But wouldn't a roving black hole produce a tell-tale roving gravitational lensing?
Only if you were extremely close by or got a perfect lineup. The former, we could probably notice out to a significant fraction of a light year or so if we were watching the sky.
The latter case is rather problematic, as it would be hard to distinguish a black hole's lensing effect from noise - one frame you see a few photons, the next you don't. Was it a galaxy? A star? Nebula? Random noise?
We could certainly do without the ability to spoof addresses. "Hi, did you send this message? No? Okay." And "Dude, you told me other people sent bogus crap more than once in the past day/you don't have a valid MX record, not talking to you." Really ought to take care of such things.
As for the Internet, though? No. As long as identity can be given some basic level of guarantee (via IP addresses, cookies, e-mails/contact information, and simply the desire to maintain a reputation), what we have can work. Some stuff needs fixing, some software could use selling, some communities need to learn how to run themselves, but the Internet as it is works fine. If you want to make a gated Internet community, nothing stops you. It can exist perfectly fine as an invisible subset of the Internet.
> When we were seen as "Sick Men from East Asia", we were called The Peril.
A growing market will destabilize existing markets until they themselves are saturated. It's not just China, it's India, Brazil, and Russia (again) - all striving to be superpowers themselves. Unfortunately corruption and a lack of transparency hamstring each of you and it's beginning to tear the United States apart as well.
> When we strived to get stronger, we are called The Threat.
Not many US policymakers consider China to be a threat, though China is the closest thing to a threat the US has. Consider it a badge of honor, only two other nations in history ever really were.
> When we closed our doors to the world, you forced them open with drugs and guns.
But forcing Tibet's doors is just fine. I'll freely admit that the US has committed many, many wrongs. Acting like China hasn't does not paint a healthy picture of you.
> When we finally embraced Free Trade, you blame us for taking away your jobs.
This is a lie, since your trade is not 'Free', but listening to your compatriots whine about Indonesians taking your jobs is amusing.
> When we were falling apart, you marched in your troops and robbed us blind.
Ah, yes, I suppose we should have let Japan run free and build the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. How many Nankings do you want?
> When we put the broken pieces back together again, "Free tÂbet" you screamed, it was an invasion!
It was an invasion. No matter how atrociously Tibet's previous leadership treated its people, it's still an invasion. In truth, it would not concern us so much if you did not try to suppress or co-opt belief systems.
> So, we tried Communism, you hated us for being Communists.
Except you didn't, you were Maoists.
> Then we learned from Capitalism, you hated us for being Capitalists.
Except you're not.
> When we had a billion people, you said "The planet is starving."
No, we said 'the planet is starving', and an American man showed you how to feed a billion people.
> So we tried to limit our population, you said it was Human Rights Abuse.
No, when you perform gender-specific abortions, we called -that- a human rights abuse.
> When we were poor, you think we are dogs.
I think it's a pity, when entire rivers are drained dry and water supply is intentionally misregulated.
> When we loan you cash, you blame us for your debts.
Who's blaming -you-? You could always not lend, but that's not an option for you. When two people place themselves into a mutual trap the fault is not the sole fault of one or the other.
> When we build our industries, you blame us for global warming.
And we blame ourselves too. The corruption inherent to your coal industry is not our fault.
> When we sell you goods you can afford, you blame us for dumping inferior products.
Lead and arsenic in products is, by Western standards, inferior. Your point?
> When we buy oil, you called that exploitation and assisting genocide.
When did we say that? It's a bit ironic since:
> When you fight for oil, you called that Liberation of Its People.
Iraqi oil is for you, not us.
> When we were lost in chaos and rampage, you wanted Rules of Law for us.
America has long appreciated peace. Peace is good for business. These past few decades have been an odd spot.
> When we uphold our law and order against violence, you called that Violating Human Rights.
Murdering intellectuals and running over protesters with tanks is generally called that by us, yes. We like to think that you got the Great Leap Forward out of your system. Do you even -know- about that?
> When we were silent, you said we have No Free Speech.
When people are arrested for making dissenting statements, we call that a move against free speech.
Space is big. There are only supposed to be about six stellar collisions, and most of those in the core region. Out here in the boondocks? We're probably fine.
Why push the limits of propulsion, materials, and energy generation technology? Why develop working ecologies and recycling systems?
I mean, really, there's obviously no use for such things, it's just wasted money! Who wants to know how to purify water better, faster, and cheaper? The world has -plenty- of fresh water and there's no concern about shortages of it -anywhere-. No one wants faster jets, no one wants better solar or nuclear power. All useless technology that no respectable citizen of Earth has any need for.
The Apollo missions gave us the modern computing industry. Going back to Luna is nice and all, but once we've run the proper tests on the Moon, the true economic cost of sending a manned mission to Mars is the productivity output of the crew. Everything else has been reinvested on Earth, in some manner.
Right, and before the nuclear age, it was nearly 100%! That must mean that the other 33% came from absolutely nowhere and that we will never find anything with the century worth of coal we have remaining. Fusion development is a hoax, nuclear, solar, wind, wave, hydro, geothermal, and biomass fuels will -never- replace it, that petawatt figure I mentioned for what the Earth was receiving is obviously unsustainable and no one will try to harness more of it in the future.
And, holy crap, that's still 5 terawatts left. Let's move back to the four person family, or go with the fact that the average drain from a fridge is measured in double or triple digits, and your argument collapses even further.
Unless fusion and solar cell research somehow completely fail to pan out, we are at no risk of losing infrastructural power until the Sun starts scorching the surface of the Earth. The entire difficulty is in finding easily transportable and reliable sources of power. Right now, that's sustainable at something like.25% of current rates, according to some - that is an issue, but not enough power for the world to live in American-style homes? Nonsense.
If you do the math, it's not possible for every family on this planet to have a refrigerator. Not even close. There is not enough energy and not enough resources.
Assuming a ~3-KW fridge (beefy!), 2-person families, that's ~3.333... billion families (I'm being lazy), or 10 terawatts. This, of course, is assuming they're all running all the time.
Total energy production of human civilization: ~15 terawatts - Energy to spare!
Total energy Earth receives from the Sun: 174 petawatts
There needs to be a '-1: Poster is incapable of basic math' mod.
AV Comparatives does not give AVG very good marks, and my experience has reinforced this. NOD32 and AntiVir are the best out there by their results. AntiVir is free for personal use and they both perform on par with Norton without bringing systems to a crawl.
Oddly, I haven't seen many truly serious rootkits. Most of them have been on pre-SP2 XP machines, which are (thankfully) becoming rarer.
While it's true that a late Pentium III / early P4 -should- be sufficient, the truth is most programs suffer so much code bloat that people who get tricked into buying the latest and greatest still need more (or at least another DIMM in their machines). While I do have several customers who specifically request that I fix their machine as is, no matter how old (odd, and I do make them understand what their machine is worth - they just do not want to throw away a genuinely useful piece of equipment and I can't really fault that), this is not the demographic with the 100+ gig mp3 collection (how much is a 750gb Barracuda again?).
And you're right, the peripherals market is exploding. But that doesn't mean capacity is insufficient. I imagine that is in part because of people like me telling friends and customers "No, you don't need a new computer, you just need more RAM and/or an external/additional HD" and that's the end of it. They then shy away from the new computer - but they'd still like it if their machine was more responsive, which would be fine except they insist on running some insane number of applications along with Norton getting its fat fingers into everything. "But I like the cute cursors"...
But I've yet to meet a residential customer that required more than one external drive or otherwise have the equivalent of two large modern disks. The people that do are generally not my customers, for obvious reasons - but people like us are far from the majority. Most small businesses I've dealt with wanted 2-3, primarily for redundant backup purposes. The large organizations I've dealt with were not concerned about the cost of storing data, but having it immediately and readily accessible at all times. This is an entirely different concern.
I'm not claiming my clientèle is representative, but if I were to spot a universal trend it would be towards accessibility, uptime and response time - far more than cost of storage. If a new, reliable, non-volatile technology has a hundred times the speed and a hundredth the capacity at ten times the price of modern drives of its era, it will shake the industry.
Most of the PC-using population doesn't have much use for more processing power right now, but we can all use a bigger hard drive.
You must be joking - in fact I was tempted to mod you funny instead of posting. Just about all of my customers, family and friends would love their computers to be even faster, but 80% of them aren't even using 20% of their drives. And not a one of the latter group has balked at the price of an external HD, to say nothing of DVD burning options.
In the mean time, I would still like to play Oblivion faster, and one of the simulations I'm writing is hell on the processor. Data storage, on the other hand, is plentiful, though more RAM or some equivalent would indeed be nice.
He states that to get a Mercury Capsule sized vessel to 0.1c takes about the energy consumption of the planet for 5 days. OK, sounds about right. He then states that this makes it impossible (accounting for inefficiencies). I'm less willing to buy that.
Case in point, if we built a Dyson Swarm around the Sun, we could construct AU-long coilguns to fire million-tonne vessels towards stars at 86% of c on a per second basis. Combine this with similar infrastructure at your target star, and you have an absolutely massive infrastructure-building potential.
In fact, if we continue to progress past the next two centuries, such coil arrays would seem almost certain.
Quicktime's FF plugin seems to be insanely unstable. I can only play a few files before it crashes Firefox. Otherwise it's been rock solid (aside from this exploit deal).
You may want to look into Wen Ho Lee, Steven Hatfill, Richard Jewell and John De Lorean, all of whom had this exact thing happen to them.
And the existence or nonexistence of a Truecrypt filesystem is going to matter how, in cases like these? For crying out loud, your entire argument is boiling down to idiotic media hype and has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual legal findings of the courts in question.
Beyond the fact that your explanation of this sort of 'weakness' can be forced upon anyone with a computer, whether or not they even know about TrueCrypt, much less use it.
that provides a unique (so that phishers can't build a list of the trojans) account number / login information that the intelligent users can request from the bank.
right (which the phishers will also see)...
I've bolded the part you missed. Seriously, this would require, at a minimum, for a phisher to use a new and unique IP for every single bank transaction they make. It would also put extreme pressure on proxy-based ISPs (such as AOL) to help ensure the legitimacy of user traffic. On top of this, if they're sufficiently flooded, it becomes hard to be productive, given captchas and things like varying user interface designs.
Slashdot Mirror
But wouldn't a roving black hole produce a tell-tale roving gravitational lensing?
Only if you were extremely close by or got a perfect lineup. The former, we could probably notice out to a significant fraction of a light year or so if we were watching the sky.
The latter case is rather problematic, as it would be hard to distinguish a black hole's lensing effect from noise - one frame you see a few photons, the next you don't. Was it a galaxy? A star? Nebula? Random noise?
...not the game.
The box.
I was offered $20.
For the box.
And would not part with it. ...help?
...but have had one modded up.
We could certainly do without the ability to spoof addresses. "Hi, did you send this message? No? Okay." And "Dude, you told me other people sent bogus crap more than once in the past day/you don't have a valid MX record, not talking to you." Really ought to take care of such things.
As for the Internet, though? No. As long as identity can be given some basic level of guarantee (via IP addresses, cookies, e-mails/contact information, and simply the desire to maintain a reputation), what we have can work. Some stuff needs fixing, some software could use selling, some communities need to learn how to run themselves, but the Internet as it is works fine. If you want to make a gated Internet community, nothing stops you. It can exist perfectly fine as an invisible subset of the Internet.
More Avira posts need modding up, and replies...
Seriously. AVG blows, period, Avast is ridiculously slow and no more accurate than Avira, and you can actually disable Avira's nag.
This might be the most senseless Guinness record ever,
Because 'most cigarette boxes balanced on a chin' is more substantive than something a billion people participate in on a regular basis.
> When we were seen as "Sick Men from East Asia", we were called The Peril.
A growing market will destabilize existing markets until they themselves are saturated. It's not just China, it's India, Brazil, and Russia (again) - all striving to be superpowers themselves. Unfortunately corruption and a lack of transparency hamstring each of you and it's beginning to tear the United States apart as well.
> When we strived to get stronger, we are called The Threat.
Not many US policymakers consider China to be a threat, though China is the closest thing to a threat the US has. Consider it a badge of honor, only two other nations in history ever really were.
> When we closed our doors to the world, you forced them open with drugs and guns.
But forcing Tibet's doors is just fine. I'll freely admit that the US has committed many, many wrongs. Acting like China hasn't does not paint a healthy picture of you.
> When we finally embraced Free Trade, you blame us for taking away your jobs.
This is a lie, since your trade is not 'Free', but listening to your compatriots whine about Indonesians taking your jobs is amusing.
> When we were falling apart, you marched in your troops and robbed us blind.
Ah, yes, I suppose we should have let Japan run free and build the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. How many Nankings do you want?
> When we put the broken pieces back together again, "Free tÂbet" you screamed, it was an invasion!
It was an invasion. No matter how atrociously Tibet's previous leadership treated its people, it's still an invasion. In truth, it would not concern us so much if you did not try to suppress or co-opt belief systems.
> So, we tried Communism, you hated us for being Communists.
Except you didn't, you were Maoists.
> Then we learned from Capitalism, you hated us for being Capitalists.
Except you're not.
> When we had a billion people, you said "The planet is starving."
No, we said 'the planet is starving', and an American man showed you how to feed a billion people.
> So we tried to limit our population, you said it was Human Rights Abuse.
No, when you perform gender-specific abortions, we called -that- a human rights abuse.
> When we were poor, you think we are dogs.
I think it's a pity, when entire rivers are drained dry and water supply is intentionally misregulated.
> When we loan you cash, you blame us for your debts.
Who's blaming -you-? You could always not lend, but that's not an option for you. When two people place themselves into a mutual trap the fault is not the sole fault of one or the other.
> When we build our industries, you blame us for global warming.
And we blame ourselves too. The corruption inherent to your coal industry is not our fault.
> When we sell you goods you can afford, you blame us for dumping inferior products.
Lead and arsenic in products is, by Western standards, inferior. Your point?
> When we buy oil, you called that exploitation and assisting genocide.
When did we say that? It's a bit ironic since:
> When you fight for oil, you called that Liberation of Its People.
Iraqi oil is for you, not us.
> When we were lost in chaos and rampage, you wanted Rules of Law for us.
America has long appreciated peace. Peace is good for business. These past few decades have been an odd spot.
> When we uphold our law and order against violence, you called that Violating Human Rights.
Murdering intellectuals and running over protesters with tanks is generally called that by us, yes. We like to think that you got the Great Leap Forward out of your system. Do you even -know- about that?
> When we were silent, you said we have No Free Speech.
When people are arrested for making dissenting statements, we call that a move against free speech.
> When we are NOW
Long before any of that, the Sun's ever-increasing solar output will overwhelm the greenhouse mechanisms of Earth.
Either we get a gravity tug, or we get fried. Simple, really.
Space is big. There are only supposed to be about six stellar collisions, and most of those in the core region. Out here in the boondocks? We're probably fine.
I'm pretty sure Martian mass is nontrivial compared to Earth's - the Lagrange points are not stable in such instances. Look up Theia.
You mean, "free advertisement for Best Buy has already been done"
I'm not so sure. I tend to get a few new customers after each incident like this.
So does OpenRPG, and it's Open Source and system agnostic.
Who modded you up?
Why push the limits of propulsion, materials, and energy generation technology? Why develop working ecologies and recycling systems?
I mean, really, there's obviously no use for such things, it's just wasted money! Who wants to know how to purify water better, faster, and cheaper? The world has -plenty- of fresh water and there's no concern about shortages of it -anywhere-. No one wants faster jets, no one wants better solar or nuclear power. All useless technology that no respectable citizen of Earth has any need for.
The Apollo missions gave us the modern computing industry. Going back to Luna is nice and all, but once we've run the proper tests on the Moon, the true economic cost of sending a manned mission to Mars is the productivity output of the crew. Everything else has been reinvested on Earth, in some manner.
No, some will be wise enough to delegate authority. Those who don't or do it poorly will be outperformed by those who do it well.
According to your own link, that was an acquisition, not Microsoft R&D
Right, and before the nuclear age, it was nearly 100%! That must mean that the other 33% came from absolutely nowhere and that we will never find anything with the century worth of coal we have remaining. Fusion development is a hoax, nuclear, solar, wind, wave, hydro, geothermal, and biomass fuels will -never- replace it, that petawatt figure I mentioned for what the Earth was receiving is obviously unsustainable and no one will try to harness more of it in the future.
.25% of current rates, according to some - that is an issue, but not enough power for the world to live in American-style homes? Nonsense.
And, holy crap, that's still 5 terawatts left. Let's move back to the four person family, or go with the fact that the average drain from a fridge is measured in double or triple digits, and your argument collapses even further.
Unless fusion and solar cell research somehow completely fail to pan out, we are at no risk of losing infrastructural power until the Sun starts scorching the surface of the Earth. The entire difficulty is in finding easily transportable and reliable sources of power. Right now, that's sustainable at something like
If you do the math, it's not possible for every family on this planet to have a refrigerator. Not even close. There is not enough energy and not enough resources.
Assuming a ~3-KW fridge (beefy!), 2-person families, that's ~3.333... billion families (I'm being lazy), or 10 terawatts. This, of course, is assuming they're all running all the time.
Total energy production of human civilization: ~15 terawatts - Energy to spare!
Total energy Earth receives from the Sun: 174 petawatts
There needs to be a '-1: Poster is incapable of basic math' mod.
AV Comparatives does not give AVG very good marks, and my experience has reinforced this. NOD32 and AntiVir are the best out there by their results. AntiVir is free for personal use and they both perform on par with Norton without bringing systems to a crawl.
Oddly, I haven't seen many truly serious rootkits. Most of them have been on pre-SP2 XP machines, which are (thankfully) becoming rarer.
While it's true that a late Pentium III / early P4 -should- be sufficient, the truth is most programs suffer so much code bloat that people who get tricked into buying the latest and greatest still need more (or at least another DIMM in their machines). While I do have several customers who specifically request that I fix their machine as is, no matter how old (odd, and I do make them understand what their machine is worth - they just do not want to throw away a genuinely useful piece of equipment and I can't really fault that), this is not the demographic with the 100+ gig mp3 collection (how much is a 750gb Barracuda again?).
...
And you're right, the peripherals market is exploding. But that doesn't mean capacity is insufficient. I imagine that is in part because of people like me telling friends and customers "No, you don't need a new computer, you just need more RAM and/or an external/additional HD" and that's the end of it. They then shy away from the new computer - but they'd still like it if their machine was more responsive, which would be fine except they insist on running some insane number of applications along with Norton getting its fat fingers into everything. "But I like the cute cursors"
But I've yet to meet a residential customer that required more than one external drive or otherwise have the equivalent of two large modern disks. The people that do are generally not my customers, for obvious reasons - but people like us are far from the majority. Most small businesses I've dealt with wanted 2-3, primarily for redundant backup purposes. The large organizations I've dealt with were not concerned about the cost of storing data, but having it immediately and readily accessible at all times. This is an entirely different concern.
I'm not claiming my clientèle is representative, but if I were to spot a universal trend it would be towards accessibility, uptime and response time - far more than cost of storage. If a new, reliable, non-volatile technology has a hundred times the speed and a hundredth the capacity at ten times the price of modern drives of its era, it will shake the industry.
Most of the PC-using population doesn't have much use for more processing power right now, but we can all use a bigger hard drive.
You must be joking - in fact I was tempted to mod you funny instead of posting. Just about all of my customers, family and friends would love their computers to be even faster, but 80% of them aren't even using 20% of their drives. And not a one of the latter group has balked at the price of an external HD, to say nothing of DVD burning options.
In the mean time, I would still like to play Oblivion faster, and one of the simulations I'm writing is hell on the processor. Data storage, on the other hand, is plentiful, though more RAM or some equivalent would indeed be nice.
He states that to get a Mercury Capsule sized vessel to 0.1c takes about the energy consumption of the planet for 5 days. OK, sounds about right. He then states that this makes it impossible (accounting for inefficiencies). I'm less willing to buy that.
Case in point, if we built a Dyson Swarm around the Sun, we could construct AU-long coilguns to fire million-tonne vessels towards stars at 86% of c on a per second basis. Combine this with similar infrastructure at your target star, and you have an absolutely massive infrastructure-building potential.
In fact, if we continue to progress past the next two centuries, such coil arrays would seem almost certain.
When I load up Miranda (~200 contacts between AIM, ICQ, YIM, MSN, and GTalk), it takes up a whopping three megabytes of RAM.
Occasionally group features and file sends get broken for some protocols (sadness) but nothing beats its footprint.
Quicktime's FF plugin seems to be insanely unstable. I can only play a few files before it crashes Firefox. Otherwise it's been rock solid (aside from this exploit deal).
You may want to look into Wen Ho Lee, Steven Hatfill, Richard Jewell and John De Lorean, all of whom had this exact thing happen to them.
And the existence or nonexistence of a Truecrypt filesystem is going to matter how, in cases like these? For crying out loud, your entire argument is boiling down to idiotic media hype and has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual legal findings of the courts in question.
Beyond the fact that your explanation of this sort of 'weakness' can be forced upon anyone with a computer, whether or not they even know about TrueCrypt, much less use it.
that provides a unique (so that phishers can't build a list of the trojans) account number / login information that the intelligent users can request from the bank.
right (which the phishers will also see)...
I've bolded the part you missed. Seriously, this would require, at a minimum, for a phisher to use a new and unique IP for every single bank transaction they make. It would also put extreme pressure on proxy-based ISPs (such as AOL) to help ensure the legitimacy of user traffic. On top of this, if they're sufficiently flooded, it becomes hard to be productive, given captchas and things like varying user interface designs.