I realize Facebook is an acceptable target, but what happens when someone live streams something appalling using a free, user supported service? I mean, youtube/twitter/facebook are just apps. They could be replaced by an open version (call it you-twit-face) and there wouldn't be any hobgoblin to be righteously angry at.
I was worried about all the fake news, hate speech, and abhorrent violent material that was appearing on the internet, but now they've passed a law - that should solve all problems.
At best we'll reach a "cashless" society in the same way we've reached a "paperless" office.
Cash will diminish, sure. But end? What about kids? Are they going to start getting debit cards? Or will they just not be allowed to buy anything in this brave new world? Lot's of people don't have bank accounts. What about them?
You don't replace one technology with another unless it's better in every way. If the new is only better in most ways, then it's only going to mostly replace the old.
By the same (faulty) logic; Clouds are made of water, therefore the ocean extends much further than previously thought - more than 5km above sea level! We've even detected water in comets believed to be as far away as the Oort cloud...
The web is not the internet. There are a large number of problems with the web (web, not internet) including;
DNS is a central point of failure.
Cost to host is based on views - i.e. a popular website is an expensive website.
Web browsers leak information about the user by design.
Content Restricted Access Protocols (a.k.a. DRM)
Personally, I've come to the conclusion that the web will die, as soon as something better comes along. LET IT DIE. It's great and all, but instead of spending effort expanding it, changing it, and "protecting" it, work on creating something better.
Attacks target the easiest thing first. By default C has no bounds checking, and it's an easy error to make, so there are a lot of those kinds of errors. Bounds checking could be added, or you could use a language that has bounds checking, but that just means the attacker will go after the next most vulnerable part of the system. If Heartbleed was impossible we'd just have more attacks like shellshock.
If you want real security, change the OS so programs can't access anything outside their own memory space - like write to disk, or read files outside of their current directory, or open network sockets, etc. If an app absolutely has to access something sensitive, make it easy to access it through a safe interface and really hard to do it directly. In fact, make it so I can optionally lie to to an app if it asks for something sensitive like location data.
The amount of water varies but typically its about 10g per cubic meter of air. Depending on the tech, you can remove about 5g of that. So to extract 2000 liters you need to process about 400,000 cubic meters of air. That sounds like a lot, but with an average wind speed of 4 meters per second, you'd need an aperture only 1.15 square meters in size - smaller than a standard door.
It's not the most efficient way to do this, but lets suppose you use regular old radiative heat transfer. At room temperature you can "beam" 250 watts per square meter into space, and (using simple tech.) you can do that for about 12 hours a night. So with only 500 square meters of cooling area, you could do it. That's big, but far from physically impossible.
Physics isn't the limiter - it's economics that's the problem. Building a 500 square meter panel isn't cheep. Perhaps you could use an already existing 500 square meter building with an aluminium roof. Add some mods, and use that to extract that much water passively (i.e. without any additional energy).
Convert asteroids into space stations, and there's more than a 1000 times as much floor space as the Earth. (At least, in theory.) There's plenty of energy (sunlight), and lots of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Lots iron and carbon to make the steel for the walls, and lots of other filler to provide shielding. The only element that is in short supply is nitrogen, and you can get that from Titan. (or Earth if people will let you)
If you could move 10,000 people from Earth to the belt per year, and assuming a yearly growth rate of 1.02%, you reach 1 trillion in under 400 years. 100,000 per year, and a growth rate of 1.03% and it only takes 200 years.
AFAIK, with current tech, it's possible to reach 1 trillion in system in less than 1 millennium. Traveling to another star system in less than 1 millennium with current tech, isn't.
Most of the bots are already violating the terms of service, and possibly committing fraud as well.
If you tried sacrificing chickens and that had no effect, would you expect sacrificing more chickens to somehow work? Why expect "law" to be any different from "sacrifice chicken"?
Maybe you could also make it so that it has a coin associated with it so that every time somebody checks out your stuff, you move a coin.
We already have a pay-per-click system, it's called "advertising" and we hate it. But even if you could figure out another way to get people to pay 1/30 of a cent whenever they visit a website, it still doesn't solve the problem. The average web server can't serve the whole world. If you get paid, then once you've been slashdotted, you can (after the fact) upgrade to a professional web server - which is the opposite of what's desired.
I can't serve the world. If I post the worlds best corn bread muffin recipe, and it goes viral, then either; my web site crashes because of the slashdot effect, or my provider charges me thousands of dollars for the honor of having a successful web site, or some combination of the two. The reason Youtube is popular isn't the technically difficultly of hosting video clips, it's the cost of doing so.
Replacing a central server with a group of central servers helps, but it's not good enough. We need a solution like BitTorrent, where the more people accessing something increases the ability of other people to access it.
Do they mean "money laundering" as in spending your money in ways they don't approve of, or "money laundering" as in receiving money for selling stuff they don't approve of?
You have to dig deep to find it, but according to the rules of the contest;
The source CO2 and hydrogen can be supplied from a commercially available pure gas (i.e., tanked CO2 and H2), or verifiably obtained from an alternate source (e.g., H2 from water electrolysis).
Pretty big "detail" to leave out of the press release, IMO.
If the service holds people accountable, then people who want to avoid that will stop using the service. There are lots of ways to spread anonymous rumors.
Going after WhatsApp is just an updated version of "kill the messenger"
It's not genetically modified, it's just a cultivar of rapeseed that is naturally low in erucic acid. Canada selected for it, they didn't "modify" it. Then they gave it a different name (CAN[adian] O[il] L[ow] A[cid]), probably for sales reasons.
Anyone who writes the way you described has a very poor understanding of OOP.
No TRUE C++ programmer would ever program that way, eh?
All the basic features of C++ (inheritance, polymorphism, classes, and objects) make writing large systems MUCH easier than they would be without those features.
I've seen this kind of claim many times - and yet, the evidence is that C++ programs aren't any better that ADA, or even FORTRAN when it comes to writing large systems.
Classes only help when they're built correctly, and C++ encourages lazy people to create them poorly.
GOTO didn't force people to write spaghetti code, but that's what actually happened.
Sure, you can write good code in C++, but what is there in the actual language that encourages it?
I hate that it allows polymorphism. Worse, it makes people think that polymorphism is a desirable feature that helps create clear, readable code.
It encourages the creation of functions that operate on classes instead of on generic data types. For example, if a C++ program has a "car" class that include the elements "miles" and "gas" a C++ programmer is likely to create a function car::calc_mpg() which requires (seemingly) no arguments, rather than the more generic calc_mpg(int miles, int gas) The problem is, the first is not reusable, and depends heavily on knowledge of the car class.
It encourages inheritance, which fundamentally breaks the box-model (a.k.a. the black-box-model) of programming. Rather than breaking things into discrete, understandable chunks, it encourages massive classes that must be understood in their entirety.
Then there's operator overloading, code that can be executed before main(), putting code in unexpected places... I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
The main problem is, C++ adds stuff with the unjustified expectation that more stuff automatically mean better. Sometimes more stuff is worse.
Unicode doesn't even support the concept of a less than full stop. There's no reasonable way to differentiate the period after an abbreviation like "Mr.", from one at the end of a sentence.
CSS doesn't let you control the number of spaces that follow a period - the authors of CSS apparently didn't believe this was a "style" choice.
What if the "best" choice was 1.5 spaces between sentences?
The fixed cost is huge, but the marginal cost is nearly zero.
Giving you just the 20 channels you maybe watch costs almost the same as giving you those 20 plus 80 channels of crap. In fact, they probably get paid to deliver the home shopping channels, so the cost of 20 might actually be higher than 20 plus 80.
... I am surprised that "facilitating prostitution" is a federal crime.
It's not, nor was Backpage charged with that. The summary of the article tries to imply that it is, but that's just the usual bullshit media distortion.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize Facebook is an acceptable target, but what happens when someone live streams something appalling using a free, user supported service?
I mean, youtube/twitter/facebook are just apps.
They could be replaced by an open version (call it you-twit-face) and there wouldn't be any hobgoblin to be righteously angry at.
I was worried about all the fake news, hate speech, and abhorrent violent material that was appearing on the internet, but now they've passed a law - that should solve all problems.
It might work with people who were accidentally being offensive, but if a trolls wants to annoy you, no AI based system is going to stop them.
At best we'll reach a "cashless" society in the same way we've reached a "paperless" office.
Cash will diminish, sure. But end?
What about kids? Are they going to start getting debit cards? Or will they just not be allowed to buy anything in this brave new world?
Lot's of people don't have bank accounts. What about them?
You don't replace one technology with another unless it's better in every way.
If the new is only better in most ways, then it's only going to mostly replace the old.
By the same (faulty) logic;
Clouds are made of water, therefore the ocean extends much further than previously thought - more than 5km above sea level!
We've even detected water in comets believed to be as far away as the Oort cloud...
Why do we allow public records to be restricted in the first place?
I'm betting there are numerous agencies that would gladly distribute the information free of charge, if it was just legal for them to do so.
The web is not the internet.
There are a large number of problems with the web (web, not internet) including;
Personally, I've come to the conclusion that the web will die, as soon as something better comes along.
LET IT DIE.
It's great and all, but instead of spending effort expanding it, changing it, and "protecting" it, work on creating something better.
Attacks target the easiest thing first.
By default C has no bounds checking, and it's an easy error to make, so there are a lot of those kinds of errors.
Bounds checking could be added, or you could use a language that has bounds checking, but that just means the attacker will go after the next most vulnerable part of the system.
If Heartbleed was impossible we'd just have more attacks like shellshock.
If you want real security, change the OS so programs can't access anything outside their own memory space - like write to disk, or read files outside of their current directory, or open network sockets, etc.
If an app absolutely has to access something sensitive, make it easy to access it through a safe interface and really hard to do it directly.
In fact, make it so I can optionally lie to to an app if it asks for something sensitive like location data.
Physics says no such thing.
The amount of water varies but typically its about 10g per cubic meter of air.
Depending on the tech, you can remove about 5g of that.
So to extract 2000 liters you need to process about 400,000 cubic meters of air.
That sounds like a lot, but with an average wind speed of 4 meters per second, you'd need an aperture only 1.15 square meters in size - smaller than a standard door.
It's not the most efficient way to do this, but lets suppose you use regular old radiative heat transfer.
At room temperature you can "beam" 250 watts per square meter into space, and (using simple tech.) you can do that for about 12 hours a night.
So with only 500 square meters of cooling area, you could do it.
That's big, but far from physically impossible.
Physics isn't the limiter - it's economics that's the problem.
Building a 500 square meter panel isn't cheep.
Perhaps you could use an already existing 500 square meter building with an aluminium roof.
Add some mods, and use that to extract that much water passively (i.e. without any additional energy).
O'Neill Cylinder Space Settlement.
Convert asteroids into space stations, and there's more than a 1000 times as much floor space as the Earth. (At least, in theory.)
There's plenty of energy (sunlight), and lots of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
Lots iron and carbon to make the steel for the walls, and lots of other filler to provide shielding.
The only element that is in short supply is nitrogen, and you can get that from Titan. (or Earth if people will let you)
If you could move 10,000 people from Earth to the belt per year, and assuming a yearly growth rate of 1.02%, you reach 1 trillion in under 400 years.
100,000 per year, and a growth rate of 1.03% and it only takes 200 years.
AFAIK, with current tech, it's possible to reach 1 trillion in system in less than 1 millennium.
Traveling to another star system in less than 1 millennium with current tech, isn't.
Most of the bots are already violating the terms of service, and possibly committing fraud as well.
If you tried sacrificing chickens and that had no effect, would you expect sacrificing more chickens to somehow work?
Why expect "law" to be any different from "sacrifice chicken"?
Maybe you could also make it so that it has a coin associated with it so that every time somebody checks out your stuff, you move a coin.
We already have a pay-per-click system, it's called "advertising" and we hate it.
But even if you could figure out another way to get people to pay 1/30 of a cent whenever they visit a website, it still doesn't solve the problem.
The average web server can't serve the whole world.
If you get paid, then once you've been slashdotted, you can (after the fact) upgrade to a professional web server - which is the opposite of what's desired.
I can't serve the world.
If I post the worlds best corn bread muffin recipe, and it goes viral, then either; my web site crashes because of the slashdot effect, or my provider charges me thousands of dollars for the honor of having a successful web site, or some combination of the two.
The reason Youtube is popular isn't the technically difficultly of hosting video clips, it's the cost of doing so.
Replacing a central server with a group of central servers helps, but it's not good enough.
We need a solution like BitTorrent, where the more people accessing something increases the ability of other people to access it.
I think I'll bet on 4) They made a mistake.
And however unlikely it might be, there's also 5) They're lying.
... the potential role in money laundering ...
Do they mean "money laundering" as in spending your money in ways they don't approve of, or "money laundering" as in receiving money for selling stuff they don't approve of?
I think they're proposing belling the cat.
You have to dig deep to find it, but according to the rules of the contest;
The source CO2 and hydrogen can be supplied from a commercially available pure gas (i.e., tanked CO2 and H2), or verifiably obtained from an alternate source (e.g., H2 from water electrolysis).
Pretty big "detail" to leave out of the press release, IMO.
Rotten Tomatoes has been gamed by industry for years, just like most online review sites are gamed.
Garbage In, Garbage Out.
RT is an aggregator. Aggregate garbage and you get garbage.
If the service holds people accountable, then people who want to avoid that will stop using the service.
There are lots of ways to spread anonymous rumors.
Going after WhatsApp is just an updated version of "kill the messenger"
Canola is genetically modified rapeseed.
It's not genetically modified, it's just a cultivar of rapeseed that is naturally low in erucic acid.
Canada selected for it, they didn't "modify" it.
Then they gave it a different name (CAN[adian] O[il] L[ow] A[cid]), probably for sales reasons.
There is a GM variant of Canola oil, but that's the evil, rapist, version made by Monsanto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canola_oil
Anyone who writes the way you described has a very poor understanding of OOP.
No TRUE C++ programmer would ever program that way, eh?
All the basic features of C++ (inheritance, polymorphism, classes, and objects) make writing large systems MUCH easier than they would be without those features.
I've seen this kind of claim many times - and yet, the evidence is that C++ programs aren't any better that ADA, or even FORTRAN when it comes to writing large systems.
Classes only help when they're built correctly, and C++ encourages lazy people to create them poorly.
GOTO didn't force people to write spaghetti code, but that's what actually happened.
Sure, you can write good code in C++, but what is there in the actual language that encourages it?
C++ is, IMO, terrible.
I hate that it allows polymorphism. Worse, it makes people think that polymorphism is a desirable feature that helps create clear, readable code.
It encourages the creation of functions that operate on classes instead of on generic data types.
For example, if a C++ program has a "car" class that include the elements "miles" and "gas" a C++ programmer is likely to create a function
car::calc_mpg() which requires (seemingly) no arguments, rather than the more generic calc_mpg(int miles, int gas)
The problem is, the first is not reusable, and depends heavily on knowledge of the car class.
It encourages inheritance, which fundamentally breaks the box-model (a.k.a. the black-box-model) of programming.
Rather than breaking things into discrete, understandable chunks, it encourages massive classes that must be understood in their entirety.
Then there's operator overloading, code that can be executed before main(), putting code in unexpected places... I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
The main problem is, C++ adds stuff with the unjustified expectation that more stuff automatically mean better.
Sometimes more stuff is worse.
Unicode doesn't even support the concept of a less than full stop.
There's no reasonable way to differentiate the period after an abbreviation like "Mr.", from one at the end of a sentence.
CSS doesn't let you control the number of spaces that follow a period - the authors of CSS apparently didn't believe this was a "style" choice.
What if the "best" choice was 1.5 spaces between sentences?
The fixed cost is huge, but the marginal cost is nearly zero.
Giving you just the 20 channels you maybe watch costs almost the same as giving you those 20 plus 80 channels of crap.
In fact, they probably get paid to deliver the home shopping channels, so the cost of 20 might actually be higher than 20 plus 80.
... I am surprised that "facilitating prostitution" is a federal crime.
It's not, nor was Backpage charged with that.
The summary of the article tries to imply that it is, but that's just the usual bullshit media distortion.