There's just that pesky continental divide. NY to Omaha would be pretty easy. Once you start going uphill is the problem. Thus the Burlington Northern and Southern Pacific, the two spots you can cross. Of course building more tunnels without illegal imigrants like the chineese that did it in the 1800's will cost a lot more that 8B. Maybe some sort of tunnel drilling laser.
The government isn't building the railroad, they are incentivizing railroads to modernize, under the guise that if we can save fuel and make the economy more productive we can stay competitive with the rising second world nations like China and India with more modern infrastructure. China has historically been the largest economy in the world. Only recently has a capital- and consumption-based economy existed. Prior to that it was just lots of people needing lots of shit to live. Until we Americans proved it's impossible to live without at least 3 TVs and one car per person in the household. Not that I'm complaining, but I do think we need to modernize and I think it's a good use of our collective tax contributions to our common good.
Some time in the future we will also have that level of density. And, the ability for frieght to travel faster from the coasts to the middle of the country (and food outward) would be beneficial to the economy and our economic competitiveness. Tech is the only answer.
Netscape gave us this flawed system and it was rushed out before anyone could think about it. So everyone started feeling safe about ecommerce. To me, what makes me feel safe is the fact that I have limited liability for credit card transactions, not SSL.
If you want real privacy, you need a secure key exchange. That means out-of-band (such as in person), you exchange public keys.
If it were easy to do (and it will be as I'll describe), you could have an easier way to input public keys into the browser (such as a QR code) using your android phone. So when you open your account at the bank, you scan their QR code for their key and they scan yours. Then your phone when you set it up exchanges keys with your browser. No EXTERNAL trust needed. You can be as safe as you want.
Obviously the current web of trust works well for casual transactions, but anything important like banking, taxes, healthcare, credit-related, or identity-related should use safe keys. There is no reason to not do it, it's been a false sense of security that has kept this from happening.
So the personal CA is needed, and that means a micro web of trust between your devices and easy ways to share your public key(s). I think the QR code can do this.
Here's a project to do that. If a single QR code does not hold a key of sufficient length, you can always have a serial array of two or three or four codes that you scan in order. Of course it'll only work if we can capitalize on it in a free and open way. That means open standards. Get on it people, down with the government controlled, leaky as a sieve web of trust!!
Yeah, it's too bad. I hoped for real change, a peaceful revolution. Not communism but merely some reasonable socialism. I visited Yellowstone National Park recently, a beautiful natural area, with some pretty amazing sites, and amazingly little or no litter, handles 3 million visitors per year. Guess what, it's "socialism". What a stupid name. All the evil dictators of Europe co-opted the name of this idea but really the violence of the 20th century had to do with ancient familial arguments, not politics. Modern socialism is necessary. Capitalism is about investing and capitalizing, it's about making improvements to grow a business or country. At some point you run low on resources and you need to be a steward. That doesn't mean stop production and close all the businesses. It means guidance from a central agency that can help facilitate communications between the producers, the consumers, and the investors.
The U.S. military is a huge, FEDERAL institution. That's socialism. The U.S. interstate highway system is built using 90% federal funds. It's "socialism". ANYTHING paid for with taxes is SOCIALISM under the crazies' definition.
The bottom line is that the corporations haven't been doing a good job for quite some time. We're out-competed by other nations in education, skill and quality, because the sole focus is capital. Guess what, if the sole focus is capital, there are only two ways to get it: 1. having and investing capital, of which 1% of the people own 99% of it, or 2. provide personal services for capital (work your ass off 80 hours per week, or work your ass off in school first).
The capitalists LOVE immigrant labor because it drives down labor costs by increasing supply. The problem is that capital has all been concentrated in the hands of the few, and those people have not been contributing back to the country that GAVE THEM IT. They are running tax shelters in offshore islands, they are building their businesses elsewhere, such as the corporate tax haven of Dubai (haliburton). All of their goods we don't need are manufactured overseas and dumped on us and we can't afford them so they lend us money to buy it. And now it's come to homes, health and food.
So, like, the crazies think we should give these true capitalists, the top 1% EVEN MORE LEEWAY so they can take it ALL?
Granted, the list is long what capitalism has brought this country. And a stronger government will simply be abused the next time the elite get to pick the leaders (oh wait, that's every year). So it's really a tough balance to strike and America has to swing back and forth to be, on the average, the free-est country on earth. Why be all crazy about it?
Gates is in a way correct. The information is expensive. I am in school (back after 10 years off;) and more than a THIRD of my education costs has been in textbooks, websites, CDs, etc. This information is basically licensed to me. You can't reuse the books or sell them because they change the revisions in a minor way. Naturally, there's huge disconnects between the high school and college texts as well.
Open source textbooks with some type of distributed version control and a moderation system in a globally standardized XML namespace would really change the cost of education.
Yeah, sorry, the computer and consumer electronics market is standardized, homogenized and commoditized. Even your fancy Apple shit is made in the same factories as the crappy pads. Just like your fancy Abercrombie and Finch shirts, you are being fleeced out of your money by pure marketing and nothing more. Tablets are the next in car DVD player. Only rednecks will be caught dead letting their kids play with one, and the rich upper class will be only ones letting their kids use "real books".
Bush had 9/11 and Iraq, arguably both were capitalized on to avoid checks and balances. It's funny when Obama passes health care the crazies fear socialism but when Bush increases the size of the government by 50% after 9/11 and they didn't even look twice, flying their flags on their SUVs.
Obama needs another four years so he can actually do some real socialism. This is really the modern way to provide basic human needs and it is possible to be fair with the increased real-time statistics and data reporting (social intelligence) being built as we speak. I think the U.S. is tending to be more socialist as we realize that some of this is possible to do right with government guidance (if not total service). There are lots of examples where a free market with pure competition is just not possible, and health care is one of them.
The crazies are supporting a borderline fascist policy put forth by the republican mainstream for 8 years, where corporations can do no wrong. At the same time they were increasing the size of the goverment, except only the part that serves the corporations and their interests (security, defense, empire-building, etc)! But thanks to the evangelical base, whose leadership is probably not even Christian, they have a decent sized force of 2-3 million that will do just about anything "for the lord" so they can make it look a lot bigger than it is (this story being a good example)
Between the two you have the vast majority of americans who don't have feelings on the matter and vote with their pocketbooks. Obama has not raised taxes on the middle class. He's really sending a ton of money back to the people (yes, they are borrowing it from the future, but Reagan invented this), and he's helping America to modernize and provide streamlined services for all it's citizens. He's the first techie president. However, you gotta be careful what you do for labor unions. We are probably better off with regulated labor unions and more jobs just to keep people off the streets. Of course, the real reason those jobs are being lost is that the crazies don't feel the need to obtain advanced education, which means they aren't real useful in a modern economy about moving stuff at highly lean and efficient paces, with lean manufacturing hopefully done by robots so you can "hire and fire" just by flipping a switch.
So, crazies: get an education, enjoy your free health care and stop being racist--it's so 60 years ago.
The thing is the quality isn't that much better. They're using the same CPU chips, the same crappy hard drives, etc. The reason it runs smoother is you have no choice for peripherals. It's still a commodity computer, and they are charging way more for the brand and the external design. This is classic monopolistic competition in a standardized market. Apple is using different branding to make you think their stuff is a superior good and therefore better. And journalists as well. I use a Mac at work, as well as windows and linux boxes. I have a Macbook pro and iphone provided by work. In my experience, these things do not "just work". We had about 1 in 5 hard drives die within the first year for 50 aluminum imacs. And you have to wait weeks for replacement unless you want to remove the glass and around 30 screws, which we do normally to save money. We also have an Xserve and AFP (their filesharing protocol) did not work until 10.6. Time machine is now broken in 10.6 with ACLs (needed on a corporate network). Not a word from Apple support, not a single comment on the forums, as the users become increasingly enraged. Samba client doesn't respect unix ACLs. I can't list all the damn problems we've had with compatibility. And none of the tools work across versions. For instance, server tools for 10.6 only run on 10.6 desktops. There are millions of these issues. This is just a bubble, don't worry. When I went to school a decade ago, Apple had those candy colored imacs that were popular with the homos. I'm sure people will realize soon enough they are massively overpaying just like they do at abercrombie for a 10 cent made-in-china t-shirt selling for 39.95.
Unless the aliens are "God". And that they are basically us, or a more evolved version of us. I mean, we WILL enevitably send DNA to another habitable planet, and there's no reason to think it absurd that life on earth may have started similarly (from foreign DNA).
However, it would be just like those pesky Christians to cover up the aliens just so they could keep their power.
It is that, but they could just be trolling as well. In a market with billions of shares and millions of actors, there are bound to be mistakes and typos. Someone puts an autocommiting ask out for a stock with an extra zero and there's no one looking there, no problem. But if there's an electronic bot trolling that price range, it can lock the order before they have a chance to retract. Now there are rules and appeals to mitigate this, but if it was just a small thing then it might be overlooked. Of course, the obvious thing is annealing, like you mentioned.
Exactly, the typesetter should handle it. I like to TYPE two spaces because it rythmically ends each sentence and enables me to move to the next thought. Some people excessively use two-dot elipses for the same effect, to the detriment of the reader..
Yeah, exactly. Cable modems basically have "out of band" management (it's in band as in, on the same wire, but not on the same protocol). Sounds like TR69 could be used similarly.
Practically speaking, this could be an awesome service as well. If you could get it to near real-time (however long it takes to scan the sky with the camera, and then map a geogrid on the viewer, you could like, see your friend sitting at the cafe if she messaged you her position. You wouldn't need to have cameras everywhere if you had one of these. Of course this could be easily supplemented by smaller cameras distributed around and geolocated, as well as satellite video. Of course, it could be used by evil corporatist police states for evil as well.
What we need is the ability to automatically grow food, distribute it and automatically build houses and give medical care. And of course not have to pay for it. Take 50% of junior high students, rip them out of traditional education and put them into dedicated robot building training for 7 years. In 15 we could all have a robot that provides everything we need. We build a robot with our neighbors and share the produce. Of course there needs to be some additional market for those people who WANT more than enough food and housing to be comfortable. All I'm saying is it's possible now to make a nice dignified baseline for everyone, so I don't know why we aren't doing it. Sure, there's the farmers and builders who would have to start working on robots, or trade some land for them. And of course energy is needed. I just don't know why no one has laid out a vision like this, even for 20-30 years from now. We could easily do it with today's tech, it's just a matter of being able to make results quickly so output is happening.
Slashdot Mirror
That's amazing. So everything on earth is directly tied to the sun. We need to stop forgetting that.
There's just that pesky continental divide. NY to Omaha would be pretty easy. Once you start going uphill is the problem. Thus the Burlington Northern and Southern Pacific, the two spots you can cross. Of course building more tunnels without illegal imigrants like the chineese that did it in the 1800's will cost a lot more that 8B. Maybe some sort of tunnel drilling laser.
The government isn't building the railroad, they are incentivizing railroads to modernize, under the guise that if we can save fuel and make the economy more productive we can stay competitive with the rising second world nations like China and India with more modern infrastructure. China has historically been the largest economy in the world. Only recently has a capital- and consumption-based economy existed. Prior to that it was just lots of people needing lots of shit to live. Until we Americans proved it's impossible to live without at least 3 TVs and one car per person in the household. Not that I'm complaining, but I do think we need to modernize and I think it's a good use of our collective tax contributions to our common good.
Fuck the terrorists, let's make money.
Some time in the future we will also have that level of density. And, the ability for frieght to travel faster from the coasts to the middle of the country (and food outward) would be beneficial to the economy and our economic competitiveness. Tech is the only answer.
Pesticide use or the dry erase marker solvents can cause this as well ;)
Netscape gave us this flawed system and it was rushed out before anyone could think about it. So everyone started feeling safe about ecommerce. To me, what makes me feel safe is the fact that I have limited liability for credit card transactions, not SSL.
If you want real privacy, you need a secure key exchange. That means out-of-band (such as in person), you exchange public keys.
If it were easy to do (and it will be as I'll describe), you could have an easier way to input public keys into the browser (such as a QR code) using your android phone. So when you open your account at the bank, you scan their QR code for their key and they scan yours. Then your phone when you set it up exchanges keys with your browser. No EXTERNAL trust needed. You can be as safe as you want.
Obviously the current web of trust works well for casual transactions, but anything important like banking, taxes, healthcare, credit-related, or identity-related should use safe keys. There is no reason to not do it, it's been a false sense of security that has kept this from happening.
So the personal CA is needed, and that means a micro web of trust between your devices and easy ways to share your public key(s). I think the QR code can do this.
Here's a project to do that. If a single QR code does not hold a key of sufficient length, you can always have a serial array of two or three or four codes that you scan in order. Of course it'll only work if we can capitalize on it in a free and open way. That means open standards. Get on it people, down with the government controlled, leaky as a sieve web of trust!!
Yeah, it's too bad. I hoped for real change, a peaceful revolution. Not communism but merely some reasonable socialism. I visited Yellowstone National Park recently, a beautiful natural area, with some pretty amazing sites, and amazingly little or no litter, handles 3 million visitors per year. Guess what, it's "socialism". What a stupid name. All the evil dictators of Europe co-opted the name of this idea but really the violence of the 20th century had to do with ancient familial arguments, not politics. Modern socialism is necessary. Capitalism is about investing and capitalizing, it's about making improvements to grow a business or country. At some point you run low on resources and you need to be a steward. That doesn't mean stop production and close all the businesses. It means guidance from a central agency that can help facilitate communications between the producers, the consumers, and the investors.
The U.S. military is a huge, FEDERAL institution. That's socialism. The U.S. interstate highway system is built using 90% federal funds. It's "socialism". ANYTHING paid for with taxes is SOCIALISM under the crazies' definition.
The bottom line is that the corporations haven't been doing a good job for quite some time. We're out-competed by other nations in education, skill and quality, because the sole focus is capital. Guess what, if the sole focus is capital, there are only two ways to get it: 1. having and investing capital, of which 1% of the people own 99% of it, or 2. provide personal services for capital (work your ass off 80 hours per week, or work your ass off in school first).
The capitalists LOVE immigrant labor because it drives down labor costs by increasing supply. The problem is that capital has all been concentrated in the hands of the few, and those people have not been contributing back to the country that GAVE THEM IT. They are running tax shelters in offshore islands, they are building their businesses elsewhere, such as the corporate tax haven of Dubai (haliburton). All of their goods we don't need are manufactured overseas and dumped on us and we can't afford them so they lend us money to buy it. And now it's come to homes, health and food.
So, like, the crazies think we should give these true capitalists, the top 1% EVEN MORE LEEWAY so they can take it ALL?
Granted, the list is long what capitalism has brought this country. And a stronger government will simply be abused the next time the elite get to pick the leaders (oh wait, that's every year). So it's really a tough balance to strike and America has to swing back and forth to be, on the average, the free-est country on earth. Why be all crazy about it?
Yeah, oh well.
Android is selling at a faster rate. So Apple is losing marketshare slowly. Not as much as RIM and WM7 are to Android but it's already starting.
Gates is in a way correct. The information is expensive. I am in school (back after 10 years off ;) and more than a THIRD of my education costs has been in textbooks, websites, CDs, etc. This information is basically licensed to me. You can't reuse the books or sell them because they change the revisions in a minor way. Naturally, there's huge disconnects between the high school and college texts as well.
Open source textbooks with some type of distributed version control and a moderation system in a globally standardized XML namespace would really change the cost of education.
Make one that can boot off a SD card also, so we can make "apps" on sd cards just like nintendo games.
Yeah, sorry, the computer and consumer electronics market is standardized, homogenized and commoditized. Even your fancy Apple shit is made in the same factories as the crappy pads. Just like your fancy Abercrombie and Finch shirts, you are being fleeced out of your money by pure marketing and nothing more. Tablets are the next in car DVD player. Only rednecks will be caught dead letting their kids play with one, and the rich upper class will be only ones letting their kids use "real books".
Major lag, is that a newton? ;)
Bush had 9/11 and Iraq, arguably both were capitalized on to avoid checks and balances. It's funny when Obama passes health care the crazies fear socialism but when Bush increases the size of the government by 50% after 9/11 and they didn't even look twice, flying their flags on their SUVs.
Obama needs another four years so he can actually do some real socialism. This is really the modern way to provide basic human needs and it is possible to be fair with the increased real-time statistics and data reporting (social intelligence) being built as we speak. I think the U.S. is tending to be more socialist as we realize that some of this is possible to do right with government guidance (if not total service). There are lots of examples where a free market with pure competition is just not possible, and health care is one of them.
The crazies are supporting a borderline fascist policy put forth by the republican mainstream for 8 years, where corporations can do no wrong. At the same time they were increasing the size of the goverment, except only the part that serves the corporations and their interests (security, defense, empire-building, etc)! But thanks to the evangelical base, whose leadership is probably not even Christian, they have a decent sized force of 2-3 million that will do just about anything "for the lord" so they can make it look a lot bigger than it is (this story being a good example)
Between the two you have the vast majority of americans who don't have feelings on the matter and vote with their pocketbooks. Obama has not raised taxes on the middle class. He's really sending a ton of money back to the people (yes, they are borrowing it from the future, but Reagan invented this), and he's helping America to modernize and provide streamlined services for all it's citizens. He's the first techie president. However, you gotta be careful what you do for labor unions. We are probably better off with regulated labor unions and more jobs just to keep people off the streets. Of course, the real reason those jobs are being lost is that the crazies don't feel the need to obtain advanced education, which means they aren't real useful in a modern economy about moving stuff at highly lean and efficient paces, with lean manufacturing hopefully done by robots so you can "hire and fire" just by flipping a switch.
So, crazies: get an education, enjoy your free health care and stop being racist--it's so 60 years ago.
By "homos" I mean, the "think different" crowd. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The thing is the quality isn't that much better. They're using the same CPU chips, the same crappy hard drives, etc. The reason it runs smoother is you have no choice for peripherals. It's still a commodity computer, and they are charging way more for the brand and the external design. This is classic monopolistic competition in a standardized market. Apple is using different branding to make you think their stuff is a superior good and therefore better. And journalists as well. I use a Mac at work, as well as windows and linux boxes. I have a Macbook pro and iphone provided by work. In my experience, these things do not "just work". We had about 1 in 5 hard drives die within the first year for 50 aluminum imacs. And you have to wait weeks for replacement unless you want to remove the glass and around 30 screws, which we do normally to save money. We also have an Xserve and AFP (their filesharing protocol) did not work until 10.6. Time machine is now broken in 10.6 with ACLs (needed on a corporate network). Not a word from Apple support, not a single comment on the forums, as the users become increasingly enraged. Samba client doesn't respect unix ACLs. I can't list all the damn problems we've had with compatibility. And none of the tools work across versions. For instance, server tools for 10.6 only run on 10.6 desktops. There are millions of these issues. This is just a bubble, don't worry. When I went to school a decade ago, Apple had those candy colored imacs that were popular with the homos. I'm sure people will realize soon enough they are massively overpaying just like they do at abercrombie for a 10 cent made-in-china t-shirt selling for 39.95.
Dudes, can we please talk about the fucking aliens already?!
Unless the aliens are "God". And that they are basically us, or a more evolved version of us. I mean, we WILL enevitably send DNA to another habitable planet, and there's no reason to think it absurd that life on earth may have started similarly (from foreign DNA).
However, it would be just like those pesky Christians to cover up the aliens just so they could keep their power.
"Print is dead." -Egon
It is that, but they could just be trolling as well. In a market with billions of shares and millions of actors, there are bound to be mistakes and typos. Someone puts an autocommiting ask out for a stock with an extra zero and there's no one looking there, no problem. But if there's an electronic bot trolling that price range, it can lock the order before they have a chance to retract. Now there are rules and appeals to mitigate this, but if it was just a small thing then it might be overlooked. Of course, the obvious thing is annealing, like you mentioned.
Exactly, the typesetter should handle it. I like to TYPE two spaces because it rythmically ends each sentence and enables me to move to the next thought. Some people excessively use two-dot elipses for the same effect, to the detriment of the reader..
Yeah, exactly. Cable modems basically have "out of band" management (it's in band as in, on the same wire, but not on the same protocol). Sounds like TR69 could be used similarly.
Practically speaking, this could be an awesome service as well. If you could get it to near real-time (however long it takes to scan the sky with the camera, and then map a geogrid on the viewer, you could like, see your friend sitting at the cafe if she messaged you her position. You wouldn't need to have cameras everywhere if you had one of these. Of course this could be easily supplemented by smaller cameras distributed around and geolocated, as well as satellite video. Of course, it could be used by evil corporatist police states for evil as well.
What we need is the ability to automatically grow food, distribute it and automatically build houses and give medical care. And of course not have to pay for it. Take 50% of junior high students, rip them out of traditional education and put them into dedicated robot building training for 7 years. In 15 we could all have a robot that provides everything we need. We build a robot with our neighbors and share the produce. Of course there needs to be some additional market for those people who WANT more than enough food and housing to be comfortable. All I'm saying is it's possible now to make a nice dignified baseline for everyone, so I don't know why we aren't doing it. Sure, there's the farmers and builders who would have to start working on robots, or trade some land for them. And of course energy is needed. I just don't know why no one has laid out a vision like this, even for 20-30 years from now. We could easily do it with today's tech, it's just a matter of being able to make results quickly so output is happening.