Same as with the first lasers, the first robots, and the first of many developments.
These will probably be the motivators for nanorobots that can be used medically and in a host of other applications. A zillion of smart little nanorobots fitted with tiny zap-o-lasers could destroy cancer cells or infections if they have the capability to distinguish between native and non native cells. Give or take a few decades these are "my tiny friend, our bodies they mend". The borg have practical uses for these bugs too:)
The problem is that "friction" in the nanotech world means chunks of machinery breaking off and components overheating and swelling up to where everything melts together. So the lifecycle of nanomachines was as long as the components were small.
This time they got the components to move by attaching the tip of their scanning microscope to the inner bearning and simply pulling it out and pushing it in. I guess if you can logde a few condictive metal atomss inside the inner bearing you can do the same with electromagnetical forces. And then you can have computer controlled frictionless nano motion after working out quite a few complicated details.
For an observer on the yoyo it would appear as if the world around it is in a constant state of extremely annoying motion while it (the observer) seriously tries to hold on to the yoyo, develops a cause of nausea, and feels too sick to figure out the math.
You'd wonder what relativistic time-effects any Einsteinian observer would have on a yoyo.
Anyone ever brought a yoyo aboard a space shuttle trip?
There exists the potential that SAMBA will be presented as an American attempt to attack German corporate interests.
Some hold the view that Linux is a European attempt to attack American corporare interests, which isnt as silly as yours because Linus Torvald is from Finland:)
actually its babelfish not babblefish and stems from a little fish galactic hitchhikers carry in their ear that picks up meaning from activities in others' brain language centra. Quote "it then execretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them."
For a thorough understanding read "The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams who did a/. interview recently.
I use punchcards, but they are so old half of them have been eaten by bugs. But the bugtraq moderators never forward my posts! I'm sure i tracked them to the kitchen tho...
Bugtraq is mostly used by opensource developers, and they tend to use/program GNU LINUX or BSD
Many of the recent posts in bugtraq have to do with weaknesses "vulnerabilities" in the underlying unix function libraries that were developed in the '70s and '80s. Those posts are usually "we're now working on those functions" rather than "we've found a bug in printf()" - it's recoding unix given the new circumstances.
Given the open nature of open software development, bugs are open:) i.e. open source developers say "we've fixed this weakness and you can get the fix here"
Commercial software developers arent about to post evey single "vulnerability" they themselves figure out to the bugtraq list, they post a generic fix or a new version, or they themselves heavily depend on opensource software.
If Caldera posts a fix in this and that a code, next thing you know you'll get the same post from the other penguins.
OpenBSD isnt vulnerable, and even if it is, it won't be in a few hours:) (blatant, I know:)
I guess those are obvious points to most of us.. But the point has to be made, open source is open dirty laundry. But perhaps after all you got to be a rocketscientist to understand that. Abc news bad bad research! bad bad generalization!
they're in love with thier own stuff! Aren't we all?:)
The nerd & tech folks at IBM really like the fact that the company is strongly supportive of linux, why? Because they love it and installed it at home. Effectively IBM is sponsoring an OS that is in competition to its own commercial product. It's likely the people at IBM are more in love with Linux than their own stuff - but whether such love can be found in redmond? I think that if the final figures would arrive on that one we wouldn't really be too amazed:)
Too bad I can't mod you up a notch topshelf because this science magazine business you're talking about does help me a lot too to get the creative process flowing again. Also watching star-trek voyager is a good help (although I would dread to use their keyboard interfaces)
If theres one thing you can say about this weird article is that it doesn't apply to the slashdot community - who really appear to love to show how vibrantly alive and aware they are given the number of posts here.
Internet, the web, is showing us, feeding us, informing us, as a collective we are learning at a far greater pace than any collective has had in known history. What a ride:)
Hey I am a geek and I care; that I now make my living with c programming, websites and the whole shebang doesn't mean that's the extent of my interests, but that's not the point.
I do think that on the whole the technocrats are well informed and will run many miles discussing a wide variety of non-tech related topics - although they tend to mix in a few interesting tidbits about tech. But that's not the point either.
It's simply not a category of people that can be categorized as is being done in this article - as if they do not have certain characteristics, or tend to show arrogance, lack of interest in the social or political process.. quote narcissistic civilization with a mean streak, fat and lazy and arrogant from years of uninterrupted opportunity, innovation and peace. So how did GNU & open source software arrive?
But thats not really it either...
The only thing you can say about the tech generation is that they are well versed with computers. In this sense it is a group that spans the generations and includes larger portions of the population the younger they are. But more than that, if you take these people and make them into a social group then here you have the group that pretty much runs everything. Without their knowledge nowadays you can't get a potato through a distribution chain to the people that eat potatos.
I honestly believe the tech generation isnt the one face the big crisisl. Quote "...the real social and political agendas are being set by older people with little knowledge of technology, working out of l9th century institutions corrupted by corporate money." They're like species 9289 who toss lawbooks at the borg. Legislation is futile, prepare to be assimilated. Killing napster strengthens freenet.
"The techno-world eschews even the most marginal understanding of the tortured history of technology, the awareness that periods of technological advancement are always followed by periods of fear and retrenchment" Is this historical necessity? I think not. Technological advancements have been ongoing since Ug picked up a stick to hammer his neighbour with - or perhaps since the big bang when matter and energy started to form ever more complex structures. The only real period of fear and retrenchment that existed was in Europe during the middle ages who after a few centuries of Roman occupation totally forgot about really how all this neat Roman stuff was supposed to work. In the mean time civilizations in the near east, orient and the americas continued to thrive.
Ok but what now? First theres the scientific breakthrough, then there's a lot of pointless debate resulting often in legislation that fails to do anything but stimulate further development. "You're not allowed to use that wheel, or we grain carriers will all be out of business!" Even if a country succeeds in stopping a scientific process, then another country can be perfectly willing to assist in furthering it.
Re:Nature got there 1st again..
on
Biotransistors
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· Score: 2
We've also got autonomous life forms inside each of our cells, without them the cell as a unit wouldn't be possible; they're called Mitocho ndria and are reponsible for energy production. They're matrilinear in descent since they're introduced into us through the mothers egg cell; they have their own DNA.
These got to be the same little buggers that anakim skywalker had in such big count:)
Re:A small step towards damnation
on
Biotransistors
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· Score: 1
Jon, I think that if god had not wanted us to be scientists or develop these kinds of technologies he would have done something about it at the moment of creation. As things are now we live in a universe in which all these things are possible because there are laws of matter and energy that make it possible.
If you believe there is a god then yes indeed these are gods laws of what is possible and what isn't. We simply can do these things with matter and energy because they have the properties allowing us to do so.
I myself believe in the presence of a universal spirit but I also believe this is a free will universe, of course within the constraints of the laws of matter & energy. I believe morality is a social regulator thats important to make sure we can, as a whole, identify and isolate depraved people, it's not to stop us from developing our potential.
There will be a raging debate going on however about the morality of these issues. I'm not sure at all whether it would be wise to integrate us with computers, in some cases yes, in some no. However there is no jurisprudence, be it legal or religious on these issues so we'll all going to have to figure this out collectively.
Unfortunately I believe the moral debate will be too little too late to stop developments. By the time people are aware of what's going on with cyborg integration it'll be too beneficial, espeically medically, to just forbid it entirely; which is impossible anyway since you can always set up lab in a country where you can buy your own laws.
These developments are a blessing to those of us who for example have diabetes.
Suppose an integrated system is developed that measures sugar levels in the blood stream and has a piece of DNA or RNA, or a whole bacteria, that can generate insulin, then you wont have to go get injections or have your system flushed every other day. I guess some smart people will think up ways to adapt such circuitry to use the citric acid cycle to get its own energy.
It simply means you can generate tightly controlled amounts of substances where needed, when needed, in the amounts needed.
When I hit a snag in programming its usually something that requires a complex function. I try to isolate the problem and make a program just for the function until it works right then degrade that program back to function in the "bigger context". Isolate, solve, integrate.
If this doesn't work I usually get frustrated and I fire up Q3 or something like it to frag away at what might well be other frustrated programmers. I did notice that my frag count is a lot higher when I first get killed a lot. Then I get angry, involved and adrenaline starts to flow. Then when I'm pumped I am having a great time, and actually what seems to be a lot of luck as every rocket hits and and after a few rounds am clear of frustration, anger, and am quietly grinning:)
I also use music from my '70's soul & disco collection, or van halen, or metallica, or some a tribe called quest, but also mozart and bach - whatever is going to change the mood to what I need. I usually don't work with music on but when I do it seems to give my mind enough whatever it is music gives the mind to be ready for a novel start/approach, or to code along with the beat, "come on, Vogue, make your fingers tyyyype to the muuusiic".
The puzzling thing is "I just sit and stare at the computer all day long feeling scared and anxious." Err when you meet a ravenously hungry lion and he has access to you yeah then I understand fear and anxiety - but as a programmer you are equipped with plenty of ways to rationalize these kinds of fears - programmers make problems vanish:) You've accepted to write the program so you know you can do it, you've got a track record of previous achievements, and if every time there is fear or anxiety these facts are stacked against it they will start to fade away. I feel anxious when I finally released something and people start to test it, but I am mostly anxious that I might have made some very stupid assumptions about how people work:)
Red Hat is a great product, but I have two computers and the big one runs windows because of Adobe software, the Quake3 and the homeworld CD I got. It's also got a RedHat partition... but I have no use for it...
That's because the other computer runs OpenBSD, it's got all I need to develop & test BSD and UNIX applications. I feel "affinity" with it, I like the Buqtrack record it has, gives me the feeling its secure.. and I drool over it. I don't know why.
To me GNU Linux is in the middle, like OpenBSD it doesnt have the Adobe aps I crave, doesn't run homeworld. It does run Q3A but I dont have the right CD. Like OpenBSD I can do any development task on it but OpenBSD is a lot more secure, and definately much more apt to fulfill the roles I require from it.
And GNU Linux would want to be everything to me, the best of both worlds, but it doesn't yet deliver that. For fun and adobe power its mac or windows, for the raw emanations of unix power its openbsd.
I thought with this "in your face" type display discussion this info would come in handy:
If you want a computer screen - not TV - right in your face, there's this company called xybernaut that makes "wearable PC's", so you dont have to leave your (or a) computer behind when you go grocery shopping.
It appears they're shipping a Pentium MMX type computer with a head mounted 640x480 resolution monocular display (errrr no 3d graphics but your shopping list is right there with you projected into the store) - has voice recognition.
It however doesnt appear they've really come out with some grand new improvement over the last year - their processors are all pentium MMX from 200 to 233 mhz... Maybe they're cash strapped.
Also the Yahoo index on wearable PC's doesnt really show a lot of promise - most of the companies manufacturing hardware need a lesson making websites, so you'd wonder where we're heading with this kind of technology.
Pegasus mail initial release was in 1990 - it was my first email client and still is my current email client on windows machines.
I have tried other programs - I wrote an email to netscape in '98 asking them to implement multiple POP support and they believed very few people would ever use that. Perhaps that attitude got them to where the... never mind that one:)
As far as i can tell pegasus was the first email client that implemented mail filtering rules, multiple accounts, and quite a few other goodies that are commonplace now. It's also been a free program since inception and the guy programming it seems to be a terribly smart aleck with great ideas and seems to listen to good ideas from the user community.
If you wont end up using pegasus at least you will have been impressed with examining it.
Too bad it isnt available for linux, however anyone willing enough to try seems welcome and seems to have to do a serious rewrite.
Like sdavies in an earlier before, I want them 3d - I want to run around a Q3 level with stereoscopic view, shouldnt be too hard to render from two perspectives just slightly apart? But they dont make these things for nerds!!
"Eye-Trek is already being used by Japan Airlines: JAL provides its first class passengers on long-haul flights with Eye-Trek to offer undisturbed video and movie entertainment."
No no no they dont get it, this should read as following:
"Eye-trick is already being used by dolta airlines: they provide their nerd class passengers with a few good local network CTF games to offer disturbing fragging entertainment and make these geeks totally forget about being stacked like matches in a box."
The new line of mission vehicles are meant to be more cost effective than the older types, smaller, smarter, lighter.
Still they're pretty heavy and it takes a fine rocket to push them off the earth and then some to have them make it to Mars in an acceptable time frame.
Given the rather strong impression I have that there is no ultimate point to us as a collective being here together on this planet, (perhaps some might have personal motivations for being alive that make good sense - and it would be a service to share those motivations) we might as well do something awe-inspiring together such as getting off this place more.
Sending robots to excavate a base near water deposits on the moon, send a few scientists over to do what they're good at and we'd have something a lot of people would identify with, and would be a stepping stone to further things
I understand its interesting to learn more about Mars, important to figure out whether there used to be any life around (although prospects on icy Europa seem much better) - but mission failures to that planet are still frequent and each time something fails nasty budget questions are asked that cut not only into what NASA can do but also the extent to which many of us live along with them.
Don't get me wrong, my linux desktop is the red planet and it inspires me in my mundane tasks, and sometimes I can just stare at it for a while. Fact is though that the moon is a lot closer and mars isnt exactly hospitable either.
Slashdot Mirror
These will probably be the motivators for nanorobots that can be used medically and in a host of other applications. A zillion of smart little nanorobots fitted with tiny zap-o-lasers could destroy cancer cells or infections if they have the capability to distinguish between native and non native cells. Give or take a few decades these are "my tiny friend, our bodies they mend". The borg have practical uses for these bugs too :)
This time they got the components to move by attaching the tip of their scanning microscope to the inner bearning and simply pulling it out and pushing it in. I guess if you can logde a few condictive metal atomss inside the inner bearing you can do the same with electromagnetical forces. And then you can have computer controlled frictionless nano motion after working out quite a few complicated details.
You'd wonder what relativistic time-effects any Einsteinian observer would have on a yoyo.
Anyone ever brought a yoyo aboard a space shuttle trip?
Some hold the view that Linux is a European attempt to attack American corporare interests, which isnt as silly as yours because Linus Torvald is from Finland :)
err babelfish, see above :)
For a thorough understanding read "The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams who did a /. interview recently.
It kinda explains why arthur dent was always so totally confused
I use punchcards, but they are so old half of them have been eaten by bugs. But the bugtraq moderators never forward my posts! I'm sure i tracked them to the kitchen tho...
I guess those are obvious points to most of us.. But the point has to be made, open source is open dirty laundry. But perhaps after all you got to be a rocketscientist to understand that. Abc news bad bad research! bad bad generalization!
Exactly so I referred carefully to The nerd & tech folks at IBM :)
The nerd & tech folks at IBM really like the fact that the company is strongly supportive of linux, why? Because they love it and installed it at home. Effectively IBM is sponsoring an OS that is in competition to its own commercial product. It's likely the people at IBM are more in love with Linux than their own stuff - but whether such love can be found in redmond? I think that if the final figures would arrive on that one we wouldn't really be too amazed :)
Too bad I can't mod you up a notch topshelf because this science magazine business you're talking about does help me a lot too to get the creative process flowing again. Also watching star-trek voyager is a good help (although I would dread to use their keyboard interfaces)
Internet, the web, is showing us, feeding us, informing us, as a collective we are learning at a far greater pace than any collective has had in known history. What a ride :)
I do think that on the whole the technocrats are well informed and will run many miles discussing a wide variety of non-tech related topics - although they tend to mix in a few interesting tidbits about tech. But that's not the point either.
It's simply not a category of people that can be categorized as is being done in this article - as if they do not have certain characteristics, or tend to show arrogance, lack of interest in the social or political process.. quote narcissistic civilization with a mean streak, fat and lazy and arrogant from years of uninterrupted opportunity, innovation and peace. So how did GNU & open source software arrive?
But thats not really it either...
The only thing you can say about the tech generation is that they are well versed with computers. In this sense it is a group that spans the generations and includes larger portions of the population the younger they are. But more than that, if you take these people and make them into a social group then here you have the group that pretty much runs everything. Without their knowledge nowadays you can't get a potato through a distribution chain to the people that eat potatos.
I honestly believe the tech generation isnt the one face the big crisisl. Quote "...the real social and political agendas are being set by older people with little knowledge of technology, working out of l9th century institutions corrupted by corporate money." They're like species 9289 who toss lawbooks at the borg. Legislation is futile, prepare to be assimilated. Killing napster strengthens freenet.
"The techno-world eschews even the most marginal understanding of the tortured history of technology, the awareness that periods of technological advancement are always followed by periods of fear and retrenchment" Is this historical necessity? I think not. Technological advancements have been ongoing since Ug picked up a stick to hammer his neighbour with - or perhaps since the big bang when matter and energy started to form ever more complex structures. The only real period of fear and retrenchment that existed was in Europe during the middle ages who after a few centuries of Roman occupation totally forgot about really how all this neat Roman stuff was supposed to work. In the mean time civilizations in the near east, orient and the americas continued to thrive.
Ok but what now? First theres the scientific breakthrough, then there's a lot of pointless debate resulting often in legislation that fails to do anything but stimulate further development. "You're not allowed to use that wheel, or we grain carriers will all be out of business!" Even if a country succeeds in stopping a scientific process, then another country can be perfectly willing to assist in furthering it.
I've written Welcome to the technological (r)evolution era in an earlier post. We should be debating this a lot :)
These got to be the same little buggers that anakim skywalker had in such big count :)
If you believe there is a god then yes indeed these are gods laws of what is possible and what isn't. We simply can do these things with matter and energy because they have the properties allowing us to do so.
I myself believe in the presence of a universal spirit but I also believe this is a free will universe, of course within the constraints of the laws of matter & energy. I believe morality is a social regulator thats important to make sure we can, as a whole, identify and isolate depraved people, it's not to stop us from developing our potential.
There will be a raging debate going on however about the morality of these issues. I'm not sure at all whether it would be wise to integrate us with computers, in some cases yes, in some no. However there is no jurisprudence, be it legal or religious on these issues so we'll all going to have to figure this out collectively.
Unfortunately I believe the moral debate will be too little too late to stop developments. By the time people are aware of what's going on with cyborg integration it'll be too beneficial, espeically medically, to just forbid it entirely; which is impossible anyway since you can always set up lab in a country where you can buy your own laws.
Suppose an integrated system is developed that measures sugar levels in the blood stream and has a piece of DNA or RNA, or a whole bacteria, that can generate insulin, then you wont have to go get injections or have your system flushed every other day. I guess some smart people will think up ways to adapt such circuitry to use the citric acid cycle to get its own energy.
It simply means you can generate tightly controlled amounts of substances where needed, when needed, in the amounts needed.
When I hit a snag in programming its usually something that requires a complex function. I try to isolate the problem and make a program just for the function until it works right then degrade that program back to function in the "bigger context". Isolate, solve, integrate.
If this doesn't work I usually get frustrated and I fire up Q3 or something like it to frag away at what might well be other frustrated programmers. I did notice that my frag count is a lot higher when I first get killed a lot. Then I get angry, involved and adrenaline starts to flow. Then when I'm pumped I am having a great time, and actually what seems to be a lot of luck as every rocket hits and and after a few rounds am clear of frustration, anger, and am quietly grinning :)
I also use music from my '70's soul & disco collection, or van halen, or metallica, or some a tribe called quest, but also mozart and bach - whatever is going to change the mood to what I need. I usually don't work with music on but when I do it seems to give my mind enough whatever it is music gives the mind to be ready for a novel start/approach, or to code along with the beat, "come on, Vogue, make your fingers tyyyype to the muuusiic".
The puzzling thing is "I just sit and stare at the computer all day long feeling scared and anxious." Err when you meet a ravenously hungry lion and he has access to you yeah then I understand fear and anxiety - but as a programmer you are equipped with plenty of ways to rationalize these kinds of fears - programmers make problems vanish :) You've accepted to write the program so you know you can do it, you've got a track record of previous achievements, and if every time there is fear or anxiety these facts are stacked against it they will start to fade away. I feel anxious when I finally released something and people start to test it, but I am mostly anxious that I might have made some very stupid assumptions about how people work :)
Red Hat is a great product, but I have two computers and the big one runs windows because of Adobe software, the Quake3 and the homeworld CD I got. It's also got a RedHat partition... but I have no use for it...
That's because the other computer runs OpenBSD, it's got all I need to develop & test BSD and UNIX applications. I feel "affinity" with it, I like the Buqtrack record it has, gives me the feeling its secure.. and I drool over it. I don't know why.
To me GNU Linux is in the middle, like OpenBSD it doesnt have the Adobe aps I crave, doesn't run homeworld. It does run Q3A but I dont have the right CD. Like OpenBSD I can do any development task on it but OpenBSD is a lot more secure, and definately much more apt to fulfill the roles I require from it.
And GNU Linux would want to be everything to me, the best of both worlds, but it doesn't yet deliver that. For fun and adobe power its mac or windows, for the raw emanations of unix power its openbsd.
If you want a computer screen - not TV - right in your face, there's this company called xybernaut that makes "wearable PC's", so you dont have to leave your (or a) computer behind when you go grocery shopping.
It appears they're shipping a Pentium MMX type computer with a head mounted 640x480 resolution monocular display (errrr no 3d graphics but your shopping list is right there with you projected into the store) - has voice recognition.
It however doesnt appear they've really come out with some grand new improvement over the last year - their processors are all pentium MMX from 200 to 233 mhz... Maybe they're cash strapped.
Also the Yahoo index on wearable PC's doesnt really show a lot of promise - most of the companies manufacturing hardware need a lesson making websites, so you'd wonder where we're heading with this kind of technology.
For too much info on this visit the temple of geeks at http://www.mit.edu and search for wearable computer.
I have tried other programs - I wrote an email to netscape in '98 asking them to implement multiple POP support and they believed very few people would ever use that. Perhaps that attitude got them to where the... never mind that one :)
As far as i can tell pegasus was the first email client that implemented mail filtering rules, multiple accounts, and quite a few other goodies that are commonplace now. It's also been a free program since inception and the guy programming it seems to be a terribly smart aleck with great ideas and seems to listen to good ideas from the user community.
If you wont end up using pegasus at least you will have been impressed with examining it.
Too bad it isnt available for linux, however anyone willing enough to try seems welcome and seems to have to do a serious rewrite.
I mean really, with this gear you can stack a zillion of us in one 747 and we'd all come out smiling!
"Eye-Trek is already being used by Japan Airlines: JAL provides its first class passengers on long-haul flights with Eye-Trek to offer undisturbed video and movie entertainment."
No no no they dont get it, this should read as following:
"Eye-trick is already being used by dolta airlines: they provide their nerd class passengers with a few good local network CTF games to offer disturbing fragging entertainment and make these geeks totally forget about being stacked like matches in a box."
Still they're pretty heavy and it takes a fine rocket to push them off the earth and then some to have them make it to Mars in an acceptable time frame.
Sending robots to excavate a base near water deposits on the moon, send a few scientists over to do what they're good at and we'd have something a lot of people would identify with, and would be a stepping stone to further things
I understand its interesting to learn more about Mars, important to figure out whether there used to be any life around (although prospects on icy Europa seem much better) - but mission failures to that planet are still frequent and each time something fails nasty budget questions are asked that cut not only into what NASA can do but also the extent to which many of us live along with them.
Don't get me wrong, my linux desktop is the red planet and it inspires me in my mundane tasks, and sometimes I can just stare at it for a while. Fact is though that the moon is a lot closer and mars isnt exactly hospitable either.