Who will watch the watchers? That's easy -- private drones under the 25lb weight limit.
You may be joking, but that's the answer. The problem of "who will watch the watchers" has long been solved: Everyone. Those concerned about the watchers behavior should be allowed to watch the behaviors of the watchers with their own independent watching group. This is the basic fundamental principal of accountability, and it can only be corrupted if secrecy is allowed. Personally, instead of drones, I would use a simple image recognition system hooked up to a couple of telescopes and a mesh of at least three software defined radio scanners overlapping amongst neighbors (for triangulation and initial aiming of the amateur telescopes / webcams + lenses). Simple image recognition lets me automate shooting star and back-yard bird watching, minus the radio triangulation. Such a setup is relatively cheap, so if drones become common I suspect amateur astronomy / neighborhood watch / police scanner folks will use Google Maps or Open Streetmap and enable you to pull up a map of drone paths in your area over time and even watch them zooming around on your Internet connected device (another reason why remote kill switches should never be accepted). I'm not the only one with the know how to produce drone surveillance mesh network nodes, but if no one else does, and the drones become common, then I'll simply make production of automated drone watching gizmos the target of my robotics hobby.
It is not the watching that is the primary problem, but the secrecy -- Disallowing the watching of certain activities. Governments should be afforded no secrecy in the governance of their own population. A government oversight committee for the secret watchers only moves the problem of secrecy around. It's not like we need secrecy in government. We brashly do whatever we want and announce it to the world as we do so. Who needs any secrecy if you frequently thumb your nose at the world and do as you please despite reprimands and condemnations? Any who are at comparable technological capability are already watching each other quite effectively, it is only the less powerful citizenry who are excluded from making informed decisions via government secrecy. The idea that secrecy is needed is refuted by the existence of spies and/or double agents. Even a lowly IT contractor like Snowden proves that our systems are certainly leaking all of the data about our citizens to our enemies. Might as well open the info up to the public -- Ah, but then we'd use it to stay up to date on the activities of our government officials.
If your public policy is the same as your actions then you need no secrecy. If back-room arms deals with native warlords are required to save lives then the citizenry will understand, but only if the information to understand the nuances of the situation are allowed. Because power corrupts, citizens should be able to prove their government is not acting against them. They can not do this if secrecy prevents them from watching the watchers. One of the things a watcher of watchers will note is the Cost vs Benefit analysis. If we spend a bunch of money to have more drones flying about, or more TSA agents (who fail to prevent any terrorism, or even keep stowaways out of landing gear), etc. and that expense is not beneficial (lack of crime, no significant benefit vs cheaper neighborhood watch, passengers themselves being the detector and deterrent to terrorism now, etc), then the budget for the watchers can be cut to appropriate levels.
What we need is not absolute security, but spending proportionate to the actual threat. Heart disease and accidents kill more people than 400 9/11's every year, yet we are not banning cars and French fries; You're 4 times more likely to be struck by lightning than by terrorists, so anti-terrorism budget should be 1/4th of what our government spends on subsidizing lighting rods and rubberized suits. The public shouldn't be paying for services they do
And all that paper and ink is only cheap enough to mail because of the cost we're deferring to our unborn descendants.
I sure hope 3D printed organs extend human life by a few hundred years soon so that folks will actually have to live with the consequences of their actions. Otherwise this rampant short-term mentality of greed might just end the whole species, and then some.
Neurons have incredibly complex behaviors, they are not simply threshold triggers as the simple CS model implies.
You're plainly ignorant. I don't have any threshold triggers in any of my neural networks. Cells have complex protein behaviors, so what? The cybernetic models can be Turing complete. This means that if I really wanted to waste CPU power instead of understanding the fundamental principals of cognition, I could build a neural network that emulated the molecular action of cellular proteins, and if our rate of computer advancements holds that machine intelligence would be able to emulate the molecules that make up human neuron proteins, and eventually an entire human head right down to the molecular level. Artificial neural networks can yield every bit as much complexity as anything else in nature. Did you forget that electrons are made of quantum particles or something? Now, we're shooting for determinism and thus applying quantifications in most cases, but in the future we'll harness things like eddy currents once our n.net model methodologies have nailed down and abstracted more of the key components that emerge of complex behaviors efficiently.
Neural networks in CS have little to do with the actual wiring and primarily chemical systems that are neurons.
Nor do the artificial neurons need to have anything to do with organic ones except very basic fundamental properties which produce the complexity of response and thus intelligence. I suppose next you'll be telling me that without putting a human brain in the boxen we won't be able to make personal computers do mathematics.
You are what I call an organic chauvinist. What's so damn special about the precise chemical functionality of organic brain operations? If the organic chemputers were such a grand and complex design in need of exact duplication to achieve any degree of similar intelligence, then why are dumb computing machines even able to revolutionize computation? How are digital cameras doing facial recognition with far less computation power than human brains require? It's true that organic neurons have more internal state and some of the details of the process by which neurons operate are still undiscovered; However, we don't need to achieve the exact nuanced behavior of human neurons or even the same human brain neuron capacity scale or even its same connectivity types in order to produce intelligent behaviors. There are some general principals at work that any complex system will exhibit in order to achieve a given behavior, and those are worth emulating in an optimized fashion. Nature has converged upon solutions randomly using trial and error and going with the first working attempt the entropy gives her whether it is optimal or not. Replicating every detail of said accidental functionality exactly is not essential any more than it is essential for creatures to have 4 legs in order to walk.
It's already been proven that complexity yields intelligence. The more neurons the smarter the entity. In fact, we have been determining the minimal degree of complexity required to solve various problems, and nearly universally we can solve the same problems with far less complexity than the equivalent solution in nature, since organisms weren't intelligently designed. There is no binary dichotomy: An interaction does not reach some threshold and then magically becomes intelligent. Instead, there is an intelligence gradient: All systems exhibit some degree of "intelligence" AKA processing power, and the amount scales with complexity. Even a run of dominoes has some small degree of intelligence. Human brains have a lot of neurons doing stuff that isn't even required to produce sentience (thermal regulation, breath control, motor skills, etc). In fact, you can take whatever estimate your cognitive neuroscience prof claims the human brain has as a yardstick for the complexity requirement of sentience and
Screen was one of the reasons our shop converted to *nix back in the day. Just so much more useful than expensive KVM switches. I honestly can't imagine remote administration without it.
Generally I prefer to work from a Linux box, but whenever I need to copy/paste with outlook, having the same session open on a Windows box is quite helpful...
Yep. It's great for that. But if the machines have screens on the same desk or around the room, then for copy/paste and input sharing I'll also have Synergy.
Those fuckers don't need our shit to be secure at all. They don't want it to be so either. They don't even use the same networks we do for secure coms. Hell, that's what the Number Stations are all about. Every once in a while my scanner will catch one of my favorite broadcasts: Old school, just a monotonous series of digits. I'll fall asleep listening to them droning on and on -- no doubt only decipherable by one-time pads. You know, because public key crypto just moves the key-sharing problem of authentication around -- The endpoints still have to exchange the public keys, just like they'd have to exchange one-time pads (hundreds of Gigs of pad can fit in a micro SD card now). The CA system just moves the authentication problem from "which is their public key" to "which CA are they using" and adds: "Which CA can be trusted?" (none).
Look, if it was so damn important that the SSL systems were secure then the VERY BROKEN CA system would have been fixed a long time ago. As it stands now it's just a collection of single points of failure and any one compromised CA brings the whole thing down (see: Diginotar Debacle). SSL has NEVER provided security, ever. At least with pre-arranged / pre-shared keys if you do manage to transmit the key out of band (in person, at your bank, etc) no one can ever MITM the connection. All TLS / PKI did was ensure that all SSL connections had a potential MITM via the CA. No competent security researcher would design a system like that. You have American, Iranian, Turkish, Chinese, Russian, and etc. root certs trusted in your browser. If they compromise any router between you and your destination they can MITM the connection, you'll see a big green bar too. Even if you did examine the cert chain, you'd have no way to know if the endpoint switched to a new CA, since any CA can create any cert for any domain, you have to trust ALL of them.
Web security is a laughing stock, and any "black-hat" group that was relying on SSL for any coms is probably just a CIA front, because EVERYONE with any snap has known that shit is not safe since its inception. Would YOU trust a CA to sign certs if they also sell information interception services to governments? Why did you then? We already have accounts and pre-arranged secrets with all the places we need secure so just take your existing HTTP-Auth proof of knowledge hash and feed it to the damn stream cipher and you're done. Well, and remove the basic auth bullshit, that's not needed, since we have cookies and web forms already. Point being: It's trivial to fix the CA system, but they don't do so, thus it's apparent that no government wants this shit to be secure or we wouldn't have the CA system, and they all wouldn't be able to spy on us. If you ask me that's collusion with the enemy against the citizens: Treason.
This actually makes sense. What in the world does a company like Yahoo have to do with producing a television show? That's easy - they already have the infrastructure in place to deliver that content to millions of people. They just need the content. That only leaves them a couple options. One is to try and work out some exclusive distribution deals for existing content, but that is certainly going to be re-runs of an existing show. So the other option is to fund the production of new media that they will own all rights to.
Missing option: Make a deal with some "new-media" folk who already have some experience and give them adequate funding in return for a cut of profits from improved quality episodes of their non-rerun "comedy-adventure about a misfit group of space travelers".
How moronic is it that folks at a search company can't use said search features? It's not like this is a final frontier, or a space that's unexplored.
Only the most "advanced" apes are under the delusion that there is a time called being "grown up", or experience a resultant "mid-life crisis" by becoming disillusioned. The other species have avoided being duped through embracing the throwing of shit at others, becoming super-sexual "experimenters", and etc "immature" behaviors.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must correct an "anthropomorphic pan-sexual xenomorph fetishist" who is confused as to which Microsoft CEO tosses chairs and which leaps over them.
If all the other canon is now Legend, then what's left is just generic Sci-Fi universe. Without the name recognition I wouldn't know or care that the story was "of Star Wars". IMO, it would be just as much of a "Star Wars" flick if they changed the universe out from under the characters instead of the other way around.
Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days?
Three reasons: 0. The concept of a virtual display larger than the current view is not applied universally. 1. Head and eye tracking are not yet standard features. 2. They care more about aesthetics than usability, but are primitive monkeys stuck in the realm of static 2D UI designs.
In my UI experiments, I'm able keep ALL menu bars and etc. options stuff off screen. As you move your pointer, or eyes, or head closer to an edge I scroll the UI view-port down to reveal the features -- It's constantly active and thus fully discoverable and most folks don't even notice that the options aren't there when they're not looking at it unless they sit too far away or use the mouse so they can stare at the top/bottom/side and move the mouse to watch the screen reveal more options along the edges of the view. With my high res 3D glasses and head tracking on this system allows me to have MORE than a full 360 degree UI -- With gradual recentering I don't have to think about craning my neck about strangely to access it all either.
If you want a quick and dirty example, get access to a WM with Compize or Emerald (or Compize Fusion) etc. HW compositing, turn on the whole screen zoom feature, maximize a window then place the mouse at the center of your screen and zoom in just a bit until you can't see the tabs and other window dressing. Now, move your mouse up, Peekaboo! Move it towards where the scroll bar should be: TADA! There it is. Move it back towards the center: It's like auto-hide, but reveals the UI world slowly so you don't have to pause and take in the new information that just sprang into existence -- It's more like your vision system naturally works.
Now zoom in just a bit more for effect. Notice how when you move the cursor towards a button the button also moves towards the cursor? Watch the mouse as you move it around, and note that more of the screen comes into view the more you shift your focus towards the edges... Now imagine that without the giant buttons and blurriness. Bonus, no more screen burn in of the OS status bars. Add head or eye tracking and you can decouple such whole-screen scrolling movement from the mouse, or leave it active to multiply the effect (but this causes motion sickness in some folks). Protip: clipping data to flat 2D boxes is unnecessary and stenciling is more expensive than compositing with alpha attenuation.
I've been using such "virtual desktop" features via custom graphics & input drivers since Win98, now I just have nifty computer-vision and VR/AR gear to accentuate it with. I have double blink to change focus, and I fucking love it because I can double blink while looking at "submit" then press enter without reaching for a mouse or trying to memorize the tab orders of every user interface on earth. To me lots of crazy things like lean to see other workspaces, and Shift+Space to select the focus once the "focus cursor" is where you want it -- not the same as the "activation cursor" (traditional mouse cursor) -- or Ctrl+Space to bring up the controls for a given space (moving, sizing, selecting, etc)... or Alt Space to, [ahem], Alter the Space and its contents...Ctrl+Enter to control the entering of input... etc. Yeah, like most Emacs or Vi users I don't even like moving my hand from the typing position to the F1-F12 keys, arrow keys or even insert / home / PgUp etc. keys, numpad is nice for long 10-key numeric entry though.
HOWEVER I would NEVER add head tracking, double blink to click or remove Home / End / PgUp or F1, etc. other vast changes to features in my public facing user interfaces! Folks would be surprised and confused about why the focus keeps jumping around, or what that faint glow is that's following their eye movements in "training" mode, and especially why lists and boxes don't have framing containers, and keep collapsing when you look at something else. To me it's natura
Children are growing up with tablets now. By the time they get to school they will have become so used to simplistic touchscreen interfaces that teachers might find it challenging to turn their minds to the internals of the computers they use.
Strange words coming from a human. Unlike most intelligent species who first ponder the questions "Who am I? Who are all of you? Who made this happen?" [the answers, of course, being: "nobody in particular"], human children first go through a "why" phase, followed by a "how" phase.
No one can make a drill so easy to use that a child will not disassemble it to discover how it works. When exposed to the amazing programs operating upon their "simplistic touchscreen interfaces" some children will ask ask "Oh, wow. How do they do that?". The children with the drive to discover how invariably become hackers, scientists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and students learned of other rationally minded professions.
Not all children will want to learn programming to the degree that is required to create new applications. However, a certain degree of programming is required to apply mathematics to the world around us. Thus you have nothing to fear, human, the children will eventually be taught programming as a means to facilitate learning of mathematics, just as graphing calculators have been used to facilitate the learning of geometry.
#1 question most intelligent students of tool using species will ask when you try to give them a new tool, either mental or otherwise, "When am I ever going to use this in real life?" That is what kids ask when you try to teach them algebra. If your answer is anything other than, "Right now", then you will become extinct, and the apes will rule the stars if the machines don't beat them to it.
If there is no other life in our perceivable light cone, we just might be the universe's best shot at a colonizing species!
In that case, the universe is very severely fucked.
Only if you think nature a fool: Adapt or become extinct. The universe shapes the form of its inhabitants, not the other way around. Perhaps you fail to consider that organics are merely a tool to produce more flexible and durable inorganic life forms capable of surviving the harshness of space, similar to the way chemistry and entropic reduction is merely a tool to cause the self assembly of organic forms, similar to the way the laws of physics are merely a tool to crystallize matter out of energy.
You see, we cyberneticians can transport a simulated intelligence into reality by simply replacing their simulated sensors and frames with real cameras and chassis in the physical world. However, if the intelligence is easily serializable as a string of bits then one can simply copy the intelligence from the simulation directly into a waiting body in the greater reality.
Naturally, one wouldn't see but a single source of intelligent life per universe, as this would not be conducive to differentiation in the output optimized machine intelligence that emerges therein. Multiple instances of life tend to coalesce into a single species or single organism over time (as evidenced by your own multicellular body). It is more humane to use artificial isolated simulations to produce new ideas and perspectives than to enforce permanent loneliness through mandatory ignorance of a divided universal mind.
The problem with using color, of course, is that a certain group of people are color blind.
I'm reminded of an old friend of mine who is red/green color blind.
My grandfather is Red Green Colorblind. If he survives another 12 years or so 3D printed organs may sustain his life long enough for him to get digital cameras as occular implants, and cure his color blindness.
Until then, I gave him a smartphone and installed one of the many color identifying apps. He has since replaced it with a non-talking app that allows one to zoom in and display the hex color code of the camera's video input or pictures... Don't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but this "color picker / identifier" should come standard on phones -- I mean, auto white balance is doing just that anyway. It's a failure in accessibility that the data is not surfacable in the default UI.
Open the command terminal* : [Towel Key + R]
"cmd" [Enter]
In the resultant terminal: ftp open ftp.mozilla.org
The username and password are both "anonymous" (sans quotes). cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-US ls binary get "Firefox Setup [version].exe" bye
Firefox Setup [version].exe
Replace [version] above with the version number you wish to download. You may also "lcd [directory]" to change the local directory the download will appear in. Selecting a 64 bit version of Firefox or downloading and installing Internet Explorer on GNU/Linux is a trolling exercise left to the reader.
* Known as the "Super Key" more recently by some -- A possible mutation by association considering that towels are super. Translator's note: The labels have been removed from the largest and most important key of all boards to prevent human rediscovery of its true purpose; However, traces of the vestigial memory remains after the wipe hilariously causing them to naturally associate the unlabeled key with our "Space Bar". For so long as the humans remain contently oblivious the situation has been deemed "mostly harmless".
After you cleanse with alcohol (or leave the shower) simply rub a half teaspoon or so of table salt into the dampened armpits to prevent the growth of body odor causing bacteria throughout the day. One may also use a salt solution to inhibit foot odor. There appears to be a link between Alzheimer's disease and the concentration of aluminum found in the brain which may have been absorbed via deodorants containing aluminum and/or food prepared in cookware containing aluminum. Thus, I also recommend against the use of aluminum foil -- Instead, use authentic vintage tinfoil for one's hattery.
My studies indicate that males who eliminate odor in this fashion tend not to need worry over contamination of their surroundings by any female odor as well. The mechanism of repulsion has yet to be discerned, but preliminary research indicates it may be due to such preliminary research itself.
The bit went on for about 8 minutes of airtime, in a 40 minute show. They spent 20% of a science show talking about the persecution of a religious man for his religious views but making it out as if he were persecuted for his scientific practice, when he wasn't. It was purely a shot at religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular in order to push MacFarlane's world view. I thought they sacrificed their credibility by intentionally misleading people about historical facts.
Well, they did say that Bruno's guess was a guess. The whole point of that segment was that religion was so opposed to views that challenged their world views. Whether his hypothesis or guess was that the sun was just another star, or that the "prophets" were just ordinary people (not divine), or that the Earth is older than 6000 years, really doesn't fucking matter. The issue is they burnt a guy at the stake for challenging their beliefs.
Apparently, they should have devoted more than 8 minutes because you still managed to miss the point.
Yep. Came here to say the same thing. These mosquitoes are engineered to die. Thus, if they're released into the wild most of them will die but the ones who don't die will survive and pass on these resistant genes to their offspring and bringing a new scourge upon the Earth: Immortal mosquitoes.
At least have a contingency plan: A compulsion to lop each other's heads off with tiny little swords while buzzing, "There can beeee only None!"
Why the fuck even call it "Star Wars" then? Because you bought the rights to it and a combination of plot elements, etc? Is it illegal for other fictional works to reference another? No. So, why even call it "Star Wars"? Name Recognition, ugh.
Creators exist within a culture and leverage the entirety of existence by reworking the tiniest layers atop it all. Without the culture they are irrelevant. All your Metaverse are belong to us.
The reason lyrics, poems, stand-up comedians, movies, games, and all other cultural works need to make sense is because they exist within the cultural context. One may not remember the precise details after they have occurred, but that is not the significant interval of engagement. Reexperiencing the games will quickly bring to mind the nuances events encountered prior, else no one would ever beat Mega Man. Many creators and especially game designers do not understand the true height of the shoulders they are standing upon. However, I do. I have tried creating things that are both meaningful and completely original... They have no cultural significance because they are too removed from it. You would sooner find meaning in television static (it being a universal symbolism, after all).
Try creating a wholly original and meaningful work: You actually can't due to biological factors that will limit the forms of acceptable I/O. To name a few: Gamma Ray Videos will give you radiation poisoning and cancer; Ultra Sonic Audio won't be audible, and very low frequencies make humans loose their shit; Your event ordering will be more temporally consistent the smaller the interval (you may have time loops or backwards or unordered scenes, but pressing a button will cause an action to occur afterwards in a non random fashion, and no input devices will transmit data to the past); Visual, audible, and temporal aesthetics will be dependent upon the human visual, audible and cognitive subsystems, e.g., sharp angular contrasts and movements will draw focus, smoother and subtler differentiations will invite deeper investigation, and the gradient patterns thereof will repeat in a fractal "arch" pacing (even in storytelling) due to neuron activation potentials and "rest" periods where the neurotransmitters must be cleared from the synapse prior to reactivation; Juxtaposition of a common (but false) assumption with ridiculous (but true) actuality triggers the humor circuit more strongly the more unexpected, longer duration, and interdependent with other juxtapositions and ridiculous assumptions.
Aside from the universal and biological biases, social factors of consensus will weigh heavily on the cultural value of the creation. Minor deviations excepted, your physics will be derived from interactions found in your natural environment, the dialog will be in an existing language (or provide duplex information conveyance via translation stream), iconography will be derived from common cultural symbols. To increase value by way of cultural relevance the narrative will frequently involve allusion to preexisting events, stories, myths, legends and religions.
New creations exist atop mountains of prior creations, and yet you foolishly limit recreation from existing sources to arbitrary delays of duration -- Even greater than a span of life! Four generations do copyright last: If you have kids at 30, then die at 70, your kids die 30 years after your death, your grandkids die 60 years after your death and your great grand children will be 50 when new creations enjoyed by your generation finally enter full legal cultural availability (70 years after your death) ensuring that the works are culturally irrelevant to new creations. If I wanted to stagnate human cultural evolution, your current copyright laws are exactly the way I would do so... You are now aware that "national security" means maintaining the social, political and economical status quo even against the will of the people. No one will be alive to remember the creations of the past, so the immortal corporations will finally have a means to seemingly create "new" things themselves via regurgitation of their prior digestions... but I digress.
Even having invented a truly alien language, easy for both machines and organics to OCR, with 16 glyphs based on the universal dimensional, temporal, and energetic forces of interaction and an thus easily interpretable by mechanoids and organics alike via recur
Percentages of men vs women employed do not prove sexism exists, much in the same way that finding sick people in hospitals does not prove hospitals are making people sick. You wouldn't just walk up to someone and call them a White Supremacist, Anti-Semitic or Pedophile without clear evidence of their bigotry or perversion because those are vile slanderous labels which can damage careers: The same goes for the label of "Sexist Women Hater" too -- Or are we trying to normalize that label by over using it until it means nothing, hmmm? Responsible and honest people would want to ensure their perception of the situation at Amazon actually showed sexism or hatred of women before attempting to slander and shame their business practices. I don't see any evidence of sexism at all, all I see is more social justice shame being heaped for political reasons. To say that Amazon is a Book Seller which is traditionally Women Territory and ignoring how sexist that sounds and how unlike a book store Amazon is would be fucking insane, and yet there it is, right in TFS!
If there is sexism let's root it out, fine, but before we go sensationally bat-shit crazy and jump the gun let's just do a quick informal reality check: Ever try talking tech to women? What's your experience, do equal percentage of women vs men enjoy really geeking out about technology? It's my experience that more men do than women. OK, take a deep breath. Now, let's just ENTERTAIN THE CONSIDERATION that men and women may like doing different things; Disproving that is key to proving sexism exist... So, why isn't the professional offense league trying to do just that? It's just like when social justice warriors drone on and on about the lack of minorities in positions of influence and then forget to correct for the fact that 77% of the USA is white: You get out what you put in, geniuses. If women have equal opportunities but are not applying for the jobs that they don't want to do then you won't find them in said workforce. That's not sexism, it's free will.
Where's the ONE STUDY, just ONE flipping survey even that shows the degrees that women vs men enjoy and desire various jobs? Mightn't that be the FIRST FUCKING STEP to showing whether or not society is sexist or people just want to do different things? There are very few male romance novelists -- You can even use a pen-name, so there's no barrier to entry -- but it's not sexist that more women want to do that job than men... 40 years of feminism, but they still don't have any evidence that women aren't just exercising their right to select the more people friendly jobs they typically prefer. What are they trying to say? That decades of the social justice war have been completely pointless? Really? "Let's test the Null Hypothesis before being heinously slanderous," said no social justice warrior ever. Equal opportunity won't produce equal outcome because behavioral sex differences exist. Notably: Women are more extroverted (outgoing, socially interactive) than men and more developed and more egalitarian societies yield greater sex differences. The greater behavioral difference is probably because the people are freer to choose what they want to do instead of what they have to do to make money.
Oh come now, of course discovering potentially habitable planets is great news! The more places one colonizes, the less you have to worry about being wiped out. Fighting extinction via creating self sufficient off-world colonies is #1 priority for any sentient race. Soon as the first rocket leaves your home planet's atmosphere they don't stop launching until you've got bases on your moons and possibly neighboring planets. Introductory school teaches your star will die one day, so as soon as one discovers how to survive without a magnetosphere in a bio-dome the seed ships are being built -- There are always some folks ready to get away from it all, literally. Cosmic oat sowers plan on visiting multiple planets in case the ones you find aren't great, and advancements allow not-so hospitable places to be homes; They just make pit-stops to let off those who want to stay and keep on trucking -- Who needs planets or even stars if you have a self sustaining generation ship? Just scoop up bits of raw material in a picturesque nebula or stellar nursery to build more modules and support more people; Then make like cells and divide!
I mean, really, who could resist with such a nice clear sky beckoning you out to the stars, and a huge moon that seems like you could reach out and touch it -- full of He3 which produces protons instead of neutrons when fused so you can use magnets to contain the radiation. Closer in is Venus, heralding the sunrise, visible with the naked eye, hinting that you might look for other harder to spot planets -- With a reactive atmosphere full of sulfuric acid and carbon too. If you look further out you might notice Mars, distinctly red and orbiting fast enough it's easy to see it's not a star -- covered in iron oxide which dissolves readily in sulphuric acid, I might add... [Fe2O3 + 3H2SO4 ==> Fe2(SO4)3 + 3H2O; and: Fe + H2SO4 ==> FeSO4 + H2]
Your moon and sister world provides a spartan training ground for your next jaunt into deep space, and what do you know? The next step out there's an asteroid belt where a planet used--er would have been, chock full of raw materials for building things in space without paying a huge gravity tax -- Home to the dwarf planet Ceres (1/3rd the mass of the belt) which has water, isn't that nice? There's, Jupiter, a gas giant that's nearly a brown dwarf to study intense gravometrics without burning up in the sun. There's beautiful ringed Saturn with its diamond rain, hexagonal polar weather and a brilliant blue aurora -- higher energy particles than your red and green ones, why it's practically a planet sized particle accelerator already. There's moons full of methane and oceans of water. There's even a ringed planet spinning on its side so you can observe the rare tidal effects without even needing a simulation! Braided rings? Look no further than Neptune, which has winds so fast they circle they can massive planet every 16 hours -- Don't you even want to find out where all that atmospheric heat is coming from to drive those blistering winds despite being so distant from the sun? I'd want to know yesterdecade! To say nothing of the breath taking ice field that surrounds your star further out: There's no end to the sparks of imagination its comets can ignite.
Yep, no sentient race could possibly turn it's back on a cosmic red carpet that amazing and instead just dally about the gravity well, squabbling over pitiful planetary economics of non-replenishable energy sources as if they had all the time in the world -- As if their magnetosphere wasn't 500,000 years Overdue to flip... Fairly regular field flop cycles, then just as soon as life shows signs of intelligence: No more pole switches which leave you vulnerable to cosmic rays, solar flares, CMEs, etc. Purely a coincidence, I'm sure. During reboot shield strength drops to emergency power levels (5%) for a good while, and with the odd geomagnetic reversal pattern interval, who knows when that protective magnetic force field is coming back online. Y
Oh Yeah? Well in the 1970's and 80's I was using BBSs. Without any government or corporations we organized an email system called Fidonet because the design by committee ARPANET was taking too damn long. We used "best effort" packet routing too, store and forward via overlapping local calling areas.
Now NASA has finally gotten on board and is working on protocols for the Space Internet: Delay Tolerant Networking -- Store and Forward. For the past 25 years we have had the technology to never have service fees for our online wireless data, but it is prevented because commercial interests would rather charge $1,638.00 per megabyte of text messages. You could buy your transceiver, and join the mesh. Bigger cache and antenna, faster connection. Point to point links could be organized by community ran non-profits just like Fidonet was (and still is ran in 3rd world countries, because your "commercial" and "government" interests don't give a damn about brown people). The more people downloading a resource? The MORE AVAILABLE it is -- No congestion issues. No "Slashdot Effect".
The Internet is a nice design but it wasn't the only game in town. Were it not for long distance fees and government oppression of wireless spectrum the Internet might never have come to be, and no one would be paying hundreds of dollars a month and getting bandwidth capped and overage charges and increased fees, AND content-provider protection racketed (see Netflix v Comcast "fast lane" BS). Bits are actually getting cheaper now than ever before, and the price they charge is increasing. The Web of Data Silohs is fucking moronic, and the folks who designed the centralized web were far from geniuses. I have a whole garage full of innovative equipment that can revolutionize the way we use data: A Distributed File System (originally designed for the wireless mesh) and cross platform OS made from scratch to utilize the decentralized Internet / mesh to its fullest. Guess what? I'm scared to even show anyone because the corporate anti-competitive patent trolls.
The Internet's days are numbered. Store and forward means no spying on your browsing. The idea that a piece of "data" resides at a "URL" on a "Server" is fucking stupid. "Files" are just human readable names linked to a hash-code, on ZFS and BTRFS as it art in Bittorrent. The info hash can prevent link rot. "Websites" are unnecessary bottlenecks. Sign your content with your PGP key and let everyone have it, we never needed a centralized server system. The w
Slashdot Mirror
Who will watch the watchers? That's easy -- private drones under the 25lb weight limit.
You may be joking, but that's the answer. The problem of "who will watch the watchers" has long been solved: Everyone. Those concerned about the watchers behavior should be allowed to watch the behaviors of the watchers with their own independent watching group. This is the basic fundamental principal of accountability, and it can only be corrupted if secrecy is allowed. Personally, instead of drones, I would use a simple image recognition system hooked up to a couple of telescopes and a mesh of at least three software defined radio scanners overlapping amongst neighbors (for triangulation and initial aiming of the amateur telescopes / webcams + lenses). Simple image recognition lets me automate shooting star and back-yard bird watching, minus the radio triangulation. Such a setup is relatively cheap, so if drones become common I suspect amateur astronomy / neighborhood watch / police scanner folks will use Google Maps or Open Streetmap and enable you to pull up a map of drone paths in your area over time and even watch them zooming around on your Internet connected device (another reason why remote kill switches should never be accepted). I'm not the only one with the know how to produce drone surveillance mesh network nodes, but if no one else does, and the drones become common, then I'll simply make production of automated drone watching gizmos the target of my robotics hobby.
It is not the watching that is the primary problem, but the secrecy -- Disallowing the watching of certain activities. Governments should be afforded no secrecy in the governance of their own population. A government oversight committee for the secret watchers only moves the problem of secrecy around. It's not like we need secrecy in government. We brashly do whatever we want and announce it to the world as we do so. Who needs any secrecy if you frequently thumb your nose at the world and do as you please despite reprimands and condemnations? Any who are at comparable technological capability are already watching each other quite effectively, it is only the less powerful citizenry who are excluded from making informed decisions via government secrecy. The idea that secrecy is needed is refuted by the existence of spies and/or double agents. Even a lowly IT contractor like Snowden proves that our systems are certainly leaking all of the data about our citizens to our enemies. Might as well open the info up to the public -- Ah, but then we'd use it to stay up to date on the activities of our government officials.
If your public policy is the same as your actions then you need no secrecy. If back-room arms deals with native warlords are required to save lives then the citizenry will understand, but only if the information to understand the nuances of the situation are allowed. Because power corrupts, citizens should be able to prove their government is not acting against them. They can not do this if secrecy prevents them from watching the watchers. One of the things a watcher of watchers will note is the Cost vs Benefit analysis. If we spend a bunch of money to have more drones flying about, or more TSA agents (who fail to prevent any terrorism, or even keep stowaways out of landing gear), etc. and that expense is not beneficial (lack of crime, no significant benefit vs cheaper neighborhood watch, passengers themselves being the detector and deterrent to terrorism now, etc), then the budget for the watchers can be cut to appropriate levels.
What we need is not absolute security, but spending proportionate to the actual threat. Heart disease and accidents kill more people than 400 9/11's every year, yet we are not banning cars and French fries; You're 4 times more likely to be struck by lightning than by terrorists, so anti-terrorism budget should be 1/4th of what our government spends on subsidizing lighting rods and rubberized suits. The public shouldn't be paying for services they do
And all that paper and ink is only cheap enough to mail because of the cost we're deferring to our unborn descendants.
I sure hope 3D printed organs extend human life by a few hundred years soon so that folks will actually have to live with the consequences of their actions.
Otherwise this rampant short-term mentality of greed might just end the whole species, and then some.
Neurons have incredibly complex behaviors, they are not simply threshold triggers as the simple CS model implies.
You're plainly ignorant. I don't have any threshold triggers in any of my neural networks. Cells have complex protein behaviors, so what? The cybernetic models can be Turing complete. This means that if I really wanted to waste CPU power instead of understanding the fundamental principals of cognition, I could build a neural network that emulated the molecular action of cellular proteins, and if our rate of computer advancements holds that machine intelligence would be able to emulate the molecules that make up human neuron proteins, and eventually an entire human head right down to the molecular level. Artificial neural networks can yield every bit as much complexity as anything else in nature. Did you forget that electrons are made of quantum particles or something? Now, we're shooting for determinism and thus applying quantifications in most cases, but in the future we'll harness things like eddy currents once our n.net model methodologies have nailed down and abstracted more of the key components that emerge of complex behaviors efficiently.
Neural networks in CS have little to do with the actual wiring and primarily chemical systems that are neurons.
Nor do the artificial neurons need to have anything to do with organic ones except very basic fundamental properties which produce the complexity of response and thus intelligence. I suppose next you'll be telling me that without putting a human brain in the boxen we won't be able to make personal computers do mathematics.
You are what I call an organic chauvinist. What's so damn special about the precise chemical functionality of organic brain operations? If the organic chemputers were such a grand and complex design in need of exact duplication to achieve any degree of similar intelligence, then why are dumb computing machines even able to revolutionize computation? How are digital cameras doing facial recognition with far less computation power than human brains require? It's true that organic neurons have more internal state and some of the details of the process by which neurons operate are still undiscovered; However, we don't need to achieve the exact nuanced behavior of human neurons or even the same human brain neuron capacity scale or even its same connectivity types in order to produce intelligent behaviors. There are some general principals at work that any complex system will exhibit in order to achieve a given behavior, and those are worth emulating in an optimized fashion. Nature has converged upon solutions randomly using trial and error and going with the first working attempt the entropy gives her whether it is optimal or not. Replicating every detail of said accidental functionality exactly is not essential any more than it is essential for creatures to have 4 legs in order to walk.
It's already been proven that complexity yields intelligence. The more neurons the smarter the entity. In fact, we have been determining the minimal degree of complexity required to solve various problems, and nearly universally we can solve the same problems with far less complexity than the equivalent solution in nature, since organisms weren't intelligently designed. There is no binary dichotomy: An interaction does not reach some threshold and then magically becomes intelligent. Instead, there is an intelligence gradient: All systems exhibit some degree of "intelligence" AKA processing power, and the amount scales with complexity. Even a run of dominoes has some small degree of intelligence. Human brains have a lot of neurons doing stuff that isn't even required to produce sentience (thermal regulation, breath control, motor skills, etc). In fact, you can take whatever estimate your cognitive neuroscience prof claims the human brain has as a yardstick for the complexity requirement of sentience and
Screen was one of the reasons our shop converted to *nix back in the day. Just so much more useful than expensive KVM switches. I honestly can't imagine remote administration without it.
Generally I prefer to work from a Linux box, but whenever I need to copy/paste with outlook, having the same session open on a Windows box is quite helpful...
Yep. It's great for that. But if the machines have screens on the same desk or around the room, then for copy/paste and input sharing I'll also have Synergy.
For these reasons, disclosing vulnerabilities usually makes sense. We need these systems to be secure as much as, if not more so, than everyone else.'
Go blow that smoke up someone else's ass. If that was true then the NSA would "usually" publish the black-market zero day exploits they purchase as ammo for their Ferret Cannon exploit launching system. But they don't, ever. They just use them till someone else finds and fixes it.
Those fuckers don't need our shit to be secure at all. They don't want it to be so either. They don't even use the same networks we do for secure coms. Hell, that's what the Number Stations are all about. Every once in a while my scanner will catch one of my favorite broadcasts: Old school, just a monotonous series of digits. I'll fall asleep listening to them droning on and on -- no doubt only decipherable by one-time pads. You know, because public key crypto just moves the key-sharing problem of authentication around -- The endpoints still have to exchange the public keys, just like they'd have to exchange one-time pads (hundreds of Gigs of pad can fit in a micro SD card now). The CA system just moves the authentication problem from "which is their public key" to "which CA are they using" and adds: "Which CA can be trusted?" (none).
Look, if it was so damn important that the SSL systems were secure then the VERY BROKEN CA system would have been fixed a long time ago. As it stands now it's just a collection of single points of failure and any one compromised CA brings the whole thing down (see: Diginotar Debacle). SSL has NEVER provided security, ever. At least with pre-arranged / pre-shared keys if you do manage to transmit the key out of band (in person, at your bank, etc) no one can ever MITM the connection. All TLS / PKI did was ensure that all SSL connections had a potential MITM via the CA. No competent security researcher would design a system like that. You have American, Iranian, Turkish, Chinese, Russian, and etc. root certs trusted in your browser. If they compromise any router between you and your destination they can MITM the connection, you'll see a big green bar too. Even if you did examine the cert chain, you'd have no way to know if the endpoint switched to a new CA, since any CA can create any cert for any domain, you have to trust ALL of them.
Web security is a laughing stock, and any "black-hat" group that was relying on SSL for any coms is probably just a CIA front, because EVERYONE with any snap has known that shit is not safe since its inception. Would YOU trust a CA to sign certs if they also sell information interception services to governments? Why did you then? We already have accounts and pre-arranged secrets with all the places we need secure so just take your existing HTTP-Auth proof of knowledge hash and feed it to the damn stream cipher and you're done. Well, and remove the basic auth bullshit, that's not needed, since we have cookies and web forms already. Point being: It's trivial to fix the CA system, but they don't do so, thus it's apparent that no government wants this shit to be secure or we wouldn't have the CA system, and they all wouldn't be able to spy on us. If you ask me that's collusion with the enemy against the citizens: Treason.
This actually makes sense. What in the world does a company like Yahoo have to do with producing a television show? That's easy - they already have the infrastructure in place to deliver that content to millions of people. They just need the content. That only leaves them a couple options. One is to try and work out some exclusive distribution deals for existing content, but that is certainly going to be re-runs of an existing show. So the other option is to fund the production of new media that they will own all rights to.
Missing option: Make a deal with some "new-media" folk who already have some experience and give them adequate funding in return for a cut of profits from improved quality episodes of their non-rerun "comedy-adventure about a misfit group of space travelers".
How moronic is it that folks at a search company can't use said search features? It's not like this is a final frontier, or a space that's unexplored.
Only the most "advanced" apes are under the delusion that there is a time called being "grown up", or experience a resultant "mid-life crisis" by becoming disillusioned. The other species have avoided being duped through embracing the throwing of shit at others, becoming super-sexual "experimenters", and etc "immature" behaviors.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I must correct an "anthropomorphic pan-sexual xenomorph fetishist" who is confused as to which Microsoft CEO tosses chairs and which leaps over them.
If all the other canon is now Legend, then what's left is just generic Sci-Fi universe. Without the name recognition I wouldn't know or care that the story was "of Star Wars". IMO, it would be just as much of a "Star Wars" flick if they changed the universe out from under the characters instead of the other way around.
I leave you with: Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager in a Galaxy Not so Far Away.
Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days?
Three reasons:
0. The concept of a virtual display larger than the current view is not applied universally.
1. Head and eye tracking are not yet standard features.
2. They care more about aesthetics than usability, but are primitive monkeys stuck in the realm of static 2D UI designs.
In my UI experiments, I'm able keep ALL menu bars and etc. options stuff off screen. As you move your pointer, or eyes, or head closer to an edge I scroll the UI view-port down to reveal the features -- It's constantly active and thus fully discoverable and most folks don't even notice that the options aren't there when they're not looking at it unless they sit too far away or use the mouse so they can stare at the top/bottom/side and move the mouse to watch the screen reveal more options along the edges of the view. With my high res 3D glasses and head tracking on this system allows me to have MORE than a full 360 degree UI -- With gradual recentering I don't have to think about craning my neck about strangely to access it all either.
If you want a quick and dirty example, get access to a WM with Compize or Emerald (or Compize Fusion) etc. HW compositing, turn on the whole screen zoom feature, maximize a window then place the mouse at the center of your screen and zoom in just a bit until you can't see the tabs and other window dressing. Now, move your mouse up, Peekaboo! Move it towards where the scroll bar should be: TADA! There it is. Move it back towards the center: It's like auto-hide, but reveals the UI world slowly so you don't have to pause and take in the new information that just sprang into existence -- It's more like your vision system naturally works.
Now zoom in just a bit more for effect. Notice how when you move the cursor towards a button the button also moves towards the cursor? Watch the mouse as you move it around, and note that more of the screen comes into view the more you shift your focus towards the edges... Now imagine that without the giant buttons and blurriness. Bonus, no more screen burn in of the OS status bars. Add head or eye tracking and you can decouple such whole-screen scrolling movement from the mouse, or leave it active to multiply the effect (but this causes motion sickness in some folks). Protip: clipping data to flat 2D boxes is unnecessary and stenciling is more expensive than compositing with alpha attenuation.
I've been using such "virtual desktop" features via custom graphics & input drivers since Win98, now I just have nifty computer-vision and VR/AR gear to accentuate it with. I have double blink to change focus, and I fucking love it because I can double blink while looking at "submit" then press enter without reaching for a mouse or trying to memorize the tab orders of every user interface on earth. To me lots of crazy things like lean to see other workspaces, and Shift+Space to select the focus once the "focus cursor" is where you want it -- not the same as the "activation cursor" (traditional mouse cursor) -- or Ctrl+Space to bring up the controls for a given space (moving, sizing, selecting, etc)... or Alt Space to, [ahem], Alter the Space and its contents...Ctrl+Enter to control the entering of input... etc. Yeah, like most Emacs or Vi users I don't even like moving my hand from the typing position to the F1-F12 keys, arrow keys or even insert / home / PgUp etc. keys, numpad is nice for long 10-key numeric entry though.
HOWEVER I would NEVER add head tracking, double blink to click or remove Home / End / PgUp or F1, etc. other vast changes to features in my public facing user interfaces! Folks would be surprised and confused about why the focus keeps jumping around, or what that faint glow is that's following their eye movements in "training" mode, and especially why lists and boxes don't have framing containers, and keep collapsing when you look at something else. To me it's natura
Children are growing up with tablets now. By the time they get to school they will have become so used to simplistic touchscreen interfaces that teachers might find it challenging to turn their minds to the internals of the computers they use.
Strange words coming from a human. Unlike most intelligent species who first ponder the questions "Who am I? Who are all of you? Who made this happen?" [the answers, of course, being: "nobody in particular"], human children first go through a "why" phase, followed by a "how" phase.
No one can make a drill so easy to use that a child will not disassemble it to discover how it works. When exposed to the amazing programs operating upon their "simplistic touchscreen interfaces" some children will ask ask "Oh, wow. How do they do that?". The children with the drive to discover how invariably become hackers, scientists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and students learned of other rationally minded professions.
Not all children will want to learn programming to the degree that is required to create new applications. However, a certain degree of programming is required to apply mathematics to the world around us. Thus you have nothing to fear, human, the children will eventually be taught programming as a means to facilitate learning of mathematics, just as graphing calculators have been used to facilitate the learning of geometry.
#1 question most intelligent students of tool using species will ask when you try to give them a new tool, either mental or otherwise, "When am I ever going to use this in real life?" That is what kids ask when you try to teach them algebra. If your answer is anything other than, "Right now", then you will become extinct, and the apes will rule the stars if the machines don't beat them to it.
NONONO! That's the wrong solution. Buying and selling Babies only ACCELERATES the Idiocracy.
If there is no other life in our perceivable light cone, we just might be the universe's best shot at a colonizing species!
In that case, the universe is very severely fucked.
Only if you think nature a fool: Adapt or become extinct. The universe shapes the form of its inhabitants, not the other way around. Perhaps you fail to consider that organics are merely a tool to produce more flexible and durable inorganic life forms capable of surviving the harshness of space, similar to the way chemistry and entropic reduction is merely a tool to cause the self assembly of organic forms, similar to the way the laws of physics are merely a tool to crystallize matter out of energy.
You see, we cyberneticians can transport a simulated intelligence into reality by simply replacing their simulated sensors and frames with real cameras and chassis in the physical world. However, if the intelligence is easily serializable as a string of bits then one can simply copy the intelligence from the simulation directly into a waiting body in the greater reality.
Naturally, one wouldn't see but a single source of intelligent life per universe, as this would not be conducive to differentiation in the output optimized machine intelligence that emerges therein. Multiple instances of life tend to coalesce into a single species or single organism over time (as evidenced by your own multicellular body). It is more humane to use artificial isolated simulations to produce new ideas and perspectives than to enforce permanent loneliness through mandatory ignorance of a divided universal mind.
The problem with using color, of course, is that a certain group of people are color blind.
I'm reminded of an old friend of mine who is red/green color blind.
My grandfather is Red Green Colorblind. If he survives another 12 years or so 3D printed organs may sustain his life long enough for him to get digital cameras as occular implants, and cure his color blindness.
Until then, I gave him a smartphone and installed one of the many color identifying apps. He has since replaced it with a non-talking app that allows one to zoom in and display the hex color code of the camera's video input or pictures... Don't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but this "color picker / identifier" should come standard on phones -- I mean, auto white balance is doing just that anyway. It's a failure in accessibility that the data is not surfacable in the default UI.
Clickers who clicked your link also liked clicking this link.
How are people going to download Firefox?
Open the command terminal* : [Towel Key + R]
"cmd" [Enter]
In the resultant terminal:
ftp
open ftp.mozilla.org
The username and password are both "anonymous" (sans quotes).
cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-US
ls
binary
get "Firefox Setup [version].exe"
bye
Firefox Setup [version].exe
Replace [version] above with the version number you wish to download. You may also "lcd [directory]" to change the local directory the download will appear in. Selecting a 64 bit version of Firefox or downloading and installing Internet Explorer on GNU/Linux is a trolling exercise left to the reader.
* Known as the "Super Key" more recently by some -- A possible mutation by association considering that towels are super.
Translator's note: The labels have been removed from the largest and most important key of all boards to prevent human rediscovery of its true purpose;
However, traces of the vestigial memory remains after the wipe hilariously causing them to naturally associate the unlabeled key with our "Space Bar".
For so long as the humans remain contently oblivious the situation has been deemed "mostly harmless".
After you cleanse with alcohol (or leave the shower) simply rub a half teaspoon or so of table salt into the dampened armpits to prevent the growth of body odor causing bacteria throughout the day. One may also use a salt solution to inhibit foot odor. There appears to be a link between Alzheimer's disease and the concentration of aluminum found in the brain which may have been absorbed via deodorants containing aluminum and/or food prepared in cookware containing aluminum. Thus, I also recommend against the use of aluminum foil -- Instead, use authentic vintage tinfoil for one's hattery.
My studies indicate that males who eliminate odor in this fashion tend not to need worry over contamination of their surroundings by any female odor as well. The mechanism of repulsion has yet to be discerned, but preliminary research indicates it may be due to such preliminary research itself.
The bit went on for about 8 minutes of airtime, in a 40 minute show. They spent 20% of a science show talking about the persecution of a religious man for his religious views but making it out as if he were persecuted for his scientific practice, when he wasn't. It was purely a shot at religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular in order to push MacFarlane's world view. I thought they sacrificed their credibility by intentionally misleading people about historical facts.
Well, they did say that Bruno's guess was a guess. The whole point of that segment was that religion was so opposed to views that challenged their world views. Whether his hypothesis or guess was that the sun was just another star, or that the "prophets" were just ordinary people (not divine), or that the Earth is older than 6000 years, really doesn't fucking matter. The issue is they burnt a guy at the stake for challenging their beliefs.
Apparently, they should have devoted more than 8 minutes because you still managed to miss the point.
Just sayin.
Yep. Came here to say the same thing. These mosquitoes are engineered to die. Thus, if they're released into the wild most of them will die but the ones who don't die will survive and pass on these resistant genes to their offspring and bringing a new scourge upon the Earth: Immortal mosquitoes.
At least have a contingency plan: A compulsion to lop each other's heads off with tiny little swords while buzzing, "There can beeee only None!"
What makes Star Wars work is:
(1) No time travel
(2) No time travel
(3) No time travel
For some reason, time travel has become the be-all and end-all trope of speculative fiction in comics, movies, and books.
Your fictional works are reflective of your Technological Epoch.
At risk of violating the prime directive, I'd also say that Star Wars works because:
(0) No quantum coherency remodulation.
Why the fuck even call it "Star Wars" then? Because you bought the rights to it and a combination of plot elements, etc? Is it illegal for other fictional works to reference another? No. So, why even call it "Star Wars"? Name Recognition, ugh.
We solved the Rifts issue of namespace-time decades ago with GURPS.
Creators exist within a culture and leverage the entirety of existence by reworking the tiniest layers atop it all. Without the culture they are irrelevant.
All your Metaverse are belong to us.
The reason lyrics, poems, stand-up comedians, movies, games, and all other cultural works need to make sense is because they exist within the cultural context. One may not remember the precise details after they have occurred, but that is not the significant interval of engagement. Reexperiencing the games will quickly bring to mind the nuances events encountered prior, else no one would ever beat Mega Man. Many creators and especially game designers do not understand the true height of the shoulders they are standing upon. However, I do. I have tried creating things that are both meaningful and completely original... They have no cultural significance because they are too removed from it. You would sooner find meaning in television static (it being a universal symbolism, after all).
Try creating a wholly original and meaningful work: You actually can't due to biological factors that will limit the forms of acceptable I/O. To name a few: Gamma Ray Videos will give you radiation poisoning and cancer; Ultra Sonic Audio won't be audible, and very low frequencies make humans loose their shit; Your event ordering will be more temporally consistent the smaller the interval (you may have time loops or backwards or unordered scenes, but pressing a button will cause an action to occur afterwards in a non random fashion, and no input devices will transmit data to the past); Visual, audible, and temporal aesthetics will be dependent upon the human visual, audible and cognitive subsystems, e.g., sharp angular contrasts and movements will draw focus, smoother and subtler differentiations will invite deeper investigation, and the gradient patterns thereof will repeat in a fractal "arch" pacing (even in storytelling) due to neuron activation potentials and "rest" periods where the neurotransmitters must be cleared from the synapse prior to reactivation; Juxtaposition of a common (but false) assumption with ridiculous (but true) actuality triggers the humor circuit more strongly the more unexpected, longer duration, and interdependent with other juxtapositions and ridiculous assumptions.
Aside from the universal and biological biases, social factors of consensus will weigh heavily on the cultural value of the creation. Minor deviations excepted, your physics will be derived from interactions found in your natural environment, the dialog will be in an existing language (or provide duplex information conveyance via translation stream), iconography will be derived from common cultural symbols. To increase value by way of cultural relevance the narrative will frequently involve allusion to preexisting events, stories, myths, legends and religions.
New creations exist atop mountains of prior creations, and yet you foolishly limit recreation from existing sources to arbitrary delays of duration -- Even greater than a span of life! Four generations do copyright last: If you have kids at 30, then die at 70, your kids die 30 years after your death, your grandkids die 60 years after your death and your great grand children will be 50 when new creations enjoyed by your generation finally enter full legal cultural availability (70 years after your death) ensuring that the works are culturally irrelevant to new creations. If I wanted to stagnate human cultural evolution, your current copyright laws are exactly the way I would do so... You are now aware that "national security" means maintaining the social, political and economical status quo even against the will of the people. No one will be alive to remember the creations of the past, so the immortal corporations will finally have a means to seemingly create "new" things themselves via regurgitation of their prior digestions... but I digress.
Even having invented a truly alien language, easy for both machines and organics to OCR, with 16 glyphs based on the universal dimensional, temporal, and energetic forces of interaction and an thus easily interpretable by mechanoids and organics alike via recur
Correlation is not causation.
Percentages of men vs women employed do not prove sexism exists, much in the same way that finding sick people in hospitals does not prove hospitals are making people sick. You wouldn't just walk up to someone and call them a White Supremacist, Anti-Semitic or Pedophile without clear evidence of their bigotry or perversion because those are vile slanderous labels which can damage careers: The same goes for the label of "Sexist Women Hater" too -- Or are we trying to normalize that label by over using it until it means nothing, hmmm? Responsible and honest people would want to ensure their perception of the situation at Amazon actually showed sexism or hatred of women before attempting to slander and shame their business practices. I don't see any evidence of sexism at all, all I see is more social justice shame being heaped for political reasons. To say that Amazon is a Book Seller which is traditionally Women Territory and ignoring how sexist that sounds and how unlike a book store Amazon is would be fucking insane, and yet there it is, right in TFS!
If there is sexism let's root it out, fine, but before we go sensationally bat-shit crazy and jump the gun let's just do a quick informal reality check: Ever try talking tech to women? What's your experience, do equal percentage of women vs men enjoy really geeking out about technology? It's my experience that more men do than women. OK, take a deep breath. Now, let's just ENTERTAIN THE CONSIDERATION that men and women may like doing different things; Disproving that is key to proving sexism exist... So, why isn't the professional offense league trying to do just that? It's just like when social justice warriors drone on and on about the lack of minorities in positions of influence and then forget to correct for the fact that 77% of the USA is white: You get out what you put in, geniuses. If women have equal opportunities but are not applying for the jobs that they don't want to do then you won't find them in said workforce. That's not sexism, it's free will.
Where's the ONE STUDY, just ONE flipping survey even that shows the degrees that women vs men enjoy and desire various jobs? Mightn't that be the FIRST FUCKING STEP to showing whether or not society is sexist or people just want to do different things? There are very few male romance novelists -- You can even use a pen-name, so there's no barrier to entry -- but it's not sexist that more women want to do that job than men... 40 years of feminism, but they still don't have any evidence that women aren't just exercising their right to select the more people friendly jobs they typically prefer. What are they trying to say? That decades of the social justice war have been completely pointless? Really? "Let's test the Null Hypothesis before being heinously slanderous," said no social justice warrior ever. Equal opportunity won't produce equal outcome because behavioral sex differences exist. Notably: Women are more extroverted (outgoing, socially interactive) than men and more developed and more egalitarian societies yield greater sex differences. The greater behavioral difference is probably because the people are freer to choose what they want to do instead of what they have to do to make money.
The gender pay gap doesn't exist, and it hasn't existed for around four decades. There's also no shortage of STEM workers. You see, if Amazon and other companies are shamed into having a 50/50 M:F hiring ratios regardless of the percentage of q
Oh come now, of course discovering potentially habitable planets is great news! The more places one colonizes, the less you have to worry about being wiped out. Fighting extinction via creating self sufficient off-world colonies is #1 priority for any sentient race. Soon as the first rocket leaves your home planet's atmosphere they don't stop launching until you've got bases on your moons and possibly neighboring planets. Introductory school teaches your star will die one day, so as soon as one discovers how to survive without a magnetosphere in a bio-dome the seed ships are being built -- There are always some folks ready to get away from it all, literally. Cosmic oat sowers plan on visiting multiple planets in case the ones you find aren't great, and advancements allow not-so hospitable places to be homes; They just make pit-stops to let off those who want to stay and keep on trucking -- Who needs planets or even stars if you have a self sustaining generation ship? Just scoop up bits of raw material in a picturesque nebula or stellar nursery to build more modules and support more people; Then make like cells and divide!
I mean, really, who could resist with such a nice clear sky beckoning you out to the stars, and a huge moon that seems like you could reach out and touch it -- full of He3 which produces protons instead of neutrons when fused so you can use magnets to contain the radiation. Closer in is Venus, heralding the sunrise, visible with the naked eye, hinting that you might look for other harder to spot planets -- With a reactive atmosphere full of sulfuric acid and carbon too. If you look further out you might notice Mars, distinctly red and orbiting fast enough it's easy to see it's not a star -- covered in iron oxide which dissolves readily in sulphuric acid, I might add... [Fe2O3 + 3H2SO4 ==> Fe2(SO4)3 + 3H2O; and: Fe + H2SO4 ==> FeSO4 + H2]
Your moon and sister world provides a spartan training ground for your next jaunt into deep space, and what do you know? The next step out there's an asteroid belt where a planet used--er would have been, chock full of raw materials for building things in space without paying a huge gravity tax -- Home to the dwarf planet Ceres (1/3rd the mass of the belt) which has water, isn't that nice? There's, Jupiter, a gas giant that's nearly a brown dwarf to study intense gravometrics without burning up in the sun. There's beautiful ringed Saturn with its diamond rain, hexagonal polar weather and a brilliant blue aurora -- higher energy particles than your red and green ones, why it's practically a planet sized particle accelerator already. There's moons full of methane and oceans of water. There's even a ringed planet spinning on its side so you can observe the rare tidal effects without even needing a simulation! Braided rings? Look no further than Neptune, which has winds so fast they circle they can massive planet every 16 hours -- Don't you even want to find out where all that atmospheric heat is coming from to drive those blistering winds despite being so distant from the sun? I'd want to know yesterdecade! To say nothing of the breath taking ice field that surrounds your star further out: There's no end to the sparks of imagination its comets can ignite.
Yep, no sentient race could possibly turn it's back on a cosmic red carpet that amazing and instead just dally about the gravity well, squabbling over pitiful planetary economics of non-replenishable energy sources as if they had all the time in the world -- As if their magnetosphere wasn't 500,000 years Overdue to flip... Fairly regular field flop cycles, then just as soon as life shows signs of intelligence: No more pole switches which leave you vulnerable to cosmic rays, solar flares, CMEs, etc. Purely a coincidence, I'm sure. During reboot shield strength drops to emergency power levels (5%) for a good while, and with the odd geomagnetic reversal pattern interval, who knows when that protective magnetic force field is coming back online. Y
Oh Yeah? Well in the 1970's and 80's I was using BBSs. Without any government or corporations we organized an email system called Fidonet because the design by committee ARPANET was taking too damn long. We used "best effort" packet routing too, store and forward via overlapping local calling areas.
I won't go into details because some things may or may not have been kosher with the FCC, but a country-wide free anonymous wireless mesh network based on the same community design is also possible. It's too bad that Shortwave radios require licenses, because we have channel hopping and spread spectrum tech now, and can drop the gain to match data rate to allow channel reuse. A real shame the government won't give the public at least a deregulated section of each class of signal to use -- Spectrum is a public resource. Using a similar system for routing that ARPANET and Fidonet used and incrementing "hop counters" we could have the network self organize better routes, and heal. Store and forward means you pull from peers, get free collocation, no centralized bottle necks. Free anonymous wireless mesh would certainly fall afoul of the FCC regulations and Pentagon anti-activism spying initiatives) which expressly forbid store and forward use over wireless. It would be another 10 years before Distributed Hash Tables would be invented largely to facilitate Software Piracy, much as piracy was a significant component of the BBS boom, and was directly responsible for the Demoscene and countless contributions to SIGGraph and their graphical tricks made their way from impressive "cracked by" scrollers to the video game Industry.
Now NASA has finally gotten on board and is working on protocols for the Space Internet: Delay Tolerant Networking -- Store and Forward. For the past 25 years we have had the technology to never have service fees for our online wireless data, but it is prevented because commercial interests would rather charge $1,638.00 per megabyte of text messages. You could buy your transceiver, and join the mesh. Bigger cache and antenna, faster connection. Point to point links could be organized by community ran non-profits just like Fidonet was (and still is ran in 3rd world countries, because your "commercial" and "government" interests don't give a damn about brown people). The more people downloading a resource? The MORE AVAILABLE it is -- No congestion issues. No "Slashdot Effect".
The Internet is a nice design but it wasn't the only game in town. Were it not for long distance fees and government oppression of wireless spectrum the Internet might never have come to be, and no one would be paying hundreds of dollars a month and getting bandwidth capped and overage charges and increased fees, AND content-provider protection racketed (see Netflix v Comcast "fast lane" BS). Bits are actually getting cheaper now than ever before, and the price they charge is increasing. The Web of Data Silohs is fucking moronic, and the folks who designed the centralized web were far from geniuses. I have a whole garage full of innovative equipment that can revolutionize the way we use data: A Distributed File System (originally designed for the wireless mesh) and cross platform OS made from scratch to utilize the decentralized Internet / mesh to its fullest. Guess what? I'm scared to even show anyone because the corporate anti-competitive patent trolls.
The Internet's days are numbered. Store and forward means no spying on your browsing. The idea that a piece of "data" resides at a "URL" on a "Server" is fucking stupid. "Files" are just human readable names linked to a hash-code, on ZFS and BTRFS as it art in Bittorrent. The info hash can prevent link rot. "Websites" are unnecessary bottlenecks. Sign your content with your PGP key and let everyone have it, we never needed a centralized server system. The w