That's just wasteful. At least while doing things in the Cloud, there are efficiencies of shared resources.
I have my own cloud. My home network of machines have had Wake On Lan support since the 90's. When I get updates, I download the data ONCE than mirrors it to the others internally.
You can run a computer efficiently or not, just as you can run a cloud efficiently or not.
IMO, that we do not have OSs inherently focused on decentralization and interoperability is the primary reason both "upgrades" and management of our multi-device lives is needlessly painful.
Cognition ordinarily normalizes fragmented images, resolves meaning, and transfers information of nature between intelligences and surroundings. All reading is "skimming". We recoginze words as collections of letters not individual letters, considering the beginning and ends of the words more strongly, and this leads to our inability to see spelling mistakes easily, as in the second and last words of this sentance. The slower you "skim" the deeper the information you may be able to extract. There are patterns in words which skimming misses. Wordplay, alliteration, meter, even subtle repetition of concepts or phrases in different contexts, esp. for ironic or humorous effect; These do not lend themselves to skimming quickly. In fact, did you not skim the first sentence of this comment as one ordinarily does in reading, and miss the message the first letter of each word spelled out? One who frequently "skims" for such hidden messages would have recognized them. Point being: You are always "skimming" the information pool of reality, and humans can do so in many ways.
The brain structures and visual systems of humans were not expressly designed for reading, but they do lend themselves to it otherwise we wouldn't write thus. The development of written (physically encoded) language is an emergent process. Were our vision very blurry up close perhaps we would all be reading and writing in braille. There are no genes for language. As a cyberneticist the problem I have with such genetic reductionist statements is that they ignore that life is full of emergent processes at every level. Consider that the brain was not designed for verbal language either. There are structures of the brain at various scales which are described ultimately by genes (and their emergent process of tissue shape forming) which happen to be suited for verbal language. As was with verbal language, given time and evolutionary pressure (eg: selection favoring the more literate and wealthy) the human genome will express complex emergent structures favorable for written language too. Evolution itself is an emergent process.
While it is true the brain is good at quickly pattern matching among a field, the brain along with resolution of the eye and its near field focus are also very good at slowly picking out differences and concentrating on details. We are good at seeing movement of contrasting colors or brightness, and then zeroing in on the area of movement and picking out increasingly more detail to determine if said motion be wind among the trees, a prey, predator, or friend. If you skim a dense technical manual you will miss much of the pertinent information, just as ancestral hunters who only "skimmed" the plains, may find themselves on wild goose chases, or being hunted themselves instead. One could skim a manual or web page to discover the area one needs to focus, but in that subsection of data skimming isn't going to be useful so the other slower mode of detail comprehension will be employed. Furthermore, in "skimming" you may miss a critical detail and fall victim to a gotcha, like your ancestors may have missed the crouching camouflaged lion among the grass.
Graphic designers know much about your cognitive vision systems, and they exploit them. Drawing in the eye first with contrasting brightness of shapes, adding subtle curves, color, and increasing detail to draw the eye deeper or in the desired directions. You find the gaudy jittering "You've Won!" ad to be annoying because you can't help but "skim" for movement between high contrasts in your visual field and have your attention drawn to it... Yet there is no singular gene for this essential evolutionarily advantageous behavior. See?
Unlike when I "skim" a technical manual, fact heavy news feed or ramble heavy social statuses to zero in on information worth digesting, When I read novels when I read novels rich in artistic expression I do so for leisure and thus read at "slow" pace AKA normal verbal rate, or slower. I don't "skim" quickly then. Instead I
Or... I could just program my Android phone to operate all the IR devices in my life instead, which is what I did the last time a battery cover went missing. I don't even know where the remotes are anymore, breeding between various cushions.
The killer battery-cover app would be image recognition for your phone where the camera takes a shot of the device, figures out what model it is, then runs through the IR pulses for various functions until it detects it turn on/off change channel, volume. A self programming universal remote. It's possible to do with my LG phone, and I have the AI know how to code it, but it would be a useless itch to scratch for me. There are bigger fish to fry.
The killer app for 3D printing would be take a video with your mobile device, then use image processing along with the accelerometer and compass "tracks" to generate a 3D model, then allow the user to "crop" out the part(s) they want, do touch-ups, and send that to a 3D printer.
You think people are going to pay you money so you can get bought out by a bigger company to take 3D printing mainstream? Take it to the VCs.
Oh, findest ye of little faith mine disturbation! Methods long established banketh not upon keen foresight and wisdom; Nay, filleth thou offering's orifice by thine heady splendorous shortsights whence upon high thee thighs be they hiketh, yon promiscuous promises. Ye doubteth dark sacred rites though in daylight be they performed, whenst thou hath surely been witness to stupendous powers of Occultist Rift's orders!?
'Tis a trick older still than even scribes or books, fishes findeth mouths of bait switched for wicked hooks!
If that were true, all the Silicon Valley startups turned businesses of billions wouldn't be getting huge tax breaks while their home state goes broke.
Like Al Capone, the real crime is not paying off enough tax law legislators.
All of this needs to get sold to a series of non-profit co-ops. They need to not turn into huge organizations or they'll get corrupt. Keep them small and problems will be local problems and corrupt leadership will be replacable.
Let it get huge and you'll get some national political cartel in charge of it all and they'll just rape it like its already being raped.
The same can be said of cities. Cut off water, power, food, roads to a big city and it can not sustain itself. Smaller decentralized developments are harder to force under your thumb, that's why off the grid communities and over productive farmers are frequently harassed by the feds.
Yeah, if the FCC let us we do have the technology to build a terrestrial mesh network using various wireless tech like point-to-point microwave, short-wave, across a deregulated (license free) sections of spectrum in UHF, FM, 5GHz to 2GHz, and use info-hashes as resource names so that the store and forward system automatically deduplicates data so that your resources will pull from one or two low latency hops away at your neighbor's place instead of coming all the way from the source each time. Essentially NASA's DTN (space Internet) implemented on Earth where a non-profit could organize other more complex aspects like we did with Fidonet.
Who would pay for it? You would pay for your hardware once, and that would be it. Just maintenance or upgrade costs and electricity. Buy a bigger node or bigger caches and get faster connections. Businesses could get active in the 'net community to get really fast services while benefiting their surrounding peers. Channel hopping exists, so does channel reuse via scaling back signal strength to what's required of the throughput.
Problem is: Anonymity. See, if the hierarchical DHT has you pulling your data from peers who had recently watched the same silly cat video or viewed the same Slashdot comment blob or web page, then the end points don't get to see who's viewing what: Everyone could be anonymous. Since they're forwarding packets for their peers anyway you can't tell if the data is for them or for someone else. Goodbye ad tracking. Oh they could still do it somewhat but your mesh browser would have to explicitly participate in the end to end round trip tunnel -- unlike now where that's the default behavior unless we kludge a cache into the middle. We could use certs to sign and or encrypt payloads to validate one or both endpoints just like we do now, but use a PGP like trust graph instead of the insecure collection of many single points of failure that is our CA system.
Hell, we could use a lot of this methodology in a new Web architecture (and we would if the web architects weren't morons): If TLS and HTML actually worked together, encrypted pages could supply a salted HMAC hash to check the URI contents via and unsecured resources could be pulled into secured pages and verified without mixed content warnings -- Yep, encryption could work with caching instead of against it if the engineers were competent. That same sort of base hash used directly for the linked content is what backends like bittorrent use, so there. Store and forward for the web. AKA: Free collocation for everything.
The decentralized net protocols I've engineered for game clients and global-company update & status notification delivery are far more efficient than the "web." Data silos are dumb. There is no reason you should have to connect to a 3rd party service to connect with your friends. The Internet is decentralized, so it deserves a decentralized content distribution system. Once you have that (and we have had so for quite some time) then it's possible to self organize mesh networks around that architecture. However, the FCC won't let us do it. Even though the wireless spectrum is a public resource we're not allowed to have store and forward on family band or any unlicensed slices of prime spectrum reserved for public because the government can not track that shit. They know what they're doing.
Using a mesh network with a non-mesh data distribution design is retarding, and so most folks wrongly think it's a pipe dream; However, a truly free and open Internet isn't technically impossible. It's just that such a system is big brother's worst nightmare, second only to kids receiving adequate education of recent history.
It's a little hard to call it 'valuable intellectual property' with a strait face when they refuse to derive any value from it.
It's like when they killed the Halo2 servers. You could only play single player, no online games over XBL, even though Bungie had the PC version still playable online, and even though while directly connected to a party of peers and chatting them up you could view the Halo2 logo next to their names on your friend's list which proved that all the XBox360's knew the others' IP addresses and that the game was loaded in their trays; Even though the only thing the game actually needed to play online was the IPs of the other players who wanted to play, you couldn't do it over the XBL service you paid for. So, fire up a VPN or Hamachi or XBox Connect, etc. and you could do a system link match over the Internet, hell, without even using XBL.
So, why disable the Halo2 online gameplay? Ah, a newer product (Halo3) had came out and everyone was supposed to move over to it, just like with XP. You see?
Planned obsolescence IS USED to derive value from old products, explicitly by limiting their lifespan artificially so you have to purchase a new product. That's why pantyhose still get runs so easily: The first nylons were given to the engineer's wives and they loved them, they didn't get runs! So the manufacturer made the engineers go back and figure out how to make them get tears. Planned obsolescence is why your stuff breaks right after the warranty runs out -- It's engineered to do just that. Planned obsolescence is why light bulbs all last the same length of time. There's an old bulb at a fire station that the town throws a birthday party for every year, because it's been burning for over a hundred years. Bulbs burn out so quickly for the same reason that hardware should come with open source drivers, but doesn't. So you have to buy new hardware to go with new OS's instead of recompiling the driver. It's the same reason you shouldn't use closed source operating systems that you can't pay a coder to maintain for you.
I had a similar problem with Visual Studio on XP. Every so often I would be in the middle of coding and it was like someone had hit the page up key: The cursor would jump higher up in the document. I'd stop, take a deep breath, look at my fingers, look across the keyboard at the Page Up key to make sure it hadn't leaped under my hand and just glare at it, sitting there, mocking me innocently, as if it had done absolutely nothing wrong!
It was only mildly irritating at first, by using some Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Ys to undo/redo the last edits I could place myself back at my last location and continue. But the thing was, it would only happen when I had finally achieved that Zen-like state where one's problem-space has clearly unfolded in one's mind and one's code changes to match one's solution by flowing onto one's screen as a char stream without one explicitly willing one's fingers, then ZERO! Blam, Page Up out of nowhere!
return !this->Fucking( shit.AGAIN ); That damn key was actually trying to screw with me. This was personal. Someone was remote-desktopping me, had to be. Those bastards were tricky though. No remote-assistance session or other VNC in the process list. Maybe it was a custom keyboard hook, maybe the executable was named svchost.exe? All the other processes were accounted for, so I wrote a daemon service to detect & kill that process any time in popped up. Screw it, no one knows what is does anyway, and sure enough it would just keep springing back to life as fast as I could kill it and things would go fine for a little while until They would kill the watchdog service itself! Clever. Girrrl. (If only I had known then what I know now about Windows.)
I disconnected the modem from the Internet. Still happened, so I filled a drive full with a Wireshark log in promiscuous mode to make sure it wasn't coming from inside the network, but I didn't see anything Tooo suspicious... I ventured a cautious query among the tables of nearby_associates, but no rows were returned. They scarcely acknowledged the sin occurred. Maybe I was inadvertently activating some context sensitive pop up. So, I managed to catch the behavior via desktop recorder. No pop-ups detected, and still no one believed me. Were they right? Was hitting the Page Up key accidentally? No, that was impossible. Like the safety mechanism on a nuke's big red button, a taped-on cardboard cover now had to be flipped up prior to activating the devil's key. Subconsciously then? I didn't feel crazy, but I hear the insane never do... It was a risky decision, but I disassembled the laptop keyboard, purged that horrific underworld of unspeakable abominations, and still the terror remained. No it wasn't me, it was a Rootkit. Had to be. I restored to increasingly older drive images, no dice. Reformatted, reinstalled everything, setup the build environment again, and the rogue Page Up still haunted me!
If I took my time and breaths evenly and carefully entered code nothing would happen. This snail's pace wouldn't do for productivity though. As soon as I got into the groove Wham! Slammed right up-side the screen again. I couldn't get anything done. I didn't know how They were doing it, but They couldn't be watching always, so I tried coding at odd hours, through lunch time, at 9pm, midnight, 3am. I broke. I didn't even accuse anyone; I just offered to pay off whichever of my colleagues or friends was doing this heinous prank. Well, what do you know? My younger brother finally confessed after I bribed him a Benjamin to ID the culprit. Little script-kiddie asshole... He was Lying! "JesusChrist, Man! It wasn't me!", he admitted the next day after I gave him what was to become known as the Serial Stare.
I became vaguely aware that the infuriating Page Up's trigger followed a pattern. The exact cause u
"honest sir I didn't crash it, someone took control away from me", firstly Bullshit. secondly it is your drone, you are responsible for it, if you can't secure it then you should not be using it around people.
Heh, you'll see the error of this statement soon. The black-boxes are mandatory in new cars. The cars themselves are hackable. Soon they'll have even more than just "parking assist" and "auto-break" functionality baked right in, we'll have a whole pool of "self driving" input to fudge on the attack surface.
"honest sir I didn't crash my car, someone took control away from me!", firstly everyone knows that's Bullshit. Secondly it is your car, you are responsible for it, if you can't secure it then you should not be using it around people.
Consider for example what would have happened had he walked back all these subversions to our liberties 6 months before the Boston Bombing
Same shit as before? At least then the NSA would have an excuse, they had evidence on these bombers as well as on the 9/11 terrorists. So, it's pointless. They either do have evidence and don't use it on purpose, which makes them look evil and/or inept. Or, they don't have the data collection evidence and shit still happens, but at least they can say there was no way to be prepared, and point out that you're still four times more likely to die of lightning than a terrorist, so if you're concerned, wear a rubber suit...
and then what would have happened in the political sphere thereafter.
Whatever they want to happen. That's how the media works. They spin it whichever way benefits the powers that be no matter the outcome. One thing is for certain: Either way, no one can prove it wasn't our own CIA, FBI, or NSA manufacturing consent through sacrificing some souls, like they always do. If you ask me (and you kind of did), What should happen either way is we ban all the secrecy from government, we can't prove they're not working against us otherwise. Then just see how fast wholesale wiretaps disappear once the public has access to the same data the state does...
3D-Printed UAV Can Go From Atoms to Airborne in 24 Hours
And even more impressively, it can go from Airborne to Atoms in only 2 seconds.
That's nothing. See this rock here?::woosh:: Now it's airborne. Took less than a second.
Ah, it's coming back down. Check this out: Feel how the rock is being pulled down to the ground? No matter how long you hold it, it will keep applying that downward force. Infinite energy.
Look around. Notice anything? Yep, not a single tiger in sight. Repels them.
I can easily create an encryption system that is unbreakable. You just won't be able to get your data back.
Then your statement is pointless, for you haven't made an encryption system at all. You've made a destruction system.
No no, it's quite easy to get the data back AND be completely unbreakable: The cipher can simply take each byte of the key and XORs it with the plain-text to produce cipher-text. Now, the genius part that makes it unbreakable is that you use the plain-text as the key! See? No one can decrypt the data without the key! It's completely unbreakable!
No, That is pretty much what every startup has been trying to become when it grows since AOL,
And then there are those like me... A non-startup who is trying to grow the absolute least possible, in fact, the goal is to become the inverse of Prodigy or AOL. By working to knit together distributed technologies to leverage the machines you already have and a network that isn't owned by anyone can thus profit everyone. Unfortunately, some sophomoric attempts have failed and left a bad taste in folks mouths, and the "web" of data silos is caustic to the distributed notion that everyone is a peer and there is no gate-keeping server or client at the packet level, even though that is the very notion that gave the Internet the democratizing and self healing properties such data silos exploit for profit.
Realize the truth: Through these centralized services no one can truly using the Internet to its fullest. There need be no middle-men besides our ISPs for grandma to remotely comment on the photos in my vacation folder. It is the crappy state of pre-Internet operating systems that is to blame for the sad state of affairs, IMO.
What is evil to me may not be evil to you which may not be evil to God.
Cybernetically, and mathematically: That which increases the complexity or awareness of the universe is good.
This is what life does, life is good. Extinction reduces complexity, and is not good. Knowledge and exploration increase awareness and are good. Censorship and falsehoods are not good. War is not good unless it will prevent more death than it causes. Genocide is not good, it reduces complexity.
The computation becomes more complex when you factor in the actions that are not good for the few, but benefit the many. Goodness is not a boolean, it is a scalar, and is relative when comparing the outcomes of a choice. Prisons limit the exploration and awareness of the universe for some to prevent their limiting of the greater goodness of others. Given the complexity of all involved one can even determine the degree of risk that should be taken to rehabilitate the dangerous. Imprisoning the innocent is not good.
Humans emerged from a bloody evolutionary path, they can not help this, but it increased their complexity faster than that of the plants. Now count the neurons and cells of the creatures and plants and learn just how good it is to eat.
The only real problem is that one can not see into the future, so only predictions can be made as to how good a choice will be, but we can analyze the past, and with a big enough computer with enough input you can discern what is good.
Evil on the other hand is a term that is mired in the meaningless muck of all things humans find detestable. Frequently one will ignore that everything flows and proclaim ridiculous statements such as, "Lying is evil", or "Killing is evil", when in reality lying can sometimes produce more goodness than the false information prevents, some call these "white lies". Are white lies evil? Some would say yes, others would say no. The fact remains that the act of lying is not good, but sometimes it is beneficial for the greater good. The same goes with killing.
It is not that Evil or "being bad" is hard to nail down, it is that humans have defined evil so broadly that it is a meaningless term. It covers everything from thought crime to selfishness to destruction of the universe. Your lack of coordination is not good since it caused you to stub your toe. The action killed some cells and perhaps limited your ability to explore, perhaps the pain even distracted you from doing more good yourself, thus it is not good. If we could analyze the probability lattice wherein you did not stub your toe we could figure out whether it was ultimately good for the universe that you did so.
We can also limit the sphere of influence to the event itself, those surrounding you, etc. and determine how much stubbing your toe affected the goodness within a subset of space-time. You are free to blame the engineer of your abode for not making the corner that stubbed your round, and even proclaim that corners are evil, but it may even lead to your designs affecting hardware and UI designs as the CEO of a successful tech company. Then, arguably, your toe stubbing may have been good for you even as you set out to round every rectangle's evil corners. Note that if every rectangle is rounded then it reduces the complexity of the shape categorization of the medium, thus is not good in general unless you are exposed to non rounded rectangles elsewhere: A different UI or design theme, or a door jamb for instance...
This is why my alternate OS eschews absolute minimalism and includes mandatory "userspace" features in its design, so it can rely on them being present. I handle the whole (multi) boot process within the OS, so I can launch other OSs from within a running instance. Boot process integration was necessary for firmware segmented loading (optionally put part of the OS in firmware, see: Coreboot). Since the OS handles boot itself it can avoid immediately crapping all over memory at boot and instead upon soft-boot the early-environment kernel detects whether the OS is resident in memory, whether the kernel halted properly in a "panic" or froze due to other lockup/powerloss, whether an unrecoverable error occurred, what the error message(s) are, walk the memory manager and move pertinent information out of the way into previously unused memory pages, then load the 2nd stage kernel into RAM with the debug option enabled (unless --no-debug is passed by its bootstrap loader's manual override). Finally the OS continues its boot process and its built in debugger launches, so I can read any detailed prior error messages left, save/print them, and attempt to debug the last thing the kernel or any of its programs was doing, or mark the prior memory free and return to standard operations. While there is no guarantee the RAM is still valid I can even attempt to restore program states and resume operation after a "panic" (if the bug was something small fixable via correcting a few erroneous bytes of memory).
Unlike Linux, my kernel includes many dedicated features of a full operating system, such as text editor, assembler, disassembler, compiler, file-system, debugger etc. so it is larger than Linux kernel itself in footprint. I can optionally remove some of these essential features if needed for my embedded projects, but I never have since memory isn't that expensive -- Being able to debug via serial console a glitched robot after reset is a godsend. Less modularity comes with its downsides, but the pros of being able to deploy programs as cross platform byte-code and have the OS "compile on install" programs into its private internal file system, and cryptographically sign the cached binaries to optionally secure the entire boot process and all running processes, far outweighs the cons. Being able to debug itself is just a side effect of other design decisions.
My "Toy" OS design has many similarities with classic OSs of old (bytecode instead of BASIC baked in), and seeks to address problems I foresaw with lack of hardware enforced sandboxing API in modern OSs: My kernel can run a program or its modules as emulated bytecode if the code is untrusted, or is loaded as a plugin. I use more than just the two userspace / kernelspace execution privilege levels in order to hardware-enforce something like a submodule level SEGFAULT to grant applications more control over their plugins or runtime scripts (also compiled as bytecode by the OS via scripting API).
4 execution privilege rings are available on x86, as opposed to 2 on ARM and thus some security features are not hardware enforced on ARM -- this is an instance of modern monolithic OS design influencing hardware design (everyone's using only 2, so ARM has 2 rings), much as C'ish calling constructs influenced x86 chipset instructions (ENTER, LEAVE, etc.) which BTW lead to inherently insecure practices such as placing mutable parameters and code pointers on the same stack (stack smashing / overrun is prevented via separate call and data stacks, kind of like good ol' FORTH used -- I'm only able to do so because all executable code is required to pass through the OS compiler / sanity checker).
I'm now seeing many of these features appear piecemeal in higher level constructs: E.g. Google's NACL bytecode for Chrome "apps", or.NET bytecode being able to go native, or Android's JIT and its native code interface, etc. I think future OSs would benefit from adopting better software deployment systems by incorporating a compiler / debugg
You're more fucking delusional than Tinkerbell on acid if you think for one second an entire generation is going to step away from the "Free" button when paying for anything online.
Geocities.
Seriously, I can't stop laughing over the absurdity of this...this brings ignorance to a whole new level.
Friendster.
And you might want to trace the money and ownership of most of the shit you use online before making claims as to where monopolies exist and where they do not.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone running old specfialized hardware which is not compatible with windows 7 or later feel the pain of the XP end of life.
That is not the pain of XP EoL, it is the self inflicted torture by those who refuse to use free and open source software.
It is a shame, but I have no sympathy for those who embrace planned obsolescence.
That's just wasteful. At least while doing things in the Cloud, there are efficiencies of shared resources.
I have my own cloud. My home network of machines have had Wake On Lan support since the 90's. When I get updates, I download the data ONCE than mirrors it to the others internally.
You can run a computer efficiently or not, just as you can run a cloud efficiently or not.
IMO, that we do not have OSs inherently focused on decentralization and interoperability is the primary reason both "upgrades" and management of our multi-device lives is needlessly painful.
Cognition ordinarily normalizes fragmented images, resolves meaning, and transfers information of nature between intelligences and surroundings. All reading is "skimming". We recoginze words as collections of letters not individual letters, considering the beginning and ends of the words more strongly, and this leads to our inability to see spelling mistakes easily, as in the second and last words of this sentance. The slower you "skim" the deeper the information you may be able to extract. There are patterns in words which skimming misses. Wordplay, alliteration, meter, even subtle repetition of concepts or phrases in different contexts, esp. for ironic or humorous effect; These do not lend themselves to skimming quickly. In fact, did you not skim the first sentence of this comment as one ordinarily does in reading, and miss the message the first letter of each word spelled out? One who frequently "skims" for such hidden messages would have recognized them. Point being: You are always "skimming" the information pool of reality, and humans can do so in many ways.
The brain structures and visual systems of humans were not expressly designed for reading, but they do lend themselves to it otherwise we wouldn't write thus. The development of written (physically encoded) language is an emergent process. Were our vision very blurry up close perhaps we would all be reading and writing in braille. There are no genes for language. As a cyberneticist the problem I have with such genetic reductionist statements is that they ignore that life is full of emergent processes at every level. Consider that the brain was not designed for verbal language either. There are structures of the brain at various scales which are described ultimately by genes (and their emergent process of tissue shape forming) which happen to be suited for verbal language. As was with verbal language, given time and evolutionary pressure (eg: selection favoring the more literate and wealthy) the human genome will express complex emergent structures favorable for written language too. Evolution itself is an emergent process.
While it is true the brain is good at quickly pattern matching among a field, the brain along with resolution of the eye and its near field focus are also very good at slowly picking out differences and concentrating on details. We are good at seeing movement of contrasting colors or brightness, and then zeroing in on the area of movement and picking out increasingly more detail to determine if said motion be wind among the trees, a prey, predator, or friend. If you skim a dense technical manual you will miss much of the pertinent information, just as ancestral hunters who only "skimmed" the plains, may find themselves on wild goose chases, or being hunted themselves instead. One could skim a manual or web page to discover the area one needs to focus, but in that subsection of data skimming isn't going to be useful so the other slower mode of detail comprehension will be employed. Furthermore, in "skimming" you may miss a critical detail and fall victim to a gotcha, like your ancestors may have missed the crouching camouflaged lion among the grass.
Graphic designers know much about your cognitive vision systems, and they exploit them. Drawing in the eye first with contrasting brightness of shapes, adding subtle curves, color, and increasing detail to draw the eye deeper or in the desired directions. You find the gaudy jittering "You've Won!" ad to be annoying because you can't help but "skim" for movement between high contrasts in your visual field and have your attention drawn to it... Yet there is no singular gene for this essential evolutionarily advantageous behavior. See?
Unlike when I "skim" a technical manual, fact heavy news feed or ramble heavy social statuses to zero in on information worth digesting, When I read novels when I read novels rich in artistic expression I do so for leisure and thus read at "slow" pace AKA normal verbal rate, or slower. I don't "skim" quickly then. Instead I
Stretch goal achieved!
Intuitive CAD software is missing because there never was any demand for it
Oh, I wouldn't be so sure. Everyone who's ever edited a few photos wants intuitive CAD tech once they've seen it in action.
Or... I could just program my Android phone to operate all the IR devices in my life instead, which is what I did the last time a battery cover went missing. I don't even know where the remotes are anymore, breeding between various cushions.
The killer battery-cover app would be image recognition for your phone where the camera takes a shot of the device, figures out what model it is, then runs through the IR pulses for various functions until it detects it turn on/off change channel, volume. A self programming universal remote. It's possible to do with my LG phone, and I have the AI know how to code it, but it would be a useless itch to scratch for me. There are bigger fish to fry.
The killer app for 3D printing would be take a video with your mobile device, then use image processing along with the accelerometer and compass "tracks" to generate a 3D model, then allow the user to "crop" out the part(s) they want, do touch-ups, and send that to a 3D printer.
You think people are going to pay you money so you can get bought out by a bigger company to take 3D printing mainstream? Take it to the VCs.
Oh, findest ye of little faith mine disturbation! Methods long established banketh not upon keen foresight and wisdom; Nay, filleth thou offering's orifice by thine heady splendorous shortsights whence upon high thee thighs be they hiketh, yon promiscuous promises. Ye doubteth dark sacred rites though in daylight be they performed, whenst thou hath surely been witness to stupendous powers of Occultist Rift's orders!?
'Tis a trick older still than even scribes or books, fishes findeth mouths of bait switched for wicked hooks!
If that were true, all the Silicon Valley startups turned businesses of billions wouldn't be getting huge tax breaks while their home state goes broke.
Like Al Capone, the real crime is not paying off enough tax law legislators.
I can financially MURDER you easier. What is needed is a LIMIT or CAP on legal
I agree with this part. Yep, we need to kill all the lawyers.
All of this needs to get sold to a series of non-profit co-ops. They need to not turn into huge organizations or they'll get corrupt. Keep them small and problems will be local problems and corrupt leadership will be replacable.
Let it get huge and you'll get some national political cartel in charge of it all and they'll just rape it like its already being raped.
The same can be said of cities. Cut off water, power, food, roads to a big city and it can not sustain itself. Smaller decentralized developments are harder to force under your thumb, that's why off the grid communities and over productive farmers are frequently harassed by the feds.
Yeah, if the FCC let us we do have the technology to build a terrestrial mesh network using various wireless tech like point-to-point microwave, short-wave, across a deregulated (license free) sections of spectrum in UHF, FM, 5GHz to 2GHz, and use info-hashes as resource names so that the store and forward system automatically deduplicates data so that your resources will pull from one or two low latency hops away at your neighbor's place instead of coming all the way from the source each time. Essentially NASA's DTN (space Internet) implemented on Earth where a non-profit could organize other more complex aspects like we did with Fidonet.
Who would pay for it? You would pay for your hardware once, and that would be it. Just maintenance or upgrade costs and electricity. Buy a bigger node or bigger caches and get faster connections. Businesses could get active in the 'net community to get really fast services while benefiting their surrounding peers. Channel hopping exists, so does channel reuse via scaling back signal strength to what's required of the throughput.
Problem is: Anonymity. See, if the hierarchical DHT has you pulling your data from peers who had recently watched the same silly cat video or viewed the same Slashdot comment blob or web page, then the end points don't get to see who's viewing what: Everyone could be anonymous. Since they're forwarding packets for their peers anyway you can't tell if the data is for them or for someone else. Goodbye ad tracking. Oh they could still do it somewhat but your mesh browser would have to explicitly participate in the end to end round trip tunnel -- unlike now where that's the default behavior unless we kludge a cache into the middle. We could use certs to sign and or encrypt payloads to validate one or both endpoints just like we do now, but use a PGP like trust graph instead of the insecure collection of many single points of failure that is our CA system.
Hell, we could use a lot of this methodology in a new Web architecture (and we would if the web architects weren't morons): If TLS and HTML actually worked together, encrypted pages could supply a salted HMAC hash to check the URI contents via and unsecured resources could be pulled into secured pages and verified without mixed content warnings -- Yep, encryption could work with caching instead of against it if the engineers were competent. That same sort of base hash used directly for the linked content is what backends like bittorrent use, so there. Store and forward for the web. AKA: Free collocation for everything.
The decentralized net protocols I've engineered for game clients and global-company update & status notification delivery are far more efficient than the "web." Data silos are dumb. There is no reason you should have to connect to a 3rd party service to connect with your friends. The Internet is decentralized, so it deserves a decentralized content distribution system. Once you have that (and we have had so for quite some time) then it's possible to self organize mesh networks around that architecture. However, the FCC won't let us do it. Even though the wireless spectrum is a public resource we're not allowed to have store and forward on family band or any unlicensed slices of prime spectrum reserved for public because the government can not track that shit. They know what they're doing.
Using a mesh network with a non-mesh data distribution design is retarding, and so most folks wrongly think it's a pipe dream; However, a truly free and open Internet isn't technically impossible. It's just that such a system is big brother's worst nightmare, second only to kids receiving adequate education of recent history.
Microsoft or any software company should be forced to provide full support for their commercial products for as long as they hold copyright over them.
That's retarding you idiot. It would put open source contract coders out of business.
It's a little hard to call it 'valuable intellectual property' with a strait face when they refuse to derive any value from it.
It's like when they killed the Halo2 servers. You could only play single player, no online games over XBL, even though Bungie had the PC version still playable online, and even though while directly connected to a party of peers and chatting them up you could view the Halo2 logo next to their names on your friend's list which proved that all the XBox360's knew the others' IP addresses and that the game was loaded in their trays; Even though the only thing the game actually needed to play online was the IPs of the other players who wanted to play, you couldn't do it over the XBL service you paid for. So, fire up a VPN or Hamachi or XBox Connect, etc. and you could do a system link match over the Internet, hell, without even using XBL.
So, why disable the Halo2 online gameplay? Ah, a newer product (Halo3) had came out and everyone was supposed to move over to it, just like with XP. You see?
Planned obsolescence IS USED to derive value from old products, explicitly by limiting their lifespan artificially so you have to purchase a new product. That's why pantyhose still get runs so easily: The first nylons were given to the engineer's wives and they loved them, they didn't get runs! So the manufacturer made the engineers go back and figure out how to make them get tears. Planned obsolescence is why your stuff breaks right after the warranty runs out -- It's engineered to do just that. Planned obsolescence is why light bulbs all last the same length of time. There's an old bulb at a fire station that the town throws a birthday party for every year, because it's been burning for over a hundred years. Bulbs burn out so quickly for the same reason that hardware should come with open source drivers, but doesn't. So you have to buy new hardware to go with new OS's instead of recompiling the driver. It's the same reason you shouldn't use closed source operating systems that you can't pay a coder to maintain for you.
Would you like to know more? Educate yourself with a documentary about planned obsolescence.
I had a similar problem with Visual Studio on XP. Every so often I would be in the middle of coding and it was like someone had hit the page up key: The cursor would jump higher up in the document. I'd stop, take a deep breath, look at my fingers, look across the keyboard at the Page Up key to make sure it hadn't leaped under my hand and just glare at it, sitting there, mocking me innocently, as if it had done absolutely nothing wrong!
It was only mildly irritating at first, by using some Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Ys to undo/redo the last edits I could place myself back at my last location and continue. But the thing was, it would only happen when I had finally achieved that Zen-like state where one's problem-space has clearly unfolded in one's mind and one's code changes to match one's solution by flowing onto one's screen as a char stream without one explicitly willing one's fingers, then ZERO! Blam, Page Up out of nowhere!
return !this->Fucking( shit.AGAIN ); That damn key was actually trying to screw with me. This was personal. Someone was remote-desktopping me, had to be. Those bastards were tricky though. No remote-assistance session or other VNC in the process list. Maybe it was a custom keyboard hook, maybe the executable was named svchost.exe? All the other processes were accounted for, so I wrote a daemon service to detect & kill that process any time in popped up. Screw it, no one knows what is does anyway, and sure enough it would just keep springing back to life as fast as I could kill it and things would go fine for a little while until They would kill the watchdog service itself! Clever. Girrrl. (If only I had known then what I know now about Windows.)
I disconnected the modem from the Internet. Still happened, so I filled a drive full with a Wireshark log in promiscuous mode to make sure it wasn't coming from inside the network, but I didn't see anything Tooo suspicious... I ventured a cautious query among the tables of nearby_associates, but no rows were returned. They scarcely acknowledged the sin occurred. Maybe I was inadvertently activating some context sensitive pop up. So, I managed to catch the behavior via desktop recorder. No pop-ups detected, and still no one believed me. Were they right? Was hitting the Page Up key accidentally? No, that was impossible. Like the safety mechanism on a nuke's big red button, a taped-on cardboard cover now had to be flipped up prior to activating the devil's key. Subconsciously then? I didn't feel crazy, but I hear the insane never do... It was a risky decision, but I disassembled the laptop keyboard, purged that horrific underworld of unspeakable abominations, and still the terror remained. No it wasn't me, it was a Rootkit. Had to be. I restored to increasingly older drive images, no dice. Reformatted, reinstalled everything, setup the build environment again, and the rogue Page Up still haunted me!
If I took my time and breaths evenly and carefully entered code nothing would happen. This snail's pace wouldn't do for productivity though. As soon as I got into the groove Wham! Slammed right up-side the screen again. I couldn't get anything done. I didn't know how They were doing it, but They couldn't be watching always, so I tried coding at odd hours, through lunch time, at 9pm, midnight, 3am. I broke. I didn't even accuse anyone; I just offered to pay off whichever of my colleagues or friends was doing this heinous prank. Well, what do you know? My younger brother finally confessed after I bribed him a Benjamin to ID the culprit. Little script-kiddie asshole... He was Lying! "JesusChrist, Man! It wasn't me!", he admitted the next day after I gave him what was to become known as the Serial Stare.
I became vaguely aware that the infuriating Page Up's trigger followed a pattern. The exact cause u
"honest sir I didn't crash it, someone took control away from me", firstly Bullshit. secondly it is your drone, you are responsible for it, if you can't secure it then you should not be using it around people.
Heh, you'll see the error of this statement soon. The black-boxes are mandatory in new cars. The cars themselves are hackable. Soon they'll have even more than just "parking assist" and "auto-break" functionality baked right in, we'll have a whole pool of "self driving" input to fudge on the attack surface.
"honest sir I didn't crash my car, someone took control away from me!", firstly everyone knows that's Bullshit. Secondly it is your car, you are responsible for it, if you can't secure it then you should not be using it around people.
Consider for example what would have happened had he walked back all these subversions to our liberties 6 months before the Boston Bombing
Same shit as before? At least then the NSA would have an excuse, they had evidence on these bombers as well as on the 9/11 terrorists. So, it's pointless. They either do have evidence and don't use it on purpose, which makes them look evil and/or inept. Or, they don't have the data collection evidence and shit still happens, but at least they can say there was no way to be prepared, and point out that you're still four times more likely to die of lightning than a terrorist, so if you're concerned, wear a rubber suit...
and then what would have happened in the political sphere thereafter.
Whatever they want to happen. That's how the media works. They spin it whichever way benefits the powers that be no matter the outcome. One thing is for certain: Either way, no one can prove it wasn't our own CIA, FBI, or NSA manufacturing consent through sacrificing some souls, like they always do. If you ask me (and you kind of did), What should happen either way is we ban all the secrecy from government, we can't prove they're not working against us otherwise. Then just see how fast wholesale wiretaps disappear once the public has access to the same data the state does...
3D-Printed UAV Can Go From Atoms to Airborne in 24 Hours
And even more impressively, it can go from Airborne to Atoms in only 2 seconds.
That's nothing. See this rock here? ::woosh:: Now it's airborne. Took less than a second.
Ah, it's coming back down. Check this out: Feel how the rock is being pulled down to the ground? No matter how long you hold it, it will keep applying that downward force. Infinite energy.
Look around. Notice anything? Yep, not a single tiger in sight. Repels them.
I can easily create an encryption system that is unbreakable. You just won't be able to get your data back.
Then your statement is pointless, for you haven't made an encryption system at all. You've made a destruction system.
No no, it's quite easy to get the data back AND be completely unbreakable: The cipher can simply take each byte of the key and XORs it with the plain-text to produce cipher-text. Now, the genius part that makes it unbreakable is that you use the plain-text as the key! See? No one can decrypt the data without the key! It's completely unbreakable!
No, That is pretty much what every startup has been trying to become when it grows since AOL,
And then there are those like me... A non-startup who is trying to grow the absolute least possible, in fact, the goal is to become the inverse of Prodigy or AOL. By working to knit together distributed technologies to leverage the machines you already have and a network that isn't owned by anyone can thus profit everyone. Unfortunately, some sophomoric attempts have failed and left a bad taste in folks mouths, and the "web" of data silos is caustic to the distributed notion that everyone is a peer and there is no gate-keeping server or client at the packet level, even though that is the very notion that gave the Internet the democratizing and self healing properties such data silos exploit for profit.
Realize the truth: Through these centralized services no one can truly using the Internet to its fullest. There need be no middle-men besides our ISPs for grandma to remotely comment on the photos in my vacation folder. It is the crappy state of pre-Internet operating systems that is to blame for the sad state of affairs, IMO.
What is evil to me may not be evil to you which may not be evil to God.
Cybernetically, and mathematically: That which increases the complexity or awareness of the universe is good.
This is what life does, life is good. Extinction reduces complexity, and is not good. Knowledge and exploration increase awareness and are good. Censorship and falsehoods are not good. War is not good unless it will prevent more death than it causes. Genocide is not good, it reduces complexity.
The computation becomes more complex when you factor in the actions that are not good for the few, but benefit the many. Goodness is not a boolean, it is a scalar, and is relative when comparing the outcomes of a choice. Prisons limit the exploration and awareness of the universe for some to prevent their limiting of the greater goodness of others. Given the complexity of all involved one can even determine the degree of risk that should be taken to rehabilitate the dangerous. Imprisoning the innocent is not good.
Humans emerged from a bloody evolutionary path, they can not help this, but it increased their complexity faster than that of the plants. Now count the neurons and cells of the creatures and plants and learn just how good it is to eat.
The only real problem is that one can not see into the future, so only predictions can be made as to how good a choice will be, but we can analyze the past, and with a big enough computer with enough input you can discern what is good.
Evil on the other hand is a term that is mired in the meaningless muck of all things humans find detestable. Frequently one will ignore that everything flows and proclaim ridiculous statements such as, "Lying is evil", or "Killing is evil", when in reality lying can sometimes produce more goodness than the false information prevents, some call these "white lies". Are white lies evil? Some would say yes, others would say no. The fact remains that the act of lying is not good, but sometimes it is beneficial for the greater good. The same goes with killing.
It is not that Evil or "being bad" is hard to nail down, it is that humans have defined evil so broadly that it is a meaningless term. It covers everything from thought crime to selfishness to destruction of the universe. Your lack of coordination is not good since it caused you to stub your toe. The action killed some cells and perhaps limited your ability to explore, perhaps the pain even distracted you from doing more good yourself, thus it is not good. If we could analyze the probability lattice wherein you did not stub your toe we could figure out whether it was ultimately good for the universe that you did so.
We can also limit the sphere of influence to the event itself, those surrounding you, etc. and determine how much stubbing your toe affected the goodness within a subset of space-time. You are free to blame the engineer of your abode for not making the corner that stubbed your round, and even proclaim that corners are evil, but it may even lead to your designs affecting hardware and UI designs as the CEO of a successful tech company. Then, arguably, your toe stubbing may have been good for you even as you set out to round every rectangle's evil corners. Note that if every rectangle is rounded then it reduces the complexity of the shape categorization of the medium, thus is not good in general unless you are exposed to non rounded rectangles elsewhere: A different UI or design theme, or a door jamb for instance...
"You wouldn't French kiss a nerd's Blender...."
Your step 3 is covered by 1 and 2. Youtube just needs to implement step 2.
This is why my alternate OS eschews absolute minimalism and includes mandatory "userspace" features in its design, so it can rely on them being present. I handle the whole (multi) boot process within the OS, so I can launch other OSs from within a running instance. Boot process integration was necessary for firmware segmented loading (optionally put part of the OS in firmware, see: Coreboot). Since the OS handles boot itself it can avoid immediately crapping all over memory at boot and instead upon soft-boot the early-environment kernel detects whether the OS is resident in memory, whether the kernel halted properly in a "panic" or froze due to other lockup/powerloss, whether an unrecoverable error occurred, what the error message(s) are, walk the memory manager and move pertinent information out of the way into previously unused memory pages, then load the 2nd stage kernel into RAM with the debug option enabled (unless --no-debug is passed by its bootstrap loader's manual override). Finally the OS continues its boot process and its built in debugger launches, so I can read any detailed prior error messages left, save/print them, and attempt to debug the last thing the kernel or any of its programs was doing, or mark the prior memory free and return to standard operations. While there is no guarantee the RAM is still valid I can even attempt to restore program states and resume operation after a "panic" (if the bug was something small fixable via correcting a few erroneous bytes of memory).
Unlike Linux, my kernel includes many dedicated features of a full operating system, such as text editor, assembler, disassembler, compiler, file-system, debugger etc. so it is larger than Linux kernel itself in footprint. I can optionally remove some of these essential features if needed for my embedded projects, but I never have since memory isn't that expensive -- Being able to debug via serial console a glitched robot after reset is a godsend. Less modularity comes with its downsides, but the pros of being able to deploy programs as cross platform byte-code and have the OS "compile on install" programs into its private internal file system, and cryptographically sign the cached binaries to optionally secure the entire boot process and all running processes, far outweighs the cons. Being able to debug itself is just a side effect of other design decisions.
My "Toy" OS design has many similarities with classic OSs of old (bytecode instead of BASIC baked in), and seeks to address problems I foresaw with lack of hardware enforced sandboxing API in modern OSs: My kernel can run a program or its modules as emulated bytecode if the code is untrusted, or is loaded as a plugin. I use more than just the two userspace / kernelspace execution privilege levels in order to hardware-enforce something like a submodule level SEGFAULT to grant applications more control over their plugins or runtime scripts (also compiled as bytecode by the OS via scripting API).
4 execution privilege rings are available on x86, as opposed to 2 on ARM and thus some security features are not hardware enforced on ARM -- this is an instance of modern monolithic OS design influencing hardware design (everyone's using only 2, so ARM has 2 rings), much as C'ish calling constructs influenced x86 chipset instructions (ENTER, LEAVE, etc.) which BTW lead to inherently insecure practices such as placing mutable parameters and code pointers on the same stack (stack smashing / overrun is prevented via separate call and data stacks, kind of like good ol' FORTH used -- I'm only able to do so because all executable code is required to pass through the OS compiler / sanity checker).
I'm now seeing many of these features appear piecemeal in higher level constructs: E.g. Google's NACL bytecode for Chrome "apps", or .NET bytecode being able to go native, or Android's JIT and its native code interface, etc. I think future OSs would benefit from adopting better software deployment systems by incorporating a compiler / debugg
You're more fucking delusional than Tinkerbell on acid if you think for one second an entire generation is going to step away from the "Free" button when paying for anything online.
Geocities.
Seriously, I can't stop laughing over the absurdity of this...this brings ignorance to a whole new level.
Friendster.
And you might want to trace the money and ownership of most of the shit you use online before making claims as to where monopolies exist and where they do not.
MySpace.
Well, some of us don't like Rasberries let alone in a pie!
We Blueberry Tau, Now!