People have been selling military equipment from the US for years. Ever seen "Lord of War"? Not all of it was fiction you know. Probably the only surprise is that it was sold on ebay. And chances are that the military equipment wasn't stolen either. Many parts from scrapped vehicles are given or sold to boneyards to be sold again. Hell, the old motors from Vietnam's apache helicopters are actually in use on speedboats up to this day.
I'm not 100% sure if these combats robots are autonomous, but seeing as the article said "the robot turned" and not "the person controlling the robot made and accident", I'm going to assume they are. In which case I might ask, what in the bleeding name of Christ are they doing? We've yet to make robots that can drive anywhere near as well as a human, let alone fight alongside us. All we need to do is make the robots remote controlled, and they'll be better than fine (and the moral judgments can be made in battle). Fighting the war with robots is a magnificent idea (I don't even need to give my points on this one since they're so obvious). Now if the robot was remote controlled, then what in the name of hell happened? It's not something that should merit a 10-20 year postponement.
Almost instantly you can see that it would be very impractical to use sound to destroy rockets. Unless you blast the sound waves constantly, you wont be able to destroy the rockets since they travel much faster than sound (that and air is a terrible medium to transfer the waves through with the Doppler effect hindering it, so they'll never reach the missiles with enough strength). Lasers are still tricky, but there wont be a better alternative to them in the future, when their strength and our tracking systems will be at a prime. Though the best missile defense is undoubtedly diplomacy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most of the algorithms for scientific simulations run just as well on parallel processors? If this is the case, it makes more sense to have cheaper processors (both to manufacture and run) so that the cap on the IPS is raised just as well (the cap being the ratio of the amount of funds an organization can allocate to these emulators versus the cost of the emulators). Though I'm no computer expert, it seems that making one sequential processor run faster isn't as efficient as making that same processor cost a fraction of the price to get more power from your dollar.
These games may be good for children, but even games made purely for entertainment can be educational. Take Starcraft for example. When people see the game, they just think you can gather resources and waltz in with an army and get lucky for a win. But it goes way beyond that. When you actually play, you learn to take a step back and rethink the way you play. There is abundant education on what to think, but there is virtually no education on how to think. This can be very helpful with programming. Many students make the mistake of programming as you go, analogous to simple hoarding of an army in Starcraft. I think that the students that take a moment to write out a design document are probably the ones that always send a worker unit before anything to start up game plan.
You're joking right? I hope that you're aware that we've been creating black holes and other "mini cosmic catastrophes" with particle accelerators for years now. Many crazy scientists (or just overly concerned) have been worried about such things while failing to realize that cosmic rays (which have been colliding for eons) should theoretically produce them since they are based on the same principles. There are even odd super particles that have odd quark configurations that are supposed to convert all matter in to it, so long as the creation process can be sustained, but if this theory was correct, neutron stars would have produced them by now. Believe me, humans aren't capable of reproducing catastrophes any better than the extreme conditions of space. These people have a good idea about what they're doing since they've observed the effects in space (though not closely enough, which is why they built the accelerators to begin with).
Seriously, people are trying to combine as many gadgets as possible into tiny crap and sell them for huge prices. I want a cell phone that makes calls, and a laptop that meets all my business/media needs. I don't want it to double as an electric razor, drill, laser beam, grill, hand grenade etc... If I want to listen to music and play games, I'll do it at home. Who the hell listens to music and plays games 24/7 (i.e. "on the go")? Sounds like they need to get a damn job (at least one that requires more than a pulse to work). It must be the same douche-bags that dance for a living, or spoiled high school students that feel accomplished just owning crap, that buys this shit.
Actually, biometrics aren't that bad of an idea. It serves as a shitty method of authentication (passwords just plain can't be beat), but as for identification, it's not so bad. You can't change the genetic sequence that you carry, but you can change the value that corresponds to it in any identification center (i.e. a sequence of T-T-C-A for some chromosome could have a value of 1-4-4-3 or 1-9-8-1).
I'm completely in favor of hiding the identity of those who have money in Swiss accounts. I am now in the rich demographic since I just got an email informing me of an inheritance for 400K from a long lost Swiss cousin of mine. All I had to do was give them my social security number (they didn't tell me his name. Most likely to keep him anonymous).
You're missing the point I'm trying to send. I'm saying they don't cut off finger tips with a cigar cutter, or rip out your sexual organs with dull instruments. Yes I agree that what they do is a form of mental torture, but it's easy to draw the line between mobster torture, and corporate harassment. Yes, both actions are an immoral way to send a message, and on that level, you can compare them to mobsters. Still, what they do is a step down from what true criminals do. If you were given the choice to instantly incarcerate all mob bosses, or all corporate entities that abuse their power, which would you choose? The "MAFIAA" is pretty bad for society, but they're no where near as bad as former trusts who cold hire pinkertons to beat down protesters. That is why we must weaken and split them before they get to that level.
Even if we found all the standard basis for life, it will still not be an accomplishment. There will be two scenarios that the planet will have. One, we simply found a O2/CO2 atmosphere enriched planet with water that sustains relatively safe weather conditions. In the one in a [insert unfeasibly large number] chance that this happens, there will not be any guarantee whatsoever that there are any forms of life there (and we couldn't detect and identify the complex organic molecules anyways) because you have to have way too many more prereqs for life to occur. Two, the planet is in the stage that earth was to match the prereqs for creation of life (an even smaller chance), in which case, there are an ungodly number of processes that must occur to form even the simplest molecules (ever taken organic chemistry?). Taking this into account, do scientists even pay attention to how small any discovery might be? Never mind that sapient beings (us) can't come anywhere near the construction of a fully functional single celled organism from "scratch" after all the knowledge we have and efforts that we've poured in, now scientists are saying that this could occur ON ITS OWN? And then there are people who contemplate the idea of OTHER SAPIENT LIFE THAT HAS SURPASSED OUR CIVILIZATION WITHOUT KILLING THEMSELVES and shoot radio waves that dissipate into noise after 2 light-years (these efforts piss me off). Now this universe is huge, and granted there is always a possibility, but it is as small as the chance of me consecutively wining every lotto that has ever been hosted. It makes you wonder if there really was divine intervention that played a hand in our creation (though I'm agnostic, and small chance doesn't mean impossible). So let me put it into perspective. By the time we discover life that is anywhere near in complexity as a cat (or a single celled organism for that matter), we'll have long passed the point where we can make a damn planet with life on it.
Nearly as bad doesn't cut it. As much as I agree that they're bastards, these guys don't kill for profit (probably because it's not worth the hassle anyways), sell harmful products, torture people, etc. Handling mobsters and handling major trust figures have some differences and similarities. One thing they have in common is that you can fix the problem quite efficiently by catching them in some horrid act and successfully convict them. But given that they are a trust, treat them like Microsoft and split them. The government is one of the few forces powerful enough to take them on, and if normal civilians get together and make a campaign against them, there is a chance that you will have a fair fight in the courtrooms. The only trouble here is motivation, and these bastards simply have to piss more people off before anything like that has a chance of succeeding. But it looks like they're on their way.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it make a lot more sense if we started going after the people that employ spammers? Now as for another aspect of cyber crime, is there any unit that simply creates a fake identity that is legally registered as real and give the info out galore and see who takes the bait?
It's going to be interesting to see what role the internet plays in granting the Chinese people more freedom. It's already a force that can't be fully controlled and grants their people some more freedom of speech, and I would bet that there is already an online campaign to take other steps forward.
Meat wouldn't be that great of an incentive considering that we can directly clone meat so that we don't need to raise any animals and there would be a greater energy efficiency for the production of meat. I don't see milk being a problem either, as a similar solution could be developed with greater ease and less time.
Wouldn't there be more merit to have one big space station that's self sufficient? We can get artificial gravity from centripetal force to maintain their health too. This would be a much greater benefit since it provides a lab with no gravity where a vacuum is readily available. You'd be surprised what those two factors alone could help researchers. Especially in material fabrication and pharmaceuticals.
For 2,500 signatures, he must have been at it for a while. Still, I wish I could be paid 750k for signing stuff for a day, all while taking a break every ten minutes to pork on groupies. Still, you have to wonder how the little guys could make it with this system. A damn good idea would be to start a website for free audio publishing that has it's new artists ranked so that people with talent can climb the latter quickly. Still a lot of work would have to go into it to get publicity and make it better than youtube quality.
Is the boarding time that long in comparison to the myriad of crap you have to pass to make sure that you're not going to blow something up? If you want fast flights, have some service where peoples luggage is delivered, then when they get to the airport, they are sedated and put in a conveyor belt, only to awaken in another conveyor belt in a foreign country (hopefully the right one). That way, you aren't even conscious for that ungodly wait (which would be less ungodly anyways).
We will either destroy ourselves before this happens, or our technology will give us a choice of many solutions to the problem (one of them undoubtedly involving CoyboyNeal).
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People have been selling military equipment from the US for years. Ever seen "Lord of War"? Not all of it was fiction you know. Probably the only surprise is that it was sold on ebay. And chances are that the military equipment wasn't stolen either. Many parts from scrapped vehicles are given or sold to boneyards to be sold again. Hell, the old motors from Vietnam's apache helicopters are actually in use on speedboats up to this day.
I'm not 100% sure if these combats robots are autonomous, but seeing as the article said "the robot turned" and not "the person controlling the robot made and accident", I'm going to assume they are. In which case I might ask, what in the bleeding name of Christ are they doing? We've yet to make robots that can drive anywhere near as well as a human, let alone fight alongside us. All we need to do is make the robots remote controlled, and they'll be better than fine (and the moral judgments can be made in battle). Fighting the war with robots is a magnificent idea (I don't even need to give my points on this one since they're so obvious). Now if the robot was remote controlled, then what in the name of hell happened? It's not something that should merit a 10-20 year postponement.
Almost instantly you can see that it would be very impractical to use sound to destroy rockets. Unless you blast the sound waves constantly, you wont be able to destroy the rockets since they travel much faster than sound (that and air is a terrible medium to transfer the waves through with the Doppler effect hindering it, so they'll never reach the missiles with enough strength). Lasers are still tricky, but there wont be a better alternative to them in the future, when their strength and our tracking systems will be at a prime. Though the best missile defense is undoubtedly diplomacy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most of the algorithms for scientific simulations run just as well on parallel processors? If this is the case, it makes more sense to have cheaper processors (both to manufacture and run) so that the cap on the IPS is raised just as well (the cap being the ratio of the amount of funds an organization can allocate to these emulators versus the cost of the emulators). Though I'm no computer expert, it seems that making one sequential processor run faster isn't as efficient as making that same processor cost a fraction of the price to get more power from your dollar.
These games may be good for children, but even games made purely for entertainment can be educational. Take Starcraft for example. When people see the game, they just think you can gather resources and waltz in with an army and get lucky for a win. But it goes way beyond that. When you actually play, you learn to take a step back and rethink the way you play. There is abundant education on what to think, but there is virtually no education on how to think. This can be very helpful with programming. Many students make the mistake of programming as you go, analogous to simple hoarding of an army in Starcraft. I think that the students that take a moment to write out a design document are probably the ones that always send a worker unit before anything to start up game plan.
You're joking right? I hope that you're aware that we've been creating black holes and other "mini cosmic catastrophes" with particle accelerators for years now. Many crazy scientists (or just overly concerned) have been worried about such things while failing to realize that cosmic rays (which have been colliding for eons) should theoretically produce them since they are based on the same principles. There are even odd super particles that have odd quark configurations that are supposed to convert all matter in to it, so long as the creation process can be sustained, but if this theory was correct, neutron stars would have produced them by now. Believe me, humans aren't capable of reproducing catastrophes any better than the extreme conditions of space. These people have a good idea about what they're doing since they've observed the effects in space (though not closely enough, which is why they built the accelerators to begin with).
Seriously, people are trying to combine as many gadgets as possible into tiny crap and sell them for huge prices. I want a cell phone that makes calls, and a laptop that meets all my business/media needs. I don't want it to double as an electric razor, drill, laser beam, grill, hand grenade etc... If I want to listen to music and play games, I'll do it at home. Who the hell listens to music and plays games 24/7 (i.e. "on the go")? Sounds like they need to get a damn job (at least one that requires more than a pulse to work). It must be the same douche-bags that dance for a living, or spoiled high school students that feel accomplished just owning crap, that buys this shit.
Actually, biometrics aren't that bad of an idea. It serves as a shitty method of authentication (passwords just plain can't be beat), but as for identification, it's not so bad. You can't change the genetic sequence that you carry, but you can change the value that corresponds to it in any identification center (i.e. a sequence of T-T-C-A for some chromosome could have a value of 1-4-4-3 or 1-9-8-1).
I'm completely in favor of hiding the identity of those who have money in Swiss accounts. I am now in the rich demographic since I just got an email informing me of an inheritance for 400K from a long lost Swiss cousin of mine. All I had to do was give them my social security number (they didn't tell me his name. Most likely to keep him anonymous).
I know I deserve it when I say: a Chuck Norris cut-out is all you need to deter anyone.
Thought you might be interested in this (though more engineered than cloned, you'd still appreciate it): http://www.tfot.info/pod/1127/animal-friendly-meat.html
How well can it repair pipelines? That's important as well.
You're missing the point I'm trying to send. I'm saying they don't cut off finger tips with a cigar cutter, or rip out your sexual organs with dull instruments. Yes I agree that what they do is a form of mental torture, but it's easy to draw the line between mobster torture, and corporate harassment. Yes, both actions are an immoral way to send a message, and on that level, you can compare them to mobsters. Still, what they do is a step down from what true criminals do. If you were given the choice to instantly incarcerate all mob bosses, or all corporate entities that abuse their power, which would you choose? The "MAFIAA" is pretty bad for society, but they're no where near as bad as former trusts who cold hire pinkertons to beat down protesters. That is why we must weaken and split them before they get to that level.
Even if we found all the standard basis for life, it will still not be an accomplishment. There will be two scenarios that the planet will have. One, we simply found a O2/CO2 atmosphere enriched planet with water that sustains relatively safe weather conditions. In the one in a [insert unfeasibly large number] chance that this happens, there will not be any guarantee whatsoever that there are any forms of life there (and we couldn't detect and identify the complex organic molecules anyways) because you have to have way too many more prereqs for life to occur. Two, the planet is in the stage that earth was to match the prereqs for creation of life (an even smaller chance), in which case, there are an ungodly number of processes that must occur to form even the simplest molecules (ever taken organic chemistry?). Taking this into account, do scientists even pay attention to how small any discovery might be? Never mind that sapient beings (us) can't come anywhere near the construction of a fully functional single celled organism from "scratch" after all the knowledge we have and efforts that we've poured in, now scientists are saying that this could occur ON ITS OWN? And then there are people who contemplate the idea of OTHER SAPIENT LIFE THAT HAS SURPASSED OUR CIVILIZATION WITHOUT KILLING THEMSELVES and shoot radio waves that dissipate into noise after 2 light-years (these efforts piss me off). Now this universe is huge, and granted there is always a possibility, but it is as small as the chance of me consecutively wining every lotto that has ever been hosted. It makes you wonder if there really was divine intervention that played a hand in our creation (though I'm agnostic, and small chance doesn't mean impossible). So let me put it into perspective. By the time we discover life that is anywhere near in complexity as a cat (or a single celled organism for that matter), we'll have long passed the point where we can make a damn planet with life on it.
Nearly as bad doesn't cut it. As much as I agree that they're bastards, these guys don't kill for profit (probably because it's not worth the hassle anyways), sell harmful products, torture people, etc. Handling mobsters and handling major trust figures have some differences and similarities. One thing they have in common is that you can fix the problem quite efficiently by catching them in some horrid act and successfully convict them. But given that they are a trust, treat them like Microsoft and split them. The government is one of the few forces powerful enough to take them on, and if normal civilians get together and make a campaign against them, there is a chance that you will have a fair fight in the courtrooms. The only trouble here is motivation, and these bastards simply have to piss more people off before anything like that has a chance of succeeding. But it looks like they're on their way.
You could just play death-metal at full volume. It more than keeps me awake. In fact, every time I listen to DethKlok, I feel like head-butting an ox.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it make a lot more sense if we started going after the people that employ spammers? Now as for another aspect of cyber crime, is there any unit that simply creates a fake identity that is legally registered as real and give the info out galore and see who takes the bait?
It's going to be interesting to see what role the internet plays in granting the Chinese people more freedom. It's already a force that can't be fully controlled and grants their people some more freedom of speech, and I would bet that there is already an online campaign to take other steps forward.
The paradoxidor. If you believe in him, he doesn't exist, if you don't believe in him, he does exist!
Meat wouldn't be that great of an incentive considering that we can directly clone meat so that we don't need to raise any animals and there would be a greater energy efficiency for the production of meat. I don't see milk being a problem either, as a similar solution could be developed with greater ease and less time.
I for one welcome our bottle opening robotic overloards
Wouldn't there be more merit to have one big space station that's self sufficient? We can get artificial gravity from centripetal force to maintain their health too. This would be a much greater benefit since it provides a lab with no gravity where a vacuum is readily available. You'd be surprised what those two factors alone could help researchers. Especially in material fabrication and pharmaceuticals.
For 2,500 signatures, he must have been at it for a while. Still, I wish I could be paid 750k for signing stuff for a day, all while taking a break every ten minutes to pork on groupies. Still, you have to wonder how the little guys could make it with this system. A damn good idea would be to start a website for free audio publishing that has it's new artists ranked so that people with talent can climb the latter quickly. Still a lot of work would have to go into it to get publicity and make it better than youtube quality.
Is the boarding time that long in comparison to the myriad of crap you have to pass to make sure that you're not going to blow something up? If you want fast flights, have some service where peoples luggage is delivered, then when they get to the airport, they are sedated and put in a conveyor belt, only to awaken in another conveyor belt in a foreign country (hopefully the right one). That way, you aren't even conscious for that ungodly wait (which would be less ungodly anyways).
We will either destroy ourselves before this happens, or our technology will give us a choice of many solutions to the problem (one of them undoubtedly involving CoyboyNeal).