How about energy stored in an internal flywheel? Such as in Neal Stephenson's quite revolting Seven Minute Special:
Just to name one example, there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscle-sized bodies, known colloquially as cookie-cutters, into the victim's bloodstream. It took about seven minutes for all of the blood in a typical person's body to recirculate, so after this interval the cookie-cutters would be randomly distributed throughout the victim's organs and limbs.
A cookie-cutter was shaped like an aspirin tablet except that the top and bottom were domed more to withstand ambient pressure; for like most other nanotechnological devices a cookie-cutter was filled with vacuum. Inside were two centrifuges, rotating on the same axis but in opposite directions, preventing the unit from acting like a gyroscope. The device could be triggered in various ways; the most primitive were simple seven-minute time bombs.
Detonation dissolved the bonds holding the centrifuges together so that each of a thousand or so ballisticules suddenly flew outward. The enclosing shell shattered easily, and each ballisticule kicked up a shock wave, doing surprisingly little damage at first, tracing narrow linear disturbances and occasionally taking a chip out of a bone. But soon they slowed to near the speed of sound, where shock wave piled on top of shock wave to produce a sonic boom. Then all the damage happened at once. Depending on the initial speed of the centrifuge, this could happen at varying distances from the detonation point; most everything near it was pulped; hence, "cookie-cutter." The victim then made a loud noise like the crack of a whip, as a few fragments exited his or her flesh and dropped through the sound barrier in air. Startled witnesses would turn just in time to see the victim flushing bright pink. Bloodred crescents would suddenly appear all over the body; these marked the geometric intersection of detonation surfaces with skin and were a boon to forensic types, who could thereby identify the type of cookie-cutter by comparing the marks against a handy pocket reference card. The victim was just a big leaky sack of undifferentiated gore at this point and, of course, never survived.
Hello, I am sending this into the future from 1908! How are you? I hope things are well in the 21st century! Anyway, I just wanted to say "hi". I'll let you get back to maintaining your underwater habitat and defending the Earth against the Martian aggressors now.
Hang on... in 1908, shouldn't _you_ be defending the Earth from the Martian aggressors? Haven't you heard about the recent observations of green flares on the surface of Mars? If I were you, I'd set up some serious defences around Woking, especially on Horsell common. Just a hint, mind.
"We Will All Go Together When We Go" -- Tom Lehrer
When you attend a funeral, It is sad to think that sooner or'l Later those you love will do the same for you. And you may have thought it tragic, Not to mention other adjec- Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do. (But don't you worry.)
No more ashes, no more sackcloth, And an arm band made of black cloth Will some day nevermore adorn a sleeve. For if the bomb that drops on you Gets your friends and neighbors too, There'll be nobody left behind to grieve.
And we will all go together when we go. What a comforting fact that is to know. Universal bereavement, An inspiring achievement, Yes, we will all go together when we go.
We will all go together when we go. All suffused with an incandescent glow. No one will have the endurance To collect on his insurance, Lloyd's of London will be loaded when they go.
Oh we will all fry together when we fry. We'll be french fried potatoes by and by. There will be no more misery When the world is our rotisserie, Yes, we will all fry together when we fry.
Down by the old maelstrom, There'll be a storm before the calm.
And we will all bake together when we bake. There'll be nobody present at the wake. With complete participation In that grand incineration, Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.
Oh we will all char together when we char. And let there be no moaning of the bar. Just sing out a Te Deum When you see that I.C.B.M., And the party will be come-as-you-are.
Oh, we will all burn together when we burn. There'll be no need to stand and wait your turn. When it's time for the fallout And Saint Peter calls us all out, We'll just drop our agendas and adjourn.
You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas. Go directly, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollahs.
And we will all go together when we go. Every Hottentot and every Eskimo. When the air becomes uranious, We will all go simultaneous. Yes, we all will go together When we all go together, Yes we all will go together when we go.
While I can't prove that it is possible, you can't prove that it's impossible either.
Perhaps not, but what we can prove is that if you have some magic means of travelling faster than light, you also have the means to travel back in time. You may not be prepared to accept what that does to the universe.
I suppose that since most classical is public domain, there wouldn't be an issue, but would the RIAA throw a fit if, say, someone was sharing mp3s ripped from a classical CD published by one of the RIAA members? Can they own a particular performance of a classical work?
Yes, But.
If you rip a classical music CD of some centuries-old symphony, the symphony itself is public domain but the performance is still under copyright. However, when you then share the mp3 file on p2p, all it says is Beethovens_Fifth.mp3, not Beethovens_Fifth_performed_by_the_Birmingham_Symph ony_Orchestra_October_2002.mp3. So, in order to know for sure that it is one of their copyrighted performances and not a public domain performance, they would have to actually download the file and possibly even listen to it. Too much work for them, really.
The BBC is like Microsoft, except its power to force consumers to pay up comes not from sleazy deals and market penetration but the well-polished heel of a bobby's boot. The classical recordings, then, are like Internet Explorer, which they are giving away for "free" (though in reality subsidized by the rents created from their power position), and this record industry exec is like Netscape, trying to protect a stagnant, failing product space while whining about how consumers are harmed by delivery of a free product.
-1, Missed the Point
The problem with IE wasn't that it was given away free. I don't think you'll find anyone on/. who has a problem with free software per se. The problem with IE was that Microsoft bundled it with Windows.
A nearer analogy would be if Apple had an orchestra record a bunch of classical music, and bundled that music with every iPod sold. Then the guys selling CDs of classical music might have a case. The problem was about abuse of a monopoly position, not about giving away a product for free.
You do not need anyone's approval to work problems out on your own. If you don't like what I have given you, then you can find your own solutions.
Proposed solution: Communist revolution followed by state seizure of Western-owned property - mines, factories etc. - the profits from which will in future remain within the country rather than going to American shareholders.
You guys OK with that, or do we suddenly need your permission?
I guess I'm saying that facing down the IRA with military action didn't achieve much. Talking to them did.
But it got them to the point where they would talk.
From what I've heard since the end of the Troubles, the position was that between the various informers and infiltrators and spies the British had within the IRA and the SAS and RUC raids against IRA resources, the organisation was in a pretty bad way. The British could probably have broken the IRA in the early 1990s, but to do so would involve a massive increase in police powers in Ulster and a hellacious amount of violence. The old problem of having a tiger cornered. Not really the sort of thing you want to do if you can avoid it.
So, secret negotiations were begun with Sinn Fein and the IRA (which we diplomatically pretend are separate entities) which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA wasn't actually defeated by the intelligence and special forces war, but without that resource and the obvious fact that no amount of bombing was ever going to intimidate the British public, the IRA would probably never have come to the table in the first place.
When was the last time you heard of a group of radical atheists throwing a hand grenade into a tour bus?
I'm pretty sure that the European Marxist terror groups of the sixties and seventies got up to some rather nasty things. I'm thinking the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Army Faction, that lot.
The other thing is - I would have expected AQ to do the old "airplane into big-ben" thing. ..
That stunt won't work again. It worked in 2001 because the advice given in case of hijacking was to cooperate and not cause trouble. It made sense back then: hijackers generally either want to be taken somewhere, or want to issue demands to be met in exchange for release of hostages. Either way your best bet was just to wait for it all to be over. The kamikaze attacks on 11 September changed the rules: now, an attempted hijack is likely to meet resistance from the passengers, who realise they're probably dead either way and might as well have a go at it, and if that is overcome the plane is probably going to be shot down anyway. It was one of those things that would only ever work once, but was bloody devastating when it did.
My Guess?
Poseurs. Wannabe jihadists who don't have anything to do with AQ, but wish they did.
I reckon so. That said, I suspect al-Qa'eda hasn't really existed as an organisation since the invasion of Afghanistan. These days, it's more of a state of mind. We've now got hundreds of maniacal little jihadist groups, most of whom are about as competent and well-resourced as the Judaean People's Front (splitters!) but who will occasionally manage to do some damage in the name of al-Qa'eda and the great Osama - who has probably never heard of the group causing mayhem in his name, but I'm sure he will thoroughly approve.
But know that America and Australia are with you, allies and friends, no matter how tough it gets.
But not France, where everyone's got to be trying really, really hard not to smirk from a colossal sense of schadenfreude...
Because you're still more likely to die crossing the road.
They've killed probably a few dozen people. The death toll will rise as they clear out the mess in the Underground, but I doubt it'll get up above a hundred.
Frankly - and perhaps rather callously - we can afford to lose a hundred people to terrorists every few years. It's completely insignificant compared to the whole population - the only difference here is that it's spectacular and newsworthy. Not feeling safe? You survived the Cold War, didn't you? Managed to live with the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, but can't cope with the terrorists?
Call this war? In war people die in numbers like this every day. London has taken far worse than this in the past. You bury the dead, hunt down the killers and get on with life.
i cant believe you people dare politicize a trajedy like this.
Terrorism is inherently political. A terrorist does what he does not out of sheer spite but in order to achieve political and ideological goals.
This whole event was political from the beginning. Whether the politics in question are those of Islamic extremism, anti-G8 anarchism or Irish republicanism remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that the bombings were politically motivated.
Bear in mind that after any major incident a lot of different groups are going to claim the credit, in order to increase their own profile - kind of a malign game of 'I'm Spartacus!' Some group in Jordan claimed responsibility for the New York attacks in 2001 - then quickly retracted their claim, presumably when some higher-up in the group found out about it and realised what it had done to his life expectancy;-)
I'm still wondering whether it's some IRA faction, personally. These don't seem to have been really big bombs - we're seeing lots of wounded, not many dead. Jihadists tend to go for the big bodycount, while the Irish terrorists always preferred to cause disruption wherever possible. Although comparatively few are known dead - fewer than, say, Omagh, and so far nowhere near the bombings in Madrid or Bali - it has ruined all business in London today, and possibly tomorrow.
One final puzzle: why didn't they do this yesterday? Bombing the Tube yesterday morning would surely have scuppered the Olympic bid...
And I'm scared of the even heavier legislation that can be expected after this tragedy.
Too right. I was actually beginning to think that I might not be getting my nice new biometric breathing licence^W^WID card, because of the ongoing backbench rebellion within the Party. I suppose that problem's over now...
I am not an anthropologist, but a chimpanzee that can more or less tear your arm off!
And you're posting to Slashdot? This is bigger news than sequencing Neanderthal DNA: they've taught chimps how to type in plain English!
More seriously: I don't know about NFL, but Neanderthals would probably make terrific rugby players. They might be poorer at kicking and throwing, and perhaps slower, but they'd sure score some tries. God help anyone who's in the opposing team's scrup, too...
I predict we will find that the neanderthal genome code for an extra neocortical layer, giving the species an eight-layer thalamocortical loop, and hence less hypersurface area than humans who have a seven layer thalamocortical loop, and thus maximum hypersurface--because everyone knows hypersurface is maximum at seven dimensions. Right?
The fuck?
I've read Archimedes Plutonium, I've read Hammond's Scientific Proof Of God, I've read the whole Time Cube thing and a goodly slice of Zetatalk. But I've never read anything quite so devoid of actual content as that paragraph, with the possible exception of some scripts from Star Trek: Voyager. What WAS that meant to be?
I wonder though, if we do find out that we absorbed them through interbreeding, will this eventually lead to discrimination against those of us who still harbor "caveman genes?"
I doubt it. If there was interbreeding between moderns and Neanderthals, it was probably Europeans who did it. Given the usual patterns of racist discrimination, expect to see 'scientific arguments' on your favourite redneck websites proving that while pure Neanderthals were indeed primitives, in combination with modern DNA their genes give considerable advantages, and therefore should not be diluted by miscegenation. Then read on for great amusement as they explain how Neanderthals fit in with the Book of Genesis.
Even moreso if you paid $2.99 for that 10 second song clip on your phone.
I didn't do anything like that. Silly prices for ringtones, those. I used GPRS to connect to a Dragonball Z fansite and downloaded MIDI files of the various theme tunes. Now when my phone rings I'm torn between answering it and singing 'We Gotta Power'...
It would be truely ironic if we did indeed clone a Neanderthal and thus bring back a sentient species that most likely was wiped out in large part because of us.
They're extinct because of us, but probably not because our ancestors murdered them all, in character for H. Sapiens though that would certainly be. At the Skhul cave in Israel there's pretty good evidence for moderns and Neanderthals living alongside each other for thousands of years in the same cave system.
More likely the Neanderthals were just outcompeted for resources by our ancestors, as the ice ages came and went, and gradually went extinct. Not that I'd be surprised if someone found a mass grave of Neanderthals with distinctly modern-looking arrowheads in their skulls... after all, our species does enjoy killing.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to name one example, there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscle-sized bodies, known colloquially as cookie-cutters, into the victim's bloodstream. It took about seven minutes for all of the blood in a typical person's body to recirculate, so after this interval the cookie-cutters would be randomly distributed throughout the victim's organs and limbs.
A cookie-cutter was shaped like an aspirin tablet except that the top and bottom were domed more to withstand ambient pressure; for like most other nanotechnological devices a cookie-cutter was filled with vacuum. Inside were two centrifuges, rotating on the same axis but in opposite directions, preventing the unit from acting like a gyroscope. The device could be triggered in various ways; the most primitive were simple seven-minute time bombs.
Detonation dissolved the bonds holding the centrifuges together so that each of a thousand or so ballisticules suddenly flew outward. The enclosing shell shattered easily, and each ballisticule kicked up a shock wave, doing surprisingly little damage at first, tracing narrow linear disturbances and occasionally taking a chip out of a bone. But soon they slowed to near the speed of sound, where shock wave piled on top of shock wave to produce a sonic boom. Then all the damage happened at once. Depending on the initial speed of the centrifuge, this could happen at varying distances from the detonation point; most everything near it was pulped; hence, "cookie-cutter." The victim then made a loud noise like the crack of a whip, as a few fragments exited his or her flesh and dropped through the sound barrier in air. Startled witnesses would turn just in time to see the victim flushing bright pink. Bloodred crescents would suddenly appear all over the body; these marked the geometric intersection of detonation surfaces with skin and were a boon to forensic types, who could thereby identify the type of cookie-cutter by comparing the marks against a handy pocket reference card. The victim was just a big leaky sack of undifferentiated gore at this point and, of course, never survived.
-- from The Diamond Age
Hang on... in 1908, shouldn't _you_ be defending the Earth from the Martian aggressors? Haven't you heard about the recent observations of green flares on the surface of Mars? If I were you, I'd set up some serious defences around Woking, especially on Horsell common. Just a hint, mind.
"We Will All Go Together When We Go"
-- Tom Lehrer
When you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner or'l
Later those you love will do the same for you.
And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
Tives, to think of all the weeping they will do.
(But don't you worry.)
No more ashes, no more sackcloth,
And an arm band made of black cloth
Will some day nevermore adorn a sleeve.
For if the bomb that drops on you
Gets your friends and neighbors too,
There'll be nobody left behind to grieve.
And we will all go together when we go.
What a comforting fact that is to know.
Universal bereavement,
An inspiring achievement,
Yes, we will all go together when we go.
We will all go together when we go.
All suffused with an incandescent glow.
No one will have the endurance
To collect on his insurance,
Lloyd's of London will be loaded when they go.
Oh we will all fry together when we fry.
We'll be french fried potatoes by and by.
There will be no more misery
When the world is our rotisserie,
Yes, we will all fry together when we fry.
Down by the old maelstrom,
There'll be a storm before the calm.
And we will all bake together when we bake.
There'll be nobody present at the wake.
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.
Oh we will all char together when we char.
And let there be no moaning of the bar.
Just sing out a Te Deum
When you see that I.C.B.M.,
And the party will be come-as-you-are.
Oh, we will all burn together when we burn.
There'll be no need to stand and wait your turn.
When it's time for the fallout
And Saint Peter calls us all out,
We'll just drop our agendas and adjourn.
You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas.
Go directly, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollahs.
And we will all go together when we go.
Every Hottentot and every Eskimo.
When the air becomes uranious,
We will all go simultaneous.
Yes, we all will go together
When we all go together,
Yes we all will go together when we go.
Perhaps not, but what we can prove is that if you have some magic means of travelling faster than light, you also have the means to travel back in time. You may not be prepared to accept what that does to the universe.
Yes, But.
If you rip a classical music CD of some centuries-old symphony, the symphony itself is public domain but the performance is still under copyright. However, when you then share the mp3 file on p2p, all it says is Beethovens_Fifth.mp3, not Beethovens_Fifth_performed_by_the_Birmingham_Symph ony_Orchestra_October_2002.mp3. So, in order to know for sure that it is one of their copyrighted performances and not a public domain performance, they would have to actually download the file and possibly even listen to it. Too much work for them, really.
-1, Missed the Point
The problem with IE wasn't that it was given away free. I don't think you'll find anyone on /. who has a problem with free software per se. The problem with IE was that Microsoft bundled it with Windows.
A nearer analogy would be if Apple had an orchestra record a bunch of classical music, and bundled that music with every iPod sold. Then the guys selling CDs of classical music might have a case. The problem was about abuse of a monopoly position, not about giving away a product for free.
So are mass extinctions, but if given the choice you'd generally prefer not to be involved in one of those.
We're supposed to be the intelligent ones here, but we don't appear to be smart enough yet not to shit in our own beds...
Only because there's no other option. Offer us some Klingons to fight instead and just watch all mankind unite in harmony!
Actually I think the TNG vision is a bit depressing. It implies that true socialism is impossible until we invent the replicator...
Proposed solution: Communist revolution followed by state seizure of Western-owned property - mines, factories etc. - the profits from which will in future remain within the country rather than going to American shareholders.
You guys OK with that, or do we suddenly need your permission?
But it got them to the point where they would talk.
From what I've heard since the end of the Troubles, the position was that between the various informers and infiltrators and spies the British had within the IRA and the SAS and RUC raids against IRA resources, the organisation was in a pretty bad way. The British could probably have broken the IRA in the early 1990s, but to do so would involve a massive increase in police powers in Ulster and a hellacious amount of violence. The old problem of having a tiger cornered. Not really the sort of thing you want to do if you can avoid it.
So, secret negotiations were begun with Sinn Fein and the IRA (which we diplomatically pretend are separate entities) which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA wasn't actually defeated by the intelligence and special forces war, but without that resource and the obvious fact that no amount of bombing was ever going to intimidate the British public, the IRA would probably never have come to the table in the first place.
I'm pretty sure that the European Marxist terror groups of the sixties and seventies got up to some rather nasty things. I'm thinking the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Army Faction, that lot.
That stunt won't work again. It worked in 2001 because the advice given in case of hijacking was to cooperate and not cause trouble. It made sense back then: hijackers generally either want to be taken somewhere, or want to issue demands to be met in exchange for release of hostages. Either way your best bet was just to wait for it all to be over. The kamikaze attacks on 11 September changed the rules: now, an attempted hijack is likely to meet resistance from the passengers, who realise they're probably dead either way and might as well have a go at it, and if that is overcome the plane is probably going to be shot down anyway. It was one of those things that would only ever work once, but was bloody devastating when it did.
My Guess? Poseurs. Wannabe jihadists who don't have anything to do with AQ, but wish they did.
I reckon so. That said, I suspect al-Qa'eda hasn't really existed as an organisation since the invasion of Afghanistan. These days, it's more of a state of mind. We've now got hundreds of maniacal little jihadist groups, most of whom are about as competent and well-resourced as the Judaean People's Front (splitters!) but who will occasionally manage to do some damage in the name of al-Qa'eda and the great Osama - who has probably never heard of the group causing mayhem in his name, but I'm sure he will thoroughly approve.
But know that America and Australia are with you, allies and friends, no matter how tough it gets. But not France, where everyone's got to be trying really, really hard not to smirk from a colossal sense of schadenfreude...
Not his job. We need Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb. Or maybe just Sam.
I remember back in 2001 watching Osama's finest hour on TV and somehow at the back of my mind expecting to see the Bat-Signal light up any moment...
Because you're still more likely to die crossing the road.
They've killed probably a few dozen people. The death toll will rise as they clear out the mess in the Underground, but I doubt it'll get up above a hundred.
Frankly - and perhaps rather callously - we can afford to lose a hundred people to terrorists every few years. It's completely insignificant compared to the whole population - the only difference here is that it's spectacular and newsworthy. Not feeling safe? You survived the Cold War, didn't you? Managed to live with the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, but can't cope with the terrorists?
Call this war? In war people die in numbers like this every day. London has taken far worse than this in the past. You bury the dead, hunt down the killers and get on with life.
Terrorism is inherently political. A terrorist does what he does not out of sheer spite but in order to achieve political and ideological goals.
This whole event was political from the beginning. Whether the politics in question are those of Islamic extremism, anti-G8 anarchism or Irish republicanism remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that the bombings were politically motivated.
We're probably the ones making the jokes. In the UK we have a long and proud tradition of extremely nasty gallows humour...
I'm still wondering whether it's some IRA faction, personally. These don't seem to have been really big bombs - we're seeing lots of wounded, not many dead. Jihadists tend to go for the big bodycount, while the Irish terrorists always preferred to cause disruption wherever possible. Although comparatively few are known dead - fewer than, say, Omagh, and so far nowhere near the bombings in Madrid or Bali - it has ruined all business in London today, and possibly tomorrow.
One final puzzle: why didn't they do this yesterday? Bombing the Tube yesterday morning would surely have scuppered the Olympic bid...
Too right. I was actually beginning to think that I might not be getting my nice new biometric breathing licence^W^WID card, because of the ongoing backbench rebellion within the Party. I suppose that problem's over now...
And you're posting to Slashdot? This is bigger news than sequencing Neanderthal DNA: they've taught chimps how to type in plain English!
More seriously: I don't know about NFL, but Neanderthals would probably make terrific rugby players. They might be poorer at kicking and throwing, and perhaps slower, but they'd sure score some tries. God help anyone who's in the opposing team's scrup, too...
The fuck?
I've read Archimedes Plutonium, I've read Hammond's Scientific Proof Of God, I've read the whole Time Cube thing and a goodly slice of Zetatalk. But I've never read anything quite so devoid of actual content as that paragraph, with the possible exception of some scripts from Star Trek: Voyager. What WAS that meant to be?
I doubt it. If there was interbreeding between moderns and Neanderthals, it was probably Europeans who did it. Given the usual patterns of racist discrimination, expect to see 'scientific arguments' on your favourite redneck websites proving that while pure Neanderthals were indeed primitives, in combination with modern DNA their genes give considerable advantages, and therefore should not be diluted by miscegenation. Then read on for great amusement as they explain how Neanderthals fit in with the Book of Genesis.
We'd probably end up inundated with troll posts from the Gay Neanderthals Association of America...
I didn't do anything like that. Silly prices for ringtones, those. I used GPRS to connect to a Dragonball Z fansite and downloaded MIDI files of the various theme tunes. Now when my phone rings I'm torn between answering it and singing 'We Gotta Power'...
They're extinct because of us, but probably not because our ancestors murdered them all, in character for H. Sapiens though that would certainly be. At the Skhul cave in Israel there's pretty good evidence for moderns and Neanderthals living alongside each other for thousands of years in the same cave system.
More likely the Neanderthals were just outcompeted for resources by our ancestors, as the ice ages came and went, and gradually went extinct. Not that I'd be surprised if someone found a mass grave of Neanderthals with distinctly modern-looking arrowheads in their skulls... after all, our species does enjoy killing.