As far as waste is concerned, the Integral Fast Reactor waste products have a relatively short half life. From the Wikipedia article: "The result is that within 300 years, such wastes are no more radioactive than the ores of natural radioactive elements."
I've been a geek since early adulthood, I've probably spent a few years sitting in chairs in front of screens, but a few years ago I discovered the ultimate form of fast, effortless, human body optimization - high-energy partner dancing. I'm talking swing, lindy hop, and the new fusions of tango and blues dancing.
Think of improvisational partner dancing (from the male perspective) as a cross between a romantic simulation (think 3-minute relationship), an exploration of the physics of the female body, and an an all-out aerobic workout set to playful yet subversively naughty tunes.
No - better yet, it is like being a musican, but your instrument is the female body, and yet the dance shares all the semantics of wholesome family fun with no risky exchanges of bodily fluids. The female body is not a difficult instrument to play - think visual basic learning curve, certainly not Java or C++. And the user-interface is drop-dead elegant - there's no syntax - just Newton's Third Law of Motion.
Because of the physical exertion involved, especially with fast-tempo music, your brain will be awash in a sea of endorphins that will nuke your headaches, and all that jumping around does wonders for getting your keyboard and chair-sculpted frame back into optimal form. Spinning fast with a partner will give you an experiential understanding of the moment of inertia of a binary mass system that you won't soon forget. You'll be so exhausted when you get home that all you'll be able to think about is sleep.
So think about all of the beautiful women around the planet, who are just waiting for your finely nuanced application of rotational inertia.
A common misconception about alternative fuels is that once the price of oil exceeds a given threshold (like $50/barrel), the free market will immediately begin to provide competitively-priced alternatives such as biofuel, hydrogen, etc.
The problem with this is that alternative fuel production and distribution infrastructure need huge investments up-front, possibly years of ramp-up time, and require that oil continue to sell for a high price years down the road when production finally comes on-line.
A lot of investors are timid about taking this kind of risk, because in the past, high oil prices have not been sustained.
For example, back in the 80s, people invested a ton of money in the infrastructure to extract oil from shale. The problem is that oil from shale is only economical if the price of oil stays above $40/barrel for many years. The price certainly peaked above this level, but then dropped below it for over a decade. So most of the oil from shale investors lost everything.
I think the moral of this story is that as much as some like to celebrate the power of the free market to guide energy policy, it may be incapable of taking on the high-risk, long term investments required of alternative energy.
Here's a nut even the collective mind of Google has been unable to crack: Machine recognition of sarcasm.
Take a look at the Huh? Corp site, and notice the counterpoint between the devilishly satirical site content and the dead-serious Google ads.
One cannot underestimate the serious menace posed to contextual ad networks by the unregulated use of sarcasm by ad-network partner sites.
As soon as I finish typing up this comment I plan to file for a provisional patent on "An Automated Method of Determining Sarcasm Content by Using a Naive Baysian Classifier Trained on Slashdot Comments."
There's a difference between having ads on a site, and presuming that everyone has to read all the ads on that site.
Of course -- those of us who make some portion of our income from advertising know that even getting 1% of viewers to notice your ads is a big accomplishment. I have no problem with the fact that some people aren't going to click on ads. But the 0.5% of people who do are critical to my ability to work full-time on open source.
My fear, though, is the possibility that popular browsers would start to disable all ads by default. This would kill a lot of free content on the web.
Before we filter internet ads into oblivion, I suggest you consider the consequences of an ad-free web.
How many of your favorite open source projects would wither away if the ad revenue dried up, not to mention your favorite web sites or TV programs?
I work full-time on a popular open source project, and I can say from personal experience that ad revenue from the website is often my primary source of income -- visitors are much more likely to click on an ad than leave a donation, by a factor of hundreds to one. I literally eat based on the income from that monthly AdSense check.
Consider the bigger picture -- much of the creative output of human beings today: actors, musicicans, web designers, search engine hackers, GPL programmers, etc., is funded by advertising. It's a terrible generalization to conclude that advertising is all about lining the pockets of spammers and evil media corporations. Yeah, pop-ups suck and will probably be relegated to the dustbin of history by the sheer power of the negative emotions they elicit, but there's a lot of reasonable, targeted, non-intrusive ads out there, and many of them are supporting your favorite web sites, TV shows, and GPL-based projects.
Advertising, as much as it is often reviled by slashdot posters and other intellectuals, is actually a rather innovative form of funding for the creative arts. It allows many of things we love to be free while still providing an income for the creators of those things.
I too enjoyed KSR's scene of the Mars cable's spectacular fall, but the truth is that the space elevator we are envisioning is extremely light in relation to the surface area of the ribbon.
Carbon nanotubes have a density of about 1.3 g/cm^3. So imagine a square meter of ribbon material = 1 micron * 1 meter * 1 meter = 1e-6 cubic meters = 1 cm^3, so our square meter has a mass of 1.3 grams! We're looking at a fall about as violent as a length of toilet paper!
I was pretty clueless in high school, didn't like parties, haplessly tried to impress girls with things that only accentuated my geekish eccentricities. Like I wrote this assembly program on my Apple 2 computer back in '81 to compute Pi to 32768 digits. I handed her the printout, thinking she would be amazed. Instead she just backed away very slowly. Things have changed a lot since then. Geeks have become trendy, rich, powerful, etc. Even powerful enough to get pies thrown in their faces and antitrust suits brought against them.
Personally, I think dancing is the best kept secret, especially if you spend a lot of time in front of a screen every day. You can head to to a dance in the evening and get a solid 2 hours of great dancing, great music, fun & attractive women, and a solid workout. Lindy Hop is a very creative and improvisational dance and I think there's a very playful side to us all, especially to geeks who revel unabashedly in our signature eccentrities, and I find that improvisational dance is a great way to express that energy playfully with another women.
I'll never forget the time I first spun a women who really knew how to spin. Just a little overhand lead with the slightest rotational inertia, and she was spinning once, twice, then disappearing in a blur of blinding speed, her dress went horizontal from the centripetal acceleration, if its edge had been sharp, I would have been sliced in two. Then suddenly she was back in front of me not even noticing the look of awe on my face that told her in no uncertain nuances that she had just given me a sacred glimpse of something beyond imagining.
I assume you mean a proxy that will run on your same machine, and not on the network; otherwise, you're transmitting cleartext on the wires.
Yes, you run the proxy locally. You configure your MUA to use localhost as both SMTP server and POP3 server, you run the proxy app on your client machine and point it to your real SMTP & POP3 servers. Maybe you put a flag such as "(PGP)" in the subject field to tell the SMTP proxy to do a PGP encrypt on a specific message. This allows for end-to-end security from the sender's client machine to the receiver's client machine, and doesn't depend on any SMTP encryption extensions, or require that you have administrative access to your mail server machine.
Rather than dealing with the problems of hacking encryption into MUAs, why not create a PGP encrypting/decrypting proxy that would work seamlessly with any MUA?
Dyson has written a book that advocates using the tools of scientific revolution - especially the Internet -- to create a better world, and a more equitable distribution of the world's wealth.
It is all too easy to think of ourselves as doing a great favor to the third world by giving them internet access. Consider the other "gifts" the West has offered other cultures over the course of history: Christianity, industrialization, Baywatch.
Today anthropologists have moved in like cultural coroners, attempting to record the last vestiges of native languages no longer spoken, once rich cultural traditions reduced to settlements of welfare recipients struggling with rampant alcoholism and broken families.
Third world nations have a sad history of accepting western technology only to experience environmental degradation, loss of native culture, language, tradition, and empowerment of a repressive political elite in bed with western economic & military interests. Even western nations such as France are grappling with the problem of English language hegemony on the net marginalizing their own language.
Consider the real costs of an internet accessible by any human being. Millions of tons of PCs, photovoltaic cells, and network infrastructure manufactured, mountains of toxic waste generated and energy consumed, increasing political and economic power of the multinational backbone providers, billions of hours spent online instead of face-to-face human contact like dancing or playing with the kids or talking with the neighbors, kids educated on the net instead of by human teachers in their communities, unskilled people commodified into a vast tribe of indentured data-entry temps, police web-cams at every corner.
The key issue is that the net must be delivered to people as a means of empowerment, not assimilation. That means having the ability to create and post content, having a license to question the political and economic status quo, exercising the right of being subversive or revolutionary. Not being delivered a brain dead surf box with a carefully chosen list of approved sites, and blocks on serving HTTP or other content.
Much of this boils down to education. Will kids be educated in an atmosphere that encourages freedom of speech and expression? Will they learn how to code HTML and be given open posting rights to servers, or better yet learn how to set up and maintain their own servers? Will they learn the open standards and open source culture of the net and how to contribute to it? Will they learn how to use the net to leverage their cultural uniqueness and individuality rather than let the net colonize themselves into the greater cyberspace hegemony (one example of this would be to teach kids and give them the tools to post HTML in their own language)?
If the answer to many of these questions is no, then the net isn't going to be much more than old media masquerading as new. A non-free net is just another vector for the neuro-linguistic virii of the day. What have we learned since boatloads of missionaries from the West arrived on every shore a few centuries ago, like chain emails bearing a macro-laden attachment called Christianity?
troop movements not considered top-secret???
on
CNN on "hackers"
·
· Score: 1
Bracing for Cyberwar contains two somewhat contradictory statements:
During the Gulf War, Dutch hackers stole information about U.S. troop movements from U.S. Defense Department computers and tried to sell it to the Iraqis, who thought it was a hoax and turned it down.
And then later:
The government says no top secret material has ever been accessed by these intruders, and that its most important information is not online.
Am I missing something here? Is the government claiming that troop movements during wartime is not considered important information or top secret?
What happens when engineered DNA leaks into wild plant populations? What happens when armored weeds and other exotics appear that have DNA-engineered protection from insects and other organisms that normally eat such plants and keep the ecosystem in balance? As is usually the case with resource exploitative industries, they hoard the lucrative IP while using the unknowing public to shoulder the huge risks implicit in their undertakings (Exxon Valdez, Bhopol, Chernobyl, etc.).
There are interesting parallels between the agriculture and software businesses. Both industries have their IP landlords who possess highly developed methods for enforcing hegemony. It is the nature of an IP landlord to create a lucrative proprietary business model with considerable barriers to entry (enforced by patents, proprietary closed standards, needs for substantial capitalization, etc.) If you are a farmer who doesn't use the latest cost-cutting, yield-improving technology, the ruthless commodity markets will ensure you will be put out of business by people who do.
Open Source & Linux is the same kind of reaction to this phenomena of corporate greed as the Organic Farming movement is to the agricultural community. And like Open Source, organic farmers have had to build their infrastructure from scratch -- detoxing fertilizer & pesticide saturated lands, developing organic alternatives to the same, and building distribution and marketing channels from the ground up. Most importantly, organic farmers use robust, "open source" seeds that have been cultivated since long before the concept of IP was even contemplated by the primate brain.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not build an Integral Fast Reactor (FAQ), and use the electrical output to electrolyze water, or use the thermal output of a Lead Cooled Fast Reactor to thermochemically crack water into oxygen and hydrogen.
As far as waste is concerned, the Integral Fast Reactor waste products have a relatively short half life. From the Wikipedia article: "The result is that within 300 years, such wastes are no more radioactive than the ores of natural radioactive elements."
I've been a geek since early adulthood, I've probably spent a few years sitting in chairs in front of screens, but a few years ago I discovered the ultimate form of fast, effortless, human body optimization - high-energy partner dancing. I'm talking swing, lindy hop, and the new fusions of tango and blues dancing.
Think of improvisational partner dancing (from the male perspective) as a cross between a romantic simulation (think 3-minute relationship), an exploration of the physics of the female body, and an an all-out aerobic workout set to playful yet subversively naughty tunes.
No - better yet, it is like being a musican, but your instrument is the female body, and yet the dance shares all the semantics of wholesome family fun with no risky exchanges of bodily fluids. The female body is not a difficult instrument to play - think visual basic learning curve, certainly not Java or C++. And the user-interface is drop-dead elegant - there's no syntax - just Newton's Third Law of Motion.
Because of the physical exertion involved, especially with fast-tempo music, your brain will be awash in a sea of endorphins that will nuke your headaches, and all that jumping around does wonders for getting your keyboard and chair-sculpted frame back into optimal form. Spinning fast with a partner will give you an experiential understanding of the moment of inertia of a binary mass system that you won't soon forget. You'll be so exhausted when you get home that all you'll be able to think about is sleep.
So think about all of the beautiful women around the planet, who are just waiting for your finely nuanced application of rotational inertia.
A common misconception about alternative fuels is that once the price of oil exceeds a given threshold (like $50/barrel), the free market will immediately begin to provide competitively-priced alternatives such as biofuel, hydrogen, etc.
The problem with this is that alternative fuel production and distribution infrastructure need huge investments up-front, possibly years of ramp-up time, and require that oil continue to sell for a high price years down the road when production finally comes on-line.
A lot of investors are timid about taking this kind of risk, because in the past, high oil prices have not been sustained.
For example, back in the 80s, people invested a ton of money in the infrastructure to extract oil from shale. The problem is that oil from shale is only economical if the price of oil stays above $40/barrel for many years. The price certainly peaked above this level, but then dropped below it for over a decade. So most of the oil from shale investors lost everything.
I think the moral of this story is that as much as some like to celebrate the power of the free market to guide energy policy, it may be incapable of taking on the high-risk, long term investments required of alternative energy.
Here's a nut even the collective mind of Google has been unable to crack: Machine recognition of sarcasm.
Take a look at the Huh? Corp site, and notice the counterpoint between the devilishly satirical site content and the dead-serious Google ads.
One cannot underestimate the serious menace posed to contextual ad networks by the unregulated use of sarcasm by ad-network partner sites.
As soon as I finish typing up this comment I plan to file for a provisional patent on "An Automated Method of Determining Sarcasm Content by Using a Naive Baysian Classifier Trained on Slashdot Comments."
There's a difference between having ads on a site, and presuming that everyone has to read all the ads on that site.
Of course -- those of us who make some portion of our income from advertising know that even getting 1% of viewers to notice your ads is a big accomplishment. I have no problem with the fact that some people aren't going to click on ads. But the 0.5% of people who do are critical to my ability to work full-time on open source.
My fear, though, is the possibility that popular browsers would start to disable all ads by default. This would kill a lot of free content on the web.
Before we filter internet ads into oblivion, I suggest you consider the consequences of an ad-free web.
How many of your favorite open source projects would wither away if the ad revenue dried up, not to mention your favorite web sites or TV programs?
I work full-time on a popular open source project, and I can say from personal experience that ad revenue from the website is often my primary source of income -- visitors are much more likely to click on an ad than leave a donation, by a factor of hundreds to one. I literally eat based on the income from that monthly AdSense check.
Consider the bigger picture -- much of the creative output of human beings today: actors, musicicans, web designers, search engine hackers, GPL programmers, etc., is funded by advertising. It's a terrible generalization to conclude that advertising is all about lining the pockets of spammers and evil media corporations. Yeah, pop-ups suck and will probably be relegated to the dustbin of history by the sheer power of the negative emotions they elicit, but there's a lot of reasonable, targeted, non-intrusive ads out there, and many of them are supporting your favorite web sites, TV shows, and GPL-based projects.
Advertising, as much as it is often reviled by slashdot posters and other intellectuals, is actually a rather innovative form of funding for the creative arts. It allows many of things we love to be free while still providing an income for the creators of those things.
I too enjoyed KSR's scene of the Mars cable's spectacular fall, but the truth is that the space elevator we are envisioning is extremely light in relation to the surface area of the ribbon.
Carbon nanotubes have a density of about 1.3 g/cm^3. So imagine a square meter of ribbon material = 1 micron * 1 meter * 1 meter = 1e-6 cubic meters = 1 cm^3, so our square meter has a mass of 1.3 grams! We're looking at a fall about as violent as a length of toilet paper!
I was pretty clueless in high school, didn't like parties, haplessly tried to impress girls with things that only accentuated my geekish eccentricities. Like I wrote this assembly program on my Apple 2 computer back in '81 to compute Pi to 32768 digits. I handed her the printout, thinking she would be amazed. Instead she just backed away very slowly. Things have changed a lot since then. Geeks have become trendy, rich, powerful, etc. Even powerful enough to get pies thrown in their faces and antitrust suits brought against them.
Personally, I think dancing is the best kept secret, especially if you spend a lot of time in front of a screen every day. You can head to to a dance in the evening and get a solid 2 hours of great dancing, great music, fun & attractive women, and a solid workout. Lindy Hop is a very creative and improvisational dance and I think there's a very playful side to us all, especially to geeks who revel unabashedly in our signature eccentrities, and I find that improvisational dance is a great way to express that energy playfully with another women.
I'll never forget the time I first spun a women who really knew how to spin. Just a little overhand lead with the slightest rotational inertia, and she was spinning once, twice, then disappearing in a blur of blinding speed, her dress went horizontal from the centripetal acceleration, if its edge had been sharp, I would have been sliced in two. Then suddenly she was back in front of me not even noticing the look of awe on my face that told her in no uncertain nuances that she had just given me a sacred glimpse of something beyond imagining.
If you're lucky enough to live in the Bay Area check out this swing dancing calendar.
James
I assume you mean a proxy that will run on your same machine, and not on the network;
otherwise, you're transmitting cleartext on the wires.
Yes, you run the proxy locally. You configure your MUA to use localhost as both SMTP server and POP3 server, you run the proxy app on your client machine and point it to your real SMTP & POP3 servers. Maybe you put a flag such as "(PGP)" in the subject field to tell the SMTP proxy to do a PGP encrypt on a specific message. This allows for end-to-end security from the sender's client machine to the receiver's client machine, and doesn't depend on any SMTP encryption extensions, or require that you have administrative access to your mail server machine.
Rather than dealing with the problems of hacking encryption into MUAs, why not create a PGP encrypting/decrypting proxy that would work seamlessly with any MUA?
Today anthropologists have moved in like cultural coroners, attempting to record the last vestiges of native languages no longer spoken, once rich cultural traditions reduced to settlements of welfare recipients struggling with rampant alcoholism and broken families.
Third world nations have a sad history of accepting western technology only to experience environmental degradation, loss of native culture, language, tradition, and empowerment of a repressive political elite in bed with western economic & military interests. Even western nations such as France are grappling with the problem of English language hegemony on the net marginalizing their own language.
Consider the real costs of an internet accessible by any human being. Millions of tons of PCs, photovoltaic cells, and network infrastructure manufactured, mountains of toxic waste generated and energy consumed, increasing political and economic power of the multinational backbone providers, billions of hours spent online instead of face-to-face human contact like dancing or playing with the kids or talking with the neighbors, kids educated on the net instead of by human teachers in their communities, unskilled people commodified into a vast tribe of indentured data-entry temps, police web-cams at every corner.
The key issue is that the net must be delivered to people as a means of empowerment, not assimilation. That means having the ability to create and post content, having a license to question the political and economic status quo, exercising the right of being subversive or revolutionary. Not being delivered a brain dead surf box with a carefully chosen list of approved sites, and blocks on serving HTTP or other content.
Much of this boils down to education. Will kids be educated in an atmosphere that encourages freedom of speech and expression? Will they learn how to code HTML and be given open posting rights to servers, or better yet learn how to set up and maintain their own servers? Will they learn the open standards and open source culture of the net and how to contribute to it? Will they learn how to use the net to leverage their cultural uniqueness and individuality rather than let the net colonize themselves into the greater cyberspace hegemony (one example of this would be to teach kids and give them the tools to post HTML in their own language)?
If the answer to many of these questions is no, then the net isn't going to be much more than old media masquerading as new. A non-free net is just another vector for the neuro-linguistic virii of the day. What have we learned since boatloads of missionaries from the West arrived on every shore a few centuries ago, like chain emails bearing a macro-laden attachment called Christianity?
What happens when engineered DNA leaks into wild plant populations? What happens when armored weeds and other exotics appear that have DNA-engineered protection from insects and other organisms that normally eat such plants and keep the ecosystem in balance? As is usually the case with resource exploitative industries, they hoard the lucrative IP while using the unknowing public to shoulder the huge risks implicit in their undertakings (Exxon Valdez, Bhopol, Chernobyl, etc.).
There are interesting parallels between the agriculture and software businesses. Both industries have their IP landlords who possess highly developed methods for enforcing hegemony. It is the nature of an IP landlord to create a lucrative proprietary business model with considerable barriers to entry (enforced by patents, proprietary closed standards, needs for substantial capitalization, etc.) If you are a farmer who doesn't use the latest cost-cutting, yield-improving technology, the ruthless commodity markets will ensure you will be put out of business by people who do.
Open Source & Linux is the same kind of reaction to this phenomena of corporate greed as the Organic Farming movement is to the agricultural community. And like Open Source, organic farmers have had to build their infrastructure from scratch -- detoxing fertilizer & pesticide saturated lands, developing organic alternatives to the same, and building distribution and marketing channels from the ground up. Most importantly, organic farmers use robust, "open source" seeds that have been cultivated since long before the concept of IP was even contemplated by the primate brain.