I enjoyed Battlefield Earth. It was stupid but entertaining. (Praise be to LRon.) I fell asleep during the last two Matrix movies. There was far too much of the characters just standing around yacking at each other.
See I knew someone out there would agree with me, but it's funny how you say you enjoyed it, yet commented Anonymous Coward. Were you ashamed you enjoyed it? I must have no shame! Should I be?
I didn't think battlefield earth was that bad. If you consider it had the bad acting of lost in space, with the religious overtoned science fiction like battlestar galactica, and the special effects a bit sup par with Babelon 5, it's not all that bad, really.
I've seen a whole lot worse in sci-fi. Remember disney's black hole?
No actually, they're not just a good idea, they're a GREAT idea.
Unlike criminal bounty hunters, there's no violence involved. It's all intellect to intellect. Who can study and understand the most about everything involved. (Which can be everything from OS's, to protocol stacks, to network topology, to application exploits, worms viruses, daemons, services, ect.)
But how are they going to determine bounties??? This is a tough question.
Will it be by volume (amount of spam sent) Will it be by complexity? (How hard will it be to decipher what the spammer did?) Will it be by difficulty? (How well did the suspect cover up their tracks?) Or will it be by the amount of time unsolved?
I think all of the above would make a great basis to calculate a bounty. I also think an audit trail of some type has to be established with evidence gathering, because it's not too hard to point the finger at an innocent person.
So if you say it's ok to bounty hunt as long as you're white hacking in the "name of the law" how far will you be allowed to go with your evidence collecting before you've crossed the line into privacy invasion?
See, that's the real conundrum with bounty hunters on the net. It's not like the days of the old west when you could hang up a picture of a guy, point and say "That's the one!" With the net there are so many complex ways to frame a person that it's unpractical to give goverment, let alone private netizens the type of evidence collecting power they would need in order to procescute people.
So maybe it isn't such a great idea after all. Sounds more like someone trying to equate the net with some spaghetti western. What we need to do is replace the current mail system with something better (something discussed many times here)
I'm one of those people that wouldn't screw someone over for a buck. I'm in the minority.
2004 PCI express will start appearing in a motherboard near you in limited quantities. As AGP is phased out (Intel and ATI will lead this initiative) PCI express will be phased in as the major video card interface on PC's.
I have friends that come over with their shiny AGP radeon 9xxx begging me to go out and blow my money on the card. I keep repeating to them...
No new video card till these minimum requirements are met.
1. 64bit CPU 2. PCI express 3. Doom 3
1 is here, 2 will be in 2004, and 3 according to JC will be here "when it's done".
Can anyone tell me the likelihood of tracking down a spammer at a laptop in a city the size of San Francisco?
SF is not as big as some people think it is. Compared to neighboring cities you could probably fit 3 SF's in Oakland, and as many as 5 in San Jose.
As far as tracking spammers, when I worked at ricochet we recovered a laptop stolen from a trade show in San Francisco once. Wasn't really that hard once we had the modem # and triangulated it's position from the poletops it saw. From there it was just a matter of pinpointing its location with a loop antenna.
That won't get money into HUD's. What will get money into HUD's will be sex.
As soon as the VR vagina
is invented as an accesory to the VR glasses, you're going to see guys lined up
around the corner to spend an intimate moment with their
favorite girl
from DOA3
is a journal entry I did a few days before this article because I was thinking about this very subject.
I would LOVE stem cell research. To those that say the earth is overpopulated BOO HOO! Maybe the earth needs a few more superhumans and a few less troglodytes.
We have a ready waiting supply for stem cells. Say it with me now folks, ABORTED FETUSES. The fetus didn't make it to term? Tough luck, that's natural selection. What do you think dogs and other wild animals do with their stillborn? They eat them of course! No self respecting carnivoire on the food chain is going to let that tasty bit of protien go to waste. Why should we as humans, the smartest creatures on the planet allow perfectly good stem cells that could SAVE LIVES become ground up and flushed down the drain?
I see stem cell research leading to more than saving lives, I see a future with unimaginativable body modifications. As a side result I would imagine learning how to keep a fetus alive outisde the womb would be a major part of the research, which could lead to healthier babies being born.
im all for spammers taking a tour of federal pound me in the ass prison.... in all 50 states
You have state and Federal prisons mixed up. It's state prisons you get your ass pounded.
I have a friend who's dad stayed in a fed pen for diamond smuggling (same friends dad who was a spammer, look at my old comments)
This is a second hand account from the dad, but apparently the fed prison in california is nicknamed "Club Fed" because they have it so easy there. He told us that he was allowed to wear his own clothes, had a telephone and cable TV in his room. An olympic sized swimming pool, and count them 2, 2 projection theaters that hollywood would provide the reels of the latest greatest films for tax writeoff purposes.
Most of the people in Club Fed were there for white collar crimes. A lot of ex-ceo types.
I can't believe you cited Total Recall as a reliable source of science.
Well no that was just a VTA (visual training aid) to give you a goofy picture in your head what I was shooting for.
I doubt a fission reactor has enough power to convert a planets worth of atomosphere for europa, but like I said, maybe while it's melting it's way down through the 100's of miles of ice, it might create a 20' wide hole with enough warmth (from rising steam) and distance from the reactor at the bottom where life could spring up near the top of the wall.
Nothing as complex as a biped, it would probably resemble some sort of an algae. Since there probably isn't enough sunlight for photosynthisis it would be like the sulfur bacteria we find near geothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean floor.
Bottom line is though... over any kind of elements you have on a planet, the most important thing for life is tempature. Too hot and cells start falling apart, too cold and they can't do anything usefull unless they have a high glucose content for antifreeze(call it a hunch, but I would bet there isn't a lot of sugar on europa)
From what we know on earth, the tempature for life is something between 120 degrees (thermal vents) and 60 (surface stuff)
Of course this is preposterous, but no more so than thinking a nuclear reactor would kick start life on a planet covered by ice sheets hundreds of miles thick.
Unless of course that reactor melted enough ice too allow stuff to live there. Maybe if it did a core meltdown, the resulting steam would create a thermal vent to the surface as it melted its way down?
I cite the machine at the end of total recall for creating an atmosphere. Couldn't a fission reactor melting through the ice do the same? Maybe not enough to cover the whole planet, but enough to sustain life in that little pocket.
Here's how it works when you (somehow, miraculously) manage to persuade billions of people to switch to a new mail protocol;
End user still needs to be able to send mail
Spammer hacks their box
Spammer can now (still) send email
Here is how I would improve it..
First time a client connects, it sends its username/pass to be hashed by the server.
The server keeps a copy of this hash.
Next time that client connects, if the hash doesn't match, don't let them send. Simple as that. Have each mail transport create a list of "trusted hashes" so we can still have somewhat reliable mail routing through top level servers.
ISP's now, run pretty open relays. On the cloud side it's blocked but on their network side any client can send garbage through the SMTP server.
The best approach I've seen so far is that grey-hat hackers need to break in and really trash every hackable box they can find.
With that kind of thinking I should go out and trash every home I find unlocked, just to teach the owners a lesson. Sorry but you need to change how you think about things, destructive behavior is never constructive. Why not go in and fix it instead of trashing it?
You both make excellent points, a. go after the spammer b. go after the people that fall for it
Yet they're both chicken before the egg type of solutions.
It was a weak protocol that let the genie out of the bottle. Open relays were a part of the net in the beginning because spam didn't exist, there was more co-operation between sysops, and because the net was mainly comprised of scientific and academic types.
Actually, what is really needed is a new mail protocol. Simple as that. Then there wouldn't be this backwards compatible layer full of holes, and it would render all these worms useless.
I just had a thought and wanted to post it real quick..
A lot of modem users can't stand bittorrent, and I think it has something to do with latency as well. Just point of concept of how high latency points of presence cannot efficiently be used in a mesh network topology.
It's 900mhz, spread spectrum frequency hopping (going through the marketdroid brainwwash scar in my head)
As far as I recall, it hopped frequencies every so many seconds, I don't know if the radio looked for s/n ratio's per frequency before using it to check if it was availiable. Since it was 900mhz my best guess is it would fall under the FCC guidlines for 900mhz transmission, the whole "You must accept interferrance" stuff.
Your modems shouldn't be completely useless if you have more than 1. Look on the back for a 8 digit number.
0000-8883 ^--like this
If you connect the ricochets to seperate computers you can launch a terminal program and connect them using AT commands. Set the computer to be dialed too to autoanswer with a "ata" command and atdt it's rico modem number from the other computer.
Now that I think about it.... Compared to 802.11 those modems are trash, I know the cases are aluminum painted black, should be worth a few cents at the recycling center. There's some usefullness:D
250bps mesh isn't all that great bruce, having worked at ricochet tech support and having sat right underneath the main los gatos WAP and being able to see at least 6 other WAPs from that spot I can tell you the performance was crud.
Even at double the bps, it still would be crud performance...
The only place mesh seems to work well is over high speed, low latency copper wire or fiber, since the number of transmission retries are zero to nil.
I'm not trying to troll, i'm just trying to point out an inherant weakness in wireless mesh networks. Point to point between 2 wireless nodes is one thing, but when you scale it up to mesh it really falls apart due to the latency cause by retries.
toq
Processing power will determine usefullness
on
The Robots are Coming
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Humanoid robots use a lot of processing power, every little shift in weight, wind, all has to be compensated for with carefully calculated counter-movements. A robot lying down or sitting would not use as much CPU.
It's why you see the Asimo moving so slowly. Even if faster motors were put into it, and it was rated for a higher top speed, those calculations for balance would have to be done more often.
This is before we even get into random terrain navigation. The robot has to know how to recognize different sorts of terrain (carpet, cement, gravel, dirt) and adjust its stride accordingly.
On top of all that we have the "interacion" layer. Facial recognition, speech and vocabulary. Now we have the perfect robot.
It's 2003, we can barely get the Asimo to walk up some stairs or do a few preprogrammed tricks. Our current limitations are CPU, storage, and battery life.
I think CPU, storage, and battery life will increase, as we create more powerful lower wattage components. Batteries themselves look as though they may be a dead end technology, so robots might be powered by methane fuel cells or some alternative power source we haven't discovered yet.
I think we have another 20 years before we see robots good enough for general use for labor, and maybe another 20 after before we can no longer tell the difference between what is robot, and what is human.
Slashdot Mirror
I enjoyed Battlefield Earth. It was stupid but entertaining. (Praise be to LRon.) I fell asleep during the last two Matrix movies. There was far too much of the characters just standing around yacking at each other.
See I knew someone out there would agree with me, but it's funny how you say you enjoyed it, yet commented Anonymous Coward. Were you ashamed you enjoyed it? I must have no shame! Should I be?
I didn't think battlefield earth was that bad. If you consider it had the bad acting of lost in space, with the religious overtoned science fiction like battlestar galactica, and the special effects a bit sup par with Babelon 5, it's not all that bad, really.
I've seen a whole lot worse in sci-fi. Remember disney's black hole?
Fighting Cancer With The Common Cold.
Sounds like
Pouring Gasoline on a fire.
No actually, they're not just a good idea, they're a GREAT idea.
Unlike criminal bounty hunters, there's no violence involved. It's all intellect to intellect. Who can study and understand the most about everything involved. (Which can be everything from OS's, to protocol stacks, to network topology, to application exploits, worms viruses, daemons, services, ect.)
But how are they going to determine bounties??? This is a tough question.
Will it be by volume (amount of spam sent)
Will it be by complexity? (How hard will it be to decipher what the spammer did?)
Will it be by difficulty? (How well did the suspect cover up their tracks?)
Or will it be by the amount of time unsolved?
I think all of the above would make a great basis to calculate a bounty. I also think an audit trail of some type has to be established with evidence gathering, because it's not too hard to point the finger at an innocent person.
So if you say it's ok to bounty hunt as long as you're white hacking in the "name of the law" how far will you be allowed to go with your evidence collecting before you've crossed the line into privacy invasion?
See, that's the real conundrum with bounty hunters on the net. It's not like the days of the old west when you could hang up a picture of a guy, point and say "That's the one!" With the net there are so many complex ways to frame a person that it's unpractical to give goverment, let alone private netizens the type of evidence collecting power they would need in order to procescute people.
So maybe it isn't such a great idea after all. Sounds more like someone trying to equate the net with some spaghetti western. What we need to do is replace the current mail system with something better (something discussed many times here)
I'm one of those people that wouldn't screw someone over for a buck. I'm in the minority.
End up going home in a pocket.
Don't the Japanese already have one? What do the Japanese have that the US does not, to allow them to create a MagLev?
For the same reason they have better broadband. Geographically denser population than the US.
2004 PCI express will start appearing in a motherboard near you in limited quantities. As AGP is phased out (Intel and ATI will lead this initiative) PCI express will be phased in as the major video card interface on PC's.
I have friends that come over with their shiny AGP radeon 9xxx begging me to go out and blow my money on the card. I keep repeating to them...
No new video card till these minimum requirements are met.
1. 64bit CPU
2. PCI express
3. Doom 3
1 is here, 2 will be in 2004, and 3 according to JC will be here "when it's done".
Are there any 64bit SFF boards?
Can anyone tell me the likelihood of tracking down a spammer at a laptop in a city the size of San Francisco?
SF is not as big as some people think it is. Compared to neighboring cities you could probably fit 3 SF's in Oakland, and as many as 5 in San Jose.
As far as tracking spammers, when I worked at ricochet we recovered a laptop stolen from a trade show in San Francisco once. Wasn't really that hard once we had the modem # and triangulated it's position from the poletops it saw. From there it was just a matter of pinpointing its location with a loop antenna.
That won't get money into HUD's. What will get money into HUD's will be sex.
As soon as the VR vagina is invented as an accesory to the VR glasses, you're going to see guys lined up around the corner to spend an intimate moment with their favorite girl from DOA3
Is there a plural for fetus? I dunno, anyways..
is a journal entry I did a few days before this article because I was thinking about this very subject.
I would LOVE stem cell research. To those that say the earth is overpopulated BOO HOO! Maybe the earth needs a few more superhumans and a few less troglodytes.
We have a ready waiting supply for stem cells. Say it with me now folks, ABORTED FETUSES. The fetus didn't make it to term? Tough luck, that's natural selection. What do you think dogs and other wild animals do with their stillborn? They eat them of course! No self respecting carnivoire on the food chain is going to let that tasty bit of protien go to waste. Why should we as humans, the smartest creatures on the planet allow perfectly good stem cells that could SAVE LIVES become ground up and flushed down the drain?
I see stem cell research leading to more than saving lives, I see a future with unimaginativable body modifications. As a side result I would imagine learning how to keep a fetus alive outisde the womb would be a major part of the research, which could lead to healthier babies being born.
You are phrasing your questions, and your thinking in a very bigotted fashion. Kind of an existence proof of my point. ;-)
As neither a scientist or a christian, I have to point out that the order in which he phrased his question has no bearing on if he is a bigot.
im all for spammers taking a tour of federal pound me in the ass prison.... in all 50 states
You have state and Federal prisons mixed up. It's state prisons you get your ass pounded.
I have a friend who's dad stayed in a fed pen for diamond smuggling (same friends dad who was a spammer, look at my old comments)
This is a second hand account from the dad, but apparently the fed prison in california is nicknamed "Club Fed" because they have it so easy there. He told us that he was allowed to wear his own clothes, had a telephone and cable TV in his room. An olympic sized swimming pool, and count them 2, 2 projection theaters that hollywood would provide the reels of the latest greatest films for tax writeoff purposes.
Most of the people in Club Fed were there for white collar crimes. A lot of ex-ceo types.
If you missed the show like I did last night, here are some torrent links.
Battlestar Galactica 2003 - Part 1 (VCD-TV) dsfgeshgtdfhjfgjg fdhdfds
fdg dsf
Battlestar Galactica Part 2 (VCD-TV) sdga gdsag dsagadsgrgaaarg
argra
Battlestar Galactica Part 2 (XviD-SFM) dsag 6rutrad reagrehrdg a
sgsdafg fadsg a
BattleStar Galactica Part2 (DSRip-SFM) as grea agr gsdafewt dsfgfagf agasdfg
asd
Battlestar Galactica- Part 1 TVRip-LoL dsag sadghyrhres esa gesagsdgrsa gag
asdgsa
Extra crap is in there because the lameness filter required it.
I hope I've given you some brainfood in here. But I'm certainly no biologist by any means.
Ya u gave me support for my theory since according to you it doesn't take as much atomsphere.
I can't believe you cited Total Recall as a reliable source of science.
Well no that was just a VTA (visual training aid) to give you a goofy picture in your head what I was shooting for.
I doubt a fission reactor has enough power to convert a planets worth of atomosphere for europa, but like I said, maybe while it's melting it's way down through the 100's of miles of ice, it might create a 20' wide hole with enough warmth (from rising steam) and distance from the reactor at the bottom where life could spring up near the top of the wall.
Nothing as complex as a biped, it would probably resemble some sort of an algae. Since there probably isn't enough sunlight for photosynthisis it would be like the sulfur bacteria we find near geothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean floor.
Bottom line is though... over any kind of elements you have on a planet, the most important thing for life is tempature. Too hot and cells start falling apart, too cold and they can't do anything usefull unless they have a high glucose content for antifreeze(call it a hunch, but I would bet there isn't a lot of sugar on europa)
From what we know on earth, the tempature for life is something between 120 degrees (thermal vents) and 60 (surface stuff)
Wow. I bet that gets the ladies all wet and anxious. You must be swatting them away like flies with bandwidth like that.
Those aren't flies in his lap!
ba da CHING!
Thank you folks, I'll be here all week!
Water is H2O, and I believe with enough heat you can break any molucule down to it's base components.
Not that I doubt they can take the load, but why make 'em?
Holy Smokes! 1 peer, 1 seed and 184kbps??
You sir are seeding from the bandwidth of the gods!! My hats off to you!
Of course this is preposterous, but no more so than thinking a nuclear reactor would kick start life on a planet covered by ice sheets hundreds of miles thick.
Unless of course that reactor melted enough ice too allow stuff to live there. Maybe if it did a core meltdown, the resulting steam would create a thermal vent to the surface as it melted its way down?
I cite the machine at the end of total recall for creating an atmosphere. Couldn't a fission reactor melting through the ice do the same? Maybe not enough to cover the whole planet, but enough to sustain life in that little pocket.
Here's how it works when you (somehow, miraculously) manage to persuade billions of people to switch to a new mail protocol;
End user still needs to be able to send mail
Spammer hacks their box
Spammer can now (still) send email
Here is how I would improve it..
First time a client connects, it sends its username/pass to be hashed by the server.
The server keeps a copy of this hash.
Next time that client connects, if the hash doesn't match, don't let them send. Simple as that. Have each mail transport create a list of "trusted hashes" so we can still have somewhat reliable mail routing through top level servers.
ISP's now, run pretty open relays. On the cloud side it's blocked but on their network side any client can send garbage through the SMTP server.
The best approach I've seen so far is that grey-hat hackers need to break in and really trash every hackable box they can find.
With that kind of thinking I should go out and trash every home I find unlocked, just to teach the owners a lesson. Sorry but you need to change how you think about things, destructive behavior is never constructive. Why not go in and fix it instead of trashing it?
Too the parent and the parent parent posters...
You both make excellent points,
a. go after the spammer
b. go after the people that fall for it
Yet they're both chicken before the egg type of solutions.
It was a weak protocol that let the genie out of the bottle. Open relays were a part of the net in the beginning because spam didn't exist, there was more co-operation between sysops, and because the net was mainly comprised of scientific and academic types.
Actually, what is really needed is a new mail protocol. Simple as that. Then there wouldn't be this backwards compatible layer full of holes, and it would render all these worms useless.
I just had a thought and wanted to post it real quick..
A lot of modem users can't stand bittorrent, and I think it has something to do with latency as well. Just point of concept of how high latency points of presence cannot efficiently be used in a mesh network topology.
It's 900mhz, spread spectrum frequency hopping (going through the marketdroid brainwwash scar in my head)
:D
As far as I recall, it hopped frequencies every so many seconds, I don't know if the radio looked for s/n ratio's per frequency before using it to check if it was availiable. Since it was 900mhz my best guess is it would fall under the FCC guidlines for 900mhz transmission, the whole "You must accept interferrance" stuff.
Your modems shouldn't be completely useless if you have more than 1. Look on the back for a 8 digit number.
0000-8883
^--like this
If you connect the ricochets to seperate computers you can launch a terminal program and connect them using AT commands. Set the computer to be dialed too to autoanswer with a "ata" command and atdt it's rico modem number from the other computer.
Now that I think about it.... Compared to 802.11 those modems are trash, I know the cases are aluminum painted black, should be worth a few cents at the recycling center. There's some usefullness
250bps mesh isn't all that great bruce, having worked at ricochet tech support and having sat right underneath the main los gatos WAP and being able to see at least 6 other WAPs from that spot I can tell you the performance was crud.
Even at double the bps, it still would be crud performance...
The only place mesh seems to work well is over high speed, low latency copper wire or fiber, since the number of transmission retries are zero to nil.
I'm not trying to troll, i'm just trying to point out an inherant weakness in wireless mesh networks. Point to point between 2 wireless nodes is one thing, but when you scale it up to mesh it really falls apart due to the latency cause by retries.
toq
Humanoid robots use a lot of processing power, every little shift in weight, wind, all has to be compensated for with carefully calculated counter-movements. A robot lying down or sitting would not use as much CPU.
It's why you see the Asimo moving so slowly. Even if faster motors were put into it, and it was rated for a higher top speed, those calculations for balance would have to be done more often.
This is before we even get into random terrain navigation. The robot has to know how to recognize different sorts of terrain (carpet, cement, gravel, dirt) and adjust its stride accordingly.
On top of all that we have the "interacion" layer. Facial recognition, speech and vocabulary. Now we have the perfect robot.
It's 2003, we can barely get the Asimo to walk up some stairs or do a few preprogrammed tricks. Our current limitations are CPU, storage, and battery life.
I think CPU, storage, and battery life will increase, as we create more powerful lower wattage components. Batteries themselves look as though they may be a dead end technology, so robots might be powered by methane fuel cells or some alternative power source we haven't discovered yet.
I think we have another 20 years before we see robots good enough for general use for labor, and maybe another 20 after before we can no longer tell the difference between what is robot, and what is human.