Welcome to the Hotel Hilbert, no need to book, just contribute the algorithm of your choice at reception and remember that all our rooms are equipped with fast ethernet. Such a lovely place!
Its tempting to imagine the utopian anarchist society, living in Hilbert Space, where the system is run by the smartest, fastest and most curious. Its a thing akin to the nature of the Internet society of today. Add a few more decades of breakdown of our existing governance and you get a Cyberspace or Metaverse. Captivating, huh?
But people with guns do not give up so easily (Sony has guns, USG has guns) and fear of these guns pushes a great many people into astonishing conformity.
The Old Western Frontier broke down in America, as the hick towns collected more people and became "civilized." What this involved, largely, was grearter specialization of the townspeople; fewer gunslingers, more civilians and more cops.
Sorry, but your depiction of the magical cube farm, extending out over acres of wide open space, suggests more, a slew of fearful pimply Dilbert-figures, each of them proud of their little accomplishment for the day, of defeating the evil manager (i.e. downloading the latest Brittney single from an illegal p2p proxy) gleefully unaware of just how profoundly they are owned by Brittney and her cadre. Every Dilbert has in his heart a rebel just bursting to be free. But what damns our friend is that that rebel *won't* ever be free, because he'll never know what it means...
If we WANT to preserve the wildness and the freedom of the frontier, we'll have to work for it.
Teach everyone you know, how to take control of their computer, and why its important
Teach people to read. Keep their minds and eyes open.
Teach people how to find GOOD free content.
Explain to them how and why this content is threatened.
The Hotel Hilbert you described doesn't work without coders; doesn't work without coders who feel free to be creative and who understand the value of play. Sure, you'll always find a few, no matter how dark the stormclouds come, or how dismal the DRM future may seem, but while there are few, (and I foree a worst-case of there being very few of them indeed) it will be much harder to work, and more discouraging for those who try.
To your Ethernet Everywhere model, I challenge: clouds of WiFi. Beware of those technologies which can most easily be controlled, and beware the seduction of the cubicle. (c.f. Showers at Belsen)
Yet more lies, and nonsense and purest babble from "DNS-and-BIND". Perhaps you should crawl back into your hole where you will be safe from the dangerous world out here.
Nonetheless, let us return to the fact of the matter:
"In 1812, Richard Stallman assembled an army of criminals, hackers and luddites, armed them with evil circumvention devices and proceeded to steal
all the software in the kingdom of Uruguay. Not content to merely steal intellectual property, the thugs slaked their lust by massacaring hundreds of millions of innocent women and children. Witnesses at the time described the excessive zeal with which the marauding Stallmanists destroyed whole villages, and every technological innovation their ignorant hands could grasp. The horrors of the Linux Genocide are well known to historians everywhere and are documented in even more detail in:"
Hey, I have an idea. Instead of actually saving their lives, let's just argue about it. Or maybe we'll just think about it. Actually DOING something would be a bit premature, though.
Yeah. Saving lives *is* preferable, but keep in mind, that in Antarctic winter, conditions down south are *dangerous* for rescuer and rescuee alike.
There are probably several available options, for the Argentines as well as for the Russians. Cost is probably one factor, as is availability of ships on-site, and the comparative cost of operations vs reliability, safety, and other cascading effects of moving these ships about. I suppose Argentina would not want the liability/embarassment if their expedition proved ineffective in getting the people out to safety. If the Russians have a ship in the region, with crew available and willing to assist, hooray for them, should they choose to step in and bail the people out. It may take a few weeks to get ships from Argentine port, or Russian cruise, so a couple days argument is probably better *now* than after they get underway.
It seems it should be easier to keep the handset in your pocket (easier for dialing, antenna, etc) but put a wireless intradental headset for speaker/mic.
Presumably, a filling in the space vacated by cavities. Should be the best use of bluetooth we'll see...
Not trying to sound pretentious, but having worked in the online
gaming industry for years, I can tell you from first hand that cheats and hacks are the number one issue with gamers - and more
importantly, the reason people get turned off of playing online.
Not pretentious necessarily, but you're still wrong.
The number one issue that I have with many of the up-and-coming multiplayer and massive-multiplayer net games (and I doubt I'm alone) is monthly access charges for playing. This is where (literally) the money is, and where its heading, and I have no doubt the gaming companies are eager to transition from the market of selling products, to that of selling services. Cheaters, loser, hackers, trolls and powergamers are all annoying; but when they start costing me *money* as well as simply the lost time spent, the game is swiftly losing what limited appeal it had to begin with.
Fortunately, not all online gaming is pay-for-play, and some will likely stay "free" after the sunk cost of the box+CD but the ongoing trends are disturbing, and frankly, leaving me a bit less than gruntled.
(of course, I still play multiplayer M.U.L.E. so ymmv)
yes, i realise the quote of the day changes so frequently, its hardly worth the karmic holocaust of pointing out a problem with it, since by the time some well-meaning person reads this the quote will have changed anyway, but,
"Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal." - Zaphod Beeblebrox in "Hithiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
has a typo. IT IS REALLY SAD that taco and company have seen fit to edit the quotes to their own standard of typoing. alas:(
am i missing something? The article referred to modified viruses, that are capable of assembling nanostructures to high precision, and on a scale that we cannot en-masse build?
If so, it it out of line to say that nanites have crossed the boundary from S.F. and "wouldn't it be cool?" and into reality?
Now... they may not be general-purpose; like the first hard-wired digital computers, the structures they produce may be limited and not of immediate practical purpose, but it seems to me that these GM virues actually are nanites, and should be treated as such.
These are fearful times we live in. I hope our new friends like us:/
This is why people hate slash: The number of abuses exceeds the number of well-thought use by about a factor of 20.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re:Not only possible, but HAS BEEN DONE for decade
on
Remote Controlled Rats
·
· Score: 1
I can recall programs on PBS 20 years ago that demonstrated this sort of thing on any number and sort of creatures.
O my brother, my droogs and I viddied something real horrorshow like on BBC, 30 years ago.
This bezoomy malchick who, while minding his own business, peeting the moloka, got loveted by the razz, and tolchocked into the staja. Like a helpless plenny he got tolchocked in the gulliver by some medical type and went around weeping and platchy and none of the usual ultraviolence.
It was all gloopy and sad, but I slooshy it turned out okay in the end, thanks to the millicents and good old Ludwig Van
Based on the article immediately following this one, why not call in the Big Guns to do your auditing?
If unauthorized software and access to it are at issue, I think the BSA would be *thrilled* at the chance to evaluate you, and your departmental procedures. Plus, its very likely they'll be able to offer concrete suggestions for upgrading your license security model.
the reason cancer rates are up, is largely because people in Western Society are living longer, in good proportion due to the advances in treating communicable diseases; with antibiotics and sulfa drugs. One thing to consider is that the average life expectancy included people dying of childhood diseases (largely eradicated or subdued today) and recurrent epidemics. People who managed to avoid these spectres, and who had good nutrition, often lived a pretty good long life. Elite Greeks and Romans lived into their 80s and 90s, some even longer. The *average* person alive in Classical times, though, was a slave, and her/his life was crud. Few folk were lucky enough to live the longer lives- due to Western Medicine many more of us have that opportunity.
It's hard to say how the toxin burden has shifted from the mid-late 1800s, though. The cities then had air quality in some cases much worse than ours; but they also lacked our friends dioxin and Sr90. Males (may) have smoked more heavily then than now, but females smoked more rarely. I don't have hard-and-fast figures, but I'd say that between 1902 and 2002 the toxin load hasn't changed *dramatically*. Between 1802 and present is another story.
The major difference though, is that many more people will live long enough to get cancer, and therefore will suffer. The best Western Medicine can do today is palliative. Whether that will improve significantly I can't say, but I suspect Westerners will try their damnded to do so.
As far as the traditional medicines you describe, its really uncharted territory. Western Medicine treads very lightly and carefully over subjects "outside" of it. It took 1500 years for Europeans to start investigating new procedures again; the field is extremely conservative, and human lives far shorter. What value there is in traditional herbal treatments and practices, I suspect will be incorporated into Western Practice, but the pace is sure to be frustrating. I recommend strongly that your friend taking St. Johns Wort stay in touch with his (Western) physicians, as they may understand better than he some aspects of the psychopharmacological process. All experts are fallable, but the more experience, the more viewpoints you can get, the better able you are to make decisions.
Western Medicine is fallable, and that is its bitter joy. Fallable means that it can correct itself, across all our bodies over time. A medical tradition that cannot admit to its errors cannot correct them. If you're interested in a different approach from what you see in the here, I suggest reading up on modern Chinese practice; in rural China many physicians make use of both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine in their treatments. I don't know how well it works, I cannot vouch for its effectiveness.
It is important to remember that not all treatments work for all patients. Western Medicine is *good* for the average patient, excellent for exceptional patients and less than adequate for some other exceptional ones. I suspect this will always be the case. The exceptional will seek out other treatment, which will work for some and fail for others.
From the people who brought you epidemic levels of Cancer - Western Medicine!
I'll concede that our ignorance of nutrients and the broad web of interplay within the dynamics of our bodies is appalling but I understood the promotion of cancer to "epidemic proportions" to be more a function of our reducing infectious disease from endemic to much lower levels of threat. We're living longer; when our bodies get old, they break down and cancer is one of the major ways we break. With better nutrition (and elimination of the major sources of free radicals) we should be able to live longer and healthier for a longer time, but as things are, Western humans have better quality of life for longer periods than most historical societies have ever had. There are some communities who have managed to do better, but they tend to be very localised and at very low population densities.
Western Medicine works pretty well from birth to circa. age 40 or so, then gradually decreases in efficiency as we age. Medicine alone is not the problem here; most of us do not take as good care of our bodies as we can, most of us do not know how, or have any macro or micro understanding of how our bodies work, beyond the Sesame Street level. There's a widespread notion (the legacy of Pasteur no doubt) that cancer is a disease with a systematic cause and a systematic cure, if we can only discover them, but it seems to me more the case that cancer is what bodies do when faced with ultimate entropy. Galen/Vesalius/Pasteur et al didn't invent cancer. What they did was to eliminate most everything else. Whether their children will find way to postpone entropy and rebuild telomeres (and prevent cell metabolism from going wacko) isn't certain, but it seems evident that they will try. Westerners have a good track record for persistence, if nothing else.
It all might be missing the point. If quality and longevity are what we really want, lifestyle and environment changes may be more effective and more direct-
-but as long as there ARE Westerners living in Western cities, drinking Western poisons and eating Western abominations, they will continue to try Western medicine, and have some fair success. Its a cultural thang.
I find the realism of Castle Wolfenstein
far surpasses, surplants and outstrips the cheezy 3d rendered polygons of 'Wolfenstein 3d', 'Doom' and even 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein'.
How so?
its more interactive.
You can have a conversation with the SS guards, before you kill them.
There are more things to find than guns/ammo.
If you get shot you die.
The sound effects are far more effective (IMO)
And none of this supernatural magickal crud! I mean, PLEASE, you call that realism??
We all know that something is keeping broadband entertainment from really catching on. After all, what ELSE could it be keeping the intrepid producers of Geeks In Space off the net-waves? With safe, secure protection for their creative property, Andover might be coaxed into letting Taco et al., out of their cave for a bit of fresh air.
Slashdot Mirror
D. Throw out Windows, and install Linux
E. ???
F. Profit!
Its tempting to imagine the utopian anarchist society, living in Hilbert Space, where the system is run by the smartest, fastest and most curious. Its a thing akin to the nature of the Internet society of today. Add a few more decades of breakdown of our existing governance and you get a Cyberspace or Metaverse. Captivating, huh?
But people with guns do not give up so easily (Sony has guns, USG has guns) and fear of these guns pushes a great many people into astonishing conformity.
The Old Western Frontier broke down in America, as the hick towns collected more people and became "civilized." What this involved, largely, was grearter specialization of the townspeople; fewer gunslingers, more civilians and more cops.
Sorry, but your depiction of the magical cube farm, extending out over acres of wide open space, suggests more, a slew of fearful pimply Dilbert-figures, each of them proud of their little accomplishment for the day, of defeating the evil manager (i.e. downloading the latest Brittney single from an illegal p2p proxy) gleefully unaware of just how profoundly they are owned by Brittney and her cadre. Every Dilbert has in his heart a rebel just bursting to be free. But what damns our friend is that that rebel *won't* ever be free, because he'll never know what it means...
If we WANT to preserve the wildness and the freedom of the frontier, we'll have to work for it.
The Hotel Hilbert you described doesn't work without coders; doesn't work without coders who feel free to be creative and who understand the value of play. Sure, you'll always find a few, no matter how dark the stormclouds come, or how dismal the DRM future may seem, but while there are few, (and I foree a worst-case of there being very few of them indeed) it will be much harder to work, and more discouraging for those who try.
To your Ethernet Everywhere model, I challenge: clouds of WiFi. Beware of those technologies which can most easily be controlled, and beware the seduction of the cubicle. (c.f. Showers at Belsen)
REAL SOY BEAN!
Meanwhile, the experimenters have a more immediate worry: the Bush administration has decided to end their financing after this year.
Few willingly join, but we have been conscripted.
It's been happening all along.
Nonetheless, let us return to the fact of the matter:
Source: "/usr/dict/words" by Ritchie, Dennis
From "words"
Aaron
Ababa
aback
abaft
abandon
abandoned
abandoning
abandonment
abandons
abase
abased
abasement
abasements
(err....)
Source: "The Linux Genocide" by Bill Gates
From "The Death of IP"
Pages 42-45
"In 1812, Richard Stallman assembled an army of criminals, hackers and luddites, armed them with evil circumvention devices and proceeded to steal all the software in the kingdom of Uruguay. Not content to merely steal intellectual property, the thugs slaked their lust by massacaring hundreds of millions of innocent women and children. Witnesses at the time described the excessive zeal with which the marauding Stallmanists destroyed whole villages, and every technological innovation their ignorant hands could grasp. The horrors of the Linux Genocide are well known to historians everywhere and are documented in even more detail in:"
R.A. :D uga
Yeah. Saving lives *is* preferable, but keep in mind, that in Antarctic winter, conditions down south are *dangerous* for rescuer and rescuee alike.
There are probably several available options, for the Argentines as well as for the Russians. Cost is probably one factor, as is availability of ships on-site, and the comparative cost of operations vs reliability, safety, and other cascading effects of moving these ships about. I suppose Argentina would not want the liability/embarassment if their expedition proved ineffective in getting the people out to safety. If the Russians have a ship in the region, with crew available and willing to assist, hooray for them, should they choose to step in and bail the people out. It may take a few weeks to get ships from Argentine port, or Russian cruise, so a couple days argument is probably better *now* than after they get underway.
(less aggravating for the ships enroute, too!)
Presumably, a filling in the space vacated by cavities. Should be the best use of bluetooth we'll see...
Albert Einstein
"God not only plays dice, He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen."
Stephen Hawking
"Who are you to tell God how to run the universe?"
Niels Bohr
Not pretentious necessarily, but you're still wrong.
The number one issue that I have with many of the up-and-coming multiplayer and massive-multiplayer net games (and I doubt I'm alone) is monthly access charges for playing. This is where (literally) the money is, and where its heading, and I have no doubt the gaming companies are eager to transition from the market of selling products, to that of selling services. Cheaters, loser, hackers, trolls and powergamers are all annoying; but when they start costing me *money* as well as simply the lost time spent, the game is swiftly losing what limited appeal it had to begin with. Fortunately, not all online gaming is pay-for-play, and some will likely stay "free" after the sunk cost of the box+CD but the ongoing trends are disturbing, and frankly, leaving me a bit less than gruntled.
(of course, I still play multiplayer M.U.L.E. so ymmv)
"Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal." - Zaphod Beeblebrox in "Hithiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
has a typo. IT IS REALLY SAD that taco and company have seen fit to edit the quotes to their own standard of typoing. alas :(
Do not call up that which you can not put back down.
Whatever for?
So you can snarf hisfingerprints, hmm?
If so, it it out of line to say that nanites have crossed the boundary from S.F. and "wouldn't it be cool?" and into reality?
Now... they may not be general-purpose; like the first hard-wired digital computers, the structures they produce may be limited and not of immediate practical purpose, but it seems to me that these GM virues actually are nanites, and should be treated as such.
These are fearful times we live in. I hope our new friends like us :/
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
O my brother, my droogs and I viddied something real horrorshow like on BBC, 30 years ago.
This bezoomy malchick who, while minding his own business, peeting the moloka, got loveted by the razz, and tolchocked into the staja. Like a helpless plenny he got tolchocked in the gulliver by some medical type and went around weeping and platchy and none of the usual ultraviolence.
It was all gloopy and sad, but I slooshy it turned out okay in the end, thanks to the millicents and good old Ludwig Van
If unauthorized software and access to it are at issue, I think the BSA would be *thrilled* at the chance to evaluate you, and your departmental procedures. Plus, its very likely they'll be able to offer concrete suggestions for upgrading your license security model.
Money fixes everything.
I'm a karma whore So I write bad poetry Mod me up some more?
(if I had mod points I'd give you a few)
the reason cancer rates are up, is largely because people in Western Society are living longer, in good proportion due to the advances in treating communicable diseases; with antibiotics and sulfa drugs. One thing to consider is that the average life expectancy included people dying of childhood diseases (largely eradicated or subdued today) and recurrent epidemics. People who managed to avoid these spectres, and who had good nutrition, often lived a pretty good long life. Elite Greeks and Romans lived into their 80s and 90s, some even longer. The *average* person alive in Classical times, though, was a slave, and her/his life was crud. Few folk were lucky enough to live the longer lives- due to Western Medicine many more of us have that opportunity.
It's hard to say how the toxin burden has shifted from the mid-late 1800s, though. The cities then had air quality in some cases much worse than ours; but they also lacked our friends dioxin and Sr90. Males (may) have smoked more heavily then than now, but females smoked more rarely. I don't have hard-and-fast figures, but I'd say that between 1902 and 2002 the toxin load hasn't changed *dramatically*. Between 1802 and present is another story.
The major difference though, is that many more people will live long enough to get cancer, and therefore will suffer. The best Western Medicine can do today is palliative. Whether that will improve significantly I can't say, but I suspect Westerners will try their damnded to do so.
As far as the traditional medicines you describe, its really uncharted territory. Western Medicine treads very lightly and carefully over subjects "outside" of it. It took 1500 years for Europeans to start investigating new procedures again; the field is extremely conservative, and human lives far shorter. What value there is in traditional herbal treatments and practices, I suspect will be incorporated into Western Practice, but the pace is sure to be frustrating. I recommend strongly that your friend taking St. Johns Wort stay in touch with his (Western) physicians, as they may understand better than he some aspects of the psychopharmacological process. All experts are fallable, but the more experience, the more viewpoints you can get, the better able you are to make decisions.
Western Medicine is fallable, and that is its bitter joy. Fallable means that it can correct itself, across all our bodies over time. A medical tradition that cannot admit to its errors cannot correct them. If you're interested in a different approach from what you see in the here, I suggest reading up on modern Chinese practice; in rural China many physicians make use of both Traditional Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine in their treatments. I don't know how well it works, I cannot vouch for its effectiveness.
It is important to remember that not all treatments work for all patients. Western Medicine is *good* for the average patient, excellent for exceptional patients and less than adequate for some other exceptional ones. I suspect this will always be the case. The exceptional will seek out other treatment, which will work for some and fail for others.
I'll concede that our ignorance of nutrients and the broad web of interplay within the dynamics of our bodies is appalling but I understood the promotion of cancer to "epidemic proportions" to be more a function of our reducing infectious disease from endemic to much lower levels of threat. We're living longer; when our bodies get old, they break down and cancer is one of the major ways we break. With better nutrition (and elimination of the major sources of free radicals) we should be able to live longer and healthier for a longer time, but as things are, Western humans have better quality of life for longer periods than most historical societies have ever had. There are some communities who have managed to do better, but they tend to be very localised and at very low population densities.
Western Medicine works pretty well from birth to circa. age 40 or so, then gradually decreases in efficiency as we age. Medicine alone is not the problem here; most of us do not take as good care of our bodies as we can, most of us do not know how, or have any macro or micro understanding of how our bodies work, beyond the Sesame Street level. There's a widespread notion (the legacy of Pasteur no doubt) that cancer is a disease with a systematic cause and a systematic cure, if we can only discover them, but it seems to me more the case that cancer is what bodies do when faced with ultimate entropy. Galen/Vesalius/Pasteur et al didn't invent cancer. What they did was to eliminate most everything else. Whether their children will find way to postpone entropy and rebuild telomeres (and prevent cell metabolism from going wacko) isn't certain, but it seems evident that they will try. Westerners have a good track record for persistence, if nothing else.
It all might be missing the point. If quality and longevity are what we really want, lifestyle and environment changes may be more effective and more direct-
-but as long as there ARE Westerners living in Western cities, drinking Western poisons and eating Western abominations, they will continue to try Western medicine, and have some fair success. Its a cultural thang.
Yeah, but John (and George) are already "up there".
I find the realism of Castle Wolfenstein far surpasses, surplants and outstrips the cheezy 3d rendered polygons of 'Wolfenstein 3d', 'Doom' and even 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein'.
How so?
We all know that something is keeping broadband entertainment from really catching on. After all, what ELSE could it be keeping the intrepid producers of Geeks In Space off the net-waves? With safe, secure protection for their creative property, Andover might be coaxed into letting Taco et al., out of their cave for a bit of fresh air.
Or maybe not. Keep those banner ads a-clickin'!
NERSC? Designed and built by the dot-com effluvia of the 1990s (Eugenics Wars)
But the good news is, Nimoy will have a final resting place when he dies.
Are you sure it wasn't Zimbabwe?