> If
[skipping] > human beings will increasingly maintain portions of their > conscious in computer networks, is there even a place for > introversion in the future? Eventually once all of mankind > is networked, it'll be harder and hard to tune out.
No, easier to tune out, because the portion of their consciousness tasked to handle these will be essentially just bots, doing auto-reply to the trivial, and aggregating the residue for latter processing. Eventually, we might even program an extrovert simulator to handle these functions, leaving us able to be alone as needed, while still giving the impression of a social butterfly.
Frex, how much easier will it be to send a party-bot to a virtual wedding reception, to handle all the obligitory social chit chat like remembering all of a friend's childrens names and ages, updating a database with any changing info (little Janey has started college => INSERT INTO COLLEGE_STUDENT [.name,.univ,.major,.entry_date,.source] WHERE NAME =.name, with the DB trigger function emitting a recollection from the database from when.name was min(.age-15, 2) years old)?
> Can't you just install a pirated version of Windows XP?
If I am going to install a pirated OS version, why wouldn't I use a pirated Win2000 version, instead? I used a (legitimate) copy at work for 4 years, without any problems, despite less memory than on today's cheap laptops and less disk than is on a $30 USB thumb drive.
I just reread the original blurb. This is a USA General talking to a UK open publication. One more point for my Patton analogy. It is like they took it from the movie. I wonder, does this general write poetry, and believe in reincarnation, too?
> what does US Cyber Command have to do with the NSA?
They are the smoke screen. I am certain that there is a better Russian term for this, but I cannot remember it right now. Basically, they make a huge noise at 0 degrees, so that the NSA can sneak in at +/- 135 degrees, using position as an analogy.
Alternate Analogy, they are Patton, commanding the vast US Army Group to launch the invasion of France at Pas de Calais, which never actually existed, to hide the real Overlord. Or the are Ahmeddinijihad (sp?)(if there CAN be a correct spelling, since the letters map poorly to English anyway), there to provide cover for the Iranian mullahs.
Expecting the typical admin of a commercial network or system to actively participate in an attack is like giving every middle-aged white collar civilian a machine gun and expecting them to attack enemy artillery emplacements.
> No, but we control NATO and tell it what to do. > > Has NATO ever used military force at the > initiative of another country? If so, when?
No one in the USA particularly wanted Yugoslavia to break up into little mutually genocidal groups until the Germans recognized Slovenia as an independent state. That, and their encouraging other states of the country to do the same, ended up dragging the European members in. Then their general helplessness (really, they NEED a Logistics Command, more than a French Foreign Legion) dragged the US in, and pretty much just as much of the Air Force as could go in, bomb, and get out without risking their paint jobs, let alone pilots. So the Kosovo mess was not the USA controlling NATO, but a NATO member jumping in and pulling the rest of the alliance in with it.
> As mobile access to the Internet gets more pervasive, > SMS will die or at least merge with other technologies anyway.
Already happened, long ago. SMS is just a variation of the better types of pagers, after all. Then GSM and CDMA incorporated it, like chloroplasts or mitochondria by primitive eukaryotes.
> That's what the hippy's thought in the 1960s > with free love, drug law reform, and peace. > Look at that generation now...
1) They never tried to reform any drug laws; at best, they ignored them; in cases, they prompted them.
2) I would point out that Bills Gates and Clinton, GWB, and Hillary are all of that generation, just not of the group that tried to see just how far they could take drug use before hitting the wall.
(g)(2) before such person's invention thereof, the invention was made in this country by another inventor who had not abandoned, suppressed, or concealed it. In determining priority of invention under this subsection, there shall be considered not only the respective dates of conception and reduction to practice of the invention, but also the reasonable diligence of one who was first to conceive and last to reduce to practice, from a time prior to conception by the other. (Emphasis added)
There has to be more to it than that, as well, or I could patent the horse collar and horseshoes, or even the use of subordinate clauses in Indo-European languages (as no one claims these "inventions" anymore). Assuming that I cannot, there must be a way to define "prior art" that recognizes ideas or practices in the public domain for ages, let alone to place one's patentable inventions into that public domain (which seems to be the article writer's goal).
If Ford made a tractor that very closely resembled a John Deere tractor (minor design differences being things like a slightly different bucket shape, different control lever styling, longer bucket pistons, etc.) and colored it green, then people would think that Ford was trying to copy Deere, not that the tractor is made by Deere. People would not buy it because they thought it was a Deere tractor, but they would instead by a Deere tractor because they would think that Ford was trying to sell an inferior product and disguising it in Deere green.
Or they might still buy it, as a cheaper tractor at least as good as another Ford tractor, just as people DO buy fake Rolexes.
OTOH, since Ford and Deere would be in the same market, in this case, Ford would lose in court (and they know it, and therefore wouldn't bother unless attempting a hostile takeover at the same time). Of course, if Deere tried complaining about a Ford (or GM) *car* color in a Detroit court, they would be laughed out of it, because no one thinks John Deere and cars, especially in a city (assuming that they even knew that Deere *had* a color, or that Deere wasn't a misspelling).
since, to the consumer, if Casio is trying to copy Rolex, why not buy the real thing with the quality craftsmanship practiced by Rolex?
Perhaps because Rolexes, with a mechanical movement, keep relatively mediocre time, compared to the Casio (or any cheap brand) with a quartz crystal movement? Yes, your Rolex will last for decades of careful use, but is it better than having a $25 watch that looks really cool for a few years which can be replaced by another fake outside that looks even cooler (there *are* brands out there that make Rolex look cheap, remember)?
BTW, Caterpiller may call its color "yellow" but (1) it is more of an orange, and (2) it doesn't affect anyone in the phone book business, who have competing yellows, let alone school busses with an even more similar shade.
It makes me suspect that what it really is, is a way for big outfits like dell and HP to get machines out the door with no windows tax built into the retail price.
Except that the "Windows Tax" for those machines is usually far less than the retail price (like 10% of retail, not 10% off retail, since the goal is to smother its competition in the cradle). I would not be surprised if the paid OS upgrades had been far better money makers than the original installed version, up until XP.
> I *fully* expect that the first version of Office that runs on "Windows 7"
Office is not now, nor has ever been, part of Windows, so you have picked about the worst possible example, except for Firefox or Quicktime.
> If anything is going to bring them down, it will be this.
You will find that there are, indeed, lots of businesses that would rent their office software, just as they do their office equipment and furniture, if the price is right. Not overcharging, given a more uncertain market for Microsoft, might be the difficulty, but there should be lots of ex-IBM salemen that they could hire to explain the process.
There would probably be fewer individuals willing, though.
>blockquote>Usually companies do the Defense contracts when they are small, need money, and don't really have a product yet.
Like AT&T, the entire aircraft industry, IBM, etc.?
This is NOT just an SBIR grant.
Maybe it's just because I'm not in the server space, but it's unclear to me why exactly I would buy a Sun machine.
Yes, I would not recommend them for cheap laptops, or to give to your grandmother to handle her email needs. That would be a bit of overkill. OTOH, if you have a problem where a 48 processor machine and a few TB of disk running a few months at a time is a good start, you might start considering it.
> Why, why, why do people submit second-hand links to Slashdot?
Because the NY Times used to require registration to read their articles?
.
Of course, the article still makes some bonehead errors. They do not cut wafers of identical chips apart to be able to eliminate the few failures in a circuit, but because we want a hundred CPU chips more than we want a single four inch processor with about 100x4 or x8 cores. You do not need that many processors to do your own taxes (unless.Net is far more wasteful than I have heard) or run a word processor. You might get a kick-ass game of WoW out of it, I suppose:-) -- providing that your net connection and database update is not the bottleneck.
That estimate of 100 chips per wafer may be low, BTW, as it has been well over a decade since I last checked into semiconductor manufacture, wafer sizes, and yields.
> In a vacuum, a laser will move as fast as energy can possibly travel. At least on paper.
Of course, the light will be going through air, where the spped of light is only 99% of C
Anyway, the speed of conduction (i.e., signal propagation, as opposed to that of the actual electrons) in copper wire is about 1/3 C, and in a coax about 95% C.
For the distances involved, the difference in speed of signal propagation is not that important. OTOH, light gates are supposed to be capable of faster switching than silicon (even in ECL mode) by orders of magnitude (once they have a decade or so of engineering behind them). Maybe this is the justification for trying lasers?
> But just like with cables services, the ISPs make their > money by offering gluttonous services to people who > don't need or want them.
Obviously, they DO want them, or they would still be using NetZero, or a succession of free AOL disks (according to a friend, if you agreed to pay AOL by check, they never refused you service for a new account on disk #2 after you used almost all your free service from disk #1; he never paid for surfing from dialup because of that, although he needed a separate stable account for email). Now, you might not think that they need the gluttonous services, but then, you aren't them, are you?
> People could pay more for more service (something that we can't effectively do right now)
That is what a business account gives you. They cost more. You seem to be incorrect. You cannot pay less than the standard rate for less broadband service, usually.
> People paid for an unlimited service, and the ISPs will be DAMNED if they'll let people have it.
Because no one can afford if everyone uses all of unlimited, just as the phone system doesn't work if EVERYBODY calls at the same time. Unlimited clearly meant hours of connection, not that there was no limit to usage (no one could give you multiple terabytes a second for hours at a time, after all, even if you could handle it).
> Is this correct? I know it is a simplification, but I use
> this as a training tool to introduce ISP's roles.
You assume that there IS an "Official Internet" whereas everything belongs to some one or some corporation (some of which are government-owned, like a university, or NSFNet, or DARPA, the original controlling agency). The only reason that the top DNS servers matter is that everyone else uses them, just as the only reason that Jon Postel was the root of all DNS back in the 1990s ws that he volunteered his services (and servers) and the bosses of the other DNS servers agreed to use him as their highest source. This was and is entirely voluntary, and there are groups trying to create their own little DNS networks with entirely different name-to-IPAddress translations; it is just a matter of setting your machines to use them rather than your ISP's choices.
Anyway, using names rather than raw IP addresses is purely a convenience; DNS could be dispensed with entirely, and the bot networks in the (Slashdot and Dark Reading) news usually do just that.
The real "Internet" is the protocol(s) that routers use to decide where to send packets from one IP address/port combo to another, and how changes to that routing get propagated (or happen quietly without needing propagation). All else depends on that. Again, that level could be changed (ala, IPv4 to IPv6, or OSI, or whatever) if needed or desired.
In short, it is organized chaos, by design. The IANA, IETF, ICANN, and others just try to apply a little organization to IPv4, and to IPv6 as it comes on line. Since the owners of the biggest and/or best routers follow those rules (because they wish to), and people connect off of them (thus MAKING them the biggest or best) have to follow their rules, it gradually propagates down, until someone seizes control of his/her unit and makes it behave differently. Then things can become interesting (in the Chinese Curse sense).
> The internet should stay as free and open as possible, > and if it's to fall under any political philosophy it > should be libertarianism.
Of course, it is, actually, feudalism. Just as Freedom of the Press only applies to those WITH a press, the freedom to shape or not shape traffic, accept or refuse packets or connections, etc., is an indiviual one, and those individuals (or companies) with more capabilities (like multiple T3 or higher pipes, and control over their routers) thus have more control over the Internet than the little ISPs that hang off of them.
This makes IETF and ICANN the equivalent of HRE Imperial Diets, or semi-permanent Runnymedes. Of course, with this analysis, governments are the Mongol Hordes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and changes in the Solar Constant, almost all-powerful but all-UNknowning, and seldom open to negotiation (instead, they have to be accepted, then worked around when possible).
> The date of birth of Jesus was also pulled out of the ass of some Pope.
Dionysus the Short was not Pope, just as the Julian Calendar was not designed by Gaius Julius Caesar but by an astronomer that he hired. And it was done pre-Medieval, in fact while there were still Roman Emperors in the West.
And, yes, he blew half of his calculations (eg, year of birth) and produced obvious crap for others (birth was obviously in Spring, but that produces a Christmas date that could precede, follow, or even be ON Easter, depending on the year; far too messy for worshippers). So what? What is the date of Easter on Mars?
Slashdot Mirror
> If
.name, with the DB trigger function emitting a recollection from the database from when .name was min(.age-15, 2) years old)?
[skipping]
> human beings will increasingly maintain portions of their
> conscious in computer networks, is there even a place for
> introversion in the future? Eventually once all of mankind
> is networked, it'll be harder and hard to tune out.
No, easier to tune out, because the portion of their consciousness tasked to handle these will be essentially just bots, doing auto-reply to the trivial, and aggregating the residue for latter processing. Eventually, we might even program an extrovert simulator to handle these functions, leaving us able to be alone as needed, while still giving the impression of a social butterfly.
Frex, how much easier will it be to send a party-bot to a virtual wedding reception, to handle all the obligitory social chit chat like remembering all of a friend's childrens names and ages, updating a database with any changing info (little Janey has started college => INSERT INTO COLLEGE_STUDENT [.name,.univ,.major,.entry_date,.source] WHERE NAME =
> Talk to a girl?
/usr/ucb, which SHOULD be in your $PATH.
> That's unpossible,
Nonsense. It is world-executable, and right there in
Now, lookat $girl would be impossible (at least without a --oneway option) for any real nerd.
> nicknamed - wait for it - "The Engineer".
So, originally, was the head of the Northern Alliance, who Al Quaida assassinated the day before hitting the towers.
> (Engineers are all smart and anti-social, therefore they're basically the unabomber).
:-)
The Unabomber was a mathematician. Quit trying to claim credit, where not due, you mere engineer, you.
IANAM, either.
> Can't you just install a pirated version of Windows XP?
If I am going to install a pirated OS version, why wouldn't I use a pirated Win2000 version, instead? I used a (legitimate) copy at work for 4 years, without any problems, despite less memory than on today's cheap laptops and less disk than is on a $30 USB thumb drive.
I just reread the original blurb. This is a USA General talking to a UK open publication. One more point for my Patton analogy. It is like they took it from the movie. I wonder, does this general write poetry, and believe in reincarnation, too?
> what does US Cyber Command have to do with the NSA?
They are the smoke screen. I am certain that there is a better Russian term for this, but I cannot remember it right now. Basically, they make a huge noise at 0 degrees, so that the NSA can sneak in at +/- 135 degrees, using position as an analogy.
Alternate Analogy, they are Patton, commanding the vast US Army Group to launch the invasion of France at Pas de Calais, which never actually existed, to hide the real Overlord. Or the are Ahmeddinijihad (sp?)(if there CAN be a correct spelling, since the letters map poorly to English anyway), there to provide cover for the Iranian mullahs.
Works for Switzerland.
> No, but we control NATO and tell it what to do.
>
> Has NATO ever used military force at the
> initiative of another country? If so, when?
No one in the USA particularly wanted Yugoslavia to break up into little mutually genocidal groups until the Germans recognized Slovenia as an independent state. That, and their encouraging other states of the country to do the same, ended up dragging the European members in. Then their general helplessness (really, they NEED a Logistics Command, more than a French Foreign Legion) dragged the US in, and pretty much just as much of the Air Force as could go in, bomb, and get out without risking their paint jobs, let alone pilots. So the Kosovo mess was not the USA controlling NATO, but a NATO member jumping in and pulling the rest of the alliance in with it.
> As mobile access to the Internet gets more pervasive,
> SMS will die or at least merge with other technologies anyway.
Already happened, long ago. SMS is just a variation of the better types of pagers, after all. Then GSM and CDMA incorporated it, like chloroplasts or mitochondria by primitive eukaryotes.
> That's what the hippy's thought in the 1960s
> with free love, drug law reform, and peace.
> Look at that generation now...
1) They never tried to reform any drug laws; at best, they ignored them; in cases, they prompted them.
2) I would point out that Bills Gates and Clinton, GWB, and Hillary are all of that generation, just not of the group that tried to see just how far they could take drug use before hitting the wall.
There has to be more to it than that, as well, or I could patent the horse collar and horseshoes, or even the use of subordinate clauses in Indo-European languages (as no one claims these "inventions" anymore). Assuming that I cannot, there must be a way to define "prior art" that recognizes ideas or practices in the public domain for ages, let alone to place one's patentable inventions into that public domain (which seems to be the article writer's goal).
Or they might still buy it, as a cheaper tractor at least as good as another Ford tractor, just as people DO buy fake Rolexes.
OTOH, since Ford and Deere would be in the same market, in this case, Ford would lose in court (and they know it, and therefore wouldn't bother unless attempting a hostile takeover at the same time). Of course, if Deere tried complaining about a Ford (or GM) *car* color in a Detroit court, they would be laughed out of it, because no one thinks John Deere and cars, especially in a city (assuming that they even knew that Deere *had* a color, or that Deere wasn't a misspelling).
Perhaps because Rolexes, with a mechanical movement, keep relatively mediocre time, compared to the Casio (or any cheap brand) with a quartz crystal movement? Yes, your Rolex will last for decades of careful use, but is it better than having a $25 watch that looks really cool for a few years which can be replaced by another fake outside that looks even cooler (there *are* brands out there that make Rolex look cheap, remember)?
BTW, Caterpiller may call its color "yellow" but (1) it is more of an orange, and (2) it doesn't affect anyone in the phone book business, who have competing yellows, let alone school busses with an even more similar shade.
But who gets kicked into the well?
Except that the "Windows Tax" for those machines is usually far less than the retail price (like 10% of retail, not 10% off retail, since the goal is to smother its competition in the cradle). I would not be surprised if the paid OS upgrades had been far better money makers than the original installed version, up until XP.
> I *fully* expect that the first version of Office that runs on "Windows 7"
Office is not now, nor has ever been, part of Windows, so you have picked about the worst possible example, except for Firefox or Quicktime.
> If anything is going to bring them down, it will be this.
You will find that there are, indeed, lots of businesses that would rent their office software, just as they do their office equipment and furniture, if the price is right. Not overcharging, given a more uncertain market for Microsoft, might be the difficulty, but there should be lots of ex-IBM salemen that they could hire to explain the process.
There would probably be fewer individuals willing, though.
Like AT&T, the entire aircraft industry, IBM, etc.?
This is NOT just an SBIR grant.
Yes, I would not recommend them for cheap laptops, or to give to your grandmother to handle her email needs. That would be a bit of overkill. OTOH, if you have a problem where a 48 processor machine and a few TB of disk running a few months at a time is a good start, you might start considering it.
Because the NY Times used to require registration to read their articles?
.
Of course, the article still makes some bonehead errors. They do not cut wafers of identical chips apart to be able to eliminate the few failures in a circuit, but because we want a hundred CPU chips more than we want a single four inch processor with about 100x4 or x8 cores. You do not need that many processors to do your own taxes (unless .Net is far more wasteful than I have heard) or run a word processor. You might get a kick-ass game of WoW out of it, I suppose :-) -- providing that your net connection and database update is not the bottleneck.
That estimate of 100 chips per wafer may be low, BTW, as it has been well over a decade since I last checked into semiconductor manufacture, wafer sizes, and yields.
> In a vacuum, a laser will move as fast as energy can possibly travel. At least on paper.
Of course, the light will be going through air, where the spped of light is only 99% of C
Anyway, the speed of conduction (i.e., signal propagation, as opposed to that of the actual electrons) in copper wire is about 1/3 C, and in a coax about 95% C.
For the distances involved, the difference in speed of signal propagation is not that important. OTOH, light gates are supposed to be capable of faster switching than silicon (even in ECL mode) by orders of magnitude (once they have a decade or so of engineering behind them). Maybe this is the justification for trying lasers?
> Art, modern art anyways - is a load of rubbish.
That is a lousy thing to say.
Rubbish is FAR better than most modern art. It is certainly MUCH better than most modern ARTISTS (term used advisedly).
Fortunately, most artists starve (alas, not enough to kill off nonrepresentational art or art critics) and move on.
> But just like with cables services, the ISPs make their
> money by offering gluttonous services to people who
> don't need or want them.
Obviously, they DO want them, or they would still be using NetZero, or a succession of free AOL disks (according to a friend, if you agreed to pay AOL by check, they never refused you service for a new account on disk #2 after you used almost all your free service from disk #1; he never paid for surfing from dialup because of that, although he needed a separate stable account for email). Now, you might not think that they need the gluttonous services, but then, you aren't them, are you?
> People could pay more for more service (something that we can't effectively do right now)
That is what a business account gives you. They cost more. You seem to be incorrect. You cannot pay less than the standard rate for less broadband service, usually.
> People paid for an unlimited service, and the ISPs will be DAMNED if they'll let people have it.
Because no one can afford if everyone uses all of unlimited, just as the phone system doesn't work if EVERYBODY calls at the same time. Unlimited clearly meant hours of connection, not that there was no limit to usage (no one could give you multiple terabytes a second for hours at a time, after all, even if you could handle it).
> this as a training tool to introduce ISP's roles.
You assume that there IS an "Official Internet" whereas everything belongs to some one or some corporation (some of which are government-owned, like a university, or NSFNet, or DARPA, the original controlling agency). The only reason that the top DNS servers matter is that everyone else uses them, just as the only reason that Jon Postel was the root of all DNS back in the 1990s ws that he volunteered his services (and servers) and the bosses of the other DNS servers agreed to use him as their highest source. This was and is entirely voluntary, and there are groups trying to create their own little DNS networks with entirely different name-to-IPAddress translations; it is just a matter of setting your machines to use them rather than your ISP's choices.
Anyway, using names rather than raw IP addresses is purely a convenience; DNS could be dispensed with entirely, and the bot networks in the (Slashdot and Dark Reading) news usually do just that.
The real "Internet" is the protocol(s) that routers use to decide where to send packets from one IP address/port combo to another, and how changes to that routing get propagated (or happen quietly without needing propagation). All else depends on that. Again, that level could be changed (ala, IPv4 to IPv6, or OSI, or whatever) if needed or desired.
In short, it is organized chaos, by design. The IANA, IETF, ICANN, and others just try to apply a little organization to IPv4, and to IPv6 as it comes on line. Since the owners of the biggest and/or best routers follow those rules (because they wish to), and people connect off of them (thus MAKING them the biggest or best) have to follow their rules, it gradually propagates down, until someone seizes control of his/her unit and makes it behave differently. Then things can become interesting (in the Chinese Curse sense).
> The internet should stay as free and open as possible,
> and if it's to fall under any political philosophy it
> should be libertarianism.
Of course, it is, actually, feudalism. Just as Freedom of the Press only applies to those WITH a press, the freedom to shape or not shape traffic, accept or refuse packets or connections, etc., is an indiviual one, and those individuals (or companies) with more capabilities (like multiple T3 or higher pipes, and control over their routers) thus have more control over the Internet than the little ISPs that hang off of them.
This makes IETF and ICANN the equivalent of HRE Imperial Diets, or semi-permanent Runnymedes. Of course, with this analysis, governments are the Mongol Hordes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and changes in the Solar Constant, almost all-powerful but all-UNknowning, and seldom open to negotiation (instead, they have to be accepted, then worked around when possible).
> The date of birth of Jesus was also pulled out of the ass of some Pope.
Dionysus the Short was not Pope, just as the Julian Calendar was not designed by Gaius Julius Caesar but by an astronomer that he hired. And it was done pre-Medieval, in fact while there were still Roman Emperors in the West.
And, yes, he blew half of his calculations (eg, year of birth) and produced obvious crap for others (birth was obviously in Spring, but that produces a Christmas date that could precede, follow, or even be ON Easter, depending on the year; far too messy for worshippers). So what? What is the date of Easter on Mars?
> but it seems like the early Church felt the need to create their
> own calculation so it didn't look like they were just copying the Jews.
No, just to simplfy the calculation for non-ex-Jews.