What a fascinating insight into human evolution. Arguably, this marks the birth of christ as being the turning point in the end of organic homo-sapiens as a species. Take that, you religious fanatics...
From my perspective, people keep framing it as a 'climocalypse'. Its ridiculous. The planet has heated up more than this in the past - and it will again in the future. Our civilisations' advanced development can be largely attributed to 10,000 years of particularly mild climate.
The IPCC quite rightly talks about the consequences of varying levels of global warming. They talk about it in terms of the percentage of GDP that will be required to offset the impacts. In some cases, they're talking about flood-levies; in others, they're talking about population relocation (to higher ground).
For those of us in the first world - and lets face it, most/. readers live in a first world country - the biggest impact is likely to be land devaluation of coastal property (which is mostly owned by right wing baby boomers who are the bulk of the denier population), and an increase in the cost of living, as it becomes harder to outsource work to third world countries that are floundering (pardon the pun). Your shiny new iPad will cost $2000 instead of $600... not exactly the end of the world.
What if the world's population is halved over a 30 year period? So what? Many folks believe that the world shouldn't be supporting more than about 1 billion people anyway. Cutting us back to 3.5 is not the end of the world - particularly when the vast majority of those deaths will occur in third world countries - places like the Nile Delta.
Let's face it. Even if the climocalypse does come to occur, it most likely won't affect many/. readers. We'll be suitably horrified (and entertained) by the news reports and documentaries, and life will go on. Most of us won't even live long enough to see that happen.
Any business owner should have a detailed register of their assets soft and hard. The register should be up to date, and it should be readily auditable. If you're serious about your business, the response to the BSA should be:
Here is our register - showing the dates that we have regularly internally audited it. Oh, and from a software perspective, here is our policy regarding workstation rebuilds to obliterate non-company software - and our log of workstation rebuilds. Oh, and here is our staff policy that makes employees responsible for any illegal/unlicensed software on their workstations. Feel free to come and audit our register at your own expense.
Any business that is not in a position to make this statement is not serious about being a business. I own a thriving software house and we have such a register, policies, etc. Let's face it folks - we're in IT. This kind of thing is almost trivial to set up - and it is relatively easy to maintain.
There were too many good games to name them all. EOB was one of them. What about Akalabeth? Truly classic. What about some of the early MUDs? Many an hour was lost (when i should have been studying).
I quite like the notion that advertising companies are relatively smart about targetting ads for me. Actually, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to register my interests in a central database that helps me mould and shape my advertising experiences. To me, this seems to be a logical progression - and would put a lot of the control of my personal information back in my own hands.
The problem as I see it is about the value (or price) of privacy. There have not been sufficient legal precedents to put a dollar value on this stuff, and that is the only thing that large corporations will respect. I suspect that many people will stop being so high and mighty about their privacy when they discover that it is only worth 47 cents.
Based on many of the comments here, I think many people consider this elevator to be like existing internal building elevators - capable of housing a dozen people standing as they are raised. Think more of a vertical train, with seats/beds that could recline 400-500 people while they are propelled out of the atmosphere. By the textbook definition of 'elevator', I guess it a reasonable term, but I think it understates the possibilities by an order of magnitude.
Once outside the atmosphere, the greatest enemy (air resistance) is gone. Speeds of 200kph are painfully slow, and based on rail technology.
You have asked for an alternative elevation technique, so let me offer some suggestions - without giving any thought to their feasibility.
What about a railgun? What about a swinging rope (like a chimpanzee swinging from branch to branch)? What about a tethered coil orbiting the central cable, rather than travelling along it? Why not pump high pressure atmosphere from the surface, and use it as a propellant?
Some of these technologies will be problematic for humans as we are not very resistant to high G-forces, but they would be ideal to exploit the opportunity to accelerate masses into space.
Whilst geosynchronous orbit is achieved at about 36,000 Kms, the atmosphere ends at roughly 120kms. Using some kind of rail to continue to elevate the payload will be hideously inefficient outside the atmosphere.
Furthermore, using the term 'elevator' is clearly an attempt to dumb-down the technology (kind of like called a Philosopher's Stone a 'Magic Stone').
Don't have a citation, but I believe that even using carbon nanotubes, the tether cable needs to be about 10 metres thick. This would mean that the project would require some 36 x 10 ^ 8 cubic metres of carbon nanotubes. Idaho Space Materials makes about 50gms per hour - at a cost measured in hundres of $ per gram.
I don't know that this is all practically do-able yet.
That's it. Long enough to achieve market dominance (if you've got half a brain).
After that, its fair game.
I've never had an employer who continues to offer me ongoing royalties for my suggestions on how to improve their business. In fact, they require me to sign away any rights I hold to any ideas I may have.
Traditional military strategy has been to go for the command and control infrastructure. The morons in DoJ just don't realise that its a useless strategy when dealing with the internet. Your enemy is far more mobile than you are, and they will simply relocate, or re-distribute to overcome the assault.
/politicians and police don't understand the internet
I don't believe that its quite that bleak. You buy a service from Facebook, and you pay with your privacy - and a fraction of your visual field of view (eg looking at ads).
I do not watch free-to-air TV, as I don't wish to pay for their service with my time (watching their annoying ads).
I do not watch pay-TV, as the original intent was for my cash payment to grant me freedom from those ads, and the pay-TV companies re-neged on their promise.
Facebook does not ask me to surrender my time in exchange for their service, so their price is acceptable to me... for now.
The biggest problem most techs face is their own arrogance. Your desire to mature as an engineer sets you apart from many of your peers.
Perhaps on a more practical note, I'd suggest that you plan to spend six months to a year working in a beauracracy nightmare shop (eg a bank).
If and when you come out of the end of that experience, you will be much better positioned to apply the theoretical knowledge, and you will also be sufficiently jaded with process overkill.
However, my strongest suggestion would be to keep doing what you're doing. Allow a little time each week to continue developing your expertise. That habit distinguishes the masters from the journeymen.
Doesn't this mean that the FBI took down the wrong site... I mean the legislation is all about 'indiscriminate hosting' of copyrighted data. Doesn't that mean they should be taking down Carpathia Hosting?
Any bank with a 'safe deposit box' service that could be used to store stolen property should be shut down.
Actually, the company that owns the building they're in should be compelled to seal its doors, and the local council should be compelled to close the street.
Oh, and the phone company should be compelled to remove them from all the phone books.
Selective enforcement is a major issue for most countries at the moment. The 'policing forces' have too much power, and too much discriminatory use of that power. It results in significant police corruption, and waters down the prosecution of real crime.
SOPA and PIPA are just part of the ongoing battle between the authoritarians and the libertarians. That battle is not one that will easily go away, and nor should it. It is through this path that our society achieves balance in its legal system.
Your post made me stop and think about it for a minute. The ability to destroy the DNS so easily is clearly a weakness in the architecture of the Internet. If DoJ can do it, then we (the technical community) have clearly failed to engineer a global network resilient to single points of failure.
Perhaps the most constructive thing we can do is re-engineer the DNS architecture so that it cannot be destroyed so easily.
This would be a great victory of intelligence over politics - something that is way overdue.
Perhaps some kind of Beowulf DNS Cluster arrangement. Or a RAID/striped/mirrored DNS database. One that cannot be centrally administered. In order to take down a website/DNS/Server - you need to physically shut down the server.
Now, I have no doubt that DoJ would seek out ways to accomplish this task, but at least other countries (with more sane governments) would have the opportunity to oppose such sloppy legislation.
I've burnt out my rage gland now... and have started thinking positively about what the post-SOPA Internet might look like.
It occurs to me that SOPA relies very heavily on the Domain Name system that the Internet uses so heavily - primarily so that we don't need to remember IP addresses - but also, to a lesser degree, so that we don't need to have fixed IPs.
Once SOPA is entrenched, and domains start getting blocked - either as legitimate takedowns, witch-hunts, or corporate espionage (I'll be expecting Samsung and Apple to be off the air within days of SOPA's activation) - a more dynamic website that doesn't rely on a DNS, and that has a flexible IP seems to be the logical approach.
Or perhaps some very powerful proxy servers based outside US soil... will SOPA have the ability to block them when they are transports and not hosts? Perhaps a combination of a proxy server with its own naming/IP translation table?
One thing I am sure of: People will get what they want from the Internet regardless of what the legislators say.
The first great cyber-civil war appears to be commencing... how does the right to bear arms relate to that?
Invariably in these situations, there is more to be found if you scratch the surface a bit.
Perhaps he was sleeping with the boss's wife. Perhaps he's an obnoxious, abrasive prat. The fact that he's suing (instead of just moving on) suggests as much.
The lawsuit eventuated because they used an inappropriate dialog in getting rid of him. Ironically, if he had just taken it on the chin and moved on, his career would not have been significantly impacted. The fact that he is suing has ended his career.
Fair comments. As it so happens, she is my business partner as well as my spouse. I suspect that I use the term out of habit, as it is 'safe' regardless of audience.
Still... perhaps a bit out of context in a sentence that contains the word 'canoodle'.
Slashdot Mirror
What a fascinating insight into human evolution. Arguably, this marks the birth of christ as being the turning point in the end of organic homo-sapiens as a species. Take that, you religious fanatics...
From my perspective, people keep framing it as a 'climocalypse'. Its ridiculous. The planet has heated up more than this in the past - and it will again in the future. Our civilisations' advanced development can be largely attributed to 10,000 years of particularly mild climate.
/. readers live in a first world country - the biggest impact is likely to be land devaluation of coastal property (which is mostly owned by right wing baby boomers who are the bulk of the denier population), and an increase in the cost of living, as it becomes harder to outsource work to third world countries that are floundering (pardon the pun). Your shiny new iPad will cost $2000 instead of $600... not exactly the end of the world.
/. readers. We'll be suitably horrified (and entertained) by the news reports and documentaries, and life will go on. Most of us won't even live long enough to see that happen.
The IPCC quite rightly talks about the consequences of varying levels of global warming. They talk about it in terms of the percentage of GDP that will be required to offset the impacts. In some cases, they're talking about flood-levies; in others, they're talking about population relocation (to higher ground).
For those of us in the first world - and lets face it, most
What if the world's population is halved over a 30 year period? So what? Many folks believe that the world shouldn't be supporting more than about 1 billion people anyway. Cutting us back to 3.5 is not the end of the world - particularly when the vast majority of those deaths will occur in third world countries - places like the Nile Delta.
Let's face it. Even if the climocalypse does come to occur, it most likely won't affect many
You make a good point. Any response to the RIAA would come from our lawyers. The $100 I would pay them to write the letter is worth every cent.
Any business owner should have a detailed register of their assets soft and hard. The register should be up to date, and it should be readily auditable. If you're serious about your business, the response to the BSA should be:
Here is our register - showing the dates that we have regularly internally audited it. Oh, and from a software perspective, here is our policy regarding workstation rebuilds to obliterate non-company software - and our log of workstation rebuilds. Oh, and here is our staff policy that makes employees responsible for any illegal/unlicensed software on their workstations. Feel free to come and audit our register at your own expense.
Any business that is not in a position to make this statement is not serious about being a business. I own a thriving software house and we have such a register, policies, etc. Let's face it folks - we're in IT. This kind of thing is almost trivial to set up - and it is relatively easy to maintain.
No. Its just that the article summary arrived before the article.
boom boom
There were too many good games to name them all. EOB was one of them. What about Akalabeth? Truly classic. What about some of the early MUDs? Many an hour was lost (when i should have been studying).
I quite like the notion that advertising companies are relatively smart about targetting ads for me. Actually, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to register my interests in a central database that helps me mould and shape my advertising experiences. To me, this seems to be a logical progression - and would put a lot of the control of my personal information back in my own hands.
The problem as I see it is about the value (or price) of privacy. There have not been sufficient legal precedents to put a dollar value on this stuff, and that is the only thing that large corporations will respect. I suspect that many people will stop being so high and mighty about their privacy when they discover that it is only worth 47 cents.
Based on many of the comments here, I think many people consider this elevator to be like existing internal building elevators - capable of housing a dozen people standing as they are raised. Think more of a vertical train, with seats/beds that could recline 400-500 people while they are propelled out of the atmosphere. By the textbook definition of 'elevator', I guess it a reasonable term, but I think it understates the possibilities by an order of magnitude.
Once outside the atmosphere, the greatest enemy (air resistance) is gone. Speeds of 200kph are painfully slow, and based on rail technology.
You have asked for an alternative elevation technique, so let me offer some suggestions - without giving any thought to their feasibility.
What about a railgun? What about a swinging rope (like a chimpanzee swinging from branch to branch)? What about a tethered coil orbiting the central cable, rather than travelling along it? Why not pump high pressure atmosphere from the surface, and use it as a propellant?
Some of these technologies will be problematic for humans as we are not very resistant to high G-forces, but they would be ideal to exploit the opportunity to accelerate masses into space.
Whilst geosynchronous orbit is achieved at about 36,000 Kms, the atmosphere ends at roughly 120kms. Using some kind of rail to continue to elevate the payload will be hideously inefficient outside the atmosphere.
Furthermore, using the term 'elevator' is clearly an attempt to dumb-down the technology (kind of like called a Philosopher's Stone a 'Magic Stone').
Don't have a citation, but I believe that even using carbon nanotubes, the tether cable needs to be about 10 metres thick. This would mean that the project would require some 36 x 10 ^ 8 cubic metres of carbon nanotubes. Idaho Space Materials makes about 50gms per hour - at a cost measured in hundres of $ per gram.
I don't know that this is all practically do-able yet.
That's it. Long enough to achieve market dominance (if you've got half a brain).
After that, its fair game.
I've never had an employer who continues to offer me ongoing royalties for my suggestions on how to improve their business. In fact, they require me to sign away any rights I hold to any ideas I may have.
What a crock. Did we expect any better from the music industry?
Six Word Definition as explained here
Traditional military strategy has been to go for the command and control infrastructure. The morons in DoJ just don't realise that its a useless strategy when dealing with the internet. Your enemy is far more mobile than you are, and they will simply relocate, or re-distribute to overcome the assault.
/politicians and police don't understand the internet
So we should abandon the term AGW, and move to the more useful Chinagogenic Global Warming.
/. is not going to change the world as far as this stuff goes. We're not even going to scratch the surface.
As an Aussie, I'm saddened that my nation's total annual CO2 output is less than the increase in China's CO2 output from one month to the next.
Even the entirety of USA, Canada and Aus combined is less than one third of the population of China.
Let's face it folks.
I don't believe that its quite that bleak. You buy a service from Facebook, and you pay with your privacy - and a fraction of your visual field of view (eg looking at ads).
I do not watch free-to-air TV, as I don't wish to pay for their service with my time (watching their annoying ads).
I do not watch pay-TV, as the original intent was for my cash payment to grant me freedom from those ads, and the pay-TV companies re-neged on their promise.
Facebook does not ask me to surrender my time in exchange for their service, so their price is acceptable to me... for now.
Sounds like you already did.
The biggest problem most techs face is their own arrogance. Your desire to mature as an engineer sets you apart from many of your peers.
Perhaps on a more practical note, I'd suggest that you plan to spend six months to a year working in a beauracracy nightmare shop (eg a bank).
If and when you come out of the end of that experience, you will be much better positioned to apply the theoretical knowledge, and you will also be sufficiently jaded with process overkill.
However, my strongest suggestion would be to keep doing what you're doing. Allow a little time each week to continue developing your expertise. That habit distinguishes the masters from the journeymen.
Doesn't this mean that the FBI took down the wrong site... I mean the legislation is all about 'indiscriminate hosting' of copyrighted data. Doesn't that mean they should be taking down Carpathia Hosting?
Oh look! /. is jumping onto the anti-Iran media bandwagon. Fancy that!
I never would have expected such blatantly obvious media manipulation from such an independent website.
What's the punctuation mark for bad sarcasm called?
Any bank with a 'safe deposit box' service that could be used to store stolen property should be shut down.
Actually, the company that owns the building they're in should be compelled to seal its doors, and the local council should be compelled to close the street.
Oh, and the phone company should be compelled to remove them from all the phone books.
There. That ought to do it.
Selective enforcement is a major issue for most countries at the moment. The 'policing forces' have too much power, and too much discriminatory use of that power. It results in significant police corruption, and waters down the prosecution of real crime.
SOPA and PIPA are just part of the ongoing battle between the authoritarians and the libertarians. That battle is not one that will easily go away, and nor should it. It is through this path that our society achieves balance in its legal system.
Your post made me stop and think about it for a minute. The ability to destroy the DNS so easily is clearly a weakness in the architecture of the Internet. If DoJ can do it, then we (the technical community) have clearly failed to engineer a global network resilient to single points of failure.
Perhaps the most constructive thing we can do is re-engineer the DNS architecture so that it cannot be destroyed so easily.
This would be a great victory of intelligence over politics - something that is way overdue.
Perhaps some kind of Beowulf DNS Cluster arrangement. Or a RAID/striped/mirrored DNS database. One that cannot be centrally administered. In order to take down a website/DNS/Server - you need to physically shut down the server.
Now, I have no doubt that DoJ would seek out ways to accomplish this task, but at least other countries (with more sane governments) would have the opportunity to oppose such sloppy legislation.
I've burnt out my rage gland now... and have started thinking positively about what the post-SOPA Internet might look like.
It occurs to me that SOPA relies very heavily on the Domain Name system that the Internet uses so heavily - primarily so that we don't need to remember IP addresses - but also, to a lesser degree, so that we don't need to have fixed IPs.
Once SOPA is entrenched, and domains start getting blocked - either as legitimate takedowns, witch-hunts, or corporate espionage (I'll be expecting Samsung and Apple to be off the air within days of SOPA's activation) - a more dynamic website that doesn't rely on a DNS, and that has a flexible IP seems to be the logical approach.
Or perhaps some very powerful proxy servers based outside US soil... will SOPA have the ability to block them when they are transports and not hosts? Perhaps a combination of a proxy server with its own naming/IP translation table?
One thing I am sure of: People will get what they want from the Internet regardless of what the legislators say.
The first great cyber-civil war appears to be commencing... how does the right to bear arms relate to that?
Well.. that is my degree...
Sorry 'bout that.
Invariably in these situations, there is more to be found if you scratch the surface a bit.
Perhaps he was sleeping with the boss's wife. Perhaps he's an obnoxious, abrasive prat. The fact that he's suing (instead of just moving on) suggests as much.
The lawsuit eventuated because they used an inappropriate dialog in getting rid of him. Ironically, if he had just taken it on the chin and moved on, his career would not have been significantly impacted. The fact that he is suing has ended his career.
Karma's a bitch like that sometimes.
Fair comments. As it so happens, she is my business partner as well as my spouse. I suspect that I use the term out of habit, as it is 'safe' regardless of audience.
Still... perhaps a bit out of context in a sentence that contains the word 'canoodle'.