If you compare modern aviation to the early days of aviation, the "average joe" is already restricted from building and/or owning aircraft.
It wasn't that long ago that anyone with a few bucks, a bit of technical ability, and a grasp of the basic concepts could have happily built an airplane. They could have barnstormed, performed impromptu aerial acrobatic shows, and revolutionized air travel.
To the best of my knowledge, barnstorming is long since dead. Pilots and aircraft have to be licensed, certified, and recertified. There are some experimental aircraft out there, but there's still enough to make it impractical at best.
Still, some folks will be such deathtraps, and some will fly them. I'm not sure I'd get within miles of that thing. Really, an exposed prop, and a parasail just begging to get tangled in it?
I'm not predicting anything. All I'm saying is that you can't predict 0 growth because you think we've already done it all. Historically, that's proven to simply not be true. Heck, in your own lifetime, we've done what was previously impossible.
Listen, I understand that FTL is not compatible with current theory. I'm aware of the energy requirements needed for fast interstellar travel. My point is that it is hubris to assume that we have it all figured out and that our theory is adequate to perfectly explain the universe.
It really wasn't that long ago that we knew it was impossible to ever travel faster than the speed of sound. It just couldn't be done. Any aircraft built to do it would simply disintegrate.
Why couldn't we travel faster than the speed of sound? Because our technology had no progressed that far. Theories were built around our understanding of the universe. In time, our understanding changes.
It's good to know that we have so many theoretical physicists here to tell us anything we don't think is possible now, is simply impossible. It's going to make life a lot simpler for researchers. They can all retire, knowing our knowledge of the universe is done.
oh ya, and Giant Electronic Bra says the Alcubierre drive can't exist.:)
Well.. kinda... We don't do it as publicly without what we have decided is our legal process.... or we can declare a war against them.... or no one else is looking.... or we can silence the witnesses.
No, we're not as bad as wild animals. We're much worse.
A few hundred thousand years ago, a sling was the most powerful launch device known. It could launch a rock dozens of feet.
About 60,000 years ago, a bow and arrow could launch a projectile hundreds of feet.
A couple hundred years ago, a cannon could launch a projectile thousands of feet.
Just over 100 years ago, man learned to fly.
About 70 years ago, the largest release of power ever known to man until that point in the first nuclear explosion.
About 50 years ago, the first man left the confines of Earth.
About 40 years ago, the first man step foot on another astronomical object.
You have never left Earth. You are standing on the Earth with knowledge of the workings of a slingshot, trying to predict what we will learn about our universe in the future.
Is running Linux or Solaris really all that different?
My resume has a long list of Unix type operating systems on it. With all of them, I see the common features, each with its eccentricities. The same can be said of only Linux.
Set an IP on an interface. Some want/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* . Some want an entry in/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf. Some want it written directly to/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.
I was writing a script to get information from a couple hundred servers. In them (mostly flavors of Linux, with some AIX). To just find the OS version, I had to check for the existence of about a dozen files. Sometimes they match/etc/*release* or/etc/*version*. Some had both to provide some sort of cross compatibility, but one was a lie and one was correct. Some give it up with uname, but most give a generic line.
Most are pretty similar. cd changes directory. ls lists files. rm -rf / is usually a bad idea.
Setting up a server to do common things usually has common methods.
You can compile Apache in almost identical fashions on any of them. If you take the same version of Apache, and compile it with the same directory flags, everything will land in the same places.
You can use a package manager to do it, but you'll have a headache of finding out what the package manager is for this kind of system, and then guessing "what directory does this distro put the conf file in?". On some you have to ask "Is it even called httpd.conf".
Once you've worked with enough different Unix variants, you learn how to find what you're looking for. You'll know to curse various platforms for not including slocate. [finger pointing at AIX and Android], and make your own flat file of filenames (find / > ~/files.list).
But with all those complaints, Unix is Unix is Unix, and you can use any of them once you realize that they're all almost identical.
Mainframes are different creatures, very dependent on who the vendor was. Once you've locked in with a vendor, you're married to them for an awful long time. We have a mainframe team. They were kind enough to give me a mainframe account. I will happily admit, I don't know shit about using it. I can give them some advice on interoperability, but only from knowing the Unix side very well. I have a shell on the mainframe. I can't even attempt to do anything, but I do hope to sit down with the mainframe folks and learn some of it before the mainframe is retired and they are laid off.
Sounds like there may be a run on them, since they caught suspect #2 alive. Maybe I should buy out the stores here and drive them up. I could probably make a fortune at the courthouse steps.
Maybe I should bring rope too. I think Boston PD can supply the horses for him to be drawn and quartered after his conviction.
If they ended up beaten to a pulp, and ended up in the same hospitals ans their victims, I suspect they wouldn't survive much longer than the first night.
I'd prefer that they see justice. The photos may be a mistake. They may not be the attackers, it could just be that they put their backpacks away somewhere. That's why we have a justice system.
Now, once convicted, execution by angry mobs with pitchforks and torches wouldn't make me shed a single tear. I'm not quite sure where they'd find the pitchforks in Boston, but...
A what?? I haven't seen a payphone in years. In older buildings, I've seen the kiosks where they once resided. In most airports, they've been replaced with kiosks for using laptops.
Even still, in the pre-cell phone era, a large enough emergency would saturate phone lines, and lines at the payphones would be huge.
I live in the Southeast US. Before cell phones were popular, the phones were frequently unusable, either due to everyone calling to make sure each other were ok, or damage to the phone networks.
When I was 13, I was flying alone through Atlanta International. At the time, the airlines (or at least that one) required unaccompanied minors would be guided by the flight crew. Mine was kind enough to say "it's on another concourse". It wasn't a problem. The problem was that a nasty storm blew in, grounding all flights for several hours. My parents were going to meet me, but it was a couple hours from home to the airport. I went hunting for a payphone that didn't have a long line at it. It was just a storm delaying flights, and the phones were blocked by passengers.
I ended up finding a phone down by some gates that were closed. Apparently, I was willing to hike farther than most people wanting to use the phones.
Now? Those huge banks of phones in Atlanta no longer exist. I don't recall seeing payphones when I was driving around Boston about a year ago.
First things first... Do you have hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users?
I worked at a shop where we did. I've known a lot of others who didn't, but their goal was so lofty. Some actually said "millions of simultaneous....", but only ever managed to get dozens, or even only one dozen at peak times, including themselves and their friends.
Even at the shop where we had hundreds of thousands of simultanious users, they didn't start out like that. It grew into that over several years.
If you have that many users, you should have the financial base to hire developers who already know what they're doing, system/network admins who can do the infrastructure properly.
As you're saying that you're to be the only dev, and you don't have the resources to hire any more, stay simple, and let it grow.
No big site ever designed for their final need. It grows over time. Just keep an eye on your current need and growth projections.
You're very optimistic. You're talking about humans who lived and survived in harsh environments.
Most modern humans haven't walked hundreds of miles to more survivable areas, and couldn't even feed themselves if given a knife in the wild. In an ELE, a high guess would be a handful of small tribes per continent surviving. In an ELE, the dead don't just disappear. They leave massive fields of rotting flesh, feeding disease ridden bugs and other scavengers.
Humans don't actually handle low G all that well.. Vision degrades. Bones weaken. Muscle tone is lost. It would be many generations in that environment before we adapted or evolved to live comfortably in it. We need gravity. We need bugs (and the whole ecosystem). We need changing weather. Without the later two, you won't have well sustained food crops.
In the end, does it really matter? Life will or won't continue on this rock. In time, this rock won't continue, after it's cooked dry to look like Mercury and finally absorbed into the sun.
If we care about the continuity of humanity, we need to spread to other planets in other solar systems, and in time to other galaxies.
Life will continue somewhere. We evolved over billions of years. Life has or will evolve in other places. it may be a passing curiosity, or a widespread and ongoing thing in the universe.
We're in the infancy of learning if there is other life out there. We're only beginning to travel to our closest neighbors. Right now, exoplanets are little more than observations of other celestial bodies or a few pixels in a photograph. It's not enough to tell us more more than that there is something out there.
Unless there is a dramatic leap in technology, you or I will never be more than about 60k feet above this rock. It's been a privileged few that have earned their astronaut wings, flying beyond 264k feet.
We can hope that our future generations do better. Hopefully they will be able to escape before it's too late.
Why? What audience are the developing for? Realtors were mentioned, but most don't have a huge budget for gadgets. My guess the first audience would be rich kids with no responsibilities and too much money. You'd have to guess what they might want to do with them... Then you're right back to the purpose of the modern cell phones for them. Take pictures of each other drunk, post them on Facebook, and text (err, voice text now?) while they're driving. They don't actually want to *talk* to each other, unless it's annoying to their parents.
I believe they had an advertised feature of letting you know when you're in proximity of someone you like or dislike.. That'd go over just as well as Google Latitude. Oh ya, it didn't.
Get a PO box, a remailer service, a hotel room (yes, you can have mail sent to your hotel), and a cheap apartment in a different town. You can send mail from, and receive mail to, it.
No, just like a street address, it does not identify you. It does lead straight to your home though. One requires someone to drive to your house. The other requires a LEO call to the ISP to ask for the address to drive to your house.
It doesn't identify *you*. Just like you can have your mail delivered to a friend, neighbor or PO box, *you* are linked to it. It still leads back to you, no matter how many layers of distractions are involved.
Your IP or mailing address cannot be used to prosecute. They can be used to point investigators towards who to prosecute.
If you get a pissy enough opposing counsel and a judge to cooperate, warrants can be issued. Trust me, being on the wrong side of it. Of course, this will vary by your jurisdiction, IANAL, and especially not yours.
Credit card fraud isn't usually that tough to deal with, if you have a decent bank. Unfortunately, you won't find out if they're decent until it happens.
I had a fraud issue once. I went down to the branch, and we called the merchant together. The merchant basically told me to fuck off. So the bank refunded me the full amount, and sent off a chargeback.
Someone else I knew at another bank had a fraudulent charge. Her transactions clearly showed what she did that day. Gas and groceries within an hour of the fraudulent charge 200 miles away. Her bank told her to prove it wasn't her.
I had a mess with identity theft for a little while. People were buying cell phones under my name online. All the shipping went to about a 20 mile area, which happened to be about 2,500 miles from where I was. I got a collections notice in the mail. When I called up, I actually got someone who cared. We chased it around until we figured out exactly what happened. They cancelled all the phones that "I" bought. I then called every cell phone company I could think of. "I" had phones with 3 different carriers. I was lucky, I got people who cared. It was probably the way I chased it down. I called, and said "I'm having an identity theft problem, can you see if I have an account with you?" When they said yes, I politely requested to be transferred to their fraud department.
It's really all in who you get on the phone.
It still took hours of my work time (pesky job coinciding with normal working hours). I was lucky that I had a very accommodating employer at the time, so there was no complaint that I spent entire work days chasing it around. Then again, I spent all night doing my work to keep up. Sadly, there's no reimbursement for *my* time spent fixing *their* failure to properly identify the client in front of them.
Slashdot Mirror
If you compare modern aviation to the early days of aviation, the "average joe" is already restricted from building and/or owning aircraft.
It wasn't that long ago that anyone with a few bucks, a bit of technical ability, and a grasp of the basic concepts could have happily built an airplane. They could have barnstormed, performed impromptu aerial acrobatic shows, and revolutionized air travel.
To the best of my knowledge, barnstorming is long since dead. Pilots and aircraft have to be licensed, certified, and recertified. There are some experimental aircraft out there, but there's still enough to make it impractical at best.
Still, some folks will be such deathtraps, and some will fly them. I'm not sure I'd get within miles of that thing. Really, an exposed prop, and a parasail just begging to get tangled in it?
Either way, that's going to hurt. a lot.
But it'll look great on YouTube.
YouTube - Documenting human stupidity since 2005.
Mr. Ex-President, is that you?
I'm not predicting anything. All I'm saying is that you can't predict 0 growth because you think we've already done it all. Historically, that's proven to simply not be true. Heck, in your own lifetime, we've done what was previously impossible.
I tried to get a travel visa to the Mars. It was denied. Bastards. We'll never get there because of the damned red tape.
It really wasn't that long ago that we knew it was impossible to ever travel faster than the speed of sound. It just couldn't be done. Any aircraft built to do it would simply disintegrate.
Why couldn't we travel faster than the speed of sound? Because our technology had no progressed that far. Theories were built around our understanding of the universe. In time, our understanding changes.
It's good to know that we have so many theoretical physicists here to tell us anything we don't think is possible now, is simply impossible. It's going to make life a lot simpler for researchers. They can all retire, knowing our knowledge of the universe is done.
oh ya, and Giant Electronic Bra says the Alcubierre drive can't exist. :)
We stopped doing that hundreds of years ago.
Well .. kinda ... We don't do it as publicly without what we have decided is our legal process. ... or we can declare a war against them. ... or no one else is looking. ... or we can silence the witnesses.
No, we're not as bad as wild animals. We're much worse.
You're stating this as if you are omnipotent.
A few hundred thousand years ago, a sling was the most powerful launch device known. It could launch a rock dozens of feet.
About 60,000 years ago, a bow and arrow could launch a projectile hundreds of feet.
A couple hundred years ago, a cannon could launch a projectile thousands of feet.
Just over 100 years ago, man learned to fly.
About 70 years ago, the largest release of power ever known to man until that point in the first nuclear explosion.
About 50 years ago, the first man left the confines of Earth.
About 40 years ago, the first man step foot on another astronomical object.
You have never left Earth. You are standing on the Earth with knowledge of the workings of a slingshot, trying to predict what we will learn about our universe in the future.
Is running Linux or Solaris really all that different?
My resume has a long list of Unix type operating systems on it. With all of them, I see the common features, each with its eccentricities. The same can be said of only Linux.
Set an IP on an interface. Some want /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* . Some want an entry in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf. Some want it written directly to /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.
I was writing a script to get information from a couple hundred servers. In them (mostly flavors of Linux, with some AIX). To just find the OS version, I had to check for the existence of about a dozen files. Sometimes they match /etc/*release* or /etc/*version*. Some had both to provide some sort of cross compatibility, but one was a lie and one was correct. Some give it up with uname, but most give a generic line.
Most are pretty similar. cd changes directory. ls lists files. rm -rf / is usually a bad idea.
Setting up a server to do common things usually has common methods.
You can compile Apache in almost identical fashions on any of them. If you take the same version of Apache, and compile it with the same directory flags, everything will land in the same places.
You can use a package manager to do it, but you'll have a headache of finding out what the package manager is for this kind of system, and then guessing "what directory does this distro put the conf file in?". On some you have to ask "Is it even called httpd.conf".
(dpkg,rpm, yum, slackpkg, ipkg, opkg, pkgadd, installp, etc)
(/usr/local/apache/conf/, /usr/local/apache2/conf/, /etc/apache/, /etc/apache2/, /etc/httpd/conf/, /etc/httpd/conf/conf.d/, /usr/pkg/etc/httpd/, /usr/local/etc/apache22/, /var/www/conf/, ""C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/conf", /etc/httpd/, /etc/conf.d/apache2, etc)
Once you've worked with enough different Unix variants, you learn how to find what you're looking for. You'll know to curse various platforms for not including slocate. [finger pointing at AIX and Android], and make your own flat file of filenames (find / > ~/files.list).
But with all those complaints, Unix is Unix is Unix, and you can use any of them once you realize that they're all almost identical.
Mainframes are different creatures, very dependent on who the vendor was. Once you've locked in with a vendor, you're married to them for an awful long time. We have a mainframe team. They were kind enough to give me a mainframe account. I will happily admit, I don't know shit about using it. I can give them some advice on interoperability, but only from knowing the Unix side very well. I have a shell on the mainframe. I can't even attempt to do anything, but I do hope to sit down with the mainframe folks and learn some of it before the mainframe is retired and they are laid off.
Sounds like there may be a run on them, since they caught suspect #2 alive. Maybe I should buy out the stores here and drive them up. I could probably make a fortune at the courthouse steps.
Maybe I should bring rope too. I think Boston PD can supply the horses for him to be drawn and quartered after his conviction.
If they ended up beaten to a pulp, and ended up in the same hospitals ans their victims, I suspect they wouldn't survive much longer than the first night.
I'd prefer that they see justice. The photos may be a mistake. They may not be the attackers, it could just be that they put their backpacks away somewhere. That's why we have a justice system.
Now, once convicted, execution by angry mobs with pitchforks and torches wouldn't make me shed a single tear. I'm not quite sure where they'd find the pitchforks in Boston, but ...
A what?? I haven't seen a payphone in years. In older buildings, I've seen the kiosks where they once resided. In most airports, they've been replaced with kiosks for using laptops.
Even still, in the pre-cell phone era, a large enough emergency would saturate phone lines, and lines at the payphones would be huge.
I live in the Southeast US. Before cell phones were popular, the phones were frequently unusable, either due to everyone calling to make sure each other were ok, or damage to the phone networks.
When I was 13, I was flying alone through Atlanta International. At the time, the airlines (or at least that one) required unaccompanied minors would be guided by the flight crew. Mine was kind enough to say "it's on another concourse". It wasn't a problem. The problem was that a nasty storm blew in, grounding all flights for several hours. My parents were going to meet me, but it was a couple hours from home to the airport. I went hunting for a payphone that didn't have a long line at it. It was just a storm delaying flights, and the phones were blocked by passengers.
I ended up finding a phone down by some gates that were closed. Apparently, I was willing to hike farther than most people wanting to use the phones.
Now? Those huge banks of phones in Atlanta no longer exist. I don't recall seeing payphones when I was driving around Boston about a year ago.
First things first... Do you have hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users?
I worked at a shop where we did. I've known a lot of others who didn't, but their goal was so lofty. Some actually said "millions of simultaneous....", but only ever managed to get dozens, or even only one dozen at peak times, including themselves and their friends.
Even at the shop where we had hundreds of thousands of simultanious users, they didn't start out like that. It grew into that over several years.
If you have that many users, you should have the financial base to hire developers who already know what they're doing, system/network admins who can do the infrastructure properly.
As you're saying that you're to be the only dev, and you don't have the resources to hire any more, stay simple, and let it grow.
No big site ever designed for their final need. It grows over time. Just keep an eye on your current need and growth projections.
I was responding to the previous post.. He wanted low G. I know there are possible ways to simulate gravity.
But he has one cool armchair. :)
Save a place for me in hell.. Right by all the whores and drugs, and rock & roll music..
You're very optimistic. You're talking about humans who lived and survived in harsh environments.
Most modern humans haven't walked hundreds of miles to more survivable areas, and couldn't even feed themselves if given a knife in the wild. In an ELE, a high guess would be a handful of small tribes per continent surviving. In an ELE, the dead don't just disappear. They leave massive fields of rotting flesh, feeding disease ridden bugs and other scavengers.
Humans don't actually handle low G all that well.. Vision degrades. Bones weaken. Muscle tone is lost. It would be many generations in that environment before we adapted or evolved to live comfortably in it. We need gravity. We need bugs (and the whole ecosystem). We need changing weather. Without the later two, you won't have well sustained food crops.
In the end, does it really matter? Life will or won't continue on this rock. In time, this rock won't continue, after it's cooked dry to look like Mercury and finally absorbed into the sun.
If we care about the continuity of humanity, we need to spread to other planets in other solar systems, and in time to other galaxies.
Life will continue somewhere. We evolved over billions of years. Life has or will evolve in other places. it may be a passing curiosity, or a widespread and ongoing thing in the universe.
We're in the infancy of learning if there is other life out there. We're only beginning to travel to our closest neighbors. Right now, exoplanets are little more than observations of other celestial bodies or a few pixels in a photograph. It's not enough to tell us more more than that there is something out there.
Unless there is a dramatic leap in technology, you or I will never be more than about 60k feet above this rock. It's been a privileged few that have earned their astronaut wings, flying beyond 264k feet.
We can hope that our future generations do better. Hopefully they will be able to escape before it's too late.
You keep your dick in your pocket? I stopped doing that because it was uncomfortable rubbing against my keys and wallet.
A dick mounted video recorder though... That's a brilliant idea. Patent it before Google does.
Why? What audience are the developing for? Realtors were mentioned, but most don't have a huge budget for gadgets. My guess the first audience would be rich kids with no responsibilities and too much money. You'd have to guess what they might want to do with them... Then you're right back to the purpose of the modern cell phones for them. Take pictures of each other drunk, post them on Facebook, and text (err, voice text now?) while they're driving. They don't actually want to *talk* to each other, unless it's annoying to their parents.
I believe they had an advertised feature of letting you know when you're in proximity of someone you like or dislike.. That'd go over just as well as Google Latitude. Oh ya, it didn't.
Get a PO box, a remailer service, a hotel room (yes, you can have mail sent to your hotel), and a cheap apartment in a different town. You can send mail from, and receive mail to, it.
No, just like a street address, it does not identify you. It does lead straight to your home though. One requires someone to drive to your house. The other requires a LEO call to the ISP to ask for the address to drive to your house.
It doesn't identify *you*. Just like you can have your mail delivered to a friend, neighbor or PO box, *you* are linked to it. It still leads back to you, no matter how many layers of distractions are involved.
Your IP or mailing address cannot be used to prosecute. They can be used to point investigators towards who to prosecute.
If you get a pissy enough opposing counsel and a judge to cooperate, warrants can be issued. Trust me, being on the wrong side of it. Of course, this will vary by your jurisdiction, IANAL, and especially not yours.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that"
- George Carlin (1937 - 2008)
Credit card fraud isn't usually that tough to deal with, if you have a decent bank. Unfortunately, you won't find out if they're decent until it happens.
I had a fraud issue once. I went down to the branch, and we called the merchant together. The merchant basically told me to fuck off. So the bank refunded me the full amount, and sent off a chargeback.
Someone else I knew at another bank had a fraudulent charge. Her transactions clearly showed what she did that day. Gas and groceries within an hour of the fraudulent charge 200 miles away. Her bank told her to prove it wasn't her.
I had a mess with identity theft for a little while. People were buying cell phones under my name online. All the shipping went to about a 20 mile area, which happened to be about 2,500 miles from where I was. I got a collections notice in the mail. When I called up, I actually got someone who cared. We chased it around until we figured out exactly what happened. They cancelled all the phones that "I" bought. I then called every cell phone company I could think of. "I" had phones with 3 different carriers. I was lucky, I got people who cared. It was probably the way I chased it down. I called, and said "I'm having an identity theft problem, can you see if I have an account with you?" When they said yes, I politely requested to be transferred to their fraud department.
It's really all in who you get on the phone.
It still took hours of my work time (pesky job coinciding with normal working hours). I was lucky that I had a very accommodating employer at the time, so there was no complaint that I spent entire work days chasing it around. Then again, I spent all night doing my work to keep up. Sadly, there's no reimbursement for *my* time spent fixing *their* failure to properly identify the client in front of them.