Now this is the kind of creative thinking that will really revolutionize robotics. Intelligent pieces that can assemble themselves into colonies that are greater than the sum of their parts. I would especially like to see this approach used in nanotech (but only if Asimov's Laws of Robotics are indelibly burned into the molecules).
There have been articles here about smart clothing that will change color and size. Why not smart spacesuits? I have no doubt that in the future there will be skin-tight suits that will maintain proper temp, flex with (or assist) body movements, and maintain a constant even pressure over the entire body by adjusting the lengths of the fibers. Not soon, but someday, why not?
Ok, I'm breaking my tradition of not replying to crap like this to ask the simple question, why do so many people bother to respond to idiotic postings? We could save a little time and bandwidth by simply ignoring people when they shout out how stupid they are. Go ahead and moderate this off-topic. I know it is, but it's aimed at an audience who will read it.
In real life lots of people buy their way into positions they don't deserve. I don't know why a virtual world would be different. But since it's really your character in the virtual world, not you, I don't see what difference it makes where the other characters come from, whether they bought or earned their stuff, or even whether they are played by real people or AI. It's just a game.
I wouldn't want to speculate on what the average British scientist would consider the funniest joke. But it's kind of cool that somebody is doing some analysis of something as subjective as humor.
This reminds me of a Scientific American article from many years ago about why people like music. The essence was that our enjoyment of music might be connected to fractal patterns in the music, in our nervous systems, and in subtle mathematical properties of changes we observe in the world around us. It seemed to suggest that the patterns in the music might map onto specific thought patterns -- love, fear, a sunny day, etc. This mapping could be what we are actually enjoying when we enjoy the music, and could explain why large numbers of people often react the same way to a given piece of music. I remember being excited by the idea that the encoding of thoughts might be based more on mathematics than on individual physiology, which would bode well for the future of direct mind-to-mind communication.
So what these British guys are doing with humor is quite intriguing. Although it might seem silly on the surface, it could lead to a greater understanding of how we are wired, which would be a good thing.
It would be great if they sent up a replica of the Russian refueling station in the movie Armageddon, complete with dirty walls, leaky plumbing and cigarette-smoking fuel attendant who doesn't give a rip. I'd pay big rubles to visit an attraction like that.
Try any pawn shop in New England about 2 months from now. If 7th-graders in Maine are anything like they are in Seattle, half the laptops will be stolen by the end of September.
It's fortunate that entertainment executives are such peacocks. Their counterparts in other industries seem more often to have the sense to perform their political maneuvers behind closed doors. Music and film industry execs have such raging egos they want everybody to see them win, no matter how ugly it makes them look. In the long run I think that's a good thing.
As detailed in this Salon article mentioned a couple/. articles back, the DMCA requires ISPs to take steps to stop copyright infringement when notified by a copyright holder. ISPs are forced to act as enforcers for the copyright industry, solely on the authority of a complaint.
Most/.ers seem to agree that the DMCA is a repressive, reprehensible piece of legislation bought and paid for by business interests. I would go further to say that the United States Congress is now pretty much an extension of business interests, and that We the People have about as much actual self-governing power as student council in high school.
It seems to me that the DMCA is more of a symptom than a problem, the actual problem being democracy vs fascism. The question is, what can we do about it other than type our indignant speeches into the Slashdot comment box? I think democracy in America is broken, and at the moment I don't see a way to fix it. The mechanisms that have broken it have been deliberate and calculated, and the loopholes are being closed methodically. Does anybody know of a credible effort to fix the problem? I'll sign up.
It's the real world, and people do whatever they think they have to do, regardless of the law. Brazil's action is no more wrong than running red lights to get your kid to the hospital. I'd do that, and so would you, so spare us the sermon.
Re:Homogeneous technology has long-term risks
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
Good point, but this issue is really more about human nature than business practices. One thing/.ers seem to forget is that most of the world - meaning like 99.99% of the population - has neither the skill nor the inclination to actually modify software. The _power_ to change consumer software is pretty much irrelevant, even for open source. Virtually everyone depends entirely on vendors. So what if the vendor is "some guy in Norway"? Well, if a ship is sinking and there are 3 life preservers hanging side by side, and one has DuPont printed on it and the others say EZ-Swim and Handi-flote, even the guy in the Greenpeace t-shirt is gonna grab the one that says DuPont.
The real problem is not how to slap Bill Gates down, it's how to get the 99.99%ers to believe that variety is the spice of life. In my opinion that won't happen until pretty much anything you buy is as good as anything else, from a consumer point of view not a programmer point of view. Monoliths would lose most of their advantage if standards became so prevalent and programmer skills so high that virtually all software worked easily, flawlessly and interoperated well. Then price would be the only object, and you can't beat free.
Is Windows security full of holes?
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, I guess. On the other hand:
(from the first page of Debian)
Security Alerts [12 Aug 2001] DSA-074 wmaker - buffer overflow
[11 Aug 2001] DSA-073 imp - 3 remote exploits
[10 Aug 2001] DSA-072 groff - printf format attack
[10 Aug 2001] DSA-071 fetchmail - memory corruption
[10 Aug 2001] DSA-070 netkit-telnet - remote exploit
[09 Aug 2001] DSA-069 xloadimage - buffer overflow
[09 Aug 2001] DSA-068 openldap - remote DoS
[28 Jul 2001] DSA-067 apache - Remote exploit
[11 Jul 2001] DSA-066 cfingerd - remote exploit
[23 Jun 2001] DSA-065 samba - remote file append/creation
For older security alerts see the Security Page. If you would like to receive security alerts...
My point is only that we all live in glass houses.
The spokeswoman says the clothing will even be able to do the same things as the uniforms on the Enterprise. So, uhhh, I guess the jackets will ride up and the shirts will get ripped in fistfights:)
When you read the whole conversation, von Lohman essentially says, "I don't know if it's legal or not," which is how almost any lawyer answers almost any really interesting question. At some point he even says, "You should consult an attorney...before proceeding." Well then what's that guy gonna say? Instead of figuring out more ways to weasel around copyright law, how about if we figure out how to change it, so we can quit having these discussions? See an earlier/. story (The essay link is now broken, but the comments are worth reading.)
At least as I understand the term, having looked it up after seeing The Big Lebowski. You have to realize that Congressmen are only there for their own gain. They don't represent you, they represent the money interests who pay to get them elected, and literally NOTHING else means anything to them. We (Americans) live under an institutionalized bribery system marketed as democracy. Once you understand that, you can stop wondering why so many things are wrong.
Another glib, uninformed remark rated as Insightful -- two people who obviously didn't bother to read the article. Well that's the Internet for you.
To sum it up: They built this magic superconductor thingy in a vacuum chamber, charged it up and measured the effect at different distances on pendulums of various materials, weighing 10 to 50 grams, hung in a separate vacuum chamber see their rough drawing. When they fired up the superconductor, the pendulums swung away several inches.
The amount of movement varied with the mass of the pendulums, but not the distance or the materials (they mention metal, glass, ceramics, wood, rubber, plastic). Pendulums 6 meters and 150 meters away in a different building, separated by brick walls and an inch of steel, showed identical effects. Even with "trace amounts of iron" a magnetic effect would vary with the square of the distance. But what do I know?
Of course, perhaps I'm prejudiced against people who criticize research without bothering to read it (and moderators who hand out points like candy).
At the risk of flaming, I ask everyone to please take a look at this diagram if you really think the Space Shuttle wings are "large," or that they could conceivably weigh anything remotely close to half of the vehicle's weight. The fuel, on the other hand, weighs many times more than the entire ship plus payload. There's just no comparison between a passive lifting body and fuel. To quote Pulp Fiction, "it aint the same ball park and it aint the same league, it aint even the same fuckin' sport!"
Speaking of flames, we haven't even considered what happens to objects sitting around near a rocket launch or landing site. Vertical landing does not mean rockets can take off and land in "any old parking lot" !!?? Can you say, "Dude, where's my car?" There's no way a giant flamethrower is going to be allowed to come down over any heavily populated area. Rockets would need their own special takeoff and landing facilities, and if they didn't land right next to the fueling site (yikes!) they would have to be hauled there, carefully.
The Shuttle has these problems too, but it's not supposed to be the Ultimate Answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The Shuttle is only the first working example of a vehicle going to orbit and landing repeatedly without fuel. It's particular shortcomings are not arguments for using fuel instead of lift. The goal is to use a regular airport, which rockets will not do.
The Space Shuttle has been using the "nice friendly atmosphere" to land without fuel for about the last 20 years. Nobody has to prove it can be done, it's just a matter of doing it at commercial cost. Landing on thrust will always mean using additional takeoff fuel to lift the landing fuel (and itself), which must increase the cost because fuel costs more than nothing. There's no reason to insist on vertical landing; we have airports! You wouldn't need to carry any more landing fuel than it takes to make a couple extra passes at the runway in case of trouble. Why are people so attached to the idea of using thrust to lower the rocket all the way to the ground when gliding is freely available?
Come on, when I say use the atmosphere I mean with Wings, not Parachutes. Like the Space Shuttle, which lands on target every time without fuel. There's a thing called aerodynamics that enables you to descend without either hovering on rockets all the way down or dropping aimlessly on parachutes. Engage brain before starting fingers.
Reusable rockets are great, but using fuel as a brake for Earth landings is dumb, dumb, dumb. The atmosphere is readily available, and you don't have to haul it up with you. Congrats on a lwe budget and getting volunteers involved, but they need some volunteers who don't have rocket fuel on the brain.
Slashdot Mirror
Now this is the kind of creative thinking that will really revolutionize robotics. Intelligent pieces that can assemble themselves into colonies that are greater than the sum of their parts. I would especially like to see this approach used in nanotech (but only if Asimov's Laws of Robotics are indelibly burned into the molecules).
There have been articles here about smart clothing that will change color and size. Why not smart spacesuits? I have no doubt that in the future there will be skin-tight suits that will maintain proper temp, flex with (or assist) body movements, and maintain a constant even pressure over the entire body by adjusting the lengths of the fibers. Not soon, but someday, why not?
Dude, 2 things:
1. Stillsuits are not spacesuits.
2. Stillsuits are not real.
Ok, I'm breaking my tradition of not replying to crap like this to ask the simple question, why do so many people bother to respond to idiotic postings? We could save a little time and bandwidth by simply ignoring people when they shout out how stupid they are. Go ahead and moderate this off-topic. I know it is, but it's aimed at an audience who will read it.
In real life lots of people buy their way into positions they don't deserve. I don't know why a virtual world would be different. But since it's really your character in the virtual world, not you, I don't see what difference it makes where the other characters come from, whether they bought or earned their stuff, or even whether they are played by real people or AI. It's just a game.
Have you ever sold a car? Did you design the car?Gimme a break.
This reminds me of a Scientific American article from many years ago about why people like music. The essence was that our enjoyment of music might be connected to fractal patterns in the music, in our nervous systems, and in subtle mathematical properties of changes we observe in the world around us. It seemed to suggest that the patterns in the music might map onto specific thought patterns -- love, fear, a sunny day, etc. This mapping could be what we are actually enjoying when we enjoy the music, and could explain why large numbers of people often react the same way to a given piece of music. I remember being excited by the idea that the encoding of thoughts might be based more on mathematics than on individual physiology, which would bode well for the future of direct mind-to-mind communication.
So what these British guys are doing with humor is quite intriguing. Although it might seem silly on the surface, it could lead to a greater understanding of how we are wired, which would be a good thing.
It would be great if they sent up a replica of the Russian refueling station in the movie Armageddon, complete with dirty walls, leaky plumbing and cigarette-smoking fuel attendant who doesn't give a rip. I'd pay big rubles to visit an attraction like that.
Try any pawn shop in New England about 2 months from now. If 7th-graders in Maine are anything like they are in Seattle, half the laptops will be stolen by the end of September.
It's fortunate that entertainment executives are such peacocks. Their counterparts in other industries seem more often to have the sense to perform their political maneuvers behind closed doors. Music and film industry execs have such raging egos they want everybody to see them win, no matter how ugly it makes them look. In the long run I think that's a good thing.
As detailed in this Salon article mentioned a couple /. articles back, the DMCA requires ISPs to take steps to stop copyright infringement when notified by a copyright holder. ISPs are forced to act as enforcers for the copyright industry, solely on the authority of a complaint.
sorry.
You have the right to remain silent. And that's about it.
It seems to me that the DMCA is more of a symptom than a problem, the actual problem being democracy vs fascism. The question is, what can we do about it other than type our indignant speeches into the Slashdot comment box? I think democracy in America is broken, and at the moment I don't see a way to fix it. The mechanisms that have broken it have been deliberate and calculated, and the loopholes are being closed methodically. Does anybody know of a credible effort to fix the problem? I'll sign up.
It's the real world, and people do whatever they think they have to do, regardless of the law. Brazil's action is no more wrong than running red lights to get your kid to the hospital. I'd do that, and so would you, so spare us the sermon.
Good point, but this issue is really more about human nature than business practices. One thing /.ers seem to forget is that most of the world - meaning like 99.99% of the population - has neither the skill nor the inclination to actually modify software. The _power_ to change consumer software is pretty much irrelevant, even for open source. Virtually everyone depends entirely on vendors. So what if the vendor is "some guy in Norway"? Well, if a ship is sinking and there are 3 life preservers hanging side by side, and one has DuPont printed on it and the others say EZ-Swim and Handi-flote, even the guy in the Greenpeace t-shirt is gonna grab the one that says DuPont.
The real problem is not how to slap Bill Gates down, it's how to get the 99.99%ers to believe that variety is the spice of life. In my opinion that won't happen until pretty much anything you buy is as good as anything else, from a consumer point of view not a programmer point of view. Monoliths would lose most of their advantage if standards became so prevalent and programmer skills so high that virtually all software worked easily, flawlessly and interoperated well. Then price would be the only object, and you can't beat free.
Yeah, I guess. On the other hand:
My point is only that we all live in glass houses.(from the first page of Debian )
The spokeswoman says the clothing will even be able to do the same things as the uniforms on the Enterprise. So, uhhh, I guess the jackets will ride up and the shirts will get ripped in fistfights :)
When you read the whole conversation, von Lohman essentially says, "I don't know if it's legal or not," which is how almost any lawyer answers almost any really interesting question. At some point he even says, "You should consult an attorney...before proceeding." Well then what's that guy gonna say? Instead of figuring out more ways to weasel around copyright law, how about if we figure out how to change it, so we can quit having these discussions? See an earlier /. story (The essay link is now broken, but the comments are worth reading.)
At least as I understand the term, having looked it up after seeing The Big Lebowski. You have to realize that Congressmen are only there for their own gain. They don't represent you, they represent the money interests who pay to get them elected, and literally NOTHING else means anything to them. We (Americans) live under an institutionalized bribery system marketed as democracy. Once you understand that, you can stop wondering why so many things are wrong.
Another glib, uninformed remark rated as Insightful -- two people who obviously didn't bother to read the article. Well that's the Internet for you.
To sum it up: They built this magic superconductor thingy in a vacuum chamber, charged it up and measured the effect at different distances on pendulums of various materials, weighing 10 to 50 grams, hung in a separate vacuum chamber see their rough drawing. When they fired up the superconductor, the pendulums swung away several inches.
The amount of movement varied with the mass of the pendulums, but not the distance or the materials (they mention metal, glass, ceramics, wood, rubber, plastic). Pendulums 6 meters and 150 meters away in a different building, separated by brick walls and an inch of steel, showed identical effects. Even with "trace amounts of iron" a magnetic effect would vary with the square of the distance. But what do I know?
Of course, perhaps I'm prejudiced against people who criticize research without bothering to read it (and moderators who hand out points like candy).
At the risk of flaming, I ask everyone to please take a look at this diagram if you really think the Space Shuttle wings are "large," or that they could conceivably weigh anything remotely close to half of the vehicle's weight. The fuel, on the other hand, weighs many times more than the entire ship plus payload. There's just no comparison between a passive lifting body and fuel. To quote Pulp Fiction, "it aint the same ball park and it aint the same league, it aint even the same fuckin' sport!"
Speaking of flames, we haven't even considered what happens to objects sitting around near a rocket launch or landing site. Vertical landing does not mean rockets can take off and land in "any old parking lot" !!?? Can you say, "Dude, where's my car?" There's no way a giant flamethrower is going to be allowed to come down over any heavily populated area. Rockets would need their own special takeoff and landing facilities, and if they didn't land right next to the fueling site (yikes!) they would have to be hauled there, carefully.
The Shuttle has these problems too, but it's not supposed to be the Ultimate Answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The Shuttle is only the first working example of a vehicle going to orbit and landing repeatedly without fuel. It's particular shortcomings are not arguments for using fuel instead of lift. The goal is to use a regular airport, which rockets will not do.
The Space Shuttle has been using the "nice friendly atmosphere" to land without fuel for about the last 20 years. Nobody has to prove it can be done, it's just a matter of doing it at commercial cost. Landing on thrust will always mean using additional takeoff fuel to lift the landing fuel (and itself), which must increase the cost because fuel costs more than nothing. There's no reason to insist on vertical landing; we have airports! You wouldn't need to carry any more landing fuel than it takes to make a couple extra passes at the runway in case of trouble. Why are people so attached to the idea of using thrust to lower the rocket all the way to the ground when gliding is freely available?
Come on, when I say use the atmosphere I mean with Wings, not Parachutes. Like the Space Shuttle, which lands on target every time without fuel. There's a thing called aerodynamics that enables you to descend without either hovering on rockets all the way down or dropping aimlessly on parachutes. Engage brain before starting fingers.
Reusable rockets are great, but using fuel as a brake for Earth landings is dumb, dumb, dumb. The atmosphere is readily available, and you don't have to haul it up with you. Congrats on a lwe budget and getting volunteers involved, but they need some volunteers who don't have rocket fuel on the brain.