I've noticed that a lot of the 2600 meetings take place in malls and bookstores. I'm sure people would be loathe to shut down a shopping mall, because that would be bad for the economy, and therefore un-American. But the bookstores? Burn 'em to the ground! That way, hackers won't come together, and you can prevent people from getting access to any sort of subversive materials. You might have to pin red "H"s on the hackers and post security at the doors of the mall.
Maybe if you're riding an old 1900's high-wheeler. With no cyclecomputer. If you're riding a modern bike, and use a cyclecomputer, or own a Palm system, may I point you to BikeBrain? [bikebrain.com] Not only is it easier to configure than most cyclecomputers, but gee, it runs on a Palm OS, and there are readily-available dev tools for that.
Seems bikes are plenty hackable.
For more on hacking and bicycles, in the fiction bent, read Bruce Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" (which won the Hugo) in his collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future. [amazon.com]
-- Dan
(who is currently working to open his own bike shop)
I suppose if you've got mounting bills, or are going to go to jail for embezzlement and want to take the easy way out, but still leave your family with money and a nest-egg, you should invest $40 in a MMORPG, play for 40 hours, then put the bullet through your head. The company will fork up millions.
Software companies (gaming companies, etc.) should not be the new form of life insurance for bereaved families that were too stupid to go to any lengths to help the victim of a suicide. Pure and simple.
Okay, you're obviously using the (220 - Age) Function. Which is a outright crock. I'm 29, and my MHR is 216. Yes. 216. This happened this fall (2001) on a bike ride, charging up a long, steep hill in the big-ring. Granted, I felt like my heart was about to explode, but there it was on the heart rate monitor.
190 = dangerously high? Right-o. For someone who is out-of-shape and never exercises, 190 = impending embolism. For someone who is an endurance athlete, 190 = business as usual.
Re:Perhaps he meant kilometers not miles...
on
Chase the Rabbits
·
· Score: 1
No, he meant 141 miles. The standard Ironman Triathlon is a 2.4 mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.4 mile run, all back to back. (I know because I'm a cyclist with a bit of tri-geek in me and have been trying to get into the Hawaii Ironman.) That's actually 140.8 miles...close enough, because you're usually running around in the transition areas.
Now, subtract the 2.4-mile swim. 138.4 miles of running. Not easy by any means, but certainly do-able.
Strangely enough, I was thinking about something like this the other day. Now, I haven't read the article yet, so I don't know if they've found some resolution to this, but storage on a wide scale like this might be difficult.
Do you really want your data on a large hard drive that can have parts of itself just disappear at random intervals?
How do you handle the storage conversion when a user decides to upgrade his hard drive?
If your storage is smeared out over a really wide area, doesn't it behoove the user to save money by investing in a smaller hard drive? I suppose you could limit the amount of storage space a user could have, based on their drive's physical size, but then that kinda defeats the purpose.
Doesn't this kind of defeat the redundancy of the Internet? Now, you nuke a city, and EVERYONE worldwide loses large chunks of their files.
I guess, as an idea, it sounds cool, but it just doesn't seem practical.
I suppose the manufacturer of the OS could provide giant mega-terabyte RAIDs, but then you come across the issue of ownership of the data contained therein.
As a novelist, I'm not sure I want to give Company X a percentage of my profits because I was using their Internet Operating System and had to store my file smeared across several different hard drives not owned by me...
The personal side of this is interesting too...if, say, Stephen King, has data stored on a hard drive in my house, purchased by me, do I get a partial royalty payment on that novel he's writing?
Ah, but who's to say that that new laptop won't come with Magic Latern already installed? Perhaps MS is getting off easy because they agreed to work with the Feds on Magic Latern? Ahhh, conspiracy theories...*grin*
From the original article: "By coincidence, in 1966, a British film called "Spy With a Cold Nose" featured a dog wired up to eavesdrop on the Russians. It was the same year as the Acoustic Kitty was tested."
Man, and I'll bet heads were rolling in Langley looking for their leak. We are, after all, discussing one of the most paranoid organizations on the entire planet.
Here's the deal. A Sony TV that would cost you $200 in the PX would be several hundred dollars more in Korea, due to trade tarriffs, and local protectionism. (Buy the local stuff, not Japanese.) It wasn't just for the purpose of knocking stuff off, either. If you had to pay $1000 on your local economy for something that the troops protecting your country could buy for $200, what would you do? Right.
As a someone who was stationed in Korea in the early 90's, I can vouch for this shit happening all the time. While I was there, they actually kept track of who bought what, and you had to be able to account for what you bought when you left the country, or if they started getting suspicious. You buy 2 TVs in a month, and you're busted, obviously.
Part of it is so that the stuff being brought in by the PX is used for the people the PX is for, and part of it is to avoid destablizing the local economy...
You know, I can see both sides of the equation. I think that what should be considered is a model where the government underwrites the cost of initial colonization and then turns the site and materials over to the Moon Development Corporation or to Mars Colonization, Inc., or whatever. Let it be run like a business, and have the government tax said corporation in a way such that they recoup their initial investment AND make money, also./P
95% of the computer users out there use a flat, 2-D interface. People are used to that. The jump from CLI to GUI was huge...and now that people are used to a standard window-based GUI, it's going to take a lot of leverage to move forward anything that differs significantly.
Buddy, a protease inhibitor is not a strain-specific drug. What you're thinking of is a vaccination. A protease inhibitor attacks a step in the virus replication process. It doesn't attack the strain itself.
While yes, it is possible for a government to raise money via taxes, you also have to remember that the world is a free market economy. The companies can charge whatever they like, but they had better prepare themselves for stuff like this if they continue to price gouge.
Do governments want to pay for medicine to be developed? Ideally, no. They don't. In an ideal situation, the drug companies would do it by themselves, and market the drugs at a reasonable cost so that the people who needed them could have access to them. Governments, however, DO fund research and development. This, should have an impact on the cost to the end-user, but it doesn't.
Do governments want to reap the benefits of the medicines developed by drug companies? Yes. But you know what? So does everyone from the end-user to the company that developed it.
Your last question is bunk. Drugs aren't developed for a particular economic area anymore. They're developed for target audience, marketed as an absolute necessity, and the price is driven up because in first-world nations, people have health insurance companies that will cover it. If they go to sell these drugs in a third world country and cut the rates, the insurance companies in the first-world nations are going to wonder why they don't get these prices, and much legal mayhem will ensue.
I bought a new iBook, and I must admit, I was a bit wary about OS X. Having now used it for about two months, I can say that I am nothing but happy with this thing.
Getting over the New GUI Hump was easy enough. Now I find myself delving more into *nix stuff. Why? Because I have the incentive to learn it. Prior to this, I had shell acounts, and could handle basic functionality, but I never really had any interest in digging deeper into the minutae of a command-line OS. That's changed. And I think that's changed because I have a consistent, reliable GUI front-end to fall back on should I get tired of stumbling around in the CLI.
Right there with you on the durability of the 520-series Powerbooks. Those things were tanks. I was walking across campus in the winter with mine in my backback, and my feet went out from under me on the ice... I landed directly on my back from a height of about three feet, and I weigh about 180 pounds. Like you situation, the damage was strictly cosmetic...not even a blown pixel....
Say what you like about Macs, but their laptops are unquestionably good. I recently picked up the new iBook 500 and am running OS X on it, and you know what? It's acceptably fast. It ain't blazing, but I don't feel the need to implode every time I try to launch an app.
I beg to differ -- IP law is hardly a boolean prospect.
No law is boolean, and that's the strength of the system. Speeding? Nope...you can go to court and contest the ticket, and in a good number of cases, you can get out of it. You think Free Speech is a boolean absolute? Let me point you to censorship, and the FCC's regulation of various media. You are free to say whatever you like, but you need to avoid saying certain things which could be construed as assault, a hate crime, and so forth.
If you remember your basic philosophy courses, there was the issue of "the chains of society" -- you live in a free country, but are you truly free to do anything you desire and remain part of the social community? The answer, of course, is no. Social regulation is something that is determined by the entire group.
IP law should go the same way, and it isn't. IP law is being dictated to society as a whole by a small minority that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and are using their financial leverage to get their way.
Should there be IP law? Yes. Should it be exploitable by companies with an army of lawyers with the intent of stuffing their wallets to the point of exploding? No.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be that "you can pay us buttloads of money for our product, but you can only use it in the manner we proscribe, and if you make any money off the use of our product, we're entitled to royalties." I can see it happening. Some paint company suing Picasso's estate for unpaid royalties on the use of their paint...
Nice to see that they can read William Gibson up there. I know the concept of balloon-assisted launched came up in one of his short stories in Burning Chrome.("White Star, Red Orbit" or something like that.)
I can't find any earlier reference...of course, I haven't looked extensively. Anyone know where this concept came from?
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
The only secure computer is one that is powered down, has all the DIMMs pulled out, is cast in a concrete block, and dropped to the bottom of Lake Superior. And even then, I have my doubts... --------------------------------------- -
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Last I'd heard, Titan has 1.5 atomspheres, not 10.
There's still energy being imparted to Titan, ensuring the lack of a steady state. First is the Sun -- while it's only 0.01% of the energy Earth receives, it's still energy. The other source would be tidal forces from Saturn. (See Io as a prime example of what tides can do.) Now, I'm speaking off the cuff here, but I'd be willing to bet that a moon Titan's size circling a gas giant is going to see a lot of tidal deformation...which is going to impart heat through the mechanical action on the planet's surface/crust...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Bob Zubrin does a great job of shooting down the concept of Solar Power Sats in his Entering Space -- it simply can't be done from Earth to orbit...the cost is too overwhelming, even when you reduce current launch costs by an order of magnitude.
He does show that it is feasible to build the panels on the Moon and launch them from there, but it seems to me that no one wants to invest in the infrastructure required to tap the energy sources and mineral sources. People seem to expect instant gratification from space because they get it from everyplace else in their lives...
Space is attainable. It's the changing the current mode of human thinking that I'm not so sure about...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Alright, this is a kinda cool idea, and it's great that the system generates enough suction to support a metric ton...
But given that the exteriors of most modern buildings are primarily glass...it seems to limit the usability of the device.
After all, what pane of glass can support a metric ton? Hell, I weigh 180 pounds, add 50 more for the gekkopad, and that's 230. 230 pounds suspended from a pane of glass via suction on the side of a skyscraper...
Doesn't strike me as too good an idea.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed that a lot of the 2600 meetings take place in malls and bookstores. I'm sure people would be loathe to shut down a shopping mall, because that would be bad for the economy, and therefore un-American. But the bookstores? Burn 'em to the ground! That way, hackers won't come together, and you can prevent people from getting access to any sort of subversive materials. You might have to pin red "H"s on the hackers and post security at the doors of the mall.
Maybe if you're riding an old 1900's high-wheeler. With no cyclecomputer. If you're riding a modern bike, and use a cyclecomputer, or own a Palm system, may I point you to BikeBrain? [bikebrain.com] Not only is it easier to configure than most cyclecomputers, but gee, it runs on a Palm OS, and there are readily-available dev tools for that.
Seems bikes are plenty hackable.
For more on hacking and bicycles, in the fiction bent, read Bruce Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" (which won the Hugo) in his collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future. [amazon.com]
-- Dan
(who is currently working to open his own bike shop)
I suppose if you've got mounting bills, or are going to go to jail for embezzlement and want to take the easy way out, but still leave your family with money and a nest-egg, you should invest $40 in a MMORPG, play for 40 hours, then put the bullet through your head. The company will fork up millions.
Software companies (gaming companies, etc.) should not be the new form of life insurance for bereaved families that were too stupid to go to any lengths to help the victim of a suicide. Pure and simple.
Okay, you're obviously using the (220 - Age) Function. Which is a outright crock. I'm 29, and my MHR is 216. Yes. 216. This happened this fall (2001) on a bike ride, charging up a long, steep hill in the big-ring. Granted, I felt like my heart was about to explode, but there it was on the heart rate monitor.
190 = dangerously high? Right-o. For someone who is out-of-shape and never exercises, 190 = impending embolism. For someone who is an endurance athlete, 190 = business as usual.
No, he meant 141 miles. The standard Ironman Triathlon is a 2.4 mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.4 mile run, all back to back. (I know because I'm a cyclist with a bit of tri-geek in me and have been trying to get into the Hawaii Ironman.) That's actually 140.8 miles...close enough, because you're usually running around in the transition areas.
Now, subtract the 2.4-mile swim. 138.4 miles of running. Not easy by any means, but certainly do-able.
JonKatz finally gets the hint and quits writing for Slashdot.
(I hope I'm at least 85% accurate.)
Strangely enough, I was thinking about something like this the other day. Now, I haven't read the article yet, so I don't know if they've found some resolution to this, but storage on a wide scale like this might be difficult.
I guess, as an idea, it sounds cool, but it just doesn't seem practical.
I suppose the manufacturer of the OS could provide giant mega-terabyte RAIDs, but then you come across the issue of ownership of the data contained therein.
As a novelist, I'm not sure I want to give Company X a percentage of my profits because I was using their Internet Operating System and had to store my file smeared across several different hard drives not owned by me...
The personal side of this is interesting too...if, say, Stephen King, has data stored on a hard drive in my house, purchased by me, do I get a partial royalty payment on that novel he's writing?
Ah, but who's to say that that new laptop won't come with Magic Latern already installed? Perhaps MS is getting off easy because they agreed to work with the Feds on Magic Latern? Ahhh, conspiracy theories...*grin*
Is Operation Acoustic Kitty just another application of this Carnivore thing I keep hearing about?
From the original article:
"By coincidence, in 1966, a British film called "Spy With a Cold Nose" featured a dog wired up to eavesdrop on the Russians. It was the same year as the Acoustic Kitty was tested."
Man, and I'll bet heads were rolling in Langley looking for their leak. We are, after all, discussing one of the most paranoid organizations on the entire planet.
Here's the deal. A Sony TV that would cost you $200 in the PX would be several hundred dollars more in Korea, due to trade tarriffs, and local protectionism. (Buy the local stuff, not Japanese.) It wasn't just for the purpose of knocking stuff off, either. If you had to pay $1000 on your local economy for something that the troops protecting your country could buy for $200, what would you do? Right.
As a someone who was stationed in Korea in the early 90's, I can vouch for this shit happening all the time. While I was there, they actually kept track of who bought what, and you had to be able to account for what you bought when you left the country, or if they started getting suspicious. You buy 2 TVs in a month, and you're busted, obviously.
Part of it is so that the stuff being brought in by the PX is used for the people the PX is for, and part of it is to avoid destablizing the local economy...
Big Uncle Sam is watching you.
It's smiling at me! Smiling!
DEAR GOD, MAKE IT STOP!
You know, I can see both sides of the equation. I think that what should be considered is a model where the government underwrites the cost of initial colonization and then turns the site and materials over to the Moon Development Corporation or to Mars Colonization, Inc., or whatever. Let it be run like a business, and have the government tax said corporation in a way such that they recoup their initial investment AND make money, also./P
"But the rug just tied the room together, man." -- The Dude
Oops. Copyright violation. MPAA's gonna jump on me for that one.
95% of the computer users out there use a flat, 2-D interface. People are used to that. The jump from CLI to GUI was huge...and now that people are used to a standard window-based GUI, it's going to take a lot of leverage to move forward anything that differs significantly.
Buddy, a protease inhibitor is not a strain-specific drug. What you're thinking of is a vaccination. A protease inhibitor attacks a step in the virus replication process. It doesn't attack the strain itself.
While yes, it is possible for a government to raise money via taxes, you also have to remember that the world is a free market economy. The companies can charge whatever they like, but they had better prepare themselves for stuff like this if they continue to price gouge.
Do governments want to pay for medicine to be developed? Ideally, no. They don't. In an ideal situation, the drug companies would do it by themselves, and market the drugs at a reasonable cost so that the people who needed them could have access to them. Governments, however, DO fund research and development. This, should have an impact on the cost to the end-user, but it doesn't.
Do governments want to reap the benefits of the medicines developed by drug companies? Yes. But you know what? So does everyone from the end-user to the company that developed it.
Your last question is bunk. Drugs aren't developed for a particular economic area anymore. They're developed for target audience, marketed as an absolute necessity, and the price is driven up because in first-world nations, people have health insurance companies that will cover it. If they go to sell these drugs in a third world country and cut the rates, the insurance companies in the first-world nations are going to wonder why they don't get these prices, and much legal mayhem will ensue.
I bought a new iBook, and I must admit, I was a bit wary about OS X. Having now used it for about two months, I can say that I am nothing but happy with this thing.
Getting over the New GUI Hump was easy enough. Now I find myself delving more into *nix stuff. Why? Because I have the incentive to learn it. Prior to this, I had shell acounts, and could handle basic functionality, but I never really had any interest in digging deeper into the minutae of a command-line OS. That's changed. And I think that's changed because I have a consistent, reliable GUI front-end to fall back on should I get tired of stumbling around in the CLI.
Right there with you on the durability of the 520-series Powerbooks. Those things were tanks. I was walking across campus in the winter with mine in my backback, and my feet went out from under me on the ice... I landed directly on my back from a height of about three feet, and I weigh about 180 pounds. Like you situation, the damage was strictly cosmetic...not even a blown pixel....
Say what you like about Macs, but their laptops are unquestionably good. I recently picked up the new iBook 500 and am running OS X on it, and you know what? It's acceptably fast. It ain't blazing, but I don't feel the need to implode every time I try to launch an app.
Guy in the Back Room Working with Bryce 4: Why am I doing this?
Goldin: Because we need to funnel some money from this program into the space station program to cover all these cost overruns.
Bryce 4 Guy: Can I have some fun like we did with that "Face on Mars" thing back in the 70's?
Goldin: Yeah, we funneled money from that into Skylab. What the Hell. Have fun.
I beg to differ -- IP law is hardly a boolean prospect.
No law is boolean, and that's the strength of the system. Speeding? Nope...you can go to court and contest the ticket, and in a good number of cases, you can get out of it. You think Free Speech is a boolean absolute? Let me point you to censorship, and the FCC's regulation of various media. You are free to say whatever you like, but you need to avoid saying certain things which could be construed as assault, a hate crime, and so forth.
If you remember your basic philosophy courses, there was the issue of "the chains of society" -- you live in a free country, but are you truly free to do anything you desire and remain part of the social community? The answer, of course, is no. Social regulation is something that is determined by the entire group.
IP law should go the same way, and it isn't. IP law is being dictated to society as a whole by a small minority that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and are using their financial leverage to get their way.
Should there be IP law? Yes. Should it be exploitable by companies with an army of lawyers with the intent of stuffing their wallets to the point of exploding? No.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be that "you can pay us buttloads of money for our product, but you can only use it in the manner we proscribe, and if you make any money off the use of our product, we're entitled to royalties." I can see it happening. Some paint company suing Picasso's estate for unpaid royalties on the use of their paint...
*knock on wood*
Nice to see that they can read William Gibson up there. I know the concept of balloon-assisted launched came up in one of his short stories in Burning Chrome .("White Star, Red Orbit" or something like that.)
I can't find any earlier reference...of course, I haven't looked extensively. Anyone know where this concept came from?
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
The only secure computer is one that is powered down, has all the DIMMs pulled out, is cast in a concrete block, and dropped to the bottom of Lake Superior. And even then, I have my doubts...- -
--------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Couple of issues:
Last I'd heard, Titan has 1.5 atomspheres, not 10.
There's still energy being imparted to Titan, ensuring the lack of a steady state. First is the Sun -- while it's only 0.01% of the energy Earth receives, it's still energy. The other source would be tidal forces from Saturn. (See Io as a prime example of what tides can do.) Now, I'm speaking off the cuff here, but I'd be willing to bet that a moon Titan's size circling a gas giant is going to see a lot of tidal deformation...which is going to impart heat through the mechanical action on the planet's surface/crust...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Bob Zubrin does a great job of shooting down the concept of Solar Power Sats in his Entering Space -- it simply can't be done from Earth to orbit...the cost is too overwhelming, even when you reduce current launch costs by an order of magnitude.
He does show that it is feasible to build the panels on the Moon and launch them from there, but it seems to me that no one wants to invest in the infrastructure required to tap the energy sources and mineral sources. People seem to expect instant gratification from space because they get it from everyplace else in their lives...
Space is attainable. It's the changing the current mode of human thinking that I'm not so sure about...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Alright, this is a kinda cool idea, and it's great that the system generates enough suction to support a metric ton...
But given that the exteriors of most modern buildings are primarily glass...it seems to limit the usability of the device.
After all, what pane of glass can support a metric ton? Hell, I weigh 180 pounds, add 50 more for the gekkopad, and that's 230. 230 pounds suspended from a pane of glass via suction on the side of a skyscraper...
Doesn't strike me as too good an idea.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!