Slashdot Mirror

Its actually very close to a webcomic i stumbled upon... http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/01/ The premise is that the US is fighting a different kind of war, by dropping supplies everywhere, along with robotic spiders controlled by civilians all over the world. They have a camera and voice box and form sort of a social network/game. Millions of these cheap drones, too inexpensive and plentiful to kill them all... At the very least it's an interesting re-imagining of the Afghanistan war.

Well crap, you've just described a scene from the spiders, an alternate-history-GWOT web comic. Life art life art life.

I suspect that they will not only have wheel but also cameras. THAT would make them useful as an occupation tool. (Of course it should absolutely not be tolerated outside a battlefield and any citizen should be authorized to destroy them during peace time). For a SF vision of this sort, you can check this SF webcomic. In fact the idea seems to come directly from it...

Since the bacteria are passed to the next generation of insects through the eggs, the bacteria reprogram the host's reproductive system so that males either die, don't reproduce, or turn into functional females. Probably don't need to worry too much about the macho DoD playing around with that one.

Oh, I dunno -

http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/3.5/01_hospital.htm l

Can't see the lawyers allowing it, but feminizing most of those hostile Islamic societies would be a vast improvement, both for us and for the people in them.

http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/

which is a damn fine webcomic as well

The Spiders
http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/

Oddly enough, someone's thought of that already.
http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/

It's a damn good web comic, so don't /. 'em... (Yeah, like that request would help anything!)

Dear me, this takes me back. I remember the dot-com era as if it were yesterday. Of course, I was born a little late for it; I was still in high school until just before it all ended, and I realized that my job prospects had gone to shit.

I remember that the boundless optimism of the time, the techno-utopianism of Wired magazine, grated on me terribly, and I could never quite articulate why. Luckily for me, someone else did a fabulous job of it.

I remember reading The Guy I Almost Was and understanding that while technology holds brilliant, world-changing promise, the dot-commies wouldn't be the ones to bring it to us.

I remember Snarfblat (or was it Jason Farnon?) saying "now go make a link to HotWired, or better yet, to your mother".

I do not, however, remember the 2000 Super Bowl ads, which seems to be what everyone else remembers. Go figure.

--grendel drago

People knew sex, and its intricacies, but were discrete about it.

I'd wouldn't call Saturnalia discrete.

Here's a really cool game based on the New Testament:

Apocamon

LS

rush limbaugh eats everything

there's a bigger 'mothership' one that is used to brave the wind.

And here's what the American invasion of Afghanistan might have looked like if the consumer tech was shifted 20 years ahead.

See for yourself

And if your curious what a robotic war might be like, look no further than Spiders.

How the heck did I end up doing advocacy for a games discussion site? It's not my thing at all. Some things are better than humour.

Go visit e-sheep instead.

• Augmented Reality. Quake2025 will be played outdoors.
• Robots take over Work. Marshall Brain talks a lot about this. So, when your job goes to the robots, what are you going to do while you retrain for one of the few jobs not done by robots? Would you rather give up the notion that you must work for money and housing, or would you have us place you in an enormous welfare dormatory? Something to think about, the next time you self-check-out at the grocery store.
• Community Networks. You and your neighbors are well connected. You've got your own currency, and you've got things you want to share (for a small exchange of some form currency) tagged with RFID, for easy registration on the local network. Does every single resident in an apartment really need to have their own vacuum cleaner? Does someone need a couch, when you're throwing yours away?
• Micropayments. I already use BitKeeper because I keep up with Scott McCloud and Patrick Farley. I will probably pay for some OpenSource dev's book one day for a quarter or two.
• Semantic Web. Your computer will have the intelligence of the Internet. When you read someone's review of a movie, your computer will be gathering local showtimes and listings. This is a major destabilizing technology. Markets will be cut and dry, not something that you have to deduce. It doesn't matter if you're a 16 year old that wants to cut lawns, or Sony- this will change your life.
• Genetic Engineering. This will take a little longer to figure out, but we'll get there. In response, humanity will fragment into hoards of species.
• Visual Language. Comics, notations, shorthands, schematics, visual explanation boxes. Write in one notation, read in another. You'll be able to learn two semesters of Chem in half a semester, with the properly coded books.
• Programming is Easy, incidentally. Programming gets easier and easier, every year, if you haven't noticed.
• Big Education Changes. Something big will happen in education, but I don't know what. I believe it will have to do with self-education, the certification process, and canonicalization. This is on top of the changes coming via Visual Language.

One of the most exciting things happening now is Aggregators. There was a slashdot story on them just a day ago. They really change everything about the web, wiki, etc.,. Everything becomes real-time.

Take some time to visit e-sheep and look at *everything*. Clear your desk first because you'll be there a while.

Prepare to be moved.

And if you're half as impressed as I was, don't forget to throw some pennies in the hat. We need to keep Patrick hard at work, he deserves to make a living at this and it would be our loss if he were to give up cartooning owing to lack of funds.

Take some time to visit e-sheep and look at *everything*. Clear your desk first because you'll be there a while.

Prepare to be moved.

And if you're half as impressed as I was, don't forget to throw some pennies in the hat. We need to keep Patrick hard at work, he deserves to make a living at this and it would be our loss if he were to give up cartooning owing to lack of funds.

I can't believe that nobody's mentioned e-sheep yet. e-sheep rocks! Apocamon, The Spiders, Barracuda, they're all great. And jwz loves 'em too.

Interesting to think of in terms of remote piloting, though.

A far-fetched scenario might involve cheap, plentiful drones (I DID say far-fetched) plus cheap or free piloting courtesy of the internet for massive reconnaisance.

Kind of like the spiders but with more readily available technology.

Interesting. And people are saying "It'll never happen" about this idea as well.

Have we become so disillusioned that we don't believe in open mesh networks anymore? Are we afraid that the regulators will kill the idea because it smacks of freedom?

I mean, this is slashdot!

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The Spiders are Coming Next Episode: June 13,2003

Ok so the idea is that you want to own your own hardware. you want it wireless and you want it as a big mesh network.

Have you thought of
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing?

whitepaper here

It's supposed to be great at handling multipath. and it's the foundation of the G4 mobile phones. There is talk of incorporating it into an 802.11 Wlan standard.

so don't worry about the doomsayers. there are smart people out there trying to make the world a better place.

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The Spiders are Coming. Next episode: June 13, 2003

They don't get out much. That is partly a result of the couple's dim finances, but also a result of Mr. Stenlund's dim view of humanity. "The more you deal with people, the more you hate people," he said. "It just feels that everybody is so asleep in this world."

[...]

"No money," Ms. Werner-Stenlund recalled. "Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. We were being threatened to be sued left and right, and I think we were both on the verge of swallowing a bottle of pills."

With the walls closing in, the Stenlunds fled to the mall one day in July 2001, just looking to treat themselves to some small gifts. Ms. Werner-Stenlund bought some shirts. Mr. Stenlund bought Anarchy Online.

"I can honestly say that A. O. helped save my life," Mr. Stenlund said, sitting on a bench outside the store where his journey began.

Games that heal. Hmmm I can feel a Dr Phil coming on....

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The Spiders are Coming. Next episode: July 13, 2003

Agent Smith: As you can see, we've had our eye on you for some time now, Mr. Stenlund. It seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're Richard L. Stenlund, a struggling, frustrated 27-year-old computer repairman trapped in a town too far from big cities where big things happen, trapped in a hand-to-mouth existence, trapped in a mean little culture of cheap thrills and fast-food television. The other life is lived at the distant end of a strife-torn galaxy, where you are a genetically engineered mutant called Thedeacon and are guilty of virtually every soul-light dimming crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. I'm going to be as forthcoming as I can be, Mr. Stenlund. You're here because we need your help. We know that you've been contacted by a certain individual, a man who calls himself Morpheus. Now whatever you think you know about this man is irrelevant. He is considered by many authorities to be the most dangerous man alive. My colleagues believe that I am wasting my time with you but I believe that you wish to do the right thing. We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start and all that we're asking in return is your cooperation in bringing a known terrorist to justice.

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The Spiders are Coming. Next episode June 13th 2003

I guess this means that we need One tax system, One government, maybe Nine or so good folks to catch people who want to run off with the ring...

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the spiders are coming

2. go to bed

I guess that since content distribution is automatic you'd have to never use K2b ever again, or delete the file or something to stop distribution. You'd have to be pretty mean to do that. Meanwhile alice has heard from the bob's who subscribe to her channel that they haven't got theGrid.mpg, so she chooses one of them to be node 1

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the Spiders are coming

Amen to that. Superior soldiers do better with average equipment in the real world than poorly trained substandard people could ever hope to do with top of the line gucci gear.

I think that companies trying to cash in on weekend warriors so that they can have a that elite soldiers have are just cynical profiteers.

There is no such thing as a Warding Staff of the Badger in the real world.

There ARE nice knives which somebody has paid attention to so they fit well in the hand, don't break and cut well without getting blunt too quickly, but the bottom line is that that knife will bounce off a true warrior's cloth chest rig if wielded by a 90lb weakling, while the trained warrior's arm will drive his standard bowey through said agressor's sternum and two inches into the hard ground behind.

Brand names mean nothing. What the particular piece of weaponry or gear can do in your hands might be something, but ulimately it is the person who does the deed which decides things.

Hell, people have been known to miss with cruise missiles.

So yeah, ye manufacturers. Stop commercialising war. Make good products for the sake of making good products. Make them well. Make them stand up on their own merits. DONT make people think that that they'll just be turned into the ultimate badass just by buying them. Practice, training and dicipline count. Anything less just makes them a danger to themselves and others around them. (unless they're buying the tools to be wall hangers, and that just deprives the rest of the community of good equipment.)

My objection is not that the knife is in the game. My objection is the game depicts a knife which is supposed to be able to make you into a better warrior, both in the game world and the real world. There is no such object.

Oh and leave the mastadon ivory for artists and paleobiologists. it has no business on a "serious knife"

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Se the Spiders?

and if so, can the FSF or Nullsoft or somesuch do a reverse SCO and sue for breach of licence?

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The Spiders are Coming. Episode 4: June 10,2003

Now that the source is closed (and that they've definitely modified it to scale for so many users) we can be told that there's encryption at both ends, but can you trust them not to go sniffing in the middle?

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The Spiders are coming. Episode 4: June 10,2003

They should have had the Crew of the Osiris there with a Sentinel and a Flying Bomb. and Digital Jada Pinket-Smith.

"Your Popcorn gives warm sustenence for your vessle... hand over your popcorn. WE DEMAND IT."

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the Spiders are coming. Part 4: June 10, 2003

if you look at traysout2.jpg on page 6 you can clearly see the terminal windows open.

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the Spiders are coming

The Roman Takeover of Gaul

Read the pricewaterhouse coopers analysis

and this other commentary

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The Spiders are coming

And then become a huge contributor?

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The Spiders are coming

I think this technology would do well in the casino industry.

Sometimes they might not want the feds knowing absolutely everything.

Is there a law against that?

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The Spiders are coming

The difference is that you don't leave your photograph on every door handle and toilet seat you touch... or at least I don't.

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The Spiders are coming

# But you donâ(TM)t code any more?

I havenâ(TM)t written code in many years. I am active in policy space rather writing code, doing a lot of public speaking. There is a lot of need for activism now in the shadow of the Patriot Act.


Interesting. I would have thought that hammering out the bugs in the law would have been the oldest form of coding.

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The Spiders are coming.

"Thermoptic camoflage? How is that possible?"

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The Spiders are coming

I just hope they come out soon.

Also, imagine full body flexible displays so you can either be camoflagued or a human billboard. Or even play live action quake with your fave TF teamskins.

yeah. One suit to rule them all. Change your style without changing your pants.

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The Spiders are coming

the FSB is only 200mhz, quad pumped out to 800mhz (that means it shifts 4 times the data per clock cycle)

Of course if your rig is running at less than 200mhz, who cares? so long as it plays the games you like.

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The Spiders are coming

and then sell them as nostalgia jewelry.

Just so long as you didn't buy them for $2k in this century, you should be fine.

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The Spiders are coming

Read all about it here

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The spiders are coming

I think you're thinking of China...

but as for strongest military, that would be USA by a nose.

Pity we don't have The Spiders yet.

In the original space program when cost was no object, the idea was that you launched unmanned missions to see what there was to see and then send humans only when there was glory and really difficult science to do.

Maybe we should just scale up the programme - we're back in the unmanned phase and are going to send out swarms of probes until we find something to investigate that the probes CANNOT examine properley (ie we find life, or a big oil deposit, or a ruined city) and then and only then send people.

Hey, maybe if we sent enough small light probes we could have a scenario like the one in this online comic - everybody controls a probe of their very own as if it's a webcam with 20 min lag.

Why send troops into battle to play networked pong when you can send the spiders.

The thing I love most about this online comic is how the USA's halucinogen bearing bomber is called "the easter bunny."

The Spiders

Highly recommended. Innovative take on the changing face of war.

I'm ripping off David Brin's "Transparent Society" and Electric Sheep's fascinating Spiders series here, but I think it would be particularly cool - for the next big war, maybe 10 years from now when the entire planet is covered in some sort of wireless communications grid - to have ultra-small form factor machines with webcams ("gridcams?") and wireless access points, dropped en masse over the battlefield.

Feeds from these autonomous cameras could be relayed into the grid, and individuals - civilian and military - could observe the war through any one of these gadgets.

I'm not entirely keen on the security implications of the idea, but it'd sure make life hard for anybody - on either side - who wanted to get a little war-crime action in on the side.

Given a theater with a wireless mesh/grid for communications, bombing out the communications infrastructure ceases to be an option -- collateral damage would be prohibitive. In such an environment, it may be better strategy to accept the principle of always-on communications as part of the environment, and to take advantage of it rather than try to shut it down.

Dolphin Brother

I was sure that Rush Limbaugh held top honors here.

From meempool
(I can heartily recommend Leisure Town, it's twisted.
I find the comment in the Forbes article about comic books not making a profit, and that the publishers treat them as R&D for ancillerary rights to be quite intriuging...)

Whatever happened to comic books? In the 1940s millions of Americans read comics not only for Superhero stories, but Romance, Cowboys, War, History, Literary Adaptations and more. Readers were lured away whenever another medium provided their "fix" cheaper, easier or better, beginning with television in the '50s. By the early '80s the only genre still dominated by comics was Superheroes, and 1989's hugely profitable Batman signaled the beginning of the superheroic exodus from comics to film. Since then comicbook sales have plummeted, from $850 million in 1993 to $275 million in 2000 and still falling fast. Leading publishers Marvel and DC Comics both now treat comics solely as Research and Development: they lose millions printing the comics, but earn far more selling licenses for movies, cartoons and toys. Comics' core audience, traditionally pre-teens, is now 18-30 and getting older every year. Is this the death of comics? Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, plays Gandalf to an unofficial fellowship out to save comics by migrating to the Internet! Join the revolution with Justine Shaw's Nowhere Girl, Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep, Tristan Farnon's Leisure Town, Derek Kirk's Small Stories, Jenn Manley Lee's Dicebox, Cat Garza's Magic Inkwell and more!

Hey, don't knock the spelling! Maybe it's something entirely different, like the Apocamon

Oh yeah, and I predict that in the next 12 months the internet and cell phone networks will be largely replaced by a vast wireless mesh network. Why? Ummm... too many gov't spies and RIAA system crackers on the wired net