible. A third, widely popularized method, is to explode atomic bombs behind a very large ablative plate. This is the least feasible technique, yet somehow it has remained in the public discussion and has been depicted in several movies (e.g., Deep Impact). Other techniques, which have been used since the 60s, include nuclear batteries to power an ion engine, using small but continuous trust.
The pellet implosion technique is the most promising, but it can only be used beyond the atmosphere because it releases radioactivity. However, for an interplanetary vehicle that is boarded from orbit, this is not a problem.
Fusion is an exciting possibility, but it is far off, and it is not needed to achieve interplanetary travel.
I agree with you. I think that the space station was essentially a program championed by the aerospace contractors to keep the gravy train rolling after the Apollo program was canceled. The ISS was a huge waste of money. Big, inefficient projects to create things that had already been invented during Apollo. The Space Shuttle was a similar waste of money.
Instead of spending money on these mundane things, NASA should have been pushing the envelope in new propulsion systems. Yet, almost all of that research got canceled during the 70s. Now it is reviving, after we have lost 40 years.
You make a good point. Perhaps there is a way to separate education and research.
But let's remember that the benefit to a university of having leading edge researchers is that they can teach graduate students who want to study under someone prominent. Further, the notoriety and credibility associated with having prominent researchers - as well as prolific and smart graduate students - enhances the appeal of the university for both research as well as advanced instruction.
Perhaps undergraduate education is appropriate for wikipedia-ization. For graduate studies, it am less inclined to think so.
Universities that sponsor research provide a more important function than teaching. Fundamental research is not done well by private industry. Throughout history the arts and the sciences have always needed benefactors. This is still true today. A professor in a science is paid to perform research with no known benefit. Such research is extremely important, because fundamental research seldom has a known benefit. However, eventually benefits become apparent, much later. Private industry does not like to sponsor fundamental research for this reason because the ROI is unclear. That leaves universities with NSF grants. A wikipedia-like university would not be able to pay scientist professors, since the assumption is that work would be volunteer. Then who would pay for the salaries of these highly skilled people as well as the research labs?
I remember leafing through the book "The Science of Star Trek", and thinking that the author simply did not have much imagination. For example, the author assumed that a "transporter" would have to "scan" all of one's atoms, in the way that a fax machine scans a piece of paper. Yet, if teleportation is possible, it probably does not involve scanning: it probably involves some kind of quantum entanglement mechanism - and even that assumption is based on the very limited understanding that we have today of how things work and what the universe is made of.
The fact is, the universe's fabric is so bizarre that we probably cannot imagine how a future race might be able to travel near the speed of light, or at it - or perhaps even beyond it. Going from one place to another might not even involve "travel" as we think of it.
So to dismiss anything at this point is pointless.
However, the point about the vastness of the solar system - and the space between solar systems at that - is very well taken. It is beyond comprehension.
Perhaps when it becomes possible to traverse these distances in some manner, humans will no longer exist in their current form; perhaps we will have long since merged with machines and become something so different from what we are today that we cannot even imagine it.
If a Windows machine had 48 cores, 47 of them would be running viruses, spyware, and anti-virus/anti-spyware software and one would be running the user's applications.
Yes.
One of the comments in the MacWorld article says,
This brings up an interesting point: How large was Next Step? And how large is today's OS X? And what do we really get for all that? And how fast was the Next CPU? And how fast is the CPU in today's Mac? And do we see that increase in actual, tangible performance for the user? If not, why not?
A case of true entanglement!
But who decides this? A court? A police officer? A judge? Or Verizon and Google?
Under these rules, the Pentagon Papers could not have been published on the Internet.
And under these rules, the ISP is free to decide is something violates copyright; yet, it is widely documented how publishers (including media companies) falsely claim copyright. For example, works that are in the public domain are routinely published in books with a copyright claim in the front. Media companies (or their telco partners) cannot be allowed the power to decide what can flow on the conduits of communication.
The decision to stop content must be made through due process.
The network management issue is a complex one, because spam is content. I think for spam filtering an exception can be made because the overwhelming majority of customers do not want spam. But other than that, any filtering or throttling of content must be clearly explained and treated with great concern. Policies for throttling should be fair and not favor certain content providers.
And the agreement states that "lawful" content will not be interfered with.
But who decides what is "lawful"?
Is this an invitation for the ISPs to take on a police role?
Is it a way for big telco and the media companies they have merged with to decide that someone's content might be unlawful, because it is politically subversive - only because it questions government policies that the telco and media companies support?
ISPs should not be in the business of deciding what is lawful content and what is not. I hope the agreement does not presume that they will be in that business. That is a job for the police and the courts. ISPs should only act on legitimate police requests (i.e., those with warrants or some other transparent or traceable due process) and court orders.
It is pretty clear from the comments here that everyone in this forum is aware that cables have become a scam, in which the vendors manage to charge a fortune for a couple of wires by patenting and branding the format and then getting the equipment manufacturers to specify that format. A 6 foot cable of any kind should cost a few bucks, tops. It is nothing short of criminal that the de facto cartel on these things forces us to pay ten times that.
Maybe there should be an open source effort to define and promote a cable standard?
Interesting. Do they then "certify" the software? Is there a designation for this?
For safety-critical software, there indeed should be a required certification regime for reliability. In the security field there is, for example, the Common Criteria. Security is one aspect of reliability (not the other way around). For too long, we have lived without any way of knowing how much effort has been put into making a system reliable. For a phone app this might not matter, but for a pacemaker it does matter.
Clever! Touche!
Apple is the company that created this situation for mobile devices. Prior to the iPhone, the mobile handset market was very stagnant, just like the PC market.
I am not an Apple fanboy saying that Apple is great; but Apple sees the end user as their customer. Before Apple entered the handset market and shook it up, handset makers saw the carriers as their customer, the same way that Microsoft and Intel see the OEMs as their customers.
The last thing I need is more noise. That's why I don't use twitter. Besides, 160 characters doesn't exactly lend itself to worthwhile discourse.
The RIAA's logic is based on the absurd idea that a download equates to a loss.
As if each person who downloaded a song would have made a purchase, had P2P not been available.
Absurd.
And also based on the assumption that each copy of a song actually has tangible value, like a physical product.
Absurd again.
The best we can do to fight this is to put the RIAA sponsor companies out of business. Only buy independent music.
You are right that an automated brain surgeon would be patentable.
But such an automated system (machine) would have to be far more than a merely programming of the "steps". A brain surgeon has skill. Such skill is not automatablbe by simply programming the steps. Surgery takes judgment, experience, true knowledge, and coordination. Such a machine would be revolutionary.
The requirement that a process not merely be an automation of steps means that, for example, one should not be able to patent the process of sorting a set of names. On the other hand, a special machine that is expressly designed for that purpose would be patentable. The gray area is whether a programmed general purpose machine is such a special purpose machine. I would think not, because in a programmed general purpose machine (i.e., an ordinary computer) the uniqueness is only in its programming, which is a mere coding of the algorithm of sorting, which is not patentable.
This has been reaffirmed in some recent court cases (e.g., the widely reported Bilski case, which is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court), yet the Patent Office continues to issue these inappropriate patents.
Thank you for researching this.
From the excerpt that you provided, their "method" sounds an awful lot like an algorithm to me, and algorithm's are not patentable. So perhaps there should be a class action against all business method patents, since many of them - perhaps all? - might constitute algorithms.
Perhaps business method patents are a sham, because they are simply too easy to come up with. As such, as a class, I think that they do not meet the requirement for non-obviousness.
Exactly. It is non-trivial to implement such automation. And therefore the mere idea should not be sufficient for a patent. The Patent Office is allowing companies to patent these "mere ideas".
I wonder if it would be possible to mount a class action lawsuit against the Patent Office, listing a volume of inappropriate software patents, and challenging them all based on the same allegation of incorrect application of patent case law. The plaintiffs could be the industry of software authors who are prevented from using the "methods" in these specious patents.
I thought that simply automating a non-automated process is not sufficient to obtain a patent. At many auctions one can bid simply with a nod.
Super. Thanks!
I agree. When I encounter Flash on a website, I generally leave.
One of the reasons is that I use NoScript (a Firefox add-on). I have it configured to prevent Flash by default. The reason I do this is because of all of the security risks associated with Flash. I also don't like the fact that Flash maintains its own cookies - and I never can remember where they are or how to get rid of them, so I just avoid Flash.
Flash - and plugins in general - operate outside of the security model of the browser. From my standpoint, the risk is not worth the advantage unless the website has a very compelling application. If it is merely an informational site then I am not going to enable Flash just to see it - unless something very compelling took me there to begin with.
Well said!