Several Bad(tm) thoughts (forgive me, it must be the tequila hangover from last night):
Don't give it to NASA, that's the place you send stuff you want to kill off.
We could put put bunches of this stuff along the desert near the US Mexican Border. Not only will we get power, but since the facilites each cover a mile or two, they will act as a natural wall stopping illegal immigration
I recall reading someplace that the producers deliberately made the animated characters less "life like" because it didn't feel right for a fairy tale.
but god help me find the link now out of all of the random bits I've read over the past month
the PBS show NOVA had something on the mummies in China (original air date January 18,1998). See the Transcript online here
All kinds of neat things, photos, etc, and you can probably order the video too.
The original story linked above looks like the human interest story of the archeologist and the political interests in China made it relevant as a story, as far as the newspaper editors were concerned.
I can see the Chinese government trying to deal with politically inconvenient truths.
I'm betting that any other gamehack who just read this article (and there are 90,000 potential gamehacks reading slashdot on any given day) can whack up something with the same user-selectable-parallel-universe model in a couple of months, if not a couple of weeks.
Which is why the market is saturated with the product right now.
;-)
But seriously, This is something I look forward to. Anytime a serious artist in the field puts together something, especially a start from scratch thing, I'll at least check it out. With enough expertise, a career in this field should go 50 or 60 years of jaw dropping products.
Well, the question arises of copyright issues to your own name, image, and personality.
That is sort of what has made a movie star or artist important. If there are no copyrights for things like this, then why would anyone want to be an artist?
or do we get to run the acting characteristics of actors of the past 100 years of film history through an OOP randomizer to slice and dice and get whatever we want? Who would own those rights?
Just the idea that someone could be required to have seven years of backups is scary.
Strangely enough there are suggestions that europe has strong elements that are pushng towards social control and social purity on many fronts.
This cuts both ways, in that the proposed controls on dangerous groups are applauded by many, until the amount of research that a eurocop would want to have at his finger tips is added up. Typically, it boils down to the idea of folks being in favor of the benefits of a police state only for certain people. People need to sort out their thinking on this just a bit.
The SOS Europe site is at:
http://www.statewatch.org/soseurope.htm
The page with the listing of the full documentation is here:
alot of the docs are in PDF format, but the documentation you seek is on the second page.
as noted here
http://www.statewatch.org/news/dec00/01tapping.htm
The demand for a new law for all records to be held and maintained for at least seven years comes out of the discussions held in the G8 group on High-Tec Crime. Public pronouncements on how
long records of all communications should be held varies from one to six months.The period of seven years requested by the NCIS matches the demands of the FBI in the G8 discussions where it is being argued that every country has to have the same, extensive, time-limit because otherwise it will be impossible to track communications. It is said that if a communication, say a telephone call, involves four different countries (A, B, C & D) intelligence-gathering will be useless if countries B & C do not hold full data for the same time period.
The G8 discussions have centred on the "problems" created for law enforcement and security and intelligence agencies by the 1995 and 1996 EU Data Protection Directives which require
communications data to be destroyed once it is surplus to commercial needs - after a few days or weeks. Faced with this situation the agencies attending the G8 meetings are campaigning at
national level for their governments to opt out of the Directives in order to establish de facto "international standards for data retention" (NCIS).
There is an excellent recent article in Netslaves about recent Microsoft Tactics. One of the Major introductory points he makes is:
[ . . . ] when Jim Allchin attacks Linux, he's not going after Linus and the kernel people. He's trying to reach about a hundred CIO/CTO's who can force their company to use Win2K servers on their boxes. All of MS's anti-Linux speeches are designed to get a very small audience to hold the line on Linux growth within the corporation. Of course it pisses you off, but that isn't the point
There is a lot more to it as well in the following paragraphs.
Point Being, the attack and response should not be against each others egos, but for the hearts and minds of the people who really count, who make the high power decisions. I note that
Late Tuesday, Microsoft responded to the open letter. "We appreciate the dialog on this issue--it's exactly the type of discussion Craig was hoping to foster," the company said in a statement.
Somehow it feels like MS is trying to try to trip up the evangistas into being too brash, by seeming to be so reasonable.
The original A-Bomb SciFi story
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 3
There is this bit from a Fantasy and Science Fiction Column about a yarn about the A-Bomb printed during the 40's:
I had read Szilard's satirical sf novel The Voice of the Dolphins in 1961, and his sf short stories, and from him heard the story, famous in the genre, of how in the spring of 1944 Cleve Cartmill published a clear description of how an atomic bomb worked in Astounding SF, titled "Deadline." Szilard mentioned to me that Cartmill's bomb
would not have worked, but the story did stress that the key problem was separating non-fissionable isotopes from the crucial Uranium 235.
This story became legend, proudly by fans touted after the war as proof of sf's predictive powers. It was a tale of an evil alliance called theAxis---oops, no, the Sixa---who are prevented from dropping the A-bomb, while their opponents, the Allies---no, oops, that's the Seilla---refrain from using the weapon, fearing its implications.
As Campbell never tired of telling, in March 1944 a captain in the Intelligence and Security Division and the Manhattan Project called for an investigation of Cartmill."
There is a lot more in the article, so go check it out. There are plenty of links if you do a common web search for the author's name, etc. The story in question has been in a number of anthologies, but I haven't found it online as far as downloading it goes.
if you give me the money and get out of the way.- Sounds a lot like: "Give me money and free slave labour and I'll get it done"...
Of course, with the hype that we have had with the dot com debacles, it is hard to remember when there were actually endevors when bunches of folks would get together and get something worthwhile done. These days most folks think that the only way that could happen would be at the point of a gun. And that all great endevors are naturally acts of slavery and enslavement. Many are, but not all. The early days of Nasa, in going to the moon, before it becames a boondoggle, for example hand a higher goal.
It is very possible that the great pyramids were built entirely with volunteers.
But the thought is completely unbelievable to modern folks with their fashionably cynical outlook. I can remeber talking with some guy on a talk show about what the big deal was aboutjack kennedy, that he was a womanizer, etc etc etc. He was totally clueless to the notion that kennedy, whatever his faults, had somehow given a breath of life to the dreams that people had, made those hopes and dreams come very much alive, and gave strength to people based on the high mindedness of these ideals. This guy was totally clueless to this, because the biggest dream he had were his fantasies for the weekend. It was outside his reality completely.
This kind of hope and freedom was dangerous, which is why, despite all of his many faults, he had to be struck down by those opposed to it. The dream had to die.
Now in this context you can get a bunch of people willing to accomplish something, and they will not be slaves. But you have to have a legit honest real goal, not a dot-com come-on with carrot and stick. Something practical that you can put you hands own. Something worth living for and giving for and sacrificing for.
I can understand that many folks don't have anything like that. This becomes a road to a smaller, more fragile, more dangerous world.
But this fits into the cynical outlook in the original topic, where we rest assured that the government can be trusted to squash new technology by means of the appropriate government agency.
Given that Radiation stays in one place, more or less, a nuclear weapon is relatively safe. A DNA weapon has no absolute gaurentees of safety, since the vectors can ultimately infiltrate every corner of earth. This becomes the blackmail of the suicide pack.
This ultimately is more dangerous than nuclear war, because in something like thind, with the relatively low costs, what are the odds that someone is ghoing to want to purify the earth of the scourge and polution of humanity? this would look very weird in the archeological record when the next big civilization comes along in 50 - 75 million years.
[...] A few years ago I was asked what it would take to build a Lunar colony. My answer was: "Two billion if you give me the money and get out of the way. If you advertise a prize for the first Lunar Colony to last two years, that should probably be about ten billion dollars. Alternatively, if you go to the Air Force or Navy with specs you won't change and let them do it black (ie without having to comply with the Armed Service Procurement Regulations, which was 25 linear feet of loose-leaf notebooks when I was in the business, and is now much larger, and includes handicapped access and much else) you would probably get bids at $10 billion; if you make them
do the paperwork and follow the ASPRs then probably $25 billion. NASA has already said it will take $85 billion and 20 years if everything goes as planned. With NASA nothing has EVER been cheaper or taken less time than the estimate." I have no real reason to change that now.
See what happens when you get Government involved in things its not supposed to touch? They don't work anymore. The web wont die because
of ICANN but we will have one more pain in our butts.
There has been a long standing tradition of squashing technology via official bureaucratic incompetance in govern in the USA.
You have to go know your history on this, but it goess back to things like the assembly line manufacture of rifles just after the revolution (date?), Robert Foulton's Steam Engine, and even far more recently as seen in NASA.
For Example, NASA turned from a place to get things done to a place to park the development of technology while developing boondoggles and pork barrels. It has turned into a place to squash the development of space flight. For an interesting take on this, check out Jerry Pournelle's idea that you could have a contest for Business to go into space, or go to the moon, setting up a permanent base, and have a 10 Billion dollar prize for the winner.
I proposed prizes for a Space Station and a Lunar Colony (Congress directs the
Treasurer to pay to the first American owned company that keeps 31 Americans alive in orbit around the Earth for a period of one year and one day the sum of $5 Billion; no other money shall be paid to develop a space station and no money shall be paid until the goal is achieved) back in about 1982 or so. I do wish someone had paid attention. I wanted a similar $10 billion lunar colony prize: keep 31 Americans alive on the surface of the Moon for 2 years and a day....)
So don't worry, the government will take its' time, but will eventually come up with some agency to stall and stop the development of the Internet until it is nothing but a government or private office with the efficiency of the post office and the warmth and caring of the IRS.
Car CD players are usually built to withstand shock, whereas my CD-ROM drive tends to skip when jostled. Is there a way to dampen the shocks
from pot-holes, etc. when using a CD-ROM drive in a car?
This is a very valid reason to worry.
Regular walkmans, for example have a bunch of ram built in as a buffer, so that if it skips, it waits while it plays data in the buffer. Typical walkmans nowadays hav something up to 30 seconds or 45 seconds worth of buffer. I also think that they are variable speed so that they can fill up the buffer fast, and then play of the buffer as needed. This has certainly been built into the car cd players.
The second issue is the robustness of the units to take a beating due to vibrations. I think that CD Roms are more fragile than car CD Players, but this may be debatable. Certainly long term durability is an issue. How many times do you tap your computer with a rubber hammer while playing your favorite tunes? Would this even be wise?
Look at all those posts in the beginning marked as redundant.
Those people are merely sharing how common crisis mode is.
Even if it is just due to managers believing that you can do with half the staff, or half the hardware, or half the budget you need to get the results they want.
Maybe it was a silly question to begin with, but it sure seems like whoever had the 150 moderator points had a problem with that much unexpected opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
I note that the low end model is not all that bad, and costs 1500 USian.
what is not mentioned is whether or not this has "advanced technology" to make it fully compliant with MPA and RIAA legal restrictions.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Don't give it to NASA, that's the place you send stuff you want to kill off.
We could put put bunches of this stuff along the desert near the US Mexican Border. Not only will we get power, but since the facilites each cover a mile or two, they will act as a natural wall stopping illegal immigration
Yes I know it's sick.
Quit it already with the baseball bats
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
A good example of this is this stick figure fight kungfu link someone sent me:
http://games.sohu.com/fightgame/fight3.swf
in this case there is no surface texture, it is all stick figures, but the body motion and all the rest is right.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
but god help me find the link now out of all of the random bits I've read over the past month
;-)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
All kinds of neat things, photos, etc, and you can probably order the video too.
The original story linked above looks like the human interest story of the archeologist and the political interests in China made it relevant as a story, as far as the newspaper editors were concerned.
I can see the Chinese government trying to deal with politically inconvenient truths.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
American Cuisine???
Competition over a Macdonalds menu? or the best Pizza and Beer combo?
the mind boggles.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Imagine Vulcan color commentary.
This could be bad, or really good camp.
Scotty - Beam me out of here!
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Which is why the market is saturated with the product right now.
;-)
But seriously, This is something I look forward to. Anytime a serious artist in the field puts together something, especially a start from scratch thing, I'll at least check it out. With enough expertise, a career in this field should go 50 or 60 years of jaw dropping products.
This could be fun.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
In fact Microsoft marketing is Viral, because it precludes the options of other solutions, where GPL allows for as many solutions as you desire.
Correctly identifying the infection verse the AntiBodies is very important
GPL acts as an AntiBody against certain infections.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
and it has more bureaucrats producing more paperwork than ever before, just to get it launched.
we want you to ride on it
right . . .
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
That is sort of what has made a movie star or artist important. If there are no copyrights for things like this, then why would anyone want to be an artist?
or do we get to run the acting characteristics of actors of the past 100 years of film history through an OOP randomizer to slice and dice and get whatever we want? Who would own those rights?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
It's evidence.
I can imagine the horrors of that for ISPs, etc. cancelbots illegal, etc.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Strangely enough there are suggestions that europe has strong elements that are pushng towards social control and social purity on many fronts.
This cuts both ways, in that the proposed controls on dangerous groups are applauded by many, until the amount of research that a eurocop would want to have at his finger tips is added up. Typically, it boils down to the idea of folks being in favor of the benefits of a police state only for certain people. People need to sort out their thinking on this just a bit.
The SOS Europe site is at:
http://www.statewatch.org/soseurope.htm
The page with the listing of the full documentation is here:
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2001/may/03Cenfopol .htm
alot of the docs are in PDF format, but the documentation you seek is on the second page.
as noted herem
http://www.statewatch.org/news/dec00/01tapping.ht
The demand for a new law for all records to be held and maintained for at least seven years comes out of the discussions held in the G8 group on High-Tec Crime. Public pronouncements on how long records of all communications should be held varies from one to six months.The period of seven years requested by the NCIS matches the demands of the FBI in the G8 discussions where it is being argued that every country has to have the same, extensive, time-limit because otherwise it will be impossible to track communications. It is said that if a communication, say a telephone call, involves four different countries (A, B, C & D) intelligence-gathering will be useless if countries B & C do not hold full data for the same time period.
The G8 discussions have centred on the "problems" created for law enforcement and security and intelligence agencies by the 1995 and 1996 EU Data Protection Directives which require communications data to be destroyed once it is surplus to commercial needs - after a few days or weeks. Faced with this situation the agencies attending the G8 meetings are campaigning at national level for their governments to opt out of the Directives in order to establish de facto "international standards for data retention" (NCIS).
I am fascinated and alarmed by the FBI connection
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
[ . . . ] when Jim Allchin attacks Linux, he's not going after Linus and the kernel people. He's trying to reach about a hundred CIO/CTO's who can force their company to use Win2K servers on their boxes. All of MS's anti-Linux speeches are designed to get a very small audience to hold the line on Linux growth within the corporation. Of course it pisses you off, but that isn't the point
There is a lot more to it as well in the following paragraphs.
Point Being, the attack and response should not be against each others egos, but for the hearts and minds of the people who really count, who make the high power decisions. I note that
Late Tuesday, Microsoft responded to the open letter. "We appreciate the dialog on this issue--it's exactly the type of discussion Craig was hoping to foster," the company said in a statement.
Somehow it feels like MS is trying to try to trip up the evangistas into being too brash, by seeming to be so reasonable.
And utterly un-repentant.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
I had read Szilard's satirical sf novel The Voice of the Dolphins in 1961, and his sf short stories, and from him heard the story, famous in the genre, of how in the spring of 1944 Cleve Cartmill published a clear description of how an atomic bomb worked in Astounding SF, titled "Deadline." Szilard mentioned to me that Cartmill's bomb would not have worked, but the story did stress that the key problem was separating non-fissionable isotopes from the crucial Uranium 235.
This story became legend, proudly by fans touted after the war as proof of sf's predictive powers. It was a tale of an evil alliance called theAxis---oops, no, the Sixa---who are prevented from dropping the A-bomb, while their opponents, the Allies---no, oops, that's the Seilla---refrain from using the weapon, fearing its implications.
As Campbell never tired of telling, in March 1944 a captain in the Intelligence and Security Division and the Manhattan Project called for an investigation of Cartmill."
There is a lot more in the article, so go check it out. There are plenty of links if you do a common web search for the author's name, etc. The story in question has been in a number of anthologies, but I haven't found it online as far as downloading it goes.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Of course, with the hype that we have had with the dot com debacles, it is hard to remember when there were actually endevors when bunches of folks would get together and get something worthwhile done. These days most folks think that the only way that could happen would be at the point of a gun. And that all great endevors are naturally acts of slavery and enslavement. Many are, but not all. The early days of Nasa, in going to the moon, before it becames a boondoggle, for example hand a higher goal.
It is very possible that the great pyramids were built entirely with volunteers.
But the thought is completely unbelievable to modern folks with their fashionably cynical outlook. I can remeber talking with some guy on a talk show about what the big deal was aboutjack kennedy, that he was a womanizer, etc etc etc. He was totally clueless to the notion that kennedy, whatever his faults, had somehow given a breath of life to the dreams that people had, made those hopes and dreams come very much alive, and gave strength to people based on the high mindedness of these ideals. This guy was totally clueless to this, because the biggest dream he had were his fantasies for the weekend. It was outside his reality completely.
This kind of hope and freedom was dangerous, which is why, despite all of his many faults, he had to be struck down by those opposed to it. The dream had to die.
Now in this context you can get a bunch of people willing to accomplish something, and they will not be slaves. But you have to have a legit honest real goal, not a dot-com come-on with carrot and stick. Something practical that you can put you hands own. Something worth living for and giving for and sacrificing for.
I can understand that many folks don't have anything like that. This becomes a road to a smaller, more fragile, more dangerous world.
But this fits into the cynical outlook in the original topic, where we rest assured that the government can be trusted to squash new technology by means of the appropriate government agency.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
This ultimately is more dangerous than nuclear war, because in something like thind, with the relatively low costs, what are the odds that someone is ghoing to want to purify the earth of the scourge and polution of humanity? this would look very weird in the archeological record when the next big civilization comes along in 50 - 75 million years.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
http://www.ugo.com/services/about/mediakit/coinfo_ exec.asp
The contact infomation is here:
http://www.ugo.com/services/about/mediakit/ contact .asp
with telephone, fax, and email.
Someone may want to save the data someplace, just in case. These guys sound a bit unpleasant, but I'm sure they are fine at a party.
[right ...]
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
(at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives/archivesmai l/mail62.html#lemonde) :
[...] A few years ago I was asked what it would take to build a Lunar colony. My answer was: "Two billion if you give me the money and get out of the way. If you advertise a prize for the first Lunar Colony to last two years, that should probably be about ten billion dollars. Alternatively, if you go to the Air Force or Navy with specs you won't change and let them do it black (ie without having to comply with the Armed Service Procurement Regulations, which was 25 linear feet of loose-leaf notebooks when I was in the business, and is now much larger, and includes handicapped access and much else) you would probably get bids at $10 billion; if you make them do the paperwork and follow the ASPRs then probably $25 billion. NASA has already said it will take $85 billion and 20 years if everything goes as planned. With NASA nothing has EVER been cheaper or taken less time than the estimate." I have no real reason to change that now.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
There has been a long standing tradition of squashing technology via official bureaucratic incompetance in govern in the USA.
You have to go know your history on this, but it goess back to things like the assembly line manufacture of rifles just after the revolution (date?), Robert Foulton's Steam Engine, and even far more recently as seen in NASA.
For Example, NASA turned from a place to get things done to a place to park the development of technology while developing boondoggles and pork barrels. It has turned into a place to squash the development of space flight. For an interesting take on this, check out Jerry Pournelle's idea that you could have a contest for Business to go into space, or go to the moon, setting up a permanent base, and have a 10 Billion dollar prize for the winner.
So don't worry, the government will take its' time, but will eventually come up with some agency to stall and stop the development of the Internet until it is nothing but a government or private office with the efficiency of the post office and the warmth and caring of the IRS.Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Just what We Need!
How am I supposed to play all these games and make time to fight the Evil Empire of Redmond as well?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Someone must have decided that this was a good trade off.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
This is a very valid reason to worry.
Regular walkmans, for example have a bunch of ram built in as a buffer, so that if it skips, it waits while it plays data in the buffer. Typical walkmans nowadays hav something up to 30 seconds or 45 seconds worth of buffer. I also think that they are variable speed so that they can fill up the buffer fast, and then play of the buffer as needed. This has certainly been built into the car cd players.
The second issue is the robustness of the units to take a beating due to vibrations. I think that CD Roms are more fragile than car CD Players, but this may be debatable. Certainly long term durability is an issue. How many times do you tap your computer with a rubber hammer while playing your favorite tunes? Would this even be wise?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Those people are merely sharing how common crisis mode is.
Even if it is just due to managers believing that you can do with half the staff, or half the hardware, or half the budget you need to get the results they want.
Maybe it was a silly question to begin with, but it sure seems like whoever had the 150 moderator points had a problem with that much unexpected opinion.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip