And for you young whippersnappers out there that don't remember the day Kennedy got shot and the rest of the 1960s (what a decade) here's the scoop on the Shell Answer Man, which would be a pretty good Beowulf project in and of itself....
Ummmm...good point. 'Cept I never told anybody I thought it would be easy...and I would substitute the word "new" for "unrealistic" in your post...and I never claimed "it" (consciousness simulation) was being done on a small scale; SETI@Home is a large scale data reduction project, not a large scale simulation like I'm thinking about. Despite their fundamental differences, both projects have (would have) the ultimate goal of discovering another consciousness besides our own.
Look, I'm not the Shell Answer Man here. If I knew how to build a positronic brain, I'd do it, start U.S. Robots of Asimov fame and be richer than Bill Gates in six months. (I wish). But neural nets, and simulations of neural nets, is a valid area of research that Beowulfs could contribute to. Do I think the hackers are all going to get togther and create HAL on the net? Nah. But discussion about what IS reasonable and IS feasible could lead to some project that would attempt to simulate maybe 10 seconds of consciousness (and not necessarily in real time, either!) for some specific situation - fight or flight, arousal, cognito ergo sum...whatever. I think it will involve a continuous (and again, not necessarily real time) input flow of "sensory data" that results in an UNEXPECTED RESPONSE from the system as a first cut as to what defines success.
Slashdot is a forum of people for whom new ideas is the stock-in-trade. All it takes is one new idea - or one connection between the links listed and somebody who didn't know those links existed - to result in some incremental progress, however small. And the future is the summation of small increments like that.
As for my nick, I originally wanted joto but I saved it for you and went with cybrpnk instead.
What I would like to see happen with beowulf research is for everybody to connect their clusters via the internet (the proverbial Beowulf of Beowulfs) and go for the Holy Grail - the simulation of consciousness within the human brain. Folks, we are already using clusters of computers to search for consciousness...that's what SETI@Home is. But space is big, and very empty, and our odds of finding ET are small. Let's start a public project to search for HAL instead. Here is what we know about the brain. Here is the place to scratch the surface on how we think it generates consciousness. We are geeks, we are hackers, we joke endlessly anout Beowulfs of Beowulfs...what are we waiting for?
I forgot to say, of course, that such a crossover episode would require the NX-01 Enterprise to travel back in time to the 1960s, where it would accidentally ram an even bigger NCC-1701 Entrtprise from the future that had just beamed aboard a USAF pilot destined to make the first trip to Titan, who was Captain Archer's great-grandfather....Just think, T'Pol could be Spock's grandmother and he would logically have to kill her just to see how the paradox played out...boy will Sam be confused trying to figure all of this out on the fly.....
In addition to supposed lost Russian nuclear material, actual lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are equally worrisome and more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West.
C'mon, Scott Bakula's not THAT bad. Quantum Leap won a slew of awards and actually had some fairly thought-provoking episodes. For example, there was the one where he beamed into a Mercury Program chimp and sat in a cage with a diaper on for the whole episode. His potrayal of one of the first primates in orbit around the Earth certainly prepared him to potray one of the first primates to leave Earth's solar system. Besides, think about the fun of an Enterprise / Quantum Leap crossover episode. Sam beams into Captain Archer and looks in a mirror and sees....himself!!!
Lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are a lot more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West. Just for grins, the official US Government document for how a nuclear weapons loss is to be handled may be read here.
Yep. But Russians finding money is almost a contradiction in terms...
Re:Your attitude is what's wrong with NASA
on
Movies in Space?
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· Score: 2
Ya know, you're right. I totally agree that anything somebody can make work (technically and economically) in space ought to be done, and that includes everything from Spacehab modules outfitted as movie studios to the 24 hr weightless smut channel. Upon reflection (at 4 AM in my bathrobe, for God's sake), I think my visceral reaction to this story is more of a reflection on my frustrations than anything else. I WANTED the super-duper science lab and spent a good chunk of my life trying to make it happen before having to give up because the reality had changed so far away from that. Dreams die hard, and acepting that you've wasted you precious life chasing an unattainable one comes even harder. But evolution doesn't care one whit for the canon fodder that gets cast in its path, it only works and creates things more amazing and beautiful than anyone could have possible imagined. Let us all hope that is what ultimately happens with the Space Station and NASA.
Re:They Should Name This Module Travesty...
on
Movies in Space?
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· Score: 3
Well, that's the obvious way to do it, of course, but the Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit and has to be exchanged fairly regularly. That's why Tito was able to get to space as a tourist recently...it was a Soyuz changeout mission and they really only need a crew of two to fly that. The problem is that to have crew escape for 6 (ie, two Soyuz) then you have to fly twice as many changeout missions and the Russians are stressed out trying to keep up with the changeout missions they are currently assigned. Plus in order to dock two Soyuz capsules at once would require another docking node, and nobody wants to pay for building that and taking it up - $1 billion at least, $500M to build it and $500M to launch it on a Shuttle mission that isn't available - they are all booked on previously scheduled construction flights. Plus if you had two Soyuz capsules docked it would tremendously complicate Shuttle ops around the station - mission rules call for keeping clear of the Soyuz capsules both spatially on orbit and schedulewise during their changeouts. It could be done, but the problems just snowball when you look at the two Soyuz option...
They Should Name This Module Travesty...
on
Movies in Space?
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· Score: 4
As a former Boeing Space Station engineer, I am stunned and appalled that SpaceHab would stoop to this - leasing a module as a movie set. To get the obvious out of the way, there aren't enough scenes needing zero G in sci-fi dramas to justify it, which leaves sports and sex as the only things that would keep people's attention for continuing and repeated use. My God, we're on the verge of seeing the dawn of the 24-hour weightless smut channel, just when I thought I had seen everything...
What's even worse is that the real rationale for the Space Station is virtually dead, if it's not totally dead already. The ONLY reason for the space station is to do life science in zero G (or reduced G, like growing plants in a Martian level centrifuge) - EVERYTHING else (earth resources photography, astronomical observations, you name it) is going to be done cheaper and better from unmanned platforms that don't have the expense of an extraneous life support system.
The Space Station is SO big that the current crew of three is run ragged trying to keep the systems maintenance going - there is NO TIME for ANY life science at present. That won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle. (If modifying a hollow can of air into a movie studio costs $100M, you can imagine what a new reentry vehicle with heat shielding, comm, nav, propulsion and all the rest would cost, starting from scratch...)
When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.
Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....
I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.
I've got to admit that if the choice was to wrap up the X-Files a few years ago in a manner that would make it an enduring classic always honed to a sharp edge or to continue it by dragging it out and then try to swap out the lead characters to keep it going, I'd take the former in a flash. The X Files will always be remembered as significant but now also as something that should have quit while it was ahead. That's tragic, when it could have been so much more powerful as a complete body of work if it had been distilled instead of diluted. However, since Carter has choosen this path, what could have been no longer matters. The X Files may have been better as just Mulder and Sculley in their prime, but the reality is that the X Files AS A WHOLE now consists of M&S in their prime, M&S over-the-hill, and also Doggett and Reyes. (Kind of like all our lives, which would be best if we could time warp thru college forever and skip the ex-wife before we get to the good relationship...) So again I say, I'm giving Doggett and Reyes a chance.
Re:"This is not happening. This is not happening."
on
Scully Leaving X-Files
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· Score: 2
Boy, do I ever agree with the resolution of Samantha's abduction. I halfway expected to see Barney come on-camera from the left when Mulder was roamping around with her happy happy joy joy ghost. This was absolutely the low point of the series and marked the moment the X-Files cut itself loose from the mythical aspect that made it great.
Actually, I wish Anderson was leaving THIS season so we could get on with a clean slate instead of this drag-it-on-til-it-stinks mentality the X-Files has now. Chris Carter & Co. have in my opinion pulled a minor miracle off by establishing Robert Pattrick / John Dogget as a viable and even desirable alternative to Duchovney / Mulder. I have become quite a fan of Doggett's take-no-crap mentality over Mulder's trust-no-one. I also think Gish is a hottie. I say lets wish Mulder and Scully well as enduring icons and get on to seeing what the dynamic could be with people who actually are on a first name basis with one another. The original X-files was about 90s-style alienation and distance between people. I'd like to see them explore the conspiracy of the 21st century now, which is all becoming one big happy group / hive mind led by M$.
Actually, Remmy didn't die, he exited via making one last jump back to (our) Earth after injecting himself with local blood (!?!) containing a virus sample deadly to the show's bad guys who had overrun multiple dimensions including our own. (Sounds kind of silly when you say it like that, huh?) He left behind all of the Slider second stringers who looked at each other saying "Now what?", which was the show's unofficial motto.
I really liked the idea of Sliders but it was very very seldom realized. The writers just never hit a good balance of what the show could be, much less the characters. Arturo is shot, but that's OK, he's dying of an incurable disease anyway. Quinn is a whiz kid from a single parent home in San Francisco, no wait, he's Superman from the dimension Krypton, no wait, he's the quantum changeling spawn from a mad scientist...Don't even get me started on dumping the Wade character off in a CroMag breeding camp never to be seen again. At least the Remmy character made a decent transition from comic relief to heroic leader.
The main point is that even with a multi-million dollar budget and hundreds of people involved, all shows come down to one guy sitting in front of a blank piece of paper to determine whether the show will suck or soar. The fact that it does the former more often than the latter shows just how brutal that blank sheet of paper can be.
The key to sucessful consulting is to find people with money who have jobs for you to do. For me, the biggest source of leads has been the
Small Business Innovation Program (SBIR) and the Commerce Business Daily. If you don't know about these resources, you should.
So what if you rent a car with an onboard GPS. With massive research like this underway, it's just a matter of time before you can get a local jamming unit that would wipe out a cheap GPS receiver's ability to pick up the satellite data. (Actually this has already been done...and discussed on Slashdot!) Then, of course, the rental car companies would get into anti-jamming technology so the thing to do is just wait until NOT having a GPS onboard becomes a market differentiator (and way to charge more)... What would really be cool is locally spoofing a GPS signal set so the record showed you went to places (at speeds) that you really didn't....
Intergraph Tried This Strategy and Failed...
on
Compaq Shifts Focus
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· Score: 2
In my hometown of Huntsville, AL the local-boys-made-good company of Intergraph (noted for their innovative CAD/CAM terminals 10 years ago) tried to get out of hardware and focus on software to cut losses but it didn't help. They've lost over a quarter billion dollars in the last five years and haven't had a profitable year since 1992. They're still saying they'll be profitable someday... Good luck Compaq - it was nice knowing you....
I saw your namesake's tomb in Moscow back in 1993... I was part of a Boeing team that was launching a protein crystal experiment to Mir. Russia, what a country...just like Chicago back in the 20s...
This is you? I am impressed! Too bad for your sake that I'm not some cute blonde 19 year old impressed coed, but I am impressed all the same....
I've always wondered how you verify the discovery / recovery of a new / rare species. Usually I wonder this right when some cool looking gold-shelled beetle with emerald green eyes lands nearby and I wonder if this is a new species that I could name cybrpnkii bugii....
Please allow me to read between the lines of your postings and make a comment or two. So what if nobody else around you thinks trees are cool or even doesn't care about your solid achievements as a naturalist? What you care about IS important, whether anybody shares that with you or not, and deep inside you obviously know that. The world is full of people who don't care and own chain saws. The day that the few people like you stop caring about conservation is the day the last field gets paved over, and that will be a very bad day indeed. It's people like you who poke around under rocks in the forest (so to speak) that have given all of us the keys to genetic engineering and leads on a cure for cancer. This is important even tho the financial rewards are often lacking...So best of wishes on your wildlife pursuits, and who knows, I'm a Tennessee native (Go Vols!) living in north Alabama, if I ever bump in to you in Gatlinburg or the Smokies, the drinks are on me!
-cybrpnk (rickyjames@email.com)
And if there isn't any life on Jupiter's moons, we can go out and start a party of our own... Recently, bacterial ecosystems have been discovered in Earth's clouds. This opens the possibility of using balloons on Venus to inject heat and acid loving bacteria into Venus' cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. Let's start colonizing space today!
Slashdot Mirror
Still more on the Shell Answer Man!!!
And for you young whippersnappers out there that don't remember the day Kennedy got shot and the rest of the 1960s (what a decade) here's the scoop on the Shell Answer Man, which would be a pretty good Beowulf project in and of itself....
Ummmm...good point. 'Cept I never told anybody I thought it would be easy...and I would substitute the word "new" for "unrealistic" in your post...and I never claimed "it" (consciousness simulation) was being done on a small scale; SETI@Home is a large scale data reduction project, not a large scale simulation like I'm thinking about. Despite their fundamental differences, both projects have (would have) the ultimate goal of discovering another consciousness besides our own.
Look, I'm not the Shell Answer Man here. If I knew how to build a positronic brain, I'd do it, start U.S. Robots of Asimov fame and be richer than Bill Gates in six months. (I wish). But neural nets, and simulations of neural nets, is a valid area of research that Beowulfs could contribute to. Do I think the hackers are all going to get togther and create HAL on the net? Nah. But discussion about what IS reasonable and IS feasible could lead to some project that would attempt to simulate maybe 10 seconds of consciousness (and not necessarily in real time, either!) for some specific situation - fight or flight, arousal, cognito ergo sum...whatever. I think it will involve a continuous (and again, not necessarily real time) input flow of "sensory data" that results in an UNEXPECTED RESPONSE from the system as a first cut as to what defines success.
Slashdot is a forum of people for whom new ideas is the stock-in-trade. All it takes is one new idea - or one connection between the links listed and somebody who didn't know those links existed - to result in some incremental progress, however small. And the future is the summation of small increments like that.
As for my nick, I originally wanted joto but I saved it for you and went with cybrpnk instead.
What I would like to see happen with beowulf research is for everybody to connect their clusters via the internet (the proverbial Beowulf of Beowulfs) and go for the Holy Grail - the simulation of consciousness within the human brain. Folks, we are already using clusters of computers to search for consciousness...that's what SETI@Home is. But space is big, and very empty, and our odds of finding ET are small. Let's start a public project to search for HAL instead. Here is what we know about the brain. Here is the place to scratch the surface on how we think it generates consciousness. We are geeks, we are hackers, we joke endlessly anout Beowulfs of Beowulfs...what are we waiting for?
I forgot to say, of course, that such a crossover episode would require the NX-01 Enterprise to travel back in time to the 1960s, where it would accidentally ram an even bigger NCC-1701 Entrtprise from the future that had just beamed aboard a USAF pilot destined to make the first trip to Titan, who was Captain Archer's great-grandfather....Just think, T'Pol could be Spock's grandmother and he would logically have to kill her just to see how the paradox played out...boy will Sam be confused trying to figure all of this out on the fly.....
In addition to supposed lost Russian nuclear material, actual lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are equally worrisome and more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West.
C'mon, Scott Bakula's not THAT bad. Quantum Leap won a slew of awards and actually had some fairly thought-provoking episodes. For example, there was the one where he beamed into a Mercury Program chimp and sat in a cage with a diaper on for the whole episode. His potrayal of one of the first primates in orbit around the Earth certainly prepared him to potray one of the first primates to leave Earth's solar system. Besides, think about the fun of an Enterprise / Quantum Leap crossover episode. Sam beams into Captain Archer and looks in a mirror and sees....himself!!!
Lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are a lot more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West. Just for grins, the official US Government document for how a nuclear weapons loss is to be handled may be read here.
Yep. But Russians finding money is almost a contradiction in terms...
Ya know, you're right. I totally agree that anything somebody can make work (technically and economically) in space ought to be done, and that includes everything from Spacehab modules outfitted as movie studios to the 24 hr weightless smut channel. Upon reflection (at 4 AM in my bathrobe, for God's sake), I think my visceral reaction to this story is more of a reflection on my frustrations than anything else. I WANTED the super-duper science lab and spent a good chunk of my life trying to make it happen before having to give up because the reality had changed so far away from that. Dreams die hard, and acepting that you've wasted you precious life chasing an unattainable one comes even harder. But evolution doesn't care one whit for the canon fodder that gets cast in its path, it only works and creates things more amazing and beautiful than anyone could have possible imagined. Let us all hope that is what ultimately happens with the Space Station and NASA.
Well, that's the obvious way to do it, of course, but the Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit and has to be exchanged fairly regularly. That's why Tito was able to get to space as a tourist recently...it was a Soyuz changeout mission and they really only need a crew of two to fly that. The problem is that to have crew escape for 6 (ie, two Soyuz) then you have to fly twice as many changeout missions and the Russians are stressed out trying to keep up with the changeout missions they are currently assigned. Plus in order to dock two Soyuz capsules at once would require another docking node, and nobody wants to pay for building that and taking it up - $1 billion at least, $500M to build it and $500M to launch it on a Shuttle mission that isn't available - they are all booked on previously scheduled construction flights. Plus if you had two Soyuz capsules docked it would tremendously complicate Shuttle ops around the station - mission rules call for keeping clear of the Soyuz capsules both spatially on orbit and schedulewise during their changeouts. It could be done, but the problems just snowball when you look at the two Soyuz option...
As a former Boeing Space Station engineer, I am stunned and appalled that SpaceHab would stoop to this - leasing a module as a movie set. To get the obvious out of the way, there aren't enough scenes needing zero G in sci-fi dramas to justify it, which leaves sports and sex as the only things that would keep people's attention for continuing and repeated use. My God, we're on the verge of seeing the dawn of the 24-hour weightless smut channel, just when I thought I had seen everything...
What's even worse is that the real rationale for the Space Station is virtually dead, if it's not totally dead already. The ONLY reason for the space station is to do life science in zero G (or reduced G, like growing plants in a Martian level centrifuge) - EVERYTHING else (earth resources photography, astronomical observations, you name it) is going to be done cheaper and better from unmanned platforms that don't have the expense of an extraneous life support system.
The Space Station is SO big that the current crew of three is run ragged trying to keep the systems maintenance going - there is NO TIME for ANY life science at present. That won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle. (If modifying a hollow can of air into a movie studio costs $100M, you can imagine what a new reentry vehicle with heat shielding, comm, nav, propulsion and all the rest would cost, starting from scratch...)
When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.
Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....
I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.
...a web site with 50+ ways to kill purple dinosaurs needs to worry that the Jurassic Park III lawyers will bite!
I've got to admit that if the choice was to wrap up the X-Files a few years ago in a manner that would make it an enduring classic always honed to a sharp edge or to continue it by dragging it out and then try to swap out the lead characters to keep it going, I'd take the former in a flash. The X Files will always be remembered as significant but now also as something that should have quit while it was ahead. That's tragic, when it could have been so much more powerful as a complete body of work if it had been distilled instead of diluted. However, since Carter has choosen this path, what could have been no longer matters. The X Files may have been better as just Mulder and Sculley in their prime, but the reality is that the X Files AS A WHOLE now consists of M&S in their prime, M&S over-the-hill, and also Doggett and Reyes. (Kind of like all our lives, which would be best if we could time warp thru college forever and skip the ex-wife before we get to the good relationship...) So again I say, I'm giving Doggett and Reyes a chance.
Boy, do I ever agree with the resolution of Samantha's abduction. I halfway expected to see Barney come on-camera from the left when Mulder was roamping around with her happy happy joy joy ghost. This was absolutely the low point of the series and marked the moment the X-Files cut itself loose from the mythical aspect that made it great.
This website already that tracks money flow via volunteers and they get some pretty interesting statistical results...
Actually, I wish Anderson was leaving THIS season so we could get on with a clean slate instead of this drag-it-on-til-it-stinks mentality the X-Files has now. Chris Carter & Co. have in my opinion pulled a minor miracle off by establishing Robert Pattrick / John Dogget as a viable and even desirable alternative to Duchovney / Mulder. I have become quite a fan of Doggett's take-no-crap mentality over Mulder's trust-no-one. I also think Gish is a hottie. I say lets wish Mulder and Scully well as enduring icons and get on to seeing what the dynamic could be with people who actually are on a first name basis with one another. The original X-files was about 90s-style alienation and distance between people. I'd like to see them explore the conspiracy of the 21st century now, which is all becoming one big happy group / hive mind led by M$.
Actually, Remmy didn't die, he exited via making one last jump back to (our) Earth after injecting himself with local blood (!?!) containing a virus sample deadly to the show's bad guys who had overrun multiple dimensions including our own. (Sounds kind of silly when you say it like that, huh?) He left behind all of the Slider second stringers who looked at each other saying "Now what?", which was the show's unofficial motto.
I really liked the idea of Sliders but it was very very seldom realized. The writers just never hit a good balance of what the show could be, much less the characters. Arturo is shot, but that's OK, he's dying of an incurable disease anyway. Quinn is a whiz kid from a single parent home in San Francisco, no wait, he's Superman from the dimension Krypton, no wait, he's the quantum changeling spawn from a mad scientist...Don't even get me started on dumping the Wade character off in a CroMag breeding camp never to be seen again. At least the Remmy character made a decent transition from comic relief to heroic leader.
The main point is that even with a multi-million dollar budget and hundreds of people involved, all shows come down to one guy sitting in front of a blank piece of paper to determine whether the show will suck or soar. The fact that it does the former more often than the latter shows just how brutal that blank sheet of paper can be.
The key to sucessful consulting is to find people with money who have jobs for you to do. For me, the biggest source of leads has been the Small Business Innovation Program (SBIR) and the Commerce Business Daily. If you don't know about these resources, you should.
So what if you rent a car with an onboard GPS. With massive research like this underway, it's just a matter of time before you can get a local jamming unit that would wipe out a cheap GPS receiver's ability to pick up the satellite data. (Actually this has already been done...and discussed on Slashdot!) Then, of course, the rental car companies would get into anti-jamming technology so the thing to do is just wait until NOT having a GPS onboard becomes a market differentiator (and way to charge more)... What would really be cool is locally spoofing a GPS signal set so the record showed you went to places (at speeds) that you really didn't....
In my hometown of Huntsville, AL the local-boys-made-good company of Intergraph (noted for their innovative CAD/CAM terminals 10 years ago) tried to get out of hardware and focus on software to cut losses but it didn't help. They've lost over a quarter billion dollars in the last five years and haven't had a profitable year since 1992. They're still saying they'll be profitable someday... Good luck Compaq - it was nice knowing you....
I saw your namesake's tomb in Moscow back in 1993... I was part of a Boeing team that was launching a protein crystal experiment to Mir. Russia, what a country...just like Chicago back in the 20s...
This is you? I am impressed! Too bad for your sake that I'm not some cute blonde 19 year old impressed coed, but I am impressed all the same.... I've always wondered how you verify the discovery / recovery of a new / rare species. Usually I wonder this right when some cool looking gold-shelled beetle with emerald green eyes lands nearby and I wonder if this is a new species that I could name cybrpnkii bugii.... Please allow me to read between the lines of your postings and make a comment or two. So what if nobody else around you thinks trees are cool or even doesn't care about your solid achievements as a naturalist? What you care about IS important, whether anybody shares that with you or not, and deep inside you obviously know that. The world is full of people who don't care and own chain saws. The day that the few people like you stop caring about conservation is the day the last field gets paved over, and that will be a very bad day indeed. It's people like you who poke around under rocks in the forest (so to speak) that have given all of us the keys to genetic engineering and leads on a cure for cancer. This is important even tho the financial rewards are often lacking...So best of wishes on your wildlife pursuits, and who knows, I'm a Tennessee native (Go Vols!) living in north Alabama, if I ever bump in to you in Gatlinburg or the Smokies, the drinks are on me! -cybrpnk (rickyjames@email.com)
And if there isn't any life on Jupiter's moons, we can go out and start a party of our own... Recently, bacterial ecosystems have been discovered in Earth's clouds. This opens the possibility of using balloons on Venus to inject heat and acid loving bacteria into Venus' cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. Let's start colonizing space today!
I'll bite. Ilyich, what was the plant that was presumed extinct that you rediscovered?