I differ! We're so used to being "wowed" by things that come with this sort of statement attached: "...that scientists say will still be some years before it is developed and on the actual market, or even something that can be demonstrated in a laboratory", that we've forgotten how to say "yeah, going wow is fun and all but the entertainment industry already makes over a trillion dollars a year, and science is supposed to be, you know, substantial".
Here's a great counter-example: Tilden, the roboticist who made analogue-"brain" robots that displayed impressively realistic "lifelike" behaviours. That's not bad, and he threw it together with his own bits and pieces of things.
Nanotech is being talked about in a few comments here like it's next to impossible to build. But we've all seen photograph, after photograph, after photograph, after photograph, after photograph, after electron-scanned PHOTOGRAPH, of the various miniscule parts and so on that would theoretically one day be used inside of a nanomachine.
You could build one today: if it were feasible. It's obviously not feasible. We wouldn't be reading about the spare parts that are sitting around waiting for the actual thing to break down like a bunch of Taiwanese warehouse owners who jumped into the future from before SAABS and Jaguars were made. It makes no sense.
And all the while the claims get more and more ridiculous. That's just not indicative of real science going on, you have to admit that much. You can go on, and on and on about how things today were unimaginable twenty years ago, or what have you, but let's not get caught up in the imaginative aspect of it, when the real argument IS that this junk -is- imagination!
What's real? When you never, ever thought you'd have so much wireless around, but one year the products are on the shelves and the next year they're everwhere and the towers are going up. Or you never thought you'd be heating up ice-cubes of spaghetti straight from the freezer to the countertop in four minutes but ta-da, here's the microwave. Or you never thought you'd be accepted by the smart kids because you don't have the common sense to tie a knot in your shoes, but ta-da, here's velcro for you.
This bullcrap, going on and on about something that's just around the corner, would smell a hell of a lot less like bullcrap if there wasn't real money being pumped into it and if it wasn't already being considered a seperate "field". It stinks, and anybody with any common sense has to admit it.
And you know what, most of us don't listen to our intuitions, but I'm sure our intuitions are telling all of us, either side of the argument, that this technology is never going to arrive, period. So who cares what the argument is? We know better. Whatever happened to just plain knowing better than to get suckered?
The point is when you come out with a sci-fi like this as "real science", it's not about the feasability, especially not the market feasability: it's about the greed of corporate sponsors who will gladly take you on once you graduate, in order to get to be the first ones with a battery like this "on the market". You'll always have the excuse that it's breakthrough and nobody's done anything like it yet, and you'll always have the security that it's this huge burgeoning field of new discoveries that all the other corporations are drooling over and buying up scientists to develope. You'll have it made.
Nanotech, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, micro-scale fission power plants, exotic materials... whatever. You know what? I'm sick of reading stories about theoretically possible things that might (but probably won't) make it into an actual product some time in the near future.
Not just on Slashdot, but I'm sick and tired of reading about these subjects AT ALL. But I expect it out of the image-worshipping, idle-minded mainstream product audience. They'll believe anything they're told, and they'll pay for things that they'll never even receive, and they'll forget they paid for it, and one day they'll die, and somebody else who was on the receiving end of the moolah will be enjoying the only one positively influential thing which money can really brings, which is a more relaxed and stimulating lifestyle.
Prematurely published research isn't just navel-gazing, it's scientific fraud, and with as much money as the frauds who support the fields you listed are receiving first from universities, then from corporations, and then from government, it should be considered market fraud and consumer fraud as well.
1. -nanotech- I am not engineer enough to know all the arguments why this will never work, but you know something, I don't miss much, either, and one thing I've noticed is that actually breakthrough amazing things which are now part of our daily lives all held something in common: there was a product that blew our minds and it's been improved ever since. There is no actual product with nanotech. It's the most amazing thing any of us have ever bought (and a lot of taxpayer money goes into colleges, those research grants aren't 100% tuition) and it hasn't ever gotten here, yet. And yet it's always being improved! Yes, we're that stupid!
2. -nuclear fusion (power)- This has been worked at already, during a generation when scientific minds had brainpower, which has been in the current image-culture generation replaced by pure imagination and cleverness. Great minds have already pored over this and it's already been discarded as an impossible dream: the process of the very sun, and a decent explosion, but not sustainable for the purpose of producing power. It just begs for us to go back to the root of the problem and think a little harder about solar power. Solar power, at least, has made recent advances.
3. -genetic engineering- It's never going to work! Period! At first the sci-fi writing grant-seekers convinced everybody that somewhere down the line we'd be harvesting vat-grown, tailor-made body parts. Really? That grew up without the attached human? There are many, many ways to argue that this is absolutely unfeasible, but I'll offer my pet argument (because it also offers impressive visuals): take a look at the 'imprint' of the bodies of living things in Kirlian photography. Do you really think you can make a decent part of a body without growing the whole thing? You can't. Later, the same hucksters promoted these ideas of special abilities or features of the creature that could be produced by tweaking the genetic "code", though the half-wit "scientists" preferred evidently to "cut-and-paste" and more or less make monstrosities whose drawbacks seriously outweigh the perceived benefits. Then they tried to convince us cloning was somehow all new and different and the answer to everything, but they're still stuck with the fact that you just can't fudge something that complicated and force it into production. Granted, one day they might perfect artificial wombs and delivery systems, but with a culture that inhuman they will by necessity have to invent nanny-nursemaids and so on, due to the events of that foreseeable future.
4. -micro-scale fission power plants- at the very least this has always been understood to be quackary.
5. -exotic materials- I remember recently there was research being done on the creation of artificial electron shells by taking avantage of Heisenberg uncertainty in very thin silicon wafers. But they can't figure ou
Why would anybody these days bother writing sci-fi when they could be making real money and real job security in "citing" their own theoretical papers in order to sell "breakthroughs" in the furtherance of "nanotechnology" grant-seeking? It's been this same process since the term hit the mainstream and it's been gobbling up oodles of research grants ever since. All you have to do is lay down some bologne about how you can paint your house with a bunch of ants and it'll light itself up for you when scheduled on Christmas and you've got it made. Especially if you get to ditch the batchelor's life of grant-seeking for "corporate r&d". Who'd ever want to go back to the hustle and bustle of phone calls to publishers and the back-and-forth of editing manuscripts?
The MMORPG "Runescape" attempts to thwart automated player clients by imposing itself at random intervals to put real human intelligence to the test. You could see a lot of hacks and anti-hacks this way: considerable time is spent designing something on computers and (inevitably to a great extent) for computers as well; but for some strange reason they are marketed toward human players, many of whom (understandably) would be just as interested in having their computer playing in their stead; so the creators try to come back and slightly increase the demand for normal human involvement, without the aid of computers. Which is ultimately self-defeating considering this is the stance they take as the logical end of what they set out to do which was completely the opposite. Strangely enough, you don't end up with so many problems in games that really stimulate the imagination and intellect, the kind that appeals to all ages and strikes people as "addictive". Frankly, that the biggest problems of the self-contradictory sort are to be found in MMORPG's isn't all that surprising. Role-playing is based on depersonalizing and dehumanizing the player to begin with, sticking them with formulaically limited means of solving problems that are yet supposed to somehow reflect their "selves" in "reality"; "robots will be robots".
my first video games were dedicated consoles with dials to set them to various sports simulators. especially if those sports were like hockey or basketball. one had a paddle-controller design, and included some top-down race tracks and tank games.
after we got an atari computer my first cartridge games were "congo bongo" and "serpentine", my first cassette-loader was "blue max" and my first shareware was "gauntlet" (a lunar mission blaster). my first downloaded game was "oil field". my first "serious" simulator was a nuclear power plant sim. the first game i coded from an issue of "COMPUTE!" was some magic-carpet scroller. my first platformer was "escape from epsilon".
the first big commercial-console game i played was "pitfall" for atari. later i got a chance to play "super mario bros" for nintendo. the first cartridge i owned for the atari 2600 was "berserk".
Oh, I would argue about how Bush was actually elected by Coca Cola (and Disney) by way of a tribunal court (which is exactly what happened!) But I've already been modded down, resulting in my first zero-or-lower-scoring-comment, in a comment mentioning exactly that same issue in another thread: so for all your complaint about the liberalism here, obviously you and cleetus get to wave the flag over your religious-political belief that he was "duly elected", because some mod somewhere shares your pew.
There is a lot of questioning the safety or security of these devices, even when they're open-source. The secret-ballot was not suggested for this nation by a gaggle of idiots, and done correctly by people who care about democracy (perhaps that's really where the issue is, concerning the lack of actual Americans these days as opposed to U.S. Citizens with vested interests). But, due to freedoms, we cannot hold Americans accountable for their nationalism or democratic spirit. Instead, we can work harder to manage more accountability for the voting process. Observe (I still hold the same stance concerning e-voting as I ever did):
counting silicon transistors? by eyenot (102141) on Saturday December 20 2003,
read any issue of 2600 and think about e-voting, then go have a heart-to-heart with your elected representatives, especially if they are democratic as the democrats intend to involve from-home e-voting in the upcoming democratic primaries.
'governor, this is a simple 64mbyte ram module. there are sixty-four million groups of eight switches in here. if you count each of these groups one per second, it would take you over two years. now consider that each little individual switch of on and off has to be verified. one switch per second, this would take you sixteen years, and would total more seconds than there are american citizens, almost twice as many. and this, just to count one storage device, dozens of which would be required to actually do the job of recording indexes, names, addresses, signatures and social security numbers, and other data that are collected in current ballots in order to ensure fair elections. there would have to be more storage, as well, to keep logs of all the electronic transactions required in order make sure the processes were secure and retractable, for the purpose of tracking down any offenders. now this task of sixteen years to count every switch in this chip has been multiplied by dozens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands. you may find enough volunteers to reduce the time required, but now reduce the volunteers, in the case of just 1,000 such citizens, by the requirement of ability to run an electron-scanning microscope and to work steadily at the task for as many as sixteen years. now find 10,000 electron-scanning microscope-operating humans who can work without stopping to eat, sleep, or drink for a year and a half and you're approaching the end of your problem. now find 1,000,000 such citizens and the work has been reduced to.016 years, or perhaps a modest six days. consider that humans need to sleep, and you have eighteen days. count breaks, errors, and certain numbers having to count the same switch at the same time to verify it, and you have a multiply of that, perhaps exceeding a month. now pay them all or otherwise convince them to spend all their time for one month counting microscopic switches. now consider that you will have to either print and provide for them on paper, or have them record on paper, the status of the switches to be verified. now accomodate the 1,000,000 vote-counters. you already have all the materials you need to have done the ballot by classic ballot means and also at the very least quadrupled the expenses. i urge you to ditch the computer junk and ask people to turn out to the booths, instead.'
This is a great argument you bring up because you specifically mention being discriminated against by a university at the behest or the whims of an intelligencer. Let's go take a look at history:)
Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation January 17, 1961 (excerpt on the Educational-Research Complex)
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.
In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
See, you would have motive embedded in there somewhere, and if there ever got wind of it, the "performance" of the judges and jury would not be purely out of artistic license.
If you don't think you're willing to display motive, then you shouldn't try it.
But here would be an even better idea: see how much or how little work it takes to distill what you know for darn sure is pure garbage/gibberish/noise and turn it into an international terrorist coordination.
Just keep a tight network of otherwise unconnected people. Decide on a few things to do in your daily lives that seems innocuous yet suspicious for its coordination. Everybody keep P.O. boxes and send each other blank postcards, the kind with those suspicious UPC codes on the back. Print and stamp your own large UPC codes on them if the ones already provided aren't potentially information-dense enough. Agree to all go to open-all-night coffeehouses at midnight GMT no matter where you are in the world or what you're doing, and IM each other with nothing more than three-word bursts straight out of the codebook or famous names. "Alpha Delta." (response: "Judy Garland".) Everybody mail-order a new chia pet every every other month. Make sure they're all the same chia pet. Things like that.
I assure you, if they want to bad enough, they will be able to make an argument impressive enough to a jury to convict you of all charges, even if they are international terrorism. You don't agree? But there's a *reason* they call them "puzzle palace"!
Example: your corporation puts all documents on uniform letterhead, using the same font, margins, spacing, and so on. Particularly, all of your financial documents appear more or less identical, with the exception of the placement of numerals, of course. You bought a big order of shredders so each office-chair would have one nearby, all the same straight-edge shredders, and all your documents shred the same. One day some people show up from some government agency or department and start going through all your bags of shredded paper. They're really good puzzle-experts, so they almost as if by magic (but it's not magic, it's professional expertise) manage to put back together several documents WHICH INCRIMINATE YOU AND YOUR DESPICABLE HOARD OF MONEY-LAUNDERERS in the biggest financial scandal in years. And you and your corporation face time behind bars. Meanwhile, none of you knows where the hell THAT zinger came from, because as far as you all know nothing has actually been done wrong! But the employees further down the ladder don't know or care: they just know that they're under a serious threat and can't afford the same big attorneys that you can, and deeply resent you due to capitalist competition and class jealousy. They simply let themselves be led in questioning by the investigators, who all ask the same leading questions (it's a well-known tactic) and who all get the same answers: yes, there might have been something going on, all those closed-door fancy-suited bigwigs are definitely complicit in SOME kind of ill-intended goings-on, just look at their fancy little cars and how I can barely afford even the gas bill on my family's two S.U.V.s! SOMETHING was going on, sure! Yes I'll sign here. And then you actually DO get summoned to court even though you don't know why, and even though you didn't actually do anything. And you also get something else on your way home from the grocery store or the gym: a threat that you either go along with all the charges, including an outline of how you should frame your arguments and what you should admit to, or you'll face fates worse than prison. The threat is real, but you have nothing to show for it. You mention something about it to a few people, but you already knew what they'd say: the stress of the charges and the upcoming trial are already getting to you. Best you'd see your shrink and take some drugs. Gotta face the music. Fast-forward: you do time, and still to this day you aren't sure why or who's behind it. The most incriminating evidence at your tria
Several of the judges who sat on the "military-style tribunal" which elected Bush in the first place have vested interests in Coca-Cola, Disney, and so on. Which don't seem like the kind of companies that should make you think twice, except that Coca-Cola still is involved in the import of coca-leaves by way of two companies: Enaco, Ltd. of Peru (the world's largest supplier of cocaine products and the sole holder of license to export coca to North America) and Stepan Chemical of Illinois (the sole holder of license to import coca to North America, a substantial supplier of narcotic cocaine-byproducts to the pharmaceutical industry, the supplier of the post-denarcoticized coca base to Coca-Cola HQ in Virginia, and fingered by Sherman Skolnick as the most probably source of street cocaine in the Midwest by way of 'losing some' between import and processing), and this provides us with two potential connections to the Bushes: that former CIA tend to 'hang their hats' at coca-cola bottlers and distributors worldwide (notably in many international countries the popular drink still contains narcotics) and that Bush the Dad is former CIA; and that Bush, Jr. seems to have a history with this particular narcotic. As far as Disney International, I guess they just seem to show up for some reason in the midst of a lot of crookedness in the circus of American justice.
In any case, who cares about warrants and having your 'day in court' when in many cases that's the least you want to do? And let's not forget: the original 'cyber-crime crackdowns' were given the go-ahead because all of us terrible hackers might be not only draining innocent American bank-accounts but could also be fudging up American medical records resulting in widespread death and chaos. The result? SWAT Rifles to the heads of 13-year-old scripters and wardialers, and people sometimes injured or killed for being involved or nearby. Bring it all up-to-date: you don't need a public or even a fair trial if you're accused of terrorism. The next step (it's SO easy to predict): 'cyber-terrorism crackdown'.
I share a similar stance (the not-bent-out-of-shape one) although for different reasons: I jsut don't care. By two sides of the same coin: if my e-mail is interesting enough that the government and/or its cronies are poking around in it, then obviously something has gone horribly wrong; a conclusion supported simultaneously by the fact that the government and/or its cronies are poking around in my email in the fisrt place, despite how horribly wrong that is in more constitutional terms (the former side of the coin is that my life is horribly uninteresting and my email can't be of any help to any government to poke around in, nor can I imagine anyone else's whose is!)
I'm sort of the same way about cameras in invasive locations: I'd willingly help install (though I would never pay for the maintenance or care of) a secret camera in my home shower stall. I think if they thought it over, so would many Americans. What's really odd to me is that liberal Americans are so scared about the possibility of a proliferation of cameras and other monitoring devices. Do they really think the world is ready to support a government agency with as many agents as there are citizens, to meet the necessary requirements for constant monitoring? You might think it's easy, as a security guard yourself (or having seen them in The Movies) that watching four or eight simultaneous monitors and keeping track of what's happening is relatively easy work for humans: sure, in mostly-empty buildings where anything 'going on' worth monitoring happens infrequently or next-to-never and is focused on certain individuals any ways. If you had to watch even two lives going on normally simultaneously (and make any sense of them) you'd have to be specially assigned to those lives so that no context is lost and no briefing need be done: the time such briefing would take is better-spent catching some Z's (monitor-watchers need sleep, too, and would probably have to correspond to just one person's sleep-cycle!) There's just no way out of this 1:1 ratio: we'll simply never be able to design software that can parse all the meaning out of a person's life. Facial recognition for the purpose of building association trees, maybe, but what's to know that already can't be laid out by checking your work and/or gym schedule?
It's all so absurd. Especially considering that there's really nothing to know worth all the hassle and watching, and that by the time something terrible happens, the fact that it was on film or received by CARNIVORE doesn't make it feel any better.
The government would be better advised to put some money into a voluntary system, like Life-Alert (or whatever it's called -- you know, "I've fallen and I can't get up") that citizens can use to turn on implanted transponders and send personal and medical history in case of a sudden terrorist attack. Then they can work on tracking down your physical person -- which matters far more than your written words or image ("constitution", after all) to see what the hell's the matter with you. Personally I think if the implant companies were more public and used some savvy marketing, more Americans would be buying such security implants. Just look at the sales of Mace, pepper-sprays, and other personal security devices: they're real money-makers. I'm surprised implant-related glitches and success stories aren't the big, everyday news item.
Back to my "coin", though: there's very little, short of direct confrontation, that can stop the intelligencers from tightening their un-Constitutional stranglehold on the American lifestyle. Politics won't do it: most politicians are either on the intelligencer side of the "field" or live lives completely surrounded and manipulated by them. You really just can't trust politicians, these days. Consider how if it ever became a big issue, this racket, just how easy it would be to win an election no matter what your actual intentions are: make the liberal, pro-constitutional argument part of your platform, and set yourself up with an opponent (sharing your act
Currently on MSN's main website newsticker, there's an article showing a headline, "Are you afraid to file a car insurance claim?" That's what is called "directed questioning". Why should you be afraid to file a car insurance claim? The informed and rational mind would reject MSN's headline question -- why the insinuation of fear? Who said anything about being afraid? But the nature of directed questioning is that it is suggestive. Now the suggestion of fear has been made, and people who aren't so well informed or rational will hold the questionable fear-state in their mind while searching the article, which is probably also rife with suggestivity. But why all this suggestion, why not just be better informed (or more rational, take your pick)?
That's just stupendous!! You know, actually, it isn't. In fact, it's sad when the decimal number system makes "news". I wonder what is causing more measurable, wasteful distraction: the repetitive digit that was "stripped"; or the 500+ comments on slashdot alone which will be generated over the numerary stripshow?
Somewhere, corporate jerkoffs send all-too-overimportant memos regarding this trifle in the hopes of retaining group synergy. You go. Oh man, I hope this doesn't cause any walkouts.
And you know, I can see how millions of people will be upset that processing this important information regarding the removal of extraneous information from the end-user-extraneous version-number of a dying language, will cause work-related repeated-motion injuries to rise. A little bit, any way. Like the swell of inflammation over arthritic, carpal-tunneled appendages. And yet they will process it. And they will feel like nobody cares, but their feelings will be wrong.
See, people care about this issue. Important people. Like you. You're so fucking important. Take some time off. Relax. Learn not to sweat "the small stuff". One of these days, these numerological catastrophes will be a thing of the past, just echoes of your previously schizoid psyche, now healed by the relaxing waters of the Bahamas. Or maybe just some iced tea. But not sweetened iced tea, okay? I think you're geeked-up enough as it is.
i started with ms-dos, but i'll always prefer the ease of using dash to limit arguments. frankly i don't know why slashes are used for directories, at all, when commas would work just fine (as long as they invalidate directory names) and are more common to typists.
but that would disarm the savviness of discussion the guy. see, by making it a big deal, you kind of 'open-source' the savvy nature of talking about ASCII and near-ancient IBM history and other such topics. so, it's put in IBM to actually add information, not take it away. the discussion is still important the the same people it should be important to, and not important to the people it should not.
See why escape was so key in X3.64? Escape was his pet monkey! Do you know what i say.
^\ = escape (carat symbol is often used from ascii to represent the escape key value) backslash, in ANSI x3.64 = string terminator.
Something else interesting? Instead of saying "ASCII allows the users of computers, which can only interpret numbers, to see a series of numbers as text," they said, "ASCII allows computers, which can only interpret numbers, to see text as a series of numbers." That's like saying the computer is the sentient operator isn't that funny. Haha.
"they know of a crime, and they wont tell how or who will do it to you.."
Yes, we need an immediate fix such as ThoughtCrime or FutureCrime. Tell me when you are finished developing the blueprint, I will forward your suggestion to the United Nations but not until after I profit from it with NATO, WHO, and the CIA.
when it comes to terms like 'hacker' or 'cracker', i choose not to use the correct terminology, opting instead to 'hack' it instead, thereby 'cracking' the language barrier.
uhh, i just did roll back recently and it was without a precedent such as power failure, battery failure, or user error. short of my bios containing behaviours, i am wondering if something like this might explain my recent rollback.
i like it, alternately i would set up a huge board with (very staminated,) human chess pieces. in order for a taking move to be successful, the pieces would have to put up their dukes in order to prove their position. alternately they could convince the other piece to battle them in a debate over physics until one cedes the point. this is stupendous!!! (i give it three exclamation points. but you noticed that. but, i digress.)
Slashdot Mirror
I differ! We're so used to being "wowed" by things that come with this sort of statement attached: "...that scientists say will still be some years before it is developed and on the actual market, or even something that can be demonstrated in a laboratory", that we've forgotten how to say "yeah, going wow is fun and all but the entertainment industry already makes over a trillion dollars a year, and science is supposed to be, you know, substantial".
Here's a great counter-example: Tilden, the roboticist who made analogue-"brain" robots that displayed impressively realistic "lifelike" behaviours. That's not bad, and he threw it together with his own bits and pieces of things.
Nanotech is being talked about in a few comments here like it's next to impossible to build. But we've all seen photograph, after photograph, after photograph, after photograph, after photograph, after electron-scanned PHOTOGRAPH, of the various miniscule parts and so on that would theoretically one day be used inside of a nanomachine.
You could build one today: if it were feasible. It's obviously not feasible. We wouldn't be reading about the spare parts that are sitting around waiting for the actual thing to break down like a bunch of Taiwanese warehouse owners who jumped into the future from before SAABS and Jaguars were made. It makes no sense.
And all the while the claims get more and more ridiculous. That's just not indicative of real science going on, you have to admit that much. You can go on, and on and on about how things today were unimaginable twenty years ago, or what have you, but let's not get caught up in the imaginative aspect of it, when the real argument IS that this junk -is- imagination!
What's real? When you never, ever thought you'd have so much wireless around, but one year the products are on the shelves and the next year they're everwhere and the towers are going up. Or you never thought you'd be heating up ice-cubes of spaghetti straight from the freezer to the countertop in four minutes but ta-da, here's the microwave. Or you never thought you'd be accepted by the smart kids because you don't have the common sense to tie a knot in your shoes, but ta-da, here's velcro for you.
This bullcrap, going on and on about something that's just around the corner, would smell a hell of a lot less like bullcrap if there wasn't real money being pumped into it and if it wasn't already being considered a seperate "field". It stinks, and anybody with any common sense has to admit it.
And you know what, most of us don't listen to our intuitions, but I'm sure our intuitions are telling all of us, either side of the argument, that this technology is never going to arrive, period. So who cares what the argument is? We know better. Whatever happened to just plain knowing better than to get suckered?
The point is when you come out with a sci-fi like this as "real science", it's not about the feasability, especially not the market feasability: it's about the greed of corporate sponsors who will gladly take you on once you graduate, in order to get to be the first ones with a battery like this "on the market". You'll always have the excuse that it's breakthrough and nobody's done anything like it yet, and you'll always have the security that it's this huge burgeoning field of new discoveries that all the other corporations are drooling over and buying up scientists to develope. You'll have it made.
Not just on Slashdot, but I'm sick and tired of reading about these subjects AT ALL. But I expect it out of the image-worshipping, idle-minded mainstream product audience. They'll believe anything they're told, and they'll pay for things that they'll never even receive, and they'll forget they paid for it, and one day they'll die, and somebody else who was on the receiving end of the moolah will be enjoying the only one positively influential thing which money can really brings, which is a more relaxed and stimulating lifestyle.
Prematurely published research isn't just navel-gazing, it's scientific fraud, and with as much money as the frauds who support the fields you listed are receiving first from universities, then from corporations, and then from government, it should be considered market fraud and consumer fraud as well.
1. -nanotech- I am not engineer enough to know all the arguments why this will never work, but you know something, I don't miss much, either, and one thing I've noticed is that actually breakthrough amazing things which are now part of our daily lives all held something in common: there was a product that blew our minds and it's been improved ever since. There is no actual product with nanotech. It's the most amazing thing any of us have ever bought (and a lot of taxpayer money goes into colleges, those research grants aren't 100% tuition) and it hasn't ever gotten here, yet. And yet it's always being improved! Yes, we're that stupid!
2. -nuclear fusion (power)- This has been worked at already, during a generation when scientific minds had brainpower, which has been in the current image-culture generation replaced by pure imagination and cleverness. Great minds have already pored over this and it's already been discarded as an impossible dream: the process of the very sun, and a decent explosion, but not sustainable for the purpose of producing power. It just begs for us to go back to the root of the problem and think a little harder about solar power. Solar power, at least, has made recent advances.
3. -genetic engineering- It's never going to work! Period! At first the sci-fi writing grant-seekers convinced everybody that somewhere down the line we'd be harvesting vat-grown, tailor-made body parts. Really? That grew up without the attached human? There are many, many ways to argue that this is absolutely unfeasible, but I'll offer my pet argument (because it also offers impressive visuals): take a look at the 'imprint' of the bodies of living things in Kirlian photography. Do you really think you can make a decent part of a body without growing the whole thing? You can't. Later, the same hucksters promoted these ideas of special abilities or features of the creature that could be produced by tweaking the genetic "code", though the half-wit "scientists" preferred evidently to "cut-and-paste" and more or less make monstrosities whose drawbacks seriously outweigh the perceived benefits. Then they tried to convince us cloning was somehow all new and different and the answer to everything, but they're still stuck with the fact that you just can't fudge something that complicated and force it into production. Granted, one day they might perfect artificial wombs and delivery systems, but with a culture that inhuman they will by necessity have to invent nanny-nursemaids and so on, due to the events of that foreseeable future.
4. -micro-scale fission power plants- at the very least this has always been understood to be quackary.
5. -exotic materials- I remember recently there was research being done on the creation of artificial electron shells by taking avantage of Heisenberg uncertainty in very thin silicon wafers. But they can't figure ou
Why would anybody these days bother writing sci-fi when they could be making real money and real job security in "citing" their own theoretical papers in order to sell "breakthroughs" in the furtherance of "nanotechnology" grant-seeking? It's been this same process since the term hit the mainstream and it's been gobbling up oodles of research grants ever since. All you have to do is lay down some bologne about how you can paint your house with a bunch of ants and it'll light itself up for you when scheduled on Christmas and you've got it made. Especially if you get to ditch the batchelor's life of grant-seeking for "corporate r&d". Who'd ever want to go back to the hustle and bustle of phone calls to publishers and the back-and-forth of editing manuscripts?
The MMORPG "Runescape" attempts to thwart automated player clients by imposing itself at random intervals to put real human intelligence to the test. You could see a lot of hacks and anti-hacks this way: considerable time is spent designing something on computers and (inevitably to a great extent) for computers as well; but for some strange reason they are marketed toward human players, many of whom (understandably) would be just as interested in having their computer playing in their stead; so the creators try to come back and slightly increase the demand for normal human involvement, without the aid of computers. Which is ultimately self-defeating considering this is the stance they take as the logical end of what they set out to do which was completely the opposite. Strangely enough, you don't end up with so many problems in games that really stimulate the imagination and intellect, the kind that appeals to all ages and strikes people as "addictive". Frankly, that the biggest problems of the self-contradictory sort are to be found in MMORPG's isn't all that surprising. Role-playing is based on depersonalizing and dehumanizing the player to begin with, sticking them with formulaically limited means of solving problems that are yet supposed to somehow reflect their "selves" in "reality"; "robots will be robots".
[these are all games i played, not games i made:]
my first video games were dedicated consoles with dials to set them to various sports simulators. especially if those sports were like hockey or basketball. one had a paddle-controller design, and included some top-down race tracks and tank games.
after we got an atari computer my first cartridge games were "congo bongo" and "serpentine", my first cassette-loader was "blue max" and my first shareware was "gauntlet" (a lunar mission blaster). my first downloaded game was "oil field". my first "serious" simulator was a nuclear power plant sim. the first game i coded from an issue of "COMPUTE!" was some magic-carpet scroller. my first platformer was "escape from epsilon".
the first big commercial-console game i played was "pitfall" for atari. later i got a chance to play "super mario bros" for nintendo. the first cartridge i owned for the atari 2600 was "berserk".
Oh, I would argue about how Bush was actually elected by Coca Cola (and Disney) by way of a tribunal court (which is exactly what happened!) But I've already been modded down, resulting in my first zero-or-lower-scoring-comment, in a comment mentioning exactly that same issue in another thread: so for all your complaint about the liberalism here, obviously you and cleetus get to wave the flag over your religious-political belief that he was "duly elected", because some mod somewhere shares your pew.
There is a lot of questioning the safety or security of these devices, even when they're open-source. The secret-ballot was not suggested for this nation by a gaggle of idiots, and done correctly by people who care about democracy (perhaps that's really where the issue is, concerning the lack of actual Americans these days as opposed to U.S. Citizens with vested interests). But, due to freedoms, we cannot hold Americans accountable for their nationalism or democratic spirit. Instead, we can work harder to manage more accountability for the voting process. Observe (I still hold the same stance concerning e-voting as I ever did):
.016 years, or perhaps a modest six days. consider that humans need to sleep, and you have eighteen days. count breaks, errors, and certain numbers having to count the same switch at the same time to verify it, and you have a multiply of that, perhaps exceeding a month. now pay them all or otherwise convince them to spend all their time for one month counting microscopic switches. now consider that you will have to either print and provide for them on paper, or have them record on paper, the status of the switches to be verified. now accomodate the 1,000,000 vote-counters. you already have all the materials you need to have done the ballot by classic ballot means and also at the very least quadrupled the expenses. i urge you to ditch the computer junk and ask people to turn out to the booths, instead.'
counting silicon transistors?
by eyenot (102141) on Saturday December 20 2003,
read any issue of 2600 and think about e-voting, then go have a heart-to-heart with your elected representatives, especially if they are democratic as the democrats intend to involve from-home e-voting in the upcoming democratic primaries.
'governor, this is a simple 64mbyte ram module. there are sixty-four million groups of eight switches in here. if you count each of these groups one per second, it would take you over two years. now consider that each little individual switch of on and off has to be verified. one switch per second, this would take you sixteen years, and would total more seconds than there are american citizens, almost twice as many. and this, just to count one storage device, dozens of which would be required to actually do the job of recording indexes, names, addresses, signatures and social security numbers, and other data that are collected in current ballots in order to ensure fair elections. there would have to be more storage, as well, to keep logs of all the electronic transactions required in order make sure the processes were secure and retractable, for the purpose of tracking down any offenders. now this task of sixteen years to count every switch in this chip has been multiplied by dozens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands. you may find enough volunteers to reduce the time required, but now reduce the volunteers, in the case of just 1,000 such citizens, by the requirement of ability to run an electron-scanning microscope and to work steadily at the task for as many as sixteen years. now find 10,000 electron-scanning microscope-operating humans who can work without stopping to eat, sleep, or drink for a year and a half and you're approaching the end of your problem. now find 1,000,000 such citizens and the work has been reduced to
See, you would have motive embedded in there somewhere, and if there ever got wind of it, the "performance" of the judges and jury would not be purely out of artistic license.
If you don't think you're willing to display motive, then you shouldn't try it.
But here would be an even better idea: see how much or how little work it takes to distill what you know for darn sure is pure garbage/gibberish/noise and turn it into an international terrorist coordination.
Just keep a tight network of otherwise unconnected people. Decide on a few things to do in your daily lives that seems innocuous yet suspicious for its coordination. Everybody keep P.O. boxes and send each other blank postcards, the kind with those suspicious UPC codes on the back. Print and stamp your own large UPC codes on them if the ones already provided aren't potentially information-dense enough. Agree to all go to open-all-night coffeehouses at midnight GMT no matter where you are in the world or what you're doing, and IM each other with nothing more than three-word bursts straight out of the codebook or famous names. "Alpha Delta." (response: "Judy Garland".) Everybody mail-order a new chia pet every every other month. Make sure they're all the same chia pet. Things like that.
I assure you, if they want to bad enough, they will be able to make an argument impressive enough to a jury to convict you of all charges, even if they are international terrorism. You don't agree? But there's a *reason* they call them "puzzle palace"!
Example: your corporation puts all documents on uniform letterhead, using the same font, margins, spacing, and so on. Particularly, all of your financial documents appear more or less identical, with the exception of the placement of numerals, of course. You bought a big order of shredders so each office-chair would have one nearby, all the same straight-edge shredders, and all your documents shred the same. One day some people show up from some government agency or department and start going through all your bags of shredded paper. They're really good puzzle-experts, so they almost as if by magic (but it's not magic, it's professional expertise) manage to put back together several documents WHICH INCRIMINATE YOU AND YOUR DESPICABLE HOARD OF MONEY-LAUNDERERS in the biggest financial scandal in years. And you and your corporation face time behind bars. Meanwhile, none of you knows where the hell THAT zinger came from, because as far as you all know nothing has actually been done wrong! But the employees further down the ladder don't know or care: they just know that they're under a serious threat and can't afford the same big attorneys that you can, and deeply resent you due to capitalist competition and class jealousy. They simply let themselves be led in questioning by the investigators, who all ask the same leading questions (it's a well-known tactic) and who all get the same answers: yes, there might have been something going on, all those closed-door fancy-suited bigwigs are definitely complicit in SOME kind of ill-intended goings-on, just look at their fancy little cars and how I can barely afford even the gas bill on my family's two S.U.V.s! SOMETHING was going on, sure! Yes I'll sign here. And then you actually DO get summoned to court even though you don't know why, and even though you didn't actually do anything. And you also get something else on your way home from the grocery store or the gym: a threat that you either go along with all the charges, including an outline of how you should frame your arguments and what you should admit to, or you'll face fates worse than prison. The threat is real, but you have nothing to show for it. You mention something about it to a few people, but you already knew what they'd say: the stress of the charges and the upcoming trial are already getting to you. Best you'd see your shrink and take some drugs. Gotta face the music. Fast-forward: you do time, and still to this day you aren't sure why or who's behind it. The most incriminating evidence at your tria
Several of the judges who sat on the "military-style tribunal" which elected Bush in the first place have vested interests in Coca-Cola, Disney, and so on. Which don't seem like the kind of companies that should make you think twice, except that Coca-Cola still is involved in the import of coca-leaves by way of two companies: Enaco, Ltd. of Peru (the world's largest supplier of cocaine products and the sole holder of license to export coca to North America) and Stepan Chemical of Illinois (the sole holder of license to import coca to North America, a substantial supplier of narcotic cocaine-byproducts to the pharmaceutical industry, the supplier of the post-denarcoticized coca base to Coca-Cola HQ in Virginia, and fingered by Sherman Skolnick as the most probably source of street cocaine in the Midwest by way of 'losing some' between import and processing), and this provides us with two potential connections to the Bushes: that former CIA tend to 'hang their hats' at coca-cola bottlers and distributors worldwide (notably in many international countries the popular drink still contains narcotics) and that Bush the Dad is former CIA; and that Bush, Jr. seems to have a history with this particular narcotic. As far as Disney International, I guess they just seem to show up for some reason in the midst of a lot of crookedness in the circus of American justice.
In any case, who cares about warrants and having your 'day in court' when in many cases that's the least you want to do? And let's not forget: the original 'cyber-crime crackdowns' were given the go-ahead because all of us terrible hackers might be not only draining innocent American bank-accounts but could also be fudging up American medical records resulting in widespread death and chaos. The result? SWAT Rifles to the heads of 13-year-old scripters and wardialers, and people sometimes injured or killed for being involved or nearby. Bring it all up-to-date: you don't need a public or even a fair trial if you're accused of terrorism. The next step (it's SO easy to predict): 'cyber-terrorism crackdown'.
Good luck with your "4th Amendment", comrade!
I share a similar stance (the not-bent-out-of-shape one) although for different reasons: I jsut don't care. By two sides of the same coin: if my e-mail is interesting enough that the government and/or its cronies are poking around in it, then obviously something has gone horribly wrong; a conclusion supported simultaneously by the fact that the government and/or its cronies are poking around in my email in the fisrt place, despite how horribly wrong that is in more constitutional terms (the former side of the coin is that my life is horribly uninteresting and my email can't be of any help to any government to poke around in, nor can I imagine anyone else's whose is!)
I'm sort of the same way about cameras in invasive locations: I'd willingly help install (though I would never pay for the maintenance or care of) a secret camera in my home shower stall. I think if they thought it over, so would many Americans. What's really odd to me is that liberal Americans are so scared about the possibility of a proliferation of cameras and other monitoring devices. Do they really think the world is ready to support a government agency with as many agents as there are citizens, to meet the necessary requirements for constant monitoring? You might think it's easy, as a security guard yourself (or having seen them in The Movies) that watching four or eight simultaneous monitors and keeping track of what's happening is relatively easy work for humans: sure, in mostly-empty buildings where anything 'going on' worth monitoring happens infrequently or next-to-never and is focused on certain individuals any ways. If you had to watch even two lives going on normally simultaneously (and make any sense of them) you'd have to be specially assigned to those lives so that no context is lost and no briefing need be done: the time such briefing would take is better-spent catching some Z's (monitor-watchers need sleep, too, and would probably have to correspond to just one person's sleep-cycle!) There's just no way out of this 1:1 ratio: we'll simply never be able to design software that can parse all the meaning out of a person's life. Facial recognition for the purpose of building association trees, maybe, but what's to know that already can't be laid out by checking your work and/or gym schedule?
It's all so absurd. Especially considering that there's really nothing to know worth all the hassle and watching, and that by the time something terrible happens, the fact that it was on film or received by CARNIVORE doesn't make it feel any better.
The government would be better advised to put some money into a voluntary system, like Life-Alert (or whatever it's called -- you know, "I've fallen and I can't get up") that citizens can use to turn on implanted transponders and send personal and medical history in case of a sudden terrorist attack. Then they can work on tracking down your physical person -- which matters far more than your written words or image ("constitution", after all) to see what the hell's the matter with you. Personally I think if the implant companies were more public and used some savvy marketing, more Americans would be buying such security implants. Just look at the sales of Mace, pepper-sprays, and other personal security devices: they're real money-makers. I'm surprised implant-related glitches and success stories aren't the big, everyday news item.
Back to my "coin", though: there's very little, short of direct confrontation, that can stop the intelligencers from tightening their un-Constitutional stranglehold on the American lifestyle. Politics won't do it: most politicians are either on the intelligencer side of the "field" or live lives completely surrounded and manipulated by them. You really just can't trust politicians, these days. Consider how if it ever became a big issue, this racket, just how easy it would be to win an election no matter what your actual intentions are: make the liberal, pro-constitutional argument part of your platform, and set yourself up with an opponent (sharing your act
Currently on MSN's main website newsticker, there's an article showing a headline, "Are you afraid to file a car insurance claim?" That's what is called "directed questioning". Why should you be afraid to file a car insurance claim? The informed and rational mind would reject MSN's headline question -- why the insinuation of fear? Who said anything about being afraid? But the nature of directed questioning is that it is suggestive. Now the suggestion of fear has been made, and people who aren't so well informed or rational will hold the questionable fear-state in their mind while searching the article, which is probably also rife with suggestivity. But why all this suggestion, why not just be better informed (or more rational, take your pick)?
s ureYourCar/InsureYourCarDyn.aspx?cp-documentid=524 9792>1=10331
The article:
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Insurance/In
Whichever I could get my hands on first. Challenge and slight differences from game to game are important.
That's just stupendous!! You know, actually, it isn't. In fact, it's sad when the decimal number system makes "news". I wonder what is causing more measurable, wasteful distraction: the repetitive digit that was "stripped"; or the 500+ comments on slashdot alone which will be generated over the numerary stripshow?
Somewhere, corporate jerkoffs send all-too-overimportant memos regarding this trifle in the hopes of retaining group synergy. You go. Oh man, I hope this doesn't cause any walkouts.
And you know, I can see how millions of people will be upset that processing this important information regarding the removal of extraneous information from the end-user-extraneous version-number of a dying language, will cause work-related repeated-motion injuries to rise. A little bit, any way. Like the swell of inflammation over arthritic, carpal-tunneled appendages. And yet they will process it. And they will feel like nobody cares, but their feelings will be wrong.
See, people care about this issue. Important people. Like you. You're so fucking important. Take some time off. Relax. Learn not to sweat "the small stuff". One of these days, these numerological catastrophes will be a thing of the past, just echoes of your previously schizoid psyche, now healed by the relaxing waters of the Bahamas. Or maybe just some iced tea. But not sweetened iced tea, okay? I think you're geeked-up enough as it is.
i started with ms-dos, but i'll always prefer the ease of using dash to limit arguments. frankly i don't know why slashes are used for directories, at all, when commas would work just fine (as long as they invalidate directory names) and are more common to typists.
Thanks for sharing these close experiences with us. So, did you work on X3.64 ?
but that would disarm the savviness of discussion the guy. see, by making it a big deal, you kind of 'open-source' the savvy nature of talking about ASCII and near-ancient IBM history and other such topics. so, it's put in IBM to actually add information, not take it away. the discussion is still important the the same people it should be important to, and not important to the people it should not.
vidi, vidi interesting!
See why escape was so key in X3.64? Escape was his pet monkey! Do you know what i say.
^\ = escape (carat symbol is often used from ascii to represent the escape key value) backslash, in ANSI x3.64 = string terminator.
Something else interesting? Instead of saying "ASCII allows the users of computers, which can only interpret numbers, to see a series of numbers as text," they said, "ASCII allows computers, which can only interpret numbers, to see text as a series of numbers." That's like saying the computer is the sentient operator isn't that funny. Haha.
"they know of a crime, and they wont tell how or who will do it to you.."
Yes, we need an immediate fix such as ThoughtCrime or FutureCrime. Tell me when you are finished developing the blueprint, I will forward your suggestion to the United Nations but not until after I profit from it with NATO, WHO, and the CIA.
when it comes to terms like 'hacker' or 'cracker', i choose not to use the correct terminology, opting instead to 'hack' it instead, thereby 'cracking' the language barrier.
but 'criminal' is just a term for a 'hacker' whose preferred system is the legislative branch.
uhh, i just did roll back recently and it was without a precedent such as power failure, battery failure, or user error. short of my bios containing behaviours, i am wondering if something like this might explain my recent rollback.
i like it, alternately i would set up a huge board with (very staminated,) human chess pieces. in order for a taking move to be successful, the pieces would have to put up their dukes in order to prove their position. alternately they could convince the other piece to battle them in a debate over physics until one cedes the point. this is stupendous!!! (i give it three exclamation points. but you noticed that. but, i digress.)