Hmmm. This post begs an interesting question. Is there any SW out there that allows a user to characterize and chart their connection quality/capacity over time. As a user of a cable modem, I sure would like that software, if for no other reason than my curiosity about my service's performance over time.
Of course the existing infrastructure can't handle the projected load created by ubiquitous broadband access. You don't build roads for 10 ton trucks when all you have are ox-carts (ok the Romans did, but that's different...).
Will there be growing pains? Almost certainly. Can you unilaterally restrict the growth for the convienience of the existing entities? You will be able to do so to a certain extent, but it will most likely grow past your barriers along paths that you don't block.
The ratio is out of whack. If the Big Scary Internet Business Dot Com has X Bandwidth, and the Home User has X / 2 Bandwidth (not X / 500) as it should be), there is a BIG problem.
If you are the Scary Dot Com that sees this shockwave of high demand headed your way, then it seems you have several choices:
1) Bail out now. Sell your business for what you can get out of it. Sit on the beach laughing at the fools who bought your swamped and dying business.
2) Upgrade your business's infrastructure to handle the increased load. Restructure your business plan so that you can make even more money off of the increased demand.
3) Keep a weather eye on what is developing and how fast. Make contingency plans. Set aside some assets so that you can compensate fast if there is a need to increase your capacity. Don't assume that your, or anyone elses assessment that "wonder tech X" will come online when/where/how/ you think it will.
Since we obviously are going to have serious broadband dispersion in the near future, what must be done, legally, technologically, and otherwise in preparation to support such a network?"
Legally? Nothing, unless you mean that you are going to need legal help with your new contracts and business arrangements.
Technologically? Good question. See my points 1, 2, & 3 above.
Otherwise? Keep informed. Watch your market. Talk to your customers. Talk to your associates. Call your congresscritter. Pray. Do whatever floats your boat and you think helps you prepare for the coming flood.
Moderators. Moderate this guy's post up, please! He makes more sense than Dilger's article.
I did read the article. Your assessment of it and Dilger is correct. He does miss the point. Take for example this passage:
However, the application to learning needs to extend beyond learning the skills needed to operate a certain program in a specific, localized spatial environment. Instead, generalization of knowledge as methodology should be encouraged and actively facilitated by both teachers and designers of software applications and computer-human interfaces.
Demystify everything. In the case of computing, explain the technologies students are using, and tell what's "under the hood" -- show students the server room, or open up a computer and identify the various parts. Use programs that give students direct control over work, instead of displacing control to "wizards" or "helpful" agents.
In the first part he advocates abstraction of skills and knowledge. In the second he proposes the way to gain this abstract skill set is by learning the guts of a particular system. This is generalization? No, your digression on the history of text editors is quite correct. One man's abstraction is another man's detail.
My thought was that he was like someone who prefers to drive a Standard transmission automobile. He puts someone who has only driven automatic transmission vehicles behind the wheel of a "stick", and then he decries the woeful lack of understanding and skills of the driver. He then would helpfully suggest that "an examination of the engine, particularly the gear train and the workings of the shifter" would allow the driver to understand the vehicle enough to drive with no problems.
Yea right. Don't expect someone to apriori know something that they have no reason to learn. In the case of Dilger and his university's UNIX network, do not assume that casual computer users are going to be able to or want to fathom network file structures and FTP. Instead, give them tools, training, and time to learn. Help them learn their new environment, don't blame their existing tools for making them ignorant.
The problem with your interpretation of my argument is that I cannot read or control your mind, and I cannot access or distribute your experiences. I can only know and control my own experiences. I have a right to share my life experiences.
That you cannot read or control my mind is not relevant to the argument. That you do have access and the ability to distribute my experiences is relevant. We agree that you and I and everyone else has the right to share their life experiences. Logically then we also have the right to restrict the sharing of our experiences. You have stated as much in other posts by recommending that if others don't want their experiences shared, then they should keep them inside their own heads. Thus you have acknowledge that people have a fundamental right to control the distribution of their life experiences to others. Since we can only share experiences through a representation of the experience, then by extension we have a right to control the representation of the experience.
Even in the extreme case of a hypothetical "mind scanner" this is true. Even if the mind scanner allowed us to directly experience what is in another's brain, what WE would experience as a result would be a different, but similar experience. Simply, you would have a right control the new experience (you in your time/place/state of mind experiencing MY experience). You could share or not share that event. You would not have the right to distribute MY experience directly. You only have the fundamental right to distribute what comes out of YOUR brain, not MY brain.
You seem to think just because you experienced a representative replaying of an experience, that you have a right to the original representation of the experience. This would be analogous to a Catholic Christian's belief that the Communion wafers they are eating really do mystically transform into the REAL body of Christ, instead of simply being a symbolic representation of said body. Again, you can distribute/control YOUR representations of your experiences. A CD that you did not originally make is NOT inside your original experience. That you heard it once does not make it yours.
It does not follow that I no longer have this right simply because someone else had this experience before I did, or because someone set into effect a sequence of events that caused my to have the experience. Once I have an experience, it is my experience too - no matter what lead to the experience or how many other people have similar experiences.
The reason you seem not to see this point is that you are muddling the distinction between representations of my experience, and representations of your experience. You seem convinced that once my experience is "out there" and that you experience it, then that representation of my experience which I ORIGINALLY DISTRIBUTED is somehow a part of your experience. That you have read my short story does not give you the right to photocopy it and give it to a friend. Yes I do reserve the right ahead of time to restrict how you handle direct representations of my experience. Should you choose to distribute a representation of your experience of reading my story (say as in a review), then go right ahead. That is your experience. If you want to distribute representations of my experiences, then you need to talk to me.
The very large integer that makes up a representation of the sounds of a song in an AIFF or MP3 format triggers experiences in the brains of those who interpret that number with a suitable device (cd player or mp3 decoder). If I come across and enjoy this number, then it joins the fold of my experiences and I might want to share this interesting number with a friend.
That interesting "very large integer" (call it VLI-1) is the encoded representation of my experience. You have already agreed that the experience is mine to withhold or distribute. In this case, the mechanism for sharing my experience is VLI-1. Some other and very different "very large integer" (call it VLI-2) is the representation of your experience of enjoying an instance of the decoding of VLI-1. Go right ahead and share your VLI-2 with your friend. It is your right. But make no mistake, VLI-2 better be coming directly out of your head (humming my tune, reviewing my book, whatever) and not just a simple copy of VLI-1. If you want to share my VLI-1 with your friend, then you do so at my discretion and with my restrictions because VLI-1 came out of MY head and not YOUR head.
What is the fundamental difference between recording my experiences with my brain only and using brain augmenting devices such as tape recorders, web browsers, video cameras, etc.? I don't think there is a moral difference.
The difference is those devices are not routing somehow through your brain. They are not brain augmentation devices. They are devices for recording and diseminating those "patterns" you spoke of earlier. The MORAL difference is that you are not recording to distribute your creation. You want to distribute, without their permission, the creative acts of other persons. If you want to add your creativity to the mix, then record and distribute a copy of YOU singing YOUR VERSION of my song. Do not copy and distribute MY VERSION of the song. It came out of my mind and my talent. Morally, it is not yours just because you heard it. THAT is what I meant by Theft of Experience.
Simply put, I do not believe that you can own a pattern or idea. I think such claims of ownership are are invalid prima facie.
I am glad you stated that as a belief and not a fact. So we fundamentally disagree. I DO believe that you can own patterns and ideas: the ones that come out of my head. You do too, or you would not have earlier stated that you have the right to distribute your experiences. This is the fundamental discord between your stated beliefs and arguments. They are in fundamental conflict.
It is only prima facie ("on the face of it" to the latin illiterate) to YOU. It is not to me. I have tried to point out the irreconsilable inconsistency between your beliefs and arguments. You seem to want to eat your cake and have it too.
I'm sorry, but I cannot make any sense of "theft of experience" since I fail to see how you could remove someone's experiences from them. If you just mean to say "theft of intellectual property", then we're back to square 1. You believe ideas and patterns can be owned and I do not.
Your failure to see stems from your failure to understand that we can physically symbolize and represent our experiences outside of our bodies. And yes I do mean Theft of Intellectual Property. I coined a synonym of "Theft of Experience" to try and move the discussion away from what seems to be, for you, a very emotionally and intellectually loaded term. I believe that if we did not own the ideas and patterns that we produce, then we would have NO rights.
My children all understood this principle well before they got their driver's licenses: they own the Title to the car, not the car itself. If you take their car without legally obtaining the title from them, then you stole the car. The car is the physical manifestation of an idea, just as a CD or MP3 is the physical manifestation of an idea. Same thing.
Nowhere in your arguments do you seem to acknowledge the concept of agreements between people (contracts). Whether explict or implicit, I feel this whole argument boils down to the fact that you do not believe that I have the right to enter into contracts because there is no such thing as property. You do not seem to recognize that a "pattern" does not exist outside of its physical representation: whether it be in my head, on a CD, as a written "very large integer" or as a DNA encoding, or as a contract.
If in a contract, I grant the right for someone to transform a pattern WHICH ORIGINATED WITH ME and WHICH IS ONLY ACCESSABLE BY ME from one form to another (say from my thoughts into an MP3 encoded song), then that contract can contain whatever conditions I want. Your argument, as best I can distill it out, is that once it leaves my head it isn't mine. My position is that I can place conditions on the act of it leaving my head and taking on a physical instantiation. That those limitations apriori interfer with your desires when you encounter my authorized representation of the pattern/thought/experience which I released, is the intent. I might want to make money off of it, I might want the sales to go to my favorite charity, I might want it to be freely downloadable and NOT to be sold by you or anyone else. Those are my conditions to you for and prior to you experiencing the represenational instantiation of a portion of MY mind.
Your rights stop where my body begins. Once a pattern leaves you, through whatever means of transmission you care to name, it is no longer part of your corpus. You have no right to tell me what I can and cannot do with my experiences. My right to self determination of thought and communication outweighs any right you believe you have to strictly control all the ripples of information spreading from your direction or elsewhere.
That is an absurd stance. If my rights stop where your body begins then I could, morally and legally, strip you of every possesion (they are not in your body) or surround you in an inescapable box, deny you access to food or water or air until you die, all without EVER touching your body. That is a patently absurd position. By the same token I could, using our mythical mind reading machine, grab every thought or feeling or memory in your head, just by reading the passive EM emanations from your head. As a result, you would have no rights at all to THE CONTENTS OF YOUR OWN MIND. Please note that you have already agreed that you do have the right to the contents of your own mind, whether I can read it or not. No sir, your rights and my rights mutually stop where they intersect. The only way we morally cross that boundry between our rights is through mutual contracts.
You have no fundamental rights to the "ripples of information" spreading out to me because I released those ripples upon contractual conditions. Again, your statement contains within it the inherent contradiction of your position: You don't think I have the right to restrict control of any "ripples of information" you encounter, but you grant yourself the right to restrict my ability to release "ripples of information" under a concensual contract, a limiting agreement between parties.
I know what my rights are and I will protect them to the greatest extent I can from individuals who try to deny them.
Respond if you want. I will say no more further. I have made my case to you. I hope you see reason and not the self serving delusion you now advocate.
Now the real crux is this: Which "right" should be respected? The right of each individual to be able to record, replay and share their life experiences - or the right of people generating information to control exactly how, when and under what circumstances you do things with the information in your brain.
The problem with your argument is that you are trying to share something that is NOT in your brain nor in your direct experience. If you were, you would not be, say, duplicating and distributing a CD via MP3. Instead, you would be downloading YOUR memories of YOUR experience of hearing THEIR music played from said CD. Your "infinite fidelity of experience" argument only plays out as your right to distribute the information if, and only if, you are distributing YOUR experience.
Neither you, I, or anyone else has the right to distribute the experience of others without their permission.
I trust you agree with that statement because I doubt you want me to have the right to copy, reproduce, and distribute the contents of your brain without your permission. You have a fundamental moral right to your own experiences. I shouldn't be allowed to view, reproduce, or destroy them without your permission. Yet, this is exactly the opposite of what you are advocating as "moral" for your rights to other people's experiences. For example: commercial audio CD is a creation of one or more people who have granted limited rights to reproducing their experience of creating, hearing, mixing, and recording an audio experience. The bits on the CD or in file copy are a reproduction of their experience, as best they can produce it currently. Hence, by your reasoning, they AND ONLY THEY should have a right to control it. This applies to music, artworks, movies, writing, inventions, you name it.
If someone invents a memory/sensory scanner, then you have right to reproduce a perfect copy of your experience/memory of your exposure to the event (including any attendant tinninitus, frequency limitation in your hearing, memory problems, etc which you have). You currently enjoy this right to the limits of your "mental fidelity" and "reproduction fidelity": you can write a review, you can record you singing it, you can score the piece from memory, and so on. That is (or should be) your right. You do not and should not have the right to: make a direct copy of my recording (my experience & expression), photocopy my score (my experience & expression), record me humming a tune (my experience & expression), and so on. Simply, you don't have ANY rights to my Intellectual (experiencial and expressional) Property which I do not grant to you. If I choose to grant you the right to share my experience under certain conditions (you have to buy from a certain supplier, you cannot reproduce it in certain ways, etc) then that is my right.
Your rights stop where mine start. An Elvis-impersonator has the right to sell as many copies of his version of "LOVE ME TENDER" as he wants. He does not have the right to distribute direct copies of Elvis's recorded version. That is theft of experience. That is wrong. That is immoral.
Amen! You described my situation perfectly. It must be just a case of bad timing.
God knows I am getting REALLY tired of hearing some of the younger folks on/. drone away about "you over 30 guys should quit bitching and keep up with the technology". <crotchety grandpa mode> I have Forgotten more languages and technologies than you will ever learn, Sonny </crotchety grandpa mode>
The ugly truth for many in the over 30 tech crowd is that the things that should make us very valuable to employers are driving them away: experience with learning new technologies, many successful and failed projects under our belt (never underestimate the educational value of a failure), a history with the technology, a love of technology apart from (or in spite of) the payoff, and a keen sense of what will and will not work.
Why they don't like us:
- we tell them their half-assed ideas really ARE half-assed and cite specific historical examples to back it up
- we do value our families and "off" time. Why the heck else are we working? To line a CEO's pocket and to get that ever so infrequent "attaboy"?
- we love the technology and have been into it since before it was "cool" to be a techie. We were the weirdos they couldn't understand and couldn't get along with in high school, and still can't.
- we do complain when we find out that some kid fresh out of a tech school, with no real problem solving skills, no real people skills, no real understanding of the foundations of the technology, and no knowledge of the problem domain come in and make MORE than we do!
I could go on and on, but just read the other "hey we are over 30" posts and you will get the idea. The above poster got it right: for most of us older tech worker the biggest problem is our timing; we were born on the wrong side of the boom... the boom we helped create.
I am glad someone else besides me holds this opinion. Stephens has a couple of excellent SF books under his belt (SNOW CRASH and DIAMOND AGE). I enjoyed many parts of CRYPTONOMICON, but it was an average good piece of regular fiction. It very much felt like Mr. Stephenson was too caught up in expanding the story element minutae and pointlessly over-developing the characters as opposed to developing a solid plotline (an all too common failing of many current authors). This book required a great deal of patient and largely unsatisfying reading for the first 400+ pages. The only reason I hung on and fought for the end was because Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite current authors. I think CRYPTO was a swing and a miss for Neal.
On whether CRYPTO should be considered SF: just because the storyline contains Alan Turing and a Perl script does not make it science fiction.
I have some factual and opinon quibles with your post:
<I>Gasoline: Polution at car - high. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation - some. Renewable - no.</I>
The cost to transport and obtain gasoline is incredibly low. This is mostly because we are on the "down" side of the infrastructure curve. All of the expensive stuff (eg refineries, storage tanks, oil tankers, etc) are mostly in place and paid off. Now we are in the "repair & replace" side of the curve. The biggest expense for a gallon (or litre) is the taxes on it. Also, it may be possible to create a gasoline substitute using coal tar, natural gas, or even bio-engineering. I would change it to 'Renewable - maybe'.
<I>Liquid Nitrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - high. Polution at creation - yes. Renewable - yes. </I>
Liquid nitrogen is INCREDIBLY easy to make. All it requires is a rather mundane staged air compressor, cooling coil, and a drip collector. It is simple enough you could set up a windmill to make liquid nitrogen. We don't go out of our way to manufacture liquid nitrogen now, and you can buy it in quantities as much as you can carry at a cost litre for litre that is cheaper than beer (and WAY cheaper than soda). The big hairy expense with liquid nitrogen (or any cryogenic liquid for that matter) is the storage cost. However, if you are planning on using it fast (a few hours), you can store it in styrofoam buckets safely. Liquid nitrogen has the advantage of being the easiest and safest cryogenic to store.
Exactly what is the pollution produced when you make liquid nitrogen? Liquid Oxygen? Heck, that isn't pollution, that's product. You sell that to all the aging baby boomers. I know. Many moons ago, I delivered cryogenic O2 to older folks with respiratory ailments. It was a great college job. You REALLY get treated well when you are literally delivering people the air that they breath.
<I>Hydrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: med. Cost to make - med. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes. </I>
Sorry to burst your bubble, but burning H2 produces lots of nasty nitrate compounds. The problem is that burning H2 is only 'clean' when you: a) burn it ONLY with O2 and b) make absolutely sure that the combustion products are allowed to cool sufficiently prior to release. Live steam will corrode metals, and if hot enough will react with the surrounding air to make those nasty nitrates and carbon compounds again. The Hydrogen Economy zealots would have you believe that Hydrogen burns 'totally clean'. I will grant that it burns much cleaner than gasoline, but about the same as methane or alcohol, and they are MUCH easier to handle.
Cost to transport/obtain is high. Hydrogen is a low density and VERY reactive cryogenic. It embrittles virtually every metal known. We had to learn how to handle it easily in order to put men on the moon. That does not make it cheap, though.
The cost to make as a renewable is high. This is because you have to split it off of its prefered terrestrial mate: water. It takes LOTS of electricity to do this and is very inefficient. The cost as a non-renewable is moderate. You can create hydrogen gas by reducing methane (natural gas). It makes lots of nice pollution in the process. Then you get to compress and cool it to store it as a liquid, more money spent. This is how ALL industrial liquid hydrogen is made.
<I>Electricity: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.</I>
The cost to transport electricity is moderate. Those power lines that everyone SO love to have hanging over their heads lose about 1% per mile. (It may be better now, I haven't checked lately). Electricity itself is expensive, so any transport losses drive the cost up rapidly. Add in lots of nice infrastructure (like substations) which requires regular maintenance and you drive the cost up even higher. The other big cost problem is load balancing. If the loads are not balanced well, then it is costing you mucho money as the 'excess' electricity radiates away as heat in the lines. Load balancing a big area is a black art.
The cost to make electricity is high. You are transforming a fundamentally cheap energy source (oil, natural gas, coal) and transforming it into another form. A big commercial plant is lucky if it can turn 60% of the total combustion heat into electricity. This applies even more to 'expensive' electricity generation techniques such as nuclear, tidal, solar, or wind.
Add to this the horror that is battery production and use, and you make electricity very difficult to use efficiently. Perhaps something like very high speed flywheels or polymer catalyst fuel cells will allow us to better use the "electic option" for transportation.
<I>Alcohol or Biodiesel: Polution at car - med. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: no. Renewable -yes. </I>
The cost to make is medium to high. Both require the transformation of low density sunlight into plant sugars. This requires LOTS of land. Land is expensive and plants are inefficient. Lets not even get into the issue of water availability. No neither of these renewables is cheap.
There is some production of pollutants in the production of both alcohol and bio-diesel. The primary gaseous product is methane, a known green-house gas. You can capture the methane as a secondary fuel source, but it just adds cost with little effective return. The other biproducts are solid wastes. These can be simple things like celluloses. There are usually some nasty stuff leftover that contains lots of ketones and other stuff fairly toxic stuff. Just ask a distiller what he does with his 'mash' when he's done.
One pollution benefit with corn based bio-diesel is that your car smells like fresh popcorn.;-D
<I>Organic fuels such as Alchohol or Biodeisel are our best choice until we come up with some cheap/free nonpoluting centralized energy source, like neuclear fusion.</I>
They are certainly a nice supplement. I would love to see them used more. However, they cannot fill more than a fraction of the current demand.
Forget fusion. Thermonuclear fusion has been "20 years from commercial use" for the last 50 years. We aren't really any closer to tokamak fusion than we were in the late 60's. The current research is underfunded and (IMHO) headed in the wrong direction. There are some glimmers: the modest revival of interest in inertial confinement fusion (e-beam, n-beam, p-beam, and laser), muon catalyzed fusion, and He3 fusion. There even seems to be some substantive data still coming out of the so-called "cold fusion" folks. Regardless, most fusion approaches are going to produce lots of hard radiation: neutrons, gamma & x-rays. Don't expect Doc Emmet E. Brown's "Mr. Fusion" any time soon.
Why the bias towards centralized energy sources? That is the exact opposite of what I want. I want off the grid. Pull down those ugly power lines. Clean up our air. I want a cheap, clean, personal power source that I can use for all my home and transportation needs.
I want cheap, clean, and safe personal energy storage. Some possibilities are non-platinum catalyst fuel cells, high speed flywheels, liquid nitrogen, buckytube hydrogen gas storage pods, and 'perfect mirror' light/heat storage units.
I want cheap, clean, and safe personal energy generation. Some possibilitities are 70%+ solar cells which use micron sized dipole antennas (rectennas) or quantum dots, methane cycle fuel cells, low grade thermal-isotopic heaters, magneto-hydrodynamic generators, and maybe even "cold-fusion" power generators.
Mostly I would like someone to develop a form of electrical power storage that would give us the equivalent energy storage capacity of 100 litres of gasoline in about a kilogram of "battery". Power generation we can do (if somewhat badly). Storage and distribution are the key.
Too true. Everyone in the computer gaming industry should pick up a copy of Scott McCloud's UNDERSTANDING COMICS. Heck, I recommend it to anyone, period. Among other things, he teaches the reader to really SEE the literal and symbolic meaning of drawn images (in particular comics). To summarize the book(from memory):
1. Time = Space 2. Reader imagination/participation is absolutely vital to communicating the work 3. You can communicate many things better with symbols and words, than with words alone. 4. The complexity of a picture has almost nothing to do with its communication value.
Lots more in there. Go read it, and his new book REINVENTING COMICS.
"But Woz was a man, and we give him more credit than he deserves by glorifying him as we do. "
ARGHHH!!! It is so painful to see historically uninformed opinions like this surface so casually.
What Woz brought to the young field of digital electronics was Art. Anyone with a smidgen of electronics training who ever looked at the schematics for the Apple II Disk Drive controller saw the genius, the elegance of the design. Forget that other disk controllers for minicomputers occupied whole cabinets. Forget that Woz's controller only used a few cheap TTLs on one board. But do remember that Woz was the first real digital designer to realize the importance of integration. The Apple II was a Tight design. He knew he could toss functionality out of the hardware and pick it up in the software. He knew that without hardware support (like onboard color graphics) he could make difficult software hacks easy (like Breakout in 100 or so lines of Apple Basic). Woz had a greater insight into a computer as a single integrated SYSTEM than anyone before him. Woz was the Bobby Fischer of digital electronics and computing. He got underneath the whole field and transformed it into something new: the personal computer.
Would he have brought that to the masses without Jobs, Markula and Co? Probably not. Would he have gotten as much credit for being a computer genius without the business success of Apple Computer? Hard to say. But before you go mouthing off about how we give him too much credit, then go back and get some pre-1980 issues of BYTE Magazine; talk to an old timer or three; ask yourself what company design team could have done what Woz did at his desk in his bedroom at home with damn near no resources but his brain and pencil and paper.
THEN you can talk to me about how much credit we should or shouldn't give Woz for his achievements.
Nope. Good old "Jack" Schmitt is alive and well. Apparently he lives in Wisconsin now. He is on the faculty of U of W-Madison. They have a brief bio page Here. Too bad for New Mexico. He was a real proponent for the state.
"I'm not saying it's for better or worse, but the fact that this propulsion system would mean launching large amounts of plutonium atop a chemical rocket to get out of the Earth's gravity well shouldn't be overlooked or swept under the rug. The potential for disaster is there. "
I completely disagree with you about the potential safety hazards of nuclear power supplies in space craft. However, there are alternatives to using nuclear materials to power a plasma rocket. Most involve a variant of solar power. Some represent a much better power supply solution for a plasma drive than does a radio-isotopic power supply. Each has its own unique advantages and disadvantages:
- Photovotaic - Solar Thermal Generator - Photovoltaic/Solar Thermal hybrid - Microwave Power Transmission - Solar Thermal/Isotopic hybrid - Photovoltaic/Solar Thermal/Iostopic hybrid
1. Photovotaic (PV): "That durn thing looks like a christmas tree!"
Advantages: high reliability, graceful failure modes, low complexity, a significant amount of in-space experience with the technology.
Disadvantages: medium to high mass, low power to mass ratio, high launch & on-orbit assembly costs, low power conversion efficiency, efficiency degrades over time.
PV panels can be hung along boom arms on the ship. Assuming a 25% conversion efficiency of sunlight to power, then a square meter of PV panel will generate about 342 (1370 * 25%) watts near Earth and about 147 (590 * 25%) watts near Mars. Assuming the spaceship needs about 20 kw of continuous power when the engines are on, then the ship would need a minimum of 136 sq-m (1464 sq-ft, for the metric impaired) of PV panels. If 200 sq-m (2153 sq-ft) of panels were used, then the panels could lose up to 32% of their efficiency or area before effecting the trip. Thin film, flexible PV panels are already in use in space today.
2. Solar Thermal Generator (STG): "Hey, that thing looks like my Pappy's old satellite dish. Wonder if he gets free cable?"
Advantages: high power to mass ratio, variable power generation, high power levels.
Disadvantages: medium complexity, several point-failure modes, little or no experience with technology in-orbit.
Basically we set up a big concentrating mirror, heat a working fluid, then spin a turbine to generate electricity. An inflatable mirror or mylar Freznel reflector could be used to concentrate the sunlight. Either could be compactly stored for launch from Earth and deployed in orbit. Energy conversion efficiencies of 60%-70% are easily achievable. Assuming again that about 20 kw of continuous power would be needed and that the STG has a conversion efficiency of 60%, then the concentrator would need to have an area of approximately 57 sq-m (613 sq-ft). If the concentrator is a flat mylar freznel lens, then its diameter is only 4.26 meters (14 feet)! This makes the STG collection surface about one quarter the area of an equivalent PV system. The turbine could be replaced with a higher efficiency Sterling Engine, or even a direct thermal conversion system as is used in some thermal-isotopic (eg the dreaded nuke!) systems. The amount of power generated can be varied by moving the heating chamber away/toward the focal point.
3. Photovoltaic/Solar Thermal hybrid (P/STG): "Still looks like my Pappy's old satellite dish."
Advantages: Same as for STG, higher conversion efficiency, lower mass, high power to mass ratio.
Disadvantages: Same as for STG, high complexity, higher chance of system degradation/failure.
This is basically an STG with a small PV pasted on the front of the heating chamber. The PV is cooled by the working fluid in the heating chamber. The heated fluid then goes on to the turbine, just like in a regular STG. The PV is there to extract just a bit more power than the STG alone can manage. The down side is that the PV must be kept cool by the working fluid. This makes designing both the PV and the heat exchanger a challenge. If the PV fries, then it could degrade the system to the point that it is LESS efficient than an unassisted STG would be. The payoff is that you can get 90%+ energy conversion efficiencies with this gadget.
4. Microwave Power Transmission (MPT): "We went wireless, because we ran out of extension cords."
Advantages: High power to mass ratio, very high reliability, power source easy to maintain (transmitter near Earth), its really nifty.
Disadvantages: Precision pointing needed for transmitting antenna, very low total system efficiency.
Take our STG, put it in L5 on a space station or somesuch. The STG powers a big maser ("microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation", it was invented before the laser) which transmits power to the ship. The ship sits in the center of HUGE, but low-mass spiderweb of antenna wires. The wires lead straight into a solid state tuner/power converter. An MPT could conceiveably shave tons off of spacecraft's total mass. Another big advantage is that the power generating component of the "engine" is left back near Earth where it can be more easily maintained and repaired. The disadvantages are that the power beam must be aimed and shaped with a very high degree of precision. If it is off by a fraction of an arc-second, then the ship loses power. Please note that the microwave power levels would not be high enough to heat water, much less fry the ship or anyone inside it. The beam would be spead out over a multi-kilometer radius. This scheme is unlikely to be used, but is one of the cooler ideas for supplying power to a spaceship.
5. Solar Thermal/Isotopic hybrid (ST/IH): "Hey, why is that guy's satellite dish glowing?"
Advantages: All the advantages of an STG, minimal power available when collector not deployed or disabled.
Disadvantages: All the disadvantages of an STG, higher system complexity, people have an irrational fear of anything "nuclear".
Again take our ubiquitous STG, now we supplement it with a safely designed radio-isotopic heater (you pick the radioactive). It acts as a supplemental heating stage for the STG. Besides reducing the concentrator size, it also allows the ship to generate power when the STG is not or cannot operate. This represents a huge increase in safety for the crew of our intrepid, but hypothetical, Mars ship. They can bring the STG down for repairs inflight if needed and not have to worry about running out of reserve battery power. While an ST/IH power system is a really good idea, it will probably never happen. Too many people are scared spitless of anything that says "nuclear" pinned on it.
6. Photovoltaic/Solar Thermal/Iostopic hybrid: "What the heck IS that thing? Its scaring the children."
Advantages: All
Disadvantages: All
Ok, so I made this one up. I just took most of the ideas above and rolled them all together into one big mess. Really it is just our ST/IH system with a PV pasted on the front of the heating chamber again. This one is brought to you by the Dept. of Redundancy Deptartment.
NS stated in his book "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE COMMAND LINE" that he used the Debian distribution of Linux. Though I haven't ever used Debian, I have heard from several sources that it is "Expert-friendly". This could explain NS's comment about Linux requiring lots of technical support.
"To be honest, I think the idea of the GUI has been tied to tightly to the misnomer 'user-friendly', and 'ease of use'. When in fact, a GUI isn't anymore easy to use the a command line its just easy to learn. You get to see all the options available to you, instead of needing to memorize commands. But in a lot of ways, what you learn ends up being weaker."
It is not that it is weaker, it that it lacks the terse complexity of a CLI.
Much of the so-called learning advantage of consistent GUIs over CLIs is due to a funny little aspect of cognitive ability. CLIs are fully dependent on Recall Memory. To use a CLI you must remember the commands and use them within the correct context and with the correct options. A fairly simple Unix command can involve four or more points of seperate recall. A complex command (say one involving multiple commands, pipes, and redirection) can involve a dozen or more seperate recollections. This is a complex recall activity, and one reason why CLIs are considered hard for most people to learn.
However, a GUI command will present the user with an explicit listing of options and potentials. Instead of recall, the user is presented with a context which reminds them of their desired choice. The user thus relies on recognition memory for most GUI operations. Complex GUI commands lead the user through nested recognition levels. If the GUI is a consistent interface, then the user gets to leverage their experience and thus reduce the number of recollections required.
Why is this a "ease of use" or "learning" advantage? Simply, recognition memory is faster and frequently more reliable than recall memory.
GUI's frequently result in much less powerful interfaces to the machine. However, a GUI allows the user to wade in, poke around, and discover (recognize) how to accomplish a task. This is not possible with a CLI.
Why do people (power users and programmers in particular) still use CLIs? A CLI allows an expert user to rapidly execute powerful commands. Frequent exposure and repetition build up a more recognition-like facility with the commands. It ceases to be a recall task and becomes a recognition task. Add to this the "pianist effect", the ability of the hands to "learn" the character patterns associated with commands (this happens with GUI mouse movements too). This turns what once was a time-consuming recall activity into a virtually automatic "playing" of the command line.
Which is better? My opinion is that GUIs are much better for infrequent operations and casual users. CLIs are much better for experts and power users.
That there are more casual users than power users explains why GUIs "won" the interface wars.
- if you like grade-A SF, read Analog it is the best SF magazine out there and has been for decades IMHO.
- If you like concise, factual, exploratory science, read Analog. Their science fact articles are the best in the business.
- if you want to read some facinating summaries of what is happening in physics, read John Cramer's Alternate View columns in Analog or on his web site.
- if you want to read some rousing good Hard SF novels, read John Cramer's TWISTER and EINSTEIN'S BRIDGE. Good stories, good characters, good science.
Lest I confuse anyone with my poor quoting, this is most certainly NOT in the US Constitution: The purpose of IP laws is to protect the owner of the IP.
Explicitly, no. Implicitly, yes. Look what the US Constitution says in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Congress gets the power to grant "Authors and Inventors" a time-limited monopoly. So the explicit purpose of the clause is to establish a mechanism where IP can be protected as an "exclusive Right" for a limited time. What sprung from this little clause is the whole mess of IP law.
I will grant that the higher and less profane purpose was for the public good. It says so right there: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.". The thing that makes it possible is private ownership of ideas. That is why I keep saying that the purpose of IP law is to protect the owners rights to their IP, not the public. The public gets the hope that "Science and useful Arts" will indeed progress. The owner gets a Right.
I think the reason it seems to be irritating people when I maintain that "IP law is to protect the owner" is that I am trumpeting property rights amongs people (open sourcers) who think that IP protection is bad. I don't think it is bad. I think it is broken and needs to be fixed.
In other words, how does one own a legal abstraction without the law that defines that legal abstraction?
Right. Until you get the law, there is no legal definition of ownership and hence no legal protection. That does not mean that there was no concept of Idea-as-Property. A need was perceived and the US Constitution set up a mechanism which was fleshed out later in the law.
If the whole idea of patents were to help companies there wouldn't be this pesky disclosure thing, a company would simply have legal rights to an idea while keeping it a trade secret. Best of both worlds as far as a company is concerned.
Bingo! Thanks for illustrating my point. Until IP was recognized and protected as PROPERTY, the developer had no legal protection when the trade secret was stolen or reverse engineered. Disclosure is necessary to create a defineable record of the property, just like land is registered. That such disclosure was open to the public at large was the founder's genius at spuring prosperity at large.
It looks like you ignored my second sentence, though. I also said "The US founders knew that making the information public would help spur innovation and industry." The IP system the US Constitution set up was a compromise between the "I own it now and forever" folks and the "It should be free for everyone" believers. I did (and still do) object to the idea that the primary purpose of the US IP system is to protect the public. Whether patents, copyrights, or trademarks, its primary purpose is to create an ownership system for ideas. That the ownership period does not last forever is the genius of the founders. It is the best of both worlds: individual greed + public interest.
The law was enacted to help people by giving companies a way to release ideas and stimulate development, and in trade for this concession, the company was granted a privellage it wouldn't have otherwise, a legally enforcable monopoly on that idea.
The trouble with your argument is that anyone with a trade secret HAS a real monopoly on that item. It is only when it becomes known that they lose the monopoly. When the secret is out they have no recourse. One theft and they lose their stranglehold. The founders knew this. As businessmen themselves, they feared it.
There were more cases of the businessmen and inventors needing protection than the public needing protection. After all, the public gets the benefit of the goods produced either way. Business is the only part that gets hampered. The best example is the Jacard (sp?) Loom. The colonies were a raw materials only backwater until the design was stolen, via a prodigious feat of memorization, and brought over the Atlantic.
This is a nice example showing the complexity of the problems facing the the early industrial age folks. A given businessman could react to the Jacard Loom story in any of the following ways: 1) "I need to protect my trade secrets from such dastardly theft." 2) "Hmmm, if I can somehow get my hands on his trade secrets, I can take his business!" 3) "If only they had sold us the looms in the first place, such sinful theft would have been unnecessary."
What the founders did was recognize that they needed to set up a way to encourage 3). They were imersed in the philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment after all.
Patents do help companies, but (with the exception of bribes) companies don't make laws. Thus laws get passed to help/protect the people.
Nice fiction. Politicians make laws. In the US Republic (people keep forgetting that it is not a democracy), the representatives are responsible to enact laws. The only real power the people have is to vote for or against a candidate. While companies don't make US laws, neither do the public. Businesses and businesspeople (who also count as part of "the public") can and do influence the lawmaking process far more than any individual or group of individuals. It has been this way from the beginning. (I better stop. I am starting to sound like a Republican here.)
Certainly the US government and laws are about the people. It is concerned about the attempt to "...create a more perfect union...to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity". However, to assume that every element of IP law is there to protect the people over business is absurd. It was an enlightened attempt to solve a real problem. That subsequent modifications of law and consequences of history have muddled the value of IP law and precedent is what WE get to figure out.
If a law helps a company then it either is a failed law, which makes it unlikely it'll be a nearly-global law, or it helps both companies and people, as is the case with IP laws. Ditto with copyrights, etc.
This is an attempt to say that a form of memetic "survival of the fitest" principle creates optimal laws. Like biological evolution, legal evolution is just as likely to create survivable, but not optimal entities. Think duck-billed platipus here, not cheetah. BTW, who gets to judge if a law "failed"? For any given individual, it will usually be "any law I don't like".
You must understand that there was a time before IP laws, that IP is fundamentally different from property and needs different protection.
I do understand that there was a time when IP laws didn't exist. There was a time when even the idea of IP was unfathomable. This is called "Most of Recorded History". IP as a concept is only a few hundred years old. That plus the changing nature of technology has rendered much of the original law ineffective or inappropriate. This rapidly changing environment is fundamental problem pointed out with this situation with Apple (remember Apple? it is what started this discussion;-D ).
The IP law and precident is not adequately covering these situations. The big question now is "What do we want?" I want what the founders wanted: vigorous rights protection, an environment that encourages innovation and prosperity (individual and societal), a system that lets the little guy compete fairly in the business environment. This of course is a moving target. The price of freedom is eternal vigilence.
Not at all. The specific gift culture we call Open Source, maybe. But Apple has thousands of years of discoveries, much research into usability, the networking knowledge of the people who developed the internet, etc. You couldn't write an exhaustive list of what Apple got for free from the world at large.
So Apple doesn't get to protect its new GUI because someone invented jello? Come on. This is just an attempt to deny that people can innovate by saying "well they just took it from somewhere else and tweeked it." The whole point of IP is to define what is the legal extent of ownership of ideas. Just because someone invented the alphabet doesn't mean I can't copyright a novel.
But, you can't make money off of everything. They don't have the right to profit from something just because they're a company. If they're can't make a profit, they can't make a profit.
You can't make money off of everything, but by the same token you can figure out the best way to make money. Apparently apple feels that protecting its GUI is a part of that revenue stream. Their analysis, their decision. Is it right? Is it fair? I don't know. I do know that the market and the legal system will make a judgement regardless of right or wrong.
They could kick and scream, like babies, and get everyone to hate them again... not long ago if you said "Apple" around 98% of hackers, they'd spit. They could bring that image back, or they could realize that a look-alike design garners mind-share, if nothing else, and share gracefully, thus not pissing everyone off.
They traveled down that road once before and Microsoft won. Mindshare does not equal market share. You are failing to learn from history here. Apple is at least trying not to make the same mistakes again. Instead they are making interesting and innovative NEW mistakes.
The whole purpose of IP laws is to help the public by giving companies a reason to release their works instead of hiding them. But if the public isn't helped by this, why should we consider strengthening these laws when it would only help the corporation with the most lawyers?
Nope. The purpose of IP laws is to protect the owner of the IP. The US founders knew that making the information public would help spur innovation and industry. They also knew that people would not innovate if there was no reasonable chance of profit.
The US IP system, particularly the Patent System, acts as a compromise between these positions. It allows the owner to profit from their work via a time-limited monopoly. It spurs innovation by turning "trade secrets" into publically available information. Licensing is the mechanism that others can use during the protected period to gain access to the technology.
With respect to Apple, they are just using the system to protect their ability to sell technology in which they have invested.
My question is: does an interface theme mimicing a true interface constitute copying (and potential violation of) patents, trademarks, copyrights, or some combination of all three? This is the kind of question that SHOULD have been clearly answered during the Apple v. Microsoft "look and feel" law suits in the 80's.
It wasn't, so now we have confusion and bullying. If it was, then either Apple wouldn't have a case or they would be able to use the courts to force a "cease and desist" order. Either way everyone would know who was right and who was wrong. Instead we have confusion and bad feelings.
Is Apple right? Are they wrong? I don't know. All I know is that given the current state of IP law and precident, what Apple is doing is legal.
I say that Apple will get all the protection they need from copyrights, and that anyone intrigued by the look or functionality of the Aqua clones will probably try the Mac, where before they wouldn't have. Apples ideas will function as advertising, and status points, their reward for contributing to the gift culture we live in, and the gift culture that gave them the ideas they used to build upon.
More likely they will stay with what they have. This was what happened with Windows. It was "good enough". To the casual observer, there was no substantial difference.
Except for Darwin, Apple doesn't participate in the so called "gift culture". I would note that the "gift culture" has gained far more from proprietary culture than vice versa. That Apple, or any successful tech company, derives and builds upon the common meme-pool is certain. However, they spend considerable time, money, and resources to modify, enhance, improve, and outright invent technologies. They deserve the right to protect their innovations as they see fit, just like any other company. Whether their business practices help or harm them only time will tell.
They are after two things: money and mind-share. Just because you are focused on "status points" as the measure of how to "win" doesn't mean that they are as well.
Point 4 is a must. If you reduce your caloric intake but do not exercise, then then your body breaks down your muscles _first_ for fuel. This happens because it is easier and faster than converting your stored fat. Metaphorically, your body thinks you are starving because you can't find enough food (damn that meddling Darwin). This reduces your base muscle mass, which in turn lowers your resting metabolism. So, you have to eat even less calories for the same average weight loss. Rinse, lather, repeat.
This is the number one reason people drop off of a diet. The diet forces their body into destroying itself. The really nasty part about this cycle is that when people drop off of a diet they usually jump back up to their pre-diet caloric intake or more. So now they experience a rapid weight gain and usually end up 5-15 pounds heavier than when they started the diet.
The Hacker's Diet seems to follow the pattern for successful long term weight control: make a long term change in your eating and exercise pattern. Think lifestyle, not diet.
Chris Peterson of the Foresight Institute did a projection a couple of years ago using Moore's Law.
She found that computing elements should be at the sub-nanometer scale by 2015. This implies that molecular nanotechnology should be coming online about the same time, since we will be fabricating logic elements at the molecular level.
This assumes quite a bit, but seems reasonable given the growing levels of research into nanoscale chemistry, molecular biology, and custom molecular synthesis.
Trudel did a much better job of presenting his case for Patent reform in the January 2000 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact. Unfortunately, the article is not posted online. Some of the main points I remember from the article are:
- The protections granted by the US Patent system was the Engine of Prosperity (the title of Trudel's book) that drove the explosion US industrial development in the last two centuries.
- The US Patent system, as defined in the Constitution, is the strongest and best patent system in the world. It was also the first.
- Japan successfully lobbied the US Congress to change US Patent law. The changes resulted in substantially weakening the international protective power of US patents.
- The Japanese lobbying effort started when one of the heads of a major keiretsu declared that US Patent protections were an unacceptable obstacle to Japanese competitiveness. He points out that this amounted to a systematic campaign by the Japanese to steal a fundamental constitutional right from the citizens of the US.
- Patent filings were once held unpublished until approved. Now they are openly accessable to competitors for 18 months. This allows competitors (foreign and domestic) to copy the design, sell it, and then defend themselves against patent suits by claiming "prior use".
- Originally, patents lasted for 17 years from issue. Now they are for 20 years after filing. Many patents take 10 or more years to be approved. The effective lifespan for a patent is now much shorter and in many cases is zero.
Caveat. I don't necessarily agree with Trudel, but he makes a strong case. I know a patent attorney for a major university. After I read the article, I asked her what we should do to reform the patent system. She said "Kill it."
Three Scripts for the Programmer-Kings past deadline, Seven for the SysAds wandering the halls alone, Nine for the Windows-Men doomed to die, One for Larry Wall whence it has grown, In the land of Internet where scripts are CGI.
One Perl to rule them all, One Perl to find them, One Perl to bring them all and across The Web BIND them, In the land of Internet where scripts are CGI.
What speculative technology advance (AI, nanotechnology, mind upload/download, FTL travel, etc) would you most like to see developed in your lifetime? Why?
Thanks and cheers to you for all your good work with kids!
Slashdot Mirror
IV
Will there be growing pains? Almost certainly. Can you unilaterally restrict the growth for the convienience of the existing entities? You will be able to do so to a certain extent, but it will most likely grow past your barriers along paths that you don't block.
The ratio is out of whack. If the Big Scary Internet Business Dot Com has X Bandwidth, and the Home User has X / 2 Bandwidth (not X / 500) as it should be), there is a BIG problem.
If you are the Scary Dot Com that sees this shockwave of high demand headed your way, then it seems you have several choices:
1) Bail out now. Sell your business for what you can get out of it. Sit on the beach laughing at the fools who bought your swamped and dying business.
2) Upgrade your business's infrastructure to handle the increased load. Restructure your business plan so that you can make even more money off of the increased demand.
3) Keep a weather eye on what is developing and how fast. Make contingency plans. Set aside some assets so that you can compensate fast if there is a need to increase your capacity. Don't assume that your, or anyone elses assessment that "wonder tech X" will come online when/where/how/ you think it will.
Since we obviously are going to have serious broadband dispersion in the near future, what must be done, legally, technologically, and otherwise in preparation to support such a network?"
Legally? Nothing, unless you mean that you are going to need legal help with your new contracts and business arrangements.
Technologically? Good question. See my points 1, 2, & 3 above.
Otherwise? Keep informed. Watch your market. Talk to your customers. Talk to your associates. Call your congresscritter. Pray. Do whatever floats your boat and you think helps you prepare for the coming flood.
IV
I did read the article. Your assessment of it and Dilger is correct. He does miss the point. Take for example this passage:
However, the application to learning needs to extend beyond learning the skills needed to operate a certain program in a specific, localized spatial environment. Instead, generalization of knowledge as methodology should be encouraged and actively facilitated by both teachers and designers of software applications and computer-human interfaces.
Demystify everything. In the case of computing, explain the technologies students are using, and tell what's "under the hood" -- show students the server room, or open up a computer and identify the various parts. Use programs that give students direct control over work, instead of displacing control to "wizards" or "helpful" agents.
In the first part he advocates abstraction of skills and knowledge. In the second he proposes the way to gain this abstract skill set is by learning the guts of a particular system. This is generalization? No, your digression on the history of text editors is quite correct. One man's abstraction is another man's detail. My thought was that he was like someone who prefers to drive a Standard transmission automobile. He puts someone who has only driven automatic transmission vehicles behind the wheel of a "stick", and then he decries the woeful lack of understanding and skills of the driver. He then would helpfully suggest that "an examination of the engine, particularly the gear train and the workings of the shifter" would allow the driver to understand the vehicle enough to drive with no problems.
Yea right. Don't expect someone to apriori know something that they have no reason to learn. In the case of Dilger and his university's UNIX network, do not assume that casual computer users are going to be able to or want to fathom network file structures and FTP. Instead, give them tools, training, and time to learn. Help them learn their new environment, don't blame their existing tools for making them ignorant.
IV
That you cannot read or control my mind is not relevant to the argument. That you do have access and the ability to distribute my experiences is relevant. We agree that you and I and everyone else has the right to share their life experiences. Logically then we also have the right to restrict the sharing of our experiences. You have stated as much in other posts by recommending that if others don't want their experiences shared, then they should keep them inside their own heads. Thus you have acknowledge that people have a fundamental right to control the distribution of their life experiences to others. Since we can only share experiences through a representation of the experience, then by extension we have a right to control the representation of the experience.
Even in the extreme case of a hypothetical "mind scanner" this is true. Even if the mind scanner allowed us to directly experience what is in another's brain, what WE would experience as a result would be a different, but similar experience. Simply, you would have a right control the new experience (you in your time/place/state of mind experiencing MY experience). You could share or not share that event. You would not have the right to distribute MY experience directly. You only have the fundamental right to distribute what comes out of YOUR brain, not MY brain.
You seem to think just because you experienced a representative replaying of an experience, that you have a right to the original representation of the experience. This would be analogous to a Catholic Christian's belief that the Communion wafers they are eating really do mystically transform into the REAL body of Christ, instead of simply being a symbolic representation of said body. Again, you can distribute/control YOUR representations of your experiences. A CD that you did not originally make is NOT inside your original experience. That you heard it once does not make it yours.
It does not follow that I no longer have this right simply because someone else had this experience before I did, or because someone set into effect a sequence of events that caused my to have the experience. Once I have an experience, it is my experience too - no matter what lead to the experience or how many other people have similar experiences.
The reason you seem not to see this point is that you are muddling the distinction between representations of my experience, and representations of your experience. You seem convinced that once my experience is "out there" and that you experience it, then that representation of my experience which I ORIGINALLY DISTRIBUTED is somehow a part of your experience. That you have read my short story does not give you the right to photocopy it and give it to a friend. Yes I do reserve the right ahead of time to restrict how you handle direct representations of my experience. Should you choose to distribute a representation of your experience of reading my story (say as in a review), then go right ahead. That is your experience. If you want to distribute representations of my experiences, then you need to talk to me.
The very large integer that makes up a representation of the sounds of a song in an AIFF or MP3 format triggers experiences in the brains of those who interpret that number with a suitable device (cd player or mp3 decoder). If I come across and enjoy this number, then it joins the fold of my experiences and I might want to share this interesting number with a friend.
That interesting "very large integer" (call it VLI-1) is the encoded representation of my experience. You have already agreed that the experience is mine to withhold or distribute. In this case, the mechanism for sharing my experience is VLI-1. Some other and very different "very large integer" (call it VLI-2) is the representation of your experience of enjoying an instance of the decoding of VLI-1. Go right ahead and share your VLI-2 with your friend. It is your right. But make no mistake, VLI-2 better be coming directly out of your head (humming my tune, reviewing my book, whatever) and not just a simple copy of VLI-1. If you want to share my VLI-1 with your friend, then you do so at my discretion and with my restrictions because VLI-1 came out of MY head and not YOUR head.
What is the fundamental difference between recording my experiences with my brain only and using brain augmenting devices such as tape recorders, web browsers, video cameras, etc.? I don't think there is a moral difference.
The difference is those devices are not routing somehow through your brain. They are not brain augmentation devices. They are devices for recording and diseminating those "patterns" you spoke of earlier. The MORAL difference is that you are not recording to distribute your creation. You want to distribute, without their permission, the creative acts of other persons. If you want to add your creativity to the mix, then record and distribute a copy of YOU singing YOUR VERSION of my song. Do not copy and distribute MY VERSION of the song. It came out of my mind and my talent. Morally, it is not yours just because you heard it. THAT is what I meant by Theft of Experience.
Simply put, I do not believe that you can own a pattern or idea. I think such claims of ownership are are invalid prima facie.
I am glad you stated that as a belief and not a fact. So we fundamentally disagree. I DO believe that you can own patterns and ideas: the ones that come out of my head. You do too, or you would not have earlier stated that you have the right to distribute your experiences. This is the fundamental discord between your stated beliefs and arguments. They are in fundamental conflict.
It is only prima facie ("on the face of it" to the latin illiterate) to YOU. It is not to me. I have tried to point out the irreconsilable inconsistency between your beliefs and arguments. You seem to want to eat your cake and have it too.
I'm sorry, but I cannot make any sense of "theft of experience" since I fail to see how you could remove someone's experiences from them. If you just mean to say "theft of intellectual property", then we're back to square 1. You believe ideas and patterns can be owned and I do not.
Your failure to see stems from your failure to understand that we can physically symbolize and represent our experiences outside of our bodies. And yes I do mean Theft of Intellectual Property. I coined a synonym of "Theft of Experience" to try and move the discussion away from what seems to be, for you, a very emotionally and intellectually loaded term. I believe that if we did not own the ideas and patterns that we produce, then we would have NO rights.
My children all understood this principle well before they got their driver's licenses: they own the Title to the car, not the car itself. If you take their car without legally obtaining the title from them, then you stole the car. The car is the physical manifestation of an idea, just as a CD or MP3 is the physical manifestation of an idea. Same thing.
Nowhere in your arguments do you seem to acknowledge the concept of agreements between people (contracts). Whether explict or implicit, I feel this whole argument boils down to the fact that you do not believe that I have the right to enter into contracts because there is no such thing as property. You do not seem to recognize that a "pattern" does not exist outside of its physical representation: whether it be in my head, on a CD, as a written "very large integer" or as a DNA encoding, or as a contract.
If in a contract, I grant the right for someone to transform a pattern WHICH ORIGINATED WITH ME and WHICH IS ONLY ACCESSABLE BY ME from one form to another (say from my thoughts into an MP3 encoded song), then that contract can contain whatever conditions I want. Your argument, as best I can distill it out, is that once it leaves my head it isn't mine. My position is that I can place conditions on the act of it leaving my head and taking on a physical instantiation. That those limitations apriori interfer with your desires when you encounter my authorized representation of the pattern/thought/experience which I released, is the intent. I might want to make money off of it, I might want the sales to go to my favorite charity, I might want it to be freely downloadable and NOT to be sold by you or anyone else. Those are my conditions to you for and prior to you experiencing the represenational instantiation of a portion of MY mind.
Your rights stop where my body begins. Once a pattern leaves you, through whatever means of transmission you care to name, it is no longer part of your corpus. You have no right to tell me what I can and cannot do with my experiences. My right to self determination of thought and communication outweighs any right you believe you have to strictly control all the ripples of information spreading from your direction or elsewhere.
That is an absurd stance. If my rights stop where your body begins then I could, morally and legally, strip you of every possesion (they are not in your body) or surround you in an inescapable box, deny you access to food or water or air until you die, all without EVER touching your body. That is a patently absurd position. By the same token I could, using our mythical mind reading machine, grab every thought or feeling or memory in your head, just by reading the passive EM emanations from your head. As a result, you would have no rights at all to THE CONTENTS OF YOUR OWN MIND. Please note that you have already agreed that you do have the right to the contents of your own mind, whether I can read it or not. No sir, your rights and my rights mutually stop where they intersect. The only way we morally cross that boundry between our rights is through mutual contracts.
You have no fundamental rights to the "ripples of information" spreading out to me because I released those ripples upon contractual conditions. Again, your statement contains within it the inherent contradiction of your position: You don't think I have the right to restrict control of any "ripples of information" you encounter, but you grant yourself the right to restrict my ability to release "ripples of information" under a concensual contract, a limiting agreement between parties.
I know what my rights are and I will protect them to the greatest extent I can from individuals who try to deny them.
Respond if you want. I will say no more further. I have made my case to you. I hope you see reason and not the self serving delusion you now advocate.
IV
The problem with your argument is that you are trying to share something that is NOT in your brain nor in your direct experience. If you were, you would not be, say, duplicating and distributing a CD via MP3. Instead, you would be downloading YOUR memories of YOUR experience of hearing THEIR music played from said CD. Your "infinite fidelity of experience" argument only plays out as your right to distribute the information if, and only if, you are distributing YOUR experience.
Neither you, I, or anyone else has the right to distribute the experience of others without their permission.
I trust you agree with that statement because I doubt you want me to have the right to copy, reproduce, and distribute the contents of your brain without your permission. You have a fundamental moral right to your own experiences. I shouldn't be allowed to view, reproduce, or destroy them without your permission. Yet, this is exactly the opposite of what you are advocating as "moral" for your rights to other people's experiences. For example: commercial audio CD is a creation of one or more people who have granted limited rights to reproducing their experience of creating, hearing, mixing, and recording an audio experience. The bits on the CD or in file copy are a reproduction of their experience, as best they can produce it currently. Hence, by your reasoning, they AND ONLY THEY should have a right to control it. This applies to music, artworks, movies, writing, inventions, you name it.
If someone invents a memory/sensory scanner, then you have right to reproduce a perfect copy of your experience/memory of your exposure to the event (including any attendant tinninitus, frequency limitation in your hearing, memory problems, etc which you have). You currently enjoy this right to the limits of your "mental fidelity" and "reproduction fidelity": you can write a review, you can record you singing it, you can score the piece from memory, and so on. That is (or should be) your right. You do not and should not have the right to: make a direct copy of my recording (my experience & expression), photocopy my score (my experience & expression), record me humming a tune (my experience & expression), and so on. Simply, you don't have ANY rights to my Intellectual (experiencial and expressional) Property which I do not grant to you. If I choose to grant you the right to share my experience under certain conditions (you have to buy from a certain supplier, you cannot reproduce it in certain ways, etc) then that is my right.
Your rights stop where mine start. An Elvis-impersonator has the right to sell as many copies of his version of "LOVE ME TENDER" as he wants. He does not have the right to distribute direct copies of Elvis's recorded version. That is theft of experience. That is wrong. That is immoral.
IV
Amen! You described my situation perfectly. It must be just a case of bad timing.
/. drone away about "you over 30 guys should quit bitching and keep up with the technology". <crotchety grandpa mode> I have Forgotten more languages and technologies than you will ever learn, Sonny </crotchety grandpa mode>
God knows I am getting REALLY tired of hearing some of the younger folks on
The ugly truth for many in the over 30 tech crowd is that the things that should make us very valuable to employers are driving them away: experience with learning new technologies, many successful and failed projects under our belt (never underestimate the educational value of a failure), a history with the technology, a love of technology apart from (or in spite of) the payoff, and a keen sense of what will and will not work.
Why they don't like us:
- we tell them their half-assed ideas really ARE half-assed and cite specific historical examples to back it up
- we do value our families and "off" time. Why the heck else are we working? To line a CEO's pocket and to get that ever so infrequent "attaboy"?
- we love the technology and have been into it since before it was "cool" to be a techie. We were the weirdos they couldn't understand and couldn't get along with in high school, and still can't.
- we do complain when we find out that some kid fresh out of a tech school, with no real problem solving skills, no real people skills, no real understanding of the foundations of the technology, and no knowledge of the problem domain come in and make MORE than we do!
I could go on and on, but just read the other "hey we are over 30" posts and you will get the idea. The above poster got it right: for most of us older tech worker the biggest problem is our timing; we were born on the wrong side of the boom... the boom we helped create.
Sigh!
IV
I am glad someone else besides me holds this opinion. Stephens has a couple of excellent SF books under his belt (SNOW CRASH and DIAMOND AGE). I enjoyed many parts of CRYPTONOMICON, but it was an average good piece of regular fiction. It very much felt like Mr. Stephenson was too caught up in expanding the story element minutae and pointlessly over-developing the characters as opposed to developing a solid plotline (an all too common failing of many current authors). This book required a great deal of patient and largely unsatisfying reading for the first 400+ pages. The only reason I hung on and fought for the end was because Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite current authors. I think CRYPTO was a swing and a miss for Neal.
On whether CRYPTO should be considered SF: just because the storyline contains Alan Turing and a Perl script does not make it science fiction.
IV
I have some factual and opinon quibles with your post:
;-D
<I>Gasoline: Polution at car - high. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation - some. Renewable - no.</I>
The cost to transport and obtain gasoline is incredibly low. This is mostly because we are on the "down" side of the infrastructure curve. All of the expensive stuff (eg refineries, storage tanks, oil tankers, etc) are mostly in place and paid off. Now we are in the "repair & replace" side of the curve. The biggest expense for a gallon (or litre) is the taxes on it. Also, it may be possible to create a gasoline substitute using coal tar, natural gas, or even bio-engineering. I would change it to 'Renewable - maybe'.
<I>Liquid Nitrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - high. Polution at creation - yes. Renewable - yes. </I>
Liquid nitrogen is INCREDIBLY easy to make. All it requires is a rather mundane staged air compressor, cooling coil, and a drip collector. It is simple enough you could set up a windmill to make liquid nitrogen. We don't go out of our way to manufacture liquid nitrogen now, and you can buy it in quantities as much as you can carry at a cost litre for litre that is cheaper than beer (and WAY cheaper than soda). The big hairy expense with liquid nitrogen (or any cryogenic liquid for that matter) is the storage cost. However, if you are planning on using it fast (a few hours), you can store it in styrofoam buckets safely. Liquid nitrogen has the advantage of being the easiest and safest cryogenic to store.
Exactly what is the pollution produced when you make liquid nitrogen? Liquid Oxygen? Heck, that isn't pollution, that's product. You sell that to all the aging baby boomers. I know. Many moons ago, I delivered cryogenic O2 to older folks with respiratory ailments. It was a great college job. You REALLY get treated well when you are literally delivering people the air that they breath.
<I>Hydrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: med. Cost to make - med. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes. </I>
Sorry to burst your bubble, but burning H2 produces lots of nasty nitrate compounds. The problem is that burning H2 is only 'clean' when you: a) burn it ONLY with O2 and b) make absolutely sure that the combustion products are allowed to cool sufficiently prior to release. Live steam will corrode metals, and if hot enough will react with the surrounding air to make those nasty nitrates and carbon compounds again. The Hydrogen Economy zealots would have you believe that Hydrogen burns 'totally clean'. I will grant that it burns much cleaner than gasoline, but about the same as methane or alcohol, and they are MUCH easier to handle.
Cost to transport/obtain is high. Hydrogen is a low density and VERY reactive cryogenic. It embrittles virtually every metal known. We had to learn how to handle it easily in order to put men on the moon. That does not make it cheap, though.
The cost to make as a renewable is high. This is because you have to split it off of its prefered terrestrial mate: water. It takes LOTS of electricity to do this and is very inefficient. The cost as a non-renewable is moderate. You can create hydrogen gas by reducing methane (natural gas). It makes lots of nice pollution in the process. Then you get to compress and cool it to store it as a liquid, more money spent. This is how ALL industrial liquid hydrogen is made.
<I>Electricity: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.</I>
The cost to transport electricity is moderate. Those power lines that everyone SO love to have hanging over their heads lose about 1% per mile. (It may be better now, I haven't checked lately). Electricity itself is expensive, so any transport losses drive the cost up rapidly. Add in lots of nice infrastructure (like substations) which requires regular maintenance and you drive the cost up even higher. The other big cost problem is load balancing. If the loads are not balanced well, then it is costing you mucho money as the 'excess' electricity radiates away as heat in the lines. Load balancing a big area is a black art.
The cost to make electricity is high. You are transforming a fundamentally cheap energy source (oil, natural gas, coal) and transforming it into another form. A big commercial plant is lucky if it can turn 60% of the total combustion heat into electricity. This applies even more to 'expensive' electricity generation techniques such as nuclear, tidal, solar, or wind.
Add to this the horror that is battery production and use, and you make electricity very difficult to use efficiently. Perhaps something like very high speed flywheels or polymer catalyst fuel cells will allow us to better use the "electic option" for transportation.
<I>Alcohol or Biodiesel: Polution at car - med. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: no. Renewable -yes. </I>
The cost to make is medium to high. Both require the transformation of low density sunlight into plant sugars. This requires LOTS of land. Land is expensive and plants are inefficient. Lets not even get into the issue of water availability. No neither of these renewables is cheap.
There is some production of pollutants in the production of both alcohol and bio-diesel. The primary gaseous product is methane, a known green-house gas. You can capture the methane as a secondary fuel source, but it just adds cost with little effective return. The other biproducts are solid wastes. These can be simple things like celluloses. There are usually some nasty stuff leftover that contains lots of ketones and other stuff fairly toxic stuff. Just ask a distiller what he does with his 'mash' when he's done.
One pollution benefit with corn based bio-diesel is that your car smells like fresh popcorn.
<I>Organic fuels such as Alchohol or Biodeisel are our best choice until we come up with some cheap/free nonpoluting centralized energy source, like neuclear fusion.</I>
They are certainly a nice supplement. I would love to see them used more. However, they cannot fill more than a fraction of the current demand.
Forget fusion. Thermonuclear fusion has been "20 years from commercial use" for the last 50 years. We aren't really any closer to tokamak fusion than we were in the late 60's. The current research is underfunded and (IMHO) headed in the wrong direction. There are some glimmers: the modest revival of interest in inertial confinement fusion (e-beam, n-beam, p-beam, and laser), muon catalyzed fusion, and He3 fusion. There even seems to be some substantive data still coming out of the so-called "cold fusion" folks. Regardless, most fusion approaches are going to produce lots of hard radiation: neutrons, gamma & x-rays. Don't expect Doc Emmet E. Brown's "Mr. Fusion" any time soon.
Why the bias towards centralized energy sources? That is the exact opposite of what I want. I want off the grid. Pull down those ugly power lines. Clean up our air. I want a cheap, clean, personal power source that I can use for all my home and transportation needs.
I want cheap, clean, and safe personal energy storage. Some possibilities are non-platinum catalyst fuel cells, high speed flywheels, liquid nitrogen, buckytube hydrogen gas storage pods, and 'perfect mirror' light/heat storage units.
I want cheap, clean, and safe personal energy generation. Some possibilitities are 70%+ solar cells which use micron sized dipole antennas (rectennas) or quantum dots, methane cycle fuel cells, low grade thermal-isotopic heaters, magneto-hydrodynamic generators, and maybe even "cold-fusion" power generators.
Mostly I would like someone to develop a form of electrical power storage that would give us the equivalent energy storage capacity of 100 litres of gasoline in about a kilogram of "battery". Power generation we can do (if somewhat badly). Storage and distribution are the key.
Too true. Everyone in the computer gaming industry should pick up a copy of Scott McCloud's UNDERSTANDING COMICS. Heck, I recommend it to anyone, period. Among other things, he teaches the reader to really SEE the literal and symbolic meaning of drawn images (in particular comics). To summarize the book(from memory):
1. Time = Space
2. Reader imagination/participation is absolutely vital to communicating the work
3. You can communicate many things better with symbols and words, than with words alone.
4. The complexity of a picture has almost nothing to do with its communication value.
Lots more in there. Go read it, and his new book REINVENTING COMICS.
IV
"But Woz was a man, and we give him more credit than he deserves by glorifying him as we do. "
ARGHHH!!! It is so painful to see historically uninformed opinions like this surface so casually.
What Woz brought to the young field of digital electronics was Art. Anyone with a smidgen of electronics training who ever looked at the schematics for the Apple II Disk Drive controller saw the genius, the elegance of the design. Forget that other disk controllers for minicomputers occupied whole cabinets. Forget that Woz's controller only used a few cheap TTLs on one board. But do remember that Woz was the first real digital designer to realize the importance of integration. The Apple II was a Tight design. He knew he could toss functionality out of the hardware and pick it up in the software. He knew that without hardware support (like onboard color graphics) he could make difficult software hacks easy (like Breakout in 100 or so lines of Apple Basic). Woz had a greater insight into a computer as a single integrated SYSTEM than anyone before him. Woz was the Bobby Fischer of digital electronics and computing. He got underneath the whole field and transformed it into something new: the personal computer.
Would he have brought that to the masses without Jobs, Markula and Co? Probably not. Would he have gotten as much credit for being a computer genius without the business success of Apple Computer? Hard to say. But before you go mouthing off about how we give him too much credit, then go back and get some pre-1980 issues of BYTE Magazine; talk to an old timer or three; ask yourself what company design team could have done what Woz did at his desk in his bedroom at home with damn near no resources but his brain and pencil and paper.
THEN you can talk to me about how much credit we should or shouldn't give Woz for his achievements.
Kids!!!
IV
IV
"I'm not saying it's for better or worse, but the fact that this propulsion system would mean launching large amounts of plutonium atop a chemical rocket to get out of the Earth's gravity well shouldn't be overlooked or swept under the rug. The potential for disaster is there. "
I completely disagree with you about the potential safety hazards of nuclear power supplies in space craft. However, there are alternatives to using nuclear materials to power a plasma rocket. Most involve a variant of solar power. Some represent a much better power supply solution for a plasma drive than does a radio-isotopic power supply. Each has its own unique advantages and disadvantages:
- Photovotaic
- Solar Thermal Generator
- Photovoltaic/Solar Thermal hybrid
- Microwave Power Transmission
- Solar Thermal/Isotopic hybrid
- Photovoltaic/Solar Thermal/Iostopic hybrid
1. Photovotaic (PV): "That durn thing looks like a christmas tree!"
Advantages: high reliability, graceful failure modes, low complexity, a significant amount of in-space experience with the technology.
Disadvantages: medium to high mass, low power to mass ratio, high launch & on-orbit assembly costs, low power conversion efficiency, efficiency degrades over time.
PV panels can be hung along boom arms on the ship. Assuming a 25% conversion efficiency of sunlight to power, then a square meter of PV panel will generate about 342 (1370 * 25%) watts near Earth and about 147 (590 * 25%) watts near Mars. Assuming the spaceship needs about 20 kw of continuous power when the engines are on, then the ship would need a minimum of 136 sq-m (1464 sq-ft, for the metric impaired) of PV panels. If 200 sq-m (2153 sq-ft) of panels were used, then the panels could lose up to 32% of their efficiency or area before effecting the trip. Thin film, flexible PV panels are already in use in space today.
2. Solar Thermal Generator (STG): "Hey, that thing looks like my Pappy's old satellite dish. Wonder if he gets free cable?"
Advantages: high power to mass ratio, variable power generation, high power levels.
Disadvantages: medium complexity, several point-failure modes, little or no experience with technology in-orbit.
Basically we set up a big concentrating mirror, heat a working fluid, then spin a turbine to generate electricity. An inflatable mirror or mylar Freznel reflector could be used to concentrate the sunlight. Either could be compactly stored for launch from Earth and deployed in orbit. Energy conversion efficiencies of 60%-70% are easily achievable. Assuming again that about 20 kw of continuous power would be needed and that the STG has a conversion efficiency of 60%, then the concentrator would need to have an area of approximately 57 sq-m (613 sq-ft). If the concentrator is a flat mylar freznel lens, then its diameter is only 4.26 meters (14 feet)! This makes the STG collection surface about one quarter the area of an equivalent PV system. The turbine could be replaced with a higher efficiency Sterling Engine, or even a direct thermal conversion system as is used in some thermal-isotopic (eg the dreaded nuke!) systems. The amount of power generated can be varied by moving the heating chamber away/toward the focal point.
3. Photovoltaic/Solar Thermal hybrid (P/STG): "Still looks like my Pappy's old satellite dish."
Advantages: Same as for STG, higher conversion efficiency, lower mass, high power to mass ratio.
Disadvantages: Same as for STG, high complexity, higher chance of system degradation/failure.
This is basically an STG with a small PV pasted on the front of the heating chamber. The PV is cooled by the working fluid in the heating chamber. The heated fluid then goes on to the turbine, just like in a regular STG. The PV is there to extract just a bit more power than the STG alone can manage. The down side is that the PV must be kept cool by the working fluid. This makes designing both the PV and the heat exchanger a challenge. If the PV fries, then it could degrade the system to the point that it is LESS efficient than an unassisted STG would be. The payoff is that you can get 90%+ energy conversion efficiencies with this gadget.
4. Microwave Power Transmission (MPT): "We went wireless, because we ran out of extension cords."
Advantages: High power to mass ratio, very high reliability, power source easy to maintain (transmitter near Earth), its really nifty.
Disadvantages: Precision pointing needed for transmitting antenna, very low total system efficiency.
Take our STG, put it in L5 on a space station or somesuch. The STG powers a big maser ("microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation", it was invented before the laser) which transmits power to the ship. The ship sits in the center of HUGE, but low-mass spiderweb of antenna wires. The wires lead straight into a solid state tuner/power converter. An MPT could conceiveably shave tons off of spacecraft's total mass. Another big advantage is that the power generating component of the "engine" is left back near Earth where it can be more easily maintained and repaired. The disadvantages are that the power beam must be aimed and shaped with a very high degree of precision. If it is off by a fraction of an arc-second, then the ship loses power. Please note that the microwave power levels would not be high enough to heat water, much less fry the ship or anyone inside it. The beam would be spead out over a multi-kilometer radius. This scheme is unlikely to be used, but is one of the cooler ideas for supplying power to a spaceship.
5. Solar Thermal/Isotopic hybrid (ST/IH): "Hey, why is that guy's satellite dish glowing?"
Advantages: All the advantages of an STG, minimal power available when collector not deployed or disabled.
Disadvantages: All the disadvantages of an STG, higher system complexity, people have an irrational fear of anything "nuclear".
Again take our ubiquitous STG, now we supplement it with a safely designed radio-isotopic heater (you pick the radioactive). It acts as a supplemental heating stage for the STG. Besides reducing the concentrator size, it also allows the ship to generate power when the STG is not or cannot operate. This represents a huge increase in safety for the crew of our intrepid, but hypothetical, Mars ship. They can bring the STG down for repairs inflight if needed and not have to worry about running out of reserve battery power. While an ST/IH power system is a really good idea, it will probably never happen. Too many people are scared spitless of anything that says "nuclear" pinned on it.
6. Photovoltaic/Solar Thermal/Iostopic hybrid: "What the heck IS that thing? Its scaring the children."
Advantages: All
Disadvantages: All
Ok, so I made this one up. I just took most of the ideas above and rolled them all together into one big mess. Really it is just our ST/IH system with a PV pasted on the front of the heating chamber again. This one is brought to you by the Dept. of Redundancy Deptartment.
That's enough for now.
IV
NS stated in his book "IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE COMMAND LINE" that he used the Debian distribution of Linux. Though I haven't ever used Debian, I have heard from several sources that it is "Expert-friendly". This could explain NS's comment about Linux requiring lots of technical support.
IV
"To be honest, I think the idea of the GUI has been tied to tightly to the misnomer 'user-friendly', and 'ease of use'. When in fact, a GUI isn't anymore easy to use the a command line its just easy to learn. You get to see all the options available to you, instead of needing to memorize commands. But in a lot of ways, what you learn ends up being weaker."
It is not that it is weaker, it that it lacks the terse complexity of a CLI.
Much of the so-called learning advantage of consistent GUIs over CLIs is due to a funny little aspect of cognitive ability. CLIs are fully dependent on Recall Memory. To use a CLI you must remember the commands and use them within the correct context and with the correct options. A fairly simple Unix command can involve four or more points of seperate recall. A complex command (say one involving multiple commands, pipes, and redirection) can involve a dozen or more seperate recollections. This is a complex recall activity, and one reason why CLIs are considered hard for most people to learn.
However, a GUI command will present the user with an explicit listing of options and potentials. Instead of recall, the user is presented with a context which reminds them of their desired choice. The user thus relies on recognition memory for most GUI operations. Complex GUI commands lead the user through nested recognition levels. If the GUI is a consistent interface, then the user gets to leverage their experience and thus reduce the number of recollections required.
Why is this a "ease of use" or "learning" advantage? Simply, recognition memory is faster and frequently more reliable than recall memory.
GUI's frequently result in much less powerful interfaces to the machine. However, a GUI allows the user to wade in, poke around, and discover (recognize) how to accomplish a task. This is not possible with a CLI.
Why do people (power users and programmers in particular) still use CLIs? A CLI allows an expert user to rapidly execute powerful commands. Frequent exposure and repetition build up a more recognition-like facility with the commands. It ceases to be a recall task and becomes a recognition task. Add to this the "pianist effect", the ability of the hands to "learn" the character patterns associated with commands (this happens with GUI mouse movements too). This turns what once was a time-consuming recall activity into a virtually automatic "playing" of the command line.
Which is better? My opinion is that GUIs are much better for infrequent operations and casual users. CLIs are much better for experts and power users.
That there are more casual users than power users explains why GUIs "won" the interface wars.
IV
Briefly:
- if you like grade-A SF, read Analog it is the best SF magazine out there and has been for decades IMHO.
- If you like concise, factual, exploratory science, read Analog. Their science fact articles are the best in the business.
- if you want to read some facinating summaries of what is happening in physics, read John Cramer's Alternate View columns in Analog or on his web site.
- if you want to read some rousing good Hard SF novels, read John Cramer's TWISTER and EINSTEIN'S BRIDGE. Good stories, good characters, good science.
'nuff said.
IV
So now we know what Bill Gates is doing since he stepped down as MS's CEO: he is posting rants to /.
Cheers,
IV
Lest I confuse anyone with my poor quoting, this is most certainly NOT in the US Constitution:
The purpose of IP laws is to protect the owner of the IP.
Explicitly, no. Implicitly, yes. Look what the US Constitution says in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Congress gets the power to grant "Authors and Inventors" a time-limited monopoly. So the explicit purpose of the clause is to establish a mechanism where IP can be protected as an "exclusive Right" for a limited time. What sprung from this little clause is the whole mess of IP law.
I will grant that the higher and less profane purpose was for the public good. It says so right there: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.". The thing that makes it possible is private ownership of ideas. That is why I keep saying that the purpose of IP law is to protect the owners rights to their IP, not the public. The public gets the hope that "Science and useful Arts" will indeed progress. The owner gets a Right.
I think the reason it seems to be irritating people when I maintain that "IP law is to protect the owner" is that I am trumpeting property rights amongs people (open sourcers) who think that IP protection is bad. I don't think it is bad. I think it is broken and needs to be fixed.
In other words, how does one own a legal abstraction without the law that defines that legal abstraction?
Right. Until you get the law, there is no legal definition of ownership and hence no legal protection. That does not mean that there was no concept of Idea-as-Property. A need was perceived and the US Constitution set up a mechanism which was fleshed out later in the law.
IV
If the whole idea of patents were to help companies there wouldn't be this pesky disclosure thing, a company would simply have legal rights to an idea while keeping it a trade secret. Best of both worlds as far as a company is concerned.
;-D ).
Bingo! Thanks for illustrating my point. Until IP was recognized and protected as PROPERTY, the developer had no legal protection when the trade secret was stolen or reverse engineered. Disclosure is necessary to create a defineable record of the property, just like land is registered. That such disclosure was open to the public at large was the founder's genius at spuring prosperity at large.
It looks like you ignored my second sentence, though. I also said "The US founders knew that making the information public would help spur innovation and industry." The IP system the US Constitution set up was a compromise between the "I own it now and forever" folks and the "It should be free for everyone" believers. I did (and still do) object to the idea that the primary purpose of the US IP system is to protect the public. Whether patents, copyrights, or trademarks, its primary purpose is to create an ownership system for ideas. That the ownership period does not last forever is the genius of the founders. It is the best of both worlds: individual greed + public interest.
The law was enacted to help people by giving companies a way to release ideas and stimulate development, and in trade for this concession, the company was granted a privellage it wouldn't have otherwise, a legally enforcable monopoly on that idea.
The trouble with your argument is that anyone with a trade secret HAS a real monopoly on that item. It is only when it becomes known that they lose the monopoly. When the secret is out they have no recourse. One theft and they lose their stranglehold. The founders knew this. As businessmen themselves, they feared it.
There were more cases of the businessmen and inventors needing protection than the public needing protection. After all, the public gets the benefit of the goods produced either way. Business is the only part that gets hampered. The best example is the Jacard (sp?) Loom. The colonies were a raw materials only backwater until the design was stolen, via a prodigious feat of memorization, and brought over the Atlantic.
This is a nice example showing the complexity of the problems facing the the early industrial age folks. A given businessman could react to the Jacard Loom story in any of the following ways: 1) "I need to protect my trade secrets from such dastardly theft." 2) "Hmmm, if I can somehow get my hands on his trade secrets, I can take his business!" 3) "If only they had sold us the looms in the first place, such sinful theft would have been unnecessary."
What the founders did was recognize that they needed to set up a way to encourage 3). They were imersed in the philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment after all.
Patents do help companies, but (with the exception of bribes) companies don't make laws. Thus laws get passed to help/protect the people.
Nice fiction. Politicians make laws. In the US Republic (people keep forgetting that it is not a democracy), the representatives are responsible to enact laws. The only real power the people have is to vote for or against a candidate. While companies don't make US laws, neither do the public. Businesses and businesspeople (who also count as part of "the public") can and do influence the lawmaking process far more than any individual or group of individuals. It has been this way from the beginning. (I better stop. I am starting to sound like a Republican here.)
Certainly the US government and laws are about the people. It is concerned about the attempt to "...create a more perfect union...to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity". However, to assume that every element of IP law is there to protect the people over business is absurd. It was an enlightened attempt to solve a real problem. That subsequent modifications of law and consequences of history have muddled the value of IP law and precedent is what WE get to figure out.
If a law helps a company then it either is a failed law, which makes it unlikely it'll be a nearly-global law, or it helps both companies and people, as is the case with IP laws. Ditto with copyrights, etc.
This is an attempt to say that a form of memetic "survival of the fitest" principle creates optimal laws. Like biological evolution, legal evolution is just as likely to create survivable, but not optimal entities. Think duck-billed platipus here, not cheetah. BTW, who gets to judge if a law "failed"? For any given individual, it will usually be "any law I don't like".
You must understand that there was a time before IP laws, that IP is fundamentally different from property and needs different protection.
I do understand that there was a time when IP laws didn't exist. There was a time when even the idea of IP was unfathomable. This is called "Most of Recorded History". IP as a concept is only a few hundred years old. That plus the changing nature of technology has rendered much of the original law ineffective or inappropriate. This rapidly changing environment is fundamental problem pointed out with this situation with Apple (remember Apple? it is what started this discussion
The IP law and precident is not adequately covering these situations. The big question now is "What do we want?" I want what the founders wanted: vigorous rights protection, an environment that encourages innovation and prosperity (individual and societal), a system that lets the little guy compete fairly in the business environment. This of course is a moving target. The price of freedom is eternal vigilence.
Not at all. The specific gift culture we call Open Source, maybe. But Apple has thousands of years of discoveries, much research into usability, the networking knowledge of the people who developed the internet, etc. You couldn't write an exhaustive list of what Apple got for free from the world at large.
So Apple doesn't get to protect its new GUI because someone invented jello? Come on. This is just an attempt to deny that people can innovate by saying "well they just took it from somewhere else and tweeked it." The whole point of IP is to define what is the legal extent of ownership of ideas. Just because someone invented the alphabet doesn't mean I can't copyright a novel.
But, you can't make money off of everything. They don't have the right to profit from something just because they're a company. If they're can't make a profit, they can't make a profit.
You can't make money off of everything, but by the same token you can figure out the best way to make money. Apparently apple feels that protecting its GUI is a part of that revenue stream. Their analysis, their decision. Is it right? Is it fair? I don't know. I do know that the market and the legal system will make a judgement regardless of right or wrong.
They could kick and scream, like babies, and get everyone to hate them again... not long ago if you said "Apple" around 98% of hackers, they'd spit. They could bring that image back, or they could realize that a look-alike design garners mind-share, if nothing else, and share gracefully, thus not pissing everyone off.
They traveled down that road once before and Microsoft won. Mindshare does not equal market share. You are failing to learn from history here. Apple is at least trying not to make the same mistakes again. Instead they are making interesting and innovative NEW mistakes.
IV
The whole purpose of IP laws is to help the public by giving companies a reason to release their works instead of hiding them. But if the public isn't helped by this, why should we consider strengthening these laws when it would only help the corporation with the most lawyers?
Nope. The purpose of IP laws is to protect the owner of the IP. The US founders knew that making the information public would help spur innovation and industry. They also knew that people would not innovate if there was no reasonable chance of profit.
The US IP system, particularly the Patent System, acts as a compromise between these positions. It allows the owner to profit from their work via a time-limited monopoly. It spurs innovation by turning "trade secrets" into publically available information. Licensing is the mechanism that others can use during the protected period to gain access to the technology.
With respect to Apple, they are just using the system to protect their ability to sell technology in which they have invested.
My question is: does an interface theme mimicing a true interface constitute copying (and potential violation of) patents, trademarks, copyrights, or some combination of all three? This is the kind of question that SHOULD have been clearly answered during the Apple v. Microsoft "look and feel" law suits in the 80's.
It wasn't, so now we have confusion and bullying. If it was, then either Apple wouldn't have a case or they would be able to use the courts to force a "cease and desist" order. Either way everyone would know who was right and who was wrong. Instead we have confusion and bad feelings.
Is Apple right? Are they wrong? I don't know. All I know is that given the current state of IP law and precident, what Apple is doing is legal.
I say that Apple will get all the protection they need from copyrights, and that anyone intrigued by the look or functionality of the Aqua clones will probably try the Mac, where before they wouldn't have. Apples ideas will function as advertising, and status points, their reward for contributing to the gift culture we live in, and the gift culture that gave them the ideas they used to build upon.
More likely they will stay with what they have. This was what happened with Windows. It was "good enough". To the casual observer, there was no substantial difference.
Except for Darwin, Apple doesn't participate in the so called "gift culture". I would note that the "gift culture" has gained far more from proprietary culture than vice versa. That Apple, or any successful tech company, derives and builds upon the common meme-pool is certain. However, they spend considerable time, money, and resources to modify, enhance, improve, and outright invent technologies. They deserve the right to protect their innovations as they see fit, just like any other company. Whether their business practices help or harm them only time will tell.
They are after two things: money and mind-share. Just because you are focused on "status points" as the measure of how to "win" doesn't mean that they are as well.
They are a business, not a movement.
IV
Point 4 is a must. If you reduce your caloric intake but do not exercise, then then your body breaks down your muscles _first_ for fuel. This happens because it is easier and faster than converting your stored fat. Metaphorically, your body thinks you are starving because you can't find enough food (damn that meddling Darwin). This reduces your base muscle mass, which in turn lowers your resting metabolism. So, you have to eat even less calories for the same average weight loss. Rinse, lather, repeat.
This is the number one reason people drop off of a diet. The diet forces their body into destroying itself. The really nasty part about this cycle is that when people drop off of a diet they usually jump back up to their pre-diet caloric intake or more. So now they experience a rapid weight gain and usually end up 5-15 pounds heavier than when they started the diet.
The Hacker's Diet seems to follow the pattern for successful long term weight control: make a long term change in your eating and exercise pattern. Think lifestyle, not diet.
IV
Either that or you will here "Eh, You've Got Mail, Doc." and "Thhhe theeha That's All Folks" when you log off.
IV
Chris Peterson of the Foresight Institute did a projection a couple of years ago using Moore's Law.
She found that computing elements should be at the sub-nanometer scale by 2015. This implies that molecular nanotechnology should be coming online about the same time, since we will be fabricating logic elements at the molecular level.
This assumes quite a bit, but seems reasonable given the growing levels of research into nanoscale chemistry, molecular biology, and custom molecular synthesis.
IV
Trudel did a much better job of presenting his case for Patent reform in the January 2000 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact. Unfortunately, the article is not posted online. Some of the main points I remember from the article are:
- The protections granted by the US Patent system was the Engine of Prosperity (the title of Trudel's book) that drove the explosion US industrial development in the last two centuries.
- The US Patent system, as defined in the Constitution, is the strongest and best patent system in the world. It was also the first.
- Japan successfully lobbied the US Congress to change US Patent law. The changes resulted in substantially weakening the international protective power of US patents.
- The Japanese lobbying effort started when one of the heads of a major keiretsu declared that US Patent protections were an unacceptable obstacle to Japanese competitiveness. He points out that this amounted to a systematic campaign by the Japanese to steal a fundamental constitutional right from the citizens of the US.
- Patent filings were once held unpublished until approved. Now they are openly accessable to competitors for 18 months. This allows competitors (foreign and domestic) to copy the design, sell it, and then defend themselves against patent suits by claiming "prior use".
- Originally, patents lasted for 17 years from issue. Now they are for 20 years after filing. Many patents take 10 or more years to be approved. The effective lifespan for a patent is now much shorter and in many cases is zero.
Caveat. I don't necessarily agree with Trudel, but he makes a strong case. I know a patent attorney for a major university. After I read the article, I asked her what we should do to reform the patent system. She said "Kill it."
IV
With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien:
Three Scripts for the Programmer-Kings past deadline,
Seven for the SysAds wandering the halls alone,
Nine for the Windows-Men doomed to die,
One for Larry Wall whence it has grown,
In the land of Internet where scripts are CGI.
One Perl to rule them all, One Perl to find them,
One Perl to bring them all and across The Web BIND them,
In the land of Internet where scripts are CGI.
What speculative technology advance (AI, nanotechnology, mind upload/download, FTL travel, etc) would you most like to see developed in your lifetime? Why?
Thanks and cheers to you for all your good work with kids!
IV