Hmm... I think everything is energy. The difference between energy & matter is just perception on our part.
Matter is just a very tight bundle of energy.
Matter is also just the property of having momentum and being subject to gravity. It's just a 'mode' of being...
Hmm... personally, I think it is really interesting to consider how our modes of observation effect our possible theories. What if we were being that 'saw' in terms of microwaves? How would our theories be different? I suppose it would all ultimately lead to the same place.
Actually, String theory has moved to M-theory, and involves "super strings" and membranes. I've read many books on the subject... most of them have taken a long time to read, i.e. read a few pages, think about it for a few days, go back...
My take is that, as has been said before, the world consists of 11 dimensions. There are actually many super-string/m-theories, but they are not contradictory, kinda like different views of the same thing.
A main problem with these theories is that there are many (infinite?) solutions the math sets that descibe them.
A 'string' in the theory is like a circular guitar string that is taunt... it has certain modes of vibration, each mode representing a certain type of particle.
Also, there are different types of strings... strings that are self connecting, open string, string that loop around more than once...
I had mod-points on this thread, but I feel compelled to responed:
I think what people what (in both music and video/audio) is to be able to play, on demand, any movie or audio.
I know I would happily pay for that, esp. since within a SHORT time someone would figure out how to hack the stream and record it for later replay.
Once something is released into the wild, it's gone, be it DeCSS, MP3 or any other codec/hack you can think of.
Let the MPAA/RIAA go wild with a subscription service.
We'll figure it out.
Not so terribly uninsightful
on
Gadgets of 2002
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· Score: 2
I wouldn't say the article is empty, here's what I got out of it...
Consumers want simplisity, something that the 'do-it-all' (i.e., pda-mp3-cellphone and home-media-storage centers) failed to deliver.
Consumers want to be entertained.
Consumers want utility, they need a product that actually fills a need (like the guy who still likes his bag cell phone).
I'd say we're in discovery mode... all sorts of things are possible, technically, and companies are just trying to hit upon the right combinations and forms that will fit the utlity or entertainment needs of consumer close enough that they will buy it.
I'm still baffled that we don't have a simple device with a LCD that can be hooked to broadband and (with a subscription service) play every song ever recorded. I would pay money for that. The RIAA really has dropped the ball.
I know... how about a mouse... with out the mouse? Just use a web cam (or two) mounted to look down at a 'mouse pad' (some color that contrasts with the color of you hands), and then have it track the motion of your hands.
What about mouse clicks???
Tap of the finger?
Hmm, interesting concept anyway.
I'd like to use this to analyze pictures taken from a model airplane to create 3d plots of the ground contour!
By the way, the jesus.sig is awesome. I'm going to try and use it in context this week. Should up my geek level a step or two, not to mention piss off all the conservatives I work with here in the midwest.
EA Games to release a one level internet multiplayer demo this Friday!
The demo will contain one of the eleven huge maps that will ship with the full retail version on January 22, 2002. You can choose the type of model that you want to be in the game, including Axis military models, and select from 14 different weapons including the Browning Automatic Riffle, Bazookas and the Colt.45.
Woah, settle down, this is test to see who actaully read the links and who didn't... what date was this written on their site? Does it work? Is it fun?
For screenshots and more information on multiplayer modes for the retail version, please click here.
Re:Another game I suggest
on
Uplink
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Ack!
Ok, we have people talking on the internet in a chat room about a game this simulates using the internet to hack places where people are talking like the current internet is like a simlulation game!
(poof)Ack! My head's on fire!
House on fire! House on fire! PUt it out, put it out... no, not anti-freeze! Noooo, my crack pipe! Bastards! Make the noise sto [life32.dll generated an invalid page fault in brain16.dll. Please swipe your credit card and bend over to restart].
I worked for a Arch. firm for 2 years... the first time I priced AutoCAD 2000 (for 20 licenses) and I saw the cost, I thought the founders would flip.
They didn't even bat an eyelid at the cost.
The thing with AutoCAD is it is GOOD software... not perfect, but my roommate, a drafter at the time, could do thousands of dollars of work a day with autocad. Take that times 10 (not every one who used it was a straight up drafter) and the AutoCAD licenses paid for themselves weekly. And the versions (i.e. R14 to 2000) had changes that made it worth while.
AutoCAD is worth it becuase it works, and the founders knew it.
There's actually two seperate issues, that being the state of my knowledge and the state of my beliefs. From what that link says, you can claim to be agnostic in knowledge, but not agnostic in faith, i.e.
The issue I have with that is that they REQUIRE a belief in something. They require either a belief that god exists or he doesn't not (theiest or athiest)...
I don't believe EITHER of those. I believe that I don't know, and thus I have suspended judgement, holding off my state of belief.
I quote:
"Getting an answer to the question is not so easy, because in order to do so, you must confront the declared Agnostic with the idea that they have not, as they previously assumed, deferred the question of theism or atheism indefinitely. Shortly, you will either have a theist, an atheist, or an abruptly terminated conversation and a very upset person. Think before you ask!"
And why can't I defer? It's all about symantics, and they are playing it hard core.
And what exactly qualifies as a god? The perfect chaos of quantum interactions that possibly drive our existence or an actual 'person-god' who actually intervenes in out lives? Are they both 'gods'?
You could play this semantics game into spirial of no escape.
I believe there may or may not be a god. I don't know if there is a god. I live my life the best I can. I am moral. I give more than I take. I do my best in every way to make the life of every person I interact with better. But I don't do it because of a god, i.e. my behaviour is not reward and punishment driven. But if I were ever to come before a god, I would face him(her/it) with confidence. Personally, I view death as the ulitmate answer... I hope at that moment I will know the truth.
I don't think the problem is lack of people willing to generate content, it's the fact that putting that content on the 'net requires bandwith, which, as has been pointed out, requires money. Bandwith has the further problem of not getting any cheaper.
Take spinsanity.org... great site, great weekly e-mail and for a long time, fairly small time. Now they are getting popular and getting press time, and now they are getting strapped for cash. They had to open up the path ways for people to make donations to pay for bandwith. They were perfectly happy to make the content for free... it's providing the content that is getting to them.
As an agnostic, isn't that the point? Professing that you're ignorant to the existence of god, i.e., don't have enough data to know?
I personally confess ignorance all the time. It makes things easier, i.e. : I am ignorant about the details of this system, but I know you are knowledgable and I want to learn from you. Letting people know that you don't know isn't a bad thing. I find it clears the air and makes way for them to teach me.
Anyway, I am agnostic. I do not know if god exists, but I've never seen proof either way, thus, I am agnostic when it comes to god.
Actually, the more I thought about it, the more I agree with you.
I use the internet as a tool to find info because I want to... the internet didn't create my thirst for knowledge, it just happens to be a tool that allows me to find more info.
I think the internet could help or speed a change in a person, but they'd probably have to be prepped for that change by forces not necessarily originating from the internet.
So I agree with you =) How often does that happen on/.?
Ok, I have some issues with the claim to MS Office suite ease of use.
I work at a university in the Midwest. I support 40 people directly, among other things (support takes about 35% of my time).
My users are decent. They are good enough that they require very little support. Once a month I lead a training sessions or two (each three hours long) and I teach them new things. They catch on quickly. There comes a point where the problem isn't the intelligence level of the user, it's the software.
I've developed an opinion about MS. I've programmed in VC++, VB, used MFC and ATL. I've done extraordinary things with ADO, and made large systems that use COM. I've used MS-SQL, and I know Win95, Win98, WinNT, and Win2000 like the back of my hand (WinME? Not much experience yet, but good luck on getting WinME personal to log onto a domain). I'm also well versed in Office95 to Office 2000.
In other words, I've used MS products to solve real world problems. I've supported MS users. I've also admined novell and MS servers, and more recently, I've been getting deep in Unix based systems (although, in the case of Unix, my average users don't use it, I use it to get info for them (think Informix and card access systems for security and POS systems)).
In my experience, I've noticed one thing about MS. There are two layers to MS software (and development environments)- the tasks that the software (or SDK) was very specifically designed to do and every thing else...
Think Visual Basic. VB gives you access to many events. Open form, load form, preview key... but try to go the next step... try to capture an event that isn't in the VB set, and welcome to the world of Win32 events. Don't get me wrong, you can do it. I've done it. Window moves and resizes (think popup text-tips. I wrote a COM control that popped up text-tips right under a custom active-x control that allowed entry of metric values with a specific range, significant digits, and resolution. The popup gave feedback to the entered value.) I don't know how many times I crashed VB debugging this solution, but I got it, and it shipped.
Another point... using COM, ATL, MFC... f-ing A, I worked my ass off to get that stuff to work right. Specifically loading dynamic ActiveX controls that each controlled a specific type of hardware. The COM spec., the ActiveX spec., Trying to find some damn good info about any MS tech and using beyond the simple stuff. It is a challenge.
Don't get me started on Access. Powerful to a point, and cripple for anything beyond the basics.
Some my users are good. And MS is good for somethings. But I call bullshit on ease of use outside a very narrow range of uses. Mail merge? Use of an ODBC data source? An Access DB that does something with more than 3 tables? Is multi user? Web access? Security?
MS usability is a layer of façade over a layer of crap.
I have yet to see something moderately complicated EASY on a MS product.
I have strong faith that SOMEONE will make it easy, and I doubt it will be MS. They will still be concerned with marketing and profits while someone else will make it easy. Use Napster as a lesson. A thousand people have thought of it, but it only take one to write it.
On the other hand, MS gets much better with each iteration. The next OS will be killer. It will be full of fluff. It will offer no choices, because everything will be preloaded, but it WILL WORK. And users will user that which is loaded.
There is hope in there, but I leave it as an exercise to the student to find it.
Mean while, Monday, I will go back to work, do some work on MS, Oracle, ColdFusion, Unix, Perl, etc... but my life will be dominated by those users using MS.
I know the net has changed me... I often tell people that EVERYTHING is on the 'net, some where, it's finding it that takes real effort. That being said, everyday I learn something new off the net.
Example: hydroponics. Where I live, the closest hydro shop is 6 hours away. Sure, I could have done mail-order, but I would have had to find a catalog. Now, a search on google and I have 50 different places I can buy hydro supplies and another 500 pages with FAQs, how-to, etc. In a half an hour, I have a very decent understanding of why hydro involves, techniques, costs, etc...
Slashdot is a good example, too... like with the new WORM_GONE virus. Slashdot ran a story, and in that story I found 10+ links about the virus and other interesting things about Outlook, like obscure information about how to set up it's handling of attachments. In 20 minutes of reading, I found more info than I would have with hours of digging (ever try to find good on info in the MS knowledge base? Drives me insane sometimes).
I once read a that the really interesting things happen at boundary areas, i.e. earth is in boundary between a sun and the coldness of deep space. The same can be said about information... when two areas of knowledge run against each other, that's where the interesting things are. The net is this very thing... an nearly infinite set of info and ideas rubbing up against another. Granted, the noise level is high, and it takes work to do put it all together, but I feel that if a person is open to ideas and can filter out bulls**t, there is a lot to be had from the chaos of the net.
Has it empowered me? Yes, in some ways. Do I feel I can make a major difference because of the net? Nope, not yet anyway.
Ok, I want to point something out to all those who don't get this:
Using something like this requires a temperature GRADIANT... i.e., you could be in a desert that is 5000 degrees, and could NOT use that temperature (i.e. ambient air energy) to generate energy with a junction like this without some form of lower temperature location.
You must have two areas with a temp. gradiate difference bewtween the two that you can place this device across... in this case, the gradient can be lower (250 degrees) and is more efficient. This gradient comes from the difference in termperature between the exhaust and the surronding air.
It's all based upon the tech of peltier junctions.
northern (and southern) lights do this too...
on
Listening to Leonids
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· Score: 3, Flamebait
I remember reading about the same type of thing occuring during very intense northern lights. Same sort of thing, where the event and sound occured at the same time, and there couldn't possibly be time for the sound to travel the distance.
IRC, it was the same sort of thing, an ELF interaction directly in the brain.
So my thought is, could we use this for actual communication? Cause voices in someones head?
I never got my hands on the memory upgrade for my CoCo...
I remember the limits on the number & types of 'screens/windows' you could have because of the memeory limit.
Wasn't there some sort of rudimentry editor & spreadsheet?
Damn, I feel dated now.
I learn to program on my Coco... got my first coco2 when I was 10 or so... I didn't get any games, so I had to type in those long-ass programs they had in the book... and I learned from that.
It took me forever to figure out the '^' in the program listings stood for the up arrow on the keyboard.
Further down the line, I figured out a way to poll the keyboard by 'peek'ing at memory locations.
I also remember using pmode to get the false color red/blue/black/white false color mode.
And using draw to make animations and using flipping between screens (buffers).
Security is a myth... anyone who understand security understands it's a sliding scale with decreasing means of return.
I've always viewed security vesus effort as the comparision between a bell-curve and a expotential curve. The amount of effort you expend with increasing security increases expotnentialy. The amount of increased security you get is like a bell curve... at some point you are getting the maximum amount of security per effort... as you move beyond that point, the amount of extra security you can get starts to drop off, while effort goes way up. The last 1% of security takes a nearly infinite amount of effot.
Effort = laws... or whatever means you have.
The point I'm trying to make is you can only be so safe. The Bill of Rights means you are free, but you accept some things with those freedoms, like everyone else is free too. And at any moment someone may lose it and start shooting... but you accept that... the problem is, most people don't get it.
I want my freedom. I am a midwestern. I was raised with guns. I'm a hell of a shot. I was raised with cows & corn. I damn well know food doesn't come from the grocery store, but I've met people that didn't beef comes from cows.
I know that if the shit hits the fan, I can defend myself. I can get milk, eggs, butter, corn, turkey, deer... and I know friends with siterns and windmill pumped wells that still work. The have pot bellies stoves that work with wood so you can cook a meal.
Point blank: if the it all went to hell tomorrow, I could be free AND alive. And I want to be free.
I think that the current state of being has made people week and afraid of freedoms.
I am not afraid. I want to be free.
I think most people are afraid... and they don't know how to survive.
I think survively and freedom (or wanting to free) go hand in hand.
I've thought about it a lot. I want a certain level of protection from the govt... that's the very premise of govt. But there is a line. And people don't get it. People don't see the line.
I believe I used this on a Tandy Color Computer 3... I was, um, 14?
It was a good learning experience.
I only had one floppy drive, though, and I remember I had to swap floppies A LOT... and I never did do anything productive... but it was my first enviorment outside of basic.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... I think everything is energy. The difference between energy & matter is just perception on our part.
Matter is just a very tight bundle of energy.
Matter is also just the property of having momentum and being subject to gravity. It's just a 'mode' of being...
Hmm... personally, I think it is really interesting to consider how our modes of observation effect our possible theories. What if we were being that 'saw' in terms of microwaves? How would our theories be different? I suppose it would all ultimately lead to the same place.
Actually, String theory has moved to M-theory, and involves "super strings" and membranes. I've read many books on the subject... most of them have taken a long time to read, i.e. read a few pages, think about it for a few days, go back...
Anyhow, some links:
My take is that, as has been said before, the world consists of 11 dimensions. There are actually many super-string/m-theories, but they are not contradictory, kinda like different views of the same thing.
A main problem with these theories is that there are many (infinite?) solutions the math sets that descibe them.
A 'string' in the theory is like a circular guitar string that is taunt... it has certain modes of vibration, each mode representing a certain type of particle.
Also, there are different types of strings... strings that are self connecting, open string, string that loop around more than once...
Ok, that probably didn't clear anything up...
Slightly OT, but a question: why does precedence have so much power? Consistency? Other wise?
Just curious.
I had mod-points on this thread, but I feel compelled to responed:
I think what people what (in both music and video/audio) is to be able to play, on demand, any movie or audio.
I know I would happily pay for that, esp. since within a SHORT time someone would figure out how to hack the stream and record it for later replay.
Once something is released into the wild, it's gone, be it DeCSS, MP3 or any other codec/hack you can think of.
Let the MPAA/RIAA go wild with a subscription service.
We'll figure it out.
I wouldn't say the article is empty, here's what I got out of it...
I'd say we're in discovery mode... all sorts of things are possible, technically, and companies are just trying to hit upon the right combinations and forms that will fit the utlity or entertainment needs of consumer close enough that they will buy it.
I'm still baffled that we don't have a simple device with a LCD that can be hooked to broadband and (with a subscription service) play every song ever recorded. I would pay money for that. The RIAA really has dropped the ball.
I like critical update (I maintain 24 machines at a university, very good users). I have my users trained to properly to use windows update.
It's not always enough.
But what kills me is when I do a virign Win98se install.
You'd think one critical update would be enough, but at my last count there are critical updates for the critical update 4 layers deep.
So if a person reinstalls windows, does a critical update, and then thinks they are safe, they are wrong.
They need to go back a few more times.
True, I'm not sure why that would piss any one off, now that you put it in that context.
I checked out your site... did you know it gives a directory listing?
Neat pictures though.
Interesting... not quite what I had in mind, but thanks for the link.
I know... how about a mouse... with out the mouse? Just use a web cam (or two) mounted to look down at a 'mouse pad' (some color that contrasts with the color of you hands), and then have it track the motion of your hands.
What about mouse clicks???
Tap of the finger?
Hmm, interesting concept anyway.
I'd like to use this to analyze pictures taken from a model airplane to create 3d plots of the ground contour!
By the way, the jesus .sig is awesome. I'm going to try and use it in context this week. Should up my geek level a step or two, not to mention piss off all the conservatives I work with here in the midwest.
My GF thought it was f-ing hilarious, 2.
Thank you , thank you, I'm here all night.
Yeah, I was going for funny. I posted about 4 hours ago and had two replies, so it was not all for naught.
Thanks for the reply!
EA Games to release a one level internet multiplayer demo this Friday!
The demo will contain one of the eleven huge maps that will ship with the full retail version on January 22, 2002. You can choose the type of model that you want to be in the game, including Axis military models, and select from 14 different weapons including the Browning Automatic Riffle, Bazookas and the Colt .45.
Woah, settle down, this is test to see who actaully read the links and who didn't... what date was this written on their site? Does it work? Is it fun?
For screenshots and more information on multiplayer modes for the retail version, please click here.Ack!
Ok, we have people talking on the internet in a chat room about a game this simulates using the internet to hack places where people are talking like the current internet is like a simlulation game!
(poof)Ack! My head's on fire!
House on fire! House on fire! PUt it out, put it out... no, not anti-freeze! Noooo, my crack pipe! Bastards! Make the noise sto [life32.dll generated an invalid page fault in brain16.dll. Please swipe your credit card and bend over to restart].
I worked for a Arch. firm for 2 years... the first time I priced AutoCAD 2000 (for 20 licenses) and I saw the cost, I thought the founders would flip.
They didn't even bat an eyelid at the cost.
The thing with AutoCAD is it is GOOD software... not perfect, but my roommate, a drafter at the time, could do thousands of dollars of work a day with autocad. Take that times 10 (not every one who used it was a straight up drafter) and the AutoCAD licenses paid for themselves weekly. And the versions (i.e. R14 to 2000) had changes that made it worth while.
AutoCAD is worth it becuase it works, and the founders knew it.
Hmm, so here's what you trying to say:
There's actually two seperate issues, that being the state of my knowledge and the state of my beliefs. From what that link says, you can claim to be agnostic in knowledge, but not agnostic in faith, i.e.
The issue I have with that is that they REQUIRE a belief in something. They require either a belief that god exists or he doesn't not (theiest or athiest)...
I don't believe EITHER of those. I believe that I don't know, and thus I have suspended judgement, holding off my state of belief.
I quote:
"Getting an answer to the question is not so easy, because in order to do so, you must confront the declared Agnostic with the idea that they have not, as they previously assumed, deferred the question of theism or atheism indefinitely. Shortly, you will either have a theist, an atheist, or an abruptly terminated conversation and a very upset person. Think before you ask!"
And why can't I defer? It's all about symantics, and they are playing it hard core.
And what exactly qualifies as a god? The perfect chaos of quantum interactions that possibly drive our existence or an actual 'person-god' who actually intervenes in out lives? Are they both 'gods'?
You could play this semantics game into spirial of no escape.
I believe there may or may not be a god. I don't know if there is a god. I live my life the best I can. I am moral. I give more than I take. I do my best in every way to make the life of every person I interact with better. But I don't do it because of a god, i.e. my behaviour is not reward and punishment driven. But if I were ever to come before a god, I would face him(her/it) with confidence. Personally, I view death as the ulitmate answer... I hope at that moment I will know the truth.
I don't think the problem is lack of people willing to generate content, it's the fact that putting that content on the 'net requires bandwith, which, as has been pointed out, requires money. Bandwith has the further problem of not getting any cheaper.
Take spinsanity.org... great site, great weekly e-mail and for a long time, fairly small time. Now they are getting popular and getting press time, and now they are getting strapped for cash. They had to open up the path ways for people to make donations to pay for bandwith. They were perfectly happy to make the content for free... it's providing the content that is getting to them.
As an agnostic, isn't that the point? Professing that you're ignorant to the existence of god, i.e., don't have enough data to know?
I personally confess ignorance all the time. It makes things easier, i.e. : I am ignorant about the details of this system, but I know you are knowledgable and I want to learn from you. Letting people know that you don't know isn't a bad thing. I find it clears the air and makes way for them to teach me.
Anyway, I am agnostic. I do not know if god exists, but I've never seen proof either way, thus, I am agnostic when it comes to god.
So be it.
Actually, the more I thought about it, the more I agree with you.
/.?
I use the internet as a tool to find info because I want to... the internet didn't create my thirst for knowledge, it just happens to be a tool that allows me to find more info.
I think the internet could help or speed a change in a person, but they'd probably have to be prepped for that change by forces not necessarily originating from the internet.
So I agree with you =) How often does that happen on
Office, and its claim of 'ease of use'...
Ok, I have some issues with the claim to MS Office suite ease of use.
I work at a university in the Midwest. I support 40 people directly, among other things (support takes about 35% of my time).
My users are decent. They are good enough that they require very little support. Once a month I lead a training sessions or two (each three hours long) and I teach them new things. They catch on quickly. There comes a point where the problem isn't the intelligence level of the user, it's the software.
I've developed an opinion about MS. I've programmed in VC++, VB, used MFC and ATL. I've done extraordinary things with ADO, and made large systems that use COM. I've used MS-SQL, and I know Win95, Win98, WinNT, and Win2000 like the back of my hand (WinME? Not much experience yet, but good luck on getting WinME personal to log onto a domain). I'm also well versed in Office95 to Office 2000.
In other words, I've used MS products to solve real world problems. I've supported MS users. I've also admined novell and MS servers, and more recently, I've been getting deep in Unix based systems (although, in the case of Unix, my average users don't use it, I use it to get info for them (think Informix and card access systems for security and POS systems)).
In my experience, I've noticed one thing about MS. There are two layers to MS software (and development environments)- the tasks that the software (or SDK) was very specifically designed to do and every thing else...
Think Visual Basic. VB gives you access to many events. Open form, load form, preview key... but try to go the next step... try to capture an event that isn't in the VB set, and welcome to the world of Win32 events. Don't get me wrong, you can do it. I've done it. Window moves and resizes (think popup text-tips. I wrote a COM control that popped up text-tips right under a custom active-x control that allowed entry of metric values with a specific range, significant digits, and resolution. The popup gave feedback to the entered value.) I don't know how many times I crashed VB debugging this solution, but I got it, and it shipped.
Another point... using COM, ATL, MFC... f-ing A, I worked my ass off to get that stuff to work right. Specifically loading dynamic ActiveX controls that each controlled a specific type of hardware. The COM spec., the ActiveX spec., Trying to find some damn good info about any MS tech and using beyond the simple stuff. It is a challenge.
Don't get me started on Access. Powerful to a point, and cripple for anything beyond the basics.
Some my users are good. And MS is good for somethings. But I call bullshit on ease of use outside a very narrow range of uses. Mail merge? Use of an ODBC data source? An Access DB that does something with more than 3 tables? Is multi user? Web access? Security?
MS usability is a layer of façade over a layer of crap.
I have yet to see something moderately complicated EASY on a MS product.
I have strong faith that SOMEONE will make it easy, and I doubt it will be MS. They will still be concerned with marketing and profits while someone else will make it easy. Use Napster as a lesson. A thousand people have thought of it, but it only take one to write it.
On the other hand, MS gets much better with each iteration. The next OS will be killer. It will be full of fluff. It will offer no choices, because everything will be preloaded, but it WILL WORK. And users will user that which is loaded.
There is hope in there, but I leave it as an exercise to the student to find it.
Mean while, Monday, I will go back to work, do some work on MS, Oracle, ColdFusion, Unix, Perl, etc... but my life will be dominated by those users using MS.
I'm not sure I agree.
I know the net has changed me... I often tell people that EVERYTHING is on the 'net, some where, it's finding it that takes real effort. That being said, everyday I learn something new off the net.
Example: hydroponics. Where I live, the closest hydro shop is 6 hours away. Sure, I could have done mail-order, but I would have had to find a catalog. Now, a search on google and I have 50 different places I can buy hydro supplies and another 500 pages with FAQs, how-to, etc. In a half an hour, I have a very decent understanding of why hydro involves, techniques, costs, etc...
Slashdot is a good example, too... like with the new WORM_GONE virus. Slashdot ran a story, and in that story I found 10+ links about the virus and other interesting things about Outlook, like obscure information about how to set up it's handling of attachments. In 20 minutes of reading, I found more info than I would have with hours of digging (ever try to find good on info in the MS knowledge base? Drives me insane sometimes).
I once read a that the really interesting things happen at boundary areas, i.e. earth is in boundary between a sun and the coldness of deep space. The same can be said about information... when two areas of knowledge run against each other, that's where the interesting things are. The net is this very thing... an nearly infinite set of info and ideas rubbing up against another. Granted, the noise level is high, and it takes work to do put it all together, but I feel that if a person is open to ideas and can filter out bulls**t, there is a lot to be had from the chaos of the net.
Has it empowered me? Yes, in some ways. Do I feel I can make a major difference because of the net? Nope, not yet anyway.
Ok, I want to point something out to all those who don't get this:
Using something like this requires a temperature GRADIANT... i.e., you could be in a desert that is 5000 degrees, and could NOT use that temperature (i.e. ambient air energy) to generate energy with a junction like this without some form of lower temperature location.
You must have two areas with a temp. gradiate difference bewtween the two that you can place this device across... in this case, the gradient can be lower (250 degrees) and is more efficient. This gradient comes from the difference in termperature between the exhaust and the surronding air.
It's all based upon the tech of peltier junctions.
I remember reading about the same type of thing occuring during very intense northern lights. Same sort of thing, where the event and sound occured at the same time, and there couldn't possibly be time for the sound to travel the distance.
IRC, it was the same sort of thing, an ELF interaction directly in the brain.
So my thought is, could we use this for actual communication? Cause voices in someones head?
I never got my hands on the memory upgrade for my CoCo...
I remember the limits on the number & types of 'screens/windows' you could have because of the memeory limit.
Wasn't there some sort of rudimentry editor & spreadsheet?
Damn, I feel dated now.
I learn to program on my Coco... got my first coco2 when I was 10 or so... I didn't get any games, so I had to type in those long-ass programs they had in the book... and I learned from that.
It took me forever to figure out the '^' in the program listings stood for the up arrow on the keyboard.
Further down the line, I figured out a way to poll the keyboard by 'peek'ing at memory locations.
I also remember using pmode to get the false color red/blue/black/white false color mode.
And using draw to make animations and using flipping between screens (buffers).
Damn, the CoCo was a cool machine!
Oh, and my favorite game: Robot Odeyssey!!!
I'm with you.
You can apply this to antrax versus the flu.
Or flying/driving.
Security is a myth... anyone who understand security understands it's a sliding scale with decreasing means of return.
I've always viewed security vesus effort as the comparision between a bell-curve and a expotential curve. The amount of effort you expend with increasing security increases expotnentialy. The amount of increased security you get is like a bell curve... at some point you are getting the maximum amount of security per effort... as you move beyond that point, the amount of extra security you can get starts to drop off, while effort goes way up. The last 1% of security takes a nearly infinite amount of effot.
Effort = laws... or whatever means you have.
The point I'm trying to make is you can only be so safe. The Bill of Rights means you are free, but you accept some things with those freedoms, like everyone else is free too. And at any moment someone may lose it and start shooting... but you accept that... the problem is, most people don't get it.
I want my freedom. I am a midwestern. I was raised with guns. I'm a hell of a shot. I was raised with cows & corn. I damn well know food doesn't come from the grocery store, but I've met people that didn't beef comes from cows.
I know that if the shit hits the fan, I can defend myself. I can get milk, eggs, butter, corn, turkey, deer... and I know friends with siterns and windmill pumped wells that still work. The have pot bellies stoves that work with wood so you can cook a meal.
Point blank: if the it all went to hell tomorrow, I could be free AND alive. And I want to be free.
I think that the current state of being has made people week and afraid of freedoms.
I am not afraid. I want to be free.
I think most people are afraid... and they don't know how to survive.
I think survively and freedom (or wanting to free) go hand in hand.
I've thought about it a lot. I want a certain level of protection from the govt... that's the very premise of govt. But there is a line. And people don't get it. People don't see the line.
Sigh. I don't know.
I'm ranting. Please move on.
I believe I used this on a Tandy Color Computer 3... I was, um, 14?
It was a good learning experience.
I only had one floppy drive, though, and I remember I had to swap floppies A LOT... and I never did do anything productive... but it was my first enviorment outside of basic.