How will the message canisters get through the screens?
OH!, heh, no way? You seriously thought that analogy was about liquid in pipes, not some actually used tube based information delivery system where messages travel all over the building and a routing system delivers messages from endpoint to endpoint? You know, some folks still use a "series of tubes" to do drive through banking, hell, just used it to get my prescription filled for my old-man drugs...
The blue ones make me not care about anything, not even the damn lawn! Isn't science great?
A 1950's double oven, A 1970's microwave, a pinball table, 1980's - 90's computers and game consoles... All running on knob and tube electrical wires from the 1930's, yes they're safe and up to code for existing residences. I have an Osborne-1's parallel port hooked to a custom made IR board, and serial port connected to a GNU/Linux Media Center Edition box. I get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I press "movie mode" button on my Android phone (wireless / local web interface to "Remote" app on Debian Server), and instantly hear those familiar 5 1/4" disk access sounds loading new IR code tables to configure my home entertainment system.
Am I surprised they work together? Hardly, I designed and build their interfaces to do just that. Eventually the Osborne-1 will become unserviceable, and I'll switch over to using LIRC (and compiling my own Kernels, again) instead of my custom "record & playback IR" setup on CP/M. For now it chugs away on a nice table in the back of the room, near a few framed panels of core memory, as a nice and functional conversation piece.
Maybe we can use the new enrichment path to create material for portable power of the satellites and rovers we want to send into space and to Mars, you know, instead of buying Plutonium-238 from the Russians, like we did with Curiosity. I mean, we increase our demand and don't fill the supply but also don't expect any nuclear "proliferation"? Just because they're rocket scientists at NASA, doesn't mean they shouldn't have a basic grasp of economics 101 too...
Anything can become weaponized if you work hard enough. It is the cost of purity that drives the difficulty.
Bunnies can't.
Well, that's no ordinary bunny; That's the most foul, cruel and bad tempered rodent you ever set eyes on! Look, that bunny's got a vicious streak a mile wide- It's a killer! He's got huge sharp-- er, He can leap abou--... Look at the Bones!
The fish needs a better name if this does take off, Hagfish is not viable from a marketing standpoint. Also the slime needs a more scientific name: Hagis Slimus shirts anyone?
You obviously don't work in marketing, here: Slilk
This means they can't ever do anything because when you benefit the working class they make the rich richer. "Trickle down" economics don't work; However, capitalism's is at it's foundation an "up yours" economy...
Seriously, all astronomers will tell you it's only a matter of time until we're hit by a planet killing asteroid. We can avert such disaster, fling asteroids at it, gravity tugs, powerful "death ray" solar mirrors pushing it, etc. But only if we're sufficiently advanced in space travel, and having some off-world colonies is part of the deal. Mars is the easy-mode before we do the asteroid belt, or deep space, collecting all our matter/energy needs from nebulae and what-not. If we choose to stay on Earth and colonize by robot proxy then the human race is doomed. I'd rather have people reminiscing over the good old days with their Sentient Machine Intelligence pals, than have the Mechano-electric races solemnly celebrate "Life Giver Day" and weep for us, their extinct makers...
The interest in Mars seems less about exploration and more about looking for another planet to inhabit.
I disagree. We're not abandoning Earth out of desperation. Besides, we would be morons to NOT get some of our eggs out of this one basket, else we're all doomed by the next big space rock. We don't have to be doomed, we could push some asteroids into orbit around the Moon, mine them in the meanwhile until something big comes along, we can send them at the earth killer like a slingshot to deflect it like billiard balls, or tug it via gravity. We can save Earth from certain Doom!...But only if we get to Space! It's going to take a lot more experience and trips to make such ventures economical, but we're talking the fate of the fucking species and even the whole planet, man! It doesn't matter how much it costs, it MUST be done.
Besides, the stars are practically crying out to us, "Come See!" The next planet over is easy to land on, no atmosphere, no magnetic shielding, and has water. For fuck's sake you couldn't ask for a better proving ground for learning how to survive self sustained away from Earth. All of the skills that go into a sustained Mars colony would be perfect for use in deep space sans planet. We've got a huge asteroid field just chock full of building material that's free from deep (expensive) gravity wells -- It's got a dwarf planet Ceres, 1/3rd the total mass of the asteroid belt, that's thought to be made of ice and rock, more valuable resources. We've got a near brown dwarf (Jupiter) to study gravity and what not without catching on fire by practicing in the Sun. We've got planets with moons full of water and methane (FUEL!).
No other race would be able to contain itself for so long! The stars have rolled out the red carpet, seemingly just for us, and you think we're just desperate to leap a sinking ship? It's our only hope to save the world and you think we have an option NOT to go to Mars? We're not teetering on the precipice of disaster, we're rip roaring ready to conquer the stars. There's just some outmoded economic models centering on petty short term personal greed that's driving pointless war efforts and holding us back. Despite the moronic economics and short sightedness the more mature among us are still dragging humanity to the stars, albeit kicking and screaming like a spoiled selfish brat.
Yeah you're right, we should never have climed down from the trees, or walk out of the sea for that matter...
You're aware that we probably walked out of the water more recently than we "climbed down from the trees", right? Look at your skin. Why, it's not covered in fur is it? It's more like elephants, hippos, rhinos, or other hairless mammals. Nearly all of which had aquatic ancestors. See also: Dolphins, whales, Manatee, etc. None of those mammals have fur... The theory of us climbing down from the trees of the Savannah has been debunked for a while, yet no other theory is popularly adopted, or even sought. Chimps & apes do not mostly stand up vertically, but they always walk upright when wading in water. Apes can't learn to speak as us because they don't have good breath control -- Holding your breath is also of benefit to any aquatic mammals; So is "humming" and modulating the frequencies as a form of underwater communications, see: whale song. Most mammals get fat all over, it clogs everything up a lot more than in humans. Most mammals would die whereas a human can be +500Lbs and still live -- Why? It's because our fat is concentrated in a layer around the outside of our bodies -- You know what? That's a blubber layer.
I know you don't want to hear this, but your ancestors were gill-less mermaids and mermen.
I have a better way to ensure that no one can "pirate" my works: Don't make them unless I'll get paid to do so. After you've done the work, the public has paid you to do, then everyone gets copies for free (or only the cost to make the copy). The trick is asking for enough money to fund my development up front, you know, like a home builder or a mechanic will give you an estimate for their work.
In short: Get paid up front or get a contract (see: crowd-funding, consignments, etc). Let the public pay a fair price for the work. If no one wants it, make something else so everyone gets what they want, and you get free market research. Stop trying to make information artificially scarce. Just stop trying to sell ice to Eskimos, it's dumb. You can't sell bits to people with computers! That doesn't make any sense. Sell your ability to configure the bits -- Ah, but that means publishers are out of the loop. GOOD. No one needs them. This is the Information Age.
However, to suggest that The Internet was not used by many as a gigantic, mostly unregulated store for pirated content is utterly ridiculous. Website links of a vast array of television shows and movies were present in essentially every streaming links website, now mostly replaced with other sites. Q/A Websites still have quite a few questions from naive users asking about how to find movies and tv shows on the Internet, along with numerous answers. Searching for warez and pirated books from prior years will come up with quite a few website links.
The Internet certainly had legitimate uses, but piracy was a major, major use. That may not have been a legitimate reason to shut it down (and certainly wasn't justification for the way it was done), but I don't think anyone can argue that The Internet, for example, didn't have much, much more pirated content than, say, TV or Movie Theaters.
If the DMCA, safe harbor provisions are meaningless, then we're all fucked.
I don't despise football or other sports which rely heavily on the physics of (human) bodies colliding, but I do think that we should have teams of robots out there instead. The real competition would then be in advancing technology instead of retarding bigger meat-sacks faster. Such competition sort of parallels the way in which car racing improves the science of automobiles, and leads to innovations like better fuel efficiency or more powerful engines, or low profile tires; Some of which wind up in common folks' vehicles... Though, it's moronic to use the low-profile tires on street cars: They're designed to be used on very smooth roads and make room for huge brake pads. Thus, street cars with tiny little brakes in their low profile wheels look ridiculous to me, esp. when your wheel (not just tire) is destroyed by a golf ball sized rock -- which those cheap wheels with more tire sidewall cope with just fine.
Where was I? Oh yes, you see, it's far too expensive to support our fragile bodies in long term space journeys. The answer is to create robotic bodies and climb another rung on the evolutionary ladder. Oh stop it, of course there'd still be romance, the bodies can look "sexy" if you like, and electronic orgasms on demand are already possible for humans. Stem cell research means we could produce egg and sperm from parent's tissue samples, then make embryos, and hook them into their robot bodies as they grow allowing not just more easy transition to sturdier bodies, but also new senses to be connected -- Thermal & x-ray vision for example, or telepathy (WIFI).
I'd much rather my city spend hundreds of millions of dollars to improve robotics, and eventually allow our minds to escape these vestigial bodies and colonize the stars (thus, ensuring some of our eggs are off planet when the next Asteroid strikes this basket) than to incentivize young people to destroy their brains with false hopes of becoming a brain-damaged millionaire sports star. I mean, screw their bodies, but we can't replace the brains.... yet.
Mr. Anderson, what good will a "set-top box" be to you if you have no TV?::poof::
Also, you are now aware that many TVs run Linux or other OSs within them. I see no exclusion for performing such "set-top box" features on a TV that has a camera and/or microphone...you know, like a computer has.
If the system hears a keyword, it increments a counter associated with the keyword but that is all it does, the audio is immediate sent to/dev/null without any sort of permanent record. No actual recording, no legal violation.
I like speak in phrases whereby the words said never repeat. Using grammatic syntax reconstruction they could discern, to a high degree of certainty, what has been spoken...
So, their stance is that the free sharing of information only applies to the information they want shared? I agree with their cause, but these fuckers are just being morons now.
If only Google developed the native platform interfaces for ALL Android phones, then maybe they'd do that; However, they don't, so they don't.
You see, Google would have to assert dictatorship like control over the Open Handset Alliance, and mandate that all distributors of Android hardware first let Google know Alll about their proprietary hardware, so that Google can ensure that their OS has drivers to support the hardware.
Google's surely not at blame here. For fuck's sake, do you blame Linus when Ubuntu, RHEL, or ANY of the down stream distributions decides to delay a kernel version for a while?!
"If Linus would have made it so that OS upgrade directly came from him and not the scumbag distros, most Linux machines would be running 3.6 or better." - This is what you sound like. Get your brain right fool. No one would use such a draconian system. They'd use MS's OS if they wanted that sort of BS. The reason that Android has any market share at all is that they don't do shit the way you suggest.
Blow up a balloon. Now, look at that rubber covering. That's where we live on the balloon planet. We could mine as much as we want from the crust and literally not even scratch the surface. Now, maybe some day we'll have mantle drilling operations to extract molten materials from deep within the planet, but no, we're not doing that, so no. Besides, Get out your GPS. Wait till a little before the moon is rising or after it has just set. Take a GPS elevation measurement. Then, take one again when the moon is directly overhead. Where I'm at the crust fluctuates ~30cm (one foot), just due to the moon's tidal forces... Massaging the crust like that has to have some effect on tectonics doncha think? Imagine all the friction that flexing causes...
I can't help to think there is more intelligent life elsewhere.
Me too. I keep waiting for news to come back from NASA's Voyager team about the probe making contact with an alien artifact just beyond the Heliosphere.
My take on the Fermi Paradox is that there's a huge meta-material cloaked universal translator projecting a message to any would be visitors:
--------
Warning: Human Infestation
This star system is Quarantined
--------
We apologize for the inconvenience. -The Gods
Out of the unfathomable amount of planets in the universe, there just has to be a better one somewhere. Trouble is getting there
The technology required to get us there means living self-sustained in space. Then we'd only want for chemical resources, which we could get by flying through any nebula much easier than by mining a planet. If we find a better planet what makes you think anyone who could get there would want to?
December 21, 2012 the date of first contact! Seriously, what will we do when/if this happens? Will it mean a paradigm shift for humanity or the implosion?
Well, 1st contact will put our patent system in a serious disadvantage if they're more advanced than us. [insert conspiracy theory whereby Patents stifle contact with aliens in addition to innovation]
Kind of shitty article though. I thought Bruce was going to talk about how some security researchers won't release their findings to the world, keeping the security holes secret so they're less likely to be patched, esp. those cyber-"security" teams of governments themselves... I run my own servers for my email and services that really matter to me and my family. That, and there's no such thing as a client or server, really... My, logs show that grandma just synched more photos to our private distributed "freenet" cloud. She probably did that by plugging in her camera to her PC -- the sync automatically scans her albums folder.
Oh, I might be pledging alegence to Free Software! Oh no! Why, whatever will I do if Linux becomes a fiefdom? Why, I'll Fork it, or use BSD, both of which run the important shit just fine... Also, my VOIP system connects directly between my family's houses avoiding even using a 3rd party service for in-family calling. I
I thought it was supposed to be increasingly difficult not to pledge alegence to MS, Apple or Google. It's actually getting easier to NOT do so if you ask me and mine. Woops, I'm sorry. Didn't mean to actually prove anyone's article completely wrong. I would say to Bruce that he needs to clarify that it's only getting more difficult for ignorant people who don't care about what he's talking about to avoid...
Fuck you and your Evolution by natural selection. We WILL spend money on the genetically defected and mentally retarded people so their defects can be bred into our genes pool. We WILL let morons rule the Earth from places of power, despite their lack of fitness in regards to ANY leadership qualities! We WILL refuse to inoculate ourselves, so that the weak will die out and only the strong will survi-- oh, wait! FUCK!
I write software that requires randomness to seed some key generation routines, for inverse DRM -- Where the user can validate mods other users make, or that my dev patches are valid (security, a value add, not the "prevent game from running" sense). When I do need randomness, I simply ask for it. I require the user to pound on the keyboard and randomly shake the mouse about, using the inputs to generate a bit of randomness to generate state and bit selection of the other random inputs for constructing the key. Hell, they even think they're playing a mini-game. Fortunately I don't need to do this often, once per install. Assuming you believe in free will, everyone has a "REAL cryptographic quality random number generator based on thermal noise or some quantum mumbo jumbo" already...
Slashdot Mirror
How will the message canisters get through the screens?
OH!, heh, no way? You seriously thought that analogy was about liquid in pipes, not some actually used tube based information delivery system where messages travel all over the building and a routing system delivers messages from endpoint to endpoint? You know, some folks still use a "series of tubes" to do drive through banking, hell, just used it to get my prescription filled for my old-man drugs...
The blue ones make me not care about anything, not even the damn lawn! Isn't science great?
A 1950's double oven, A 1970's microwave, a pinball table, 1980's - 90's computers and game consoles... All running on knob and tube electrical wires from the 1930's, yes they're safe and up to code for existing residences. I have an Osborne-1's parallel port hooked to a custom made IR board, and serial port connected to a GNU/Linux Media Center Edition box. I get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I press "movie mode" button on my Android phone (wireless / local web interface to "Remote" app on Debian Server), and instantly hear those familiar 5 1/4" disk access sounds loading new IR code tables to configure my home entertainment system.
Am I surprised they work together? Hardly, I designed and build their interfaces to do just that. Eventually the Osborne-1 will become unserviceable, and I'll switch over to using LIRC (and compiling my own Kernels, again) instead of my custom "record & playback IR" setup on CP/M. For now it chugs away on a nice table in the back of the room, near a few framed panels of core memory, as a nice and functional conversation piece.
Maybe we can use the new enrichment path to create material for portable power of the satellites and rovers we want to send into space and to Mars, you know, instead of buying Plutonium-238 from the Russians, like we did with Curiosity. I mean, we increase our demand and don't fill the supply but also don't expect any nuclear "proliferation"? Just because they're rocket scientists at NASA, doesn't mean they shouldn't have a basic grasp of economics 101 too...
Anything can become weaponized if you work hard enough. It is the cost of purity that drives the difficulty.
Bunnies can't.
Well, that's no ordinary bunny; That's the most foul, cruel and bad tempered rodent you ever set eyes on! Look, that bunny's got a vicious streak a mile wide- It's a killer! He's got huge sharp-- er, He can leap abou-- ... Look at the Bones!
The fish needs a better name if this does take off, Hagfish is not viable from a marketing standpoint. Also the slime needs a more scientific name: Hagis Slimus shirts anyone?
You obviously don't work in marketing, here: Slilk
This means they can't ever do anything because when you benefit the working class they make the rich richer. "Trickle down" economics don't work; However, capitalism's is at it's foundation an "up yours" economy...
Seriously, all astronomers will tell you it's only a matter of time until we're hit by a planet killing asteroid. We can avert such disaster, fling asteroids at it, gravity tugs, powerful "death ray" solar mirrors pushing it, etc. But only if we're sufficiently advanced in space travel, and having some off-world colonies is part of the deal. Mars is the easy-mode before we do the asteroid belt, or deep space, collecting all our matter/energy needs from nebulae and what-not. If we choose to stay on Earth and colonize by robot proxy then the human race is doomed. I'd rather have people reminiscing over the good old days with their Sentient Machine Intelligence pals, than have the Mechano-electric races solemnly celebrate "Life Giver Day" and weep for us, their extinct makers...
The interest in Mars seems less about exploration and more about looking for another planet to inhabit.
I disagree. We're not abandoning Earth out of desperation. Besides, we would be morons to NOT get some of our eggs out of this one basket, else we're all doomed by the next big space rock. We don't have to be doomed, we could push some asteroids into orbit around the Moon, mine them in the meanwhile until something big comes along, we can send them at the earth killer like a slingshot to deflect it like billiard balls, or tug it via gravity. We can save Earth from certain Doom! ...But only if we get to Space! It's going to take a lot more experience and trips to make such ventures economical, but we're talking the fate of the fucking species and even the whole planet, man! It doesn't matter how much it costs, it MUST be done.
Besides, the stars are practically crying out to us, "Come See!" The next planet over is easy to land on, no atmosphere, no magnetic shielding, and has water. For fuck's sake you couldn't ask for a better proving ground for learning how to survive self sustained away from Earth. All of the skills that go into a sustained Mars colony would be perfect for use in deep space sans planet. We've got a huge asteroid field just chock full of building material that's free from deep (expensive) gravity wells -- It's got a dwarf planet Ceres, 1/3rd the total mass of the asteroid belt, that's thought to be made of ice and rock, more valuable resources. We've got a near brown dwarf (Jupiter) to study gravity and what not without catching on fire by practicing in the Sun. We've got planets with moons full of water and methane (FUEL!).
No other race would be able to contain itself for so long! The stars have rolled out the red carpet, seemingly just for us, and you think we're just desperate to leap a sinking ship? It's our only hope to save the world and you think we have an option NOT to go to Mars? We're not teetering on the precipice of disaster, we're rip roaring ready to conquer the stars. There's just some outmoded economic models centering on petty short term personal greed that's driving pointless war efforts and holding us back. Despite the moronic economics and short sightedness the more mature among us are still dragging humanity to the stars, albeit kicking and screaming like a spoiled selfish brat.
Yeah you're right, we should never have climed down from the trees, or walk out of the sea for that matter...
You're aware that we probably walked out of the water more recently than we "climbed down from the trees", right? Look at your skin. Why, it's not covered in fur is it? It's more like elephants, hippos, rhinos, or other hairless mammals. Nearly all of which had aquatic ancestors. See also: Dolphins, whales, Manatee, etc. None of those mammals have fur... The theory of us climbing down from the trees of the Savannah has been debunked for a while, yet no other theory is popularly adopted, or even sought. Chimps & apes do not mostly stand up vertically, but they always walk upright when wading in water. Apes can't learn to speak as us because they don't have good breath control -- Holding your breath is also of benefit to any aquatic mammals; So is "humming" and modulating the frequencies as a form of underwater communications, see: whale song. Most mammals get fat all over, it clogs everything up a lot more than in humans. Most mammals would die whereas a human can be +500Lbs and still live -- Why? It's because our fat is concentrated in a layer around the outside of our bodies -- You know what? That's a blubber layer.
I know you don't want to hear this, but your ancestors were gill-less mermaids and mermen.
I have a better way to ensure that no one can "pirate" my works: Don't make them unless I'll get paid to do so. After you've done the work, the public has paid you to do, then everyone gets copies for free (or only the cost to make the copy). The trick is asking for enough money to fund my development up front, you know, like a home builder or a mechanic will give you an estimate for their work.
In short: Get paid up front or get a contract (see: crowd-funding, consignments, etc). Let the public pay a fair price for the work. If no one wants it, make something else so everyone gets what they want, and you get free market research. Stop trying to make information artificially scarce. Just stop trying to sell ice to Eskimos, it's dumb. You can't sell bits to people with computers! That doesn't make any sense. Sell your ability to configure the bits -- Ah, but that means publishers are out of the loop. GOOD. No one needs them. This is the Information Age.
So, Let's continue...
However, to suggest that The Internet was not used by many as a gigantic, mostly unregulated store for pirated content is utterly ridiculous. Website links of a vast array of television shows and movies were present in essentially every streaming links website, now mostly replaced with other sites. Q/A Websites still have quite a few questions from naive users asking about how to find movies and tv shows on the Internet, along with numerous answers. Searching for warez and pirated books from prior years will come up with quite a few website links.
The Internet certainly had legitimate uses, but piracy was a major, major use. That may not have been a legitimate reason to shut it down (and certainly wasn't justification for the way it was done), but I don't think anyone can argue that The Internet, for example, didn't have much, much more pirated content than, say, TV or Movie Theaters.
If the DMCA, safe harbor provisions are meaningless, then we're all fucked.
I don't despise football or other sports which rely heavily on the physics of (human) bodies colliding, but I do think that we should have teams of robots out there instead. The real competition would then be in advancing technology instead of retarding bigger meat-sacks faster. Such competition sort of parallels the way in which car racing improves the science of automobiles, and leads to innovations like better fuel efficiency or more powerful engines, or low profile tires; Some of which wind up in common folks' vehicles... Though, it's moronic to use the low-profile tires on street cars: They're designed to be used on very smooth roads and make room for huge brake pads. Thus, street cars with tiny little brakes in their low profile wheels look ridiculous to me, esp. when your wheel (not just tire) is destroyed by a golf ball sized rock -- which those cheap wheels with more tire sidewall cope with just fine.
Where was I? Oh yes, you see, it's far too expensive to support our fragile bodies in long term space journeys. The answer is to create robotic bodies and climb another rung on the evolutionary ladder. Oh stop it, of course there'd still be romance, the bodies can look "sexy" if you like, and electronic orgasms on demand are already possible for humans. Stem cell research means we could produce egg and sperm from parent's tissue samples, then make embryos, and hook them into their robot bodies as they grow allowing not just more easy transition to sturdier bodies, but also new senses to be connected -- Thermal & x-ray vision for example, or telepathy (WIFI).
I'd much rather my city spend hundreds of millions of dollars to improve robotics, and eventually allow our minds to escape these vestigial bodies and colonize the stars (thus, ensuring some of our eggs are off planet when the next Asteroid strikes this basket) than to incentivize young people to destroy their brains with false hopes of becoming a brain-damaged millionaire sports star. I mean, screw their bodies, but we can't replace the brains.... yet.
Or, indeed, because you have no expectation of privacy.
Mr. Anderson, what good will a "set-top box" be to you if you have no TV? ::poof::
Also, you are now aware that many TVs run Linux or other OSs within them. I see no exclusion for performing such "set-top box" features on a TV that has a camera and/or microphone...you know, like a computer has.
If the system hears a keyword, it increments a counter associated with the keyword but that is all it does, the audio is immediate sent to /dev/null without any sort of permanent record. No actual recording, no legal violation.
I like speak in phrases whereby the words said never repeat. Using grammatic syntax reconstruction they could discern, to a high degree of certainty, what has been spoken...
So, their stance is that the free sharing of information only applies to the information they want shared? I agree with their cause, but these fuckers are just being morons now.
If only Google developed the native platform interfaces for ALL Android phones, then maybe they'd do that; However, they don't, so they don't.
You see, Google would have to assert dictatorship like control over the Open Handset Alliance, and mandate that all distributors of Android hardware first let Google know Alll about their proprietary hardware, so that Google can ensure that their OS has drivers to support the hardware.
Google's surely not at blame here. For fuck's sake, do you blame Linus when Ubuntu, RHEL, or ANY of the down stream distributions decides to delay a kernel version for a while?!
"If Linus would have made it so that OS upgrade directly came from him and not the scumbag distros, most Linux machines would be running 3.6 or better." - This is what you sound like. Get your brain right fool. No one would use such a draconian system. They'd use MS's OS if they wanted that sort of BS. The reason that Android has any market share at all is that they don't do shit the way you suggest.
You wouldn't download a car....
Blow up a balloon. Now, look at that rubber covering. That's where we live on the balloon planet. We could mine as much as we want from the crust and literally not even scratch the surface. Now, maybe some day we'll have mantle drilling operations to extract molten materials from deep within the planet, but no, we're not doing that, so no. Besides, Get out your GPS. Wait till a little before the moon is rising or after it has just set. Take a GPS elevation measurement. Then, take one again when the moon is directly overhead. Where I'm at the crust fluctuates ~30cm (one foot), just due to the moon's tidal forces... Massaging the crust like that has to have some effect on tectonics doncha think? Imagine all the friction that flexing causes...
I can't help to think there is more intelligent life elsewhere.
Me too. I keep waiting for news to come back from NASA's Voyager team about the probe making contact with an alien artifact just beyond the Heliosphere.
My take on the Fermi Paradox is that there's a huge meta-material cloaked universal translator projecting a message to any would be visitors:
--------
Warning: Human Infestation
This star system is Quarantined
--------
We apologize for the inconvenience.
-The Gods
Out of the unfathomable amount of planets in the universe, there just has to be a better one somewhere. Trouble is getting there
The technology required to get us there means living self-sustained in space. Then we'd only want for chemical resources, which we could get by flying through any nebula much easier than by mining a planet. If we find a better planet what makes you think anyone who could get there would want to?
December 21, 2012 the date of first contact! Seriously, what will we do when/if this happens? Will it mean a paradigm shift for humanity or the implosion?
Well, 1st contact will put our patent system in a serious disadvantage if they're more advanced than us. [insert conspiracy theory whereby Patents stifle contact with aliens in addition to innovation]
Kind of shitty article though. I thought Bruce was going to talk about how some security researchers won't release their findings to the world, keeping the security holes secret so they're less likely to be patched, esp. those cyber-"security" teams of governments themselves... I run my own servers for my email and services that really matter to me and my family. That, and there's no such thing as a client or server, really... My, logs show that grandma just synched more photos to our private distributed "freenet" cloud. She probably did that by plugging in her camera to her PC -- the sync automatically scans her albums folder.
Oh, I might be pledging alegence to Free Software! Oh no! Why, whatever will I do if Linux becomes a fiefdom? Why, I'll Fork it, or use BSD, both of which run the important shit just fine... Also, my VOIP system connects directly between my family's houses avoiding even using a 3rd party service for in-family calling. I
I thought it was supposed to be increasingly difficult not to pledge alegence to MS, Apple or Google. It's actually getting easier to NOT do so if you ask me and mine. Woops, I'm sorry. Didn't mean to actually prove anyone's article completely wrong. I would say to Bruce that he needs to clarify that it's only getting more difficult for ignorant people who don't care about what he's talking about to avoid...
Fuck you and your Evolution by natural selection. We WILL spend money on the genetically defected and mentally retarded people so their defects can be bred into our genes pool. We WILL let morons rule the Earth from places of power, despite their lack of fitness in regards to ANY leadership qualities! We WILL refuse to inoculate ourselves, so that the weak will die out and only the strong will survi-- oh, wait! FUCK!
I write software that requires randomness to seed some key generation routines, for inverse DRM -- Where the user can validate mods other users make, or that my dev patches are valid (security, a value add, not the "prevent game from running" sense). When I do need randomness, I simply ask for it. I require the user to pound on the keyboard and randomly shake the mouse about, using the inputs to generate a bit of randomness to generate state and bit selection of the other random inputs for constructing the key. Hell, they even think they're playing a mini-game. Fortunately I don't need to do this often, once per install. Assuming you believe in free will, everyone has a "REAL cryptographic quality random number generator based on thermal noise or some quantum mumbo jumbo" already...