There are current, actual uses for nanotechnology, mostly in the realm of sensors so far. However, you are correct that this is the one of the first macroscopic uses granted funding by the government... I'm sure there have been classified projects receiving funding in nanotechnology before now.
But I agree with the parent post... this is not news, this is a notice that there may be news sometime in the future, that the army hopes there will be news if they throw enough money at the problem, and they are detailing what they hope the news will be several years from now.
One of their definitions of 'occupied' is that the land is within 15km of a road. I don't know about you, but a couple paved roads through a 10,000 acre forest don't make it 'occupied' to me.
I'd be interested to see how much area is considered occupied if you remove the roads from the equation... does it drop a scant few percent, or does it drop through the floor down to 50%-60%?
David Brin (Sci Fi Author) considers this in the universe his novels take place in. He postulates silicon/mechanical, energy, gas giant, oxygen (including humans and most of the species interacted with in the series), and a couple other life types that I cannot recall offhand. The various types do not interact normally, because they do not have much of a common frame of reference to comminicate with and/or do not compete much for resources.
He also has a reason for why Earth was not visited much by aliens... we were not at an 'easy access point' in the wormholes that most aliens use to travel around with.
I like science fiction that really tries to make explanations that cover all the bases.:-)
Many of them based on id software's engines, there are many games nowadays that use CD keys to prevent piracy. One of the first was Half Life, and unfortunately Half Life sold very well and used too simple a key... so it is relatively easy to 'generate' a valid Half Life key.
However, Quake 3 and related games have a CD Key system as well, and their keys are much more cryptographically secure. They have a legal keyspace in the trillions, making it very difficult to generate valid keys.
The system works. You can crack the game to make the key unnecessary, but you cannot crack all the Internet servers you could connect to. So a warez monkey can only play the game in single player or on a LAN, not on random Internet servers.
... with any variant of Autism. However, despite not understanding, my parents were very understanding. I never even heard of Aspergar Syndrome until less than a year ago, though I had self diagnosed myself as having some form of mild autism since my mid teens.
I too have slowly learned the things that came naturally to other people... subtle nuances of body language, interpersonal relationships, etc. I am very sensitive to sound... I cannot have a TV on while I am trying to do anything, because it distracts me completely. I cannot tune it out. And I have various other symptoms common to Asperger Syndrome (AS), though I have never been 'withdrawn' or in any way introverted. I have always been outgoing, though often vary naive.
I doubt having a label to attach to my oddities would have made me less of a pariah in school.
It is interesting to think that Geeks = Autism, but I think it is highly unlikely. Many people diagnosed with AS may have some geeky traits, but that does not mean that those with geeky traits have AS. It would be interesting to see a study done on this though.
I'm not a particularly big fan of Intel. But I want 64 bit processing to take off. This only hinders that. I'm really goddamn tired of our litigous society.
Is Intergraph going to market a 64 bit chip for us? No. So why the hell do they feel the need to... bah. Nevermind. I can't go anywhere with this, it just gets me upset.
Unfortunately, Phoenix is held back (speed wise) by several bugs/design choices in the Mozilla codebase.
Mozilla contains a bug, unresolved for AGES, in how it handles combo boxes (drop down boxes). Tabbing through a combo box causes cpu usage to peg... this is probably related to a bug that causes the browser to re-render the entire page every time the user interacts with a combo box. I use my browser at work, interacting with a large number of forms... tabbing over a simple Combo box with 'Yes' and 'No' as the choices causes the cursor to pause for half a second. Blech. This bug applies to Phoenix as well.
Switching between tabs is slow. I have not reviewed the code, but it seems that the browser needs to re-render the page every time you arrive at its tab. It does not store the previously rendered version in memory. Thus, switching between tabs is very slow.
The tabbing UI is inferior, IMO. I far prefer other tabbing UI's, particularly Crazy Browser. It is not the look of the UI, or how you interact with it... it is the circumstances of when it chooses to make a new tab, or not. Also, it still allows making new windows (which I hate), I would prefer it forced all new windows to be new tabs instead.
So, unfortunately, I am still stuck with CrazyBrowser (a tabbed browser that uses the IE rendering engine). It is not bad, but I would like to be able to switch to a Mozilla based browser... but until some of these problems are resolved, I cannot.
I like the Windows UI. I use my keyboard for more stuff than the mouse. Tab is good. Alt+F4. Alt+Accelerator keys. Ctrl+Tab. Y. Esc. Ctrl+Esc. Alt+Tab. Alt+Enter.
So many keystrokes... many of which just simply do not exist in many other OS. I'm not saying that the keystroke has to be the same... I'm saying that often, there is no way to do a task without a mouse. It's frustrating.
But despite all that... I still might switch to OSX (or OS11, or OS12, or whatever is out by then) if that's the only platform not implimenting DRM in five years.
At least the UI is better than the offerings that run under X.
The Internet is decentralized. The services required to operate it are not. Central administration is required for domain name resolution and routing tables... I'm sure there are other things, but I'm not an Inet expert.
Perhaps they are trying to make a self organizing network... automatic rerouting, dynamic topology creation, decentralized name resolution. Similar ideas have been discussed with P2P networks.
Perhaps they are designing a network using P2P concepts.
My preferred genres are still firmly entrenched in the PC world. MMORPG, FPS, and Strategy.
MMORPG require a keyboard. Until consoles come with one standard, I refuse to play with someone who cannot talk to me except with emoticons selected from the gamepad, or typing at 5WPM on a screen keyboard.
FPS require a mouse. You can Halo me all you like, I refuse to play a first person shooter hampered by a joystick.
Strategy games require a keyboard, and lots of CPU power. AI is getting smarter on the computer, and the consoles are not keeping up with the CPU needs of todays strategy titles. In addition, I need the hotkey control and quick-selection a mouse allows me.
RPGs require more hard drive space than a console can afford. Try porting Morrowind to a console... it ain't happening. I like my RPGs rich, with tons of world to explore. However, I agree that Consoles can also create a good RPG... just not the same kind. I did like Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy 7. But I have a greater fondness for Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, and Fallout.
You can keep your platform titles, your space thingies, your arcade shooters and race car games. Some of them I enjoy playing... but it is the PC games that keep and hold me for months and years, rather than a couple weeks.
You can't be using Kazaa correctly... just in the past week I've downloaded over 10GB. Of course, I haven't been very choosy about it... I've been sucking down every unique AMV I could find...
But only 2GB in a month? They should be HAPPY you've kept your usage so low.:-)
Banner Ads will not cover the cost of equipment and bandwidth. And even if they do NOW, they won't SOON... this Alertbox article by respected Internet Usability guy Jacob Neilson talks about why web advertising does not work. The article was writtin in 1997, but it has comments at the bottom keeping it up to date.
Banner ads are slowly dying. Basing a long term business model on them is a bad idea.
There is no mention of Gnutella or any of the Gnutella developers in this suit... while Gnutella has had great difficulty advancing the protocol specification to the efficiency of other P2P networks, they are making progress. Advances in query by hash, query routing, network traversing searches, bandwidth shaping, and many more are being developed or incorporated now into newer clients.
With one of the only completely decentralized networks around a totally open specification, I am interested to see if the RIAA behemoth will ever attempt to 'take on' the task of legalizing Gnutella into oblivion.
When all the lawyers are finished, will Gnutella be the last left standing?
I would think that the performance increase OR lower power usage would be the result... not both at once. If you take the performance increase, you need to use the same amount of power... or if you take the power savings, performance needs to stay the same.
Trojans and their ilk succeed when people do not know they exist. Do you go around renaming every source file? That's not as easy when you also have to rename every reference to it in the makefile and other related files. Making changes like the name of the output and input files can get annoying... why would you do it for EVERY compile you do just because MAYBE, just MAYBE, this compile contains a trojan based on the input filename.
The answer is that you would not.
Even technically savvy professionals can get taken in by a suitably complicated trojan. The saving grace usually is the fact that in this Internet age, we have instant communication disseminating known viruses, trojans, and hacks.
But even a savvy individual who keeps up on the lists could be the first dupe. Targeted hacks aimed at a single company are even more difficult, since no mailing list will tell you about a hack that is going to be used nowhere else but on your network. A network administrator cannot scan the source of every file from every thing that gets inside their network... assuming the source is available, assuming it is not obfuscated.
Would you refuse using a well known and useful tool just because you couldn't understand what one function did? What if that tool only activated and became a trojan if it detected YOUR domain on the local computer's reverse resolve?
Skepticism is irrelevant... it *did* work. I believe it simply checked the name of the output file... if it was creating an output target called 'gcc' (or the equivalent, whatever it had back then) then it compiled in the hack. I do not know how robust it was, but from what I remember reading, it worked, so it was obviously robust enough.
You have not met my sister. She is the center of a thriving social group... she is the mother figure/alpha female of the group. She is responsible, down to earth. She is helping raise two kids (her roommates, not her own), and is trying for her own with her husband.
She also spends at least 20 hours a week playing Dark Age of Camelot on Isseult, is a member of a small but powerful guild well known to everyone, and has formed some powerful friendships online. Another couple who live in New York are moving to a new job... a major factor in their decision will be how close the new job brings them to us.
Online relationships are OFTEN trivial, that is true... especially if all you know about is IRC or AOL Chat. But online social games tend to form stronger bonds, because the people involved are not just idly talking to pass the time... they are overcoming obstacles (in the game), creating their domain (in the game), and competing with others (in the game). In between these activities that develop trust (or destroy it), they chitchat about their lives, their loves, their dislikes and hatreds... the smalltalk that defines a person... smalltalk that is backed up by the players behavior in the game. You don't just hear the person say they dislike stealing... you see they CARRY OUT that belief in the game, being honorable about another players stuff even when given the opportunity to steal. You don't just hear them SAY they are generous, you can see them give their possessions to those who need it more, even possessions that they needed.
A game defines a world with challenges, rewards, and rules. These challenges are generally easier than real life, the rewards easier, and the rules less strict... but it does define a structure for real life attitudes and behaviors to be seen. Chat rooms have no structure, they are more like a party or smalltalk at a water fountain. In those situations, lasting relationships do not generally get created, because there is no framework with which to judge a persons real personality.
To summarise my rambling: My sister is an example of a well rounded, social individual who has developed strong relationships online. And relationships built within a games structure are more 'real' and strong on average than ones built within chat rooms.
just part of a (boring) storyline which is the main storyline in any "respected" soap series on TV, namely; "Does she love me/Will I be able to bone her eventually?".
Well, you're free to have that opinion. However, I would like to point out that Piro, and hence the storyline, are heavily influenced by Shoujo (sp!?) manga... ie, japanese girly comics. Like Love Hina. Which have plots VERY like Megatokyo. I happen to think they're cool... you don't. That's nice.
But don't act all surprised about it... it's normal for the style of comic Piro is creating.
As for its relevance... webcomics are a geek thing. Megatokyo is one of THE biggest webcomics, period. He is just as relevant as news about a new anime release by a popular anime director or something... it is news for nerds.
Slashdot Mirror
There are current, actual uses for nanotechnology, mostly in the realm of sensors so far. However, you are correct that this is the one of the first macroscopic uses granted funding by the government... I'm sure there have been classified projects receiving funding in nanotechnology before now.
But I agree with the parent post... this is not news, this is a notice that there may be news sometime in the future, that the army hopes there will be news if they throw enough money at the problem, and they are detailing what they hope the news will be several years from now.
Hope and speculation... not news.
One of their definitions of 'occupied' is that the land is within 15km of a road. I don't know about you, but a couple paved roads through a 10,000 acre forest don't make it 'occupied' to me.
I'd be interested to see how much area is considered occupied if you remove the roads from the equation... does it drop a scant few percent, or does it drop through the floor down to 50%-60%?
David Brin (Sci Fi Author) considers this in the universe his novels take place in. He postulates silicon/mechanical, energy, gas giant, oxygen (including humans and most of the species interacted with in the series), and a couple other life types that I cannot recall offhand. The various types do not interact normally, because they do not have much of a common frame of reference to comminicate with and/or do not compete much for resources.
:-)
He also has a reason for why Earth was not visited much by aliens... we were not at an 'easy access point' in the wormholes that most aliens use to travel around with.
I like science fiction that really tries to make explanations that cover all the bases.
Many of them based on id software's engines, there are many games nowadays that use CD keys to prevent piracy. One of the first was Half Life, and unfortunately Half Life sold very well and used too simple a key... so it is relatively easy to 'generate' a valid Half Life key.
However, Quake 3 and related games have a CD Key system as well, and their keys are much more cryptographically secure. They have a legal keyspace in the trillions, making it very difficult to generate valid keys.
The system works. You can crack the game to make the key unnecessary, but you cannot crack all the Internet servers you could connect to. So a warez monkey can only play the game in single player or on a LAN, not on random Internet servers.
Not true. You can sue anyone-anytime-anywhere-for-anything. You just may not WIN.
... with any variant of Autism. However, despite not understanding, my parents were very understanding. I never even heard of Aspergar Syndrome until less than a year ago, though I had self diagnosed myself as having some form of mild autism since my mid teens.
I too have slowly learned the things that came naturally to other people... subtle nuances of body language, interpersonal relationships, etc. I am very sensitive to sound... I cannot have a TV on while I am trying to do anything, because it distracts me completely. I cannot tune it out. And I have various other symptoms common to Asperger Syndrome (AS), though I have never been 'withdrawn' or in any way introverted. I have always been outgoing, though often vary naive.
I doubt having a label to attach to my oddities would have made me less of a pariah in school.
It is interesting to think that Geeks = Autism, but I think it is highly unlikely. Many people diagnosed with AS may have some geeky traits, but that does not mean that those with geeky traits have AS. It would be interesting to see a study done on this though.
Of course. But apps won't be compiled for 64bits until Intel's offering has become mainstream. Perhaps I should have been more clear...
I can't wait for 64bit processors to become mainstream. That won't happen until Intel's Itanium has been out for several years.
Unless AMD leapfrogs them. That'd be nice.
I'm not a particularly big fan of Intel. But I want 64 bit processing to take off. This only hinders that. I'm really goddamn tired of our litigous society.
Is Intergraph going to market a 64 bit chip for us? No. So why the hell do they feel the need to... bah. Nevermind. I can't go anywhere with this, it just gets me upset.
Unfortunately, Phoenix is held back (speed wise) by several bugs/design choices in the Mozilla codebase.
Mozilla contains a bug, unresolved for AGES, in how it handles combo boxes (drop down boxes). Tabbing through a combo box causes cpu usage to peg... this is probably related to a bug that causes the browser to re-render the entire page every time the user interacts with a combo box. I use my browser at work, interacting with a large number of forms... tabbing over a simple Combo box with 'Yes' and 'No' as the choices causes the cursor to pause for half a second. Blech. This bug applies to Phoenix as well.
Switching between tabs is slow. I have not reviewed the code, but it seems that the browser needs to re-render the page every time you arrive at its tab. It does not store the previously rendered version in memory. Thus, switching between tabs is very slow.
The tabbing UI is inferior, IMO. I far prefer other tabbing UI's, particularly Crazy Browser. It is not the look of the UI, or how you interact with it... it is the circumstances of when it chooses to make a new tab, or not. Also, it still allows making new windows (which I hate), I would prefer it forced all new windows to be new tabs instead.
So, unfortunately, I am still stuck with CrazyBrowser (a tabbed browser that uses the IE rendering engine). It is not bad, but I would like to be able to switch to a Mozilla based browser... but until some of these problems are resolved, I cannot.
Hmm. NT Authentication is encrypted. SQL Authentication is not. It's a no brainer to me.
I like the Windows UI. I use my keyboard for more stuff than the mouse. Tab is good. Alt+F4. Alt+Accelerator keys. Ctrl+Tab. Y. Esc. Ctrl+Esc. Alt+Tab. Alt+Enter.
So many keystrokes... many of which just simply do not exist in many other OS. I'm not saying that the keystroke has to be the same... I'm saying that often, there is no way to do a task without a mouse. It's frustrating.
But despite all that... I still might switch to OSX (or OS11, or OS12, or whatever is out by then) if that's the only platform not implimenting DRM in five years.
At least the UI is better than the offerings that run under X.
The Internet is decentralized. The services required to operate it are not. Central administration is required for domain name resolution and routing tables... I'm sure there are other things, but I'm not an Inet expert.
:-)
Perhaps they are trying to make a self organizing network... automatic rerouting, dynamic topology creation, decentralized name resolution. Similar ideas have been discussed with P2P networks.
Perhaps they are designing a network using P2P concepts.
And perhaps I should just read the article.
My preferred genres are still firmly entrenched in the PC world. MMORPG, FPS, and Strategy.
MMORPG require a keyboard. Until consoles come with one standard, I refuse to play with someone who cannot talk to me except with emoticons selected from the gamepad, or typing at 5WPM on a screen keyboard.
FPS require a mouse. You can Halo me all you like, I refuse to play a first person shooter hampered by a joystick.
Strategy games require a keyboard, and lots of CPU power. AI is getting smarter on the computer, and the consoles are not keeping up with the CPU needs of todays strategy titles. In addition, I need the hotkey control and quick-selection a mouse allows me.
RPGs require more hard drive space than a console can afford. Try porting Morrowind to a console... it ain't happening. I like my RPGs rich, with tons of world to explore. However, I agree that Consoles can also create a good RPG... just not the same kind. I did like Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy 7. But I have a greater fondness for Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, and Fallout.
You can keep your platform titles, your space thingies, your arcade shooters and race car games. Some of them I enjoy playing... but it is the PC games that keep and hold me for months and years, rather than a couple weeks.
You can't be using Kazaa correctly... just in the past week I've downloaded over 10GB. Of course, I haven't been very choosy about it... I've been sucking down every unique AMV I could find...
:-)
But only 2GB in a month? They should be HAPPY you've kept your usage so low.
As detailed by this article, the web is not like Network TV, never will be, and trying to emulate the business model of the TV Networks will fail.
Banner Ads will not cover the cost of equipment and bandwidth. And even if they do NOW, they won't SOON... this Alertbox article by respected Internet Usability guy Jacob Neilson talks about why web advertising does not work. The article was writtin in 1997, but it has comments at the bottom keeping it up to date.
Banner ads are slowly dying. Basing a long term business model on them is a bad idea.
There is no mention of Gnutella or any of the Gnutella developers in this suit... while Gnutella has had great difficulty advancing the protocol specification to the efficiency of other P2P networks, they are making progress. Advances in query by hash, query routing, network traversing searches, bandwidth shaping, and many more are being developed or incorporated now into newer clients.
With one of the only completely decentralized networks around a totally open specification, I am interested to see if the RIAA behemoth will ever attempt to 'take on' the task of legalizing Gnutella into oblivion.
When all the lawyers are finished, will Gnutella be the last left standing?
Pfau... who says we pay for them? I borrow a friends corporate copy of his charter MSDN membership. :-)
I would think that the performance increase OR lower power usage would be the result... not both at once. If you take the performance increase, you need to use the same amount of power... or if you take the power savings, performance needs to stay the same.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Trojans and their ilk succeed when people do not know they exist. Do you go around renaming every source file? That's not as easy when you also have to rename every reference to it in the makefile and other related files. Making changes like the name of the output and input files can get annoying... why would you do it for EVERY compile you do just because MAYBE, just MAYBE, this compile contains a trojan based on the input filename.
The answer is that you would not.
Even technically savvy professionals can get taken in by a suitably complicated trojan. The saving grace usually is the fact that in this Internet age, we have instant communication disseminating known viruses, trojans, and hacks.
But even a savvy individual who keeps up on the lists could be the first dupe. Targeted hacks aimed at a single company are even more difficult, since no mailing list will tell you about a hack that is going to be used nowhere else but on your network. A network administrator cannot scan the source of every file from every thing that gets inside their network... assuming the source is available, assuming it is not obfuscated.
Would you refuse using a well known and useful tool just because you couldn't understand what one function did? What if that tool only activated and became a trojan if it detected YOUR domain on the local computer's reverse resolve?
There is no security.
Skepticism is irrelevant... it *did* work. I believe it simply checked the name of the output file... if it was creating an output target called 'gcc' (or the equivalent, whatever it had back then) then it compiled in the hack. I do not know how robust it was, but from what I remember reading, it worked, so it was obviously robust enough.
You have not met my sister. She is the center of a thriving social group... she is the mother figure/alpha female of the group. She is responsible, down to earth. She is helping raise two kids (her roommates, not her own), and is trying for her own with her husband.
She also spends at least 20 hours a week playing Dark Age of Camelot on Isseult, is a member of a small but powerful guild well known to everyone, and has formed some powerful friendships online. Another couple who live in New York are moving to a new job... a major factor in their decision will be how close the new job brings them to us.
Online relationships are OFTEN trivial, that is true... especially if all you know about is IRC or AOL Chat. But online social games tend to form stronger bonds, because the people involved are not just idly talking to pass the time... they are overcoming obstacles (in the game), creating their domain (in the game), and competing with others (in the game). In between these activities that develop trust (or destroy it), they chitchat about their lives, their loves, their dislikes and hatreds... the smalltalk that defines a person... smalltalk that is backed up by the players behavior in the game. You don't just hear the person say they dislike stealing... you see they CARRY OUT that belief in the game, being honorable about another players stuff even when given the opportunity to steal. You don't just hear them SAY they are generous, you can see them give their possessions to those who need it more, even possessions that they needed.
A game defines a world with challenges, rewards, and rules. These challenges are generally easier than real life, the rewards easier, and the rules less strict... but it does define a structure for real life attitudes and behaviors to be seen. Chat rooms have no structure, they are more like a party or smalltalk at a water fountain. In those situations, lasting relationships do not generally get created, because there is no framework with which to judge a persons real personality.
To summarise my rambling: My sister is an example of a well rounded, social individual who has developed strong relationships online. And relationships built within a games structure are more 'real' and strong on average than ones built within chat rooms.
One day, turtles will learn how to fly...
I've never really felt the need to upgrade past a P200 for office apps. My work computer is a 233.
Sure, for games... but at work, all you need is more RAM. Always more RAM, and sometimes more HD space. But the processor? Nah.
But don't act all surprised about it... it's normal for the style of comic Piro is creating.
As for its relevance... webcomics are a geek thing. Megatokyo is one of THE biggest webcomics, period. He is just as relevant as news about a new anime release by a popular anime director or something... it is news for nerds.