The problem is that "Common sense" (admittedly lacking in the people who drive off bridges. I did not say I did so, only that my TTN software suggested that I do so, then bitched mightily about my being offroute when I failed to do so when it said to. I believe my exact words were "Fuck that shit!" before continuing over the bridge in the sane and rational fashion.) is extremely difficult to imbue to a computer.
Automatic driving systems would be at the mercy of the quality of the GPS maps, the GPS reciever hardware, and the quality of the sensors it uses to determine what lane it is in, etc...
If you have ever performed automotive work, you would know exactly what I mean when I say that delicate computer hardware, like precision optical sensors/cameras, and the like, are not going to hold up under the adverse road conditions present underneath a vehicle's hood, or in the undercarriage.
Mud, bug splatter, rust, oily road grime, etc are all going to take their tolls on the utility of any external sensor systems built into such vehicles, which means that the vehicles are going to need to rely more heavily on GPS, and on inter-vehicle communication, and use exterior sensors as more of a "fuzzy logic" decision factor. (Otherwise your vehicle would come to a screeching halt after getting mud-splattered by the cattle truck in front of you on the highway, as the optical sensors would insist that you were mere inches from an obstacle.)
This would mean that the vehicle would need to be doing the following things:
Retrieving GPS timestamps, and calculating rough coordinates and vector.
Collecting data from external sensors for fine tuning.
Collecting data from other vehicles about speed and distance (and possibly collision hazards, like obstacles.)
Store all that data, and decide accordingly.
Given the highly volatile, and complicated natures of that data, something a little more sophisticated than the fuel injection computer built into modern vehicles would be required, which means there are possibilities to hijack execution with a well formed exploit. At that point, you can override sensor data, and all kinds of things.
I didnt say it would be easy, only that it would be possible. Given the relentless march of "For the Lulz!" types of hacks lately, do you really want to be in a vehicle that even remotely has such a vulnerability?
You have at least 3 ways to use that word in this particular situation:
1) Sensible from the systems design point of view, where security of the vehicle and its occupant are given priority. (the one you chose.)
2) Sensible from the hardware design point of view, where things like dirt, corrosion, vibrational damage, etc are all going to deteriorate sensor function, leading to the vehicle thinking it is approaching a wall or other obstacle when it really isnt, because it has occluded sensors from the MAC truck in front of it not having mud flaps, or any other potential hazard that would make reliance on sensor telemetry unreliable without festidious maintenance.
3) The finance boy's idea of sensible, in terms of pricepoints for implementations of both previous systems.
Any automatically driving vehicle would have to simultanously meet all 3 definitions of sensible to avoid the kinds of problems I am saying would plaugue the system.
Am I the only one that sees the potential for serious abuses should driverless vehicles become massively adopted and standardized?
Roadways are ALWAYS under construction, which means that static map data inside the vehicle is never going to be an option. The vehicles will *HAVE* to connect to the internet in some fashion to pull updated maps.
It might be well within the tinfoil hat arena, but I can clearly see this being used to kill somebody. Case in point:
The Turn-by-Turn navigation software I used to use fell out of date by about a year. "Thats not too bad.." I said to myself, so I decided that I wouldnt update it before my next roadtrip when I went to go visit a friend of mine in another city out of state. Low and behold, the navigation software told me to turn *OFF THE TOP OF A BRIDGE* onto the parkway below, in order to reach my destination.
Reason: The software was unaware that I was crossing a bridge, and not an intersection.
Now, imagine an automatically driving vehicle, a sleeping diplomat inside with a hangover, and a similar malfunction. (Either purposeful or accidental, doesnt matter. The diplomat will be just as dead.)
A little step further, and you have malicious map injection attacks, with the intent to redirect vehicles at the hacker's whim. Sony losing millions of customers information would seem like small potatoes compared to hackers sending their CEOs to their deaths.
Then you have the whole can of worms of the vehicle-to-vehicle communcation cells that some automotive engineers want to try to implement to help "Improve roadway safety." Abuse of these transmissions could give a whole new meaning to the term "Road hog."
Right up to the point where legal turns around and talks candidly with you about the influx of impact statement requests...
Something along the lines of this, perhaps:
Director of Legal services: Didnt this request get denied last month?
Dir of IT: Yes, it did.
Legal: You do realize that time is money, and that filling my inbox with requests I have previously denied, and given reasons for denying, an uncountable number of times is wasteful of both, right?
IT: Yes. However, I do not have the authority to simply say no, and cite your previous statements to the managers when they pitch a fit and demand that these "requests" be implemented.
Legal: I see... I will take care of it myself then.
3 days later---
Dir of HR: Do you know why we are having this meeting, [Dir of IT]?
IT: Uh-- no, I really dont know why you called me in here--- Were in the middle of a server upgrade at the moment, so I know it must be important though...
HR: Oh yes. At the last managers meeting, the dir of the legal department told us you were behaving in an insubordinate manner, and fed him some angry excuses about why you could not comply with a simple request--- I dont think I need to explain why requests from the legal department need to be complied with...
---
And there you have it.
In any sufficiently large enterprise, certainly any that would be large enough to have a legal department, the managers will have long ago implemented political hegemonies that indemnify themselves personally of any wrongdoing. Rather than see your plight as the IT director, being shafted--- Legal is simply tired of repeatedly saying no for you like a sock puppet. This is because THEY have no problem saying that word, and it should be a simple fix for you to say it instead, and just cite the previous reply from legal concerning such matters.
Naturally, the part that will stick at the managers meeting is that you told LEGAL that you could not comply.... Not the office bureaucracy reasons why you had to.
As such, it will ultimately come right back around to the same tired, well-trodden path of decrying IT as not being a team player, being insubordinate, stubborn, and costing the company money and time. [When in reality what is really costing the company time and money is the preconception that board members and other senior management are always right.]
Sockpuppeting legal might buy you some time, and might help you win a few altercations, but managers have short memories, and tend to be repeat offenders for destructive/illegal feature requests. Keep that in mind.
The problem with most fusion reactors is that they produce copious amounts of neutrons which do not directly contribute to power generation, and require extensive shielding to avoid being a problem. That shielding itself will then become radioactive over time... Additionally, the energies needed to continually burn the fusion plasma exceeds the useful energy collected from the reaction. Often by an order of magnitude.
Now, the silly idea. You dont need to achieve direct over-unity on power generation from the fusion reaction itself, if you capture a sufficient amount of the resulting neutron spray in a suitably reactive shielding layer, and total energy release (including neutron spray) is greater than energy input. (read on.)
The material I had in mind with the silly idea was a high density carbon aerogel, filled with liquid nitrogen, and sealed to maintain pressure.
As the fusion reactor happily churns out neutrons, these will interact with either the carbon or the nitrogen in the shielding layer. Both interactions ultimately lead to the creation of carbon 14, which is a known beta-decay element, which decays back into nitrogen, emits an electron, and a neutrino. Neutrinos are harmless, the nitrogen isotope created is non-radioactive, and the electron can be directly used for power generation.
The issue of degredation of the cathode would be partially resolved as well, by continuing neutron exposure. The idea is to cause an equilibrium of nitrogen->C14 | C14->nitrogen reactions, so that the carbon components of the shielding will be continually regenerated by the neutron exposure. C14 is still carbon, and would still have semiconductor properties, in addition to its betavoltaic properties.
Sadly, that is all the further my silly idea went, because I hit a brick wall with paywalled neuclear physics data sets concerning what hardness the neutrons need to be for efficient capture, and at what rates that capture occurs, so I could not calculate how thick the shielding layer would need to be, nor at what energies the catalytic fusion reaction would need to burn. However, the fusion reactor would appear to able to be something as simple as a farnsworth fusor, since the goal is to release as many neutrons as possible to seed the shielding layer.
(If anyone knows where I can get such information for free, I would still like to work out the specifics as a thought experiment.)
Once sufficiently primed, the betavoltaic nature of the system coupled with the absurdly long half life of carbon 14 (thousands of years...) would mean that after the crucial incubation period, it would provide continual, and consistent electrical output for potentially thousands of years, with minimal additional fusion input.
[EG-- while total rate of decay is low, due to long halflife, the high concentration of C14 in the chamber would mean useful numbers of decay reactions would be statistically likely. You simply need to supply sufficient neutron flux of the right hardness to keep the system going after that point.]
Bonus-- It would make a great place to store all that carbon that is clogging up the atmosphere's ability to re-radiate IR radiation back into space.
Message: Take these pirated movies, and this woman (Sound stage tech) loses her job.
Sub-message: The people that still take the movies are heartless scum.
As article points out, shameless PSA produced by NBC; proffered by HSA.
That over with--
1) This assertion (Take pirate DVD, woman loses job) makes a series of fundamentally broken assumptions:
i) Content production companies (like studios-- like the one which made the PSA) live so hand-to-mouth that the failure to monopoly dominate sales/transfers of the content they create will cause them to lay off workers.
Reality: The phase 'hollywood accounting' exists for a reason. Any such 'Hand-to-mouth' type economics exists exclusively on paper, to avoid paying actors, authors and film crew while simultaneously generating huge profits for the production company. It exists exclusively as a contrived mechanism to avoid paying royalty money on the very sales the video harps about. This makes the video a hypocritical, bold faced lie from the get-go.
ii) The act of taking the pirated DVD would cause the person to lose her job, because you are not paying-- EG-- the lost sale angle.
Reality: Multiple redundant studies have shown that consummate media pirates on average BUY MORE products than their 'legitimate purchases only' counterparts.
Additionally, the pirate is only interested in the product to begin with because he does not have to invest anything; EG, the appropriation of the pirated DVDs are NOT lost sales.
Without the piracy option, the consumer would simply not have consumed, reducing media penetration, and realistically doing far worse than what piracy allegedly would have done. At least when the product gets pirated, the pirate gets a direct assessment of the quality of the product, and if it is any good, would now have direct motivation to buy additional products. Eg- Pirate downloads first matrix movie-- likes it, orders the trilogy box set. The subsequent sale would never have taken place if the initial piracy had never occurred. The notion that the pirate would have just sunk down 50$ for the box set of movies he has never seen and is dubious about, is pure insanity.
--------------------
What I personally took away from the video PSA:
'See this poor token production worker? See her frazzled hair!? Doesnt she look pathetic?'
See me? I am in my fancy suit, and have perfect teeth-- Isn't it terrible that you would cause me to take money away from this poor frazzled worker because you would dare upset the apple cart?
Never-mind that I am obviously not hurting for money (As seen by my quarterly finance reports), or that I am a lieing shyster who personally is responsible for this poor token floor worker's plight because I care about my corporate bonuses more than her and her welfare---OR that I am being a hypocritical bastard by passing that blame on to you...
Just Pretend that simply isn't the case and embrace the fantasy we spin for you about how it is YOUR fault she suffers, and it's all because you don't impulse blanket-buy everything we shit out on store shelves blindly! (In fact, she probably isnt even a real sound boom operator to begin with, and is probably some poor soul we conned into thinking might get an acting career if she did this humiliation gig, whom we will probably never call on again.)
That you would take these DVDs for free and 'force' me to fire this woman (Again, because I value my own bonus more than her or her employment-- but never-mind that) whom I barely pay purely out of my own greed and do legal gymnastics to get out of responsibility for; Why that makes you a disgusting person! You should be ashamed of yourself!'
Message brought to you by the federal Homeland Security Administration.
One of the things holding me back from forking out the 100$ for the XBOX360 XNA license was my inability to make nice graphic images larger than your traditional ancient sprite types. (I am pretty good at making sprites, or at least I used to be. Been awhile since I have dabbled with it.)
I feel I could do some fantastic things with an algorithm like this.
Being able to convert low resolution pixel art into nice vectors like that is kick ass. I wish they had released a utility to try it out on other materials. (like my own..)
I do some of my best work in a work envelope around 100x100 pixels.
The PS3 has had a long standing, and almost glacially low, level of dedicated hacker interest compared to other contemporary systems which were targeted almost immediately after launch. Fail0verflow themselves even pointed out this timeline in their presentation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4loZGYqaZ7Ii
Throwing the bone to the homebrew community, however sparse on meat, was one of the biggest, if not *THE* biggest things (Given the very very sorry PKI implementation discovered years later...) sony did to help ensure profitability of their system in the face of piracy, since it removed the MOTIVE to hack the console! Why fix what isnt broken? If the console lets you run your own code already, why dig deeper?
The hackers like Geohot who were fuzzing the hypervisor were doing so to get a little more meat on that bone-- Not to raid the table, like you are implying. It wasn't until AFTER Sony took that bone away that the angry pitchfork carrying hackers teamed up to oust the baron from his lofty castle.
By taking the bone away totally, they created HUGE incentive to hack the system, along with deeply seated enmity. That enmity was kindled once before by the sony rootkit debacle, and once restoked, seems to have been one of the major motivational forces behind the seemingly systematic attacks against sony's infrastructure.
To do this right next time, to avoid further hacker enmity, and to prevent piracy on their next console (this one is irreversibly compromised), Sony needs to do the following:
1) Re-enable OtherOS like functionality, with access to the GPU. Access does not == white papers, so a sufficiently advanced custom GPU would take a lot of effort to map out functionality by the community, and would be an activity many would consider *fun*. While they are mapping out what the hardware can do, they are NOT trying to make copied games run. Without a whitepaper to work from, it would be very hard to compete with licensed commercial games. Your average NES emulator or Tetris clone would be about what you would expect to come out. Hardly a competitor for the latest Gears of War, or Red Faction type games.
2) Implement a correct and proper PKI. Give otherOS application code a unique public key to enable execution. Bonus if it uses a totally different private key too.
3) Stop retroactively removing features from consoles. It does not matter how unprofitable that functionality is-- DONT TOUCH IT!
4) Treat users with some dignity, stop warehousing their personal information, and store what information they DO collect on a server that isnt pitifully protected.
But no. You have already made up your mind that Geohot is Teh Badz, that hackers hacked the PS3 exclusively to cheat on online latter play, and that sony is the victim of these dreadful offenses.
No amount of factual reporting will change your mind either.
Please, correct me if I am mistaken in this evaluation, but your tone kept consistently on target with that viewpoint.
Not withstanding the lack of internal support for such a foolish thing as the rapture from within the insular and circular reasoning of biblical scriptures, nor the aburd levels of improbability that such a thing is even remotely possible--- coupled with the infinite capacity for human stupidity-- I have decided that tomorrow I will stay home, do laundry, and get my house ready for a friend of mine who intends to come visit me over Memorial Day week.
By evening time, If I havent been hoover vaccuum cleanered up into the celestial host against my will, I will be sitting back and drinking a nice glass of iced tea while I read about all the "Dissapointed" people who got all excited about this sillyness.
Afterwards I might play some good old Halflife 2, or watch a movie from netflix. I think Constantine might make a good choice, if it is available for streaming.
As a matter of curiosity, how could astronomers tell the difference between a distant spaceship equipped with an alcubierre warp drive and a rouge planetoid?
Both would exhibit localized micro-lensing, and depending on the tradjectory of the objects (in both cases), might appear to be standing still, or moving at sub-luminal speeds. (Since they are not emitting light that would red or blue shift if the object was moving toward or away.) The spaceship equipped with such a device would have to create a very strong dimple in spacetime to create a fast moving bubble, which would be mathematically identical to a gravity well, and would bend light in exactly the same ways.
I realize that such devices are de-facto science fictional, but this is a hypothetical question.
Excuse me. I have had my fill of the "Democrat" this and "Republican" that argument. It is tired, useless posturing.
The democratic national party has done what every political body has done since the organization of large government; it has arranged things to secure itself a profitable future. Pandering to it in the hopes of getting a scrap of meat on the bones thrown down is truly pathetic. Same goes for the republican GOP.
Here's an idea. Stop voting along party lines. Having the "wrong" letter under their name is not grounds to exculde a candidate, nor to blanket vote.
In fact-- Totally ignore that little letter under their names, because in the end it really is only there to distract you. Instead, vote for candidates based on their political histories, and corporate affiliation statuses (EG, if they are a corporate shill, they are a corporate shill, and DO NOT deserve your vote, regardless of what that little letter under their name is.)
I am SICK TO FUCKING DEATH of hearing "apologies" from little Ds and little Rs about what the big Ds and big Rs are doing, spewing false hope that "If only you vote for OUR guys" things will get better. They wont. There is no incentive for things to get better for anyone other than the corporations and their hired shills, the very representatives we are arguing over.
Here's an idea-- Instead of providing support to the people who are trying to kill us normal citizens at the behest of the monied elite, why dont we just let them die? They are losing support you say? GOOD! BOTH parties need to die.
The US *REALLY* needs a parlamentary system with many more than 2 parties involved, where the party status is determined by percentage of popular voter registration. We need to eliminate the "Independant" registration status, and make it what it really should be: A whole new fertile list of political affiliation choices.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is STILL VOTING FOR MORE EVIL.
Perhaps you dont need to switch at that frequency.
If you have two antennas of very close lengths, but sufficiently different in length to resonate at different discrete frequencies, you could combine them to produce a very reliable "Beat" wave of a much lower frequency that would have partial wave reinforcement from both antennas, that would be within the capabilities of current transisto technology.
Naturally this would sacrifice a huge amount of the potential energy of the waves you are trying to harvest, but it might make this technology buildable and testable in a shorter period of time, thus preventing it from dieing on the vine while waiting for faster silicon (or equivilent.)
There was a whole thread on the PSX-SCENE forums that was over 11 pages long discussing this issue. It was independently verified by several forum members. Sadly, I am at work right now and we have some draconian internet filtering set up, so I cant link to the forum thread. You can find it yourself though. It was in the news section, dated april 30, 2011.
Names and some other information were redacted to protect people from corporate retaliation; remember, this was released at the height of the Geohot lawsuit.
With the fukushima daiichi incident fresh and lingering in the japanese publics eyes, exhibiting additional signs of blatant regulatory capture is counter intuitive to fat-cat politicians, and their political careers.
Prior to the disaster, there was a revolving door between government employees and politicians and the (ahem) regulated nuclear power industry-- a connection that was lambasted by inquiries and probes into the reasons for the spectacular failure of Fukushima Daiichi in preventing a meltdown. Turned out that the captured regulatory agencies turned blind eyes to major warning signs about the reactor, and did so consistently.
Now that the shit has hit the fan, Japanese politicos are busy trying to save face, which is probably why they are taking such a hard stance against Sony. Additional embarrassment would not help them win back public confidence, while even token gestures like this one may distract and give talking points to weasel out of having hell come to breakfast.
There were also the glaring issues of not hashing passwords, storing all kinds of sensitive information in plain text, failing to offer sunset on old customer data, etc...
For the most part, I agree. (Recently had this very thing happen, in fact. I DO have PSN account, which I used for some casual PSP game downloads about 8 months ago. At the beginning of the month it seems I took a surprise vacation to Poland, and bought a bunch of expensive clothing in georgia the next day. Fancy that. I never left my house that weekend... Called my card company, filed fraud dispute forms, had my number terminated and a new one issued. Right as rain now.)
The problem that persists, however, is that SONY in their infinite wisdom, decided they needed to hold on to other pertinent information, such as security question answers, and other "Challenge" information that would greatly aid in additional attacks later, such as falsifying people's identities while contacting their credit card companies, and requesting new lines of credit at new addresses, etc.
If it was JUST CC numbers, it would be OK. If it was JUST names, that would be OK too--- But, Sony gave them an identity theft motherload that could cause problems for a considerable amount of time to come, if the fraudsters want to be persistent about it.
I personally consider the rather deep and blatant connection between big media and "National Security" to be a direct [defacto] admission that the US government feels it is in danger of severe insolvency if the intellectual property cartels are broken, and/or, leave the US.
It is one of the forms of handwriting on the wall that I mention when I say that the US is mortally ill, and in serious danger of economic implosion.
Heavy handed DHS actions like this on behalf of this industry without proper due process would seem to be an indication of just how serious the insolvency problem actually is. That is why it is a "national security" issue.
I do not know whether to take comfort in this insight, or to cower in fear at the notion that the economic fortunes of millions of americans might well hinge on the success or failure of a fundementally defective business model, due to the cumulative impact of many short-sighted politicians and corporate empires and their policies.
Frighteningly enough, it would clearly explain the recent behavior my nation has had on the world stage concerning the adoption and enforcement of draconian worldwide DMCA-Like laws, and heavy handed activities using ICANN.
That said, as terrible as the consequences would be, I actually DO hope that the DHS is UNSUCCESSFUL, and that the cartels are broken through public dissent, as per tools like the subject of this article, and outspoken civil defiance as seen in the population of Canada. (God I love the citizens of Canada. They are doing the world an unbeleivable favor by being so resolute.)
The kind of future that would come out of a strongly enforced worldwide DMCA is not the kind of future I want to live in. I would rather see my nation fall, and have the damage contained, than see the very fundemental attribute that makes humans special (Creative intellect, and the freedom to create and share ideas) regulated for monetary purposes of a tiny few, at the expense of the whole world's freedom for EVERYONE else.
Well done Mozilla! Ask those hard questions! Put feet to fire! I applaud your efforts!
The issue here, is that governments are often pressured to take away from people that have honestly labored for what they have, to give to people who are of less merit, and undeserving of those resources. (Be they skill-less and rich, or skill-less and poor. The trend does not discriminate in and of itself.)
This is because really skilled and/or capable people (people who consistently succeed on their own merits, regardless of source for that merit) are a minority, whereas the less skilled (comparably) and the totally skill-less far outnumber them.
Such is typical of any anomalous demographic.
In an ideal situation, the really skilled would be lauded. Their rarity would be naturally self limiting toward their influence in the society, and the normally skillfull would power the society, creating a trend toward being skillfull.
But the reality is of course different. What would happen instead is that the less skilled (Be it by fate, fortune, or choice, does not matter) would demand the boons and perks of the skilled, without gaining any skills themselves other than how to bilk the system.
As such, people who REALLY DO work hard to get what they have, often have it yanked out from under them by either greedy rich bastards, or by well meaning but politicially enabled robber barrons who think they are helping the poor.
Note: By this I mean things like the following scenario-- Hard working and brilliant inventor creates a new invention that could revolutionize the world--- Huge patent troll sues him into oblivion, gobbles down the invention he worked hard to create, gets richer at his expense, and he gets nothing. Possibly jail time, and a lifetime of debt.
Brilliant chemisty is on the verge of creating a new plastic derived exclusively from waste cellulose and plant oil that biodegrades safely. Goes to jail for owning chemical glassware for suspicion of creating drugs.
And or-- Hard working person manages to beat the odds, and get a useful start in the business world. As the business succeeds, laws intended to keep the ultra-wealthy from being too powerful come to bear against him, and push him back into the poor house. Whatever he used to get ahead is siezed by government of larger enterprise.
This is because of the EXTREME divide between rich and poor-- Any measure of success would cross that line. (How do you discriminate against the 1% population that owns >90% of wealth, without discriminating against the small demographic of upwardly mobile citizens that alone would be able to erode that state?)
EG-- both sides of the knife keep the creme from rising, which is exactly what it was meant to do. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and both actively engineer the situation, knowingly or unknowingly.
A true meritocracy would be radically different from what we have today, and would certainly be even MORE exclusive than the plutocracy we have right now... [Which would be bad!] You can always get money (Illegally, or legally, does not matter really once you have enough of it, which is why lazy and unscrupulous rich fuckers thrive in it. It is also why there is a tiny glimmer of chance that poor people can become upwardly mobile.) but you cannot magically become truly elite without real talent, or the means to hone it. Practice all you want, you wont become Beethoven or Bach unless you have talen; Paint all you want, you wont become a Rembrant without innate talent, which is naturally rare.
As such, a meritocracy would be riddled with REAL ivory tower mentalities, and as your oponent above points out, this is how the fuedal system started. All royal dynasties come from a skilled warrior, or from a wise administrator who unites a divided population.
What would come out of a meritocracy would be the decendents of really smart and capable people riding the coat-tails of those people's legacies, rather than forging their own--- because they are statistically unlikely to be able to do so-- coupled with the sense of entitlement that being r
1) Did you hunt? A) Yes. Found it boring. Know how to do it though if pressed. (Found making and laying snares more profitable.) Also know how to identify wild edible plants, and how to process them. Found the latter more enjoyable than hunting anyway. Plants are awesome. Also understand the importance of avoiding over harvesting.
2) Help a cow deliver a calf? A) Having been raised in an agricultural environment, and having been exposed to animal husbandry-- YES. Yes I have, and yes, yes I do know how to pull a calf. Thank you. I have done it several times, and could still do it if needed.
3) Help building the house? A), No, but I have helped rebuild roofs. (No, not tarpaper and shingles. I mean support timbers) I have also helped build barns. Very similar to your houses in no less respect. Same principles apply. Also well practiced in making survival structures. Lots of fun for young and old.
4) Make bread? A) From powdered yeast, or from cultured sponge? In either case-- YES, and YES. The latter is much more challenging, and is actually quite fun. Hard to get people to not throw out your sponge when they find it in the fridge though. Gives you a good lesson in keeping your kitchen clean so you get the right kind of culture when working from sponge too. Good for historical lessons on why breweries and bakeries were not normally in close proximity to each other as well. I would highly recommend it as a home lession in microbiology and home economics.
5) Fix your own car and fully understand it? I do fix my own car, but I dont fully understand it. The automatic transmission alone is absurdly complicated in the nitty gritty of how it operates-- Something to do with over a thousand moving parts and complicated fluid dynamics involved in how it shifts gears. The basic understanding is there, but not complete understanding. So "Sort-of". I have seriously considered building an electric vehicle as well. Really want to get my hands on some tritium based beta-voltaic cells. I dont mind painting the big radioactive sticker on my car, if it means I dont have to recharge it for 25 years.;) As far as useful radio isotopes go, Tritium is pretty harmless. Sadly, the prevaling ignorance, fear mongering, and paranoia from government, industry, and other citizens makes sourcing such batteries nearly impossible unless you are a military contractor. Still looking for a private sector distributor... I really dont want to use dirty heavy-isotope pacemaker batteries. Nasty isotopes in those.
6) Build your own radio? A) Actually, YEAH! I DID build my own AM radio once-- Course, I had instructions and it was part of a kit, but yes-- I DID create my own crystal set AM radio. Really neat. Further, now that I am older I understand how the crystal set radio works well enough to build one without a kit. I might do that some time when I am bored.
So... I guess I score a 5.5 out of 6 on your quiz.
No. I am not "Old". I am not even 30 yet. Oh yeah, I can also spin, weave, crochet, know how to produce vegetable textile dyes, and can synthesize simple pharmecuticals (like aspirin), and a whole host of other neat stuff. (Like make rope, fishing nets, ceramics, glazes, glass,...... You get the idea. This *IS* slashdot. Geeks come in a wide variety of flavors.)
I realize I am abnormal in that respect--- I am an information and skill junkie; LOVE learning new things rather than say, A porn junky, or sex addict like most people are these days-- but that does not invalidate the GP. I am this way BECAUSE my parents encouraged "Dangerous learning activities." If they had kept me in a plastic bubble like most people do with their kids these days, (OMG! They might come into contact with GERMS! Quick, get the hand sanitizer!) I would not be anywhere NEAR as capable and skilled as I am today. I wouldnt even be the same person!
I am apalled at the state of education of other people around me. No concept at all of how the rea
Sadly, The US does not refine any of the raw materials used to make airplanes, with exception to the petrochemical side. The US has maybe 2 functional steel mills, and a handful of aluminum plants... Nearly all of our raw materials are sourced overseas. We dont produce nearly enough raw material for the combined consumption needs of our populace.
If the US Dollar tanked severely, we would be unable to acquire the raw materials to produce anything, and the factories we DO have would sit empty. Those that somehow stay open would have to charge absurd prices.
That is why we prop up the US dollar with intellectual properties licensing, and with military might.
Incidentally, it is also why we are becoming more and more like a police state.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you are saying that geekiness is almost a direct correlary to autistic like behaviors?
Extreme fixation on a specific topic, or subset of topics is one of the defining clinical characteristic of autistic spectrum disorder.....
(So is social awkwardness.)
The problem is that "Common sense" (admittedly lacking in the people who drive off bridges. I did not say I did so, only that my TTN software suggested that I do so, then bitched mightily about my being offroute when I failed to do so when it said to. I believe my exact words were "Fuck that shit!" before continuing over the bridge in the sane and rational fashion.) is extremely difficult to imbue to a computer.
Automatic driving systems would be at the mercy of the quality of the GPS maps, the GPS reciever hardware, and the quality of the sensors it uses to determine what lane it is in, etc...
If you have ever performed automotive work, you would know exactly what I mean when I say that delicate computer hardware, like precision optical sensors/cameras, and the like, are not going to hold up under the adverse road conditions present underneath a vehicle's hood, or in the undercarriage.
Mud, bug splatter, rust, oily road grime, etc are all going to take their tolls on the utility of any external sensor systems built into such vehicles, which means that the vehicles are going to need to rely more heavily on GPS, and on inter-vehicle communication, and use exterior sensors as more of a "fuzzy logic" decision factor. (Otherwise your vehicle would come to a screeching halt after getting mud-splattered by the cattle truck in front of you on the highway, as the optical sensors would insist that you were mere inches from an obstacle.)
This would mean that the vehicle would need to be doing the following things:
Retrieving GPS timestamps, and calculating rough coordinates and vector.
Collecting data from external sensors for fine tuning.
Collecting data from other vehicles about speed and distance (and possibly collision hazards, like obstacles.)
Store all that data, and decide accordingly.
Given the highly volatile, and complicated natures of that data, something a little more sophisticated than the fuel injection computer built into modern vehicles would be required, which means there are possibilities to hijack execution with a well formed exploit. At that point, you can override sensor data, and all kinds of things.
I didnt say it would be easy, only that it would be possible. Given the relentless march of "For the Lulz!" types of hacks lately, do you really want to be in a vehicle that even remotely has such a vulnerability?
The operative term there is "Sensible."
You have at least 3 ways to use that word in this particular situation:
1) Sensible from the systems design point of view, where security of the vehicle and its occupant are given priority. (the one you chose.)
2) Sensible from the hardware design point of view, where things like dirt, corrosion, vibrational damage, etc are all going to deteriorate sensor function, leading to the vehicle thinking it is approaching a wall or other obstacle when it really isnt, because it has occluded sensors from the MAC truck in front of it not having mud flaps, or any other potential hazard that would make reliance on sensor telemetry unreliable without festidious maintenance.
3) The finance boy's idea of sensible, in terms of pricepoints for implementations of both previous systems.
Any automatically driving vehicle would have to simultanously meet all 3 definitions of sensible to avoid the kinds of problems I am saying would plaugue the system.
Am I the only one that sees the potential for serious abuses should driverless vehicles become massively adopted and standardized?
Roadways are ALWAYS under construction, which means that static map data inside the vehicle is never going to be an option. The vehicles will *HAVE* to connect to the internet in some fashion to pull updated maps.
It might be well within the tinfoil hat arena, but I can clearly see this being used to kill somebody. Case in point:
The Turn-by-Turn navigation software I used to use fell out of date by about a year. "Thats not too bad.." I said to myself, so I decided that I wouldnt update it before my next roadtrip when I went to go visit a friend of mine in another city out of state. Low and behold, the navigation software told me to turn *OFF THE TOP OF A BRIDGE* onto the parkway below, in order to reach my destination.
Reason: The software was unaware that I was crossing a bridge, and not an intersection.
Now, imagine an automatically driving vehicle, a sleeping diplomat inside with a hangover, and a similar malfunction. (Either purposeful or accidental, doesnt matter. The diplomat will be just as dead.)
A little step further, and you have malicious map injection attacks, with the intent to redirect vehicles at the hacker's whim. Sony losing millions of customers information would seem like small potatoes compared to hackers sending their CEOs to their deaths.
Then you have the whole can of worms of the vehicle-to-vehicle communcation cells that some automotive engineers want to try to implement to help "Improve roadway safety." Abuse of these transmissions could give a whole new meaning to the term "Road hog."
Right up to the point where legal turns around and talks candidly with you about the influx of impact statement requests...
Something along the lines of this, perhaps:
Director of Legal services:
Didnt this request get denied last month?
Dir of IT:
Yes, it did.
Legal:
You do realize that time is money, and that filling my inbox with requests I have previously denied, and given reasons for denying, an uncountable number of times is wasteful of both, right?
IT:
Yes. However, I do not have the authority to simply say no, and cite your previous statements to the managers when they pitch a fit and demand that these "requests" be implemented.
Legal:
I see... I will take care of it myself then.
3 days later---
Dir of HR:
Do you know why we are having this meeting, [Dir of IT]?
IT:
Uh-- no, I really dont know why you called me in here--- Were in the middle of a server upgrade at the moment, so I know it must be important though...
HR:
Oh yes. At the last managers meeting, the dir of the legal department told us you were behaving in an insubordinate manner, and fed him some angry excuses about why you could not comply with a simple request--- I dont think I need to explain why requests from the legal department need to be complied with...
---
And there you have it.
In any sufficiently large enterprise, certainly any that would be large enough to have a legal department, the managers will have long ago implemented political hegemonies that indemnify themselves personally of any wrongdoing. Rather than see your plight as the IT director, being shafted--- Legal is simply tired of repeatedly saying no for you like a sock puppet. This is because THEY have no problem saying that word, and it should be a simple fix for you to say it instead, and just cite the previous reply from legal concerning such matters.
Naturally, the part that will stick at the managers meeting is that you told LEGAL that you could not comply.... Not the office bureaucracy reasons why you had to.
As such, it will ultimately come right back around to the same tired, well-trodden path of decrying IT as not being a team player, being insubordinate, stubborn, and costing the company money and time. [When in reality what is really costing the company time and money is the preconception that board members and other senior management are always right.]
Sockpuppeting legal might buy you some time, and might help you win a few altercations, but managers have short memories, and tend to be repeat offenders for destructive/illegal feature requests. Keep that in mind.
The problem with most fusion reactors is that they produce copious amounts of neutrons which do not directly contribute to power generation, and require extensive shielding to avoid being a problem. That shielding itself will then become radioactive over time... Additionally, the energies needed to continually burn the fusion plasma exceeds the useful energy collected from the reaction. Often by an order of magnitude.
Now, the silly idea. You dont need to achieve direct over-unity on power generation from the fusion reaction itself, if you capture a sufficient amount of the resulting neutron spray in a suitably reactive shielding layer, and total energy release (including neutron spray) is greater than energy input. (read on.)
The material I had in mind with the silly idea was a high density carbon aerogel, filled with liquid nitrogen, and sealed to maintain pressure.
As the fusion reactor happily churns out neutrons, these will interact with either the carbon or the nitrogen in the shielding layer. Both interactions ultimately lead to the creation of carbon 14, which is a known beta-decay element, which decays back into nitrogen, emits an electron, and a neutrino. Neutrinos are harmless, the nitrogen isotope created is non-radioactive, and the electron can be directly used for power generation.
The issue of degredation of the cathode would be partially resolved as well, by continuing neutron exposure. The idea is to cause an equilibrium of nitrogen->C14 | C14->nitrogen reactions, so that the carbon components of the shielding will be continually regenerated by the neutron exposure. C14 is still carbon, and would still have semiconductor properties, in addition to its betavoltaic properties.
Sadly, that is all the further my silly idea went, because I hit a brick wall with paywalled neuclear physics data sets concerning what hardness the neutrons need to be for efficient capture, and at what rates that capture occurs, so I could not calculate how thick the shielding layer would need to be, nor at what energies the catalytic fusion reaction would need to burn. However, the fusion reactor would appear to able to be something as simple as a farnsworth fusor, since the goal is to release as many neutrons as possible to seed the shielding layer.
(If anyone knows where I can get such information for free, I would still like to work out the specifics as a thought experiment.)
Once sufficiently primed, the betavoltaic nature of the system coupled with the absurdly long half life of carbon 14 (thousands of years...) would mean that after the crucial incubation period, it would provide continual, and consistent electrical output for potentially thousands of years, with minimal additional fusion input.
[EG-- while total rate of decay is low, due to long halflife, the high concentration of C14 in the chamber would mean useful numbers of decay reactions would be statistically likely. You simply need to supply sufficient neutron flux of the right hardness to keep the system going after that point.]
Bonus-- It would make a great place to store all that carbon that is clogging up the atmosphere's ability to re-radiate IR radiation back into space.
Watched the video.
Message: Take these pirated movies, and this woman (Sound stage tech) loses her job.
Sub-message: The people that still take the movies are heartless scum.
As article points out, shameless PSA produced by NBC; proffered by HSA.
That over with--
1) This assertion (Take pirate DVD, woman loses job) makes a series of fundamentally broken assumptions:
i) Content production companies (like studios-- like the one which made the PSA) live so hand-to-mouth that the failure to monopoly dominate sales/transfers of the content they create will cause them to lay off workers.
Reality: The phase 'hollywood accounting' exists for a reason. Any such 'Hand-to-mouth' type economics exists exclusively on paper, to avoid paying actors, authors and film crew while simultaneously generating huge profits for the production company. It exists exclusively as a contrived mechanism to avoid paying royalty money on the very sales the video harps about. This makes the video a hypocritical, bold faced lie from the get-go.
ii) The act of taking the pirated DVD would cause the person to lose her job, because you are not paying-- EG-- the lost sale angle.
Reality: Multiple redundant studies have shown that consummate media pirates on average BUY MORE products than their 'legitimate purchases only' counterparts.
Additionally, the pirate is only interested in the product to begin with because he does not have to invest anything; EG, the appropriation of the pirated DVDs are NOT lost sales.
Without the piracy option, the consumer would simply not have consumed, reducing media penetration, and realistically doing far worse than what piracy allegedly would have done. At least when the product gets pirated, the pirate gets a direct assessment of the quality of the product, and if it is any good, would now have direct motivation to buy additional products. Eg- Pirate downloads first matrix movie-- likes it, orders the trilogy box set. The subsequent sale would never have taken place if the initial piracy had never occurred. The notion that the pirate would have just sunk down 50$ for the box set of movies he has never seen and is dubious about, is pure insanity.
--------------------
What I personally took away from the video PSA:
'See this poor token production worker? See her frazzled hair!? Doesnt she look pathetic?'
See me? I am in my fancy suit, and have perfect teeth-- Isn't it terrible that you would cause me to take money away from this poor frazzled worker because you would dare upset the apple cart?
Never-mind that I am obviously not hurting for money (As seen by my quarterly finance reports), or that I am a lieing shyster who personally is responsible for this poor token floor worker's plight because I care about my corporate bonuses more than her and her welfare---OR that I am being a hypocritical bastard by passing that blame on to you...
Just Pretend that simply isn't the case and embrace the fantasy we spin for you about how it is YOUR fault she suffers, and it's all because you don't impulse blanket-buy everything we shit out on store shelves blindly! (In fact, she probably isnt even a real sound boom operator to begin with, and is probably some poor soul we conned into thinking might get an acting career if she did this humiliation gig, whom we will probably never call on again.)
That you would take these DVDs for free and 'force' me to fire this woman (Again, because I value my own bonus more than her or her employment-- but never-mind that) whom I barely pay purely out of my own greed and do legal gymnastics to get out of responsibility for; Why that makes you a disgusting person! You should be ashamed of yourself!'
Message brought to you by the federal Homeland Security Administration.
Agreed! EVERYONE knows that GOOD engineers use duct tape instead!
(You can solve ANYTHING with well-used duct tape!)
One of the things holding me back from forking out the 100$ for the XBOX360 XNA license was my inability to make nice graphic images larger than your traditional ancient sprite types. (I am pretty good at making sprites, or at least I used to be. Been awhile since I have dabbled with it.)
I feel I could do some fantastic things with an algorithm like this.
Being able to convert low resolution pixel art into nice vectors like that is kick ass. I wish they had released a utility to try it out on other materials. (like my own..)
I do some of my best work in a work envelope around 100x100 pixels.
I agree. Classic race to the bottom in the bad way. Seems many business are penny-wise and pound-foolish these days.
You see it all the time in telecom for some reason.
the whole OH NOEZ! We have to spend money on INFRASTRUCTURE!? I wanted a fat bonus this year! bullshit.
Wait-- What!?
The PS3 has had a long standing, and almost glacially low, level of dedicated hacker interest compared to other contemporary systems which were targeted almost immediately after launch. Fail0verflow themselves even pointed out this timeline in their presentation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4loZGYqaZ7Ii
Throwing the bone to the homebrew community, however sparse on meat, was one of the biggest, if not *THE* biggest things (Given the very very sorry PKI implementation discovered years later...) sony did to help ensure profitability of their system in the face of piracy, since it removed the MOTIVE to hack the console! Why fix what isnt broken? If the console lets you run your own code already, why dig deeper?
The hackers like Geohot who were fuzzing the hypervisor were doing so to get a little more meat on that bone-- Not to raid the table, like you are implying. It wasn't until AFTER Sony took that bone away that the angry pitchfork carrying hackers teamed up to oust the baron from his lofty castle.
By taking the bone away totally, they created HUGE incentive to hack the system, along with deeply seated enmity. That enmity was kindled once before by the sony rootkit debacle, and once restoked, seems to have been one of the major motivational forces behind the seemingly systematic attacks against sony's infrastructure.
To do this right next time, to avoid further hacker enmity, and to prevent piracy on their next console (this one is irreversibly compromised), Sony needs to do the following:
1) Re-enable OtherOS like functionality, with access to the GPU. Access does not == white papers, so a sufficiently advanced custom GPU would take a lot of effort to map out functionality by the community, and would be an activity many would consider *fun*. While they are mapping out what the hardware can do, they are NOT trying to make copied games run. Without a whitepaper to work from, it would be very hard to compete with licensed commercial games. Your average NES emulator or Tetris clone would be about what you would expect to come out. Hardly a competitor for the latest Gears of War, or Red Faction type games.
2) Implement a correct and proper PKI. Give otherOS application code a unique public key to enable execution. Bonus if it uses a totally different private key too.
3) Stop retroactively removing features from consoles. It does not matter how unprofitable that functionality is-- DONT TOUCH IT!
4) Treat users with some dignity, stop warehousing their personal information, and store what information they DO collect on a server that isnt pitifully protected.
But no. You have already made up your mind that Geohot is Teh Badz, that hackers hacked the PS3 exclusively to cheat on online latter play, and that sony is the victim of these dreadful offenses.
No amount of factual reporting will change your mind either.
Please, correct me if I am mistaken in this evaluation, but your tone kept consistently on target with that viewpoint.
Not withstanding the lack of internal support for such a foolish thing as the rapture from within the insular and circular reasoning of biblical scriptures, nor the aburd levels of improbability that such a thing is even remotely possible--- coupled with the infinite capacity for human stupidity-- I have decided that tomorrow I will stay home, do laundry, and get my house ready for a friend of mine who intends to come visit me over Memorial Day week.
By evening time, If I havent been hoover vaccuum cleanered up into the celestial host against my will, I will be sitting back and drinking a nice glass of iced tea while I read about all the "Dissapointed" people who got all excited about this sillyness.
Afterwards I might play some good old Halflife 2, or watch a movie from netflix. I think Constantine might make a good choice, if it is available for streaming.
As a matter of curiosity, how could astronomers tell the difference between a distant spaceship equipped with an alcubierre warp drive and a rouge planetoid?
Both would exhibit localized micro-lensing, and depending on the tradjectory of the objects (in both cases), might appear to be standing still, or moving at sub-luminal speeds. (Since they are not emitting light that would red or blue shift if the object was moving toward or away.) The spaceship equipped with such a device would have to create a very strong dimple in spacetime to create a fast moving bubble, which would be mathematically identical to a gravity well, and would bend light in exactly the same ways.
I realize that such devices are de-facto science fictional, but this is a hypothetical question.
Excuse me. I have had my fill of the "Democrat" this and "Republican" that argument. It is tired, useless posturing.
The democratic national party has done what every political body has done since the organization of large government; it has arranged things to secure itself a profitable future. Pandering to it in the hopes of getting a scrap of meat on the bones thrown down is truly pathetic. Same goes for the republican GOP.
Here's an idea. Stop voting along party lines.
Having the "wrong" letter under their name is not grounds to exculde a candidate, nor to blanket vote.
In fact-- Totally ignore that little letter under their names, because in the end it really is only there to distract you. Instead, vote for candidates based on their political histories, and corporate affiliation statuses (EG, if they are a corporate shill, they are a corporate shill, and DO NOT deserve your vote, regardless of what that little letter under their name is.)
I am SICK TO FUCKING DEATH of hearing "apologies" from little Ds and little Rs about what the big Ds and big Rs are doing, spewing false hope that "If only you vote for OUR guys" things will get better. They wont. There is no incentive for things to get better for anyone other than the corporations and their hired shills, the very representatives we are arguing over.
Here's an idea-- Instead of providing support to the people who are trying to kill us normal citizens at the behest of the monied elite, why dont we just let them die? They are losing support you say? GOOD! BOTH parties need to die.
The US *REALLY* needs a parlamentary system with many more than 2 parties involved, where the party status is determined by percentage of popular voter registration. We need to eliminate the "Independant" registration status, and make it what it really should be: A whole new fertile list of political affiliation choices.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is STILL VOTING FOR MORE EVIL.
GAHH!
An odd idea just occured to me...
Perhaps you dont need to switch at that frequency.
If you have two antennas of very close lengths, but sufficiently different in length to resonate at different discrete frequencies, you could combine them to produce a very reliable "Beat" wave of a much lower frequency that would have partial wave reinforcement from both antennas, that would be within the capabilities of current transisto technology.
Naturally this would sacrifice a huge amount of the potential energy of the waves you are trying to harvest, but it might make this technology buildable and testable in a shorter period of time, thus preventing it from dieing on the vine while waiting for faster silicon (or equivilent.)
There was a whole thread on the PSX-SCENE forums that was over 11 pages long discussing this issue. It was independently verified by several forum members. Sadly, I am at work right now and we have some draconian internet filtering set up, so I cant link to the forum thread. You can find it yourself though. It was in the news section, dated april 30, 2011.
Names and some other information were redacted to protect people from corporate retaliation; remember, this was released at the height of the Geohot lawsuit.
I see!
I had heard it reported that they transmitted cleartext information over the wire protocol, and even read a packet dump taken some 2 weeks or so before the breach at PSX-SCENE. Hackers there reported that cc data and other sensitive information was sent in cleartext.
With the fukushima daiichi incident fresh and lingering in the japanese publics eyes, exhibiting additional signs of blatant regulatory capture is counter intuitive to fat-cat politicians, and their political careers.
Prior to the disaster, there was a revolving door between government employees and politicians and the (ahem) regulated nuclear power industry-- a connection that was lambasted by inquiries and probes into the reasons for the spectacular failure of Fukushima Daiichi in preventing a meltdown. Turned out that the captured regulatory agencies turned blind eyes to major warning signs about the reactor, and did so consistently.
Now that the shit has hit the fan, Japanese politicos are busy trying to save face, which is probably why they are taking such a hard stance against Sony. Additional embarrassment would not help them win back public confidence, while even token gestures like this one may distract and give talking points to weasel out of having hell come to breakfast.
There were also the glaring issues of not hashing passwords, storing all kinds of sensitive information in plain text, failing to offer sunset on old customer data, etc...
For the most part, I agree. (Recently had this very thing happen, in fact. I DO have PSN account, which I used for some casual PSP game downloads about 8 months ago. At the beginning of the month it seems I took a surprise vacation to Poland, and bought a bunch of expensive clothing in georgia the next day. Fancy that. I never left my house that weekend... Called my card company, filed fraud dispute forms, had my number terminated and a new one issued. Right as rain now.)
The problem that persists, however, is that SONY in their infinite wisdom, decided they needed to hold on to other pertinent information, such as security question answers, and other "Challenge" information that would greatly aid in additional attacks later, such as falsifying people's identities while contacting their credit card companies, and requesting new lines of credit at new addresses, etc.
If it was JUST CC numbers, it would be OK. If it was JUST names, that would be OK too--- But, Sony gave them an identity theft motherload that could cause problems for a considerable amount of time to come, if the fraudsters want to be persistent about it.
I personally consider the rather deep and blatant connection between big media and "National Security" to be a direct [defacto] admission that the US government feels it is in danger of severe insolvency if the intellectual property cartels are broken, and/or, leave the US.
It is one of the forms of handwriting on the wall that I mention when I say that the US is mortally ill, and in serious danger of economic implosion.
Heavy handed DHS actions like this on behalf of this industry without proper due process would seem to be an indication of just how serious the insolvency problem actually is. That is why it is a "national security" issue.
I do not know whether to take comfort in this insight, or to cower in fear at the notion that the economic fortunes of millions of americans might well hinge on the success or failure of a fundementally defective business model, due to the cumulative impact of many short-sighted politicians and corporate empires and their policies.
Frighteningly enough, it would clearly explain the recent behavior my nation has had on the world stage concerning the adoption and enforcement of draconian worldwide DMCA-Like laws, and heavy handed activities using ICANN.
That said, as terrible as the consequences would be, I actually DO hope that the DHS is UNSUCCESSFUL, and that the cartels are broken through public dissent, as per tools like the subject of this article, and outspoken civil defiance as seen in the population of Canada. (God I love the citizens of Canada. They are doing the world an unbeleivable favor by being so resolute.)
The kind of future that would come out of a strongly enforced worldwide DMCA is not the kind of future I want to live in. I would rather see my nation fall, and have the damage contained, than see the very fundemental attribute that makes humans special (Creative intellect, and the freedom to create and share ideas) regulated for monetary purposes of a tiny few, at the expense of the whole world's freedom for EVERYONE else.
Well done Mozilla! Ask those hard questions! Put feet to fire! I applaud your efforts!
The issue here, is that governments are often pressured to take away from people that have honestly labored for what they have, to give to people who are of less merit, and undeserving of those resources. (Be they skill-less and rich, or skill-less and poor. The trend does not discriminate in and of itself.)
This is because really skilled and/or capable people (people who consistently succeed on their own merits, regardless of source for that merit) are a minority, whereas the less skilled (comparably) and the totally skill-less far outnumber them.
Such is typical of any anomalous demographic.
In an ideal situation, the really skilled would be lauded. Their rarity would be naturally self limiting toward their influence in the society, and the normally skillfull would power the society, creating a trend toward being skillfull.
But the reality is of course different. What would happen instead is that the less skilled (Be it by fate, fortune, or choice, does not matter) would demand the boons and perks of the skilled, without gaining any skills themselves other than how to bilk the system.
As such, people who REALLY DO work hard to get what they have, often have it yanked out from under them by either greedy rich bastards, or by well meaning but politicially enabled robber barrons who think they are helping the poor.
Note: By this I mean things like the following scenario-- Hard working and brilliant inventor creates a new invention that could revolutionize the world--- Huge patent troll sues him into oblivion, gobbles down the invention he worked hard to create, gets richer at his expense, and he gets nothing. Possibly jail time, and a lifetime of debt.
Brilliant chemisty is on the verge of creating a new plastic derived exclusively from waste cellulose and plant oil that biodegrades safely. Goes to jail for owning chemical glassware for suspicion of creating drugs.
And or-- Hard working person manages to beat the odds, and get a useful start in the business world. As the business succeeds, laws intended to keep the ultra-wealthy from being too powerful come to bear against him, and push him back into the poor house. Whatever he used to get ahead is siezed by government of larger enterprise.
This is because of the EXTREME divide between rich and poor-- Any measure of success would cross that line. (How do you discriminate against the 1% population that owns >90% of wealth, without discriminating against the small demographic of upwardly mobile citizens that alone would be able to erode that state?)
EG-- both sides of the knife keep the creme from rising, which is exactly what it was meant to do. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, and both actively engineer the situation, knowingly or unknowingly.
A true meritocracy would be radically different from what we have today, and would certainly be even MORE exclusive than the plutocracy we have right now... [Which would be bad!] You can always get money (Illegally, or legally, does not matter really once you have enough of it, which is why lazy and unscrupulous rich fuckers thrive in it. It is also why there is a tiny glimmer of chance that poor people can become upwardly mobile.) but you cannot magically become truly elite without real talent, or the means to hone it. Practice all you want, you wont become Beethoven or Bach unless you have talen; Paint all you want, you wont become a Rembrant without innate talent, which is naturally rare.
As such, a meritocracy would be riddled with REAL ivory tower mentalities, and as your oponent above points out, this is how the fuedal system started. All royal dynasties come from a skilled warrior, or from a wise administrator who unites a divided population.
What would come out of a meritocracy would be the decendents of really smart and capable people riding the coat-tails of those people's legacies, rather than forging their own--- because they are statistically unlikely to be able to do so-- coupled with the sense of entitlement that being r
1) Did you hunt?
A) Yes. Found it boring. Know how to do it though if pressed. (Found making and laying snares more profitable.) Also know how to identify wild edible plants, and how to process them. Found the latter more enjoyable than hunting anyway. Plants are awesome. Also understand the importance of avoiding over harvesting.
2) Help a cow deliver a calf?
A) Having been raised in an agricultural environment, and having been exposed to animal husbandry-- YES. Yes I have, and yes, yes I do know how to pull a calf. Thank you. I have done it several times, and could still do it if needed.
3) Help building the house?
A), No, but I have helped rebuild roofs. (No, not tarpaper and shingles. I mean support timbers) I have also helped build barns. Very similar to your houses in no less respect. Same principles apply. Also well practiced in making survival structures. Lots of fun for young and old.
4) Make bread?
A) From powdered yeast, or from cultured sponge? In either case-- YES, and YES. The latter is much more challenging, and is actually quite fun. Hard to get people to not throw out your sponge when they find it in the fridge though. Gives you a good lesson in keeping your kitchen clean so you get the right kind of culture when working from sponge too. Good for historical lessons on why breweries and bakeries were not normally in close proximity to each other as well. I would highly recommend it as a home lession in microbiology and home economics.
5) Fix your own car and fully understand it? ;) As far as useful radio isotopes go, Tritium is pretty harmless. Sadly, the prevaling ignorance, fear mongering, and paranoia from government, industry, and other citizens makes sourcing such batteries nearly impossible unless you are a military contractor. Still looking for a private sector distributor... I really dont want to use dirty heavy-isotope pacemaker batteries. Nasty isotopes in those.
I do fix my own car, but I dont fully understand it. The automatic transmission alone is absurdly complicated in the nitty gritty of how it operates-- Something to do with over a thousand moving parts and complicated fluid dynamics involved in how it shifts gears. The basic understanding is there, but not complete understanding. So "Sort-of". I have seriously considered building an electric vehicle as well. Really want to get my hands on some tritium based beta-voltaic cells. I dont mind painting the big radioactive sticker on my car, if it means I dont have to recharge it for 25 years.
6) Build your own radio?
A) Actually, YEAH! I DID build my own AM radio once-- Course, I had instructions and it was part of a kit, but yes-- I DID create my own crystal set AM radio. Really neat. Further, now that I am older I understand how the crystal set radio works well enough to build one without a kit. I might do that some time when I am bored.
So... I guess I score a 5.5 out of 6 on your quiz.
No. I am not "Old". I am not even 30 yet. Oh yeah, I can also spin, weave, crochet, know how to produce vegetable textile dyes, and can synthesize simple pharmecuticals (like aspirin), and a whole host of other neat stuff. (Like make rope, fishing nets, ceramics, glazes, glass, ... ... You get the idea. This *IS* slashdot. Geeks come in a wide variety of flavors.)
I realize I am abnormal in that respect--- I am an information and skill junkie; LOVE learning new things rather than say, A porn junky, or sex addict like most people are these days-- but that does not invalidate the GP. I am this way BECAUSE my parents encouraged "Dangerous learning activities."
If they had kept me in a plastic bubble like most people do with their kids these days, (OMG! They might come into contact with GERMS! Quick, get the hand sanitizer!) I would not be anywhere NEAR as capable and skilled as I am today. I wouldnt even be the same person!
I am apalled at the state of education of other people around me. No concept at all of how the rea
I work in Aerospace myself!
Sadly, The US does not refine any of the raw materials used to make airplanes, with exception to the petrochemical side. The US has maybe 2 functional steel mills, and a handful of aluminum plants... Nearly all of our raw materials are sourced overseas. We dont produce nearly enough raw material for the combined consumption needs of our populace.
If the US Dollar tanked severely, we would be unable to acquire the raw materials to produce anything, and the factories we DO have would sit empty. Those that somehow stay open would have to charge absurd prices.
That is why we prop up the US dollar with intellectual properties licensing, and with military might.
Incidentally, it is also why we are becoming more and more like a police state.