The water supposedly has accumulated from past cometary impacts that have not boiled away since some places on the poles of the moon never get sunlight.
There may be a lot of water there (tons). Enough for coolant on a nuclear reactor.
If not, there are other ways to cool a reactor: gas cooled (C02 was used at one point), liquid sodium (which would probably have to be shipped in so that doesn't help)
You could send robot probes out into the outer solar system to mine comets and bring back ice and other hydrogen compounds (like methane etc). It would be easier than mining iron and nickel out of asteroids.
If China had a base on the moon they might be able to join OPEC. They could builds lots of robot mining probes and then ship the methane back to Earth. The moon base would have lower launch costs than any Earth competitors.
I was going to get you on the comment that nukes give you a better bang for the buck than slamming asteroids down a gravity well until I realized you meant the up-front costs of establishing a moon colony.
I agree with you that if the only purpose of a colony was to threaten Earth, you are right, nukes are a better threat.But once you pay for the base by other means you are set.
If you had a colony you would build a mass driver to get stuff into orbit, like that H3 they talk about.(In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress they were growing grain and shooting it to Earth). You can use cheap solar electricity or even nuclear energy to power the mass driver. Maybe you can use the H3 for fusion onsite instead of exporting it to Earth. The moon has a lower gravity than Earth and no atmosphere, so it is easier to get things into orbit from there. Once it is in orbit it is cheap to bring it down to Earth (well cheaper than bringing something into orbit from Earth).
Hey, since you have cheap energy from solar panels or nuclear fusion (or even fission, you don't really have a radiation problem or security problem. Your base is heavily shielded from solar flares and cosmic rays anyway. No one is going to walk in and out of your base without you knowing and if someone did manage to blow up your reactor, it is probably in the middle of nowhere and the atmosphere or ecosystem will not be devasted by the explosion since there isn't any).
Well back to the cheap energy. You have cheap energy and cheap transport to anywhere on Earth, why not locate manufacturing on the moon. Since the moon has no atmosphere and low gravity it is easier to bring things down and up from it than Earth. You can get some resources on the moon (Hydrogen and Oxygen from water frozen at the poles, H3, silicon is everywhere, Moon rock can be made into concrete) You can get Iron and Nickel from asteroids due to cheaper orbital costs. You turn these into high value, low weight commidities (like memory chips) and shoot them at the Earth.
So now you have a a profitable base on the moon. As long as you are up there you can control the Earth. A large lump or rock coming in from orbit has the same destructive power as a nuke and it is a lot cheaper once the infrastructure is in place.
If the Earth wants to nuke you you have way more than the 15 to 30 minutes warning that you have on Earth. You have time to locate and shoot down any incoming missles due to the distance.
Once books are digitized and OCR'd they need to be proofread by humans. The people who can afford this machine might do it another way but Project Gutenberg has volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders.
There was a Slashdot Article about it last year but there have been a lot of changes since then (many due to Slashdotters). If you haven't seen the project in a while you should check it out.
Even if Linux was to suffer from this ridiculous law suit, there is always [Free|Net|Open]BSD, systems that certainly do not include any code from SCO (otherwise, they would be named).
I don't want to put down BSD. It is great and all and I am glad it exists. Diversity and variety is strength.
I also do not believe in the idae that this is a 12 year old plot by Microsoft, meaning MS spun off Xenix and SCO many years ago just so they could do this now muwhaahaahaa. I think MS is just taking advantage of something that came up. I do think they bought the license to lend credibility to SCO's claims and help keep them in business long enough to stretch this FUD campaign out as long as possible.
Having said those two things, if Linux went under and all developement switched to BSD licenses, nothing would make MS happier. They would just rape all the code that Open Source people developed, make slight changes to the file format s and protocols so they do not work with BSD systems and sell your own code back to you at 85% profit margins.
Linux and the GPL is the real thorn in MS's side. They would like to see it's adoption stopped or slowed and SCO is just one way to do it.
I totally agree with the idea of using directional antennas.
The first wireless set up I did, I figured put the antenna up high where everything can see it. Even though I was only using it as a way to connect a one building that was offnet to another that had a T1 coming into it. Trouble is I put it up too high and picked up other traffic that interfered on all the available channels at times. We called in an expert. He placed antennas that were just powerful enough to do the job in out of the way corners so that the antennas could only see each other and nothing else. (Of course still try to make it in a place that you can access and get a cable and power to. Nothing comes easy)
In your case the interfering traffic would be your own AP's. Buildings and trees can block signal. This is NOT a disadvantage. It is an advantage. Put small directional antennas below the roof line to connect one building to the next. Place them as much as possible so that they can only see one antenna on one other building. If you do not have enough shadows try to keep any antenna in view of at most 3 other antennas. One you bridge to is on your channel. The other two would be on the other channels.
Wire each building with ethernet and a switch. Use the wireless to avoid having to wire across the complex, not for client access. Each building becomes a link in the chain. You do not hav to dig trenches or put up phone poles.
If the walls block enough signal the users can still have cordless phones and microwave ovens. If the walls are brick or use steel studs you may let the user have their own in house AP's plugged into your ethernet jacks.
This is all based on NYC brick, concrete and steel construction. I don't know what effect those suburban, grey-vinyl siding, chipboard and sheet rock apartment complexes I see on the side of the highway while travelling have on 2.4Ghz signals. They may be totally transparent with no attenuation whatsoever. In that case put up a huge omnidirectional antenna and blast as much power through it as the FCC will let you.
I meant dense in terms of number and distribution of housing developements, not number and distribution of people. There are a lot of housing developements.
You could replace hundreds of sub-urban track homes with one luxury high rise. The high rise would be a denser concentration of people but there would be a lower concentration of buildings.
My choice of words did not communicate that idea. Also, the ending was weak. It petered out. I should have also included links to back up the "facts" I was mentioning.
I guess I tend to rush comments in in the hopes that someone reads them. Your post goes to prove that not everyone on \. just reads the top story and ignores later posts.
1. There are no sidewalks or routes to get anywhere, you may be able to walk to the 7/11 but you can't walk to the mall. This is because everything is designed with the car in mind.
2. Anyplace people want to go is designed to be driven to, so it is surrounded by acres of asphalt for parking lots. Each building is at least 1/2 mile from the next because each is surrounded by a parking lot. This discourage walking. The high speed highways which buildings are built along are almost impossible to cross on foot. You have to drive.
3. Since no one is walking Americans are getting fat. Even 20 minutes of walking a day is enough to keep most people from getting fat. The way suburbs are designed most people only walk from the front door to the car. That's it.
4. Most cars fit 4 or 5 people but are occupied by 1. This is a waste of space on the highway and in the parking lot.
5. Parking lots and pavement actually make cities hotter. Atlanta is much hotter now than it was 50 years ago due to all the asphalt parking lots built around it. This heat island effect even changes weather patterns.
6. A square mile of untouched forest and a square mile of forest with a road through the middle have completely different wildlife. There are habitats defined by edges of forests and by deep forests. Roads, highways, subdivisions all make edge habitats out of deep woods. You lose bird species, insects, plants.
7. Dense suburban developement destroys watersheds that are used to fill reservoirs. This is a problem in New Jersey. You end up with oil, gasoline, weed killer and lawn fertilizer in your ground water. The largest polluter of the Cheasapeake Bay is suburban lawn fertilizer.
8. Dense suburban developement paves over dirt and cuts down forests causing flooding. This is also a problem in New Jersey. Rainstorms are not absorbed by soil and tree roots, they run down storm drains and concrete streets into local streams that flood downriver.
9. Pollution.
10. Traffic Jams.
11.Buying foreign oil, money goes to Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. I won't say where some of that money ends up, who knows?
12. Needing to go to war every 10 years to keep the oil flowing.
Many people have mentioned that one problem is with Mountains and with areas of large gaps.
One possible solution is to first make a system that goes from Key West Florida to the Maine/Canadian border. The east coast is more uniformly and densly populated.
Another problem was power. I remember on Slashdot recently someone posted an item about a portable 802.11 Security Camera snooper. The imporatnt thing is that it ran off homebrew 12 volt batteries. I have seen solar panel systems that produced 12 volt DC. Someone should be able to come up with a simple homebrew, rechargeable wireless router that you can stick out in the middle of nowhere.
Another power solution that comes to mind is wind power. Wind mills need to be high up to catch the breeze. Wireless AP need to be high up for lines of sight. A windmill with an AP built in would be great for the Great Plains states or isolated areas like Farms. I am sure that the local Farmer/Rancher might actually want to have this for himself. Put up a couple on his spread that connects back to his house as well as the rest of the US. He could email from a PDA while riding fences.
If the power thing gets solved and they do an East Coast thing, what might be cool would be to get Appalachian Trail Coverage. Put up nodes all along the Appalachian Trail. It could be used for emergency communications or just so people on the trail could update each other on their positions etc.
The last good idea I saw was the Fidonet/FreeNet combination. Even if the rules say NO INTERNET connection, people could put up gateways for Mail like Fidonet did. Email is more the killer ap that the WWW is anyway.
I replied to someone else in this thread that, yeah, Neo doesn't strike me as the Genius type. But he does get the prize of being able to see through the shadows to the deeper reality. He seems to achieve this through some Bhuddistic sudden realization instead of through thinking about it.
The closest thing to him (as Keanu plays him) seems to me to be Parsifal, one of King Arthurs Knights that stumbles onto the grail while everyone else is busting their humps looking for it. Parsifal is the fool who discovers enlightenment through being an idiot. whoa
He is in the sense that he can see the shadows for what they are, as shadows. Socrates never achieved this, he only questioned everything. Socrates had no answers, only questions.
Neo is the mystic that achieves enlightenment through non-intellectual means.His enlightenment does not come from dialectic or logic. It comes through some other form of revelation, epiphany, sudden realization. It is more a bhuddist idea of enlightenment than a greek philosophical one. It is something perculating away in his subconscious, not something he has achieved through logical thought.
In a Western Mythological context he is more like Parsifal who achieves the grail (enlightenment, grace, union with God, the Good) because he's an idiot, not like Galihad because who achieves it through perfection.
There are other, older movies than The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix that can map to Christian symbolism.
Examples: In the first Conan the Barbarian movie, Conan is tied to a tree (crucified), dies, and then rises from the dead.
In ET, ET performs various miracles, dies (or seems dead, I haven't seen it in a while) and then Ascends into the heavens. Before he leaves he says to Eliot that he would be with him always in Eliot's heart (soul). Also there were the adds for the movie which are imitations of Michalangelo's Creation of Adam where God gives Adam life by touching his outstretched finger.
Another little one is in some versions of Blade Runner (depends on which cut of the movie you see), at the end Roy, the last replicant, is malfunctioning, his muscles are locking up. He takes a big, ugly looking nail and shoves it through his palm to get his hands working again. This is meant to remind you of the crucification and make you feel that his death is unfair.
Roy also releases a dove when he dies. A dove is the symbol for the Holy Spirit, it could represent the idea that he has a soul, which,as a replicant he is not supposed to have, or it could mean that he is a Christ figure.
Anyway, this sort of thing is common in all entertainment, especially with the kind you can watch more than once. Each time you watch it you pick up another level of meaning (only some of which may be religious).
Book VII contains the allegory of the cave. This describes people who live in a deep cave seeing only shadows of the real world outside as things pass in front of the cave. These people, knowing nothing else, believe the shadows are the real things. Plato says that what we consider real are shadows of a higher reality. An accomplished philosopher can see beyond the shadows to the deeper reality.
For those who can't map this to the topic at hand: The shadows are the virtual reality. The greater reality is what Neo awakes into. Neo is an accomplished philosopher.
I worked for a company that wired commercial and residential buildings in NYC. This is what I learned there:
RUNNING CABLE: Contract the running of the cable to a good company.
If you are running new cable the cost of making the drops is way more than the cost of the cable itself. This means there is little difference between running CAT5,or CAT3 the adavantage of using DSL is that you can use existing phone wire and so avoid the cost of running new wire.
If you are running new wire go with Ethernet over CAT5 (5e,6 whatever the best you can get) Think about possibly running fiber. Again, the cost of the fiber itself isn't that much. Fiber is a little less flexible and takes more skill to run and splice than CAT5 but over long distances you may not have a choice. Also media converters are costly. You could run the fiber alongside the CAT5 and not put any equipment on it at the ends. The cost will be less than deciding to run new fiber 5 years from now.
EQUIPMENT CLOSET Try to keep your switches(other equipment) in one place, don't daisy chain them. You only will have to provide power, security and cooling to one location. Having switches (or DSLAMS) all over the place is not a good idea. You need to get access to the various places for maintenance etc. Costs go up too when you spread out: you might need UPS and Cooling for each location. If you don't then yo have to run to different places (and get access to different places) to fix them.
T1 LINES: Depending on usage you may be able to get away with 1 T1. If I lived there I would like 2 or 4 or 8 sure, you can never have enough bandwidth but 1 might be enough. See how much they cost.
If you can afford it do get at least 2 though for redundancy. If you are unlucky enough to get a crappy set of lines from the phone company (this is probably more common on antique NYC Verizon lines) that T1 may be up and down for weeks or months and the phone company will take hours or days to fix it. Sure they will give you refunds off your bill or whatever the law says they have to do, but meanwhile 160 families are screaming for their Internet. If you have 2 T1's they'll notice things have gotten slower but they won't complain as much.
WIRELESS Wireless is not as easy as people think it is. If you have clean lines of sight, are fairly isolated from other Wireless equipment or other sources of interference, and have buildings mostly made of wood, you might be OK. I wouldn't know. I was setting up wireless equipment in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and the Spectrum was lit up like a christmas tree. There's interference all over the place and the steel and concrete of the buildings blocked and bounced signals left and right. Someone with good testing equipment and lots of experience could do a better job than me. I was an amateur at wireles but I guess you are too.
Wireless is not magic. You just don't plug in an AP and everyone within 5 miles has 100Mb access. Maybe in the Suburbs conditions are better.
Wireless also has security problems unless you do it right. If I had a choice I'd do Ethernet over CAT5 or better.
That's it. Document everything and post your experiences. Good luck
Men and women, boys and girls. All with really thick, dirty, obscuring mustaches.
What is this world coming to?
Well if we give the girls male hormones to make mustaches the world looks like the East German Womans Swim Team
If we forgo the hormones and just have the men grow mustaches and the women wear veils to cover their faces the world will look like 1990's Iraq with all the guys being Saddam Doubles and all the women in Burquas, covered head to toe.
Thank Goodness we're living in Free America not Iraq.
I think in the movie they gave stats on how much energy a human body gave off. I disagree with the beowulf cluster idea. The machines themselves are intelligent computers, they would not need computer power.
My belief is that the humans are adopted as a power source so that the power source would not be destroyed by rebel/free humans. Think back to Star Wars. How is the Death Star destroyed (twice). The rebels de-stabilize the central reactor causing and explosion that takes out the whole thing.
The human power source cannot be blown up in good conscience. They are power source and human shield in one. So even if they are terribly inefficient as a power source they are invulnerable, unlike a fusion reactor, fields of solar panels, long geothermal pipelines or anything else you can come up with.
It is up to Microsoft how and to whom they license the software but this guy and 500 others did not get a license of any kind, just a disk.
He could have downloaded this off of Kazaa or somewhere.
What happens when the company or school he is at gets audited 6 months from now? Does he have to pay up for a license? If MS had given him a piece of paper that said 1 non transferable license free for non-commercial use he could wip the paper out and show the auditors. Now he has to erase the software from his computer or pay up if he gets audited. MS is being lazy. If they want the rules to protect their revenue stream then they have to stick to the rules themselves.
After reading the posts, has anyone noticed that the grammar, diction and spelling of those who are pro-preservation of dying languages, is, for the most part, better than the grammar, diction and spelling of those who wouldn't mind languages dying off?
The above poster is correct in saying hydrogen is not an energy source. It is a method of energy delivery and storage.
The major use for it is to provide energy for cars. While there are many wonderful things about cars, we would be as well off moving away from the need for them.
Small, walkable, bikeable, urban centers connected by rail (powered by electricity) instead of sprawling suburbs connected by congested highways would be a good start. The move to hydrogen is just a way to sustain the current interests of General Motors, Big Oil and other industries.
You just change zoning laws to discourage sprawl, building codes to promote higher density living, divert highway funds from highways to promoting mass transit.
Major problems in society today can be traced to cars and the suburb/highway system:
1. Global warming/CO2 production 2. American Obesity "epidemic" from lack of exercise (if we walked to a train station instead of driving to it or driving to work that would be a start. Most Suburbs are not designed to let you walk anywhere) 3. Pollution of groundwater/ocean water from nitrates and fertilizers when suburbanites spread too much fertilizer on their lawns. This is a major problem in Chesapeake Bay and the Long Island Sound and has a big impact on fisheries and drinking water. No quarter acre suburban lots, no fertilizer runoff. 4. Hours long commutes due to traffic congestion. Also cars idleing in traffic cause more pollution than cars running down the open highway. More trains, more homes and offices closer together, less traffic. 5. Smog's effects on Asthma which is a major health concern in most cities (the Asthma itself may be due to high density living conditions (roaches etc.) so you got me there). 6. Flooding in New Jersey, drought, due to sprawl moving into water sheds. Forests that used to soak up and store water now are paved over for mall parking lots. This results in flooding when it rains and drought when it doesn't.
I could go on and on. Most of these are due to America building its infrastructure around the car since World War II. Hydrogen would only let this continue and eliminate only some of the problems (smog, CO2, pollution) and possibly not eliminate them but just move them elsewhere or increase them if the hydrogen is derived from hydrocarbons.
There have been two objections raised that I think are legitimate: 1. We enter all this info and the site locks up the database and starts selling access, just so they can make dirty money. 2. This effort will take a lot of bandwidth, resources and effort. You need money for that.
I don't want to contribute to an effort that will lock up the info like #1 but without #1, #2 will stop this from being a success.
Could a solution be a distributed database? Something between DNS and a P2P system. You set up a daemon on your machine. Enter your reviews locally, 10 books, 100 books, in one category (SF, Classics) whatever. Someone with the client does a query. It goes through a heirarchical system like DNS or broadcasts like a P2P system and you get back a review and other info. You can rate this review, or choose to read reviews by people who like books similiar to yours to filter out duplicates you don't like.
The protocol, client and daemon are all open source and open standards. As someone else pointed out, this could be handy for things other than books: magazines, journals, cds, dvd's etc.
Another way to get a similiar effect is to have an standard XML description of a book, have people post the info on their personal websites and have goolge or something similiar webcrawl and catalog that data for later searches.
This way the bandwidth and database are distributed. The cost and effort are distributed and the data can't be locked up.
You can say we have ruined parts of the enviroment on Earth because we have put various chemicals harmful to the life in places where they were not present before.
The moon is lifeless and bombarded by solar and cosmic radiation. The moons of the outer planets, like Titan are covered in hydrocarbons and other chemicals that look like someone knocked over a New Jersey refinery. Io is a seething, boiling sulfer spill. Venus atmosphere IS pollution. There is a constant rain of suphuric acid and the rest of the atmosphere looks like L.A. on a bad day.
I am not saying we should engrave a 7-up or Pepsi Logo across the surface of the moon, like Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" but there is more lee-way for various operations off Earth.
In fact whenever I read about a strip mining operation on earth the writer almost always says the end result looks like a lunar landscape, being cratered and lifeless. How can you a moon crater is one you've stripped mined into it or one formed by a rock hitting it a billion years ago?
In the original Star Trek series the Klingons can be seen as stand-ins for the Russians or any generic enemy. They are warlike and aggressive but this is not really elaborated on.
In the newer Star Trek movies and series they have been fleshed out and given codes of honor, culture and history. These new Klingons seem to me to be very similiar to the Kzin. The Kzin are more alien and more fun but I guess Paramount didn't want to spring for Cat suits for everyoine. Do you see any relationship between the new Klingons and the Kzin? If so are you pleased or not?
What does this say about intellectual property? If the batteries were used for electroplating (one possibility) people kept them and there principal secret so that they could profit from them. Likewise , Hero's engine also mentioned in the article.
If the principle and functioning of these batteries and the steam engine had been studied and the knowledge shared, as such things were in the 18th and 19th centuries, science and the industrial revolution could have started around 200 BC.
The patent system was meant to encourage such sharing but it seems that it is helping to keep ideas and methods away from the public instead.
I am not so much worried, on a personal level, about an extinction level impact. We can't do much about that and we won't be around to suffer the consequences. I would be much more afraid of an impact that, say caused a tsunami that wiped out all the cities on either side of the Atlantic, or maybe wiped out a single city like Phoenix Arizona but looked enough like a nuclear explosion that the missle start flying. Anyone looking for the small rocks (which are harder to see) or making contigency plans for other scenarios?
Why don't you make one, upload it on the Internet and it can be submitted to the public access channels, where they exist, by local people or LUGs.
Re:A Cash-Free France with the Moneo Smart Card? D
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Cashless Society
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I agree that these should be free.
I guess the banks want a fee because they say it costs to process these cards. But if the system is completely electronic, about the only cost in paperwork would be in mailing out the yearly bills.
Let's say everyone in France got one of these cards and cash went out of existence. Wouldn't the banks need fewer people to count and transport change around. These cards would therefore SAVE the banks money. They should not charge.
It is like ATMs. The more ATMs a bank has the fewer tellers they need to hire but they still charge ATM fees. It is a money grab.
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Well, there is supposed to be water at the poles.
The water supposedly has accumulated from past cometary impacts that have not boiled away since some places on the poles of the moon never get sunlight.
There may be a lot of water there (tons). Enough for coolant on a nuclear reactor.
If not, there are other ways to cool a reactor:
gas cooled (C02 was used at one point), liquid sodium (which would probably have to be shipped in so that doesn't help)
You could send robot probes out into the outer solar system to mine comets and bring back ice and other hydrogen compounds (like methane etc). It would be easier than mining iron and nickel out of asteroids.
If China had a base on the moon they might be able to join OPEC. They could builds lots of robot mining probes and then ship the methane back to Earth. The moon base would have lower launch costs than any Earth competitors.
I was going to get you on the comment that nukes give you a better bang for the buck than slamming asteroids down a gravity well until I realized you meant the up-front costs of establishing a moon colony.
I agree with you that if the only purpose of a colony was to threaten Earth, you are right, nukes are a better threat.But once you pay for the base by other means you are set.
If you had a colony you would build a mass driver to get stuff into orbit, like that H3 they talk about.(In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress they were growing grain and shooting it to Earth). You can use cheap solar electricity or even nuclear energy to power the mass driver. Maybe you can use the H3 for fusion onsite instead of exporting it to Earth. The moon has a lower gravity than Earth and no atmosphere, so it is easier to get things into orbit from there. Once it is in orbit it is cheap to bring it down to Earth (well cheaper than bringing something into orbit from Earth).
Hey, since you have cheap energy from solar panels or nuclear fusion (or even fission, you don't really have a radiation problem or security problem. Your base is heavily shielded from solar flares and cosmic rays anyway. No one is going to walk in and out of your base without you knowing and if someone did manage to blow up your reactor, it is probably in the middle of nowhere and the atmosphere or ecosystem will not be devasted by the explosion since there isn't any).
Well back to the cheap energy. You have cheap energy and cheap transport to anywhere on Earth, why not locate manufacturing on the moon. Since the moon has no atmosphere and low gravity it is easier to bring things down and up from it than Earth. You can get some resources on the moon (Hydrogen and Oxygen from water frozen at the poles, H3, silicon is everywhere, Moon rock can be made into concrete) You can get Iron and Nickel from asteroids due to cheaper orbital costs. You turn these into high value, low weight commidities (like memory chips) and shoot them at the Earth.
So now you have a a profitable base on the moon. As long as you are up there you can control the Earth. A large lump or rock coming in from orbit has the same destructive power as a nuke and it is a lot cheaper once the infrastructure is in place.
If the Earth wants to nuke you you have way more than the 15 to 30 minutes warning that you have on Earth. You have time to locate and shoot down any incoming missles due to the distance.
Once books are digitized and OCR'd they need to be proofread by humans. The people who can afford this machine might do it another way but Project Gutenberg has volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders.
There was a Slashdot Article about it last year but there have been a lot of changes since then (many due to Slashdotters). If you haven't seen the project in a while you should check it out.
Even if Linux was to suffer from this ridiculous law suit, there is always [Free|Net|Open]BSD, systems that certainly do not include any code from SCO (otherwise, they would be named).
I don't want to put down BSD. It is great and all and I am glad it exists. Diversity and variety is strength.
I also do not believe in the idae that this is a 12 year old plot by Microsoft, meaning MS spun off Xenix and SCO many years ago just so they could do this now muwhaahaahaa. I think MS is just taking advantage of something that came up. I do think they bought the license to lend credibility to SCO's claims and help keep them in business long enough to stretch this FUD campaign out as long as possible.
Having said those two things, if Linux went under and all developement switched to BSD licenses, nothing would make MS happier. They would just rape all the code that Open Source people developed, make slight changes to the file format s and protocols so they do not work with BSD systems and sell your own code back to you at 85% profit margins.
Linux and the GPL is the real thorn in MS's side. They would like to see it's adoption stopped or slowed and SCO is just one way to do it.
I totally agree with the idea of using directional antennas.
The first wireless set up I did, I figured put the antenna up high where everything can see it. Even though I was only using it as a way to connect a one building that was offnet to another that had a T1 coming into it. Trouble is I put it up too high and picked up other traffic that interfered on all the available channels at times. We called in an expert. He placed antennas that were just powerful enough to do the job in out of the way corners so that the antennas could only see each other and nothing else. (Of course still try to make it in a place that you can access and get a cable and power to. Nothing comes easy)
In your case the interfering traffic would be your own AP's. Buildings and trees can block signal. This is NOT a disadvantage. It is an advantage. Put small directional antennas below the roof line to connect one building to the next. Place them as much as possible so that they can only see one antenna on one other building. If you do not have enough shadows try to keep any antenna in view of at most 3 other antennas. One you bridge to is on your channel. The other two would be on the other channels.
Wire each building with ethernet and a switch. Use the wireless to avoid having to wire across the complex, not for client access. Each building becomes a link in the chain. You do not hav to dig trenches or put up phone poles.
If the walls block enough signal the users can still have cordless phones and microwave ovens.
If the walls are brick or use steel studs you may let the user have their own in house AP's plugged into your ethernet jacks.
This is all based on NYC brick, concrete and steel construction. I don't know what effect those suburban, grey-vinyl siding, chipboard and sheet rock apartment complexes I see on the side of the highway while travelling have on 2.4Ghz signals. They may be totally transparent with no attenuation whatsoever. In that case put up a huge omnidirectional antenna and blast as much power through it as the FCC will let you.
You are right, bad choice of words on my part.
I meant dense in terms of number and distribution of housing developements, not number and distribution of people. There are a lot of housing developements.
You could replace hundreds of sub-urban track homes with one luxury high rise. The high rise would be a denser concentration of people but there would be a lower concentration of buildings.
My choice of words did not communicate that idea. Also, the ending was weak. It petered out. I should have also included links to back up the "facts" I was mentioning.
I guess I tend to rush comments in in the hopes that someone reads them. Your post goes to prove that not everyone on \. just reads the top story and ignores later posts.
Why cars are bad:
1. There are no sidewalks or routes to get anywhere, you may be able to walk to the 7/11 but you can't walk to the mall. This is because everything is designed with the car in mind.
2. Anyplace people want to go is designed to be driven to, so it is surrounded by acres of asphalt for parking lots. Each building is at least 1/2 mile from the next because each is surrounded by a parking lot. This discourage walking. The high speed highways which buildings are built along are almost impossible to cross on foot. You have to drive.
3. Since no one is walking Americans are getting fat. Even 20 minutes of walking a day is enough to keep most people from getting fat. The way suburbs are designed most people only walk from the front door to the car. That's it.
4. Most cars fit 4 or 5 people but are occupied by 1. This is a waste of space on the highway and in the parking lot.
5. Parking lots and pavement actually make cities hotter. Atlanta is much hotter now than it was 50 years ago due to all the asphalt parking lots built around it. This heat island effect even changes weather patterns.
6. A square mile of untouched forest and a square mile of forest with a road through the middle have completely different wildlife. There are habitats defined by edges of forests and by deep forests. Roads, highways, subdivisions all make edge habitats out of deep woods. You lose bird species, insects, plants.
7. Dense suburban developement destroys watersheds that are used to fill reservoirs. This is a problem in New Jersey. You end up with oil, gasoline, weed killer and lawn fertilizer in your ground water. The largest polluter of the Cheasapeake Bay is suburban lawn fertilizer.
8. Dense suburban developement paves over dirt and cuts down forests causing flooding. This is also a problem in New Jersey. Rainstorms are not absorbed by soil and tree roots, they run down storm drains and concrete streets into local streams that flood downriver.
9. Pollution.
10. Traffic Jams.
11.Buying foreign oil, money goes to Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. I won't say where some of that money ends up, who knows?
12. Needing to go to war every 10 years to keep the oil flowing.
13. One acronym: SUVs
etc. etc. etc.
Many people have mentioned that one problem is with Mountains and with areas of large gaps.
One possible solution is to first make a system that goes from Key West Florida to the Maine/Canadian border. The east coast is more uniformly and densly populated.
Another problem was power. I remember on Slashdot recently someone posted an item about a portable 802.11 Security Camera snooper. The imporatnt thing is that it ran off homebrew 12 volt batteries. I have seen solar panel systems that produced 12 volt DC. Someone should be able to come up with a simple homebrew, rechargeable wireless router that you can stick out in the middle of nowhere.
Another power solution that comes to mind is wind power. Wind mills need to be high up to catch the breeze. Wireless AP need to be high up for lines of sight. A windmill with an AP built in would be great for the Great Plains states or isolated areas like Farms. I am sure that the local Farmer/Rancher might actually want to have this for himself. Put up a couple on his spread that connects back to his house as well as the rest of the US. He could email from a PDA while riding fences.
If the power thing gets solved and they do an East Coast thing, what might be cool would be to get Appalachian Trail Coverage. Put up nodes all along the Appalachian Trail. It could be used for emergency communications or just so people on the trail could update each other on their positions etc.
The last good idea I saw was the Fidonet/FreeNet combination. Even if the rules say NO INTERNET connection, people could put up gateways for Mail like Fidonet did. Email is more the killer ap that the WWW is anyway.
I replied to someone else in this thread that, yeah, Neo doesn't strike me as the Genius type. But he does get the prize of being able to see through the shadows to the deeper reality. He seems to achieve this through some Bhuddistic sudden realization instead of through thinking about it.
The closest thing to him (as Keanu plays him) seems to me to be Parsifal, one of King Arthurs Knights that stumbles onto the grail while everyone else is busting their humps looking for it. Parsifal is the fool who discovers enlightenment through being an idiot. whoa
He is in the sense that he can see the shadows for what they are, as shadows. Socrates never achieved this, he only questioned everything. Socrates had no answers, only questions.
Neo is the mystic that achieves enlightenment through non-intellectual means.His enlightenment does not come from dialectic or logic. It comes through some other form of revelation, epiphany, sudden realization. It is more a bhuddist idea of enlightenment than a greek philosophical one. It is something perculating away in his subconscious, not something he has achieved through logical thought.
In a Western Mythological context he is more like Parsifal who achieves the grail (enlightenment, grace, union with God, the Good) because he's an idiot, not like Galihad because who achieves it through perfection.
There are other, older movies than The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix that can map to Christian symbolism.
Examples:
In the first Conan the Barbarian movie, Conan is tied to a tree (crucified), dies, and then rises from the dead.
In ET, ET performs various miracles, dies (or seems dead, I haven't seen it in a while) and then Ascends into the heavens. Before he leaves he says to Eliot that he would be with him always in Eliot's heart (soul).
Also there were the adds for the movie which are imitations of Michalangelo's Creation of Adam where God gives Adam life by touching his outstretched finger.
Another little one is in some versions of Blade Runner (depends on which cut of the movie you see), at the end Roy, the last replicant, is malfunctioning, his muscles are locking up. He takes a big, ugly looking nail and shoves it through his palm to get his hands working again. This is meant to remind you of the crucification and make you feel that his death is unfair.
Roy also releases a dove when he dies. A dove is the symbol for the Holy Spirit, it could represent the idea that he has a soul, which,as a replicant he is not supposed to have, or it could mean that he is a Christ figure.
Anyway, this sort of thing is common in all entertainment, especially with the kind you can watch more than once. Each time you watch it you pick up another level of meaning (only some of which may be religious).
I agree with the AC. But you can get most of Greek philosophy online.
You can get Plato's Republic online from project Gutenberg:
Gutenberg Etext
Book VII contains the allegory of the cave. This describes people who live in a deep cave seeing only shadows of the real world outside as things pass in front of the cave. These people, knowing nothing else, believe the shadows are the real things. Plato says that what we consider real are shadows of a higher reality. An accomplished philosopher can see beyond the shadows to the deeper reality.
For those who can't map this to the topic at hand:
The shadows are the virtual reality. The greater reality is what Neo awakes into. Neo is an accomplished philosopher.
This is probably late and no one will read it.
I worked for a company that wired commercial and residential buildings in NYC. This is what I learned there:
RUNNING CABLE:
Contract the running of the cable to a good company.
If you are running new cable the cost of making the drops is way more than the cost of the cable itself. This means there is little difference between running CAT5,or CAT3 the adavantage of using DSL is that you can use existing phone wire and so avoid the cost of running new wire.
If you are running new wire go with Ethernet over CAT5 (5e,6 whatever the best you can get) Think about possibly running fiber. Again, the cost of the fiber itself isn't that much.
Fiber is a little less flexible and takes more skill to run and splice than CAT5 but over long distances you may not have a choice. Also media converters are costly. You could run the fiber alongside the CAT5 and not put any equipment on it at the ends. The cost will be less than deciding to run new fiber 5 years from now.
EQUIPMENT CLOSET
Try to keep your switches(other equipment) in one place, don't daisy chain them. You only will have to provide power, security and cooling to one location. Having switches (or DSLAMS) all over the place is not a good idea. You need to get access to the various places for maintenance etc. Costs go up too when you spread out: you might need UPS and Cooling for each location. If you don't then yo have to run to different places (and get access to different places) to fix them.
T1 LINES:
Depending on usage you may be able to get away with 1 T1. If I lived there I would like 2 or 4 or 8 sure, you can never have enough bandwidth but 1 might be enough. See how much they cost.
If you can afford it do get at least 2 though for redundancy. If you are unlucky enough to get a crappy set of lines from the phone company (this is probably more common on antique NYC Verizon lines) that T1 may be up and down for weeks or months and the phone company will take hours or days to fix it. Sure they will give you refunds off your bill or whatever the law says they have to do, but meanwhile 160 families are screaming for their Internet. If you have 2 T1's they'll notice things have gotten slower but they won't complain as much.
WIRELESS
Wireless is not as easy as people think it is. If you have clean lines of sight, are fairly isolated from other Wireless equipment or other sources of interference, and have buildings mostly made of wood, you might be OK. I wouldn't know. I was setting up wireless equipment in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and the Spectrum was lit up like a christmas tree. There's interference all over the place and the steel and concrete of the buildings blocked and bounced signals left and right. Someone with good testing equipment and lots of experience could do a better job than me. I was an amateur at wireles but I guess you are too.
Wireless is not magic. You just don't plug in an AP and everyone within 5 miles has 100Mb access. Maybe in the Suburbs conditions are better.
Wireless also has security problems unless you do it right. If I had a choice I'd do Ethernet over CAT5 or better.
That's it. Document everything and post your experiences. Good luck
Men and women, boys and girls. All with really thick, dirty, obscuring mustaches.
What is this world coming to?
Well if we give the girls male hormones to make mustaches the world looks like the East German Womans Swim Team
If we forgo the hormones and just have the men grow mustaches and the women wear veils to cover their faces the world will look like 1990's Iraq with all the guys being Saddam Doubles and all the women in Burquas, covered head to toe.
Thank Goodness we're living in Free America not Iraq.
I think in the movie they gave stats on how much energy a human body gave off. I disagree with the beowulf cluster idea. The machines themselves are intelligent computers, they would not need computer power.
My belief is that the humans are adopted as a power source so that the power source would not be destroyed by rebel/free humans. Think back to Star Wars. How is the Death Star destroyed (twice). The rebels de-stabilize the central reactor causing and explosion that takes out the whole thing.
The human power source cannot be blown up in good conscience. They are power source and human shield in one. So even if they are terribly inefficient as a power source they are invulnerable, unlike a fusion reactor, fields of solar panels, long geothermal pipelines or anything else you can come up with.
It is up to Microsoft how and to whom they license the software but this guy and 500 others did not get a license of any kind, just a disk.
He could have downloaded this off of Kazaa or somewhere.
What happens when the company or school he is at gets audited 6 months from now? Does he have to pay up for a license? If MS had given him a piece of paper that said 1 non transferable license free for non-commercial use he could wip the paper out and show the auditors. Now he has to erase the software from his computer or pay up if he gets audited. MS is being lazy. If they want the rules to protect their revenue stream then they have to stick to the rules themselves.
After reading the posts, has anyone noticed that the grammar, diction and spelling of those who are pro-preservation of dying languages, is, for the most part, better than the grammar, diction and spelling of those who wouldn't mind languages dying off?
The above poster is correct in saying hydrogen is not an energy source. It is a method of energy delivery and storage.
The major use for it is to provide energy for cars. While there are many wonderful things about cars, we would be as well off moving away from the need for them.
Small, walkable, bikeable, urban centers connected by rail (powered by electricity) instead of sprawling suburbs connected by congested highways would be a good start. The move to hydrogen is just a way to sustain the current interests of General Motors, Big Oil and other industries.
You just change zoning laws to discourage sprawl, building codes to promote higher density living, divert highway funds from highways to promoting mass transit.
Major problems in society today can be traced to cars and the suburb/highway system:
1. Global warming/CO2 production
2. American Obesity "epidemic" from lack of exercise (if we walked to a train station instead of driving to it or driving to work that would be a start. Most Suburbs are not designed to let you walk anywhere)
3. Pollution of groundwater/ocean water from nitrates and fertilizers when suburbanites spread too much fertilizer on their lawns. This is a major problem in Chesapeake Bay and the Long Island Sound and has a big impact on fisheries and drinking water. No quarter acre suburban lots, no fertilizer runoff.
4. Hours long commutes due to traffic congestion. Also cars idleing in traffic cause more pollution than cars running down the open highway. More trains, more homes and offices closer together, less traffic.
5. Smog's effects on Asthma which is a major health concern in most cities (the Asthma itself may be due to high density living conditions (roaches etc.) so you got me there).
6. Flooding in New Jersey, drought, due to sprawl moving into water sheds. Forests that used to soak up and store water now are paved over for mall parking lots. This results in flooding when it rains and drought when it doesn't.
I could go on and on. Most of these are due to America building its infrastructure around the car since World War II. Hydrogen would only let this continue and eliminate only some of the problems (smog, CO2, pollution) and possibly not eliminate them but just move them elsewhere or increase them if the hydrogen is derived from hydrocarbons.
Get rid of the car, not just the oil.
There have been two objections raised that I think are legitimate:
1. We enter all this info and the site locks up the database and starts selling access, just so they can make dirty money.
2. This effort will take a lot of bandwidth, resources and effort. You need money for that.
I don't want to contribute to an effort that will lock up the info like #1 but without #1, #2 will stop this from being a success.
Could a solution be a distributed database? Something between DNS and a P2P system. You set up a daemon on your machine. Enter your reviews locally, 10 books, 100 books, in one category (SF, Classics) whatever. Someone with the client does a query. It goes through a heirarchical system like DNS or broadcasts like a P2P system and you get back a review and other info. You can rate this review, or choose to read reviews by people who like books similiar to yours to filter out duplicates you don't like.
The protocol, client and daemon are all open source and open standards.
As someone else pointed out, this could be handy for things other than books: magazines, journals, cds, dvd's etc.
Another way to get a similiar effect is to have an standard XML description of a book, have people post the info on their personal websites and have goolge or something similiar webcrawl and catalog that data for later searches.
This way the bandwidth and database are distributed. The cost and effort are distributed and the data can't be locked up.
You can say we have ruined parts of the enviroment on Earth because we have put various chemicals harmful to the life in places where they were not present before.
The moon is lifeless and bombarded by solar and cosmic radiation. The moons of the outer planets, like Titan are covered in hydrocarbons and other chemicals that look like someone knocked over a New Jersey refinery. Io is a seething, boiling sulfer spill. Venus atmosphere IS pollution. There is a constant rain of suphuric acid and the rest of the atmosphere looks like L.A. on a bad day.
I am not saying we should engrave a 7-up or Pepsi Logo across the surface of the moon, like Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" but there is more lee-way for various operations off Earth.
In fact whenever I read about a strip mining operation on earth the writer almost always says the end result looks like a lunar landscape, being cratered and lifeless. How can you a moon crater is one you've stripped mined into it or one formed by a rock hitting it a billion years ago?
In the original Star Trek series the Klingons can be seen as stand-ins for the Russians or any generic enemy. They are warlike and aggressive but this is not really elaborated on.
In the newer Star Trek movies and series they have been fleshed out and given codes of honor, culture and history. These new Klingons seem to me to be very similiar to the Kzin. The Kzin are more alien and more fun but I guess Paramount didn't want to spring for Cat suits for everyoine. Do you see any relationship between the new Klingons and the Kzin? If so are you pleased or not?
What does this say about intellectual property? If the batteries were used for electroplating (one possibility) people kept them and there principal secret so that they could profit from them. Likewise , Hero's engine also mentioned in the article.
If the principle and functioning of these batteries and the steam engine had been studied and the knowledge shared, as such things were in the 18th and 19th centuries, science and the industrial revolution could have started around 200 BC.
The patent system was meant to encourage such sharing but it seems that it is helping to keep ideas and methods away from the public instead.
I am not so much worried, on a personal level, about an extinction level impact. We can't do much about that and we won't be around to suffer the consequences. I would be much more afraid of an impact that, say caused a tsunami that wiped out all the cities on either side of the Atlantic, or maybe wiped out a single city like Phoenix Arizona but looked enough like a nuclear explosion that the missle start flying. Anyone looking for the small rocks (which are harder to see) or making contigency plans for other scenarios?
Why don't you make one, upload it on the Internet and it can be submitted to the public access channels, where they exist, by local people or LUGs.
I agree that these should be free.
I guess the banks want a fee because they say it costs to process these cards. But if the system is completely electronic, about the only cost in paperwork would be in mailing out the yearly bills.
Let's say everyone in France got one of these cards and cash went out of existence. Wouldn't the banks need fewer people to count and transport change around. These cards would therefore SAVE the banks money. They should not charge.
It is like ATMs. The more ATMs a bank has the fewer tellers they need to hire but they still charge ATM fees. It is a money grab.