Well, it would be very costly, but if you can justify the long term investment, it wouldn't be too costly. It will pay for itself after a period of time.
There was somebody once somewhere, a science fiction author perhaps, who said that the next phase of our civilization would be when we were mining the sun for energy -- just simply drawing hydrogen out of the sun for fuel. Ultimately, what limits us is not the sunlight that falls on the Earth, but the amount of energy in the sun ( assuming we can't get to other solar systems in a reasonable time frame).
What do you do about rain? Also, do you have to wear nice clothes? I have a problem with my shirts getting sweaty during the summer, and also getting the legs of my nice slacks greasy with gear grease. Do you bring a change of clothes to work? If so, how do you keep them from wrinkling? Also, does your city maintain bike paths from your house to work? I know that's common in Finland -- I was an exchange student there, but here in the US, there often isn't even a walkable path between a lot of roads!
We'll probably send up some kind of orbiting solar collector that beams down power in microwave or laser or something like that (I'm not an expert in that kind of power transmission). But probably not in the next five years.
C'mon, Taco, you have lived through the careers of Lee Atwater, James Carville, Bill Clinton, and Karl Rove. Have you learned nothing about political strategy from the best in the business? Yeah, because just living during the tenure of a Great in any field means you automatically learn about what they're doing.
Given the state of petroleum based chemistry 100 years ago versus today, do you think that advances in gene manipulation could make plant sourced chemicals more affordable?
Also, why do we get so many useful chemicals out of oil? Is it because of its ultimate source being organic processes? So if we do want a real replacement for the chemical cornucopia that is oil, are we almost by definition going to be looking at plants?
You're right on. Imagine this was 1992, back before the 'internet'. You really had absolutely no way to know where the candidate stood on the issue. You could either get the information 3rd hand: from the newspaper, from a supporter, or try to watch every media appearance the candidate made to piece together their platform, or write to the campaign and get the official written document of their stand on the issues, if they even produced such a document.
Nowadays you can just surf on over to their website and find "where I stand". It couldn't be easier, especially for tech-savvy geeks reading slashdot, yet somehow "I still don't know where they stand on the issues."
You forgot to mention that the.com burst happened during the Clinton administration and the economy recovered during the Bush administratation. Are you kidding me? The economy hasn't recovered; all that's happened is 1. a housing bubble, where people got cash from home equity loans -- which has since crashed -- and 2. a credit card bubble, which will crash shortly after this housing crash cycles through. There's been no recovery; just two bubbles, one of which just burst.
The American economy is like this: You used to have a good paying union job with benefits. That job got shipped overseas, and you started to work two part-time jobs. To make ends meet, you got home-equity loans, traded up your house, and got 0% APR deals on new credit card lines. Things were looking good ( i.e. the economy 'recovered' ) until you found yourself upside down in your mortgage, with ballooning mortage payments. Now you have that plus your credit card debt. Also, your parents are elderly and your kids want to go college in a few years. And, you would like to retire at some point. And, you don't have health insurance. And, the value of the dollar has been cut in half. And, gas has doubled in price. And, food prices are going up.
Economy recovered!? What year are you living in? 2003?
Sorry to say this, but racism is endemic to the human species. Where were you thinking about moving? Europe? They're not too fond of blacks/browns/Muslims/Hindus/Germans/French/Swedes etc.
If you and your son are "white" you could move to a country where white people are still on top, say Brazil or something, but that doesn't fix the racism situation; you're just positioning yourself to be on its good side.
It's sort of like the saying "You can't not care about the government, because government is interested in you."
In an ideal world, the problems of government and politics would be as meaningless as Paris Hilton and American Idol, but it's not. Politics brought us the Third Reich, Stalin's Soviet Union, Pol Pot, etc. People live and die because of government. It's easy to sit back in the richest nation in the world, typing away on your computer, and think all of this stuff doesn't affect you. Sooner or later, perhaps when they're hauling people off to camps in box cars, this will catch up with your, or your children, or your grandchildren. It's worth worrying about.
So how does this relate back to computers? Well, what do you think about the RIAA cajoling the government into charging a tax on blank media? What about the government mandating copy-protection chips into all motherboards? What if the SBA manages to outlaw free software? What if we get into an era where we have to have permission for all of our software and all of the posts and emails we make on the internet? The computer and the internet are today's printing press, and tremendous political battles will fought over it. I think 'the right to communicate freely' will be one of the freedoms that the next revolutionaries will fight and die for.
The politics and the software run now will determine the course of this country for the foreseeable future. It's up for grabs, and its being negotiated in the public arena *right now*.
I was actually a "child" of 2001: A Space Odyssey, having seen it in the theater when I was six. Interesting! In that sense, I am a child of Dark Crystal. My dad took me to see it in the theater when it came out, and I remember the opening scene, with that tower on the river plains and the deep narrator's voice. It's the earliest memory I can accurately date.
I don't consciously remember much from my viewing in the theater, but I think it had a profound impact on my psyche. When I watch it now, I sometimes well up when I see the evil Skeksis and the good Mystics merging into a single, complete being.
When you say 'addressed' do you mean the user, or the domain name?
If I send an email to 'joe@canadian-copmany.com' is it addressed to his company? Does that override the the face that it was addressed to 'joe'? I understand if it were addressed to 'sales@canadian-company.com', but a personal name is a different story.
RFID chips have no power source of their own, and are electrically inert until they're powered up by receiving energy from an external transmitter. Unless you have an actively transmitting RFID reader next to you, your tag won't be able to "modulate your nervous system" or do anything else to you. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the external transmitter that activates an RFID chip simply a radio broadcaster? In that case, couldn't a radio or cell phone tower be repurposed, relatively easily, to 'activate' the RFID chips of an entire town?
Or if you were some law enforcement agency or some governmental authority, couldn't you easily disable anybody with the proper RFID chip nested into their nervous system with the right kind of 'radio gun'? Just walk into a room, press a button, and the target is is suddenly in such a fog that they can't walk.
From the article:
It is believed the article was deleted because it did not promote Wikimedia, although the excuse used to do so, by Wikimedia counsel Michael Godwin was that it might be defamatory. So not only are we getting overloaded with wiki terminology, this case is also going to fall under Godwin's law!?
Are you opposed in every case, or just "forced" implantation? I can think of several scenarios... You see, the thing is, I'm not really opposed to it at all. What I'm opposed to is its misuse by government. If it were totally and completely voluntary, great. I wouldn't have a problem. The problem is, I see the 'several scenarios' growing to a point where it's mandatory to have a chip from birth, or else you are an 'untouchable'. Sort of like a social security number -- who even knows what its original scope and purpose was? But nowadays, you need one for practically any serious financial transaction. You need one in order to live within the system in the US.
So sure, I don't have a problem with X professional choosing to have an implant for their job. But I don't think it will end there. I think that would be the 'first step' towards a more pervasive and mandatory use of RFID implants.
Basically, just think of a scenario where the government could use it to locate and round up some despised ethnic group, say, or 'dissappear' political dissidents in a single night. That's what I'm opposed to. An identification system where it is out of the control of the person being identified. Well, that and the real-time tracking.
As a voluntary part of a lifesaving medical treatment -- perhaps the tag is swallowed and followed through your GI tract, or perhaps it's implanted and used to monitor a medical condition?
I understand the use of RFID implants in the case where you need to identify a person confidently, such as a prison guard, soldier, or employee in a secure room. However, what's the point of RFID in this scenario? If you swallow the tag, that's fine -- you'll pass it in a few days. But how would an RFID chip monitor a medical condition? Aren't you talking about an electronic a medical device, like a pacemaker, rather than a remote identifier? I have no problem with pacemakers. Again, it's the problem of identification being out of control of those being identified.
As a required part of a lifesaving medical treatment, where your only access to obtain treatment is to consent to implanted RFID?
Why would you need an RFID chip for surgery? Why not a regular hospital bracelet? If you need definite identification, you can even get a temporary tattoo from a tattoo gun. If it's done lightly, it comes off in about 30 days.
I'm just wondering what your tolerance is. A similar question is: do you carry a cell phone? They're more trackable than an RFID chip. I can drop a cell phone any time I want. I don't have to dig it out of my skin. ( Who knows, they might even put these RFID chips in your brain! How would you get it out on your own accord then? ) I can drop a wallet, ID card, anything. Those things aren't mandatory. If RFID chips were mandatory, and removing one from your system was illegal, I would have a serious problem with that.
But again, it's all about the creep. Mandatory implants (hopefully) won't be around in my lifetime. But if several generations grow up with implants being state of course for certain situations, nobody will really have a problem with mandatory implants for everyone.
Also, as far as health, I wouldn't worry about cancer; I would worry more about its ability to modulate your nervous system -- either central *or* peripheral. What if there were an RFID implant that was implanted in your brain that induced a general 'haziness' of thought, or slight depression, in response to a certain signal? There's been a lot of experiments showing that electromagnetic waves and electronic implants can control experience and behavior.
For me, RFID rolls up a lot of nasty in a little implant. Identification out of control of the person ( think Auschwitz tattoo ), real-time remote tracking, and possible nervous system modulation. Bad, bad mojo.
There's nothing that bugs me more with nascent technology than RFID. I don't mind it in products -- it would be great to inventory a warehouse, or, say a refrigerator, in minutes. Theoretically, I wouldn't mind RFIDs in identification cards, if it weren't so darned close to the skin. What really concerns me is RFID implants.
It reminds me of the tattooing of numbers on Jews during the holocaust, for the Third Reich to track them and 'dispose' of them. I'm not a Christian, but the whole "mark of the beast" stuff raises my hackles. It just seems way too open to abuse for any totalitarian-minded politician. At first it's just for medical records, then it's for routine identification stops... finally, there's some computer screen somewhere in a mountain showing the movement of every American citizen.
I don't know, I just have a very visceral reaction against the idea of an RFID implant. I have a phobia of needs; that might have something to do with it. If it really came down to the point where you had to have an RFID implant to participate in society, I don't know what I would do. I really don't. I might just drop out at that point, try to live in a cabin somewhere.
Thanks for posting expertise from a field not normally represented on slashdot! As far as paragraphs, use an HTML tag such as . It stands for break, as in line break, and two of them will put a blank line in your text.
Name one plausible environmental damage scenario (other than full-out nuclear war) that would cause a significant proportion of human extinction. Global crop failure due to lack of petroleum-based fertilizer and pesticides, due to peak oil.
Well, it is more detailed, but it's not that different. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about fantastic worlds on Mars, and William Morris was writing about an invented world based on mythology in the 1850s. Perhaps I asked my question wrong. I think that Tolkien's work is qualitatively different, and therefore new, because it took place somewhere else entirely, with no connection to the world we know.
A story that takes place on Mars is a story that takes place in the reality that we inhabit. We can look at Mars in the sky; we might go there someday. A story that takes place on Mount Olympus takes place in our reality -- Mount Olympus is an actual place in Greece. There may or may not be gods up there, but we can at least visit the place. Same with Valhalla -- dead heroes go there; it's just beyond the rainbow bridge. You can supposedly get there from Earth. Atlantis was supposed to be in the Atlantic somewhere.
All of these fantastic places had some connection to our reality -- either they existed in the past, or you could somehow travel there, perhaps magically -- but there was some connection, some intersection in space or time.
However, Tolkien's Middle Earth does not intersect with our reality in space or time. The Hobbit and LOTR takes place somewhere else entirely. Not in the magical past, not on another planet in our sky, not in a mythical Earth City. It's some completely other dimension or universe.
I wasn't familiar with William Morris, so I looked him up on wikipedia. It looks like his fantasy stories take place in some radically other place. So, he would predate Tolkien.
PGP is 17 years old. GnuPG is 9 years old. This is pretty mature stuff. Why, PGP is almost old enough to vote! Quite mature. Meanwhile, meeting to discuss in private is thousands of years old.
Suppose they discover a new kind of math tomorrow that renders PGP useless? Then, chances are, we'll all know about it. More importantly, lots of people are trying, and in very public ways, and not getting very far -- short of a quantum computer, it's pretty unbreakable. So, if it breaks tomorrow, and somebody has a copy of your PGP communiques over the past year, they can suddenly read all of them? Meanwhile, if Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer was meeting in person and writing his notes, his notes are still private, right?
People understand physical security. They don't understand digital security.
Question: Is Tolkein's fantasy qualitatively different from what came before it, in that it took place "somewhere else" and had nothing to do with the world that we know? For instance, King Arthur takes place in Britain, Don Quixote in Spain, and any other story may presumably have taken place in a generic Earth locale: some village, somewhere, in time. Even C.S. Lewis' wardrobe series intersected with Earth. However, Middle Earth is not Earth, nobody ever travels between Middle Earth and Earth, etc.
This sounds like a typical geek solution: Jump latest and greatest technology.
However, if I were a lawyer, I would stick with the time-tested method of ensuring privacy, rather than risk my client's confidentiality with some new-fangled technology that I don't understand. Do I have it installed right? What if it gets hacked?
Heck, I'm a computer guy and I don't understand PGP. I do in the biggest sense; but not enough to pass my own judgment on how well it works. I have to rely on the opinions of people who are smarter than me. Suppose they discover a new kind of math tomorrow that renders PGP useless?
This is true. Get a Doberman. They're teddy bears in the presence of their owners ( including children ), demon dogs when the family isn't around.
A friend of mine had a doberman. One night he came home, and found his doberman resting in the middle of his living room, looking up at him dolefully. Normally she would greet him with licking tongue and wagging tail. My friend walked into the living room, and saw a worn-out perp resting against the wall, VCR next to him. Before the guy could finish the sentence "Call your dog off, man", the doberman had bared fangs in his face.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it would be very costly, but if you can justify the long term investment, it wouldn't be too costly. It will pay for itself after a period of time.
There was somebody once somewhere, a science fiction author perhaps, who said that the next phase of our civilization would be when we were mining the sun for energy -- just simply drawing hydrogen out of the sun for fuel. Ultimately, what limits us is not the sunlight that falls on the Earth, but the amount of energy in the sun ( assuming we can't get to other solar systems in a reasonable time frame).
What do you do about rain? Also, do you have to wear nice clothes? I have a problem with my shirts getting sweaty during the summer, and also getting the legs of my nice slacks greasy with gear grease. Do you bring a change of clothes to work? If so, how do you keep them from wrinkling? Also, does your city maintain bike paths from your house to work? I know that's common in Finland -- I was an exchange student there, but here in the US, there often isn't even a walkable path between a lot of roads!
We'll probably send up some kind of orbiting solar collector that beams down power in microwave or laser or something like that (I'm not an expert in that kind of power transmission). But probably not in the next five years.
Given the state of petroleum based chemistry 100 years ago versus today, do you think that advances in gene manipulation could make plant sourced chemicals more affordable?
Also, why do we get so many useful chemicals out of oil? Is it because of its ultimate source being organic processes? So if we do want a real replacement for the chemical cornucopia that is oil, are we almost by definition going to be looking at plants?
Grandparent is probably Finnish. In Finnish, the colon serves as the contraction marker, like the apostrophe in English.
You're right on. Imagine this was 1992, back before the 'internet'. You really had absolutely no way to know where the candidate stood on the issue. You could either get the information 3rd hand: from the newspaper, from a supporter, or try to watch every media appearance the candidate made to piece together their platform, or write to the campaign and get the official written document of their stand on the issues, if they even produced such a document.
Nowadays you can just surf on over to their website and find "where I stand". It couldn't be easier, especially for tech-savvy geeks reading slashdot, yet somehow "I still don't know where they stand on the issues."
The American economy is like this: You used to have a good paying union job with benefits. That job got shipped overseas, and you started to work two part-time jobs. To make ends meet, you got home-equity loans, traded up your house, and got 0% APR deals on new credit card lines. Things were looking good ( i.e. the economy 'recovered' ) until you found yourself upside down in your mortgage, with ballooning mortage payments. Now you have that plus your credit card debt. Also, your parents are elderly and your kids want to go college in a few years. And, you would like to retire at some point. And, you don't have health insurance. And, the value of the dollar has been cut in half. And, gas has doubled in price. And, food prices are going up.
Economy recovered!? What year are you living in? 2003?
Sorry to say this, but racism is endemic to the human species. Where were you thinking about moving? Europe? They're not too fond of blacks/browns/Muslims/Hindus/Germans/French/Swedes etc.
If you and your son are "white" you could move to a country where white people are still on top, say Brazil or something, but that doesn't fix the racism situation; you're just positioning yourself to be on its good side.
It's sort of like the saying "You can't not care about the government, because government is interested in you."
In an ideal world, the problems of government and politics would be as meaningless as Paris Hilton and American Idol, but it's not. Politics brought us the Third Reich, Stalin's Soviet Union, Pol Pot, etc. People live and die because of government. It's easy to sit back in the richest nation in the world, typing away on your computer, and think all of this stuff doesn't affect you. Sooner or later, perhaps when they're hauling people off to camps in box cars, this will catch up with your, or your children, or your grandchildren. It's worth worrying about.
So how does this relate back to computers? Well, what do you think about the RIAA cajoling the government into charging a tax on blank media? What about the government mandating copy-protection chips into all motherboards? What if the SBA manages to outlaw free software? What if we get into an era where we have to have permission for all of our software and all of the posts and emails we make on the internet? The computer and the internet are today's printing press, and tremendous political battles will fought over it. I think 'the right to communicate freely' will be one of the freedoms that the next revolutionaries will fight and die for.
The politics and the software run now will determine the course of this country for the foreseeable future. It's up for grabs, and its being negotiated in the public arena *right now*.
I don't consciously remember much from my viewing in the theater, but I think it had a profound impact on my psyche. When I watch it now, I sometimes well up when I see the evil Skeksis and the good Mystics merging into a single, complete being.
When you say 'addressed' do you mean the user, or the domain name?
If I send an email to 'joe@canadian-copmany.com' is it addressed to his company? Does that override the the face that it was addressed to 'joe'? I understand if it were addressed to 'sales@canadian-company.com', but a personal name is a different story.
Or if you were some law enforcement agency or some governmental authority, couldn't you easily disable anybody with the proper RFID chip nested into their nervous system with the right kind of 'radio gun'? Just walk into a room, press a button, and the target is is suddenly in such a fog that they can't walk.
So sure, I don't have a problem with X professional choosing to have an implant for their job. But I don't think it will end there. I think that would be the 'first step' towards a more pervasive and mandatory use of RFID implants.
Basically, just think of a scenario where the government could use it to locate and round up some despised ethnic group, say, or 'dissappear' political dissidents in a single night. That's what I'm opposed to. An identification system where it is out of the control of the person being identified. Well, that and the real-time tracking.
- As a voluntary part of a lifesaving medical treatment -- perhaps the tag is swallowed and followed through your GI tract, or perhaps it's implanted and used to monitor a medical condition?
I understand the use of RFID implants in the case where you need to identify a person confidently, such as a prison guard, soldier, or employee in a secure room. However, what's the point of RFID in this scenario? If you swallow the tag, that's fine -- you'll pass it in a few days. But how would an RFID chip monitor a medical condition? Aren't you talking about an electronic a medical device, like a pacemaker, rather than a remote identifier? I have no problem with pacemakers. Again, it's the problem of identification being out of control of those being identified.- As a required part of a lifesaving medical treatment, where your only access to obtain treatment is to consent to implanted RFID?
Why would you need an RFID chip for surgery? Why not a regular hospital bracelet? If you need definite identification, you can even get a temporary tattoo from a tattoo gun. If it's done lightly, it comes off in about 30 days. I'm just wondering what your tolerance is. A similar question is: do you carry a cell phone? They're more trackable than an RFID chip. I can drop a cell phone any time I want. I don't have to dig it out of my skin. ( Who knows, they might even put these RFID chips in your brain! How would you get it out on your own accord then? ) I can drop a wallet, ID card, anything. Those things aren't mandatory. If RFID chips were mandatory, and removing one from your system was illegal, I would have a serious problem with that.But again, it's all about the creep. Mandatory implants (hopefully) won't be around in my lifetime. But if several generations grow up with implants being state of course for certain situations, nobody will really have a problem with mandatory implants for everyone.
Also, as far as health, I wouldn't worry about cancer; I would worry more about its ability to modulate your nervous system -- either central *or* peripheral. What if there were an RFID implant that was implanted in your brain that induced a general 'haziness' of thought, or slight depression, in response to a certain signal? There's been a lot of experiments showing that electromagnetic waves and electronic implants can control experience and behavior.
For me, RFID rolls up a lot of nasty in a little implant. Identification out of control of the person ( think Auschwitz tattoo ), real-time remote tracking, and possible nervous system modulation. Bad, bad mojo.
There's nothing that bugs me more with nascent technology than RFID. I don't mind it in products -- it would be great to inventory a warehouse, or, say a refrigerator, in minutes. Theoretically, I wouldn't mind RFIDs in identification cards, if it weren't so darned close to the skin. What really concerns me is RFID implants.
It reminds me of the tattooing of numbers on Jews during the holocaust, for the Third Reich to track them and 'dispose' of them. I'm not a Christian, but the whole "mark of the beast" stuff raises my hackles. It just seems way too open to abuse for any totalitarian-minded politician. At first it's just for medical records, then it's for routine identification stops... finally, there's some computer screen somewhere in a mountain showing the movement of every American citizen.
I don't know, I just have a very visceral reaction against the idea of an RFID implant. I have a phobia of needs; that might have something to do with it. If it really came down to the point where you had to have an RFID implant to participate in society, I don't know what I would do. I really don't. I might just drop out at that point, try to live in a cabin somewhere.
What do other geeks think? Am I being paranoid?
Thanks for posting expertise from a field not normally represented on slashdot! As far as paragraphs, use an HTML tag such as
. It stands for break, as in line break, and two of them will put a blank line in your text.
Certain people seem to be carriers of AIDS. They are HIV positive, but in 20 years, they haven't developed AIDS, nor do they take medication. Link
A story that takes place on Mars is a story that takes place in the reality that we inhabit. We can look at Mars in the sky; we might go there someday. A story that takes place on Mount Olympus takes place in our reality -- Mount Olympus is an actual place in Greece. There may or may not be gods up there, but we can at least visit the place. Same with Valhalla -- dead heroes go there; it's just beyond the rainbow bridge. You can supposedly get there from Earth. Atlantis was supposed to be in the Atlantic somewhere.
All of these fantastic places had some connection to our reality -- either they existed in the past, or you could somehow travel there, perhaps magically -- but there was some connection, some intersection in space or time.
However, Tolkien's Middle Earth does not intersect with our reality in space or time. The Hobbit and LOTR takes place somewhere else entirely. Not in the magical past, not on another planet in our sky, not in a mythical Earth City. It's some completely other dimension or universe.
I wasn't familiar with William Morris, so I looked him up on wikipedia. It looks like his fantasy stories take place in some radically other place. So, he would predate Tolkien.
People understand physical security. They don't understand digital security.
Question: Is Tolkein's fantasy qualitatively different from what came before it, in that it took place "somewhere else" and had nothing to do with the world that we know? For instance, King Arthur takes place in Britain, Don Quixote in Spain, and any other story may presumably have taken place in a generic Earth locale: some village, somewhere, in time. Even C.S. Lewis' wardrobe series intersected with Earth. However, Middle Earth is not Earth, nobody ever travels between Middle Earth and Earth, etc.
Maybe he meant fantasy literature. Tolkien and Lewis are often credited with originating the fantasy genre.
This sounds like a typical geek solution: Jump latest and greatest technology.
However, if I were a lawyer, I would stick with the time-tested method of ensuring privacy, rather than risk my client's confidentiality with some new-fangled technology that I don't understand. Do I have it installed right? What if it gets hacked?
Heck, I'm a computer guy and I don't understand PGP. I do in the biggest sense; but not enough to pass my own judgment on how well it works. I have to rely on the opinions of people who are smarter than me. Suppose they discover a new kind of math tomorrow that renders PGP useless?
This is true. Get a Doberman. They're teddy bears in the presence of their owners ( including children ), demon dogs when the family isn't around.
A friend of mine had a doberman. One night he came home, and found his doberman resting in the middle of his living room, looking up at him dolefully. Normally she would greet him with licking tongue and wagging tail. My friend walked into the living room, and saw a worn-out perp resting against the wall, VCR next to him. Before the guy could finish the sentence "Call your dog off, man", the doberman had bared fangs in his face.