It's not clear to me that your box will reliably last that long. I would like to suggest an abandoned mine. This will also give you more room. Your best bet would be hard rock, something like basalt or granite would do nicely. Water is a potential problem so you want to site your shaft in a desert or well above the snowline. Frozen water won't hurt your stuff. Antartica is also a possible candidate.
(Thangodin) Four legged creatures walk and run very well, but six legged creatures are problematic--they tend to stumble and jerk a lot. Not a problem if you're a small light animal like an ant, but military research into six legged miltary ATV's was aborted because of this problem. The bigger the creature, the more pronounced the problem.
(KM) Sounds like a control problem. That we have trouble making a six legged vehicle walk smoothly does not mean that nature will have trouble making a six legged creature walk smoothly. Do you have anything else to back this assertion?
(Thangodin) Intelligent, tool using animals must readapt at least some of their limbs to prehensile appendages.
(KM) Er, No. It doesn't have to be a walking limb. Spiders manipulate things very well and thay haven't readapted anything. My dog manipulates things with his mouth and elephants manipulate things with their noses. Beavers manipulate things with their tails. Give them a little incentive and a quarter of a million years to practice up, and they'll manipulate things as well as you or I.
(Thangodin) Given that their predecessors will probably begin with four legs,
(KM) Four legs is common among large terrestrial animals, but I don't see any particular reason why this must be so elsewhere. Four works well, but so would fourty.
(Thangodin) you end up with a creature that walks upright,
(KM) Walking upright gives you the chance for a better view, and is good for developing a finely tuned sense of balance, but I don't see how it is generally better than a downright position.
(Thangodin) with two limbs for manipulation,
(KM) There's nothing special about two. One would work, or three, or twenty-three.
(Thangodin) sense organs located high up for good vantage,
(KM) This is highly dependent of the details of your circumstances. Butterflies taste with their feet. Fish "hear" with their sides. Scorpions "hear" with their feet.
(Thangodin) close to the brain for high speed transmission of information. In other words, humanoid.
(KM) Putting your main brain way up high off the ground makes it vulnerable to falling and having your fellow humanoids wack you on the head to good effect. Me, I'd rather have the brain safely tucked away in the torso somewhere, or maybe be a distributed organ like the immune sytem.
(KM) I'm not convinced that the transmission lag is all that bad. I can shuffle along a path in the dark by feeling it with my feet , and that's a full length two way trip for the signals.
(Thangodin) there is also the problem of energy expenditure of moving all those extra limbs, especially in high gravity.
(KM) Make twice as many supports, but with the same total mass, and you gain redundancy and use about the same energy.
(KM) Nature has not used every possible shape or form here on Earth. Evolution is quirky and follows tight constraints that depend on your initial conditions. Because a thing isn't in service here doesn't mean it can't be the number one favorite elsewhere.
I-CAN-SPAM Act Flawed By Design
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you take a look at the actual bill ~
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:S.877:
and spend some time to boil off all the legalese, you will see that the bill is not intended to prevent spamming. That was used as a sales point, but is not supported anywhere in the text. The bill is written obscurely enough that ordinary people cannot read or understand it. I assume that is by design.
Some of the main things it does do:
It destroys all existing state and local level anti-spam laws. Some of them were actually becoming effective, so they had to go.
It removes any legal right of action from 99.99% of the population. The only entities who can bring action under it are ISPs and a few governmental agencies.
If these ISPs/Agencies want to bring suit they must do so in a federal court, not state, local, or small claims. If you don't have $10,000 (US) that you can throw away to make a point, there is no reason to go there. You cannot represent yourself and even normal attournies are not all qualified to go there.
The few federal agencies that can apply the law, such as state attourney generals, tend to already be fully occupied with things like rape, murder, grand theft, and chasing down workers in the drug and terrorism industries.
If you come up to them looking for help, they have to decide whether to look into a few annoying emails, or go out and catch passing speeders and arsonists and burglars. Because they only see 1/10,000,000 of any given spam run, it will look like nothing more than a misdemeanor. It will usually look like it is not even in their jursdiction. Guess who wins?
Small ISPs are unlikely to have the money to pursue cases under this law. Some of the major ISPs have gone after a dozen or so spammers. Even if they win every case, twelve or so prosecutions a year is not a noticable deterent for the remaining hundred thousand or so spammers.
The net effect is that this bill ought to be called the
I-CAN-SPAM act, as this would represent it accurately.
Steve Gibson gives long, clear review of how zombies work, how a thirteen year old with attitude and his own private zombie army took Steve off the net:
http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm
Sobig virus was not random act, several time-limited versions were released into the wild, after each field test the next gen. improved on the last. These articles talk about how they captured unsecure machines, rooted them, put them to work DDOSing antispam outfits, installed mail servers or websites on the newly owned machines:
It would have to be quite a lot. If we were to launch, say, Australia into orbit you might start to notice the difference. For one little beagle don't worry about it.
It's worse than you thought. As an ISP you can sue, but you have to be able to show damages. You also can't file in small claims or the local county courthouse. You have to file in a FEDERAL court. If you can't show $75,000 (US) in damages they don't want to hear about it. Also, at this level no normal person can even try to represent themself, you are looking at a licensed attourney and probably $20,000 (US) in legal bills if you want to win.
I'm aware that a lot of things have come out of the rest of the world. However the internet is not one of them. I mean no generalized slander upon the non-western world. Hopefully their best is yet to come.
Let's see now, China and Saudi Arabia, those bastions of free and independent media, want to run the net? Guess that Goatse guy is history...
Let's consider, what did all these 2nd and 3rd world countries do to invent the 'net? to do the intellectual heavy lifting to figure out how to make it work? Build the technology? Fund the demo models? Iron out the bugs? Make it an almost free world-wide utility such as has never been seen in all of history? (Sound of crickets chirping in the silence)
So they have done, ah, roughly nothing to create it but now they want to own it? Riiiiiight.....
Of course I'm not wild about ICANN either, they seem to have this fascination with money. I don't mind if they make a living wage, I mind when they simply make everything available to the highest bidder.
OK, lets throw the ITU a bone. Split off the.ORG domains and throw them to the ITU for say ten years. Comes the year 2014 we'll see how they're doing. They screw up horibly and people can simply flee the.ORG TLDs. I think it might also prove healthy for ICANN to be reminded that they could be replaced.
No need to be confused. American law has been hitting some limits to its growth in the US. It has gotten big and malignant enough that it is starting to impare the vitality of its host. It's response to this has been to start metastasizing its way abroad searching for new hosts. Reference: Dmitry Sklyarov, Juan Pablo Roque, Maher Arar, those poor bastards in Guantanamo who are somehow not POWs, etc.
My advice to those of you living in what used to be sovereign nations? Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
With current technology you can't protect it from attack. However, if your terrorists feel that they benefit from it too, not just those godless Americans, then their motive to attack it goes away.
>>I doubt the common 747 jet airliner would be such a popular mode of transportation today if >>the Nazi's weren't looking for a plane that could run circles around the allied air force.
>The 747 and Nazi's? >This is spawned from one of those expert trolling checklists isn't it?
No, he's right about that. Germany created and flew the first jet fighters. Unfortunately for them, the war was almost over already. Commercial jets are descended from those planes.
>What is to gain by building a space elevator? > Unless they can mine diamonds or gold > from the upper atmosphere...
Would you settle for:
Cheap communication?
Cheap, almost zero pollution, electricity?
Cheap iron ore with NO pesky environmental restrictions?
Cheap surveillance satellites?
The possibility that you could somewhat influence the weather?
A new era in astronomy?
Total air superiority? If someone annoys you, you take the tailings from your cheap iron ore, make iron balls the size of an the Arc de Triomphe, and drop them on their heads for a while. They can't even intercept them, too much mass. If you're after a mobile target, substitute an iron rod with a camera in the nose, stubby little wings, maybe some attitude correction thrusters in the tail. How would you like to dodge those going by at mach 12?
By now it may be leaky, but it was airtight when it was built. Did you see the "lung" building with the roof that goes up and down to allow for expansion as the inside air warms and expands during the day, then cools and contracts at night?
Re:Magnetic Sensors Can't See my Plastic Pontiac
on
Sensors Gone Wild
·
· Score: 1
You still have a signature. The metal in the engine block, radiator, driveshaft, rims, tires, and axles should give you at least as big a signature as a motorcycle. What you need in that plastic pontiac are a couple of big electromagnets and some switches on the dash...
Slashdot Mirror
So if I see someone down the block setting up a 30 meter dish pointed at my house, that means the paint really is working?
It's not clear to me that your box will reliably last that long. I would like to suggest an abandoned mine. This will also give you more room. Your best bet would be hard rock, something like basalt or granite would do nicely. Water is a potential problem so you want to site your shaft in a desert or well above the snowline. Frozen water won't hurt your stuff. Antartica is also a possible candidate.
(KM) Sounds like a control problem. That we have trouble making a six legged vehicle walk smoothly does not mean that nature will have trouble making a six legged creature walk smoothly. Do you have anything else to back this assertion?
(Thangodin) Intelligent, tool using animals must readapt at least some of their limbs to prehensile appendages.
(KM) Er, No. It doesn't have to be a walking limb. Spiders manipulate things very well and thay haven't readapted anything. My dog manipulates things with his mouth and elephants manipulate things with their noses. Beavers manipulate things with their tails. Give them a little incentive and a quarter of a million years to practice up, and they'll manipulate things as well as you or I.
(Thangodin) Given that their predecessors will probably begin with four legs,
(KM) Four legs is common among large terrestrial animals, but I don't see any particular reason why this must be so elsewhere. Four works well, but so would fourty.
(Thangodin) you end up with a creature that walks upright,
(KM) Walking upright gives you the chance for a better view, and is good for developing a finely tuned sense of balance, but I don't see how it is generally better than a downright position.
(Thangodin) with two limbs for manipulation,
(KM) There's nothing special about two. One would work, or three, or twenty-three.
(Thangodin) sense organs located high up for good vantage,
(KM) This is highly dependent of the details of your circumstances. Butterflies taste with their feet. Fish "hear" with their sides. Scorpions "hear" with their feet.
(Thangodin) close to the brain for high speed transmission of information. In other words, humanoid.
(KM) Putting your main brain way up high off the ground makes it vulnerable to falling and having your fellow humanoids wack you on the head to good effect. Me, I'd rather have the brain safely tucked away in the torso somewhere, or maybe be a distributed organ like the immune sytem.
(KM) I'm not convinced that the transmission lag is all that bad. I can shuffle along a path in the dark by feeling it with my feet , and that's a full length two way trip for the signals.
(Thangodin) there is also the problem of energy expenditure of moving all those extra limbs, especially in high gravity.
(KM) Make twice as many supports, but with the same total mass, and you gain redundancy and use about the same energy.
(KM) Nature has not used every possible shape or form here on Earth. Evolution is quirky and follows tight constraints that depend on your initial conditions. Because a thing isn't in service here doesn't mean it can't be the number one favorite elsewhere.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:S.877:
and spend some time to boil off all the legalese, you will see that the bill is not intended to prevent spamming. That was used as a sales point, but is not supported anywhere in the text. The bill is written obscurely enough that ordinary people cannot read or understand it. I assume that is by design.
Some of the main things it does do:
It destroys all existing state and local level anti-spam laws. Some of them were actually becoming effective, so they had to go.
It removes any legal right of action from 99.99% of the population. The only entities who can bring action under it are ISPs and a few governmental agencies.
If these ISPs/Agencies want to bring suit they must do so in a federal court, not state, local, or small claims. If you don't have $10,000 (US) that you can throw away to make a point, there is no reason to go there. You cannot represent yourself and even normal attournies are not all qualified to go there.
The few federal agencies that can apply the law, such as state attourney generals, tend to already be fully occupied with things like rape, murder, grand theft, and chasing down workers in the drug and terrorism industries.
If you come up to them looking for help, they have to decide whether to look into a few annoying emails, or go out and catch passing speeders and arsonists and burglars. Because they only see 1/10,000,000 of any given spam run, it will look like nothing more than a misdemeanor. It will usually look like it is not even in their jursdiction. Guess who wins?
Small ISPs are unlikely to have the money to pursue cases under this law. Some of the major ISPs have gone after a dozen or so spammers. Even if they win every case, twelve or so prosecutions a year is not a noticable deterent for the remaining hundred thousand or so spammers.
The net effect is that this bill ought to be called the I-CAN-SPAM act, as this would represent it accurately.
Steve Gibson gives long, clear review of how zombies work, how a thirteen year old with attitude and his own private zombie army took Steve off the net:
1 ,0 0.asp
t ml
, 00 .html?tw=wn_story_related
http://grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm
Sobig virus was not random act, several time-limited versions were released into the wild, after each field test the next gen. improved on the last. These articles talk about how they captured unsecure machines, rooted them, put them to work DDOSing antispam outfits, installed mail servers or websites on the newly owned machines:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,11226
or:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/33721.h
Mercenary crackers hire out to spammers:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60747
It would have to be quite a lot. If we were to launch, say, Australia into orbit you might start to notice the difference. For one little beagle don't worry about it.
It's worse than you thought. As an ISP you can sue, but you have to be able to show damages. You also can't file in small claims or the local county courthouse. You have to file in a FEDERAL court. If you can't show $75,000 (US) in damages they don't want to hear about it. Also, at this level no normal person can even try to represent themself, you are looking at a licensed attourney and probably $20,000 (US) in legal bills if you want to win.
I'm aware that a lot of things have come out of the rest of the world. However the internet is not one of them. I mean no generalized slander upon the non-western world. Hopefully their best is yet to come.
Let's consider, what did all these 2nd and 3rd world countries do to invent the 'net? to do the intellectual heavy lifting to figure out how to make it work? Build the technology? Fund the demo models? Iron out the bugs? Make it an almost free world-wide utility such as has never been seen in all of history? (Sound of crickets chirping in the silence)
So they have done, ah, roughly nothing to create it but now they want to own it? Riiiiiight.....
Of course I'm not wild about ICANN either, they seem to have this fascination with money. I don't mind if they make a living wage, I mind when they simply make everything available to the highest bidder.
OK, lets throw the ITU a bone. Split off the .ORG domains and throw them to the ITU for say ten years. Comes the year 2014 we'll see how they're doing. They screw up horibly and people can simply flee the .ORG TLDs. I think it might also prove healthy for ICANN to be reminded that they could be replaced.
My advice to those of you living in what used to be sovereign nations? Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
It has repeatedly been spotted walking upright...
With current technology you can't protect it from attack. However, if your terrorists feel that they benefit from it too, not just those godless Americans, then their motive to attack it goes away.
>>I doubt the common 747 jet airliner would be such a popular mode of transportation today if
>>the Nazi's weren't looking for a plane that could run circles around the allied air force.
>The 747 and Nazi's?
>This is spawned from one of those expert trolling checklists isn't it?
No, he's right about that. Germany created and flew the first jet fighters. Unfortunately for them, the war was almost over already. Commercial jets are descended from those planes.
>What is to gain by building a space elevator?
> Unless they can mine diamonds or gold
> from the upper atmosphere...
Would you settle for:
Cheap communication?
Cheap, almost zero pollution, electricity?
Cheap iron ore with NO pesky environmental restrictions?
Cheap surveillance satellites?
The possibility that you could somewhat influence the weather?
A new era in astronomy?
Total air superiority? If someone annoys you, you take the tailings from your cheap iron ore, make iron balls the size of an the Arc de Triomphe, and drop them on their heads for a while. They can't even intercept them, too much mass. If you're after a mobile target, substitute an iron rod with a camera in the nose, stubby little wings, maybe some attitude correction thrusters in the tail. How would you like to dodge those going by at mach 12?
By now it may be leaky, but it was airtight when it was built. Did you see the "lung" building with the roof that goes up and down to allow for expansion as the inside air warms and expands during the day, then cools and contracts at night?
You still have a signature. The metal in the engine block, radiator, driveshaft, rims, tires, and axles should give you at least as big a signature as a motorcycle. What you need in that plastic pontiac are a couple of big electromagnets and some switches on the dash...