I will say that the next step isn't BNS, but rather, just actually implementing existing idea, best practices, and software.
You got that right. I have a security textbook. About 350+pages. 30 odd on encryption and such matters. The rest on organizational issues. Dumpster diving and social engineering are always a threat.
If you can pick some developer's brain for a password or pay the secretary $5K for a way in... cheaper than trying to crack a 128 bit encryption scheme. And probably more interesting because in addition to getting info on how to get in, you can get info on where what you want might be located!
Security starts with a well-thought out policy covering the organization, the employees, and the computer systems. Then the next step is implementation of those policies in a meaningful way. Passwords that are too short or easy to guess, people who write their passwords on their desk pad, employees who run anything that arrives in their inbox including viruses and trojans, etc - these are the threats to security that we have to beat before fancy shmancy AI biological and biometric systems matter a whit.
Re:The problem isn't always getting up there
on
Apollo 1
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I said it'd give space a run for its money. But, in space, in addition to the issues of pressure differential, no possibility of real rescue, etc. you can add in: radiation (both regularly dangerous amounts and storms), gravity (or lack thereof) which does everything up to and including inducing an AIDS like drop off in the human immune system as well as causing erosion of bone density, and heat issues (how to dispose of heat is a main concern because disposing of heat generally means disposing of some mass at the same time).
Don't get me wrong: The sea floor is a very demanding environment. It is the best place we have on earth to train for space (not the same challenges, but the same degree of risk almost). But it doesn't quite have the cornucopia of threats (sudden and gradual) that space has, some of which (such as the gravity issues) are very hard to deal with effectively.
BTW, you'll notice I never mentioned who'd developed it. And the discussion about the merits of these kinds of projects is hardly urban myth, thanks very much. The point is people question whether these kinds of projects are worthwhile. Moreso, admittedly, if it is public money. But even if it is not. (and I never suggested it was!)
I agree with the parent. The last thing I want to do is create a world (built in the name of some sort of greater realism) that favours script kiddies and the itinerant rich. Yipeee. I make a pile of cash in real life, but abusing other players in a game with it (even if in self-defense) is a ridiculous waste of my money, my time, and (in a sense) my human dignity.
The rich have power in real life, but what keeps people from going around killing people in masses? (Answer: sometimes they do, but I'm not interested in Rwanda:MMORPG).
The reasons are manifold. One reaon is that all of us are fundamentally vulnerable. We all have to sleep, eat, and sometimes trust other people. Plenty of places for you to get dry-gulched and brought low if you're some sort of super dude killer badass.
Another reason is that modern weapons make even the peons dangerous. You're a super SF dude who knows Chop Sockey and can fire a Bushmaster one-handed? Jee.... I'm just a dork with a.22 pistol, but if I shoot you in the eye, you're done.
Another reason is that communities and laws exist. If you were to structure a game with laws and a justice system and you had people paid to enforce laws against murder, arson, looting, robbery etc (police, bounty hunters, the army), then you'd end up with a more "real" environment. You'd end up with an environment where thinking, hard work, and innovation paid off. Rather than cheesiness, gamerism, and maybe some cheatbots.
When the natural checks and balances that exist in our own world (the mortality of normal humans, the legal and institutional frameworks) are exempted while other parts of the game world start to approach reality, you get an odd and (to my mind) unfun imbalance.
On the old Zanzibar MUD, I recall the Dark Reavers having a guild. It had a community idea where if anyone from another guild PK'd one Reaver, they got payback from the others. Turns out one of the best thieves in the game PK'd my buddy's low level Reaver. A month later, he ran into a high level Reaver somewhere who mentioned said high level thief had "got his" in payback. this kind of "gang" based situation can be one effective check on PKing.
Anyway, I certainly won't be participating in a scheme designed to print money for the company who provides the service (pay close attention, Mr. Gates). I did that once (Wallets of the Coast took far too much of my money) and it was no fun then and (like sour milk put back in the fridge) isn't likely to be any better now.....
The problem isn't always getting up there
on
Apollo 1
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I forget which Apollo mission it was, but it was one of the ones that made it to land on the moon. The crew were down and they were getting ready to leave and a switch snapped off. Left them in quite a pickle. Of course, their suits bulky gloves couldn't depress it. And without it, they couldn't leave. IIRC, this was solved with one of the super-fancy space pens.
Perhaps some other slashdotter will post the link to the story about this - some sci-fi author (Spider Robinson) wrote about it (in the context of whether it made sense to spend piles of cash developing a pen that could write in space).
It just illustrates the point that space is the most unforgiving environment we're aware of. The Antarctic and the deep sea floor might be close competitors, but space still has them beat. If engineers and astronauts can overcome the kinds of challenges space presents, that is quite an achievement.
We talk about the trickle down from space technologies... and we bitch about the costs of the space program. Quite frankly, it isn't that expensive when you think of the things that have worked there way down to us from that program, that might not have otherwise been developed.
Add to that the fact that one of the major things lacking in our modern world is aspirations and dreams. The dream of getting off the planet to Mars, and then to other systems, should be a powerful draw. It offers us new horizons, new frontiers, a chance to be new pioneers, not just custodians of the remnants of the past. It offers us opportunities to expand our horizons, to learn, and maybe one day to discover other life forms. That has to be the single greatest opportunity I can imagine, and if the dream of going to space doesn't fire your blood, then you're already dead.
Besides, we'd better get some of our populace into some other stable biosphere just in case a big chunk of space debris decides to make a bank shot and knock Earth into the Sun. (With apologies to Dave Lister, cosmic pool player extrordinaire).
If you have a box between you and the net which substitutes addresses or wraps packets, then the company providing you access can determine this is occuring from things in the TCP/IP datastream.
OTOH, if your box connects to a box (we'll call it a proxy server) and that proxy server connects to your target URL itself, and receives any data requested by you, then the only IP the outside world ever sees is that of the proxy. The proxy never references your internal IP (because it is always connecting ITSELF to the external system and so it looks like one computer is at your end). It does incur the overhead of two TCP connections, a bit of request translation and reply translation (some lag), but it does make your packets appear to all originate from one place. Anyone who knows HTTP and TCP/IP sockets can write one of these (for TCP).
The only thing that isn't so good for is FPS or other online games. It'll work fine (really well in fact) for web surfing or file downloading.
But really, if I'm buying X bandwidth from my ISP, provided I don't violate a law, what in the Blue Blazes gives them the right to pry into my internal network setup? If my smartFridge wants to talk to e-Grocer to order me some new lettuce, the ISP shouldn't be snivelling. They sold me the bandwidth.
If they are having problems with some users using more than their bandwidth then they have a network bandwidth throttling problem. This should be solved by a quality-of-service approach and bandwidth throttling, not pursuing those who happen to have a home network and don't suck bandwidth beyond the permissible and agreed upon amount.
This is a case of solving the wrong damn problem. But it is just this kind of blinkered thinking that has helped in the demise of so many high-speed service providers. It isn't that the market isn't there, they just want good service for their dollar. And this and other examples just illustrate that most services don't deliver.
Someone should mod up the parent post! The poster has the right of it.
To further amplify the point, many successful cracks aren't reported to anyone (insurance, law enforcement, etc) because to do so would be in breach of the management team's responsibilities to its shareholders to protect the share value. This is a non-trivial situation and places corporations in a position where they have to not report a crime in order to not commit a crime (of sorts - breach of trust) upon their shareholders.
This is all too common. I haven't the vaguest clue how you fix it, but it smacks of wrongness. There should be a way (as far as the market is concerned) to not report a crack, while simultaneously actually reporting it (perhaps annonymously?) to the people who track and investigate these things.
You might headquarter there as many US Corps headquarter in states that offer shareholders more minimal rights. But I con't think you'd actually move your real physical HQ.
You think it would be trivial to move the tech base required to support a computer industry? To provide all the things like medical, etc. that you require as infrastructural support? To provide equivalent services to all the nearby small companies your company does business with?
I can't see it. And then there are the physical security issues. Remember, Sealand was once taken by hostile forces. And they are arguably inside UK territorial waters! And denial of service becomes far easier if your connection is a seafloor fibre pipe (oops, sorry about that Micro$oft...). Not to mention exposing your HQ and your employees to flooding and tropical storms. And all those wonderful bugs that dont thrive in North America.
It might make sense to maintain a legal fiction with a lawyer and a P.O. Box down there, much like corps do in Virginia, but that's about the end of it. And in this New World of Terrorism (really, the same old world but with a new media focus...), it seems unlikely corporations would be anxious to locate to more vulnerable locations. Or did you think they'd pay for their own army, navy, air force, and significant intelligence assets? There are a few benefits to being HQ'd in the Continental USA!
Besides, if M$ were to relocate to the Carribean, whose Judges would they buy? Whose DoJ would they bribe?:)
I can attest to that. From 1995-2000, I worked for a company that was a custom-software house that went after government contracts. My first 4 years were on a mobile computing and dispatch system for the RCMP. Government work. Then my next year was working on a Tactical Mission Trainer for the CF Air Navigation School. Defence Work.
Then I decided that the company had been bought out and went from 200->1800 and that was too big for me. So I went to a 50 person.com custom-software house. For a year, until the US.com crash caught up with us. There I worked on speech recognition systems and cellular portal software frameworks. This was clearly a corporate job and different in nature to the government work - faster cycle of delivery, less ISO, less overhead in management, more pruning of anything that blocked hitting deadlines and budgets.
Then, it was off to an even smaller.com developing massively multi-user immersive 3D virtual worlds. This is product development and bears little in common with contract software work. And an 11 person firm bears nothing in common with a 200 person firm or a fifty person firm (well, not much).
So it is easily possible to move between these markets if you had an open mind, a broad based skillset, and an attitude of "I can do it, whatever it is!". Three years ago I couldn't discuss details of my work and held a Top Secret Restricted Access clearance. Now I tell everyone what I do and teach at the local tech college for fun!
Moral/Lesson: With a broad based skillset, and adaptable mind, and useful experience (you sometimes have to understand what parts of what you learned can be generically useful), you can make the transition between private sector and government work. I could probably go back. You just have to adjust your thinking accordingly and you keep getting a paycheck, which is a nice plus!
Not every task will be suited to a solid state solution. Some will require mechanistic activity or (another alternative to solid state) biological activity. In the case of things like nanites that are going to navigate throughout the body and do stuff, this kind of thing could be useful (or a springboard to something useful).
But my first thought was "once they have the chain, then they can build the nano-cycle... but where will they find all those itsy-bitsy Clowns? And how many can dance on the head of a pin?"
Yes. My sources indicate that a wookie will rip his arms off.
Whose arms shall the wookie rip off: Jar-Jar Bites or George "This-space-for-rent-or-product-placement" Lucas?
Jar-Jar is an enormously annoying figure to adults, beloved of children, and therefore killing him in a bloody mass of dismembered limbs, although satisfying to the adults, would make the movie traumatic for the young-uns.
If the wookie was to tear off George's arms, it'd be some measure of justice for Episode 1, Jar-Jar, etc. and it could be done in a backroom so no kiddies need be traumatized. And the adults would still be satisfied.
The great story of good and evil and redemption evolved in the middle 3 movies (Ep IV-VI) with Campbellian overtones is being sold down the river by a man whose vision has lost its way in favour of a big paycheck. There were a lot of worthwhile Mythic elements amidst the entertainment of the original movies, and the story had a certain power. Jar-Jar the rastafarian doppelganger and even fancy high-kicking Darth Maul (of few words, and a cheesy death) can't conceal the deeper emptiness in Episode 1, which is about to be (by all appearances) surpassed in its vaccuity by Episode 2: Attack of the Clowns.
George... how could you? How did they ever get to you man....?
You forgot one: Oft times, vcs will store binary versions as complete objects (rather than the forward or reverse deltas used with ascii text files like code). This means if I check in 16 versions of MyDoc.doc, then I eat up a heck of a lot of space. Space always seems to be a consideration on version control systems, so this is a good reason to use ascii-based doc formats.
Not arguing in favor of MS Word (far from it), but if you'd used a Master Document and SubDocs to split up your information, then you might have avoided some of this thrashing problem. Or not, but I'd be careful in damning a tool until I was intimately conversant with its many functions, and the modern word processor has a lot of options and capabilities.... ones most of us never see/use/learn.
Katz, try reality sometime. You might like it.
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 1
Let us take a trip through the odd world of Katz, which bears little resemblance to common consensus reality:
The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."
Not being a paranoid, but the Pentagon has on occasion been known to lie about who died and when and when it starts operations on the ground (or even that such operations exist). I feel reasonably certain that, current claims to the contrary, allied Special Ops forces were conducting some business in-theatre before the dates the Pentagon has admitted. It wouldn't surprise me if there were casualties in this time, but a real dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin press officer might consider these "not part of the war on terrorism". They'd be just as dead though.
Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops.
This part remains true after Afghanistan, otherwise explain to me what the US SF and Marines and soon the Airborne will be doing there?
The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest the civilian casualties may be lower than in any other large-scale military operation in modern history.
You don't think this could have to do with the fact that the most militarily potent nation in the world (Thank God for that too) is making war on one of the the most abused and battered backwater nations? Or perhaps the fact this is the first large scale war that does not really occur between two state entities - rather between a state and an NGO (Al-Queda)? Yes, the US has removed the Taliban regime, but they held power only by virtue of factionalism and the weakness of their enemies. But in any case, the war was not a general war on a state, so far more surgical strikes and fighting in far more remote areas were likely (terrain of Afghanistan helps here). So civilian casualties could be expected to be lighter. If I ran a war in backwoods Montana, not many civilians would likely be killed either.
Although dangerous and complex for the military on the scene, it's hard to imagine a conflict more remote to the majority of Americans, asked to go about their business as usual.
The conflict isn't remote to anyone who has a friend, family member, or co-worker over there on active duty. I don't think this campaign is as remote to the average American as several other dustups the US has fought in the past 20 years.
Orwell's "Drone Wars" come very much to mind here. So does Sir Arthur Clarke's machine warfare and AI military stories. A handful of human soldiers guide and direct the increasingly sophisticated technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks
Says who? So far, only the Pentagon pretty much. These are the same guys that claimed they were destroying lots of Scuds in the Gulf, then recanted years later very quietly on those figures. I don't suppose they are having _no_ impact, and the greatest impact on an NGO terrorist organization is to remove its state sponsor, so in that sense, there has been an impact. But whether Al-Queda is crippled by military action or by worldwide law enforcement and intelligence actions will probably be debatable and impossible to sort out.
with stunningly few U.S. military casualties and American civilian casualties beyond September 11 and the anthrax attacks.
This, while true, is also part of the grand problem. The fact that Katz doesn't mention all the ground fighting done by the Northern Alliance and all of their casualties and the fact he only cares about US casualties is symptomatic of the attitudes that helped bring us to the horror of Sept. 11th.
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
Hello, Americo-centric viewpoint! Pakistan and I believe Israel (from that part of the world) use RPVs. Australia has them. Canada and Germany do too. Canada did some of the pioneering work in this area. RPVs have been in use since the 1970s in one form or another. The newer generation are an incremental step forward and they are starting to mount effectual weapons systems, but it is hardly a whole new technology invented by America.
brutish wars of the 20th Century have rendered both objectives hard to attain.
Not to mention that acquiring land isn't that useful anymore from an economic point of view unless it is easily defensible and sitting on key resources!
Technologically advanced civilian populations -- just as Orwell foresaw -- can send their technological surrogates off to battle one another while humans stay home to wait for the outcome.
This is possibly the most idiotic thing I've heard yet! Did the US lay a beat-down on Al-Queda without on-ground HUMINT and FAC/FAO? No. Did they lay a beat-down on them without Spec Ops and Marine raiders doing cordon and sweep ops and Pakistani border gaurds? No. Did they change the geopolitics of Afghanistan without the Northern Alliance and a stabilization force of INFANTRY not DRONES? No. Afghanistan is a total force effort. We won't know bombing results for five years (when the Pentagon and independent military specialists have had a chance to make sense of the effects of their strikes or lack thereof and where the incentive to give an upbeat report regardless of actual outcomes is removed). But one way or another, it wasn't won by drones without human casualties. And civilians hit by B-52 strikes are dead even if the bombs are smart...
A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea.
No, sadly not. This kind of idiotic view of war was what lead to WW1 (We'll be home by Xmas!) and to a number of lesser conflicts. This is definitely not a new idea. But then, those who cannot remember there past.... err... what was the rest of that?
The dude who wrote those sci-fi books on Dolphins such as Startide Rising and Uplift war.
Skipjack is another possibility. (Think about it)
Then we have SQueaL -- people have always said "sequel" but considering the "fun" of working with it, I always thought "squeal" was more appropriate...
Of coure, Bottlenose, Bluenose, etc. are possibilities.
And Wanda (in this case, it would be a Fish Called....). (Okay pedants, don't bother with the "ain't a fish" thing...)
And last but not least, I submit Jar-Jar. Why? Kids love Dolphins, and a Dolphin is bound to be better than some poor CGI-rastafarian-knockoff.
The speed of light is a limiting condition more than it is a defined speed. It's an asymptotic thing IIRC. You can't ever accelerate to the speed of light (though there are particles alleged to move faster than the speed of light, but the last time I heard that explained is that they popped into existence moving faster, so they never "broke" the barrier or limiting condition that lightspeed represents).
At least, not in the fashion the Millenium Falcon would!:)
And with Attack of the Clowns on the way, with (rumor has it) NSync in it, and more Jarhead Bites, you certainly have to wonder if Lucas is having "Sellout" tatoo'd on his forehead....
Now, LOTR may not have been perfect, but at least it was reasonably true to the book (hence a decent story) and showed what you can do with a good story. In this instance, we have Lucas busily destroying the mystique and the depth built up in the first SW trilogy (well, first in terms of release date).
I waited outside for a few hours to get tickets to EP1. I'll wait till a while after the premier to see this next film. If it is as disappointing, I'll wait for EP3 maybe longer than that. George, this is not the way to go about prying Imperial Credits from my wallet....
Hmmm, was this a troll? Apparently some moderator thought so. I have to disagree. Apparently anytime that you end with a question (even a self-evidently rhetorical one) you are "trolling".
Sorry, I don't buy it. There's more to a troll than that. And I stand by the core content - the reason the record industry can and does get away with the shenanigans it does is that it wields a huge amount of power and uses that power to protect its position to the detriment of variety, quality, the consumer and the artist.
And the only way to get them to change is for artists and consumers to act. Easier for artists because 1) they are a smaller group and 2) they have some money themselves.
If this is the standard of moderation applied, then slashdot moderation bears a lot in common with an oligarchy of the blinkered dictating standards of community wisdom as if they were the Oracle at Delphi. Go ahead and mod me into oblivion, but that doesn't particularly make you any brighter, your contribution any more valuable, or mine any less valuable. Or so says I.
They're being asked to explain how they can collect a tithe on all blank media sales and at the same time act to prevent copying... and I think the answer is obvious. They have lots of money, they have their artists in a rather nasty spot (work with us or you don't get the exposure and distribution you want), and they have a billion lawyers.
I hardly think the "how" is a mystery. The why is equally obvious: More money == more power == more control. And we all know (don't we Mr. Gates?) that more control is a Very Good Thing (TM)... for the person or agency who holds that control!
Since you can rent studio time and since you can now market your music over the Internet, shouldn't most bands and artists be telling the RIAA to "blow!"? Wouldn't that be the best way to put them in their place? They derive their revenue from a symbiotic (or probably more likely parasitic) relationship with artists. If the artists said "No siree, we ain't having that no more!", things would have to change.
Of course, that might be one way to ensure you never make it big, but what happened to artistic integrity anyway?
Language _should_be_ an implementation detail. In practical fact, there are many instances where it actually does represent a constraint.
Additionally, not all languages are equally capable of implementing a given design. Design done without reference to the language it will be implemented in is Utopian thinking. It fails to account for the efficiencies and defficiencies of particular languages.
In a perfect world, langauge would be an implementation detail. In the real one, it is a design consideration.
One year I was in engineering school, the graduating year took a car and (somehow) got it hung beneath our tilting bridge/causeway (Kingston Ont). And this is on one of the main arteries into or out of town... and it took the city the better part of a day to get it off safely so they could get boat traffic through...
Another good one: Some U of T students had access to some Ministry of Transport kit... they went to RentAll and picked up some pneumatic jackhammers, a generator, a tamper, etc. Then they went to downtown TO, setup a dig, even had the cops come by, talk to their foreman-type guy who had all the right paperwork, and had the cop direct traffic for them. After digging a big ass hole, they packed up, put up sawhorses and flashing lights and signs, and buggered off, never to be seen again.....
Another exploit: A student's dad is an electrician. Gets a new white panel van, no logos yet. Summer time. So one of the major Toronto libraries has summer staff (read: without a clue). So they go down in coveralls with a fake work order for "annual dry cleaning" of the carpeting. They bamboozle the staff, pack up a really nice carpet into the van, off they go. It subsequently adorned their cottage floor.
Then there was the year that graduating engineers at Queen's U covered all of the street lights along University Avenue with.... giant sized condoms. It was... a site to see. And gave new meaning to the phrase "size matters!".
I'm assuming FF (the movie) will make stupid amounts of money (counting video and spin off products). Why sell off the unit that helped make that a reality, given that a sequel would probably make a pile of cash too? What's the logic there? Helloooooooo brain.....
It would be disappointing to think that a wonderful character like Dr. Ross, so capably brought to life in the movie, may not make it back to the big screen. Frankly, the FF characters were more interesting than a lot of the drek Hollywood plants in front of us the rest of the time.....
Glen Cook's Black Company novels (some names for searching - Shadows Linger, Water Sleeps, The Black Company, Soldiers Live, etc) traces the travels of a Mercenary company through a number of city states and (one might suggest) planes of existense. Along the way, there are some terrific threads woven in relating to distinctly non-Christian religions. The Nyueng Bao particularly surely borrows liberally from SE Asia and the Deceivers (a cult of assassins) seem to have some Khali-esque overtones. Truly an interesting series from a good writer (though not perhaps the most upbeat or happy set of tales - more about endurance than victory by direct means).
Mary's books are interesting. Although quite a few reflect her....different outlook and different sense of humor. Grunts! for example is a rather different kind of work that would set a number of people's sensibilities on edge.
But Mary can tell a good story. And I'm told she throws a mean die in tabletop games too!
This same technique is why I stopped buying stuff from TSR/WotC/Hasboro and David Drake. Only Marc Miller and his spinoffs have managed to repeatedly sell me the same product and I've been too happy to not buy it.
Baen got into the annoying habbit of reprinting Drake's stuff in different packaging, sometimes obviously, sometimes not so obviously. And then they'd throw in a short story to make you think you were getting your $9.99 Cdn worth. Sad. I like Drake as an author (similar to Bujold in enjoyability, not content) but I won't repeatedly buy the same words just to get at the few new ones scattered amidst the old.
When are these publishers going to wise up and let us buy short stories or novellas separately? I suppose this hinges on a workable internet micropayment scheme (or not, given the cost of a novella...) but it would sure be handy. Then I could get all the works of author X without worrying about buying a given piece more than once.
Slashdot Mirror
I will say that the next step isn't BNS, but rather, just actually implementing existing idea, best practices, and software.
You got that right. I have a security textbook. About 350+pages. 30 odd on encryption and such matters. The rest on organizational issues. Dumpster diving and social engineering are always a threat.
If you can pick some developer's brain for a password or pay the secretary $5K for a way in... cheaper than trying to crack a 128 bit encryption scheme. And probably more interesting because in addition to getting info on how to get in, you can get info on where what you want might be located!
Security starts with a well-thought out policy covering the organization, the employees, and the computer systems. Then the next step is implementation of those policies in a meaningful way. Passwords that are too short or easy to guess, people who write their passwords on their desk pad, employees who run anything that arrives in their inbox including viruses and trojans, etc - these are the threats to security that we have to beat before fancy shmancy AI biological and biometric systems matter a whit.
I said it'd give space a run for its money. But, in space, in addition to the issues of pressure differential, no possibility of real rescue, etc. you can add in: radiation (both regularly dangerous amounts and storms), gravity (or lack thereof) which does everything up to and including inducing an AIDS like drop off in the human immune system as well as causing erosion of bone density, and heat issues (how to dispose of heat is a main concern because disposing of heat generally means disposing of some mass at the same time).
Don't get me wrong: The sea floor is a very demanding environment. It is the best place we have on earth to train for space (not the same challenges, but the same degree of risk almost). But it doesn't quite have the cornucopia of threats (sudden and gradual) that space has, some of which (such as the gravity issues) are very hard to deal with effectively.
The article from Spider thanks to Google cache.
BTW, you'll notice I never mentioned who'd developed it. And the discussion about the merits of these kinds of projects is hardly urban myth, thanks very much. The point is people question whether these kinds of projects are worthwhile. Moreso, admittedly, if it is public money. But even if it is not. (and I never suggested it was!)
I agree with the parent. The last thing I want to do is create a world (built in the name of some sort of greater realism) that favours script kiddies and the itinerant rich. Yipeee. I make a pile of cash in real life, but abusing other players in a game with it (even if in self-defense) is a ridiculous waste of my money, my time, and (in a sense) my human dignity.
.22 pistol, but if I shoot you in the eye, you're done.
The rich have power in real life, but what keeps people from going around killing people in masses? (Answer: sometimes they do, but I'm not interested in Rwanda:MMORPG).
The reasons are manifold. One reaon is that all of us are fundamentally vulnerable. We all have to sleep, eat, and sometimes trust other people. Plenty of places for you to get dry-gulched and brought low if you're some sort of super dude killer badass.
Another reason is that modern weapons make even the peons dangerous. You're a super SF dude who knows Chop Sockey and can fire a Bushmaster one-handed? Jee.... I'm just a dork with a
Another reason is that communities and laws exist. If you were to structure a game with laws and a justice system and you had people paid to enforce laws against murder, arson, looting, robbery etc (police, bounty hunters, the army), then you'd end up with a more "real" environment. You'd end up with an environment where thinking, hard work, and innovation paid off. Rather than cheesiness, gamerism, and maybe some cheatbots.
When the natural checks and balances that exist in our own world (the mortality of normal humans, the legal and institutional frameworks) are exempted while other parts of the game world start to approach reality, you get an odd and (to my mind) unfun imbalance.
On the old Zanzibar MUD, I recall the Dark Reavers having a guild. It had a community idea where if anyone from another guild PK'd one Reaver, they got payback from the others. Turns out one of the best thieves in the game PK'd my buddy's low level Reaver. A month later, he ran into a high level Reaver somewhere who mentioned said high level thief had "got his" in payback. this kind of "gang" based situation can be one effective check on PKing.
Anyway, I certainly won't be participating in a scheme designed to print money for the company who provides the service (pay close attention, Mr. Gates). I did that once (Wallets of the Coast took far too much of my money) and it was no fun then and (like sour milk put back in the fridge) isn't likely to be any better now.....
I forget which Apollo mission it was, but it was one of the ones that made it to land on the moon. The crew were down and they were getting ready to leave and a switch snapped off. Left them in quite a pickle. Of course, their suits bulky gloves couldn't depress it. And without it, they couldn't leave. IIRC, this was solved with one of the super-fancy space pens.
Perhaps some other slashdotter will post the link to the story about this - some sci-fi author (Spider Robinson) wrote about it (in the context of whether it made sense to spend piles of cash developing a pen that could write in space).
It just illustrates the point that space is the most unforgiving environment we're aware of. The Antarctic and the deep sea floor might be close competitors, but space still has them beat. If engineers and astronauts can overcome the kinds of challenges space presents, that is quite an achievement.
We talk about the trickle down from space technologies... and we bitch about the costs of the space program. Quite frankly, it isn't that expensive when you think of the things that have worked there way down to us from that program, that might not have otherwise been developed.
Add to that the fact that one of the major things lacking in our modern world is aspirations and dreams. The dream of getting off the planet to Mars, and then to other systems, should be a powerful draw. It offers us new horizons, new frontiers, a chance to be new pioneers, not just custodians of the remnants of the past. It offers us opportunities to expand our horizons, to learn, and maybe one day to discover other life forms. That has to be the single greatest opportunity I can imagine, and if the dream of going to space doesn't fire your blood, then you're already dead.
Besides, we'd better get some of our populace into some other stable biosphere just in case a big chunk of space debris decides to make a bank shot and knock Earth into the Sun. (With apologies to Dave Lister, cosmic pool player extrordinaire).
If you have a box between you and the net which substitutes addresses or wraps packets, then the company providing you access can determine this is occuring from things in the TCP/IP datastream.
OTOH, if your box connects to a box (we'll call it a proxy server) and that proxy server connects to your target URL itself, and receives any data requested by you, then the only IP the outside world ever sees is that of the proxy. The proxy never references your internal IP (because it is always connecting ITSELF to the external system and so it looks like one computer is at your end). It does incur the overhead of two TCP connections, a bit of request translation and reply translation (some lag), but it does make your packets appear to all originate from one place. Anyone who knows HTTP and TCP/IP sockets can write one of these (for TCP).
The only thing that isn't so good for is FPS or other online games. It'll work fine (really well in fact) for web surfing or file downloading.
But really, if I'm buying X bandwidth from my ISP, provided I don't violate a law, what in the Blue Blazes gives them the right to pry into my internal network setup? If my smartFridge wants to talk to e-Grocer to order me some new lettuce, the ISP shouldn't be snivelling. They sold me the bandwidth.
If they are having problems with some users using more than their bandwidth then they have a network bandwidth throttling problem. This should be solved by a quality-of-service approach and bandwidth throttling, not pursuing those who happen to have a home network and don't suck bandwidth beyond the permissible and agreed upon amount.
This is a case of solving the wrong damn problem. But it is just this kind of blinkered thinking that has helped in the demise of so many high-speed service providers. It isn't that the market isn't there, they just want good service for their dollar. And this and other examples just illustrate that most services don't deliver.
Someone should mod up the parent post! The poster has the right of it.
To further amplify the point, many successful cracks aren't reported to anyone (insurance, law enforcement, etc) because to do so would be in breach of the management team's responsibilities to its shareholders to protect the share value. This is a non-trivial situation and places corporations in a position where they have to not report a crime in order to not commit a crime (of sorts - breach of trust) upon their shareholders.
This is all too common. I haven't the vaguest clue how you fix it, but it smacks of wrongness. There should be a way (as far as the market is concerned) to not report a crack, while simultaneously actually reporting it (perhaps annonymously?) to the people who track and investigate these things.
You might headquarter there as many US Corps headquarter in states that offer shareholders more minimal rights. But I con't think you'd actually move your real physical HQ.
:)
You think it would be trivial to move the tech base required to support a computer industry? To provide all the things like medical, etc. that you require as infrastructural support? To provide equivalent services to all the nearby small companies your company does business with?
I can't see it. And then there are the physical security issues. Remember, Sealand was once taken by hostile forces. And they are arguably inside UK territorial waters! And denial of service becomes far easier if your connection is a seafloor fibre pipe (oops, sorry about that Micro$oft...). Not to mention exposing your HQ and your employees to flooding and tropical storms. And all those wonderful bugs that dont thrive in North America.
It might make sense to maintain a legal fiction with a lawyer and a P.O. Box down there, much like corps do in Virginia, but that's about the end of it. And in this New World of Terrorism (really, the same old world but with a new media focus...), it seems unlikely corporations would be anxious to locate to more vulnerable locations. Or did you think they'd pay for their own army, navy, air force, and significant intelligence assets? There are a few benefits to being HQ'd in the Continental USA!
Besides, if M$ were to relocate to the Carribean, whose Judges would they buy? Whose DoJ would they bribe?
I can attest to that. From 1995-2000, I worked for a company that was a custom-software house that went after government contracts. My first 4 years were on a mobile computing and dispatch system for the RCMP. Government work. Then my next year was working on a Tactical Mission Trainer for the CF Air Navigation School. Defence Work.
.com custom-software house. For a year, until the US .com crash caught up with us. There I worked on speech recognition systems and cellular portal software frameworks. This was clearly a corporate job and different in nature to the government work - faster cycle of delivery, less ISO, less overhead in management, more pruning of anything that blocked hitting deadlines and budgets.
.com developing massively multi-user immersive 3D virtual worlds. This is product development and bears little in common with contract software work. And an 11 person firm bears nothing in common with a 200 person firm or a fifty person firm (well, not much).
Then I decided that the company had been bought out and went from 200->1800 and that was too big for me. So I went to a 50 person
Then, it was off to an even smaller
So it is easily possible to move between these markets if you had an open mind, a broad based skillset, and an attitude of "I can do it, whatever it is!". Three years ago I couldn't discuss details of my work and held a Top Secret Restricted Access clearance. Now I tell everyone what I do and teach at the local tech college for fun!
Moral/Lesson: With a broad based skillset, and adaptable mind, and useful experience (you sometimes have to understand what parts of what you learned can be generically useful), you can make the transition between private sector and government work. I could probably go back. You just have to adjust your thinking accordingly and you keep getting a paycheck, which is a nice plus!
Not every task will be suited to a solid state solution. Some will require mechanistic activity or (another alternative to solid state) biological activity. In the case of things like nanites that are going to navigate throughout the body and do stuff, this kind of thing could be useful (or a springboard to something useful).
:)
But my first thought was "once they have the chain, then they can build the nano-cycle... but where will they find all those itsy-bitsy Clowns? And how many can dance on the head of a pin?"
All right, I probably do need therapy
Yes. My sources indicate that a wookie will rip his arms off.
Whose arms shall the wookie rip off: Jar-Jar Bites or George "This-space-for-rent-or-product-placement" Lucas?
Jar-Jar is an enormously annoying figure to adults, beloved of children, and therefore killing him in a bloody mass of dismembered limbs, although satisfying to the adults, would make the movie traumatic for the young-uns.
If the wookie was to tear off George's arms, it'd be some measure of justice for Episode 1, Jar-Jar, etc. and it could be done in a backroom so no kiddies need be traumatized. And the adults would still be satisfied.
The great story of good and evil and redemption evolved in the middle 3 movies (Ep IV-VI) with Campbellian overtones is being sold down the river by a man whose vision has lost its way in favour of a big paycheck. There were a lot of worthwhile Mythic elements amidst the entertainment of the original movies, and the story had a certain power. Jar-Jar the rastafarian doppelganger and even fancy high-kicking Darth Maul (of few words, and a cheesy death) can't conceal the deeper emptiness in Episode 1, which is about to be (by all appearances) surpassed in its vaccuity by Episode 2: Attack of the Clowns.
George... how could you? How did they ever get to you man....?
You forgot one: Oft times, vcs will store binary versions as complete objects (rather than the forward or reverse deltas used with ascii text files like code). This means if I check in 16 versions of MyDoc.doc, then I eat up a heck of a lot of space. Space always seems to be a consideration on version control systems, so this is a good reason to use ascii-based doc formats.
Not arguing in favor of MS Word (far from it), but if you'd used a Master Document and SubDocs to split up your information, then you might have avoided some of this thrashing problem. Or not, but I'd be careful in damning a tool until I was intimately conversant with its many functions, and the modern word processor has a lot of options and capabilities.... ones most of us never see/use/learn.
Let us take a trip through the odd world of Katz, which bears little resemblance to common consensus reality:
The most staggering statistic out of Afghanistan might be that the first American combat casualty died nearly three months into the "war."
Not being a paranoid, but the Pentagon has on occasion been known to lie about who died and when and when it starts operations on the ground (or even that such operations exist). I feel reasonably certain that, current claims to the contrary, allied Special Ops forces were conducting some business in-theatre before the dates the Pentagon has admitted. It wouldn't surprise me if there were casualties in this time, but a real dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin press officer might consider these "not part of the war on terrorism". They'd be just as dead though.
Before Afghanistan, conventional military wisdom held that a war can't be won without substantial numbers of ground troops.
This part remains true after Afghanistan, otherwise explain to me what the US SF and Marines and soon the Airborne will be doing there?
The Afghanistan campaign is a very different kind of fight. Early reports suggest the civilian casualties may be lower than in any other large-scale military operation in modern history.
You don't think this could have to do with the fact that the most militarily potent nation in the world (Thank God for that too) is making war on one of the the most abused and battered backwater nations? Or perhaps the fact this is the first large scale war that does not really occur between two state entities - rather between a state and an NGO (Al-Queda)? Yes, the US has removed the Taliban regime, but they held power only by virtue of factionalism and the weakness of their enemies. But in any case, the war was not a general war on a state, so far more surgical strikes and fighting in far more remote areas were likely (terrain of Afghanistan helps here). So civilian casualties could be expected to be lighter. If I ran a war in backwoods Montana, not many civilians would likely be killed either.
Although dangerous and complex for the military on the scene, it's hard to imagine a conflict more remote to the majority of Americans, asked to go about their business as usual.
The conflict isn't remote to anyone who has a friend, family member, or co-worker over there on active duty. I don't think this campaign is as remote to the average American as several other dustups the US has fought in the past 20 years.
Orwell's "Drone Wars" come very much to mind here. So does Sir Arthur Clarke's machine warfare and AI military stories. A handful of human soldiers guide and direct the increasingly sophisticated technological arsenal that has devastated the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda networks
Says who? So far, only the Pentagon pretty much. These are the same guys that claimed they were destroying lots of Scuds in the Gulf, then recanted years later very quietly on those figures. I don't suppose they are having _no_ impact, and the greatest impact on an NGO terrorist organization is to remove its state sponsor, so in that sense, there has been an impact. But whether Al-Queda is crippled by military action or by worldwide law enforcement and intelligence actions will probably be debatable and impossible to sort out.
with stunningly few U.S. military casualties and American civilian casualties beyond September 11 and the anthrax attacks.
This, while true, is also part of the grand problem. The fact that Katz doesn't mention all the ground fighting done by the Northern Alliance and all of their casualties and the fact he only cares about US casualties is symptomatic of the attitudes that helped bring us to the horror of Sept. 11th.
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
Hello, Americo-centric viewpoint! Pakistan and I believe Israel (from that part of the world) use RPVs. Australia has them. Canada and Germany do too. Canada did some of the pioneering work in this area. RPVs have been in use since the 1970s in one form or another. The newer generation are an incremental step forward and they are starting to mount effectual weapons systems, but it is hardly a whole new technology invented by America.
brutish wars of the 20th Century have rendered both objectives hard to attain.
Not to mention that acquiring land isn't that useful anymore from an economic point of view unless it is easily defensible and sitting on key resources!
Technologically advanced civilian populations -- just as Orwell foresaw -- can send their technological surrogates off to battle one another while humans stay home to wait for the outcome.
This is possibly the most idiotic thing I've heard yet! Did the US lay a beat-down on Al-Queda without on-ground HUMINT and FAC/FAO? No. Did they lay a beat-down on them without Spec Ops and Marine raiders doing cordon and sweep ops and Pakistani border gaurds? No. Did they change the geopolitics of Afghanistan without the Northern Alliance and a stabilization force of INFANTRY not DRONES? No. Afghanistan is a total force effort. We won't know bombing results for five years (when the Pentagon and independent military specialists have had a chance to make sense of the effects of their strikes or lack thereof and where the incentive to give an upbeat report regardless of actual outcomes is removed). But one way or another, it wasn't won by drones without human casualties. And civilians hit by B-52 strikes are dead even if the bombs are smart...
A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea.
No, sadly not. This kind of idiotic view of war was what lead to WW1 (We'll be home by Xmas!) and to a number of lesser conflicts. This is definitely not a new idea. But then, those who cannot remember there past.... err... what was the rest of that?
The dude who wrote those sci-fi books on Dolphins such as Startide Rising and Uplift war.
Skipjack is another possibility. (Think about it)
Then we have SQueaL -- people have always said "sequel" but considering the "fun" of working with it, I always thought "squeal" was more appropriate...
Of coure, Bottlenose, Bluenose, etc. are possibilities.
And Wanda (in this case, it would be a Fish Called....). (Okay pedants, don't bother with the "ain't a fish" thing...)
And last but not least, I submit Jar-Jar. Why? Kids love Dolphins, and a Dolphin is bound to be better than some poor CGI-rastafarian-knockoff.
The speed of light is a limiting condition more than it is a defined speed. It's an asymptotic thing IIRC. You can't ever accelerate to the speed of light (though there are particles alleged to move faster than the speed of light, but the last time I heard that explained is that they popped into existence moving faster, so they never "broke" the barrier or limiting condition that lightspeed represents).
:)
At least, not in the fashion the Millenium Falcon would!
And with Attack of the Clowns on the way, with (rumor has it) NSync in it, and more Jarhead Bites, you certainly have to wonder if Lucas is having "Sellout" tatoo'd on his forehead....
Now, LOTR may not have been perfect, but at least it was reasonably true to the book (hence a decent story) and showed what you can do with a good story. In this instance, we have Lucas busily destroying the mystique and the depth built up in the first SW trilogy (well, first in terms of release date).
I waited outside for a few hours to get tickets to EP1. I'll wait till a while after the premier to see this next film. If it is as disappointing, I'll wait for EP3 maybe longer than that. George, this is not the way to go about prying Imperial Credits from my wallet....
Hmmm, was this a troll? Apparently some moderator thought so. I have to disagree. Apparently anytime that you end with a question (even a self-evidently rhetorical one) you are "trolling".
Sorry, I don't buy it. There's more to a troll than that. And I stand by the core content - the reason the record industry can and does get away with the shenanigans it does is that it wields a huge amount of power and uses that power to protect its position to the detriment of variety, quality, the consumer and the artist.
And the only way to get them to change is for artists and consumers to act. Easier for artists because 1) they are a smaller group and 2) they have some money themselves.
If this is the standard of moderation applied, then slashdot moderation bears a lot in common with an oligarchy of the blinkered dictating standards of community wisdom as if they were the Oracle at Delphi. Go ahead and mod me into oblivion, but that doesn't particularly make you any brighter, your contribution any more valuable, or mine any less valuable. Or so says I.
They're being asked to explain how they can collect a tithe on all blank media sales and at the same time act to prevent copying... and I think the answer is obvious. They have lots of money, they have their artists in a rather nasty spot (work with us or you don't get the exposure and distribution you want), and they have a billion lawyers.
I hardly think the "how" is a mystery. The why is equally obvious: More money == more power == more control. And we all know (don't we Mr. Gates?) that more control is a Very Good Thing (TM)... for the person or agency who holds that control!
Since you can rent studio time and since you can now market your music over the Internet, shouldn't most bands and artists be telling the RIAA to "blow!"? Wouldn't that be the best way to put them in their place? They derive their revenue from a symbiotic (or probably more likely parasitic) relationship with artists. If the artists said "No siree, we ain't having that no more!", things would have to change.
Of course, that might be one way to ensure you never make it big, but what happened to artistic integrity anyway?
Language _should_be_ an implementation detail. In practical fact, there are many instances where it actually does represent a constraint.
Additionally, not all languages are equally capable of implementing a given design. Design done without reference to the language it will be implemented in is Utopian thinking. It fails to account for the efficiencies and defficiencies of particular languages.
In a perfect world, langauge would be an implementation detail. In the real one, it is a design consideration.
One year I was in engineering school, the graduating year took a car and (somehow) got it hung beneath our tilting bridge/causeway (Kingston Ont). And this is on one of the main arteries into or out of town... and it took the city the better part of a day to get it off safely so they could get boat traffic through...
.... giant sized condoms. It was... a site to see. And gave new meaning to the phrase "size matters!".
Another good one: Some U of T students had access to some Ministry of Transport kit... they went to RentAll and picked up some pneumatic jackhammers, a generator, a tamper, etc. Then they went to downtown TO, setup a dig, even had the cops come by, talk to their foreman-type guy who had all the right paperwork, and had the cop direct traffic for them. After digging a big ass hole, they packed up, put up sawhorses and flashing lights and signs, and buggered off, never to be seen again.....
Another exploit: A student's dad is an electrician. Gets a new white panel van, no logos yet. Summer time. So one of the major Toronto libraries has summer staff (read: without a clue). So they go down in coveralls with a fake work order for "annual dry cleaning" of the carpeting. They bamboozle the staff, pack up a really nice carpet into the van, off they go. It subsequently adorned their cottage floor.
Then there was the year that graduating engineers at Queen's U covered all of the street lights along University Avenue with
I'm assuming FF (the movie) will make stupid amounts of money (counting video and spin off products). Why sell off the unit that helped make that a reality, given that a sequel would probably make a pile of cash too? What's the logic there? Helloooooooo brain..... It would be disappointing to think that a wonderful character like Dr. Ross, so capably brought to life in the movie, may not make it back to the big screen. Frankly, the FF characters were more interesting than a lot of the drek Hollywood plants in front of us the rest of the time.....
Glen Cook's Black Company novels (some names for searching - Shadows Linger, Water Sleeps, The Black Company, Soldiers Live, etc) traces the travels of a Mercenary company through a number of city states and (one might suggest) planes of existense. Along the way, there are some terrific threads woven in relating to distinctly non-Christian religions. The Nyueng Bao particularly surely borrows liberally from SE Asia and the Deceivers (a cult of assassins) seem to have some Khali-esque overtones. Truly an interesting series from a good writer (though not perhaps the most upbeat or happy set of tales - more about endurance than victory by direct means).
Mary's books are interesting. Although quite a few reflect her....different outlook and different sense of humor. Grunts! for example is a rather different kind of work that would set a number of people's sensibilities on edge.
But Mary can tell a good story. And I'm told she throws a mean die in tabletop games too!
This same technique is why I stopped buying stuff from TSR/WotC/Hasboro and David Drake. Only Marc Miller and his spinoffs have managed to repeatedly sell me the same product and I've been too happy to not buy it.
Baen got into the annoying habbit of reprinting Drake's stuff in different packaging, sometimes obviously, sometimes not so obviously. And then they'd throw in a short story to make you think you were getting your $9.99 Cdn worth. Sad. I like Drake as an author (similar to Bujold in enjoyability, not content) but I won't repeatedly buy the same words just to get at the few new ones scattered amidst the old.
When are these publishers going to wise up and let us buy short stories or novellas separately? I suppose this hinges on a workable internet micropayment scheme (or not, given the cost of a novella...) but it would sure be handy. Then I could get all the works of author X without worrying about buying a given piece more than once.
Or is that a stupid idea?