The technology certainly exists. Some wildlife researchers a while back found that you can even make implanted chips power themselves from muscle movements.
The tags in the article are just fine for tracking in warehouses, but once the marketers make it ubiquitous and law enforcement starts getting warrants to access the records, the dystopian potential becomes enormous.
Try removing the tag and carrying it with you for a while. Wander through some area that you know has plenty of readers, like a large store or mall. See what happens when they think you're driving your car through Radio Shock. One could have plenty of fun messing with removing and/or transplanting tags, as long as such activity doesn't become illegal "marketing circumvention."
Radio was pioneered by corporations? Did I miss something?
Wireless electromagnetic transmission of information was invented and pioneered by Tesla and Marconi. To my knowlege, they were not working for any corporations at the time. They were pursuing a mix of scientific curiosity, economic self-interest, and possibly a desire for recognition. Radio was turned into a profit-making enterprise by corporations, but do not confuse this with being pioneered by corporations. Militaries were using radio technology before radios became standard civilian devices, and hence before there was much profit in it.
How about electric power? What corporation was Alessandro Volta working for? I'm sure that Ampere, Coulomb, and Tesla were also on salary when they did their work on electricity. The corporations interested in early electric power (Edison in particular) wanted to develop DC technology. For large-scale applications, DC is a total dead-end. Today's power use would require copper lines several meters in diameter if we used DC. Tesla's research into AC power enabled electric power to actually work with reasonable materials cost.
You do have a point (though it, like most points here, have been stated countless times on/.) about profit driving innovation. But your use of incorrect supporting information obscures the validity of your point and makes you look like a dumbass.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you own a computer, and from your comment I deduce that you own a house. If you gave up these luxuries, you could probably save several people from starvation with your surplus cash, even without leaving your present job. You could also reduce others' suffering by devoting your extra time and money to charity work. But for some reason, you spent that money on a computer and you're spending that time reading Slashdot.
The world in general is not funded by people stumbling across valuable rocks. Wealth (with a few insignificant exceptions) is the product of work. There are very few wealthy people who actually earned all of their money. The rest figured out how to manipulate existing socioeconomic structures to screw others out of fair compensation for their work.
If you can convince a programmer that his time is worth $25/hr, and then sell his programs for the equivalent of $100/programmer-hr, then you will become wealthy. Even more so if you can convince many programmers that their time has the same value as the first guy's. The only thing you have done to earn that wealth is to convince different people that the same commodity has different values. Now if you weren't such a greedy bastard, you might just tell the programmers and buyers about each other, let them agree on a price, and go off and find a job that actually produces something of value.
So where was your air conditioner made? How much are the workers there paid? Just because the people getting screwed aren't right in front of you doesn't mean that nobody's getting screwed.
That's not to say that wealth needs to be built on the backs of the poor. We could stop that tendency if we wanted to badly enough. But most wealth today still comes from exploiting somebody.
Re:The 'Free' version of the chair.
on
License to Sit
·
· Score: 1
But you obviously violated the intellectual property rights of the original chair's designers by reverse-engineering their product. You then proceeded to effectively circumvent the access control measures designed into the original product, by using a competing product which does not comply with the UseatA license conditions.
You are hereby ordered to turn over all property, intellectual and physical, and rights related to the offending seating mechanism to SeatWorks. Faliure to comply will result in prompt legal action.
All you have to do is find some moron in the patent office to whom the idea isn't obvious. Judging by recent stories, many of the employees of the USPTO may have graduated from my high school.
This is beginning to remind me of the incessant Mir stories. It's coming down! No wait, it's going back up! Now it's coming down again!
If they make a small hop this time, might they be able to lift off twice? Maybe even 3 or more times? They don't seem to have much to lose, so I wouldn't put it past them.
Quite, though it can have some unpleasant side effects. I seem to remember some engineers accidentally discovering this technique when their "aerobraking" proved insufficient. I believe the lithobraking in that case did as much breaking as it did braking. Most people said that they should just be more careful with the aerobraking, but the engineers saw an opportunity. Now we see lithobraking applied in a more controlled fashion than before, under circumstances when aerobraking simply won't work.
It's sort of an obvious solution, though. We've employed lithobraking down here on the surface for many many years, to great effect. I wonder why it took so long for it to become an accepted practice in spaceflight?
I think I'll have to use that term the next time I see a car impacted on a large concrete object.
"Damn, that guy crashed good!"
"No, just a successful application of lithobraking, though possibly in excess of the structural tolerance of the vehicle."
It doesn't really prove jack shit, but I'd like to see you do better with "1+1=2" as your only given statement.:)
But as a physics major, I'm used to this kind of proof being valid. For example, physicists have proven that all odd numbers are prime:
3 is odd, and it is prime
5 is odd, and it is prime
7 is odd, and it is prime
9 can be attributed to experimental error
11 is odd, and it is prime
13 is odd, and it is prime
From this, it logically follows that all odd numbers are prime. This has tremendous implications for cryptology.
Telemetry operator: "Woohoo! It LANDED! It's even transmitting!"
Systems controller: "Great! So what do we do now?"
Boss-type guy: "Uhm... er... Well, we never really expected this to work, so... I guess we just go get drunk now"
Systems controller: "What, we can't do anything with it now? Then what the hell did we spend all weekend practicing for?"
Boss-type guy: "Well, it was a really good job guys, and everybody's really impressed, but we just don't have anything to do with it."
Systems controller: "I'll be damned if I'm going home now! We've gotta find something to do with this thing!"
Telemetry operator: "You know it still has a bit of fuel left." (Telemetry and Systems look at each other)
Systems controller: "You don't think -"
Telemetry operator: "Well why not?"
Systems controller: "But it could never..."
Telemetry operator: "It was never designed to land in the first place, but we pulled that off, didn't we?"
Systems controller: "What the hell! Hey boss! We checked out the neighborhood, and it sucks. We're leaving."
Boss-type guy: "Huh? Leaving? What the hell are you talking about?"
Systems controller: "We decided that the view on the surface isn't half as cool as the one we had before, so we're going back to orbit."
Boss-type guy: "But there's no way to do that! The odds of making it back to orbit are less tha"
Systems controller, interrupting: "Never tell me the odds!"
Boss-type guy: "Good point. You guys have fun, I'll go call CNN."
NOTE: This is 100% speculation, and probably mostly bullshit. But it's an interesting idea.
The power source thing is a great idea, but it would be pretty hard to make it work on Earth. Any singularity kept around for long would accelerate at the good ol' 9.8 m/s^2, straight out of its containment. In microgravity, however, you could hold a small singularity in one place by feeding it from different directions if the matter you throw in is moving fast enough. Hawking radiation is mostly electrons and positrons, not directly gamma rays (the positrons usually end up as 511 keV gamma rays after meeting up with an electron, though). If you trap some of the positrons, along with any antiprotons you get, and feed the rest back into the singularity, you might be able to accumulate macroscopic quantities of antimatter after a long enough time. Unless singularities are particular about what particles they will emit, which is one thing that could be studied from nucleus-sized versions.
So we just need to build an orbiting accelerator capable of energies several orders of magnitude greater than anything we can get on Earth, and we might be able to make lots of antimatter. No problem, right?
I think we've strayed sufficiently far from the topic of the story, so I'll stop now.
Never read it, but singularities would be harmless if you made them small enough. There should be some critical mass, dependant on the density of the surrounding medium, below which a black hole cannot survive. Below that mass, it loses energy to Hawking radiation faster than it can suck in mass to compensate, and is gone in a tiny fraction of a second. Above that mass, it sucks in matter faster than it radiates, quickly gets big enough that it hardly radiates anything at all, and proceeds to consume the experiment apparatus, the lab, the city, and most of the solar system. The first variety would be really interesting to physicists. The second would be even more interesting, but only for the few moments before they destroy Earth.
As I remember, the landing was originally planned for the 14th. Some little mishap forced them to change schedule, but I can't remember what it was now.
That depends on the surface and the probe. If the surface is covered in a thick enough layer of dust or other small particles, that would damp the impact quite a bit. Also, how bouncy are space probes?
As I read it, they said that data from NEAR might help prevent a collision, not that Eros itself might hit Earth.
And it might be kinda cool to create a micro-black hole. A sufficiently small black hole would just sort of evaporate due to Hawking radiation before it could eat much, and it'd sure be fun to watch. I wonder how small it would have to be to disappear before it could grow significantly? Too bad the RHIC's collision energies are a few orders of magnitude too small.
Good guess. Industrial, miliary and medical uses were mentioned in the article. They quoted the silk as being 3 times as strong as Kevlar. I can't remember how many times as strong as steel Kevlar is, though.
>...remember the golden rule, what goes around comes around.
1) The usual golden rule is "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." The other one (usually meant as a joke) is "He who has the gold makes the rules." I dunno what the fuck kinda golden rule yours is.
2) Why the hell do so many people think stuff like that? The universe does not obey your Sunday-school rules. Just because "what goes around comes around" makes a good quote doesn't make it true. Unless you want to invoke theological arguments, which have absolutely no place in discussion of facts, (Don't even bother flaming that one. I've heard everything you've got to say and I don't give a shit.) there is nothing which inevitably causes human ingeneuity to come back and destroy us. So fucking what if some sci-fi stories show humanity being destroyed by genetically altered organisms or overzealous nanotech robots? Life is not a $1.50 sci-fi novel!
Does the potential exist for genetically altered organisms to destroy humanity? Yes! Does the potential exist for nuclear technology to destroy humanity? Hell yes! Does the potential exist for the space program to piss off some alien race that then destroys humanity? Again, yes!
Does that stop us from exploring space or researching nuclear power? Hell no! Why? The potential to help humanity, combined with our drive to discover, outweighs the risk as an elephant outweighs a speck of dust. Should it stop us from examining the fundamentals of life and possibly using that knowlege? I think you know my answer to that.
Hubris leading to destruction may make for good reading, but in real life hubris leads to destruction a lot less often than stagnation does. Arrogance and "playing God" are the only things that keep human society moving and evolving. If, from the time God was invented, nobody played God, you'd be out ploughing your fields behind a couple oxen. If you got a scratch and it got infected, you'd have to amputate the limb. You would still believe that every body in the universe revolved (literally) around Earth, and that crossing the Great Ocean was not only impossible, but prohibited by God. I've got news for ya buddy: We are the closest thing to God this planet has ever seen. No, we don't control life, we don't control the stars, we don't even control the weather. But we damn well control ourselves.
Every visible major advance in science has met with incredibly vocal opposition, always on the grounds of "We don't understand this and we shouldn't mess with it." Well if we don't mess with it, we will never understand it. That's how we learn, by doing.
Technological advances have definitely contributed to human suffering and destruction. Not because of technology, but because of intentional, malicious action by humans. You can't stop humans from trying to screw each other out of food, shelter, and life, and you also can't stop us from learning and inventing. All you do by trying is make yourself look like a fool. You have every right to do exactly that, but don't expect too many people to listen.
Re:Destroying ourselves... same problem, new means
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 1
Come on, get it right:
"Jesus!"
"You said it man. Nobody fucks with the Jesus."
You can't legitimately claim the body is the mothers as it is a genetically seperate being...
So genetic differentiation constitutes a separate organism, does it? I'll remind you of that in case you get cancer. Those cancer cells reproduce like that because of a genetic mutation, which makes their genome distinct from that of the host person. So while you're lying on your hospital bed begging for the chemotherapy that can save your life, I'll be blocking the door of your hospital room crusading for the civil rights of the genetically seperate being you're trying to kill.
define f(a,b) = a + b
set a = 0, b = 0
f(0,0) = 0
set da = 1, db = 1
f(a + da,b + db)=0 + 0 + 1 + 1 = 2
therefore df = 2
df = da + db
Good enough?
Re:I have an idea! Stop it.
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 1
I wonder if you're diabetic. If you are, you probably owe your life to transgenic pigs and cows. Even if you're not diabetic, someone you know probably is. Nearly all medical insulin is currently produced by transgenic farm animals, mostly through modifying cows' mammary glands. Dozens of other life-saving drugs are produced in the same way. Machines are not capable of synthesizing mass quantities of any chemical you want, and your ethical problems won't change that.
I also wonder if you're a vegetarian. I hope so, otherwise you're a total hypocrite. These animals have lives no worse than dairy cows, and they save thousands of human lives.
So if you do know anyone who's diabetic, imagine them going blind and dying a slow death for lack of insulin. Then talk to me about emotions.
Slashdot Mirror
The tags in the article are just fine for tracking in warehouses, but once the marketers make it ubiquitous and law enforcement starts getting warrants to access the records, the dystopian potential becomes enormous.
Try removing the tag and carrying it with you for a while. Wander through some area that you know has plenty of readers, like a large store or mall. See what happens when they think you're driving your car through Radio Shock. One could have plenty of fun messing with removing and/or transplanting tags, as long as such activity doesn't become illegal "marketing circumvention."
Wireless electromagnetic transmission of information was invented and pioneered by Tesla and Marconi. To my knowlege, they were not working for any corporations at the time. They were pursuing a mix of scientific curiosity, economic self-interest, and possibly a desire for recognition. Radio was turned into a profit-making enterprise by corporations, but do not confuse this with being pioneered by corporations. Militaries were using radio technology before radios became standard civilian devices, and hence before there was much profit in it.
How about electric power? What corporation was Alessandro Volta working for? I'm sure that Ampere, Coulomb, and Tesla were also on salary when they did their work on electricity. The corporations interested in early electric power (Edison in particular) wanted to develop DC technology. For large-scale applications, DC is a total dead-end. Today's power use would require copper lines several meters in diameter if we used DC. Tesla's research into AC power enabled electric power to actually work with reasonable materials cost.
You do have a point (though it, like most points here, have been stated countless times on /.) about profit driving innovation. But your use of incorrect supporting information obscures the validity of your point and makes you look like a dumbass.
Perhaps you'd be so kind as to explain why?
In other words, we've passed "Thou shalt not," and hit "Thou shalt." And we're well on our way to "Thou art."
Definitely, but not in a way that Microsoft objects to.
If you can convince a programmer that his time is worth $25/hr, and then sell his programs for the equivalent of $100/programmer-hr, then you will become wealthy. Even more so if you can convince many programmers that their time has the same value as the first guy's. The only thing you have done to earn that wealth is to convince different people that the same commodity has different values. Now if you weren't such a greedy bastard, you might just tell the programmers and buyers about each other, let them agree on a price, and go off and find a job that actually produces something of value.
That's not to say that wealth needs to be built on the backs of the poor. We could stop that tendency if we wanted to badly enough. But most wealth today still comes from exploiting somebody.
You are hereby ordered to turn over all property, intellectual and physical, and rights related to the offending seating mechanism to SeatWorks. Faliure to comply will result in prompt legal action.
All you have to do is find some moron in the patent office to whom the idea isn't obvious. Judging by recent stories, many of the employees of the USPTO may have graduated from my high school.
If they make a small hop this time, might they be able to lift off twice? Maybe even 3 or more times? They don't seem to have much to lose, so I wouldn't put it past them.
Quite, though it can have some unpleasant side effects. I seem to remember some engineers accidentally discovering this technique when their "aerobraking" proved insufficient. I believe the lithobraking in that case did as much breaking as it did braking. Most people said that they should just be more careful with the aerobraking, but the engineers saw an opportunity. Now we see lithobraking applied in a more controlled fashion than before, under circumstances when aerobraking simply won't work.
It's sort of an obvious solution, though. We've employed lithobraking down here on the surface for many many years, to great effect. I wonder why it took so long for it to become an accepted practice in spaceflight?
I think I'll have to use that term the next time I see a car impacted on a large concrete object.
"Damn, that guy crashed good!"
"No, just a successful application of lithobraking, though possibly in excess of the structural tolerance of the vehicle."
But as a physics major, I'm used to this kind of proof being valid. For example, physicists have proven that all odd numbers are prime:
3 is odd, and it is prime
5 is odd, and it is prime
7 is odd, and it is prime
9 can be attributed to experimental error
11 is odd, and it is prime
13 is odd, and it is prime
From this, it logically follows that all odd numbers are prime. This has tremendous implications for cryptology.
Telemetry operator: "Woohoo! It LANDED! It's even transmitting!"
Systems controller: "Great! So what do we do now?"
Boss-type guy: "Uhm... er... Well, we never really expected this to work, so... I guess we just go get drunk now"
Systems controller: "What, we can't do anything with it now? Then what the hell did we spend all weekend practicing for?"
Boss-type guy: "Well, it was a really good job guys, and everybody's really impressed, but we just don't have anything to do with it."
Systems controller: "I'll be damned if I'm going home now! We've gotta find something to do with this thing!"
Telemetry operator: "You know it still has a bit of fuel left."
(Telemetry and Systems look at each other)
Systems controller: "You don't think -"
Telemetry operator: "Well why not?"
Systems controller: "But it could never..."
Telemetry operator: "It was never designed to land in the first place, but we pulled that off, didn't we?"
Systems controller: "What the hell! Hey boss! We checked out the neighborhood, and it sucks. We're leaving."
Boss-type guy: "Huh? Leaving? What the hell are you talking about?"
Systems controller: "We decided that the view on the surface isn't half as cool as the one we had before, so we're going back to orbit."
Boss-type guy: "But there's no way to do that! The odds of making it back to orbit are less tha"
Systems controller, interrupting: "Never tell me the odds!"
Boss-type guy: "Good point. You guys have fun, I'll go call CNN."
The power source thing is a great idea, but it would be pretty hard to make it work on Earth. Any singularity kept around for long would accelerate at the good ol' 9.8 m/s^2, straight out of its containment. In microgravity, however, you could hold a small singularity in one place by feeding it from different directions if the matter you throw in is moving fast enough. Hawking radiation is mostly electrons and positrons, not directly gamma rays (the positrons usually end up as 511 keV gamma rays after meeting up with an electron, though). If you trap some of the positrons, along with any antiprotons you get, and feed the rest back into the singularity, you might be able to accumulate macroscopic quantities of antimatter after a long enough time. Unless singularities are particular about what particles they will emit, which is one thing that could be studied from nucleus-sized versions.
So we just need to build an orbiting accelerator capable of energies several orders of magnitude greater than anything we can get on Earth, and we might be able to make lots of antimatter. No problem, right?
I think we've strayed sufficiently far from the topic of the story, so I'll stop now.
Never read it, but singularities would be harmless if you made them small enough. There should be some critical mass, dependant on the density of the surrounding medium, below which a black hole cannot survive. Below that mass, it loses energy to Hawking radiation faster than it can suck in mass to compensate, and is gone in a tiny fraction of a second. Above that mass, it sucks in matter faster than it radiates, quickly gets big enough that it hardly radiates anything at all, and proceeds to consume the experiment apparatus, the lab, the city, and most of the solar system. The first variety would be really interesting to physicists. The second would be even more interesting, but only for the few moments before they destroy Earth.
As I remember, the landing was originally planned for the 14th. Some little mishap forced them to change schedule, but I can't remember what it was now.
That depends on the surface and the probe. If the surface is covered in a thick enough layer of dust or other small particles, that would damp the impact quite a bit. Also, how bouncy are space probes?
And it might be kinda cool to create a micro-black hole. A sufficiently small black hole would just sort of evaporate due to Hawking radiation before it could eat much, and it'd sure be fun to watch. I wonder how small it would have to be to disappear before it could grow significantly? Too bad the RHIC's collision energies are a few orders of magnitude too small.
Good guess. Industrial, miliary and medical uses were mentioned in the article. They quoted the silk as being 3 times as strong as Kevlar. I can't remember how many times as strong as steel Kevlar is, though.
1) The usual golden rule is "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." The other one (usually meant as a joke) is "He who has the gold makes the rules." I dunno what the fuck kinda golden rule yours is.
2) Why the hell do so many people think stuff like that? The universe does not obey your Sunday-school rules. Just because "what goes around comes around" makes a good quote doesn't make it true. Unless you want to invoke theological arguments, which have absolutely no place in discussion of facts, (Don't even bother flaming that one. I've heard everything you've got to say and I don't give a shit.) there is nothing which inevitably causes human ingeneuity to come back and destroy us. So fucking what if some sci-fi stories show humanity being destroyed by genetically altered organisms or overzealous nanotech robots? Life is not a $1.50 sci-fi novel!
Does the potential exist for genetically altered organisms to destroy humanity? Yes! Does the potential exist for nuclear technology to destroy humanity? Hell yes! Does the potential exist for the space program to piss off some alien race that then destroys humanity? Again, yes!
Does that stop us from exploring space or researching nuclear power? Hell no! Why? The potential to help humanity, combined with our drive to discover, outweighs the risk as an elephant outweighs a speck of dust. Should it stop us from examining the fundamentals of life and possibly using that knowlege? I think you know my answer to that.
Hubris leading to destruction may make for good reading, but in real life hubris leads to destruction a lot less often than stagnation does. Arrogance and "playing God" are the only things that keep human society moving and evolving. If, from the time God was invented, nobody played God, you'd be out ploughing your fields behind a couple oxen. If you got a scratch and it got infected, you'd have to amputate the limb. You would still believe that every body in the universe revolved (literally) around Earth, and that crossing the Great Ocean was not only impossible, but prohibited by God. I've got news for ya buddy: We are the closest thing to God this planet has ever seen. No, we don't control life, we don't control the stars, we don't even control the weather. But we damn well control ourselves.
Every visible major advance in science has met with incredibly vocal opposition, always on the grounds of "We don't understand this and we shouldn't mess with it." Well if we don't mess with it, we will never understand it. That's how we learn, by doing.
Technological advances have definitely contributed to human suffering and destruction. Not because of technology, but because of intentional, malicious action by humans. You can't stop humans from trying to screw each other out of food, shelter, and life, and you also can't stop us from learning and inventing. All you do by trying is make yourself look like a fool. You have every right to do exactly that, but don't expect too many people to listen.
"Jesus!"
"You said it man. Nobody fucks with the Jesus."
>Prove: Differential calculus.
define f(a,b) = a + b
set a = 0, b = 0
f(0,0) = 0
set da = 1, db = 1
f(a + da,b + db)=0 + 0 + 1 + 1 = 2
therefore df = 2
df = da + db
Good enough?
I also wonder if you're a vegetarian. I hope so, otherwise you're a total hypocrite. These animals have lives no worse than dairy cows, and they save thousands of human lives.
So if you do know anyone who's diabetic, imagine them going blind and dying a slow death for lack of insulin. Then talk to me about emotions.