I haven't used Opera lately. Early this year I tried to install Opera on my SonyEricsson phone, but it failed, and not smoothly. I'm not ready to switch browsers for just the "slideable multipane" feature. But I'd like to see someone incorporate that mature feature, as tested on Opera, into Firefox.
They've buried Linux so that the end user doesn't see it; the entire UI is presented through Firefox.
Is there a Javascript interface to Linux that can use the URL line as a commandline to an embedded shell? Something like "javascript: alert(cmd('ls -l ~'))"? Or even better, a javascript option that can direct output to the main Firefox window (tabs for file descriptors). Of course, with security settings to lock untrustworthy javascript (eg. in downloaded HTML pages) in a crippled/chrooted sandbox, but allowing typed commandlines just like in a bash shell.
That way, Firefox can wrap the OS out of sight, except that skilled users could still get to the OS and a commandline. But without a whole extra terminal app, or any other apps for that matter.
But "for no money" is equal to "for free". Though, as I keep pointing out, Japan would get benefits apart from a monetary fee.
FWIW, diplomacy often uses money, but it is not always defined by money. Diplomacy is to turn communication into political influence, even when no money changes hands, or even remains in the same hands in any differential. Diplomacy negotiates exchanges, but they can be entirely non material, and valued completely differently on either side of the table, as money is not.
NASA is providing plenty of services in return, in the rest of the mission. The paying customers in each case are the taxpayers of each nation, which get an escalated domestic space industry capacity, and the glory.
How is the US the only one for which these missions are worth spending the money?
I'd like HTML forms to include a tag that uniquely identifies the site publishing the form, and the form itself. Probably a hash of the form's field names, signed by the site with its SSL certificate. Then I could click an option on the form to repopulate it with the last data I already inserted into that same form the last time I filled it (or any previous time, in a history). Storing that data on my local terminal, rather than leave it stored at the remote site.
And I'd like for the full range of common personal info fields to have standard names, so I could click to fill out the neverending series of personal info forms the Web challenges me with all day, every day. Click to refill the form with the same info as last time I visited it. Or one dataset from a list of named profiles stored on my local machine. So I don't have to remember what personal info I disclosed to this or that site, or scrounge for it from the other places I keep that info stored personally.
If the system let my browser point at a "personal info server", I could click to populate these personal info forms using anyone's terminal, not just my own, though I'd have to trust the terminal not to exploit the personal data exposed while using its browser as a transfer point. Maybe these personal info forms could also take a URL that points directly at my personal info server, and let the challenging server direct its request to my personal info server, which lets the challenging server login (as prearranged) and get the data specified as available to it.
That infrastructure would take some work. But it would save me a lot of trouble every day. And therefore save a lot of trouble for millions of others in the same boat. While lowering the transaction barriers, without sacrificing security. And indeed increasing security, by minimizing the personal data stored outside my control, at numerous (and forgettable) unaccountable remote servers.
I'd love Firefox to let me set not just exclusive tabs each with their own page, but also to let me slide around a dividing border between two panels, each with its own page in it. Side by side, or top/bottom, or a grid of X x Y. Let me look at two (or more) pages at once, scrolling each independently inside its pane. Comparing. copy/pasting. Like Excel and OO.o spreadsheets can allocate ranges of cells to separate window "portals" onto the sheet below.
Bruce Sterling (coined the term "cyberpunk" for associate William Gibson's SF style that he imitated) promoted the Millennium Clock (Clock of the Long Now, from the Long Now Foundation) on his "eco-future design revolution" Viridian movement mailing list. We discussed it at length, but everyone missed the point.
The #1 design problem in a Millennium Clock is how to be sure that people 10,000 years from now (and along the way) will be able to "read" the clock, make sense of the clock's striking. Knowing that it's a "clock", knowing that it struck before at regular intervals, that it will strike again. "How to tell the time?" is a problem more for the uncontrolled people the clock is designed to signal, than it is for a clock that can at least theoretically be controlled from its beginnings across millennia.
Mechanical failures or 100% success is irrelevant if people as far in the future from now as we are from shortly after the end of the last Ice Age, twice as distant as the people whose ancient Egyptian and Sumerian writing is decipherable only by the most learned experts, can't recognize the clock enough that they know it's marking time.
So I proposed that we concentrate on that problem. After all, we've already got a giant, maintenance free, frictionless and durable clockwork flying around the sky every day. The Sun, Moon, Earth, planets and stars are all marking time every day. Their alignments at each year, century and millennium are evident to everyone on Earth, distinctive, and already "built". What we need to do to ensure our descendants can read any clock through the next 10,000 years is exactly the same task for inventing a mechanical clock we build and encode with time symbols, and for discovering how to use the existing "clock" (that humans have already used as timekeeper for our whole history).
Maybe we should indeed build some monuments pointing at the "clock". Maybe to indulge our current fetish for precision matter engineering in the service of information manipulation, we sould build precise models of the sky at each time the clock strikes. Maybe we should spread thousands of Volkswagen sized synthetic diamonds, into which glowing radioactive doped renderings of the sky at each "gong" are obvious to everyone. Perhaps with a "Rosetta Stone" embedded inside, showing how we presently represent those times at those gongs (eg. "00:00 January 1, 2000 AD") also embedded in there, the privilege of the builders. Perhaps we should launch satellites (redundant - 10,000 years is a long time, even in the near-vacuum of orbit), powered by solar panels, that laser down to some such markers, burning away debris that might cover them, but passing through the readable, transparent monument. Perhaps we should carve the sequence of images into a circle on the face of the Moon, so anyone can glance up and compare the century/millennia arrangements in the Lunar pictures to the sky framing it.
But building a clock that can be stolen, lost or broken, and which could easily become an unreadable enigma even if still available and moving in 10,000 years, is a distraction. In fact, our obsession with building that clock, rather than learning how to communicate with our distant descendants, shows just how important such a project is to its real goal: changing our naive approaches to longterm thinking. The failure of Version 1 of this Millennium Clock is a perfect expression of why we need to learn to devise a clock that succeeds.
We missed the 2000 AD launch of a clock that people will recognize striking in 12,000 AD (or whatever they call it then). Lucky for us, we have 992 years to figure out how to do it right before the next deadline for what could become its first consecutive strike, that 10 millennia hence people will still know was a "clock" that started "now".
Japan could get in return valuable space operations experience, and first rate publicity for their space program which should help them get more of their own domestic funding.
Just like NASA gets.
This is the International Space Station. All the science is published. All the different nations get to develop and test their space tech in (and orbiting) the real world. They get to test interop with the global space industry. They get the glory of high profile missions featured on US, and then international, TV.
The US already takes the risk of leading this project. It already is the guarantor of funding, and pays most of the bills. Why should Japan get paid to get the same benefits the US has to pay to get?
Facial recognition doesn't even work at all, even on specialized HW, SW, and selected test subjects. In 5 years, maybe it might work occasionally. Not replace the mouse. Nor will any of those other brand new special skills input devices. Hell, the majority of PCs even now are probably about 5 years old, and we're about to plunge into a "recession" that won't even have the vast debt to prop it up that the past decade had.
Gartner has always been nothing but a PR mill to market "mindshare" of directions in computer industry trends. I've never read a Gartner report or employee (or "Fellow", which must really take bribing) that was anything other than "Big Computer Corp X wishes this report would come true".
Think about the gaming magazine "reporting" you read, and how it's all PR. Big computer corps, like Apple, Microsoft, Dell - and probably Sony, Nintendo etc, all trying to become "computer" corps or their synthesis - have even more money to buy reporting. And Gartner isn't even saying it's "journalism". It's like those 1990s Internet Bubble stockbrokers' in-house "analysts", whose reports always said that whatever stocks the brokerage was vested in would go nowhere but up. In fact, those fake analysts are still doing the same thing, and the market is still a wasteland because of it. Gartner has even less accountability, and even less of a track record of guessing right, rather than wishing hard.
I bet Gartner predicted in 1999 that by 2008 we'd all have Aeron chairs and foosball tables.
Even if the peak use of electricity extends beyond the sunlight hours, the PV still does more than "little" to reduce the demands.
For one, as I mentioned, the PV is a better insulator (reflector/absorber) of solar power that makes the heat that air conditioners must cool. That is the peak of the peak, with "double" (or something like it) the effect of just the extra shade, because the shade amount is partly used to power extra cooling. Also, since the standard time zones see the actual solar peak (solar noon) moving within them, the solar supply / power demand peak shifts away from the synchronized office hours, further offloading from the peak time.
For another, solar PV generates more power than is necessary to cool what remains to heat a building. PV, especially in places like Texas (sunny, subtropical) can get something like 20% of the 1KW that strikes each square meter at "solar noon", through nearly the entire year. That's something like 200W:m^2. An insulated building (including UV-shielded windows) doesn't require 200W to cool each m^2, especially in the average low-storey buildings in Texas. And of course lots of buildings don't need cooling while people aren't in them (either the home or the office), but both are generating power for nearby consumption. The extra can be consumed elsewhere in the neighborhood, or stored for later.
That's way more than "little" to reduce peak power demands.
But that doesn't mean that solar thermal doesn't also have its place. In fact, its place is probably higher than the lowest priority grid buildouts, though lower than solar rooftops. If we're going for maximum returns (in money, energy and sustainability), we should do them all, in proper proportion.
The lines can handle 18,500 megawatts of power, enough for 3.7 million homes on a hot day when air-conditioners are running.
That's 5KW per home. If each (or many) of those homes also covered their roofs with solar panels, which protect the home from converting the Sun's rays into heat that must be cooled, and instead convert the rays into power to cool the house that doesn't need long distance transmission, those homes would need closer to 1-2KW max.
A fat "wide area network" for power is better than one too bottlenecked to be reliable. But just like only building too many roads only guarantees congestion everywhere at greater scale, instead of making neighborhoods with local access and easy walking/biking, creating only a fatter grid will just escalate everyone's power consumption by removing inhibitions.
Some of that $4.93B should be spent on local generation that offloads from the grid, as well as a better grid to distribute loads away from hotpoints.
If I were a rich oilman desperate to invest my $billions in something to make sense and not just many more dollars (like T. Boone Pickens), I'd offer free solar roofs to everyone, and split the income from the excess power pushed back into the grid. If I got everyone in Texas (through their taxes) to spend the $4-5B on that grid to make my distributed power corp work, I'd make back the investment in 5-10 years, and then rake in $billions more.
But that would require competing with easy oil and natural gas profits, even with all their problems, so maybe that's why I'm not T. Boone Pickens.
I can tell that you're interested in seeing a trust web working for Web browsing, or just all network access. And maybe like the one I mentioned.
I don't really have the specific implementation of such a trust web thought through. It's just clear to me that trust webs are the way to make our network access work the way our regular trust skills work in the real world, as PGP and other trust webs work. If I thought there was actually a plugin for Firefox, or a chance at a core feature to implement it underway, I'd work on the details more. But actually I'd rather see you work on it, and make it as simple and reliable as possible. I'll be happy to use it when it's ready:).
Humans are very dextrous and expressive tool users. Our brains excel at feedback with an object we manipulate, especially with our hands, to get what's on our minds out there in the world.
We're not nearly as good at just waving our hands, with nothing in them, to communicate, as we are at flapping our lips. Our hand gestures are much more precise and accurate when they've got something to feel moving with or against them. So I expect that these gloves will not nearly compete with decent keyboards for productivity.
Except that the gloves can signal more than a single letter at a time, in more complex gestures. If keyboards could recognize those macros in a more complex language, the keyboard would blast ahead again.
Apple's multitouch is just that chance for complex gestures. A keyboard and a multitouch screen, or a keyboard that can be twiddled like a multitouch screen and a plain multitouch screen, are probably the most productive input devices that aren't sharply limited like joysticks.
Now, if these gloves had real force feedback and texture, so the hands could work against and within the gloves, then maybe they'd compete well with other objects that we manipulate with our hands, instead of empty gestures. But they'd still probably be even better if we could hold or touch a real, interactive object with our hands inside those gloves.
Again, the idea here isn't to change the default set of trusted CAs as currently shipped to a large group of new CAs. It's to allow even one difference, whether dropping a default CA, or adding a new one.
Most people won't do anything different. Or an enterprise might point at a few "gateway CAs" it maintains itself, but which all point to the same default CAs. So it can just edit a few of its own CAs to change from what pointing at the real ones would do, like a DNS cache or any other proxy/gateway. Rather than push new configs to all the clients.
Such actions would be rare, but doing them even once means moving from a centralized CA system with all its vulnerabilities and limitations to one that could be changed at all. And by the choice of the user.
There is not going to be any system that achieves the "Open CA Authorities" this story asks for in its title that avoids the problems of complexity and the possibility of trusting the wrong alternative. That is true by definition. I just described a system which could get those "Open CAs", without sacrificing the default system we have now, and with flexibility, and using current tech and paradigms. If you don't like it, you're probably not going to like anything that fulfills "Open CAs".
In which case you're free to use the centralized authority ones of today. Or even, if a trust web is deployed as I describe, just use its defaults which function identically.
You have a lot to learn about nonviolence. Read some more Gandhi and get back to me. Or some more history of India, or of the US Civil Rights Revolution, or other nonviolent struggles around the world.
And about the value of getting yourself killed. As well as how violence is a better way to get yourself killed, without winning anything - or anything worth keeping.
Instead of relying on centralized CAs, and implicitly trusting these privileged monopolies, we could shift to trust webs.
How does one get inducted into a web of trust without traveling hundreds of miles to a major city where key signing parties happen? Or do you expect the majority of notaries public to sign keys?
This trust web is a separate layer from the PGP trust web, though they could "gateway" to each other to extend trust from one layer to the other.
To use it, you would need to get the added trust authority's credentials out of band of this new trust layer, like in any trust layer. One way would be to use the default trust authorities shipped with the browser (as they are now) to trust other authorities while they're all trustworthy. Or some other out of band way, like a CD in postal mail, or a business card at a convention (or in postal mail), or bound into a magazine, etc. There is nothing special about this trust web's need for PKI.
But if there is already a PGP PKI, that can be used to transmit the HTTP trust web credentials. As can any other trusted channel. Or they can be kept separated.
But we'd each have the freedom (or our sysadmins, who could lock the trust web changes away from normal users) to emphasize whoever we actually trust to influence our automated trust.
The "or our sysadmins" part scares me. Home Internet access is moving slowly toward a model where the ISP is a home user's sysadmin.
But that is already the model. The point is that enterprises don't need to always rely on the user themself to specify that user's trust web. Again, the system I'm talking about is just a new application of an existing system.
Besides, the ISP as the home user's sysadmin has quite a lot of benefit to everyone. If that role is decided by the home user, and not just yet another bundled service from their ISP (telco, cableco, who also own and control their home's router, and perhaps eventually their home's TV - and "security cameras") that excludes the home user from control and choice, that is extra security, without forcing security monoculture and lockin. Again, a separate issue from using what's good about a trust web, that has its own logic and tradeoffs.
Nonviolence does have that effect on people among the abusers who like to think they are the "good guys". But the people running the British occupation didn't think they were the good guys, except in the sense that everyone thinks their actions are "justified" at worst by "looking out for #1".
Nonviolence's power is in fact to redraw the boundary between "Us vs Them" that started out drawn by the chief abusers, instead to cut away much, most or all (depending on the success of the nonviolent tactics used) of the people previously drawn as "Us" along with the chief abusers. Including, perhaps, the chief abusers themselves from their previous actions, if indeed those chief abusers' conscience can be reached. But it does not at all require those chief abusers to have a conscience, or to change themselves at all.
It doesn't even need the abuser's own forces to be converted. The main product of nonviolent resistance is to get the victims themselves to stop cooperating with the abusers in their own abuse. Most of the effort in the abuse is practiced by the victims against themselves, or each other. Take that away, and that work is converted to helping each other and themselves. Which doubles the effect of that work: taking its power away from the abuser, and giving it to the resister. Since the resisters tend to work harder for themselves than they did for the abuser, once freed at all to do so, the effect of the nonviolent resistance tends to put more than double the power the abuser used to count on into the hands of the resisters.
Nonviolent resistance frees the minds of the victims first. From that freedom all power flows. It breaks the "spell" (mass psychology, AKA "politics") that the abusers have cast on the victims, breaking the abuser's power over them. When properly coordinated, that freed up power can stop the abuser. The nonviolence leverages a more powerful compassion among the more numerous victims and associates of the abuser against the tyranny of the abuser. That compassion isn't "being nice", but rather the simple identification of "that could be me next", humans' selfish desire for self-preservation. To at least stop supporting the abuser, even if not to actively oppose them. As the overall cooperation shifts from the side of the abuser to the side of the victims, the abuser is forced from power. Even if the abuser never changes their own mind.
That is the pattern of nonviolent resistance throughout its history. Since masses of people are even less insightful than individuals, and individuals are typically hard to teach exclusive nonviolence to ourselves, there has usually (perhaps always) also been violence. But we can see that when there's no nonviolence, that resistance typically fails, or at best succeeds but with the seeds of its own violent self-destruction. Nonviolence, even when it fails, fails to perpetuate the violence that is necessary for the abuse.
Mars is teeming with vampires in underground caverns. They've covered the surface with a layer of blood dust to protect themselves from the Sun's rays. It's time to start arming our probes and orbital satellite bases with SOLASERS, to focus the Sun's power through cracks we dig in their defenses.
Otherwise, the biters will just ride back to Earth our probes, and raise their earthling cousins into an army to destroy us while the Sun's back is turned.
These cheap landers with specialized probes show just how much more powerful our science can be when we interact with its subjects through matter-on-matter operations, rather than just interacting with energy as we do in telescopes, or interacting with information as we do in simulations.
When we actually send a human to Mars, a "generalized probe" with sensory and mechanical amplification equipment, we'll really be getting to work, down to brass tacks.
"Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons.
Gandhi is unequivocally reiterating that nonviolence is "in fact the mightiest force in the world", even in a statement mentioning an atomic bomb as an alternative (which shortsighted Indians would have used to their own detriment).
Myanmar won't be freed through violence, either. It never has been. In violence, the ruling thugs have the upper hand, and fighting it with more violence turns the "new boss" into a thug, too. Mynamar is not nearly free now, but it is closer, even if only in inches, than it has been throughout the long violent struggle.
Nonviolence doesn't work by embarrassing the opponent, or really directly causing any internal change in the opponent. It works by alienating everyone else from cooperating with the opponent. The victim's cooperation with one's own abuser is the abuser's chief ally. Nonviolence in a coordinated effort to refuse cooperation destroys the abuser's ability to leverage whatever strength they do have into any greater strength to be found in the victim or others who made up the status quo. The "embarrassment" of the abuser is important only as it exists in the minds of everyone else, who is no longer either intimidated or tempted into supporting the abuser.
The colonial era didn't just "simply end". It took a lot of help. It's hard, perhaps impossible, to know whether the violence that accompanied the nonviolence accelerated or slowed the success of evicting the British. But it's pretty clear that violence alone wouldn't have worked, as it never did before, and generally hasn't since (except since the Reagan Era) to end colonial occupation. It's even more clear that the nonviolence made India more governable after evicting the British than the nonviolence did.
The point being that Indians were lucky (some might say "blessed", but I wouldn't) that they were forced to nonviolence because they had no alternative. Lucky because nonviolence is, as Gandhi said, the mightiest force in the world. Mightier than the atom bomb. Since Indians were forced by lack of alternatives, not so much from any greater enlightenment, they failed to stay nonviolent once the British were out.
And that's why their resorting to violence lost India Pakistan. Which of course is the greatest turning point in world history of the last century apart from the splitting of the Allies into the Cold War with the Soviets. And the Pakistan war is still raging 60 years later. In Afghanistan, Pakistan's secret police's colony, Pakistan is "winning". And along the Pakistan/India border, their nuclear "Cold War" (that is not infrequently a hot, shooting war), the brink is usually closer than it ever was between the US/SU, but for a couple-few times some fool actually ordered the launch of armageddon.
Gandhi was of course not criticizing nonviolence. He was criticizing the weakness of Indians who abandoned it once it was no longer necessity, though nonviolence was the mightier force. Through it India and "Pakistan" could have gone down a road that these weaker forces, including nukes, only make more dangerous to everyone.
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I haven't used Opera lately. Early this year I tried to install Opera on my SonyEricsson phone, but it failed, and not smoothly. I'm not ready to switch browsers for just the "slideable multipane" feature. But I'd like to see someone incorporate that mature feature, as tested on Opera, into Firefox.
Is there a Javascript interface to Linux that can use the URL line as a commandline to an embedded shell? Something like "javascript: alert(cmd('ls -l ~'))"? Or even better, a javascript option that can direct output to the main Firefox window (tabs for file descriptors). Of course, with security settings to lock untrustworthy javascript (eg. in downloaded HTML pages) in a crippled/chrooted sandbox, but allowing typed commandlines just like in a bash shell.
That way, Firefox can wrap the OS out of sight, except that skilled users could still get to the OS and a commandline. But without a whole extra terminal app, or any other apps for that matter.
Well, no one's asking them to do it for nothing.
But "for no money" is equal to "for free". Though, as I keep pointing out, Japan would get benefits apart from a monetary fee.
FWIW, diplomacy often uses money, but it is not always defined by money. Diplomacy is to turn communication into political influence, even when no money changes hands, or even remains in the same hands in any differential. Diplomacy negotiates exchanges, but they can be entirely non material, and valued completely differently on either side of the table, as money is not.
NASA is providing plenty of services in return, in the rest of the mission. The paying customers in each case are the taxpayers of each nation, which get an escalated domestic space industry capacity, and the glory.
How is the US the only one for which these missions are worth spending the money?
I'd like HTML forms to include a tag that uniquely identifies the site publishing the form, and the form itself. Probably a hash of the form's field names, signed by the site with its SSL certificate. Then I could click an option on the form to repopulate it with the last data I already inserted into that same form the last time I filled it (or any previous time, in a history). Storing that data on my local terminal, rather than leave it stored at the remote site.
And I'd like for the full range of common personal info fields to have standard names, so I could click to fill out the neverending series of personal info forms the Web challenges me with all day, every day. Click to refill the form with the same info as last time I visited it. Or one dataset from a list of named profiles stored on my local machine. So I don't have to remember what personal info I disclosed to this or that site, or scrounge for it from the other places I keep that info stored personally.
If the system let my browser point at a "personal info server", I could click to populate these personal info forms using anyone's terminal, not just my own, though I'd have to trust the terminal not to exploit the personal data exposed while using its browser as a transfer point. Maybe these personal info forms could also take a URL that points directly at my personal info server, and let the challenging server direct its request to my personal info server, which lets the challenging server login (as prearranged) and get the data specified as available to it.
That infrastructure would take some work. But it would save me a lot of trouble every day. And therefore save a lot of trouble for millions of others in the same boat. While lowering the transaction barriers, without sacrificing security. And indeed increasing security, by minimizing the personal data stored outside my control, at numerous (and forgettable) unaccountable remote servers.
I'd love Firefox to let me set not just exclusive tabs each with their own page, but also to let me slide around a dividing border between two panels, each with its own page in it. Side by side, or top/bottom, or a grid of X x Y. Let me look at two (or more) pages at once, scrolling each independently inside its pane. Comparing. copy/pasting. Like Excel and OO.o spreadsheets can allocate ranges of cells to separate window "portals" onto the sheet below.
Yes they will. That's what diplomacy is all about. Negotiations between countries for their mutual benefit.
If Japan wants to be included in more space science missions, it will join the mission in the same spirit the US leads it.
Or lead their own and invite the US along.
Bruce Sterling (coined the term "cyberpunk" for associate William Gibson's SF style that he imitated) promoted the Millennium Clock (Clock of the Long Now, from the Long Now Foundation) on his "eco-future design revolution" Viridian movement mailing list. We discussed it at length, but everyone missed the point.
The #1 design problem in a Millennium Clock is how to be sure that people 10,000 years from now (and along the way) will be able to "read" the clock, make sense of the clock's striking. Knowing that it's a "clock", knowing that it struck before at regular intervals, that it will strike again. "How to tell the time?" is a problem more for the uncontrolled people the clock is designed to signal, than it is for a clock that can at least theoretically be controlled from its beginnings across millennia.
Mechanical failures or 100% success is irrelevant if people as far in the future from now as we are from shortly after the end of the last Ice Age, twice as distant as the people whose ancient Egyptian and Sumerian writing is decipherable only by the most learned experts, can't recognize the clock enough that they know it's marking time.
So I proposed that we concentrate on that problem. After all, we've already got a giant, maintenance free, frictionless and durable clockwork flying around the sky every day. The Sun, Moon, Earth, planets and stars are all marking time every day. Their alignments at each year, century and millennium are evident to everyone on Earth, distinctive, and already "built". What we need to do to ensure our descendants can read any clock through the next 10,000 years is exactly the same task for inventing a mechanical clock we build and encode with time symbols, and for discovering how to use the existing "clock" (that humans have already used as timekeeper for our whole history).
Maybe we should indeed build some monuments pointing at the "clock". Maybe to indulge our current fetish for precision matter engineering in the service of information manipulation, we sould build precise models of the sky at each time the clock strikes. Maybe we should spread thousands of Volkswagen sized synthetic diamonds, into which glowing radioactive doped renderings of the sky at each "gong" are obvious to everyone. Perhaps with a "Rosetta Stone" embedded inside, showing how we presently represent those times at those gongs (eg. "00:00 January 1, 2000 AD") also embedded in there, the privilege of the builders. Perhaps we should launch satellites (redundant - 10,000 years is a long time, even in the near-vacuum of orbit), powered by solar panels, that laser down to some such markers, burning away debris that might cover them, but passing through the readable, transparent monument. Perhaps we should carve the sequence of images into a circle on the face of the Moon, so anyone can glance up and compare the century/millennia arrangements in the Lunar pictures to the sky framing it.
But building a clock that can be stolen, lost or broken, and which could easily become an unreadable enigma even if still available and moving in 10,000 years, is a distraction. In fact, our obsession with building that clock, rather than learning how to communicate with our distant descendants, shows just how important such a project is to its real goal: changing our naive approaches to longterm thinking. The failure of Version 1 of this Millennium Clock is a perfect expression of why we need to learn to devise a clock that succeeds.
We missed the 2000 AD launch of a clock that people will recognize striking in 12,000 AD (or whatever they call it then). Lucky for us, we have 992 years to figure out how to do it right before the next deadline for what could become its first consecutive strike, that 10 millennia hence people will still know was a "clock" that started "now".
Japan could get in return valuable space operations experience, and first rate publicity for their space program which should help them get more of their own domestic funding.
Just like NASA gets.
This is the International Space Station. All the science is published. All the different nations get to develop and test their space tech in (and orbiting) the real world. They get to test interop with the global space industry. They get the glory of high profile missions featured on US, and then international, TV.
The US already takes the risk of leading this project. It already is the guarantor of funding, and pays most of the bills. Why should Japan get paid to get the same benefits the US has to pay to get?
When the oil runs out, or just the oil you can afford, it's never coming back.
The Sun, though, is going to come out again tomorrow.
Maybe people who don't think to use a UPS shouldn't get to post on Slashdot as often as those who do.
Facial recognition doesn't even work at all, even on specialized HW, SW, and selected test subjects. In 5 years, maybe it might work occasionally. Not replace the mouse. Nor will any of those other brand new special skills input devices. Hell, the majority of PCs even now are probably about 5 years old, and we're about to plunge into a "recession" that won't even have the vast debt to prop it up that the past decade had.
Gartner has always been nothing but a PR mill to market "mindshare" of directions in computer industry trends. I've never read a Gartner report or employee (or "Fellow", which must really take bribing) that was anything other than "Big Computer Corp X wishes this report would come true".
Think about the gaming magazine "reporting" you read, and how it's all PR. Big computer corps, like Apple, Microsoft, Dell - and probably Sony, Nintendo etc, all trying to become "computer" corps or their synthesis - have even more money to buy reporting. And Gartner isn't even saying it's "journalism". It's like those 1990s Internet Bubble stockbrokers' in-house "analysts", whose reports always said that whatever stocks the brokerage was vested in would go nowhere but up. In fact, those fake analysts are still doing the same thing, and the market is still a wasteland because of it. Gartner has even less accountability, and even less of a track record of guessing right, rather than wishing hard.
I bet Gartner predicted in 1999 that by 2008 we'd all have Aeron chairs and foosball tables.
Even if the peak use of electricity extends beyond the sunlight hours, the PV still does more than "little" to reduce the demands.
For one, as I mentioned, the PV is a better insulator (reflector/absorber) of solar power that makes the heat that air conditioners must cool. That is the peak of the peak, with "double" (or something like it) the effect of just the extra shade, because the shade amount is partly used to power extra cooling. Also, since the standard time zones see the actual solar peak (solar noon) moving within them, the solar supply / power demand peak shifts away from the synchronized office hours, further offloading from the peak time.
For another, solar PV generates more power than is necessary to cool what remains to heat a building. PV, especially in places like Texas (sunny, subtropical) can get something like 20% of the 1KW that strikes each square meter at "solar noon", through nearly the entire year. That's something like 200W:m^2. An insulated building (including UV-shielded windows) doesn't require 200W to cool each m^2, especially in the average low-storey buildings in Texas. And of course lots of buildings don't need cooling while people aren't in them (either the home or the office), but both are generating power for nearby consumption. The extra can be consumed elsewhere in the neighborhood, or stored for later.
That's way more than "little" to reduce peak power demands.
But that doesn't mean that solar thermal doesn't also have its place. In fact, its place is probably higher than the lowest priority grid buildouts, though lower than solar rooftops. If we're going for maximum returns (in money, energy and sustainability), we should do them all, in proper proportion.
That's 5KW per home. If each (or many) of those homes also covered their roofs with solar panels, which protect the home from converting the Sun's rays into heat that must be cooled, and instead convert the rays into power to cool the house that doesn't need long distance transmission, those homes would need closer to 1-2KW max.
A fat "wide area network" for power is better than one too bottlenecked to be reliable. But just like only building too many roads only guarantees congestion everywhere at greater scale, instead of making neighborhoods with local access and easy walking/biking, creating only a fatter grid will just escalate everyone's power consumption by removing inhibitions.
Some of that $4.93B should be spent on local generation that offloads from the grid, as well as a better grid to distribute loads away from hotpoints.
If I were a rich oilman desperate to invest my $billions in something to make sense and not just many more dollars (like T. Boone Pickens), I'd offer free solar roofs to everyone, and split the income from the excess power pushed back into the grid. If I got everyone in Texas (through their taxes) to spend the $4-5B on that grid to make my distributed power corp work, I'd make back the investment in 5-10 years, and then rake in $billions more.
But that would require competing with easy oil and natural gas profits, even with all their problems, so maybe that's why I'm not T. Boone Pickens.
I can tell that you're interested in seeing a trust web working for Web browsing, or just all network access. And maybe like the one I mentioned.
I don't really have the specific implementation of such a trust web thought through. It's just clear to me that trust webs are the way to make our network access work the way our regular trust skills work in the real world, as PGP and other trust webs work. If I thought there was actually a plugin for Firefox, or a chance at a core feature to implement it underway, I'd work on the details more. But actually I'd rather see you work on it, and make it as simple and reliable as possible. I'll be happy to use it when it's ready :).
Humans are very dextrous and expressive tool users. Our brains excel at feedback with an object we manipulate, especially with our hands, to get what's on our minds out there in the world.
We're not nearly as good at just waving our hands, with nothing in them, to communicate, as we are at flapping our lips. Our hand gestures are much more precise and accurate when they've got something to feel moving with or against them. So I expect that these gloves will not nearly compete with decent keyboards for productivity.
Except that the gloves can signal more than a single letter at a time, in more complex gestures. If keyboards could recognize those macros in a more complex language, the keyboard would blast ahead again.
Apple's multitouch is just that chance for complex gestures. A keyboard and a multitouch screen, or a keyboard that can be twiddled like a multitouch screen and a plain multitouch screen, are probably the most productive input devices that aren't sharply limited like joysticks.
Now, if these gloves had real force feedback and texture, so the hands could work against and within the gloves, then maybe they'd compete well with other objects that we manipulate with our hands, instead of empty gestures. But they'd still probably be even better if we could hold or touch a real, interactive object with our hands inside those gloves.
Expiration, and reissuance (and requests for reissuance) prior to expiration, pretty much solves that problem. As does any similar polling protocol.
Again, the idea here isn't to change the default set of trusted CAs as currently shipped to a large group of new CAs. It's to allow even one difference, whether dropping a default CA, or adding a new one.
Most people won't do anything different. Or an enterprise might point at a few "gateway CAs" it maintains itself, but which all point to the same default CAs. So it can just edit a few of its own CAs to change from what pointing at the real ones would do, like a DNS cache or any other proxy/gateway. Rather than push new configs to all the clients.
Such actions would be rare, but doing them even once means moving from a centralized CA system with all its vulnerabilities and limitations to one that could be changed at all. And by the choice of the user.
There is not going to be any system that achieves the "Open CA Authorities" this story asks for in its title that avoids the problems of complexity and the possibility of trusting the wrong alternative. That is true by definition. I just described a system which could get those "Open CAs", without sacrificing the default system we have now, and with flexibility, and using current tech and paradigms. If you don't like it, you're probably not going to like anything that fulfills "Open CAs".
In which case you're free to use the centralized authority ones of today. Or even, if a trust web is deployed as I describe, just use its defaults which function identically.
You have a lot to learn about nonviolence. Read some more Gandhi and get back to me. Or some more history of India, or of the US Civil Rights Revolution, or other nonviolent struggles around the world.
And about the value of getting yourself killed. As well as how violence is a better way to get yourself killed, without winning anything - or anything worth keeping.
This trust web is a separate layer from the PGP trust web, though they could "gateway" to each other to extend trust from one layer to the other.
To use it, you would need to get the added trust authority's credentials out of band of this new trust layer, like in any trust layer. One way would be to use the default trust authorities shipped with the browser (as they are now) to trust other authorities while they're all trustworthy. Or some other out of band way, like a CD in postal mail, or a business card at a convention (or in postal mail), or bound into a magazine, etc. There is nothing special about this trust web's need for PKI.
But if there is already a PGP PKI, that can be used to transmit the HTTP trust web credentials. As can any other trusted channel. Or they can be kept separated.
But that is already the model. The point is that enterprises don't need to always rely on the user themself to specify that user's trust web. Again, the system I'm talking about is just a new application of an existing system.
Besides, the ISP as the home user's sysadmin has quite a lot of benefit to everyone. If that role is decided by the home user, and not just yet another bundled service from their ISP (telco, cableco, who also own and control their home's router, and perhaps eventually their home's TV - and "security cameras") that excludes the home user from control and choice, that is extra security, without forcing security monoculture and lockin. Again, a separate issue from using what's good about a trust web, that has its own logic and tradeoffs.
Nonviolence does have that effect on people among the abusers who like to think they are the "good guys". But the people running the British occupation didn't think they were the good guys, except in the sense that everyone thinks their actions are "justified" at worst by "looking out for #1".
Nonviolence's power is in fact to redraw the boundary between "Us vs Them" that started out drawn by the chief abusers, instead to cut away much, most or all (depending on the success of the nonviolent tactics used) of the people previously drawn as "Us" along with the chief abusers. Including, perhaps, the chief abusers themselves from their previous actions, if indeed those chief abusers' conscience can be reached. But it does not at all require those chief abusers to have a conscience, or to change themselves at all.
It doesn't even need the abuser's own forces to be converted. The main product of nonviolent resistance is to get the victims themselves to stop cooperating with the abusers in their own abuse. Most of the effort in the abuse is practiced by the victims against themselves, or each other. Take that away, and that work is converted to helping each other and themselves. Which doubles the effect of that work: taking its power away from the abuser, and giving it to the resister. Since the resisters tend to work harder for themselves than they did for the abuser, once freed at all to do so, the effect of the nonviolent resistance tends to put more than double the power the abuser used to count on into the hands of the resisters.
Nonviolent resistance frees the minds of the victims first. From that freedom all power flows. It breaks the "spell" (mass psychology, AKA "politics") that the abusers have cast on the victims, breaking the abuser's power over them. When properly coordinated, that freed up power can stop the abuser. The nonviolence leverages a more powerful compassion among the more numerous victims and associates of the abuser against the tyranny of the abuser. That compassion isn't "being nice", but rather the simple identification of "that could be me next", humans' selfish desire for self-preservation. To at least stop supporting the abuser, even if not to actively oppose them. As the overall cooperation shifts from the side of the abuser to the side of the victims, the abuser is forced from power. Even if the abuser never changes their own mind.
That is the pattern of nonviolent resistance throughout its history. Since masses of people are even less insightful than individuals, and individuals are typically hard to teach exclusive nonviolence to ourselves, there has usually (perhaps always) also been violence. But we can see that when there's no nonviolence, that resistance typically fails, or at best succeeds but with the seeds of its own violent self-destruction. Nonviolence, even when it fails, fails to perpetuate the violence that is necessary for the abuse.
Mars is teeming with vampires in underground caverns. They've covered the surface with a layer of blood dust to protect themselves from the Sun's rays. It's time to start arming our probes and orbital satellite bases with SOLASERS, to focus the Sun's power through cracks we dig in their defenses.
Otherwise, the biters will just ride back to Earth our probes, and raise their earthling cousins into an army to destroy us while the Sun's back is turned.
These cheap landers with specialized probes show just how much more powerful our science can be when we interact with its subjects through matter-on-matter operations, rather than just interacting with energy as we do in telescopes, or interacting with information as we do in simulations.
When we actually send a human to Mars, a "generalized probe" with sensory and mechanical amplification equipment, we'll really be getting to work, down to brass tacks.
You need more coffee.
Gandhi is unequivocally reiterating that nonviolence is "in fact the mightiest force in the world", even in a statement mentioning an atomic bomb as an alternative (which shortsighted Indians would have used to their own detriment).
Myanmar won't be freed through violence, either. It never has been. In violence, the ruling thugs have the upper hand, and fighting it with more violence turns the "new boss" into a thug, too. Mynamar is not nearly free now, but it is closer, even if only in inches, than it has been throughout the long violent struggle.
Nonviolence doesn't work by embarrassing the opponent, or really directly causing any internal change in the opponent. It works by alienating everyone else from cooperating with the opponent. The victim's cooperation with one's own abuser is the abuser's chief ally. Nonviolence in a coordinated effort to refuse cooperation destroys the abuser's ability to leverage whatever strength they do have into any greater strength to be found in the victim or others who made up the status quo. The "embarrassment" of the abuser is important only as it exists in the minds of everyone else, who is no longer either intimidated or tempted into supporting the abuser.
The colonial era didn't just "simply end". It took a lot of help. It's hard, perhaps impossible, to know whether the violence that accompanied the nonviolence accelerated or slowed the success of evicting the British. But it's pretty clear that violence alone wouldn't have worked, as it never did before, and generally hasn't since (except since the Reagan Era) to end colonial occupation. It's even more clear that the nonviolence made India more governable after evicting the British than the nonviolence did.
The point being that Indians were lucky (some might say "blessed", but I wouldn't) that they were forced to nonviolence because they had no alternative. Lucky because nonviolence is, as Gandhi said, the mightiest force in the world. Mightier than the atom bomb. Since Indians were forced by lack of alternatives, not so much from any greater enlightenment, they failed to stay nonviolent once the British were out.
And that's why their resorting to violence lost India Pakistan. Which of course is the greatest turning point in world history of the last century apart from the splitting of the Allies into the Cold War with the Soviets. And the Pakistan war is still raging 60 years later. In Afghanistan, Pakistan's secret police's colony, Pakistan is "winning". And along the Pakistan/India border, their nuclear "Cold War" (that is not infrequently a hot, shooting war), the brink is usually closer than it ever was between the US/SU, but for a couple-few times some fool actually ordered the launch of armageddon.
Gandhi was of course not criticizing nonviolence. He was criticizing the weakness of Indians who abandoned it once it was no longer necessity, though nonviolence was the mightier force. Through it India and "Pakistan" could have gone down a road that these weaker forces, including nukes, only make more dangerous to everyone.