What do you mean by realistically? If you mean, for example, that the sun in your game solar system attracts the spacecraft, and if you wait long enough you'll unfortunately fall into the sun, then I'd say your game is a bit too realistic. The gravitational force on a spacecraft at any significant distance from a star extremely slight in comparison to the forces acting on the craft locally, such as thrust and collisions.
Even if the gravitational force were extremely strong, it wouldn't make much difference in space battle. You still point the missile at the enemy and shoot it. You, the missile, and the enemy are all accelerating toward the sun at equal rates. The fact that a G-field is present makes absolutely no difference, since the field is uniform, at least when you are quite far from the sun and the spacecraft are relatively close to each other. In a fun game, the craft will not be far apart, since it's not much fun to fire on an an enemy when you can't see the pretty explosion.
Look, I'm going on and on about a specific example, when my real point was much more general. "Realistic" behavior of objects can be very closely approximated with very simple methods. The player will not know the difference. Problems such as integrations "blowing up" can be easily avoided simply by looking for the blow-up and correcting for it.
First of all, let me say that I will be getting my degree in physics in a few months, and I'm well versed in physical simulation. Not in the game arena, but in the applications arena.
Runge-Kutta is a complex method for quickly and accurately solving differential equations by numerical means. It is used instead of simple Euler iteration because it is equivalent in speed and gives much more accurate results. It works by adjusting the timestep dynamically to skip over regions where the system is changing slowly, and to integrate more carefully when the system is changing quickly.
This is all well and good when you are trying to do something important, like simulating heat flow within in a heatsink. But for simulating the orbits of planets around a star, for example? What a waste of time! The orbit is elliptical, so just simulate a freaking ellipse!
What about space missiles? Do you need Euler integration? No! There is a closed-form solution to the linear acceleration problem -- it's a quadratic. This procedure does not give low error. It gives zero error.
I read this guy's articles several months ago. I thought he was off his rocker then, and I still think so now.
Re:XP? Wouldn't Linux be just as easy?
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I really doubt something like that could make its way into the kernel. Kernel changes are always submitted as patches, and are always reviewed. Imagine if someone submitted a two-liner backdoor (very improbable). It would be caught immediately. Now, imagine that someone submitted a five hundred line patch with a backdoor (more likely). It will be just as carefully scrutinized, by virtue of the fact that it is a large patch. In either case, the evil code will never make its way into the kernel.
Now, third-party patches such as those at linuxhq.com are not scrutinized by the kernel team, and these patches might possibly contain nasty code (as well as simply poor code). But if you're downloading third-party patches and applying them without reading them, you're an idiot. Can't read C, or don't understand kernel internals? Then don't apply third-party patches.
It would be far easier, as you suggest, to insert backdoors and other nasties into userspace open source programs. When was the last time you downloaded a source tarball and actually read all the code before building and installing it? The most evil of all would be a trojan in gcc -- all programs compiled with the trojaned compiler would themselves be trojans. After a while all source remnants of the trojan would be wiped away, but the trojan code would still be lurking in all our binaries. Horrible thought.
Like you say, be careful. Just because you're running Linux, or you use open source, doesn't make you immune to viruses, backdoors, trojans, or anything else.
DCOP, CORBA, UNO, XPCOM, COM, JavaBeans, etc were all created with the same goal in mind: enabling transparent RPC between desktop and server applications, cross-network and cross-platform. As far as I know, none have succeeded in this dream.
DCOP: although I was excited about DCOP the first time I saw it, it hasn't evolved very much since then and has never reached the level of flexibility that complicated distributed RPC apps demand.
CORBA: on the opposite end of the spectrum from DCOP, CORBA is bloated and slow, but it runs on almost every UNIX and maybe that will be what saves it.
COM/DCOM: to be perfectly honest, MS has done a fairly good job with these. Too bad they are built on an ABI centered around little-endian Intel machines running WIndows. I wonder what will be the fate of COM/DCOM when Microsoft moves over to Itanium...
What we really need is an efficient, cross-platform RPC system with full security mechanisms, transactions, synchronous and asynchronous modes, which can bridge the gap between fully distributed RPC systems such as CORBA and fully internalized component systems such as COM. It needs to be language-independent, fast, and use little memory.
I wish all the smart people working on all these systems would stop one-upping each other every other month and actually sit down to design something we can all agree on and use. Every program on every platform out there could benefit from that.
Huge problems enforcing this? When's the last time you were able to convince your employer to dump the VPN system that have so carefully set up and replace it with some weird, HTTPS based system?
Even if P == NP, this just means that all NP problems can be solved in polynomial time. This does not necessarily mean linear time. An algorithm of order O(n^100000000000) is polynomial time, but it certainly isn't fast.
Even linear problems can take a long time to solve. Remember that algorithmic order represents asymptotic behavior -- how does the algorithm perform as the input size goes to infinity? A linear algorithm where each operation takes a trillion clock cycles will, in practice, be much slower than a quadratic algorithm where each operation takes only one hundred clock cycles; at least for "reasonable" input. In the real world, N does not go to infinity!
Stop the double standards. We'll never be taken seriously as a community of free-thinking, mature, Unix/open_source/whatever believers until we start acting like mature people in the first place.
Not all of us hold double standards. I would guess that most of the people here on/. that have these double standards are of the high-school type. Who cares what these people think? Lots of Unix people are level-headed, just like you.
There already is a community of mature, free-thinking believers in open source. This community includes you and me, along with thousands of others. Take pride in this community, and don't worry so much about all the idiots:-)
Re:This is a weapon of massless destruction
on
Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 3, Informative
1. How will they focus the beam on receptor antenas?
By any number of means. Mirrors, lenses, etc. A maser beam will not spread out too much.
2. How will they keep airplanes from flying across the beams?
They probably won't. If the idea really gets off the ground, it wouldn't be hard to equip airplanes with microwave dissipation grids. It'll heat up the grid but the airplane will cross the beam very quickly.
3. Will they coordinate with satellite operators so they can avoid the beam too?
This is the one major problem. The effects would vary depending on what sort of electronics the satellite is carrying.
The only way for this not to harm you would be for it not to strike you.
The article states the beam would have an areal power of about 20% that of sunlight. This is approx. 270 watts per square meter. Pretty strong, but since the microwave beam will be collected, the only way you could be exposed to it would be to stand at the collector.
Actually it's conceptually related to holographic imaging. In a hologram, information is evenly distributed across the film, and any finite piece of the film can be used to reconstruct the original image. Of course, the more pieces you have, the more accurate the reconstruction is.
This method is somewhat analogous. The information in the file to be transmitted is spread uniformly across a number of packets, with redundancy. Once you have acquired enough packets, you can accurately reconstruct the original file. The difference between this and holography is that in holography you can reconstruct a useable image from very few "packets": it will just be fuzzy and less distinct than if you had all the packets. In this method, you must have a certain minimum number of packets to reconstruct the file.
This is a stream of questions, but they all center around the same idea so I'll ask them all: What do you personally think of federally regulated software? Should the federal government really be sticking its nose into private-sector business? If Microsoft's monopoly is so bad, why do we need government help to break it? Why not just stop buying Microsoft software?
If and when Linux or some other open source system becomes commonplace and can be found on every desktop, should we make sure that the federal government is right there, carefully regulating everything it does?
I don't think the problem is monopolies, per se. A monopoly can be a good thing if it is a good thing. If Microsoft produced stable, powerful, fast software on a regular basis (and not just out of the blue) then I think their monopoly would be deserved.
Remember that consumers make the monopoly. Sure, Microsoft has their fingers in all the standards and it seems like there's no way out, but if everyone really hated it so much they could just come up with new standards. People have been digging their own graves for the last 20 years by continuing to put up with MS bullshit. And now we're in a position where billions of lines of code depend on MS's proprietary, messed up "standards." Maybe Microsoft gave a little push every now and then, but they didn't create this monopoly. A monopoly requires that people be willing to play along, and willing players can be found in droves.
What if through some strange turn of fate, Linux became commonplace and everyone was running it on their desktops? Would you see that monopoly also as bad?
Do you really think federal regulation of software systems is a good idea? Really? Remember that the street runs both ways.
Actually, I don't think the debate is over whether or not we are causing it, either. Most people you talk to in the field of Earth systems will tell you, "Yes, it is getting warmer, and yes, humans have something to do with it."
The debate, at least among these scientists, is whether this warming will have significant impacts on ecosystems and human life. Take food crop production as an example. Increasing global temperatures could boost crop yields on the one hand. On the other hand, increasing temperatures may stimulate explosions of pest insects, leading to crop shortages and famine. It is possible that global warming will lead to faster regeneration of the ozone layer.
Before we go jumping into the deep end, spending billions or even trillions of dollars to curb CO2 and methane emissions, we should first have some idea whether:
global warming is even going to be a problem, and, if so:
whether what we try is even going to work.
When you, as an informed and intelligent individual, hear that humans are causing global warming, your first thought should not be "Oh, that's bad, what can we do to stop it?" Your first thought should be, "Will global warming have catastrophic effects?" The fact is, no one knows. Just because the possibility is there does not justify an all-out assault on global warming; the investment of time and resources would be so immense that, if we failed, or if we later found out that none of it was necessary, we will have done an extreme disservice to mankind.
The CD was put out by the Oregon DMV for several years, before it was issued for the last time in 1997. I still have a copy of it. I never used the information for any purpose, but I knew people who used it for substantial monetary gain (illegal of course).
These days, whenever some asshole cuts me off on the road, I'm always tempted to write down the license number and look it up on my DMV CD. It has everything -- SSN, Address, DOB, vehicle information, etc...
Why such a thing was ever published, and why it was decided that the general public should have access to it, I don't know. Don't get the impression that these people acquired this CD through some diabolical means -- in 1997, you could walk right in to the DMV and request a copy. For free, I believe...
I've been thinking about these kinds of devices for a while now. Getting the chip to physically interface with a neuron is not actually that tricky. Getting the interface to communicate data bidirectionally in a meaningful way is an entirely different prospect.
One technique that could be used is an artificial neural net that is trained to be a transducer between wetspace and chipspace. This NN would sit between the microchip and the neural interface, translating signals to and from the two domains.
The only thing that would be left to do is to train your own brain (learn, basically) to interface with the chip. This might be difficult, or it might be easy. Biofeedback is actually a very good technique and it could be used in this arena as well.
I wonder what the first true brain/chip interface would do. I have a lot of trouble putting names to faces I've only met a few times. It would be nice to look at a face, and suddenly be aware of the name because my little computer looked it up for me.
I can think of plenty other applications. You could do evil-complex math in your head, or visualize anything you want with total realism (ok, maybe some people might abuse that;) What else?
This is the first story I've seen on/. about a Microsoft product that had no undertones whatsoever of Microsoft bashing in a loooooong time.
To be honest, it's refreshing to see some reporting from the other side of the fence make it onto/. Please continue doing it. Just not every day, ok?;)
I've always been fascinated by the potential loophole here. You can go slower than light (everything we see) or you can go faster (tachyons?). The only thing actually forbidden is attaining that exact velocity. So figure out a way to jump from one speed to another without going through the intervening velocities (an easy task, right?) and you're golden.
Actually, it's not quite so simple. From the equations of special relativity, one can determine that the following are true:
1. If an object travels at a speed less than that of light, it must have real mass.
2. If an object travels at the speed of light, it must have no mass.
3. If an object travels at a speed greater than that of light, something bizarre happens. If such an object has real energy, it will have imaginary mass. If it has imaginary energy, it will have real mass.
Ok, so you want to go faster than light. You probably don't want to turn into imaginary matter, so you're going to have to find some imaginary energy.
2) My only 486 could never in its wildest dreams play DivX, which is MPEG-4 and requires a crapload of processing power...but even a lowly 486 can handle MPEG-1 or low bitrate RealMedia. So I can believe it's possible to watch movies on even an old Commodore PC clone.
Commodore never made PC clones. The computers it did make that bore the name "Commodore" were the Commodore 64 and the Commodore 128. Both processors were under 1 megahertz (don't remember the exact speed), and were 8-bit.
Let me put it to you this way: the CPU in the Commodore did not have a multiply instruction. How do you decode compressed video data when you cannot even multiply without using a lookup table? Magic? This feat would be impossible. Even if it were possible, the video adapter in the Commodore, although quite unique in its capabilities, would never have been able to display video images with any reasonable quality.
In short, as so many others have made so clear, this entire story is a complete farce.
Of course it's great to hear Commodore mentioned:) I've still got one...
No matter what our wonderful government chooses to do, their network will still be vulnerable to physical destruction. I've always wondered, what are the alternate means of communicating information over long distances that are more difficult to disrupt?
Sonic communication? When your "wire" is the atmosphere/ocean, no one can cut the wire.
AM radio? This already travels long distances, but might be susceptible to (brief) interference by nuclear explosions. (A nuclear detonation will ionize a large portion of the atmosphere, making it quite opaque to radio signals.)
High-power visible lasers?
For all these methods, signal repeaters would be a must, but remember: signal repeaters are used in solid-state communications as well, so this isn't really a drawback. You might argue that someone could simply blow up the repeaters, or the transceivers, but it's impossible to eliminate those elements of the system. The wires are the most susceptible element of the system, since they have to travel long distances through unguarded territory. And the wires can surely be eliminated.
If you make the argument that all of these methods will necessarily have very low bandwidth, you'd probably be correct. Except for the fact that in a wartime crisis, you don't need to swap gigabytes of porn -- you just need to send vital information such as "The enemy is at 56.47 by 14.03," and "Incline the mortar by 56 degrees". These messages don't need much bandwidth.
As for DOS or DDOS, however unlikely they might be on a private network -- just use a strong protocol such as IPv6.
Thanks for your comments. How does d.net verify that the number of stubs is correct?
I also thought of a counterargument to my point; if the problem being solved is NP complete, then it could be possible to VERIFY the answer much faster than it took to PRODUCE the answer. There are other classes of problems as well, where the procedure for verification is much less expensive than the procedure to arrive at the solution in the first place. For example, using the Newton-Raphson method to find roots of a very high-degree (I'm talking 10^6 or greater) polynomial. Once the roots are found, verification of the answer is trivial compared to the effort required to find the roots.
The usual answer to your question is, "If we opened the source, we'd make it a lot easier for people to fake results, and spoil the entire project." I don't see this as an argument for closed-source distributed computing systems, but rather an argument against distributed computing systems themselves. All DC systems will be vulnerable to evil adversaries, no matter how complicated your validation scheme. The entire POINT of DC is to farm out the work -- if each block must be checked for validity (and the only feasible proof of validity is to recompute the answer), then you just end up doing the computation in-house anyway.
DC would be an incredibly cool idea, if not for the fact that the world is full of assholes who want to throw a monkey wrench into your operation. A small step is made toward making it viable by closing the source, and making it difficult to fake results. It doesn't exclude the possibility, however.
I'm quite close to my BSCS (should graduate in spring) and I think I share some of your frustrations. I too went into school with high hopes to become a trend-setter, to be "The One" that does the "Big Thing." As I move toward Real Life I find this goal was a little misguided, but I don't lose heart in that. There are a few reasons for this:
1. My school experience has been a rich one. I did 1-1/2 years in California, decided I didn't like the culture there, and returned to the Northwest where I've been completing my studies. I've met a lot of different sorts of people over the last 4 years. Interacting with them and learning from them has been one of the more valuable facets of my education.
2. Everyone wants to do the Big Thing. Sometimes when people fail, they become depressed as they realize that they aren't "as smart as I thought I was." This is entirely self defeating and needless. I used to get depressed when I heard about 16 year old kids porting XFree86 to Macintosh. Or think of the girl in elementary school who knew multivariate calculus and couldn't stop asking questions to which the teacher always replied, "I just don't know." Now, I realize that these people, no matter how intelligent, are completely lacking in social skills and are, generally, quite maladapted to reality. That isn't the sort of thing I'm aiming for. I want my life to be balanced and comfortable, and I'll do what's necessary to make it that way, whether that involves CS or not.
3. I found that pursuing an alternate field of study is helpful. I decided last year to minor in physics, and since I only have three terms left, I am really cramming it in. I feel more like a physics major than a CS major! It's really fantastically distracting, and it seems to help my performance in the one CS course I'm now taking (AI/Combinatorics). Now, I'm excited about combining AI, CS, and physics, and doing my own research in directions people haven't explored before. It's fantastic.
If all else fails, turn to spirituality. No, I don't mean organized religion; I mean sitting down on a log in the middle of nowhere and listening to the Earth. Don't ponder. Don't meditate. Don't strain. Just listen. Relax and let life flow through you, and see where you go. You're on an incredible tour of Planet Earth and you shouldn't miss out just because of some pesky computers.
Actually, HTML has not become layout-centric at all. HTML developers have become layout-centric. Think about it. If you want such-and-such a paragraph to appear in such-and-such a place, should you have to use funky kludges such as "invisible GIFs" to get the thing to line up properly?
You shouldn't HAVE to use invisible GIFs. Or tables in tables in tables in... HTML in fact has no good layout controlling features. Why has HTML become so hard to use, if you want a real good-looking page? Because HTML has nothing to do with layout -- and this remains the case.
First theres the problem with the propulsion system: we're simply not fast enough in our spaceships. In order to get anywhere we need to approach the speed of light or even exceed it (or better yet, make the whole thing about space/time irrelevant, but that is sci-fi for the time being)
This is some of the most hilarious pseudoscientific spew I've heard in a long time. Exceed the speed of light? If you knew anything about physics you would realize that this is totally unnecessary.
Suppose I travel at 99.999995% the speed of light. According to special relativity, this gives a gamma value of about 3162.278. At such a speed, an observer on earth witnesses the spacecraft travelling at nearly the speed of light, and it reaches Alpha Centauri in about 4 years. The time as measured by the people on the spacecraft turns out to be 4 years divided by gamma: about 11 hours.
So, we can get to Alpha Centauri in 11 hours, as measured on the spacecraft, without travelling faster than light. Of course, when you returned to earth you'd be 8 years younger than everyone else, but if I were going to AC, I wouldn't really want to come back.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the gravitational force were extremely strong, it wouldn't make much difference in space battle. You still point the missile at the enemy and shoot it. You, the missile, and the enemy are all accelerating toward the sun at equal rates. The fact that a G-field is present makes absolutely no difference, since the field is uniform, at least when you are quite far from the sun and the spacecraft are relatively close to each other. In a fun game, the craft will not be far apart, since it's not much fun to fire on an an enemy when you can't see the pretty explosion.
Look, I'm going on and on about a specific example, when my real point was much more general. "Realistic" behavior of objects can be very closely approximated with very simple methods. The player will not know the difference. Problems such as integrations "blowing up" can be easily avoided simply by looking for the blow-up and correcting for it.
Runge-Kutta is a complex method for quickly and accurately solving differential equations by numerical means. It is used instead of simple Euler iteration because it is equivalent in speed and gives much more accurate results. It works by adjusting the timestep dynamically to skip over regions where the system is changing slowly, and to integrate more carefully when the system is changing quickly.
This is all well and good when you are trying to do something important, like simulating heat flow within in a heatsink. But for simulating the orbits of planets around a star, for example? What a waste of time! The orbit is elliptical, so just simulate a freaking ellipse!
What about space missiles? Do you need Euler integration? No! There is a closed-form solution to the linear acceleration problem -- it's a quadratic. This procedure does not give low error. It gives zero error.
I read this guy's articles several months ago. I thought he was off his rocker then, and I still think so now.
Now, third-party patches such as those at linuxhq.com are not scrutinized by the kernel team, and these patches might possibly contain nasty code (as well as simply poor code). But if you're downloading third-party patches and applying them without reading them, you're an idiot. Can't read C, or don't understand kernel internals? Then don't apply third-party patches.
It would be far easier, as you suggest, to insert backdoors and other nasties into userspace open source programs. When was the last time you downloaded a source tarball and actually read all the code before building and installing it? The most evil of all would be a trojan in gcc -- all programs compiled with the trojaned compiler would themselves be trojans. After a while all source remnants of the trojan would be wiped away, but the trojan code would still be lurking in all our binaries. Horrible thought.
Like you say, be careful. Just because you're running Linux, or you use open source, doesn't make you immune to viruses, backdoors, trojans, or anything else.
misspelled --> misspelt
dreamed --> dreamt
cleaned --> cleant
flew --> flempt
ate --> empt
Wait. I think I overgeneralempt.
DCOP: although I was excited about DCOP the first time I saw it, it hasn't evolved very much since then and has never reached the level of flexibility that complicated distributed RPC apps demand.
CORBA: on the opposite end of the spectrum from DCOP, CORBA is bloated and slow, but it runs on almost every UNIX and maybe that will be what saves it.
COM/DCOM: to be perfectly honest, MS has done a fairly good job with these. Too bad they are built on an ABI centered around little-endian Intel machines running WIndows. I wonder what will be the fate of COM/DCOM when Microsoft moves over to Itanium...
What we really need is an efficient, cross-platform RPC system with full security mechanisms, transactions, synchronous and asynchronous modes, which can bridge the gap between fully distributed RPC systems such as CORBA and fully internalized component systems such as COM. It needs to be language-independent, fast, and use little memory.
I wish all the smart people working on all these systems would stop one-upping each other every other month and actually sit down to design something we can all agree on and use. Every program on every platform out there could benefit from that.
Most likely, that is not going to happen.
Even linear problems can take a long time to solve. Remember that algorithmic order represents asymptotic behavior -- how does the algorithm perform as the input size goes to infinity? A linear algorithm where each operation takes a trillion clock cycles will, in practice, be much slower than a quadratic algorithm where each operation takes only one hundred clock cycles; at least for "reasonable" input. In the real world, N does not go to infinity!
Not all of us hold double standards. I would guess that most of the people here on /. that have these double standards are of the high-school type. Who cares what these people think? Lots of Unix people are level-headed, just like you.
There already is a community of mature, free-thinking believers in open source. This community includes you and me, along with thousands of others. Take pride in this community, and don't worry so much about all the idiots :-)
By any number of means. Mirrors, lenses, etc. A maser beam will not spread out too much.
2. How will they keep airplanes from flying across the beams?
They probably won't. If the idea really gets off the ground, it wouldn't be hard to equip airplanes with microwave dissipation grids. It'll heat up the grid but the airplane will cross the beam very quickly.
3. Will they coordinate with satellite operators so they can avoid the beam too?
This is the one major problem. The effects would vary depending on what sort of electronics the satellite is carrying.
The only way for this not to harm you would be for it not to strike you.
The article states the beam would have an areal power of about 20% that of sunlight. This is approx. 270 watts per square meter. Pretty strong, but since the microwave beam will be collected, the only way you could be exposed to it would be to stand at the collector.
Not to mention the energy required to mine and process the borax in the first place.
This method is somewhat analogous. The information in the file to be transmitted is spread uniformly across a number of packets, with redundancy. Once you have acquired enough packets, you can accurately reconstruct the original file. The difference between this and holography is that in holography you can reconstruct a useable image from very few "packets": it will just be fuzzy and less distinct than if you had all the packets. In this method, you must have a certain minimum number of packets to reconstruct the file.
If and when Linux or some other open source system becomes commonplace and can be found on every desktop, should we make sure that the federal government is right there, carefully regulating everything it does?
Remember that consumers make the monopoly. Sure, Microsoft has their fingers in all the standards and it seems like there's no way out, but if everyone really hated it so much they could just come up with new standards. People have been digging their own graves for the last 20 years by continuing to put up with MS bullshit. And now we're in a position where billions of lines of code depend on MS's proprietary, messed up "standards." Maybe Microsoft gave a little push every now and then, but they didn't create this monopoly. A monopoly requires that people be willing to play along, and willing players can be found in droves.
What if through some strange turn of fate, Linux became commonplace and everyone was running it on their desktops? Would you see that monopoly also as bad?
Do you really think federal regulation of software systems is a good idea? Really? Remember that the street runs both ways.
The debate, at least among these scientists, is whether this warming will have significant impacts on ecosystems and human life. Take food crop production as an example. Increasing global temperatures could boost crop yields on the one hand. On the other hand, increasing temperatures may stimulate explosions of pest insects, leading to crop shortages and famine. It is possible that global warming will lead to faster regeneration of the ozone layer.
Before we go jumping into the deep end, spending billions or even trillions of dollars to curb CO2 and methane emissions, we should first have some idea whether:
When you, as an informed and intelligent individual, hear that humans are causing global warming, your first thought should not be "Oh, that's bad, what can we do to stop it?" Your first thought should be, "Will global warming have catastrophic effects?" The fact is, no one knows. Just because the possibility is there does not justify an all-out assault on global warming; the investment of time and resources would be so immense that, if we failed, or if we later found out that none of it was necessary, we will have done an extreme disservice to mankind.
it.
These days, whenever some asshole cuts me off on the road, I'm always tempted to write down the license number and look it up on my DMV CD. It has everything -- SSN, Address, DOB, vehicle information, etc...
Why such a thing was ever published, and why it was decided that the general public should have access to it, I don't know. Don't get the impression that these people acquired this CD through some diabolical means -- in 1997, you could walk right in to the DMV and request a copy. For free, I believe...
One technique that could be used is an artificial neural net that is trained to be a transducer between wetspace and chipspace. This NN would sit between the microchip and the neural interface, translating signals to and from the two domains.
The only thing that would be left to do is to train your own brain (learn, basically) to interface with the chip. This might be difficult, or it might be easy. Biofeedback is actually a very good technique and it could be used in this arena as well.
I wonder what the first true brain/chip interface would do. I have a lot of trouble putting names to faces I've only met a few times. It would be nice to look at a face, and suddenly be aware of the name because my little computer looked it up for me.
I can think of plenty other applications. You could do evil-complex math in your head, or visualize anything you want with total realism (ok, maybe some people might abuse that ;) What else?
To be honest, it's refreshing to see some reporting from the other side of the fence make it onto /. Please continue doing it. Just not every day, ok? ;)
Actually, it's not quite so simple. From the equations of special relativity, one can determine that the following are true:
1. If an object travels at a speed less than that of light, it must have real mass.
2. If an object travels at the speed of light, it must have no mass.
3. If an object travels at a speed greater than that of light, something bizarre happens. If such an object has real energy, it will have imaginary mass. If it has imaginary energy, it will have real mass.
Ok, so you want to go faster than light. You probably don't want to turn into imaginary matter, so you're going to have to find some imaginary energy.
If you find some, let me know.
Commodore never made PC clones. The computers it did make that bore the name "Commodore" were the Commodore 64 and the Commodore 128. Both processors were under 1 megahertz (don't remember the exact speed), and were 8-bit.
Let me put it to you this way: the CPU in the Commodore did not have a multiply instruction. How do you decode compressed video data when you cannot even multiply without using a lookup table? Magic? This feat would be impossible. Even if it were possible, the video adapter in the Commodore, although quite unique in its capabilities, would never have been able to display video images with any reasonable quality.
In short, as so many others have made so clear, this entire story is a complete farce.
Of course it's great to hear Commodore mentioned :) I've still got one...
- Sonic communication? When your "wire" is the atmosphere/ocean, no one can cut the wire.
- AM radio? This already travels long distances, but might be susceptible to (brief) interference by nuclear explosions. (A nuclear detonation will ionize a large portion of the atmosphere, making it quite opaque to radio signals.)
- High-power visible lasers?
For all these methods, signal repeaters would be a must, but remember: signal repeaters are used in solid-state communications as well, so this isn't really a drawback. You might argue that someone could simply blow up the repeaters, or the transceivers, but it's impossible to eliminate those elements of the system. The wires are the most susceptible element of the system, since they have to travel long distances through unguarded territory. And the wires can surely be eliminated.If you make the argument that all of these methods will necessarily have very low bandwidth, you'd probably be correct. Except for the fact that in a wartime crisis, you don't need to swap gigabytes of porn -- you just need to send vital information such as "The enemy is at 56.47 by 14.03," and "Incline the mortar by 56 degrees". These messages don't need much bandwidth.
As for DOS or DDOS, however unlikely they might be on a private network -- just use a strong protocol such as IPv6.
I also thought of a counterargument to my point; if the problem being solved is NP complete, then it could be possible to VERIFY the answer much faster than it took to PRODUCE the answer. There are other classes of problems as well, where the procedure for verification is much less expensive than the procedure to arrive at the solution in the first place. For example, using the Newton-Raphson method to find roots of a very high-degree (I'm talking 10^6 or greater) polynomial. Once the roots are found, verification of the answer is trivial compared to the effort required to find the roots.
DC would be an incredibly cool idea, if not for the fact that the world is full of assholes who want to throw a monkey wrench into your operation. A small step is made toward making it viable by closing the source, and making it difficult to fake results. It doesn't exclude the possibility, however.
1. My school experience has been a rich one. I did 1-1/2 years in California, decided I didn't like the culture there, and returned to the Northwest where I've been completing my studies. I've met a lot of different sorts of people over the last 4 years. Interacting with them and learning from them has been one of the more valuable facets of my education.
2. Everyone wants to do the Big Thing. Sometimes when people fail, they become depressed as they realize that they aren't "as smart as I thought I was." This is entirely self defeating and needless. I used to get depressed when I heard about 16 year old kids porting XFree86 to Macintosh. Or think of the girl in elementary school who knew multivariate calculus and couldn't stop asking questions to which the teacher always replied, "I just don't know." Now, I realize that these people, no matter how intelligent, are completely lacking in social skills and are, generally, quite maladapted to reality. That isn't the sort of thing I'm aiming for. I want my life to be balanced and comfortable, and I'll do what's necessary to make it that way, whether that involves CS or not.
3. I found that pursuing an alternate field of study is helpful. I decided last year to minor in physics, and since I only have three terms left, I am really cramming it in. I feel more like a physics major than a CS major! It's really fantastically distracting, and it seems to help my performance in the one CS course I'm now taking (AI/Combinatorics). Now, I'm excited about combining AI, CS, and physics, and doing my own research in directions people haven't explored before. It's fantastic.
If all else fails, turn to spirituality. No, I don't mean organized religion; I mean sitting down on a log in the middle of nowhere and listening to the Earth. Don't ponder. Don't meditate. Don't strain. Just listen. Relax and let life flow through you, and see where you go. You're on an incredible tour of Planet Earth and you shouldn't miss out just because of some pesky computers.
You shouldn't HAVE to use invisible GIFs. Or tables in tables in tables in... HTML in fact has no good layout controlling features. Why has HTML become so hard to use, if you want a real good-looking page? Because HTML has nothing to do with layout -- and this remains the case.
This is some of the most hilarious pseudoscientific spew I've heard in a long time. Exceed the speed of light? If you knew anything about physics you would realize that this is totally unnecessary.
Suppose I travel at 99.999995% the speed of light. According to special relativity, this gives a gamma value of about 3162.278. At such a speed, an observer on earth witnesses the spacecraft travelling at nearly the speed of light, and it reaches Alpha Centauri in about 4 years. The time as measured by the people on the spacecraft turns out to be 4 years divided by gamma: about 11 hours.
So, we can get to Alpha Centauri in 11 hours, as measured on the spacecraft, without travelling faster than light. Of course, when you returned to earth you'd be 8 years younger than everyone else, but if I were going to AC, I wouldn't really want to come back.