Once, we had a society where everything was known to everybody. That society was called the small town, and the result was oppression by groupthink as a measure of excellence, wielded against those who deviated from the norm, and where gossip and slander were social weapons of choice. Is that any better? Perhaps compared to a heavily rigged oligarchy, but that's not saying much.
Better is this: keep public decisions and the processes leading to the decisions public (except when doing so would break privacy), and then keep the rest private, except by choice of the participants.
The problem with complete public disclosure is not that your actions might be damning so much that it is that it can be cleverly twisted into something of the sort, and that these distortions very easily attain a life of their own.
This will work for plain text IRC connections but what if the bot is on an encrypted IRC connection?
Or Achord for that matter. If the botnet is based on a peer to peer structure and the author has added public-key encryption, all he has to do is connect to an arbitrary bot host and insert the (signed) command which propagates through the network to all the other nodes; there'll be no fixed master server to home in on.
You'd have to compress a Planck mass into a Planck length to do that. And that is very hard to do.
To create the hole? "Ordinary" black holes form without starting off compressed to Planck length. They are obviously too cold to use for that kind of energy extraction scheme, but by making the hole as large as you want you can also make the density as low as you want, which would seem to disprove a hard (constant factor) limit.
IANAP, but as I understand it, Hawking radiation is caused by virtual particles pairs being created such that rather than annihilating each other and returning local space to a base 'zero' state, one of the pair escapes the singularity's gravity and the other does not.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that mean you could use artificial black holes to convert matter to energy? Dump some matter into the hole, and extract energy as the velocity (kinetic energy) of the Hawking radiation particles (as they surely must travel at some speed to escape the hole's gravity).
About the only way of making this feasible is to use a gas core or fusion rocket (insert 50-100 years of engineering here). At that point, you can just stick the reactor on Earth and heat up water instead (or liquid salt or some molten metal if you want to do thermocracking of steam into hydrogen and oxygen).
So in other words, yes, the need for oil in 100 years time would be far lower than now. Even if 100 years only gives us Project Orion, that still has the Earth analog of PACER...
No explosives whatsoever, just pure momentum. Couple that with a GPS guidance system and you'll have your own man-made meteorite that'll flatten whole city blocks from the impact alone, with pin-point accuracy.
Sounds like a scaled down version of Project Thor (or Rods from God) -- scaled down in the sense of having more mass and less energy. But the advantage of the Blackbird weapon concept with regards to Project Thor is that the latter can't be guided after launch.
Someone? not much at all. Just enough to sever limbs and cause major bleeding or trauma.
Aww, you're not being economic enough. Think blowdarts and poisons. (Or maybe that's too slow - I wonder what poison is the quickest, and how much time it needs...)
They also need some way of fixing the railgun abrasion problem, but I guess they have, as otherwise they wouldn't even consider putting it on a ship.
(Railguns work by using the projectile to connect a circuit up one rail and down the other. This sets up a magnetic field that propels the projectile forwards. The problem appears because of recoil - a railgun's recoil pushes the rails away from each other, and when that happen and you have lots of power in the circuit, guess what? Arcing!)
When can I have a quantum graphics card that displays all possible pictures at the same time ?
Quantum algorithm for finding properly rendered pictures:
1. Randomly construct a picture, splitting the universe into as many possibilities as exist.
2. Look at the picture.
3. If it's incorrectly rendered, destroy the universe.
But now, with Quantum Graphics, you don't have to destroy the unfit universes - the card will take care of it for you! Buy now!
So it isn't sufficient for a society to work, it also has to work in the face of a war that great, and be victorious where representative democracy did fail as well? After all, the entire Republican side was defeated, not just the anarchists; and the anarchist society/organization held until the defeat.
Before you fire back with that example, note I said "successful". As in "still working".
Would groups that worked until some external war brought them down count? Like say, the anarchists in Spain prior to Franco?
Yes. Checks and balances are a good thing. The executives have the power to act in concert, and that power needs to be balanced. Unions do that (or rather, should in the ideal case; the real world is rarely that perfect).
However, as another article pointed out, a stealth plane could profit from being able to absorb radar beams. Research into the absorption of non-visible wavelengths is already underway.
On the other hand, the physical structure of a record limits the shenanigans you can do with compression. On a CD, the loudness wars has continued at full speed until, in some cases, we're listening to nothing more than modulated noise (less RMS than a sine wave).
Is it then surprising that some people say vinyl sounds better? No, but the reason isn't some magic ability of vinyl. A digital format with automatic Replay Gain (or something similar) would stop the loudness wars (since any dynamic range compression would be compensated by a decrease in volume from the RG check) and sound just as good, but there's no such standard.
Arguing against a planned economy because of GOSPLAN is like arguing that sorting large arrays will never be possible because bubblesort has such lousy time complexity. I know about the craziness of GOSPLAN, about how they first commissioned panes of glass by weight (guess what, really thick windows), then by area (you think thick was bad, here's thin!), about storming, and about how the factories would weld lumps of metal to their products to increase their mass (when that was what they were scored by).
A well working planned economy must handle both logistics and innovation. GOSPLAN didn't handle either, except when the dictatorship was the "customer" (funny, that!). That doesn't imply it's impossible. Allende's government of Chile used real-time management to run their logistics (just before the coup), where careful organization of 200 trucks thwarted a blockade by 50000 small business owners, for instance.
On the matters of scoring, GOSPLAN tried to score "objectively", to set plans by objective factors. That didn't work, because there was always a loophole. But it's possible to make "accounting prices" that serve the same adjustment purpose as real prices do in capitalism. Oskar Lange (and earlier, Strumilin) advocated using such accounting prices, but the computational power at the time wasn't nearly sufficient to get the work done. The USSR and similar nations were stuck with a bubble sort (or maybe even a bozo sort terminated after n swaps) because neither better algorithms nor the power required to run them were present, they were too dictatorial to use iterative processes, and to some extent they didn't see the problem at all.
But now one could be decentralized and use iteration, solve the economy as an input output matrix (which is easier than thought since the matrix is sparse) to get "accounting prices", or go at it more directly.
Yes, GOSPLAN made all the wrong choices, and yes, the economy suffered for it. But so did their politics, yet we don't say totalitarian dictatorship is the only option possible for political government. So why should we say that their "oh, let's plan a little bit based on what the dictator wants and then hope the rest works out" approach is the only option possible for economic regulation?
Slashdot Mirror
Once, we had a society where everything was known to everybody. That society was called the small town, and the result was oppression by groupthink as a measure of excellence, wielded against those who deviated from the norm, and where gossip and slander were social weapons of choice. Is that any better? Perhaps compared to a heavily rigged oligarchy, but that's not saying much.
Better is this: keep public decisions and the processes leading to the decisions public (except when doing so would break privacy), and then keep the rest private, except by choice of the participants.
The problem with complete public disclosure is not that your actions might be damning so much that it is that it can be cleverly twisted into something of the sort, and that these distortions very easily attain a life of their own.
Or Achord for that matter. If the botnet is based on a peer to peer structure and the author has added public-key encryption, all he has to do is connect to an arbitrary bot host and insert the (signed) command which propagates through the network to all the other nodes; there'll be no fixed master server to home in on.
And how much is that kind of stateful packet meddling and injection going to cost?
You'd have to compress a Planck mass into a Planck length to do that. And that is very hard to do.
To create the hole? "Ordinary" black holes form without starting off compressed to Planck length. They are obviously too cold to use for that kind of energy extraction scheme, but by making the hole as large as you want you can also make the density as low as you want, which would seem to disprove a hard (constant factor) limit.
IANAP, but as I understand it, Hawking radiation is caused by virtual particles pairs being created such that rather than annihilating each other and returning local space to a base 'zero' state, one of the pair escapes the singularity's gravity and the other does not.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that mean you could use artificial black holes to convert matter to energy? Dump some matter into the hole, and extract energy as the velocity (kinetic energy) of the Hawking radiation particles (as they surely must travel at some speed to escape the hole's gravity).
About the only way of making this feasible is to use a gas core or fusion rocket (insert 50-100 years of engineering here). At that point, you can just stick the reactor on Earth and heat up water instead (or liquid salt or some molten metal if you want to do thermocracking of steam into hydrogen and oxygen).
So in other words, yes, the need for oil in 100 years time would be far lower than now. Even if 100 years only gives us Project Orion, that still has the Earth analog of PACER...
Of course not, for that would be bending the laws in a way that does not support ever increasing concentration of power.
No explosives whatsoever, just pure momentum. Couple that with a GPS guidance system and you'll have your own man-made meteorite that'll flatten whole city blocks from the impact alone, with pin-point accuracy.
Sounds like a scaled down version of Project Thor (or Rods from God) -- scaled down in the sense of having more mass and less energy. But the advantage of the Blackbird weapon concept with regards to Project Thor is that the latter can't be guided after launch.
Yeah, that's why NASA uses genetic algorithms for antenna design instead of doing it manually, and estimates that it takes less work.
Err...
That was the last straw.
Now I use my secret weapon!
Someone? not much at all. Just enough to sever limbs and cause major bleeding or trauma.
Aww, you're not being economic enough. Think blowdarts and poisons. (Or maybe that's too slow - I wonder what poison is the quickest, and how much time it needs...)
They also need some way of fixing the railgun abrasion problem, but I guess they have, as otherwise they wouldn't even consider putting it on a ship.
(Railguns work by using the projectile to connect a circuit up one rail and down the other. This sets up a magnetic field that propels the projectile forwards. The problem appears because of recoil - a railgun's recoil pushes the rails away from each other, and when that happen and you have lots of power in the circuit, guess what? Arcing!)
Of course it's crisp! It's raw!
(A raw pixel dump, that is.)
Bah, that probability distribution is just wrong! Or you overflowed all your pixels.
When can I have a quantum graphics card that displays all possible pictures at the same time ?
Quantum algorithm for finding properly rendered pictures:
1. Randomly construct a picture, splitting the universe into as many possibilities as exist.
2. Look at the picture.
3. If it's incorrectly rendered, destroy the universe.
But now, with Quantum Graphics, you don't have to destroy the unfit universes - the card will take care of it for you! Buy now!
It's more of the poor risk analysis.
Damn, we're not Vulcan enough yet.
And a dirty bomb attack is much more likely than a terrorist nuclear weapon.
While that's true, a dirty bomb isn't very likely either. The terrorists will simply get a bigger bang for the buck with conventional explosives.
So it isn't sufficient for a society to work, it also has to work in the face of a war that great, and be victorious where representative democracy did fail as well? After all, the entire Republican side was defeated, not just the anarchists; and the anarchist society/organization held until the defeat.
Before you fire back with that example, note I said "successful". As in "still working". Would groups that worked until some external war brought them down count? Like say, the anarchists in Spain prior to Franco?
Are unions even needed these day?
Yes. Checks and balances are a good thing. The executives have the power to act in concert, and that power needs to be balanced. Unions do that (or rather, should in the ideal case; the real world is rarely that perfect).
However, as another article pointed out, a stealth plane could profit from being able to absorb radar beams. Research into the absorption of non-visible wavelengths is already underway.
So... black helicopters?
On the other hand, the physical structure of a record limits the shenanigans you can do with compression. On a CD, the loudness wars has continued at full speed until, in some cases, we're listening to nothing more than modulated noise (less RMS than a sine wave).
Is it then surprising that some people say vinyl sounds better? No, but the reason isn't some magic ability of vinyl. A digital format with automatic Replay Gain (or something similar) would stop the loudness wars (since any dynamic range compression would be compensated by a decrease in volume from the RG check) and sound just as good, but there's no such standard.
Arguing against a planned economy because of GOSPLAN is like arguing that sorting large arrays will never be possible because bubblesort has such lousy time complexity. I know about the craziness of GOSPLAN, about how they first commissioned panes of glass by weight (guess what, really thick windows), then by area (you think thick was bad, here's thin!), about storming, and about how the factories would weld lumps of metal to their products to increase their mass (when that was what they were scored by).
A well working planned economy must handle both logistics and innovation. GOSPLAN didn't handle either, except when the dictatorship was the "customer" (funny, that!). That doesn't imply it's impossible. Allende's government of Chile used real-time management to run their logistics (just before the coup), where careful organization of 200 trucks thwarted a blockade by 50000 small business owners, for instance.
On the matters of scoring, GOSPLAN tried to score "objectively", to set plans by objective factors. That didn't work, because there was always a loophole. But it's possible to make "accounting prices" that serve the same adjustment purpose as real prices do in capitalism. Oskar Lange (and earlier, Strumilin) advocated using such accounting prices, but the computational power at the time wasn't nearly sufficient to get the work done. The USSR and similar nations were stuck with a bubble sort (or maybe even a bozo sort terminated after n swaps) because neither better algorithms nor the power required to run them were present, they were too dictatorial to use iterative processes, and to some extent they didn't see the problem at all.
But now one could be decentralized and use iteration, solve the economy as an input output matrix (which is easier than thought since the matrix is sparse) to get "accounting prices", or go at it more directly.
Yes, GOSPLAN made all the wrong choices, and yes, the economy suffered for it. But so did their politics, yet we don't say totalitarian dictatorship is the only option possible for political government. So why should we say that their "oh, let's plan a little bit based on what the dictator wants and then hope the rest works out" approach is the only option possible for economic regulation?
How about doing a whois on one of the AACS keys? DMCA-tastic!
Initiating flame... done!
I know I'll get flamed for saying it, but this is exactly the sort of problem that a TPM can solve.
And you can "solve" crime with a ubiquitous secret police, but would you want to?