The only way out of the tenements were to be gainfully employed or if someone on the outside would agree to be responsible for their financial needs.
Other people already replied with a specific story, but the whole idea is very common. See Andre Norton's Dipple series - Catseye as an example. Tens if not hundreds of writers explored this scenario.
In essence, if all needs of a human can be satisfied with robots then the natural propagation of wealth stops. Rich people don't hire poor people anymore to clean floors; poor people lose their jobs and starve.
I can imagine some possibility of making it work, just for a moment, if all the human wealth (say, universal robots) were to be instantly and equally distributed among all people. But then some people will start trading some of their robots with other people, for a promise of something. Or they start pooling resources. And the first inequality is born. It's downhill from there.
When that happens, you download an.stl file and print whatever object it is you wanted.
You are jumping too far ahead. Automation doesn't mean that you can just waltz in and run your program on that automated production line. Having one at home is not an option because of costs.
Here is a specific example. Imagine that Bill Gates, our favorite super-villain, bought all industry in the USA and made it fully automated. Gas stations sell fuel with credit cards (just as it is now,) McD sells sandwiches from vending machines, and so on.
In this world BG can produce - or not produce - whatever he wants. No workers are needed (let's forget for the moment about engineers.) There are 300+ million people without jobs and without food. BG has food, and it costs him just the energy and the amortization of machines.
In essence, BG would not need those people. He may want to feed them for free, just so they don't riot, but for every practical purpose they are irrelevant. Kings wanted to have many subjects because they could tax them and use them as soldiers. But BG can't tax poor people, and he has noone to wage war with.
That brave new world that you are talking about doesn't appear to be such a great place. From the POV of communism at this stage BG should declare world peace and just give things to people as they need them - and if they want to work (say, weave baskets) it's OK too. But will BG do that? Why should he do that? What happens after he does that? If you say BG will be that communist, and he will share... then some out of those 300 million will be not so kind, and they will take over. Human nature is a well known factor.
You need to be practically an omnipotent god to be completely free from the environment and from other people. Since we haven't figured out yet how to use dark energy (and build gravity guns with it) our industry will be for quite some time based on physical resources of the planet. Even if we imagine a perfect communist world where energy and resources are monetarily free, those resources aren't free to the society. There is so much fresh water on the planet, for example... you can't just open all taps and go on a year-long vacation. But that's what people will do; we value only what we pay for. USSR tried to educate "a new human" and failed miserably.
Unless you are building chips for your hardware by yourself in your underground lab
It is actually very easy today; you don't need to make silicon devices. All you need to buy a cheap FPGA and program your processor into it, and some peripherals. Such a project was discussed on/. a month or so ago. It will be slow, but resistance fighters are not going to play Far Cry on it (they will have plenty of that IRL, modulo the monsters.)
By using such a device a member of the Resistance can be pretty sure that nobody in the government had a chance to mess with the bits (as long as you obtain the configuration bitstream from a reliable party.)
Remind me of how this will be a disaster for the USA?
Manned spaceflight itself is largely pointless these days, but it is a useful indicator. Space capabilities closely follow the economic and scientific might of a country.
Besides, if you have a well funded lab with brilliant scientists you always have a chance to discover something that changes the world (and you will be in control of that something.) If you have a well funded law office with brilliant lawyers you won't discover anything of value to the rest of the humanity.
The US is castigated for waging wars and they are also castigated when they leave people alone.
This is a self-inflicted problem. A country needs to be consistent in its policy. But the USA goes into Somalia, then ignores it; doesn't go into Rwanda or Zimbabwe but attacks Iraq; doesn't touch North Korea but bombs Pakistan but isn't at war with it; threatens Iran that hasn't attacked the USA but bows to Saudis who did, and then illegally intervenes in local disputes in Northern Africa...
Let's go Chinese on them then. If the prisoner or his family can't pay for his incarceration he gets executed the next day his balance turns red.
Plus the victim doesn't benefit and the perpetrator is not violent or a danger to society.
The benefit to the victim, and to the society, is obvious - the criminal won't do the same thing ever again. Especially if he is 6' under. Violence is not a defining factor in severity of the crime - just ask Bernie Madoff, he is an expert on that thing.
It also doesn't leave any sticky residue on the lens.
It hardly matters; if I put a sticker over a camera then most likely I don't want this camera to be active, ever.
I did just that a few weeks ago when I bought an all-in-one PC (HP Omni 100) to be used as a server in a business. It had a camera, but not for long. I put a piece of masking tape over it, and then checked what the camera sees. The tape wasn't even black, but still the camera was just seeing a tan-colored, dim light. It is not a vulnerability at that point even if someone can figure out how to activate this camera on Lucid. I certainly didn't bother.
But if you want a removable sticker then sure, any small piece of cloth would work wonders. A Band-Aid will do the job if you don't mind the wrong color.
*profit* declines "to $4 billion from $18 billion last year".... Oh boo hoo. I wish I could absorb a decline in *profit* like that.
As I understand, it's across the whole industry. Let's say there are 18 airlines in the USA, all equal. Each used to get $1B per year in profits. One Boeing 787 costs between 150 and 200 million dollars, so they could buy five new airplanes with that profit.
However if the profit drops to $4B, each company then has $220M. Out of this money they need to pay dividends to shareholders, and they need to expand the business. They can buy only one new airplane with this money.
So the key problem here is that airlines are playing with very expensive toys. The sums of money they have to operate with are necessarily large. But even if all the reinvestment and expansion expenses are already counted before the profit figure is obtained, still this is one major drop of profit in just one year. Those are all public companies, so the drop in their profits results in the drop of their share prices, which in turn pulls the index down...
This reminds me of the famous Chinese initiative (in Mao's times) when they made iron in every backyard, in small kilns. The process was very inefficient and produced metal of poor quality, nearly useless.
We don't run our own electric generators in our homes (except in emergencies.) We instead buy electric energy that is produced elsewhere. We don't want to order coal or gas, we don't want to subject our homes to endless inspections, and we don't want to invest into boilers and turbines and generators.
But this initiative does exactly that - it tries to deploy millions of tiny and inefficient solar panels into places where they are at most risk of damage, and at least value in terms of the sunlight. Whatever you say, laptops spend most of their life either on desks or in backpacks. Unless you are a student who works outdoors (because it's impossible to work in your room due to some scheduled orgy) you virtually never take the laptop outside. It's insecure; it's inconvenient; it may be raining; a bird may decide to land on it, with the obvious end result; there are millions of reasons why laptops typically stay indoors.
If you want to build a solar power plant then do so, using the most appropriate components and placing the solar panels where they do the most good. It involves careful selection of the site and the proper orientation of panels.
But perhaps a few starry-eyed Gaia worshippers with too much money will buy a couple of laptops with solar panels built in. The rest of Gaia worshippers should instead invest in proper solar plants that use the energy grid of the whole country as their "battery." These fixed plants will be more efficient, and they can deliver power to everyone, not just to people who bought these laptops. I have a 6 kW setup that feeds unused power back into the grid.
Yesterday I followed a few links here and there, but whenever I find an IPv6 router setup it ends up being horrendously complicated, with acronyms flying around unchecked. One can understand this only if he already knows it all.
What I need is a simple thing that can be plugged into an existing IPv4 router (taking a routable static IP address or - even better - not doing that.) I want to have IPv6 on the other side of the thing. The box should have an IPv6 firewall, a DHCP server (if required) and perhaps a DNS server for the LAN.
With such a device it becomes trivial to augment existing IPv4 networks with IPv6. However I don't know if anything like that exists. I'm honestly unwilling to go too deep into the IPv6 networking maze myself. Networking is just one small aspect of software development, and software development is just one aspect of product development... and I develop products. I can't afford to spend much time on fiddling with bits, and I certainly aren't going to learn all about IPv6 just to visit Google. IPv6 was sold to the public as largely self-configuring, and I'd like it to really be that way. All the tunnels that I see on the Net are intended for experienced developers, not for users.
And a functioning stack being defined as a globally unique address on at least one interface and a route to the intended destination, although some operating systems will prefer v4 over v6 if the only global address an automatic tunnel (6to4 or Toredo).
Yes, I remembered something like that, and I double-checked now and it is true. If IPv4 link works then the tunnel won't be activated.
As I mentioned, I just use some hardcoded IPv6 addresses (2001:db8:290c:1291::4 on this box, to be changed to a routable one at some point) and that is good enough to allow my local boxes (Vista, Win7 and Ubuntu Lucid) to talk to each other. I have no router for IPv6, and since that router won't come from my ISP it means I have to build it myself, cramming a tunnel and a firewall into some Linux box. I haven't found time yet to do that, for the same old reason... IPv4 already works, and I have plenty of other things to do.
Ping statistics for 2001:4860:800e::93: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)
I wonder what exactly they are trying to achieve by this experiment. Even if someone asks for AAAA records and gets them, if the path is not configured all the way down to them not much is going to happen. If the computer gets stuck in IPv6 mode then Google will be simply unreachable. If there is a fallback to IPv4 then it there be just a delay. How will Google know about any of that?
There is a lot of "people don't want to believe we are bad" going on here which shows us more of people being blinded to the facts by belief.
I finished reading this (a text, not the audio book) just yesterday. It's quite on topic.
Spoiler alert or not, the story is pretty sad. A common guy from the modern world magically, against his wish, ends up being a "Dark Lord" in a magical land. However he is a "Dark Lord" in name only - he is not doing anything bad at all, and he is maintaining his kingdom as well as he can. He has a magical artifact that allows him to kill, but he doesn't have to use it.
It then appears that the rest of the world (all kingdoms) decided to wage a PR campaign against him, as they did against his predecessors. They accuse him of unspeakable crimes, dark magic (of which he isn't even capable of, outside of the use of his artifact) etc. etc. This is done because those kingdoms want his death because they need an external, convenient enemy to keep their people in check; they need a version of Emmanuel Goldstein.
The kings gather a 150,000 army and call it "the army of the light." The army marches toward the guy's kingdom and barbarically kills and destroys everything and everyone in their path. When they arrive at the citadel of the guy they send a dragon against civilians who are hiding in underground caves, and the dragon burns them all. The army of the light goes on like that for a while, driven by political ambition and not concerned about morality. At the same time "the Dark Lord", a pacifist, contemplates his willingness to open a certain Pandora's box and release forces that are likely to kill everything and everyone. In the end the citadel falls, everyone around the guy is viciously murdered.
The idea of the story is that it's not enough to declare yourself "a good guy." You also need to be a good guy. But too many people and countries don't bother to do the latter; they only focus on PR, correctly believing that most people are fools. In the end the evil, under the name of "good guys," is victorious.
When someone lands at Ben Gurion and then states an intention to speak in Palestine, one typically faces an extensive set of invasive questions - Questions that I suspect someone like Stallman may be unwilling to answer.
Wouldn't those questions be asked when you leave? It's a screening for terrorists on airplanes. Customs want to know very simple things - "What is the purpose of your visit?", "Who invited you?", "Where you are going to stay?" etc. etc. There is zero secret in any of that. Customs officers may not like RMS, his plans, and the PA in general, but what reasons may they legally have to send him back? He'd have to be declared an "undesirable person" in some way, a threat to the country, and I doubt that it can be done just over some discussion about politics. One needs some specific information about intended wrongdoing against the country. UK may be an exception, though.
There are arabs flying into Israel; some of them live in PA. Questioning them is probably far more shocking, and their political views are probably opposite to those of customs officers, for a good reason. Still, it's not a good enough cause to keep them away.
Here he's been told they don't want to pay for his trip if he does something that has no bearing on what they've asked him to come and do. Accepting these terms is what makes him a hypocrite. He should have refused the terms.
I can support canceling the whole trip only if RMS pays his own money for the airfare. Then the PA would be only paying for him physically driving a hundred miles and speaking. PA would be not in control of what he does before and after.
But here most likely PA pays for everything, starting and ending with the cab fare to/from the airport in the USA. They pay for his entire trip. If so, it gives them the right to dictate what he does while being employed.
Good employers understand the needs of employees and accept some amount of personal work done on the company dime. But in this case PA has some disagreements with Israel, and RMS should have known that his plans to double-dip can't be well received.
If you want to earn some bitcoins, I have some work for you...
Lots of people have lots of work for other people as long as they don't have to pay real money.
What is real money? Well, the USD is not exactly it, as we know, but at least it is a state-approved (and state-enforced) currency. If you pay me in bitcoins I can't buy groceries with it, or gas. So the bitcoins are useless to me in the most essential areas of economy. If you want to hire me then you'd better give me something in return that I can exchange for something - which means other people must want bitcoins. This last part is not happening, and without it bitcoins will be a fringe currency for a niche economy, not better (but worse) than any government-supported currency or a product (in case of barter.)
You sort of miss the whole point of the early miners. The idea is to get a fair number of bitcoins into circulation, the fact that it's becoming harder to mine is a good thing (for bitcoin business owners). It means that the number of coins is stabilizing.
I think I get the idea correctly. Early miners mined the coins to get rich. That's basically all. You can build whatever social theory you want on top of that, but the foundation is very simple.
A honest currency would be minted by an independent 3rd party that has no sticky hands. That's what countries do; treasury doesn't print a million dollars and give $800K to its employees. All the printed money go into circulation, and printers just get their salaries.
It is not a requirement that "everybody is able to mint their own coins", though it wouldn't be unreasonable. For example, a gold miner is free to wash his own gold, and everyone is free to become such a miner. But in case of bitcoins minting is allowed for different purposes:
to put the currency into circulation. After the founders set aside about 2/3 of the issue to themselves, the rest was given to the masses, to mint for themselves. There was no other way to distribute bitcoins, short of giving them away (I believe this is also happening but on tiny scale.)
to promote the currency. It creates an illusion that anyone can make money.
The illusion doesn't last; some people understand that they are about to he had when they read the instructions ("a modern CPU needs a year to generate one bitcoin, and because of that only GPU-assisted generation makes sense" - that's what the bitcoin client tells you.) Other people don't read instructions, run the client for a week or two, notice that they are burning through the lifetime of the computer, spending $$$ on energy, and no bitcoins are coming out.
There are, of course, GPU farm owners. With the best hardware money can buy, and with proper setup, they appear to make some income. Good for them. But in essence they are the trailing edge, the last ripple of the initial wave of founders. They are undermining their own business, and the founders are just laughing how those farm owners are fighting between each other for the last scraps of the money pile. Founders already got most of the bitcoins. It's like a medieval aristocrat throwing a handful of copper coins at the crowd of beggars.
To summarize, the idea of bitcoins may or may not be sound, but the implementation is certainly unacceptable. I don't want to have anything to do with a currency where its issuer pocketed most of the issue on day one.
I don't live in Schaumburg anymore. So that's terribly relevant information for someone trying to sell me something when I live two states away now.;)
That would be only marginally true. You are interested in these cars, and you even had one - so this bit of information is quite valuable, especially if it can be datamined without the expense of owning dealerships and keeping records.
And that would be completely untrue with regard to protecting your anonymity - if, for example, the government is after you. The IP address is history; probably nobody can figure out who it was given to 7 years ago. However Schaumburg is a small town (about 75,000?) - how many cars of this make and model were sold to residents there? Probably not more than a few; and these records stay forever.
I'm probably not sufficiently paranoid to worry too much about such things (and obviously neither are you) - but from purely technical point of view a lot of information was leaked, and that information can be exploited by anyone who cares. This is something to be concerned about if you discuss your ownership of expensive cars, firearms, or other stuff that is in high demand. You don't want to reveal ownership and location at the same time.
I'm not a futurist, and there are certainly threats to BitCoin from other established internet exchangers, but I think it's got potential
It got no potential, and for one very simple reason: common people today can't earn this "currency." It is very difficult to generate bitcoins - so difficult that it is impractical, unless you invest into a GPU farm. Of course you can buy bitcoins, but why would anyone do that?
The inability to earn bitcoins creates an ever-growing chasm between early adopters (and inventors, who minted mountains of bitcoins in the early days of the project) and today's people who need to task their computer to work for days, weeks or months (wasting energy that costs real money) to generate one bitcoin.
The numbers of early adopters are fixed - that phase has already happened, and by definition there were only few players. The numbers of the late refuseniks are growing, and ultimately the whole population of the planet (modulo the first group) will be in their ranks.
The refuseniks are justifying their refusal to use bitcoins by a very simple fact that the coin has variable exchange value to different groups of people. Early adopters got it for free. Late adopters need 100 kWh to generate one.
This is not the case with gold or most of other currencies. The miner had to work $n hours to mine $m grams of gold. The baker had to work $k hours to buy $m grams of gold from the miner. The ratio $k/$n is the difference in risk and hardships and all that that forms the difference between occupations. The baker can become a miner if he thinks the grass is greener there, and the other way around (if the miner breaks a leg and can't do the mining job anymore.) But the late user of bitcoins can't go back in time and become a bitcoin miner.
This factor alone will be sufficient to create a backlash against bitcoins, and that backlash will be serious enough to kill the idea. At this point, though, bitcoins are simply ignored as a raw deal, a pyramid scheme that they are.
It's not like I can Google "nschubach bought ? on Tuesday" and get a full report.
Why don't you try that query yourself? I did. Congratulations with your purchase of '04 Silver RX8 - G/T Package - 6 Spd. MT in June 2004. It was probably nice weather then in Schaumburg, IL. Is there anything else you'd like to announce to the whole world? Google doesn't need to do a thing here, other than to collect what people willingly reveal about themselves.
With regard to my own username, it is short and common (as in RFC 783). Besides, I don't reuse usernames. The only way one can associate my posts across multiple sites is by writing style.
I appreciate that the way Android works means that yes, you don't need an app killer; you don't even need to quit apps. That's great. But you need a way of killing faulty/poorly written/malicious ones.
It is also required for comfort. The user should be able to stop anything that he starts. There should be no action that has no counter-action; the last device with that flaw was called "Pandora's Box."
Slashdot Mirror
The only way out of the tenements were to be gainfully employed or if someone on the outside would agree to be responsible for their financial needs.
Other people already replied with a specific story, but the whole idea is very common. See Andre Norton's Dipple series - Catseye as an example. Tens if not hundreds of writers explored this scenario.
In essence, if all needs of a human can be satisfied with robots then the natural propagation of wealth stops. Rich people don't hire poor people anymore to clean floors; poor people lose their jobs and starve.
I can imagine some possibility of making it work, just for a moment, if all the human wealth (say, universal robots) were to be instantly and equally distributed among all people. But then some people will start trading some of their robots with other people, for a promise of something. Or they start pooling resources. And the first inequality is born. It's downhill from there.
When that happens, you download an .stl file and print whatever object it is you wanted.
You are jumping too far ahead. Automation doesn't mean that you can just waltz in and run your program on that automated production line. Having one at home is not an option because of costs.
Here is a specific example. Imagine that Bill Gates, our favorite super-villain, bought all industry in the USA and made it fully automated. Gas stations sell fuel with credit cards (just as it is now,) McD sells sandwiches from vending machines, and so on.
In this world BG can produce - or not produce - whatever he wants. No workers are needed (let's forget for the moment about engineers.) There are 300+ million people without jobs and without food. BG has food, and it costs him just the energy and the amortization of machines.
In essence, BG would not need those people. He may want to feed them for free, just so they don't riot, but for every practical purpose they are irrelevant. Kings wanted to have many subjects because they could tax them and use them as soldiers. But BG can't tax poor people, and he has noone to wage war with.
That brave new world that you are talking about doesn't appear to be such a great place. From the POV of communism at this stage BG should declare world peace and just give things to people as they need them - and if they want to work (say, weave baskets) it's OK too. But will BG do that? Why should he do that? What happens after he does that? If you say BG will be that communist, and he will share... then some out of those 300 million will be not so kind, and they will take over. Human nature is a well known factor.
You need to be practically an omnipotent god to be completely free from the environment and from other people. Since we haven't figured out yet how to use dark energy (and build gravity guns with it) our industry will be for quite some time based on physical resources of the planet. Even if we imagine a perfect communist world where energy and resources are monetarily free, those resources aren't free to the society. There is so much fresh water on the planet, for example... you can't just open all taps and go on a year-long vacation. But that's what people will do; we value only what we pay for. USSR tried to educate "a new human" and failed miserably.
Market-pricing would reduce demand without having to shut anyone's power off.
Instead of personally turning consumers' power off you force them to do it for you.
Unless you are building chips for your hardware by yourself in your underground lab
It is actually very easy today; you don't need to make silicon devices. All you need to buy a cheap FPGA and program your processor into it, and some peripherals. Such a project was discussed on /. a month or so ago. It will be slow, but resistance fighters are not going to play Far Cry on it (they will have plenty of that IRL, modulo the monsters.)
By using such a device a member of the Resistance can be pretty sure that nobody in the government had a chance to mess with the bits (as long as you obtain the configuration bitstream from a reliable party.)
Remind me of how this will be a disaster for the USA?
Manned spaceflight itself is largely pointless these days, but it is a useful indicator. Space capabilities closely follow the economic and scientific might of a country.
Besides, if you have a well funded lab with brilliant scientists you always have a chance to discover something that changes the world (and you will be in control of that something.) If you have a well funded law office with brilliant lawyers you won't discover anything of value to the rest of the humanity.
What universe do you live in that has the kind of math where 1/14 is "almost half"?
You can sleep well knowing that you owe $14K to your father. However a $1K debt to the local crime boss may kill you.
The US is castigated for waging wars and they are also castigated when they leave people alone.
This is a self-inflicted problem. A country needs to be consistent in its policy. But the USA goes into Somalia, then ignores it; doesn't go into Rwanda or Zimbabwe but attacks Iraq; doesn't touch North Korea but bombs Pakistan but isn't at war with it; threatens Iran that hasn't attacked the USA but bows to Saudis who did, and then illegally intervenes in local disputes in Northern Africa...
A prisoner costs 50,000 per year on average.
Let's go Chinese on them then. If the prisoner or his family can't pay for his incarceration he gets executed the next day his balance turns red.
Plus the victim doesn't benefit and the perpetrator is not violent or a danger to society.
The benefit to the victim, and to the society, is obvious - the criminal won't do the same thing ever again. Especially if he is 6' under. Violence is not a defining factor in severity of the crime - just ask Bernie Madoff, he is an expert on that thing.
It also doesn't leave any sticky residue on the lens.
It hardly matters; if I put a sticker over a camera then most likely I don't want this camera to be active, ever.
I did just that a few weeks ago when I bought an all-in-one PC (HP Omni 100) to be used as a server in a business. It had a camera, but not for long. I put a piece of masking tape over it, and then checked what the camera sees. The tape wasn't even black, but still the camera was just seeing a tan-colored, dim light. It is not a vulnerability at that point even if someone can figure out how to activate this camera on Lucid. I certainly didn't bother.
But if you want a removable sticker then sure, any small piece of cloth would work wonders. A Band-Aid will do the job if you don't mind the wrong color.
*profit* declines "to $4 billion from $18 billion last year" .... Oh boo hoo. I wish I could absorb a decline in *profit* like that.
As I understand, it's across the whole industry. Let's say there are 18 airlines in the USA, all equal. Each used to get $1B per year in profits. One Boeing 787 costs between 150 and 200 million dollars, so they could buy five new airplanes with that profit.
However if the profit drops to $4B, each company then has $220M. Out of this money they need to pay dividends to shareholders, and they need to expand the business. They can buy only one new airplane with this money.
So the key problem here is that airlines are playing with very expensive toys. The sums of money they have to operate with are necessarily large. But even if all the reinvestment and expansion expenses are already counted before the profit figure is obtained, still this is one major drop of profit in just one year. Those are all public companies, so the drop in their profits results in the drop of their share prices, which in turn pulls the index down...
I'd like to see a source supporting this claim.
Biologically induced nuclear reactions are nothing new. Here is the link that you asked about :-)
This reminds me of the famous Chinese initiative (in Mao's times) when they made iron in every backyard, in small kilns. The process was very inefficient and produced metal of poor quality, nearly useless.
We don't run our own electric generators in our homes (except in emergencies.) We instead buy electric energy that is produced elsewhere. We don't want to order coal or gas, we don't want to subject our homes to endless inspections, and we don't want to invest into boilers and turbines and generators.
But this initiative does exactly that - it tries to deploy millions of tiny and inefficient solar panels into places where they are at most risk of damage, and at least value in terms of the sunlight. Whatever you say, laptops spend most of their life either on desks or in backpacks. Unless you are a student who works outdoors (because it's impossible to work in your room due to some scheduled orgy) you virtually never take the laptop outside. It's insecure; it's inconvenient; it may be raining; a bird may decide to land on it, with the obvious end result; there are millions of reasons why laptops typically stay indoors.
If you want to build a solar power plant then do so, using the most appropriate components and placing the solar panels where they do the most good. It involves careful selection of the site and the proper orientation of panels.
But perhaps a few starry-eyed Gaia worshippers with too much money will buy a couple of laptops with solar panels built in. The rest of Gaia worshippers should instead invest in proper solar plants that use the energy grid of the whole country as their "battery." These fixed plants will be more efficient, and they can deliver power to everyone, not just to people who bought these laptops. I have a 6 kW setup that feeds unused power back into the grid.
Yesterday I followed a few links here and there, but whenever I find an IPv6 router setup it ends up being horrendously complicated, with acronyms flying around unchecked. One can understand this only if he already knows it all.
What I need is a simple thing that can be plugged into an existing IPv4 router (taking a routable static IP address or - even better - not doing that.) I want to have IPv6 on the other side of the thing. The box should have an IPv6 firewall, a DHCP server (if required) and perhaps a DNS server for the LAN.
With such a device it becomes trivial to augment existing IPv4 networks with IPv6. However I don't know if anything like that exists. I'm honestly unwilling to go too deep into the IPv6 networking maze myself. Networking is just one small aspect of software development, and software development is just one aspect of product development... and I develop products. I can't afford to spend much time on fiddling with bits, and I certainly aren't going to learn all about IPv6 just to visit Google. IPv6 was sold to the public as largely self-configuring, and I'd like it to really be that way. All the tunnels that I see on the Net are intended for experienced developers, not for users.
And a functioning stack being defined as a globally unique address on at least one interface and a route to the intended destination, although some operating systems will prefer v4 over v6 if the only global address an automatic tunnel (6to4 or Toredo).
Yes, I remembered something like that, and I double-checked now and it is true. If IPv4 link works then the tunnel won't be activated.
As I mentioned, I just use some hardcoded IPv6 addresses (2001:db8:290c:1291::4 on this box, to be changed to a routable one at some point) and that is good enough to allow my local boxes (Vista, Win7 and Ubuntu Lucid) to talk to each other. I have no router for IPv6, and since that router won't come from my ISP it means I have to build it myself, cramming a tunnel and a firewall into some Linux box. I haven't found time yet to do that, for the same old reason... IPv4 already works, and I have plenty of other things to do.
Pinging 2001:4860:800e::93 with 32 bytes of data:
PING: transmit failed, error code 1231.
PING: transmit failed, error code 1231.
PING: transmit failed, error code 1231.
PING: transmit failed, error code 1231.
Ping statistics for 2001:4860:800e::93:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)
I wonder what exactly they are trying to achieve by this experiment. Even if someone asks for AAAA records and gets them, if the path is not configured all the way down to them not much is going to happen. If the computer gets stuck in IPv6 mode then Google will be simply unreachable. If there is a fallback to IPv4 then it there be just a delay. How will Google know about any of that?
generally imagining their own wife is the one cheating.
How do you arrive at that conclusion based on a simple two-word search term? The opposite would be more likely:
There is a lot of "people don't want to believe we are bad" going on here which shows us more of people being blinded to the facts by belief.
I finished reading this (a text, not the audio book) just yesterday. It's quite on topic.
Spoiler alert or not, the story is pretty sad. A common guy from the modern world magically, against his wish, ends up being a "Dark Lord" in a magical land. However he is a "Dark Lord" in name only - he is not doing anything bad at all, and he is maintaining his kingdom as well as he can. He has a magical artifact that allows him to kill, but he doesn't have to use it.
It then appears that the rest of the world (all kingdoms) decided to wage a PR campaign against him, as they did against his predecessors. They accuse him of unspeakable crimes, dark magic (of which he isn't even capable of, outside of the use of his artifact) etc. etc. This is done because those kingdoms want his death because they need an external, convenient enemy to keep their people in check; they need a version of Emmanuel Goldstein.
The kings gather a 150,000 army and call it "the army of the light." The army marches toward the guy's kingdom and barbarically kills and destroys everything and everyone in their path. When they arrive at the citadel of the guy they send a dragon against civilians who are hiding in underground caves, and the dragon burns them all. The army of the light goes on like that for a while, driven by political ambition and not concerned about morality. At the same time "the Dark Lord", a pacifist, contemplates his willingness to open a certain Pandora's box and release forces that are likely to kill everything and everyone. In the end the citadel falls, everyone around the guy is viciously murdered.
The idea of the story is that it's not enough to declare yourself "a good guy." You also need to be a good guy. But too many people and countries don't bother to do the latter; they only focus on PR, correctly believing that most people are fools. In the end the evil, under the name of "good guys," is victorious.
When someone lands at Ben Gurion and then states an intention to speak in Palestine, one typically faces an extensive set of invasive questions - Questions that I suspect someone like Stallman may be unwilling to answer.
Wouldn't those questions be asked when you leave? It's a screening for terrorists on airplanes. Customs want to know very simple things - "What is the purpose of your visit?", "Who invited you?", "Where you are going to stay?" etc. etc. There is zero secret in any of that. Customs officers may not like RMS, his plans, and the PA in general, but what reasons may they legally have to send him back? He'd have to be declared an "undesirable person" in some way, a threat to the country, and I doubt that it can be done just over some discussion about politics. One needs some specific information about intended wrongdoing against the country. UK may be an exception, though.
There are arabs flying into Israel; some of them live in PA. Questioning them is probably far more shocking, and their political views are probably opposite to those of customs officers, for a good reason. Still, it's not a good enough cause to keep them away.
Here he's been told they don't want to pay for his trip if he does something that has no bearing on what they've asked him to come and do. Accepting these terms is what makes him a hypocrite. He should have refused the terms.
I can support canceling the whole trip only if RMS pays his own money for the airfare. Then the PA would be only paying for him physically driving a hundred miles and speaking. PA would be not in control of what he does before and after.
But here most likely PA pays for everything, starting and ending with the cab fare to/from the airport in the USA. They pay for his entire trip. If so, it gives them the right to dictate what he does while being employed.
Good employers understand the needs of employees and accept some amount of personal work done on the company dime. But in this case PA has some disagreements with Israel, and RMS should have known that his plans to double-dip can't be well received.
If you want to earn some bitcoins, I have some work for you...
Lots of people have lots of work for other people as long as they don't have to pay real money.
What is real money? Well, the USD is not exactly it, as we know, but at least it is a state-approved (and state-enforced) currency. If you pay me in bitcoins I can't buy groceries with it, or gas. So the bitcoins are useless to me in the most essential areas of economy. If you want to hire me then you'd better give me something in return that I can exchange for something - which means other people must want bitcoins. This last part is not happening, and without it bitcoins will be a fringe currency for a niche economy, not better (but worse) than any government-supported currency or a product (in case of barter.)
You sort of miss the whole point of the early miners. The idea is to get a fair number of bitcoins into circulation, the fact that it's becoming harder to mine is a good thing (for bitcoin business owners). It means that the number of coins is stabilizing.
I think I get the idea correctly. Early miners mined the coins to get rich. That's basically all. You can build whatever social theory you want on top of that, but the foundation is very simple.
A honest currency would be minted by an independent 3rd party that has no sticky hands. That's what countries do; treasury doesn't print a million dollars and give $800K to its employees. All the printed money go into circulation, and printers just get their salaries.
It is not a requirement that "everybody is able to mint their own coins", though it wouldn't be unreasonable. For example, a gold miner is free to wash his own gold, and everyone is free to become such a miner. But in case of bitcoins minting is allowed for different purposes:
The illusion doesn't last; some people understand that they are about to he had when they read the instructions ("a modern CPU needs a year to generate one bitcoin, and because of that only GPU-assisted generation makes sense" - that's what the bitcoin client tells you.) Other people don't read instructions, run the client for a week or two, notice that they are burning through the lifetime of the computer, spending $$$ on energy, and no bitcoins are coming out.
There are, of course, GPU farm owners. With the best hardware money can buy, and with proper setup, they appear to make some income. Good for them. But in essence they are the trailing edge, the last ripple of the initial wave of founders. They are undermining their own business, and the founders are just laughing how those farm owners are fighting between each other for the last scraps of the money pile. Founders already got most of the bitcoins. It's like a medieval aristocrat throwing a handful of copper coins at the crowd of beggars.
To summarize, the idea of bitcoins may or may not be sound, but the implementation is certainly unacceptable. I don't want to have anything to do with a currency where its issuer pocketed most of the issue on day one.
I don't live in Schaumburg anymore. So that's terribly relevant information for someone trying to sell me something when I live two states away now. ;)
That would be only marginally true. You are interested in these cars, and you even had one - so this bit of information is quite valuable, especially if it can be datamined without the expense of owning dealerships and keeping records.
And that would be completely untrue with regard to protecting your anonymity - if, for example, the government is after you. The IP address is history; probably nobody can figure out who it was given to 7 years ago. However Schaumburg is a small town (about 75,000?) - how many cars of this make and model were sold to residents there? Probably not more than a few; and these records stay forever.
I'm probably not sufficiently paranoid to worry too much about such things (and obviously neither are you) - but from purely technical point of view a lot of information was leaked, and that information can be exploited by anyone who cares. This is something to be concerned about if you discuss your ownership of expensive cars, firearms, or other stuff that is in high demand. You don't want to reveal ownership and location at the same time.
I'm not a futurist, and there are certainly threats to BitCoin from other established internet exchangers, but I think it's got potential
It got no potential, and for one very simple reason: common people today can't earn this "currency." It is very difficult to generate bitcoins - so difficult that it is impractical, unless you invest into a GPU farm. Of course you can buy bitcoins, but why would anyone do that?
The inability to earn bitcoins creates an ever-growing chasm between early adopters (and inventors, who minted mountains of bitcoins in the early days of the project) and today's people who need to task their computer to work for days, weeks or months (wasting energy that costs real money) to generate one bitcoin.
The numbers of early adopters are fixed - that phase has already happened, and by definition there were only few players. The numbers of the late refuseniks are growing, and ultimately the whole population of the planet (modulo the first group) will be in their ranks.
The refuseniks are justifying their refusal to use bitcoins by a very simple fact that the coin has variable exchange value to different groups of people. Early adopters got it for free. Late adopters need 100 kWh to generate one.
This is not the case with gold or most of other currencies. The miner had to work $n hours to mine $m grams of gold. The baker had to work $k hours to buy $m grams of gold from the miner. The ratio $k/$n is the difference in risk and hardships and all that that forms the difference between occupations. The baker can become a miner if he thinks the grass is greener there, and the other way around (if the miner breaks a leg and can't do the mining job anymore.) But the late user of bitcoins can't go back in time and become a bitcoin miner.
This factor alone will be sufficient to create a backlash against bitcoins, and that backlash will be serious enough to kill the idea. At this point, though, bitcoins are simply ignored as a raw deal, a pyramid scheme that they are.
"an undeserved air of smug superiority combined with rampant paranoia" is a "writing style".
That is true. But I do my best to vary the style :-) Besides, wearing the mask of "rampant paranoia" mixes me with the rest of the Internet crowd :-)
It's not like I can Google "nschubach bought ? on Tuesday" and get a full report.
Why don't you try that query yourself? I did. Congratulations with your purchase of '04 Silver RX8 - G/T Package - 6 Spd. MT in June 2004. It was probably nice weather then in Schaumburg, IL. Is there anything else you'd like to announce to the whole world? Google doesn't need to do a thing here, other than to collect what people willingly reveal about themselves.
With regard to my own username, it is short and common (as in RFC 783). Besides, I don't reuse usernames. The only way one can associate my posts across multiple sites is by writing style.
I appreciate that the way Android works means that yes, you don't need an app killer; you don't even need to quit apps. That's great. But you need a way of killing faulty/poorly written/malicious ones.
It is also required for comfort. The user should be able to stop anything that he starts. There should be no action that has no counter-action; the last device with that flaw was called "Pandora's Box."