Cute. I suspect he'll be proved right on some of it. Load a shotgun with enough pellets and you're bound to hit something. But I doubt we'll see the end of laywers as a profession (even excepting IP laywers). Human nature is just that way, when something goes wrong we want the ability to blame someone, anyone, other then ourselves and the legal system with the lawyers allows that to happen.
Global currency. Could happen, never would have guessed that the EU would agree on the Euro myself.
Predicting the market? Sorry, too much chaos there. We still can't get the weather parterns right, in another 35 yrs we're gonna get something as chaotic as human expectations, buying patterns and new IPOs down pat? No, not buying Bruce.
Mars structures in the desert. This one does truly intruge me. The concept is taken from his book distractions. I could see this happening. When you think of it, the desert has a lot to recommend it. Homogenious terrain, plenty of solar energy. Lacks H2O but oxygen is in plentyful supply, and H is farily easily obtainable from hydrocarbons with a bit of technological advancment. Wouldn't be the first space application to see real world use.
I do disgree with the commercial inviability of space though. I believe that ore mining from asteriods will become commercially viable in the next 40-70 yrs. Which admitably puts us beyond 2035, but not much.
Seti@home. Who knows? It's a lottery, only cheaper:)
Anyways, those are my thoughts, take em or leave me, I don't have any better precognative skills then Bruce Sterling, but I figured I'd load up my shotgun too:)
Allow me to be the first to congratulate all of you on being above the mean. I clicked on this article dreading the expected, "My tax dollars at waste, I want my cup of coffee instead!" torrent of posts.
I was pleasently suprised to see most of the posts if not coming out in favor of NASA's exact plan, proposing other plans that would also result in a near 0 chance of contanimating the Europian biosphere.
It is truely encouraging to know that there is a group of people out there with more enlightenment then your average 6 o'clock news show.
Actually, a small point. The MIT lockpick FAQ does in fact mention that in some jurisdictions, (DC comes to mind, but I belive ther were others) mere prossession of lock picking equiptment is in fact a crime.
By in large though you are correct. I only hope that laws don't develop in the same way the lock picking laws have whereby it is legal in some places to possess system security auditing tools, and illegal in other jurisidictions.
In my time as a sysadmin I've been involved in some pretty strange situations. The one that takes the cake tho is the time when the cops went to my boss and asked to subcontract me to track down a cracker who had infultrated a box of another local ISP (one of our customers). After tracking it down, the end result was it was the SA of another ISP (also our customer) who had made the break in. I assisted the cops with executing a search and siesure warrent, and came away with a confession from the offending party. (which is why I am free to tell this story). So yes, some times the police do manage.
This was of course Canada, and the mounties always get their man:)
Why not UDP the phone company until they stop drug deals from happening over their wires?
Hrm, interesting. I'd change it to "Why doesn't the phone company UDP people for causing damage to their network".
Oops, hold it, they can and do. If I hook up equitpment to the PSTN that is incompatible with their network, they have the right to suspend my service until such time as I come back into technical complience with the standards.
Usenet is doing something very simliar. The instant that @home comes back into technical complience, they will be allowed back on the net. They need to close some open proxies.
Till then their users can use Daja (the phone booth on the street corner.
Please, read the proposal before posting responses like this. Otherwise you're just posting flamebait: ================================================== ============================= Date n/100 Source Total spam %spam KBytes ================================================== ============================= Total: 1366098 530072 51870913 ================================================== ============================= Average: 42 4479 1738 39 170069 ================================================== ============================= Note the averages (this is quoted from the original proposal linked to the UDP notice... http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?A N=570620876&fmt=text). I would argue that when 39% of all arcticles coming from a provider are spam a UDP is indeed warrented.
Do you believe that we will ever suffiently overcome the technological barriers to useful censorware (ie: censorware that will allow people to see content involving breast cancer, but not porn, and will not involve the rather hopeless task of keeping an up-to-date list of bad sites, or falling back to the totally useless practice of only allowing "good sites"). And do you (to paraphrase Dilbert) feel that pitching your technological abilities against the avg 15 yr olds hormons is a losing battle?
In general I agree with the proposed changes. With one exception. The 20% rule.
You mention that you believe that in general the majority of people are good and behave in a manner consistant with this evaluation. Ergo, the majority of people when given moderation powers will exercise them with the best possible judgement they can (we're not perfect and moderation is an exercise in personal perference to some degree or another).
So then why limit to 20% of the comments. By your own argument this restriction would do more harm then good, as there are more good moderators who would be hindered by the restriction then there are bad moderators who would abuse the ability.
Add to this the idea of giving karma more overall effect in the moderation process and I think you've pretty much solved the problem. Bad moderators will not gain moderation status as often, thus further raising the proportion of good moderators. Adding the 20% rule to this would only exasberate the problem. In my opinion:).
One man's carbon lattice is another man's diamond. The humourous articles are a large part of my enjoyment of/. and permitting people who have karma from having posted a humourous article (and let's keep in mind here that they were good enough to have someone spend moderation points on) to have a higher chance at moderation seems like a good way to keep the balance. The idea behind moderators is that they represent an average user. Average users obviously enjoy the humourous articles.
And lest we forget, humour can often times being insight to a subject too. Political comics have survived all these years for a reason.
There are a number of applications that don't require any more then the o/s in memory (consider a router/firewall box, or a file server). For these applications having the entire O/S cached would be just the ticket. And as you say, is eminately doable. A good idea, IMHO as someone who does a lot of router/firewall boxen.
Slashdot Mirror
Cute. I suspect he'll be proved right on some of it. Load a shotgun with enough pellets and you're bound to hit something. But I doubt we'll see the end of laywers as a profession (even excepting IP laywers). Human nature is just that way, when something goes wrong we want the ability to blame someone, anyone, other then ourselves and the legal system with the lawyers allows that to happen.
:)
:)
Global currency. Could happen, never would have guessed that the EU would agree on the Euro myself.
Predicting the market? Sorry, too much chaos there. We still can't get the weather parterns right, in another 35 yrs we're gonna get something as chaotic as human expectations, buying patterns and new IPOs down pat? No, not buying Bruce.
Mars structures in the desert. This one does truly intruge me. The concept is taken from his book distractions. I could see this happening. When you think of it, the desert has a lot to recommend it. Homogenious terrain, plenty of solar energy. Lacks H2O but oxygen is in plentyful supply, and H is farily easily obtainable from hydrocarbons with a bit of technological advancment. Wouldn't be the first space application to see real world use.
I do disgree with the commercial inviability of space though. I believe that ore mining from asteriods will become commercially viable in the next 40-70 yrs. Which admitably puts us beyond 2035, but not much.
Seti@home. Who knows? It's a lottery, only cheaper
Anyways, those are my thoughts, take em or leave me, I don't have any better precognative skills then Bruce Sterling, but I figured I'd load up my shotgun too
-- Minupla
Allow me to be the first to congratulate all of you on being above the mean. I clicked on this article dreading the expected, "My tax dollars at waste, I want my cup of coffee instead!" torrent of posts.
I was pleasently suprised to see most of the posts if not coming out in favor of NASA's exact plan, proposing other plans that would also result in a near 0 chance of contanimating the Europian biosphere.
It is truely encouraging to know that there is a group of people out there with more enlightenment then your average 6 o'clock news show.
Give yourselves a big pat on the back.
Actually, a small point. The MIT lockpick FAQ does in fact mention that in some jurisdictions, (DC comes to mind, but I belive ther were others) mere prossession of lock picking equiptment is in fact a crime.
By in large though you are correct. I only hope that laws don't develop in the same way the lock picking laws have whereby it is legal in some places to possess system security auditing tools, and illegal in other jurisidictions.
-- Minupla
And when did /. start catering to the mean population of the inet? This is news for Nerds, not news for the average web surfer :)
Minupla
In my time as a sysadmin I've been involved in some pretty strange situations. The one that takes the cake tho is the time when the cops went to my boss and asked to subcontract me to track down a cracker who had infultrated a box of another local ISP (one of our customers). After tracking it down, the end result was it was the SA of another ISP (also our customer) who had made the break in. I assisted the cops with executing a search and siesure warrent, and came away with a confession from the offending party. (which is why I am free to tell this story). So yes, some times the police do manage.
:)
This was of course Canada, and the mounties always get their man
Why not UDP the phone company until they stop drug deals from happening over their wires?
Hrm, interesting. I'd change it to "Why doesn't the phone company UDP people for causing damage to their network".
Oops, hold it, they can and do. If I hook up equitpment to the PSTN that is incompatible with their network, they have the right to suspend my service until such time as I come back into technical complience with the standards.
Usenet is doing something very simliar. The instant that @home comes back into technical complience, they will be allowed back on the net. They need to close some open proxies.
Till then their users can use Daja (the phone booth on the street corner.
Please, read the proposal before posting responses like this. Otherwise you're just posting flamebait: ================================================== ============================= Date n/100 Source Total spam %spam KBytes ================================================== ============================= Total: 1366098 530072 51870913 ================================================== ============================= Average: 42 4479 1738 39 170069 ================================================== ============================= Note the averages (this is quoted from the original proposal linked to the UDP notice... http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?A N=570620876&fmt=text). I would argue that when 39% of all arcticles coming from a provider are spam a UDP is indeed warrented.
Do you believe that we will ever suffiently overcome the technological barriers to useful censorware (ie: censorware that will allow people to see content involving breast cancer, but not porn, and will not involve the rather hopeless task of keeping an up-to-date list of bad sites, or falling back to the totally useless practice of only allowing "good sites"). And do you (to paraphrase Dilbert) feel that pitching your technological abilities against the avg 15 yr olds hormons is a losing battle?
In general I agree with the proposed changes. With one exception. The 20% rule.
:).
You mention that you believe that in general the majority of people are good and behave in a manner consistant with this evaluation. Ergo, the majority of people when given moderation powers will exercise them with the best possible judgement they can (we're not perfect and moderation is an exercise in personal perference to some degree or another).
So then why limit to 20% of the comments. By your own argument this restriction would do more harm then good, as there are more good moderators who would be hindered by the restriction then there are bad moderators who would abuse the ability.
Add to this the idea of giving karma more overall effect in the moderation process and I think you've pretty much solved the problem. Bad moderators will not gain moderation status as often, thus further raising the proportion of good moderators. Adding the 20% rule to this would only exasberate the problem. In my opinion
One man's carbon lattice is another man's diamond. The humourous articles are a large part of my enjoyment of /. and permitting people who have karma from having posted a humourous article (and let's keep in mind here that they were good enough to have someone spend moderation points on) to have a higher chance at moderation seems like a good way to keep the balance. The idea behind moderators is that they represent an average user. Average users obviously enjoy the humourous articles.
And lest we forget, humour can often times being insight to a subject too. Political comics have survived all these years for a reason.
There are a number of applications that don't require any more then the o/s in memory (consider a router/firewall box, or a file server). For these applications having the entire O/S cached would be just the ticket. And as you say, is eminately doable. A good idea, IMHO as someone who does a lot of router/firewall boxen.
There is a planned UserFriendly book to be published by ORA in Oct of 99, and Illiad's been hinting that it won't be the end of his publishing career.