For wireless to really explode in the business arena, however, security needs to be built-in from the start.
Security is at least as important to the home user.
If P2P filesharing is going to keep from dying on the vine, a very robust IP masking security layer needs to be implemented soon. An IP address is like a license plate. Now that ISP's can be bullied into identifying thier users, there's really nothing we can take for granted. Those of you who take issue with filesharing may not agree, but the next application to be blacklisted may be yours.
IP anonymity is the 21st century equivalent of the proverbial "right to bear arms". It should be protected in order to ensure that we are protected from our government.
This is why I'm still playing games like Steel Beasts, Civ III, Counterstrike and Combat Mission. I don't need to spend ludicrous amounts of cash./agree
Given the state of the economy, and the fact that many Slashdot readers are either not working anymore or are struggling just to make payments, I'd say this article fits into the "...you insenstive clod" department.
Give us jobs that pay us beyond our means, then we can afford all these nice shiny toys. Until then stop reminding us of how bad things are.
Never before in the history of Mankind has there ever been an equalizer like the atomic bomb. The stone spearhead helped the Neanderthal Man usurp Homo Erectus as king of the hominids, the catapult and the arrow helped the Anglos crush the Saxons, and the atomic bomb brought an end to Nazi/Nipponese aggression and eventually delivered the glory of Christ to billions of Soviets suffering under Communistic enslavement.
It is clear that J. Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Goddard, Albert Einstein, and the rest of the tiger team that worked on the Manhattan Project had nothing but moral purposes in mind. The atomic bomb is an instrument of hope, not terror. Christ Himself said that splitting the atom would lead to a new world of peace and harmony if we did not allow Islam to get out of hand. We have heeded His first piece of advice but ignored the second, and now we face a new threat brought on by our own failure to keep infidelity in check.
To cleanse the world of evil and return it to morality, we must use our sizable nuclear arsenal to rid the world of the Muslimic threat. By dropping 10-megaton warheads on Islamic epicenters such as Baghdad, Mecca, Medina, Detroit, Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, and Cordoba, we can instantly remove the vast majority of the evil that threatens moral society. Please write your Congressman and demand that we cleanse the world, and implore the others within your congregation to do the same. The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you.
This was one of the most refreshing and truly funny posts I've read on slashdot in a very long time. The fact that an AC posted this, and then was modded to (-1, Troll ) leaves me fealing very out of place here.
Re:Another example of WHY the US Patent office suc
on
NCR Patents the Internet
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
adjusts tin-foil hat
Personally I think there's a major backlash campaign being given unspoken support from all the old-money dow-like companies. The internet is something they have never understood, and view it only as a threat to thier way of doing business.
The legal system in no way supports the proliferation of free technocratic society, but serves only to perpetuate old-money institutions. You will never find a retired programmer on the bench. You will find a trial lawyer of some 30 years experience whos outlook is based entirely on precedent(think 1970s and 1980s). This was a time of farms, banks, automobile production, petroleum embargoes, and cold war.
90% of the serving officials in the 3 branches of government were lawyers before being elected senators, or supreme court judges, or in many cases presidents. Very very rarely will you ever see an engineer or scientist turned politician.
We are a fundamentally misrepresented class of people. Our priorities are largely askew from the priorities of the "majority voting public". All we want is unlimited bandwidth, unlimited computing power, and to be left alone. These 3 things are very much within our technological/finacial means as a nation. If the $200billion spent on the defense budget was poured into building a broadband infrastructure we would have it. And we all know how quickly processors and storage mediums improve. Simply said there are no real technological bariers towards the implementation of what the majority of us here want.
But none of this will happen because old-money has become aware of the threat of giving abundant resources to "everyone". They will use the legal system as a means of slowing/crippling/dismantling the "internet" until it is no longer functional.
Said again, the "internet" is under siege from old money...and it is nothing if not a war. Throwing file-sharers in jail, patenting hyper-links, all of this is insanity...but in war you use whatever means necessary to destroy your enemy. We, and what we represent, are the enemy of old-money institutions....and they will leverage every resource in thier means to destroy us.
Regardless of what your ideals tell you, every time you vote Libertarian you are voting Republican. And I hope for the love of god that the last two years have illustrated the consequences of doing so.
Does it occur to you guys that most of the stories worth telling have already been told? Try sitting down for 30mins and creating a short-story. Then submit it here and watch all the flames come in about how you just ripped off a, b, and c to hack together your story.
Originality is one of the rarest things around. We've all been exposed to so many different stories, movies, etc that there's really not much we haven't seen. If one in 10,000 artists actually does something original, how do you propose to build an economy off of that?
I enjoyed both MOO1 and MOO2, but was a bit disappointed with the fact that the skills in MOO2 were basically a carbon copy of those in M001. I liked the improved graphics and interface of M002, but would have appreciated more expansion of content.
It gets kinda dull when you reach the end of the game and start exhausting what you can research. Researching Planetary Future Tech 24 , or Weapons Tech 33 may improve my score...but I'd rather have better guns/ships.
Does anyone know if the skills have been expanded for M003?
And uncertainty diminishes VERY rapidly with increasing scale, there is basically nothing uncertain about something the size of a spaceship.
Correct.
There are however very real and demonstratable effects of the uncertainty priciple. In Bose-Einstein condensates for example, a cloud of particles is cooled to exremely low temperatures. This in turn lowers the de-broglie(quantum) wavelength of the atoms in the cloud to such an extent that they begin to share the same space collectively.
Said another way, they are moving so slowly(certainty of momentum) that thier location(certainty of location) becomes very uncertain, allowing many of them to occupy the same space at the same time. This is a completely novel, and un-intuitive state of matter. Something which occurs solely because of the very real effects of the uncertainty principle.
I had the same thought. This is a joke as far as military vehicles are concerned.
It's not a joke, it's just good marketing:
1) All the rich republican assholes driving thier 30gallon/mile SUVS need more oil.
2) Bush has many ties with the oil industry, many of whom are prompting him to leverage Irag out of its oil.
3) Oh ya, Bush wants the american people to say "A-OK George" when he bombs the shit out of Iraq for more oil.
Now that the army's got it's own SUV, America can fuel up right after dust-off. Symbolism at it's finest. Ary Fleisher, Cheney, Rumsfield and friends are having a field day with this one.
That is something entirely different, just transmitting the info needed to recreate something is one thing, magically reducing the mass of something is entirely different. What he was saying is that if there was a way to reduce the mass of a ship then we could avoid the whole "mass increases as velocity approaches light" thing by reducing the mass of the ship in the same amount that it would increase from the velocity. There isn't even the beginning of a theory that would explain a way to do that, and in fact doing it would violate the conservation of mass & energy laws that that are fairly well established. Oh and if your method of reducing the mass of the ship is to convert some of its mass to energy, then it's good to know that stored energy has inertia, for example a charged capacitor has more mass than a discharged one. I haven't done the math but I bet it's the equivilent to the increase in mass that you'd get from converting the same amount of energy to matter.
Yes this guy understands what I'm saying. And you're right about energy having inertia of course...I was thinking along the lines of maybe using some obscure quantum effect to "hide" the mass. Like maybe using the uncertainty principle in some strange way by rotating the (mass certainty/location uncertainty) into (mass uncertainty/location certainty).
Problem with the uncertainty principle is that it's just more uncertain about some mean value. If you have a 1kg mass rotated into "uncertain mass space" then you might have 0.5kg or 2kg with equal probability.
All this recent talk of the special properties of Bose-Einstien condensates had me wondering if something like that was possible.
There are a few laws of physics which are very fundamental and reliable. One of those is the law of conservation of momentum. The classical formula for momentum is as follows:
P = v * m (velocity times momentum)
The relativistic version is:
P = gamma * m * v, where gamma is the Lorentz transform. (gamma = sqrt of 1/(1-v2/c2)), and c is the speed of light.
OK, so the idea is this. As objects approach the speed of light relativity says that they become more massive. Therefore it takes asymptotically more energy to approach c. *But* if there were a way to reduce the mass of that object(by some magical means) then it wouldn't require nearly as much energy to accelerate.
Said another way, this magical technology could reduce an object's mass at the same rate it increased from relativistic effects. Thus allowing the object to approach the speed of light in a way that's energetically economical. An even better option would be to take a spacecraft wieghing say...100tons and accelerate it until it reached a speed of maybe 1000km/s. (This is possible with existing technologies, by averaging a constact acceration over 6 months or so). Then in the 2nd stage of space travel, you would invoke the *magic* technology to dramtically reduce the wieght of the spacecraft.
Since the law of conservation of momentum is true at relativistic speeds, the more the mass of the ship is reduced, the faster it would go! Said simply, if this new technology could somehow reduce the mass of the craft by 1000 times, it would then be traveling at 99% the speed of light.
Traveling at these speeds the people inside of the space craft would effectively "stop aging" with respect to thier destination. Here on earth thousands of years may pass in a single one of thier lifetimes. So we would never hear about thier journey. But the people in that craft would be able to travel all over the galaxy within thier lifetimes.
Basically it's just like star-trek, except more like voyager because there's noone to call home to anymore.
Everything here is completely feasible, and not wacko crack-pot physics stuff.
All someone has to do is invent a single technology that can reduce mass. Or if you prefer, a technology that converts mass to energy, and then converts that energy back to mass again at the flip of a switch. It needs to be 100% efficiect of course.
Playing violent video games does NOT cause violence. In fact, most people who play violent video games do not commit violent acts.
Well, personally I have to disagree. While they may not promote violent behavior in most people, I do think they promote violent thought. Often I find myself in a situation where I have to deal with difficult people. Let's just say that while I'm polite on the outside, the inside is seething sometimes. And I do have violent FPS-like scenarios play out in my head. The real question is where does the line between fantasy and action blur.
It shouldn't be a crime to play counter-strike.
Agreed(I play CS and EQ just about every day), but denying any linkage is a bit over the top.
Then again it's very hard to find moderate legislators these days. So maybe we can't afford the luxory of being scientific, and need to speak up for our rights to play. Tough call.
A lot of sf fans are actively hostile to cyberpunk nowadays
Yes, I have been staying inside the Fantasy genre myself.
Reading Snowcrash, and Neuromancer during my college years while studying Computer Science was a real mind job. Especially during the dot-com years. I think a lot of us really thought the "Cyberpunk" phenomenon was happening before our eyes.
In the wake of the last 2-3 years though many of those dreams of progress in a technocracy have been crushed. I can't even pick up a Sci-Fi novel anymore. I never realised how important my fantasies were in motivating me in real life. And I never realized how damaged I would be when reality decided to veto my fantasy.
One in four of the planetary systems identified to date outside the Solar System are capable of harbouring other Earths, say astrophysicists, a much higher proportion than anyone expected.
Is it me or does anyone see the connection? Those of us who've played the fabled "Master of Orion" series(Civ in space) are well aware that on average 1 in every 4 planets are hospitable to indigenous life. (You can teraform planets to colonize them, but 1 in 4 are naturally sustaining)
So apparently the game designers knew about this research well before it was published(1994). Or the scientific community is "broadening" its scope to include data from computer games. I'm more inclined to believe the latter, as game designers usually don't have time to engage in bio-astronomy on the side.
Slashdot Mirror
So you expect people to reply to you when you talk, but they're not allowed to know where to reply to? Care to explain how that works?
I am not claiming that this is a trivial problem. But I am claiming that the risks are beginning to outwiegh the benefits.
For wireless to really explode in the business arena, however, security needs to be built-in from the start.
Security is at least as important to the home user.
If P2P filesharing is going to keep from dying on the vine, a very robust IP masking security layer needs to be implemented soon. An IP address is like a license plate. Now that ISP's can be bullied into identifying thier users, there's really nothing we can take for granted. Those of you who take issue with filesharing may not agree, but the next application to be blacklisted may be yours.
IP anonymity is the 21st century equivalent of the proverbial "right to bear arms". It should be protected in order to ensure that we are protected from our government.
Two Words:
Open Office.
It's times like this I thank GOD I'm a a secret agent man.
Erm, I mean, a Canadian.
I'm closer and closer to moving to Canada every day.
Oh well, maybe this will stimulate UWB and other wireless broadband initiatives here in the states.
*Stares at shoes in sheepish denial*
This is why I'm still playing games like Steel Beasts, Civ III, Counterstrike and Combat Mission. I don't need to spend ludicrous amounts of cash. /agree
Given the state of the economy, and the fact that many Slashdot readers are either not working anymore or are struggling just to make payments, I'd say this article fits into the "...you insenstive clod" department.
Give us jobs that pay us beyond our means, then we can afford all these nice shiny toys. Until then stop reminding us of how bad things are.
Took me about 0.5 seconds to get this joke, but I still can't buy a job. Oh well, at least
employment != geekdom.
Never before in the history of Mankind has there ever been an equalizer like the atomic bomb. The stone spearhead helped the Neanderthal Man usurp Homo Erectus as king of the hominids, the catapult and the arrow helped the Anglos crush the Saxons, and the atomic bomb brought an end to Nazi/Nipponese aggression and eventually delivered the glory of Christ to billions of Soviets suffering under Communistic enslavement.
It is clear that J. Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Goddard, Albert Einstein, and the rest of the tiger team that worked on the Manhattan Project had nothing but moral purposes in mind. The atomic bomb is an instrument of hope, not terror. Christ Himself said that splitting the atom would lead to a new world of peace and harmony if we did not allow Islam to get out of hand. We have heeded His first piece of advice but ignored the second, and now we face a new threat brought on by our own failure to keep infidelity in check.
To cleanse the world of evil and return it to morality, we must use our sizable nuclear arsenal to rid the world of the Muslimic threat. By dropping 10-megaton warheads on Islamic epicenters such as Baghdad, Mecca, Medina, Detroit, Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, and Cordoba, we can instantly remove the vast majority of the evil that threatens moral society. Please write your Congressman and demand that we cleanse the world, and implore the others within your congregation to do the same. The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you.
This was one of the most refreshing and truly funny posts I've read on slashdot in a very long time. The fact that an AC posted this, and then was modded to (-1, Troll ) leaves me fealing very out of place here.
adjusts tin-foil hat
Personally I think there's a major backlash campaign being given unspoken support from all the old-money dow-like companies. The internet is something they have never understood, and view it only as a threat to thier way of doing business.
The legal system in no way supports the proliferation of free technocratic society, but serves only to perpetuate old-money institutions.
You will never find a retired programmer on the bench. You will find a trial lawyer of some 30 years experience whos outlook is based entirely on precedent(think 1970s and 1980s). This was a time of farms, banks, automobile production, petroleum embargoes, and cold war.
90% of the serving officials in the 3 branches of government were lawyers before being elected senators, or supreme court judges, or in many cases presidents. Very very rarely will you ever see an engineer or scientist turned politician.
We are a fundamentally misrepresented class of people. Our priorities are largely askew from the priorities of the "majority voting public". All we want is unlimited bandwidth, unlimited computing power, and to be left alone. These 3 things are very much within our technological/finacial means as a nation. If the $200billion spent on the defense budget was poured into building a broadband infrastructure we would have it. And we all know how quickly processors and storage mediums improve. Simply said there are no real technological bariers towards the implementation of what the majority of us here want.
But none of this will happen because old-money has become aware of the threat of giving abundant resources to "everyone". They will use the legal system as a means of slowing/crippling/dismantling the "internet" until it is no longer functional.
Said again, the "internet" is under siege from old money...and it is nothing if not a war. Throwing file-sharers in jail, patenting hyper-links, all of this is insanity...but in war you use whatever means necessary to destroy your enemy. We, and what we represent, are the enemy of old-money institutions....and they will leverage every resource in thier means to destroy us.
My bad, here it is.
While you're waiting go ahead and download this
little mp3. If you've ever played counter-strike, I'm sure you'll relate.
Some guy recorded his nieghbor playing counter-strike and put this together. Funny as hell.
Vote Libretarian!!!!!!!!
Regardless of what your ideals tell you, every time you vote Libertarian you are voting Republican. And I hope for the love of god that the last two years have illustrated the consequences of doing so.
Does it occur to you guys that most of the stories worth telling have already been told? Try sitting down for 30mins and creating a short-story. Then submit it here and watch all the flames come in about how you just ripped off a, b, and c to hack together your story.
Originality is one of the rarest things around. We've all been exposed to so many different stories, movies, etc that there's really not much we haven't seen. If one in 10,000 artists actually does something original, how do you propose to build an economy off of that?
This place is developing an echo...when are we actually gonna make a dent in the real world?
I enjoyed both MOO1 and MOO2, but was a bit disappointed with the fact that the skills in MOO2 were basically a carbon copy of those in M001. I liked the improved graphics and interface of M002, but would have appreciated more expansion of content.
It gets kinda dull when you reach the end of the game and start exhausting what you can research. Researching Planetary Future Tech 24 , or Weapons Tech 33 may improve my score...but I'd rather have better guns/ships.
Does anyone know if the skills have been expanded for M003?
I will never buy one of these systems in my lifetime.
And uncertainty diminishes VERY rapidly with increasing scale, there is basically nothing uncertain about something the size of a spaceship.
Correct.
There are however very real and demonstratable effects of the uncertainty priciple. In Bose-Einstein condensates for example, a cloud of particles is cooled to exremely low temperatures. This in turn lowers the de-broglie(quantum) wavelength of the atoms in the cloud to such an extent that they begin to share the same space collectively.
Said another way, they are moving so slowly(certainty of momentum) that thier location(certainty of location) becomes very uncertain, allowing many of them to occupy the same space at the same time. This is a completely novel, and un-intuitive state of matter. Something which occurs solely because of the very real effects of the uncertainty principle.
I had the same thought. This is a joke as far as military vehicles are concerned.
It's not a joke, it's just good marketing:
1) All the rich republican assholes driving thier 30gallon/mile SUVS need more oil.
2) Bush has many ties with the oil industry, many of whom are prompting him to leverage Irag out of its oil.
3) Oh ya, Bush wants the american people to say "A-OK George" when he bombs the shit out of Iraq for more oil.
Now that the army's got it's own SUV, America can fuel up right after dust-off. Symbolism at it's finest. Ary Fleisher, Cheney, Rumsfield and friends are having a field day with this one.
That is something entirely different, just transmitting the info needed to recreate something is one thing, magically reducing the mass of something is entirely different. What he was saying is that if there was a way to reduce the mass of a ship then we could avoid the whole "mass increases as velocity approaches light" thing by reducing the mass of the ship in the same amount that it would increase from the velocity. There isn't even the beginning of a theory that would explain a way to do that, and in fact doing it would violate the conservation of mass & energy laws that that are fairly well established. Oh and if your method of reducing the mass of the ship is to convert some of its mass to energy, then it's good to know that stored energy has inertia, for example a charged capacitor has more mass than a discharged one. I haven't done the math but I bet it's the equivilent to the increase in mass that you'd get from converting the same amount of energy to matter.
Yes this guy understands what I'm saying. And you're right about energy having inertia of course...I was thinking along the lines of maybe using some obscure quantum effect to "hide" the mass. Like maybe using the uncertainty principle in some strange way by rotating the (mass certainty/location uncertainty) into (mass uncertainty/location certainty).
Problem with the uncertainty principle is that it's just more uncertain about some mean value. If you have a 1kg mass rotated into "uncertain mass space" then you might have 0.5kg or 2kg with equal probability.
All this recent talk of the special properties of Bose-Einstien condensates had me wondering if something like that was possible.
P = v * m (velocity times momentum)
Err, that should read:
P = v * m (velocity times mass)
Here's how we can do space travel.
There are a few laws of physics which are very fundamental and reliable. One of those is the law of conservation of momentum. The classical formula for momentum is as follows:
P = v * m (velocity times momentum)
The relativistic version is:
P = gamma * m * v, where gamma is the Lorentz transform. (gamma = sqrt of 1/(1-v2/c2)), and c is the speed of light.
OK, so the idea is this. As objects approach the speed of light relativity says that they become more massive. Therefore it takes asymptotically more energy to approach c. *But* if there were a way to reduce the mass of that object(by some magical means) then it wouldn't require nearly as much energy to accelerate.
Said another way, this magical technology could reduce an object's mass at the same rate it increased from relativistic effects. Thus allowing the object to approach the speed of light in a way that's energetically economical. An even better option would be to take a spacecraft wieghing say...100tons and accelerate it until it reached a speed of maybe 1000km/s. (This is possible with existing technologies, by averaging a constact acceration over 6 months or so). Then in the 2nd stage of space travel, you would invoke the *magic* technology to dramtically reduce the wieght of the spacecraft.
Since the law of conservation of momentum is true at relativistic speeds, the more the mass of the ship is reduced, the faster it would go! Said simply, if this new technology could somehow reduce the mass of the craft by 1000 times, it would then be traveling at 99% the speed of light.
Traveling at these speeds the people inside of the space craft would effectively "stop aging" with respect to thier destination. Here on earth thousands of years may pass in a single one of thier lifetimes. So we would never hear about thier journey. But the people in that craft would be able to travel all over the galaxy within thier lifetimes.
Basically it's just like star-trek, except more like voyager because there's noone to call home to anymore.
Everything here is completely feasible, and not wacko crack-pot physics stuff.
All someone has to do is invent a single technology that can reduce mass. Or if you prefer, a technology that converts mass to energy, and then converts that energy back to mass again at the flip of a switch. It needs to be 100% efficiect of course.
Any ideas on how?
*sheepish grin*
Playing violent video games does NOT cause violence. In fact, most people who play violent video games do not commit violent acts.
Well, personally I have to disagree. While they may not promote violent behavior in most people, I do think they promote violent thought. Often I find myself in a situation where I have to deal with difficult people. Let's just say that while I'm polite on the outside, the inside is seething sometimes. And I do have violent FPS-like scenarios play out in my head. The real question is where does the line between fantasy and action blur.
It shouldn't be a crime to play counter-strike.
Agreed(I play CS and EQ just about every day), but denying any linkage is a bit over the top.
Then again it's very hard to find moderate legislators these days. So maybe we can't afford the luxory of being scientific, and need to speak up for our rights to play. Tough call.
A lot of sf fans are actively hostile to cyberpunk nowadays
Yes, I have been staying inside the Fantasy genre myself.
Reading Snowcrash, and Neuromancer during my college years while studying Computer Science was a real mind job. Especially during the dot-com years. I think a lot of us really thought the "Cyberpunk" phenomenon was happening before our eyes.
In the wake of the last 2-3 years though many of those dreams of progress in a technocracy have been crushed. I can't even pick up a Sci-Fi novel anymore. I never realised how important my fantasies were in motivating me in real life. And I never realized how damaged I would be when reality decided to veto my fantasy.
Ya I know. Grow up, get laid, etc. etc.
One in four of the planetary systems identified to date outside the Solar System are capable of harbouring other Earths, say astrophysicists, a much higher proportion than anyone expected.
Is it me or does anyone see the connection? Those of us who've played the fabled "Master of Orion" series(Civ in space) are well aware that on average 1 in every 4 planets are hospitable to indigenous life. (You can teraform planets to colonize them, but 1 in 4 are naturally sustaining)
So apparently the game designers knew about this research well before it was published(1994). Or the scientific community is "broadening" its scope to include data from computer games. I'm more inclined to believe the latter, as game designers usually don't have time to engage in bio-astronomy on the side.
Props to H1B's and Indian Programmers
Ya ya, sieg heil.
sounds like a goose and gander scenario to me
Yes, but be grateful that these little tricks still exist. Otherwise the Rupublicans would start passing laws like these:
*If you vote Democrat you have to pay higher taxes because you want more government.
or
*If you're white and over 40 then you're tax exempt.
or
*Anyone with the last name of Bush gets a lifetime gaurentee of social security benefits.
or
*If your name appears on this list you are gaurenteed a seat at all White House VIP luncheons.