Where's the evidence that infrastructure is brittle? If a home breaks, build another. If a farm ceases to be productive then move to a location where farming is more productive.And energy production is particularly resistance to climate change since it's widespread and very diverse.
Have you considered the cost of the actions you describe? It's not just the cost of materials and labor, but also the lost productivity incurred by lack of access to the infrastructure during the transition. Worse even than that is the (inevitable) case where the people already living at your new location don't want you (and all your thousands of dirty refugee friends) crowding their primo living space, and make their displeasure known with laws and/or guns...
Apple must think people are really too stupid to know where this is going.
And they're probably right about that. On the other hand, people buy Nintendos, X-boxes, Roku boxes, etc all the time without batting an eyelash, so it's more likely that the people who know where this is going don't really care, or think it is a good thing.
Toss all incumbents out. Demand term limits. Eliminate career politicians.
Be careful what you wish for -- there's no reason to expect that the replacement politicians would be any less corrupt than the current ones, and every reason to expect that none of them would know what the hell they were doing for the first year of their first term in office. The result would be a completely dysfunctional government after every election.
The goal shouldn't simply be to have new representatives, the goal should be to have good representatives. And the way to get good representatives is to change the electoral system so that the path to getting elected isn't "raise the most money", but rather "best represent the views of the largest number of constituents". Only then will have you have politicians who are motivated to listen to people rather than to money.
Obviously it can only go in 1 eye, as the pixels wouldn't match up perfectly 1:1 between the eyes so the user would be disoriented and have no depth perception
Don't underestimate the brain's power to figure out the distortion in sensory inputs and compensate for them. For example, there was that study where subjects wore mirrored glasses so that everything they saw was upside down -- within a day or two they didn't even notice (until they took the glasses off, anyway, at which point they had to re-adapt again).
A more likely reason to limit the procedure to one eye would be to avoid having to double the price to $120,000 for only minimal additional benefit.
And we are still here. Looks like the Earth`s magnetic field has protected us again. Thank god for a spinning Iron core. it would suck to be living on Mars right now.
Anthropic Principle saves humanity yet again! Someone really should write a comic book about that guy, he's the best superhero ever.
I don't see traffic lights disappearing unless EVERY SINGLE CAR is autonomous, and probably not even then. How will pedestrians cross the street?
By taking a deep breath, stepping out into traffic, and hoping that all the auto-cars' collision-avoidance mechanisms are operating correctly (which they presumably will be, since otherwise society would never have gotten to the point of removing the traffic lights in the first place).
If it came from an external source, it's a potential danger.
I'm sure I'm just being naive here, but it seems to me that user-supplied strings are only dangerous if your site ever passes strings to an SQL parser that converts them into database commands and then executes those commands. If your site never does that, then even the most evil SQL string is nothing more than a sequence of inert character data.
Given that, one way to avoid SQL injection would be to simply disable the database server's SQL parser and never use it. The site's own code could still do SQL queries, etc, by building them programatically using an API, rather than by expressing them as character strings. That way there is no mechanism by which trusted code and the untrusted data might be unintentionally intermingled.
It'll be some guy you got off of Craigs List that you paid in cash and who doesn't remember your face, and you told him you were "with the convention" and he believed you.
Well, you hope he won't remember your face. If you're unlucky, he'll describe to the police what you look like, what kind of car you drove to the meeting, etc.
(It's the old "look like you belong" trick. Put on a service uniform--janitor, phone tech, whatever--and no one will stop you.)
I'm not saying it couldn't work, just that it's more risky. Nobody will stop you, but your face (or that of the guy you hired) will be in all the convention security footage afterwards, once the victim realizes where the virus came from and asks the convention people about it. Scattering USB sticks in public places, on the other hand, is less likely to compromise your anonymity (well maybe not in Britain).
Excluding the cost of maintaining 5,500 km of vacuum tubes UNDER THE OCEAN. Got that money spare?
Clearly not. I think a system like this would only become practical after some real revolutions in manufacturing -- large-scale self-assembling nanotube structures or something like that, maybe combined with automated repair robots.
Well, a guy can dream anyway. Back to my paperback SF novels....
The train has a lot of inertia. Those magnets would have to be insanely strong to keep the train in the center if there was a shift in the tunnel.
Either that, or the tunnel would have to be built some percentage larger than the train, so that the train could wander farther from the center of the tunnel without touching the tunnel wall.
Even then, imagine going 4,000mph and then getting shifted say, four inches to the right all of a sudden. You'd have a hard time keeping your internal organs, well, internal.
I don't really see how the forward speed of the train would amplify the effects of lateral shifts. 747s shift four inches to the right every day when there is turbulence, with little damage beyond airsickness. Heck, the Earth is speeding at 67,062 an hour on its journey around the sun, and yet I can shift in my chair as often as I like without losing any internal organs.
Wouldn't it be more productive to give them away? [...] I think someone would be much more likely to use a USB given to them at a "legitimate" event, than one found on the ground.
I think you're right... but the downside would be that it would be much easier for the victims to track the infection back to its source that way.
But the chances are high a crazy person will gain control of a country that already has nukes. Or someone will develop a true brain disorder that drives them insane after they come to power.
Fortunately, launching a nuke is not (yet) a one-person job. Hypothetical Crazy Leader would still need to convince the military (or whichever organization is in charge of maintaining and operating the nuclear weapons) that he was sane, or they'd likely refuse the order to launch.
Is there any doubt that the overall destructiveness is huge? It is way too unlikely that a thermonuclear war stays at the level of WWII destructiveness or just a bit above it.
On the plus side, an all-in thermonuclear war would immediately solve global warming, the obesity crisis, and the IPv4 address-space-exhaustion problem.
The likelihood of crazy people having their act together enough to form a nation with nuclear capability (or to take over a nation that already owns nukes, and then figure out how to use them) is pretty slim.
I think one problem with American media is they like to portray Muslim leaders as irrational. This makes for good propaganda ("why shouldn't we invade Iraq, it's being led by a madman anyway"), but in reality those leaders are quite rational, but they are playing by the political/sociological rules of their own culture, which is very different from American culture, and that is why their words and actions seem odd to Americans. (Which is not to say that their actions are moral or justified, only that they are not raving suicidal lunatics and therefore are unlikely to sacrifice their own lives or their homeland in a pointless nuclear exchange)
Hmm, that gold record sounds quite valuable. What would I have to do in order to retrieve it? (after all it's just floating out there in space, it's not like anyone will stop me from nabbing it;))
Huh? I was convinced my GPS unit only receives (no, I don't use my mobile as a GPS). When did they start to emit?
GPS units in general can be (and often are) receive-only, but of course if you want your car to automatically notify the authorities when you get into a bad accident, then the car will also need to be able send a signal to the authorities.
On what grounds do you assume that? Jurassic Park-style 20m tall high voltage barriers around them and a ground-to-air missile defense systems?
Unlikely, that sounds more like a Microsoft thing. I imagine the Googleplex is defended mostly by machine-gun turrets, moving platforms, and an all-seeing but emotionally unstable AI.
Sort of like Christopher Columbus' expedition, then.
The thing that made Columbus' expedition profitable was the discovery of vast amounts of human-compatible, habitable land that was (more or less) available for colonization, and also natural resources that were worth more what it cost to transport them back to Europe. It seems unlikely that either of those things will be found on Titan (which isn't to say people shouldn't try anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
Where's the evidence that infrastructure is brittle? If a home breaks, build another. If a farm ceases to be productive then move to a location where farming is more productive.And energy production is particularly resistance to climate change since it's widespread and very diverse.
Have you considered the cost of the actions you describe? It's not just the cost of materials and labor, but also the lost productivity incurred by lack of access to the infrastructure during the transition. Worse even than that is the (inevitable) case where the people already living at your new location don't want you (and all your thousands of dirty refugee friends) crowding their primo living space, and make their displeasure known with laws and/or guns...
Three more feet and the manatees backs should be safe...
Maybe if you gave them all snorkels. They hang around at the surface because that's where the air is.
Apple must think people are really too stupid to know where this is going.
And they're probably right about that. On the other hand, people buy Nintendos, X-boxes, Roku boxes, etc all the time without batting an eyelash, so it's more likely that the people who know where this is going don't really care, or think it is a good thing.
Or in other words, we aren't running out of fossil fuels, we just need to stop using them. That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
Toss all incumbents out. Demand term limits. Eliminate career politicians.
Be careful what you wish for -- there's no reason to expect that the replacement politicians would be any less corrupt than the current ones, and every reason to expect that none of them would know what the hell they were doing for the first year of their first term in office. The result would be a completely dysfunctional government after every election.
The goal shouldn't simply be to have new representatives, the goal should be to have good representatives. And the way to get good representatives is to change the electoral system so that the path to getting elected isn't "raise the most money", but rather "best represent the views of the largest number of constituents". Only then will have you have politicians who are motivated to listen to people rather than to money.
Obviously it can only go in 1 eye, as the pixels wouldn't match up perfectly 1:1 between the eyes so the user would be disoriented and have no depth perception
Don't underestimate the brain's power to figure out the distortion in sensory inputs and compensate for them. For example, there was that study where subjects wore mirrored glasses so that everything they saw was upside down -- within a day or two they didn't even notice (until they took the glasses off, anyway, at which point they had to re-adapt again).
A more likely reason to limit the procedure to one eye would be to avoid having to double the price to $120,000 for only minimal additional benefit.
Isn't the impossibility of memory corruption supposed to be one of the benefits of Java (and other managed-code languages too of course)?
And we are still here. Looks like the Earth`s magnetic field has protected us again. Thank god for a spinning Iron core. it would suck to be living on Mars right now.
Anthropic Principle saves humanity yet again! Someone really should write a comic book about that guy, he's the best superhero ever.
I don't see traffic lights disappearing unless EVERY SINGLE CAR is autonomous, and probably not even then. How will pedestrians cross the street?
By taking a deep breath, stepping out into traffic, and hoping that all the auto-cars' collision-avoidance mechanisms are operating correctly (which they presumably will be, since otherwise society would never have gotten to the point of removing the traffic lights in the first place).
If it came from an external source, it's a potential danger.
I'm sure I'm just being naive here, but it seems to me that user-supplied strings are only dangerous if your site ever passes strings to an SQL parser that converts them into database commands and then executes those commands. If your site never does that, then even the most evil SQL string is nothing more than a sequence of inert character data.
Given that, one way to avoid SQL injection would be to simply disable the database server's SQL parser and never use it. The site's own code could still do SQL queries, etc, by building them programatically using an API, rather than by expressing them as character strings. That way there is no mechanism by which trusted code and the untrusted data might be unintentionally intermingled.
It'll be some guy you got off of Craigs List that you paid in cash and who doesn't remember your face, and you told him you were "with the convention" and he believed you.
Well, you hope he won't remember your face. If you're unlucky, he'll describe to the police what you look like, what kind of car you drove to the meeting, etc.
(It's the old "look like you belong" trick. Put on a service uniform--janitor, phone tech, whatever--and no one will stop you.)
I'm not saying it couldn't work, just that it's more risky. Nobody will stop you, but your face (or that of the guy you hired) will be in all the convention security footage afterwards, once the victim realizes where the virus came from and asks the convention people about it. Scattering USB sticks in public places, on the other hand, is less likely to compromise your anonymity (well maybe not in Britain).
Excluding the cost of maintaining 5,500 km of vacuum tubes UNDER THE OCEAN. Got that money spare?
Clearly not. I think a system like this would only become practical after some real revolutions in manufacturing -- large-scale self-assembling nanotube structures or something like that, maybe combined with automated repair robots.
Well, a guy can dream anyway. Back to my paperback SF novels....
How much is enough? How much should be enough?
It just so happens that we have the answer to this question: $75,000 per year per person is "enough".
I suppose that number will need to be adjusted periodically to account for inflation, the introduction of new tchotchkes from Apple, etc.
The train has a lot of inertia. Those magnets would have to be insanely strong to keep the train in the center if there was a shift in the tunnel.
Either that, or the tunnel would have to be built some percentage larger than the train, so that the train could wander farther from the center of the tunnel without touching the tunnel wall.
Even then, imagine going 4,000mph and then getting shifted say, four inches to the right all of a sudden. You'd have a hard time keeping your internal organs, well, internal.
I don't really see how the forward speed of the train would amplify the effects of lateral shifts. 747s shift four inches to the right every day when there is turbulence, with little damage beyond airsickness. Heck, the Earth is speeding at 67,062 an hour on its journey around the sun, and yet I can shift in my chair as often as I like without losing any internal organs.
Wouldn't it be more productive to give them away? [...] I think someone would be much more likely to use a USB given to them at a "legitimate" event, than one found on the ground.
I think you're right... but the downside would be that it would be much easier for the victims to track the infection back to its source that way.
But dont let your ignorance get in the way of your anti-religious sentiment, this is slashdot and theres karma to be had.
Are you claiming that because the Song of Solomon exists, religions don't use guilt about sex as a mean to control people's behavior?
It's either that, or you are rebutting a straw argument that is very different from the one the previous poster actually made.
But the chances are high a crazy person will gain control of a country that already has nukes. Or someone will develop a true brain disorder that drives them insane after they come to power.
Fortunately, launching a nuke is not (yet) a one-person job. Hypothetical Crazy Leader would still need to convince the military (or whichever organization is in charge of maintaining and operating the nuclear weapons) that he was sane, or they'd likely refuse the order to launch.
Is there any doubt that the overall destructiveness is huge? It is way too unlikely that a thermonuclear war stays at the level of WWII destructiveness or just a bit above it.
On the plus side, an all-in thermonuclear war would immediately solve global warming, the obesity crisis, and the IPv4 address-space-exhaustion problem.
So there's that.
Until the crazy's form a nation
The likelihood of crazy people having their act together enough to form a nation with nuclear capability (or to take over a nation that already owns nukes, and then figure out how to use them) is pretty slim.
I think one problem with American media is they like to portray Muslim leaders as irrational. This makes for good propaganda ("why shouldn't we invade Iraq, it's being led by a madman anyway"), but in reality those leaders are quite rational, but they are playing by the political/sociological rules of their own culture, which is very different from American culture, and that is why their words and actions seem odd to Americans. (Which is not to say that their actions are moral or justified, only that they are not raving suicidal lunatics and therefore are unlikely to sacrifice their own lives or their homeland in a pointless nuclear exchange)
Hmm, that gold record sounds quite valuable. What would I have to do in order to retrieve it? (after all it's just floating out there in space, it's not like anyone will stop me from nabbing it ;))
Huh? I was convinced my GPS unit only receives (no, I don't use my mobile as a GPS). When did they start to emit?
GPS units in general can be (and often are) receive-only, but of course if you want your car to automatically notify the authorities when you get into a bad accident, then the car will also need to be able send a signal to the authorities.
who's going to pay for it?
People who buy new cars in Europe?
On what grounds do you assume that? Jurassic Park-style 20m tall high voltage barriers around them and a ground-to-air missile defense systems?
Unlikely, that sounds more like a Microsoft thing. I imagine the Googleplex is defended mostly by machine-gun turrets, moving platforms, and an all-seeing but emotionally unstable AI.
Sort of like Christopher Columbus' expedition, then.
The thing that made Columbus' expedition profitable was the discovery of vast amounts of human-compatible, habitable land that was (more or less) available for colonization, and also natural resources that were worth more what it cost to transport them back to Europe. It seems unlikely that either of those things will be found on Titan (which isn't to say people shouldn't try anyway).