I guess the main thing is that producers of mainstream pop culture aren't dumb. A previous poster said "[Consumers] may well be willing to pay for their entertainment -- if the quality is guaranteed and the price is fair."
That sounds familiar.. where have I heard that.. oh yeah, now I remember, that's how all the other industries work.
that's it from the consumer perspective. from the producer side of things, the aim of the game is to get the cheapest stuff together, and sell it for the highest price. Somewhere in the 1980s some idiot decided to buy overpriced media and the the producers kept hiking the prices. Then, instead of stopping consuming totally the consumers took advantage of the inherent duplicatibility of information and decided to make their own copies and "bring the price back down" by making one purchase serve many consumers.
If we were talking insanely priced brand-name jeans (which cannot be easily copied at home) then you'd just see consumers not buy the item until prices fell. With information it's easier to take matters into your own hands.
The big guys are just trying to make a buck. I'm sure you'll find that the seat padding in a luxury car is obtained from the cheapest bidder.
Doesn't this remind you of the infinite energy producer/levitation device that the kid built in Chocky's Childen (or was it chocky's challenge?), a BBC series based on John Whyndham's Chocky?
That's a much better explanation than the other one I heard about which basically involved a barnacle-like mating solution and a sea squirt-like motile phase.
Did you ever get this starwars name algorithm in your emailbox?
It's the answer to all your problems.
Of course rules 7 and 9 mean that you'll be condemned to being a petty bougois bystander in the great galactic civil war who amounts to nothing in history. Just like your parents always said you'd be.
This will stop windows pirated windows landing on people's desktops, but will be no obstacle to GPL.
As for the draconian restrictions on personal freedoms like getting blank cds and researching crypto, that is good for the rest of the world, because it will allow us to continue on while they are slowed down by their laws.
Heck, imagine if they don't have any local researchers to validate their crypto because getting a licence to do so from the government is prohibitive? We'd become the sole source of decent crypto which we can sell to them at munitions rates! Or give it to them for free if we feel nice.
from the article: [2] Recently, our competitors have added âoepoliticalâ to this list. Political actions result in law, which is backed up by force. They may come to regret educating us of the power of political means.
I think that Microsoft is about to add Ng Security Industries to their list of technology aquisition targets.
Brings a whole new meaning to "Microsoft Action Pack Subscriber."
I would like to agree with you. You do make good points, that the path of force does make you do things that you regret sometimes. Scratch that. Most of the time. That the path of imperialism is immoral.
But the thing is morality is no barrier to force. Morality is merely a tool which allows society to control the masses, to let the ordinary moral person be safe from thievery and violation at the hands of the other moral people. But not everyone comes to the same conclusion as the protagonist of Crime and Punishment. Trust me, those who believe that morality will protect them, and find themselves in the path of immoral people will be crushed. They will die with a look of surprise and outrage on their faces.
Which brings me to your next point: the cynical view of life has to be masked to be effective. I'm pretty sure that everyone who stays in office for any amount of time knows the joke inside Machiavelli's The Prince, or would be able to write such a book from their own personal experience. The exercise of power is struggle. The beauty of an election system is that you can lose the struggle without losing much more than money and pride, but people still have to struggle to get the right to lead. And they have to make their competitors lose.
With regards to war being no longer an option because the riches of this world cannot be looted, note that globalism is simply colonialism continued through other means. You don't have to conquer your client states, you just have to get them to tie their currency to yours and become economically enmeshed in your country... for the purpose of your enrichment. Economic warfare is a very new thing. so far the only useful tactic of note is the dumping of currency to cause rapid inflation in the target country while making it cheap to buy goods from them. When they've had enough, then you sell them back the processed goods (ie wool into designer jumpers) and buy back their currency. It's worked all over south east asia and south america. I don't know if it's been done in to africa or russia/CIS yet, but we get so little news from there.
If you want to capture intangible things like "talent" you simply have to amass enough creature comforts and then brain drain the talent to yourself. If you want cheap labour, find an amenible country with no labour laws, ship them old, outmoded equipment, set them up and milk them dry. It's so simple it's painful.
With regards to actual war, real economic strength - that is the amount of goods in your economy to fuel your military industrial complex - is the backbone of todays high tech battlefield. Unless your economy can produce trucks that can trace artillery shells in flight back to their point of origin, or bombs that can kill every one of your enemies before they can hurt your vastly outnumbered force, then you are fighting last year's war. The engineers that make this hapen need a large economy to pay the taxes or the actual market price of this equipment (ie govt buys specialised equipment such as tanks, other equipment like gps reciever chips are bought by private individuals for peaceful ends because it is dual use) and keep them in material comforts. Material comforts not everything? A strong economy also pays for good religeous institutions, higher education and entertainment.
When the economy begins to "soften" (ie it is still huge but is not *growing*) then the depressive mood must be chased away by a big distraction. And there is no better way to get somebody's attention than to kill somebody they love. Their sons. Their daughters. Innocent people who look at them accusingly from websites and tv. Some are outraged by this and protest in the street. Others are frightened and redouble their efforts to hold up a "sick" economy.
Have you noticed that no protest has ever put the fairware lable on nike (see pages 22 and 23 of the Nike Verite Report. I'm sorry it's a.PDF)? Have you noticed that no pr
With regards to tibet, the military significance of a country is influenced to a large degree by its economic importance. With massive mineral wealth, including minerals needed for high technology and the space programme, china had to invade them. Add that fact to the fact that the China-Russia oil pipeline is on schedule and underway, you can see why America has to take more resources from other nations just to maintain the balance of power.
Why do you think we went to war in iraq? If we were concerned with humanitarian issues, we would be all over Uzbekistan.
We're not.
Why? Their main wealth is derived from cotton, which is deminishing because massive use of agrochemicals has destroyed their environment and ariable lands. Furthermore, they're useless as a base right now, but that may change in future.
With regards to Imperialism, yes since the 20th Century empire building was frowned upon. Instead the superpowers started up client states which they armed, used to extract natural resourses and committed to proxy wars. The only major difference between a colony and a client state is that a colony has a Governer General, and a client state has a Benevolant-President-For-Life.
The bottom line is that Empires never went out of fashion since the day they were invented in ancient sumeria. Some people ran from them and settled out in Australia, or Northern Europe or Central America. Some empires fell over and died, because running empires is hard to do. But eventually one empire or another will come for you.
Unless you are an empire yourself, you are screwed.
You've got the attitude backwards, it is not "the rest of the world be damned so long as we are wealthy and safe."
The hard truth of the matter is "To remain alive, safe and reasonably well off, we must damn the rest of the world."
The planet earth is closed. Few things fall from the cosmos to provide us wealth. Under this atmosphere it is a zero sum game.
Anybody who uses a computer or a cell phone has funded the violence in the congo because both sides are arming themselves with the sale of the mineral coltan which is used to make capacitors for high technology electronics like cell phones and 802.11b. We don't stop buying from the militias, simply because there is no other source to mine. Instead we let people like you buy a computer or a car or a nice pair of jeans or a public transport ticket or any number of other blood soaked consumer products knowing that you will never truly find out how the atoms which come together to provide those products and services are actually the result of untold human misery.
This is the truth in which we live. Once upon a time, when the first human beings (or their ancestors) could travel faster than they could overpopulate and area, we were able to spread from messopotamia and walk over oceans during the great ice age. We didn't have to take the fruits of creation from another person's mouth just to feed our own.
I propose to use any means needed to go back to those days. If it takes a nuclear rocket to take us to the stars. So be it. If it takes research which might produce a stable negative strangelet (a particle which reacts with normal matter to produce more stable negative strangelets) so be it.
We have to get off the planet, and begin spreading the human empire to other stars. If we don't we will mine this planet dry and strangle each other fighting over the scraps. And if we somehow avert that, then somebody else who beleives in imperial power will get us.
In fact, I would even hazard a guess that somebody who belie
Ok, what about the british against the dutch. In 1850 the dutch had control of Indonesia and were expanding north. The British saw that the farming they were doing was making them very, very rich, so the british had to expand into the straits settlements (now Malaysia and Singapore) to give them the muscle to supress the unrest near home.
Notice that the british and the dutch never fought each other directly in this exchange. instead they captured the weaker, easier targets to build their empires and thereby make the idea of a direct war between empires unthinkable.
In the same way America will never fight China. They'll be best trading buddies. America WILL attack weak, emaciated Iraq, because modern China has done the same thing to Tibet.
Notice that you do NOT want to be the weaker player in this game.
So ask youself, do you want Earth to be like Modern America or Tibet? What's in your best interests?
Very interesting. What would happen if somebody came up with a whole camera and image processor on a chip which works something like the human retina (ie, pictures come in as photons, descriptions of objects and their spatial relationships come out as electrical impulses)? Or is that what the slashdotted article was about?
Also, Alan Turing once said that one way to make an artifical intelligence is to make an artificial baby and then "educate" it to the level of an intelligent adult.
I'm glad that robots too will now have a chance to play catch in the back yard with their parents.
Lets just show them a bit more respect than B1-66ER got when they grow up.
If you're consulting and not attached to a company, why does anybody have to know how old you are IRL?
I've worked smart mob style with designers who I've payed through paypal, and I've gotten jobs (not tech ones unfortunately, just writing/journo stuff) from people who are just an email address and a funny line on Instand Mesenger.
Your website looks pretty mad! You could probably illustrate comics for someone like Neil Gaimon if you got the right lucky breaks.
Hang in there.
And don't tell anyone your age!
(ps. look at my old slashdot posts, and then guess how old I am.)
So you understand my point exactly. If the Native Americans had developed enough technology to defend themselves the world would be a better place.
But that isn't going to happen by hoping that everyone will stay at home. If the chinese didn't have a marauding navy, then the british/dutch/portugeese would.
Another example: In australia, the indigineous population was essentially declared nonexistant and the whole continent named Terra Nullus - or empty land - because the first contacts were rather peaceful. Result? Ethnicide. Near genocide. The stolen generation. A population where the white australian can expect to live to 75 and the black australian gets a life expectancy of 40. Today there are some steps towards reconcilliation, but the current political climate is against it.
In contrast, when explorers went to New Zealand their longboat contacted a Maori warboat. The warboat kicked their asses, so the explorers signed the Treaty of Waitangi.
No matter who you are, your civilisation needs to be able to reach out and touch someone. Or other people WILL molest you.
The world would be a different place if there was such a thing as the Inca Coast Guard.
Hmm... You know, I never thought to ask, but is there any radioactive mineral deposits on mars? I couldn't find any on google. (search terms "mars radiation" and got a map on how much radiation a human would take rather than how much Uranium has been found by rovers in the ground.) If not, and we decide to go the fast way to avoid space-sickness (and all its bone weakening effects), earth would be the sole supplier of fuel to mars for return voyages.
That makes it pretty tough if you want to start a colony.
I think you should go to MIT, finish your degree and become a research associate at the testing facility. While you're at it I think you also should speak to Dr. Alex Kleiner or Dr Eli Vance. Failing that contact Dr Walter Bennett.
Greenpeace reports that between 1950 and 1993 there have been 380 nuclear weapons accidents, some involving the accidental "dirty bomb" incidents, such as the dispersion of nuclear materials over Palomares in southern Spain.
Now according to the the National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository who studied the Palomares incident as well as many other cases, a 78 year old person with elevated Pu in their bones will only have a 0.14285 probability of dying this year, whereas a normal american 78 year old will have an average probaility of dying this year of 0.12780.
We're already dropping nuclear material all over ourselves, and for the most part, you aren't going to hear about it until it's declassified.
Furthermore, have you been to Hiroshima and stood under the peace dome? Have you seen the children playing in the schools at Nagasaki?
The oppertunites for using peaceful nuclear power to explore space far outweigh the risks. Those accidents haven't degraded my environmental quality. I'm sure that a deliberate attack on myself would, but even that will heal with time.
We are talking about the power to reach out and travel the cosmos.
the chinese ming Emperor Zhu Di built a massive navy which traded extensively in the pacific, reached africa and almost discovered america.
When Emperor Zhu died, his sucessor was advised to lessen the tax burden of the navy, and burned all the ships. Result? Other more outward looking seafaring nations whipped them.
If we don't have deep space capability, then we are dead meat when we come across those who do. Especially if they are ex-earth colonists who decide to return. No chance of benevolance through alien genetics there.
Interesting. And people are saying "It'll never happen" about this idea as well.
Have we become so disillusioned that we don't believe in open mesh networks anymore? Are we afraid that the regulators will kill the idea because it smacks of freedom?
I mean, this is slashdot!
__________________________________________ The Spiders are Coming Next Episode: June 13,2003
It's supposed to be great at handling multipath. and it's the foundation of the G4 mobile phones. There is talk of incorporating it into an 802.11 Wlan standard.
so don't worry about the doomsayers. there are smart people out there trying to make the world a better place.
________________________________________ The Spiders are Coming. Next episode: June 13, 2003
They don't get out much. That is partly a result of the couple's dim finances, but also a result of Mr. Stenlund's dim view of humanity. "The more you deal with people, the more you hate people," he said. "It just feels that everybody is so asleep in this world."
[...]
"No money," Ms. Werner-Stenlund recalled. "Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. We were being threatened to be sued left and right, and I think we were both on the verge of swallowing a bottle of pills."
With the walls closing in, the Stenlunds fled to the mall one day in July 2001, just looking to treat themselves to some small gifts. Ms. Werner-Stenlund bought some shirts. Mr. Stenlund bought Anarchy Online.
"I can honestly say that A. O. helped save my life," Mr. Stenlund said, sitting on a bench outside the store where his journey began.
Games that heal. Hmmm I can feel a Dr Phil coming on....
Slashdot Mirror
I guess the main thing is that producers of mainstream pop culture aren't dumb. A previous poster said "[Consumers] may well be willing to pay for their entertainment -- if the quality is guaranteed and the price is fair."
That sounds familiar.. where have I heard that.. oh yeah, now I remember, that's how all the other industries work.
that's it from the consumer perspective. from the producer side of things, the aim of the game is to get the cheapest stuff together, and sell it for the highest price. Somewhere in the 1980s some idiot decided to buy overpriced media and the the producers kept hiking the prices. Then, instead of stopping consuming totally the consumers took advantage of the inherent duplicatibility of information and decided to make their own copies and "bring the price back down" by making one purchase serve many consumers.
If we were talking insanely priced brand-name jeans (which cannot be easily copied at home) then you'd just see consumers not buy the item until prices fell. With information it's easier to take matters into your own hands.
The big guys are just trying to make a buck. I'm sure you'll find that the seat padding in a luxury car is obtained from the cheapest bidder.
Doesn't this remind you of the infinite energy producer/levitation device that the kid built in Chocky's Childen (or was it chocky's challenge?), a BBC series based on John Whyndham's Chocky?
I remember that Chocky was into pyramids too.
That's a much better explanation than the other one I heard about which basically involved a barnacle-like mating solution and a sea squirt-like motile phase.
Did you ever get this starwars name algorithm in your emailbox?
It's the answer to all your problems.
Of course rules 7 and 9 mean that you'll be condemned to being a petty bougois bystander in the great galactic civil war who amounts to nothing in history. Just like your parents always said you'd be.
The name is The Sarlacc in the Great Pit of Carkoon.
official lore here
I suppose that there would be other Sarlaccs in less famous pits, if you don't manage to camp Carkoon, which is like the beverley hills of pits.
What the hell is going on?
They're merely asking you to be more Politically Correct.
This will stop windows pirated windows landing on people's desktops, but will be no obstacle to GPL.
As for the draconian restrictions on personal freedoms like getting blank cds and researching crypto, that is good for the rest of the world, because it will allow us to continue on while they are slowed down by their laws.
Heck, imagine if they don't have any local researchers to validate their crypto because getting a licence to do so from the government is prohibitive? We'd become the sole source of decent crypto which we can sell to them at munitions rates! Or give it to them for free if we feel nice.
the free outrun the fettered.
from the article: [2] Recently, our competitors have added âoepoliticalâ to this list. Political actions result in law, which is backed up by force. They may come to regret educating us of the power of political means.
I think that Microsoft is about to add Ng Security Industries to their list of technology aquisition targets.
Brings a whole new meaning to "Microsoft Action Pack Subscriber."
The black ice doesn't care who it kills.
I would like to agree with you. You do make good points, that the path of force does make you do things that you regret sometimes. Scratch that. Most of the time. That the path of imperialism is immoral.
.PDF)? Have you noticed that no pr
But the thing is morality is no barrier to force. Morality is merely a tool which allows society to control the masses, to let the ordinary moral person be safe from thievery and violation at the hands of the other moral people. But not everyone comes to the same conclusion as the protagonist of Crime and Punishment. Trust me, those who believe that morality will protect them, and find themselves in the path of immoral people will be crushed. They will die with a look of surprise and outrage on their faces.
Which brings me to your next point: the cynical view of life has to be masked to be effective. I'm pretty sure that everyone who stays in office for any amount of time knows the joke inside Machiavelli's The Prince, or would be able to write such a book from their own personal experience. The exercise of power is struggle. The beauty of an election system is that you can lose the struggle without losing much more than money and pride, but people still have to struggle to get the right to lead. And they have to make their competitors lose.
With regards to war being no longer an option because the riches of this world cannot be looted, note that globalism is simply colonialism continued through other means. You don't have to conquer your client states, you just have to get them to tie their currency to yours and become economically enmeshed in your country... for the purpose of your enrichment. Economic warfare is a very new thing. so far the only useful tactic of note is the dumping of currency to cause rapid inflation in the target country while making it cheap to buy goods from them. When they've had enough, then you sell them back the processed goods (ie wool into designer jumpers) and buy back their currency. It's worked all over south east asia and south america. I don't know if it's been done in to africa or russia/CIS yet, but we get so little news from there.
If you want to capture intangible things like "talent" you simply have to amass enough creature comforts and then brain drain the talent to yourself. If you want cheap labour, find an amenible country with no labour laws, ship them old, outmoded equipment, set them up and milk them dry. It's so simple it's painful.
With regards to actual war, real economic strength - that is the amount of goods in your economy to fuel your military industrial complex - is the backbone of todays high tech battlefield. Unless your economy can produce trucks that can trace artillery shells in flight back to their point of origin, or bombs that can kill every one of your enemies before they can hurt your vastly outnumbered force, then you are fighting last year's war. The engineers that make this hapen need a large economy to pay the taxes or the actual market price of this equipment (ie govt buys specialised equipment such as tanks, other equipment like gps reciever chips are bought by private individuals for peaceful ends because it is dual use) and keep them in material comforts. Material comforts not everything? A strong economy also pays for good religeous institutions, higher education and entertainment.
When the economy begins to "soften" (ie it is still huge but is not *growing*) then the depressive mood must be chased away by a big distraction. And there is no better way to get somebody's attention than to kill somebody they love. Their sons. Their daughters. Innocent people who look at them accusingly from websites and tv. Some are outraged by this and protest in the street. Others are frightened and redouble their efforts to hold up a "sick" economy.
Have you noticed that no protest has ever put the fairware lable on nike (see pages 22 and 23 of the Nike Verite Report. I'm sorry it's a
With regards to tibet, the military significance of a country is influenced to a large degree by its economic importance. With massive mineral wealth, including minerals needed for high technology and the space programme, china had to invade them. Add that fact to the fact that the China-Russia oil pipeline is on schedule and underway, you can see why America has to take more resources from other nations just to maintain the balance of power.
Why do you think we went to war in iraq? If we were concerned with humanitarian issues, we would be all over Uzbekistan.
We're not.
Why? Their main wealth is derived from cotton, which is deminishing because massive use of agrochemicals has destroyed their environment and ariable lands. Furthermore, they're useless as a base right now, but that may change in future.
With regards to Imperialism, yes since the 20th Century empire building was frowned upon. Instead the superpowers started up client states which they armed, used to extract natural resourses and committed to proxy wars. The only major difference between a colony and a client state is that a colony has a Governer General, and a client state has a Benevolant-President-For-Life.
The bottom line is that Empires never went out of fashion since the day they were invented in ancient sumeria. Some people ran from them and settled out in Australia, or Northern Europe or Central America. Some empires fell over and died, because running empires is hard to do. But eventually one empire or another will come for you.
Unless you are an empire yourself, you are screwed.
You've got the attitude backwards, it is not "the rest of the world be damned so long as we are wealthy and safe."
The hard truth of the matter is "To remain alive, safe and reasonably well off, we must damn the rest of the world."
The planet earth is closed. Few things fall from the cosmos to provide us wealth. Under this atmosphere it is a zero sum game.
Anybody who uses a computer or a cell phone has funded the violence in the congo because both sides are arming themselves with the sale of the mineral coltan which is used to make capacitors for high technology electronics like cell phones and 802.11b. We don't stop buying from the militias, simply because there is no other source to mine. Instead we let people like you buy a computer or a car or a nice pair of jeans or a public transport ticket or any number of other blood soaked consumer products knowing that you will never truly find out how the atoms which come together to provide those products and services are actually the result of untold human misery.
This is the truth in which we live. Once upon a time, when the first human beings (or their ancestors) could travel faster than they could overpopulate and area, we were able to spread from messopotamia and walk over oceans during the great ice age. We didn't have to take the fruits of creation from another person's mouth just to feed our own.
I propose to use any means needed to go back to those days. If it takes a nuclear rocket to take us to the stars. So be it. If it takes research which might produce a stable negative strangelet (a particle which reacts with normal matter to produce more stable negative strangelets) so be it.
We have to get off the planet, and begin spreading the human empire to other stars. If we don't we will mine this planet dry and strangle each other fighting over the scraps. And if we somehow avert that, then somebody else who beleives in imperial power will get us.
In fact, I would even hazard a guess that somebody who belie
Ok, what about the british against the dutch. In 1850 the dutch had control of Indonesia and were expanding north. The British saw that the farming they were doing was making them very, very rich, so the british had to expand into the straits settlements (now Malaysia and Singapore) to give them the muscle to supress the unrest near home.
Notice that the british and the dutch never fought each other directly in this exchange. instead they captured the weaker, easier targets to build their empires and thereby make the idea of a direct war between empires unthinkable.
In the same way America will never fight China. They'll be best trading buddies. America WILL attack weak, emaciated Iraq, because modern China has done the same thing to Tibet.
Notice that you do NOT want to be the weaker player in this game.
So ask youself, do you want Earth to be like Modern America or Tibet? What's in your best interests?
I say expand, explore and carry nukes.
Very interesting. What would happen if somebody came up with a whole camera and image processor on a chip which works something like the human retina (ie, pictures come in as photons, descriptions of objects and their spatial relationships come out as electrical impulses)? Or is that what the slashdotted article was about?
Also, Alan Turing once said that one way to make an artifical intelligence is to make an artificial baby and then "educate" it to the level of an intelligent adult.
I'm glad that robots too will now have a chance to play catch in the back yard with their parents.
Lets just show them a bit more respect than B1-66ER got when they grow up.
If you're consulting and not attached to a company, why does anybody have to know how old you are IRL?
I've worked smart mob style with designers who I've payed through paypal, and I've gotten jobs (not tech ones unfortunately, just writing/journo stuff) from people who are just an email address and a funny line on Instand Mesenger.
Your website looks pretty mad! You could probably illustrate comics for someone like Neil Gaimon if you got the right lucky breaks.
Hang in there.
And don't tell anyone your age!
(ps. look at my old slashdot posts, and then guess how old I am.)
So you understand my point exactly. If the Native Americans had developed enough technology to defend themselves the world would be a better place.
But that isn't going to happen by hoping that everyone will stay at home. If the chinese didn't have a marauding navy, then the british/dutch/portugeese would.
Another example: In australia, the indigineous population was essentially declared nonexistant and the whole continent named Terra Nullus - or empty land - because the first contacts were rather peaceful. Result? Ethnicide. Near genocide. The stolen generation. A population where the white australian can expect to live to 75 and the black australian gets a life expectancy of 40. Today there are some steps towards reconcilliation, but the current political climate is against it.
In contrast, when explorers went to New Zealand their longboat contacted a Maori warboat. The warboat kicked their asses, so the explorers signed the Treaty of Waitangi.
No matter who you are, your civilisation needs to be able to reach out and touch someone. Or other people WILL molest you.
The world would be a different place if there was such a thing as the Inca Coast Guard.
Imagine if they sent GPS equipped soldiers to topple a government. Then everyone would hate and fear GPS. Damn.
Why does that sound like scientist porn?
"Oh! How I do enjoy a good Rammstein."
Hmm... You know, I never thought to ask, but is there any radioactive mineral deposits on mars? I couldn't find any on google. (search terms "mars radiation" and got a map on how much radiation a human would take rather than how much Uranium has been found by rovers in the ground.) If not, and we decide to go the fast way to avoid space-sickness (and all its bone weakening effects), earth would be the sole supplier of fuel to mars for return voyages.
That makes it pretty tough if you want to start a colony.
I think you should go to MIT, finish your degree and become a research associate at the testing facility. While you're at it I think you also should speak to Dr. Alex Kleiner or Dr Eli Vance. Failing that contact Dr Walter Bennett.
Greenpeace reports that between 1950 and 1993 there have been 380 nuclear weapons accidents, some involving the accidental "dirty bomb" incidents, such as the dispersion of nuclear materials over Palomares in southern Spain.
Now according to the the National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository who studied the Palomares incident as well as many other cases, a 78 year old person with elevated Pu in their bones will only have a 0.14285 probability of dying this year, whereas a normal american 78 year old will have an average probaility of dying this year of 0.12780.
We're already dropping nuclear material all over ourselves, and for the most part, you aren't going to hear about it until it's declassified.
Furthermore, have you been to Hiroshima and stood under the peace dome? Have you seen the children playing in the schools at Nagasaki?
The oppertunites for using peaceful nuclear power to explore space far outweigh the risks. Those accidents haven't degraded my environmental quality. I'm sure that a deliberate attack on myself would, but even that will heal with time.
We are talking about the power to reach out and travel the cosmos.
the chinese ming Emperor Zhu Di built a massive navy which traded extensively in the pacific, reached africa and almost discovered america.
When Emperor Zhu died, his sucessor was advised to lessen the tax burden of the navy, and burned all the ships. Result? Other more outward looking seafaring nations whipped them.
If we don't have deep space capability, then we are dead meat when we come across those who do. Especially if they are ex-earth colonists who decide to return. No chance of benevolance through alien genetics there.
Smith: Hello Neo. Welcome back. We missed you...
Neo: shut up... just shut up. You had me from "hello."
passonate violin music.
Trinity: You know, when we first came to this place it was so different.
Interesting. And people are saying "It'll never happen" about this idea as well.
Have we become so disillusioned that we don't believe in open mesh networks anymore? Are we afraid that the regulators will kill the idea because it smacks of freedom?
I mean, this is slashdot!
__________________________________________
The Spiders are Coming Next Episode: June 13,2003
Ok so the idea is that you want to own your own hardware. you want it wireless and you want it as a big mesh network.
Have you thought of
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing?
whitepaper here
It's supposed to be great at handling multipath. and it's the foundation of the G4 mobile phones. There is talk of incorporating it into an 802.11 Wlan standard.
so don't worry about the doomsayers. there are smart people out there trying to make the world a better place.
________________________________________
The Spiders are Coming. Next episode: June 13, 2003
They don't get out much. That is partly a result of the couple's dim finances, but also a result of Mr. Stenlund's dim view of humanity. "The more you deal with people, the more you hate people," he said. "It just feels that everybody is so asleep in this world."
[...]
"No money," Ms. Werner-Stenlund recalled. "Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. We were being threatened to be sued left and right, and I think we were both on the verge of swallowing a bottle of pills."
With the walls closing in, the Stenlunds fled to the mall one day in July 2001, just looking to treat themselves to some small gifts. Ms. Werner-Stenlund bought some shirts. Mr. Stenlund bought Anarchy Online.
"I can honestly say that A. O. helped save my life," Mr. Stenlund said, sitting on a bench outside the store where his journey began.
Games that heal. Hmmm I can feel a Dr Phil coming on....
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The Spiders are Coming. Next episode: July 13, 2003