The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is Robert Heinlein’s Hugo-award-winning novel about a revolution on the Lunar colonies to overthrow the tyrannical control of Earth. One of the main characters in the story is Mike, a self-aware computer who helps the colonists win their freedom. Here’s how Heinlein describes him:

…Mike was a fair dinkum thinkum, sharpest computer you’ll ever meet.

Not fastest. At Bell Labs, Bueno Aires, down Earthside, they’ve got a thinkum a tenth his size which can answer almost before you ask.

When I first read that passage (30 years or so ago!), I smiled at the absurdity of it.

From NewScientist.com:

Quantum computer works best switched off

Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running.

The idea behind the feat, first proposed in 1998, is to put a quantum computer into a “superposition”, a state in which it is both running and not running….

With the right set-up, the theory suggested, the computer would sometimes get an answer out of the computer even though the program did not run. And now researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have improved on the original design and built a non-running quantum computer that really works.

“It is very bizarre that you know your computer has not run but you also know what the answer is,” says team member Onur Hosten.

So it gives them the answer almost before they ask for it!

On the other hand, the quantum computer does seem to violate this dictum of Heinlein’s: TAANSTAFL! (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!).

Read the whole article.

Tags: blog | weblog | sci-fi | science fiction | heinlein | physics | science | computing | quantum

On January 23, 1984, a mouse was something that ate cheese and scared excitable women in early sixties sitcoms, a GUI was a sticky something on the soles of your shoes, the Internet was science fiction, and Bill Gates was sure that nobody would ever need more than 640K of memory.

Then on January 24, Apple ran a Super Bowl commercial that announced “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

Tags: computers | news | weblog | blog | mac | apple | technology

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BusinessWeek Online has an article on the blizzard of patents being awarded by the technologically clueless U.S. Patent Office. They describe a patent-everything-in-sight craze in which inventions are being patented that shouldn’t even be considered (because they’re obvious or there’s a lot of prior art) and it’s endangering innovation in the United States.

How to determine when an invention is “obvious” is one of the most critical and contentious issues in patent circles. Over the past two decades, critics say, the hurdle for passing the obviousness test has been steadily lowered, and the U.S. is now awash in a sea of junk patents. Some are just plain silly, such as a patent for “a method [of] exercising and entertaining cats” (basically teasing them with a laser pointer), or another for “an animal toy that a dog may carry in its mouth” (which not only sounds suspiciously like a stick but also looks like one in the patent drawings).
…
The tide shows no sign of turning. In 2004, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued 181,000 patents, up from 99,000 in 1990. New applications, meanwhile, are being filed at a rate of about 400,000 per year. If the Patent Office closed its doors today it would need two years just to clear the backlog.

One reason for this explosion is the natural tendency of patents to track broad economic and technological trends. Just as the early 20th century saw the advent of large-scale patenting of chemicals, the past two decades have witnessed the spread of patents on computer software, business methods, and genes. Controversy often accompanies the expansion. For example, critics say many business method patents, for processes that perform operations, are often nothing more than combinations of age-old practices with a computer or the Internet.

In an article in The National Law Journal last month, New York attorney Barry Schindler expressed the current patent-everything-in-sight mentality. Seizing on a recent ruling by a Patent Office administrative board that said method patents don’t even need to make use of technology, he advised companies to “now seek U.S. patent rights for any unique business method covering every conceivable business operation, such as methods of billing clients, hiring employees, marketing products or service…or simply obtaining funding.”

The computer industry has seen plenty of questionable patents lately. Microsoft has received a patent for clicking a mouse button in various patterns, one of them being the double-click that computer users have been doing since Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984. Then there’s Frank Meyer, a lawyer who realized that nobody had thought to patent the addressing scheme that has been used to access websites and send e-mail on the World Wide Web since the early ’90s, so he patented it in 2003.

The biotech field is seeing similar poaching:

• In 1991, Biocyte patented human umbilical cord cells, so now any doctor wishing to use them in surgery or transfusions must pay royalties.

• Human Genome Sciences (HGS) has patented a human growth hormone gene and has also filed patent applications for more than a million partial human gene sequences.

• Monsanto holds the patent on all genetically-engineered cotton. Belatedly realizing that the patent should never have been granted, the U.S. government has asked the patent office to revoke it.

There are many more examples of patent abuse on the WWW (check out the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Patent Busting Project for starters).

Tags: economics | computers | biotech | technology | blog | weblog

Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” currently includes close to 4 million entries and is the 37th most visited site on the Internet. With that growth in popularity has come concerns about the accuracy of those articles.

Several recent cases have highlighted the potential problems. One article was revealed as falsely suggesting that a former assistant to US Senator Robert Kennedy may have been involved in his assassination. And podcasting pioneer Adam Curry has been accused of editing the entry on podcasting to remove references to competitors’ work. Curry says he merely thought he was making the entry more accurate.

Nature.com has an article comparing science entries in Wikipedia and in Encyclopedia Brittanica.

The results were surprising.

The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.

Considering how Wikipedia articles are written, that result might seem surprising. A solar physicist could, for example, work on the entry on the Sun, but would have the same status as a contributor without an academic background. Disputes about content are usually resolved by discussion among users.

Wikipedia’s accuracy may be even better than Nature states. Two Wikipedia editors compared article lengths and found that Wikipedia entries on average 2.6 times as long as those in Brittanica, so when errors are counted based on article length, Wikipedia’s error rate is far lower than Encyclopedia Brittanica’s.

Encyclopedia Britannica officials declined to comment on the findings because they haven’t seen the data. But spokesman Tom Panelas said such comparisons, assuming they’re conducted correctly, are valuable “because they tell us things you wouldn’t know otherwise.”

Science Journal provides more details.

While some Britannica officials have publicly criticized Wikipedia’s quality in the past, Panelas praised the free service for having the speed and breadth to keep up on topics such as “extreme ironing.” The sport, in which competitors iron clothing in remote locations, is not covered in Britannica.

Britannica researchers plan to review the Nature study and correct any errors discovered, Panelas said.

Unlike Britannica, which charges for its content and pays a staff of experts to research and write its articles, Wikipedia gives away its content for free and allows anyone — amateur or professional, expert or novice — to submit and edit entries.

Harder to pin down are accusations that Wikipedia articles on politics suffer from liberal bias. Blogger La Shawn Barber, who has experienced the anti-conservative bias first-hand had this to say about Wikipedia: “Their reference entries for things like the Star Wars movies and the Harry Potter series are great; their entries on political subjects are atrocious.”

In short, if your teacher gives you an assignment to research solar eclipses, seek out Wikipedia. But if you want to learn about conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, go ahead and check out Wikipedia, just make sure you get a second opinion.

According to an article at Engaget, Quanta has announced that they will be producing the OLPC $100 laptop intended for children in developing nations.

Quanta, who inked another deal with MIT earlier this year, says they’re aiming for a 5 - 15 million unit launch by Q4 2006…with a million or more units destined for Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Nigeria, and Thailand.

Engaget also has photos of the OLPC (or One Laptop Per Child) which is being designed at MIT. The laptop is expected to include:

…A 500 MHz processor, 1GB memory, four USB ports and a dual-mode display usable in full-color or in black-and-white, sunlight-readable mode. Power will be provided either via conventional electric current, batteries, or via a windup crank attached to the side of the notebook for usage in remote regions without a power grid. The systems will be WiFi-enabled and able to connect via cellular networks, as well as including built-in mesh networking allowing multiple machines to share a single internet connection. [Nicholas Negroponte] is working with MIT and five companies (Google, AMD, News Corp., Red Hat and BrightStar) to develop an ambitious 5 to 15 million test systems within the year, to be purchased at $100 a pop by governments in Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa and distributed for free to students.

The Engaget article shows the OLPC being used as a laptop computer, eBook reader, and video game player.

So I’m reading MacBytes.com for the latest Apple news and I come across this headline: Rob Glasser of RealNetworks calls Apple “Pig Headed”. Knowing how similar articles never seem to live up to their headlines, I decided not to RTFA and ambled instead over to the MacRumors forums to see what comments there were. Therein always lies the entertainment.

To sum up the gist of the long and short of it, here’s what I learned: Rob Glasser of RealNetworks (perpetual thorn in Steve Jobs’s pinkie finger) complained at a tradeshow that Apple’s refusal to license their FairPlay software amounts to “pigheadedness.” (FairPlay is how Apple prevents the music it sells from being copied or otherwise ripped off. Vendors using digital-rights management (DRM) schemes other than FairPlay can’t get their tunes loaded onto iPods, which means they’re locked out of 80% of the MP3 player market.)

Glasser’s gibes are fighting words to Mac zealots and commenter liketom responds:

Comment #6

who’s Rob (BUFFERING) Glaser calling pig headed

Celebrity death match needed on this one

To which Blue Velvet replies:

Comment #7

OK. Here you go.

Our man, every time

Folks, the site he references is Google Fight, a wonderful time-waster! You set up deathmatches between contestants and the winner is decided by who has the most hits in a Google search. So, for example, Steve Jobs kicks Rob Glasser’s fundament but loses to God, go figure.

Not surprisingly Jobs also lays the smackdown on Bill Gates. It’s only in the real world that he can’t seem to lay a glove on Bill.