RAM, CPU, and GPU I'll agree with. But bandwidth -- which is often given in finite, non-recoupable allotments -- is stolen. If this guy intends to locate computers on the net and push ads to them without permission, he's stealing bandwidth.
He's also likely to be using a security exploit and/or a worm, as I can't think of any other way to do this 'through a firewall, through everything' as he claims. Hopefully that will put him in jail, even if bandwidth theft never becomes an enforced crime.
A New York Life Investment Management survey of high-net-worth Gen Xers found that the respondents thought they needed $2 million to retire. Not even close, says Beverly Moore, who conducted the study. A Gen Xer who makes $100,000 and wants to retire at 59 needs $7.3 million net of taxes to sustain that lifestyle. (That means saving $2,600 a month and assumes an 8% return.)
Someone help me understand why those numbers don't seem to work. If someone has $2mil saved with an 8% return, they're pulling $160,000 per year pre-taxes or about $105,000 net. $7.3 mil should give you over $380,000 after tax income. Even if we correct for 5% inflation, it only takes $5 mil in savings to keep an income of $100k.
It just seems that these figures, like every other number in the article, were set artificially high.
What someone should do is make their own versions of the Steamboat Willie cartoon, without Micky or any other recognizable characters, and then extrapolate from there. Make a live action version. Or, considering the title, make it a porno. Lots of options, as long as there are no black-eared mice involved.
Not necessarily what you're working on next (although that would be interesting), but what do you think might be the next really big thing? What will be the next technological achievement to affect all of humanity? Are there any projects out there that are still small, like the internet was in the 70's and 80's, but which you believe may mushroom into a world-changing invention?
I've never used a P2P or Gnutella client -- I'm on dialup, and although I'd love to impact the RIAA's profits by downloading songs it's just not technically feasible for me.
But one part of the story intrigues me. The RIAA is making spurious files on P2P networks in an attempt to fool users, so that 'nine out of ten versions on a peer-to-peer network may be empty shells'.
So am I to understand that there is no moderation or filtering on P2P networks? Doesn't any of the clients out there allow users to vote on a file's usefulness, so that other users can highlight files known to be good and filter out files known to be bad? I'd think that would be a basic feature for any peer network. 90% of everything is crap, after all, and nowhere is that more true than on the internet.
I'll second this. I'm a DOI subcontractor, and all our systems are DOI-owned. We have Linux, Unix, Irix, and SunOs all over the place, plus a Mac here and there. Most of these systems are running custom applications and their OS cannot be replaced by Windows. This will have little if any effect.
Firefly was okay. I think it was too heavily oriented towards being a western, if anything, and not enough science fiction. One test for sci-fi is if the story works once you take the science out of it. The Firefly pilot, with all the science removed, would have worked just fine as a standard western. So it was an okay show, but as a sci-fi show I'd say it was just passing.
I like the characters, although they aren't fleshed out at all yet and there are two many of them. I counted eight or nine major protagonists. Farscape only has six or seven. Buffy had nine at max -- and people quickly started dying when it got that high -- but the show started with only three or four. I fear the weight of all that characterization is going to drag this show down. We'll see.
I thought of that also. But I read the article more closely, and they mention that different view angles would be used to generate different speckle patterns.
A one-angle view of this token would not be secure, but a security mechanism that scanned the token through multiple angles would be very difficult to recreate. I don't know if they should be throwing around the word 'impossible', however.
Ahem. Pons and Fleischmann were *chemists*. That was one of the reasons that the physics world descended on their research like crows eager to pick the eyes out of a corpse.
The F&P incident is a good example of the ethical side of the physics community. F&P made dozens of errors contrary to what physicists consider the 'right' way to perform an experiment. Then they aimed for publicity and fame instead of peer-review and verification. So the physics community crucified them, as well they should. Hopefully the same thing will happen to Dr.s Ninov and Schon.
(Disclaimer: Yes, I am a physicist.:) )
I see a great need...
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Soon to be announced: Google for Wackos! With a clean-cut, cookie-less interface free of CIA influence, Google for Wackos will return search results based not on the listed sites' popularity, but on the wackiness of the conspiracy theories they present. Most popular search terms include Zapruder, tin foil, UFOs, and of course sex (but only the dirty illegal kind that politicians have.)
Wake me when GRACE is able to sign up at a sci-fi convention. Applicable skills will have to include: Giving backrubs to others standing in line; Recognizing the registration counter people as objects to talk to even when they're wearing klingon costumes; and bitch-slapping the crowd of fanboys around her chanting "Exterminate...exterminate!"
You're thinking too small. Yes, payment mechanisms are one thing we should be developing, because it will fix one of the problems Mr. Ellis mentions. But he mentioned several problems. We need solutions for them all.
Payment mechanisms would help fix the advertising model. But we also need to solve the last mile problem. And Copyright issues.
Once we have easy solutions for these problems, companies will have to implement them or be driven out of business by those competitors who do. We can't give them a choice to implement or stall -- we need to invent solutions that are so simple that the big guys could be beaten out by small business unless they come around to a new way of thinking.
Fortunately, time and the ongoing march of progress are on our side.
Not likely. See the Oklo data. The thermal fissionable isotopes would be diluted by the shear volume of U-238. Fast neutrons from U-238 spontaneous fission cannot induce fission in U-235 without thermalization by a moderator. There would be no adequate moderator in the molten core.
What you're implying is that injection of a large enough moderator into the earth's core could drive it critical.
Wow. I think we've just discovered a new Doomsday device. Fortunately I don't think we have the tech to send burrowing missles filled with deuterium to the planet's core, yet.
He's not going to make antigravity with this theory, no. But he might make Cavorite.
Cavorite is a fictional material that blocks gravity, and it has appeared in science fiction for decades. No, it's not as useful as antigravity...but imagine what you could do with a launch vehicle that was weightless sitting on the ground.
Cavorite is also what Podkletnov was claiming, so the crackpot alarms should be ringing about now. But if it works, this is bigger than the invention of the automobile or airplane.
The discrete nature of space and time is neither new nor particularly controversial.
That's odd, because while working for my doctoral degree in physics I remembering arguing with my professors about discreteness in spacetime. They said there was no empirical evidence to suggest discreteness, and there never had been.
So either discreteness is new (arisen since I left college in 1993) or it is controversial.
Do they mean to say that we as Americans should applaud our fake heroes as "Real American Heroes" instead of our real ones?
Why not? The imagined heroes are the ideal, the symbols. The real heroes are the reality, the ones you can count on. Both are important.
I'm not a New Yorker, I didn't even notice the WTC was supposed to be anywhere in the film, and I thought the crowd scene on the bridge was pretty cool.
My main complaints about the film was hokey dialog and that Kirsten Dunst looked like a 30-something crack whore. I didn't even notice the jingoism to which you're referring.
Can the browser be removed or replaced in Gnome or KDE?
Now, a better question is whether there are any other OSes where the desktop environment cannot be replaced. If others exist (Mac X?), then MS is in the clear -- they have an irreplaceable DE just like other OSes, and that DE happens to have an irreplacable browser just like other DEs. Then this entire argument (not the entire court case, just this argument) is ruled in MS's favor.
What the court should be focussing on, IMHO, is that Windows is not like other OSes -- being a monopoly product, it should be forced to play by stricter rules than the rest of the free market.
Hmmn. I'm not so sure this played against Microsoft. Consider: Gnome and KDE are desktop environments, not OSes. What if MS decides to change its strategy, and claim that IE cannot be separated from the Windows desktop environment? The fact that the desktop environment cannot be separated from the Windows OS wouldn't matter -- MS gets credence for its claim and can legitimately point to other software that does the same thing.
Don't get me wrong, this witness's testimony didn't help MS one bit. But his stumbling may have illuminated a new strategy for MS to pursue.
Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...
on
The Next Generation
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I mean, look at our daily lives in the last 1,000 years. [...] When is that going to change?
You're underestimating the magnitude of the changes in store for the human race in the next 50 years.
We no longer need to sleep, as fatigue poisons are scoured from our body by nanobots, while the processors added to our brains do memory processing in the background with no downtime.
We design kids from their genes up, and they learn through their neural links, 24 hours a day.
We work? Why? Robots perform all menial labor, and nanotech insures that all material products are free. Perhaps we spend the day diddling with art, philosophy, or programming for our own pleasure.
I'll assume we'll still need to eat. We almost certainly won't need to *cook*...
We entertain ourselves with family, friends, simulated friends, simulated long dead famous people, and the simulations of the children you're designing for next year. And you won't be able to tell the difference between them.
We go to bed? Again, why?
Nanobots automatically clean our hair, so even 'Rinse, lather, repeat' becomes a thing of the past.;)
If you're thinking life will go on much as it always has, you're thinking too small.
Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...
on
The Next Generation
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
... is that when this stuff arrives, it will seem like No Big Deal.
Wrong. It will seem like No Big Deal to you, and to the majority of Slashdot readers. We are, after all, the techno-elite -- we're able to adapt to the rapid progression of technology better than most.
The cool thing about CD players, and laptops, and cell phones, etc., is that not only are they all over the place, but also hardly anyone thinks of them as exotic. And, Future Shock to the contrary, they haven't come too fast for people to handle them.
Haven't come too fast for *you* to handle them, and for most of the populace of the US. But the RIAA/MPAA certainly are having problems accepting the technology of CD burning and network transfer. Our legislature still can't get a grasp on the internet. There are aristocrats and senior citizens who don't know how a supermarket scanner works (c.f. George Bush, Sr.) or can't handle simple technology. My mother still won't use a microwave oven. Some people *do* have problems with tech progress, and that segment of the population will grow exponentially as the rate of change accelerates. That was the nature of Future Shock as Toffler described it...it sneaks up on us.
And people in foreign countries are less likely to adapt to rapid technological progress. The Islamic countries are having problems with the concept of high speed communications and an open society -- not that they can't accept it for themselves, but they're having problems accepting its *existence*.
What do you think will happen in third world countries when the first man becomes immortal, and he's an American? There will be war.
I'm glad you're enjoying your rose-colored glasses, but the transcendence of the human race is going to be as turbulent as it is inevitable. Brace yourselves.
Robots should be cute. Otherwise they remind us of the whole taking-over-the-world scenario.
Re:Have these astronauts never played video games?
on
Playing Ball in Space
·
· Score: 2
But the researchers are arguing that it's a matter of how the brain predicts motion in a 3D space. The physical training is not supposed to be the issue here. The researchers are blaming the eye part of the astronauts' eye-hand coordination, and that's something that video games can train.
I'm left with two conclusions, both of which are likely: That this research conclusion is either seriously flawed, or these astronauts have never played video games in their lives.:)
Slashdot Mirror
RAM, CPU, and GPU I'll agree with. But bandwidth -- which is often given in finite, non-recoupable allotments -- is stolen. If this guy intends to locate computers on the net and push ads to them without permission, he's stealing bandwidth.
He's also likely to be using a security exploit and/or a worm, as I can't think of any other way to do this 'through a firewall, through everything' as he claims. Hopefully that will put him in jail, even if bandwidth theft never becomes an enforced crime.
A New York Life Investment Management survey of high-net-worth Gen Xers found that the respondents thought they needed $2 million to retire. Not even close, says Beverly Moore, who conducted the study. A Gen Xer who makes $100,000 and wants to retire at 59 needs $7.3 million net of taxes to sustain that lifestyle. (That means saving $2,600 a month and assumes an 8% return.)
Someone help me understand why those numbers don't seem to work. If someone has $2mil saved with an 8% return, they're pulling $160,000 per year pre-taxes or about $105,000 net. $7.3 mil should give you over $380,000 after tax income. Even if we correct for 5% inflation, it only takes $5 mil in savings to keep an income of $100k.
It just seems that these figures, like every other number in the article, were set artificially high.
What someone should do is make their own versions of the Steamboat Willie cartoon, without Micky or any other recognizable characters, and then extrapolate from there. Make a live action version. Or, considering the title, make it a porno. Lots of options, as long as there are no black-eared mice involved.
Not necessarily what you're working on next (although that would be interesting), but what do you think might be the next really big thing? What will be the next technological achievement to affect all of humanity? Are there any projects out there that are still small, like the internet was in the 70's and 80's, but which you believe may mushroom into a world-changing invention?
I've never used a P2P or Gnutella client -- I'm on dialup, and although I'd love to impact the RIAA's profits by downloading songs it's just not technically feasible for me.
But one part of the story intrigues me. The RIAA is making spurious files on P2P networks in an attempt to fool users, so that 'nine out of ten versions on a peer-to-peer network may be empty shells'.
So am I to understand that there is no moderation or filtering on P2P networks? Doesn't any of the clients out there allow users to vote on a file's usefulness, so that other users can highlight files known to be good and filter out files known to be bad? I'd think that would be a basic feature for any peer network. 90% of everything is crap, after all, and nowhere is that more true than on the internet.
So a family named Robinson is really into a swiss toy, huh?
I guess it's pointless to ask him what he'd take with him to a desert island.
I'll second this. I'm a DOI subcontractor, and all our systems are DOI-owned. We have Linux, Unix, Irix, and SunOs all over the place, plus a Mac here and there. Most of these systems are running custom applications and their OS cannot be replaced by Windows. This will have little if any effect.
Firefly was okay. I think it was too heavily oriented towards being a western, if anything, and not enough science fiction. One test for sci-fi is if the story works once you take the science out of it. The Firefly pilot, with all the science removed, would have worked just fine as a standard western. So it was an okay show, but as a sci-fi show I'd say it was just passing.
I like the characters, although they aren't fleshed out at all yet and there are two many of them. I counted eight or nine major protagonists. Farscape only has six or seven. Buffy had nine at max -- and people quickly started dying when it got that high -- but the show started with only three or four. I fear the weight of all that characterization is going to drag this show down. We'll see.
John Doe sucked. That was a disappointment.
I thought of that also. But I read the article more closely, and they mention that different view angles would be used to generate different speckle patterns.
A one-angle view of this token would not be secure, but a security mechanism that scanned the token through multiple angles would be very difficult to recreate. I don't know if they should be throwing around the word 'impossible', however.
Ahem. Pons and Fleischmann were *chemists*. That was one of the reasons that the physics world descended on their research like crows eager to pick the eyes out of a corpse.
:) )
The F&P incident is a good example of the ethical side of the physics community. F&P made dozens of errors contrary to what physicists consider the 'right' way to perform an experiment. Then they aimed for publicity and fame instead of peer-review and verification. So the physics community crucified them, as well they should. Hopefully the same thing will happen to Dr.s Ninov and Schon.
(Disclaimer: Yes, I am a physicist.
Soon to be announced: Google for Wackos! With a clean-cut, cookie-less interface free of CIA influence, Google for Wackos will return search results based not on the listed sites' popularity, but on the wackiness of the conspiracy theories they present. Most popular search terms include Zapruder, tin foil, UFOs, and of course sex (but only the dirty illegal kind that politicians have.)
I'm sure the spammers in China will laugh wildly as they forge the haiku.
;)
That's the point, Taco.
Spammers who forge the haiku
will quickly get sued.
You may have heard it
called 'copyright infringement'
look it up next time.
Wake me when GRACE is able to sign up at a sci-fi convention. Applicable skills will have to include: Giving backrubs to others standing in line; Recognizing the registration counter people as objects to talk to even when they're wearing klingon costumes; and bitch-slapping the crowd of fanboys around her chanting "Exterminate...exterminate!"
You're thinking too small. Yes, payment mechanisms are one thing we should be developing, because it will fix one of the problems Mr. Ellis mentions. But he mentioned several problems. We need solutions for them all.
Payment mechanisms would help fix the advertising model. But we also need to solve the last mile problem. And Copyright issues.
Once we have easy solutions for these problems, companies will have to implement them or be driven out of business by those competitors who do. We can't give them a choice to implement or stall -- we need to invent solutions that are so simple that the big guys could be beaten out by small business unless they come around to a new way of thinking.
Fortunately, time and the ongoing march of progress are on our side.
"Like the kryptonite, Clark? It took years to synthesize, and cost a fortune. Fortunately I had both." -- Batman, _The Dark Knight Returns_
I doubt this movie will do the Batman vs Superman battle as well as Miller did. We'll see.
Not likely. See the Oklo data. The thermal fissionable isotopes would be diluted by the shear volume of U-238. Fast neutrons from U-238 spontaneous fission cannot induce fission in U-235 without thermalization by a moderator. There would be no adequate moderator in the molten core.
What you're implying is that injection of a large enough moderator into the earth's core could drive it critical.
Wow. I think we've just discovered a new Doomsday device. Fortunately I don't think we have the tech to send burrowing missles filled with deuterium to the planet's core, yet.
He's not going to make antigravity with this theory, no. But he might make Cavorite.
Cavorite is a fictional material that blocks gravity, and it has appeared in science fiction for decades. No, it's not as useful as antigravity...but imagine what you could do with a launch vehicle that was weightless sitting on the ground.
Cavorite is also what Podkletnov was claiming, so the crackpot alarms should be ringing about now. But if it works, this is bigger than the invention of the automobile or airplane.
The discrete nature of space and time is neither new nor particularly controversial.
That's odd, because while working for my doctoral degree in physics I remembering arguing with my professors about discreteness in spacetime. They said there was no empirical evidence to suggest discreteness, and there never had been.
So either discreteness is new (arisen since I left college in 1993) or it is controversial.
Do they mean to say that we as Americans should applaud our fake heroes as "Real American Heroes" instead of our real ones?
Why not? The imagined heroes are the ideal, the symbols. The real heroes are the reality, the ones you can count on. Both are important.
I'm not a New Yorker, I didn't even notice the WTC was supposed to be anywhere in the film, and I thought the crowd scene on the bridge was pretty cool.
My main complaints about the film was hokey dialog and that Kirsten Dunst looked like a 30-something crack whore. I didn't even notice the jingoism to which you're referring.
Can the browser be removed or replaced in Gnome or KDE?
Now, a better question is whether there are any other OSes where the desktop environment cannot be replaced. If others exist (Mac X?), then MS is in the clear -- they have an irreplaceable DE just like other OSes, and that DE happens to have an irreplacable browser just like other DEs. Then this entire argument (not the entire court case, just this argument) is ruled in MS's favor.
What the court should be focussing on, IMHO, is that Windows is not like other OSes -- being a monopoly product, it should be forced to play by stricter rules than the rest of the free market.
Hmmn. I'm not so sure this played against Microsoft. Consider: Gnome and KDE are desktop environments, not OSes. What if MS decides to change its strategy, and claim that IE cannot be separated from the Windows desktop environment? The fact that the desktop environment cannot be separated from the Windows OS wouldn't matter -- MS gets credence for its claim and can legitimately point to other software that does the same thing.
Don't get me wrong, this witness's testimony didn't help MS one bit. But his stumbling may have illuminated a new strategy for MS to pursue.
You're underestimating the magnitude of the changes in store for the human race in the next 50 years.
If you're thinking life will go on much as it always has, you're thinking too small.
Wrong. It will seem like No Big Deal to you, and to the majority of Slashdot readers. We are, after all, the techno-elite -- we're able to adapt to the rapid progression of technology better than most.
The cool thing about CD players, and laptops, and cell phones, etc., is that not only are they all over the place, but also hardly anyone thinks of them as exotic. And, Future Shock to the contrary, they haven't come too fast for people to handle them.
Haven't come too fast for *you* to handle them, and for most of the populace of the US. But the RIAA/MPAA certainly are having problems accepting the technology of CD burning and network transfer. Our legislature still can't get a grasp on the internet. There are aristocrats and senior citizens who don't know how a supermarket scanner works (c.f. George Bush, Sr.) or can't handle simple technology. My mother still won't use a microwave oven. Some people *do* have problems with tech progress, and that segment of the population will grow exponentially as the rate of change accelerates. That was the nature of Future Shock as Toffler described it...it sneaks up on us.
And people in foreign countries are less likely to adapt to rapid technological progress. The Islamic countries are having problems with the concept of high speed communications and an open society -- not that they can't accept it for themselves, but they're having problems accepting its *existence*.
What do you think will happen in third world countries when the first man becomes immortal, and he's an American? There will be war.
I'm glad you're enjoying your rose-colored glasses, but the transcendence of the human race is going to be as turbulent as it is inevitable. Brace yourselves.
Here are some pictures of Priscilla. That robot is scary looking. I wouldn't want to meet it (her?) on a soccer field or anywhere else.
Robots should be cute. Otherwise they remind us of the whole taking-over-the-world scenario.
But the researchers are arguing that it's a matter of how the brain predicts motion in a 3D space. The physical training is not supposed to be the issue here. The researchers are blaming the eye part of the astronauts' eye-hand coordination, and that's something that video games can train.
:)
I'm left with two conclusions, both of which are likely: That this research conclusion is either seriously flawed, or these astronauts have never played video games in their lives.