"You fool, you weren't wearing your Kevlar vest! Silly you! You have nobody but yourself to blame for your gaping chest wound!"
"I'm really shocked that you didn't have two security alarms. You only had one, and your trained attack dogs numbered a pitiful five. My blowtorch cut through your one inch thick steel door. How could you be so irresponsible? You deserve to be robbed!"
And so forth. Take other areas in the law, like doctors and confidentiality. Files about patients are, when not in use, required to be kept in a locked cabinet or drawer. Not one that requires your fingerprints and has a trained bobcat perching atop the cabinent who will scratch the eyes out of anyone who isn't the proper owner approaching it... just a locked drawer.
Legally, and, rationally, you're expected at most to provide a token level of defense.
If a couple of bozos hack your site, yeah, it sucks, but if they are using a day zero exploit and you weren't there on Sunday, well... if you think I should be at the office twenty-four seven, with BugTraq hitting my alphanumeric pager, and taking vast amounts of crystal meth to stay awake, that simply isn't rational or reasonable.
Nobody forces anyone to hack your site, carjack you, rob you, shoot you. These are crimes. You can apply some common sense ("don't go wandering through the ghetto with a fat wallet hanging out of your suit" "don't go stumbling around that DMZ wearing a bright orange clown suit"), but the fact of the matter is, a crime is a crime. Nobody is making these jerks attack. Blaming the victim is not useful or even particularly rational.
Your first step is to identify your vibrational modes. For example:
Subwoofer: Assume that you will be protecting against 10 Hz to perhaps 100 Hz
Random shocks: No guess as to the frequency of these.
Figuring out the direction of these vibrations is important. Will they be going from side to side? Up and down? Front to back?
Examine the materials that came with your hard drive. Many of them will talk about what kinds of vibrational modes they are rated for, what they can withstand, etc. Compare to the directions of your vibrational modes to find in which to mount your hard drive. That is, if your vibrations are mostly side-to-side, mount your hard drive such that your most vulnerable direction (for example, perpendicular to the platters) is not parallel to the side-to-side vibration.
Now, another important part is that you want to damp the vibrations in multiple modes. That is, you want to guard against as many big modes as possible. If you have a contraption made from bungee cords, it will damp best against a specific frequency (and possibly some harmonics), but the damping will be less effective at other frequencies. Where the weak patches are, damp with a different material. So, perhaps bungee cords + silicone gel + foam could guard against many of them.
Test. Test again. If I were you, I would construct a "cradle" for the drive or case. Then, put something in it susceptible to vibration (a covered bowl of water, perhaps, or a leaf). Crank the bass. Have someone else drive around while you look at it. See any ripples or shaking? If so, back to the drawing board! More high-tech solutions exist for testing, etc., but I doubt you want to go there.
And, when all else fails, drivespace is cheap. Buy several replacement drives.
Didn't they cover this in Office Space, how outsourcing a bunch of code to some Ruwandans willing to work for a bag of rice is the first sign that Your Job Is In Trouble?
Seriously, though, almost any time I have seen a company outsource anything delicate, or where the goal in question was not completely and totally generic (account collections, for example), the company runs into problems like:
Losing a "personal touch."
Losing contact with their customers or other business partners.
Not getting exactly what they want because the outsourcing firm doesn't know how each little thing has been done in the company for the last million years.
The United States Post Office (yeah, I know, five hundred Ugandans sit up and scream with outrage because I assume this article is about the US, "Bloody Americans," blah blah) requires you to show ID. If you go to Mailboxes, Etc., they also require ID. Basically, legal places require legal identification.
Unless you have access to fake ID, your transaction still isn't that anonymous. We need places to get these things shipped that we buy online (unless they are services [like porn] or goods [like file downloads]). Any ideas?
If you are referring to the 1/3rd solar neutrino problem, that problem was solved when we noticed that the electron neutrinos (or are they antis? I forget) produced by the sun in nuclear fusion can oscillate to tauon neutrinos and muon neutrinos.
Also, while we are still waiting for proton decay (which, if it occurs, will mean the end of baryonic matter in roughly 10^34 years) to be validated (and is predicted by all of the GUTs we currently have), and it doesn't wash, well...
...and I kid you not, but protons can decay by another process I read about, pretty speculative, and would take 10^122 years. Hawking suggested it, though, in a method similar to the radiation he posits for black holes.
A pretty decent hard sci-fi writer did something, in the pre-oscillation era, about how we discovered that alien lifeforms were interfering with our sun's fusion, thus leading to lower neutrinos than expected.
No, five billion years hence is about the right time.
If you look at a HR diagram, you can see that Sol has already begun to leave the main sequence. One hundred billion years might be plausible for something just out of the brown dwarf stage, I think, but we're not it. Stars far larger than ours can burn up all of their hydrogen in the order of millions, not billions, of years.
I'd like to conduct an interview with the man in the picture. I have a lot of fascinating questions to ask, and I'm pretty sure that, while we want to ask the questions, the answers might frighten us.
What's the name of this lovely piece of hardware? I could have some serious usage of it. Being a good little consumer droid, I have thousands of paperbacks and a few hundred CDs that need cataloging.
Let's hustle this baby into Freenet, Gnutella, and any other good repositories of "stuff that THEY don't want you to have." Hell, push it to some newsgroups, even throw it in alt.sex.binaries.teen.lesbian.sourcecode or something to make sure it gets lots of exposure.
It'll probably show up in the next Master Hackers Secrets CD or the like.
Twin black holes rotating around one another would produce a lot of noticeable effects.
First, you would see a very funny-looking accretion disk and some very strange radiation patterns.
You'd see massive Doppler shifting from the x-ray spouts, not unlike our observations of the binary pulsar in (I think) 1974.
Black holes wouldn't rotate around each other for long -- in their case, the gravitational radiation would be enormous, causing the system to radiate energy away until they collapsed into one another.
Finally, no wrinkles to special relativity. Gravity's pull would relate to general relativity.
For example, you could build particle accelerators until the cows come home searching for a fourth and fifth lepton family.
We don't. Why? Because physics + astronomy tells us that we have a certain percentage of helium in the universe, and the amount created during the Big Bang is very tightly constrained by the number of lepton families. Current helium percentages allow for three families, and just barely four if we squeezed and fudged the numbers.
The Universe is the poor man's particle accelerator, as the saying goes. Helium again: discovered as existing in the sun before it was found here on Earth.
The two sciences help one another. Killing one in favor of the other isn't helping either of them.
Lars isn't the guy I'm worried about. While I completely disagree with the "Those musicians make so much money, they don't need any more, and I'm the person to decide how much they should be making" stance, I'm not sweating the death of Metallica (not that it wouldn't be welcome, they've sucked since '91). I am more concerned about the little guys, the ones who have set up some expensive home studios. I had no idea how much these things cost until I talked to some budding musicians. Then I picked up a Musician's Friend catalog and looked at some of the equipment, just about passed out. And I thought my computers were an expensive hobby!
As for leaving tips at restaurants, you'll find that people leave the largest tips when they are in a group, publically. Why? They don't want to be embarassed and be seen as cheapskates. It's a basic social pressure, and you can ask any waitress about it. Conversely, people who just pay the bill, who are alone, and who don't have to look anyone in the eye when they pay... aren't as generous. Gnutella users are both singular (in that few of them have anyone looking over their shoulders when the tipping time comes due) and anonymous (in that nobody can wag a finger at them for not coughing up a few bucks). People, by and large, are cheap bastards, and they'll not be likely to leave a buck for artists they only like one track from. It's these artists with talent who could make it, but might not, that are in real trouble.
And, frankly, if you are trying to enforce a system where the leeches of the world (equivalent to maybe 90% of humanity) have to pay, they won't go for it. They'll drift over to Napster or anything that is free before they shell out. This may be a cynical view of human nature, but I'll be shocked if it isn't also accurate.
If you are concerned about the artists/content creators, try implementing the following features and see how it works out...
Something to allow each artist to see what item of theirs has been downloaded and how many times...
Something where the artists can see how much they have had donated to them for each piece of content...
An "opt-out" feature (like what Doubleclick and other big websites say/should be doing) where, if they don't like it, they can have their material pulled from distribution in this fashion. If opting out is good enough for users who don't want their privacy data distributed without consent(and what privacy advocate doesn't shout about that?), then it should be good enough for producers who don't want their content data distributed without consent? Two edged sword, isn't it?
If you can track the Mojo, you can track each of these features without too much sweat.
Some solution. I thought information wanted to be free?
People sharing files now have to give back, so, again we're at a "payment" system, where we are paying in terms of bandwidth and hard drive space (both of which still cost something). And the people getting screwed again? The musicians. Trade those mp3s, and make sure other people have to give some back, you don't want people wasting your precious bandwidth and hard drive space, eating your cycles, but do anything to prevent giving to the artists.
With Gnutella and Mojo Nation, we have successfully replicated the record companies, the labels and the distributors, right down to the part where we screw the artists. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If you don't believe me, consider this:
Old style record companies: you pay them dollars to get music.
Gnutella + Mojo Nation: you pay bandwidth and storage space (which are equivalent to dollars in that they aren't free) to get music.
Old style record companies: the artists don't get a lot, maybe 7% of it.
Gnutella + Mojo Nation: the artists don't...wait, where are we paying them at all?
Old style record companies: 90% of the crap they push is Britney Spears, Metallica, or N'Sync (sorry if I got the names wrong)
Gnutella + Mojo Nation: 90% of the crap people have on their hard drives is...Britney Spears, Metallica, or N'Sync.
Congratulations, we have successfully replicated most of the lousy things in the music industry. I imagine we'll see Flatplanet payola appearing pretty soon...
Oh, sure, you'll probably argue that:
Not everything being shared is music... but I'd like to see a breakdown on the numbers there, a pie chart would not show a great deal of revolutionary doctrines being surpressed as compared to mp3s
People can always donate to the artists...What was that walloping total in the electronic tip jar again? $200? Wasn't most of it to someone already enormously popular, again screwing the little guy?
People can offer any music they want... but let's see what they actually do.
Idealism about how it could be used has nothing to do with how it is actually being used.
How do you even get started doing 3D stuff? Both still images and animated 3D?
I'm looking for cost-free stuff that isn't cripware to get started. I have a very strong math/physics background, so I have no problem describing equations of motion, but I haven't the faintest as to how to get started.
Also, how prohibitive is the hardware for this kind of thing?
"8. What is the resolution of the black hole information paradox? According to quantum theory, information -- whether it describes the velocity of a particle or the precise manner in which ink marks or pixels are arranged on a document -- cannot disappear from the universe.
But the physicists Kip Thorne, John Preskill and Stephen Hawking have a standing bet: what would happen if you dropped a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica down a black hole? It does not matter whether there are other identical copies elsewhere in the cosmos. As defined in physics, information is not the same as meaning, but simply refers to the binary digits, or some other code, used to precisely describe an object or pattern. So it seems that the information in those particular books would be swallowed up and gone forever. And that is supposed to be impossible.
Dr. Hawking and Dr. Thorne believe the information would indeed disappear and that quantum mechanics will just have to deal with it. Dr. Preskill speculates that the information doesn't really vanish: it may be displayed somehow on the surface of the black hole, as on a cosmic movie screen."
Let us start with a black hole of a few billion solar masses, such that someone entering the event horizon would not be immediately torn apart by tidal forces.
This question could be resolved by checking your reference frame. If I am someone outside of the black hole, dropping my copy of Webster's in, I never actually see that copy of Webster's hit the event horizon. Instead, it approaches it more and more slowly, the image growing ever redder and ever dimmer. From my reference frame, it never actually enters the black hole. It may be very red and very dim, but just 'cause I can't read it, doesn't mean that it is not there. Locking that Webster's in a box doesn't count as information loss. Thus, no information loss.
From the reference frame of someone (someone due to die a quick and short death) inside the event horizon, I would see a Webster's plunging in towards me. Still, no information loss.
Black holes were also once called "frozen stars," due to the fact that the "history" of a black hole (as Thorne puts it) is contained just above the event horizon -- the star's surface would appear to be there, if it weren't so red(-shifted) and dim. Somewhere in Wheeler's gravitation there's a nice calculation on how long it takes something to become practically invisible (red/dim) as it plunges towards the event horizon.
What is troubling for my two cent explanation is the problem of the matter that was there when the collapse began, which would be the neutron-laden core of a supernova. That definitely seems like lost information.
Black holes do all kinds of fun things, like violate baryon conservation and lepton conservation, in big ways. They do pose some very interesting questions. Of course, we don't have any really handy to test out stuff like Hawking radiation and whatnot on, so we won't know if our theory meets reality. We've detected black holes, but we haven't gotten up close enough to really know if what we predict about them in regards to particle production is true.
I'm not sure if I am nitpicking, and I'll have to go home and check my book on pions, but I don't recall them being in the lepton class at all. Leptons consist of:
Electrons
Electron neutrinos
Muons
Muon neutrinos
Tauons
Tauon neutrinos
Plus six more, tack on an "anti-" prefix for each of the six above.
Now, I'd have to check, but I thought pions were mesons, yes?
For any non-profit business, money = survival. Sure, Amazon.com is some freak of nature, but it is going to die eventually.
Money is the blood of any company. Protecting their wallet is basically like protecting their heart. Continuing existence is based on "do we have enough cash to do this month's payroll?"
If, and this is purely hypothetical and would never happen, if Windows 2000 was a total resource hog and, due to its extreme bloat, staggered around like a drunken boar with a hip replacement, you could have 10% of the servers running W2k, however, they might only be serving, say, half as fast as a lighter, more reasonable operating system, due to reboots, bloat, inefficient code, checking to see if you are running Netscape's browser so it could serve to you just a little slower, and so forth.
Again, purely hypothetical. Nothing to see here folks, move along!
That's why it would be, yes, pretty smart to have a small "egg" for the Marsnauts (Aresnauts?) to travel in, safely contained for the bulk of the mission, then, when they land, have a smelter start kicking out some iron from nearby ore. You'd need digger bots, some transport bots, three or four smelters, and some mold bots together, I see no reason why we have to carry all of that iron with us. We could even have it set up before we land. Five foot thick iron walls shouldn't be a problem. Mars appears to be lousy with the stuff.
Meanwhile, rather than the "let's put a big wall around it" approach, how about deflecting those oncoming protons with, say, a magnetic field? We could safely assume a rough direction for them, straight down, plus or minus 120 degrees in either direction. A stable magnetic field wouldn't be harmful to human flesh, as opposed to an oscillating one. Let's see, assume go with your 100 MeV proton, make the shelter five meters tall...well, we'd probably need to get cracking on that superconductor technology to make it happen, but it is worth a shot.
Meanwhile, let's take a clue from R. Durans and see if we can't hijack some of its DNA to help our aresnauts rebuild their damaged DNA at a faster rate, which is where most of the radiation damage occurs, anyway.
These are all three separate projects and problems, but, my guess is that they are all capable of being research independently and could conceivably be finished around the same time. I give the genetic engineering a bit more time than the rest of them, but hey, it's worth a shot.
No, probably not. Otherwise, every pill of Viagra would cost several million dollars. Every car would cost about as much, too.
First you do the research and development work. You pay the engineers. You test the parts in various conditions. You design, you redesign, you do it over and over again. Much of the expense is in the R&D. For a second probe, just copy the first. No additional R&D required, just like in cars.
It's probably smarter to design the hell out of a single probe, then launch ten of the things, all identical, like buckshot.
And I had to wonder about it a bit. If implemented, what do we go back to?
A system wherein only the people who own the factories and the land have any money or power. Yeah. Stop and think about how great it was, before unions (I say this because destroying copyright would drop the value of "intellectual labor" to an astonishing degree), before all of those copyright systems were in place.
Does copyright suffer abuse? Hell yes. Can I make a perfect analogy between tangible property and intellectual property? Well, no. So what? Who said that the Noosphere had to be exactly like meatspace?
The paper seems to say, "Intellectual property is hard and confusing, must abolish." This is the Neaderthal approach. No, what happens is we need to think harder. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law" (I'm misquoting, nine points? Nine points out of ten? Do I get a gold star?) worked great for a while. It doesn't extend perfectly into the realm of ideas. So what? Who says it has to? It just means we'll have to come up with new concepts, rather than extending old concepts to the point of idiocy.
If you abolish intellectual property, you will go back to the factories. The factories may look like MIDI studios for musicians, who will now be no more than jingle-writers for commercials. The factories may look like data entry for creative writers, who will be reduced to the status of ad copy and Hallmark cards, or possibly romance novels. The programmer will now be a data entry guy, just entering code, and his factory will look like a Unix workstation bought by the guy he writes drivers for. The artists will be doing work in studios in giant rows to catch the morning sun, and will be called "graphic designers." Back to minimum wage, guys.
Our economy is moving more and more towards the production of intellectual goods, not tangible ones. The service sector is huge.
Many artists work for more than just recognition, and, let us not forget that recognition and compensation frequently go hand-in-hand. Bill Gates is famous (or infamous) partly due to the amount of money he possesses. Demanding that someone give up their time for free (which is what you are doing if you tell people to do intellectual work sans monetary reward) is like saying, "Hey, come mow my lawn!"
No longer will your artists and programmers have any independence. We will all require patrons and corporations to back us from largesse. We will paint flattering pictures of moneyed families. We will compose pop tunes about how great it is to use Microsoft (or RedHat, you never know). We will ghostwrite biographies of Linus Torvalds, Courtney Love, and George Bush. We will program what we are told to program, for whom, when we are told to do it. We will do it cheaply, because our work has no intrinsic value, and we will enjoy our minimum wage. We will not sing, paint, write, or program what is on our minds, because the people who pay for the studios, the canvases, the printing, and the servers may not agree with us.
"Destroy a work of corporate art," said Tyler Derden. If we take away intellectual property, that will be the future: corporate art. Corporate programming. No more little guys in basements making the bills on a dream.
Now, stop slacking and Slashdotting, back to your factories!
Slashdot Mirror
Let's apply this to other crimes for a second.
"You fool, you weren't wearing your Kevlar vest! Silly you! You have nobody but yourself to blame for your gaping chest wound!"
"I'm really shocked that you didn't have two security alarms. You only had one, and your trained attack dogs numbered a pitiful five. My blowtorch cut through your one inch thick steel door. How could you be so irresponsible? You deserve to be robbed!"
And so forth. Take other areas in the law, like doctors and confidentiality. Files about patients are, when not in use, required to be kept in a locked cabinet or drawer. Not one that requires your fingerprints and has a trained bobcat perching atop the cabinent who will scratch the eyes out of anyone who isn't the proper owner approaching it ... just a locked drawer.
Legally, and, rationally, you're expected at most to provide a token level of defense.
If a couple of bozos hack your site, yeah, it sucks, but if they are using a day zero exploit and you weren't there on Sunday, well ... if you think I should be at the office twenty-four seven, with BugTraq hitting my alphanumeric pager, and taking vast amounts of crystal meth to stay awake, that simply isn't rational or reasonable.
Nobody forces anyone to hack your site, carjack you, rob you, shoot you. These are crimes. You can apply some common sense ("don't go wandering through the ghetto with a fat wallet hanging out of your suit" "don't go stumbling around that DMZ wearing a bright orange clown suit"), but the fact of the matter is, a crime is a crime. Nobody is making these jerks attack. Blaming the victim is not useful or even particularly rational.
- Subwoofer: Assume that you will be protecting against 10 Hz to perhaps 100 Hz
- Random shocks: No guess as to the frequency of these.
- Figuring out the direction of these vibrations is important. Will they be going from side to side? Up and down? Front to back?
Examine the materials that came with your hard drive. Many of them will talk about what kinds of vibrational modes they are rated for, what they can withstand, etc. Compare to the directions of your vibrational modes to find in which to mount your hard drive. That is, if your vibrations are mostly side-to-side, mount your hard drive such that your most vulnerable direction (for example, perpendicular to the platters) is not parallel to the side-to-side vibration.Now, another important part is that you want to damp the vibrations in multiple modes. That is, you want to guard against as many big modes as possible. If you have a contraption made from bungee cords, it will damp best against a specific frequency (and possibly some harmonics), but the damping will be less effective at other frequencies. Where the weak patches are, damp with a different material. So, perhaps bungee cords + silicone gel + foam could guard against many of them.
Test. Test again. If I were you, I would construct a "cradle" for the drive or case. Then, put something in it susceptible to vibration (a covered bowl of water, perhaps, or a leaf). Crank the bass. Have someone else drive around while you look at it. See any ripples or shaking? If so, back to the drawing board! More high-tech solutions exist for testing, etc., but I doubt you want to go there.
And, when all else fails, drivespace is cheap. Buy several replacement drives.
Seriously, though, almost any time I have seen a company outsource anything delicate, or where the goal in question was not completely and totally generic (account collections, for example), the company runs into problems like:
The United States Post Office (yeah, I know, five hundred Ugandans sit up and scream with outrage because I assume this article is about the US, "Bloody Americans," blah blah) requires you to show ID. If you go to Mailboxes, Etc., they also require ID. Basically, legal places require legal identification.
Unless you have access to fake ID, your transaction still isn't that anonymous. We need places to get these things shipped that we buy online (unless they are services [like porn] or goods [like file downloads]). Any ideas?
Also, while we are still waiting for proton decay (which, if it occurs, will mean the end of baryonic matter in roughly 10^34 years) to be validated (and is predicted by all of the GUTs we currently have), and it doesn't wash, well...
A pretty decent hard sci-fi writer did something, in the pre-oscillation era, about how we discovered that alien lifeforms were interfering with our sun's fusion, thus leading to lower neutrinos than expected.
If you look at a HR diagram, you can see that Sol has already begun to leave the main sequence. One hundred billion years might be plausible for something just out of the brown dwarf stage, I think, but we're not it. Stars far larger than ours can burn up all of their hydrogen in the order of millions, not billions, of years.
I'd like to conduct an interview with the man in the picture. I have a lot of fascinating questions to ask, and I'm pretty sure that, while we want to ask the questions, the answers might frighten us.
What's the name of this lovely piece of hardware? I could have some serious usage of it. Being a good little consumer droid, I have thousands of paperbacks and a few hundred CDs that need cataloging.
It'll probably show up in the next Master Hackers Secrets CD or the like.
First, you would see a very funny-looking accretion disk and some very strange radiation patterns.
You'd see massive Doppler shifting from the x-ray spouts, not unlike our observations of the binary pulsar in (I think) 1974.
Black holes wouldn't rotate around each other for long -- in their case, the gravitational radiation would be enormous, causing the system to radiate energy away until they collapsed into one another.
Finally, no wrinkles to special relativity. Gravity's pull would relate to general relativity.
For example, you could build particle accelerators until the cows come home searching for a fourth and fifth lepton family.
We don't. Why? Because physics + astronomy tells us that we have a certain percentage of helium in the universe, and the amount created during the Big Bang is very tightly constrained by the number of lepton families. Current helium percentages allow for three families, and just barely four if we squeezed and fudged the numbers.
The Universe is the poor man's particle accelerator, as the saying goes. Helium again: discovered as existing in the sun before it was found here on Earth.
The two sciences help one another. Killing one in favor of the other isn't helping either of them.
I think the poster was referring to Alien, Aliens, et al.
I think that the tipster thing is an indication of how people are generous -- which is to say, not at all.
As for leaving tips at restaurants, you'll find that people leave the largest tips when they are in a group, publically. Why? They don't want to be embarassed and be seen as cheapskates. It's a basic social pressure, and you can ask any waitress about it. Conversely, people who just pay the bill, who are alone, and who don't have to look anyone in the eye when they pay ... aren't as generous. Gnutella users are both singular (in that few of them have anyone looking over their shoulders when the tipping time comes due) and anonymous (in that nobody can wag a finger at them for not coughing up a few bucks). People, by and large, are cheap bastards, and they'll not be likely to leave a buck for artists they only like one track from. It's these artists with talent who could make it, but might not, that are in real trouble.
And, frankly, if you are trying to enforce a system where the leeches of the world (equivalent to maybe 90% of humanity) have to pay, they won't go for it. They'll drift over to Napster or anything that is free before they shell out. This may be a cynical view of human nature, but I'll be shocked if it isn't also accurate.
If you are concerned about the artists/content creators, try implementing the following features and see how it works out...
- Something to allow each artist to see what item of theirs has been downloaded and how many times...
- Something where the artists can see how much they have had donated to them for each piece of content...
- An "opt-out" feature (like what Doubleclick and other big websites say/should be doing) where, if they don't like it, they can have their material pulled from distribution in this fashion. If opting out is good enough for users who don't want their privacy data distributed without consent(and what privacy advocate doesn't shout about that?), then it should be good enough for producers who don't want their content data distributed without consent? Two edged sword, isn't it?
If you can track the Mojo, you can track each of these features without too much sweat.People sharing files now have to give back, so, again we're at a "payment" system, where we are paying in terms of bandwidth and hard drive space (both of which still cost something). And the people getting screwed again? The musicians. Trade those mp3s, and make sure other people have to give some back, you don't want people wasting your precious bandwidth and hard drive space, eating your cycles, but do anything to prevent giving to the artists.
With Gnutella and Mojo Nation, we have successfully replicated the record companies, the labels and the distributors, right down to the part where we screw the artists. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If you don't believe me, consider this:
- Old style record companies: 90% of the crap they push is Britney Spears, Metallica, or N'Sync (sorry if I got the names wrong)
- Gnutella + Mojo Nation: 90% of the crap people have on their hard drives is...Britney Spears, Metallica, or N'Sync.
Congratulations, we have successfully replicated most of the lousy things in the music industry. I imagine we'll see Flatplanet payola appearing pretty soon... Oh, sure, you'll probably argue that:- Not everything being shared is music
... but I'd like to see a breakdown on the numbers there, a pie chart would not show a great deal of revolutionary doctrines being surpressed as compared to mp3s
- People can always donate to the artists...What was that walloping total in the electronic tip jar again? $200? Wasn't most of it to someone already enormously popular, again screwing the little guy?
- People can offer any music they want
... but let's see what they actually do.
Idealism about how it could be used has nothing to do with how it is actually being used.I'm looking for cost-free stuff that isn't cripware to get started. I have a very strong math/physics background, so I have no problem describing equations of motion, but I haven't the faintest as to how to get started.
Also, how prohibitive is the hardware for this kind of thing?
This question could be resolved by checking your reference frame. If I am someone outside of the black hole, dropping my copy of Webster's in, I never actually see that copy of Webster's hit the event horizon. Instead, it approaches it more and more slowly, the image growing ever redder and ever dimmer. From my reference frame, it never actually enters the black hole. It may be very red and very dim, but just 'cause I can't read it, doesn't mean that it is not there. Locking that Webster's in a box doesn't count as information loss. Thus, no information loss.
From the reference frame of someone (someone due to die a quick and short death) inside the event horizon, I would see a Webster's plunging in towards me. Still, no information loss.
Black holes were also once called "frozen stars," due to the fact that the "history" of a black hole (as Thorne puts it) is contained just above the event horizon -- the star's surface would appear to be there, if it weren't so red(-shifted) and dim. Somewhere in Wheeler's gravitation there's a nice calculation on how long it takes something to become practically invisible (red/dim) as it plunges towards the event horizon.
What is troubling for my two cent explanation is the problem of the matter that was there when the collapse began, which would be the neutron-laden core of a supernova. That definitely seems like lost information.
Black holes do all kinds of fun things, like violate baryon conservation and lepton conservation, in big ways. They do pose some very interesting questions. Of course, we don't have any really handy to test out stuff like Hawking radiation and whatnot on, so we won't know if our theory meets reality. We've detected black holes, but we haven't gotten up close enough to really know if what we predict about them in regards to particle production is true.
- Electrons
- Electron neutrinos
- Muons
- Muon neutrinos
- Tauons
- Tauon neutrinos
- Plus six more, tack on an "anti-" prefix for each of the six above.
Now, I'd have to check, but I thought pions were mesons, yes?Do you have any pages up where we can look at the script? Is it perl?
You want sick, try doing stuff in GR, where you set both c and G to be equal to 1.
Money is the blood of any company. Protecting their wallet is basically like protecting their heart. Continuing existence is based on "do we have enough cash to do this month's payroll?"
If, and this is purely hypothetical and would never happen, if Windows 2000 was a total resource hog and, due to its extreme bloat, staggered around like a drunken boar with a hip replacement, you could have 10% of the servers running W2k, however, they might only be serving, say, half as fast as a lighter, more reasonable operating system, due to reboots, bloat, inefficient code, checking to see if you are running Netscape's browser so it could serve to you just a little slower, and so forth.
Again, purely hypothetical. Nothing to see here folks, move along!
Meanwhile, rather than the "let's put a big wall around it" approach, how about deflecting those oncoming protons with, say, a magnetic field? We could safely assume a rough direction for them, straight down, plus or minus 120 degrees in either direction. A stable magnetic field wouldn't be harmful to human flesh, as opposed to an oscillating one. Let's see, assume go with your 100 MeV proton, make the shelter five meters tall...well, we'd probably need to get cracking on that superconductor technology to make it happen, but it is worth a shot.
Meanwhile, let's take a clue from R. Durans and see if we can't hijack some of its DNA to help our aresnauts rebuild their damaged DNA at a faster rate, which is where most of the radiation damage occurs, anyway.
These are all three separate projects and problems, but, my guess is that they are all capable of being research independently and could conceivably be finished around the same time. I give the genetic engineering a bit more time than the rest of them, but hey, it's worth a shot.
First you do the research and development work. You pay the engineers. You test the parts in various conditions. You design, you redesign, you do it over and over again. Much of the expense is in the R&D. For a second probe, just copy the first. No additional R&D required, just like in cars.
It's probably smarter to design the hell out of a single probe, then launch ten of the things, all identical, like buckshot.
A system wherein only the people who own the factories and the land have any money or power. Yeah. Stop and think about how great it was, before unions (I say this because destroying copyright would drop the value of "intellectual labor" to an astonishing degree), before all of those copyright systems were in place.
Does copyright suffer abuse? Hell yes. Can I make a perfect analogy between tangible property and intellectual property? Well, no. So what? Who said that the Noosphere had to be exactly like meatspace?
The paper seems to say, "Intellectual property is hard and confusing, must abolish." This is the Neaderthal approach. No, what happens is we need to think harder. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law" (I'm misquoting, nine points? Nine points out of ten? Do I get a gold star?) worked great for a while. It doesn't extend perfectly into the realm of ideas. So what? Who says it has to? It just means we'll have to come up with new concepts, rather than extending old concepts to the point of idiocy.
If you abolish intellectual property, you will go back to the factories. The factories may look like MIDI studios for musicians, who will now be no more than jingle-writers for commercials. The factories may look like data entry for creative writers, who will be reduced to the status of ad copy and Hallmark cards, or possibly romance novels. The programmer will now be a data entry guy, just entering code, and his factory will look like a Unix workstation bought by the guy he writes drivers for. The artists will be doing work in studios in giant rows to catch the morning sun, and will be called "graphic designers." Back to minimum wage, guys.
Our economy is moving more and more towards the production of intellectual goods, not tangible ones. The service sector is huge.
Many artists work for more than just recognition, and, let us not forget that recognition and compensation frequently go hand-in-hand. Bill Gates is famous (or infamous) partly due to the amount of money he possesses. Demanding that someone give up their time for free (which is what you are doing if you tell people to do intellectual work sans monetary reward) is like saying, "Hey, come mow my lawn!"
No longer will your artists and programmers have any independence. We will all require patrons and corporations to back us from largesse. We will paint flattering pictures of moneyed families. We will compose pop tunes about how great it is to use Microsoft (or RedHat, you never know). We will ghostwrite biographies of Linus Torvalds, Courtney Love, and George Bush. We will program what we are told to program, for whom, when we are told to do it. We will do it cheaply, because our work has no intrinsic value, and we will enjoy our minimum wage. We will not sing, paint, write, or program what is on our minds, because the people who pay for the studios, the canvases, the printing, and the servers may not agree with us.
"Destroy a work of corporate art," said Tyler Derden. If we take away intellectual property, that will be the future: corporate art. Corporate programming. No more little guys in basements making the bills on a dream.
Now, stop slacking and Slashdotting, back to your factories!