One is the poisoning of the environment. This means nuclear waste, chemical waste including commercial and manufacturing waste and by-products, and consumer trash. This includes the CFCs that give the Aussies those great tans by gaping open that hole in the ozone layer.
Another is the "poisoning" of the atmosphere by an increase in carbon dioxide and methane. Harmless by themselves, but which will eventually cause the "greenhouse effect" we hear so much about -- which some say has already started.
Another issue is alternate forms of energy, which someone above (sorry, I didn't reply directly) has stated are reasonably inadequate at the moment but which show promise. I firmly believe that Necessity is the mother of Invention and that as supplies of fossil fuels became more scarce, prices will go up and alternatives will become affordable and viable.
The atmosphere will eventually settle itself. Ecosystems may get trashed and species may extinguish left and right, but life will go on even if it is without Homo Stupiditus. We may not be able to adapt, but many other species will.
The worst part is the poisoning through nuclear, chemical, and other types of waste. This will cause the most problems, and will eventually lead to stricter and stricter guidelines on manufacturing and waste disposal. We eventually, even as consumers, will not be able to buy anything without the express understanding that 100% of it will be recycled, with stiff fines to enforce it. The process of recycling will need to be refined to the point that we can reuse just about everything. It will also behoove recycling firms to comb over dumps and recycle old trash as that will likely be profitable.
Basically, I think mother nature is very forgiving, and where she is not forgiving, we will pay... and if we pay the ultimate price, life will go on without us. The only way I can see total destruction of life on earth is through a nuclear war that poisons a significant portion of the atmosphere and freezes everything off.
However, I think sea life and plant life will eventually recover from even that...
Kendall,
That reminds me of a game that I personally never played, but only knew of through stories from friends. The game was called Lethal Chess. It's a very old game, and was played on two different levels. You have two teams, each of which has a leader. Each leader makes moves on a 'game' level, moving pieces. The rest of the teams inhabited each square as if it was a mini-adventure game, complete with puzzles and combat.
I think this is a fantastic idea, although difficult to implement. I love it. From world builder to city builder to general to captain to Joe Schmoe. Heck, SimAnt could live at the bottom of that food chain.
I don't know *anything* about GPS's, but as a corrolary to what someone said about hooking a GPS up to a Palm Pilot.. is there some kind of 'data out' port on a GPS that you could hook up to some kind of computerized device?
Then a website could be created that stores data on all available Geocaches, and you could run a program that checks your GPS data against that data and says: Nearest Geocache: 30 miles away
or whatever. That'd be cool.
But then again, you could also use it to register other stuff... like a Personals site that hooks up compatible people.
There's a 75% match 25 miles away.
There's a 99% match 100 miles away.
I don't think that's a new idea, though. But the point is, GPS+internet has a LOT of possibilities.
I don't know about you guys, but I had to change the "cut -b" to "cut -c".
dig @138.195.138.195 goret.org. axfr | grep '^c..\..*A' | sort | cut -b5-36 | perl -e 'while(){print pack("H32",$_)}' | gzip -d
Then it worked.
Well, at Ford Motor Company, out of about 200,000 desktops, the majority are either Windows 95 or 98. Windows NT is used for development, not for desktops that are mainly Word and Outlook terminals. However, the next major iteration of the "Global Client" (our term for the packaging of the OS and apps for the Ford end user) will be based on Windows 2000. We've already done beta field tests and will begin rolling it out production at the very beginning of next year.
I work at the shop that tests and packages all desktop software for Ford.
Your statement that "Most businesses haven't run Win 95/98 on the desktop in years," seems fallacious, although I only have my experience at Ford as evidence.
First off, the company could care less that someone is hacking their box. They make some money from the boxes and licensing, but the monthly fees are where it's at. ISPs, banks, computer manufacturers, etc. They all know that selling a product once isn't enough anymore to put the kids through college. Attention spans are too short and there are too many gadgets coming out to guarantee a repeat customer, so they have to keep people coming back, in the form of monthly service contracts. Commitments. Screw with the monthlies (ie, the program guides) and you'll have a ton of brick legal department to deal with.
Now, having said that, the TiVo people are very willing to either officially or unofficially condone hacking on their boxes. They can't necessarily support the hacks, but what they're really saying is "We know it's happening, and unlike Netpliance we are not going to start shipping TiVo boxes with gooed insides and other changes to try to prevent these hacks. However, we can't be spending the time to make sure our upcoming OS releases will allow your hacks to keep working, but we're not doing it on purpose." What isn't there to get? It's not rocket surgery.
As far as the potential for the TiVo; since it's running Linux, I'd love to see a way to transfer recorded shows to another box and store it on CD etc. I'd like to set up my PC to take those Simpsons and X-Files episodes and burn them to a VCD, or whatever. Television episodes are freely available online already (I missed the first season finale of Futurama, so I went on IRC and was able to download it and view it. Picture sucked, but I got the majority of the experience) and this will make it even easier.
I worked at a major internet provider for over 2 years, and when I left I was Senior Network Engineer, with only the head of the engineering department above me, and above him was the CTO. We had over a dozen POPs (Points of Presence), and OC3 lines strung from MAE East to MAE West and many points between, and OC12's being installed. So, let's assume I can speak slightly to this issue.
With a major provider, your hardware is going to be big enough (BFR, GRF, etc) to handle 60,000+ routes AND do adequate security filtering. Don't accept the RFC'd routes in, and don't propogate them. Period. Don't accept internal routes from external sources. These are simple rules any major provider *can* handle if they can handle a full routing table. We're talking edge routers.
Smaller providers who are multi-homed and that lease dialups wholesale are a problem, though. Their dialups have IPs that don't belong to them. They often don't have the expertise to configure their ACLs correctly, and leave gaping holes in their security. Sometimes we'd scan our customers' routers with SNMP probes and find a lot of default SNMP passwords for read *AND* write access to their router, and we'd let them know to button up their router. One of our routers would occasionally get flooded with extra routes from a customer (we had lousy filtering) and the resulting flood of traffic would kill the customer's router. The first sign of this would be the customer's line going down. We were understaffed and used several different kinds of routers, so ACL's varied slightly between platforms because of the way they had to be written.
My point is that you need three things for merely minimal security (just by IP blocks):
Hardware: a router with enough CPU and enough RAM Expertise: engineers that know how to write ACLs for the IOS you're using Priority: your engineers have to have the time to actually sit down and get the ACLs updated on all the routers correctly
Unfortunately, I don't think there are many providers that have all of these.
I think this is just one step towards agents that help us deal with the enormous amount of information available at our jobs and on the internet.
I personally could use an agent that would keep an eye on all the websites I frequent and pre-download them and keep them in a queue for me to look at, with a "new items" counter in the system tray. Especially if it could retrieve items and grade them according to keywords for me.
The technology spoken of in this article is too far away and too imprecise. Human behavior (eye roving) is just too unpredictable. It's more a pie-in-the-sky kind of thing that sounds cool but will never go anywhere, until image recognition is much more improved and the CPU cycles to process the data are free.
Can we please not start another/. cult around an underage actress?
Saying a woman is attractive shouldn't be flame bait to be overcriticized by someone looking to get a couple karma points.
Anna Paquin (sp) was presented by the movie as an attractive, sexual being.
The first shot in the movie is of her in a very sheer skirt, and then she kisses some guy on her bed. Then she's romping around in a flimsy nightie. Then we see her at the end of the movie in long, black gloves and a black dress showing some decent cleavage.
Don't blame the dog if he licks his lips after you show him a steak; even if the steak is a little undercooked. With some nice sized potatoes and a little garnish, it can be an attractive meal.
Personally, I thought she was attractive. Part of that being the fact that she wasn't your typical bombshell. She had a girl-next-door plain-ness and freckly quality that appealed to me.
As several people have mentioned, I think that helping people without computer skills to develop some of those skills would be most beneficial.
Instead of saving a charity $50k a year in admin costs, you might show 10 people how to make a living with simple computer and UNIX admin or web administration skills. There are many intelligent people living in shelters or drifting between low paying jobs living in low-rent housing because they just don't have any marketable skills. Get those people out of the packed shelters and low-rent housing so you can get the street people into the shelters so they can get cleaned up and trained. (See, it's a process.)
Apart from that, contribue to open source projects that you find interesting, donate blood, and donate all your organs when you croak. It's not a matter of if, but when. So be prepared. Mark your license AND tell your family.
One solution for the record companies is to release low bitrate versions, or mono versions, or short versions, of the songs. If I heard a 32k or 64k version of a song, or one minute (as they do somewhat now) and I liked it, and a dialog box said "Do you want to buy the full version of this song at a much higher bitrate sampling for $1 and download it now?" I would be tempted. Of course, I would have to have an account at this website with a charge card to do this... Either pay first and get credit or be billed monthly.
If they're not happy with the security, they should develop their own audio format and their own player.
Offer specials for buying more than one track at a time from the same album, or more than one album at a time.
The really cool thing is, any band could be independent and sell their music online... or someone could start an 'online' label, and skip all this record industry bullshit about artists not getting their money.
The biggest problem is advertising and exposure for these bands. Well, if you want to sell something, you can't avoid that.
Launching payload from the surface of the Earth is one of the biggest problems in space travel, since it takes so much energy, which is compounded by the need for the larger engines and fuel storage. The other problem is time, since space is so gosh darn big.
What are the possible launch methods?
Traditionally; solid or liquid accelerant (rocket fuel.) Huge rocket boosters push against the ground in a massive show of force, wasting huge amounts of energy in lifting a heavy craft, which mostly consists of fuel and the machinery for using fuel.
Focused laser on the bottom of a craft can cause it to rise. I saw a special on TDC or TLC last year about someone using a laser burst to launch what looked like pie tins dozens of feet into the air. The problem was that because of air currents and eddies, the laser quickly lost focus and the pie tin went off track and lost its fuel, falling to the Earth again. In space, this wouldn't be such a big deal. Or maybe with a larger craft and larger laser, focusing would be easier.
Magnetic rings. I remember reading about this as a child. Some kind of magnetic ring accelerator... not sure how exactly this works. If someone with some brains could post on the practicality of this, I'd like to see some debunking (or even bunking).
I have an idea; instead of using all kinds of liquid fuel to lift (for example) the space shuttles, why not use some kind of mechanical launcher? Use whatever energy source to fuel a big device like a Ferris Wheel. Load your payload into a slot on it, get it up to speed, and then throw your craft up in the sky. What's wrong with that idea, besides the problems with accuracy in launching? It seems to me like it would be a bit more efficient than the current method, along with having other benefits; smaller craft since most of the launch power is coming externally, slower acceleration times to make it easier on astronauts, no tons of rocket fuel sitting around ready to explode, etc.
Bandwidth limits *are* a huge concern. As an ex-employee of a national service provider, I have firsthand experience that the need for bandwidth is giving providers hotflashes as they attempt to order and provision the "fat pipes" they need with enough lead-time to prevent saturating their network.
Not only are individual providers having problems meeting customers needs, but the peering points (NAPs, MAEs) are having trouble keeping data flowing between the disparate networks because their switches can't handle the amount of traffic. Do a search for "MAE" or "NAP" plus "outage" and see how many are switch-related.
Some of the larger networks have partnered with, or ARE, the actual wire providers (Qwest, etc) so they can actually provision the pipes fast enough to meet demand, but the companies that have to lease the OC3s and OC12s (and fatter) are running into provisioning delays. (There have been lawsuits due to 'conflict of interest' problems. WorldCom was really bad about that. They could provision a new line for their internet in days; for us they said it would take months.)
The bottom line is, internet traffic is increasing rapidly because: 1. More people are using it. More AOLers, more Earthlinkers, etc, plus everyone wants a dot.com to run their flower or plumbing business. 2. Some people are using it more. Cable modems, ADSL, and ISDN have become more affordable and more widely available. Think warez and mp3s. 3. Overhead. What most people don't realize is that a GOOD CHUNK of internet traffic at the level they can't see is overhead, retries, fragments, etc. The CEO of my nameless-ex-employer made a rough guess that up to 30-40% of internet traffic could be reduced by tidying up certain protocols, configuring equipment PROPERLY, eliminating MTU mismatches, cleaning up and trimming routing announcements, etc. Some of this is also a result of crowding at the NAPs/MAEs causing packet fragmenting, busy webservers causing endusers to retry, DOS attacks by petulant teens at other petulant teens, etc etc. (non-productive traffic.)
Wave division multiplexing and more and fatter pipes help. I think routing and addressing are a concern, but not right away. Private interconnects help with the NAPs/MAEs, although this tends to help the larger providers more than the smaller ones.
Personally, I think we don't have much to worry about. The problems we do have are being solved by very smart engineers who come up with outrageous new equipment that outperforms the old equipment, or they come up with ingenious workarounds to the problems.
Some of these ideas and thoughts are really great, but it's really quite simple how and why societies adopt methods of doing things.
The point was raised about telecommuting. Telecommuting is not extremely popular for several reasons. 1 - It's new. 2 - Companies can't keep an eye on their employees to make sure they're actually working 3 - Many niggling things crop up. Even as a network engineer and system administrator, doing my job would have been more difficult from home. Sometimes you have to be at a machine physically if there's a problem. Sometimes hard copies go around that you need to see - and who wants to scan or fax everything to you when they can just hand it to the rest of the employees? Plus there are the legal aspects -- can I claim my PC and 1/3rd of my home and bills as work expenses?
These things contribute to the fact that telecommuting is in most implementations, at the very least, a hassle. But what really counts is perception. If your Boss perceives that telecommuting is a viable solution, you will be able to telecommute. The more people perceive telecommuting as a viable solution, the more people actually implement it. Seeing other companies implement telecommuting is one way to spread the perception of its viability
Newspapers. There are many reasons people still read them.
1. It's old, it's been done, it works (contrary to New things; see above). People perceive it as a proven technology and as a proven business model. 2. Screens suck for comfortable reading. If you work at a computer all day, you probably get sore eyes. Even with my 21" monitor and the brains to put my monitor at the correct angle, right refresh, etc etc., my eyes still get fatigued by staring at a computer screen for extended lengths of time. Newspapers are easy on the eyes. 3. Portability. Can't beat a newspaper. 4. Cheap. Disposable. 1001 uses for a dead newspaper; lining the birdcage, wrapping stuff for shipping, art projects, etc etc. Newspapers are a part of most people's life because they grew up with them, and they're comfortable getting that newspaper. As more people 'defect' to online news sources, or to television, the perception of newspapers will change. As online news sources become more reliable and accurate, more visible, and perceived as 'trustworthy', a shift will occur. Newspapers may never die totally, but the cost of producing them as subscribers decline will severely hamper them. You maintain a complete staff to put out x pages of quality newsprint, regardless of how many copies you print.
The internet is still in its infancy. When 99% of the U.S. is broadband-connected and have a PC at home for every person, really radical changes will occur.
Until then, word of mouth and eyewitness testimony contribute mostly to what people 'perceive' as what they think is normal and comfortable. Why do most people in the States eat with silverware? Because they perceive it's correct and normal. Many things are deep-rooted in our social conscious, and we bank on precedent because it's comfortable.
Comfort -- with what we want and what we perceive as 'normal' based on what other people do. New things come about because some people are willing to go through the discomfort of being first adopters.
Everything we do is about and for people. Whether it's ourselves, our neighbors, or our descendants. Information without people is just a pattern without an observer. Whatever changes happen to our society because we digest, process, and produce information more quickly -- just because we use a different machine to do it -- will happen at its own pace and in its own way because of the early adopters who suffer and champion, and the secondary adopters who proselytize and spread the perception to others.
Excellent point. Fortunately, the adoption of individual input into the political process would be slow and deliberate, giving at least some opportunity to note the effects. As mentioned in the original post, this starts with grass-roots stuff; petitions. One step at a time. If it doesn't work, hopefully it won't get too far and smash in the skulls of too many oil drill guys.
Agreed; for the near term, direct constituent input would likely be used for local government input (city, state) more than a nationwide voting device to replace the Senate and House like I glibly stated in my original post.
I *do* think that overall, as long as the exploits can be avoided, this is a Good Thing.
Even though the vast majority of the public doesn't know what a digital signature is, or how encryption works, doesn't mean that they can't participate in the kind of political process described in this article. Many people have concerns about how secure this system will be, and I'm one of them. I think voting online is a dual-edged sword that will cause a lot of problems, but also has the potential to solve a lot of problems. If you trust our government to count our paper votes, you should trust them to count our digital ones as honestly, barring technological road hazards and 'hackers' (for this purpose read: someone abusing the technological loopholes that may exist to cause the results to be invalid). I see this as a tiny baby step towards a future with an actual democracy. Imagine 10-15 years down the road (when your TV and your computer are the same device) sitting on your couch, listening to some mp6's and channel surfing your 1,000,000 channels of iCable. Your TV/Computer pops a little running notice on the bottom of your screen that says "Don't forget to vote tonight on the welfare law." You say to yourself, "Oh yeah; I looked up some information on that and I am *way* against it." So you go to the "voting channel" and look through the list of pending bills/etc until you find the right one. You bring it up and click "I am against this law". It asks you to confirm or read more about the law, and then when you confirm, asks you to input your key, since you haven't "logged in" and identified yourself yet. It says "Thank you for voting; results will be available after 23:59 PST." and then exits to a screen saying: "Welfare Bill 23923A - Results not in yet." You click the bookmark button on your remote so that when the results change you'll be notified by a little scrolly bar on the bottom of your TV until you visit the site. Once the exploits and bugs have been worked out and broadband connectivity is in 99% of homes, I see this as a great way to speed up the democratic process. Who needs a House or Senate then?
Slashdot Mirror
There really are several issues involved here.
One is the poisoning of the environment. This means nuclear waste, chemical waste including commercial and manufacturing waste and by-products, and consumer trash. This includes the CFCs that give the Aussies those great tans by gaping open that hole in the ozone layer.
Another is the "poisoning" of the atmosphere by an increase in carbon dioxide and methane. Harmless by themselves, but which will eventually cause the "greenhouse effect" we hear so much about -- which some say has already started.
Another issue is alternate forms of energy, which someone above (sorry, I didn't reply directly) has stated are reasonably inadequate at the moment but which show promise. I firmly believe that Necessity is the mother of Invention and that as supplies of fossil fuels became more scarce, prices will go up and alternatives will become affordable and viable.
The atmosphere will eventually settle itself. Ecosystems may get trashed and species may extinguish left and right, but life will go on even if it is without Homo Stupiditus. We may not be able to adapt, but many other species will.
The worst part is the poisoning through nuclear, chemical, and other types of waste. This will cause the most problems, and will eventually lead to stricter and stricter guidelines on manufacturing and waste disposal. We eventually, even as consumers, will not be able to buy anything without the express understanding that 100% of it will be recycled, with stiff fines to enforce it. The process of recycling will need to be refined to the point that we can reuse just about everything. It will also behoove recycling firms to comb over dumps and recycle old trash as that will likely be profitable.
Basically, I think mother nature is very forgiving, and where she is not forgiving, we will pay... and if we pay the ultimate price, life will go on without us. The only way I can see total destruction of life on earth is through a nuclear war that poisons a significant portion of the atmosphere and freezes everything off.
However, I think sea life and plant life will eventually recover from even that...
Kendall, That reminds me of a game that I personally never played, but only knew of through stories from friends. The game was called Lethal Chess. It's a very old game, and was played on two different levels. You have two teams, each of which has a leader. Each leader makes moves on a 'game' level, moving pieces. The rest of the teams inhabited each square as if it was a mini-adventure game, complete with puzzles and combat.
I think this is a fantastic idea, although difficult to implement. I love it. From world builder to city builder to general to captain to Joe Schmoe. Heck, SimAnt could live at the bottom of that food chain.
I don't know *anything* about GPS's, but as a corrolary to what someone said about hooking a GPS up to a Palm Pilot.. is there some kind of 'data out' port on a GPS that you could hook up to some kind of computerized device?
Then a website could be created that stores data on all available Geocaches, and you could run a program that checks your GPS data against that data and says: Nearest Geocache: 30 miles away or whatever. That'd be cool.
But then again, you could also use it to register other stuff... like a Personals site that hooks up compatible people. There's a 75% match 25 miles away. There's a 99% match 100 miles away.
I don't think that's a new idea, though. But the point is, GPS+internet has a LOT of possibilities.
I don't know about you guys, but I had to change the "cut -b" to "cut -c". dig @138.195.138.195 goret.org. axfr | grep '^c..\..*A' | sort | cut -b5-36 | perl -e 'while(){print pack("H32",$_)}' | gzip -d Then it worked.
Well, at Ford Motor Company, out of about 200,000 desktops, the majority are either Windows 95 or 98. Windows NT is used for development, not for desktops that are mainly Word and Outlook terminals. However, the next major iteration of the "Global Client" (our term for the packaging of the OS and apps for the Ford end user) will be based on Windows 2000. We've already done beta field tests and will begin rolling it out production at the very beginning of next year.
I work at the shop that tests and packages all desktop software for Ford.
Your statement that "Most businesses haven't run Win 95/98 on the desktop in years," seems fallacious, although I only have my experience at Ford as evidence.
First off, the company could care less that someone is hacking their box. They make some money from the boxes and licensing, but the monthly fees are where it's at. ISPs, banks, computer manufacturers, etc. They all know that selling a product once isn't enough anymore to put the kids through college. Attention spans are too short and there are too many gadgets coming out to guarantee a repeat customer, so they have to keep people coming back, in the form of monthly service contracts. Commitments. Screw with the monthlies (ie, the program guides) and you'll have a ton of brick legal department to deal with.
Now, having said that, the TiVo people are very willing to either officially or unofficially condone hacking on their boxes. They can't necessarily support the hacks, but what they're really saying is "We know it's happening, and unlike Netpliance we are not going to start shipping TiVo boxes with gooed insides and other changes to try to prevent these hacks. However, we can't be spending the time to make sure our upcoming OS releases will allow your hacks to keep working, but we're not doing it on purpose." What isn't there to get? It's not rocket surgery.
As far as the potential for the TiVo; since it's running Linux, I'd love to see a way to transfer recorded shows to another box and store it on CD etc. I'd like to set up my PC to take those Simpsons and X-Files episodes and burn them to a VCD, or whatever. Television episodes are freely available online already (I missed the first season finale of Futurama, so I went on IRC and was able to download it and view it. Picture sucked, but I got the majority of the experience) and this will make it even easier.
I worked at a major internet provider for over 2 years, and when I left I was Senior Network Engineer, with only the head of the engineering department above me, and above him was the CTO. We had over a dozen POPs (Points of Presence), and OC3 lines strung from MAE East to MAE West and many points between, and OC12's being installed. So, let's assume I can speak slightly to this issue.
With a major provider, your hardware is going to be big enough (BFR, GRF, etc) to handle 60,000+ routes AND do adequate security filtering. Don't accept the RFC'd routes in, and don't propogate them. Period. Don't accept internal routes from external sources. These are simple rules any major provider *can* handle if they can handle a full routing table. We're talking edge routers.
Smaller providers who are multi-homed and that lease dialups wholesale are a problem, though. Their dialups have IPs that don't belong to them. They often don't have the expertise to configure their ACLs correctly, and leave gaping holes in their security. Sometimes we'd scan our customers' routers with SNMP probes and find a lot of default SNMP passwords for read *AND* write access to their router, and we'd let them know to button up their router. One of our routers would occasionally get flooded with extra routes from a customer (we had lousy filtering) and the resulting flood of traffic would kill the customer's router. The first sign of this would be the customer's line going down. We were understaffed and used several different kinds of routers, so ACL's varied slightly between platforms because of the way they had to be written.
My point is that you need three things for merely minimal security (just by IP blocks):
Hardware: a router with enough CPU and enough RAM
Expertise: engineers that know how to write ACLs for the IOS you're using
Priority: your engineers have to have the time to actually sit down and get the ACLs updated on all the routers correctly
Unfortunately, I don't think there are many providers that have all of these.
I think this is just one step towards agents that help us deal with the enormous amount of information available at our jobs and on the internet.
I personally could use an agent that would keep an eye on all the websites I frequent and pre-download them and keep them in a queue for me to look at, with a "new items" counter in the system tray. Especially if it could retrieve items and grade them according to keywords for me.
The technology spoken of in this article is too far away and too imprecise. Human behavior (eye roving) is just too unpredictable. It's more a pie-in-the-sky kind of thing that sounds cool but will never go anywhere, until image recognition is much more improved and the CPU cycles to process the data are free.
Can we please not start another /. cult around an underage actress?
Saying a woman is attractive shouldn't be flame bait to be overcriticized by someone looking to get a couple karma points.
Anna Paquin (sp) was presented by the movie as an attractive, sexual being.
The first shot in the movie is of her in a very sheer skirt, and then she kisses some guy on her bed.
Then she's romping around in a flimsy nightie.
Then we see her at the end of the movie in long, black gloves and a black dress showing some decent cleavage.
Don't blame the dog if he licks his lips after you show him a steak; even if the steak is a little undercooked. With some nice sized potatoes and a little garnish, it can be an attractive meal.
Personally, I thought she was attractive. Part of that being the fact that she wasn't your typical bombshell. She had a girl-next-door plain-ness and freckly quality that appealed to me.
As several people have mentioned, I think that helping people without computer skills to develop some of those skills would be most beneficial.
Instead of saving a charity $50k a year in admin costs, you might show 10 people how to make a living with simple computer and UNIX admin or web administration skills. There are many intelligent people living in shelters or drifting between low paying jobs living in low-rent housing because they just don't have any marketable skills. Get those people out of the packed shelters and low-rent housing so you can get the street people into the shelters so they can get cleaned up and trained. (See, it's a process.)
Apart from that, contribue to open source projects that you find interesting, donate blood, and donate all your organs when you croak. It's not a matter of if, but when. So be prepared. Mark your license AND tell your family.
One solution for the record companies is to release low bitrate versions, or mono versions, or short versions, of the songs. If I heard a 32k or 64k version of a song, or one minute (as they do somewhat now) and I liked it, and a dialog box said "Do you want to buy the full version of this song at a much higher bitrate sampling for $1 and download it now?" I would be tempted. Of course, I would have to have an account at this website with a charge card to do this... Either pay first and get credit or be billed monthly.
If they're not happy with the security, they should develop their own audio format and their own player.
Offer specials for buying more than one track at a time from the same album, or more than one album at a time.
The really cool thing is, any band could be independent and sell their music online... or someone could start an 'online' label, and skip all this record industry bullshit about artists not getting their money.
The biggest problem is advertising and exposure for these bands. Well, if you want to sell something, you can't avoid that.
Launching payload from the surface of the Earth is one of the biggest problems in space travel, since it takes so much energy, which is compounded by the need for the larger engines and fuel storage. The other problem is time, since space is so gosh darn big.
What are the possible launch methods?
Traditionally; solid or liquid accelerant (rocket fuel.) Huge rocket boosters push against the ground in a massive show of force, wasting huge amounts of energy in lifting a heavy craft, which mostly consists of fuel and the machinery for using fuel.
Focused laser on the bottom of a craft can cause it to rise. I saw a special on TDC or TLC last year about someone using a laser burst to launch what looked like pie tins dozens of feet into the air. The problem was that because of air currents and eddies, the laser quickly lost focus and the pie tin went off track and lost its fuel, falling to the Earth again. In space, this wouldn't be such a big deal. Or maybe with a larger craft and larger laser, focusing would be easier.
Magnetic rings. I remember reading about this as a child. Some kind of magnetic ring accelerator... not sure how exactly this works. If someone with some brains could post on the practicality of this, I'd like to see some debunking (or even bunking).
I have an idea; instead of using all kinds of liquid fuel to lift (for example) the space shuttles, why not use some kind of mechanical launcher? Use whatever energy source to fuel a big device like a Ferris Wheel. Load your payload into a slot on it, get it up to speed, and then throw your craft up in the sky. What's wrong with that idea, besides the problems with accuracy in launching? It seems to me like it would be a bit more efficient than the current method, along with having other benefits; smaller craft since most of the launch power is coming externally, slower acceleration times to make it easier on astronauts, no tons of rocket fuel sitting around ready to explode, etc.
No 575?
He must be out fly-fishing;
I'll fill in today
Most say "hack," some crack.
People argue semantics;
Does anyone care?
Astronauts go up
Cracker breaks in for a thrill
News at eleven
NASA desk jockey
Surfs the net to pass the day
Brave men die for porn
Bandwidth limits *are* a huge concern. As an ex-employee of a national service provider, I have firsthand experience that the need for bandwidth is giving providers hotflashes as they attempt to order and provision the "fat pipes" they need with enough lead-time to prevent saturating their network.
Not only are individual providers having problems meeting customers needs, but the peering points (NAPs, MAEs) are having trouble keeping data flowing between the disparate networks because their switches can't handle the amount of traffic. Do a search for "MAE" or "NAP" plus "outage" and see how many are switch-related.
Some of the larger networks have partnered with, or ARE, the actual wire providers (Qwest, etc) so they can actually provision the pipes fast enough to meet demand, but the companies that have to lease the OC3s and OC12s (and fatter) are running into provisioning delays. (There have been lawsuits due to 'conflict of interest' problems. WorldCom was really bad about that. They could provision a new line for their internet in days; for us they said it would take months.)
The bottom line is, internet traffic is increasing rapidly because:
1. More people are using it. More AOLers, more Earthlinkers, etc, plus everyone wants a dot.com to run their flower or plumbing business.
2. Some people are using it more. Cable modems, ADSL, and ISDN have become more affordable and more widely available. Think warez and mp3s.
3. Overhead. What most people don't realize is that a GOOD CHUNK of internet traffic at the level they can't see is overhead, retries, fragments, etc. The CEO of my nameless-ex-employer made a rough guess that up to 30-40% of internet traffic could be reduced by tidying up certain protocols, configuring equipment PROPERLY, eliminating MTU mismatches, cleaning up and trimming routing announcements, etc. Some of this is also a result of crowding at the NAPs/MAEs causing packet fragmenting, busy webservers causing endusers to retry, DOS attacks by petulant teens at other petulant teens, etc etc. (non-productive traffic.)
Wave division multiplexing and more and fatter pipes help. I think routing and addressing are a concern, but not right away. Private interconnects help with the NAPs/MAEs, although this tends to help the larger providers more than the smaller ones.
Personally, I think we don't have much to worry about. The problems we do have are being solved by very smart engineers who come up with outrageous new equipment that outperforms the old equipment, or they come up with ingenious workarounds to the problems.
Some of these ideas and thoughts are really great, but it's really quite simple how and why societies adopt methods of doing things.
The point was raised about telecommuting. Telecommuting is not extremely popular for several reasons.
1 - It's new.
2 - Companies can't keep an eye on their employees to make sure they're actually working
3 - Many niggling things crop up. Even as a network engineer and system administrator, doing my job would have been more difficult from home. Sometimes you have to be at a machine physically if there's a problem. Sometimes hard copies go around that you need to see - and who wants to scan or fax everything to you when they can just hand it to the rest of the employees? Plus there are the legal aspects -- can I claim my PC and 1/3rd of my home and bills as work expenses?
These things contribute to the fact that telecommuting is in most implementations, at the very least, a hassle. But what really counts is perception. If your Boss perceives that telecommuting is a viable solution, you will be able to telecommute. The more people perceive telecommuting as a viable solution, the more people actually implement it. Seeing other companies implement telecommuting is one way to spread the perception of its viability
Newspapers. There are many reasons people still read them.
1. It's old, it's been done, it works (contrary to New things; see above). People perceive it as a proven technology and as a proven business model.
2. Screens suck for comfortable reading. If you work at a computer all day, you probably get sore eyes. Even with my 21" monitor and the brains to put my monitor at the correct angle, right refresh, etc etc., my eyes still get fatigued by staring at a computer screen for extended lengths of time. Newspapers are easy on the eyes.
3. Portability. Can't beat a newspaper.
4. Cheap. Disposable. 1001 uses for a dead newspaper; lining the birdcage, wrapping stuff for shipping, art projects, etc etc.
Newspapers are a part of most people's life because they grew up with them, and they're comfortable getting that newspaper.
As more people 'defect' to online news sources, or to television, the perception of newspapers will change. As online news sources become more reliable and accurate, more visible, and perceived as 'trustworthy', a shift will occur. Newspapers may never die totally, but the cost of producing them as subscribers decline will severely hamper them. You maintain a complete staff to put out x pages of quality newsprint, regardless of how many copies you print.
The internet is still in its infancy. When 99% of the U.S. is broadband-connected and have a PC at home for every person, really radical changes will occur.
Until then, word of mouth and eyewitness testimony contribute mostly to what people 'perceive' as what they think is normal and comfortable. Why do most people in the States eat with silverware? Because they perceive it's correct and normal. Many things are deep-rooted in our social conscious, and we bank on precedent because it's comfortable.
Comfort -- with what we want and what we perceive as 'normal' based on what other people do. New things come about because some people are willing to go through the discomfort of being first adopters.
Everything we do is about and for people. Whether it's ourselves, our neighbors, or our descendants. Information without people is just a pattern without an observer. Whatever changes happen to our society because we digest, process, and produce information more quickly -- just because we use a different machine to do it -- will happen at its own pace and in its own way because of the early adopters who suffer and champion, and the secondary adopters who proselytize and spread the perception to others.
Excellent point. Fortunately, the adoption of individual input into the political process would be slow and deliberate, giving at least some opportunity to note the effects. As mentioned in the original post, this starts with grass-roots stuff; petitions. One step at a time. If it doesn't work, hopefully it won't get too far and smash in the skulls of too many oil drill guys.
Agreed; for the near term, direct constituent input would likely be used for local government input (city, state) more than a nationwide voting device to replace the Senate and House like I glibly stated in my original post.
I *do* think that overall, as long as the exploits can be avoided, this is a Good Thing.
Even though the vast majority of the public doesn't know what a digital signature is, or how encryption works, doesn't mean that they can't participate in the kind of political process described in this article. Many people have concerns about how secure this system will be, and I'm one of them. I think voting online is a dual-edged sword that will cause a lot of problems, but also has the potential to solve a lot of problems. If you trust our government to count our paper votes, you should trust them to count our digital ones as honestly, barring technological road hazards and 'hackers' (for this purpose read: someone abusing the technological loopholes that may exist to cause the results to be invalid). I see this as a tiny baby step towards a future with an actual democracy. Imagine 10-15 years down the road (when your TV and your computer are the same device) sitting on your couch, listening to some mp6's and channel surfing your 1,000,000 channels of iCable. Your TV/Computer pops a little running notice on the bottom of your screen that says "Don't forget to vote tonight on the welfare law." You say to yourself, "Oh yeah; I looked up some information on that and I am *way* against it." So you go to the "voting channel" and look through the list of pending bills/etc until you find the right one. You bring it up and click "I am against this law". It asks you to confirm or read more about the law, and then when you confirm, asks you to input your key, since you haven't "logged in" and identified yourself yet. It says "Thank you for voting; results will be available after 23:59 PST." and then exits to a screen saying: "Welfare Bill 23923A - Results not in yet." You click the bookmark button on your remote so that when the results change you'll be notified by a little scrolly bar on the bottom of your TV until you visit the site. Once the exploits and bugs have been worked out and broadband connectivity is in 99% of homes, I see this as a great way to speed up the democratic process. Who needs a House or Senate then?
Yeah, down to the rhyme of "bomb" with "mom".