I'm not talking about large scale nuclear weapons here.
I am talking about the ability for a single crazy person to kill many people by himself.
For instance, long ago when the only personal weapons we had were sticks and rocks, it was hard to kill single person, and in the meantime someone would stop the attacker.
Then we had swords. A single person with a sword can kill more effectively with a sword and would require an opponent with a sword to stop him.
Now we have personal firearms. A single person can kill a whole bunch of people before he is taken out by the SWAT team.
The current fission products are not quite enough, it requires many people's involvement to fire one off. A single crazy person can't do this, and does not have the capability to do so.
However, once effectively 'free' energy is available, everything changes.
Give the hateful suicidal crazy person free energy, and instead of constructive, effective changes, you will see HUGE amounts of innocent people die because of his decisions before he could be stopped.
What happens next when I can wear a cheap mega-watt generator device on my back that is powering a hand-held magnetron that I can aim at people from a distance? Would YOU give everyone the tools to do this?
Beyond that, I personally believe that us humans are not yet able to handle a cheap, powerful energy source such as fusion. Imagine if energy were effectively free. What would we do with it? Constructive, imaginative things?
No - with a powerful, cheap energy source comes the ability to make even more powerful, cheap weapons.
As our technology advances and becomes ubiquitous, the ability of a single, rogue person to kill many people increases.
Five years ago I visited Prague. Not only was the term 'Robot' created by a Czech - The first mythological robot was created there too.
Rabbi Loew's Golem was a robot. I had heard the myth before but did not realize that Rabbi Loew had lived relatively recently - in the 16th century, during the same time Kepler lived in Prague.
Embedded on Rabbie Lowe's tomb is the encrypted hebrew that describes how to 'wake up' the Golem if needed. I saw the tomb in person and I wonder if anyone has tried to make sense of the engravings.
So what was it? Just a myth of robot? Or an embellished story of an actual robot?
Regardless, the idea of a robot was there in the 16th century.
--jeff++
If I remember correctly, it was Aldus PageMaker for NeXTStep. Someone I know had a pirated version of it - After he installed it on his NeXT cube, he saw his on-demand-dial-up internet slip connection start connecting. He shut off his external modem and poked around and found that it had set up a cron job to email home about the violation. So deleting the current email from the mail queue would not be sufficient. If he didn't have a dial up connection he never would have noticed.
The only issue with this scheme is when the software screws up and THINKS it is pirated when it is not.
I was one of the designers of a MIDI Show Control-to-Allen-Bradley PLC controller specifically designed for this show. The EFX show used dozens of them. These boxes in turn were controlled by Amigas! by Richmod Sound Design's software.
The fog wall in the show was huge, and they would project a scene onto the fog while the actors and props would be moved into place. Then the fog would dissipate and the projected 'scene' would come to life.
For a neat learning experience, try programming the Texas Instruments C6701 family of VLIW DSP's. 8 different execution units allowing you to specifically designate 8 instructions to execute in parallel - depending on the instruction type - 'flying' registers, manually specified wait states - NOP takes a parameter! Multiple busses, 256 bit wide program memory, etc, etc. The TI tools include an 'Optimizing Assembler' which is totally amazing - without it you would end up spending days on a 10 cycle loop plotting out flying register dependancies and opcodes in a 2 dimensional matrix...
...and locks you out after several incorrect attempts.
I hate systems that lock you out like that. It means anyone in the world can easily do a denial of service on me if they want, whenever they want.
--jeff++
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 1
Take a look at propellerheads Reason with tons of widgets flying on the gui under win32 or mac osx. Then try to make an app with Qt or GTK on windows, mac, and linux, with the same number of widgets flying and just see how much slower the gui update rate is.
The slowdown IS the widget library.
It would be interesting to make an open source OpenGL 2D widget library a la Reason, optimized for speed.
X does not make things slow, this is a myth...
--jeff++
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
Quake3 runs great on my X11 installtion... It pushes lots of pixels and FAST! Any widget apps that are slow are slow because of bad widget library design, not because of X11.
vmware rocks! It also saves you the hassle of having to re-install windows all the time - just make a backup of your drive C file after your first windows install!
But many people I know, using their computers for home use, are still using Windows ME and even Win98, some even Win95. They will end up switching to Mozilla because MS is not allowing them to upgrade to the new versions of IE without them throwing out their computers. So to them, there IS a lack of development and extension of current versions of IE.
$1 million fine? Death penalty? This would be fun if there were someone I really didn't like - It would be easy to make it look like he was spamming. Death by virus!
And beyond that, your code must know that wordVec is a std::vector... C++ does not allow you to do 'typename wordVec.iterator i;' so without 'auto i=wordVec.begin();' the code breaks if you later decide to use a different container for wordVec.
The timetable was to take full control of Iraq before June 2nd, 2003. If Saddam were still in power on June 2nd, the oil embargo would have been lifted by the UN and Saddam would be very busy selling oil for EUROS.
I heard an argument that it wouldn't have mattered who the president of the united states was... The war with iraq was an economic necessity.
In Mac OS X, all apps are really directories with a.app suffix. Inside them can be all sorts of files and directories that you need, not just the executable code. OS X allows your app to look inside these directories, no matter where you have placed or moved them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not talking about large scale nuclear weapons here.
I am talking about the ability for a single crazy person to kill many people by himself.
For instance, long ago when the only personal weapons we had were sticks and rocks, it was hard to kill single person, and in the meantime someone would stop the attacker.
Then we had swords. A single person with a sword can kill more effectively with a sword and would require an opponent with a sword to stop him.
Now we have personal firearms. A single person can kill a whole bunch of people before he is taken out by the SWAT team.
The current fission products are not quite enough, it requires many people's involvement to fire one off. A single crazy person can't do this, and does not have the capability to do so.
However, once effectively 'free' energy is available, everything changes.
Give the hateful suicidal crazy person free energy, and instead of constructive, effective changes, you will see HUGE amounts of innocent people die because of his decisions before he could be stopped.
What happens next when I can wear a cheap mega-watt generator device on my back that is powering a hand-held magnetron that I can aim at people from a distance? Would YOU give everyone the tools to do this?
--jeff++
Beyond that, I personally believe that us humans are not yet able to handle a cheap, powerful energy source such as fusion. Imagine if energy were effectively free. What would we do with it? Constructive, imaginative things?
No - with a powerful, cheap energy source comes the ability to make even more powerful, cheap weapons.
As our technology advances and becomes ubiquitous, the ability of a single, rogue person to kill many people increases.
--jeff++
This, of course, is exactly how the first C++ compilers were designed. They were really just C code generators.
--jeff++
Rabbi Loew's Golem was a robot. I had heard the myth before but did not realize that Rabbi Loew had lived relatively recently - in the 16th century, during the same time Kepler lived in Prague.
Embedded on Rabbie Lowe's tomb is the encrypted hebrew that describes how to 'wake up' the Golem if needed. I saw the tomb in person and I wonder if anyone has tried to make sense of the engravings.
So what was it? Just a myth of robot? Or an embellished story of an actual robot?
Regardless, the idea of a robot was there in the 16th century. --jeff++
If I remember correctly, it was Aldus PageMaker for NeXTStep. Someone I know had a pirated version of it - After he installed it on his NeXT cube, he saw his on-demand-dial-up internet slip connection start connecting. He shut off his external modem and poked around and found that it had set up a cron job to email home about the violation. So deleting the current email from the mail queue would not be sufficient. If he didn't have a dial up connection he never would have noticed.
The only issue with this scheme is when the software screws up and THINKS it is pirated when it is not.
The solution? Use free software.
--jeff++
What exactly is happening to the server when it does this? Why would it drop connections? What could they have done to improve it?
--jeff++
Is a job the only reason why you want a Phd?
--jeff++
Better yet, don't use ftp at all. Use SCP and tell users to use WinSCP or Fugu or equivalents...
--jeff++
It has also been done in Vegas 8 years ago at the MGM Grand Hotel's EFX show (now defunct):
I was one of the designers of a MIDI Show Control-to-Allen-Bradley PLC controller specifically designed for this show. The EFX show used dozens of them. These boxes in turn were controlled by Amigas! by Richmod Sound Design's software.
The fog wall in the show was huge, and they would project a scene onto the fog while the actors and props would be moved into place. Then the fog would dissipate and the projected 'scene' would come to life.
--jeffy++
It depends on the cpu architecture.
For a neat learning experience, try programming the Texas Instruments C6701 family of VLIW DSP's. 8 different execution units allowing you to specifically designate 8 instructions to execute in parallel - depending on the instruction type - 'flying' registers, manually specified wait states - NOP takes a parameter! Multiple busses, 256 bit wide program memory, etc, etc. The TI tools include an 'Optimizing Assembler' which is totally amazing - without it you would end up spending days on a 10 cycle loop plotting out flying register dependancies and opcodes in a 2 dimensional matrix...
--jeffy++
...and locks you out after several incorrect attempts.
I hate systems that lock you out like that. It means anyone in the world can easily do a denial of service on me if they want, whenever they want.
--jeff++
The slowdown IS the widget library.
It would be interesting to make an open source OpenGL 2D widget library a la Reason, optimized for speed.
X does not make things slow, this is a myth...
--jeff++
Quake3 runs great on my X11 installtion... It pushes lots of pixels and FAST! Any widget apps that are slow are slow because of bad widget library design, not because of X11.
--jeff++
What does a Canadian say when you step on his foot?
And it is too true.
--jeff++
And worth every penny!!!
--jeff++
Pretty simple, really.
vmware rocks! It also saves you the hassle of having to re-install windows all the time - just make a backup of your drive C file after your first windows install!
--jeff++
Wow! Cool! Thanks for the link! I do altivec stuff and had not seen that!
--jeff++
Unfortunately, most scientific number crunching requires more than 32 bit floats, which is all that altivec can give you.
for audio and video and image effects and processing, however, altivec works wonders!
--jeff++
That's just it, most people are NOT upgrading their hardware, and if they don't then they can not run the latest IE.
--jeff++
But many people I know, using their computers for home use, are still using Windows ME and even Win98, some even Win95. They will end up switching to Mozilla because MS is not allowing them to upgrade to the new versions of IE without them throwing out their computers. So to them, there IS a lack of development and extension of current versions of IE.
--jeff++
$1 million fine? Death penalty? This would be fun if there were someone I really didn't like - It would be easy to make it look like he was spamming. Death by virus!
--jeff++
And beyond that, your code must know that wordVec is a std::vector... C++ does not allow you to do 'typename wordVec.iterator i;' so without 'auto i=wordVec.begin();' the code breaks if you later decide to use a different container for wordVec.
--jeff++
The timetable was to take full control of Iraq before June 2nd, 2003. If Saddam were still in power on June 2nd, the oil embargo would have been lifted by the UN and Saddam would be very busy selling oil for EUROS.
I heard an argument that it wouldn't have mattered who the president of the united states was... The war with iraq was an economic necessity.
but what do I know besides c++ programming....
--jeff++
So what if it said 'Bush' instead of 'Gore' and they wanted to vote for 'Gore'?
It is not like anyone would believe them, after all computers are always right...
--jeff++
In Mac OS X, all apps are really directories with a .app suffix. Inside them can be all sorts of files and directories that you need, not just the executable code. OS X allows your app to look inside these directories, no matter where you have placed or moved them.
--jeff++