Yeah, but since I never see ads (I have Tivo:) I don't know about those things until (and unless) some buddy of mine mentions them, or they appear on slashdot, etc. I didn't even know about the Spiderman movie until a friend happened to mention it to me, and I could very easily have missed Queen of the Damned; I just happened to notice it at the theater marquis. Of course, I haven't seen QotD yet, and from the previews I've looked up, it may be very missable...
Right, and then you stop accepting email from the address from which you're getting that crap. If that becomes standard (and I think it will start to be), then the spamming bastards go out of business and only the reasonable services survive. In theory;)
If this service could actually identify my preferences and let me know about things I care about, rather than just spam me with anything they can think of, I would love to see it.
How many of us rushed to see the Lord of the Rings or Phantom Menace trailers? Wouldn't it be great to be informed about such things as soon as they happen, as long as you don't get a ton of other crap?
I still think it would be better to have an intelligent agent that represents you finding these links for you rather than a marketing engine pushing the links to you, but, frankly, there's virtually no economic incentive for someone to build such an agent and every incentive for the marketers to send you their links. In fact, over time, I think marketers who actually do meet our needs will be the ones who win out, and untargeted spam will fall by the wayside.
There are already services that let you give each person with whom you correspond a different email address, thus letting you see who you can trust and eliminate those you can't. As these kind of services become ubiquitous, indiscriminate spammers will begin losing money, while smarter marketers, who actually (gasp!) tell us about products we care about will succeed.
Reading the article, it sounds to me (of course, it's marketing hype, and only time and experience will tell) like this might be such a service.
Wasn't there a slashdot article fairly recently about useful marketing versus spamming?
There should be some slight selection against such traits since the older family member isn't able to help, and in fact can become a burden on, the younger members who still haven't stopped reproducing.
I suspect that there are some kind of positive effects early in life, even if very mild, that are associated with the same genes that cause the late-in-life diseases.
Check out the game that I'm project lead for, Magicosm, at http://www.cosmgame.com
While obviously we can't let everyone actually save the game world (since if you failed it would mean the end of the game for everyone else;), you can create your own village, expand to become a country, build buildings within your area, declare laws in your ruled area, drive away or attract local monsters, run a newspaper, etc., all of which have lasting impact on the game world.
The game is not available yet, but we will be showing it at the Game Developer's Conference (Sun is sponsoring us). At a guess, I would say we will be releasing in about a year and a half.
Unfortunately, what we will be showing at the GDC will look more like an EQ clone than anything, but that's because we have the infrastructure done but not all of the game mechanics, and because of the superficial nature of what you can show at a conference to people passing by.
I know it's a little late in the game, but who has ideas on how we can help get the Sonny Bono act shot down? To whom should I give money? Should I try to write editorials and get them published in the judges' home town newspapers? Is there someplace to send comments?
Java is ok, but i have yet to see a successful project written in java.
Wow, rarely have I seen such a ridiculous statement. J2EE is incredibly widely used for internet businesses of all kinds. In this time of declining job options for programmers, java (well, J2EE, anyway) programmers are still somewhat in demand.
I have worked on many successful java projects. Xtra Online, Marconi Communications, and PDX, are just a few of the companies at which I have worked on successful java projects.
Business software is generally about reliability. Computers are easily fast enough to do any kind of business calculation blindingly fast in virtually any language, and Java is fairly speedy. Java has great reliability (no buffer overflows, no uninitialized pointers, no stack overflows, no doubly-deleted pointers, etc, etc).
If you think java is too slow for business applications, the game we are working on over at http://www.cosmgame.com is all in java. I get 50-100 frames per second in full screen 3d mode, all running under java. I shit you not. We will be showing it at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco March 20-23rd at Sun's booth.
Virtually no business application has anything vaguely close to the kind of performance requirements we have, and we run just fine.
I disagree with your notion that the species that succeeds most is the one with the most selfish members. It's not a zero sum game, and groups that cooperate amongst themselves, and groups most capable of working out arrangements that balance trust versus mutual gain, succeed best. Groups of individually selfish, greedy bastards find themselves unable to form larger, more powerful entities, and they are wiped out by coordinated groups.
As for the radiation, yes the earth does a pretty good job. You could use an artificial magnetosphere to shield against the solar wind, but power failures do happen, and you still have cosmic radiation (which is the bigger problem).
If you were going to build an artificial magnetosphere, you would probably use permanent, not electro, magnets, in which case power failures don't happen.
Uh, yeah, right. I mean, really, right. There are people out there who want to donate their bandwidth to the cause of free anonymous speech, and if that means someone might see some ugliness that could result in us testing some of the more oppressive aspects of recent turns of law in court, so be it.
If you're not willing to stand up for your beliefs, at least don't mock those who are.
Um, yes, it has. Take a look around you, and compare your status now to the status of those living hundreds of years ago.
Naivete is still naivete when it's pessimistic rather than optimistic. And in what magical way will legislation stop, e.g., encrypted contributions to the freenet?
Ah, well. Discussion of this is useless. Time will tell; meanwhile, we fight to make privacy laws more equitable; on which I think we can all agree.
What does this have to do with laws? If most people carry around wearables that are part of a p2p network that lets you trivially make notes about what people are doing, then public figures will naturally have more information about what they're doing than others.
I would also like to disassociate myself from this world - I'm not proposing it's the best of all possible worlds, it just seems very likely given ubiquitous broadband wireless, stylish and lightweight powerful wearable computers, and human nature.
I wasn't making a value judgement as to whether it was a good thing or not, just pointing out that it sure seems inevitable.
The disguise will work until there are good enough chemical sensors to recognize you by smell.
I believe that the answer is that there will come a point at which it is more effort to circumvent such systems than it is worth. We will have to learn to live in an open society at that point.
The good thing is that this should end up applying to government officials, corporate officers, etc. as much or more than to other people.
15 years from now, tops, I look at the guy through the camera on my wearable, and since someone else who's imaged him before has entered his name, and someone else has associated the name with his address, I know everything about him. Assuming that there is some sort of P2P network to which I subscribe to get info which requires that I give info, software automatically analyzes the picture and logs his purchasing habits, and sells the info for 5c.
But those same files are already copied many, many more times than are necessary. Say (to exaggerate horribly) that 1000 copies of a movie file are needed to guarantee that you can play it whenever you want. But how many 100s of thousands of people have copies of the file now?
And, as regards CPU time, it doesn't matter if it takes twice as much CPU time to get anything done, if you've made 50x as much CPU time available since all of your idle cycles become useful cycles.
This, or a system like this, could lead to you never having to buy disk space again. You just put files 'on your system', and periodically you may need to pay another $5 to the your disk farm provider (probably part of your ISP) since you've gone over your previously alloted space. And you end up with backups & redundancy.
Assuming we can overcome some basic hurdles like overzealous copyright law, ubiquitous broadband, and automatic encryption of your files, I don't see how disk space sharing can not become the direction for the future.
Hmm, to elaborate on letting people report that your doohickey was taken: you report that it was taken, then it gets deactivated and you contest your vote (so you have to go vote in person, votes from home must be in say two weeks before 'in person' votes, and must be contested at least a week before). Then you can request a new doohickey; the old one is useless.
That's easy; let people report that it was taken. Then you go contest the web vote. And that's why I said you go somewhere to pick it up, not get it from your mailbox.
I do agree, though, that it's much more important to have accurate vote-taking methods before we worry about voting via the internet. But, that said, I think the method I described would be much more accurate on average than our current voting methods...
But, concludes Stewart, "my hunch is that even when the security issues get solved, Internet voting is going to be a niche."
This is an idiotic statement. When the security issues get resolved, who the hell wouldn't vote over the internet instead of having to go out to the voting booth?
And it seems to me that the security issues could be easily resolved by the government issuing us public/private key pairs. We would all go in somewhere at our leisure, verify our identity and get a doohickey that plugs into the PC via USB, serial port, or whatever. The doohickey would have a public & private key in it, and wouldn't provide a way of getting the private key out. But it would provide an interface for signing any data sent to it and returning it to you. They could just note who got what doohickey (and correlate the public key with your social security # in a central repository), and now you have easy electronic identification, signatures, and the ability to send private info. Of course, I wouldn't trust anything like that for my own encryption (FBI backdoor, anyone?) but it should be fine for voting. It just signs your vote with your private key, encrypts it with the government's public key, and sends it on its way. I should be able to log into a specific site on the internet and see my vote (encrypted with my public key, so others can't see it) so I can go contest it if it was somehow falsified.
Ah, yup, this is exactly the info I was looking for. When he said chopping, I thought he was talking about low and high pass frequency filters, which didn't make sense for obvious reasons.
I'm no electrician, but I do have a degree in physics...
How can you chop DC at any frequency? DC current has no frequency. And transformers only work on alternating current; it just makes a big electromagnet if you run DC through a transformer (and no current comes out the other side, except when you first apply the DC then again when you turn it off).
What am I missing here? Or is it the original post that's off?
I'm sure that it would do an incredible amount of damage (I haven't done any calculations to see how much) but the counterweight would fly out into space. To function as a counterweight it would have to have a net force (centripetal + gravity) outwards, away from the earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but since I never see ads (I have Tivo :) I don't know about those things until (and unless) some buddy of mine mentions them, or they appear on slashdot, etc. I didn't even know about the Spiderman movie until a friend happened to mention it to me, and I could very easily have missed Queen of the Damned; I just happened to notice it at the theater marquis. Of course, I haven't seen QotD yet, and from the previews I've looked up, it may be very missable...
Right, and then you stop accepting email from the address from which you're getting that crap. If that becomes standard (and I think it will start to be), then the spamming bastards go out of business and only the reasonable services survive. In theory ;)
If this service could actually identify my preferences and let me know about things I care about, rather than just spam me with anything they can think of, I would love to see it.
How many of us rushed to see the Lord of the Rings or Phantom Menace trailers? Wouldn't it be great to be informed about such things as soon as they happen, as long as you don't get a ton of other crap?
I still think it would be better to have an intelligent agent that represents you finding these links for you rather than a marketing engine pushing the links to you, but, frankly, there's virtually no economic incentive for someone to build such an agent and every incentive for the marketers to send you their links. In fact, over time, I think marketers who actually do meet our needs will be the ones who win out, and untargeted spam will fall by the wayside.
There are already services that let you give each person with whom you correspond a different email address, thus letting you see who you can trust and eliminate those you can't. As these kind of services become ubiquitous, indiscriminate spammers will begin losing money, while smarter marketers, who actually (gasp!) tell us about products we care about will succeed.
Reading the article, it sounds to me (of course, it's marketing hype, and only time and experience will tell) like this might be such a service.
Wasn't there a slashdot article fairly recently about useful marketing versus spamming?
There should be some slight selection against such traits since the older family member isn't able to help, and in fact can become a burden on, the younger members who still haven't stopped reproducing.
I suspect that there are some kind of positive effects early in life, even if very mild, that are associated with the same genes that cause the late-in-life diseases.
Check out the game that I'm project lead for, Magicosm, at http://www.cosmgame.com
;), you can create your own village, expand to become a country, build buildings within your area, declare laws in your ruled area, drive away or attract local monsters, run a newspaper, etc., all of which have lasting impact on the game world.
While obviously we can't let everyone actually save the game world (since if you failed it would mean the end of the game for everyone else
The game is not available yet, but we will be showing it at the Game Developer's Conference (Sun is sponsoring us). At a guess, I would say we will be releasing in about a year and a half.
Unfortunately, what we will be showing at the GDC will look more like an EQ clone than anything, but that's because we have the infrastructure done but not all of the game mechanics, and because of the superficial nature of what you can show at a conference to people passing by.
I know it's a little late in the game, but who has ideas on how we can help get the Sonny Bono act shot down? To whom should I give money? Should I try to write editorials and get them published in the judges' home town newspapers? Is there someplace to send comments?
Wow, rarely have I seen such a ridiculous statement. J2EE is incredibly widely used for internet businesses of all kinds. In this time of declining job options for programmers, java (well, J2EE, anyway) programmers are still somewhat in demand.
I have worked on many successful java projects. Xtra Online, Marconi Communications, and PDX, are just a few of the companies at which I have worked on successful java projects.
Business software is generally about reliability. Computers are easily fast enough to do any kind of business calculation blindingly fast in virtually any language, and Java is fairly speedy. Java has great reliability (no buffer overflows, no uninitialized pointers, no stack overflows, no doubly-deleted pointers, etc, etc).
If you think java is too slow for business applications, the game we are working on over at http://www.cosmgame.com is all in java. I get 50-100 frames per second in full screen 3d mode, all running under java. I shit you not. We will be showing it at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco March 20-23rd at Sun's booth.
Virtually no business application has anything vaguely close to the kind of performance requirements we have, and we run just fine.
See you at the GDC!
I disagree with your notion that the species that succeeds most is the one with the most selfish members. It's not a zero sum game, and groups that cooperate amongst themselves, and groups most capable of working out arrangements that balance trust versus mutual gain, succeed best. Groups of individually selfish, greedy bastards find themselves unable to form larger, more powerful entities, and they are wiped out by coordinated groups.
If you were going to build an artificial magnetosphere, you would probably use permanent, not electro, magnets, in which case power failures don't happen.
Uh, yeah, right. I mean, really, right. There are people out there who want to donate their bandwidth to the cause of free anonymous speech, and if that means someone might see some ugliness that could result in us testing some of the more oppressive aspects of recent turns of law in court, so be it.
If you're not willing to stand up for your beliefs, at least don't mock those who are.
Um, yes, it has. Take a look around you, and compare your status now to the status of those living hundreds of years ago.
Naivete is still naivete when it's pessimistic rather than optimistic. And in what magical way will legislation stop, e.g., encrypted contributions to the freenet?
Ah, well. Discussion of this is useless. Time will tell; meanwhile, we fight to make privacy laws more equitable; on which I think we can all agree.
What does this have to do with laws? If most people carry around wearables that are part of a p2p network that lets you trivially make notes about what people are doing, then public figures will naturally have more information about what they're doing than others.
I would also like to disassociate myself from this world - I'm not proposing it's the best of all possible worlds, it just seems very likely given ubiquitous broadband wireless, stylish and lightweight powerful wearable computers, and human nature.
I wasn't making a value judgement as to whether it was a good thing or not, just pointing out that it sure seems inevitable.
The disguise will work until there are good enough chemical sensors to recognize you by smell.
I believe that the answer is that there will come a point at which it is more effort to circumvent such systems than it is worth. We will have to learn to live in an open society at that point.
The good thing is that this should end up applying to government officials, corporate officers, etc. as much or more than to other people.
15 years from now, tops, I look at the guy through the camera on my wearable, and since someone else who's imaged him before has entered his name, and someone else has associated the name with his address, I know everything about him. Assuming that there is some sort of P2P network to which I subscribe to get info which requires that I give info, software automatically analyzes the picture and logs his purchasing habits, and sells the info for 5c.
It will happen.
But those same files are already copied many, many more times than are necessary. Say (to exaggerate horribly) that 1000 copies of a movie file are needed to guarantee that you can play it whenever you want. But how many 100s of thousands of people have copies of the file now?
And, as regards CPU time, it doesn't matter if it takes twice as much CPU time to get anything done, if you've made 50x as much CPU time available since all of your idle cycles become useful cycles.
This, or a system like this, could lead to you never having to buy disk space again. You just put files 'on your system', and periodically you may need to pay another $5 to the your disk farm provider (probably part of your ISP) since you've gone over your previously alloted space. And you end up with backups & redundancy.
Assuming we can overcome some basic hurdles like overzealous copyright law, ubiquitous broadband, and automatic encryption of your files, I don't see how disk space sharing can not become the direction for the future.
Yet another good point, and an interesting piece of information. Makes sense, though.
Hmm, good point, for which I have no answer :( Sounds like a social problem rather than an internet problem, but a killer nonetheless. Bummer.
Hmm, to elaborate on letting people report that your doohickey was taken: you report that it was taken, then it gets deactivated and you contest your vote (so you have to go vote in person, votes from home must be in say two weeks before 'in person' votes, and must be contested at least a week before). Then you can request a new doohickey; the old one is useless.
That's easy; let people report that it was taken. Then you go contest the web vote. And that's why I said you go somewhere to pick it up, not get it from your mailbox.
I do agree, though, that it's much more important to have accurate vote-taking methods before we worry about voting via the internet. But, that said, I think the method I described would be much more accurate on average than our current voting methods...
This is an idiotic statement. When the security issues get resolved, who the hell wouldn't vote over the internet instead of having to go out to the voting booth?
And it seems to me that the security issues could be easily resolved by the government issuing us public/private key pairs. We would all go in somewhere at our leisure, verify our identity and get a doohickey that plugs into the PC via USB, serial port, or whatever. The doohickey would have a public & private key in it, and wouldn't provide a way of getting the private key out. But it would provide an interface for signing any data sent to it and returning it to you. They could just note who got what doohickey (and correlate the public key with your social security # in a central repository), and now you have easy electronic identification, signatures, and the ability to send private info. Of course, I wouldn't trust anything like that for my own encryption (FBI backdoor, anyone?) but it should be fine for voting. It just signs your vote with your private key, encrypts it with the government's public key, and sends it on its way. I should be able to log into a specific site on the internet and see my vote (encrypted with my public key, so others can't see it) so I can go contest it if it was somehow falsified.
Now that wasn't so hard, was it?
Good points all. I had a different (and wrong ;) definition of alternating current, and used sloppy verbage talking about transformers.
But my biggest stumbling block was not knowing what 'chopping' DC meant.
Thanks!
Ah, yup, this is exactly the info I was looking for. When he said chopping, I thought he was talking about low and high pass frequency filters, which didn't make sense for obvious reasons.
Thanks much!
Yes, but doing it over and over really fast is called AC.
I'm no electrician, but I do have a degree in physics...
How can you chop DC at any frequency? DC current has no frequency. And transformers only work on alternating current; it just makes a big electromagnet if you run DC through a transformer (and no current comes out the other side, except when you first apply the DC then again when you turn it off).
What am I missing here? Or is it the original post that's off?
I'm sure that it would do an incredible amount of damage (I haven't done any calculations to see how much) but the counterweight would fly out into space. To function as a counterweight it would have to have a net force (centripetal + gravity) outwards, away from the earth.