It's an OS plus a set of standard libraries and applications, mixed up *really* well.
Since the OS and standard libraries aren't well divided, it's not practical to allow people to simply upgrade the kernel or the libraries, but not both.
Yah, the way Windows lumps everything into one big program (kernel, libraries, GUI, registry, etc) is horrifying. You can't replace any one part and if any one bit has to be replaced, the whole system is pretty much fubar.
Here's the insane part. Linux and Co. maintains discrete levels, so you have near total freedom to change out any one section of the OS (have to keep stuff within certain versions of each other, but hey...). It's fantastic, but it comes at a slight performance cost; Making your code smarter and more adaptable also makes it a bit more complex. Theoretically, it would run faster and have fewer internal conflicts as one big monolith of code since the whole thing was designed together at the same time. So, why does Windows, almost as a rule, run slower and crash more on any given platform?
There is a difference between illegalizing 'not good things' and illegalizing stuff that lets people do 'not good things' It's bad to rape people, but that doesn't mean we should make laws legally requiring all women to ware armored panties.
Precisely. Think of it as 3 approaches to law enforcement. The best method is the make the criminal not want to commit the crime, either by making everyone nice guys or would-be criminals knowing the swift and inevitable punishment that will result. Of varying effectiveness is making the criminal unable to commit the crime, using various types of surveillance and security and, of course, armored panties. Usually least effective is just making it illegal. It's a halfassed attempt by a paper pusher to try and modify the Real World. If they get lucky, it'll have some influence on desire (new threat of punishment) or ability (increased power for law enforcement), but usually it's only effects are more work for cops (which they hate) and lawyers (which they love).
You can see this in a lot of the recent technology issues. Look at the DMCA: it doesn't make us want to hack software any less (publish it, maybe), it doesn't make us unable to hack software any less. The RIAA trying to get us all off Napster and Kazaa and so forth is similar. With their online systems, they charge about the same prices as before only now per track (no change in desire) and every free file sharing system they take down spawns three more (no change in ability). Obviously they'll never be able to hurt ability, so they need to get us to want to buy from them. And since they really just don't listen when we say that we want artists to be rewarded for their work, such a realization from them may be long in coming.
Or even ordinary crimes? Violent crime is high in the US since the justice system is a joke (nothing to hinder desire) and counters to ability (eg, a highly armed citizenry) are uncommon. Not a pro-gun argument, per se, just that I think there's some truth to "An armed society is a polite society".
Well, the first MIRV ICBM's were like that. There'd be one warhead and a bunch of decoys. Of course, then someone realized that the enemy had no way of shooting down either the warhead or the decoys and that the cost of the warhead was cheap compared to that of the missile, so they gave up on the decoys. How much more expensive is a mortar that can kill you than a decoy which will merely annoy you?
Foliage
Fantastic. Now ground troops are given yet another set of contradictory imperatives: find cover in the trees vs don't be under the trees where your lasers are useless.
Line of sight
Well, all that says to me is that if this tech catches on, the days of artillery firing from over the horizon (or at all, really) are essentially over.
Water in the air
Agree, very big problem. Hmmm, I wonder what the effect of a high power laser is on the atmosphere. What happens when air and water vapor are heated to extremely high temperatures? Anyone know if it might it mitigate the dissipating effects somewhat?
Depends on the power of the laser, how well the surface reflects, and the melting/boiling point of the material. No mirror is 100% effective. Once the shiny surface absorbs enough of the energy from the laser it'll boil away and won't be much use anymore.
Adaptive optics, yeah. They use it to reduce (ie, virtually eliminate) atmospheric distortion in telescopes and may be used to make vision correcting laser surgery even more effective. How'd you like to have 20/10 vision?
The problem is, powerful lasers have until recently been VERY big beasts
Agree, and getting the kind of surge power needed to actually destroy something is never easy.
and aiming at something the size and speed of a missle is an incredibly difficult problem
But it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to hit it with another missile! Look at the inter-satellite laser link the ESA set up a few weeks ago. It was almost trivially easy to do! It's clear that lasers will be able to do what ABM's never can.
The US has developed a flying version of this technology that can shoot down an ICMB from hundreds of miles away. The laser take up most of the space inside a gutted 747.
Yeah, I saw that. How about we put nuclear reactors on a couple of space stations in LEO and use them to shoot down any long range missiles? We know that the reactors would work, the lasers would work, and the targetting would work. Aside from the fact that it would be expensive to deploy (thank you very much, NASA!), though less than an equivalent ABM system, what's left?
Unfortunatly the US is violating treaties in developing it, so who knows if they will ever be put into action.
I'm not sure, did we have any ABM treaties with countries other than the USSR? If not, they're treaties with a nation that no longer exists. Just how binding is it?
Re:Paper will never be replaced...
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 2
As I recall, Xerox PARC was working on something similar to this. It's not a paper monitor so much as reprintable paper, though. You have to feed the sheet through the printer to change it, but then it doesn't use any power. Or dead trees, which is always a bonus for any kind of e-paper.
I was rather appalled at Valenti's performance. If I hadn't thought he was a schmuck before, I certainly would now. I can't believe his lawyers let him do something like this; they'd have to know that real people (ie, not lawyers or recording execs) would be shocked at the stuff that is going on.
For those who haven't seen all 90 minutes of it, here's some of the high points:
The wierdest thing was his argument about how simply because Congress has the power to make far-reaching and restrictive copyright laws anything they do is certain to be just and proper. A real 'might makes right' argument, right down to the "The EU is doing it too, so it must be correct".
Then there was Lessig's response to "How does overprotective copyright inhibit creativity?" (a parallel novel to Gone With the Wind, The Wind Done Gone, was hit with an injunction immediately after publication) which Valenti dismissed a trivial example. I really wonder what universe he lives in where having to pay $150,000 in legal fees just to write a book is 'trivial'. He also completely ignored the DMCA horror stories (Aibo hacking, Felton, Dmitri, and DeCSS) Lessig put forth.
Oh yeah, and Valenti actually claims that he's been proven correct in regards to his 1982 statement to the court about the VCR being the death of the entertainment industry. "We're losing $3 billion every year to pirated cassettes!". This guy just cracks me up.
Yes, it was a great achievement. So are the probes to the outer planets. They are all of them fascinating and greatly enlightening. But when we are totally incapable of getting there ourselves and have no plans to do so in the forseeable future, the useful applications of it amount to virtually zero. "Firing the imagination" is all well and good, but I think there are other ways than spending umpteen billions on a rock hunt.
I've said it before, we don't need NASA to be our "presence" in space, nor do we want them to be. All they need to do, all they ever needed to do was make it cheap and practical for others to get up there.
I agree, corporations tend not to take the long view, especially when dealing with space which has such a high entry cost. That's why they put a government program working on it in the first place. But rather than open space up to the rest of us they've made it a government monopoly; look how much finagling Tito had to go through just to get a week-long jaunt. If they'd made it possible for a company to make a profit from mining asteroids or establishing a lunar colony or whatever, it'd happen and it'd happen a thousand times faster than NASA could ever manage. That's the advantage of a free market. Instead, they spent all their money on interesting and mostly useless missions. The Apollo program was the most significant achievment in the history of mankind, but it wasn't followed up with anything, making it a totally pointless endeavor. What was the Internet before it was made public? Less spam, sure, but it was also a lot less beneficial to everyone not in the military or a university.
Well, there is the whole man on the moon thing. NASA
Though I agree with your general point, these items I will object to. The Apollo program didn't do anything useful to the space industry. And in my opinion, NASA hasn't done much for it either.
For instance, what was NASA doing 30 or 40 years ago that could in any way benefit you and me? Put up commercial unmanned satellites. What was NASA doing 10 or 20 years ago that could in any way benefit you and me? Put up commercial unmanned satellites. What is NASA doing today that could in any way benefit you and me? Put up commercial unmanned satellites. See a pattern here?
One day, a new disease will crop up and wipe us all out because there's no variation in our species
Aside from the fact that nobody is suggesting we all give our children the exact same DNA, don't you think one of the nice little bonuses we could conceivably give our genomes would be a vastly improved immune system? There's animals that rarely ever get sick (Sharks come to mind); why spent billions on treatment and lost worktime if we can preempt nearly every kind of illness? I have no problems giving such a gift to my descendants.
anyone out there know why farmers plant different strains of corn in different fields
Very good. So this little aspect which every Farmer John out there is keenly aware of is somehow going to be ignored by every geneticist, biologist, proteologist, etc in the future? 100% is an awfully high rate of incompetence among any profession; even lawyers and politicians can't make that claim.
Ok, fine. I steal a car and say, "Oh good, now I know how to do this." Then I tell you and no one else. You post this information on a newsgroup. Now at this point you have not commited the crime (stealing the car) yet they can still come after you for telling people about what I did.
Electrolysis and combustion (even chemical with a fuel cell) is going to be really inefficient.
And ordinary chemical batteries are the pinnacle of efficiency? You're lucky if you get a tiny fraction of what you put into them back out. Not to mention they are usually highly toxic and have to be thrown out every few years. Using H2 to store energy has the potential to be much more efficient, resuable, clean, and lightweight than a corresponding set of chemical batteries. It's not right now, mostly due to problems with storing the H2, but so what? Our solar cells suck too, does that mean they'll never be any good?
"Pound-for-pound" ?? Are you sure you don't mean "Litre-for-litre-at-room-temperature-pressurized-t o-atmospheric-at-sea-level"? Hydrogen compresses significantly with ease. This gives it a "Pound-for-pound" greater than most fuels.
He meant pound for pound. The mass doesn't change with temperature, pressure, altitude, or zodiac sign. How well it compresses has nothing to do with it's energy density by unit mass.
And no, H2 doesn't compress easily, at least not to anything really useful. The parent was right, pound for pound hydrogen has 3 times the energy density of gasoline. But it can't be compressed to anything like the mass density of gasoline. Even as a liquid it's only 1/10th as dense. And liquifying it is no answer, it takes several times the energy you get from combusting it to cool it to that point.
Offhand, I can think of a few possibilities:
A packet coming from port 80 on $PRIVATE_IP gets remapped so that it appears as some oddball port number on $PUBLIC_IP. If they see lots of activity involving strange port numbers, they might conclude that $PUBLIC_IP is assigned to a router or a firewall.
Maybe they can check the number of hops a packet has made. I would think that all of the packets coming from a machine would be allowed so many hops before they expire. Machines behind a firewall would use one hop to go from the machine to the firewall...so unless the firewall also rewrites that part of the packet, that's possibly another method by which a firewall could be sniffed out.
Something similar to the "OS identification" function in nmap ought to fairly easily tell the firewall appliances from Linksys and such apart from a computer. Just as the network stacks in Linux and Windows respond to the same types of traffic in different ways, there's no doubt a similar difference with the firewall appliances.
Good points, but again it all comes down to the telecom trying to analyze data coming from untrusted (that is, my personal) equipment. Joe Q. User is totally at their mercy, but if I run a Linux gateway or can reprogram a stand-alone router, it'd be easy to, say, have it not decrement the TTL as it goes through. Or rewrite OS data on packets or whatever (the behavior of network stacks is a good idea though, very tricky. I'll get back to you on that one). I don't think they'd get anything from looking at oddball port numbers, since a lot of perfectly legit programs use oddball ports. I once wrote a program to let me control what Winamp was playing over the Shoutcast server remotely; I forget exactly what port it used but it was chosen at random. There's no way to distinguish between that and a router keeping its clients' connections distinct.
but they didn't care how many devices I ran behind my Cisco router
Really? Lucky you. Bellsouth kept bitching at us whenever they found out that we hooked multiple computers up to our connection. Of course, they also bitched that we were running a linux machine, but in both cases we just pointed out that there was nothing in our contract prohibiting that.
Yeah, but think of how fast your laptop will move under it's own power
We can have drive races again!
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, some really old magnetic drives were so clunky and carried such angular momentum that failure of or certain seek patterns would cause them to 'walk' across the floor. You could thus have two teams 'racing' drives with their programs.
Err, I agree completely? "Computers are fast, precise, and utterly stupid. People are slow, sloppy, and brilliant", and all that. This kind of wetware is a bridge between the two, giving human brains the speed and accuracy of machines giving and computers the advantage of a creative intelligence, all in the same package.
I don't think this will be like installing a RAM upgrade in your head. More like hooking the existing computer (your brain) up to another over some Cat5. If the new system crashes, you have to reboot it, but it won't affect the original. It would certainly suck when that happened, though. It be like a temporary lobotomy; it's over once the add-on reboots, but until then you're limited to your own grey matter.
I wonder if the brain could be used as a data store like in the movie Johnny Mnemonic
Poor Johnny was a courier of information; he didn't actually have access to it. They put a hard drive in his head, sure, but the I/O didn't go to anything biological. The new USB keychain drives are just as good and don't need the brain surgery.
Lotsa downsides, yes, most related to 'system' security. Lotsa upsides, though. Imagine what this would do for education. How much of what we all went through was "Memorize this for your test tomorrow". Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could dispense with nearly all of that and jump straight to understanding of concepts rather then spend years memorizing mostly useless facts?
How about occupational specialization? The sum of human knowledge is getting so huge that nobody can be an expert in more than a few fields. Not least of all because nobody lives long enough to learn more than that. If we can add whole rooms to our memory and thinking capacity, what more could we accomplish?
I'm trying to imagine what this could do to software design; rather than typing code and looking at it on a screen, we'd simply write it in our minds. It'd certainly be faster; combine it with instant recall of the entire program, no matter how large, and you've got a truly powerful programming tool. It'd make Emacs and VI look like punched cards.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an OS plus a set of standard libraries and applications, mixed up *really* well.
Since the OS and standard libraries aren't well divided, it's not practical to allow people to simply upgrade the kernel or the libraries, but not both.
Yah, the way Windows lumps everything into one big program (kernel, libraries, GUI, registry, etc) is horrifying. You can't replace any one part and if any one bit has to be replaced, the whole system is pretty much fubar.
Here's the insane part. Linux and Co. maintains discrete levels, so you have near total freedom to change out any one section of the OS (have to keep stuff within certain versions of each other, but hey...). It's fantastic, but it comes at a slight performance cost; Making your code smarter and more adaptable also makes it a bit more complex. Theoretically, it would run faster and have fewer internal conflicts as one big monolith of code since the whole thing was designed together at the same time. So, why does Windows, almost as a rule, run slower and crash more on any given platform?
I don't think I've seen a turn signal used since I moved here. I walk to work, and I can't count how many times I've been nearly run down
Sweet jesus, you as a pedestrian still trust turn signals? 3 years in Atlanta without a car cured me of that for good!
the average consumer?
...what you meant to say was "citizen" or "person" right? Right?
Ahh, the first major literary faux pas of the 21st century. It's a brave new world...
There is a difference between illegalizing 'not good things' and illegalizing stuff that lets people do 'not good things' It's bad to rape people, but that doesn't mean we should make laws legally requiring all women to ware armored panties.
Precisely. Think of it as 3 approaches to law enforcement. The best method is the make the criminal not want to commit the crime, either by making everyone nice guys or would-be criminals knowing the swift and inevitable punishment that will result. Of varying effectiveness is making the criminal unable to commit the crime, using various types of surveillance and security and, of course, armored panties. Usually least effective is just making it illegal. It's a halfassed attempt by a paper pusher to try and modify the Real World. If they get lucky, it'll have some influence on desire (new threat of punishment) or ability (increased power for law enforcement), but usually it's only effects are more work for cops (which they hate) and lawyers (which they love).
You can see this in a lot of the recent technology issues. Look at the DMCA: it doesn't make us want to hack software any less (publish it, maybe), it doesn't make us unable to hack software any less. The RIAA trying to get us all off Napster and Kazaa and so forth is similar. With their online systems, they charge about the same prices as before only now per track (no change in desire) and every free file sharing system they take down spawns three more (no change in ability). Obviously they'll never be able to hurt ability, so they need to get us to want to buy from them. And since they really just don't listen when we say that we want artists to be rewarded for their work, such a realization from them may be long in coming.
Or even ordinary crimes? Violent crime is high in the US since the justice system is a joke (nothing to hinder desire) and counters to ability (eg, a highly armed citizenry) are uncommon. Not a pro-gun argument, per se, just that I think there's some truth to "An armed society is a polite society".
I must have been keeping Webvan in business because the week after I left Atlanta they went under. Real shame...
If you can make them perfectly reflective on whatever spectrum is used. I doubt that, to be honest.
Hahaha, I hadn't thought of that! What kinds of materials reflect, say, an infrared beam? Anyone know offhand?
Decoys
Well, the first MIRV ICBM's were like that. There'd be one warhead and a bunch of decoys. Of course, then someone realized that the enemy had no way of shooting down either the warhead or the decoys and that the cost of the warhead was cheap compared to that of the missile, so they gave up on the decoys. How much more expensive is a mortar that can kill you than a decoy which will merely annoy you?
Foliage
Fantastic. Now ground troops are given yet another set of contradictory imperatives: find cover in the trees vs don't be under the trees where your lasers are useless.
Line of sight
Well, all that says to me is that if this tech catches on, the days of artillery firing from over the horizon (or at all, really) are essentially over.
Water in the air
Agree, very big problem. Hmmm, I wonder what the effect of a high power laser is on the atmosphere. What happens when air and water vapor are heated to extremely high temperatures? Anyone know if it might it mitigate the dissipating effects somewhat?
Depends on the power of the laser, how well the surface reflects, and the melting/boiling point of the material. No mirror is 100% effective. Once the shiny surface absorbs enough of the energy from the laser it'll boil away and won't be much use anymore.
Adaptive optics, yeah. They use it to reduce (ie, virtually eliminate) atmospheric distortion in telescopes and may be used to make vision correcting laser surgery even more effective. How'd you like to have 20/10 vision?
The problem is, powerful lasers have until recently been VERY big beasts
Agree, and getting the kind of surge power needed to actually destroy something is never easy.
and aiming at something the size and speed of a missle is an incredibly difficult problem
But it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to hit it with another missile! Look at the inter-satellite laser link the ESA set up a few weeks ago. It was almost trivially easy to do! It's clear that lasers will be able to do what ABM's never can.
The US has developed a flying version of this technology that can shoot down an ICMB from hundreds of miles away. The laser take up most of the space inside a gutted 747.
Yeah, I saw that. How about we put nuclear reactors on a couple of space stations in LEO and use them to shoot down any long range missiles? We know that the reactors would work, the lasers would work, and the targetting would work. Aside from the fact that it would be expensive to deploy (thank you very much, NASA!), though less than an equivalent ABM system, what's left?
Unfortunatly the US is violating treaties in developing it, so who knows if they will ever be put into action.
I'm not sure, did we have any ABM treaties with countries other than the USSR? If not, they're treaties with a nation that no longer exists. Just how binding is it?
As I recall, Xerox PARC was working on something similar to this. It's not a paper monitor so much as reprintable paper, though. You have to feed the sheet through the printer to change it, but then it doesn't use any power. Or dead trees, which is always a bonus for any kind of e-paper.
I was rather appalled at Valenti's performance. If I hadn't thought he was a schmuck before, I certainly would now. I can't believe his lawyers let him do something like this; they'd have to know that real people (ie, not lawyers or recording execs) would be shocked at the stuff that is going on.
For those who haven't seen all 90 minutes of it, here's some of the high points:
The wierdest thing was his argument about how simply because Congress has the power to make far-reaching and restrictive copyright laws anything they do is certain to be just and proper. A real 'might makes right' argument, right down to the "The EU is doing it too, so it must be correct".
Then there was Lessig's response to "How does overprotective copyright inhibit creativity?" (a parallel novel to Gone With the Wind, The Wind Done Gone, was hit with an injunction immediately after publication) which Valenti dismissed a trivial example. I really wonder what universe he lives in where having to pay $150,000 in legal fees just to write a book is 'trivial'. He also completely ignored the DMCA horror stories (Aibo hacking, Felton, Dmitri, and DeCSS) Lessig put forth.
Oh yeah, and Valenti actually claims that he's been proven correct in regards to his 1982 statement to the court about the VCR being the death of the entertainment industry. "We're losing $3 billion every year to pirated cassettes!". This guy just cracks me up.
Yes, it was a great achievement. So are the probes to the outer planets. They are all of them fascinating and greatly enlightening. But when we are totally incapable of getting there ourselves and have no plans to do so in the forseeable future, the useful applications of it amount to virtually zero. "Firing the imagination" is all well and good, but I think there are other ways than spending umpteen billions on a rock hunt.
I've said it before, we don't need NASA to be our "presence" in space, nor do we want them to be. All they need to do, all they ever needed to do was make it cheap and practical for others to get up there.
I agree, corporations tend not to take the long view, especially when dealing with space which has such a high entry cost. That's why they put a government program working on it in the first place. But rather than open space up to the rest of us they've made it a government monopoly; look how much finagling Tito had to go through just to get a week-long jaunt. If they'd made it possible for a company to make a profit from mining asteroids or establishing a lunar colony or whatever, it'd happen and it'd happen a thousand times faster than NASA could ever manage. That's the advantage of a free market. Instead, they spent all their money on interesting and mostly useless missions. The Apollo program was the most significant achievment in the history of mankind, but it wasn't followed up with anything, making it a totally pointless endeavor. What was the Internet before it was made public? Less spam, sure, but it was also a lot less beneficial to everyone not in the military or a university.
Well, there is the whole man on the moon thing. NASA
Though I agree with your general point, these items I will object to. The Apollo program didn't do anything useful to the space industry. And in my opinion, NASA hasn't done much for it either.
For instance, what was NASA doing 30 or 40 years ago that could in any way benefit you and me? Put up commercial unmanned satellites. What was NASA doing 10 or 20 years ago that could in any way benefit you and me? Put up commercial unmanned satellites. What is NASA doing today that could in any way benefit you and me? Put up commercial unmanned satellites. See a pattern here?
Other than that, yeah, we Americans kick ass.
One day, a new disease will crop up and wipe us all out because there's no variation in our species
Aside from the fact that nobody is suggesting we all give our children the exact same DNA, don't you think one of the nice little bonuses we could conceivably give our genomes would be a vastly improved immune system? There's animals that rarely ever get sick (Sharks come to mind); why spent billions on treatment and lost worktime if we can preempt nearly every kind of illness? I have no problems giving such a gift to my descendants.
anyone out there know why farmers plant different strains of corn in different fields
Very good. So this little aspect which every Farmer John out there is keenly aware of is somehow going to be ignored by every geneticist, biologist, proteologist, etc in the future? 100% is an awfully high rate of incompetence among any profession; even lawyers and politicians can't make that claim.
Ok, fine. I steal a car and say, "Oh good, now I know how to do this." Then I tell you and no one else. You post this information on a newsgroup. Now at this point you have not commited the crime (stealing the car) yet they can still come after you for telling people about what I did.
Electrolysis and combustion (even chemical with a fuel cell) is going to be really inefficient.
And ordinary chemical batteries are the pinnacle of efficiency? You're lucky if you get a tiny fraction of what you put into them back out. Not to mention they are usually highly toxic and have to be thrown out every few years. Using H2 to store energy has the potential to be much more efficient, resuable, clean, and lightweight than a corresponding set of chemical batteries. It's not right now, mostly due to problems with storing the H2, but so what? Our solar cells suck too, does that mean they'll never be any good?
"Pound-for-pound" ??t o-atmospheric-at-sea-level"? Hydrogen compresses significantly with ease. This gives it a "Pound-for-pound" greater than most fuels.
Are you sure you don't mean "Litre-for-litre-at-room-temperature-pressurized-
He meant pound for pound. The mass doesn't change with temperature, pressure, altitude, or zodiac sign. How well it compresses has nothing to do with it's energy density by unit mass.
And no, H2 doesn't compress easily, at least not to anything really useful. The parent was right, pound for pound hydrogen has 3 times the energy density of gasoline. But it can't be compressed to anything like the mass density of gasoline. Even as a liquid it's only 1/10th as dense. And liquifying it is no answer, it takes several times the energy you get from combusting it to cool it to that point.
Offhand, I can think of a few possibilities:
A packet coming from port 80 on $PRIVATE_IP gets remapped so that it appears as some oddball port number on $PUBLIC_IP. If they see lots of activity involving strange port numbers, they might conclude that $PUBLIC_IP is assigned to a router or a firewall.
Maybe they can check the number of hops a packet has made. I would think that all of the packets coming from a machine would be allowed so many hops before they expire. Machines behind a firewall would use one hop to go from the machine to the firewall...so unless the firewall also rewrites that part of the packet, that's possibly another method by which a firewall could be sniffed out.
Something similar to the "OS identification" function in nmap ought to fairly easily tell the firewall appliances from Linksys and such apart from a computer. Just as the network stacks in Linux and Windows respond to the same types of traffic in different ways, there's no doubt a similar difference with the firewall appliances.
Good points, but again it all comes down to the telecom trying to analyze data coming from untrusted (that is, my personal) equipment. Joe Q. User is totally at their mercy, but if I run a Linux gateway or can reprogram a stand-alone router, it'd be easy to, say, have it not decrement the TTL as it goes through. Or rewrite OS data on packets or whatever (the behavior of network stacks is a good idea though, very tricky. I'll get back to you on that one). I don't think they'd get anything from looking at oddball port numbers, since a lot of perfectly legit programs use oddball ports. I once wrote a program to let me control what Winamp was playing over the Shoutcast server remotely; I forget exactly what port it used but it was chosen at random. There's no way to distinguish between that and a router keeping its clients' connections distinct.
but they didn't care how many devices I ran behind my Cisco router
Really? Lucky you. Bellsouth kept bitching at us whenever they found out that we hooked multiple computers up to our connection. Of course, they also bitched that we were running a linux machine, but in both cases we just pointed out that there was nothing in our contract prohibiting that.
Yeah, but think of how fast your laptop will move under it's own power
We can have drive races again!
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, some really old magnetic drives were so clunky and carried such angular momentum that failure of or certain seek patterns would cause them to 'walk' across the floor. You could thus have two teams 'racing' drives with their programs.
Err, I agree completely? "Computers are fast, precise, and utterly stupid. People are slow, sloppy, and brilliant", and all that. This kind of wetware is a bridge between the two, giving human brains the speed and accuracy of machines giving and computers the advantage of a creative intelligence, all in the same package.
Oh, and it's 'encyclopedia'.
I don't think this will be like installing a RAM upgrade in your head. More like hooking the existing computer (your brain) up to another over some Cat5. If the new system crashes, you have to reboot it, but it won't affect the original. It would certainly suck when that happened, though. It be like a temporary lobotomy; it's over once the add-on reboots, but until then you're limited to your own grey matter.
I wonder if the brain could be used as a data store like in the movie Johnny Mnemonic
Poor Johnny was a courier of information; he didn't actually have access to it. They put a hard drive in his head, sure, but the I/O didn't go to anything biological. The new USB keychain drives are just as good and don't need the brain surgery.
Lotsa downsides, yes, most related to 'system' security. Lotsa upsides, though. Imagine what this would do for education. How much of what we all went through was "Memorize this for your test tomorrow". Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could dispense with nearly all of that and jump straight to understanding of concepts rather then spend years memorizing mostly useless facts?
How about occupational specialization? The sum of human knowledge is getting so huge that nobody can be an expert in more than a few fields. Not least of all because nobody lives long enough to learn more than that. If we can add whole rooms to our memory and thinking capacity, what more could we accomplish?
I'm trying to imagine what this could do to software design; rather than typing code and looking at it on a screen, we'd simply write it in our minds. It'd certainly be faster; combine it with instant recall of the entire program, no matter how large, and you've got a truly powerful programming tool. It'd make Emacs and VI look like punched cards.