The really funny thing is, they'd never use it, because using it would give it away and make it worth less. They'd just sit on the technology, always making up excuses as to why this time it's not important enough to waste the tech on.
That is, supposing they ever did have anything so funky. These are the same people who spent money on psychic surveillance of the soviets, after all.
Without some exotic and currently unknown breeder reaction, they'll never make enough antimatter to boil a cup of water, let alone make rockets.
Me, I want to toy around with M/AM symetry a bit, make my own miniature big bang where it's all dialed in differently so that 99.9% of what is created is AM. Then, we can really party.
Good? Since when does a magnetic field, intense or otherwise, have anything to do with a gravitational field?
You are aware of the implications of a Grand Unified Theory, should one ever work, right? That all the forces of nature are related, are even the same force, but at different energy levels?
I can't tell if this is crap either, but it's not because magnetism and gravity aren't related. They are almost certainly, electroweak is all but a given, and electrogravity is pretty solid too. (The first including electricity, magnetism and the weak force, the latter including those and gravity... hadronic/strong is the tough one to resolve, as I rememeber).
Are you sure? As a child, I remember doing the math, and a probe to the nearest star using nuclear pulse drive would take the better part of 100 years to reach and decelerate. And then 5 years after that before we started receiving data back. And it's not exactly feasible to build such a drive either.
I know ion drives accelerate more smoothly, but the specific impulse is nowhere near as impressive.
Even so, 10 or 100 years to get a probe to Centauri sounds like the kind of thing NASA should be doing now, shame they're a bunch of asshats.
Adama looks like he's about to have a psychotic break 24 hours a day. Which is what I would expect someone to do, if they were trying to keep alive what little is left of humanity after a nuclear holocaust. He feels tired, and you can see it. Doesn't know what to do, and is afraid that those he leads will see it and despair. His one confidant, the president is totally whacko, to the point he couldn't even stomach it anymore... but then he's lost it to, and she's forgiven.
Less than 50,000 people left, mostly because they had to abandon the ships that had no FTL. Every week something more horrible than the last happens, to the point that they can't even trust the hardware that keeps them alive in the void of space. And there is no understanding their enemy, period.
vs.
Bad scifi settings with an overcamped enemy and everyone trying to spout the next oneliner.
I only hope that the writers are planning BSG far ahead, I don't like making it up as they go along. Pick the number of seasons you want out of it, and figure out a way to end it with a bang. (The humans manage to escape, only a few hundred left on a wilderness planet, worried that the cylons might not all be dead?)
I have to agree. Ultra-cheap CG rendering has made the point moot, and the assertion laughable. It's been that way since Hercules and Xena.
I mean, for fuck's sake, we've already seen plenty of the mechanicals. If they wanted more of them, for the sake of the story, you think *THAT* will bust the budget?
BSG is horrific. I've not seen a nuclear holocaust so heart-rending, and they managed that with what, 2 minutes of airtime, total? The space scenes are awesome too, if repetetive. This show does not lack for special affects. And certainly not because they can't afford it.
General conspiracy theory crap would tell you that its old european families like the Rothschilds.
Not sure that it's them, or any of the other names bandied around. But, I think they got it basically right, and its one or even a few families that have made an art of not really being noticed publically.
Tell me, how much time to you devote to getting freedom-protecting people elected? How much do you donate to the ACLU?
He could devote every waking second to getting them elected. He could donate his last red cent to the ACLU. Wouldn't do a bit of good. Not one.
I don't expect him to sacrifice his own life to that, either. It's too much to ask, knowing the outcome beforehand. Legal means might have worked up until recent history, but they no longer do. There's a point that if corruption creeps past it, all the safeguards don't work anymore. That point has been passed. Didn't you notice?
Such revolutions always have a few tyrants manipulating the populace so thay they are a cohesive group with direction. Without them, it doesn't work. With them, what comes after the revolution is worse than what came before.
There hasn't been a revolution worthy of the word since France, I think. And even that one might be a little bloodthirsty to some.
I always install a console-based version of whatever gui network app I need to use. Lynx/firefox. pine/Tbird. Etc. And CenterICQ is a pretty decent console analog to Gaim. Only problem I have with it is that screen messes it up bad. So just open up another putty/xterm.
But for GUI stuff, gaim is hard to beat.
If you don't like it, you don't like it. But if you're one of the guys bitching about the developer's attitude, step back and think about it for a moment. They're giving you free software, and they're trying to keep up with not one, but several closed protocols. It is open source, if you feel so strongly that they can't be trusted to do a decent job, fork the goddamned thing. Your reaction makes sense if you're paying for it, but you aren't. And they won't care if you stop using it... doesn't cost them any money.
This attitude befuddles me... if only you people would do the same with crappy commercial software, stop using it because the developers are assholes, Microsoft wouldn't be the force that it is today. Somehow though, it only ever gets applied to OSS...
I submitted an SVG version of the icon to the devs awhile back. Looks nice at any resize (though doesn't use a proper drop shadow yet, no gaussian support in inkscape) and has alpha transparency background.
Check it out. (128x128 submitted to the kxdocker project)
Why do that? Give the thing wireless, period, and let a beefy server somewhere in the rest of the house do all the logic. Can do all sorts of neat things that way.
I'd like to see a bluetooth/wifi dongle that plugs into it. My central server already does the other home automation stuff, even if I could just schedule vaccuuming once a day with the wireless, would be a help.
But what I really want, is to be able to get a location to within 6" or so. This would allow you to write a quick program that steers it from room to room. Or guards against it going places it shouldn't.
(Not to mention you could have it do "dirt maps" via the dirt sensor, wonder if I really want to know the results or not, though).
A search for the Beatles brings up every cover album ever, but very few Beatles albums. Didn't even bother to check what result Sgt Pepper was at... wasn't first or second page though.
But these are also the people who couldn't convert to FF until it was IE-like enough.
For me, I had heard about it for months, including a cleaner interface and all the extensions. Especially opening more than one tab on start up. (Not to mention that I noticed that some favicons showed up on FF but not on moz) I was tempted, but I just couldn't stand the default Qute theme. I was talking to another guy, who pointed out "you know, you can just install GrayModern and make it look like mozilla anyway".
It was only afterward, that I started liking the idea of searchplugins. So many of them.
Even though I was a hesitant firefox convert, I was never an IE lackey. I don't understand how anything M$ could ever do could convince people to return, short of their usual underhanded tactics to sabotage FF on windows.
The line isn't numeric. A million people might know, and it not bother you unless one of them was one specific person. Only you might know who that person is, or it might be obvious to everyone who it would be.
But statistically speaking, the more people that know, or the more easily accessible it is digitally, the more likely that one person finds out.
From a practical viewpoint, that means controlling it as a numbers thing. That's why a single cop at a streetcorner isn't as bad as a stoplight camera. The potential for abuse is nearly nil with the former, but high with the latter.
Okay, one of you hot shots write a program that let's me watch what my chip is sending out. And then another one of you please write a spoofing routine that runs at the router. Okay, you can't change it at the machine, but as long as it's my router, then one of you smart people can whip out a program that either blocks it or spoofs it between here and the outside world.
If it was your consumer-grade router, it would have to do this itself, to be able to get a DHCP lease. And the next hop is the ISP router, which you wouldn't have access to.
More so, some projects are too big for single hotshots to do on their own. In the past, they'd collaborate over the internet... even if the guy whose help you need is across an ocean, the internet made this possible.
But, the assholes that dream up all this evil shit already discovered methods to screw with that. Send out cease and desist's to all the websites that offer such collaboration. You see, being good at breaking something crypto doesn't mean you're so bright as to be able to hide the site through which you all work... people tend to be specialized like that. And worse, the current generation of anonymous networks are pretty lame, being non-IP based, not much software runs on them.
Try running a generic forums website on freenet, or a mailing list on tor.
Yes, plenty of EEs out there that can build a 8"x8" six-layer board. Even more with their own lithography equipment who can fabricate modern CPUs to solder onto the things.
Few people can put together a computer on their own comparable to machines made in 1980.
Even fewer still (maybe 1000 the world over) are capable of making a computer on their own comparable to one made from 1984-1995 or so.
I doubt that the hobbyist, no matter how clever, smart, or resourceful, can make (from scratch) a computer comparable to anything past that date. Too many layers on the board, too many chips that are no longer hand-solderable...
And on top of that, when this shit hits, it won't be soldered to the board. It will be etched into every silicon chip... just what CPU do you want in this self-made computer? A 20 year old supersparc core on an outdated FPGA? (The new FPGA's will only be configurable with a TCP-compliant software, which will insist on the TCP verilog being put into it also).
And then, crypto will keep it from connecting to the internet anyway, unless you break that also. Could a team of hobbyists working together do it? Yes, of course. The directv hackers proved that. Trouble is, that sort of massive collaboration requires a network like the internet... when directv made all the sites that coordinated things illegal, directv caught up and finally smited them. One person alone can't crack the p4/p5, and the sort of collaboration that before made it all possible is no longer present.
You can beat some measures, but sometimes the boulder rolls off a 1000ft cliff... you can't roll it back up no matter how hard you push.
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The really funny thing is, they'd never use it, because using it would give it away and make it worth less. They'd just sit on the technology, always making up excuses as to why this time it's not important enough to waste the tech on.
That is, supposing they ever did have anything so funky. These are the same people who spent money on psychic surveillance of the soviets, after all.
Without some exotic and currently unknown breeder reaction, they'll never make enough antimatter to boil a cup of water, let alone make rockets.
Me, I want to toy around with M/AM symetry a bit, make my own miniature big bang where it's all dialed in differently so that 99.9% of what is created is AM. Then, we can really party.
Good? Since when does a magnetic field, intense or otherwise, have anything to do with a gravitational field?
You are aware of the implications of a Grand Unified Theory, should one ever work, right? That all the forces of nature are related, are even the same force, but at different energy levels?
I can't tell if this is crap either, but it's not because magnetism and gravity aren't related. They are almost certainly, electroweak is all but a given, and electrogravity is pretty solid too. (The first including electricity, magnetism and the weak force, the latter including those and gravity... hadronic/strong is the tough one to resolve, as I rememeber).
Are you sure? As a child, I remember doing the math, and a probe to the nearest star using nuclear pulse drive would take the better part of 100 years to reach and decelerate. And then 5 years after that before we started receiving data back. And it's not exactly feasible to build such a drive either.
I know ion drives accelerate more smoothly, but the specific impulse is nowhere near as impressive.
Even so, 10 or 100 years to get a probe to Centauri sounds like the kind of thing NASA should be doing now, shame they're a bunch of asshats.
Adama looks like he's about to have a psychotic break 24 hours a day. Which is what I would expect someone to do, if they were trying to keep alive what little is left of humanity after a nuclear holocaust. He feels tired, and you can see it. Doesn't know what to do, and is afraid that those he leads will see it and despair. His one confidant, the president is totally whacko, to the point he couldn't even stomach it anymore... but then he's lost it to, and she's forgiven.
Less than 50,000 people left, mostly because they had to abandon the ships that had no FTL. Every week something more horrible than the last happens, to the point that they can't even trust the hardware that keeps them alive in the void of space. And there is no understanding their enemy, period.
vs.
Bad scifi settings with an overcamped enemy and everyone trying to spout the next oneliner.
I only hope that the writers are planning BSG far ahead, I don't like making it up as they go along. Pick the number of seasons you want out of it, and figure out a way to end it with a bang. (The humans manage to escape, only a few hundred left on a wilderness planet, worried that the cylons might not all be dead?)
I have to agree. Ultra-cheap CG rendering has made the point moot, and the assertion laughable. It's been that way since Hercules and Xena.
I mean, for fuck's sake, we've already seen plenty of the mechanicals. If they wanted more of them, for the sake of the story, you think *THAT* will bust the budget?
BSG is horrific. I've not seen a nuclear holocaust so heart-rending, and they managed that with what, 2 minutes of airtime, total? The space scenes are awesome too, if repetetive. This show does not lack for special affects. And certainly not because they can't afford it.
Sure for a dark ritual, but it would have to be a harem of supermodels before I'd give up my beta black lotus...
IE was woven into the codebase for Windows itself. I doubt Microsoft has the talent to untangle it, even with Vista.
Or maybe they wouldn't, and just leave the bloat there, with another userland application plonked down on top of it. Would be their style.
I stand corrected. At the very least, Gandhi should have been obvious to me.
Chile might not count, we're talking right around the time I contended that the good ones ended, just to nitpick.
But India and Poland are both really recent, one even within my own lifetime.
General conspiracy theory crap would tell you that its old european families like the Rothschilds.
Not sure that it's them, or any of the other names bandied around. But, I think they got it basically right, and its one or even a few families that have made an art of not really being noticed publically.
Tell me, how much time to you devote to getting freedom-protecting people elected? How much do you donate to the ACLU?
He could devote every waking second to getting them elected. He could donate his last red cent to the ACLU. Wouldn't do a bit of good. Not one.
I don't expect him to sacrifice his own life to that, either. It's too much to ask, knowing the outcome beforehand. Legal means might have worked up until recent history, but they no longer do. There's a point that if corruption creeps past it, all the safeguards don't work anymore. That point has been passed. Didn't you notice?
Such revolutions always have a few tyrants manipulating the populace so thay they are a cohesive group with direction. Without them, it doesn't work. With them, what comes after the revolution is worse than what came before.
There hasn't been a revolution worthy of the word since France, I think. And even that one might be a little bloodthirsty to some.
Heh. Actually, I like my desktop to feel integrated. Just not willing to use ugly-assed KDE or Gnome to get that.
My windowmaker + kxdocker + skippy-xd is actually pretty nice. Like some NeXTStep-OSX monstrosity cooked up in a ominous bavarian castle.
Gaim looks ok with the gtk2step theme, but theming can only fix so much.
So you're saying there's a GNUstep IM client? Something with the scrollbar on the left, where it should be?
I always install a console-based version of whatever gui network app I need to use. Lynx/firefox. pine/Tbird. Etc. And CenterICQ is a pretty decent console analog to Gaim. Only problem I have with it is that screen messes it up bad. So just open up another putty/xterm.
But for GUI stuff, gaim is hard to beat.
If you don't like it, you don't like it. But if you're one of the guys bitching about the developer's attitude, step back and think about it for a moment. They're giving you free software, and they're trying to keep up with not one, but several closed protocols. It is open source, if you feel so strongly that they can't be trusted to do a decent job, fork the goddamned thing. Your reaction makes sense if you're paying for it, but you aren't. And they won't care if you stop using it... doesn't cost them any money.
This attitude befuddles me... if only you people would do the same with crappy commercial software, stop using it because the developers are assholes, Microsoft wouldn't be the force that it is today. Somehow though, it only ever gets applied to OSS...
Check it out. (128x128 submitted to the kxdocker project)
Why do that? Give the thing wireless, period, and let a beefy server somewhere in the rest of the house do all the logic. Can do all sorts of neat things that way.
I'd like to see a bluetooth/wifi dongle that plugs into it. My central server already does the other home automation stuff, even if I could just schedule vaccuuming once a day with the wireless, would be a help.
But what I really want, is to be able to get a location to within 6" or so. This would allow you to write a quick program that steers it from room to room. Or guards against it going places it shouldn't.
(Not to mention you could have it do "dirt maps" via the dirt sensor, wonder if I really want to know the results or not, though).
A search for the Beatles brings up every cover album ever, but very few Beatles albums. Didn't even bother to check what result Sgt Pepper was at... wasn't first or second page though.
But these are also the people who couldn't convert to FF until it was IE-like enough.
For me, I had heard about it for months, including a cleaner interface and all the extensions. Especially opening more than one tab on start up. (Not to mention that I noticed that some favicons showed up on FF but not on moz) I was tempted, but I just couldn't stand the default Qute theme. I was talking to another guy, who pointed out "you know, you can just install GrayModern and make it look like mozilla anyway".
It was only afterward, that I started liking the idea of searchplugins. So many of them.
Even though I was a hesitant firefox convert, I was never an IE lackey. I don't understand how anything M$ could ever do could convince people to return, short of their usual underhanded tactics to sabotage FF on windows.
The line isn't numeric. A million people might know, and it not bother you unless one of them was one specific person. Only you might know who that person is, or it might be obvious to everyone who it would be.
But statistically speaking, the more people that know, or the more easily accessible it is digitally, the more likely that one person finds out.
From a practical viewpoint, that means controlling it as a numbers thing. That's why a single cop at a streetcorner isn't as bad as a stoplight camera. The potential for abuse is nearly nil with the former, but high with the latter.
Okay, one of you hot shots write a program that let's me watch what my chip is sending out. And then another one of you please write a spoofing routine that runs at the router. Okay, you can't change it at the machine, but as long as it's my router, then one of you smart people can whip out a program that either blocks it or spoofs it between here and the outside world.
If it was your consumer-grade router, it would have to do this itself, to be able to get a DHCP lease. And the next hop is the ISP router, which you wouldn't have access to.
More so, some projects are too big for single hotshots to do on their own. In the past, they'd collaborate over the internet... even if the guy whose help you need is across an ocean, the internet made this possible.
But, the assholes that dream up all this evil shit already discovered methods to screw with that. Send out cease and desist's to all the websites that offer such collaboration. You see, being good at breaking something crypto doesn't mean you're so bright as to be able to hide the site through which you all work... people tend to be specialized like that. And worse, the current generation of anonymous networks are pretty lame, being non-IP based, not much software runs on them.
Try running a generic forums website on freenet, or a mailing list on tor.
No, this is more like a transponder that broadcasts the vehicle's location to Dept. of Homeland Security every 3 seconds.
Isn't that slightly more Orwellian?
No, just immoral.
Yes, plenty of EEs out there that can build a 8"x8" six-layer board. Even more with their own lithography equipment who can fabricate modern CPUs to solder onto the things.
Few people can put together a computer on their own comparable to machines made in 1980.
Even fewer still (maybe 1000 the world over) are capable of making a computer on their own comparable to one made from 1984-1995 or so.
I doubt that the hobbyist, no matter how clever, smart, or resourceful, can make (from scratch) a computer comparable to anything past that date. Too many layers on the board, too many chips that are no longer hand-solderable...
And on top of that, when this shit hits, it won't be soldered to the board. It will be etched into every silicon chip... just what CPU do you want in this self-made computer? A 20 year old supersparc core on an outdated FPGA? (The new FPGA's will only be configurable with a TCP-compliant software, which will insist on the TCP verilog being put into it also).
And then, crypto will keep it from connecting to the internet anyway, unless you break that also. Could a team of hobbyists working together do it? Yes, of course. The directv hackers proved that. Trouble is, that sort of massive collaboration requires a network like the internet... when directv made all the sites that coordinated things illegal, directv caught up and finally smited them. One person alone can't crack the p4/p5, and the sort of collaboration that before made it all possible is no longer present.
You can beat some measures, but sometimes the boulder rolls off a 1000ft cliff... you can't roll it back up no matter how hard you push.