We need to store our passwords on our own local trusted machine. Like on our personal mobile phone with tested HW encryption, which requires multifactor ID: thumbprint, voice recog, keyed PIN, retina scan. In fact, that device shouldn't store some simple password data, but rather a onetime password generator that generates unique secure password sequences for each challenging site. Maybe the phone should send the password via IR/Bluetooth or a phonecall, but secure itself against attacks over that connection, or just report the momentary password on the screen for its human to read and enter into the challenge.
It's insane that I give my bank PIN to some arbitrary sketchy ATM in some latenight deli when I'm already drunk, need another 6-pack, and won't even remember where (or who) I was when I find out months later that my PIN was used by someone (of the dozen sketchy ATMs I used that year) to rob my account. I want onetime passwords right now, that my phone can remember, attached to the specific counterparties, money quantities and transaction description. So later I've got my own complete, authoritave record.
Not go the other way and give my PIN to every fly by night website, just because they "trust each other" with nothing of their own at stake.
This whole idea is the stupidest security idea I've heard in a while, and I hear stupid ones every day.
Why would I trust MySpace with my AOL login? Once there's several other people to blame, any one of whom could have used or leaked my password, what's stopping unethical people at MySpace from using my "MySpace" login to get into my AOL login, and make our clueless police/FBI figure out which of the many possible perpetrators was the real perp?
I don't use the same PIN for all of my banks. Then one of the banks, or some unethical employee, could rob my other bank's account.
The whole point of a password is to keep everyone except you and the specific challenging party from accessing your account with that party. Good security doesn't even let the other party know your cleartext password, or access your account with them without it. But I don't see how OpenID will do anything like that.
Why not just open an account with my service. We'll let you register all of your passwords, for websites and your banks, to login to us. Then, you can use any password you happen to remember. And then, I'll go and use all of those passwords to rob you blind.
Maybe. Sterling says he did. Sterling says a lot of things. Because he's really a punk (70s punk rocker) - the punk who's the real cyberpunk. In his person, if not as much as in his writing style as is Gibson (by definition, no matter whose).
If we don't learn to think any differently, then the Millennium Clock is an exercise in doing nothing but working within our limits. But the purpose of the project is to find, examine and push back our limits. The goal is to design and build a clock that we can be the most sure will gong regularly for 10,000 years. Even if it's impossible, studying why it's impossible furthers the goal of improving our longterm thinking.
But in turn, you cannot be certain that it's impossible to have a clock that gongs regularly for 10,000 years. There is indeed a "Copernican principle", that predicting the distant future is aided by seeing the distant past", which you just used in your calendars example. The reason to believe the next 10,000 years will be at all like the last 10,000 years is because the last 5,000 years were much like the 5,000 years before that. At least in terms of the durability of both physical and cultural artifacts. FWIW, the Hebrew calendar might track almost 5800 years, but it was probably inaugurated "only" about 2500-3000 years ago. Just as the Egyptian Great Pyramids point to a foundational date about 13,500 years ago, but are an artifact of probably at most 7-8000 years ago, in stone as well as in conception. But they do seem on track to last another 3000, or 7-8000 years.
Most of the world is actually the same as it's been for the last 5000-10,000 years in most ways that count, especially those that are conserved in watching clocks. Yes, we do have many times the number of people, but most of that increase is in pinpoints around cities. In most of the world's land area, people live much the way they have for millennia. If we look back a hundred years, the world looks even more like it had. Our differences are mostly ones of degree. But even so, the future is indeed largely unpredictable. That's the point of exercises like designing a Millennium Clock: to learn to better predict the future, or to prepare for its unpredictability, or just to learn our limits in prediction so we don't live beyond them.
I'm not so sure about our beating papyrus for durability, and even less sure about how "provably" we've done so. Some papyrus artifacts do already have at least 5000 years under their belt. The "provably" part of your statement will require another 5000 years of testing. And just as, say, CDs were promoted as "perfect for 100 years", but many already are fading or succumbing to literal rot, the rest of our new materials very well might face an unexpected extinction within the next few millennia. Time will tell.
Which is all why I say we have to look at the human element in using a clock. We have to start with the problem of how to ensure people will recognize a clock 10,000 years from now. Perhaps the next 10,000 years will see changes as exponential in rate as the last 100 years have been for so many (though not yet all) humans. I doubt the planetary orbits will be any different (other than their now predictable natural decay), and if they are, then I doubt we can predict anything that will last long enough to count as a clock. Figuring out how to mark the planets as a clock, and to make those markers (whether cultural, physical, or both), will help us understand the next 10,000 years, or at least understand why we can't understand it. Learning from Hebrew and Chinese calendars, which indeed use the skies as their clock, and retain a comprehensive cultural apparatus for reading the clock, is exactly the kind of approach I'm talking about. The efforts of those ancient peoples didn't just make a clock, but locked in a comprehensive cultural apparatus that ensured its longevity through those millennia. They each were products, and master exploiters, of an epoch of transformational technological change. We too are like that now. We should put our mark on humanity in a similarly bold and aggressive way. Because we can.
Paper is an interesting substrate, because it's cheap, but also because it's a renewable resource. It literally grows on trees. It's an interesting development because it's carbon, not a silicon material. It's not even made from plastic, which we have to make from oil. Which means that it could be made from the extra pollution we suck out of the air - the old fashioned way: growing it in the ground.
What will be really interesting is if we can match that innovation by printing organic inks onto the paper to make the rest of the transistors. Carbon based "wires" on the substrate. Preferably grown from plants (or algae - I'm not picky). See if we can't grow our microelectronics, rather than manufacture it, and cut out most of the waste and pollution, while perhaps making fairly durable objects that can be easily recycled into the environment by just burying them in soil. Atop which we grow the next generation.
No problem. I'm not such a fool that I won't do what I can to protect myself from the destruction of my country's economy and my world's enviroment, just because I'm making it easier for selfish jerks like you, who probably still deny that oil is killing us.
FWIW, I've also had the fun and vast economic opportunity from being an early adopter of personal computer and networking tech for the past 30 years. Sure, I paid a lot more for the inefficient, untested early stuff. But I was there making a fortune off it at every step, defining it at the forefront. And always secure in the knowledge that I was doing the right thing for my personal future, and for the future of the rest of you wannabes who we dragged along into the future we were making up for ourselves.
Of course, we need lots of people like you to come along later and pay less than we did to start it, but in so much volume that we get to rake it in while you've got to figure out how to pay the bills. Doing it our way, rather than your inevitably lame way, is priceless anyway. So you're welcome. Any time.
We don't even have anything recognizable from 10,000 years ago, though rock carving is older than that, and those scales of thinking have been part of those old cultures since before that.
This conversation isn't really going anywhere. Thanks for playing.
But I'm not asking Japan to pay for the rest of the ISS outside their own mission. I'm just saying that Japan should pay its own way. Since the ISS is so much bigger than this Japanese mission, that means that Japan is getting to take advantage of a much larger infrastructure in their own mission than they could possibly afford on their own. So Japan's mission is an investment in its own space program that is already subsidized by the US' very large investment in the rest of the ISS.
The US shouldn't additionally subsidize the Japanese space program on top of that by also paying it cash. That's ridiculous. And exactly the kind of insult that, if reversed, would help drive the relationship between the two countries apart. If that deal were further falsely portrayed as also asking Japan to pay for ISS expenses beyond Japan's own mission, that kind of talk would really damage the relationship, for good reason.
How are you going to be sure the chart lasts 10,000 years? How will they know that it's a conversion chart? How do you know that people in the future will have a Web to "look it up" in?
For that matter, how do we know that people in 10,000 will indeed use numbers, in any symbols? We just found an Amazonian tribe that doesn't really use numbers, and they're contemporaneous with us.
Besides, even if they can recognize that some object just showed some ancient symbols that some of their historian experts (if they have them) can recognize as a displayed quantity, how can we be sure they'll know that it counts time? Even if they do have similar concepts of cyclical time as we do now, how do we know they'll associate the time display with the passage of time? Let's say that various periods over the next 10,000 years see human development fall to the level of, say, the 1450 Sioux tribes. Would they recognize the clock display as a "clock", unless there were some cultural substrate that is really longterm in its duration, as using the sky as a calendar is already proven.
I don't expect people to look at the sky and read it like a clock. I think it's also becoming evident that you didn't even RTFA. The Millennium Clock project is designing a clock that will indicate the passage of the years, decades, centuries and millennia for 10,000 years. We can rely on people's minds and culture remaining about the same over that period as they need to be to simply recognize that a picture of the sky represents the sky itself, or they're not really recognizably human. That's why it's a reliable method of "encoding" the clock's strikes. Numbers aren't nearly as reliable.
Natural gas pipelines feed many, perhaps most of the homes in US48, about 6m^3 per hour max. The energy in 6m^3 natural gas is about 6*39Mj = 234Mj:h, or 65 kilowatts. NG fuelcells already get at least 40% efficiency into electricity, so that would be 26KW peak. Which means that the average home at 2KW average continuous needs only 0.08% of maximum duty (the typical 5KW peak demand would be 0.2% duty).
Big SUVs have about 80KW max output engines. If a 40% efficient fuelcell drove a 90% efficient NEMA-B motor, 80KW kinetic would consume about 225KW in NG, which would still consume only 84% of the home's incoming flow. So overnight "charging" even a big SUV could still drive that SUV for as many hours as it spent charging. Since most people don't drive SUVs at full motor power all the time, even an hour charging is probably enough to refuel after a day's driving.
In April 2008, NG cost about $7:Gj, while direct electricity cost in February, 2008 about $0.09:KWh, which is about $25:Gj. Even at 40% efficiency converting NG to electricity, that's only $17.5 per Gj.
Another advantage of NG powering homes and cars is that very little energy is consumed/lost in the NG distribution, compared to double-digit (up to 50%) losses in electric distribution. Compared with gasoline powering cars, the distribution of gasoline is very wasteful, with not only tankers driving around to filling stations, but cars driving to (and lining up at) filling stations for every refill. While NG can refill along the car's normal route, at home. Meanwhile, any kind of energy storage at home, whether electric in batteries, or tanks of NG, or raising water to roof tanks, or heating water even into steam, all can let the home user buy more energy input only when prices are lowest, which also takes pressure off the distribution systems.
A NG home charger that is also a fuelcell for a 2-5KW (or more) home should cost under $10,000. That's about as much as a good new water heater that's part of a home (air) heating system, which the fuelcell can also supply to bring its efficiency closer to 100% total. In fact such a fuelcell should really cost $3-5K. Which that $7+ savings per Gj would repay in 9 years or less.
And as efficiencies go up, that 9 years could go down to 2-5 years pretty rapidly.
Yep, Split Browser looks like the deluxe version (with a few bugs), but Split Pannel [sic] looks good, too.
I wonder how I can use javascript: in the URL bar to script the DOM of separate panels in Split Browser, maybe sending data between separate pages that way. I guess it probably works just like the DOM of tabs in the same browser, which seems to be Split Browser's paradigm.
Another advantage of a shell integrated within Firefox is simplicity. Using all the same Firefox GUI features for items linked in the Firefox shell output. Like if ls output filenames linked to the files (which terminals like GNOME's do, but with only limited operands on the embedded URL), the rest of Firefox's features could be applied to it. It's not just a matter of putting a shell launcher into Firefox, but actually merging the functions into one app that can use them all in combination.
Firefox's protocol parser and executor (ie. network retrieval) could be used without installing curl or wget, and with the same MIME handler DB for every operation. Scripts that integrate page DOMs with shell (or Perl, or other highly interoperable API language) scripts could be very useful.
I'd like a Firefox commandline shell to offer views of output as draggable icons, not just linked text, so I could select and drag/drop results into other apps, or just select them as args to other shell commands. Further, Firefox's native network features could let me do all that targeting any remote host with a server, translating the shell commands into perhaps ssh commands, and wrapping the results from the remote shell into Firefox's display styles and markup.
Really, integrating a commandline into Firefox, with the commandline able to access the DOM and Firefox's MIME handling/rendering and protocol parsing/transacting functions is a great synthesis of the commandline and the GUI, without modally excluding each from the other. And since Firefox already does most of it, I'd start by upgrading Firefox.
No, you're not getting it, either. How are you going to teach people to read the numbers 10,000 years from now? How many number systems did we actually have 10,000 or even just 3000 years ago that have become unrecognizable? How are you going to ensure that kind of continuing tradition across the next 10,000, when we already have so much power as people to make changes much faster than everyone did over nearly all the past 10,000 years?
And even that is missing the forest for the trees. My point is that since you have to pick some kind of signal that will be understood 10,000 years from now, it's not the durability of the clock, but the persistence of the signal's intelligibility that is the problem. So why even bother tackling the problem of making a durable clock mechanism, when the visible sky already has such a durable mechanism, and could be converted with the same efforts at encoding it as a clock that a mechanical one would require?
We already have longterm thinking in our species' reading the sky as a clock. If we want to experiment with doing so explicitly for the next 10,000 years, in any way that actually develops our longterm thinking, we should start with ourselves. Not some fancy materials that are ultimately an NP complete problem in the intractability of protecting a valuable artifact from theft or destruction. We should tackle the ignorance and insight part of the problem first. Then the rest of the problem is also mostly taken care of, with the existing materials already surrounding us.
The point is that our current fashion of fashioning counters isn't nearly as longterm a feature as is our language and our planetary environment.
But why add the complexity of a webserver, when what I want is just a very simple GUI to bash (or preferably Perl)? Why not cut out the middleman?
I guess your proposal has the advantage of being installable right now, without coding a new addon. But I'd like to see the shell more interactive with FF than HTTP would allow.
Yeah, Japan's decision to get paid to do what America is giving to the world for free is indeed rational. Nice work if you can get it.
But that has nothing to do with how the US uses NASA for other political agendas. Even if those agendas, at US expense, keep Russian rocket scientists in space exploration rather than weapons development, pointing missiles at Japan across the Japan Sea. Why not? The US pays for most of Japan's domestic defense anyway, not to mention the rest of the global security that protects Japan's export empire and the sources of the imports that keep Japan alive.
But like I said, that has nothing to do with whether Japan should pay its own way in the ISS mission. Japan's not being asked to pay for the rest of the US' agenda, whether that other agenda benefits Japan or not.
What I'm saying is that Japan's participation in the ISS program benefits Japan the way that the US' participation benefits the US. Which is why the US pays its way. Sure, the US also pays the way of some countries, like Russia, because Russia can't even feed its own people (while its oilocracy is diverting the economy to Putin's cronies), and Russia is of course a security threat to the rest of the world unless its idle hands are kept at constructive work. But that shouldn't stop Japan, which would be investing in its own domestic space industry here. Why should the US pay for that?
I suppose that since the US would have to spend money borrowed from Japan (and others) on top of the $400B the US already borrowed from Japan, it's "rational" of Japan to demand payment that will also become something like 150% bigger once fully paid off as US Treasury Bonds. But there's nothing rational at all in the US deciding to do something foolhardy like that.
Evidently, exactly like Split Browser. But someone beat you to it. Thanks for the great suggestion anyway.
And if you know of other FF addons that give a commandline shell in the URL bar, and a Perl interpreter for that commandline, I'd love to see them, too.
That Split Browser addon is exactly what I wanted! It works nearly perfectly, with only a few minor (workaroundable) bugs that target only one frame with some of the main browser functions, like "browser default homepage" and "Find". But it's really fullfeatured, and is just a presentation layer rendition alternate to tabs, interoperating with tabs and their GUI, that even mixes split frames and tabs together. Fantastic!
Your response just paid for hundreds of useless Slashdot flamewars:). Thanks.
Now, since you're so smart, can you tell me where to find an addon that turns the Firefox URL bar into a local commandline that outputs to the tabs/frames?
And if you can pull that off, how about an addon that sends those commandlines to a Perl interpreter, not just bash?
For each time I start a new frameset, I have to spend 5 minutes creating a new local HTML page? For each time that I delete or add a new page in the frameset, I have to spend time opening and editing the local HTML frameset page?
What I'm talking about does use that basic technology and technique. But gives an immediate GUI that lets me create that local HTML page and edit it by pointing at links and clicking buttons, not opening and editing files without automation.
A good way to do it would be to let me merge tabs together into two frames showing at the same time in the same window. Let me drag frames around inside the window to snap to bordering sides of other frames, then dropping them to push the shared border over. Letting me click and drag any frame's border across (or up/down) to reveal a new blank frame into which I can start browsing a new independent page. Maybe start with just a "View as Tabs/Panes" button or menu item that un/merges stacked tab frames into side by side draggable frames.
Since, as you point out, this technique could be done without modifying Firefox's current code in a crude (and unmanageable) fashion, making the GUI support doing it easily shouldn't be a very hard project.
How would you get commandlines to the webserver component?
And how does the localhost webserver protect from attacking HTML? All the HTML from a hostile remote host would have to do would be to include hostile commandline code in a clickable link pointing to localhost. The security problems would just be moved from the browser to the embedded webserver. Why not cut out the middleman?
Well, if it needs another computer, then it's just the same problem on the other computer. And the problem of needing another computer.
And really, what I'm looking for is just using Firefox as a commandline shell. Not so much because there's no other app, but because I'd like to integrate the shell into the Firefox app's process space. Commandline integration to the OS and to the other pages in the browser would be a great environment. Give Firefox an emacs plugin running the Perl debugger as its interpreter, and I'm in hyperheaven.
Irony is when we think or hear something is true, but then events demonstrate that thing is false. That is in no way the case with this research.
The scientist who just published these conclusive results is indeed the same scientist whose preliminary results in 1974 were the scientific basis for global laws and the industrial movement that removed and reduced phosphorus in wastewater. They demonstrated then that phosphorus was causing the toxic algae blooms, so we cut way back on phosphorus pollution. Now he's conclusively proved that it is indeed the phosphorus alone.
There's nothing ironic about that sequence of this scientist's career. There's nothing ironic about two completely consistent events.
What's the easy way for me to tile multiple open Firefox windows on Ubuntu?
But that's not quite enough. I don't want to have a whole GUI frame, including redundant navigation controls, for each page's pane (just one, that controls the active pane, like with tabs). And I don't want to have to rebuild the tiling, and de/retile my desktop's current mode when I switch among Firefox and other apps (like Evolution, OO.o, etc). Plus I would like the DOM to allow Javascript to access across independent pane boundaries, for app integration, and do other IPC.
So yes, the multipane feature and its subfeatures do belong to the Firefox app, and not the OS. Unless the OS can do all those things for Firefox (the DOM part seems impossible that way, though). But if the OS could do all that, and let me mix/match different app panes in a combined window, that would really transform my Desktop usage. If I could save combo "racks" of apps set up that way, with GUI features hidden or combined into a single "combo GUI" for the entire rack, then I'd probably stop a lot of my whining for a better Desktop.
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What we need is the opposite of this scheme.
We need to store our passwords on our own local trusted machine. Like on our personal mobile phone with tested HW encryption, which requires multifactor ID: thumbprint, voice recog, keyed PIN, retina scan. In fact, that device shouldn't store some simple password data, but rather a onetime password generator that generates unique secure password sequences for each challenging site. Maybe the phone should send the password via IR/Bluetooth or a phonecall, but secure itself against attacks over that connection, or just report the momentary password on the screen for its human to read and enter into the challenge.
It's insane that I give my bank PIN to some arbitrary sketchy ATM in some latenight deli when I'm already drunk, need another 6-pack, and won't even remember where (or who) I was when I find out months later that my PIN was used by someone (of the dozen sketchy ATMs I used that year) to rob my account. I want onetime passwords right now, that my phone can remember, attached to the specific counterparties, money quantities and transaction description. So later I've got my own complete, authoritave record.
Not go the other way and give my PIN to every fly by night website, just because they "trust each other" with nothing of their own at stake.
This whole idea is the stupidest security idea I've heard in a while, and I hear stupid ones every day.
Why would I trust MySpace with my AOL login? Once there's several other people to blame, any one of whom could have used or leaked my password, what's stopping unethical people at MySpace from using my "MySpace" login to get into my AOL login, and make our clueless police/FBI figure out which of the many possible perpetrators was the real perp?
I don't use the same PIN for all of my banks. Then one of the banks, or some unethical employee, could rob my other bank's account.
The whole point of a password is to keep everyone except you and the specific challenging party from accessing your account with that party. Good security doesn't even let the other party know your cleartext password, or access your account with them without it. But I don't see how OpenID will do anything like that.
Why not just open an account with my service. We'll let you register all of your passwords, for websites and your banks, to login to us. Then, you can use any password you happen to remember. And then, I'll go and use all of those passwords to rob you blind.
Maybe. Sterling says he did. Sterling says a lot of things. Because he's really a punk (70s punk rocker) - the punk who's the real cyberpunk. In his person, if not as much as in his writing style as is Gibson (by definition, no matter whose).
If we don't learn to think any differently, then the Millennium Clock is an exercise in doing nothing but working within our limits. But the purpose of the project is to find, examine and push back our limits. The goal is to design and build a clock that we can be the most sure will gong regularly for 10,000 years. Even if it's impossible, studying why it's impossible furthers the goal of improving our longterm thinking.
But in turn, you cannot be certain that it's impossible to have a clock that gongs regularly for 10,000 years. There is indeed a "Copernican principle", that predicting the distant future is aided by seeing the distant past", which you just used in your calendars example. The reason to believe the next 10,000 years will be at all like the last 10,000 years is because the last 5,000 years were much like the 5,000 years before that. At least in terms of the durability of both physical and cultural artifacts. FWIW, the Hebrew calendar might track almost 5800 years, but it was probably inaugurated "only" about 2500-3000 years ago. Just as the Egyptian Great Pyramids point to a foundational date about 13,500 years ago, but are an artifact of probably at most 7-8000 years ago, in stone as well as in conception. But they do seem on track to last another 3000, or 7-8000 years.
Most of the world is actually the same as it's been for the last 5000-10,000 years in most ways that count, especially those that are conserved in watching clocks. Yes, we do have many times the number of people, but most of that increase is in pinpoints around cities. In most of the world's land area, people live much the way they have for millennia. If we look back a hundred years, the world looks even more like it had. Our differences are mostly ones of degree. But even so, the future is indeed largely unpredictable. That's the point of exercises like designing a Millennium Clock: to learn to better predict the future, or to prepare for its unpredictability, or just to learn our limits in prediction so we don't live beyond them.
I'm not so sure about our beating papyrus for durability, and even less sure about how "provably" we've done so. Some papyrus artifacts do already have at least 5000 years under their belt. The "provably" part of your statement will require another 5000 years of testing. And just as, say, CDs were promoted as "perfect for 100 years", but many already are fading or succumbing to literal rot, the rest of our new materials very well might face an unexpected extinction within the next few millennia. Time will tell.
Which is all why I say we have to look at the human element in using a clock. We have to start with the problem of how to ensure people will recognize a clock 10,000 years from now. Perhaps the next 10,000 years will see changes as exponential in rate as the last 100 years have been for so many (though not yet all) humans. I doubt the planetary orbits will be any different (other than their now predictable natural decay), and if they are, then I doubt we can predict anything that will last long enough to count as a clock. Figuring out how to mark the planets as a clock, and to make those markers (whether cultural, physical, or both), will help us understand the next 10,000 years, or at least understand why we can't understand it. Learning from Hebrew and Chinese calendars, which indeed use the skies as their clock, and retain a comprehensive cultural apparatus for reading the clock, is exactly the kind of approach I'm talking about. The efforts of those ancient peoples didn't just make a clock, but locked in a comprehensive cultural apparatus that ensured its longevity through those millennia. They each were products, and master exploiters, of an epoch of transformational technological change. We too are like that now. We should put our mark on humanity in a similarly bold and aggressive way. Because we can.
Paper is an interesting substrate, because it's cheap, but also because it's a renewable resource. It literally grows on trees. It's an interesting development because it's carbon, not a silicon material. It's not even made from plastic, which we have to make from oil. Which means that it could be made from the extra pollution we suck out of the air - the old fashioned way: growing it in the ground.
What will be really interesting is if we can match that innovation by printing organic inks onto the paper to make the rest of the transistors. Carbon based "wires" on the substrate. Preferably grown from plants (or algae - I'm not picky). See if we can't grow our microelectronics, rather than manufacture it, and cut out most of the waste and pollution, while perhaps making fairly durable objects that can be easily recycled into the environment by just burying them in soil. Atop which we grow the next generation.
No problem. I'm not such a fool that I won't do what I can to protect myself from the destruction of my country's economy and my world's enviroment, just because I'm making it easier for selfish jerks like you, who probably still deny that oil is killing us.
FWIW, I've also had the fun and vast economic opportunity from being an early adopter of personal computer and networking tech for the past 30 years. Sure, I paid a lot more for the inefficient, untested early stuff. But I was there making a fortune off it at every step, defining it at the forefront. And always secure in the knowledge that I was doing the right thing for my personal future, and for the future of the rest of you wannabes who we dragged along into the future we were making up for ourselves.
Of course, we need lots of people like you to come along later and pay less than we did to start it, but in so much volume that we get to rake it in while you've got to figure out how to pay the bills. Doing it our way, rather than your inevitably lame way, is priceless anyway. So you're welcome. Any time.
Not ironic.
We don't even have anything recognizable from 10,000 years ago, though rock carving is older than that, and those scales of thinking have been part of those old cultures since before that.
This conversation isn't really going anywhere. Thanks for playing.
But I'm not asking Japan to pay for the rest of the ISS outside their own mission. I'm just saying that Japan should pay its own way. Since the ISS is so much bigger than this Japanese mission, that means that Japan is getting to take advantage of a much larger infrastructure in their own mission than they could possibly afford on their own. So Japan's mission is an investment in its own space program that is already subsidized by the US' very large investment in the rest of the ISS.
The US shouldn't additionally subsidize the Japanese space program on top of that by also paying it cash. That's ridiculous. And exactly the kind of insult that, if reversed, would help drive the relationship between the two countries apart. If that deal were further falsely portrayed as also asking Japan to pay for ISS expenses beyond Japan's own mission, that kind of talk would really damage the relationship, for good reason.
How are you going to be sure the chart lasts 10,000 years? How will they know that it's a conversion chart? How do you know that people in the future will have a Web to "look it up" in?
For that matter, how do we know that people in 10,000 will indeed use numbers, in any symbols? We just found an Amazonian tribe that doesn't really use numbers, and they're contemporaneous with us.
Besides, even if they can recognize that some object just showed some ancient symbols that some of their historian experts (if they have them) can recognize as a displayed quantity, how can we be sure they'll know that it counts time? Even if they do have similar concepts of cyclical time as we do now, how do we know they'll associate the time display with the passage of time? Let's say that various periods over the next 10,000 years see human development fall to the level of, say, the 1450 Sioux tribes. Would they recognize the clock display as a "clock", unless there were some cultural substrate that is really longterm in its duration, as using the sky as a calendar is already proven.
I don't expect people to look at the sky and read it like a clock. I think it's also becoming evident that you didn't even RTFA. The Millennium Clock project is designing a clock that will indicate the passage of the years, decades, centuries and millennia for 10,000 years. We can rely on people's minds and culture remaining about the same over that period as they need to be to simply recognize that a picture of the sky represents the sky itself, or they're not really recognizably human. That's why it's a reliable method of "encoding" the clock's strikes. Numbers aren't nearly as reliable.
Natural gas pipelines feed many, perhaps most of the homes in US48, about 6m^3 per hour max. The energy in 6m^3 natural gas is about 6*39Mj = 234Mj:h, or 65 kilowatts. NG fuelcells already get at least 40% efficiency into electricity, so that would be 26KW peak. Which means that the average home at 2KW average continuous needs only 0.08% of maximum duty (the typical 5KW peak demand would be 0.2% duty).
Big SUVs have about 80KW max output engines. If a 40% efficient fuelcell drove a 90% efficient NEMA-B motor, 80KW kinetic would consume about 225KW in NG, which would still consume only 84% of the home's incoming flow. So overnight "charging" even a big SUV could still drive that SUV for as many hours as it spent charging. Since most people don't drive SUVs at full motor power all the time, even an hour charging is probably enough to refuel after a day's driving.
In April 2008, NG cost about $7:Gj, while direct electricity cost in February, 2008 about $0.09:KWh, which is about $25:Gj. Even at 40% efficiency converting NG to electricity, that's only $17.5 per Gj.
Another advantage of NG powering homes and cars is that very little energy is consumed/lost in the NG distribution, compared to double-digit (up to 50%) losses in electric distribution. Compared with gasoline powering cars, the distribution of gasoline is very wasteful, with not only tankers driving around to filling stations, but cars driving to (and lining up at) filling stations for every refill. While NG can refill along the car's normal route, at home. Meanwhile, any kind of energy storage at home, whether electric in batteries, or tanks of NG, or raising water to roof tanks, or heating water even into steam, all can let the home user buy more energy input only when prices are lowest, which also takes pressure off the distribution systems.
A NG home charger that is also a fuelcell for a 2-5KW (or more) home should cost under $10,000. That's about as much as a good new water heater that's part of a home (air) heating system, which the fuelcell can also supply to bring its efficiency closer to 100% total. In fact such a fuelcell should really cost $3-5K. Which that $7+ savings per Gj would repay in 9 years or less.
And as efficiencies go up, that 9 years could go down to 2-5 years pretty rapidly.
Yep, Split Browser looks like the deluxe version (with a few bugs), but Split Pannel [sic] looks good, too.
I wonder how I can use javascript: in the URL bar to script the DOM of separate panels in Split Browser, maybe sending data between separate pages that way. I guess it probably works just like the DOM of tabs in the same browser, which seems to be Split Browser's paradigm.
Too late, I already took the advice in this thread to install the Split Browser extension :).
Another advantage of a shell integrated within Firefox is simplicity. Using all the same Firefox GUI features for items linked in the Firefox shell output. Like if ls output filenames linked to the files (which terminals like GNOME's do, but with only limited operands on the embedded URL), the rest of Firefox's features could be applied to it. It's not just a matter of putting a shell launcher into Firefox, but actually merging the functions into one app that can use them all in combination.
Firefox's protocol parser and executor (ie. network retrieval) could be used without installing curl or wget, and with the same MIME handler DB for every operation. Scripts that integrate page DOMs with shell (or Perl, or other highly interoperable API language) scripts could be very useful.
I'd like a Firefox commandline shell to offer views of output as draggable icons, not just linked text, so I could select and drag/drop results into other apps, or just select them as args to other shell commands. Further, Firefox's native network features could let me do all that targeting any remote host with a server, translating the shell commands into perhaps ssh commands, and wrapping the results from the remote shell into Firefox's display styles and markup.
Really, integrating a commandline into Firefox, with the commandline able to access the DOM and Firefox's MIME handling/rendering and protocol parsing/transacting functions is a great synthesis of the commandline and the GUI, without modally excluding each from the other. And since Firefox already does most of it, I'd start by upgrading Firefox.
No, you're not getting it, either. How are you going to teach people to read the numbers 10,000 years from now? How many number systems did we actually have 10,000 or even just 3000 years ago that have become unrecognizable? How are you going to ensure that kind of continuing tradition across the next 10,000, when we already have so much power as people to make changes much faster than everyone did over nearly all the past 10,000 years?
And even that is missing the forest for the trees. My point is that since you have to pick some kind of signal that will be understood 10,000 years from now, it's not the durability of the clock, but the persistence of the signal's intelligibility that is the problem. So why even bother tackling the problem of making a durable clock mechanism, when the visible sky already has such a durable mechanism, and could be converted with the same efforts at encoding it as a clock that a mechanical one would require?
We already have longterm thinking in our species' reading the sky as a clock. If we want to experiment with doing so explicitly for the next 10,000 years, in any way that actually develops our longterm thinking, we should start with ourselves. Not some fancy materials that are ultimately an NP complete problem in the intractability of protecting a valuable artifact from theft or destruction. We should tackle the ignorance and insight part of the problem first. Then the rest of the problem is also mostly taken care of, with the existing materials already surrounding us.
The point is that our current fashion of fashioning counters isn't nearly as longterm a feature as is our language and our planetary environment.
I think the FF Javascript shell addon can already do that. I want one that speaks bash, or preferably Perl.
But why add the complexity of a webserver, when what I want is just a very simple GUI to bash (or preferably Perl)? Why not cut out the middleman?
I guess your proposal has the advantage of being installable right now, without coding a new addon. But I'd like to see the shell more interactive with FF than HTTP would allow.
Yeah, Japan's decision to get paid to do what America is giving to the world for free is indeed rational. Nice work if you can get it.
But that has nothing to do with how the US uses NASA for other political agendas. Even if those agendas, at US expense, keep Russian rocket scientists in space exploration rather than weapons development, pointing missiles at Japan across the Japan Sea. Why not? The US pays for most of Japan's domestic defense anyway, not to mention the rest of the global security that protects Japan's export empire and the sources of the imports that keep Japan alive.
But like I said, that has nothing to do with whether Japan should pay its own way in the ISS mission. Japan's not being asked to pay for the rest of the US' agenda, whether that other agenda benefits Japan or not.
What I'm saying is that Japan's participation in the ISS program benefits Japan the way that the US' participation benefits the US. Which is why the US pays its way. Sure, the US also pays the way of some countries, like Russia, because Russia can't even feed its own people (while its oilocracy is diverting the economy to Putin's cronies), and Russia is of course a security threat to the rest of the world unless its idle hands are kept at constructive work. But that shouldn't stop Japan, which would be investing in its own domestic space industry here. Why should the US pay for that?
I suppose that since the US would have to spend money borrowed from Japan (and others) on top of the $400B the US already borrowed from Japan, it's "rational" of Japan to demand payment that will also become something like 150% bigger once fully paid off as US Treasury Bonds. But there's nothing rational at all in the US deciding to do something foolhardy like that.
Evidently, exactly like Split Browser. But someone beat you to it. Thanks for the great suggestion anyway.
And if you know of other FF addons that give a commandline shell in the URL bar, and a Perl interpreter for that commandline, I'd love to see them, too.
That Split Browser addon is exactly what I wanted! It works nearly perfectly, with only a few minor (workaroundable) bugs that target only one frame with some of the main browser functions, like "browser default homepage" and "Find". But it's really fullfeatured, and is just a presentation layer rendition alternate to tabs, interoperating with tabs and their GUI, that even mixes split frames and tabs together. Fantastic!
Your response just paid for hundreds of useless Slashdot flamewars :). Thanks.
Now, since you're so smart, can you tell me where to find an addon that turns the Firefox URL bar into a local commandline that outputs to the tabs/frames?
And if you can pull that off, how about an addon that sends those commandlines to a Perl interpreter, not just bash?
For each time I start a new frameset, I have to spend 5 minutes creating a new local HTML page? For each time that I delete or add a new page in the frameset, I have to spend time opening and editing the local HTML frameset page?
What I'm talking about does use that basic technology and technique. But gives an immediate GUI that lets me create that local HTML page and edit it by pointing at links and clicking buttons, not opening and editing files without automation.
A good way to do it would be to let me merge tabs together into two frames showing at the same time in the same window. Let me drag frames around inside the window to snap to bordering sides of other frames, then dropping them to push the shared border over. Letting me click and drag any frame's border across (or up/down) to reveal a new blank frame into which I can start browsing a new independent page. Maybe start with just a "View as Tabs/Panes" button or menu item that un/merges stacked tab frames into side by side draggable frames.
Since, as you point out, this technique could be done without modifying Firefox's current code in a crude (and unmanageable) fashion, making the GUI support doing it easily shouldn't be a very hard project.
How would you get commandlines to the webserver component?
And how does the localhost webserver protect from attacking HTML? All the HTML from a hostile remote host would have to do would be to include hostile commandline code in a clickable link pointing to localhost. The security problems would just be moved from the browser to the embedded webserver. Why not cut out the middleman?
Well, if it needs another computer, then it's just the same problem on the other computer. And the problem of needing another computer.
And really, what I'm looking for is just using Firefox as a commandline shell. Not so much because there's no other app, but because I'd like to integrate the shell into the Firefox app's process space. Commandline integration to the OS and to the other pages in the browser would be a great environment. Give Firefox an emacs plugin running the Perl debugger as its interpreter, and I'm in hyperheaven.
That's not "ironic".
Irony is when we think or hear something is true, but then events demonstrate that thing is false. That is in no way the case with this research.
The scientist who just published these conclusive results is indeed the same scientist whose preliminary results in 1974 were the scientific basis for global laws and the industrial movement that removed and reduced phosphorus in wastewater. They demonstrated then that phosphorus was causing the toxic algae blooms, so we cut way back on phosphorus pollution. Now he's conclusively proved that it is indeed the phosphorus alone.
There's nothing ironic about that sequence of this scientist's career. There's nothing ironic about two completely consistent events.
What's the easy way for me to tile multiple open Firefox windows on Ubuntu?
But that's not quite enough. I don't want to have a whole GUI frame, including redundant navigation controls, for each page's pane (just one, that controls the active pane, like with tabs). And I don't want to have to rebuild the tiling, and de/retile my desktop's current mode when I switch among Firefox and other apps (like Evolution, OO.o, etc). Plus I would like the DOM to allow Javascript to access across independent pane boundaries, for app integration, and do other IPC.
So yes, the multipane feature and its subfeatures do belong to the Firefox app, and not the OS. Unless the OS can do all those things for Firefox (the DOM part seems impossible that way, though). But if the OS could do all that, and let me mix/match different app panes in a combined window, that would really transform my Desktop usage. If I could save combo "racks" of apps set up that way, with GUI features hidden or combined into a single "combo GUI" for the entire rack, then I'd probably stop a lot of my whining for a better Desktop.