by Neal Stephenson is a must read book for anyone interested in some of the potential possibilities, implications, and ethics in a world where nanotech is an everyday thing. Obligitory Amazon Link.
It's good scifi/cyberpunk stuff.
My questions would be, in a world where physical objects can be duplicated easily, would property rights stop meaning as much? and would property laws become more like intellectual property laws?
Imagine a DNCA (N for nano), anti-nano-copying... this car is nano-righted 2092. Any attempt to duplicate it is a violation of our nanorights...
Heh, funny. I don't think you can be held to a contract you never signed. Only the people who signed your contracts with the confidentiality clause could be held accountable to it.
I think, far beyond use in games, replacing actors, and automated phone systems, this tech has important uses and implications especially for the disabled.
Imagine not being able to speak and relying on a computer generated voice like Stephen Hawking does. Now imagine if you could actually bring intonation and expression back to your words? Or perhaps even use your own voice again if you had sufficient recordings from prior to your loss of speech?
Imagine being blind and the computer having to read a website or ebook to you. A cold, unnatural voice, with no hint of meaning in the words. Wouldn't it be nice if it actually had some sense of humanity to it, some bit of inflection and reality to the speech?
This could be an important advance in enabling technology for many people.
Umm. ColdFusion server runs on linux. Sure, you can't use studio, but the lack of a text editor's not necessarily a reason to abandon the platform. The docs are all HTML, install in windows, copy the docs over.
Actually, the you could make a pretty cool one-time pad for text messages.;)
Take your text and rot13 it, or do a similar transform. Then uuencode it. Remove the uuencoding headers/footers. XOR it with x number of digits of pi, from point y.
You've given the person you're communicating with a calendar with a different x and y on it every day, generated with a decent random number generator. These could be of arbitrary size.
Yes, this requires you to transfer the keys in advance, and has the obvious problem of someone stealing or copying your calendar. But your digital correspondence security is always, at it's best, only as good as your physical security. PKI methods have the same limitations. Someone gets your private key, and you're pretty much screwed. Your monitor can be read from a distance too, you know.
Of course it might not survive some good cryptanalysis, but it would be sufficient I think for casual use.;)
Capitalism is a helluva lot better than socialism
or communism. Look at the rest of the world to see
how well that's worked out.
I don't think it's "good" for our society to have an entire underclass who cannot access the net. I also don't think it's good to blame people who work hard and make money, or to attempt to force them redistribute the products of their labor, or their parents labor, to those who don't or can't.
What good is it to force someone to help their fellow man, instead of letting them decide of their free will where and how to help?
There are students who can't afford pencils and paper to do their homework on, or a full meal so they don't go to school hungry, or running water to bathe so they can go to school clean, or electricty or gas to heat their homes and cook what food they do have.
To whine about someone not being able to afford internet access or voice mail is absolutely meaningless, and quite frankly sickens me.
These folks can't afford to buy medical texts to get information either. But they can access the internet and read the texts at most public libraries (just fyi, I'm against censorship and filtering). These millions of kids will be no more disadvantaged than kids who couldn't afford to buy books 50 years ago. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying you need to get some damn perspective!
A crowbar is a tool. It's the action of how the tool is used that is illegal or not.
A better comparison would be a "digital high-powered automatic weapon", if it's so deadly surely the goverment can ban it! Although somehow I don't see DeCSS as taking lives or holding the MPAA hostage.
PS, for anyone whose interested, I didn't finish the bio program. I switched over to psych. My bio dept. sucked. You couldn't get to see an advisor if you weren't pre-Med/Dent/Pharm/etc (I was pre-EDU). I eventually dropped the the EDU in favor of INFOSYS.;)
Doctors can't go camping while on call, that's a given. But to not be able to go to a nice sit down restraunt, or a movie? I think that's asking a bit much.
A jam would never fly unless you could somehow exempt devices on an individual basis. But then who controls the list of people that get the exemptions. Hrm. Let me guess... the Canadian gov't.
Where was Orrin Hatch on this one huh? Maybe he's spending too much time downloading stuff off of Napster before they get shut down.
I think the old 50 years after the death of the author was good enough. I wounder, would the retroactive provision in this apply to works that have expired copyrights? Could we see Project Gutenburg have to take down texts because of new copyrights?
Jeez that's doing it the hard way.
Ever heard of SQL?
You can even do automagic timestamps on new entries, write yourself a little php admin frontend.
Setup a cron job to automagically rewrite your new.html and news.rdf pages, sucking the data
and generating the pages through any number of languages that have SQL support.
It violates the laws of economics, of supply and
demand they're used to dealing with.
They can't artificially alter the supply of an
unlimited resource to jack up the price.
Some artists like Metallica fear the same thing.
If the RIAA gets trampled on digital music, and
we do the same thing next for the MPAA, I forsee
a great revival of live shows and theater.
A cultural reawakening, as artists actually have
to perform to get paid, not just to boost record
sales, where actors actually have to be able to
act, not just look pretty for the screen. Where
human interaction and a real connection with fans
is necessary for success, where musicians and
other performers are brought back down from the
level of stardom and inflated ego'd godhood to the
level of people like everyone else. What a
wonderful world it would be.
Was this review translated from German?
on
Code Breaking
·
· Score: 2
The number of grammatical mistakes, missing words, and general incoherencies make me wonder if this review hasn't been pass through babblefish at least once.
"For instance, the Zimmerman telegram, for instance,..." (enough "for instance"'s?)
"the examples in many cases have been transformed from to work well..." (transformed from what?)
The number of "though"'s is troubling to say the least.
This is someone's idea of a story? There's nothing but anecdotal evidence here.
I could maybe see information overload. Over reliance on PDA's and computers and car navigation systems causing memory loss is a pretty stupid idea. One lady forgot how to remember what she read? Sounds like she has a visual learning problem to me.
Re:Rigging the Marketing Information?
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 1
It was the school, as a neighboring school in the same county was able to access/.
Re:Rigging the Marketing Information?
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 1
That's if slashdot isn't blocked. I've actually seen a couple of elem. schools that've blocked/. as material not suited for children. Sad huh?
The real problem is that the US postal system would soon, if it's not already, become totally dependent on the income from junk mail, and would fight any attempt to stop it.
Return their mailing? Sure. If your name and/or address appears anywhere, obscure it. If they request information, put in totally fake garbage.
The idea isn't to save the environment, it's to put the lousy spammers out of business.
Re:HTTP request sent; waiting for response.
on
Pocketlinux Hits 1.0
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, they're probably using a java based web server running jsp's on an ipaq... I can't imagine anything much slower...
I have the same problem. I'm a Jr., the only thing seperating my name from my dads is the Jr. on the end of mine.
It's a good thing he's got great credit. When I was living at home, I had my own phone line. I got solicitations for credit cards daily. Well, finally one sounded good (at this point i had 0 cards).
They took my info, and were like, do you have this debt and this debt, we can do a balance transfer... nope, not me thats my dad.. oh wait, the social you gave us doesn't match.. yup, that's my dad, but this is MY phone number. Well, I wound up getting the card, still have it, 5.9% fixed, high limit.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like regular old /. is having some problems.
I just tried to submit a comment to this article, and this is what I got:
Invalid form key WB0j2L6oh8 !
It's good scifi/cyberpunk stuff.
My questions would be, in a world where physical objects can be duplicated easily, would property rights stop meaning as much? and would property laws become more like intellectual property laws?
Imagine a DNCA (N for nano), anti-nano-copying... this car is nano-righted 2092. Any attempt to duplicate it is a violation of our nanorights...
Heh, funny. I don't think you can be held to a contract you never signed. Only the people who signed your contracts with the confidentiality clause could be held accountable to it.
I think, far beyond use in games, replacing actors, and automated phone systems, this tech has important uses and implications especially for the disabled.
Imagine not being able to speak and relying on a computer generated voice like Stephen Hawking does. Now imagine if you could actually bring intonation and expression back to your words? Or perhaps even use your own voice again if you had sufficient recordings from prior to your loss of speech?
Imagine being blind and the computer having to read a website or ebook to you. A cold, unnatural voice, with no hint of meaning in the words. Wouldn't it be nice if it actually had some sense of humanity to it, some bit of inflection and reality to the speech?
This could be an important advance in enabling technology for many people.
Umm. ColdFusion server runs on linux. Sure, you can't use studio, but the lack of a text editor's not necessarily a reason to abandon the platform. The docs are all HTML, install in windows, copy the docs over.
He got cured of cancer by the aliens, dont'cha know.
Actually, the you could make a pretty cool one-time pad for text messages. ;)
;)
Take your text and rot13 it, or do a similar transform. Then uuencode it. Remove the uuencoding headers/footers. XOR it with x number of digits of pi, from point y.
You've given the person you're communicating with a calendar with a different x and y on it every day, generated with a decent random number generator. These could be of arbitrary size.
Yes, this requires you to transfer the keys in advance, and has the obvious problem of someone stealing or copying your calendar. But your digital correspondence security is always, at it's best, only as good as your physical security. PKI methods have the same limitations. Someone gets your private key, and you're pretty much screwed. Your monitor can be read from a distance too, you know.
Of course it might not survive some good cryptanalysis, but it would be sufficient I think for casual use.
Last time I checked, icq was a heavily modified IRC.
I guess nipple is a bit more socially gracefull maybe?
Capitalism is a helluva lot better than socialism
or communism. Look at the rest of the world to see
how well that's worked out.
I don't think it's "good" for our society to have an entire underclass who cannot access the net. I also don't think it's good to blame people who work hard and make money, or to attempt to force them redistribute the products of their labor, or their parents labor, to those who don't or can't.
What good is it to force someone to help their fellow man, instead of letting them decide of their free will where and how to help?
There are students who can't afford pencils and paper to do their homework on, or a full meal so they don't go to school hungry, or running water to bathe so they can go to school clean, or electricty or gas to heat their homes and cook what food they do have.
To whine about someone not being able to afford internet access or voice mail is absolutely meaningless, and quite frankly sickens me.
These folks can't afford to buy medical texts to get information either. But they can access the internet and read the texts at most public libraries (just fyi, I'm against censorship and filtering). These millions of kids will be no more disadvantaged than kids who couldn't afford to buy books 50 years ago. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying you need to get some damn perspective!
A crowbar is a tool. It's the action of how the tool is used that is illegal or not.
A better comparison would be a "digital high-powered automatic weapon", if it's so deadly surely the goverment can ban it! Although somehow I don't see DeCSS as taking lives or holding the MPAA hostage.
I asked this question about 6 years ago. (Guess I'm getting old 'huh?). The question and a couple of rather interesting responses are archived here, http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/R106025-115883-/news/ bionet/cellbiol/9406.newsm , and here http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/R13845-16134-/news/bi onet/cellbiol/9406.newsm.
;)
PS, for anyone whose interested, I didn't finish the bio program. I switched over to psych. My bio dept. sucked. You couldn't get to see an advisor if you weren't pre-Med/Dent/Pharm/etc (I was pre-EDU). I eventually dropped the the EDU in favor of INFOSYS.
Yeah. I can really just see this now.
Doctors can't go camping while on call, that's a given. But to not be able to go to a nice sit down restraunt, or a movie? I think that's asking a bit much.
A jam would never fly unless you could somehow exempt devices on an individual basis. But then who controls the list of people that get the exemptions. Hrm. Let me guess... the Canadian gov't.
I think you mean that to say intelligent life... :)
Where was Orrin Hatch on this one huh? Maybe he's spending too much time downloading stuff off of Napster before they get shut down.
I think the old 50 years after the death of the author was good enough. I wounder, would the retroactive provision in this apply to works that have expired copyrights? Could we see Project Gutenburg have to take down texts because of new copyrights?
Jeez that's doing it the hard way.
Ever heard of SQL?
You can even do automagic timestamps on new entries, write yourself a little php admin frontend.
Setup a cron job to automagically rewrite your new.html and news.rdf pages, sucking the data
and generating the pages through any number of languages that have SQL support.
Just get your product shipped with a commercial ;)
Linux distribution. Boom, you're product is in
commerce.
The RIAA and others are scared of digital media.
It violates the laws of economics, of supply and
demand they're used to dealing with.
They can't artificially alter the supply of an
unlimited resource to jack up the price.
Some artists like Metallica fear the same thing.
If the RIAA gets trampled on digital music, and
we do the same thing next for the MPAA, I forsee
a great revival of live shows and theater.
A cultural reawakening, as artists actually have
to perform to get paid, not just to boost record
sales, where actors actually have to be able to
act, not just look pretty for the screen. Where
human interaction and a real connection with fans
is necessary for success, where musicians and
other performers are brought back down from the
level of stardom and inflated ego'd godhood to the
level of people like everyone else. What a
wonderful world it would be.
The number of grammatical mistakes, missing words, and general incoherencies make me wonder if this review hasn't been pass through babblefish at least once.
..." (transformed from what?)
"For instance, the Zimmerman telegram, for instance,..." (enough "for instance"'s?)
"the examples in many cases have been transformed from to work well
The number of "though"'s is troubling to say the least.
Please. Learn how to proof read!
This is someone's idea of a story? There's nothing but anecdotal evidence here.
I could maybe see information overload. Over reliance on PDA's and computers and car navigation systems causing memory loss is a pretty stupid idea. One lady forgot how to remember what she read? Sounds like she has a visual learning problem to me.
It was the school, as a neighboring school in the same county was able to access /.
That's if slashdot isn't blocked. I've actually seen a couple of elem. schools that've blocked /. as material not suited for children. Sad huh?
The real problem is that the US postal system would soon, if it's not already, become totally dependent on the income from junk mail, and would fight any attempt to stop it.
Return their mailing? Sure. If your name and/or address appears anywhere, obscure it. If they request information, put in totally fake garbage.
The idea isn't to save the environment, it's to put the lousy spammers out of business.
Yeah, they're probably using a java based web server running jsp's on an ipaq... I can't imagine anything much slower...
I have the same problem. I'm a Jr., the only thing seperating my name from my dads is the Jr. on the end of mine.
;)
It's a good thing he's got great credit. When I was living at home, I had my own phone line. I got solicitations for credit cards daily. Well, finally one sounded good (at this point i had 0 cards).
They took my info, and were like, do you have this debt and this debt, we can do a balance transfer... nope, not me thats my dad.. oh wait, the social you gave us doesn't match.. yup, that's my dad, but this is MY phone number. Well, I wound up getting the card, still have it, 5.9% fixed, high limit.