I'm afraid the root motivation for coming up with a new internet from scratch is not because we're running out of IPV4 numbers, because then all you'd need is extend it to IPV6. Instead, how about college kids caught downloading movies on internet2 and punished? Internet2 won't be as free as the current one, but it will be the new, hip thing, marketed to death. The old internet must go because it's too free, the corporations can't milk enough profit out of it. When the new internet2 shows up, it will have extremely severe mechanisms of copyright and intellectual property, just like mpeg to mpeg2(dvd) changed into an IP massacre. You can't find a free legal mpeg2-compressor in the US today, because the patent holding consortium forbids it, and demands you to demand a fee. There are quite a few free mpeg1 compressors, but quality sucks, and I don't even know the IP status there. But that's all that's needed. Spam the heck out of the current internet, so people will go to the new one for 'better quality.' In fact I wonder why this 'spam-world' on the net is allowed to go out of hand, because tracing IP addresses is so easy, everything is logged, it's a lot easier than tracing crack dealers where there is no record of anything going on. How about MS buying Gator? Where is this world coming to? It'd be so easy to just enforce rules on the current one, but it "feels" like the powers that be actually help it go downhill, for reasons of greed and power thirst.
It looks like such a serious post, and I wondered why it's still modded at 1, since you obviously took the effort and time to care.
I read and pieced the formulas apart in my brain about halfway through your post. The math is accurate, though unnecessarily complexly written - have you considered using beta and gamma notations instead of stuff like (1-(dx/dt)^2/(c)^2)^(-1/2)? But what you're getting is no different than what you started with.
There were a couple key phrases that grabbed my attention, such as "rotation meaning a shift into a different dimension" - because I still don't have a true, intuitive grasp of what rotation means, and as far as I know, yes, rotation means taking something that was x, and changing it into y, or sin into cosine, two quantities defining change into each other, such as oscillation energy from inertial into potential energies, and voila, you describe it best via a rotating vector and phase angles. Another key idea that grabbed my eye was that the photon has a null-vector in 4-d spacetime. But halfway through I gave up reading the rest, because I saw no meaningful way shown on how space changes into time, or time changes into space, or whether such concepts are even workable. True, space and time have the same nature, distance, just like electric and magnetic fields, or spring/mass oscillators have the unifying concept of energy, kinds of energy shifting, but where is the shift, where is the pheomenon that makes it happen? Back and forth, you loose space, you get time, now you get time, you lose space. You have to spell it out in more detai, something to the point.
Please realize that the 4d spacetime no longer has the concept of "speed", only "distance." You basically have 4 coordinates x,y,z,w (w being ict), and minkowski's geometry says that the "euclidian 4d-distance" along the "worldline" (ds2=x2+y2+z2+w2) is invariant to coordinate system changes. For photons this distance 0, and so is it for anything that moves with speed of light (ict messes with your mind, because ict^2 makes a negative quantity out of a positive time change, giving you 0 in a sum.) For other things it's different than 0, and it's a quantity of length units (meters.) When time becomes one of the full coordinates, nothing 'changes', you basically have a still picture, the snapshot of the whole universe, present and past, and everything fits into this one big coordinate system, behold your magic crystal-ball. Considering 'changes' you might as well say dx/dy, dx/dz, dx/ict, or whatever you want, there is no longer an undealt with variable, all information is contained in the path-coordinates, the world-line, dealing with velocities no longer introduces new useful information, such as when introducing time variable when dealing with a 3d space-world.
As far as saying that the space coordinates "flow' or shift through the time axis, they don't in the spacetime world, you got everything in one big picture, it's you, your 3d-mind who scans a 3d space with a 2-d plane, or the 4-d spacetime with a 3d-space, along the time axis, which is how we experience the world, nobody knows why, or does this question make sense even. Note that this means the space dimensions moving along the time dimension, we observe many spatial variables at once, simultaneously, but time always in sequence, and not how you titled it, the time dimension moving along the space dimension. That's not how we experience the world, and it'd be really interesting to experience it your way. Deja-vu could be when someone is experiencing many time-coordinates at the same time, being "present" in many time-coordinates "at once". See we even have difficulty experiencing many time coordinates at once, let alone how holding this awareness of many still temporal coordinates, while shifting through space, could mean something that makes sense.
Now whether time flows versus something else, that's just a variable change, or parameter substitution in math, where you take f(x) and make it into f(ay), thus x=ay. So what? x is
Frankly, he went offtopic. We're talking about relativity of time and he discusses time as we all thought of it before relativity came along. "What did God do before the beginning of time?" is what got him modded down, because it's a nonsense question.(It's a flamebait because it's a sensitive topic and it could turn this whole discussion into something else. Start a new story about religion, hey, we'd love it, but don't do it here.) Nobody knows what time is, let alone when did it start. The concept of "time" is something utterly problematic to define, though we all have some instinctual grasp of it, it's one of the highest level "induction" concepts about the world, it applies to so many things we think about, and because it's so important, it's pretty much 'promoted' into our subconscious, it's fully soaked into the fiber of every thought of ours. Relativity is an 'in your face' against this habitual induction, that time 'flows' uniform everywhere, simply because before it we had no reason to think otherwise. We're all happy and in awe about it, and that's what we want to discuss here, this superb finding, that looky look, who would have thought, time doesn't flow equally, and even though we don't completely understand what time is, at least we know something about it, something that can only bring us closer, deeper, more enlightened.
The real issue has been cheap oil (at $20/barrel throughout the 20th century), and keeping up the status-quo. We're only now at the point ($60/barrel, going on $100) where the powers that be can't just ignore the real world, but have to step up and adapt to reality, risking change in the status quo, including their own power positions. In fact, if anything, this technology will be so sophisticated that it will mean even more concentration of power that can be abused.
Even though Japan uses 3 times as much energy than France, France makes 2 times as much uranium-fission-type energy than Japan, only second to the US.
Geohive data.
Gone are the days of 486DX4-75 to 100 and P133 to 166 overclockings, when overclocking really made a huge difference. These days the disk, memory latency and bus speed lag much behind, plus the computer is fast enough (it doesn't feel like crawling, though new software is intentionally made bad to support the need for faster), and instead, doing something about the humongous power consumption is what people yearn for. A chip that can be throttled to 500 MHz, and kicked up to 4000 if needed, on the fly, just like your volume control, now that's a cool cool underclocking. By the way the true megahertz on the bus only advanced to about 33 PCI to 133 to 400MHz for RAM, from the uniform 25 or 33MHz bus AND processor speed that the 486DX25 and 486DX33 had. The true megahertz only went to 200 MHz in a decade, the rest are all tricks, like using the falling and rising edge of the clock to get 400 MHz for memory, or using superdeep pipelines to 'technically' call a CPU 3 GHz, when it really ticks at 200 MHz x 15 pipeline stages working at the same time.
Highways are wonderful as long as there is oil. What trains could do is use green-house neutral electricity, straight from the nukular/solar/wind power plants.
The real idea here is to turn software into a service, not a product, so they can send you a monthly bill just like the phone, electric and other companies do, and have a sure source of income even if they sit on their butt and do nothing, them being proud entrepreneurs, but you being chastized if you sit on your butt and do nothing and still get an income. The method of revenue based on getting people to "upgrade, upgrade, upgrade" is running out of steam. And "unfortunately" not enough users use Windows Update, to keep their OS up to date, and I'm sure studies show that if you forced them to pay a monthly fee for it, 95%+ would simply reject it and stick with their current Win98SE+Firefox, even in face of overblown security threats.
So, to rectify all this, they pitch this new idea, because monkey see, monkey do. They have to show you the way it's done, and lead you through a tutorial on how to update your OS. For now you pay for the disk when you get XP, then download stuff for free, but the real goal is to ultimately give you a free boot floppy, and make you pay before downloading, right on the web, and thus getting you on the downloading-your-OS-and-keeping-it-up-to-date bandwagon. That's what I dislike about debian and apt-get, or redhat update. Bunch of useless traffic to get the list of new packages, and the artificially created dependency hell, just so apt-get has a real function. I prefer downloading a zip for win32, or tar.gz source/rpm/deb by hand, then stuffin it away on my harddrive so I always have it available, even 10 years from now. If it needs a supporting library, such as vbrun300.dll, or something similar on unix, I'd like to be able to zip them together and stuff them away like that. There are actually some programs I downloaded a decade ago that I can still open up, install, and use happily. But this behavior that I'm doing must be eradicated somehow. The goal is to get you hooked on always coming back to a website, and paying, just like druggies, they give you the stuff for free first, but then you keep coming back for more.
There is another side of the story, even when you're not very replacable. You're also paid what you're willing to accept than rather die instead when your arms are twisted, and when they smell talent, they will push you pretty fast to that limit, because this stockholder machinery is pretty refined, all they do is sit in board meetings, coming up with better ways to milk profit, inlcluding milking profit out of you, or to use a bad word, "exploiting you," but it's only exploiting when it's "unfair". And in these how-to-squeeze-more-profit-brainstormings they consider not only what they can lose, but what you can lose too, if they tighten the belt just a tad bit more, risking it to be the drop to overflow the cup.
So, there are two equilibriums, one on their side of the fence, the other on your side of the fence. One is how replacable you are, how much you can hurt them by leaving, the other is how much are you willing to lose, how much will they hurt you if they leave you. In the ideal case, cooperation should precipitate somehow, but sometimes the buyers are unwilling to pay, and sellers are unwilling to go low enough, and there is no deal at all in the end.
Got anything to lose? You're then cheap my friend, it doesn't matter what your worth is by your above reasoning, because you can easily be persuaded, having a chain around your neck that can be yanked at pleasure.
Of course in this IBM moving jobs to cheaper places the replacability effect is the major one, I just want to call attention to the other side, something you need to realize, even if you are irreplacable. If you never ever make a stand like Europe does, the belt will always get tighter and tighter, and tighter...
First of all, as previously mentioned, 50 nanoKelvin, i.e. 0.000000050 K degrees is nowhere close to room temperature. The definition of temperature is what they are playing with to call this "hot", saying the density is low.
Otherwise I think even superconductor rings lose energy over time, because they have a magnetic field, which can induce current in moving conducturs, which in turn generates an opposing magnetic field that generates a back emf slowing the superconducting electrons down. That's how you take back the electrical energy stored in them, but that's also how anything conducting moving in its magnetic field "steals" energy and loses it through ohmic resistance.
Even mechanical superfluids interact with their environment, if by nothing else, by electromagnetic radiation, to the nearest wall, which then conducts the heat/cold away. (Unless of course you have full thermal death in the Universe, everything being at the same exact temperature, and at this temperature your thing is superfluid.)
Therefore, because of interactions with the imperfect/lossy environment, perfect perpetuum mobile things only exist in an environment that's: a) either perfectly isolated,
b) or perfectly nonlossy itself
In this world nothing macroscopic is perpetuum mobile, you can only talk about close enough, such as using good bearings on a 10 ton cylinder spinning in a vacuum chamber, where your losses could be made, well, negligible for a decade. Tough it'd be interesting to see these superfluids used as bearing lubricants.
How long until windows the OS will monitor and reject any email as a security threat that does not utilize some M$ patented identification technology? It won't matter if Outlook Express will catch it for you, or if you don't use that, then IE the browser, or if you don't use IE but Firefox then the underlying OS will be kind enough to do the job for you. Monopoly abuse anyone, in the name of security?
They can't stop analog-to-analog recordings. Basically you get as good an output as you can on a tv screen, and then place a camera before it to record it and digitize it back. Voila. To stop this kind of thing they'd have to forbid cameras altogether, meaning you would not be able to record your kids, weddings or your family at all. Good luck to that. Ultimately it comes down to consumers behaving, just like with tax-confessions, with the IRS coming to get you if you're dishonest. All these content-protection technologies are only like fences that can be jumped easily, especially when no-one's watching.
Suppose you had a fly with a huge brain-to-body mass ratio. It would still have only, say 1 million neurons compared to 100 million for a dog. Would that make it more intelligent, because the ratio was higher? I'd think that sheer count of neurons should matter more than the ratio of brain mass to body mass, but even sheer count is a minuscule factor compared to the degree of organization, interlinking.
Actually if Al Quaeda hung out in these rooms, we should keep them open by all means. Haven't you heard they only talk in person and don't even use cell phones? We got satellites aimed at listening to these people, if they only would speak up. I mean what's better than having them type up their shit in a chat room, and then just run in through some translation program? Free intelligence anyone, without wasting arabic-speaking-undercover-precious-time?
Nah, actually these rooms are getting closed, because the undercover law officers wasted tremendous time and effort fishing for pedophiles in it, for no good. Thing is there IS a line between reality and fiction, and in fiction people will do countless things, including butchering each other in games. But when it comes to reality, there is a little inner voice that goes off, that makes people care about each other. I wonder how many pedophiles they set up who actually treated their bait very very decently and with respect, and stopped the contact after coming to their senses. Like, look, even Michael Jackson got let off, so why waste time fishing for these people if the law will just let them go?
PS. Chatting is a bit impersonal, and because of that it can get rude. If you don't like it, flip the switch off. How many times have you seen people talk really nasty in 3rd person, but when they are face to face with someone, they shape up and behave, and become less offensive? Well in chat the "I" can talk to the "You" as if it were a "he,she,it." Webcams and voice can aid making it more personal, but it's impossible for everyone to voice-talk at the same time the same way as they can type, it'd be a mess. Of course there are two sides to every story, and the opposite is true too, when you get to know someone very well even through "impersonal" means such as letters only. Also I'm sure there were some true pedophiles that stop at nothing, caught. It's always funny when they catch a 50-year old judge or respected person about to meet a 17-year old. I always think of salmon or black widow males. Sex is a funny thing, I tell ya, but without it you wouldn't be here, nor would the little salmons.
This would make every elephant, shark, whale, bear, etc. a genius. Of course you can't be a genius with a single neuron, or even a dozen, you need some, but when you get past a few million of them, how they are organized counts more than just the mass of them, because the permutations and combinations are humongous. Given the same degree of organization yeah, more neurons the better. For instance, Einstein's brain wasn't even that big, and he was clearly a genius. Plus don't forget that humanity gets nowhere without each other, without the body of knowledge gathered over the millenia. The "forbidden experiment" even shows that a person not taught language before puberty hits does not fare much better than, say a bear would.
We need those weapons to take out the chinese and indian shuttles when they are about to take off and leave us behind by building a better space station.
What does it matter when there are cameras at the library entrance? Simply that you go to a library, that you go in and "steal" intellectual property instead of buying the book, that's enough sin. After all, how are we going to have an information economy when public institutions like libraries give the stuff away for free? How are the authors going to feed themselves? You have to deal with the people who choose to go to the libraries instead of buying pay-per-view programs and sitting at home, before you can close the libraries due to "lack of attendance,", or at least completely revamp them into fully digital DRM'd bookstores. You will still be able to check out digital copies of some books, but the library will only have one copy that's permanently checked out, and instead you're ushered to buy the damn digital copy, instant download at your fingertips, only $9.99 for a non-resellable copy that self-destructs as soon as it detects someone else's fingerprints.
You get half the truth. The other half is mass promotion of blogging, simply out of world security. If you write out how you feel, and all the little details of your life, you can be better controlled, exploited, plus the chances of you secretly flying off the handle are less, so those in charge are less weary. Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear. I'm afraid there may be a day when NOT blogging will be a crime, just like not going to confession in the Catholic church is almost like a sin - do you have something to hide? Perhaps you have terrorist thoughts?
For one, when I was a kid I really enjoyed Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, and the like. I don't know whether I would have enjoyed all these politically incorrect japanese creations, that teach nothing to kids, except what they already know and are born with, such as how to rub stuff in each other's faces, and show off how my pokemon is bigger than your pokemon, and my uber-power-crystal-ring beats the pants off your uber-power-magic-sword. What ever happened to Hans Cristian Anderssen's stories, and LaFontaine's fables? Why is it that the only way to get someone's brain tickled anymore is by eyecatching ching-boom-explosions and fast-fast-fast action where you can't catch your breath, let alone meditate or think over things. And why do you think that computerized classrooms will teach kids more than a simple chalk and blackboard, and a teacher with a heart and devotion. Or for that matter 3D stuff will be automatically more entertaining than hand-drawn, 2D stuff, with meaning and content?
Yeah, how about taking a digital copy of the Mona Lisa and storing it on your computer? There are tons of digital copies. But the original is still precious to us all. Here too we're dealing with objects that represent value beyond the intellectual content alone, where the intellectual content has been digitized and backed up a million ways. Each physical vehicle is unique, kind of - not kind of, exactly - like antiques. And where tradition means a lot, jumping on the latest and greatest storage medium such as a dual layer blue laser DVD that emits a hologram may not be regarded so highly, especially if you find out that the ink in the DVD degrades after 10 years, but too late when you threw away your parchment 10 years ago thinking you got something better.
How do you know this world is real and you yourself are not just a simulation experiment? I may be just an object-oriented-object in the simulation game that you are, and completely "unreal." Or from my perspective, all there is is my own mind, and y'all are unreal. Think of Chuang-Tzu who once dreamed he was a butterfly, then when he awoke, he no longer knew if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man, or a man who dreamed he was a butterfly. Sensory deprivation? You may not have all the senses you want, but you definitely got the ones you need, it's all programmed into this game. Think of Plato's allegory of the cave. You live in a sandbox, whether you have sensory perception or not. Not enough features in the sandbox? Whatcha want, we can talk to the lead programmer named "God" and see if he will work it in. You may even try praying to him. I wonder if this simulation becomes conscious if it will start repeating rosaries begging us for a woman? Then we'll know how annoyed God must feel when all his creatures start nagging him for stuff. As far as boredom goes, do the Sims ever get bored?:)
Then when you're stuck in a cave in a snowstorm, you can chew on this first instead of chewing on your mate. Watches, gps receivers, cellphones, laptops,.. yummi.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid the root motivation for coming up with a new internet from scratch is not because we're running out of IPV4 numbers, because then all you'd need is extend it to IPV6. Instead, how about college kids caught downloading movies on internet2 and punished? Internet2 won't be as free as the current one, but it will be the new, hip thing, marketed to death. The old internet must go because it's too free, the corporations can't milk enough profit out of it. When the new internet2 shows up, it will have extremely severe mechanisms of copyright and intellectual property, just like mpeg to mpeg2(dvd) changed into an IP massacre. You can't find a free legal mpeg2-compressor in the US today, because the patent holding consortium forbids it, and demands you to demand a fee. There are quite a few free mpeg1 compressors, but quality sucks, and I don't even know the IP status there. But that's all that's needed. Spam the heck out of the current internet, so people will go to the new one for 'better quality.' In fact I wonder why this 'spam-world' on the net is allowed to go out of hand, because tracing IP addresses is so easy, everything is logged, it's a lot easier than tracing crack dealers where there is no record of anything going on. How about MS buying Gator? Where is this world coming to? It'd be so easy to just enforce rules on the current one, but it "feels" like the powers that be actually help it go downhill, for reasons of greed and power thirst.
It looks like such a serious post, and I wondered why it's still modded at 1, since you obviously took the effort and time to care.
I read and pieced the formulas apart in my brain about halfway through your post. The math is accurate, though unnecessarily complexly written - have you considered using beta and gamma notations instead of stuff like (1-(dx/dt)^2/(c)^2)^(-1/2)? But what you're getting is no different than what you started with.
There were a couple key phrases that grabbed my attention, such as "rotation meaning a shift into a different dimension" - because I still don't have a true, intuitive grasp of what rotation means, and as far as I know, yes, rotation means taking something that was x, and changing it into y, or sin into cosine, two quantities defining change into each other, such as oscillation energy from inertial into potential energies, and voila, you describe it best via a rotating vector and phase angles. Another key idea that grabbed my eye was that the photon has a null-vector in 4-d spacetime. But halfway through I gave up reading the rest, because I saw no meaningful way shown on how space changes into time, or time changes into space, or whether such concepts are even workable. True, space and time have the same nature, distance, just like electric and magnetic fields, or spring/mass oscillators have the unifying concept of energy, kinds of energy shifting, but where is the shift, where is the pheomenon that makes it happen? Back and forth, you loose space, you get time, now you get time, you lose space. You have to spell it out in more detai, something to the point.
Please realize that the 4d spacetime no longer has the concept of "speed", only "distance." You basically have 4 coordinates x,y,z,w (w being ict), and minkowski's geometry says that the "euclidian 4d-distance" along the "worldline" (ds2=x2+y2+z2+w2) is invariant to coordinate system changes. For photons this distance 0, and so is it for anything that moves with speed of light (ict messes with your mind, because ict^2 makes a negative quantity out of a positive time change, giving you 0 in a sum.) For other things it's different than 0, and it's a quantity of length units (meters.) When time becomes one of the full coordinates, nothing 'changes', you basically have a still picture, the snapshot of the whole universe, present and past, and everything fits into this one big coordinate system, behold your magic crystal-ball. Considering 'changes' you might as well say dx/dy, dx/dz, dx/ict, or whatever you want, there is no longer an undealt with variable, all information is contained in the path-coordinates, the world-line, dealing with velocities no longer introduces new useful information, such as when introducing time variable when dealing with a 3d space-world.
As far as saying that the space coordinates "flow' or shift through the time axis, they don't in the spacetime world, you got everything in one big picture, it's you, your 3d-mind who scans a 3d space with a 2-d plane, or the 4-d spacetime with a 3d-space, along the time axis, which is how we experience the world, nobody knows why, or does this question make sense even. Note that this means the space dimensions moving along the time dimension, we observe many spatial variables at once, simultaneously, but time always in sequence, and not how you titled it, the time dimension moving along the space dimension. That's not how we experience the world, and it'd be really interesting to experience it your way. Deja-vu could be when someone is experiencing many time-coordinates at the same time, being "present" in many time-coordinates "at once". See we even have difficulty experiencing many time coordinates at once, let alone how holding this awareness of many still temporal coordinates, while shifting through space, could mean something that makes sense.
Now whether time flows versus something else, that's just a variable change, or parameter substitution in math, where you take f(x) and make it into f(ay), thus x=ay. So what? x is
Frankly, he went offtopic. We're talking about relativity of time and he discusses time as we all thought of it before relativity came along. "What did God do before the beginning of time?" is what got him modded down, because it's a nonsense question.(It's a flamebait because it's a sensitive topic and it could turn this whole discussion into something else. Start a new story about religion, hey, we'd love it, but don't do it here.) Nobody knows what time is, let alone when did it start. The concept of "time" is something utterly problematic to define, though we all have some instinctual grasp of it, it's one of the highest level "induction" concepts about the world, it applies to so many things we think about, and because it's so important, it's pretty much 'promoted' into our subconscious, it's fully soaked into the fiber of every thought of ours. Relativity is an 'in your face' against this habitual induction, that time 'flows' uniform everywhere, simply because before it we had no reason to think otherwise. We're all happy and in awe about it, and that's what we want to discuss here, this superb finding, that looky look, who would have thought, time doesn't flow equally, and even though we don't completely understand what time is, at least we know something about it, something that can only bring us closer, deeper, more enlightened.
The real issue has been cheap oil (at $20/barrel throughout the 20th century), and keeping up the status-quo. We're only now at the point ($60/barrel, going on $100) where the powers that be can't just ignore the real world, but have to step up and adapt to reality, risking change in the status quo, including their own power positions. In fact, if anything, this technology will be so sophisticated that it will mean even more concentration of power that can be abused.
Even though Japan uses 3 times as much energy than France, France makes 2 times as much uranium-fission-type energy than Japan, only second to the US. Geohive data.
Gone are the days of 486DX4-75 to 100 and P133 to 166 overclockings, when overclocking really made a huge difference. These days the disk, memory latency and bus speed lag much behind, plus the computer is fast enough (it doesn't feel like crawling, though new software is intentionally made bad to support the need for faster), and instead, doing something about the humongous power consumption is what people yearn for. A chip that can be throttled to 500 MHz, and kicked up to 4000 if needed, on the fly, just like your volume control, now that's a cool cool underclocking. By the way the true megahertz on the bus only advanced to about 33 PCI to 133 to 400MHz for RAM, from the uniform 25 or 33MHz bus AND processor speed that the 486DX25 and 486DX33 had. The true megahertz only went to 200 MHz in a decade, the rest are all tricks, like using the falling and rising edge of the clock to get 400 MHz for memory, or using superdeep pipelines to 'technically' call a CPU 3 GHz, when it really ticks at 200 MHz x 15 pipeline stages working at the same time.
Highways are wonderful as long as there is oil. What trains could do is use green-house neutral electricity, straight from the nukular/solar/wind power plants.
So, to rectify all this, they pitch this new idea, because monkey see, monkey do. They have to show you the way it's done, and lead you through a tutorial on how to update your OS. For now you pay for the disk when you get XP, then download stuff for free, but the real goal is to ultimately give you a free boot floppy, and make you pay before downloading, right on the web, and thus getting you on the downloading-your-OS-and-keeping-it-up-to-date bandwagon. That's what I dislike about debian and apt-get, or redhat update. Bunch of useless traffic to get the list of new packages, and the artificially created dependency hell, just so apt-get has a real function. I prefer downloading a zip for win32, or tar.gz source/rpm/deb by hand, then stuffin it away on my harddrive so I always have it available, even 10 years from now. If it needs a supporting library, such as vbrun300.dll, or something similar on unix, I'd like to be able to zip them together and stuff them away like that. There are actually some programs I downloaded a decade ago that I can still open up, install, and use happily. But this behavior that I'm doing must be eradicated somehow. The goal is to get you hooked on always coming back to a website, and paying, just like druggies, they give you the stuff for free first, but then you keep coming back for more.
There is another side of the story, even when you're not very replacable. You're also paid what you're willing to accept than rather die instead when your arms are twisted, and when they smell talent, they will push you pretty fast to that limit, because this stockholder machinery is pretty refined, all they do is sit in board meetings, coming up with better ways to milk profit, inlcluding milking profit out of you, or to use a bad word, "exploiting you," but it's only exploiting when it's "unfair". And in these how-to-squeeze-more-profit-brainstormings they consider not only what they can lose, but what you can lose too, if they tighten the belt just a tad bit more, risking it to be the drop to overflow the cup.
So, there are two equilibriums, one on their side of the fence, the other on your side of the fence. One is how replacable you are, how much you can hurt them by leaving, the other is how much are you willing to lose, how much will they hurt you if they leave you. In the ideal case, cooperation should precipitate somehow, but sometimes the buyers are unwilling to pay, and sellers are unwilling to go low enough, and there is no deal at all in the end.
Got anything to lose? You're then cheap my friend, it doesn't matter what your worth is by your above reasoning, because you can easily be persuaded, having a chain around your neck that can be yanked at pleasure.
Of course in this IBM moving jobs to cheaper places the replacability effect is the major one, I just want to call attention to the other side, something you need to realize, even if you are irreplacable. If you never ever make a stand like Europe does, the belt will always get tighter and tighter, and tighter...
First of all, as previously mentioned, 50 nanoKelvin, i.e. 0.000000050 K degrees is nowhere close to room temperature. The definition of temperature is what they are playing with to call this "hot", saying the density is low.
Otherwise I think even superconductor rings lose energy over time, because they have a magnetic field, which can induce current in moving conducturs, which in turn generates an opposing magnetic field that generates a back emf slowing the superconducting electrons down. That's how you take back the electrical energy stored in them, but that's also how anything conducting moving in its magnetic field "steals" energy and loses it through ohmic resistance.
Even mechanical superfluids interact with their environment, if by nothing else, by electromagnetic radiation, to the nearest wall, which then conducts the heat/cold away. (Unless of course you have full thermal death in the Universe, everything being at the same exact temperature, and at this temperature your thing is superfluid.)
Therefore, because of interactions with the imperfect/lossy environment, perfect perpetuum mobile things only exist in an environment that's:
a) either perfectly isolated,
b) or perfectly nonlossy itself
In this world nothing macroscopic is perpetuum mobile, you can only talk about close enough, such as using good bearings on a 10 ton cylinder spinning in a vacuum chamber, where your losses could be made, well, negligible for a decade. Tough it'd be interesting to see these superfluids used as bearing lubricants.
How long until windows the OS will monitor and reject any email as a security threat that does not utilize some M$ patented identification technology? It won't matter if Outlook Express will catch it for you, or if you don't use that, then IE the browser, or if you don't use IE but Firefox then the underlying OS will be kind enough to do the job for you. Monopoly abuse anyone, in the name of security?
Kudos to me for refuting straw-man arguments. Yay!
They can't stop analog-to-analog recordings. Basically you get as good an output as you can on a tv screen, and then place a camera before it to record it and digitize it back. Voila. To stop this kind of thing they'd have to forbid cameras altogether, meaning you would not be able to record your kids, weddings or your family at all. Good luck to that. Ultimately it comes down to consumers behaving, just like with tax-confessions, with the IRS coming to get you if you're dishonest. All these content-protection technologies are only like fences that can be jumped easily, especially when no-one's watching.
Suppose you had a fly with a huge brain-to-body mass ratio. It would still have only, say 1 million neurons compared to 100 million for a dog. Would that make it more intelligent, because the ratio was higher? I'd think that sheer count of neurons should matter more than the ratio of brain mass to body mass, but even sheer count is a minuscule factor compared to the degree of organization, interlinking.
Actually if Al Quaeda hung out in these rooms, we should keep them open by all means. Haven't you heard they only talk in person and don't even use cell phones? We got satellites aimed at listening to these people, if they only would speak up. I mean what's better than having them type up their shit in a chat room, and then just run in through some translation program? Free intelligence anyone, without wasting arabic-speaking-undercover-precious-time?
Nah, actually these rooms are getting closed, because the undercover law officers wasted tremendous time and effort fishing for pedophiles in it, for no good. Thing is there IS a line between reality and fiction, and in fiction people will do countless things, including butchering each other in games. But when it comes to reality, there is a little inner voice that goes off, that makes people care about each other. I wonder how many pedophiles they set up who actually treated their bait very very decently and with respect, and stopped the contact after coming to their senses. Like, look, even Michael Jackson got let off, so why waste time fishing for these people if the law will just let them go?
PS. Chatting is a bit impersonal, and because of that it can get rude. If you don't like it, flip the switch off. How many times have you seen people talk really nasty in 3rd person, but when they are face to face with someone, they shape up and behave, and become less offensive? Well in chat the "I" can talk to the "You" as if it were a "he,she,it." Webcams and voice can aid making it more personal, but it's impossible for everyone to voice-talk at the same time the same way as they can type, it'd be a mess. Of course there are two sides to every story, and the opposite is true too, when you get to know someone very well even through "impersonal" means such as letters only. Also I'm sure there were some true pedophiles that stop at nothing, caught. It's always funny when they catch a 50-year old judge or respected person about to meet a 17-year old. I always think of salmon or black widow males. Sex is a funny thing, I tell ya, but without it you wouldn't be here, nor would the little salmons.
This would make every elephant, shark, whale, bear, etc. a genius. Of course you can't be a genius with a single neuron, or even a dozen, you need some, but when you get past a few million of them, how they are organized counts more than just the mass of them, because the permutations and combinations are humongous. Given the same degree of organization yeah, more neurons the better. For instance, Einstein's brain wasn't even that big, and he was clearly a genius. Plus don't forget that humanity gets nowhere without each other, without the body of knowledge gathered over the millenia. The "forbidden experiment" even shows that a person not taught language before puberty hits does not fare much better than, say a bear would.
We need those weapons to take out the chinese and indian shuttles when they are about to take off and leave us behind by building a better space station.
What does it matter when there are cameras at the library entrance? Simply that you go to a library, that you go in and "steal" intellectual property instead of buying the book, that's enough sin. After all, how are we going to have an information economy when public institutions like libraries give the stuff away for free? How are the authors going to feed themselves? You have to deal with the people who choose to go to the libraries instead of buying pay-per-view programs and sitting at home, before you can close the libraries due to "lack of attendance,", or at least completely revamp them into fully digital DRM'd bookstores. You will still be able to check out digital copies of some books, but the library will only have one copy that's permanently checked out, and instead you're ushered to buy the damn digital copy, instant download at your fingertips, only $9.99 for a non-resellable copy that self-destructs as soon as it detects someone else's fingerprints.
You get half the truth. The other half is mass promotion of blogging, simply out of world security. If you write out how you feel, and all the little details of your life, you can be better controlled, exploited, plus the chances of you secretly flying off the handle are less, so those in charge are less weary. Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear. I'm afraid there may be a day when NOT blogging will be a crime, just like not going to confession in the Catholic church is almost like a sin - do you have something to hide? Perhaps you have terrorist thoughts?
For one, when I was a kid I really enjoyed Mickey Mouse, Tom and Jerry, and the like. I don't know whether I would have enjoyed all these politically incorrect japanese creations, that teach nothing to kids, except what they already know and are born with, such as how to rub stuff in each other's faces, and show off how my pokemon is bigger than your pokemon, and my uber-power-crystal-ring beats the pants off your uber-power-magic-sword. What ever happened to Hans Cristian Anderssen's stories, and LaFontaine's fables? Why is it that the only way to get someone's brain tickled anymore is by eyecatching ching-boom-explosions and fast-fast-fast action where you can't catch your breath, let alone meditate or think over things. And why do you think that computerized classrooms will teach kids more than a simple chalk and blackboard, and a teacher with a heart and devotion. Or for that matter 3D stuff will be automatically more entertaining than hand-drawn, 2D stuff, with meaning and content?
Yeah, how about taking a digital copy of the Mona Lisa and storing it on your computer? There are tons of digital copies. But the original is still precious to us all. Here too we're dealing with objects that represent value beyond the intellectual content alone, where the intellectual content has been digitized and backed up a million ways. Each physical vehicle is unique, kind of - not kind of, exactly - like antiques. And where tradition means a lot, jumping on the latest and greatest storage medium such as a dual layer blue laser DVD that emits a hologram may not be regarded so highly, especially if you find out that the ink in the DVD degrades after 10 years, but too late when you threw away your parchment 10 years ago thinking you got something better.
How do you know this world is real and you yourself are not just a simulation experiment? I may be just an object-oriented-object in the simulation game that you are, and completely "unreal." Or from my perspective, all there is is my own mind, and y'all are unreal. Think of Chuang-Tzu who once dreamed he was a butterfly, then when he awoke, he no longer knew if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man, or a man who dreamed he was a butterfly. Sensory deprivation? You may not have all the senses you want, but you definitely got the ones you need, it's all programmed into this game. Think of Plato's allegory of the cave. You live in a sandbox, whether you have sensory perception or not. Not enough features in the sandbox? Whatcha want, we can talk to the lead programmer named "God" and see if he will work it in. You may even try praying to him. I wonder if this simulation becomes conscious if it will start repeating rosaries begging us for a woman? Then we'll know how annoyed God must feel when all his creatures start nagging him for stuff. As far as boredom goes, do the Sims ever get bored? :)
Then when you're stuck in a cave in a snowstorm, you can chew on this first instead of chewing on your mate. Watches, gps receivers, cellphones, laptops, .. yummi.
Hahaha, I'd mod this as the funniest thing I heard in a while, but how do you get to be a moderator on Slashdot?