Well, there are some problems with this. I favor the heavily armored elephants because, well, exactly what animals prey on elephants? Not too damned many. Gazelles, on the other hand, are definitely the takeout of the animal kingdom: cheap, easily available, and tasty!
I, as a clueless sysadmin, would rather see the source code, for numerous reasons:
Source code allows me to compile an executable to test if my current systems are vulnerable. "Just patch," you say. The problems with this are twofold:
Many of the patches that are released are not fulled regression tested on some of the more obscure problems. A choice between "Well, I could install this non-regression tested patch on an important machine" or "I can't figure out if I'm even vulnerable to this one!" is not much of a choice at all.
Not all of these exploits can be solved wtih a simple patch, some require reconfiguration, new software, whatever.
Source code, rather than an executable, allows me to make sure I am not installing a Trojan, e.g. "New vulnerability found! Use this binary to test your system!" and having it format c: or alter my/bin/login
Source code allows me to further incorporate detection of this vulnerability into an automated scanner, for later work. As I add machines, I run an automated scan against them.
I simply cannot count on vendors to getting around to fixing things. I will give a practical, if Microsoft, example, namely the RFPoison DoS attack on the IPC$ for services.exe under WinNT 4.0. I was nailed by this one almost two years ago, quite casually (mind you, by someone who was not a mere script kiddie). When did Microsoft correct this? Service Pack 6. Of course, if you search on their site, they also claim it to be a not-fully-tested post Service Pack 6a hotfix on a different page. Which is it? Apparently, not even they know.
It was a security issue (DoS). It was obscure (MS sure as hell didn't tell me). I got nailed. Security through obscurity failed in this particular instance. It would be interesting to do a comparison of various exploits to see how they work out, rather than us all shouting opinions, ambiguous logic, and, in my case, lousy anecdotal evidence.
We can't vote on every single thing...
on
Inside Echelon
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· Score: 4
"We can't vote on every single thing that happens in government..."
I humbly suggest that the potential to do that is now at hand. I'm not sure which Presidents have lost the public vote, but ended up Presidents because of the electoral college, but the technology, if not actually present, is at hand for online voting and direct democratic participation in the government. We could dispatch the electoral college entirely. In fact, I'm somewhat at a loss as to its current utility. We've had what it takes to eliminate the electoral college for decades, as far as I can tell.
Certainly, I will not sit on filibuster.gov or something, waiting all day to cast my vote on every little thing, but, I don't have to vote on every little thing right now. I could conceivably vote on the issues which were important to me.
This technology could start at the county/city level, move up to the state level, and then eventually federal.
Also, we need not control the troops in the woods. How about people casting simple, "let's get out of Vietnam" votes? We need not try to vote in every little thing, all the time. We could concentrate on some of the broader issues.
Mind you, some of the Greeks thought that this would be mob rule, and the elitist in me cringes at the thought of millions of sub-100-IQ Americans punching away at the "Let's have gladiators on national holidays and public torture of criminals!" option on their WebTVs, but with a small but bold experiment at a local level, we could see how it works out.
Pardon me if I am wrong, but is not Texas the #1 state in executions? I'm sure we could even it out a bit if we divided the executees by the amount of people in Texas' population as a whole, but... I believe that, on average, Texas is whacking one guy every two weeks.
You may not do it for money. Are you now mandating that everyone else do the same?
What if I say, "Screw my privacy rights, let's put a webcam everywhere in my life," right now? Does that mean that you suddenly are required to do so? No.
Just because one person wants to give up a right, doesn't mean that the rest of us have to. If you want to live in a commune, or undergo alien experiments, or have Carnivore read your email doesn't mean that everyone should jump in with you.
And, for the folks who want to create for a living, what the heck is so bad about wanting to put a roof over your head and simultaneously avoid the deep fat fryer burns on your forearms from your shift at KFC? Starving artists are very romantic notions, but they don't exactly put out a lot of second CDs.
"In the other, almost every piece of information is unrestricted, and the people who created it are rewarded in other ways."...
If the people taking that information feel like it.
What are you going to do, send them a box of cookies? Warm and supportive Hallmark cards? I'd like everyone who has a bunch of mp3s to apply the following filter:
Remove all mp3s in your list that you actually own the media to, CDs, cassettes, vinyl, or, God help us, minidisc.
Remove all remaining mp3s by bands you can actually swear you'll buy CDs from in the next three months. Be honest.
Remove all remaining mp3s for songs you've only had on your hard drive for two months (let's give you a chance to throw out the chaff).
If you really feel like you are someone who has the exclusive right to determine how much someone else makes (and, for those of you who are high-paid geeks, or don't think you're that highly paid, guess how much someone working at McDonald's thinks you should make), take off all bands that are incredibly famous millionaires, your Britney Spears, Metallica, and NIN kind of bands.
Armed with that list of remaining tracks, go over to your wardrobe and count how many band T-shirts you own by that band.
What? No T-shirts? Well, where are your concert ticket stubs? Okay, none of those...umm, bumper stickers? (A stretch, who knows if they get anything from that at all.)
Let's get this "rewarded in other ways" thing nailed down before we start the revolution, shall we? And, heck, before we're in such a rush to help out all of the poor, unfortunate natives (the musicians, the artists, the writers), let's actually ask them before bringing (forcing) the benefits of our wonderful civilization on them. "Geek culture knows best for you" is not the approach we want to take.
Gee, I forgot that the onus of my rights was entirely on me. Stupidly I go outside not wearing a bulletproof vest. I mean, if I'm not interested in being shot, maybe I shouldn't be walking around without one?
Give me a break.
The same group that is having a big to-do (and rightly so) about Carnivore is saying that it is okay to snoop around on IRC?
I most seriously doubt this is going to be implemented by putting a bot in every channel. I just hopped on Efnet, Undernet, and Dalnet, looking for the nicks that were scrolling by in their little java applet, I couldn't find any of them in any of the channels they had listed. No, my guess is that someone is taking a rogue ircd server and just hauling everything that comes through onto eNow. I couldn't find anything about the specific implementation on their website, though I didn't look for more than a few minutes.
But, if you are upset about Carnivore, you should be upset about this. Anyone know anything about this besides the pretty brochure? I suggest some harsh asskicking on this. I'm not doing mindshare so someone can make a buck off of my thoughts with my friends. What's next, putting microphones at tables in restaurants?
As someone once pointed out, "what we have here is a failure to communicate." That is to say, they want to communicate this "buy me" noise to us, leading to a cycle of effort-avoidance-increased effort-increased avoidance.
Just as we have learned to filter out the number of signs, bits of advertising, logos, billboards, posters, handbills, and such that continually surround us (and, if you don't believe me, take a video camera, duct tape it to the top dashboard of your car, go on a ten minute drive, then play back and count every advertisement you see), so the spammers (which can be abstracted to Advertising And Marketing Droids) will simply try harder.
Pretty soon the logos on your shoes will light up when you walk. It won't be particularly hard to rig up a tiny chip and speaker to cough out the one second noise of "Nike!" every fifth step, with energy supplied by piezoelectric crystals.
No, marketing works like this...they advertise until you buy the product. Now, this has a scary problem with it, namely, total immersion in advertising, via e-mail, product placements on Buffy (too bad they don't show ads for sex toys, if they did it on Skinemax, we could have product placements in Buffy), until the point where we break down and buy the damned thing.
The point at which it all stops is when the marketing budget breaks, when you don't make enough out of advertising the product to justify the product's existence.
With snail-mail, this is easy enough, you just make sure that they pay bulk rate postage on so many addresses that they never get back what they put into it. Right now, they are betting that 28 cents in bulk rate mail (or whatever it is right now) will, on average, get them 28.5 cents back. If they mail out to too many fake addresses and the return drops below 28 cents, snail-mail spam starts to go away.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good model for the destruction of e-mail spam, as e-mail is, currently, anyway, free. Now, if someone ever legislates that e-mail costs money, well, the only good thing about it is that it will help eliminate spam. And we'd still be stuck with the rest of advertising.
Also, making spam illegal sets a bad precedent for other speech. What we should do is not only have the legal right to be taken off of a spammer's list, but, have the right to find out from where they received that information. We could then backtrack to that company, and keep backtracking until we are off of the books. Our current situation just means that someone takes us off of his list, the guy who sold him that list just sells our addresses to someone else! We're killing the ants, not the queens.
Each spammer should be required to, for every name on the list, keep the name, phone number, email address, blah blah blah, of the source who sold him a target name. Failure to give up that information on demand should be an automatic $1,000 penalty, something really juicy. Also, said source corporations would be required to keep their phone numbers, etc., open for no less than a year at a time, to prevent name-selling companies from just changing their names and phone numbers every three weeks to avoid us tracking their asses down. We will eventually be able to find that Radio Shack, or Toysmart, or whoever is the company that originally gave our name out. We need a trail, we need to track it to its source, and then we need to strike, sue, lobby, and maim.
Parents today are not leaping in front of sabretooth tigers to protect their infants. Parenting today is about childproofing the entire world so you don't have to pay attention to what little Suzy is doing.
Think about it.
First, we have the idiot box (I'll bet "boob tube" is probably filtered out by default). Put your child in front of it, point their heads at the shiny part, and walk off. Originally, this worked out pretty well, then TV started getting sexy. That just had to go.
Nevermind watching TV with your kids, probably the most minimal form of parenting possible. Nevermind that you don't want your kids to see sex (hopefully, they will grow up and have sex), but it's okay to watch gods know how many murders per day (hopefully, they will grow up and not murder people).
No, for the 15% of the children who were just a little too active and intelligent to just sit in front of the television, let's give them something interactive. Here comes the Web. Same principle applies here. Put the kid in front of a computer, let little Timmy click away, and, again, stop interacting with the child.
Minimalist parenting arises from a mostly Republican morality and a Democratic sense of "we know what's best." The worst of both parties has collided to create parents who would like to put a childproof cap on the world, kid-safe, mother-approved, no small parts to swallow, no sharp edges. Just have them, take the baby pictures, throw some clothes on them, and then let them wander about the big, wild world while you go off and have your lattes and shop frantically in your SUVs. Your children will be protected automagically, just as easy as procreation itself.
Parents have pretty much abdicated all interaction with their kids, and tools like this help it happen.
Walking around with their big white hair, sweatervests inside out, forgetting where they live, and, more importantly, wasting our tax dollars.
Damn me for not knowing it offhand, but there's a pretty famous quote about a queen in some country asking a scientist just how he thought all of this electricity stuff was going to be useful. Might have even seen it here.
Anyway, it's not "can we find a use for neutrinos." Neutrinos interact only weakly (a bit of a physics pun, they don't listen to the strong nuclear force, aka colorforce, just gravity and the weak nuclear), and are fairly intractable.
What is potentially useful is the understanding they give us. With them, we might be able to better understand, say, the weak nuclear force involved in beta decay better. If this sounds abtruse, how about the idea of making old nuclear waste radiate down to stable iron atoms and various other smaller, stable nuclei? Waste disposal problem solved.
In the large scheme of things, neutrinos themselves may not be particularly interesting, but specific numbers, like mass, may eventually answer questions like: Will the universe expand forever, or will it be reborn after a Big Crunch? And, what's the field equation that runs the universe?
Just try understanding electricity without magnetism, and you'll see what I mean.
There's a quite extended calculation in one of my cosmology books. It might be in Outer Space: Inner Space a collection of symposium material, dryly formatted in a hideous monospace font.
It turns out that the observed helium we see in the universe puts very tight limits on the number of neutrino families.
Three being the most likely, four being just barely able to fit with the rest of our observations. Also, three is also a likely choice, given the whole "we're only seeing one-third of the neutrinos we expect from the sun" plus "neutrino oscillation." Four, well, it's possible, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
For us to remain truly private, forget about all of that fancy online business. We need real-world privacy to back it up.
The scenario: I set up an account with PayPal, maybe I've send them a money order from the Post Office (which has probably videotaped me buying the money order). I send it off to PayPal, I agree on some eBay transaction for something I really don't want people to know I have, like "Dildo-Wielding Herpes She-Males" or whatnot.
The problem: How do I get it to me? It has to show up somewhere, doesn't it? A Post Office box? They want to see a drivers' license. Mailboxes, Etc.? Not only do they cost more, again, they want to see ID.
Anonymous surfing, posting, etc., these things are possible, if not now, eventually, with Fling and ZeroKnowledge (and, hey, good luck making that happen on your NAT'd DSL connection from your Linux box), but what if I want to buy something? How can I set up bank accounts under fake names? ISPs can trace me down to a phone line, that has an address attached to it.
It all boils down to getting a fake identity made, birth certificate on up. From there, your drivers' license (photo taken with optional disguise kit) and a social security card. Then, a bank account, work up a little credit, and so forth. Backstop by trying to plant records in a school system. "Sure, I was there in 2nd grade."
Anonymous cash is great if I am buying porn-time online, but if I want to receive tangible goods, it's going to have to reach my hot little hands somehow. Same problem with snailmail, how do you get replies back?
Until these issues are addressed, we are not going to have privacy.
Uh, I just went to a nice presentation on the Casimir effect about two months back. By people who spend years doing it, with Ph.Ds.
The Casimir effect is NOT negative energy.
Nor is it a bottomless source of energy, as people seem to assume.
Just because two plates fall towards each other, that doesn't mean that it is negative energy. Potential energy is not negative energy. Otherwise, you could say that potential energy from gravitation is negative energy (hey, stuff falls down, right?)
Also, amusingly, the two plate thing creates an "attraction," but, depending on the geometry of the two surfaces, you can also get a repulsion, where the two surfaces would push apart. The math is really, really ugly, though.
So, again, Casimir effect is NOT negative energy. Also, all of my previous stuff stands. Negative net energies would cause all kinds of things to happen that we just do not see.
Casimir effect is a purely QM phenomenon. In a very weird way, it's like the Van Der Waals forces. I'm not sure if you've ever done the basic blackbody stuff, but, imagine a box, say the size of the universe, with two metal plates floating in the midst of it. You can have all kinds of allowable, full wavelenghts of photons (virtual, hey, this is QM) on either side of the plate. Big wavelengths, light-years long. Little ones, nanometers long. Anyway, the possible push that QM allows on the plates is just a little bit bigger than the push generated by the possible push between the plates, thus generating what appears to be an attraction (really just unbalanced pushing from both sides).
A proton decays into a neutron by emitting a positron and an electron-neutrino. Welcome to conservation of lepton number, as well as possibly spin.
Don't get your physics off of kiddie webpages.
In this scenario, we have to conserve a few quantities.
Charge: this is why we have to have a positron, a proton can't just drop to a neutron, we have to conserve charge by kicking off a positron.
Baryon number: this is why the proton turns into a neutron (although, to do this, you have to add energy, protons mass slightly less than neutrons)
Lepton number: Leptons in equals leptons out. A positron has lepton number of -1, which is balanced by the +1 of the electron-neutrino.
Spin: Spin conservation is what led to first the hypothesis for, and then the eventual detection of, neutrinos.
Only some of the conservations can ever be broken, like CP (this is the very slight violation that we think led to the predominance of matter in the universe, as opposed to a perfect balance of antimatter and matter). There's a good physics website out there that lists the current experimental conservation limits, some of them down to one part in a billion or so.
Maybe we need a Particle Physics for Slashdotters webpage. Any suggestions?
Gravity gets no stronger (in proportion), as far as we can tell, down at the subatomic scale.
The model for gravity has a strength like 1/r^2, just as the electromagnetic force. As far as we can tell right now, it's a wimp at all scales.
Interestingly, the strong nuclear force is "short-range" in that it drops to nothing after a certain distance. However, at subatomic distances, it outstrips even the power of the EM force. This is why stable nuclei don't fly apart.
"Matter consists of electrons, protons, and neutrons." Wrong!
Matter consists of leptons, antileptons, quarks, and antiquarks. Baryons (including but CERTAINLY not limited to protons and neutrons) are built out of quarks and antiquarks, three of them, to be exact. Mesons (a class of particles you have neglected) are made of two quarks. No, quarks don't ever appear singly. Leptons aren't quarks. In the lepton family, we have electrons, muons, tauons, antielectrons (positrons), antimuons, and antitauons.
"Electrons have a negative charge but no mass." Wrong!
Electrons have mass. The mass is smaller than that of a proton, and it would take roughly 1,300 of them, if I recall, to equal that mass, but, yes, they definitely have mass.
Same thing goes for positrons.
Also wrong "a proton is essentially a neutron combined with a positron." First, neutrons weigh more than protons. Second, you're forgetting about conservation of baryon number.
When a neutron beta-decays, it typically falls apart into a proton, an electron, and an electron anti-neutrino.
Never confuse equality of quantity with equality of property. Example: A dollar buys me two dollars. However, apples are not the same thing as dollars. Apples are tender, dollars are legal tender. Apples are round, dollars are rectangular and flat.
Conversion may occur under some limited conditions, as well.
For example, I may not transform an electron directly into energy. You gasp! No, I'm not kidding. I have to have an electron and a positron to do that. Nor can I convert a photon into just an electron.
Saying that "mass=energy" and "charge=energy" ignores all kinds of basics, like conservation of baryon number, conservation of lepton number, conservation of charge, etc.
Matter and energy are not the same two things. You may exchange one for another, under limitations, but don't think that they are in any way identical.
The "we just haven't found it" argument has many flaws, not the least of which is that you can look as long as you like on Earth, you're not going to stumble across a unicorn.
Also, let's talk about what negative mass entails: If you go for negative mass, I'll use the kiddie E=mc^2 and point out that negative mass would lead to having negative energy (don't confuse this with potential energy, or a negative differential).
Now, if negative energy was an "allowable" number, we would see all kinds of very odd things in quantum mechanics that we do not see, at all, and we'd expect to see them quite easily. They haven't been observed yet. Basically, think about the creation of two particles, one with positive energy, one with negative energy. This wouldn't violate any conservation laws (assuming you made one a baryon and another an anti-baryon, charges opposite, blah blah). We would then see particles simply appearing out of nowhere and staying there, all the time. The vacuum would blaze up and be, well, solid particles. We don't see this, ergo, no negative energy, ergo, no negative mass.
Now, you could "decouple" the two numbers and say, "perhaps the 'mass' in gravitational attraction doesn't have to do anything with the 'mass' in E=mc^2." Unfortunately, that's also a problem if you look at anything in General Relativity.
As for the "other forces," we keep looking. Every so often they'll revive a fifth and sixth force routine, I think the last time I remember that happening was circa 1990, but it has yet to pan out.
Also, only in EM fields do the same charges repel. In strong, they hook to each other, there's no real analogue of "charge" there, unless you count baryon number. Weak I'm not so sure about, you have to start talking about neutral currents and stuff my profs never got to when I got my degree.
The upper limit of the radio band could be, well, infrared, or, hell, yeah, optical light. Big laser beams going through the air. Tough luck on those planes, eh?
Physics is full of good, solid, tested limits.
The "Nothing is impossible" crowd does not understand the concept of "the laws of physics." No matter what version of the laws of physics you use, current Standard Model or something a thousand years from now, the laws of physics determine what does, and does not, happen. If you want ANYTHING to happen, then you can have no laws of physics, whatsoever, at any time, and everything you see must be totally random fluctuations.
Put another way, when you observe an event, well, you didn't observe something else happening. I dropped a rock and observed it falling. I did not observe it turning into a cat. Some set of physical laws (whether or not the ones we know now are perfect, we know they aren't) determined that one thing happened instead of a thousand other things. That means that something was forbidden by physics to occur.
Limits exist. Deal with them. Mass-energy conservation. Live with it. Uncertainty principle. Cope with it.
I never had a chance to own an Amiga, but I understand the nostalgia. My dad sold my TI-994A.
I used to have all kinds of cool games for it, like Fathom and Parsec, stuff I'd play for hours.
I did my first real home programming on it, too, since the Timex-Sinclair just couldn't cut it. I had to back up my programs to cassette tapes when I was done with them. I made my own stupid video games with it.
It's a shame I can't find any TI-994A emulators out there. What's this about the ROMs being passed around? I'd kill to play some of those good old games again.
Many chat clients do have viruses/virii/trojans/worms.
The very popular mIRC has a lot of scripting abilities in it. Older versions had "default scripts," and, if you had DCC autoget enabled, someone could replace your default scripts rather easily, and you would start sending out the virus yourself. I've also seen a newer version of that which relies on.bat files of some kind.
Also, the much older ircii had numerous "warscripts," "botscripts," and so forth that, at the very least, were often useful-but-trojaned, allowing remote users to control IRC clients. Worse yet, ircii even had an "/exec" command, allowing you to execute commands right onto your shell. As you might imagine, getting newbies to "/exec rm [fileglob of your choice]" was considered high sport.
Basically, they had roughly the same susceptibility to attacks as does the oft-maligned-and-deserving-it Microsoft Outlook.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you want your server to be the gazelle?
- Source code allows me to compile an executable to test if my current systems are vulnerable. "Just patch," you say. The problems with this are twofold:
- Many of the patches that are released are not fulled regression tested on some of the more obscure problems. A choice between "Well, I could install this non-regression tested patch on an important machine" or "I can't figure out if I'm even vulnerable to this one!" is not much of a choice at all.
- Not all of these exploits can be solved wtih a simple patch, some require reconfiguration, new software, whatever.
- Source code, rather than an executable, allows me to make sure I am not installing a Trojan, e.g. "New vulnerability found! Use this binary to test your system!" and having it format c: or alter my
/bin/login - Source code allows me to further incorporate detection of this vulnerability into an automated scanner, for later work. As I add machines, I run an automated scan against them.
I simply cannot count on vendors to getting around to fixing things. I will give a practical, if Microsoft, example, namely the RFPoison DoS attack on the IPC$ for services.exe under WinNT 4.0. I was nailed by this one almost two years ago, quite casually (mind you, by someone who was not a mere script kiddie). When did Microsoft correct this? Service Pack 6. Of course, if you search on their site, they also claim it to be a not-fully-tested post Service Pack 6a hotfix on a different page. Which is it? Apparently, not even they know.It was a security issue (DoS). It was obscure (MS sure as hell didn't tell me). I got nailed. Security through obscurity failed in this particular instance. It would be interesting to do a comparison of various exploits to see how they work out, rather than us all shouting opinions, ambiguous logic, and, in my case, lousy anecdotal evidence.
I humbly suggest that the potential to do that is now at hand. I'm not sure which Presidents have lost the public vote, but ended up Presidents because of the electoral college, but the technology, if not actually present, is at hand for online voting and direct democratic participation in the government. We could dispatch the electoral college entirely. In fact, I'm somewhat at a loss as to its current utility. We've had what it takes to eliminate the electoral college for decades, as far as I can tell.
Certainly, I will not sit on filibuster.gov or something, waiting all day to cast my vote on every little thing, but, I don't have to vote on every little thing right now. I could conceivably vote on the issues which were important to me.
This technology could start at the county/city level, move up to the state level, and then eventually federal.
Also, we need not control the troops in the woods. How about people casting simple, "let's get out of Vietnam" votes? We need not try to vote in every little thing, all the time. We could concentrate on some of the broader issues.
Mind you, some of the Greeks thought that this would be mob rule, and the elitist in me cringes at the thought of millions of sub-100-IQ Americans punching away at the "Let's have gladiators on national holidays and public torture of criminals!" option on their WebTVs, but with a small but bold experiment at a local level, we could see how it works out.
It's not a stereotype if you live up to it.
What if I say, "Screw my privacy rights, let's put a webcam everywhere in my life," right now? Does that mean that you suddenly are required to do so? No.
Just because one person wants to give up a right, doesn't mean that the rest of us have to. If you want to live in a commune, or undergo alien experiments, or have Carnivore read your email doesn't mean that everyone should jump in with you.
And, for the folks who want to create for a living, what the heck is so bad about wanting to put a roof over your head and simultaneously avoid the deep fat fryer burns on your forearms from your shift at KFC? Starving artists are very romantic notions, but they don't exactly put out a lot of second CDs.
If the people taking that information feel like it.
What are you going to do, send them a box of cookies? Warm and supportive Hallmark cards? I'd like everyone who has a bunch of mp3s to apply the following filter:
- Remove all mp3s in your list that you actually own the media to, CDs, cassettes, vinyl, or, God help us, minidisc.
- Remove all remaining mp3s by bands you can actually swear you'll buy CDs from in the next three months. Be honest.
- Remove all remaining mp3s for songs you've only had on your hard drive for two months (let's give you a chance to throw out the chaff).
- If you really feel like you are someone who has the exclusive right to determine how much someone else makes (and, for those of you who are high-paid geeks, or don't think you're that highly paid, guess how much someone working at McDonald's thinks you should make), take off all bands that are incredibly famous millionaires, your Britney Spears, Metallica, and NIN kind of bands.
Armed with that list of remaining tracks, go over to your wardrobe and count how many band T-shirts you own by that band.What? No T-shirts? Well, where are your concert ticket stubs? Okay, none of those...umm, bumper stickers? (A stretch, who knows if they get anything from that at all.)
Let's get this "rewarded in other ways" thing nailed down before we start the revolution, shall we? And, heck, before we're in such a rush to help out all of the poor, unfortunate natives (the musicians, the artists, the writers), let's actually ask them before bringing (forcing) the benefits of our wonderful civilization on them. "Geek culture knows best for you" is not the approach we want to take.
Give me a break.
The same group that is having a big to-do (and rightly so) about Carnivore is saying that it is okay to snoop around on IRC?
I most seriously doubt this is going to be implemented by putting a bot in every channel. I just hopped on Efnet, Undernet, and Dalnet, looking for the nicks that were scrolling by in their little java applet, I couldn't find any of them in any of the channels they had listed. No, my guess is that someone is taking a rogue ircd server and just hauling everything that comes through onto eNow. I couldn't find anything about the specific implementation on their website, though I didn't look for more than a few minutes.
But, if you are upset about Carnivore, you should be upset about this. Anyone know anything about this besides the pretty brochure? I suggest some harsh asskicking on this. I'm not doing mindshare so someone can make a buck off of my thoughts with my friends. What's next, putting microphones at tables in restaurants?
Just as we have learned to filter out the number of signs, bits of advertising, logos, billboards, posters, handbills, and such that continually surround us (and, if you don't believe me, take a video camera, duct tape it to the top dashboard of your car, go on a ten minute drive, then play back and count every advertisement you see), so the spammers (which can be abstracted to Advertising And Marketing Droids) will simply try harder.
Pretty soon the logos on your shoes will light up when you walk. It won't be particularly hard to rig up a tiny chip and speaker to cough out the one second noise of "Nike!" every fifth step, with energy supplied by piezoelectric crystals.
No, marketing works like this...they advertise until you buy the product. Now, this has a scary problem with it, namely, total immersion in advertising, via e-mail, product placements on Buffy (too bad they don't show ads for sex toys, if they did it on Skinemax, we could have product placements in Buffy), until the point where we break down and buy the damned thing.
The point at which it all stops is when the marketing budget breaks, when you don't make enough out of advertising the product to justify the product's existence.
With snail-mail, this is easy enough, you just make sure that they pay bulk rate postage on so many addresses that they never get back what they put into it. Right now, they are betting that 28 cents in bulk rate mail (or whatever it is right now) will, on average, get them 28.5 cents back. If they mail out to too many fake addresses and the return drops below 28 cents, snail-mail spam starts to go away.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good model for the destruction of e-mail spam, as e-mail is, currently, anyway, free. Now, if someone ever legislates that e-mail costs money, well, the only good thing about it is that it will help eliminate spam. And we'd still be stuck with the rest of advertising.
Also, making spam illegal sets a bad precedent for other speech. What we should do is not only have the legal right to be taken off of a spammer's list, but, have the right to find out from where they received that information. We could then backtrack to that company, and keep backtracking until we are off of the books. Our current situation just means that someone takes us off of his list, the guy who sold him that list just sells our addresses to someone else! We're killing the ants, not the queens.
Each spammer should be required to, for every name on the list, keep the name, phone number, email address, blah blah blah, of the source who sold him a target name. Failure to give up that information on demand should be an automatic $1,000 penalty, something really juicy. Also, said source corporations would be required to keep their phone numbers, etc., open for no less than a year at a time, to prevent name-selling companies from just changing their names and phone numbers every three weeks to avoid us tracking their asses down. We will eventually be able to find that Radio Shack, or Toysmart, or whoever is the company that originally gave our name out. We need a trail, we need to track it to its source, and then we need to strike, sue, lobby, and maim.
Think about it.
First, we have the idiot box (I'll bet "boob tube" is probably filtered out by default). Put your child in front of it, point their heads at the shiny part, and walk off. Originally, this worked out pretty well, then TV started getting sexy. That just had to go.
Nevermind watching TV with your kids, probably the most minimal form of parenting possible. Nevermind that you don't want your kids to see sex (hopefully, they will grow up and have sex), but it's okay to watch gods know how many murders per day (hopefully, they will grow up and not murder people).
No, for the 15% of the children who were just a little too active and intelligent to just sit in front of the television, let's give them something interactive. Here comes the Web. Same principle applies here. Put the kid in front of a computer, let little Timmy click away, and, again, stop interacting with the child.
Minimalist parenting arises from a mostly Republican morality and a Democratic sense of "we know what's best." The worst of both parties has collided to create parents who would like to put a childproof cap on the world, kid-safe, mother-approved, no small parts to swallow, no sharp edges. Just have them, take the baby pictures, throw some clothes on them, and then let them wander about the big, wild world while you go off and have your lattes and shop frantically in your SUVs. Your children will be protected automagically, just as easy as procreation itself.
Parents have pretty much abdicated all interaction with their kids, and tools like this help it happen.
50 pictures. Blocks 34. That means it leaves 16 unblocked, right?
16 divided by 50, multiply by 100%, hrm, yeah, that's leaving 32% viewable alright.
Looks like we all need a few math exercises.
Damn me for not knowing it offhand, but there's a pretty famous quote about a queen in some country asking a scientist just how he thought all of this electricity stuff was going to be useful. Might have even seen it here.
Anyway, it's not "can we find a use for neutrinos." Neutrinos interact only weakly (a bit of a physics pun, they don't listen to the strong nuclear force, aka colorforce, just gravity and the weak nuclear), and are fairly intractable.
What is potentially useful is the understanding they give us. With them, we might be able to better understand, say, the weak nuclear force involved in beta decay better. If this sounds abtruse, how about the idea of making old nuclear waste radiate down to stable iron atoms and various other smaller, stable nuclei? Waste disposal problem solved.
In the large scheme of things, neutrinos themselves may not be particularly interesting, but specific numbers, like mass, may eventually answer questions like: Will the universe expand forever, or will it be reborn after a Big Crunch? And, what's the field equation that runs the universe?
Just try understanding electricity without magnetism, and you'll see what I mean.
It turns out that the observed helium we see in the universe puts very tight limits on the number of neutrino families.
Three being the most likely, four being just barely able to fit with the rest of our observations. Also, three is also a likely choice, given the whole "we're only seeing one-third of the neutrinos we expect from the sun" plus "neutrino oscillation." Four, well, it's possible, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
The scenario: I set up an account with PayPal, maybe I've send them a money order from the Post Office (which has probably videotaped me buying the money order). I send it off to PayPal, I agree on some eBay transaction for something I really don't want people to know I have, like "Dildo-Wielding Herpes She-Males" or whatnot.
The problem: How do I get it to me? It has to show up somewhere, doesn't it? A Post Office box? They want to see a drivers' license. Mailboxes, Etc.? Not only do they cost more, again, they want to see ID.
Anonymous surfing, posting, etc., these things are possible, if not now, eventually, with Fling and ZeroKnowledge (and, hey, good luck making that happen on your NAT'd DSL connection from your Linux box), but what if I want to buy something? How can I set up bank accounts under fake names? ISPs can trace me down to a phone line, that has an address attached to it.
It all boils down to getting a fake identity made, birth certificate on up. From there, your drivers' license (photo taken with optional disguise kit) and a social security card. Then, a bank account, work up a little credit, and so forth. Backstop by trying to plant records in a school system. "Sure, I was there in 2nd grade."
Anonymous cash is great if I am buying porn-time online, but if I want to receive tangible goods, it's going to have to reach my hot little hands somehow. Same problem with snailmail, how do you get replies back?
Until these issues are addressed, we are not going to have privacy.
The Casimir effect is NOT negative energy.
Nor is it a bottomless source of energy, as people seem to assume.
Just because two plates fall towards each other, that doesn't mean that it is negative energy. Potential energy is not negative energy. Otherwise, you could say that potential energy from gravitation is negative energy (hey, stuff falls down, right?)
Also, amusingly, the two plate thing creates an "attraction," but, depending on the geometry of the two surfaces, you can also get a repulsion, where the two surfaces would push apart. The math is really, really ugly, though.
So, again, Casimir effect is NOT negative energy. Also, all of my previous stuff stands. Negative net energies would cause all kinds of things to happen that we just do not see.
Casimir effect is a purely QM phenomenon. In a very weird way, it's like the Van Der Waals forces. I'm not sure if you've ever done the basic blackbody stuff, but, imagine a box, say the size of the universe, with two metal plates floating in the midst of it. You can have all kinds of allowable, full wavelenghts of photons (virtual, hey, this is QM) on either side of the plate. Big wavelengths, light-years long. Little ones, nanometers long. Anyway, the possible push that QM allows on the plates is just a little bit bigger than the push generated by the possible push between the plates, thus generating what appears to be an attraction (really just unbalanced pushing from both sides).
A proton decays into a neutron by emitting a positron and an electron-neutrino. Welcome to conservation of lepton number, as well as possibly spin.
Don't get your physics off of kiddie webpages.
In this scenario, we have to conserve a few quantities.
- Charge: this is why we have to have a positron, a proton can't just drop to a neutron, we have to conserve charge by kicking off a positron.
- Baryon number: this is why the proton turns into a neutron (although, to do this, you have to add energy, protons mass slightly less than neutrons)
- Lepton number: Leptons in equals leptons out. A positron has lepton number of -1, which is balanced by the +1 of the electron-neutrino.
- Spin: Spin conservation is what led to first the hypothesis for, and then the eventual detection of, neutrinos.
Only some of the conservations can ever be broken, like CP (this is the very slight violation that we think led to the predominance of matter in the universe, as opposed to a perfect balance of antimatter and matter). There's a good physics website out there that lists the current experimental conservation limits, some of them down to one part in a billion or so.Maybe we need a Particle Physics for Slashdotters webpage. Any suggestions?
Gravity gets no stronger (in proportion), as far as we can tell, down at the subatomic scale.
The model for gravity has a strength like 1/r^2, just as the electromagnetic force. As far as we can tell right now, it's a wimp at all scales.
Interestingly, the strong nuclear force is "short-range" in that it drops to nothing after a certain distance. However, at subatomic distances, it outstrips even the power of the EM force. This is why stable nuclei don't fly apart.
Matter consists of leptons, antileptons, quarks, and antiquarks. Baryons (including but CERTAINLY not limited to protons and neutrons) are built out of quarks and antiquarks, three of them, to be exact. Mesons (a class of particles you have neglected) are made of two quarks. No, quarks don't ever appear singly. Leptons aren't quarks. In the lepton family, we have electrons, muons, tauons, antielectrons (positrons), antimuons, and antitauons.
"Electrons have a negative charge but no mass." Wrong!
Electrons have mass. The mass is smaller than that of a proton, and it would take roughly 1,300 of them, if I recall, to equal that mass, but, yes, they definitely have mass.
Same thing goes for positrons.
Also wrong "a proton is essentially a neutron combined with a positron." First, neutrons weigh more than protons. Second, you're forgetting about conservation of baryon number.
When a neutron beta-decays, it typically falls apart into a proton, an electron, and an electron anti-neutrino.
Whoops, sorry about that. I even previewed the thing before I posted. That's what I get for typing before I've had Mountain Dew.
Definitely not right.
Never confuse equality of quantity with equality of property. Example: A dollar buys me two dollars. However, apples are not the same thing as dollars. Apples are tender, dollars are legal tender. Apples are round, dollars are rectangular and flat.
Conversion may occur under some limited conditions, as well.
For example, I may not transform an electron directly into energy. You gasp! No, I'm not kidding. I have to have an electron and a positron to do that. Nor can I convert a photon into just an electron.
Saying that "mass=energy" and "charge=energy" ignores all kinds of basics, like conservation of baryon number, conservation of lepton number, conservation of charge, etc.
Matter and energy are not the same two things. You may exchange one for another, under limitations, but don't think that they are in any way identical.
The "we just haven't found it" argument has many flaws, not the least of which is that you can look as long as you like on Earth, you're not going to stumble across a unicorn.
Also, let's talk about what negative mass entails: If you go for negative mass, I'll use the kiddie E=mc^2 and point out that negative mass would lead to having negative energy (don't confuse this with potential energy, or a negative differential).
Now, if negative energy was an "allowable" number, we would see all kinds of very odd things in quantum mechanics that we do not see, at all, and we'd expect to see them quite easily. They haven't been observed yet. Basically, think about the creation of two particles, one with positive energy, one with negative energy. This wouldn't violate any conservation laws (assuming you made one a baryon and another an anti-baryon, charges opposite, blah blah). We would then see particles simply appearing out of nowhere and staying there, all the time. The vacuum would blaze up and be, well, solid particles. We don't see this, ergo, no negative energy, ergo, no negative mass.
Now, you could "decouple" the two numbers and say, "perhaps the 'mass' in gravitational attraction doesn't have to do anything with the 'mass' in E=mc^2." Unfortunately, that's also a problem if you look at anything in General Relativity.
As for the "other forces," we keep looking. Every so often they'll revive a fifth and sixth force routine, I think the last time I remember that happening was circa 1990, but it has yet to pan out.
Also, only in EM fields do the same charges repel. In strong, they hook to each other, there's no real analogue of "charge" there, unless you count baryon number. Weak I'm not so sure about, you have to start talking about neutral currents and stuff my profs never got to when I got my degree.
"How's Annie? How's Annie?"
This has not always happened.
The upper limit of the radio band could be, well, infrared, or, hell, yeah, optical light. Big laser beams going through the air. Tough luck on those planes, eh?
Physics is full of good, solid, tested limits.
The "Nothing is impossible" crowd does not understand the concept of "the laws of physics." No matter what version of the laws of physics you use, current Standard Model or something a thousand years from now, the laws of physics determine what does, and does not, happen. If you want ANYTHING to happen, then you can have no laws of physics, whatsoever, at any time, and everything you see must be totally random fluctuations.
Put another way, when you observe an event, well, you didn't observe something else happening. I dropped a rock and observed it falling. I did not observe it turning into a cat. Some set of physical laws (whether or not the ones we know now are perfect, we know they aren't) determined that one thing happened instead of a thousand other things. That means that something was forbidden by physics to occur.
Limits exist. Deal with them. Mass-energy conservation. Live with it. Uncertainty principle. Cope with it.
I used to have all kinds of cool games for it, like Fathom and Parsec, stuff I'd play for hours.
I did my first real home programming on it, too, since the Timex-Sinclair just couldn't cut it. I had to back up my programs to cassette tapes when I was done with them. I made my own stupid video games with it.
It's a shame I can't find any TI-994A emulators out there. What's this about the ROMs being passed around? I'd kill to play some of those good old games again.
The very popular mIRC has a lot of scripting abilities in it. Older versions had "default scripts," and, if you had DCC autoget enabled, someone could replace your default scripts rather easily, and you would start sending out the virus yourself. I've also seen a newer version of that which relies on .bat files of some kind.
Also, the much older ircii had numerous "warscripts," "botscripts," and so forth that, at the very least, were often useful-but-trojaned, allowing remote users to control IRC clients. Worse yet, ircii even had an "/exec" command, allowing you to execute commands right onto your shell. As you might imagine, getting newbies to "/exec rm [fileglob of your choice]" was considered high sport.
Basically, they had roughly the same susceptibility to attacks as does the oft-maligned-and-deserving-it Microsoft Outlook.