Category: crazy ideas

Relationships between speculative bubbles and economic depressions?

It seems to me that after each bubble (like the American stock market speculations of the 1920’s or the 1990’s dotcom bubble) , an economic depression ensues.

Possible explanation?

When a bubble happens, several people lose their sound judgment and spend their capital and precious time on nonprofitable business dealings. They waste their time on activities, which do not create food and other life’s needs. Without feeling so, they get into debt, one way or other. Eventually, the bubble bursts and they realize that they didn’t make a profit from the work and capital spent.

Since their capital is gone and time was spent on other than profitable work, they find themselves without money to buy the necessities and luxuries of life. Hence, depression.

Depression ends after people work few years and pay off their debts (both real and virtual) and again have money to spend.

A Loophole in Niven's Law (written few hours before The Time Traveler Convention)

Niven’s Law says that if it is physically possible to build time machines and change the past using them, then a stable world is one, in which no time machine has ever been built and operated. This is so because if some inventor built a time machine at a certain time, then in the future, there will always be a time traveler, who changes history so as to prevent the builder from building his time machine.

This assumes that a single brilliant inventor invents a time machine. A single person can be blocked. This is a single point of failure.

However, what if the world has technologically advanced to such a state that there are millions of people, who have the know-how and materials, so it takes only a small leap for them to build a time machine?

My thesis is that such a case represents a loophole in Niven’s Law.

This is so because it is as possible to block development of a time machine as preventing superheated water from eventually boiling, or supersaturated salt solution from eventually crystallizing all excess salt. Water needs to be cooled or the salt solution needs to be diluted. In the case of human technology, this means setting the technology back – shutting down the Internet, having a large natural disaster, etc.

Otherwise, no single time traveler from the future will be able to block all people, who are capable of building time machines. There would be no single point of failure, such that acting on it would prevent the world from having a time machine altogether.

Civil empowerment in Israel?

Where is the Israeli Ralph Nader?
http://www.nader.org/history/bollier_chapter_1.html

After Yom Kippur War in 1973, there were civil protest movements, which eventually caused Golda Meir to resign from her post as the Israeli Prime Minister. However, there were no organizations which lasted for long time and which addressed a spectrum of issues, like Nader’s creations.

The longest surviving organization of protesting citizens, “Peace Now”, dealt with Mideast political issues, rather than with consumer or civil issues.

Jack W. Reeves' opinion that Code Is Design – an exercise in outdated concepts

In http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html there are links to three essays by Jack W. Reeves, in which he claims that source code is software design, and that the software design process contains both high level design, coding, debugging and testing.
According to his point of view, software testing is the equivalent in software engineering of testing airplane models in wind tunnels in aeronautical engineering.

Now, the question is why haven’t people thought of this at the beginning of computer era?

One possibility is that the languages available for building the software for the first computers were very very very low level. Assemblers were nonexistent or very primitive. Compilers were not there yet, either.

Therefore, people had to do the equivalent of modern software building by hand. They had to manually translate their ideas into machine language (or low level assembly language), adjust addresses and offsets by hand, link code pieces by hand. In short, they had to manufacture software (in Reeves’ sense of the word) by hand. The process was relatively labor intensive. Therefore, at the early years of the computer era, design was really separate from coding, more or less.

However, the sixty years, which elapsed since those days, brought us better assemblers, good compilers and high-level programming languages. There were also changes in software development processes. However, our concepts about software design and manufacturing did not change to fit the new reality – until Reeves pointed out the discrepancy.

Any ideas for business model for distributed Free knowledgebase?

I am now reading the interesting article at http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/SoftwareEngineering/BrooksNoSilverBullet.html, referred to by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_in_computer_science, which is in turn referred to by http://www.livejournal.com/users/mulix/141984.html?nc=2&style=mine.

As I was reading the section about expert systems and knowledge bases needed by expert systems, the following question came to my mind:
Suppose we want to develop, build and deploy an Internet based database of rules for software test cases generation.
We would like to have software test engineers contribute their wisdom to the database, for the benefit of everyone.
We would also like to allow GPL-like freedom to the users of the information in the database.

Thus, access to the database and the expert system will be free for everyone. Everyone will also be able to contribute new knowledge to the system. Everyone will also be able to have a private repository of knowledge about testing those parts of his software, which he wants to keep secret for now.

The big question:
Is there any business model, which can make the above work?
Such a business model would have to:

  1. Encourage users of the system to contribute information to the public rather than keep it to themselves.
  2. Encourage payment to the company which developed and is maintaining the expert system and the database and the network of hosts, which make the data accessible to the public.
  3. Discourage people from defiling the database by filling it with junk information.

Municipal E-mail addresses – bonanza for spammers?

According to today’s Ma’ariv, the municipality of Tel Aviv plans to give all residents of Tel Aviv an E-mail address, in the domain telaviv.gov.il.
The E-mailbox will be used for sending various messages to the residents.

It is claimed that a similar service already operates successfully in Berlin.

I hope that residents can elect to receive legal notices (like municipal tax payment notices) via a different E-mail address, instead of the one issued to them. Otherwise, spammers will have helluva of feast spamming those E-mail addresses, which the residents MUST follow lest they be stuck with scandalous late payment penalties.

Software reliability according to Edsgar W. Dijkstra

Dijkstra (A position paper on Software Reliability) argued that the notion of software reliability is meaningless, because the environment in which the software is made to work cannot be dealt with in scientific ways. There is always a gap between the formal specifications and the behavior, which the software user really wanted from the software.

I agree with the meaninglessness of the notion. But I disagree that the environment cannot be treated scientifically.

Consider, for the example, software for controlling an airplane, which flies by wire. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that takeoffs and landings are 100% manually controlled. Let’s also assume that there is no issue of collision with mountains. Then, it is possible to specify all weather conditions, which the airplane might face while being en route. Thus, the control software can be fully specified to control the airplane no matter what air turbulences, rain or snow conditions the airplane might face as long as it is being flown in Earth’s atmosphere.

A discussion held in a far-away country with crazy legal system

The discussion at http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.75691.30
(titled “Excuse me: you are unsecure”) illustrates the situation in a country where people do not understand the difference between breaking mechanical locks and breaking into computers or Web sites.

I said it in the past and I am reiterating the point.

A burglar can break only one physical lock at a time. Therefore vulnerabilities in locks has a built-in limit on the possible damage to society. Working societies do not have enough burglars to exploit the vulnerabilities in locks. Existing laws are also adequate to deal with those who chose the careers of burglars.

On the other hand, a vulnerability in a widely-used software package can cause millions of computers to be broken into with a single sequence of keystrokes, once the hacker has figured out how to exploit the vulnerability. Therefore, vulnerabilities in software have no built-in limit to the possible damage to society. Therefore, liability must be assigned to software vendors, who leave vulnerabilities unplugged, rather than to hackers.

[HIGHLY POLITICAL] Letting Arab citizens of Israel use KKL lands

Recently there was a ruling, which requires KKL (Keren Kayemet Le’israel) to let Arabs use its lands.

KKL was founded by Theodore Herzl to buy lands in the territory known then as Palestine and now as Israel, and settle Jews on those lands.

The ruling is due to the need to cleanse Israel from discriminatory laws.

I believe that in this case this ruling is misguided.

The reason is that KKL is based upon the principle of affirmative action (in Hebrew – “aflaia metakenet” which literally translates into “corrective discrimination”). Jews can be safe in the world only if there is at least one country in the world, in which Jews are clear majority and have full control of their destiny. Currently, this special country is Israel.

For example, Auschwitz could happen only because at the time there was no independent country with overwhelming Jewish majority, ready and willing to absorb all Jews which the Nazis wanted to get rid of.

The Arabs around Israel do not accept the situation in which there is a country with Jewish majority in the Mideast, between Arab countries. They try to change the situation by several means. One of the means is by having the Palestinians insist upon the Right of Return, whose ultimate consequence would be that Israel lose its Jewish overwhelming majority and cease to be the protector of the rights of Jews worldwide.

Another means is by judicial challenges, like the one which resulted in the ruling that KKL must allow Arabs to use its lands.

My practical suggestion:
Accept the anti-discriminatory rulings as just, but pass another law, which would stipulate that the affirmative action based discriminations continue unchanged until all the following happen:
1. All Arab and Muslim countries grant Jews equal rights – to be citizens, to buy lands, to build synagogues of unlimited size (currently forbidden by Islam), to worship their God.
2. There are no antisemite attacks against Jews anywhere in the world.

There is no chance that (1) or (2) will happen, so Israel will be able to practice affirmative action and fulfill its role as the protector of Jews worldwide.

The Tsunami DIsaster – pointing out the need for pilotless cargo airplanes

Now, that adequate help was pledged for and actually provided to the countries stricken with the tsunami, the major bottleneck to prevention of further deaths and hardships is logistical.

Other disasters of similar magnitude, which happened during recent years, were localized in a relatively small region. So the logistical issue was not a significant factor. The tsunami disaster is affecting several communities all around the Indian Ocean. Several of those communities are in hard to reach geographical areas.

For example, in several places, the most important unavailable items, which stand between recovery and further deaths, are water purification tablets and medications against plagues.

This leads to the idea that to prepare for future disasters of this kind of geographical dispersion, rescue teams should equip themselves also with fleets of pilotless cargo airplanes. At time of need, those airplanes would be launched from a mother ship and carry their cargo to the far corners of the disaster area. They would then drop the cargo off and return to the ship. They would be equipped with GPS units and they would network with each other, so that they can autonomously spread over an area and distribute their cargo evenly over it. Each airplane would be capable of carrying 10Kg cargo and have range of 1000Km from the mother ship.

A fleet of 50,000 pilotless airplanes could have meant the difference between a minor logistical nuisance in the tsunami’s aftermath and a major headache for the rescue teams and the health systems of the countries involved.