some script kiddy will download ten thousand and kill it.
At least that would be detectable, since all the requests would come from the same IP. If King's people are on the ball, they'll filter the logs and the script kiddie will only count as one download.
I think there's a good example of what the world would be like in the absense of big media. It's the internet porn industry. Because, up to now, the biggies were too squeamish to be associated with it (AT&T is now dipping its big toe in the water, however) and financiers are likewise loath to have their names associated with backing them, the industry is fragmented into thousands of mom-and-pop size operations. There's content for every fetish and taste, each struggling to gather an audience thru ads, spam, and word-of-mouth. I draw no conclusions as to what this 'means', just offering a glimpse of what a big-medialess world might look like. I have to say that, even if all big media vanished tomorrow, the forces of consolidation are inexorable, and we'd have it back again within a very short time.
Assuming the dire predictions of a court loss are true, here's one strategy for resolving the situation: do everything possible to make the new DivX (or even some other format; anything but the locked version the industry is pushing) used ubiquitously in the same way that MP3 has become. Then make existing content available in this format. This would include piracy, personal rippers, etc. The whole idea is to get the public-domain format to become the defacto 'standard'. Pretty soon, commercial manufacturers will come forth with players, recorders, editors, etc. for this format. Even DVD players will have to be able to handle this format on top of DVD. At some point, the industry will have to capitulate and offer content in DivX if it hopes to maintain its profits. Until they do, people will rip and pirate their material to the more convenient DivX (or whatever). MP3 is well along this path already, and I predict industry resistance to distribution in MP3 form will ultimately crumble. Now, it's just necessary to do the same for other content.
I was thinking the other day what I'd be doing if I were a clever National Security Agency type, if I wanted to maximize my agency's ability to break codes while minimizing the budget. If I were that hypothetical NSA person, I'd be trying to set up a vast, free network of many computers working in parallel. Since not too many people would be in favor of donating their spare computer time to a super-secret government agency to do God-knows-what, I'd have to set the whole thing up with a catchy name and mission. Like the Search for Exterrestrial Intelligence. Who could be against helping E.T. phone home, or assisting Scully and Mulder find the Truth that's Out There?
They'd react by passing anti-trust laws that forbid collusion in doing business. Which is exactly what's happened. Unfortunately, it either doesn't always apply (professional sports leagues like the NFL have gotten themselves exempted, for example), or it isn't equitably enforced.
we must all remember that this is not the first time 'the law' has been used as a device to throttle new technology
Not true. 'The law' is a frequent tool to stifle new technology. For example, one law in the early days of the automobile required that a driver, when coming to an intersection, dismount, look for traffic, shout a warning in each direction, fire a pistol in the air, and only then proceed. This was obviously an attempt to make the use of 'horseless carriages' such a pain to use that no one would want to. Another example was the early suits again Sony for the Betamax, claiming that it was going to be used as a piracy tool. Even more recently was the suit again the Diamond Rio (the MP3 player) for the same reason. The establishment has a long history of whacking threats with the law, and they're frequently helped by our political 'leaders'. As Machiavelli said in The Prince: We must bear in mind, then, that there is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things while those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.
That's for the 18" version. The 15" is a mere $8,600. They did tell the reviewer that mass production will bring the price down to affordable ranges (although one person's 'affordable' might be another's Oh my God!'). Quite a glowing review. I'll be interested to see what some of the more mainstream publications like PC Magazine or Maximum PC think of it.
Does anybody else wonder how a bad link gets into a SlashDot article? Wouldn't the reviewer(s) have to try the link to determine whether the submission is worth putting up?
There is an implied right for that work to propigate through usenet and be used for a certain amount of time but Deja by keeping such posts for YEARS, rebranding them, slapping an ad on them and turning a profit on them is nothing short of blatant copyright violation
That's what X-NO-ARCHIVE: YES is for. If you don't want your posting archived, add that to your header. That can be both good and bad, by the way. I've been noticing that more and more people automatically decline to have their Usenet postings archived, which can mean that genuinely useful advice or commentary disappears forever. I wish that this option would be used more selectively.
Well, when the military wants a weapon, i don't think they give too much thought to the environment. Just look at nukes!
Look at the neutron bomb. It was designed to be a weapon used when an invading army was coming at you, having limited range and minimal destruction (beyond the immediate blast area, only living organisms were damaged). It was to be used when a defender was seriously outgunned/outnumbered, and would be a response that could stop the invader without having to resort to heaving thermonuclear weapons at his cities. The no-nukes crowd went nuts, calling it a bomb designed to kill people while leaving their buildings and equipment intact (strictly true, but ignoring its intended use as a defensive weapon, not an offensive one). The enormous political pressure brought on the issue effectively killed the neutron bomb. So I disagree that whatever the military wants, it gets.
Concorde flys at much higher altitudes than ordinary jet aircraft in order to reduce drag and skin heating. The claim is that, flying at such high altitudes, Concorde's emissions can reach the ionosphere and interfere with the formation of ozone. I don't know of any study which has confirmed this (but then again, I've haven't looked at all).
Environmentalists have conniptions over sonar discombobulating whales migration patterns and maybe even deafening them. They also accuse the supersonic Concorde of contributing to the degradation of the ozone layer. Now combine the two in the form of supersonic underwater travel and you may as well just paint the target on your back for Greenpeace. Had this emerged before environmentalism took such a hold, maybe it would continue to be used, but attempting to introduce it today just isn't going to fly. And I hate to say it, but just maybe that would be a good thing for once.
If it's really sensitive, encode it and broadcast it, like the "numbers" stations or the BBC broadcasts to French partisans during WWII.
Let's see. "Hi, here's a picture of us in the Forbidden City" vs "Clarinet molluscs enjoin rodent souffles subordinating bowling pins". Yeaaaaah, no attention-getting stuff there:-)
Robert Patrick isn't your vacuum-brain pretty-boy galumphing hunk type. He's got that edginess to his look and demeanor that's an essential element in this role. He looks like the type who could coalesce from a mist in a darkened alley. Now, if the producers of the X-Files can just resist the temptation to have one of those drawn-out seductions between Scully and Patrick's character. That 'will-they, won't-they' crap has gotten incredibly tiresome.
I thought that the central premise of "Light of Other Days" was that scientists had developed "slow glass" which let light through at such slow speeds that past events could be observed hours, days, or even months later. I read it in installments in Analog Science Fiction. The last installment I read had the government grinding up slow glass into dust-mote size particles and spreading it everywhere by aircraft. The idea being that it would be ubiqutious and, using microscopy, any past event could be observed. This story line sounds completely different. Has the title been recycled?
a receiver: your choices: 1) **huge** tank of cleaning fluid and array of photomultiplier tubes
As I recall, the proposal thought that the vast quantity of water surrounding the sub might be in some way used for detection. Hey, I never said I thought that this would work, just that someone wanted funds to look into it.
Now the proposal to use modulated black holes to communicate via gravity waves, that had some promise...:-)
Whew, dodged the bullet one more time. I dread the release of each new generation of PDA, because I know that one of these days they're going to begin offering voice recognition for input. Then, in addition to the construction guys and their offices shouting back and forth via Nextel phones, the yuppies chatting up their brokers, the teenagers with their pagers, and the dweebs who set their watches to beep every ten minutes, we can look forward to everyone bellowing into their fruit-colored brain-crutch. Where's a High-Energy Electro Magnetic Pulse when you need one?
couldn't you take care of number two by having the sub initiate contact periodically since it would likely be communicating with a fixed position
Subs are generally given patrol areas, and it's up to the captain to decide exactly where they are within it at any given time. They're also given discretion on where/whether/when to come to comms depth, since the first priority is to remain undetected.
There was one project I heard of where the idea was to use a blue-green laser (a color which penetrates water well) from a helicopter so that the submarine didn't have to come near the surface. Don't know what ever happened to that. As far as I know, today the only communications system that works when the sub is at depth is VERDIN. It's so slow (in its initial version it was literally seconds per bit) that it has limited utility. To get maximal depth penetration, they were using frequencies @ 7 Hz, and using the earth/ionosphere as a gigantic cavity resonator. To do this, they needed an enormous groundplane, so they were burying miles and miles of wire in the bedrock in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. The power levels were equally enormous. There were amusing stories published when they were testing it. Seems that fences were being electrified, telephone systems fried, St. Elmo's fire breaking out all over the place, and all manner of electrical havoc being wreaked. People in those regions went so nuts that the Navy ultimately abandoned that version of it. Good thing, cuz the ultimate goal was to wire much of the Northern U.S. with the system.
The best source of reliable info related to military equipment is Jane's. They publish lots of different reference books on weapons, communication systems, vehicles, etc. Unfortunately, they want actual money for their stuff.
You can also sometimes find information on specific items on the web sites of the military contractors building them. They like to showcase their major projects.
I once saw a proposal to research the use of neutrinos for communications with submarines, which are notoriously difficult to communicate with (sub drivers really hate having to get near the surface to pick up comms). Since neutrinos pass through matter like it's not there, the idea was to aim a neutrino beam through the earth, pointing it directly at the sub, and passing shore-ship data to the sub. Some of the (perhaps insurmountable) obstacles were: 1) Modulating a neutrino beam. 2) Figuring out where the sub is in order to point the beam at it. 3) Detecting the beam (it passes thru matter like empty space, recall).
Don't know if anything ever came of this. Jane's certainly doesn't have the Neutrino Beam Submarine Communications System listed yet.
Gresham's law applies here: the bad drives out the good. A person might realize that the review 'coinage' is getting contaminated by bad reviews, but without the knowledge/skill to distinguish a bad one from a good one (and I'd have to say that applies to most of us, based on my own experience), the debased reviews ultimately take over for the reasons I earlier gave. The only people I'm reasonably sure of giving an honest review these days (I'm sure there are others, but I haven't run across them) is Maximum PC. They're the only magazine that in whose reviews I can recall the word 'awful' appearing.
Reviewers are dependent on getting new products in advance of their official release. Magazine leadtime is around 2-3 months, and if they had to wait to buy the product, conduct their tests and review, and then finally publish, the manufacturer would be shipping the next version. Plus, if some other mag kisses up to the manufacturers and gets the products early while yours has to buy it, you will be consistently scooped. Pretty soon, your readers are going to realize that they can get more up-to-date info elsewhere and you lose them. I suspect the review sites are under the same pressures. Even though they don't have the same publishing leadtimes, if their competitors always have the reviews first, who's going to visit their site to get old news?
Slashdot Mirror
some script kiddy will download ten thousand and kill it.
At least that would be detectable, since all the requests would come from the same IP. If King's people are on the ball, they'll filter the logs and the script kiddie will only count as one download.
I think there's a good example of what the world would be like in the absense of big media. It's the internet porn industry. Because, up to now, the biggies were too squeamish to be associated with it (AT&T is now dipping its big toe in the water, however) and financiers are likewise loath to have their names associated with backing them, the industry is fragmented into thousands of mom-and-pop size operations. There's content for every fetish and taste, each struggling to gather an audience thru ads, spam, and word-of-mouth. I draw no conclusions as to what this 'means', just offering a glimpse of what a big-medialess world might look like. I have to say that, even if all big media vanished tomorrow, the forces of consolidation are inexorable, and we'd have it back again within a very short time.
Assuming the dire predictions of a court loss are true, here's one strategy for resolving the situation: do everything possible to make the new DivX (or even some other format; anything but the locked version the industry is pushing) used ubiquitously in the same way that MP3 has become. Then make existing content available in this format. This would include piracy, personal rippers, etc. The whole idea is to get the public-domain format to become the defacto 'standard'. Pretty soon, commercial manufacturers will come forth with players, recorders, editors, etc. for this format. Even DVD players will have to be able to handle this format on top of DVD. At some point, the industry will have to capitulate and offer content in DivX if it hopes to maintain its profits. Until they do, people will rip and pirate their material to the more convenient DivX (or whatever). MP3 is well along this path already, and I predict industry resistance to distribution in MP3 form will ultimately crumble. Now, it's just necessary to do the same for other content.
Congress refused to fund it.
Yeah, that's what they want you to believe.
I was thinking the other day what I'd be doing if I were a clever National Security Agency type, if I wanted to maximize my agency's ability to break codes while minimizing the budget. If I were that hypothetical NSA person, I'd be trying to set up a vast, free network of many computers working in parallel. Since not too many people would be in favor of donating their spare computer time to a super-secret government agency to do God-knows-what, I'd have to set the whole thing up with a catchy name and mission. Like the Search for Exterrestrial Intelligence. Who could be against helping E.T. phone home, or assisting Scully and Mulder find the Truth that's Out There?
They'd react by passing anti-trust laws that forbid collusion in doing business. Which is exactly what's happened. Unfortunately, it either doesn't always apply (professional sports leagues like the NFL have gotten themselves exempted, for example), or it isn't equitably enforced.
Woops. The first sentaence should say, "Unfortunately, all too true."
we must all remember that this is not the first time 'the law' has been used as a device to throttle new technology
Not true. 'The law' is a frequent tool to stifle new technology. For example, one law in the early days of the automobile required that a driver, when coming to an intersection, dismount, look for traffic, shout a warning in each direction, fire a pistol in the air, and only then proceed. This was obviously an attempt to make the use of 'horseless carriages' such a pain to use that no one would want to. Another example was the early suits again Sony for the Betamax, claiming that it was going to be used as a piracy tool. Even more recently was the suit again the Diamond Rio (the MP3 player) for the same reason. The establishment has a long history of whacking threats with the law, and they're frequently helped by our political 'leaders'. As Machiavelli said in The Prince: We must bear in mind, then, that there is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things while those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders.
Nice idea, but it's freaking $11,000!
That's for the 18" version. The 15" is a mere $8,600. They did tell the reviewer that mass production will bring the price down to affordable ranges (although one person's 'affordable' might be another's Oh my God!'). Quite a glowing review. I'll be interested to see what some of the more mainstream publications like PC Magazine or Maximum PC think of it.
The correct URL is [snip]
Does anybody else wonder how a bad link gets into a SlashDot article? Wouldn't the reviewer(s) have to try the link to determine whether the submission is worth putting up?
There is an implied right for that work to propigate through usenet and be used for a certain amount of time but Deja by keeping such posts for YEARS, rebranding them, slapping an ad on them and turning a profit on them is nothing short of blatant copyright violation
That's what X-NO-ARCHIVE: YES is for. If you don't want your posting archived, add that to your header. That can be both good and bad, by the way. I've been noticing that more and more people automatically decline to have their Usenet postings archived, which can mean that genuinely useful advice or commentary disappears forever. I wish that this option would be used more selectively.
Well, when the military wants a weapon, i don't think they give too much thought to the environment. Just look at nukes!
Look at the neutron bomb. It was designed to be a weapon used when an invading army was coming at you, having limited range and minimal destruction (beyond the immediate blast area, only living organisms were damaged). It was to be used when a defender was seriously outgunned/outnumbered, and would be a response that could stop the invader without having to resort to heaving thermonuclear weapons at his cities. The no-nukes crowd went nuts, calling it a bomb designed to kill people while leaving their buildings and equipment intact (strictly true, but ignoring its intended use as a defensive weapon, not an offensive one). The enormous political pressure brought on the issue effectively killed the neutron bomb. So I disagree that whatever the military wants, it gets.
Concorde flys at much higher altitudes than ordinary jet aircraft in order to reduce drag and skin heating. The claim is that, flying at such high altitudes, Concorde's emissions can reach the ionosphere and interfere with the formation of ozone. I don't know of any study which has confirmed this (but then again, I've haven't looked at all).
Environmentalists have conniptions over sonar discombobulating whales migration patterns and maybe even deafening them. They also accuse the supersonic Concorde of contributing to the degradation of the ozone layer. Now combine the two in the form of supersonic underwater travel and you may as well just paint the target on your back for Greenpeace. Had this emerged before environmentalism took such a hold, maybe it would continue to be used, but attempting to introduce it today just isn't going to fly. And I hate to say it, but just maybe that would be a good thing for once.
If it's really sensitive, encode it and broadcast it, like the "numbers" stations or the BBC broadcasts to French partisans during WWII.
:-)
Let's see. "Hi, here's a picture of us in the Forbidden City" vs "Clarinet molluscs enjoin rodent souffles subordinating bowling pins". Yeaaaaah, no attention-getting stuff there
Good one :-)
Robert Patrick isn't your vacuum-brain pretty-boy galumphing hunk type. He's got that edginess to his look and demeanor that's an essential element in this role. He looks like the type who could coalesce from a mist in a darkened alley. Now, if the producers of the X-Files can just resist the temptation to have one of those drawn-out seductions between Scully and Patrick's character. That 'will-they, won't-they' crap has gotten incredibly tiresome.
I thought that the central premise of "Light of Other Days" was that scientists had developed "slow glass" which let light through at such slow speeds that past events could be observed hours, days, or even months later. I read it in installments in Analog Science Fiction. The last installment I read had the government grinding up slow glass into dust-mote size particles and spreading it everywhere by aircraft. The idea being that it would be ubiqutious and, using microscopy, any past event could be observed. This story line sounds completely different. Has the title been recycled?
a receiver: your choices: 1) **huge** tank of cleaning fluid and array of photomultiplier tubes
... :-)
As I recall, the proposal thought that the vast quantity of water surrounding the sub might be in some way used for detection. Hey, I never said I thought that this would work, just that someone wanted funds to look into it.
Now the proposal to use modulated black holes to communicate via gravity waves, that had some promise
Whew, dodged the bullet one more time. I dread the release of each new generation of PDA, because I know that one of these days they're going to begin offering voice recognition for input. Then, in addition to the construction guys and their offices shouting back and forth via Nextel phones, the yuppies chatting up their brokers, the teenagers with their pagers, and the dweebs who set their watches to beep every ten minutes, we can look forward to everyone bellowing into their fruit-colored brain-crutch. Where's a High-Energy Electro Magnetic Pulse when you need one?
couldn't you take care of number two by having the sub initiate contact periodically since it would likely be communicating with a fixed position
Subs are generally given patrol areas, and it's up to the captain to decide exactly where they are within it at any given time. They're also given discretion on where/whether/when to come to comms depth, since the first priority is to remain undetected.
There was one project I heard of where the idea was to use a blue-green laser (a color which penetrates water well) from a helicopter so that the submarine didn't have to come near the surface. Don't know what ever happened to that. As far as I know, today the only communications system that works when the sub is at depth is VERDIN. It's so slow (in its initial version it was literally seconds per bit) that it has limited utility. To get maximal depth penetration, they were using frequencies @ 7 Hz, and using the earth/ionosphere as a gigantic cavity resonator. To do this, they needed an enormous groundplane, so they were burying miles and miles of wire in the bedrock in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. The power levels were equally enormous. There were amusing stories published when they were testing it. Seems that fences were being electrified, telephone systems fried, St. Elmo's fire breaking out all over the place, and all manner of electrical havoc being wreaked. People in those regions went so nuts that the Navy ultimately abandoned that version of it. Good thing, cuz the ultimate goal was to wire much of the Northern U.S. with the system.
The best source of reliable info related to military equipment is Jane's. They publish lots of different reference books on weapons, communication systems, vehicles, etc. Unfortunately, they want actual money for their stuff.
You can also sometimes find information on specific items on the web sites of the military contractors building them. They like to showcase their major projects.
I once saw a proposal to research the use of neutrinos for communications with submarines, which are notoriously difficult to communicate with (sub drivers really hate having to get near the surface to pick up comms). Since neutrinos pass through matter like it's not there, the idea was to aim a neutrino beam through the earth, pointing it directly at the sub, and passing shore-ship data to the sub. Some of the (perhaps insurmountable) obstacles were:
1) Modulating a neutrino beam.
2) Figuring out where the sub is in order to point the beam at it.
3) Detecting the beam (it passes thru matter like empty space, recall).
Don't know if anything ever came of this. Jane's certainly doesn't have the Neutrino Beam Submarine Communications System listed yet.
Gresham's law applies here: the bad drives out the good. A person might realize that the review 'coinage' is getting contaminated by bad reviews, but without the knowledge/skill to distinguish a bad one from a good one (and I'd have to say that applies to most of us, based on my own experience), the debased reviews ultimately take over for the reasons I earlier gave. The only people I'm reasonably sure of giving an honest review these days (I'm sure there are others, but I haven't run across them) is Maximum PC. They're the only magazine that in whose reviews I can recall the word 'awful' appearing.
Reviewers are dependent on getting new products in advance of their official release. Magazine leadtime is around 2-3 months, and if they had to wait to buy the product, conduct their tests and review, and then finally publish, the manufacturer would be shipping the next version. Plus, if some other mag kisses up to the manufacturers and gets the products early while yours has to buy it, you will be consistently scooped. Pretty soon, your readers are going to realize that they can get more up-to-date info elsewhere and you lose them. I suspect the review sites are under the same pressures. Even though they don't have the same publishing leadtimes, if their competitors always have the reviews first, who's going to visit their site to get old news?