The vast majority of military electronics are heavily shielded, to provide resistance to a nuclear weapon's EMP. A sufficiently powerful pulse might work, but you'd have to find out just how well shielded that stuff is. Good luck getting the military to tell you that.
Officer: "What objective are you and your team working on?"
Soldier: "SIR, we're attempting to h4x0r the Blue's Gibson, SIR"
Officer: "What progress have you made?"
Soldier: "SIR, We have successfully 0wn3d one of the systems connected to the primary objective. The password was CPE1704TKS. We should be able to gain access to the target from there, SIR"
Let's take the original post's logic a bit further:
The prevailing trend of superpowers is to test each other's forces in small brush-fire conflicts. This deters all-out confrontation. More succinctly: War is Peace.
If a spirit of self-sacrifice is necessary to avoid conquest by a totalitarian regime, a strong sense of individual liberties is as good as defeat. Freedom is Slavery.
Paying too much attention to the fact that the Chinese are actually humans, with an existance independant of that of their government, could weaken the all-important resolve of Americans. Ignorance is Strength.
Sounds good enough to make national policy out of, doesn't it?
Doug Adams said something like "Anyone capable of being elected President should never be allowed to do so." I'm not sure about the exact quote, but it's just expressing the fact that in most governments, the scum rises to the top.
Not to mention the psychological value of the high-tech route. When a plane flies over, the enemy soldiers notice it, maybe shoot at it, then run like hell hoping to not be there when the bomb hits. When a Tomahawk hits, the explosion is usually the first sign that anything's up. Same thing with properly used stealth attack aircraft. The effect on morale of fighting an enemy you can't see is already well known to the US military, and can allow a small force to claim victory over a much larger enemy.
But don't want to save things locally. Saving things locally is the old, non-dot-something way to do it. When you save something locally, you can easily delete it without meaning to, and you can only access it from one system. When Microsoft stops letting you do something as stupid as saving documents locally, you will be able to access your work from any system with an internet connection. Also, a copy will be kept for all eternity in case you didn't mean to delete it. And we all know that we can trust Big Br^H^H^H^H^H^HMicrosoft to keep your data private and secure. With all these advantages, you won't even care when Microsoft adds a small service charge for every time you access a document. In addition, any terrorists using Microsoft software to plan attacks will be immediately spotted and stopped once Carnivore gets modified to scan suspicious documents.
So how can you not want to use.NET for all your software?
There are a few that haven't been converted, though. I spent most of today in front of this computer, reading/. and playing some cool old games from when graphics sucked so much that games couldn't get by on looks alone. Background music was provided by several artists, mostly Arlo Guthrie, MC Hawking, and Purple Motion. My roommate was down the hall, watching the game with somebody who actually has a TV in their room. In short, all those companies paying millions for commercial time can have their TV-addicted zombies. I'm going back to my game of Master of Orion.
Maybe it's because we don't want to change anything about the good events. When we see bad things happen, we try to think of a way to keep it from happening again. If we keep reminding ourselves about unfortunate events, we might remember to be more careful next time, to not let political arrogance take precedence over human life, or somthing like that.
I think the risk assessment was accurate, assuming that proper safety protocol was followed. The problem was that safety protocol was ignored for fear of inconveniencing a politician (see earlier note about Reagan's speech). The result was 7 people needlessly dying.
Shit like this happens far more often than it should. Take a look at what happened on the USS Iowa when some admiral came aboard for a tour. He wanted to see the 16 inchers fire, so the captain arranged to have the guns fire a few salvos. When something got jammed in turret 2 after the first shot, the crew was ordered not clear it out as required by safety procedure, as the delay would have annoyed the admiral. They ordered the crew to fire the second shot, and the entire interior of the turret exploded. Forty-seven people were incinerated because an admiral wanted to see something go boom, and the captain didn't want to keep him waiting.
Re:Other historical tragedies.
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 1
>4) The removal of people's rights to pray in school if/when they see fit.
Uhm, you can pray in school whenever see fit. Any student in a public school can pray to any deity they want to, whenever they see fit. You can read the Christian Bible. You can even mention your God.
You can also not pray, not read the bible, and not mention God, of you so choose. That's the whole point of keeping religious influences away from school, to let each person believe what they will. Not to promote one system of beliefs over another, not to belittle and insult anyone who doesn't share your beliefs, not to force others into taking part in your rituals.
Admittedly, there are some people who try to make any mention of religion in school a punishable offense. These people are just as small-minded and intolerant as those who would turn schools into churches. Fortunately, they have yet had little success, so I fail to see where people's right to pray in school has been removed.
> I prayed at my public high school
Doesn't this statement alone cast some doubt on the validity of 4)?
I didn't pray at my public high school. Some of my friends did. Nobody told any of us that what we were doing was wrong (not the school staff, anyway). For that I thank everyone who has given their time, effort, money, or life to protect our right to individual belief.
This whole thread is gonna be kinda redundant, but I'll explain this anyway:
> Charging people money for something that could potentially solve a world problem should be criminal.
By that logic, every farmer who has ever sold a bushel of corn or wheat should be in prison.
If you want to go and spend a couple million dollars on gene sequencing equipment, pay a few dozen scientists living wages for a year or two, and not ask for any money in return, go ahead. Really. The world can only benefit from it. Maybe we should start a non-profit organization to promote public domain genetic research. But if you don't have several million dollars to blow, then you're gonna want some return on that investment.
Many recent patents on biotech, genetics, and technology in general are absurd at best. That doesn't mean the whole idea of making a profit from investment and hard work (yes, some of the people involved actually put forth a hell of a lot of effort) is fundamentally evil. Outright exploitation, as we see so often today, is definitely evil.
Our patent system is fucked up in a big way, and some people exploit that to eliminate anything that might keep money away from them. But just because a company tries to make money from doing genetic research doesn't make them evil. Just because a company files a patent doesn't make them evil. Exploiting already impoverished people would make them evil. Restricting scientific research would make them evil. So far, I don't see the company in question doing either one of those. Until they do start exploiting people, or using the patent office to stifle science, or anything else generally shitty, I won't get too angty at them.
I've always wanted to try a slightly different idea: Genetically engineer some standard lawn grass to contain THC. Maybe give it some other characteristics that make it grow just a bit better than regular grass. Grow plenty of it, then start planting it wherever you can. Your own lawn, your neighbors' lawns, city parks, anywhere.
If it manages to propagate quickly enough, it provides a perfect workaround for all those pesky laws about schedule 1 narcotics. Let's see the guvmint try to outlaw lawns. Nobody would have to mow their lawns anymore, either. All the stoners would be doing it for free.
As for making stealth weed, you'd first need to know exactly what chemicals the tests look for, then try to find some chemical that will still have the same psychoactive effect but won't be detected. Trouble is, the tests would probably change to look for the new chemicals in a few months.
The space elevator is completely feasible, as soon as you find a material strong enough to build it with. IIRC, the tensile strength per unit mass required is about 10^2 or 10^3 greater than any material we've ever managed to produce in quantity.
Rockets of one form or another are the only things we currently know how to build that actually get into orbit. It takes a lot of energy to get out of this gravity well. As long as you have to carry chemical propellants with you, you're gonna need a hell of a lot of fuel.
Yes, space flight is in its infancy. Quite a few people are working on designing more efficient means of achieving orbit. Some are simply trying to perfect the current systems, like that Venture Star thing. (OT question: anybody know if/when that thing is supposed to fly?) Others are trying to develop completely new techniques (plasma-burst propulsion powered by ground-based lasers, for example). Some more are trying to combine novel technology with more conventional methods (replacing the first stage of the space shuttle with a long stretch of maglev track).
< gratuitous 2001 reference >
One big problem will be the development of a toilet that's easy to use in microgravity.
</gratuitous 2001 reference >
I think this is enough off-topic-ness, so I'll quit now.
I think your definition should be modified slightly, if it is to coincide with the usual use of the word "own." If A owns X, A should be the one who gets to decide what to do with X.
The big question here is one of morality and "right." When somebody starts explaining their opinion about what we should or shouldn't do to a planet in terms of ownership, things get messy. Statements like "We don't own Earth" or "We do own Earth" tend to presume that there is someone or something else which could claim ownership of an entire planet. I think that a discussion of morality should not be camouflaged as a discussion of ownership.
IMHO, humans are doing pretty well at fucking up Earth, and don't need another planet to mess with. Most of the reasons people think we shouldn't go to Mars stem from the fact that the large-scale society of Earth (international politics and macroeconomics) resembles a room full of screaming 6-year-olds trying to decide who gets to play with which toys. If human society ever begins to resemble something more rational and mature, maybe then we can be trusted not to completely fuck up some other planet.
He may also be talking about the potential for cloning of individual organs to greatly extend one's life expectancy. It won't get you to Mars any faster, but it might keep you alive long enough to do it the slow way.
I'd guess that while the chance of a race with better technology than us existing is very good, they've probably never even seen our star. Remember that the whole reason we think there's life out there somewhere is that there are so damn many stars, and presumably a similarly incredible quantity of planets. The thing is, most of them are millions or billions of light-years away from us.
Even if some alien race has been around for, say, 1e8 years, they probably haven't yet travelled a thousandth of the distance from their point of origin to ours. Unless somebody has figured out how to side-step relativity, any alien race is limited to a fairly tiny neighborhood of the universe even if they've been travelling at near-light speed for a few thousand millenia.
My point is that the assumption that any advanced race already knows about us is pretty absurd when the distances involved are taken into account.
How does uncertainty (btw, the uncertainty relation you're looking for is momentum and position, not impulse and position) on the order of 10^-34 J*s interfere with observing electromagnetic signals? Or anything else, for that matter? The only things you can't observe to absurd levels of precision are atomic- or subatomic-scale objects and events. In all other cases, lack of measurement precision causes errors at least a dozen orders of magnitude greater than quantum uncertainty.
And what's with the capitalization? The last time I had so many improperly capitalized letters in a message, I was thinly concealing an insulting sub-message.
Not likely, considering that electrons don't *have* a surface, much less a well-defined position, size, shape, or anything else, really.
It's an interesting thought, that life could exist right under our figurative noses. The problem is that physics as we understand it makes it completely impossible, what with uncertainty and all.
Those aren't aliens in your sofa. You just stumbled upon the formerly well-kept secret that dinosaurs aren't extinct, they're just hiding in and behind furniture. Most peoplw who read Dilbert already knew that, though.
BTW, what's the proper punctuation/formatting for the name of a comic strip, such as Dilbert?
Groupthink as never questioning the "scientific establishment" is bad. Questioning is what leads to new ideas, new developments, etc. That's why we have scientists.
Groupthink as agreeing on what we mean by the word "planet" is good. Having an established definition for a word really helps when you're trying to communicate meaning. That's why we have dictionaries.
One museum saying "We feel like redefining "planet" in such a way that Pluto isn't covered" while the vast majority of the scientific community disagrees is just plain stupid. When most people talk about "the planets," they mean the 9 big chunks of rock, gas, and other junk that we're all familiar with. When the museum talks about "the planets," shouldn't they mean the same thing? Some small group of people propagating a conflicting definition only serves to create confusion and reduce credibility.
I've seen that "outside" thing you mentioned. The graphics are amazing. Color depth you wouldn't believe, and absolutely insane resolution (dot pitch is around 400-700 nm). The interface is a little clumsy though. The AI for most of the "human" characters is pretty lacking, also.
It looks like a kick-ass engine, but the original concept is a bit bland. Needs a good mod or two.
As for patenting, lotsa people claim they've got prior art. I think one goes by either Elohim, or maybe it was Yahweh or Jehovah. Something like that. I think one of the others is named Allah. See if you can contact them before you file a patent application.
Slashdot Mirror
The vast majority of military electronics are heavily shielded, to provide resistance to a nuclear weapon's EMP. A sufficiently powerful pulse might work, but you'd have to find out just how well shielded that stuff is. Good luck getting the military to tell you that.
Soldier: "SIR, 5kr1p7 k1dd13 Second Class, SIR"
Officer: "What objective are you and your team working on?"
Soldier: "SIR, we're attempting to h4x0r the Blue's Gibson, SIR"
Officer: "What progress have you made?"
Soldier: "SIR, We have successfully 0wn3d one of the systems connected to the primary objective. The password was CPE1704TKS. We should be able to gain access to the target from there, SIR"
Officer: "Excellent work, son. Carry on."
The prevailing trend of superpowers is to test each other's forces in small brush-fire conflicts. This deters all-out confrontation. More succinctly: War is Peace.
If a spirit of self-sacrifice is necessary to avoid conquest by a totalitarian regime, a strong sense of individual liberties is as good as defeat. Freedom is Slavery.
Paying too much attention to the fact that the Chinese are actually humans, with an existance independant of that of their government, could weaken the all-important resolve of Americans. Ignorance is Strength.
Sounds good enough to make national policy out of, doesn't it?
Doug Adams said something like "Anyone capable of being elected President should never be allowed to do so." I'm not sure about the exact quote, but it's just expressing the fact that in most governments, the scum rises to the top.
Not to mention the psychological value of the high-tech route. When a plane flies over, the enemy soldiers notice it, maybe shoot at it, then run like hell hoping to not be there when the bomb hits. When a Tomahawk hits, the explosion is usually the first sign that anything's up. Same thing with properly used stealth attack aircraft. The effect on morale of fighting an enemy you can't see is already well known to the US military, and can allow a small force to claim victory over a much larger enemy.
So how can you not want to use .NET for all your software?
There are a few that haven't been converted, though. I spent most of today in front of this computer, reading /. and playing some cool old games from when graphics sucked so much that games couldn't get by on looks alone. Background music was provided by several artists, mostly Arlo Guthrie, MC Hawking, and Purple Motion. My roommate was down the hall, watching the game with somebody who actually has a TV in their room. In short, all those companies paying millions for commercial time can have their TV-addicted zombies. I'm going back to my game of Master of Orion.
Maybe it's because we don't want to change anything about the good events. When we see bad things happen, we try to think of a way to keep it from happening again. If we keep reminding ourselves about unfortunate events, we might remember to be more careful next time, to not let political arrogance take precedence over human life, or somthing like that.
Shit like this happens far more often than it should. Take a look at what happened on the USS Iowa when some admiral came aboard for a tour. He wanted to see the 16 inchers fire, so the captain arranged to have the guns fire a few salvos. When something got jammed in turret 2 after the first shot, the crew was ordered not clear it out as required by safety procedure, as the delay would have annoyed the admiral. They ordered the crew to fire the second shot, and the entire interior of the turret exploded. Forty-seven people were incinerated because an admiral wanted to see something go boom, and the captain didn't want to keep him waiting.
Uhm, you can pray in school whenever see fit. Any student in a public school can pray to any deity they want to, whenever they see fit. You can read the Christian Bible. You can even mention your God.
You can also not pray, not read the bible, and not mention God, of you so choose. That's the whole point of keeping religious influences away from school, to let each person believe what they will. Not to promote one system of beliefs over another, not to belittle and insult anyone who doesn't share your beliefs, not to force others into taking part in your rituals.
Admittedly, there are some people who try to make any mention of religion in school a punishable offense. These people are just as small-minded and intolerant as those who would turn schools into churches. Fortunately, they have yet had little success, so I fail to see where people's right to pray in school has been removed.
> I prayed at my public high school
Doesn't this statement alone cast some doubt on the validity of 4)?
I didn't pray at my public high school. Some of my friends did. Nobody told any of us that what we were doing was wrong (not the school staff, anyway). For that I thank everyone who has given their time, effort, money, or life to protect our right to individual belief.
> Charging people money for something that could potentially solve a world problem should be criminal.
By that logic, every farmer who has ever sold a bushel of corn or wheat should be in prison.
If you want to go and spend a couple million dollars on gene sequencing equipment, pay a few dozen scientists living wages for a year or two, and not ask for any money in return, go ahead. Really. The world can only benefit from it. Maybe we should start a non-profit organization to promote public domain genetic research. But if you don't have several million dollars to blow, then you're gonna want some return on that investment.
Many recent patents on biotech, genetics, and technology in general are absurd at best. That doesn't mean the whole idea of making a profit from investment and hard work (yes, some of the people involved actually put forth a hell of a lot of effort) is fundamentally evil. Outright exploitation, as we see so often today, is definitely evil.
Our patent system is fucked up in a big way, and some people exploit that to eliminate anything that might keep money away from them. But just because a company tries to make money from doing genetic research doesn't make them evil. Just because a company files a patent doesn't make them evil. Exploiting already impoverished people would make them evil. Restricting scientific research would make them evil. So far, I don't see the company in question doing either one of those. Until they do start exploiting people, or using the patent office to stifle science, or anything else generally shitty, I won't get too angty at them.
If it manages to propagate quickly enough, it provides a perfect workaround for all those pesky laws about schedule 1 narcotics. Let's see the guvmint try to outlaw lawns. Nobody would have to mow their lawns anymore, either. All the stoners would be doing it for free.
As for making stealth weed, you'd first need to know exactly what chemicals the tests look for, then try to find some chemical that will still have the same psychoactive effect but won't be detected. Trouble is, the tests would probably change to look for the new chemicals in a few months.
Rockets of one form or another are the only things we currently know how to build that actually get into orbit. It takes a lot of energy to get out of this gravity well. As long as you have to carry chemical propellants with you, you're gonna need a hell of a lot of fuel.
Yes, space flight is in its infancy. Quite a few people are working on designing more efficient means of achieving orbit. Some are simply trying to perfect the current systems, like that Venture Star thing. (OT question: anybody know if/when that thing is supposed to fly?) Others are trying to develop completely new techniques (plasma-burst propulsion powered by ground-based lasers, for example). Some more are trying to combine novel technology with more conventional methods (replacing the first stage of the space shuttle with a long stretch of maglev track). /gratuitous 2001 reference >
< gratuitous 2001 reference >
One big problem will be the development of a toilet that's easy to use in microgravity.
<
I think this is enough off-topic-ness, so I'll quit now.
The big question here is one of morality and "right." When somebody starts explaining their opinion about what we should or shouldn't do to a planet in terms of ownership, things get messy. Statements like "We don't own Earth" or "We do own Earth" tend to presume that there is someone or something else which could claim ownership of an entire planet. I think that a discussion of morality should not be camouflaged as a discussion of ownership.
IMHO, humans are doing pretty well at fucking up Earth, and don't need another planet to mess with. Most of the reasons people think we shouldn't go to Mars stem from the fact that the large-scale society of Earth (international politics and macroeconomics) resembles a room full of screaming 6-year-olds trying to decide who gets to play with which toys. If human society ever begins to resemble something more rational and mature, maybe then we can be trusted not to completely fuck up some other planet.
He may also be talking about the potential for cloning of individual organs to greatly extend one's life expectancy. It won't get you to Mars any faster, but it might keep you alive long enough to do it the slow way.
Better patent it before anybody else starts using my business model.
Even if some alien race has been around for, say, 1e8 years, they probably haven't yet travelled a thousandth of the distance from their point of origin to ours. Unless somebody has figured out how to side-step relativity, any alien race is limited to a fairly tiny neighborhood of the universe even if they've been travelling at near-light speed for a few thousand millenia.
My point is that the assumption that any advanced race already knows about us is pretty absurd when the distances involved are taken into account.
And what's with the capitalization? The last time I had so many improperly capitalized letters in a message, I was thinly concealing an insulting sub-message.
Not likely, considering that electrons don't *have* a surface, much less a well-defined position, size, shape, or anything else, really.
It's an interesting thought, that life could exist right under our figurative noses. The problem is that physics as we understand it makes it completely impossible, what with uncertainty and all.
It's a 7.
Go ahead. Prove me wrong. :)
BTW, what's the proper punctuation/formatting for the name of a comic strip, such as Dilbert?
Groupthink as agreeing on what we mean by the word "planet" is good. Having an established definition for a word really helps when you're trying to communicate meaning. That's why we have dictionaries.
One museum saying "We feel like redefining "planet" in such a way that Pluto isn't covered" while the vast majority of the scientific community disagrees is just plain stupid. When most people talk about "the planets," they mean the 9 big chunks of rock, gas, and other junk that we're all familiar with. When the museum talks about "the planets," shouldn't they mean the same thing? Some small group of people propagating a conflicting definition only serves to create confusion and reduce credibility.
It looks like a kick-ass engine, but the original concept is a bit bland. Needs a good mod or two.
As for patenting, lotsa people claim they've got prior art. I think one goes by either Elohim, or maybe it was Yahweh or Jehovah. Something like that. I think one of the others is named Allah. See if you can contact them before you file a patent application.
Reading the article usually helps.
Yes. Da. Si. Oui. Ja. Damn straight.