Just because a technology has potentially bad side effects doesn't mean it shouldn't be explored. Of course nano has the potential to become a harmful military weapon, like you said, even sticks and rocks were powerful military weapons at one point in our evolution. But nano also has the potential to solve many problems you talk about.
1. Nano can build harmful semi-biological weapons, but we can also build nanotech to fight those machines and do other cleanup activities in our bodies at the same time.
2. Superlight, fuel efficient spacecraft and colonies built from the molecule up from native elements by semi-autonomous nanotech would help Earth over-population.
3. I don't have a potential solution to your third problem except for the inherent individuality of humans. People don't want to look the same now, why would they want to look the same with nano help? If anything, I think people will look more different than they do now once they have the ability to change things we can't change now.
Bear with me if you will while I make this association.
I'm very interested in wireless and like the authors of this paper, I think it will be very important in the coming years. But I've never thought about things like this 'sleep deprivation attack' they were talking about. To me, this demonstrates one of the most powerful things about the open source/free software community, the fact that there are smart people thinking in ways others wouldn't. When big companies put a group of smart people together, they may very well come up with a great product but they probably won't be able to think of every attack/feature/etc that a larger interested group could think of.
Another example of this is the development of so-called "side channel attacks" in cryptography. People have used things like battery drain, EMF radiation signatures, and others, to attack smart cards and their ilk. Certainly the designers of the smart cards were assured their crypto was up to snuff but they hadn't counted on these side-channel attacks. If this hadn't been discovered until everybody had a smart card in their wallet, it would be a huge catastrophe.
Open thinking is a bit difficult for most big corporations to do, but I think things like this paper will help bring them around. The time of believing that a small group can design important projects in a closed manor is almost finished, there are too many smart people around thinking in new ways.
I know this is a little offtopic but that sleep deprevation attack got me thinking. Which, I guess, is the point.
I remember lobbying my parents to buy me a subscription to the web version in 1995 for my senior english paper. My dad didn't think that they, or the web, would be around at the end of the year subscription. hehe
I've been following the match via the email newsletter they've been sending out and I find it very interesting that not even Danny King has mentioned any of this furor in the email. You have to have been keeping up with the online chats and bulletin board to know that the game is pretty much wrecked.
I don't expect much from Microsoft but I would think that an event like this that is being touted as a way to bring children and a wider overall audience to chess would deserve much better treatment. I've never been a fan of MS software but I've never expected much from them in that area, in this case though, it's not just software and shame on them for it.
The one thing that tells me that Mozilla will be a killer browser when it comes out is that I can view freshmeat, the site with the most tables I've ever seen, and it dynamically resizes the tables when I resize the browser without reloading the page or even slowing down. That's a hell of a feat. Plus the fact that it's cross-platform to the core is a beautiful thing that appeals to the coder in me.
I didn't see the MTV show but I was watching Serena Altshul (sp?) on The View the other day (it was on in my gym, seriously) and I knew from what she said that it wouldn't be accurate. She didn't once mention the word "cracker" although she was refering to them. She also mixed hacking in with spam and the y2k thing. Then she said the best way to get rid of spam was to reply to the sender and tell them to leave you alone, wrong again. When the reporter didn't learn anything, I have doubts about the program. I haven't seen too much of Ms. Altshul recently but I do remember liking her reporting on Channel 1 in high school so I was disappointed to see her stoop to this type of typical MTV reporting. That show would have been an excellent place to get the word out about the difference real hackers like the l0pht guys and lamer script kiddies but instead, they seem to have squandered the opprotunity for the same old sensationalist crap. I guess I didn't really expect any different though.
I know this is a little offtopic but phrasing this whole thing as a "lesson" to a group of fictional students is more than a little annoying. The same information could have just as easily be put down in a better format and I would have been able to conecentrate on it. Instead I have to read the phrase "boys and girls" 78 times and I still don't know who Rachel and Brian are. I'm all for personal writing style but this isn't a story, it's supposed to be a news article.
Like I said, this is a little offtopic but I felt I had to say it. Other than the form issues I have, excellent job michael.
Is that really their answer? I thought it might be some patent or intellectual property argument. I've seen people at companies who want to release stuff as GPL (and other open/free licenses) not be able to because of the company lawyers. IBM has one of the largest corporate lawyer forces around and I'm sure they have to go over every piece of software/documentation/etc before it gets anywhere near an Open Source/free release.
I've always figured that the bigtime use of space wouldn't happen until we had something better than gianormous rockets to get stuff Up. For $75 bucks worth of electricity, a lot of stuff could be sent up everyday. I don't know if people would be hip to being magnetically hurled into space at 6gs for vacations or something but still, it's better than sitting on top of millions of gallons of rocket fuel.
I'm glad to see a quality distro getting bigtime help. Good job to all the Debian people.
On a side note, I was in a mainstream computer store the other day and saw in the front of the store boxes for Caldera, SuSE, and Redhat displayed really promenantly. It was good not only to see Linux up front but 3 different distros getting shelf space.
For once I'm happy to say I live in New Mexico. I heard about this a couple of days ago but I figured as usual we were just catching up to everybody else. Good to hear though, this state has a real problem with the quality of it's education system and I see this as if not a great step forward because evolution is already taught, at least it's not the steps backward I've come to expect from the people in charge here.
Man, how do you do that? Those curved folds rock. I'd put those on my wall. Anybody know any books on how to do that stuff? My brother rocks at origami but I've never seen him do curved stuff like that before.
Focusing on killing Windows is a stupid thing to do. Most people here know that Windows sucks in many, many ways but the thing is, a lot of people in the Windows using world know that too. The difference is they don't know there is any alternative. We in the Linux community don't need to try and trip up MS, they are doing a good job of that themselves. If we keep making Linux better and more importantly, get the word out that Windows isn't the only game in town, we will achieve much more than if we continually focus on MS. Making sure Linux doesn't have the same flaws as Windows is great, it makes an awesome TODO list for us to look at, it just shouldn't be the only thing we use for our roadmap.
There is a springboard module for the Visor that will supposedly do this type of stuff. Details are sketchy, as usual with unreleased products, but from what I've heard it will be a normal pager but when you plug it into the Visor it will do all sorts of logs and 2way paging stuff. Again, this is all preliminary but if the rumors pan out, it will be a killer little deal.
Damn, this could lead to the "borrowed experiences" things from the movie Strange Days. For those of you who didn't see it (you should), they had these webs that you put on your head and you could experience whatever was recorded by the person. They kept the experiences on little mini-disc things and they were bought and sold like drugs. My favorite was the guy who was "sold" on the idea by getting to experience a 19 year old girl taking a shower.:)
Re:No need to be out of print
on
The Big U
·
· Score: 1
What this guy is talking about is not reprinting entire catalogs and leaving them in warehouses but the ability to print one book for a customer when they buy it. Some publishing company has the ability to print a paperback in 7 minutes, from the button push to the customer leaving with the book. People in the industry have talked about bookstores downloading books over satellite connections and printing a copy for customer if they don't have one in stock.
Chris Carter has been saying for awhile that this would be the last season and they would continue doing XFiles movies. It would be rather pointless to do a movie where you have to introduce two new characters because Mulder & Scully were killed in the final TV episodes.
I just hope that they have the guts to make the aliens invade Earth for the last couple of episodes. That would be a hell of a way to end the show.
While I'm not a *BSD user, I'm always glad to see another "alternative" OS getting some recognition. As I remember, the coming of LinuxCare was one of the first major stories in the rise of Linux and I really hope that this is the first of many wins for the BSD camp. Keep up the good work team, someday we'll be able to show every computer user in the world what it means to run a stable, powerful operating system.
I think a split between MS-OS and MS-Apps would be a good thing for everyone. With the ability to let the Apps people look at and change the OS gone, it would allow much more real competition. An example I heard somewhere: If MS-OS wanted to integrate a browser into the OS, they would be forced to write App agnostic hooks into the OS that any browser could use, or the feature would be much less useful and much less worthwhile. With MS making both items, it behooves the OS team to only build the MS browser into the OS. This would have to be watched so the two new companies don't collude and effectivly become 1 company again but it would be the best solution for the industry overall. It eliminates the need for hefty regulation that might stifle other companies and it gives everybody a new reason to compete and innovate.
I was just about to post something saying this exact thing! I hope they named it after the show and not after regular sledgehammers you buy at Home Depot.
I have to say that I didn't even know that MacMillan has anything to do with Mandrake. I've never used Mandrake personally so that's probably why I was ignorant but if MacMillan wants the Linux community to think better of them, they should get on the ball and more strongly associate the two names together. Before I read this article I just thought of MacMillan as another company who just shovels books onto the shelves to take advantage of the latest trends like most book publishers. I also knew they had a book that contained a CD of Mandrake but lots of companies have Linux CDs in their books. They need to make people aware of the connection if they want credit.
I remember when The Last Action Hero did this (for far less money) and nobody even noticed as I remember. This is a hell of a stunt but they better do better business because of it than TLAH did.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because a technology has potentially bad side effects doesn't mean it shouldn't be explored. Of course nano has the potential to become a harmful military weapon, like you said, even sticks and rocks were powerful military weapons at one point in our evolution. But nano also has the potential to solve many problems you talk about.
1. Nano can build harmful semi-biological weapons, but we can also build nanotech to fight those machines and do other cleanup activities in our bodies at the same time.
2. Superlight, fuel efficient spacecraft and colonies built from the molecule up from native elements by semi-autonomous nanotech would help Earth over-population.
3. I don't have a potential solution to your third problem except for the inherent individuality of humans. People don't want to look the same now, why would they want to look the same with nano help? If anything, I think people will look more different than they do now once they have the ability to change things we can't change now.
That's the first thing I thought too. It's good to see another Bill Hicks fan loose in the world.
Bear with me if you will while I make this association.
I'm very interested in wireless and like the authors of this paper, I think it will be very important in the coming years. But I've never thought about things like this 'sleep deprivation attack' they were talking about. To me, this demonstrates one of the most powerful things about the open source/free software community, the fact that there are smart people thinking in ways others wouldn't. When big companies put a group of smart people together, they may very well come up with a great product but they probably won't be able to think of every attack/feature/etc that a larger interested group could think of.
Another example of this is the development of so-called "side channel attacks" in cryptography. People have used things like battery drain, EMF radiation signatures, and others, to attack smart cards and their ilk. Certainly the designers of the smart cards were assured their crypto was up to snuff but they hadn't counted on these side-channel attacks. If this hadn't been discovered until everybody had a smart card in their wallet, it would be a huge catastrophe.
Open thinking is a bit difficult for most big corporations to do, but I think things like this paper will help bring them around. The time of believing that a small group can design important projects in a closed manor is almost finished, there are too many smart people around thinking in new ways.
I know this is a little offtopic but that sleep deprevation attack got me thinking. Which, I guess, is the point.
I remember lobbying my parents to buy me a subscription to the web version in 1995 for my senior english paper. My dad didn't think that they, or the web, would be around at the end of the year subscription. hehe
I've been following the match via the email newsletter they've been sending out and I find it very interesting that not even Danny King has mentioned any of this furor in the email. You have to have been keeping up with the online chats and bulletin board to know that the game is pretty much wrecked.
I don't expect much from Microsoft but I would think that an event like this that is being touted as a way to bring children and a wider overall audience to chess would deserve much better treatment. I've never been a fan of MS software but I've never expected much from them in that area, in this case though, it's not just software and shame on them for it.
The one thing that tells me that Mozilla will be a killer browser when it comes out is that I can view freshmeat, the site with the most tables I've ever seen, and it dynamically resizes the tables when I resize the browser without reloading the page or even slowing down. That's a hell of a feat. Plus the fact that it's cross-platform to the core is a beautiful thing that appeals to the coder in me.
I didn't see the MTV show but I was watching Serena Altshul (sp?) on The View the other day (it was on in my gym, seriously) and I knew from what she said that it wouldn't be accurate. She didn't once mention the word "cracker" although she was refering to them. She also mixed hacking in with spam and the y2k thing. Then she said the best way to get rid of spam was to reply to the sender and tell them to leave you alone, wrong again. When the reporter didn't learn anything, I have doubts about the program. I haven't seen too much of Ms. Altshul recently but I do remember liking her reporting on Channel 1 in high school so I was disappointed to see her stoop to this type of typical MTV reporting. That show would have been an excellent place to get the word out about the difference real hackers like the l0pht guys and lamer script kiddies but instead, they seem to have squandered the opprotunity for the same old sensationalist crap. I guess I didn't really expect any different though.
I know this is a little offtopic but phrasing this whole thing as a "lesson" to a group of fictional students is more than a little annoying. The same information could have just as easily be put down in a better format and I would have been able to conecentrate on it. Instead I have to read the phrase "boys and girls" 78 times and I still don't know who Rachel and Brian are. I'm all for personal writing style but this isn't a story, it's supposed to be a news article.
Like I said, this is a little offtopic but I felt I had to say it. Other than the form issues I have, excellent job michael.
Is that really their answer? I thought it might be some patent or intellectual property argument. I've seen people at companies who want to release stuff as GPL (and other open/free licenses) not be able to because of the company lawyers. IBM has one of the largest corporate lawyer forces around and I'm sure they have to go over every piece of software/documentation/etc before it gets anywhere near an Open Source/free release.
I've always figured that the bigtime use of space wouldn't happen until we had something better than gianormous rockets to get stuff Up. For $75 bucks worth of electricity, a lot of stuff could be sent up everyday. I don't know if people would be hip to being magnetically hurled into space at 6gs for vacations or something but still, it's better than sitting on top of millions of gallons of rocket fuel.
I'm glad to see a quality distro getting bigtime help. Good job to all the Debian people.
On a side note, I was in a mainstream computer store the other day and saw in the front of the store boxes for Caldera, SuSE, and Redhat displayed really promenantly. It was good not only to see Linux up front but 3 different distros getting shelf space.
Damn, I just looked at the list again and it turns out I'm #6294. Weird. One of those small world things I'm always hearing about.
For once I'm happy to say I live in New Mexico. I heard about this a couple of days ago but I figured as usual we were just catching up to everybody else. Good to hear though, this state has a real problem with the quality of it's education system and I see this as if not a great step forward because evolution is already taught, at least it's not the steps backward I've come to expect from the people in charge here.
Man, how do you do that? Those curved folds rock. I'd put those on my wall. Anybody know any books on how to do that stuff? My brother rocks at origami but I've never seen him do curved stuff like that before.
Focusing on killing Windows is a stupid thing to do. Most people here know that Windows sucks in many, many ways but the thing is, a lot of people in the Windows using world know that too. The difference is they don't know there is any alternative. We in the Linux community don't need to try and trip up MS, they are doing a good job of that themselves. If we keep making Linux better and more importantly, get the word out that Windows isn't the only game in town, we will achieve much more than if we continually focus on MS. Making sure Linux doesn't have the same flaws as Windows is great, it makes an awesome TODO list for us to look at, it just shouldn't be the only thing we use for our roadmap.
There is a springboard module for the Visor that will supposedly do this type of stuff. Details are sketchy, as usual with unreleased products, but from what I've heard it will be a normal pager but when you plug it into the Visor it will do all sorts of logs and 2way paging stuff. Again, this is all preliminary but if the rumors pan out, it will be a killer little deal.
Damn, this could lead to the "borrowed experiences" things from the movie Strange Days. For those of you who didn't see it (you should), they had these webs that you put on your head and you could experience whatever was recorded by the person. They kept the experiences on little mini-disc things and they were bought and sold like drugs. My favorite was the guy who was "sold" on the idea by getting to experience a 19 year old girl taking a shower. :)
What this guy is talking about is not reprinting entire catalogs and leaving them in warehouses but the ability to print one book for a customer when they buy it. Some publishing company has the ability to print a paperback in 7 minutes, from the button push to the customer leaving with the book. People in the industry have talked about bookstores downloading books over satellite connections and printing a copy for customer if they don't have one in stock.
Chris Carter has been saying for awhile that this would be the last season and they would continue doing XFiles movies. It would be rather pointless to do a movie where you have to introduce two new characters because Mulder & Scully were killed in the final TV episodes.
I just hope that they have the guts to make the aliens invade Earth for the last couple of episodes. That would be a hell of a way to end the show.
While I'm not a *BSD user, I'm always glad to see another "alternative" OS getting some recognition. As I remember, the coming of LinuxCare was one of the first major stories in the rise of Linux and I really hope that this is the first of many wins for the BSD camp. Keep up the good work team, someday we'll be able to show every computer user in the world what it means to run a stable, powerful operating system.
That's the first thing I thought when the first image on the page popped up. Yikes, iAsses.
:).
This post meant to be Funny, not Offtopic
I think a split between MS-OS and MS-Apps would be a good thing for everyone. With the ability to let the Apps people look at and change the OS gone, it would allow much more real competition. An example I heard somewhere: If MS-OS wanted to integrate a browser into the OS, they would be forced to write App agnostic hooks into the OS that any browser could use, or the feature would be much less useful and much less worthwhile. With MS making both items, it behooves the OS team to only build the MS browser into the OS. This would have to be watched so the two new companies don't collude and effectivly become 1 company again but it would be the best solution for the industry overall. It eliminates the need for hefty regulation that might stifle other companies and it gives everybody a new reason to compete and innovate.
I was just about to post something saying this exact thing! I hope they named it after the show and not after regular sledgehammers you buy at Home Depot.
I have to say that I didn't even know that MacMillan has anything to do with Mandrake. I've never used Mandrake personally so that's probably why I was ignorant but if MacMillan wants the Linux community to think better of them, they should get on the ball and more strongly associate the two names together. Before I read this article I just thought of MacMillan as another company who just shovels books onto the shelves to take advantage of the latest trends like most book publishers. I also knew they had a book that contained a CD of Mandrake but lots of companies have Linux CDs in their books. They need to make people aware of the connection if they want credit.
I remember when The Last Action Hero did this (for far less money) and nobody even noticed as I remember. This is a hell of a stunt but they better do better business because of it than TLAH did.