I also quite liked technocrat, mainly because despite the trolls the signal to noise ratio there was lower than anywhere else i have found. And this includes Slashdot! I will miss it (even the extremists), and look forward to seeing the next incarnation.
Actually, these days physicists commonly think that Tesla was actually trying to use the (relatively static) magnetic field of the earth as a carrier for pulsed power. This turns out to be not quite as far fetched as it seemed at the time, and may actually be feasible.
Much like the difference between AC and DC current in copper (AC is significantly more effective because it essentially vibrates electrons back and forth rather then sending them all the way along the conductive medium from source to target), theoretically one could 'ring' the magnetic field of the earth with a large enough installation and appropriate frequency controls, and local power stations could use that 'ring' or oscillation to do work.
Much like how the AC power grid works today, except you are using the earths magnetic field to transfer energy between remote locations rather than our power grid, which is essentially a huge network of copper wires.
So it is not at all clear that what stopped Tesla was actually the laws of physics, it could have been any number of things and the basic idea may actually be sound.
These days if anyone is playing around with trying to manipulate the earths magnetic field, even for altruistic goals, i hope they think about the potential seen and unforeseen side effects. Which despite his genius Tesla clearly did not generally do. No one really knows as yet (to my knowledge, anyway) what the long term effects are of exposure to large and/or rapidly fluctuating magnetic fields. Heck, we still dont know what the real biological effects are of various electrical fields.
Upshot: not at all clear that Tesla's scheme to implement wireless power on an extremely large scale was stopped by the laws of physics - the possibility of something similar to his designs being able to accomplish some part of his goals still appears to be a real potential.
I agree that we are generally ignoring the real problem, but i suggest that you are not thinking the big picture through when you identify limited energy sources as the problem.
Seems to me that whether human activities are causing global warming and other environmental impacts or whether they are not pales by comparison to the real question.
It seems to have been established fairly conclusively in the scientific community that the earth's climate changes in fairly severe ways over time. Sometimes quite quickly, sometimes more slowly. So regardless of man's effect on the environment, we can essentially be assured that the global climate *will change* and *in a significant fashion* as a result of a wide range of natural processes (pole reversal, ice age, large volcanic eruptions, cometary impact, biological toxicity, methane hydrate blooms, changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels, etc etc etc).
So what we should be worrying about is not whether man is having a significant impact on the environment, but rather how man has prepared for inevitable climactic change.
We *really need* to figure out feasible ways to adapt our technologies and cultures, and perhaps even our genetics, to surviving and prospering under the extraordinary range of potential species ending natural disasters that are virtually guaranteed to occur at some point. The side benefit of preparing potential solutions to these type of disasters is that the work is equally applicable toward surviving the wide variety of potential disasters posed by the evolution of humankind and its technology.
Nature is certain, mankind capricious. We know the one has killed and will kill again, while some of us still hold out a feeble faith in mankind.
Sorry if that seems a bit over the top. Just the way i see it, after all...
Well, the evolution part comes into play when athletes choose the wrong therapies or drug regimens and experience consequences like sterility, genetic damage, or early death.
So, evolution, actually a pretty clear case. The successful ones live to pass on their genes, the unsuccessful ones either die or damage the genes they do manage to pass on.
But the value of free lab rats willing to test this stuff for us so they can succeed at a game cannot be overstated. Now the situation is less than desirable because they are all secretive and stuff so it is difficult to use the risks they are taking to contribute to our store of scientific evidence regarding the effects and side effects associated with these therapies.
Plus i just like to say 'evolution in action'. Maybe they have a bumper sticker or something. I would totally wear that t-shirt.
Just think of it as evolution in action. Plus how else are you going to get free lab rats for human enhancement technologies? Let the gene and drug doping flow, then we can just cherry pick the ones that stand the test of time and use em on real people.
Only socially constructive use for professional athletes i can think of, anyway...
I just assumed that if we were talking about applications where optical properties are important this new composite stuff would be used as a coating for traditional materials. So a thin layer of this stuff on top of lexan might indeed be useful in windows and windscreens.
You also have to realize that because they are using millimeter wave technology in this application there are quite a few optically opaque surfaces transparent at these frequencies. So the 'pain ray' could be inside the van behind one or more optically opaque ports. In addition, historically any 'man portable' weapons developed by the industry are generally 'made' available to at least some private individuals as soon as or before they are commonly available to military and police personnel. So it is virtually guaranteed that we will have to figure out how to deal with civilian use of and possession of equivalent technology. I mean, on the bright side a small enough version of something like this would be the perfect self defense weapon, yet on the flip side it would make a great addition to any criminal arsenal.
So i guess my point is - it will be difficult to figure out where this class of weapons are deployed and who is firing them in most situations, what are we going to do about virtually guaranteed civilian use, and what is our stand as a society on frequent use of 'non-lethal' weaponry?
Hm, i wonder if anyone is making aerosol cans each filled with some (full or partial) DNA data from 100,000+ randomly selected folks. Then all you have to do as a paranoid nutter is fire off a few shots of this can anywhere you think you may be leaving DNA. ah, progress. Gotta love it.
I just want to know if I will be able to run some sort of software PBX on a cell phone anytime soon. Define my *own* call plans and dial plans to do what *i* want with various incoming and outgoing numbers at various times.
Asterisk on a cell phone. Now *that* would revolutionize my cell phone experience.
Heck, i would even write a cell phone suitable PBX myself if i had sufficient access to the internals - most processors in the current generation of cell phones are more than capable of handling the overhead associated with a low call volume (personal) PBX.
Fat chance of anything like this happening anytime soon, however...
More importantly, what would happen if this system fired 'accidentally' on another passenger jet? Something I would certainly be thinking about before installing them on *any* planes...
Ahhh, another retro gamer. I have to admit, my only real comfort game over the years has been Hack, NetHack, Rogue, Angband and all the variants in thier full ASCII splendor. The gameplay is superb even though I have been playing these games for something like 25 years now.
Another thing to remember when building high density storage appliances at the moment is that the MTBF for >=750 GB drives that use the new perpendicular recording tech (multiple layers of data - 2 at the moment - stored at each point) is actually higher than that for standard drives. That is, the new larger drives that use this tech are actually more reliable than smaller drives using the old tech. Seagate is the only drive manufacturer actually using perpendicular recording tech for retail drives, although this should be changing in the near future as more devices from other manufacturers make it into the retail chain.
I am not affiliated with Seagate or any other HDD manufacturer.
Most of the issues and coping strategies folks have been bringing up are reasonable, albeit relatively short term concerns. It appears to me, however, that these concerns miss the point - a 100 year timeframe is much different than a 20 year one.
I suggest that the human race will survive the next 25 years or so by muddling along in its time honored traditions barring, of course, some unforseen global catastrophe. Problems like overpopulation, environmental degredation, warfare, disease, global warming - these are serious problems but problems the human race has shown itself to be capable of dealing with as long as one is not overly concerned about collateral damage. And when looking at something like the survival of the human race, a few billion here or there kind of falls into the noise.
Considering the longer term (25-75 years out) future of the human raises some more interesting concerns...
One of the questions I find compelling is how human social, cultural, political, and economic networks will survive and behave in a post-scarcity economy. For about 15 years the inflation adjusted costs of manufactured goods has continued to decrease. Just in time manufacturing, custom fabrication, these trends all point toward a transition to an economy based on 'how to do/build things' rather than 'things' alone. I have yet to see any cogent model of how human networks will adapt to this transition, and I therefore belive that this transition has the potential to be quite disruptive.
Another consideration is how the definition of 'human' may change as a result of technological progress and environmental demands. If anything, I suspect that the answer to the question 'how will the human race survive the next 100 years?' is, in the long term, quite simple.
Change what it means to be human.
Terrifying, and extraordinarily difficult to predict, but in the long run the *only* way species survive is by changing - and the potential for that change to be mediated by technology in humans drastically accellerates the potential timeframe. Some relatively simple changes are already filtering into human culture almost invisibly - laser eye surgery, fairly serious cosmetic modifications, cochlear implants, hair transplants, hair removal, sex reassignment, prosthetics, longterm drug therapies, gene therapy; I could go on and on.
Sometimes the only way to solve an intractable problem is my changing the terms of the problem itself. Just as Alexander the Great trumped generations of philosophers by cutting the Gordian Knot in half instead of untangling it, it may be that the only way to truly insure the long term survival of the human race is by changing what it means to be human.
Folks appear to be missing the point here - the mistake Gannon made had nothing to do with being polite to the police. His mistake was recording audio as well as video. There is a large body of case law confirming the legality of recording video without subjects permission, but as soon as you include audio you run into another set of case law which is much more restrictive. There is a reason virtually all surveillance systems do not record audio data...
There should never be an excuse for selling or transfering ownership of a hard drive with pre-existing data when there are fast, free, and convienient utilities that can effectively remove all data without damaging HDD functionality. Physical destruction is of course, the most secure method of permanently wiping data, but for most folks good software based data destruction should be more than sufficient.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am in no way associated with any of the above products except as a satisfied user.
To extend your metaphor, it seems clear to me that the way to think about this class of technologies is to look at it as a better paintbrush rather than as a replacement for the painter. See, improving tools - or in this case predictive maturation algorithms - almost never negatively impacts the art associated with the creation process. Anything that can provide additional information to the oenologist should only increase the quality of the creation process in my opinion.
Actually this could be somewhat brilliant. Turn some of the drawbacks of wind turbines into a selling point. Screw scarecrows, put up wind turbines over a significant portion of your arable land to keep birds and insects away as well as generate significant cash revenues from selling the generated electricity back to the grid or using it to power your water distribution system. Why arent folks selling turbines to farmers this way?
Basically it seems to me that there is a very simple dividing line between companies that *should* stay below the radar for as long as possible and those that should attract as much attention as possible.
If you have real, defensible intellectual property in an emerging market, stealth mode is, in my experience, a really good idea. You need time to figure out what follow on patents are needed - solving some of the problems that always arise when developing innovative technology often generate *more* innovative technology that also needs to be patented. In addition, quite frankly if you are *actually building* something innovative, most likely the big players are at least 24-36 months behind you. And they wont start catching up (and they will, and they can afford better lawyers than you can) until they find out what you are doing when you go public. So the time you spend below the radar is invaluable.
On the other hand, if you are building product in an existing market, staying below the radar is the last thing you want. In this case, you want as high a profile as possible well before you are even ready to release product.
As always, there are no real hard and fast rules. Sometimes you want to be below the radar, sometimes you want to be as visible as possible, and sometimes you just want to be hidden in plain sight in the middle of the pack. Common sense just isnt that common, i suppose.;-)
I hate seeing folks running windows without easy ways to optimize which processes are actively running. When forced to use windows, one application i find extremely useful is a freeware program called EndItAll which allows you easily to set which processes are not allowed to run, which are optional, and which should never be killed. Pretty useful stuff - the original version is freeware, tho i think 2.0 may not be - just google it.
Once installed, play around and figure out a minimal process set to use as a baseline...
Ok, this really gets me going. How are you going to put out a list like that and forget to mention the fact that Bell Labs invented the *transistor*? I mean, talk about something really important in the saga of modern technology...;-)
Ah, now i know exactly what to put into the air during our next hedge fund investor meeting and all meetings with prospective investors. Excellent work.
Now i just have to wonder what would happen if some of my associates in the casino industry added this to thier air flow mechanisms in addition to the old standbys...;-)
One of the things folks dont realize about Sun is that they *still* own the majority of russian supercomputer experts, and this asset will continue to pay serious dividends regardless of what CPUs they choose to use.
Slashdot Mirror
I also quite liked technocrat, mainly because despite the trolls the signal to noise ratio there was lower than anywhere else i have found. And this includes Slashdot! I will miss it (even the extremists), and look forward to seeing the next incarnation.
Sounds passive depressive to me ... ;-)
Actually, these days physicists commonly think that Tesla was actually trying to use the (relatively static) magnetic field of the earth as a carrier for pulsed power. This turns out to be not quite as far fetched as it seemed at the time, and may actually be feasible.
Much like the difference between AC and DC current in copper (AC is significantly more effective because it essentially vibrates electrons back and forth rather then sending them all the way along the conductive medium from source to target), theoretically one could 'ring' the magnetic field of the earth with a large enough installation and appropriate frequency controls, and local power stations could use that 'ring' or oscillation to do work.
Much like how the AC power grid works today, except you are using the earths magnetic field to transfer energy between remote locations rather than our power grid, which is essentially a huge network of copper wires.
So it is not at all clear that what stopped Tesla was actually the laws of physics, it could have been any number of things and the basic idea may actually be sound.
These days if anyone is playing around with trying to manipulate the earths magnetic field, even for altruistic goals, i hope they think about the potential seen and unforeseen side effects. Which despite his genius Tesla clearly did not generally do. No one really knows as yet (to my knowledge, anyway) what the long term effects are of exposure to large and/or rapidly fluctuating magnetic fields. Heck, we still dont know what the real biological effects are of various electrical fields.
Upshot: not at all clear that Tesla's scheme to implement wireless power on an extremely large scale was stopped by the laws of physics - the possibility of something similar to his designs being able to accomplish some part of his goals still appears to be a real potential.
I agree that we are generally ignoring the real problem, but i suggest that you are not thinking the big picture through when you identify limited energy sources as the problem.
Seems to me that whether human activities are causing global warming and other environmental impacts or whether they are not pales by comparison to the real question.
It seems to have been established fairly conclusively in the scientific community that the earth's climate changes in fairly severe ways over time. Sometimes quite quickly, sometimes more slowly. So regardless of man's effect on the environment, we can essentially be assured that the global climate *will change* and *in a significant fashion* as a result of a wide range of natural processes (pole reversal, ice age, large volcanic eruptions, cometary impact, biological toxicity, methane hydrate blooms, changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels, etc etc etc).
So what we should be worrying about is not whether man is having a significant impact on the environment, but rather how man has prepared for inevitable climactic change.
We *really need* to figure out feasible ways to adapt our technologies and cultures, and perhaps even our genetics, to surviving and prospering under the extraordinary range of potential species ending natural disasters that are virtually guaranteed to occur at some point. The side benefit of preparing potential solutions to these type of disasters is that the work is equally applicable toward surviving the wide variety of potential disasters posed by the evolution of humankind and its technology.
Nature is certain, mankind capricious. We know the one has killed and will kill again, while some of us still hold out a feeble faith in mankind.
Sorry if that seems a bit over the top. Just the way i see it, after all ...
Well, the evolution part comes into play when athletes choose the wrong therapies or drug regimens and experience consequences like sterility, genetic damage, or early death.
So, evolution, actually a pretty clear case. The successful ones live to pass on their genes, the unsuccessful ones either die or damage the genes they do manage to pass on.
But the value of free lab rats willing to test this stuff for us so they can succeed at a game cannot be overstated. Now the situation is less than desirable because they are all secretive and stuff so it is difficult to use the risks they are taking to contribute to our store of scientific evidence regarding the effects and side effects associated with these therapies.
Plus i just like to say 'evolution in action'. Maybe they have a bumper sticker or something. I would totally wear that t-shirt.
Just think of it as evolution in action. Plus how else are you going to get free lab rats for human enhancement technologies? Let the gene and drug doping flow, then we can just cherry pick the ones that stand the test of time and use em on real people.
Only socially constructive use for professional athletes i can think of, anyway ...
/joking
I just assumed that if we were talking about applications where optical properties are important this new composite stuff would be used as a coating for traditional materials. So a thin layer of this stuff on top of lexan might indeed be useful in windows and windscreens.
You also have to realize that because they are using millimeter wave technology in this application there are quite a few optically opaque surfaces transparent at these frequencies. So the 'pain ray' could be inside the van behind one or more optically opaque ports. In addition, historically any 'man portable' weapons developed by the industry are generally 'made' available to at least some private individuals as soon as or before they are commonly available to military and police personnel. So it is virtually guaranteed that we will have to figure out how to deal with civilian use of and possession of equivalent technology. I mean, on the bright side a small enough version of something like this would be the perfect self defense weapon, yet on the flip side it would make a great addition to any criminal arsenal.
So i guess my point is - it will be difficult to figure out where this class of weapons are deployed and who is firing them in most situations, what are we going to do about virtually guaranteed civilian use, and what is our stand as a society on frequent use of 'non-lethal' weaponry?
Hm, i wonder if anyone is making aerosol cans each filled with some (full or partial) DNA data from 100,000+ randomly selected folks. Then all you have to do as a paranoid nutter is fire off a few shots of this can anywhere you think you may be leaving DNA. ah, progress. Gotta love it.
I just want to know if I will be able to run some sort of software PBX on a cell phone anytime soon. Define my *own* call plans and dial plans to do what *i* want with various incoming and outgoing numbers at various times.
...
Asterisk on a cell phone. Now *that* would revolutionize my cell phone experience.
Heck, i would even write a cell phone suitable PBX myself if i had sufficient access to the internals - most processors in the current generation of cell phones are more than capable of handling the overhead associated with a low call volume (personal) PBX.
Fat chance of anything like this happening anytime soon, however
The Sphinx project is the current 'gold standard' in open source speech recognition. It can be found at
Sphinx Project at CMU
I have used a variety of open source libraries in addition to 'rolling my own' and for general purposes Sphinx is certainly the most mature option.
More importantly, what would happen if this system fired 'accidentally' on another passenger jet? Something I would certainly be thinking about before installing them on *any* planes ...
Ahhh, another retro gamer. I have to admit, my only real comfort game over the years has been Hack, NetHack, Rogue, Angband and all the variants in thier full ASCII splendor. The gameplay is superb even though I have been playing these games for something like 25 years now.
I think the Squeak project is worthy of note for anyone interested in a first programming environment. Start em off right.
Squeak homepage
and the Education focused site
Another thing to remember when building high density storage appliances at the moment is that the MTBF for >=750 GB drives that use the new perpendicular recording tech (multiple layers of data - 2 at the moment - stored at each point) is actually higher than that for standard drives. That is, the new larger drives that use this tech are actually more reliable than smaller drives using the old tech. Seagate is the only drive manufacturer actually using perpendicular recording tech for retail drives, although this should be changing in the near future as more devices from other manufacturers make it into the retail chain.
I am not affiliated with Seagate or any other HDD manufacturer.
Most of the issues and coping strategies folks have been bringing up are reasonable, albeit relatively short term concerns. It appears to me, however, that these concerns miss the point - a 100 year timeframe is much different than a 20 year one.
...
I suggest that the human race will survive the next 25 years or so by muddling along in its time honored traditions barring, of course, some unforseen global catastrophe. Problems like overpopulation, environmental degredation, warfare, disease, global warming - these are serious problems but problems the human race has shown itself to be capable of dealing with as long as one is not overly concerned about collateral damage. And when looking at something like the survival of the human race, a few billion here or there kind of falls into the noise.
Considering the longer term (25-75 years out) future of the human raises some more interesting concerns
One of the questions I find compelling is how human social, cultural, political, and economic networks will survive and behave in a post-scarcity economy. For about 15 years the inflation adjusted costs of manufactured goods has continued to decrease. Just in time manufacturing, custom fabrication, these trends all point toward a transition to an economy based on 'how to do/build things' rather than 'things' alone. I have yet to see any cogent model of how human networks will adapt to this transition, and I therefore belive that this transition has the potential to be quite disruptive.
Another consideration is how the definition of 'human' may change as a result of technological progress and environmental demands. If anything, I suspect that the answer to the question 'how will the human race survive the next 100 years?' is, in the long term, quite simple.
Change what it means to be human.
Terrifying, and extraordinarily difficult to predict, but in the long run the *only* way species survive is by changing - and the potential for that change to be mediated by technology in humans drastically accellerates the potential timeframe. Some relatively simple changes are already filtering into human culture almost invisibly - laser eye surgery, fairly serious cosmetic modifications, cochlear implants, hair transplants, hair removal, sex reassignment, prosthetics, longterm drug therapies, gene therapy; I could go on and on.
Sometimes the only way to solve an intractable problem is my changing the terms of the problem itself. Just as Alexander the Great trumped generations of philosophers by cutting the Gordian Knot in half instead of untangling it, it may be that the only way to truly insure the long term survival of the human race is by changing what it means to be human.
Folks appear to be missing the point here - the mistake Gannon made had nothing to do with being polite to the police. His mistake was recording audio as well as video. There is a large body of case law confirming the legality of recording video without subjects permission, but as soon as you include audio you run into another set of case law which is much more restrictive. There is a reason virtually all surveillance systems do not record audio data ...
As a public service, links to three excellent, free, software based HDD wiping utilities. The first is even open source ...
Darik's Boot and Nuke
Active Kill Disk
PC Inspector
There should never be an excuse for selling or transfering ownership of a hard drive with pre-existing data when there are fast, free, and convienient utilities that can effectively remove all data without damaging HDD functionality. Physical destruction is of course, the most secure method of permanently wiping data, but for most folks good software based data destruction should be more than sufficient.
Obligatory disclaimer: I am in no way associated with any of the above products except as a satisfied user.
To extend your metaphor, it seems clear to me that the way to think about this class of technologies is to look at it as a better paintbrush rather than as a replacement for the painter. See, improving tools - or in this case predictive maturation algorithms - almost never negatively impacts the art associated with the creation process. Anything that can provide additional information to the oenologist should only increase the quality of the creation process in my opinion.
Actually this could be somewhat brilliant. Turn some of the drawbacks of wind turbines into a selling point. Screw scarecrows, put up wind turbines over a significant portion of your arable land to keep birds and insects away as well as generate significant cash revenues from selling the generated electricity back to the grid or using it to power your water distribution system. Why arent folks selling turbines to farmers this way?
Basically it seems to me that there is a very simple dividing line between companies that *should* stay below the radar for as long as possible and those that should attract as much attention as possible.
;-)
If you have real, defensible intellectual property in an emerging market, stealth mode is, in my experience, a really good idea. You need time to figure out what follow on patents are needed - solving some of the problems that always arise when developing innovative technology often generate *more* innovative technology that also needs to be patented. In addition, quite frankly if you are *actually building* something innovative, most likely the big players are at least 24-36 months behind you. And they wont start catching up (and they will, and they can afford better lawyers than you can) until they find out what you are doing when you go public. So the time you spend below the radar is invaluable.
On the other hand, if you are building product in an existing market, staying below the radar is the last thing you want. In this case, you want as high a profile as possible well before you are even ready to release product.
As always, there are no real hard and fast rules. Sometimes you want to be below the radar, sometimes you want to be as visible as possible, and sometimes you just want to be hidden in plain sight in the middle of the pack. Common sense just isnt that common, i suppose.
I hate seeing folks running windows without easy ways to optimize which processes are actively running. When forced to use windows, one application i find extremely useful is a freeware program called EndItAll which allows you easily to set which processes are not allowed to run, which are optional, and which should never be killed. Pretty useful stuff - the original version is freeware, tho i think 2.0 may not be - just google it.
...
Once installed, play around and figure out a minimal process set to use as a baseline
Ok, this really gets me going. How are you going to put out a list like that and forget to mention the fact that Bell Labs invented the *transistor*? I mean, talk about something really important in the saga of modern technology ... ;-)
Ah, now i know exactly what to put into the air during our next hedge fund investor meeting and all meetings with prospective investors. Excellent work.
... ;-)
Now i just have to wonder what would happen if some of my associates in the casino industry added this to thier air flow mechanisms in addition to the old standbys
One of the things folks dont realize about Sun is that they *still* own the majority of russian supercomputer experts, and this asset will continue to pay serious dividends regardless of what CPUs they choose to use.