The job you were trained to do was to protect this country and its values. Doing so, even amidst personal conflict, deserves the highest amount of respect. God bless.
Please tell me how bombing and killing thousands of innocent civilians, mostly under the age of 15 is protecting this country? Really, please, I really want to know.
I think congress should seriously consider some news laws. If countries want to outsource all of their work to overseas offices. Fine. However by the same token, they should not be allowed to sell back over here, unless they pay a huge tariff, just like any other OVERSEAS company!
Sounds fair to me.
The real sad irony of all of this, as more and more companies resort to cheaper labor overseas, especially highly technical labor, then that means there will be that many previously affluent employees who will not be purchasing and driving the economy. Its a vicious spiral... downwards. Pretty soon, all of these companies, the economy itself will tank, becuase it consists of consumers who can't afford to buy anythign becuase:
1) They were laid off by companies finding cheaper labor overseas.
2) They are those people working overseas only making $.85/hour.
Its one big fucking joke, if the end result wasn't so damn serious - A global Deflationary Depression.
I'm sorry, but I just don't understand why these companies are continuing to implement Blue Tooth. With the maturity of wi-fi 802.11b, 802.11g, and coming soon UWB, why would anyone choose BlueTooth??? It has inferior bandwidth and inferior range.
Why would I carry around a WDA that has a range of 30 feet if I'm lucky, when I can wear the same thing that has 10 times the range and 10 times the bandwidth?
I think its time that companies who stupidly spent billions on developing BlueTooth humble themselves and realize they made a huge mistake with their investments and move on, rather than try to push this inferior technology onto the market. To bluetooth companies out there - I'm not buying it!
Carbon Nanotubes and Ringworlds
on
Ask Larry Niven
·
· Score: 1
Larry,
Now that mass-produced carbon nanotubes ) are about to make their debut (supposeldy close to the strongest theoretical limit that a material can be made), any thoughts on how this material could be used to construct a real ring world? I would imagine because of this limitation, albeit great, constructing a ring world in one piece is out of the question.
Because THEY will be the ones, the corporations, the government and the DOD, who control our indentities. Any digital identity should exist to empower the individual to become a better, more informed customer, not a manipulated consumer.
I highly recommend you read Doc Searles and David Wienbergersviews on this to see why any implementation of DigID that is corporate centered rather than individual centered is PURE EVIL, and will be used for all sorts of nefarois things, from total erasure of shopping anonymonity, total profiling, and even BLACKLISTING. This is bad stuff, pure and simple.
Re:I'd say First Post, but it probably isn't so...
on
World of Ends
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well first post or not, the whole end-to-end paradigm of the stupid network, is so simple and brilliant with economic abundance and endless innovation for everyone, except the telcos, that the only reasons we are not seeing the benefits is because of corporate welfare and monopoly power being given back to the Telcos. I say get them out of the way by letting them die fast in the free-market. We have everything to gain it. Now if only Michael Powell, FCC head, would get the simple message thru his head.
I think this Book List is a fabulous idea and I support it 100%. My only concern is something of this magnitude will require a business plan of some sort. Already the server appears to be having problems handing the slashdotting effect. If this project hopes to achieve its true potential its going to need a lot of bandwith and storage capacity, in addition to a lot of open-sourced people power and coordination. At the very least I would expect it would require some people to manage it full-time, who will need monetary compensation for doing so.
Do you have a business plan that will anticipate and manage this growth. I hope so.
Perhaps I have not kept up with the latest P2P developments, but its almost impossible to imagine how Gnutella2 could possibly be Propietary. How is this even possible, that a new standard for a P2P protocol of all things, a systems that is decentralized without authority being propietary. Is this some kind of joke or a nightmare?
No, the entire point of my argument, is I, and I alone am responsible for my security. When security is mandated on myself then it is Tyranny. If I don't want to wear a seatbelt then it is MY LIFE that is at risk, no one elses. Now, if my insurance company wants to charge me more for the increased medical cost resulting from my accident from not wearing a seatbelt - they have that right. But to force me to wear seatbelts - bullshit. Same goes for my bank. Except in this case, if my money is stolen, there is no insurance company thats going to foot the bill. Only I will loose. Therefore, please tell me why I should be FORCED to use Iris scans??
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I'll be damned if I submit to biometric identifiers to bank. It is afterall MY bank account that is insecure, not anyone elses, if I decide to remaim with using a so-called less secure PIN method. And only I to blame if someone steals it, which by the way has not happened once in all the years there has been a PIN number. I've been using ATM's since they were first introduced, and not once, have I had any security breach on my accont. Your crazy, if I'm going to let some corporation get their hands on my unique biometric identifiers which they will most likely sell to other companies. Before you know it, my biometric date will be on hundreds of databases outside of my control. My identity, both analog and digital is my own. Period.
My long-term goal is to be running a fully-realistic, totally customizable and scalable universe with believability passing anything depicted in the matrix - in other words my own play universe. I already calculated that to run a sufficiently realistic emulated 'Earth' with everything simulated, people, plants, trees, mountains, rocks in realistic detail would take at least 10^30 ops/sec. I would certainly need several Zettabytes of memory to run it effectively.
So quite frankly, there is no such thing as too much RAM, Storage or Speed that I could need, assuming the software was developed to utilize it.
You are 12 years old now and are starting to feel deeply your own inner voice... listen to it! Your creativity is beginning is beginning to flourish so do anything, everything you can to express yourself. Take chances. Don't do it for anyone else, do it for yourself. And if someone happens to critisize you for having your head in the clouds, or being weird, don't listen to them! Follow this inner muse and you will be richly rewarded with a happy life and lots of money.
Your parents mean well, so try to understand that at least their heart is in the right place. If you strongly disagree with them, I suggest at the vert least you keep reserve that strength for yourself and not for battling your parents. It will only cause both you and them needless amounts of grief. Experiment and get away with what you can, and if you get caught, do your best to at least play the part of the "good son". They don't need to know everything you're up to, because you are a life long quest of exploration and adventure and the fun is only getting started.
Good luck, and may you reach the stars before I do.
They are claiming we will have capacities of 1 Terabyte per square inch in 7 years. This sounds very conservative. Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is storage capacity more than doubling each year, and are we not at 100Gbits per square inch now? And if this is correct then we should habe Terabit per square inch capacities in half the time as this company expects to deliver it.
I have onle one doubt - there is still no clear or viable way to mass produce these carbon nanotubes. High Lift Systems is saying that all they need is the funding because the technology already exists. Yet it does not. There are so many technological hurdles required before they could even consider manufacturing a space elevator. Although I am technological optimists, it just seems like they are being a bit fanciful to think that these technical hurdles will be overcome as a matter of course. How do they know? How do we know if there is not some unforseen technical hurdle tha just can't be overcome in any reasonable time - think fusion.
Do I know you? Am I correct in assuming you are a transhumanist? If so, cool. I read a couple of your comments and saw other threads regarding terraforming and of course I also agree that in less than 100 years, the real game will be entirely post - biological in nature.
Seriously, though, if "life" is just the mindless expansion of a system to fill every niche, then terraforming is neither "good" nor "bad"--it just is.
I'm not sure how you concluded from my thesis that I think life is some kind of mindless cancerous growth that just keeps going. Instead I think life, and more importantly complex life, and even more importantly the emergence of complex consciousness - love, music, beauty, culture IS what it's all about. If you disagree, then you see no difference between hydrogen and life. That is your perogative. But as an intelligent and most grateful complex lifeform, I declare thru choice, that life and consciousness is important, and therefore support any expansion of both at the harm of no other. That is my ethic, that is my choice, and I feel it in my bones (even dogmatically), that its the one and probably only precept that I am not flexible on. If I was, then life is meaningless, and can see no reason why you, me or anyone else should do anything at all (i.e why life at all then?).
Here is why Terraforming is good. It turns an otherwise dead planet into a living one. Think beyond us mere humans, and thing of life as a whole and what it has done since its beginnings billions of years ago - life expands to fill every available niche. Life has expanded and become the massive and complex biosphere that it is today. Life has also experienced numerous near total extinction on numerous occasions. Life has now finally gained the capability of leaving its womb planet and expanding outwards to other worlds.
Of course we are talking about life expanding onto other worlds as long as there is no pre-existing life, especially complex life there already. As long as Terraforming meets those ethical requirments I have yet to hear a single reason not to terraform. After all we are only talking about the perpetuation of life itself. I almost would be bold enough to say, "that if you are against terraforming, then you are basically against life itself".
Are there exceptions to this rule? In otherwords who specifically is classified as a Telemarketer. Are the Shriners, Muscular Dystrophy, your neighbors girl scout drive, local newspaper, etc. also considered telemarketers? What about small local businesses who call you for business?
It depends on if you are an American citizen or not.
Well there's the rub. If Ashcroft gets his way with PATRIOT II, anyone he doesn't like can be stripped of their citzenship. And we all know once you are no longer a US Citizen, they have the legal right to secretly arrest you in the dead of night, not tell your family where you are, so they in turn think you are dead or kidnapped, and you end up on a milk carton. Meanwhile you are shipped off to some nasty place like Guatonomo Bay, where you are subjected to constant interogation, torture and possibly death. No due process, no evidence of your guilt is required. All it requires is to get in Ashcrofts shit list.
Sure it is. Its completely feasible, just not politically viable in the current pork barrel climate. Please re-read my post for clarification. I'm all for sending unmanned probes into space to further our scientific knowledge. But going their first hand is what it's all about. That is what drives peoples spirit. Thats why motivated nearly all of space development from Goddard to Von Braun. Wilbur and Wright didn't invent the airplane so it could fly unmanned. The whole point - is going up there ourselves! Star Trek, Star Wars, they are both popular because people are travelling in space. Thats where the freedom lies, no matter what the costs.
The good news: we can get there cheap. The coming economics of afordable space travel will inevitably lead us there. Politics can only hold back this spirit for so long. Bring on the carbon nanotubes!
The answer has been staring us in the face for decades - Price. If we make space access cheap, the rest will follow. What we have done up to this point, is basic feasability testing. Enough already! We know its feasible. There are thousands upon thousands of amzing engineering papers that have been published that will revolutionize space travel and habitation. The one thing, the ONLY thing keeping it from happening, is the cost per pound to orbit.
And the sad part is, there are hundreds of designs that could and would reduce the cost to orbit from its exorbitant $10,000/lb to less than $100/lb. But you know what? All of the aerospace contractors have lobbied for years for these advances to be underfunded, never considered, or just plain cancelled.
I agree with the Cliff, I'm pinning all of my space dreams and hopes on the advent of mass-produced carbon nanotubes. Once they become available, the entire economics of space will change radically. Finally, it will make economic sense for even the most conservative corporations to invest in space industrialization.
Emperor Norton would finance his own movie using his own minted cash, playing himself as the star, but in this case, protector of the federation, and emperor of Orion, or some such. And he would very likely make it a better film than Nemesis.
Manned Space Travel is worth every risk! Sure the science they are doing might seem trivial, but just having people in space is absolutely necessary for our survival. As Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said:
We cannot remain in the cradle forever
We must continue to explore space, to push the envelop. Sure space travel is still dangerous, but every astronaut tooks those risks gladly and with with dignity and honor. Don't let them die in vain. If they were alive today they would urge us to continue this nobelest of pursuits - the inexorable drive of live to expand.
Manned space travel is the greatest adventure we can possibly make and it is worth every risk. In the scheme of things, the current survival rate and safety ratings of space travel is light years ahead of where it was a short 30 years ago.
And with nanotech materials on their way, space travel is only going to get cheaper, safer and more profound in everyway.
My hear goes out to the families, and with them I say we keep moving forward.
Wow, I posted about Iain Bank early on in this story, see above. But I thought I'd mention it again here. I would love to do more with the site, but I just don't have the time. Here it is, Culture Shock
Xeger - Nice comprehensive overview of Banks by the Way!
Slashdot Mirror
The job you were trained to do was to protect this country and its values. Doing so, even amidst personal conflict, deserves the highest amount of respect. God bless.
Please tell me how bombing and killing thousands of innocent civilians, mostly under the age of 15 is protecting this country? Really, please, I really want to know.
I think congress should seriously consider some news laws. If countries want to outsource all of their work to overseas offices. Fine. However by the same token, they should not be allowed to sell back over here, unless they pay a huge tariff, just like any other OVERSEAS company!
Sounds fair to me.
The real sad irony of all of this, as more and more companies resort to cheaper labor overseas, especially highly technical labor, then that means there will be that many previously affluent employees who will not be purchasing and driving the economy. Its a vicious spiral... downwards. Pretty soon, all of these companies, the economy itself will tank, becuase it consists of consumers who can't afford to buy anythign becuase:
1) They were laid off by companies finding cheaper labor overseas.
2) They are those people working overseas only making $.85/hour.
Its one big fucking joke, if the end result wasn't so damn serious - A global Deflationary Depression.
Planet P Blog
I'm sorry, but I just don't understand why these companies are continuing to implement Blue Tooth. With the maturity of wi-fi 802.11b, 802.11g, and coming soon UWB, why would anyone choose BlueTooth??? It has inferior bandwidth and inferior range.
Why would I carry around a WDA that has a range of 30 feet if I'm lucky, when I can wear the same thing that has 10 times the range and 10 times the bandwidth?
I think its time that companies who stupidly spent billions on developing BlueTooth humble themselves and realize they made a huge mistake with their investments and move on, rather than try to push this inferior technology onto the market. To bluetooth companies out there - I'm not buying it!
Planet P Blog
Larry,
Now that mass-produced carbon nanotubes ) are about to make their debut (supposeldy close to the strongest theoretical limit that a material can be made), any thoughts on how this material could be used to construct a real ring world? I would imagine because of this limitation, albeit great, constructing a ring world in one piece is out of the question.
Planet P Blog
Because THEY will be the ones, the corporations, the government and the DOD, who control our indentities. Any digital identity should exist to empower the individual to become a better, more informed customer, not a manipulated consumer.
I highly recommend you read Doc Searles and David Wienbergers views on this to see why any implementation of DigID that is corporate centered rather than individual centered is PURE EVIL, and will be used for all sorts of nefarois things, from total erasure of shopping anonymonity, total profiling, and even BLACKLISTING. This is bad stuff, pure and simple.
Planet P Blog
Well first post or not, the whole end-to-end paradigm of the stupid network, is so simple and brilliant with economic abundance and endless innovation for everyone, except the telcos, that the only reasons we are not seeing the benefits is because of corporate welfare and monopoly power being given back to the Telcos. I say get them out of the way by letting them die fast in the free-market. We have everything to gain it. Now if only Michael Powell, FCC head, would get the simple message thru his head.
Planet P Blog
I think this Book List is a fabulous idea and I support it 100%. My only concern is something of this magnitude will require a business plan of some sort. Already the server appears to be having problems handing the slashdotting effect. If this project hopes to achieve its true potential its going to need a lot of bandwith and storage capacity, in addition to a lot of open-sourced people power and coordination. At the very least I would expect it would require some people to manage it full-time, who will need monetary compensation for doing so.
Do you have a business plan that will anticipate and manage this growth. I hope so.
Best of luck and success to you.
Planet P Blog
Perhaps I have not kept up with the latest P2P developments, but its almost impossible to imagine how Gnutella2 could possibly be Propietary. How is this even possible, that a new standard for a P2P protocol of all things, a systems that is decentralized without authority being propietary. Is this some kind of joke or a nightmare?
No, the entire point of my argument, is I, and I alone am responsible for my security. When security is mandated on myself then it is Tyranny. If I don't want to wear a seatbelt then it is MY LIFE that is at risk, no one elses. Now, if my insurance company wants to charge me more for the increased medical cost resulting from my accident from not wearing a seatbelt - they have that right. But to force me to wear seatbelts - bullshit. Same goes for my bank. Except in this case, if my money is stolen, there is no insurance company thats going to foot the bill. Only I will loose. Therefore, please tell me why I should be FORCED to use Iris scans??
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technolgy.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I'll be damned if I submit to biometric identifiers to bank. It is afterall MY bank account that is insecure, not anyone elses, if I decide to remaim with using a so-called less secure PIN method. And only I to blame if someone steals it, which by the way has not happened once in all the years there has been a PIN number. I've been using ATM's since they were first introduced, and not once, have I had any security breach on my accont. Your crazy, if I'm going to let some corporation get their hands on my unique biometric identifiers which they will most likely sell to other companies. Before you know it, my biometric date will be on hundreds of databases outside of my control. My identity, both analog and digital is my own. Period.
Planet P Blog
My long-term goal is to be running a fully-realistic, totally customizable and scalable universe with believability passing anything depicted in the matrix - in other words my own play universe. I already calculated that to run a sufficiently realistic emulated 'Earth' with everything simulated, people, plants, trees, mountains, rocks in realistic detail would take at least 10^30 ops/sec. I would certainly need several Zettabytes of memory to run it effectively.
So quite frankly, there is no such thing as too much RAM, Storage or Speed that I could need, assuming the software was developed to utilize it.
Planet P Blog
Dear Self,
You are 12 years old now and are starting to feel deeply your own inner voice... listen to it! Your creativity is beginning is beginning to flourish so do anything, everything you can to express yourself. Take chances. Don't do it for anyone else, do it for yourself. And if someone happens to critisize you for having your head in the clouds, or being weird, don't listen to them! Follow this inner muse and you will be richly rewarded with a happy life and lots of money.
Your parents mean well, so try to understand that at least their heart is in the right place. If you strongly disagree with them, I suggest at the vert least you keep reserve that strength for yourself and not for battling your parents. It will only cause both you and them needless amounts of grief. Experiment and get away with what you can, and if you get caught, do your best to at least play the part of the "good son". They don't need to know everything you're up to, because you are a life long quest of exploration and adventure and the fun is only getting started.
Good luck, and may you reach the stars before I do.
You older self,
Paul
Planet P Blog
They are claiming we will have capacities of 1 Terabyte per square inch in 7 years. This sounds very conservative. Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is storage capacity more than doubling each year, and are we not at 100Gbits per square inch now? And if this is correct then we should habe Terabit per square inch capacities in half the time as this company expects to deliver it.
I have onle one doubt - there is still no clear or viable way to mass produce these carbon nanotubes. High Lift Systems is saying that all they need is the funding because the technology already exists. Yet it does not. There are so many technological hurdles required before they could even consider manufacturing a space elevator. Although I am technological optimists, it just seems like they are being a bit fanciful to think that these technical hurdles will be overcome as a matter of course. How do they know? How do we know if there is not some unforseen technical hurdle tha just can't be overcome in any reasonable time - think fusion.
Planet P Blog
Hi Susano,
Do I know you? Am I correct in assuming you are a transhumanist? If so, cool. I read a couple of your comments and saw other threads regarding terraforming and of course I also agree that in less than 100 years, the real game will be entirely post - biological in nature.
Planet P Blog
Seriously, though, if "life" is just the mindless expansion of a system to fill every niche, then terraforming is neither "good" nor "bad"--it just is.
I'm not sure how you concluded from my thesis that I think life is some kind of mindless cancerous growth that just keeps going. Instead I think life, and more importantly complex life, and even more importantly the emergence of complex consciousness - love, music, beauty, culture IS what it's all about. If you disagree, then you see no difference between hydrogen and life. That is your perogative. But as an intelligent and most grateful complex lifeform, I declare thru choice, that life and consciousness is important, and therefore support any expansion of both at the harm of no other. That is my ethic, that is my choice, and I feel it in my bones (even dogmatically), that its the one and probably only precept that I am not flexible on. If I was, then life is meaningless, and can see no reason why you, me or anyone else should do anything at all (i.e why life at all then?).
Planet P Blog
Ok,
Here is why Terraforming is good. It turns an otherwise dead planet into a living one. Think beyond us mere humans, and thing of life as a whole and what it has done since its beginnings billions of years ago - life expands to fill every available niche. Life has expanded and become the massive and complex biosphere that it is today. Life has also experienced numerous near total extinction on numerous occasions. Life has now finally gained the capability of leaving its womb planet and expanding outwards to other worlds.
Of course we are talking about life expanding onto other worlds as long as there is no pre-existing life, especially complex life there already. As long as Terraforming meets those ethical requirments I have yet to hear a single reason not to terraform. After all we are only talking about the perpetuation of life itself. I almost would be bold enough to say, "that if you are against terraforming, then you are basically against life itself".
Planet P Blog
Are there exceptions to this rule? In otherwords who specifically is classified as a Telemarketer. Are the Shriners, Muscular Dystrophy, your neighbors girl scout drive, local newspaper, etc. also considered telemarketers? What about small local businesses who call you for business?
It depends on if you are an American citizen or not.
Well there's the rub. If Ashcroft gets his way with PATRIOT II, anyone he doesn't like can be stripped of their citzenship. And we all know once you are no longer a US Citizen, they have the legal right to secretly arrest you in the dead of night, not tell your family where you are, so they in turn think you are dead or kidnapped, and you end up on a milk carton. Meanwhile you are shipped off to some nasty place like Guatonomo Bay, where you are subjected to constant interogation, torture and possibly death. No due process, no evidence of your guilt is required. All it requires is to get in Ashcrofts shit list.
Sure it is. Its completely feasible, just not politically viable in the current pork barrel climate. Please re-read my post for clarification. I'm all for sending unmanned probes into space to further our scientific knowledge. But going their first hand is what it's all about. That is what drives peoples spirit. Thats why motivated nearly all of space development from Goddard to Von Braun. Wilbur and Wright didn't invent the airplane so it could fly unmanned. The whole point - is going up there ourselves! Star Trek, Star Wars, they are both popular because people are travelling in space. Thats where the freedom lies, no matter what the costs.
The good news: we can get there cheap. The coming economics of afordable space travel will inevitably lead us there. Politics can only hold back this spirit for so long. Bring on the carbon nanotubes!
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
The answer has been staring us in the face for decades - Price. If we make space access cheap, the rest will follow. What we have done up to this point, is basic feasability testing. Enough already! We know its feasible. There are thousands upon thousands of amzing engineering papers that have been published that will revolutionize space travel and habitation. The one thing, the ONLY thing keeping it from happening, is the cost per pound to orbit.
And the sad part is, there are hundreds of designs that could and would reduce the cost to orbit from its exorbitant $10,000/lb to less than $100/lb. But you know what? All of the aerospace contractors have lobbied for years for these advances to be underfunded, never considered, or just plain cancelled.
I agree with the Cliff, I'm pinning all of my space dreams and hopes on the advent of mass-produced carbon nanotubes. Once they become available, the entire economics of space will change radically. Finally, it will make economic sense for even the most conservative corporations to invest in space industrialization.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
What would Emperor Norton do?
Emperor Norton would finance his own movie using his own minted cash, playing himself as the star, but in this case, protector of the federation, and emperor of Orion, or some such. And he would very likely make it a better film than Nemesis.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technologuy.
Your absolutely right. And the 'Inner Light' was probably the very best Start Trek episode, certainly my personal favorite.
Planet P Blog
Manned Space Travel is worth every risk! Sure the science they are doing might seem trivial, but just having people in space is absolutely necessary for our survival. As Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said:
We cannot remain in the cradle forever
We must continue to explore space, to push the envelop. Sure space travel is still dangerous, but every astronaut tooks those risks gladly and with with dignity and honor. Don't let them die in vain. If they were alive today they would urge us to continue this nobelest of pursuits - the inexorable drive of live to expand.
Manned space travel is the greatest adventure we can possibly make and it is worth every risk. In the scheme of things, the current survival rate and safety ratings of space travel is light years ahead of where it was a short 30 years ago.
And with nanotech materials on their way, space travel is only going to get cheaper, safer and more profound in everyway.
My hear goes out to the families, and with them I say we keep moving forward.
Planet P Blog
Wow, I posted about Iain Bank early on in this story, see above. But I thought I'd mention it again here. I would love to do more with the site, but I just don't have the time. Here it is, Culture Shock
Xeger - Nice comprehensive overview of Banks by the Way!
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.