By far the toughest storage medium I ever encountered was mylar punch tape. That stuff can stand up to anything but fire. I'm a strong strapping lad and I can barely deform even a single strip (and you could still reconstruct the bits from it if you had to). It's decidedly low-density storage by today's standards, but short of carving your bits on rocks or etching them onto gold plates, I don't think you'd find anything better.
Quake players didn't find themselves looking for a no-CD hack and Half-life players didn't need to connect to a master server to play single-player games, but DooM III and Half-life 2 owners just might have to.
This is going to make it really tough playing it at work in a DoD Tempest-shielded room. I may have to drill a hole to run a net cable...
Witness! Fellow slashdotters; the Ad hominem attack! See for yourself, marvel at the absence of reason as our frind [sic] John Jorsett uses the tools of Propaganda101 to amaze and influence, decieve [sic] and misdirect.
Despite all the wailing, I'm betting you'd be hard pressed to find many governmental entities that are actually going to get less money this year. When a bureaucrat says "cut," that generally means less of an increase than expected, not less actual dollars. During the '90s, goverments got used to fat increases each year and built those expectations into each successive budget. Then when the good times ended, suddenly instead of 5, 6, 7, or even 8 percent increase, they got 1 or 2, and it looked like the end of the world.
Center for Food Safety works to protect human health and the environment by curbing the proliferation of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture. CFS engages in legal, scientific and grassroots initiatives to guide national and international policymaking on critical food safety issues.
CFS doesn't want genetically modified food, period. It's closely associated with Jeremy Rifkin of Foundation on Economic Trends, which pretty much says it all regarding where CFS comes down on the political/technological issues.
Let's see. Declaration of Jihad. Hate speech. Threat of attack. Description of targets. I think this qualifies under the USA Patriot Act for a rubber-hosing by Homeland Security.
Some former employers of my acquaintance (*cough* rat bastard restaurant owners *cough*)used to 'round off' the 20 or 30 minutes I put in past the hour, and I'd never get paid for it. I'd have loved a system that recorded me as on the clock until I walked out the door. Plus my state requires employers to pay overtime for more than 8 hours a day, which they ignored too, and I'd have loved a record I could have taken to the labor department.
Oh well, now I'm a high-paid technologist and those days are behind me. But when I go to a restaurant I'll frequently put cards listing "employee rights" and the labor department phone number on the worst-looking cars around back as I leave.
I predict that this won't get as far as the courts. If it did, the technique for encoding the identifying info would have to be exposed, risking that people will figure out how to find and remove it. I'm betting on a settlement. But that's just me; I could be wrong.
I'm guessing that telling some of the more extreme environmentalist elements that your launch puts out "almost no radiation" isn't going to hack it as far as they're concerned. 1 microrad/hr above background will be reason enough to predict apocalyptic nightmares of mass cancers, food contamination, mutations, dropsy, genital warts, and flatulence. They're essentially anti-technology and will use any excuse to oppose it. Frankly, I'm surprised I can still buy a radium-dial wristwatch.
Not to announce major scientific discoveries in the press before they have been properly peer-reviewed?
If they tried to keep it under wraps, the Area 51ers would be accusing NASA of a coverup. Besides, it's pretty tough to keep any sort of secret these days, and it's probably better to put out some bad info and have to retract it than having leakers with their own agendas putting out a distorted and fragmented view.
Would you rather have a report today saying you're going to get cancer in 6 months, or a report in a year saying you just died of cancer?
Human reaction to this question has been demonstrated, by the way. Genetic tests have been developed that can tell a person with absolute certainty whether they will develop certain congenital disorders, some of them fatal. A surprising number of people in at-risk groups for those disorders (it was 50% in one group that I read about) don't have the test done because they simply don't want to know. They'd rather live on with the chance that they won't develop the disorder, than to know for a fact that they're going to develop something which they're powerless to do anything about, and live with that knowledge casting a shadow on their lives.
If you knew that a quake was hitting an area in 60 days that you were planning on developing, wouldn't you be GLAD so you could tell the general contractor to just wait it out?
Well... YEAH! That's exactly my point: don't build, don't buy, don't hire, don't insure. It'd be like putting the earthquake region in an economic deep freeze. When it happens to the overal economy, we call it a depresssion.
Riiiight. No one will buy a home, build a business, or write insurance anywhere on the west coast. But they do. But we know The Big One is on its way. But we don't know when.
If you're going to build straw man arguments, at least put some effort into making it less obvious. I said nothing about no one building anything anywhere on the West Coast. If an earthquake is forecast for San Jose, nobody is San Diego is going to act differently.
But if we did know when, wouldn't that give a chance to evacuate the people to a safe place and make sure the buildings were properly fortified? Wouldn't that predictive power make the earthquake less powerful, not more? Wouldn't that predictive power make buying a home or starting a business in that area more secure?
Sure it'll help, as I noted in my first post. But if people know for a fact that at latitude x, longitude y, there will be a seismic event that will result in some foreseeable amount of damage, people are going to avoid that area, and it won't be economically pretty.
BTW, nice style. What are you, about 8? How does it feel to have your argument ripped to shreds by someone who is about twelve. =)
Unjustified self-esteem, the curse of the products of public education. Sad, really.
You may say the large uncertainly in timing allows people of psychologically avoid the certainly of the event, and you'd probably be right. But that does not validate the proposition that people or businesses will avoid the west coast when earthquake predictions become more reliable and the certainly of a quake becomes more immediate. That's exactly my point. We all know we're going to die, but not the date, and that ambiguity is what allows us to go about our daily lives. If you know that you're going to kick it in 90 days, you're not going to go to work, avoid that high-fat food, put off that trip to Hawaii, or engage in a myriad of other behavioral changes that you otherwise wouldn't. Likewise, when certainty of a disaster becomes a given, people will change their behavior, to the detriment of the region where it's going to happen.
Nonsense. You might get a handful of people nutty enough to want to experience The Big One first hand, but by and large it would be an economic catastrophe. Any one with the option will move out for that period of time. No one would want to buy a home, build a business, or write insurance when it's known that an earthquake is on its way. Are you going to buy or insure a burning building?
By the way, nice forensic style. What are you, about twelve?
Apparently the answer is Yes. California--with the earthquakes, fires, mud slides, Bonos and Schwarzeneggers --is the most populous state in the union. So people do hang around despite imminent doom.
Bosh. There's an enormous difference between "maybe" there'll be an earthquake and "definitely." While there might not be a mass out-migration, people will be reluctant to build, start new businesses, visit as tourists, buy stocks in businesses based in the region, issue insurance, etc. We've become a world of wimps put off by the least whiff of risk. Look at the over-reaction to the single Mad Cow we've found in the U.S. You think the kind of people who panic over the infinitesimal chance of getting a bad burger are going to suddenly develop a spine when it comes to an earthquake? I don't. People can and do remain serene when the risk is ambiguous and abstract, but they'll lose their minds when it's no longer an abstraction.
If this turns out to be true, it would be a disaster for the economy in an area. Would you hang around or invest in a place where there's a big quake known to be coming in the next few months? It'd be like being told you've got a 100% chance of contracting cancer in the next few months. Although it helps you prepare, life can't be normal after that.
Cool. More efficiency in mugging
on
RFID Casino Chips
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If people are walking around outside with casino chips, all a mugger will have to do is scan them to see which ones are worth the effort of a robbery. No more knocking over some old lady and just getting chump change.
Remember when conservatives were all about limiting government spending? Wow. what the hell ever happened to that party?
The Democrats succeeded in convincing us that the solution to all problems is to throw more money at them, and that the measure of our concern over an issue is how much we spend on it. Plus, we Republicans are all old farts and realize that when the bill comes due, we'll be dead and the young liberal kids are going to be stuck with the tab, so IT'S PARTY TIME! Give me my medicare, free drugs, and senior citizen discounts!
My exact thought. Either someone in DoD needs some training in what animal does what job, or they think that there's PR points to be gained by calling it a 'dog'. If that's the objective, they may as well call it a 'robot manatee' and really score some environmentalist points.
Slashdot Mirror
By far the toughest storage medium I ever encountered was mylar punch tape. That stuff can stand up to anything but fire. I'm a strong strapping lad and I can barely deform even a single strip (and you could still reconstruct the bits from it if you had to). It's decidedly low-density storage by today's standards, but short of carving your bits on rocks or etching them onto gold plates, I don't think you'd find anything better.
This is going to make it really tough playing it at work in a DoD Tempest-shielded room. I may have to drill a hole to run a net cable ...
(Just kidding, guys: put away your ISP subpoenas)
Tu quoque
Despite all the wailing, I'm betting you'd be hard pressed to find many governmental entities that are actually going to get less money this year. When a bureaucrat says "cut," that generally means less of an increase than expected, not less actual dollars. During the '90s, goverments got used to fat increases each year and built those expectations into each successive budget. Then when the good times ended, suddenly instead of 5, 6, 7, or even 8 percent increase, they got 1 or 2, and it looked like the end of the world.
Center for Food Safety works to protect human health and the environment by curbing the proliferation of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture. CFS engages in legal, scientific and grassroots initiatives to guide national and international policymaking on critical food safety issues.
CFS doesn't want genetically modified food, period. It's closely associated with Jeremy Rifkin of Foundation on Economic Trends, which pretty much says it all regarding where CFS comes down on the political/technological issues.
Let's see. Declaration of Jihad. Hate speech. Threat of attack. Description of targets. I think this qualifies under the USA Patriot Act for a rubber-hosing by Homeland Security.
Does anyone else see a fundamental flaw in the assumptions about the potential market?
Some former employers of my acquaintance (*cough* rat bastard restaurant owners *cough*)used to 'round off' the 20 or 30 minutes I put in past the hour, and I'd never get paid for it. I'd have loved a system that recorded me as on the clock until I walked out the door. Plus my state requires employers to pay overtime for more than 8 hours a day, which they ignored too, and I'd have loved a record I could have taken to the labor department.
Oh well, now I'm a high-paid technologist and those days are behind me. But when I go to a restaurant I'll frequently put cards listing "employee rights" and the labor department phone number on the worst-looking cars around back as I leave.
Phil! Thank God! I've been trying to get in touch since I had to change ISPs and you stopped answering my email. How have you been?
Dad
You can still buy used/antique watches with radium dials.
Try here (google Image Search thumbnail; the site with the photo doesn't seem to have it any longer).
I predict that this won't get as far as the courts. If it did, the technique for encoding the identifying info would have to be exposed, risking that people will figure out how to find and remove it. I'm betting on a settlement. But that's just me; I could be wrong.
I'm guessing that telling some of the more extreme environmentalist elements that your launch puts out "almost no radiation" isn't going to hack it as far as they're concerned. 1 microrad/hr above background will be reason enough to predict apocalyptic nightmares of mass cancers, food contamination, mutations, dropsy, genital warts, and flatulence. They're essentially anti-technology and will use any excuse to oppose it. Frankly, I'm surprised I can still buy a radium-dial wristwatch.
Tell me, have you ever heard this?
Actually yes, thereby proving my point that it's tough to keep a secret. (By the way, it's also nuts, but I'm sure you knew that.)
Not to announce major scientific discoveries in the press before they have been properly peer-reviewed?
If they tried to keep it under wraps, the Area 51ers would be accusing NASA of a coverup. Besides, it's pretty tough to keep any sort of secret these days, and it's probably better to put out some bad info and have to retract it than having leakers with their own agendas putting out a distorted and fragmented view.
Would you rather have a report today saying you're going to get cancer in 6 months, or a report in a year saying you just died of cancer?
Human reaction to this question has been demonstrated, by the way. Genetic tests have been developed that can tell a person with absolute certainty whether they will develop certain congenital disorders, some of them fatal. A surprising number of people in at-risk groups for those disorders (it was 50% in one group that I read about) don't have the test done because they simply don't want to know. They'd rather live on with the chance that they won't develop the disorder, than to know for a fact that they're going to develop something which they're powerless to do anything about, and live with that knowledge casting a shadow on their lives.
If you knew that a quake was hitting an area in 60 days that you were planning on developing, wouldn't you be GLAD so you could tell the general contractor to just wait it out?
... YEAH! That's exactly my point: don't build, don't buy, don't hire, don't insure. It'd be like putting the earthquake region in an economic deep freeze. When it happens to the overal economy, we call it a depresssion.
Well
Riiiight. No one will buy a home, build a business, or write insurance anywhere on the west coast. But they do. But we know The Big One is on its way. But we don't know when.
If you're going to build straw man arguments, at least put some effort into making it less obvious. I said nothing about no one building anything anywhere on the West Coast. If an earthquake is forecast for San Jose, nobody is San Diego is going to act differently.
But if we did know when, wouldn't that give a chance to evacuate the people to a safe place and make sure the buildings were properly fortified? Wouldn't that predictive power make the earthquake less powerful, not more? Wouldn't that predictive power make buying a home or starting a business in that area more secure?
Sure it'll help, as I noted in my first post. But if people know for a fact that at latitude x, longitude y, there will be a seismic event that will result in some foreseeable amount of damage, people are going to avoid that area, and it won't be economically pretty.
BTW, nice style. What are you, about 8? How does it feel to have your argument ripped to shreds by someone who is about twelve. =)
Unjustified self-esteem, the curse of the products of public education. Sad, really.
You may say the large uncertainly in timing allows people of psychologically avoid the certainly of the event, and you'd probably be right. But that does not validate the proposition that people or businesses will avoid the west coast when earthquake predictions become more reliable and the certainly of a quake becomes more immediate.
That's exactly my point. We all know we're going to die, but not the date, and that ambiguity is what allows us to go about our daily lives. If you know that you're going to kick it in 90 days, you're not going to go to work, avoid that high-fat food, put off that trip to Hawaii, or engage in a myriad of other behavioral changes that you otherwise wouldn't. Likewise, when certainty of a disaster becomes a given, people will change their behavior, to the detriment of the region where it's going to happen.
Nonsense. You might get a handful of people nutty enough to want to experience The Big One first hand, but by and large it would be an economic catastrophe. Any one with the option will move out for that period of time. No one would want to buy a home, build a business, or write insurance when it's known that an earthquake is on its way. Are you going to buy or insure a burning building?
By the way, nice forensic style. What are you, about twelve?
Apparently the answer is Yes. California--with the earthquakes, fires, mud slides, Bonos and Schwarzeneggers --is the most populous state in the union. So people do hang around despite imminent doom.
Bosh. There's an enormous difference between "maybe" there'll be an earthquake and "definitely." While there might not be a mass out-migration, people will be reluctant to build, start new businesses, visit as tourists, buy stocks in businesses based in the region, issue insurance, etc. We've become a world of wimps put off by the least whiff of risk. Look at the over-reaction to the single Mad Cow we've found in the U.S. You think the kind of people who panic over the infinitesimal chance of getting a bad burger are going to suddenly develop a spine when it comes to an earthquake? I don't. People can and do remain serene when the risk is ambiguous and abstract, but they'll lose their minds when it's no longer an abstraction.
If this turns out to be true, it would be a disaster for the economy in an area. Would you hang around or invest in a place where there's a big quake known to be coming in the next few months? It'd be like being told you've got a 100% chance of contracting cancer in the next few months. Although it helps you prepare, life can't be normal after that.
If people are walking around outside with casino chips, all a mugger will have to do is scan them to see which ones are worth the effort of a robbery. No more knocking over some old lady and just getting chump change.
The Democrats succeeded in convincing us that the solution to all problems is to throw more money at them, and that the measure of our concern over an issue is how much we spend on it. Plus, we Republicans are all old farts and realize that when the bill comes due, we'll be dead and the young liberal kids are going to be stuck with the tab, so IT'S PARTY TIME! Give me my medicare, free drugs, and senior citizen discounts!
My exact thought. Either someone in DoD needs some training in what animal does what job, or they think that there's PR points to be gained by calling it a 'dog'. If that's the objective, they may as well call it a 'robot manatee' and really score some environmentalist points.