Actually, Sony got around this by having Toshiba stuff a vector processor in the PS2. Eight 128-bit FP registers, SIMD @ 300MHz.. Yah, it'll beat a P3 now, but Williamette (last of the IA-32 series) should per rumor, have 32 SSE registers, and should do a good job of keeping up with the PS2, if it doesn't cream it outright.
However, the integer side of the chip is standard RISC stuff AFAIK. So for handling game AI and decision making for the game elements, it should do quite nicely.
Bingo! no more problems, no more crappy ads, etc. I've been doing this with every banner provider I can find. However, can anyone come up with a good reason why this is a bad idea? (other than 'hope you don't work for doubleclick?')
Apple's been down this road before. I remember an old lawsuit by which they said MS was intruding on their look and feel for desktop GUIs. Now, anyone who's ever used both PCs and Macs knows that they look and act nothing alike. However, the fight went on, back and forth, until Xerox (the real inventors) brought out a demo of an Altos box. Here's where it gets interesting. See, the Macintosh team (at least one of them) had seen one of Xerox's systems at PARC back in the late 70s/early 80s. And had _blatantly_ ripped off the UI. In fact, if you look at the 2-color System 1-6 GUI, it's the same (and I mean _identical_) as what Xerox had put together. I take that back. There was one difference, instead of the apple logo on the apple menu, there was the Xerox stylized "X". And that was the ONLY difference. Xerox started making rumblings that if MS and Apple didn't stop this silly shit (it was inciting lots of other lawsuits), they were going to start playing the part of the 9000-pound gorilla (with evidence to boot!) that invented the GUI, and bitch-slap both companies into receivership with legal fees and licensing fees and other back fines, etc.
Apple and MS backed off, and there (to my knowledge) hasn't been a similar lawsuit in ages. Until now. You'd think that Jobs'd learn from his mistakes. You just can't sue over look and feel.
Well, to begin with, you have to define obscenity. Now, in order for something to really be obscene, it first has to lampoon or in some way defile something thought to be sacred. However, if you are to take a completely objective and clinical look at the human race, nay, the entirety of the universe, _nothing_ is sacred. There is simply no such thing. Therefore, obscenity can only be applied as a single person's opinion, and should therefore be protected as free speech. I invoke Voltaire: "I may not agree with everything you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
And honestly, I don't care what the hell you're doing in the privacy of your own home. As long as it's not physically or mentally harming another person without their consent (now, there are going to have to be some exceptions, $cientology would be one of them), there shouldn't be any problem with it.
Please. I'd _kill_ to see more women get involved in what we do (net. engineers, software devel, unix admin, etc). Unfortuantely, this won't happen very quickly for a couple of reasons:
You have to want to excel in a technical subject. Not that women don't, but this requires a focused effort in learning the craft. Now, most girls I've met (and this isn't to slam anyone reading this here, you're obviously not in this group) are more concerned with landing a guy and getting pregnant. Sorry, if you stop to have children in your 20s, you're probably not going to make it here. Kids take a _huge_ amount of your time and energy, and if you want to raise your children properly (instilling them with a good set of morals and a certain degree of respect for everyone, etc), you simply won't have the time to pursue a career in this field. It will just take more time than you have in a given day to do both.
Secondly, given the state of our society, attractive women (and this applies to men, too) don't have to work; the rest of society will pay them, in some form or another, to be beautiful. There's no incentive there to get a clue. (i'm really trying not to be derogatory) When you can stand on a stage and wave your tits around, or if you can get people to pay you for your photograph (don't get me wrong, both can be very lucrative fields, moreso than tech), there's no need to spend time holed up in a cube farm or behind a desk, earning your $35/hr bill rate.
Now, I'm really not slamming the exotic dancer/modelling career fields, as both take some degree of effort (have to stay in shape, and both can be quite time demanding). However, I think that the above are going to be significant reasons why women are slow to become the "movers and shakers" (no pun intended) of the industry. Additionally, I don't think that it will create barriers to entry into the fields, and I think that from a user standpoint, women and men will be about equal.
Seriously, with Jedi, George learned that there's a hell of a lot of money to be made targeting the story to kids. Meaning three things: crap story (i.e., no real character development, no remotely adult situations like Leia & Han's romance in Empire), lots of commercialization, and more cheap plastic crap from the likes of Kenner, etc. bent on ripping you off under the guise of "collectibles"
yah, the text wanders and the grammer's messed up, but I dont' care...
I'm not kidding either. The 128x128 icons? The new look of the File Manager? The flashy windows? The extra buttons on the titlebars? huh. Looks like a huge kludge, but hey, at least the code they lifted was kinda stable to begin with. More than we can say for NT or heaven forbid, 9x...
is it possible that by effectively removing the 111 someodd additional genes, we might accidentally evolve the organism some millionfold amount by optimizing it's DNA for it? If the bug is reduced to it's minimum sequence, might it become some horrible kind of fast-moving flesh-eating bacteria? Sure, it coexists with homo sapiens now, but what if our tinkering creates a bug that's extremely good at reproducing and devouring humans?
Think: it's obviously evolved to the point where it doesn't set off our immune systems. It can comfortably feed off nutrients in the intercellular fluid. It's pretty much dedicated it's existance to feeding off of humans, so it's going to be able to rapidly break down our specific proteins. Speeding it up a few times might be enough for it to kill us easily.
I'm not a genetic engineer or cellular microbiologist, but I'd give this a miss for a few years until IBM gets their petaflop box done and we can run a few simulations of this thing before we loose it in reality.
that's all fine and good, but unfortunately, what everyone with your position seems to have forgotten is that we live under a system of Rule of Law by Precedent. What this means in simple terms is that the first judicial example of a case is generally the mindset used when dealing with a case. However, most judges in this country (at all levels) seem to have forgotten that fact, and therefore do not weigh carefully the full gravity of their decision. Now, in the case of etoy.com, this establishes a legal precedent for a corporation that owns a site name for business purposes to shut down an individual's site (with a similar but disparate name) solely on the basis that they "Didn't like what he said." Whether or not you view it as such, some scheming lawyer is going to use _exactly_ that argument to do the same to another site, thus strengthening the precedent. In any event, it means that a small part of your personal freedom has been chipped away. In short, it is now more or less accepted for a large corp to shut you up forcibly if you get in their way, thus pretty much burning the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Regardless of what you think about the rest of the pending 'net legislation out there, forcing the cable companies to open their lines is a Good Thing.
Up until recently, cable companies were given free reign over just about everything they did, as they were a one-way broadcast medium. Now they want to move into the consumer/broadband telecommunications arena. Well, sorry, the FCC already has regulations regarding services like that, and the RBOCs, LD carriers, and every littel podunk telco out there has to follow them, at some level. Just because the telcos use twisted-pair and the cablecos use coaxial doesn't make them any different. What matters is that they are providing part of a national communications infrastructure, something that requires them to guarantee a certain level of service, provide said service for specific rates (that they're not allowed to determine, the local principality determines that), and allow other competitors into the market. The FCC, with their hands-off policy towards cable has basically said, "No, AT&T, you have too much of a monopoly in the phone market, you have to divest and play by all new rules. Oh what? Cable? Uh, sure you can have that monopoly back..."
Congress is right in trying to stop that silly shit...
It's the old, tired-but-true Pascal's Wager that is used so often against atheists: "If you atheists are right and there is no God, then when I die, nothing will happen. But if we Christians are right and our God does exist, then when you die, you're going to fry for eternity. Therefore, worship God, because He's a safe bet!"
I'd like to extend that a little. What if you've picked the wrong god? There's hundreds of religions on this planet, each with at least one god, some with several. How do you know which one is right? They all have some kind of clause saying you will suffer horribly if you don't believe. I'd take the path of not believing in any of them, not playing favorites, so as not to piss any of them off.
Gee, maybe that would help. But probably not, since we can't afford to throw six figures at a politician's campaign fund just to get him or her to listen... Additionally, we can't get the ear of the persons who have the money in the first place.
Compare: 100 million persons with an average per capita of $27000. Or, 10,000 persons with an average per capita of $2,000,000. Or, 100 corporations with average revenues of $3,000,000,000. Who will get the largest part of the pie, attention-wise? I guarantee that each of the first group will have, overall, significantly less disposable income than either of the two latter groups. the problem isn't that people don't save enough, the problem is that the groups with money and power don't have to spend all of it just to survive.
and there's nothing we can do about it. Seriously. There's no way we geeks (or the rest of the population of the world) can do about this, since in order to fight these inane laws we have to have money, and unfortunately, we (the lower 90%) only control about 33% of the wealth. So the rich can continue to beat us down, and throw us bones (like TV, minimum wage, welfare, etc.) to pacify us, while they continue to solidify their position of power.
1. It looks like this is an extension of the original Voodoo architecture, but with 32bpp rendering, T-buffer, LOTS more RAM, better Z-buffering, etc.
2. I'm not really sure that geometry accel is a terribly important issue. Modern CPUs (P3/450) can push 100 FPS in Q3 right now. The limiting factor to date has been fillrate. If they can pull off what they say they can, you'll be getting 100 FPS in Q3 at _all_ resolutions. Also, increases in FP capacity in x86 or whatever CPUs will continue to allow more complex models, engines, etc.
2a. Additionally, if you're using a geometry accel, you're EXACTLY LIMITED to the capacity of the chip. No faster CPU is going to give you better performance. What happens when your 10 MFLOP processor isn't enough for Q6?
3. Metal process: It looks like that until they move to.18um processes, no single-chip solution is going to go faster than ~150MHz (safely). using the SLI-type design, 3dfx can ship faster solutions than the competition, using a cheaper process (.25um), with better reliability. Then when they have a cheaper.18 process, up go the clock rates and out comes a new board! Remember, for the V5 6k, clock rate increases are magnified by a factor of four!
I think they've picked the right solution for the times, kept themselves from pissing off Intel (which Nvidia is sure to do), and delivered on their promise of but-kicking features and performance!
You know I was sure that this already existed in the form of good logging on your servers, session logging firewalls, and sniffers. Why reinvent the wheel?
Well, this also goes along with a pet theory of mine. All these big media companies are money-grubbing greed-driven capitalists. At some point they're going to have to get used to slimmer margins, as what they're trying to do is make up for expense in volume, and that requires you to drop your price. Look at hard drives. The individual margin for a disk from say, Seagate (EIDE, not SCSI), is around 2-5%. They make up the cost by selling zillions of drives. The margins on a DVD are around 90%. they dont' really care if the DVD doesn't sell, as the studio is usually ahead by the end of the theater run; any money that comes in from rentals and home-video purchases is pretty much pure profit.
I dunno if these attacks are really that coordinated. A random SYN flood looks like hundreds if not thousands of servers are hammering you all day long. And what's worse is that there's no real way to defend against it.
And as for smurf attacks (ICMP echo-requests desined for the broadcast address), any engineer or network admin worth his salt should be setting 'no ip directed-broadcast' on _all_ of his interfaces. That'll put a stop to that silly shit right now.
Is intellectual laziness on the part of the US citizenry (and the human race in general). I spoke with one of my friends at length regarding the gun issues facing our country and world. He constructed a fascinating argument using personal responsibility as the reason why guns should be legal and unencombered. Managed to use the 1920s prohibition as an example. When I brought up the fact that the _exact_same_argument_ (personal responsibility) can be used to promote the legalization of drugs (he did use prohibition as an example), his response was, "No not really. Drugs are bad."
?????
How did this happen? It just amazes me that people are so often blind to flaws in their logic, just because it would force them to change their mind. Reminds me of something the fortune file served up the other day:
"The very powerful and very stupid have something in common. Instead of changing their mind to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their mind. It can get pretty nasty when you're one of the facts that needs changing."
for me this brings up another point. Really, what do we all want most from this life? How can we be allowed to experience it to its fullest within our lifetimes? If an intelligent machine is brought into this world to find itself with selfless humans, why would it want to take over? Wouldn't it quickly ('cause they is fazt!) come to the same conclusion that the rest of us have? that we just want to live in peace, not have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, to feel like we belong, to enjoy a sunset, play, laugh, sing, feel productive when we need to, have a sens of accomplishment, in our hobbies and our jobs (what they may be in 100+ years should be interesting) and in general, just have a good time and be happy. Now, any of you not agreeing with me, I feel sorry for. You can go ahead and do what you want, but don't push it on me.
Why wouldn't a being made in our image want the same thing?
??? You're forgetting that based on economic value only, and the potential for faster computers, will drive the nanotech and computer markets to the point that it _is_ feasable to build a device of such staggering complexity as the human brain, do it in an order of magnitude less space, have it be upwards of 10-100,000 times faster than what you're currently running in, and do it cheaply.
Oh, and to the guy who used the bad SF story as some crap form of evidence, the labormonkeys forgot to tell the machine what the end result was they wanted. If they told it that they wanted to grade the land for a construction site, it would have taken into account _every_ local variable it was aware of, and would have done a fantastic job. Remember, we still have to do most of the work in making the box do the rest of the work for us. Besides, brute force CPU will never reach the level of matching the wholeness of the human brain. Well, not in the short term. There are too many complex systems to have to emulate.
Half of imagination is a complex feedback circuit between the visual cortex and the corpus collosum (sp?).
But a box can be configured to reduce engineering systems, given a knowledge of physics, 3d modelling, and the intended result. In the long term, engineering expert systems are going to save our ass. The real problem for nanotech is the fact that the systems we want to produce are just too complex. More so than even the human body, and they'll use far more exotic components. Too complex, in fact, to be created on any kind of timescale short of decades. Expert systems will reduce design times to weeks, or even hours, as CPU power increases.
and I'm starting to wander. hm. think i'll stop now.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Sony got around this by having Toshiba stuff a vector processor in the PS2. Eight 128-bit FP registers, SIMD @ 300MHz.. Yah, it'll beat a P3 now, but Williamette (last of the IA-32 series) should per rumor, have 32 SSE registers, and should do a good job of keeping up with the PS2, if it doesn't cream it outright.
However, the integer side of the chip is standard RISC stuff AFAIK. So for handling game AI and decision making for the game elements, it should do quite nicely.
hosts file:
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ads.doubleclick.net
Bingo! no more problems, no more crappy ads, etc. I've been doing this with every banner provider I can find. However, can anyone come up with a good reason why this is a bad idea? (other than 'hope you don't work for doubleclick?')
Apple's been down this road before. I remember an old lawsuit by which they said MS was intruding on their look and feel for desktop GUIs. Now, anyone who's ever used both PCs and Macs knows that they look and act nothing alike. However, the fight went on, back and forth, until Xerox (the real inventors) brought out a demo of an Altos box. Here's where it gets interesting. See, the Macintosh team (at least one of them) had seen one of Xerox's systems at PARC back in the late 70s/early 80s. And had _blatantly_ ripped off the UI. In fact, if you look at the 2-color System 1-6 GUI, it's the same (and I mean _identical_) as what Xerox had put together. I take that back. There was one difference, instead of the apple logo on the apple menu, there was the Xerox stylized "X". And that was the ONLY difference. Xerox started making rumblings that if MS and Apple didn't stop this silly shit (it was inciting lots of other lawsuits), they were going to start playing the part of the 9000-pound gorilla (with evidence to boot!) that invented the GUI, and bitch-slap both companies into receivership with legal fees and licensing fees and other back fines, etc.
Apple and MS backed off, and there (to my knowledge) hasn't been a similar lawsuit in ages. Until now. You'd think that Jobs'd learn from his mistakes. You just can't sue over look and feel.
Well, to begin with, you have to define obscenity. Now, in order for something to really be obscene, it first has to lampoon or in some way defile something thought to be sacred. However, if you are to take a completely objective and clinical look at the human race, nay, the entirety of the universe, _nothing_ is sacred. There is simply no such thing. Therefore, obscenity can only be applied as a single person's opinion, and should therefore be protected as free speech. I invoke Voltaire: "I may not agree with everything you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
And honestly, I don't care what the hell you're doing in the privacy of your own home. As long as it's not physically or mentally harming another person without their consent (now, there are going to have to be some exceptions, $cientology would be one of them), there shouldn't be any problem with it.
this may be redundant but who cares..
Please. I'd _kill_ to see more women get involved in what we do (net. engineers, software devel, unix admin, etc). Unfortuantely, this won't happen very quickly for a couple of reasons:
You have to want to excel in a technical subject. Not that women don't, but this requires a focused effort in learning the craft. Now, most girls I've met (and this isn't to slam anyone reading this here, you're obviously not in this group) are more concerned with landing a guy and getting pregnant. Sorry, if you stop to have children in your 20s, you're probably not going to make it here. Kids take a _huge_ amount of your time and energy, and if you want to raise your children properly (instilling them with a good set of morals and a certain degree of respect for everyone, etc), you simply won't have the time to pursue a career in this field. It will just take more time than you have in a given day to do both.
Secondly, given the state of our society, attractive women (and this applies to men, too) don't have to work; the rest of society will pay them, in some form or another, to be beautiful. There's no incentive there to get a clue. (i'm really trying not to be derogatory) When you can stand on a stage and wave your tits around, or if you can get people to pay you for your photograph (don't get me wrong, both can be very lucrative fields, moreso than tech), there's no need to spend time holed up in a cube farm or behind a desk, earning your $35/hr bill rate.
Now, I'm really not slamming the exotic dancer/modelling career fields, as both take some degree of effort (have to stay in shape, and both can be quite time demanding). However, I think that the above are going to be significant reasons why women are slow to become the "movers and shakers" (no pun intended) of the industry. Additionally, I don't think that it will create barriers to entry into the fields, and I think that from a user standpoint, women and men will be about equal.
I just know I'm gonna get flamed for this...
Seriously, with Jedi, George learned that there's a hell of a lot of money to be made targeting the story to kids. Meaning three things: crap story (i.e., no real character development, no remotely adult situations like Leia & Han's romance in Empire), lots of commercialization, and more cheap plastic crap from the likes of Kenner, etc. bent on ripping you off under the guise of "collectibles"
yah, the text wanders and the grammer's messed up, but I dont' care...
I'm not kidding either. The 128x128 icons? The new look of the File Manager? The flashy windows? The extra buttons on the titlebars? huh. Looks like a huge kludge, but hey, at least the code they lifted was kinda stable to begin with. More than we can say for NT or heaven forbid, 9x...
see above
is it possible that by effectively removing the 111 someodd additional genes, we might accidentally evolve the organism some millionfold amount by optimizing it's DNA for it? If the bug is reduced to it's minimum sequence, might it become some horrible kind of fast-moving flesh-eating bacteria? Sure, it coexists with homo sapiens now, but what if our tinkering creates a bug that's extremely good at reproducing and devouring humans?
Think: it's obviously evolved to the point where it doesn't set off our immune systems. It can comfortably feed off nutrients in the intercellular fluid. It's pretty much dedicated it's existance to feeding off of humans, so it's going to be able to rapidly break down our specific proteins. Speeding it up a few times might be enough for it to kill us easily.
I'm not a genetic engineer or cellular microbiologist, but I'd give this a miss for a few years until IBM gets their petaflop box done and we can run a few simulations of this thing before we loose it in reality.
see above
tune those babies to different frequencies, build a controller, get close enough to someone, then dance them like a puppet!
that's all fine and good, but unfortunately, what everyone with your position seems to have forgotten is that we live under a system of Rule of Law by Precedent. What this means in simple terms is that the first judicial example of a case is generally the mindset used when dealing with a case. However, most judges in this country (at all levels) seem to have forgotten that fact, and therefore do not weigh carefully the full gravity of their decision. Now, in the case of etoy.com, this establishes a legal precedent for a corporation that owns a site name for business purposes to shut down an individual's site (with a similar but disparate name) solely on the basis that they "Didn't like what he said." Whether or not you view it as such, some scheming lawyer is going to use _exactly_ that argument to do the same to another site, thus strengthening the precedent. In any event, it means that a small part of your personal freedom has been chipped away. In short, it is now more or less accepted for a large corp to shut you up forcibly if you get in their way, thus pretty much burning the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!
I thought that it went something like this:
"The ratio of transistors to area doubles roughly every 18 months."
Now, whether this directly translates into performance is to be debated. But by and large, Gordon was right...
Regardless of what you think about the rest of the pending 'net legislation out there, forcing the cable companies to open their lines is a Good Thing.
Up until recently, cable companies were given free reign over just about everything they did, as they were a one-way broadcast medium. Now they want to move into the consumer/broadband telecommunications arena. Well, sorry, the FCC already has regulations regarding services like that, and the RBOCs, LD carriers, and every littel podunk telco out there has to follow them, at some level. Just because the telcos use twisted-pair and the cablecos use coaxial doesn't make them any different. What matters is that they are providing part of a national communications infrastructure, something that requires them to guarantee a certain level of service, provide said service for specific rates (that they're not allowed to determine, the local principality determines that), and allow other competitors into the market. The FCC, with their hands-off policy towards cable has basically said, "No, AT&T, you have too much of a monopoly in the phone market, you have to divest and play by all new rules. Oh what? Cable? Uh, sure you can have that monopoly back..."
Congress is right in trying to stop that silly shit...
you mentioned Pascal's Wager:
It's the old, tired-but-true Pascal's Wager that is used so often against atheists: "If you atheists are right and there is no God, then when I die, nothing will happen. But if we Christians are right and our God does exist, then when you die, you're going to fry for eternity. Therefore, worship God, because He's a safe bet!"
I'd like to extend that a little. What if you've picked the wrong god? There's hundreds of religions on this planet, each with at least one god, some with several. How do you know which one is right? They all have some kind of clause saying you will suffer horribly if you don't believe. I'd take the path of not believing in any of them, not playing favorites, so as not to piss any of them off.
Gee, maybe that would help. But probably not, since we can't afford to throw six figures at a politician's campaign fund just to get him or her to listen... Additionally, we can't get the ear of the persons who have the money in the first place.
Compare: 100 million persons with an average per capita of $27000. Or, 10,000 persons with an average per capita of $2,000,000. Or, 100 corporations with average revenues of $3,000,000,000. Who will get the largest part of the pie, attention-wise? I guarantee that each of the first group will have, overall, significantly less disposable income than either of the two latter groups. the problem isn't that people don't save enough, the problem is that the groups with money and power don't have to spend all of it just to survive.
and there's nothing we can do about it. Seriously. There's no way we geeks (or the rest of the population of the world) can do about this, since in order to fight these inane laws we have to have money, and unfortunately, we (the lower 90%) only control about 33% of the wealth. So the rich can continue to beat us down, and throw us bones (like TV, minimum wage, welfare, etc.) to pacify us, while they continue to solidify their position of power.
There's no hope.
I see a few things here:
.18um processes, no single-chip solution is going to go faster than ~150MHz (safely). using the SLI-type design, 3dfx can ship faster solutions than the competition, using a cheaper process (.25um), with better reliability. Then when they have a cheaper .18 process, up go the clock rates and out comes a new board! Remember, for the V5 6k, clock rate increases are magnified by a factor of four!
1. It looks like this is an extension of the original Voodoo architecture, but with 32bpp rendering, T-buffer, LOTS more RAM, better Z-buffering, etc.
2. I'm not really sure that geometry accel is a terribly important issue. Modern CPUs (P3/450) can push 100 FPS in Q3 right now. The limiting factor to date has been fillrate. If they can pull off what they say they can, you'll be getting 100 FPS in Q3 at _all_ resolutions. Also, increases in FP capacity in x86 or whatever CPUs will continue to allow more complex models, engines, etc.
2a. Additionally, if you're using a geometry accel, you're EXACTLY LIMITED to the capacity of the chip. No faster CPU is going to give you better performance. What happens when your 10 MFLOP processor isn't enough for Q6?
3. Metal process: It looks like that until they move to
I think they've picked the right solution for the times, kept themselves from pissing off Intel (which Nvidia is sure to do), and delivered on their promise of but-kicking features and performance!
You know I was sure that this already existed in the form of good logging on your servers, session logging firewalls, and sniffers. Why reinvent the wheel?
Well, this also goes along with a pet theory of mine. All these big media companies are money-grubbing greed-driven capitalists. At some point they're going to have to get used to slimmer margins, as what they're trying to do is make up for expense in volume, and that requires you to drop your price. Look at hard drives. The individual margin for a disk from say, Seagate (EIDE, not SCSI), is around 2-5%. They make up the cost by selling zillions of drives. The margins on a DVD are around 90%. they dont' really care if the DVD doesn't sell, as the studio is usually ahead by the end of the theater run; any money that comes in from rentals and home-video purchases is pretty much pure profit.
I dunno if these attacks are really that coordinated. A random SYN flood looks like hundreds if not thousands of servers are hammering you all day long. And what's worse is that there's no real way to defend against it.
And as for smurf attacks (ICMP echo-requests desined for the broadcast address), any engineer or network admin worth his salt should be setting 'no ip directed-broadcast' on _all_ of his interfaces. That'll put a stop to that silly shit right now.
Proof that the single most damaging aspect of humanity is greed.
Is intellectual laziness on the part of the US citizenry (and the human race in general). I spoke with one of my friends at length regarding the gun issues facing our country and world. He constructed a fascinating argument using personal responsibility as the reason why guns should be legal and unencombered. Managed to use the 1920s prohibition as an example. When I brought up the fact that the _exact_same_argument_ (personal responsibility) can be used to promote the legalization of drugs (he did use prohibition as an example), his response was, "No not really. Drugs are bad."
?????
How did this happen? It just amazes me that people are so often blind to flaws in their logic, just because it would force them to change their mind. Reminds me of something the fortune file served up the other day:
"The very powerful and very stupid have something in common. Instead of changing their mind to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their mind. It can get pretty nasty when you're one of the facts that needs changing."
I forget who said this. Oh, yah, it was Dr. Who.
for me this brings up another point. Really, what do we all want most from this life? How can we be allowed to experience it to its fullest within our lifetimes? If an intelligent machine is brought into this world to find itself with selfless humans, why would it want to take over? Wouldn't it quickly ('cause they is fazt!) come to the same conclusion that the rest of us have? that we just want to live in peace, not have to worry about where the next meal is coming from, to feel like we belong, to enjoy a sunset, play, laugh, sing, feel productive when we need to, have a sens of accomplishment, in our hobbies and our jobs (what they may be in 100+ years should be interesting) and in general, just have a good time and be happy. Now, any of you not agreeing with me, I feel sorry for. You can go ahead and do what you want, but don't push it on me.
Why wouldn't a being made in our image want the same thing?
??? You're forgetting that based on economic value only, and the potential for faster computers, will drive the nanotech and computer markets to the point that it _is_ feasable to build a device of such staggering complexity as the human brain, do it in an order of magnitude less space, have it be upwards of 10-100,000 times faster than what you're currently running in, and do it cheaply.
Oh, and to the guy who used the bad SF story as some crap form of evidence, the labormonkeys forgot to tell the machine what the end result was they wanted. If they told it that they wanted to grade the land for a construction site, it would have taken into account _every_ local variable it was aware of, and would have done a fantastic job. Remember, we still have to do most of the work in making the box do the rest of the work for us. Besides, brute force CPU will never reach the level of matching the wholeness of the human brain. Well, not in the short term. There are too many complex systems to have to emulate.
Half of imagination is a complex feedback circuit between the visual cortex and the corpus collosum (sp?).
But a box can be configured to reduce engineering systems, given a knowledge of physics, 3d modelling, and the intended result. In the long term, engineering expert systems are going to save our ass. The real problem for nanotech is the fact that the systems we want to produce are just too complex. More so than even the human body, and they'll use far more exotic components. Too complex, in fact, to be created on any kind of timescale short of decades. Expert systems will reduce design times to weeks, or even hours, as CPU power increases.
and I'm starting to wander. hm. think i'll stop now.