I can hardly imagine the deprivation of a resource our people have used for scarcely a few centuries to be that catastrophic an event. Yes, we're very dependent on it, yes there would be lots of havoc and whatnot, but we'd get over it pretty quick. Nuclear is far from the only alternative available to us (btw, a buddy of mine is a nuclear engineer, and he would argue I'm sure with your statement, "there are no nuclear engineers anymore"). Not only are there some very sound agricultural power possibilities (hemp burns almost as hot as coal, not to mention the fact that the first deisel engine ran on peanut oil, so I'm sure the combustion motor will survive the end of the oil.
Although I'm sure I'll get flamed for this. There have been quite a few proposed solutions to problems like the power problem that may not have gotten quite the attention they deserved due to reasons quite different from their viability. Some of these have included Viktor Schauberger (web resources on him aren't nearly as good as the print books available, check amazon.com), and although a bit cliche, Nicola Tesla.
Anyway, empires have crashed before, sudden catastrophic change has much historical president. I'm not worried about the power going out. We'll survive.
I watch the Simpsons every single week. Every time it's on, I do indeed try to watch it. I own the first season DVDs (only one out, as far as I know), hell I even have some of their merchandise. I take almost every oportunity I get to give the makers money (through advertising, etc.)
I also have about 60 odd episodes on my hard drive. I like to be able to watch them more often than I'm given opportunity. Presumably, these AVIs and RAMs and ASFs that I've downloaded off iMesh and gotten burned on CDs from my friends are illegal, pirated episodes... But if I'm giving them money every opportunity I get, how can I possibly be said to be STEALING from them for watching The Simpsons every day, instead of the lame every week (if I'm lucky) that it's on in the season? Off-season, it might not even be on at all! Same holds true for the (not all that many) shows that I actually enjoy on the babble box.
Benoit: Either you make the data shared, or you make the application components shared. And sharing the data was easier. (Dominic agrees).
If the data is shared, and you have libraries that are shared, then why not ask the data to display itself (object.display(x);) and have it call to a standard library (system library?) which queries a system properties database object as to what application to display it? Don't actually store the display code in the objects, but have the objects query the system as to what the user has specified to display that type of data with.
Dominic: That's what I mean. Some people are very anal about organizing things in rigid hierarchies and others are 'I know what I want to find'.
I think there is a place for hierarchies, but not as the base organizational method of the filesystem. I would like to see a hierarchy of attributes, or keys, or whatever you want to call them. When you save an object (off the internet, or out of your head), a title is only one possible attribute you want to give it. When I save a pr0n jpg, it doesn't need a damn title, I need to mark what it's a damn picture of (amateur AND cumshots AND redhead)! Perhaps start with people, places, things. Or later in the hierarchy, sound -> music -> various bands as well as various artists as well as various sound effects as well as dates and live or studio, all keyed (so to speak) and queryable. But the hierarchy is for browsing. Just for browsing, because browsing is important (when you want to look at cumshots, you want to look at cumshots, but when you query for cumshots, watersports and lesbians, well that's bloody well what you should get), and micro$oft's nice little explorer looks about right. Although instead of a stupid directory tree, we have a tree of object properties and types, and any object can be in any number of places in that tree, depending on it's attributes (categories?).
I know of course that I haven't really said anything new in this post, and I know that performace needs to be taken into account. This is, however, the way things are moving, and all we really need is a really good, really fast, solid state storage medium. When permanent storage is as fast as or faster than RAM is today, the database filesystem will finally become a reality, until then, we'll sure be gearing up.
Has anyone heard of a man named Viktor Schauberger? He was an Austrian forester scientist in the late 1800's. He died in the 50's. I've read several books about him, and although I am in no position to judge whether any of his ideas had any merit, I am inclined to feel that his work should be persued.
He studied the shape of the vortex, he invented (all supposedly, of course) power generation devices, climate control devices, pipes that cleaned water, and it's said that the natzi's kidnapped him in WWII to have him build a flying saucer. Many think that he came damn close. He was a contemporary of the guy who's behind Biodynamic Faming, and Schauberger had a lot of research and ideas into agriculture, farming and composting. He had many interesting acomplishments in his time, and they called him the Water Wizard.
The books I've read about him have inspired me and some day I hope to recreate some of his experiments. A search on amazon will find several books about him, all of which are good, and a search on google will find more than the measly link I've provided. I'm sure someone who reads german could find most of his original works.
Anyway, the point is, maybe some of the most amazing inventions have already been surpressed once or twice (Tesla anyone?)
OpenBSD's learning curve is so high, my girlfriend will never find it.
Amen to that. I run RedHat, and keep my pr0n in a.pr0n directory right there in my home directory. I couldn't possibly imagine her finding it. All she knows how to do is connect to the internet and browse the web.
Computers are quite a different beast than any of the technologies before them. Capitalism and competition get us a long way, but at very high environmental and social costs. I'm not convinced that competition is the best way to produce software. Infact, I'm convinced it's not. It saddens me that this country (culture) is so concerned with the details of the laws that we cannot think about real change, which is what is needed.
I think that the place to start is with the way we communicate with eachother. We have e-mail, but every time I go to a computer I have to set up the pop settings, and then I don't have my old e-mails and categorized in folders and stuff, and I don't have my address book with all my contacts and stuff. Many people say, but we have web-based e-mail, but you know what? Web-based services suck. They are not interactive and flexible enough.
What I want is a very flexible login protocol. Where I can log into my server from any machine with the client software (doing most of the display stuff on the client side, and just transering data and security information) with my login (account@server.net), and then I get whatever data I have stored there. More importantly though, I get a way to be contacted. Lets say I'm logged into my server (terradot.org) and you're logged into yours (fuckmail.com). When I try to contact fuckmail.com and make a connection with (or simply send data to) you, that connection can be mediated by our servers (I don't need to know your IP and you don't need to know mine) if we want, or the servers can just refer us to eachother so we can connect directly (depending on security preferences).
What I'm really talking about is changing the paradigm from an IP-centric one to a user-centric one, and I'm envisioning a good new standard for internet communications. I don't know about you, but I have quite a few discordant communications systems on my machine (and trillian can't even stay connected for long). Eventually, this kind of framework could be increased to allow more kinds of connections.
Of course, this is not that much different a vision than micro$oft has for.NET, but the key difference is that they seem to want to be the central authority, and I want to create a (open source) framework of distributed authority, where I could give a few dozen of my friends accounts on my machine running on my DSL, and then they would have a server as permanent as I want to make it. Then, whenever I go to a friend's house that has a good internet connection, I can log on and when someone sends me a quick note (or an IM or whatever distiction ends up being made), I can recieve it wherever I am.
The clinet should allow multiple users to log into it, so all the people in a room could log in, and then unlock their screen with a password (your server would also be an accessable, by you, place for your PGP key, perhaps).
Anyway, I've been thinking about this for a long time, enough ranting for me, you get the idea.;)
I think this is a very interesting idea, as I would quite like to see a geek talk show, and I would also like to see the release of the un-edited data. Maybe Cringly could pull it off with the weight of PBS behind it, but perhaps this would be a a good application for the Street Performer Protocol (maybe slightly modified?). Of course, you'd probably want to do the entire first season and release it free (beer and speech) and then ask for contributions towards the second season, so it would be quite a while until you get any return.
For years, I've heard many on slashdot and other geek blogs talk about how they would pay for good, free (as in speech) content. Here is some proposed content for the internet, for geeks. I would like to see a really good opportunity for all those geeks (me included!) to put our money where are posts are. If the first season was good, and I enjoyed it, I would give $10 or $20 towards the second season.
And after a few seasons, if this was succesful, it would start to pave the way for other media released using the internet, and perhaps even this business model, maybe books or music or other shows. I think that eventually this could be a great concept to fund OSS development projects. Sooner or later, we're going to have to start the next generation of publishing companies. I envision it being a little like a blog, where you can see what new media is on offer, and what is waiting for funding, contribute to projects you like, and when things are released, they are released to everyone.
My mom has a very strong magnetic field. After a matter of weeks of carrying any card with a magstipe, that stripe stops working. My dad carries most of the cards, and she still has an old-school license.
When she buys things with her credit cards, if it doesn't work, she gets them to type the # in manually, and I guess she'd do the same if she had to get a magstipe license.
I know I'm tempted to run a magnet across mine. Cheers, Joshua
Prohibition turns otherwise honest citizens into criminals. If the SSSCA (or similar legislation) ever passes, I think it inevitable that an underground hardware market will emerge. Geeks with soldering irons and smaller-scale manufacturing equipment in their basements will fight the control.
Just like a whole population of stoners has been turned into criminals, we geeks could face the same fate, having our passtime be deemed illegal, and punishable by lots of jail time. I could end up buying hardware and pot from the same people.;)
Agreed. I think the idea of a copyleft is a kludge. What we really need is no license at all. After all, if information is free, who am I to say where and when my work can and cannot be copied? If I produce information, I want only to be known as the mind (or one of the minds) behind that information, not to retain control. I simply want credit, which I think could be quite easily acomplished.
You make a very good point. I don't know whether the hearings are closed to the public or not, but I've been thinking about the proliferation of small recording devices, and how useful they could be to the activist community if used properly. I would be interested in knowing if there is an underground market in stealth recording devices. The really good kinds... the kinds our government uses against us.
Okay, I admit it, I was inspired by the movie Enemy of the State, but it was a damn good movie!
but I would wager that the final push needed to get it more mainstream is for someone to make a GUI that looks 95% like Windows GUI.
Bullshit. I think we need to look beyond the windows GUI. I mean, sure it's good, but we don't want to be playing catch-up. We want to create new and innovative things, but most of all, we need more uniformity and standardization. Linux seems fragmented because it is, it's a hodge podge, and so I'm not sure Linux will ever really be as easy to use as Windoze. Unless, perhaps, one distro really takes over.
Now, I will be the first to admit that this story sounds pretty far-fetched. As everyone has pointed out, the little described experiment proved nothing, except that car batteries can run light bulbs. However, I do think that there are many aspects of technology we do not yet understand. There have been scientists who have done remarkable things that have (supposedly) been supressed.
Of particular interest to me, is Viktor Schauberger, who was an Austrian forester turned scientist at the turn of the 20th century (13th of June 1885 to 25th September 1958). Schauberger's motto was "observe and copy nature" and he claimed to be studying a different branch of technology. He said that all of the technology's we use are explosive, heat generating, outward moving technologies, but the technology he studied and worked with was implosive, cold generating, and based on the shape of the vortex. He had several acomplishments that are quite well documented, and interesting, and some day, I very much hope to re-create some of his experiments. He studied water, agriculture, and other things, applying information he gleaned from his native Austrian forests.
Supposedly, the Nazi's kidnapped him in World War II, and attempted to force him to work on creating a flying saucer, and many believe he came close. He had power-generators, as well. I've even seen supposed diagrams of how they worked, based on a special pipe, the shape of a Kudu Antelope horn. According to what I've read, Schauberger died in America, where he was tricked into coming.
I take no conclusions from this, except that many things are possible, and technology as we know it is not all there is. There have been other inventors people thought were wacko, including Nicola Tesla, but I haven't particularly studied him. I can only recommend the books on Schauberger (available at Amazon, I believe), and hope to see his work followed up.
I spent the summer on the road, and when I settled down the for the cold months, I was quite sad to see the the Misanthropic Bitch appears to have vanished. This made me very sad. Today, when I read this article, I was delighted to find that all of dear bitch's articles are archived.
I think this is a fabulous project, and I hope it does well. However, I think that the notion of such a centralized database will begin to become unrealistic. I think peer to peer projects are the future, and I can see a day far in the future when the database layer comes down and inhabits the filesystem layer and all the databases on the internet can talk to eachother, and in a sense, the net becomes a giant database that anyone can contribute to.
Is there no electricity in Mendicino? I mean, I know there are lots of stoners, but is there no radio signals or microwaves? Can I not get any TV channels at all with my antenna there?
I would certainly be the first to admit that all these waves that we've been sending out and bouncing around for about the last hundred odd years could be harmful. Hell, I'm not even sure that it would surprise me. But I know there are great benefits to wireless networking (not to mention electricity), and good luck getting entirely away from signals and waves. Go to some third world underdeveloped country if you must, cause I don't think you're going to find it here.
Also, the very important point that what if some others in Mendicino like thier radio waves. I would certainly not want to see this guy's problem inflicted on everyone else in this community.
I couldn't agree with you more. I consider myself an anarchist, and for that matter, I think open source as a whole is very much in the spirit of anarchy. Call it rainbow software if you will. I'm in the initial steps right now of trying to get a wireless community network project up and running here in Missoula, Montana. I'm going to form a non-profit organization and use that to try for grant funding to speed growth. I want to give everyone who contributes to the network (in either money or bandwidth) a real IP address, and encourage people to host. Sure, we'll have more bandwidth locally than out to the rest of the net, but so bloody what?! We'll create and host some great content right here. I will, at least.;)
Come on. How about considering the option that the person responsible for the teenager should be held liable to the full extent of the law.
How about considering the possibility that teenagers can be responsible for themselves!? Just a few centuries ago, in many cultures children were considered adults around 13-16. If you treat them like they are not responsible and cannot make their own decisions, how will they ever learn to. I'm about to be a first time father (she's due in July!), and, once our kid's a teenager, I have every intention of telling them the truth and letting them make their own decisions. I will be responsible for them only until they can understand for themselves. Oh, and I agree with you completely that these regulations should be abolished, as well as all the other damn nanny state laws, including the drug war.
Every day I hear someone comparing television to the internet, and I feel that they are two very different beasts. Television is a technology whereby the rich can show the poor what they want them to see. Can you get on television? I can't. Hell, Adbusters can't even buy adspace on TV because the rich people who own the networks don't like their message. TV is "few to many," when I watch TV, I'm not looking at the excretion of human creativity, I'm looking at a set of images carefully crafted to make me feel and think a certain way.
The internet, on the other hand, is "many to many," and this is a critical difference. Now, I'm not saying that the internet doesn't have propoganda, and I'm not saying that the playing field is completely level on the internet, but I'm saying that it's a hell of a lot more level, and getting more so every day. On the internet, I can speak, I can communicate with other minds, not corporate conglomerations (okay, they're here too), but they're not the only ones here!
I think that a big change will happen with the internet with the widespread use of real broadband, and I think the best way we can do that is to use (mostly, I would imagine) wireless and wired technology to build real community networks, that are not owned by companies. When I have a real IP on a real network, the possibilities are much greater. Give me the net over TV any day. I'd rather think than vegitate.
The website doesn't mention what kind of technology is used for the display. If this is done with technology from Microvision, then I will be impressed, I think that looks like good technology. If it's just a damn little hi-res LCD or something, then I would be less impressed, although OLED wouldn't be bad, I would think.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I'm sure I'll get flamed for this. There have been quite a few proposed solutions to problems like the power problem that may not have gotten quite the attention they deserved due to reasons quite different from their viability. Some of these have included Viktor Schauberger (web resources on him aren't nearly as good as the print books available, check amazon.com), and although a bit cliche, Nicola Tesla.
Anyway, empires have crashed before, sudden catastrophic change has much historical president. I'm not worried about the power going out. We'll survive.
Cheers, Joshua
I also have about 60 odd episodes on my hard drive. I like to be able to watch them more often than I'm given opportunity. Presumably, these AVIs and RAMs and ASFs that I've downloaded off iMesh and gotten burned on CDs from my friends are illegal, pirated episodes... But if I'm giving them money every opportunity I get, how can I possibly be said to be STEALING from them for watching The Simpsons every day, instead of the lame every week (if I'm lucky) that it's on in the season? Off-season, it might not even be on at all! Same holds true for the (not all that many) shows that I actually enjoy on the babble box.
Cheers, Joshua
If the data is shared, and you have libraries that are shared, then why not ask the data to display itself (object.display(x);) and have it call to a standard library (system library?) which queries a system properties database object as to what application to display it? Don't actually store the display code in the objects, but have the objects query the system as to what the user has specified to display that type of data with.
Dominic: That's what I mean. Some people are very anal about organizing things in rigid hierarchies and others are 'I know what I want to find'.
I think there is a place for hierarchies, but not as the base organizational method of the filesystem. I would like to see a hierarchy of attributes, or keys, or whatever you want to call them. When you save an object (off the internet, or out of your head), a title is only one possible attribute you want to give it. When I save a pr0n jpg, it doesn't need a damn title, I need to mark what it's a damn picture of (amateur AND cumshots AND redhead)! Perhaps start with people, places, things. Or later in the hierarchy, sound -> music -> various bands as well as various artists as well as various sound effects as well as dates and live or studio, all keyed (so to speak) and queryable. But the hierarchy is for browsing. Just for browsing, because browsing is important (when you want to look at cumshots, you want to look at cumshots, but when you query for cumshots, watersports and lesbians, well that's bloody well what you should get), and micro$oft's nice little explorer looks about right. Although instead of a stupid directory tree, we have a tree of object properties and types, and any object can be in any number of places in that tree, depending on it's attributes (categories?).
I know of course that I haven't really said anything new in this post, and I know that performace needs to be taken into account. This is, however, the way things are moving, and all we really need is a really good, really fast, solid state storage medium. When permanent storage is as fast as or faster than RAM is today, the database filesystem will finally become a reality, until then, we'll sure be gearing up.
Cheers, Joshua
He studied the shape of the vortex, he invented (all supposedly, of course) power generation devices, climate control devices, pipes that cleaned water, and it's said that the natzi's kidnapped him in WWII to have him build a flying saucer. Many think that he came damn close. He was a contemporary of the guy who's behind Biodynamic Faming, and Schauberger had a lot of research and ideas into agriculture, farming and composting. He had many interesting acomplishments in his time, and they called him the Water Wizard.
The books I've read about him have inspired me and some day I hope to recreate some of his experiments. A search on amazon will find several books about him, all of which are good, and a search on google will find more than the measly link I've provided. I'm sure someone who reads german could find most of his original works.
Anyway, the point is, maybe some of the most amazing inventions have already been surpressed once or twice (Tesla anyone?)
Cheers, Joshua
That's a damn fine idea. I'm in for $10. Who should we buy?
They didn't kick me out at all, I was bored as fuck, and dropped out.
Amen to that. I run RedHat, and keep my pr0n in a .pr0n directory right there in my home directory. I couldn't possibly imagine her finding it. All she knows how to do is connect to the internet and browse the web.
Cheers, Joshua
Everything you've said could be said about most virus programs. Spyware is a virus, and should be treated as such.
I prefer mindsweeper. I spend my entire ninth grade year of highschool playing that game. Come to think of it, that was my last year...
Computers are quite a different beast than any of the technologies before them. Capitalism and competition get us a long way, but at very high environmental and social costs. I'm not convinced that competition is the best way to produce software. Infact, I'm convinced it's not. It saddens me that this country (culture) is so concerned with the details of the laws that we cannot think about real change, which is what is needed.
Cheers, Joshua
What I'm really talking about is changing the paradigm from an IP-centric one to a user-centric one, and I'm envisioning a good new standard for internet communications. I don't know about you, but I have quite a few discordant communications systems on my machine (and trillian can't even stay connected for long). Eventually, this kind of framework could be increased to allow more kinds of connections.
Of course, this is not that much different a vision than micro$oft has for .NET, but the key difference is that they seem to want to be the central authority, and I want to create a (open source) framework of distributed authority, where I could give a few dozen of my friends accounts on my machine running on my DSL, and then they would have a server as permanent as I want to make it. Then, whenever I go to a friend's house that has a good internet connection, I can log on and when someone sends me a quick note (or an IM or whatever distiction ends up being made), I can recieve it wherever I am.
The clinet should allow multiple users to log into it, so all the people in a room could log in, and then unlock their screen with a password (your server would also be an accessable, by you, place for your PGP key, perhaps).
Anyway, I've been thinking about this for a long time, enough ranting for me, you get the idea. ;)
Cheers, Joshua
For years, I've heard many on slashdot and other geek blogs talk about how they would pay for good, free (as in speech) content. Here is some proposed content for the internet, for geeks. I would like to see a really good opportunity for all those geeks (me included!) to put our money where are posts are. If the first season was good, and I enjoyed it, I would give $10 or $20 towards the second season.
And after a few seasons, if this was succesful, it would start to pave the way for other media released using the internet, and perhaps even this business model, maybe books or music or other shows. I think that eventually this could be a great concept to fund OSS development projects. Sooner or later, we're going to have to start the next generation of publishing companies. I envision it being a little like a blog, where you can see what new media is on offer, and what is waiting for funding, contribute to projects you like, and when things are released, they are released to everyone.
Cheers, Joshua
When she buys things with her credit cards, if it doesn't work, she gets them to type the # in manually, and I guess she'd do the same if she had to get a magstipe license.
I know I'm tempted to run a magnet across mine.
Cheers, Joshua
Just like a whole population of stoners has been turned into criminals, we geeks could face the same fate, having our passtime be deemed illegal, and punishable by lots of jail time. I could end up buying hardware and pot from the same people. ;)
Cheers, Joshua
Cheers, Joshua
Okay, I admit it, I was inspired by the movie Enemy of the State, but it was a damn good movie!
Cheers, Joshua
Bullshit. I think we need to look beyond the windows GUI. I mean, sure it's good, but we don't want to be playing catch-up. We want to create new and innovative things, but most of all, we need more uniformity and standardization. Linux seems fragmented because it is, it's a hodge podge, and so I'm not sure Linux will ever really be as easy to use as Windoze. Unless, perhaps, one distro really takes over.
Cheers, Joshua
Of particular interest to me, is Viktor Schauberger, who was an Austrian forester turned scientist at the turn of the 20th century (13th of June 1885 to 25th September 1958). Schauberger's motto was "observe and copy nature" and he claimed to be studying a different branch of technology. He said that all of the technology's we use are explosive, heat generating, outward moving technologies, but the technology he studied and worked with was implosive, cold generating, and based on the shape of the vortex. He had several acomplishments that are quite well documented, and interesting, and some day, I very much hope to re-create some of his experiments. He studied water, agriculture, and other things, applying information he gleaned from his native Austrian forests.
Supposedly, the Nazi's kidnapped him in World War II, and attempted to force him to work on creating a flying saucer, and many believe he came close. He had power-generators, as well. I've even seen supposed diagrams of how they worked, based on a special pipe, the shape of a Kudu Antelope horn. According to what I've read, Schauberger died in America, where he was tricked into coming.
I take no conclusions from this, except that many things are possible, and technology as we know it is not all there is. There have been other inventors people thought were wacko, including Nicola Tesla, but I haven't particularly studied him. I can only recommend the books on Schauberger (available at Amazon, I believe), and hope to see his work followed up.
Anything's possible, Joshua
I think this is a fabulous project, and I hope it does well. However, I think that the notion of such a centralized database will begin to become unrealistic. I think peer to peer projects are the future, and I can see a day far in the future when the database layer comes down and inhabits the filesystem layer and all the databases on the internet can talk to eachother, and in a sense, the net becomes a giant database that anyone can contribute to.
Cheers, Joshua
I would certainly be the first to admit that all these waves that we've been sending out and bouncing around for about the last hundred odd years could be harmful. Hell, I'm not even sure that it would surprise me. But I know there are great benefits to wireless networking (not to mention electricity), and good luck getting entirely away from signals and waves. Go to some third world underdeveloped country if you must, cause I don't think you're going to find it here.
Also, the very important point that what if some others in Mendicino like thier radio waves. I would certainly not want to see this guy's problem inflicted on everyone else in this community.
Cheers, Joshua
I couldn't agree with you more. I consider myself an anarchist, and for that matter, I think open source as a whole is very much in the spirit of anarchy. Call it rainbow software if you will. I'm in the initial steps right now of trying to get a wireless community network project up and running here in Missoula, Montana. I'm going to form a non-profit organization and use that to try for grant funding to speed growth. I want to give everyone who contributes to the network (in either money or bandwidth) a real IP address, and encourage people to host. Sure, we'll have more bandwidth locally than out to the rest of the net, but so bloody what?! We'll create and host some great content right here. I will, at least. ;)
Anyway, peace.
Joshua
Cheers, Joshua
The internet, on the other hand, is "many to many," and this is a critical difference. Now, I'm not saying that the internet doesn't have propoganda, and I'm not saying that the playing field is completely level on the internet, but I'm saying that it's a hell of a lot more level, and getting more so every day. On the internet, I can speak, I can communicate with other minds, not corporate conglomerations (okay, they're here too), but they're not the only ones here!
I think that a big change will happen with the internet with the widespread use of real broadband, and I think the best way we can do that is to use (mostly, I would imagine) wireless and wired technology to build real community networks, that are not owned by companies. When I have a real IP on a real network, the possibilities are much greater. Give me the net over TV any day. I'd rather think than vegitate.
Cheers, Joshua
Cheers, Joshua
Cheers, Joshua