know this is intended to be funny, but when I read it, it actually frightened me instead. Can you imagine what would happen if this technology were used to manufacture destructive little nanobots that couldn't be seen, but could be inhaled?
Even better are the nano bots coded to attack only a specific DNA pattern. You could release them into the air and the entire population would be safe except for the one guy you coded the bots to kill. Fun, eh?
Well, then free energy is just around the corner. All we have to do is "pop" in an even smaller universe inside of our universe and syphon off all the energy.
All of the reports said "So and so CLAIMED to have done X and Y." Reporting a claim is not the same as getting a story wrong. I'm not saying that they SHOULD have published it but I don't see why they should publish a retraction...
I claim to be the inventor of Pizza and the color aqua! Now where the hell are my reporters?
Just for a second, let's say that these fools DID invent thier magical energy machine. Are they really the heros of the world? Not if they are trying to make a profit off of thier device. By keeping it secret, they would be worthy of a serious lynching, not a hero's parade. I am all for the progress of science and inventors getting paid for thier work, but when something like this comes around, it is simply too valuable to humanity to try and profit from. If the man who eventually finds the "cure" for cancer (not just a treatment, an actualy honest to goodness cure), or AIDS, or old age decided that he was going to only give it out to the highest bidder the world would be very very displeased. Free energy would transform the entire world forever. It would solve hunger (by providing palnts with energy for food, day and night, everywhere in the world), overpopulation (by providing the energy to get into space), poverty & crime (energy and money are interchangable, few realize this. When energy is free, economies will change on an astronomical scale), war (with limitless energy, everyone will have railguns, making even minor skermishes as pointless as thermonuclear war), everything.
If these men are telling the truth, they will go down in history as villians.
"...it's about a city legislating a business. It happens all the time with Bars, Porn Shops, Video Stores and whatnot, why should an arcade be treated differently?"
...it's about a city legislating a business. It happens all the time with Bars, Porn Shops, Video Stores and whatnot, why should a Church, a YMCA or a Library be treated differently?
is by faking them out. Put them in a room with a fake transmitter and tell them that everytime the green light goes on, they are going to get zapped and you will watch thier reactions. Except, in reality, you actually zap them when the light is OFF. Then after they finish having thier seizures or whatever when the EMF radation is off and they seem to recover when it's on, go publish your report saying that too little radiation is bad for people's health.
...to actually find out for yourself. One guy down under, on guy in America, and start your counters at 0.0.0.0 and start pinging port 80 until you get to 255.255.255.255. After you are done, compare notes, and viola, there is your blacklist. In fact once this is done once, other groups could do this in other countries usuing the same "roadmap" of all the viable sites. I'm sure you could get a distributed.net project going that could get this done in a couple of days...
It's the expensive subscriptions that don't. Who wants to pay full price for a new copy of MS Word every year when the one from five years ago still works. A $5-$10 a year subscription over the lifetime of a product would go over very well, but a $50-$100 one will ALWAYS fail.
Excellent links... I think virtual particles are fascinating... I only see one serious flaw. Virtual particles CAN transmit information, albiet only one-half of a bit of information. All we have to do, it would seem, is decide this: (However one sends virtual particles) We will decide that if you recieve a virtual particle, that means X. Now, if I send one at all, and you recieve it, then X has been transmitted. This won't be very useful, but it seems to work. For example, if I wanted to set up the "I have arrived on the alien world" message, I would send you a virtual particle when I do arrive. That particle will tell you that I have landed. The absence of that particle doesn't mean anything, however, so it's only a half-bit of information, it would seem.
I have a feeling the the Quantum Gravity people need to team up with the Dark Energy people, because I suspect they are tackling the same issue. Case in point: Dark Energy is thought to have a "negative pressure" (i.e. the less dense, the more pressure), which is similar to the way "gravitons" work (as the more of them that strike an object, that is to say, the greater density, the less the pressure keeping two objects apart). Also, somehow, mass never seems to run out of gravitons. Stars eventually run out of photons, but gravitons never stop. What happens to all these hojillion gravitons? They can't ALL be absorbed by matter, can they? If they had even a nutrino's nutrino worth of mass, they could easily make up all the dark matter in the universe. Some food for thought...
One other thing, I wonder if there is a such thing as a gravatic black hole. Something so powerfully repulsive that gravitons cannot escape...
The more I think about it, the more I like it. All we need, though, is to put these on those business-card CDs. It would be very cool to not just send a picture of where you are from, but a few minutes of video, maybe a snapshot or two of the local festivals and activities, and a personal note of some kind.
Heck if it gets popular enough, maybe it'll take off beyond simple "hello" recognition and we'll see these start showing up in sea-faring bottles, wedged in between the seats of long-distance busses, stuck into the crack in old brick walls down dark alleys. It would be fascinating to collect these.
What I can't understand is how the SELLING of patents and copyrights is EVER a good thing. I can undersatnd that case for innovation and protecting people's ideas for a limited time, but when you allow those protections to be sold, they stop being used as devices to foster innovation, but as roadblocks.
That's just a cliche... When it comes down to it, a voter is just a person when in the voting booth. Don't forget, just because you flipped heads 50 times in a row doesn't mean that the chance of the next flip coming up tails is greater than 50 percent, 'cuase it's not. Aggregates are nice, but they aren't reality.
I'm a voter, and I want things to be complex. I want somone to go over all the nitty-gritty details. I would vote for somone who didn't trat me like an idiot in a second. The atmosphere nowadays is so bad that I would vote for that , even if I didn't agree with a word he was saying. In my book, a politican who doesn't treat his voters like simpltons is going to be able to sway my vote no matter what his beliefs.
How about a different angle on the same idea: Suppose you gave public funding for research on Fusion Reactors, and a breakthrough resulted in a working design. Would you demand that you be given your own Fusion Reactor because you contributed funding?
Does the Fusion Reactor require no cost, time or effort to re-create and can be sent to me over the phone line? Hell yes, I expect to get one!
Use the open source philosophy as a selling point. Say you want your goverment to work like open source does, where everyone contributes, where everything is out in the open (no secret deals), and where it works perfectly.
It will be a huge paradigm shift for most politicians, but IF you can pull it off, you will be on the road to the presidency and you will have DESERVED it.
develop software for a small company. I'm quite lucky to be where I am now, doing what I want to.
And imagine how quickly your "small software company" would be out of business if I sent in an anonymous tip saying that you had illegal software and in response they took your computers as evidence. No matter that you were in compliance, you know. Sure they'll give your computers back eventually, but can your small business survive 5-6 months without them?
You know, I would love to have all the criminals in jail, but not if that means taking people one by one and throwing them in jail until they can prove that they are innocent...
If you fill your hard drive with crap, the incriminating stuff can still be found.
What you are missing here is volume. If you really, really, REALLY fill your hard drive with crap, then you'll be safe. If you have one cleartext email detailing the route of your drug shipment and 485,966,282 emails detailing similar but fake shipments, then you will be far safer than if you had one single encrypted message.
Encryption can be broken by brute force, and can be done by machine. Sifting through million of pieces of similar but different information trying to weed out the disinformation from the real information MUST be done by hand.
YUCK! Do NOT try and use Sun's HTML rendering swing components unless you don't need any more sophistication than can be provided in a slashdot comment. Once you go past bold, italics and font colors, you start seeing serious glitches in the rendering code. Like try putting INPUT tags inside of a TABLE... OUCH! IT will start placing ing INPUT tags randomly all over the screen.
It was a nice idea, adding the HTML to the swing components, but unless they are going to actually do it right then it's useless.
Slashdot Mirror
know this is intended to be funny, but when I read it, it actually frightened me instead. Can you imagine what would happen if this technology were used to manufacture destructive little nanobots that couldn't be seen, but could be inhaled?
Even better are the nano bots coded to attack only a specific DNA pattern. You could release them into the air and the entire population would be safe except for the one guy you coded the bots to kill. Fun, eh?
Well, then free energy is just around the corner. All we have to do is "pop" in an even smaller universe inside of our universe and syphon off all the energy.
All of the reports said "So and so CLAIMED to have done X and Y." Reporting a claim is not the same as getting a story wrong. I'm not saying that they SHOULD have published it but I don't see why they should publish a retraction...
I claim to be the inventor of Pizza and the color aqua! Now where the hell are my reporters?
Just for a second, let's say that these fools DID invent thier magical energy machine. Are they really the heros of the world? Not if they are trying to make a profit off of thier device. By keeping it secret, they would be worthy of a serious lynching, not a hero's parade. I am all for the progress of science and inventors getting paid for thier work, but when something like this comes around, it is simply too valuable to humanity to try and profit from. If the man who eventually finds the "cure" for cancer (not just a treatment, an actualy honest to goodness cure), or AIDS, or old age decided that he was going to only give it out to the highest bidder the world would be very very displeased. Free energy would transform the entire world forever. It would solve hunger (by providing palnts with energy for food, day and night, everywhere in the world), overpopulation (by providing the energy to get into space), poverty & crime (energy and money are interchangable, few realize this. When energy is free, economies will change on an astronomical scale), war (with limitless energy, everyone will have railguns, making even minor skermishes as pointless as thermonuclear war), everything.
If these men are telling the truth, they will go down in history as villians.
Next time you are handed one of those promotional AOL CDs with a "free 70 hours", here is your new retort:
"So is that Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech, or Free as in Energy?"
"...it's about a city legislating a business. It happens all the time with Bars, Porn Shops, Video Stores and whatnot, why should an arcade be treated differently?"
...it's about a city legislating a business. It happens all the time with Bars, Porn Shops, Video Stores and whatnot, why should a Church, a YMCA or a Library be treated differently?
Well, of course "Wired" would run this story! "Wireless" is the LAST thing that the want!
is by faking them out. Put them in a room with a fake transmitter and tell them that everytime the green light goes on, they are going to get zapped and you will watch thier reactions. Except, in reality, you actually zap them when the light is OFF. Then after they finish having thier seizures or whatever when the EMF radation is off and they seem to recover when it's on, go publish your report saying that too little radiation is bad for people's health.
It's at 633 mod points so far... When it reaches 666 I wonder if that will signal the apacolypse?
...to actually find out for yourself. One guy down under, on guy in America, and start your counters at 0.0.0.0 and start pinging port 80 until you get to 255.255.255.255. After you are done, compare notes, and viola, there is your blacklist. In fact once this is done once, other groups could do this in other countries usuing the same "roadmap" of all the viable sites. I'm sure you could get a distributed.net project going that could get this done in a couple of days...
It's the expensive subscriptions that don't. Who wants to pay full price for a new copy of MS Word every year when the one from five years ago still works. A $5-$10 a year subscription over the lifetime of a product would go over very well, but a $50-$100 one will ALWAYS fail.
Excellent links... I think virtual particles are fascinating... I only see one serious flaw. Virtual particles CAN transmit information, albiet only one-half of a bit of information. All we have to do, it would seem, is decide this: (However one sends virtual particles) We will decide that if you recieve a virtual particle, that means X. Now, if I send one at all, and you recieve it, then X has been transmitted. This won't be very useful, but it seems to work. For example, if I wanted to set up the "I have arrived on the alien world" message, I would send you a virtual particle when I do arrive. That particle will tell you that I have landed. The absence of that particle doesn't mean anything, however, so it's only a half-bit of information, it would seem.
I have a feeling the the Quantum Gravity people need to team up with the Dark Energy people, because I suspect they are tackling the same issue. Case in point: Dark Energy is thought to have a "negative pressure" (i.e. the less dense, the more pressure), which is similar to the way "gravitons" work (as the more of them that strike an object, that is to say, the greater density, the less the pressure keeping two objects apart). Also, somehow, mass never seems to run out of gravitons. Stars eventually run out of photons, but gravitons never stop. What happens to all these hojillion gravitons? They can't ALL be absorbed by matter, can they? If they had even a nutrino's nutrino worth of mass, they could easily make up all the dark matter in the universe. Some food for thought...
One other thing, I wonder if there is a such thing as a gravatic black hole. Something so powerfully repulsive that gravitons cannot escape...
The more I think about it, the more I like it. All we need, though, is to put these on those business-card CDs. It would be very cool to not just send a picture of where you are from, but a few minutes of video, maybe a snapshot or two of the local festivals and activities, and a personal note of some kind.
Heck if it gets popular enough, maybe it'll take off beyond simple "hello" recognition and we'll see these start showing up in sea-faring bottles, wedged in between the seats of long-distance busses, stuck into the crack in old brick walls down dark alleys. It would be fascinating to collect these.
What I can't understand is how the SELLING of patents and copyrights is EVER a good thing. I can undersatnd that case for innovation and protecting people's ideas for a limited time, but when you allow those protections to be sold, they stop being used as devices to foster innovation, but as roadblocks.
If this could really protect the software companies, then you would see packs of Malboro's with EULA's on the wrapper...
That's just a cliche... When it comes down to it, a voter is just a person when in the voting booth. Don't forget, just because you flipped heads 50 times in a row doesn't mean that the chance of the next flip coming up tails is greater than 50 percent, 'cuase it's not. Aggregates are nice, but they aren't reality.
Just remember, voters don't want things complex
I'm a voter, and I want things to be complex. I want somone to go over all the nitty-gritty details. I would vote for somone who didn't trat me like an idiot in a second. The atmosphere nowadays is so bad that I would vote for that , even if I didn't agree with a word he was saying. In my book, a politican who doesn't treat his voters like simpltons is going to be able to sway my vote no matter what his beliefs.
How about a different angle on the same idea: Suppose you gave public funding for research on Fusion Reactors, and a breakthrough resulted in a working design. Would you demand that you be given your own Fusion Reactor because you contributed funding?
Does the Fusion Reactor require no cost, time or effort to re-create and can be sent to me over the phone line? Hell yes, I expect to get one!
Sure, but it would look like this:
for (int i=[BLACK];i<[BLACK];i++) {
if ([BLACK]) {
callFunction([BLACK]);
} else {
[BLACK];
}
[BLACK](i);
}
Open Source, Open Government.
Use the open source philosophy as a selling point. Say you want your goverment to work like open source does, where everyone contributes, where everything is out in the open (no secret deals), and where it works perfectly.
It will be a huge paradigm shift for most politicians, but IF you can pull it off, you will be on the road to the presidency and you will have DESERVED it.
develop software for a small company. I'm quite lucky to be where I am now, doing what I want to.
And imagine how quickly your "small software company" would be out of business if I sent in an anonymous tip saying that you had illegal software and in response they took your computers as evidence. No matter that you were in compliance, you know. Sure they'll give your computers back eventually, but can your small business survive 5-6 months without them?
You know, I would love to have all the criminals in jail, but not if that means taking people one by one and throwing them in jail until they can prove that they are innocent...
If you fill your hard drive with crap, the incriminating stuff can still be found.
What you are missing here is volume. If you really, really, REALLY fill your hard drive with crap, then you'll be safe. If you have one cleartext email detailing the route of your drug shipment and 485,966,282 emails detailing similar but fake shipments, then you will be far safer than if you had one single encrypted message.
Encryption can be broken by brute force, and can be done by machine. Sifting through million of pieces of similar but different information trying to weed out the disinformation from the real information MUST be done by hand.
Of course, the best idea would be to do both....
I COULD see somone shipping a new media device that burns itself after being played X times... This *is* the ultimate copy protection scheme.
YUCK! Do NOT try and use Sun's HTML rendering swing components unless you don't need any more sophistication than can be provided in a slashdot comment. Once you go past bold, italics and font colors, you start seeing serious glitches in the rendering code. Like try putting INPUT tags inside of a TABLE... OUCH! IT will start placing ing INPUT tags randomly all over the screen.
It was a nice idea, adding the HTML to the swing components, but unless they are going to actually do it right then it's useless.