CO2 isn't just needed for the greenhouse effect. It's also a necessity for plant life. Without not enough CO2 plants will not be able to create enough oxygen. And also, keeping CO2 production high? How? We're talking about an annual production of CO2 that rivals, if not surpasses that of all the Earth's industry and transportation combined.
And yes, terraforming Mars will be a long, slow and boring process:-)
The one thing that many scenarios for terraforming Mars forget is that Mars has no plate tectonics. At first glance that doesn't seem important, but actually it is.
The oceans of the Earth absorb an amazing amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the water that CO2 reacts with the water to form carbonates, which settle on the ocean floor. The carbonates are recycled back into CO2, back into the atmosphere by underwater volcanos along the Atlantic and Pacific ocean ridges. The amount of CO2 that is put back into the atmosphere that way is exactly the same as the amount of CO2 that is absorbed by the oceans.
A very delicate balance, that didn't, doesn't, and never will exist on Mars. When Mars was young it was probably quite similar to the Earth. Nice and warm. Life might have, and probably did, begin. But the oceans sucked in the CO2, the carbonates settled on the ocean floor, and there were no plate tectonics, no volcanos to recycle those carbonates back into CO2, back into the atmosphere. Slowly but steadily Mars ran out of CO2, the temperatures dropped because the main greenhouse gas was gone, and the planet froze.
Now what would happen if we terraformed Mars? There'd be liquid oceans again. And again the same problem would arise. CO2 would be absorbed into those oceans, carbonates would settle on the ocean floor, and eventually Mars would again freeze up. Sure, then you could terraform again, or you could introduce other greenhouse gasses to keep Mars' temperature elevated, but eventually you wouldn't be able to keep up.
The balance on Earth is so delicate that even a small change can screw up the climates all around the globe. Mars is completely different, it'll have a completely different balance.
Venus, Terra and Mars all started alike. Venus' greenhouse effect got completely out of control and the planet heated up, probably even before life could form. Mars' greenhouse effect screwed up aswell, and the planet froze up before any complex life could form. Terra is right inbetween. A delicate balance that becomes upset after only minute changes. A delicate balance that imho is doomed to fail if attempted on any other planet.
Terraforming mars is nice stuff for fiction, but I'm convinced it will never happen. And if it does, it probably won't last for more than a few hundred or maybe a few thousand years.
Mars is also 1.637 times farther away from the sun, so it gets only 0.373 times the solar radiation as Terra here gets. Ultra violet solar radiation is probably still quite a big problem on Mars. And even though Mars is a lot farther away, solar winds might also provide a big problem. Due to its proximity to the Asteroid Belt it's also more likely to be hit by a big piece of space junk. Actually, Antarctica and the Sahara are hundreds of times more hospitable to human life than Mars.
But then again, in the place that is the most inhospitable to human life here on Earth, in the depths of the oceans, there is life, completely independent from the sun. Actually I think the chance of finding life on Europa are larger than the chance of finding life on Mars. Mars' climate is unlike that anywhere on earth. Below Europa's icey surface are liquid oceans, melted by its volcanos; an environment quite similar to the depths of the Earth's oceans; an environment quite similar to the environment many scientists believe spawned the first life on Earth.
However most witches, decided that "witch" was bad PR, so their religion is now called Wikken (sp?).
that's Wicca... and though Wicca and Witchcraft do have a large common area, they're not the same. most Wiccans are Witches, but by far not all Witches are Wiccans... I for example am a Witch, but I do not adhere as strictly to the Wiccan Rede as would a Wiccan, so I feel I don't really qualify as a Wiccan.
as for names with a bad connotation... yes, one way is to invent a new term. Wicca was coined first in the '50s by Gerald Gardner for probably exactly that reason. but all Witches bear the name Witch with honor and dignity as all Hackers bear the name Hacker with honor and dignity.
see, witches and hackers have yet another thing in common. we don't really care what the outside world thinks.:-)
Bingo. That is THE way to solve such a problem. I'm a witch, so I'm seeing the same thing in another area aswell. The general people at large have no idea what exactly witches are and what they do, so they kind of stick to the stereotypes of the Wicked Witch of the West... Just like they stick to l337 hax0rz when they see the word "hacker".
The way to dispel such ignorance is through information. Tell them what you do and what you don't do. Teach them what your ways are. And slowly but steadily the general idea will start to change, and the mainstream media will start to catch on. Just about now we witches are finally starting to break through the problem in the US, after half a century. In Europe we still have a long way to go.
Hackers probably won't effect a change much faster... Count on at least few decennia before the word hacker is finally used correctly by mainstream media. But it'll get there.
The word "hacker" may have a negative ring to it to the general populace, and so you might think of inserting the term "good hacker"...
The same thing is happening in other things too. Witches and satanists are coping with the same problems. Some witches call themselves "white witches" to discern themselves from the stereotypical witch, as some hackers might call themselves "good hackers" to discern themselves from the stereotypical hacker. But that's not the solution. I know. I'm a witch, and I'm a hacker.
Yes, some would call me a white witch. Yes, some would call me a good hacker. But I'm just a witch, just a hacker. Even though the general populace holds negative images regarding those words, I prefer to call myself a plain witch, a plain hacker, a plain nerd.
A real witch knows there is no such thing as good or bad witches. A real hacker knows there is no such thing as good or bad hackers. There are just witches, and just hackers. Who cares what the general populace thinks.
)O( the Gods have a sense of humor,
Re: Net as a commodity:Bad Idea or Spawn of Satan?
on
Bandwidth as Commodity
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· Score: 1
let me get this straight... people pay money to buy routers, servers and lines, and pay yet more money to maintain them, yet you demand to use that for free? and for illegal activity too? that's like going into a McDonalds, sitting down in the non-smoker section, lighting a cigarette, and demanding you have a Quarterpounder menu for free.
)O( the Gods have a sense of humor,
Re: Net as a commodity:Bad Idea or Spawn of Satan?
on
Bandwidth as Commodity
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· Score: 2
I think you're thinking in the wrong direction. Comparing the internet with gas lines is just a bad comparison, because, indeed as you say, on one side, a cubic foot of gas has an intrinsic value, while a kilobyte of packets doesn't. But on the other side, bandwidth can be shared between dozens of consumers and providers. Try sending one specific cubic foot of gas from one specific point to another specific point through that big net of pipes...:-)
Comparing gas pipelines and the internet is like comparing melons and oranges. They're kind of similar, but the similarity is only superficial.
The internet can much better be compared with mail and transport. A pound of mail has no intrinsic value either, nor does a cubic foot of mail package, just like a kilobyte of packets. One cubic foot of mail package can travel seemingly independently from one consumer to another through the mail system, just like a kilobyte of packets can do that through the internet.
How does the mail work? You pay for upstream mail only, and many companies, as a service, give you postage paid enveloppes for your return mail. The internet could work the same way, and that's what I think the general geste here is.
But then still there's the bit about the bandwidth. Basically to you nothing would change. You'd just pop your packet into the mailbox, and your ISP would empty that mailbox. But then your ISP has the choice to send it on with UPS, with TNT, with American Express, and so on, and your ISP would choose the best option regarding speed and cost. You, the consumer, wouldn't notice very much of a difference, except maybe a cost decrease and/or speed increase because your ISP can easily choose what's best.
Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're proposing to turn the world upside down; that content providers (servers) pay networks to connect them to ISPs instead of consumers paying their ISPs to connect them to the content providers? Very interesting, I had never thought of that.
Off the top of my head, without having spent very much time thinking this over, I can think of a few problems. Perhaps they're not problems at all, perhaps there are solutions that I've overlooked. Or I may have completely misinterpreted your idea:-)
1) Consumer to consumer connections. Since the content providers pay the WANS who pay the ISPs, who pays for such a connection?
2) What would happen to sites like Slashdot? It would cost much more to maintain such a site, and they'd probably have to ask a (small) fee for not being an Anonymous Coward, if you catch my drift. On the other hand, this could be good or bad.
3) Advertising on the web would increase immensely. I'm already completely fed up with banners, especially those banners that pop up right in your face, but that'll just get worse, especially on free content providers like Geoshitties. On the other hand, with a bit of luck Geoshitties will cease to exist:-)
On the other hand, now that I spent a few more minutes thinking it over while writing this, it would be more of a real world feel actually. When you order something you pay that company for the goods, and you pay them to deliver the goods to you. That company hires a TNT or American Express or whatever to deliver those goods to you. The internet would follow the same model.
In that view, maybe the consumer to consumer connections could be solved too in such a way by having a consumer pay for his upstream data, while downstream data is payed for by the other party, just like with snailmail. And ofcourse then you could (should) also have content providers that do the equivalent of sending you a postage paid envelope for your packets to them.
Very interesting... I'll have to spend some more thought on this.:-)
That's just part of the scenarios. Some of the scenarios I've seen were very extensive, and very interesting too.
It would start with a power grid failing, and nobody knowing why. Then the traffic lights in NYC would go haywire for some time. Then a large newspaper would be shut down. Then a satellite would go off course and fall back to earth. A ferocious virus would suddenly pop up and spread like wildfire across the Internet. A Boeing 777 falls out of the sky due to a strange software malfunction. An emergency breaks out at a nuclear power plant due to some software glitch. All sorts of such seemingly unconnected incidents would probably be extremely effective cyberwarfare. It would take weeks, perhaps even months before defence would fully realize the US were under attack. And currently there is nothing that could stop such a scenario from actually happening.
Personally I worry more about a cyber attack than about Y2K... Not that I worry much about Y2K, but that's a different story:-)
I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly news. Well, it's news that they're going to use it against Milosevic, but it's not news that Information Warfare aka Cyberwarfare exists. The Pentagon has been working on it for a long time, and there are also lots of Cyberwarfare scenarios.
By the way, the country that is most vulnerable to Cyberwarfare is the USA. Literally everything is run by or with the aid of computers. Good Cyberwarfare could criple the US completely. Yugoslavia however is probably pretty much impervious to Cyberwarfare because most of the country is run without computers.
*nod*... I'm busy learning C at the moment, so I'm far from making a coding contribution, but I have some experience with testing non-free software, and I can certainly understand the general structure of a program to make detailed bug reports. when I encounter a bug in a program I'm using I'll send a bug report, but I'm not really involved in any testing at the moment. I'd like to though:-)
exactly. it's illegal, it's a crime, period. you should see what's going on on THIS campus lan... I'm pretty sure that there's nobody here who doesn't have something illegal on his system. if "they" came they could probably book every single one of us and take our hardware. ofcourse if they come I could simply do rm -rf/dos/* to get rid of all the illegal stuff on my system, but my CDs would be gone.
and then some, if they come and take one, the message that they're here will spread around campus at the speed of light, and everybody will dump their burners and cds in the nearest ditch. I've seen one person get caught, but he was publicly advertising his MP3 site, which is ofcourse the dumbest thing you can do. as for the rest, we're well shielded. if you keep a low profile they won't come get you.
a close personal friend of mine is right in the center of the MP3, music video and movie "business". he'd just dump his CD collection and rip out his hard drive. sure, big loss, but it's less of a loss than being caught. two words: Shodan, VooDooMovie.:-)
by the way, I'm damn sure Big Brother knows what's going on here. but they also know damn well that they'd only get one or two big fish and a few dozen small ones, and the other big fish would just ditch their equipment and help the smaller fish ditch theirs.
same thing happens when there's a road sign razzia. they empty one or two dorms, and immedeately all the other dorms know what's going on and they ditch their road signs on the roof. once they did manage to get a big catch by offering a cream pie for every road sign returned to the police. what they hadn't anticipated is that people didn't return previously stolen roadsigns but stole new ones to get more pies:-)
)O( the Gods have a sense of humor,
computer games _decrease_ violence...
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
every kid, especially every adolescent, has feelings of rage, feelings of agression sometimes. pure natural adrenalin rushes, that in the biological order of things prepare them to become adults, prepare them to become leaders. in every class there are one or two bullies (alphas) and one or two outcasts (omegas). that's just the natural order of things, we have that in common with almost every other pack animal.
in the natural order of things children would play and fight among eachother just like lion cubs do. but those acts of agression are seen as bad nowadays, and the agression is kept inside, which in turn can and will turn into stress. just like adults on the job who hate their boss will become stressed because their body is preparing for a fight to challenge the boss, but that fight ofcourse never comes.
games like doom and quake and the like form an excellent vent for cropped up agression. instead of physically attacking one of your peers as would be the natural order of things you virtually attack a virtual peer.
your body, your hormones want to fight, but you won't let it. so if you instead fool it into thinking you're fighting you release that agression, that stress. in the olden days people used to go to the gym and run around or beat up a defenseless punching bag. nowadays adolescents go on the net and virtually beat up a virtual opponent. but the principle is the same.
imho keeping children FROM those kinds of games is harmful. they need to vent their natural agression anyway, so it's best to let them do it through a harmless computer game.
This law is against the Bill of Rights. Now this, what next? This is a bad precedent. Whenever now laws come up that are against the Bill of Rights they can point to this one and say "hey, that one is against the Bill of Rights, so why can't this one be?". What's next? CDA pushed through anyway? Big Brother? Sure, Big Brother is a hyperbole, and using this law as a precedent is a worst case scenario, but the point is that it's a possibility. This is a bad day for the rights of US citizens.
)O( the Gods have a sense of humor,
What most people want in a computer.
on
UNIX for Moms
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· Score: 2
What most people, including most moms, dads, little sisters and neighbors want in a computer is just a machine that does what they want it to do. They don't care how it actually works, they don't care about the many different ways to configure it, they just want it to do what they want it to do.
I've given up on trying to teach my parents (and my sister) to actually use a computer. my sister knows how to start her 486SX33, her printer, Word 2.0 and how to print stuff. she doesn't need more, she doesn't even play games. it's just a fancy typewriter to her, and that 486SX33 is sufficient to do that.
my father is a transport planner; he can figure out the best way to shove many tons of freight all across Europe and constantly have most trucks filled to the brim for maximum efficiency, and does that faster than a super computer. but when it comes to anything technical he's a complete moron, with the result that I fix everything around the house, from light switches to setting the time on the stereo and the vcr, to programming the TVs... all he does with the computer at home (my old P166) is play a few games, mainly sol.exe and mines.exe:-)
my mother is a grade school teacher (4 and 5 year olds), so she is mostly interested in computers for their educational purposes. she actually knows how to install programs and how to switch themes, but most of what she does with the computer at home is word processing and the odd simple game.
I've given up on trying to teach them you can do much more with a computer. they're simply not interested. it does what they want and/or need it to do, and when it doesn't they ask me to have a look at it. on the old machine was Win3.11 with Calypso to create a task bar. on the new machine is Win98, and I don't think my father noticed the difference. my mother did, but mainly because she could now more easily switch themes and screen savers.
most "dummies" aren't dumb. they're just not interested.
...is that there are many different flavors of linux and many different window managers. If, for example, RedHat + KDE becomes (l)user friendly the hardcore linux freaks could still use Debian or SuSe + fvwm2. besides, I'm sure they'll make the usability features options that can be switched off by more experienced users. and you must admit that the Windows Control Panel is pretty useful for the simple configuration stuff, and I'd love to see such a thing in linux, but when you get down and dirty nothing's better than plain text config files and joe:-)
see, it's not either one or the other, it's a symbiosis (sp?). hardcore linux geeks will still be able to use the Ultimate OS as they like to, while Joe Schmoe the average (l)user will also be able to get meaningful work done without having to get down and dirty into all the config files.
Linux isn't a big threat to Microsoft at all because linux is only used by people who actually know something about computers while MS Windows is generally used by people who don't know much about computers at all.
Windows will always be the main OS for home computing, unless MS manages to kill itself, and then some other Windows-like OS will fill the hole. Linux and OSS will always stay alive. there'll always be geeks and other computer-savvy people who like the idea of OSS and linux and will continue working on it.
OSS won't kill Microsoft, nor can MS ever hope to kill OSS.
With this technology, couldn't you also use the laser to burn a pattern of "live" and "dead" spaces into the medium, thus getting a read-only medium with even higher density? Or do you only get parallel lines of scoring?
no, that's not possible. all you can do is etch out lines, and by repeating the process rotated 90 degrees you can etch out a grid, so you create little islands of magnetic material.
Also, from what you're saying, this is a grid, not a radial pattern like what you'd need for a rotating disk medium. That might actually be better, though: what kinds of bearings could rotate a disk with only nanometers of vibration?
yup, it's a grid. but as you say, a rotating disk will undoubtedly vibrate, which probably is very bad for the head's accuracy:-)
I just found this out from a friend who's studying electrotechnics here; the University of Twente, Netherlands, is developing a similar system.
with current technology all domain grains are irregular, and the stronger ones might start dominating the weaker ones over time, corrupting the data, so you need about 100 domains per bit, making one bit about 50nm in size. the solution to that problem is to make sure all domains are equal in strength. up to here it's the same as the nanomagnet theory.
the next problem is how to get those grains on a drive, and here is where it starts differing. the nanomagnet technology takes a number of nanomagnets and lines them up. the technology developed by the UT uses LIL, Laser Interference Lithography. the surplus magnetic material is etched away using two interfering laser beams, so in the first go you create lines of magnetic material. then you turn it by 90 degrees and repeat the procedure to create small islands of magnetic material, at perfectly equal distances. currently they're able to create a periodicity of 200nm, but with a new laser they could decrease that to 160nm, and with a new technique that is still in development they could decrease it even to 80nm. yes, 80nm per bit.
they've also designed a head with a one atom wide tip to read the data... the only real problem still is how to position that head accurately enough and quickly enough to allow for reliable, efficient and quick reading and writing.
so basically the University of Twente is already ahaid of Cornell University:-)
this technology won't just enable you to create huge storage capacity in a standard size hard drive, but also teeny tiny hard drives with standard storage capacity... how big would a nano-magnet drive with 10GB capacity be? 0.5x1x2" maybe? imagine what that would do for portables and wearables. and a tiny drive like that would surely also take less power, yet another convenience...
well who says they're gonna put a full size hard drive in a portable MP3 player? just think how small a 5 or 10GB drive would be using that technology. tiny drives like that would revolutionize portable equipment like laptops, palmtops and MP3 players. not to mention that a drive like that would require much less power, which would also be very convenient for portable computers.
Slashdot Mirror
CO2 isn't just needed for the greenhouse effect. It's also a necessity for plant life. Without not enough CO2 plants will not be able to create enough oxygen. And also, keeping CO2 production high? How? We're talking about an annual production of CO2 that rivals, if not surpasses that of all the Earth's industry and transportation combined.
:-)
And yes, terraforming Mars will be a long, slow and boring process
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
The one thing that many scenarios for terraforming Mars forget is that Mars has no plate tectonics. At first glance that doesn't seem important, but actually it is.
The oceans of the Earth absorb an amazing amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. In the water that CO2 reacts with the water to form carbonates, which settle on the ocean floor. The carbonates are recycled back into CO2, back into the atmosphere by underwater volcanos along the Atlantic and Pacific ocean ridges. The amount of CO2 that is put back into the atmosphere that way is exactly the same as the amount of CO2 that is absorbed by the oceans.
A very delicate balance, that didn't, doesn't, and never will exist on Mars. When Mars was young it was probably quite similar to the Earth. Nice and warm. Life might have, and probably did, begin. But the oceans sucked in the CO2, the carbonates settled on the ocean floor, and there were no plate tectonics, no volcanos to recycle those carbonates back into CO2, back into the atmosphere. Slowly but steadily Mars ran out of CO2, the temperatures dropped because the main greenhouse gas was gone, and the planet froze.
Now what would happen if we terraformed Mars? There'd be liquid oceans again. And again the same problem would arise. CO2 would be absorbed into those oceans, carbonates would settle on the ocean floor, and eventually Mars would again freeze up. Sure, then you could terraform again, or you could introduce other greenhouse gasses to keep Mars' temperature elevated, but eventually you wouldn't be able to keep up.
The balance on Earth is so delicate that even a small change can screw up the climates all around the globe. Mars is completely different, it'll have a completely different balance.
Venus, Terra and Mars all started alike. Venus' greenhouse effect got completely out of control and the planet heated up, probably even before life could form. Mars' greenhouse effect screwed up aswell, and the planet froze up before any complex life could form. Terra is right inbetween. A delicate balance that becomes upset after only minute changes. A delicate balance that imho is doomed to fail if attempted on any other planet.
Terraforming mars is nice stuff for fiction, but I'm convinced it will never happen. And if it does, it probably won't last for more than a few hundred or maybe a few thousand years.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
Mars is also 1.637 times farther away from the sun, so it gets only 0.373 times the solar radiation as Terra here gets. Ultra violet solar radiation is probably still quite a big problem on Mars. And even though Mars is a lot farther away, solar winds might also provide a big problem. Due to its proximity to the Asteroid Belt it's also more likely to be hit by a big piece of space junk. Actually, Antarctica and the Sahara are hundreds of times more hospitable to human life than Mars.
But then again, in the place that is the most inhospitable to human life here on Earth, in the depths of the oceans, there is life, completely independent from the sun. Actually I think the chance of finding life on Europa are larger than the chance of finding life on Mars. Mars' climate is unlike that anywhere on earth. Below Europa's icey surface are liquid oceans, melted by its volcanos; an environment quite similar to the depths of the Earth's oceans; an environment quite similar to the environment many scientists believe spawned the first life on Earth.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
However most witches, decided that "witch" was bad PR, so their religion is now called Wikken (sp?).
:-)
that's Wicca... and though Wicca and Witchcraft do have a large common area, they're not the same. most Wiccans are Witches, but by far not all Witches are Wiccans... I for example am a Witch, but I do not adhere as strictly to the Wiccan Rede as would a Wiccan, so I feel I don't really qualify as a Wiccan.
as for names with a bad connotation... yes, one way is to invent a new term. Wicca was coined first in the '50s by Gerald Gardner for probably exactly that reason. but all Witches bear the name Witch with honor and dignity as all Hackers bear the name Hacker with honor and dignity.
see, witches and hackers have yet another thing in common. we don't really care what the outside world thinks.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
it can be found here. they threw a dictionary through the filter... let me list a few of the more stunning ones...
adult
alcohol
amaretto
amateur
anarchy
anus
aryan
available
babe
banging
bangle
bare
bastard
beaver
beer
bikini
binaries
blonde
bloody
bomb
bottom
bra
bud
buxom
chat
cherry
chicks
cigar
circumcise
conception
condom
destined
doom
dynamite
enema
eros
escort
explosive
fantasies
fist
flesh
fondle
free
frigid
geisha
gin
girlie
girls
glamour
gothic
grenade
gun
hack
hacker
heroine [no more female heros?]
hole
homo
incest
intercourse
jenny [???]
kill
killer
kissing
klan
klux
knights [???]
knives
ku
latex
leather
lesbian
lingerie
liquor
lover
well, you get the picture... it's f***ing outrageous.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
exactly. that too is why I prefer to call myself a witch and not a white witch, because the term "white witch" implies that other witches are bad.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
Bingo. That is THE way to solve such a problem. I'm a witch, so I'm seeing the same thing in another area aswell. The general people at large have no idea what exactly witches are and what they do, so they kind of stick to the stereotypes of the Wicked Witch of the West... Just like they stick to l337 hax0rz when they see the word "hacker".
The way to dispel such ignorance is through information. Tell them what you do and what you don't do. Teach them what your ways are. And slowly but steadily the general idea will start to change, and the mainstream media will start to catch on. Just about now we witches are finally starting to break through the problem in the US, after half a century. In Europe we still have a long way to go.
Hackers probably won't effect a change much faster... Count on at least few decennia before the word hacker is finally used correctly by mainstream media. But it'll get there.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
The word "hacker" may have a negative ring to it to the general populace, and so you might think of inserting the term "good hacker"...
The same thing is happening in other things too. Witches and satanists are coping with the same problems. Some witches call themselves "white witches" to discern themselves from the stereotypical witch, as some hackers might call themselves "good hackers" to discern themselves from the stereotypical hacker. But that's not the solution. I know. I'm a witch, and I'm a hacker.
Yes, some would call me a white witch. Yes, some would call me a good hacker. But I'm just a witch, just a hacker. Even though the general populace holds negative images regarding those words, I prefer to call myself a plain witch, a plain hacker, a plain nerd.
A real witch knows there is no such thing as good or bad witches. A real hacker knows there is no such thing as good or bad hackers. There are just witches, and just hackers. Who cares what the general populace thinks.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
let me get this straight... people pay money to buy routers, servers and lines, and pay yet more money to maintain them, yet you demand to use that for free? and for illegal activity too? that's like going into a McDonalds, sitting down in the non-smoker section, lighting a cigarette, and demanding you have a Quarterpounder menu for free.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
I think you're thinking in the wrong direction. Comparing the internet with gas lines is just a bad comparison, because, indeed as you say, on one side, a cubic foot of gas has an intrinsic value, while a kilobyte of packets doesn't. But on the other side, bandwidth can be shared between dozens of consumers and providers. Try sending one specific cubic foot of gas from one specific point to another specific point through that big net of pipes... :-)
Comparing gas pipelines and the internet is like comparing melons and oranges. They're kind of similar, but the similarity is only superficial.
The internet can much better be compared with mail and transport. A pound of mail has no intrinsic value either, nor does a cubic foot of mail package, just like a kilobyte of packets. One cubic foot of mail package can travel seemingly independently from one consumer to another through the mail system, just like a kilobyte of packets can do that through the internet.
How does the mail work? You pay for upstream mail only, and many companies, as a service, give you postage paid enveloppes for your return mail. The internet could work the same way, and that's what I think the general geste here is.
But then still there's the bit about the bandwidth. Basically to you nothing would change. You'd just pop your packet into the mailbox, and your ISP would empty that mailbox. But then your ISP has the choice to send it on with UPS, with TNT, with American Express, and so on, and your ISP would choose the best option regarding speed and cost. You, the consumer, wouldn't notice very much of a difference, except maybe a cost decrease and/or speed increase because your ISP can easily choose what's best.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're proposing to turn the world upside down; that content providers (servers) pay networks to connect them to ISPs instead of consumers paying their ISPs to connect them to the content providers? Very interesting, I had never thought of that.
:-)
:-)
:-)
Off the top of my head, without having spent very much time thinking this over, I can think of a few problems. Perhaps they're not problems at all, perhaps there are solutions that I've overlooked. Or I may have completely misinterpreted your idea
1) Consumer to consumer connections. Since the content providers pay the WANS who pay the ISPs, who pays for such a connection?
2) What would happen to sites like Slashdot? It would cost much more to maintain such a site, and they'd probably have to ask a (small) fee for not being an Anonymous Coward, if you catch my drift. On the other hand, this could be good or bad.
3) Advertising on the web would increase immensely. I'm already completely fed up with banners, especially those banners that pop up right in your face, but that'll just get worse, especially on free content providers like Geoshitties. On the other hand, with a bit of luck Geoshitties will cease to exist
On the other hand, now that I spent a few more minutes thinking it over while writing this, it would be more of a real world feel actually. When you order something you pay that company for the goods, and you pay them to deliver the goods to you. That company hires a TNT or American Express or whatever to deliver those goods to you. The internet would follow the same model.
In that view, maybe the consumer to consumer connections could be solved too in such a way by having a consumer pay for his upstream data, while downstream data is payed for by the other party, just like with snailmail. And ofcourse then you could (should) also have content providers that do the equivalent of sending you a postage paid envelope for your packets to them.
Very interesting... I'll have to spend some more thought on this.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
That's just part of the scenarios. Some of the scenarios I've seen were very extensive, and very interesting too.
:-)
It would start with a power grid failing, and nobody knowing why. Then the traffic lights in NYC would go haywire for some time. Then a large newspaper would be shut down. Then a satellite would go off course and fall back to earth. A ferocious virus would suddenly pop up and spread like wildfire across the Internet. A Boeing 777 falls out of the sky due to a strange software malfunction. An emergency breaks out at a nuclear power plant due to some software glitch. All sorts of such seemingly unconnected incidents would probably be extremely effective cyberwarfare. It would take weeks, perhaps even months before defence would fully realize the US were under attack. And currently there is nothing that could stop such a scenario from actually happening.
Personally I worry more about a cyber attack than about Y2K... Not that I worry much about Y2K, but that's a different story
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly news. Well, it's news that they're going to use it against Milosevic, but it's not news that Information Warfare aka Cyberwarfare exists. The Pentagon has been working on it for a long time, and there are also lots of Cyberwarfare scenarios.
By the way, the country that is most vulnerable to Cyberwarfare is the USA. Literally everything is run by or with the aid of computers. Good Cyberwarfare could criple the US completely. Yugoslavia however is probably pretty much impervious to Cyberwarfare because most of the country is run without computers.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
*nod*... I'm busy learning C at the moment, so I'm far from making a coding contribution, but I have some experience with testing non-free software, and I can certainly understand the general structure of a program to make detailed bug reports. when I encounter a bug in a program I'm using I'll send a bug report, but I'm not really involved in any testing at the moment. I'd like to though :-)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
exactly. it's illegal, it's a crime, period. you should see what's going on on THIS campus lan... I'm pretty sure that there's nobody here who doesn't have something illegal on his system. if "they" came they could probably book every single one of us and take our hardware. ofcourse if they come I could simply do rm -rf /dos/* to get rid of all the illegal stuff on my system, but my CDs would be gone.
:-)
:-)
and then some, if they come and take one, the message that they're here will spread around campus at the speed of light, and everybody will dump their burners and cds in the nearest ditch. I've seen one person get caught, but he was publicly advertising his MP3 site, which is ofcourse the dumbest thing you can do. as for the rest, we're well shielded. if you keep a low profile they won't come get you.
a close personal friend of mine is right in the center of the MP3, music video and movie "business". he'd just dump his CD collection and rip out his hard drive. sure, big loss, but it's less of a loss than being caught. two words: Shodan, VooDooMovie.
by the way, I'm damn sure Big Brother knows what's going on here. but they also know damn well that they'd only get one or two big fish and a few dozen small ones, and the other big fish would just ditch their equipment and help the smaller fish ditch theirs.
same thing happens when there's a road sign razzia. they empty one or two dorms, and immedeately all the other dorms know what's going on and they ditch their road signs on the roof. once they did manage to get a big catch by offering a cream pie for every road sign returned to the police. what they hadn't anticipated is that people didn't return previously stolen roadsigns but stole new ones to get more pies
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
every kid, especially every adolescent, has feelings of rage, feelings of agression sometimes. pure natural adrenalin rushes, that in the biological order of things prepare them to become adults, prepare them to become leaders. in every class there are one or two bullies (alphas) and one or two outcasts (omegas). that's just the natural order of things, we have that in common with almost every other pack animal.
in the natural order of things children would play and fight among eachother just like lion cubs do. but those acts of agression are seen as bad nowadays, and the agression is kept inside, which in turn can and will turn into stress. just like adults on the job who hate their boss will become stressed because their body is preparing for a fight to challenge the boss, but that fight ofcourse never comes.
games like doom and quake and the like form an excellent vent for cropped up agression. instead of physically attacking one of your peers as would be the natural order of things you virtually attack a virtual peer.
your body, your hormones want to fight, but you won't let it. so if you instead fool it into thinking you're fighting you release that agression, that stress. in the olden days people used to go to the gym and run around or beat up a defenseless punching bag. nowadays adolescents go on the net and virtually beat up a virtual opponent. but the principle is the same.
imho keeping children FROM those kinds of games is harmful. they need to vent their natural agression anyway, so it's best to let them do it through a harmless computer game.
just my two eurocents ofcourse...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
This law is against the Bill of Rights. Now this, what next? This is a bad precedent. Whenever now laws come up that are against the Bill of Rights they can point to this one and say "hey, that one is against the Bill of Rights, so why can't this one be?". What's next? CDA pushed through anyway? Big Brother? Sure, Big Brother is a hyperbole, and using this law as a precedent is a worst case scenario, but the point is that it's a possibility. This is a bad day for the rights of US citizens.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
What most people, including most moms, dads, little sisters and neighbors want in a computer is just a machine that does what they want it to do. They don't care how it actually works, they don't care about the many different ways to configure it, they just want it to do what they want it to do.
:-)
I've given up on trying to teach my parents (and my sister) to actually use a computer. my sister knows how to start her 486SX33, her printer, Word 2.0 and how to print stuff. she doesn't need more, she doesn't even play games. it's just a fancy typewriter to her, and that 486SX33 is sufficient to do that.
my father is a transport planner; he can figure out the best way to shove many tons of freight all across Europe and constantly have most trucks filled to the brim for maximum efficiency, and does that faster than a super computer. but when it comes to anything technical he's a complete moron, with the result that I fix everything around the house, from light switches to setting the time on the stereo and the vcr, to programming the TVs... all he does with the computer at home (my old P166) is play a few games, mainly sol.exe and mines.exe
my mother is a grade school teacher (4 and 5 year olds), so she is mostly interested in computers for their educational purposes. she actually knows how to install programs and how to switch themes, but most of what she does with the computer at home is word processing and the odd simple game.
I've given up on trying to teach them you can do much more with a computer. they're simply not interested. it does what they want and/or need it to do, and when it doesn't they ask me to have a look at it. on the old machine was Win3.11 with Calypso to create a task bar. on the new machine is Win98, and I don't think my father noticed the difference. my mother did, but mainly because she could now more easily switch themes and screen savers.
most "dummies" aren't dumb. they're just not interested.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
...is that there are many different flavors of linux and many different window managers. If, for example, RedHat + KDE becomes (l)user friendly the hardcore linux freaks could still use Debian or SuSe + fvwm2. besides, I'm sure they'll make the usability features options that can be switched off by more experienced users. and you must admit that the Windows Control Panel is pretty useful for the simple configuration stuff, and I'd love to see such a thing in linux, but when you get down and dirty nothing's better than plain text config files and joe :-)
:-)
see, it's not either one or the other, it's a symbiosis (sp?). hardcore linux geeks will still be able to use the Ultimate OS as they like to, while Joe Schmoe the average (l)user will also be able to get meaningful work done without having to get down and dirty into all the config files.
just my two eurocents ofcourse
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
Linux isn't a big threat to Microsoft at all because linux is only used by people who actually know something about computers while MS Windows is generally used by people who don't know much about computers at all.
Windows will always be the main OS for home computing, unless MS manages to kill itself, and then some other Windows-like OS will fill the hole. Linux and OSS will always stay alive. there'll always be geeks and other computer-savvy people who like the idea of OSS and linux and will continue working on it.
OSS won't kill Microsoft, nor can MS ever hope to kill OSS.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
but then you'd first have to make a flat magnetic layer and then wrap it around a drum, and I don't know how possible that is :-)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
With this technology, couldn't you also use the laser to burn a pattern of "live" and "dead" spaces into the medium, thus getting a read-only medium with even higher density? Or do you only get parallel lines of scoring?
:-)
no, that's not possible. all you can do is etch out lines, and by repeating the process rotated 90 degrees you can etch out a grid, so you create little islands of magnetic material.
Also, from what you're saying, this is a grid, not a radial pattern like what you'd need for a rotating disk medium. That might actually be better, though: what kinds of bearings could rotate a disk with only nanometers of vibration?
yup, it's a grid. but as you say, a rotating disk will undoubtedly vibrate, which probably is very bad for the head's accuracy
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
I just found this out from a friend who's studying electrotechnics here; the University of Twente, Netherlands, is developing a similar system.
:-)
with current technology all domain grains are irregular, and the stronger ones might start dominating the weaker ones over time, corrupting the data, so you need about 100 domains per bit, making one bit about 50nm in size. the solution to that problem is to make sure all domains are equal in strength. up to here it's the same as the nanomagnet theory.
the next problem is how to get those grains on a drive, and here is where it starts differing. the nanomagnet technology takes a number of nanomagnets and lines them up. the technology developed by the UT uses LIL, Laser Interference Lithography. the surplus magnetic material is etched away using two interfering laser beams, so in the first go you create lines of magnetic material. then you turn it by 90 degrees and repeat the procedure to create small islands of magnetic material, at perfectly equal distances. currently they're able to create a periodicity of 200nm, but with a new laser they could decrease that to 160nm, and with a new technique that is still in development they could decrease it even to 80nm. yes, 80nm per bit.
they've also designed a head with a one atom wide tip to read the data... the only real problem still is how to position that head accurately enough and quickly enough to allow for reliable, efficient and quick reading and writing.
so basically the University of Twente is already ahaid of Cornell University
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
this technology won't just enable you to create huge storage capacity in a standard size hard drive, but also teeny tiny hard drives with standard storage capacity... how big would a nano-magnet drive with 10GB capacity be? 0.5x1x2" maybe? imagine what that would do for portables and wearables. and a tiny drive like that would surely also take less power, yet another convenience...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
well who says they're gonna put a full size hard drive in a portable MP3 player? just think how small a 5 or 10GB drive would be using that technology. tiny drives like that would revolutionize portable equipment like laptops, palmtops and MP3 players. not to mention that a drive like that would require much less power, which would also be very convenient for portable computers.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,