It's no secret any more that radio stations alter the sound of the records that they play. I listen to 'classic' rock a lot from the 1970's and pop from the 1960's. Before the songs came out on CD (and before I could find the CD's of classic rock in the public library as I don't buy RIAA product anymore), I would record long sessions of FM-radio broadcasts on 6-hour VCR tapes. When I found a song that I liked and wasn't in my collection, I would copy it onto a mix cassette audio tape. This was before MP3 and CD ripping appeared in the late 1990s.
When I started ripping the same songs from CDs, I noticed that they all sounded flat or simply different. I encoded several of the FM recordings to WAV files using GOLDWAVE and other audio programs and looked at the resulting waveforms of the CD and the FM broadcast. The FM always had less difference between the loudest and softest passages of the same song. Then when Slashdot appeared and this topic became occasionally discussed, several people described how FM stations routinely compressed the signal to make the music sound more 'alive' on the air and to overcome some FM frequency range limitations.
Personally, I like the FM compression. It adds a different mood to the song. I keep the old FM compressed recordings and will play them instead of the CD MP3 256KBPS recordings when I'm in the mood for a 'hotter' and more low-fidelity recording.
I don't listen to new music very much. My only source of new music is the FM radio and very little new music seems worth the hassle of listening to. Add all the commercials and promos and FM has become a dead medium for me. Hip-hop tracks are interesting until the singer-rapper-DJ-loudmouth-poet-nigga-whatever starts, then it becomes unbearable. Since the whole point of hip-hop is the singer-rapper-DJ-loudmouth-poet-nigga-whatever, I don't listen to it much. But the hip-hop basic groove audio tracks are exciting.
After reading the article in Rolling Stone (several weeks ago) I came to realize that the quoted music producers didn't know the difference between the two audio definitions of word 'compression'. They were using the two different meanings interchangeably to make arguments that reflected their financial positions in the music industry rather than make sense to the music consuming public.
Audio compression means to reduce the amount of difference between the loudest and softest sounds of an audio recording or signal. This is what a guitar stompbox pedal like the MXR Dyna-comp does or what the NE571 Compandor IC does.
File compression is to transform the time-domain voltage samples of a digital audio recording, convert them in frequency domain, and discard data below a certain threshold.
Compression means to make smaller. Audio compression reduces volume range and file compression reduces file data size. But they are completely different concepts.
Both types of compression are done on audio recordings by the music industry. Both affect the resultant product.
But they are completely different processes that affect the music in completely different ways. And many of the music professionals quoted in the article couldn't tell or honestly didn't know the difference.
What the brass doesn't understand is the underlining fundamental difference between using virtual reality to train solders and using traditional means. The army is always fighting the last war. They don't understand the new war until they lose. It doesn't matter which country or which army. As long as you are in the business of ripping apart meat (killing enemy soldiers through body incapacitation like bullets or IEDs) for the benefit of the rich, the flag or holy book that you use is of secondary importance.
The new war is a different in that it is a permanent war. It is never totally lost or won. It continues for as long as it makes profit for the rich, who never touch the meat. In many cases, the actual soldiers never leave the battlefield. Their 'tours of duty' are extended until they are either dead, blown up, or insane.
In the new war, a side never wins. Only an individual solder wins. And he/she only wins when get their 'tour of duty' ended without having themselves killed, maimed, or driven insane.
The internet is the only tool that makes the new war different for the old wars that the army (or al-quaida, same thing in the new war) is still fighting. Virtual reality permits the soldiers to contact each other *in virtual reality space using MUDs and other on-line multi-person games) regardless of what 'side' they are on (sides don't matter in the new permanent war) and arrange separate peace micro-treaties on a neighborhood or local basis. Virtual reality is one of the few tools that soldiers have that allows them to win the war (returning home intact). Virtual reality allows the soldiers of each side to identify each other side's gung-ho psychopaths and to ensure that these guys are the ones that get killed in the meat world.
This vastly increases the chances that the soldiers that are on-line in the games will win the war (return from the war zone intact and as a certified 'war hero') while still creating enough violence and mayhem in the meat world to convince the rich and the brass that the war is still progressing to a 'winnable solution'.
It will only be after the army loses the current war in the meat world that it will realize the extent that virtual reality and video games are training soldiers to survive and win the current war.
I agree completely. These people are a bunch of writers and often primarily joke writers. The idea that they have a union is absurd; the idea that they could use this union to halt production in a billion dollar industry using Jimmy Hoffa-style tactics and street sign-waving is ludicrous.
They are allowed this charade because the studio heads don't want to appear anti-union to the predominately leftist Hollywood limo-liberal crowd. So they give the illusion of going along with the 'writer's strike' (an absurd concept) in order to manipulate and solidify their own positions.
Meanwhile, the internet is transforming the industry without their being aware of it.
They actually believe that they can simply package up and move their whole bullshit operation onto the internet in the same way that they moved the whole package from broadcast television to cable.
They're like Marie Antoinette's dressmakers commenting on the styles of the peasant's storming the Bastille.
Why is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 important? It's the HD DVD processing key that allows people to watch HD DVD content.
I copied and pasted the sixteen hex numbers into Google, a first for me.
Imaginary Property will only become respected and valid when enough people will have attempted to actually create something artistic that they will have come to respect the process of creation of art. The industry that markets the artistic creations of other people discourages this because people aren't buying artistic 'product' when they are busy creating their own. By selling other's artistic work at a much cheaper rate than people could create entertainment product on their own, the industry is depreciating the value of entertainment products.
The problem that industry has with file sharing isn't so much the distribution of product, it's the fact that new price of entertainment product is much less than the old price. The old price, which was controlled by the industry, was always set high enough to support the leaders of the industry (and sometimes the entertainment product creators themselves) in luxury and style. The new price, that is the cost of the download link and the home equipment needed to connect to the file sharing link and to view it, doesn't provide for the means to continue for the luxury lifestyle of the entertainment property owners. That's why they hate file sharing so much.
This actually is solvable. The industry needs to increase the volume of file sharing and start taking a percentage of the new lower price. The formula is: luxury lifestyle = small price + small percentage + HUGE volume of downloads.
All these RIAA lawsuits are happening because many if not most of the very top executives in the recording industry are law school graduates. Clive Davis, Yetnikov, ect... They started in the entertainment industry through the legal department and rose up and into sales and then into the top slots. To a lawyer, lawsuit is the one word solution to all of the world's problems. If you're a hammer, every situation looks like a nail. If you're a lawyer, everything is a lawsuit. Geeks code their way out of problems; lawyers sue their way out; hammers bang their way through the world.
Eventually in the next few years, the lawyers will be moved out of the top slots of the entertainment industry and be replaced by engineers and content producers. When this happens, the lawsuits will stop.
I've been thinking about using this type of material that shrinks, expands, or twists under voltage for robots. Small, precise, and especially cheap robots.
IF (and that's a big if here folks,) the material can be made to repeatedly move in precise quantifiable intervals then it would be a boom for micro robots.
For example, micro surgery. Having a dual joystick-like control that moves a micro knife or cellular glue stick 0.1mm for every centimeter movement of the controller in the doctor or med tech's hand.
Or testing a circuit board with high density Quad Flat Pack ICs with 100+ pins to an inch. A miniature robot-controlled oscilloscope probe that moves from pin to pin under the technician's keyboard control.
Take thin strips of the material and arrange them into cylinders. By placing precise voltages on each of the strips (say 100 strips arranged into one centimeter in diameter), the cylinder becomes a robotic probe with extremely flexible and precise control of movement. Without using motors or servos.
I look forward to more research and development in this field.
As soon as television goes off the air, I'll be ready with a low-powered neighborhood station that is broadcasting on the old (and now empty) channel to all the people who have come to expect to be able to turn on the TV and see shows.
It will be MY television station. Showing the things that I want. DVD movies, porn (after the children have gone to bed, of course!), and especially political documentaries that would never be shown on ABC (owned by Disney), NBC (owned by General Electric), CBS, or FOX (Fascist Obstinate eXcrement network).
It goes without saying that there will be no commercials.
And when or if the FCC finds the transmitter, we'll just build another one, put it in a different location, have some kids with guns hang around to protect it, and be back on the air in no time. Bringing TRUTH to the community!
Taking television off the air in poor neighborhoods might prove to be one of the dumbest things that the rich white corporate government ever did.
...the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems...
That's pretty simple. They thought that there was a vast network of 13-year-old superhackers that were going to destroy the company by sharing files of music recordings. Then some schmuck (names? anyone who knows?) in the firmware special projects department told some marketing manager that he knew how to keep 13-year-old superhackers from copying music from CDs by simply adding a little piece of code....demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy.
The only security and privacy that they care about is their own. These concepts don't exist for people who are not executives in the company. Especially customers.
... then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures...
"Since we own the music on the disk that is placed into a computer CD drive, we, by the simple and obvious extension of corporate logic, thereby own the computer and all of the data inside it." If you want to become a corporate executive, you need to start thinking like one.... flawed protection measures...
If it keeps ordinary people from copying stupid pop songs from our CDs, then it is not flawed. If it destroys or corrupts the data on user's PC, we don't care. Serves them right as they are supposed to only be listening to CDs on a real Sony CD player. After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.... contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law......is whatever the hell Sony's legal department says it is. And we have many, many millions of dollars, euro, UK pounds, or yen to prove it. Without the cash, talk is trash.
... Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea... Next year's rootkit software will work. And the first thing that it will do is send your name and address to our lawyer's office who will prepare a standardized form charging you with theft of intellectual property (which is some illiterate junkie thug under Sony corporate contract moaning 'baby, baby, baby' over and over). Our bot software will then serve this to anyone who puts a Sony music CD into any device with internet access (unless, of course, the device is a $999 Sony model DRM-XKE CD player with hi-def 2-inch LCD screen and wireless internet access). After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
suggests some changes to the DMCA...
The only changes that our legal department will allow the US politicians to pass will be ones that increase the criminal penalties for possession of music. This will happen when Sony completes its corporate merger with Wackenhut and CCA and completes the vast network of corporate prisons being built in distant lands. These will be needed to hold the vast number of unemployed former American college students who not only illegally listened to music, but also fell behind on their student loan payments.
the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy. After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures, the Article examines law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, and argues that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict these harms on the public.' Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea. The article also suggests some changes to the DMCA to protect consumers from this sort of intrusive, and security-undermining, technique in the future."...the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems...
That's pretty simple. They thought that there was a vast network of 13-year-old superhackers that were going to destroy the company by sharing files of music recordings. Then some schmuck (names? anyone who knows?) in the firmware special projects department told some marketing manager that he knew how to keep 13-year-old superhackers from copying music from CDs by simply adding a little piece of code....demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy.
The only security and privacy that they care about is their own. These concepts don't exist for people who are not executives in the company. Especially customers.
... then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures...
"Since we own the music on the disk that is placed into a computer CD drive, we, by the simple and obvious extension of corporate logic, thereby own the computer and all of the data inside it." If you want to become a corporate executive, you need to start thinking like one.... flawed protection measures...
If it keeps ordinary people from copying stupid pop songs from our CDs, then it is not flawed. If it destroys or corrupts the data on user's PC, we don't care. Serves them right as they are supposed to only be listening to CDs on a real Sony CD player. After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.... contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law......is whatever the hell Sony's legal department says it is. And we have many, many millions of dollars, euro, UK pounds, or yen to prove it. Without the cash, talk is trash.
... Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea... Next year's rootkit software will work. And the first thing that it will do is send your name and address to our lawyer's office who will prepare a standardized form charging you with theft of intellectual property (which is some illiterate junkie thug under Sony corporate contract moaning 'baby, baby, baby' over and over). Our bot software will then serve this to anyone who puts a Sony music CD into any device with internet access (unless, of course, the device is a $999 Sony model DRM-XKE CD player with hi-def 2-inch LCD screen and wireless internet access). After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
suggests some changes to the DMCA...
The only changes that our legal department will allow the US politicians to pass will be ones that increase the criminal penalties for possession of music. This will happen when Sony completes its corporate merger with Wackenhut and CCA and completes the vast network of corporate prisons being built in distant lands. These will be needed to hold the vast number of unemployed former American college students who not only illegally listened to music, but also fell behind on their student loan payments.
Thanks for taking the time for the comment, especially about K-narc.
I live in Portland also but usually only listen to KBOO or the rich, over-educated, politically-brain-addled ladies on NPR (KOPB locally). I'll flip on to K-narc whenever I can't stand to listen to the bozos on KBOO or KOPB for another second. K-narc's not my style, but it's not bad and I need the flexibility. I would have never heard the "they're trying to make go to rehab" song except for occasionally listening to KNRC. According to marketing surveys and research, I should be listening all the time to Kay Gone (KGON), but they bore the piss out of me. I outgrew them in 1975.
The TV marketeers are wise to post an occasional new show to the pirate outlets. Myself, I don't watch TV anymore and never will again. So I will be missing anything that is good if by some odd chance a quality show appears on TV.
I don't use pirate download services. I have dial-up internet access and it is too slow. The only opportunity that I get to see the TV shows that people write about as excellent is when they appear in the local library in DVD form. Which means I see the same shows about two years after everyone else. But what difference does it make? It's free and I get to watch the entire season (usually about 15 to 18 hours of episodes of a series) over the course of a few nights at home. No commercials, no credits and skip over the endless corporate logos.
So how come no one is asking the obvious question?
Just why the fuck would anyone want to go from New York to Tokyo in two hours?
And since no one at Slashdot can come up with a reasonable and mature answer to the above question, how can you justify spending all the money and intellectual resources needed to come up with a machine that does what no one has a need for being done?
You know this thing is going to be extremely damaging to the environment: what with punching holes in the upper atmosphere. This will create gaps that will let high levels of ultraviolet light fall in small zones in dense urban areas around cities large enough to support this machine. So this machine punches a hole large enough to let extreme and hazardous levels of ultraviolet light fall on a few city blocks and all the kids and outdoor workers get blasted with life-threatening sunburn.
All advanced technology has unknown and unpleasant consequences. The time has come to determine what those consequences are going to be before introducing advanced technology like this into the public.
But no one here at Slashdot gives a fuck. In fact, it never occurred to you that there even could be adverse consequences before releasing some new technology.
There isn't a single message here that brings up this point. That's because the Slashdot community and the technology community in general has a mental disease that blinds them from accepting responsibility for the consequences of the technology that they release into the public sphere.
Thank God for millions of greedy lawyers just waiting to sue the fuck out of your dumb slide-rule asses!
Code should read like a novel...The comments should be in paragraph form. The part of the code that actually communicates to the computer should be like dialog.
You can't have too many comments. I like to place a photograph of someone attractive next to the monitor screen. I pretend that this person is somehow extraordinarily interested in the program and how it functions.
Then I use a speech-to-text program and talk about the code. Describe it from the beginning; what it does, why it is needed, and what is special about this code as opposed to the other programs out there that to more-or-less the same thing but not as well as your code. Talk to the photo. It's a fraud, it's a little pathetic but ignore this feeling. You are creating comments.
You end up with a lot of speech converted to text. Break it into paragraphs of a few sentences each. Place each paragraph between one or two of the actual lines of code. Try color coding the comment paragraphs differently from the code. Try recompiling the actual compiler so that the code must have a special character or pair instead of the comments. A double quote char for the actual code is good because it makes the code look like actual dialog.
Our coding style comes from the long-ago days fifty years ago when memory was extremely expensive and programming talent was relatively cheap. The opposite is true today. The great thing about speech-to-text is that it allows people who hate to type but love to talk to be able to create extensive and valuable documentation. Remember that it is easy for your 'reader' (that is, the next person who will be studying your code in order to modify or improve it) to read quickly or skip over the paragraphs of comments that are overly long. It's much easier to skip over excessive verbage than it is to try to understand what the previous coder was actually trying to do with dense code.
The more advanced and powerful the computer, the easier it should be to write programs for it. The computer should be doing the work, not the programmer.
C language is junk and obsolete. We only use it because we spent so much time learning it. We invest billions of dollars making an ARM microprocessor that runs at 80 MegaHertz, has 128K of Flash memory, and costs only $5. But we won't invest billions of dollars to make a simple programming language. So we're stuck with C. It's a trade off. Luckily for our grandchildren, they won't have to bother with it. Just like our children will never have to deal with typewriters or Morse code.
White space sucks. It's source code, not avant-garde poetry. It should read like a book. In the future, writing code by itself should seem as strange as adding long columns of numbers seems today. But 100 years ago, people made good money doing it. Probably better money than you make now writing code.
I live also in Portland and I simply detest these street name changes. This isn't simply a matter of swapping a handful of street signs. There are millions of maps both printed and internet-based throughout the world that are now out-of-date. And with millions of GPS navigational devices being installed in cars and other vehicles, all the software becomes invalid. And with the absurd tendency to change a major street name every few years, none of the software for Portland Oregon is ever correct. Try renting a car from the airport and trying to find an address on Portland Blvd, and then getting lost in Northeast Portland. What a nightmare.
This street-renaming tendency results from the inability to tell the difference between an empty symbolic gesture and an action that would really make a difference in the lives of the people? For instance, instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a street name change for Cesar Chavez, why not spend the same amount of money developing a public domain software program that translates Mexican Indian languages like Maya and Zapotec into English. There are thousand or so Mexicans in Portland and the Willamette Valley who don't speak Spanish but occasionally interact with the locals. A language translation utility would be much more useful to the Mexican people in Oregon than an empty symbolic gesture like a street name change. It would be more in spirit with Cesar Chavez's actual vision of doing serious and concrete things to help his people in their daily lives.
This is the big Portland on the Pacific coast, the one that's 100 miles inland from an ocean. The decision to name the city Portland (as opposed to Boston) was decided by a coin toss in the 1850s. There's two Frankfort cities in Germany, and as you pointed out, many Springfields.
All this is doing is getting huge military contracts to guys who are trying to fight World War Two with robots this time. They assume an enemy with centralized command and control that is run by intelligent, civilized men identical to themselves abet from a different empire. They assume vast armies and navies each in control of their own territory and able to control the populations within these territories, either civilian or military. They assume complete civilian support in their home country; a people fully supporting the military and willing to make great sacrifices in wealth and blood for god and country. The assume a historical continuity. This present conflict, that they are fighting with robots, is simply the latest in a long series that they will eventually win, for the betterment of mankind. They assume that they, as the robot builders, won't be killed in these robot wars, or that their homes and labs won't be destroyed.
All that is nonsense today. World War Two is over and so is the USA/Soviet war, the so-called 'cold war'. The enemy today is not centralized. Little wars grow like weeds. They pop up, explode in violence, and fade. They fade, but never end. There is never a quantifiable victory or a complete defeat of any military unit such as a country's army. Stronger forces can go to a place in the world and ID all the young men. But they can't control the population. And the longer that they stay, the less control that the army officers have over their own troops.
Low level permanent conflict generated for corporate defense contractor replenishment doesn't invoke any sacrifice or interest in the general population of the empire that is staging the endless war. There is no historical overview, no grand vision of empire for the betterment of humanity. There's just this decade's war in some distant part of the globe that few have ever heard of.
And the robot death makers will be surprised to find out that when some third-world sweatshop can make and design the robots for a fraction of the cost than they do in their beautiful university labs, then the empire will sell them out to terrorists that they are supposed to be fighting. The terrorists will blow up the university robot labs, the empire will use it as justification for more and large defense contracts, and no one ten miles away will either know or care.
This is modern war, and it can't be won or fought by robots. Robots are only good for systematic extermination of populations in small sectors, such as shown in the future scenes of the Terminator movies. Except extermination robots won't be of humanoid shape.
So yes this is just pork for men of great technological capabilities and no moral foundation. No wonder Slashdot readers find it so appealing.
This is one more reason why there won't be a manned Mars mission by 2031, as discussed several days ago. This obsessive American need to probe into the private lives of people. This has a long history of from the days of the early 1950s, the McCarthy Witch Hunt era, and before. Americans in any position of authority are still obsessed with knowing the details of private lives of those working for them. No one else demands loyality oaths, or urine tests.
This is not completely fair to the Americans, though. In most other countries, the leaders of an business or community simply assume that they can ask about personal details from anyone working for them. They just ask and then fire people indiscriminately according to their whim. It's because the USA has such a wide variety of people from so many cultures and backgrounds that limits to inquiry of personal lives and arbitrary firing because of personal lifestyles have become so public and necessary.
In other countries, if you're different, then you're very limited in opportunities. People simply accept it as the natural order of things. This mentality keeps the society 'in order', but it also limits its potential for growth by denying opportunities for success to large groups of people for nonsensical or overwrought reasons.
It's been a long hard road for the outside groups in the USA to smash barriers, but it seems that they can do it (eventually) more in the USA than other places. Here is a brief bigotry 'shit list' and a time frame of when the group suffered the most discrimination:
First Nation peoples 1620 - ; the Native Americans are pretty much still massively down, maybe next century...
Africans 1650 - 1965 ; the African-Americans have traditionally been the most oppressed, even now only half are middle class in the USA. Advances made after the Civil War were repressed until the Civil Rights protests of 1950s and the end of legal segregation in 1965.
Irish 1840 - 1920;
Italians 1890 - 1940
Jews 1880 - 1950 ; The educational achievements of Eastern European and Russian Jews and the Shoah defeated anti-Semitism in the USA by 1960.
Asians 1880 - 1975 ; The repeal of the Asian Exclusion act of the 1920s brought millions of Asians to the USA between 1975 and the present. Now considered the 'model minority'
Hispanics 1840 - 1995 ; Massive immigration from Mexico and Cuba leading to bilingual acceptance in the USA. Process is still far from complete, but discrimination is much less than 50 years ago.
Leftists 1900 - ; discrimination against political progressives comes in cycles. 1919, 1950, 1970, and 2004 were peaks in the cycle against the left in the USA.
Sexual Minorities - 1995 ; GLBTg people have always been discriminated against harshly, until their economic prosperity and strong political organization lead to ending (mostly) legal discrimination.
Cannibus and intoxicant users 1919-1932 for alcohol drinkers, 1935- for marijuana users 1980s- other drug users - legal discrimination is still active and strong. Millions of drug users imprisoned in the USA. Urine tests and mandatory employment termination prevasive throughout the USA
Genetic discrimination - mandatory DNA testing and job termination based on genetic disposition is rare in the USA.
Music taste - denying employment and educational benefits to people who have been found using P2P file sharing is still rare, but is becoming the fastest growing form of discrimination in the USA. Widespread legal restrictions
But when you look at it, we spend 200 times as much money killing people as we spend putting anybody in space.
That's because all the people who need killing are here on earth. If they were in space, then we would be spending a lot more money on killing them... in space. But since they aren't in space, then there isn't any sense in spending all that money on space when we have so... many... people who need killing right here on earth.
Actually 2231 is more like it. We have some prescheduled things arranged for 2031 that don't include billions of dollars spent on a trip to a red dot in the night sky. Which is all that Mars is. To us. Here. On earth.
Earth that is running out of oil. Earth that is on the verge of massive climatic change due to massive CO2 overproduction in the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st. Earth that is so overpopulated in regards to the local economies that major religions are putting aside spirituality in order to replace it with mass suicide-warrior cults. Earth where melting ice caps threaten to disrupt ocean currents to the point of creating new ice-ages for our most productive regions.
Are these problems solvable? Sure. Will they be solved? Not a fucking chance! This is where some bozo jumps up and says that this is the exact reason that we need a space program to preserve the earth's civilization and science because the earth is doomed.
But with all that will be on the plate by 2031, there isn't going to be enough resources left to entertain such fantasies as Mars travel.
Basically, Mars travel fantasies for 2031 are what flying-car fantasies by 2007 were in the 1960's.
Realistically, by 2031, we'll be lucky to get the broken windows at the local McDonald's fixed. By 2031, there will be another three billion people wanting to come to your town and either kill you for some idiot god or take your job. By 2031, all the new cardboard and sheet-rock $750000 new McMansions built in the early 2000's will be rotting slums. And all the people who bought them will be bankrupt. Which means they aren't going to be paying taxes for fantasy space voyages. Because all the money that they do manage to pay in taxes will be going to pay for the Iraq war, which will be by then just a distant memory. But the 30-year notes will be due, and no one is going to buying the new US Treasury notes that were expected to replace them. With US dollar so worthless that it takes a hundred of them to buy a loaf of bread.
Mars voyages by 2031? Absurd. Try 2231. Start thinking of the 1000 year future.
No, the Americans did not start this stupid airport mess. The Arabs started it, and in specific, the Palestinians started it when they decided to enact a policy of randomly selecting civilian aircraft, hijacking them, and murdering passengers in order to focus world attention on their political situation. This hijacking and selected murder (of Jewish passengers) policy started in the late 1960s and continued until the civilized world was forced to enact 'this airport mess' in order to try and stop it.
Please have no illusions about who is responsible for this current aircraft 'security' nightmare.
So, ahh, after all this research, do they have a program that will actually get the robot cockroaches to lead the bio-roaches OUT of the house? Or into a poison trap where they can all be killed?
I used to live in New Orleans. They have cockroaches there that are as big as your finger. They hang out on light bulbs. When you turn on a light in a dark room, you learn to put your hand in front of your face because the instant light causes the giant roaches to blast off the light bulb and often right at your face.
Killing these roaches by the hundreds of thousands would really improve the quality of life. Along with getting the carcinogens out of the drinking water, making the levees stronger, and a whole lot of other things.
Still getting a fleet of robot cockroaches to lead bio-roaches to their doom somehow would be wonderful. Then we can start to work on the termites and the rats, then the republicans and the Klan.
Thousands of people now and in the future would be interested in studying this code. Please dig up and post this work. Perhaps to one of the 'vintage computer' websites.
People are still writing assembler code for tiny microprocessors. However now it is being done for very inexpensive microcontrollers like the Atmel AVR and the Microchip PIC. This ICs have all their major components integrated (like program ROM, limited RAM, UARTs, and ADC) and sell for about $1-$2. This business is moving to C language as the 32-bit, 128Kbyte memory, 50MHz microcontrollers like the ARM fall below the $5 price.
But constructing code out of instruction sets one byte at a time is still done for very low-end devices like the Atmel Tiny11 that sells for about $0.30 each. At this price, they can replace 555 timers and TTL gates in updates of classic 1970's and 1980s electronic designs.
All this from a guy who's greatest contribution to his civilization is dressing up in a 7 foot (3.2 meter) cat suit and wagging his tongue incessantly in the mass media simulating cunnilingus. That's it. Now he's saying that thousands of people should be thrown in jail because they are no longer giving him their money.
This guy is a total asshole. No one should take him seriously.
In this age, any machine that is manually operated especially those designed for the sole purpose of offering physical resistance to muscles, needs to have a generator attached to it so that the exercise charges a battery.
I have a cheap crank flashlight. Inside is a small generator with a stiff winder, a NiMH battery, and four high-intensity white LEDs. Cheap and effective. This kind of thing should be inside every exercise bicycle and piece of gym equipment, along with a device that converts battery AC to standard wall-outlet.
Check it out for yourself. Their website is www.parksmed.com. Behind the painted beige pressed sheet metal exterior and the off-the-shelf components like monitors and paper recorders, there is nothing but board after board of 1970's TTL circuitry, coated with hundreds of resistor-capacitor combinations. No one knows how the circuitry works and the schematics on file don't match the boards.
Whenever a chip maker changes the internal design of a simple flip-flop or 4000-CMOS counter chip, the circuitry fails. Then they go searching frantically on the web to any distant third-world warehouse that might have a couple of tubes of the old chips lying around. Failing that, they remove the functionality that the chip provided and bring out a new model.
The owner is well-known in Oregon for giving millions of dollars to demented ultra-conservative political crusades. Meanwhile, back in the factory, the technicians can't even get common basic 1990s-level tools like vacuum desoldering stations. We were expected to use hand-pump $15 solder suckers to remove 40-pin ICs from non-functioning circuit boards.
Yes, it is that bad. If you work for a company that even acknowledges the possibility that you could contribute something to improving their bottom line, consider yourself lucky. Most companies are very reluctant to accept any constructive input from employees.
Better this than the opposite mentality. The last job that I worked for (Parks Medical, Inc. in Aloha, Oregon) enforced a complete company-wide ban on any creative ideas that any employee might have had for any improvement in the company operations. They were absolutely committed to 1970's technology to the point where they would search to the remotest corners for old 74LS and CD4000 series discrete gate logic chips. Their designs had capacitors and resistors hanging off CD4000-type gates and feeding back. Going off a circuit board across a backplane bus to access a single unused inverter gate in a distant part of the circuit. All sorts of weirdness and madness. They had lost all the original designers (who didn't leave comprehensive notes or documentation) and had only one or two people in a company of 100 who had any idea of how the circuitry worked.
I was put on probation when I tried to implement a $5 DSP microcontroller that would replace a $500 board filled with 555 timers and TTL chips. And I designed and documented my board on my own time after hours.
I was finally fired after having had implemented a tiny script in MS Access that would allow me to avoid copying long strings of 12 to 15 digit numbers by hand onto pre-printed calibration forms.
So if you work for a company that even acknowledges the possibility that their employees might have the brains and talent to make the company run more profitably, then you should consider yourself lucky. After all, you can always get a lawyer to arbitrate and resolve any implementation of the ideas that you might have.
Believe me, there a lots of worse situations out there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's no secret any more that radio stations alter the sound of the records that they play. I listen to 'classic' rock a lot from the 1970's and pop from the 1960's. Before the songs came out on CD (and before I could find the CD's of classic rock in the public library as I don't buy RIAA product anymore), I would record long sessions of FM-radio broadcasts on 6-hour VCR tapes. When I found a song that I liked and wasn't in my collection, I would copy it onto a mix cassette audio tape. This was before MP3 and CD ripping appeared in the late 1990s.
When I started ripping the same songs from CDs, I noticed that they all sounded flat or simply different. I encoded several of the FM recordings to WAV files using GOLDWAVE and other audio programs and looked at the resulting waveforms of the CD and the FM broadcast. The FM always had less difference between the loudest and softest passages of the same song. Then when Slashdot appeared and this topic became occasionally discussed, several people described how FM stations routinely compressed the signal to make the music sound more 'alive' on the air and to overcome some FM frequency range limitations.
Personally, I like the FM compression. It adds a different mood to the song. I keep the old FM compressed recordings and will play them instead of the CD MP3 256KBPS recordings when I'm in the mood for a 'hotter' and more low-fidelity recording.
I don't listen to new music very much. My only source of new music is the FM radio and very little new music seems worth the hassle of listening to. Add all the commercials and promos and FM has become a dead medium for me. Hip-hop tracks are interesting until the singer-rapper-DJ-loudmouth-poet-nigga-whatever starts, then it becomes unbearable. Since the whole point of hip-hop is the singer-rapper-DJ-loudmouth-poet-nigga-whatever, I don't listen to it much. But the hip-hop basic groove audio tracks are exciting.
After reading the article in Rolling Stone (several weeks ago) I came to realize that the quoted music producers didn't know the difference between the two audio definitions of word 'compression'. They were using the two different meanings interchangeably to make arguments that reflected their financial positions in the music industry rather than make sense to the music consuming public.
...And they are supposed to be professionals!
Audio compression means to reduce the amount of difference between the loudest and softest sounds of an audio recording or signal. This is what a guitar stompbox pedal like the MXR Dyna-comp does or what the NE571 Compandor IC does.
File compression is to transform the time-domain voltage samples of a digital audio recording, convert them in frequency domain, and discard data below a certain threshold.
Compression means to make smaller. Audio compression reduces volume range and file compression reduces file data size. But they are completely different concepts.
Both types of compression are done on audio recordings by the music industry. Both affect the resultant product.
But they are completely different processes that affect the music in completely different ways. And many of the music professionals quoted in the article couldn't tell or honestly didn't know the difference.
What the brass doesn't understand is the underlining fundamental difference between using virtual reality to train solders and using traditional means. The army is always fighting the last war. They don't understand the new war until they lose. It doesn't matter which country or which army. As long as you are in the business of ripping apart meat (killing enemy soldiers through body incapacitation like bullets or IEDs) for the benefit of the rich, the flag or holy book that you use is of secondary importance.
The new war is a different in that it is a permanent war. It is never totally lost or won. It continues for as long as it makes profit for the rich, who never touch the meat. In many cases, the actual soldiers never leave the battlefield. Their 'tours of duty' are extended until they are either dead, blown up, or insane.
In the new war, a side never wins. Only an individual solder wins. And he/she only wins when get their 'tour of duty' ended without having themselves killed, maimed, or driven insane.
The internet is the only tool that makes the new war different for the old wars that the army (or al-quaida, same thing in the new war) is still fighting. Virtual reality permits the soldiers to contact each other *in virtual reality space using MUDs and other on-line multi-person games) regardless of what 'side' they are on (sides don't matter in the new permanent war) and arrange separate peace micro-treaties on a neighborhood or local basis. Virtual reality is one of the few tools that soldiers have that allows them to win the war (returning home intact). Virtual reality allows the soldiers of each side to identify each other side's gung-ho psychopaths and to ensure that these guys are the ones that get killed in the meat world.
This vastly increases the chances that the soldiers that are on-line in the games will win the war (return from the war zone intact and as a certified 'war hero') while still creating enough violence and mayhem in the meat world to convince the rich and the brass that the war is still progressing to a 'winnable solution'.
It will only be after the army loses the current war in the meat world that it will realize the extent that virtual reality and video games are training soldiers to survive and win the current war.
I agree completely. These people are a bunch of writers and often primarily joke writers. The idea that they have a union is absurd; the idea that they could use this union to halt production in a billion dollar industry using Jimmy Hoffa-style tactics and street sign-waving is ludicrous.
They are allowed this charade because the studio heads don't want to appear anti-union to the predominately leftist Hollywood limo-liberal crowd. So they give the illusion of going along with the 'writer's strike' (an absurd concept) in order to manipulate and solidify their own positions.
Meanwhile, the internet is transforming the industry without their being aware of it.
They actually believe that they can simply package up and move their whole bullshit operation onto the internet in the same way that they moved the whole package from broadcast television to cable.
They're like Marie Antoinette's dressmakers commenting on the styles of the peasant's storming the Bastille.
They just don't get it.
Why is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 important? It's the HD DVD processing key that allows people to watch HD DVD content.
I copied and pasted the sixteen hex numbers into Google, a first for me.
Imaginary Property will only become respected and valid when enough people will have attempted to actually create something artistic that they will have come to respect the process of creation of art. The industry that markets the artistic creations of other people discourages this because people aren't buying artistic 'product' when they are busy creating their own. By selling other's artistic work at a much cheaper rate than people could create entertainment product on their own, the industry is depreciating the value of entertainment products.
The problem that industry has with file sharing isn't so much the distribution of product, it's the fact that new price of entertainment product is much less than the old price. The old price, which was controlled by the industry, was always set high enough to support the leaders of the industry (and sometimes the entertainment product creators themselves) in luxury and style. The new price, that is the cost of the download link and the home equipment needed to connect to the file sharing link and to view it, doesn't provide for the means to continue for the luxury lifestyle of the entertainment property owners. That's why they hate file sharing so much.
This actually is solvable. The industry needs to increase the volume of file sharing and start taking a percentage of the new lower price. The formula is: luxury lifestyle = small price + small percentage + HUGE volume of downloads.
All these RIAA lawsuits are happening because many if not most of the very top executives in the recording industry are law school graduates. Clive Davis, Yetnikov, ect... They started in the entertainment industry through the legal department and rose up and into sales and then into the top slots. To a lawyer, lawsuit is the one word solution to all of the world's problems. If you're a hammer, every situation looks like a nail. If you're a lawyer, everything is a lawsuit. Geeks code their way out of problems; lawyers sue their way out; hammers bang their way through the world.
Eventually in the next few years, the lawyers will be moved out of the top slots of the entertainment industry and be replaced by engineers and content producers. When this happens, the lawsuits will stop.
I've been thinking about using this type of material that shrinks, expands, or twists under voltage for robots. Small, precise, and especially cheap robots.
IF (and that's a big if here folks,) the material can be made to repeatedly move in precise quantifiable intervals then it would be a boom for micro robots.
For example, micro surgery. Having a dual joystick-like control that moves a micro knife or cellular glue stick 0.1mm for every centimeter movement of the controller in the doctor or med tech's hand.
Or testing a circuit board with high density Quad Flat Pack ICs with 100+ pins to an inch. A miniature robot-controlled oscilloscope probe that moves from pin to pin under the technician's keyboard control.
Take thin strips of the material and arrange them into cylinders. By placing precise voltages on each of the strips (say 100 strips arranged into one centimeter in diameter), the cylinder becomes a robotic probe with extremely flexible and precise control of movement. Without using motors or servos.
I look forward to more research and development in this field.
As soon as television goes off the air, I'll be ready with a low-powered neighborhood station that is broadcasting on the old (and now empty) channel to all the people who have come to expect to be able to turn on the TV and see shows.
It will be MY television station. Showing the things that I want. DVD movies, porn (after the children have gone to bed, of course!), and especially political documentaries that would never be shown on ABC (owned by Disney), NBC (owned by General Electric), CBS, or FOX (Fascist Obstinate eXcrement network).
It goes without saying that there will be no commercials.
And when or if the FCC finds the transmitter, we'll just build another one, put it in a different location, have some kids with guns hang around to protect it, and be back on the air in no time. Bringing TRUTH to the community!
Taking television off the air in poor neighborhoods might prove to be one of the dumbest things that the rich white corporate government ever did.
...the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems... ...demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy.
... then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures... ... flawed protection measures... ... contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law... ...is whatever the hell Sony's legal department says it is. And we have many, many millions of dollars, euro, UK pounds, or yen to prove it. Without the cash, talk is trash.
... Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea...
...
That's pretty simple. They thought that there was a vast network of 13-year-old superhackers that were going to destroy the company by sharing files of music recordings. Then some schmuck (names? anyone who knows?) in the firmware special projects department told some marketing manager that he knew how to keep 13-year-old superhackers from copying music from CDs by simply adding a little piece of code.
The only security and privacy that they care about is their own. These concepts don't exist for people who are not executives in the company. Especially customers.
"Since we own the music on the disk that is placed into a computer CD drive, we, by the simple and obvious extension of corporate logic, thereby own the computer and all of the data inside it." If you want to become a corporate executive, you need to start thinking like one.
If it keeps ordinary people from copying stupid pop songs from our CDs, then it is not flawed. If it destroys or corrupts the data on user's PC, we don't care. Serves them right as they are supposed to only be listening to CDs on a real Sony CD player. After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
Next year's rootkit software will work. And the first thing that it will do is send your name and address to our lawyer's office who will prepare a standardized form charging you with theft of intellectual property (which is some illiterate junkie thug under Sony corporate contract moaning 'baby, baby, baby' over and over). Our bot software will then serve this to anyone who puts a Sony music CD into any device with internet access (unless, of course, the device is a $999 Sony model DRM-XKE CD player with hi-def 2-inch LCD screen and wireless internet access). After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
suggests some changes to the DMCA
The only changes that our legal department will allow the US politicians to pass will be ones that increase the criminal penalties for possession of music. This will happen when Sony completes its corporate merger with Wackenhut and CCA and completes the vast network of corporate prisons being built in distant lands. These will be needed to hold the vast number of unemployed former American college students who not only illegally listened to music, but also fell behind on their student loan payments.
the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy. After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures, the Article examines law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, and argues that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict these harms on the public.' Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea. The article also suggests some changes to the DMCA to protect consumers from this sort of intrusive, and security-undermining, technique in the future." ...the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems... ...demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy.
... then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures... ... flawed protection measures... ... contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law... ...is whatever the hell Sony's legal department says it is. And we have many, many millions of dollars, euro, UK pounds, or yen to prove it. Without the cash, talk is trash.
... Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea...
...
That's pretty simple. They thought that there was a vast network of 13-year-old superhackers that were going to destroy the company by sharing files of music recordings. Then some schmuck (names? anyone who knows?) in the firmware special projects department told some marketing manager that he knew how to keep 13-year-old superhackers from copying music from CDs by simply adding a little piece of code.
The only security and privacy that they care about is their own. These concepts don't exist for people who are not executives in the company. Especially customers.
"Since we own the music on the disk that is placed into a computer CD drive, we, by the simple and obvious extension of corporate logic, thereby own the computer and all of the data inside it." If you want to become a corporate executive, you need to start thinking like one.
If it keeps ordinary people from copying stupid pop songs from our CDs, then it is not flawed. If it destroys or corrupts the data on user's PC, we don't care. Serves them right as they are supposed to only be listening to CDs on a real Sony CD player. After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
Next year's rootkit software will work. And the first thing that it will do is send your name and address to our lawyer's office who will prepare a standardized form charging you with theft of intellectual property (which is some illiterate junkie thug under Sony corporate contract moaning 'baby, baby, baby' over and over). Our bot software will then serve this to anyone who puts a Sony music CD into any device with internet access (unless, of course, the device is a $999 Sony model DRM-XKE CD player with hi-def 2-inch LCD screen and wireless internet access). After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
suggests some changes to the DMCA
The only changes that our legal department will allow the US politicians to pass will be ones that increase the criminal penalties for possession of music. This will happen when Sony completes its corporate merger with Wackenhut and CCA and completes the vast network of corporate prisons being built in distant lands. These will be needed to hold the vast number of unemployed former American college students who not only illegally listened to music, but also fell behind on their student loan payments.
Thanks for taking the time for the comment, especially about K-narc.
I live in Portland also but usually only listen to KBOO or the rich, over-educated, politically-brain-addled ladies on NPR (KOPB locally). I'll flip on to K-narc whenever I can't stand to listen to the bozos on KBOO or KOPB for another second. K-narc's not my style, but it's not bad and I need the flexibility. I would have never heard the "they're trying to make go to rehab" song except for occasionally listening to KNRC. According to marketing surveys and research, I should be listening all the time to Kay Gone (KGON), but they bore the piss out of me. I outgrew them in 1975.
The TV marketeers are wise to post an occasional new show to the pirate outlets. Myself, I don't watch TV anymore and never will again. So I will be missing anything that is good if by some odd chance a quality show appears on TV.
I don't use pirate download services. I have dial-up internet access and it is too slow. The only opportunity that I get to see the TV shows that people write about as excellent is when they appear in the local library in DVD form. Which means I see the same shows about two years after everyone else. But what difference does it make? It's free and I get to watch the entire season (usually about 15 to 18 hours of episodes of a series) over the course of a few nights at home. No commercials, no credits and skip over the endless corporate logos.
Works for me.
So how come no one is asking the obvious question?
Just why the fuck would anyone want to go from New York to Tokyo in two hours?
And since no one at Slashdot can come up with a reasonable and mature answer to the above question, how can you justify spending all the money and intellectual resources needed to come up with a machine that does what no one has a need for being done?
You know this thing is going to be extremely damaging to the environment: what with punching holes in the upper atmosphere. This will create gaps that will let high levels of ultraviolet light fall in small zones in dense urban areas around cities large enough to support this machine. So this machine punches a hole large enough to let extreme and hazardous levels of ultraviolet light fall on a few city blocks and all the kids and outdoor workers get blasted with life-threatening sunburn.
All advanced technology has unknown and unpleasant consequences. The time has come to determine what those consequences are going to be before introducing advanced technology like this into the public.
But no one here at Slashdot gives a fuck. In fact, it never occurred to you that there even could be adverse consequences before releasing some new technology.
There isn't a single message here that brings up this point. That's because the Slashdot community and the technology community in general has a mental disease that blinds them from accepting responsibility for the consequences of the technology that they release into the public sphere.
Thank God for millions of greedy lawyers just waiting to sue the fuck out of your dumb slide-rule asses!
Code should read like a novel...The comments should be in paragraph form. The part of the code that actually communicates to the computer should be like dialog.
You can't have too many comments. I like to place a photograph of someone attractive next to the monitor screen. I pretend that this person is somehow extraordinarily interested in the program and how it functions.
Then I use a speech-to-text program and talk about the code. Describe it from the beginning; what it does, why it is needed, and what is special about this code as opposed to the other programs out there that to more-or-less the same thing but not as well as your code. Talk to the photo. It's a fraud, it's a little pathetic but ignore this feeling. You are creating comments.
You end up with a lot of speech converted to text. Break it into paragraphs of a few sentences each. Place each paragraph between one or two of the actual lines of code. Try color coding the comment paragraphs differently from the code. Try recompiling the actual compiler so that the code must have a special character or pair instead of the comments. A double quote char for the actual code is good because it makes the code look like actual dialog.
Our coding style comes from the long-ago days fifty years ago when memory was extremely expensive and programming talent was relatively cheap. The opposite is true today. The great thing about speech-to-text is that it allows people who hate to type but love to talk to be able to create extensive and valuable documentation. Remember that it is easy for your 'reader' (that is, the next person who will be studying your code in order to modify or improve it) to read quickly or skip over the paragraphs of comments that are overly long. It's much easier to skip over excessive verbage than it is to try to understand what the previous coder was actually trying to do with dense code.
The more advanced and powerful the computer, the easier it should be to write programs for it. The computer should be doing the work, not the programmer.
C language is junk and obsolete. We only use it because we spent so much time learning it. We invest billions of dollars making an ARM microprocessor that runs at 80 MegaHertz, has 128K of Flash memory, and costs only $5. But we won't invest billions of dollars to make a simple programming language. So we're stuck with C. It's a trade off. Luckily for our grandchildren, they won't have to bother with it. Just like our children will never have to deal with typewriters or Morse code.
White space sucks. It's source code, not avant-garde poetry. It should read like a book. In the future, writing code by itself should seem as strange as adding long columns of numbers seems today. But 100 years ago, people made good money doing it. Probably better money than you make now writing code.
Thank you.
I live also in Portland and I simply detest these street name changes. This isn't simply a matter of swapping a handful of street signs. There are millions of maps both printed and internet-based throughout the world that are now out-of-date. And with millions of GPS navigational devices being installed in cars and other vehicles, all the software becomes invalid. And with the absurd tendency to change a major street name every few years, none of the software for Portland Oregon is ever correct. Try renting a car from the airport and trying to find an address on Portland Blvd, and then getting lost in Northeast Portland. What a nightmare.
This street-renaming tendency results from the inability to tell the difference between an empty symbolic gesture and an action that would really make a difference in the lives of the people? For instance, instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a street name change for Cesar Chavez, why not spend the same amount of money developing a public domain software program that translates Mexican Indian languages like Maya and Zapotec into English. There are thousand or so Mexicans in Portland and the Willamette Valley who don't speak Spanish but occasionally interact with the locals. A language translation utility would be much more useful to the Mexican people in Oregon than an empty symbolic gesture like a street name change. It would be more in spirit with Cesar Chavez's actual vision of doing serious and concrete things to help his people in their daily lives.
This is the big Portland on the Pacific coast, the one that's 100 miles inland from an ocean. The decision to name the city Portland (as opposed to Boston) was decided by a coin toss in the 1850s. There's two Frankfort cities in Germany, and as you pointed out, many Springfields.
All this is doing is getting huge military contracts to guys who are trying to fight World War Two with robots this time. They assume an enemy with centralized command and control that is run by intelligent, civilized men identical to themselves abet from a different empire. They assume vast armies and navies each in control of their own territory and able to control the populations within these territories, either civilian or military. They assume complete civilian support in their home country; a people fully supporting the military and willing to make great sacrifices in wealth and blood for god and country. The assume a historical continuity. This present conflict, that they are fighting with robots, is simply the latest in a long series that they will eventually win, for the betterment of mankind. They assume that they, as the robot builders, won't be killed in these robot wars, or that their homes and labs won't be destroyed.
All that is nonsense today. World War Two is over and so is the USA/Soviet war, the so-called 'cold war'. The enemy today is not centralized. Little wars grow like weeds. They pop up, explode in violence, and fade. They fade, but never end. There is never a quantifiable victory or a complete defeat of any military unit such as a country's army. Stronger forces can go to a place in the world and ID all the young men. But they can't control the population. And the longer that they stay, the less control that the army officers have over their own troops.
Low level permanent conflict generated for corporate defense contractor replenishment doesn't invoke any sacrifice or interest in the general population of the empire that is staging the endless war. There is no historical overview, no grand vision of empire for the betterment of humanity. There's just this decade's war in some distant part of the globe that few have ever heard of.
And the robot death makers will be surprised to find out that when some third-world sweatshop can make and design the robots for a fraction of the cost than they do in their beautiful university labs, then the empire will sell them out to terrorists that they are supposed to be fighting. The terrorists will blow up the university robot labs, the empire will use it as justification for more and large defense contracts, and no one ten miles away will either know or care.
This is modern war, and it can't be won or fought by robots. Robots are only good for systematic extermination of populations in small sectors, such as shown in the future scenes of the Terminator movies. Except extermination robots won't be of humanoid shape.
So yes this is just pork for men of great technological capabilities and no moral foundation. No wonder Slashdot readers find it so appealing.
This is one more reason why there won't be a manned Mars mission by 2031, as discussed several days ago. This obsessive American need to probe into the private lives of people. This has a long history of from the days of the early 1950s, the McCarthy Witch Hunt era, and before. Americans in any position of authority are still obsessed with knowing the details of private lives of those working for them. No one else demands loyality oaths, or urine tests.
... ;
This is not completely fair to the Americans, though. In most other countries, the leaders of an business or community simply assume that they can ask about personal details from anyone working for them. They just ask and then fire people indiscriminately according to their whim. It's because the USA has such a wide variety of people from so many cultures and backgrounds that limits to inquiry of personal lives and arbitrary firing because of personal lifestyles have become so public and necessary.
In other countries, if you're different, then you're very limited in opportunities. People simply accept it as the natural order of things. This mentality keeps the society 'in order', but it also limits its potential for growth by denying opportunities for success to large groups of people for nonsensical or overwrought reasons.
It's been a long hard road for the outside groups in the USA to smash barriers, but it seems that they can do it (eventually) more in the USA than other places. Here is a brief bigotry 'shit list' and a time frame of when the group suffered the most discrimination:
First Nation peoples 1620 - ; the Native Americans are pretty much still massively down, maybe next century
Africans 1650 - 1965 ; the African-Americans have traditionally been the most oppressed, even now only half are middle class in the USA. Advances made after the Civil War were repressed until the Civil Rights protests of 1950s and the end of legal segregation in 1965.
Irish 1840 - 1920
Italians 1890 - 1940
Jews 1880 - 1950 ; The educational achievements of Eastern European and Russian Jews and the Shoah defeated anti-Semitism in the USA by 1960.
Asians 1880 - 1975 ; The repeal of the Asian Exclusion act of the 1920s brought millions of Asians to the USA between 1975 and the present. Now considered the 'model minority'
Hispanics 1840 - 1995 ; Massive immigration from Mexico and Cuba leading to bilingual acceptance in the USA. Process is still far from complete, but discrimination is much less than 50 years ago.
Leftists 1900 - ; discrimination against political progressives comes in cycles. 1919, 1950, 1970, and 2004 were peaks in the cycle against the left in the USA.
Sexual Minorities - 1995 ; GLBTg people have always been discriminated against harshly, until their economic prosperity and strong political organization lead to ending (mostly) legal discrimination.
Cannibus and intoxicant users 1919-1932 for alcohol drinkers, 1935- for marijuana users 1980s- other drug users - legal discrimination is still active and strong. Millions of drug users imprisoned in the USA. Urine tests and mandatory employment termination prevasive throughout the USA
Genetic discrimination - mandatory DNA testing and job termination based on genetic disposition is rare in the USA.
Music taste - denying employment and educational benefits to people who have been found using P2P file sharing is still rare, but is becoming the fastest growing form of discrimination in the USA. Widespread legal restrictions
But when you look at it, we spend 200 times as much money killing people as we spend putting anybody in space.
... in space. But since they aren't in space, then there isn't any sense in spending all that money on space when we have so... many... people who need killing right here on earth.
That's because all the people who need killing are here on earth.
If they were in space, then we would be spending a lot more money on killing them
It's all a matter of priorities.
Actually 2231 is more like it. We have some prescheduled things arranged for 2031 that don't include billions of dollars spent on a trip to a red dot in the night sky. Which is all that Mars is. To us. Here. On earth.
Earth that is running out of oil. Earth that is on the verge of massive climatic change due to massive CO2 overproduction in the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st. Earth that is so overpopulated in regards to the local economies that major religions are putting aside spirituality in order to replace it with mass suicide-warrior cults. Earth where melting ice caps threaten to disrupt ocean currents to the point of creating new ice-ages for our most productive regions.
Are these problems solvable? Sure. Will they be solved? Not a fucking chance! This is where some bozo jumps up and says that this is the exact reason that we need a space program to preserve the earth's civilization and science because the earth is doomed.
But with all that will be on the plate by 2031, there isn't going to be enough resources left to entertain such fantasies as Mars travel.
Basically, Mars travel fantasies for 2031 are what flying-car fantasies by 2007 were in the 1960's.
Realistically, by 2031, we'll be lucky to get the broken windows at the local McDonald's fixed. By 2031, there will be another three billion people wanting to come to your town and either kill you for some idiot god or take your job. By 2031, all the new cardboard and sheet-rock $750000 new McMansions built in the early 2000's will be rotting slums. And all the people who bought them will be bankrupt. Which means they aren't going to be paying taxes for fantasy space voyages. Because all the money that they do manage to pay in taxes will be going to pay for the Iraq war, which will be by then just a distant memory. But the 30-year notes will be due, and no one is going to buying the new US Treasury notes that were expected to replace them. With US dollar so worthless that it takes a hundred of them to buy a loaf of bread.
Mars voyages by 2031? Absurd. Try 2231. Start thinking of the 1000 year future.
No, the Americans did not start this stupid airport mess. The Arabs started it, and in specific, the Palestinians started it when they decided to enact a policy of randomly selecting civilian aircraft, hijacking them, and murdering passengers in order to focus world attention on their political situation. This hijacking and selected murder (of Jewish passengers) policy started in the late 1960s and continued until the civilized world was forced to enact 'this airport mess' in order to try and stop it.
Please have no illusions about who is responsible for this current aircraft 'security' nightmare.
So, ahh, after all this research, do they have a program that will actually get the robot cockroaches to lead the bio-roaches OUT of the house? Or into a poison trap where they can all be killed?
I used to live in New Orleans. They have cockroaches there that are as big as your finger. They hang out on light bulbs. When you turn on a light in a dark room, you learn to put your hand in front of your face because the instant light causes the giant roaches to blast off the light bulb and often right at your face.
Killing these roaches by the hundreds of thousands would really improve the quality of life. Along with getting the carcinogens out of the drinking water, making the levees stronger, and a whole lot of other things.
Still getting a fleet of robot cockroaches to lead bio-roaches to their doom somehow would be wonderful. Then we can start to work on the termites and the rats, then the republicans and the Klan.
Thousands of people now and in the future would be interested in studying this code. Please dig up and post this work. Perhaps to one of the 'vintage computer' websites.
People are still writing assembler code for tiny microprocessors. However now it is being done for very inexpensive microcontrollers like the Atmel AVR and the Microchip PIC. This ICs have all their major components integrated (like program ROM, limited RAM, UARTs, and ADC) and sell for about $1-$2. This business is moving to C language as the 32-bit, 128Kbyte memory, 50MHz microcontrollers like the ARM fall below the $5 price.
But constructing code out of instruction sets one byte at a time is still done for very low-end devices like the Atmel Tiny11 that sells for about $0.30 each. At this price, they can replace 555 timers and TTL gates in updates of classic 1970's and 1980s electronic designs.
All this from a guy who's greatest contribution to his civilization is dressing up in a 7 foot (3.2 meter) cat suit and wagging his tongue incessantly in the mass media simulating cunnilingus. That's it. Now he's saying that thousands of people should be thrown in jail because they are no longer giving him their money.
This guy is a total asshole. No one should take him seriously.
In this age, any machine that is manually operated especially those designed for the sole purpose of offering physical resistance to muscles, needs to have a generator attached to it so that the exercise charges a battery.
I have a cheap crank flashlight. Inside is a small generator with a stiff winder, a NiMH battery, and four high-intensity white LEDs. Cheap and effective. This kind of thing should be inside every exercise bicycle and piece of gym equipment, along with a device that converts battery AC to standard wall-outlet.
Check it out for yourself. Their website is www.parksmed.com. Behind the painted beige pressed sheet metal exterior and the off-the-shelf components like monitors and paper recorders, there is nothing but board after board of 1970's TTL circuitry, coated with hundreds of resistor-capacitor combinations. No one knows how the circuitry works and the schematics on file don't match the boards.
Whenever a chip maker changes the internal design of a simple flip-flop or 4000-CMOS counter chip, the circuitry fails. Then they go searching frantically on the web to any distant third-world warehouse that might have a couple of tubes of the old chips lying around. Failing that, they remove the functionality that the chip provided and bring out a new model.
The owner is well-known in Oregon for giving millions of dollars to demented ultra-conservative political crusades. Meanwhile, back in the factory, the technicians can't even get common basic 1990s-level tools like vacuum desoldering stations. We were expected to use hand-pump $15 solder suckers to remove 40-pin ICs from non-functioning circuit boards.
Yes, it is that bad. If you work for a company that even acknowledges the possibility that you could contribute something to improving their bottom line, consider yourself lucky. Most companies are very reluctant to accept any constructive input from employees.
Dilbert isn't a comic, it's a documentary.
Better this than the opposite mentality. The last job that I worked for (Parks Medical, Inc. in Aloha, Oregon) enforced a complete company-wide ban on any creative ideas that any employee might have had for any improvement in the company operations.
They were absolutely committed to 1970's technology to the point where they would search to the remotest corners for old 74LS and CD4000 series discrete gate logic chips. Their designs had capacitors and resistors hanging off CD4000-type gates and feeding back. Going off a circuit board across a backplane bus to access a single unused inverter gate in a distant part of the circuit. All sorts of weirdness and madness. They had lost all the original designers (who didn't leave comprehensive notes or documentation) and had only one or two people in a company of 100 who had any idea of how the circuitry worked.
I was put on probation when I tried to implement a $5 DSP microcontroller that would replace a $500 board filled with 555 timers and TTL chips. And I designed and documented my board on my own time after hours.
I was finally fired after having had implemented a tiny script in MS Access that would allow me to avoid copying long strings of 12 to 15 digit numbers by hand onto pre-printed calibration forms.
So if you work for a company that even acknowledges the possibility that their employees might have the brains and talent to make the company run more profitably, then you should consider yourself lucky. After all, you can always get a lawyer to arbitrate and resolve any implementation of the ideas that you might have.
Believe me, there a lots of worse situations out there.