Downtown Boston is a mess, and Cambridge is downright Byzantine. No wonder them Haavaad and MIT folk is so smart. They have to be to navigate the f*cking streets.
I also betcha Cambridge maps as one, big, continuous WLAN. f*ckers.
I'm all for sharing unused CPU power and DSL bandwidth, but what if I think SETI@Home is a waste of time, or have moral objections to my box being used as a repeater to broadcast R-rated movies? Is there going to be a way to itemize every flop and byte, and opt-out of the ones I don't want?
Probably not.
Re:When the ISPs all start blocking P2P....
on
Cringely's Bank Shot
·
· Score: 2
Knowing what little I do about IP, I can try to address some of the problems:
Q1) Routing tables could potentially grow HUGE to handle loops within the system.
A1)We would probably need to develop some sort of massively hierarchical routing scheme. Several levels of domains, subdomains, sub-subdomains, and so forth. Using IPv6 wouldn't hurt. Make the domains geographically-oriented. Incorporate AI into route calculations.
2) I think (am I wrong?) that a system would require point-to-multipoint or at least WAP-to-WAP, which IIRC 802.11b was bad at.
Q2.1) Either that or we need two or more 802.11b repeaters on anybody's internal network. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's more complicated, since one (or more) would have to be able to touch somebody else's WAP. Is there some combination of AdHoc and AP modes that the 802.11 system can operate in?
A2) Since I know even less about MAC-level networking, I'm not sure I have a better answer than "technology will improve."
Q3) How do you assign an IP address? No DHCP servers, can't be static... messy, no?
A3) WAPs can serve as perfectly good DHCP servers. The DHCP servers know what IPv6 address block to use from their sub-subdomain info, which would be culled from the IPv6 router in the LAN (see A1).
Q4) Suddenly route-advertising and route-discovery would have to become standard features on all WAPs.
A4) No, just on the level-3 routers. The WAPs are only concerned with MAC-level connectivity, whereas each (multi-WAP) LAN would contain one IPv6 router to the greater network (for now, let's call it the "CringelyNet.") It would be like in my apartment, where I have multiple 100bT hubs, uplinked to one another, but only one router to the outside world. The hubs don't know anything about IP routing, but as long as there is MAC-level connectivity to the *router*, everyone in the LAN can get to the outside.
When the ISPs all start blocking P2P....
on
Cringely's Bank Shot
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Ultimately the Internet is going to become useless, taken over by AOL/Time-Warner and a handful of other major providers, all in control of Big Media. At that time, we'll need to set up our own nationwide, underground, wireless IP network. And it's ideas like this that are going to make it work. Here's how:
We start with neighborhood wireless LANs. A few WAPs on the block, and forthcoming wireless technology will allow the WAPs to uplink to one another. It's not all that different from the old BBS, except that it's over the airwaves, rather than over the phone, the bandwidth is about 1000x better, and it's completely public.
Then we get some Cringely-esque techniques in place to route between different neighborhood LANs. Set an IP router in front of several microwave links to other IP routers, each in a nearby town/neighborhood. This would be like a wireless version of the old FidoNet.
If we can get the whole nation connected, we can then have P2P-paradise that the Media companies can't touch. Well, except that bandwidth would suck, and it would be able to scale for anything. Only, I'm looking at 5 or 10 years down the road, after technology has taken a few leaps forward.
And, you could have access to this network virtually anywhere you can take an 802.11 device. And don't get me started on the Voice-over-IP possibilities.
Just when we thought the world was safe from Steven Hawkings, he can now give more boring lectures by "zapping" words directly into a terminal using his brain.
Sure, Harrison Ford was great as usual, but Mark Hamill whined his way through the trilogy, and Carrie Fisher was too wasted to put on a decent performance.
What made the original trilogy great was the "human" aspect of the characters. Han's scoundrel-turned-reluctant hero. Leia calling Han a "scruffy-looking nerfherder" and Chewy a "walking carpet." While the fate of the galaxy hung in the balance, the main characters were really just a bunch of crazy kids having a good time. It was light-hearted in the face of impending doom.
That element was utterly missing from TPM. Qui-Gon was serious and dour. Obi-Wan was serious and dour. There was no sense of fun in the face of grave danger, but rather a sense of solemness in the face of bland political intrigue and trade embargoes. Jar-Jar was an attempt to inject the needed element into the movie, but it was forced and stale. If Jar-Jar had been a human, or at least a live actor, it might have worked.
I also have a great fear about AOTC: the trailers clearly are geared towards the "WB crowd." A cheezy romance story (unlike the childish and subdued Luke-Leia-Han triangle that was not the focus but rather a "fleshing out") isn't going to fit well into the arc of the Star Wars saga in general. I fear it's going to be forced, stale, and drag down a trilogy that already shows deep flaws.
Of course this still leaves moral controversy over what is done with these stem cells - I mean, that whole human cloning thing.
IF human reproductive cloning doesn't involve the destruction of human life, and IF human cloning is safe (no great chance of abnormalities), what's the problem then?
Anyway, the ability to farm perfectly good tissues and organs out of our own cells would be such a boon to medicine that I can't really see the possibility that it could also be used for reproductive cloning as being that big of a deal.
The media companies are going to figure out how to wrap video content into a streaming form with "copy protection" built into the stream. In a closed source environment, in which the API layers that translate the stream into viewable video are hidden, it will work perfectly.
But what about an open source environment? When the stream-to-video APIs are open source, it becomes trivial to stick a frame-grabber on top, instead of a media player. Instant, lossless recording of any internet video stream, whether it be "copy protected" or not.
Access-controlled streaming is going to be the standard MO in the media industry, and that means two things: one, that open source OSes are going to be left out of the content-on-demand game, and two, if Linux takes over a commanding portion of the desktop, Big Media will be inhibited from doing any sort of access-protected media streaming.
The best reason, in my mind, to use open platforms is that it keeps the entire Internet open and functional for everyone.
I'm starting to think that jumping sides from the Haavaad nosers to the Meowers was a mistake.
My life would have been oh-so-cheerier for the past six years had I never entered into alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. I certainly wouldn't have gotten on the bad side of campus network security. *sigh*
Heh. I agree with this post. It should be entitled "why SETI is a useless exercise, Part Deux."
Even if there is intelligent life around one of these 400 Billion stars, how can we know they use EM to communicate, or would look like anything what we would recognize as intelligent life?
The Drake equation worksheet sets the lowest bound of planets per star capable of sustaining life at.33. That's absurd. Given what we know about what a planet needs to support life, it's ridiculous. Here's a small sampling of parameters needed for a planet to support life, and odds that they will be satisfied (from renound astronomer Hugh Ross):
- planetary distance from star: 0.001
- rate of change of axial tilt: 0.01
- rate of change in planetary rotation period: 0.05
- mass and distance of moon: 0.01
- surface gravity (escape velocity): 0.001
- magnetic field: 0.01
- thickness of crust: 0.01
- mass of body colliding with primordial earth: 0.002
- number & distribution of planets in solar system: 0.01
- atmospheric transparency: 0.01
- atmospheric pressure: 0.01
- carbon dioxide level in atmosphere: 0.01
- oxygen quantity in atmosphere: 0.01
- cobalt quantity in crust 0.1
- arsenic quantity in crust 0.1
- copper quantity in crust 0.1
- boron quantity in crust 0.1
- flourine quantity in crust 0.1
- iodine quantity in crust 0.1
- manganese quantity in crust 0.1
- nickel quantity in crust 0.1
- phosphorus quantity in crust 0.1
- potassium quantity in crust 0.1
- tin quantity in crust 0.1
- zinc quantity in crust 0.1
- molybdenum quantity in crust 0.05
- vanadium quantity in crust 0.1
- chromium quantity in crust 0.1
- selenium quantity in crust 0.1
- iron quantity in oceans 0.1
Multiply all of those probabilities, and you get a number that's *slightly* smaller than.33.
"Unfortunately, this is the only number in your post that means anything. The rest are pure speculation on your part. "
Pure speculation, yes. But absurdly optimistic speculation. My point is, even if we stack the deck well in favor of there being ET intelligence out there, the system itself is still set up in such a way that there's NO chance we'll be able to find it.
"This is simply untrue. In fact, any molecular biologists think it's possible that life may have formed from inanimate matter more than once on the Earth. "
Well, I admit that I am only talking about molecular biologists at the University of Wisconsin. I'm sure there are others with differing opinions. However, if life was easy enough to form that it came about by accident in the wild, it stands to reason that under the most exacting laboratory conditions, we would be able to reproduce life. We haven't even come close. And no, strings of polypeptides are NOT the same thing as living cells.
The thing about a temporal cold war is that it can be fought in many difference centuries at once. The guy may be from the 29th century, but that doesn't mean he's not operating in the 24th century, as well as Ancient Byzantium.
Still, the two best Trek movies (II and VI) had no time travel whatsoever, and I hope X follows that example.
2. Let's be generous and say there is a one in a thousand shot of a star having planet capable of supporting life (right distance from the star so that it's between 250-350 K at the surface, enough atmospheric pressuse so that water can exist as a liquid, protected by massive outer planets against constant meteor bombardment, far above-average abundance of Oxygen, Sulphur, Nitrogen, and Phosphorous, etc, etc.) That puts the number of *potential* life supporting planets in the galaxy at 400 million.
3. Let's be very, very generous and estimate that life actually *does* form on one in every thousand potential life-supporting planets. Most molecular biologists will tell you that even the most basic life is so complex that the odds of it forming from inanimate matter are staggeringly small, and we should count ourselves lucky that it managed to happen once in the entire history of the Universe. But we'll be liberal and say one in a thousand. That puts the number of planets in the galaxy with any sort of life at 400 thousand.
4. There is no reason to assume that just because life exists, it will become intelligent and start using EM communications that we can receive. I don't know how you could put odds on something like that. Let's just go nuts and say that ALL planets with life eventually give rise to intelligent life. So 400 thousand planets out there in our own galaxy will have intelligent life at some point in their history.
5. Now, here's the depressing part. Our planet has been around for 4 billion years. We've been using EM waves to communicate for roughly 100 years. So, in the whole history of our planet, civilization has only been detectable for 0.0000025 *percent* of the time. Let's say your typical advanced civilization (using radio waves) can last 1000 years before nuking itself into oblivion, and your typical planet exists for 5 billion years. That would mean that out of the 400 thousand planets with life, chances are only 0.00002 percent of them, or 0.08 total, are broadcasting at the same time we are receiving.
Thus, even with the most wildly optimistic estimates, there is only an 8% chance that there is even one civilization out there that we can listen to, in the entire galaxy. Forget about there being one within 100, or even 1000 light years.
Of course, you could simply throw those numbers out, and believe in a God who likes to put intelligent life on planets all over the place. But that wouldn't be very scientific.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the Future Dude directing the Suliban on Enterprise is a Romulan? Maybe we'll get to see the 24th Century theater of the "temporal cold war".
Also, it wouldn't be a Star Trek movie without time travel. *sigh*
That's only about 177 years' worth of 640x480, 24-color, 30fps uncompressed video.
Sheesh. I at least want to be able to chronicle the entire history of mankind in uncompressed video on my Linux box. Right now I'll have to settle for the history of the Industrial Age, or split my documentary into several smaller files.
Slashdot Mirror
What's a "code fag"?
I'm scared.
I also betcha Cambridge maps as one, big, continuous WLAN. f*ckers.
Probably not.
Q1) Routing tables could potentially grow HUGE to handle loops within the system.
A1)We would probably need to develop some sort of massively hierarchical routing scheme. Several levels of domains, subdomains, sub-subdomains, and so forth. Using IPv6 wouldn't hurt. Make the domains geographically-oriented. Incorporate AI into route calculations.
2) I think (am I wrong?) that a system would require point-to-multipoint or at least WAP-to-WAP, which IIRC 802.11b was bad at.
Q2.1) Either that or we need two or more 802.11b repeaters on anybody's internal network. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's more complicated, since one (or more) would have to be able to touch somebody else's WAP. Is there some combination of AdHoc and AP modes that the 802.11 system can operate in?
A2) Since I know even less about MAC-level networking, I'm not sure I have a better answer than "technology will improve."
Q3) How do you assign an IP address? No DHCP servers, can't be static... messy, no?
A3) WAPs can serve as perfectly good DHCP servers. The DHCP servers know what IPv6 address block to use from their sub-subdomain info, which would be culled from the IPv6 router in the LAN (see A1).
Q4) Suddenly route-advertising and route-discovery would have to become standard features on all WAPs.
A4) No, just on the level-3 routers. The WAPs are only concerned with MAC-level connectivity, whereas each (multi-WAP) LAN would contain one IPv6 router to the greater network (for now, let's call it the "CringelyNet.") It would be like in my apartment, where I have multiple 100bT hubs, uplinked to one another, but only one router to the outside world. The hubs don't know anything about IP routing, but as long as there is MAC-level connectivity to the *router*, everyone in the LAN can get to the outside.
Ultimately the Internet is going to become useless, taken over by AOL/Time-Warner and a handful of other major providers, all in control of Big Media. At that time, we'll need to set up our own nationwide, underground, wireless IP network. And it's ideas like this that are going to make it work. Here's how:
We start with neighborhood wireless LANs. A few WAPs on the block, and forthcoming wireless technology will allow the WAPs to uplink to one another. It's not all that different from the old BBS, except that it's over the airwaves, rather than over the phone, the bandwidth is about 1000x better, and it's completely public.
Then we get some Cringely-esque techniques in place to route between different neighborhood LANs. Set an IP router in front of several microwave links to other IP routers, each in a nearby town/neighborhood. This would be like a wireless version of the old FidoNet.
If we can get the whole nation connected, we can then have P2P-paradise that the Media companies can't touch. Well, except that bandwidth would suck, and it would be able to scale for anything. Only, I'm looking at 5 or 10 years down the road, after technology has taken a few leaps forward.
And, you could have access to this network virtually anywhere you can take an 802.11 device. And don't get me started on the Voice-over-IP possibilities.
That would *rule*.
And this is news because....
Just when we thought the world was safe from Steven Hawkings, he can now give more boring lectures by "zapping" words directly into a terminal using his brain.
What made the original trilogy great was the "human" aspect of the characters. Han's scoundrel-turned-reluctant hero. Leia calling Han a "scruffy-looking nerfherder" and Chewy a "walking carpet." While the fate of the galaxy hung in the balance, the main characters were really just a bunch of crazy kids having a good time. It was light-hearted in the face of impending doom.
That element was utterly missing from TPM. Qui-Gon was serious and dour. Obi-Wan was serious and dour. There was no sense of fun in the face of grave danger, but rather a sense of solemness in the face of bland political intrigue and trade embargoes. Jar-Jar was an attempt to inject the needed element into the movie, but it was forced and stale. If Jar-Jar had been a human, or at least a live actor, it might have worked.
I also have a great fear about AOTC: the trailers clearly are geared towards the "WB crowd." A cheezy romance story (unlike the childish and subdued Luke-Leia-Han triangle that was not the focus but rather a "fleshing out") isn't going to fit well into the arc of the Star Wars saga in general. I fear it's going to be forced, stale, and drag down a trilogy that already shows deep flaws.
Not the Christ. Just His pesky little brother.
--No one. It's just my Inspiron.
IF human reproductive cloning doesn't involve the destruction of human life, and IF human cloning is safe (no great chance of abnormalities), what's the problem then?
Anyway, the ability to farm perfectly good tissues and organs out of our own cells would be such a boon to medicine that I can't really see the possibility that it could also be used for reproductive cloning as being that big of a deal.
Some things are just plain funny.
The media companies are going to figure out how to wrap video content into a streaming form with "copy protection" built into the stream. In a closed source environment, in which the API layers that translate the stream into viewable video are hidden, it will work perfectly.
But what about an open source environment? When the stream-to-video APIs are open source, it becomes trivial to stick a frame-grabber on top, instead of a media player. Instant, lossless recording of any internet video stream, whether it be "copy protected" or not.
Access-controlled streaming is going to be the standard MO in the media industry, and that means two things: one, that open source OSes are going to be left out of the content-on-demand game, and two, if Linux takes over a commanding portion of the desktop, Big Media will be inhibited from doing any sort of access-protected media streaming.
The best reason, in my mind, to use open platforms is that it keeps the entire Internet open and functional for everyone.
I'm starting to think that jumping sides from the Haavaad nosers to the Meowers was a mistake.
My life would have been oh-so-cheerier for the past six years had I never entered into alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. I certainly wouldn't have gotten on the bad side of campus network security. *sigh*
I wonder if Matt still gives free blowjobs...
Prove that it's impossible to solve NP-Complete problems in linear time, before someone figures out how to do it.
I'm offended.
Heh. I agree with this post. It should be entitled "why SETI is a useless exercise, Part Deux."
Even if there is intelligent life around one of these 400 Billion stars, how can we know they use EM to communicate, or would look like anything what we would recognize as intelligent life?
The Drake equation worksheet sets the lowest bound of planets per star capable of sustaining life at .33. That's absurd. Given what we know about what a planet needs to support life, it's ridiculous. Here's a small sampling of parameters needed for a planet to support life, and odds that they will be satisfied (from renound astronomer Hugh Ross):
.33.
- planetary distance from star: 0.001
- rate of change of axial tilt: 0.01
- rate of change in planetary rotation period: 0.05
- mass and distance of moon: 0.01
- surface gravity (escape velocity): 0.001
- magnetic field: 0.01
- thickness of crust: 0.01
- mass of body colliding with primordial earth: 0.002
- number & distribution of planets in solar system: 0.01
- atmospheric transparency: 0.01
- atmospheric pressure: 0.01
- carbon dioxide level in atmosphere: 0.01
- oxygen quantity in atmosphere: 0.01
- cobalt quantity in crust 0.1
- arsenic quantity in crust 0.1
- copper quantity in crust 0.1
- boron quantity in crust 0.1
- flourine quantity in crust 0.1
- iodine quantity in crust 0.1
- manganese quantity in crust 0.1
- nickel quantity in crust 0.1
- phosphorus quantity in crust 0.1
- potassium quantity in crust 0.1
- tin quantity in crust 0.1
- zinc quantity in crust 0.1
- molybdenum quantity in crust 0.05
- vanadium quantity in crust 0.1
- chromium quantity in crust 0.1
- selenium quantity in crust 0.1
- iron quantity in oceans 0.1
Multiply all of those probabilities, and you get a number that's *slightly* smaller than
"Unfortunately, this is the only number in your post that means anything. The rest are pure speculation on your part. "
Pure speculation, yes. But absurdly optimistic speculation. My point is, even if we stack the deck well in favor of there being ET intelligence out there, the system itself is still set up in such a way that there's NO chance we'll be able to find it.
"This is simply untrue. In fact, any molecular biologists think it's possible that life may have formed from inanimate matter more than once on the Earth. "
Well, I admit that I am only talking about molecular biologists at the University of Wisconsin. I'm sure there are others with differing opinions. However, if life was easy enough to form that it came about by accident in the wild, it stands to reason that under the most exacting laboratory conditions, we would be able to reproduce life. We haven't even come close. And no, strings of polypeptides are NOT the same thing as living cells.
The thing about a temporal cold war is that it can be fought in many difference centuries at once. The guy may be from the 29th century, but that doesn't mean he's not operating in the 24th century, as well as Ancient Byzantium.
Still, the two best Trek movies (II and VI) had no time travel whatsoever, and I hope X follows that example.
2. Let's be generous and say there is a one in a thousand shot of a star having planet capable of supporting life (right distance from the star so that it's between 250-350 K at the surface, enough atmospheric pressuse so that water can exist as a liquid, protected by massive outer planets against constant meteor bombardment, far above-average abundance of Oxygen, Sulphur, Nitrogen, and Phosphorous, etc, etc.) That puts the number of *potential* life supporting planets in the galaxy at 400 million.
3. Let's be very, very generous and estimate that life actually *does* form on one in every thousand potential life-supporting planets. Most molecular biologists will tell you that even the most basic life is so complex that the odds of it forming from inanimate matter are staggeringly small, and we should count ourselves lucky that it managed to happen once in the entire history of the Universe. But we'll be liberal and say one in a thousand. That puts the number of planets in the galaxy with any sort of life at 400 thousand.
4. There is no reason to assume that just because life exists, it will become intelligent and start using EM communications that we can receive. I don't know how you could put odds on something like that. Let's just go nuts and say that ALL planets with life eventually give rise to intelligent life. So 400 thousand planets out there in our own galaxy will have intelligent life at some point in their history.
5. Now, here's the depressing part. Our planet has been around for 4 billion years. We've been using EM waves to communicate for roughly 100 years. So, in the whole history of our planet, civilization has only been detectable for 0.0000025 *percent* of the time. Let's say your typical advanced civilization (using radio waves) can last 1000 years before nuking itself into oblivion, and your typical planet exists for 5 billion years. That would mean that out of the 400 thousand planets with life, chances are only 0.00002 percent of them, or 0.08 total, are broadcasting at the same time we are receiving.
Thus, even with the most wildly optimistic estimates, there is only an 8% chance that there is even one civilization out there that we can listen to, in the entire galaxy. Forget about there being one within 100, or even 1000 light years.
Of course, you could simply throw those numbers out, and believe in a God who likes to put intelligent life on planets all over the place. But that wouldn't be very scientific.
Personally, I think Wil Wheaton's best work was on Family Ties, as Jennifer's jock boyfriend.
Wil Wheaton and Tina Yothers were a winning combination, if ever there was one.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the Future Dude directing the Suliban on Enterprise is a Romulan? Maybe we'll get to see the 24th Century theater of the "temporal cold war".
Also, it wouldn't be a Star Trek movie without time travel. *sigh*
That's only about 177 years' worth of 640x480, 24-color, 30fps uncompressed video.
Sheesh. I at least want to be able to chronicle the entire history of mankind in uncompressed video on my Linux box. Right now I'll have to settle for the history of the Industrial Age, or split my documentary into several smaller files.